Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Decades ago George Orwell described the process totalitarian governments use to win over the populous to their way of thinking: they creative a convincing narrative that serves their ends and they repeat it incessantly until it becomes conventional wisdom. The narrative can be especially convincing if it is intuitively appealing and has some moral overtones.

From the early 1990s through 2004 Diane Ravitch believed the narrative put forth by the business community regarding public education. In her words, as reported in an interview in District Administration magazine, she describes what changed her mind:

Yes, I went along with the zeitgeist that said, “We need testing. We need accountability. We need choice. We need competition.” These are ideas that appeal to very basic American values about choice and competition and holding people accountable for results.

But about five years into No Child Left Behind, I went to a conference at a conservative think tank. And there were a dozen papers from scholars across the country saying that No Child Left Behind wasn’t working here, it wasn’t working there.

The choice provisions weren’t working because the kids were not choosing to leave their neighborhood school. The tutoring provisions were not working because all these fly-by-night businesses were popping up. There wasn’t a single paper that said it’s working.

At the end of the day, I, who had been a believer, had become a nonbeliever. And from that point forward, I began listening and realized that this was not going to work ever. It simply was not going to get better five years later. The things I had been advocating for sounded good in theory, but I could no longer support what the evidence showed didn’t work.

Even more disturbingly, she became convinced that the business community and political establishment were telling the public a “Big Lie”:

The big lie was that we are failing and there’s a rising tide of mediocrity. We’ve now heard it so many times over the last 30 years, beginning with “A Nation At Risk,” that people believe it because it never gets countered.

But when you look at the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, people say, “Oh, American education is in terrible shape.” And then you ask, “Well, how’s your local school?” They say, “Oh, my local school is great. Love my local school. Love my teachers. They’re all terrific. But American education is failing.”

So the big lie has worked, but it hasn’t reached what people know from their own personal reality. The other point is that there is an assault on American public education today coming from federal government, coming from the foundations, coming from so many right-wing public policy think tanks that it is immensely destabilizing.

If you don’t believe in “the big lie” conspiracy theory— that the destabilization of public education is designed to pave the way for privatization of public schools, here’s some evidence:

• Lee Fang reports in The Nation that Ted Mitchell, the nominee for USDOE’s second-in-command, has ties to Pearson and the privatization movement.
• Robert Freeman offers a three-step recipe for tearing down public education in order to introduce privatization in his Common Dreams blog post:  First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits; second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can; third, rinse and repeat five thousand times. He then describes how this is occurring through charter schools and choice.
• The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington and Suzanne Goldenberg describe how conservative think tanks funded by the likes of the Koch brothers are funding efforts to undercut the public’s confidence in public schools and public services in general
• The NYTimes’ Juan Hernandez describes how Pearson. the company that has made billions due to the increase in testing, was fined millions for subsidizing privatization efforts.
• Unsurprisingly, Mother Jones weighs in on the issue of the .1% funding privatization movements, calling out the Gates Foundations investments in corporations whose actions are contrary to the Gates’ Foundation’s mission statement. While the article does not mention it, the Gates Foundation was a major (if not primary) investor in the Common Core, which is making the curriculum “…narrow, rote, and regimented” as described in Common Dreams.

Diane Ravitch is optimistic about the public’s ability to see through the Big Lie and believes they will ultimately see what is happening to their schools and communities and seek change through politics. She envisions:

A growing movement that will cause the politicians to say, “We really have to have change.”…

We all need to understand that what has been happening is not just an idea that some politician had in this state or that state. This is a national effort to undermine public education, to make people think that it stinks and anything is better than having community public schools.

The best way to spread the message is for lots of people to share it, talk about it, and see how they can mobilize to strengthen their public schools, not to defend the status quo. The status quo are the people who call themselves reformers. They reform nothing.

I don’t have nearly the readership of Diane Ravitch, but I will continue to do my part to “spread the message” that public education is NOT failing, we are failing our children— especially those raised in poverty.  A strong public education is the best means of improving the opportunities for those born into poverty, and testing them early and often will not improve the schools they attend or their quality of life. Coordinated early intervention is the best means of accomplishing that goal, and it can only be done through government funding.