F is for Friedman's Dream

Time Magazine: Dec. 19, 1969

Economist Milton Friedman is the father of the school privatization movement.  He believed in a largely unregulated, unfettered free market for virtually everything and was an early champion of charter schools, choice, and vouchers.  We see evidence of his theories playing out in abundance today in every facet of public policy in the U.S.

For those who think that it's outrageous to believe that there is really an ongoing and deliberate campaign to privatize schools in the U.S., take note that Friedman's ideas are highly respected in libertarian, wealth, and power circles.  He was awarded the Nobel prize for economic science in 1976 and up until his death in 2006, he was sought after as a speaker, professor, and adviser to US government leaders and presidents.  

• Milton Friedman Biography (Hoover Institution at Stanford)
• "Public Schools: Make Them Private" by Milton Friedman
• Excerpt from the Introduction to The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, a book that explores Friedman's ideas about exploiting major crises for corporate and private profit
• Privatizing Education in New Orleans: The Commodification of Education 
• Privatizing Public Schools: Leveling the Playing Field or Political Football?
• ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors

E is for Evaluation

Corporate reformers propagandize the idea that if only we can "fix" the teachers, we can fix all of education.  Equitable funding, class size, student effort or ability, parental involvement, the impact of poverty on achievement--to the corporate reformer, none of these variables carry any import--the only variable that matters is the teacher in the classroom.  Thus, teacher evaluation is a centerpiece of the corporate reformer's plan for improving schools, and a great deal of money and energy is currently being devoted to creating new rubrics and scoring scales for judging teachers' effectiveness, which is ideally judged primarily by students' standardized test scores.  The Obama Administration, which clearly supports the corporate reform agenda, even made tying teacher evaluations to student standardized test scores a mandatory requirement for state eligibility for the Race to the Top grant/bribe.   The evaluation and testing mandate has also been extended to any state that wants to be granted a waiver from the ridiculous NCLB accountability system.

The new teacher evaluations are usually quite complex and are beginning to generate a whole new industry for corporate reformers to tap into.  Race to the Top was designed in such a way that most of the grant/bribe money states and school systems received could not be used for hiring teachers or purchasing books and supplies; instead, billions of dollars are being poured into trainings, consultants, committees, and study groups in order to create and implement the required new evaluations and Common Core curriculum.  Experienced school administrators have even been required to attend trainings run by consultants who have never worked in schools in order to learn how to implement these new evaluation systems.  Educators are being treated like they don't know anything about educating kids, and oftentimes these new evaluations are being created by people who really don't know anything about educating kids.

• Companies, Nonprofits Making Millions Off Teacher Effectiveness Push
• Nearly Half of States Link Teacher Evaluations to Tests
• Standardized Tests and Teacher Accountability: The Research
• Battle Brewing on Capitol Hill over Testing, Teacher Evaluation, and School Accountability
• Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers 
• Principals Protest Role of Testing in Evaluations
• Focus on Standardized Tests May Be Pushing Some Teachers to Cheat
• Getting Teacher Evaluation Right

Update 3/11/12: The NY Times decided to publish teacher rankings based on standardized testing in February of 2012.  This is another trend that is likely take off with test-based evaluations.

• City Teacher Data Reports are Released [NYTimes Attempts to Justify Participation in Witch Hunt]
• Reign of Error: The Publication of Teacher Data Reports in New York City 
• New York City's Flawed Data Fuels the Right's War on Teachers
• More on the Utter Stupidity of NYC's Value-Added Machinations

added 4/5/12: Storm and Fury: Teacher Evaluation Stirs a Ruckus