Liberating Education -- An Introductory Policy Overview
What is happening in Detroit educationally today, in terms of changes like increased reliance on testing, moving Detroit schools into the statewide district, closing other schools, and restructuring schools or turning them over to charters, is a product of policy changes and social changes at a variety of different levels, and involving a lot of different key players. Our job this morning is to try our best to sketch all this out, at least to the extent that information is available. We think it’s important to do this not just because it's informative, but because we need to take all of this into account as we work to protect and revitalize and reimagine community schools and move them in the direction of serving as centers of community rebirth across the city.
First of all, we need to talk about what is happening at the national level, particularly under the reform agenda of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan of the Obama Administration, and before that, Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings of the Bush Administration. The two key policy interventions to think about there are No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which became law about 10 years ago, and Race to the Top (RTTP), which has only been around for a couple years.
Those policies at the national level affect what happens educationally in our state and our city.
In addition to the national policies, the state of Michigan has been engaged in a set of new policies both under the Granholm Administration and the Snyder administration before it. The Granholm administration gave us our first Emergency Financial Manager, Robert Bobb, and when he lost his battle for academic control to the DPS Board in court, the state under Snyder responded by toughening the Emergency Financial Manager law, based on PA 72, into the Emergency Manager law, PA 4, which gives the state unprecedented power to overturn locally elected education and municipal officials as well as union contracts and a number of other things. Although Robert Bobb gained these new emergency manager powers by the end of his term, he was soon replaced by Roy Roberts, who in partnership with Governor Snyder formed the Educational Achievement System or EAS for so-called low performing schools across the state. So far, only Detroit schools have been swept into the state district, 15 DPS schools to be specific, effective this coming school year.
The state has also passed a lot of other education related legislation that we will mention in a moment.
Meanwhile, at the city level, Detroit Mayor Bing had expressed some interest in mayoral control of the schools a couple years ago, but that has been put on the back burner because of the ongoing so-called financial emergencies of the school district and the city. The DPS elected school board continues to exist, even with Emergency Manager Roy Roberts in place, but it essentially has no power. The DPS Board has continued to meet, with seven of the eleven board members also meeting under a new name, the DPS Board in Exile, in order to build solidarity with the community and DPS workers, and also to prepare to hit the ground running should their power be restored with a stay and eventual possible electoral appeal of the Emergency Manager Law.
Increasingly, it’s important in relation to education to also highlight, beyond what various levels of government are doing, the actions of a number of foundations at the national, state, and local level who have assumed roles in what has become a disturbing new form of unelected and unaccountable quasi government. Of particular relevance to Detroit are the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and more locally, the Skillman Foundation, Kresge Foundation, the McGregor foundation, and the Kellogg Foundation, among others.
Together with many civic organizations like New Detroit, Business Leaders for Michigan, the Detroit Parent Network, and others, they have moved forward in lockstep, more or less, on a particular educational agenda, and the agenda is educational marketization, or more broadly, educational neoliberalism.
We’ll say more about this later, but for now, neoliberalism is a set of beliefs that says that more market competition is the best thing for everybody, that it will cure our schools, and everything else for that matter, and that there are two things stopping it-- teachers unions and elected government, at least the wrong elected government. Neoliberals like elected governments that are in line with their beliefs, and as my comments about the Obama and Bush administrations, along with, at the state level, Granholm and Snyder shows, neoliberal ideas—ideas about the healing power of the free market—in education and beyond dominate both major parties. It might be right to say there are more Democrats than Republicans who resist neoliberalism, but the leadership of both parties, unfortunately, is solidly neoliberal. The problem, for neoliberals, is that people in Detroit and other cities, mainly people of color, vote in people who aren’t sold on what neoliberals want to do. So for them, although democracy is a nice idea, it sometimes gets in the way of them doing what they want to do. That’s when niceties like democracy and voting get pushed out of the way, like in Detroit, Benton Harbor, and so on.
Now let's take these things one part at a time.
Where did all this crazy testing in our schools come from? No Child Left Behind, passed with broad bipartisan support. We had some testing like this before, but it went gonzo with NCLB. NCLB is all about making schools accountable, at least supposedly, mostly through standardized testing. How is NCLB neoliberal? Because underlying it is the belief that schools should be measured on various performance indicators, and that families should then be allowed to choose among school options based on those indicators. Schools that chronically fail to increase test scores are designated as failing, and eventually lose funding and are restructured-- meaning dramatically changed through mass firings, turning the school over to a charter organization, or otherwise radically changing the school. When DPS schools have been closed or moved into the EAS, it is often because they have not done well on measurements associated with NCLB. Neoliberalism punishes struggling schools for low scores, which is the opposite of lending assistance to struggling schools. It blames the schools, and particularly teachers and administrators for the low scores. It doesn't blame the poverty and other conditions that also impact the school. It believes that schools have everything they need to be top flight already, except that teachers need to be shamed or fired for not working harder. Teachers whose students receive low scores are, to neoliberals, bad teachers, and teachers with higher scores are, according to the same people, good teachers. Where you teach or under what conditions, they believe, makes no difference. Besides punishing the very schools that need the most help, NCLB also crowds everything that is seen as not helping get better test scores out of the curriculum—music, arts, critical thinking, reading great books, studying your own culture, trying to learn about and make better your own community or neighborhood, etc. In short, it turns schools into testing factories, rather than a place where our imaginations are fired and where we can envision building the lives and the city that we want.
The Obama administration doubled down on NCLB with Race to the Top. With Race to the Top, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan set up a competition for limited federal funding. States were judged by a number of factors, all relating to the presence of freer education market conditions. States could improve their scores by removing caps on the number of charters operating in the state. By putting in place teacher effectiveness measures, which evaluated and rewarded teachers, at least in part, based on the increase in their students test scores. Almost all states participated in this competition, changing state law in accordance with Duncan's stated criteria, in such a way that even states that did not win the race to the top funds, such as Michigan, still have the laws newly in place that they put together in order to try to win. The Secretary of Education’s plan for reforming schools this way is brilliant, unless you consider that none of the reforms that were induced have any evidence that they deliver positive results, no matter how they are measured. At least no positive results for kids. Quite the contrary. What evidence we have points the opposite way. The losers are kids, teachers, families, our communities and democracy, and the winners are chain store charter schools, private companies that provide goods and services to schools, for profit educational management organizations. And the politicians who represent these people. The 1 percent, as we said last summer and fall.