CHAPTER 8
GERM Warfare
How to Reclaim the Education Debate from
Corporate Occupation
by Adam Bessie
INTRODUCTION
“Do or Die” in DC
I could hear the exhaustion in Stacey’s voice—perhaps she had the flu, one brought on by long hours teaching sixth-grade language arts classes in a “failing” public middle school, which serves a high-poverty, primarily African-American community under the shadow of the White House. Since the start of the fall semester, it’s been a sprint for Stacey. On the first day of school, in the first of three classes, she was greeted by a crowd of fifty eleven-year-old children.1 Many came from the local housing projects, and most of their parents were unemployed—which is consistent with the staggering 20 percent unemployment rate that afflicted the African-American community in Washington DC in 2011.2 At the time, the nation’s capital had a poverty rate of 20 percent, and in the areas where Stacy’s students came from, poverty was even more concentrated and sometimes climbs as high as 40 percent.3
It’s “do or die,” Stacey’s principal told the staff from day one—a phrase that carries particular gravity given there are about nine murders a month in the DC metro area.4 In fact, the day we talked, there was a shooting near the school. However, the principal wasn’t referring to the violence or poverty Stacey’s students are exposed to, but rather a high-stakes standardized test, one that would decide the fate of the school. Six weeks after the start of the semester, Stacey’s 150 students needed to be prepared to take a standardized test on basic reading skills, to fill in the right bubbles—or else.
Stacey, in her second year teaching at a school fighting for its life, needed to “hit the ground running,” preparing her students for the first of a series of tests that would decide their collective fates. Her school needed to raise its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), an “accountability measure” implemented nationally in 2002 by the bipartisan education reform bill No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which holds schools responsible for the test scores of its students.5 Over the previous few years, Stacey’s school had consistently failed to make AYP, and if her school doesn’t didn’t gain higher standardized test scores by the end of the academic year, it would be shuttered.
As for the teachers, said Stacey, “Either we meet AYP or we find new jobs.”
Yet, the first six weeks of the semester felt more like “crowd control” than anything resembling the actual teaching that she had been trained for in her credential program in South Carolina. And even when the crowd was controlled enough for instruction, Stacey neither had the time nor the academic freedom to actually teach. “Constant test prep is the expectation,” Stacey told me, her voice weakening, as she described the required “scripted, prepackaged curriculum,” consisting of practice tests and “constant skill and drill” handouts to ensure that the school wouldn’t close.
“We’re just supposed to read passages and answer multiple choice questions,” Stacey reported, letting out a deep, frustrated sigh. “As someone who doesn’t believe in any of that, work is a constant struggle. I feel like my students are already so trapped, and I feel like I’m trapping them even further when I do what [the administration] tells me is the correct thing to do.”
But Stacey learned quickly that if she wanted to keep her job, she needed to play by the rules and teach to the script. “If I do what I know my students will benefit from (language experience, novel studies, word play, inquiry) I risk bad evaluations, and therefore I risk my job and my livelihood,” Stacey explained, pointing out that much of her evaluation—and thus her job—is based on her IMPACT rating, which is, in essence, her students’ test scores. So even if the school were to survive this fight, Stacey could still be let go should her students not demonstrate “adequate” improvement.6
“I’m not treated like a professional at all,” she exclaimed, outraged.
“I’m not trusted to make decisions about my children, yet I’m held accountable.”
THE GLOBAL EDUCATION REFORM MOVEMENT: A THREAT
TO OUR EDUCATIONAL COMMONS
Fighting for her professional life while fighting to save her students from poverty and violence, Stacey is left utterly exhausted and utterly demoralized—a trend reflected in the lowest teacher morale in the last twenty years.7 Like many public school teachers who have committed themselves to helping children learn in America’s poorest neighbor-hoods, Stacey is on the front lines of a battle—not just for her students, her job, or her school. Stacey is fighting for the very future of high-quality, open-access, equitable national public education against the powerful forces of GERM—the Global Education Reform Movement.
GERM has invaded her school, the nation, and many other Western nations. GERM—a term coined by Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, and more popularly known as “education reform”—models public education on corporate philosophies and practices, handing over public institutions to corporate-style management, and ultimately, corporations themselves.8 Once a philosophy only discussed in elite neoconservative think tanks and by Republican politicians, GERM policies have been adopted by Democratic leaders and injected into the mainstream American consciousness not merely by an uncritical corporate media, but at times a complicit one. GERM poses a terminal threat to public education; it takes our educational commons and hands the system over to corporate America.9
While GERM is a particularly virulent and powerful strain of corporate infection in our American democracy, there is a movement fighting to keep public education alive and thriving. This truly grass-roots movement—of educators, parents, community activists, and students themselves—is fighting to challenge GERM, and starting to win battles on a local and national level. To reclaim our public schools from corporate occupation, though, this grassroots movement must reclaim the conversation, challenge the GERM narrative, and give Stacey and her students their voices back.
This is no test: it’s “do or die.”
EXPEXPOSING THE GERM EPIDEMIC: THE CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE
OF OUR GENERATION
“Education is the civil rights issue of our generation,” Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney announced at a recent press conference, where he also claimed that our public schools are in a state of “national emergency.” In the speech, the former Bain Capital chief executive officer Romney portrayed himself a civil rights hero, fighting against systemic racism and inequality that provides American children a “third world education.”10 And the cause of this educational emergency? It’s not the foreclosure crisis, deep unemployment in minority communities, the increasing racially segregated schools, nor the 21 percent childhood poverty rate, which Romney, who made twenty-seven million dollars in 2010, never mentions.11 Rather, this grave civil rights injustice has been inflicted by excessively powerful “special interests” and “union bosses” that put their needs in front of the poor, minority children. And Romney plans to be the 1 percent’s very own Martin Luther King Jr., a “champion of real education reform in America,” saving the underprivileged from the greed of the powerful.
Romney’s speech on education—with the superrich as champions of social justice, and teachers like Stacey protecting a status quo of racism and poverty—would be hilarious . . . that is, if anyone seemed to get the joke. The Global Education Reform Movement fable that Romney tells— of Broken Schools held hostage by Bad Teachers and Evil Unions, only to be saved by the heroics of the Free Market—is cliché not only for conservative politicians, but is also championed by Democrats, most prominently, President Barack Obama. And today, GERM—once an extreme conservative economic theory—is the only education reform philosophy discussed in the halls of political power. How did this happen?
THE GENESIS OF GERM
While GERM has only gone viral in the last decade, it was designed nearly fifty years ago, by the “grandmaster of free-market economic theory,” Milton Friedman.12 Friedman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, was the architect of the “small government” ethos that now dominates the Republican Party—in fact, he is said to have inspired former president Ronald Reagan’s free-market economic philosophy, which involves cutting taxes and government regulation, and selling public industry to the private sector.13 Hailed as a hero by economic conservatives, prominent progressives believe that the former Reagan advisor’s policies have been central in creating the increasingly stratified and privatized economy, dominated by an oligarchic class— the wealthiest 1 percent. Naomi Klein authored the best-selling book The Shock Doctrine, devoted to the corrosive influence of Friedman’s “free market” philosophy, which she argues dominates the world and exploits disaster to enrich the wealthy.14 Further, after the economic disaster of 2008, Jeff Madrick, director of policy research at the Center for Economic Policy Analysis, concluded “There is a direct line from Milton Friedman’s ascendancy in the 1970s to the debacle on Wall Street today.”15 Wall Street’s disaster has also consumed the nation’s public schools, whose budgets continue to be eaten away in the name of “responsible belt-tightening” of public services.
Whatever one thinks about the success of Friedman’s economic philosophy, GERM clearly shares its “free-market” DNA. Friedman is considered the “Father of Modern School Reform,”16 and articulated GERM’s pro-corporate philosophy, policies, and even phrasing in his seminal 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” and later in his 1962 deregulation manifesto, Capitalism and Free-dom—the same book in which he explained his economic theories most vividly. Friedman calls for the privatization of public education, and the creation of a “competitive education market.” In doing so, he radically reconceived the nature of public education, reframing it as a service industry, rather than public service. He claimed that private, profit-based enterprise would provide better education than the government. Thus, Friedman argued the government should have a very limited role in education—by providing funding, and applying some regulation—and beyond that, there should be competition between schools for students and their parents, whom he referred to as “consumers.” Friedman thought that if schools and teachers were subjected to such competition, “the development and improvement of all schools would thus be stimulated.” To this end, he invented the “voucher,” funding from the government that “education consumers” used to choose their schools from a variety of “service providers.”17 He also then advocated for “merit pay,” for paying teachers based not on their years of service or education attained, but on their “performance.”18 According to Friedman, these corporate measures would, in turn, make schools more “efficient” and “productive,” which would increase the quality of the “educational service.”
Today, “education reform” is a friendly, benign-sounding euphemism for privatizing public education while reconceiving it as a competitive market following Friedman’s theories. A disciple of Fried-man, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) resident scholar Frederick Hess elaborated by stating explicitly that the current education reform movement is a “serious deregulatory project . . . to establish a genuine marketplace in education,” not unlike the telecommunications, energy, or airline industries.19 What Hess meant is that public education is a service like any other—like a phone company, an energy provider, or an airline—and that it should be “reformed” to act more like these service providers, so that “consumers” have a “choice.” According to Hess, there should be “incentives and consequences for producers and consumers,” so that schools behave more like your cell phone provider. “To get schools to respond more meaningfully to competitive pressure, incentives and rules must be changed in order to ensure that the competitive pressure is actually felt,” Hess concluded. To translate, successful schools—like successful businesses—should be rewarded, while “failing schools,” those that can’t produce a competitive educational service, should be punished, not unlike Stacey’s school discussed at the outset of this chapter.
But Friedman’s greatest influence on GERM isn’t his theories. Rather, it is the way in which he has successfully framed schools as businesses. Friedman did not just propose a set of education policies. He proposed a fundamentally different way of thinking about and discussing education. His use of industrial and corporate language— “efficiency,” “productivity,” and “consumer”—encourages the reader to imagine schools in terms of the private sector, of corporations, or “factories,” as the University of California–Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff observed. A business has a primary goal of pleasing the consumer, keeping costs low, raking in revenue, and ultimately making money. A business’s primary goal is not to enrich the public good, but rather the private entity itself. However, as Lakoff argued, “Education is about more than making money. It is about coming to know the world, about learning to think critically, and about developing the capacity to create new knowledge, new social institutions, and new kinds of businesses.”20 Of course, education serves a critical economic function, but it is also serves to enrich culture, our morals, our quality of life, and our democracy—and to view education as a business, as a private service rather than a public good, is to strip it of these critical values.
Therein is the most potent symptom of Friedman’s education philosophy: in framing education as a business, GERM reduces the incredibly complex, rich, vibrant, and human process of education into a mechanized production line, with goals of “efficiency” and “productivity” replacing learning, growth, creativity, community, and democracy. It is a pedagogy of Taylorism on a twentieth-century assembly line.21
A BIPARTISAN ILLNESS
After decades in the laboratory, Friedman’s theories were released nationwide under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), establishing GERM as federal law. While it did not go nearly as far as Friedman or Hess would have liked (enacting vouchers), NCLB did accept their metaphor—that schools are businesses, and public education would serve students better if modeled as such. Even the name—No Child Left Behind—frames education as a competition, one with winners, and losers. NCLB made this metaphor a reality, providing real consequences for schools that could not “keep up” on standardized test scores, providing escalating corporate-style punitive measures for schools like Stacey’s that do not meet Adequate Yearly Progress. NCLB assumes that real learning can be measured by multiple-choice standardized tests, and that these standardized tests reflect the performance of the school, but not the effects of society, community, or family—like socioeconomics, or access to health care—though there is overwhelming evidence that test scores are most strongly correlated with these out-of-school influences.22
Once a school is declared “failing,” it is subject to corporate takeover, much like Romney would have taken over a “failing business” and imposed new management while at Bain. Because NCLB views schools as businesses, then “failure” rests solely on the shoulders of the employees—the teachers and the principal. The remedy, therefore, is in providing appropriate incentives and consequences (“carrots and sticks”) to improve the “performance” of the school; the threat of school closure is such a consequence, which motivates the staff to focus exclusively on the test, as are mass firings. By focusing relentlessly on the test, the teachers no longer have control over how to teach, as they must focus on the content to be tested as a matter of career survival. In some cases, school districts actually buy “commercially packaged reading instruction programs, which tell teachers exactly which page to be on each day as well as every word and line they are allowed to say while teaching reading, all in preparation for the high-stakes testing,” as former public school teacher and education professor Wayne Au reported.23 The teachers—and students—must submit to the corporate testing regimen, in order to once again be considered on the “right path,” away from “failure,” and toward “success.” The “winners” in this Race to the Top are determined then by corporate testing standards and outcomes, not honed critical thinking skills, creativity, expressive ability, empathy, nor increased cognitive development. Ultimately, NCLB is a race toward standardization and conformity—for schools, teachers, and children themselves.
If the school still does not meet AYP after conforming to the corporate testing regimen and being stripped of its academic freedom, it can be “turned around,” a business euphemism for mass layoffs and new management. In the “turnaround model,” the principal and no less than half of the staff is fired and replaced—often by nonprofit or for-profit corporations who specialize in this process. The school also can be “restarted,” with all staff fired and replaced, “converted” into a nonprofit or for-profit charter school (which are not unionized), or closed, with the students moved to other higher performing schools, including charters.24 In this fashion, schools in the poorest neighborhoods not only begin to look like businesses, but are actually handed over to private enterprise which receive public funding, thus fulfilling Friedman’s philosophy that government should manage schooling as minimally as possible.
Though President Barack Obama has publicly distanced himself from NCLB, his signature program, Race to the Top (RttT) spreads Friedman’s GERM even further. Much like NCLB, RttT adopts the metaphor that education is a competition—a race—and enacts policies that treat it as such, to make schools and teachers feel the “com-petitive pressure” that Hess describes. Though Obama claimed in the 2012 State of the Union that we should “stop teaching to the test,” RttT still relies on these tests to identify “failing schools,” which are subject to punitive measures and corporate takeover.25 Obama promises to “turn around” the 5,000 lowest scoring schools, using GERM style corporate interventions. Further, RttT created a four-billion-dollar contest for grants for which states (and soon, districts) can “compete,” though the state has to submit to tying standardized test scores not just to schools, but to teacher and principal evaluations, not unlike the IMPACT program that evaluates Stacey in Washington DC.26 And to receive federal dollars, cash-strapped states and districts, must also open their doors to charter schools, which draw public funds, but can be run by private enterprise. And what’s more, RttT looks to reach out more explicitly to private enterprise. Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called on “education entrepreneurs” to help “reform America’s lowest performing public schools.”27 By “reform,” Duncan is referring to Friedman and Hess’s definition—of transforming public education into a business, with business leaders, and not educators, leading the charge.
Ultimately, the Obama administration didn’t laugh as multimillionaire businessman Mitt Romney framed himself as a civil rights hero, because they have done the same. In fact, Obama and Duncan used the exact same catchphrase—“Education is the civil rights issue of our generation”—to promote RttT. In 2009, Obama, Duncan, and Rev. Al Sharpton met with Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich to declare “Education is the civil rights issue of our generation,” and that they “put aside their differences” to “reform” education. At the event, Gingrich—who wrote a book in 2011 titled To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine—put aside his fear of Obama’s impending socialist revolution to commend him for supporting corporate education policies, such as merit pay, and charter schools. Not surprisingly, George W. Bush is credited as the “architect of this school of thought,” as he used the exact same phrase in 2002, the day before Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, in support of his recently enacted bill, NCLB. This led education writer Liz Dwyer to conclude “Let’s Stop Comparing Education to the Civil Rights Movement.”28
However, the real architect of GERM is Milton Friedman, who predicted that Democrats would come around to his perspective and see that the path to social justice is through the privatization of education. “The Democratic Party should be the natural supporter of vouchers,” Friedman told libertarian magazine Reason in 2005, less than a year before his death. “In Ted Kennedy’s words, the Democrats are supposed to be the ‘voice of the voiceless.’ The voiceless would benefit the most from full-scale universal vouchers. You know, if you ask the voiceless, they are all in favor of vouchers. So I think, sooner or later, the nearly religious support for the anti-voucher position will crum-ble.”29 And while RttT does not support vouchers (as Romney does), Friedman’s prediction has been borne out, as Obama and the Democratic Party are now the foremost carriers of Friedman’s GERM.
TRTRANSMITTING GERM: THE GLOBAL EDUCATION REFORM MOVEMENT GOES VIRAL
The Corporate Media’s Bully Pulpit
We’re going to take on teachers next, we’re going to go after teachers . . .
In the days following Mitt Romney’s education speech, the phrase “failing schools” appeared in nearly 5,000 news articles according to a search on Google News. Before 2008, the loaded term—which suggests schools, and not society, are to blame for educational problems—had very little traffic on Google.31 Veteran reporter Paul Fahri, in his own search on LexisNexis in January 2012, found 544 news stories in that month; in contrast, in January of 1992, it appeared thirteen times. As a result of his extensive evaluation of education coverage, Fahri found that “the prevailing narrative is that the nation’s educational system is in crisis, that schools are ‘failing,’ that teachers aren’t up to the job and that America’s economic competitiveness is threatened as a result.” Further, he concluded that this narrative was not accurate: “If anything, America has been a largely successful experiment in universal, open access public education . . . by many important measures—high school completion rates, college graduation, overall performance on standardized tests—America’s educational attainment has never been higher.”32
But one is very unlikely to read about the successes of public education in the corporate media, which has spread the GERM narrative uncritically to the public. The Failing School, the Bad Teacher, and the Evil Union are the main characters in the GERM narrative, which has evolved into a powerful meme—or viral idea—so widely spread that it has become the commonplace way in which education is debated. Indeed, reporters have adopted this narrative, and its loaded terms like “failing schools,” and “bad teachers” without rigorous investigation.33 Thus, Breitbart’s mission—to “go after the teachers”—has been fulfilled by the corporate media, even after he passed away in early 2012.
CNN host Fareed Zakaria—considered a “liberal journalist” by Breitbart TV34—is a prime example of how this misleading narrative reveals what’s “wrong with mainstream media coverage of education,” according to Fahri. In a series of specials and an article in Time, Zakaria claimed that the poor quality of our nation’s schools have put the American Dream at risk, especially for minorities and the un-derprivileged, much like Romney’s claims. Zakaria lists a litany of facts—including dismal graduation rates, and low test scores—that show that our education is in a state of crisis, and further, we are being “outsmarted” by other nations and the world. Zakaria interviewed former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner, who pinned the blame on the teachers: “We need far better teachers . . . we have too many teachers that are not strong enough today.” In all coverage, Zakaria has neither challenged nor questioned this sweeping generalization.35
In fact, Zakaria didn’t challenge Gerstner because he agrees with him, that teachers have destroyed our schools, and are threating our economy. In the course of another of Zakaria’s reports devoted to “Fixing Education,” teachers bear the brunt of the blame for this crisis. The word “teacher” is mentioned forty-seven times, and “poverty” five times over the course of the episode.36 When discussing Finland, whose students score at the top of the world in standardized tests, he observed that 4 percent of children live in poverty—compared to over 20 percent in the United States. Rather than discuss what socioeconomic conditions have lead to one in five children living in poverty—and how this might affect their education—Zakaria focused on teachers: “Can an education system overcome poverty? And can the US create an army of great teachers like in Finland?” Through these juxtaposed questions, Zakaria implied that teachers bear the brunt of responsibility for “overcoming poverty”—and what’s more, that our teachers aren’t up to the job. Zakaria concluded, “Part of the reason we’re in this crisis is that we have slacked off and allowed our education system to get rigid and sclerotic.” In other words, the schools, the teachers, and their “rigid” unions have failed due to lack of motivation—not society at large. As a result, our slacker schools—and not society—need to be reformed. By framing the issue in this fashion, Zakaria is essentially promoting the GERM narrative, rather than questioning, challenging, or exploring it like a leading, influential journalist that is part of a major news organization should.
Taking Zakaria and Breitbart’s lead, the corporate media has made a crusade of rooting out and exposing real-life “bad teachers,” employing a statistical model taken from the business world. In both New York and Los Angeles, teachers “rankings” were released to the press, based on a “value-added” analysis of their students’ standardized test scores, setting off teacher bashing headlines like Business Insider’s “These Are the Worst Teachers in New York City.”37 While the idea of ranking teachers makes for dramatic headlines, the reliability of the value-added system is still under intense debate. The National Research Council, for one, argued that “valued added . . . should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.”38 This debate, which is still unsettled in the academic world, has been either downplayed or ignored by the corporate media, swept up in the search to publicly flog these “bad teachers,” as a sort of public service. Further, by ranking educators numerically, based on the standardized tests scores of their students, these corporate outlets reveal an astonishingly narrow definition of learning, and teaching—that education is a process that can be quantified, like the manufacture of no. 2 pencils.39
In 2010, after the Los Angeles Times released the rankings of LA public school teachers, fifth-grade teacher Rigberto Ruelas was publicly shamed from such a teacher witch hunt. Rigberto—who taught in a tough, impoverished city area like Stacey in DC—had “near perfect attendance for 14 years on the job,” and “reached out to the toughest kids . . . tutor[ing] them on weekends and after school, visit[ing] their homes, encourag[ing] them to aim high and go to college.” One such student, Andromeda Palma, a thirteen-year-old eighth grader, cried as she shared her memories of his impact: “He told me it is not about where you are from. . . . Now I am doing real good because of him.” Still, he was rated “less effective” than his peers based on his “value-added score,” and went missing shortly thereafter, then was found dead. Rigberto had committed suicide, and had left no note, but did leave behind considerable anger about how such a committed, passionate public servant could be publicly maligned, his work fourteen years of service reduced to a single number based on a standardized test.40
While public education has been maligned—even dubbed a “dragon” in the media—since at least the mid-1800s, the GERM attacks today are more vitriolic and personal, focused on individual teachers rather than just the system as a whole. “This historical badgering of schools has evolved recently into a more direct and personal attack on teachers,” associate professor of education Paul Thomas observes, describing the treatment of teachers like Rigberto—by Breitbart, by the media, and by GERM policies like NCLB—as “bullying.”41 Rather than exploring the incredibly complex issue of education with comprehensive investigations into the efficacy and consequences of GERM policies, the corporate media transmits GERM to the public unfiltered, demonizing public education, while scapegoating public school teachers for America’s socioeconomic ills.
GRASSROOTS GERM: STUDENTS FIRST, TEACHERS LAST
A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people
who should and do know better.
—George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”42
No wonder Stacey seemed exhausted when I talked to her on the phone in February of this year: not only was the pressure for her students to pass the standardized test in April reaching a fever pitch, but everywhere she looked, she saw that her school was “failing” because of her. Indeed, she was doing such a bad job that she put the entire American Dream—and economy—at risk, at least according to CNN’s Zakaria. What’s more, she feared that her IMPACT value-added score could be released to the public, where she could be embarrassed like Rigberto. Playing the scapegoat for a frightened and angry nation can be a tiring affair.
However, it appeared that the tide might be turning against the unremitting teacher bashing, as a viral e-mail honoring “great teachers” found its way into my college e-mail inbox. The contest asked entrants to write a “six-word essay” to describe what it means to be a “great teacher,” as a means to honor hard-working, underappreciated, and much maligned educators like Rigberto and Stacey. And the entries read like liberal bumper stickers: “Encouraging the discouraged to defy obstacles,” “Transforms barred windows into open doors,” “Destroy chains. Shape wings. Inspire flight,” “Open books, open minds, open doors.” The contest felt like just the sort of corny self-esteem boost besieged teachers needed, an oasis of applause and liberal clichés to make up for an exhaustion borne of dried-up budgets and a year of scorching criticism.43
Upon a cursory inspection, the contest seemed to check out as an authentic pro-teacher event; it was authored by StudentsFirst, a pro-gressive-sounding group that seemed a perfect antidote to GERM’s corporate, privatizing assault on public education and teachers. StudentsFirst dubbed itself “a grassroots movement to reform America’s public education and keep our best teachers in the classroom.” The StudentsFirst website employed progressive-sounding language, claiming that the organization wanted to “empower” and work toward “social justice,” arguing in its mission statement that “every child, regardless of their zip code, deserves to attend a great school; all families should have quality school options available.” To add to the progressive credentials, the founder of the organization was a teacher, and called herself a “life-long Democrat,” while the vice president of communications was a senior spokesperson on the Obama-Biden 2008 campaign, and also “a former teacher and union member,” who knows “that when we treat teachers like the professionals they are, our students come out on top.”44
StudentsFirst is actively involved in changing state and federal policy to ensure we have “great teachers.” The organization authored the petition “Pay Effective Teachers What They Deserve” at Change.org, a popular website that allows anyone to start a “grassroots” campaign in three easy, hassle-free steps. “America’s most qualified teachers are grossly underpaid. Those [teachers] who show they can move kids along academically should be compensated accordingly,” read the petition, which was sandwiched between countless other petitions for progressive causes on Change.org—to reinstate a Boy Scout leader who was fired for being gay, to maintain a plastic bottle ban in the Grand Canyon, or to stop the needless slaughter of goats by the Department of Defense. In short, it looks like StudentsFirst has the progressive credentials and power to fight on behalf of teachers.45
Yet, StudentsFirst is anything but a grassroots movement committed to teachers. Rather, StudentsFirst is highly sophisticated Astroturf—or a movement intended to look populist, like a real, organic uprising of the public, when in fact it is funded by the elite, and forwards their agenda.46 The lobbying group was founded by Michelle Rhee, the former Washington DC superintendent who was a major force in creating the IMPACT rating—a “value-added” analysis—that evaluates Stacey. Rhee, who taught for only three years—and never at a public school— became a celebrity for her attacks on the Bad Teacher. Most notably, she was featured on a Time cover holding a broom, signifying her policy sweeping “bad teachers” out of the classroom—which is what she did in DC. “I’m going to fire somebody in a little while,” Rhee said to John Merrow’s crew while shooting a segment for PBS NewsHour called the “The Influence of Teachers,” inviting them to televise the teacher’s career execution. “Do you want to see that?”47 Rhee became famous for this cutthroat, autocratic managerial style, referring to herself as the “decider” (much like former president George W. Bush); as a result, she was widely applauded by education outsiders, business leaders in particular, as standardized test scores raised during this time. There are now three separate investigations into whether these raised scores are the result of cheating, due to exceptional statistical irregularities found in the test,48 calling into question her extensive GERM reforms including “merit pay.” Further, seventy-five teachers that were fired en masse in 2008 during Rhee’s tenure were reinstated, as they were denied due process, not told why they were being fired, nor provided an opportunity to provide “their side of the story.”49
For her efforts, though, Rhee—and StudentsFirst—earned applause from Breitbart’s Big Government blog: “StudentsFirst is making headway in the education reform movement, and should be commended by students and taxpayers for their hard work.”50
Rhee has become the face of GERM through StudentsFirst, and she hopes to replicate her DC work nationwide. StudentsFirst works against teacher tenure, teacher’s unions, and collective bargaining, while it works for merit pay, increasing charter schools, and access to vouchers—in short, all of the key elements that Friedman envisioned that became the GERM. Rhee also has powerful friends from the corporate world. Though she keeps her donors somewhat hidden, “public records indicate that they include billionaire financiers and wealthy foundations,” according to a report by Reuters. The organization has received millions from Wal-Mart heirs, the neoconservative Broad Foundation, and hedge fund managers that have donated “substantially” to a Political Action Committee supporting Mitt Romney, while still more have yet to be identified.51 In her first year at StudentsFirst, Rhee acted as a political advisor to three Republican Governors—including Governor Scott Walker, who effectively stopped collective bargaining in the state of Wisconsin, resulting in the much-televised “Wisconsin Uprising,” and a subsequent recall effort.52 Rhee, the “life-long Democrat,” will be speaking with former President George W. Bush at a for-profit college conference summer of 2012.53 While she speaks with Bush and works on behalf of Republican governors, she was also invited to the White House by President Obama, and gave a speech with his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.54
Yet, Rhee—who makes up to $50,000 a speech55—claims Students-First is a “grassroots” movement, as real people are making real donations to the cause. These individual members, she claims, have made a million dollars in small donations,56 suggesting that there is an real populist movement supporting these GERM policies—even if the policies are also supported by hedge fund managers who have never been to a public school, nor will send their children to one. A professor at a New York University, Ric Brown, wonders how many of the signers actually know what StudentsFirst stands for, as they have gone to great lengths to cloak their message in progressive-sounding language and vague euphemisms. When he received the petition in his inbox, he quickly signed it, thinking it was supporting higher pay for teachers—he didn’t realize, until closer inspection, that the petition was in support of “merit pay.” “It was very deceptive,” Brown concluded. “It would be very easy to collect a lot of members this way.”57 And indeed, they have—as StudentsFirst boasts that it is “one million members strong,” and nearly 500,000 have signed their petition to “Pay Effective Teachers What They Deserve,” in favor of GERM policies, fulfilling Breitbart’s mission.58
MINORITY REPORT: HIJACKING CIVIL RIGHTS
TO SPREAD GERM
Before Rhee and her multimillionaire supporters, before Obama and Bush, GERM existed in Milton Friedman’s laboratory for decades, but had difficulty getting outside the walls of academia and into real schools—largely because the public did not share the conservative enthusiasm for privatizing education. “In roughly two dozen referenda across the country over the past few decades, voucher advocates have yet to record a single win,” observed Frederick Hess.59 In short, people weren’t voting for Friedman’s signature reform—vouchers. Conservative think tanks recognized they had a marketing problem; that they were not selling vouchers and they were not selling GERM effectively to the public. A new strategy needed to be developed: how could the reformers get the public to buy GERM?
In the late 1990s, Diane Ravitch, a distinguished professor of education history (and now reformed education “reformer” who eventually blew the whistle on the corporate takeover of public education in her best-selling book The Death and Life of the Great American School System) worked at the Manhattan Institute, a New York–based conservative think tank that was trying to solve this critical question. GERM advocates realized that their policies needed to be reframed, presented in a way that would appeal to the public. Vouchers didn’t have popular support, so conservative think tanks decided to throw their weight behind charter schools, “because they achieved almost the same result as vouchers—a transfer of government dollars from government to private control.” But exchanging vouchers for charters, by itself, wasn’t enough. Charters were not popularly known, nor could the public personally relate to the Manhattan Institute’s sterile economic theories and language that informed their corporate philosophies. Therein, a new strategy was born—co-opting progressive language to sell privatized education policies to the public.
“There was explicit discussion about the importance of presenting the charter idea as a way to save poor minority children. In a city and state that was consistently liberal, that was a smart strategy,” Ravitch recalled in an e-mail to the author.60 Hess noticed these strategies were being used throughout the country, and observed that “the case for school choice was thus not argued in terms of efficiency or deregulation, but instead presented as a moral imperative—an obligation to give poor, black inner-city parents the kinds of educational choices taken for granted by suburban home owners.”61 Indeed, the heart-wrenching propaganda documentary Waiting for Superman—which features Rhee—relies on this “social justice” narrative, while selling the audience on charters, and railing against unions. Today, co-opting liberal language, values, and morals—appealing to “social justice,” “civil rights,” and “equality”—has become standard in selling GERM, from Romney to Rhee. This marketing strategy has worked, as we see in Rhee’s extensive mailing list, and in the fact that prominent “liberals” like Zakaria support it. Ravitch, herself a lifelong “liberal” who became such a reformer, lured in by similar promises, concluded: “In retrospect, it seems strange that so many liberals bought an idea that emanated from conservative think tanks and conservative thinkers.”62
BUILDING A RESISTANCE TO GERM: RECOGNIZE, RESIST,
REFRAME, AND RECLAIM
American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?
—Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System63
A central front in the battle for GERM is not in the schools, but in the public’s mind. The “tycoons and politicians” to which Ravitch referred have taken this lesson to heart, and invest not just in policy, but in an extensive propaganda campaign to convince the public that our schools are failing, and that the free market is the only solution. Rather than expose these efforts, rather than investigate the GERM narrative and hold reformers accountable for their claims, the corporate media has been swept up in spreading it. And as a result, grassroots supporters of public education are losing this battle, as corporate reformers essentially control the conversation on education, from the White House to the television in your living room.
Yet, there is hope.
All these efforts to hide GERM from the public suggest that the grassroots activists have far more power than they may even recognize. Why must StudentsFirst go to such great lengths to hide who funds them? Why must they hide their policy agenda under misleading euphemisms? And why, overall, must the corporate reformers invest so much energy—and money—into misdirection? Because, ultimately, corporate reformers know that if the public could actually see the true intent and nature of policies, if they could look past the slick marketing, then Friedman’s GERM would shrivel back into obscurity. If grassroots defenders of public education could recognize GERM, if they could resist its misleading narrative and pose a new frame—a new way of discussing and thinking about education—they can begin to reclaim the conversation from corporate occupation and actually improve public education, from the ground up.
CONCLUSION: A REAL GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT TO
RECLAIM PUBLIC EDUCATION
We need to improve our public education system—of this there is no doubt. But it is not “failing schools,” nor “bad teachers,” nor their “selfinterested unions” that harm our schools, but rather the Global Education Reform Movement—and Friedman’s destructive economic philosophy from which it was born. The corporate education policies of NCLB and RttT place faith in business people and billionaires to educate our children, rather than in educators who work with the children themselves. By transferring public education to private management, our schools have become more unaccountable and less responsive to the individual needs of children, their parents, and the community at large, and more responsive to the needs of the company, the shareholder, the market—the need to make a profit. Ultimately, GERM narrows education in classrooms across America from a journey of discovery and into process of indoctrination: in doing so, GERM diminishes the essential joy and passion of learning from teachers and children, squelching the curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and humanity needed for the twenty-first-century economy, democracy, and community.
GERM is not improving our schools but destroying them—as are the devastating austerity measures that target our poorest schools and our most vulnerable children, increasing class sizes while decreasing services inside of the schools. Outside of school, our poorest children face the same cuts, as the same austerity measures cut social services and other public services—such as police and fire—making their communities more difficult and dangerous places to live. As a result of the foreclosure crisis and persistent unemployment, more and more of our children live in poverty, with jobless parents, in jobless communities, forgotten by the “free market,” as a result of economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
Stacey is right—it is not she who should be held accountable for her students’ struggle. Stacey did not create the poverty her children live in; she did not destroy the economy her children’s parents struggle in; she did not staff her class with fifty students; she did not even design the limited curriculum that she is required to teach.
This is the story grassroots defenders of public education tell: it is not teachers like Stacey who have failed; it is the politicians and tycoons of GERM who have failed our children. An answer will not come from these distant technocratic elite, but rather from children, educators, parents, and the communities working collaboratively to develop schools that enrich, rather than impoverish, our children, and our society at large.
We can reclaim our schools, and our fair share of the educational commons, Stacey concludes, “if more teachers would not allow themselves to be silenced anymore, if we speak up, if we write, if we present what we know to be true—loudly.”
Notes
1. “Stacy” is a pseudonym for a real Washington DC–based teacher who wished to remain anonymous, out of fear for reprisals on her career. We communicated through a series of e-mails from February 19, 2012, through June 1, 2012. We also spoke February 29, 2012. You can see her story illustrated by Dan Archer and Adam Bessie, “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price of Education Reform (Episode I),” Truthout, May 31, 2012, http://truth-out. org/art/item/9391-the-disaster-capitalism-curriculum-the-high-price-of-education-reform-episode-i.
2. Algernon Austin, “No Relief in 2012 from High Unemployment for African Americans and Latinos,” Economic Policy Institute Issue Brief #332, February 16, 2012, http://www.epi.org/ publication/ib322-african-american-latino-unemployment.
3. Alemayehu Bishaw, “Areas With Concentrated Poverty: 2006–2010,” United States Census Bureau, December 2011, http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acsbr10-17.pdf.
4. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, “District Crime Data at a Glance,” last updated June 1, 2012, http://mpdc.dc.gov/mpdc/cwp/view,a,1239,q,561242,mpdcNav_ GID,1523,mpdcNav,%7C.asp.
5. For an easy-to-read overview of No Child Left Behind, see “No Child Left Behind,” Education Week, last updated September 19, 2011, http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/no-child-left-behind/. For an official summary of NCLB see Rod Paige, “Key Policy Letters Signed by the Education Secretary or Deputy Secretary,” United States Department of Education, July 24, 2002, http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/guid/secletter/020724.html.
6. “An Overview of IMPACT,” District of Columbia Public Schools, http://www.dc.gov/DCPS/ In+the+Classroom/Ensuring+Teacher+Success/IMPACT+(Performance+Assessment)/ An+Overview+of+IMPACT#0.
7. Mary Ann Giordano, “Teachers’ Morale Reaches 20-Year Low,” New York Times’ SchoolBook, March 8, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/03/08/teachers-morale-reaches20-year-low. You can see the original series of surveys—started in 1984—on which Giordano’s commentary is based in “MetLife Survey of the American Teacher,” MetLife, http://www.metlife.com/about/corporate-profile/citizenship/metlife-foundation/metlife-survey-of-theamerican-teacher.html?WT.mc_id=vu1101.
8. Pasi Sahlberg, “Global Educational Reform Movement is Here!” Pasi Sahlberg Blog, April 2, 2012, http://www.pasisahlberg.com/blog/?p=68. See also Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011).
9. The theme of education and the commons, along with how corporate media owners overlapping with many involved in the so-called “education reform” movement was expanded upon in Oakland CA, January 22, 2012, at an all-day conference titled, “The Attack on Public Education and Privatization,” where the author of this chapter spoke with Project Censored director Mickey Huff, Steve Zeltzer, Dr. Gray Brechin, Kathleen Carroll, Jack Gerson, and professors George Wright and Peter Matthews. See http://occupyeducationca.org/wordpress/?p=217 for more details.
10. Corey Dade, “Romney Pivots to Education Platform Seeking Latino Votes,” NPR Blogs, May 23, 2012, http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/05/23/153518350/romney-stresses-education-platform-in-seeking-latino-votes. See also “Romney: American Kids Get ‘Third World Education,’” CBS MoneyWatch, May 23, 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_16257440299/romney-american-kids-get-third-world-education/.
11. “What Mr. Romney’s returns illustrated, instead, was the array of perfectly ordinary ways in which the United States tax code confers advantages on the rich, allowing Mr. Romney to amass wealth under rules very different from those faced by most Americans who take home a paycheck,” Nicholas Confessore and David Kocieniewski found in their investigation, “For Romneys, Friendly Code Reduces Taxes,” New York Times, January 24, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/us/politics/romneys-tax-returns-show-21-6-million-income-in-10. html?_r=1&pagewanted=all.
12. Holcomb Noble, “Milton Friedman, Free Markets Theorist, Dies at 94,” New York Times, November 16, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/business/17friedmancnd. html?pagewanted=all.
13. Peter Goodman, “A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets,” New York Times, April 13, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/weekinreview/13goodman.html?pagewanted=all.
14. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). See a comprehensive critique of Klein by Johan Norberg in “Defaming Milton Friedman,” Reason, October 2008, http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/26/defaming-milton-friedman/singlepage. Norberg claims Klein is “dead wrong about Friedman.” For further reading on how the Shock Doctrine concept applies to education see “Shock Doctrine, Manufactured Education Crisis and Media’s Distorted Portrayal of American Education,” New York City Eye (blog), April 2, 2012, http:// nycityeye.blogspot.com/2012/04/shock-doctrine-manufactured-education.html; David Sirota,“The ‘Shock Doctrine’ Comes to Your Neighborhood Classroom,” Salon, September 6, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/09/06/shockreform/; and Adam Sanchez, “Disaster Schooling: The Education ‘Shock Doctrine,’” International Socialist Review 71 (May/June 2010), http:// www.isreview.org/issues/71/feat-disasterschooling.shtml.
15. Jeff Madrick, “The End of the Age of Milton Friedman,” Huffington Post, March 31, 2008, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-madrick/the-end-of-the-age-of-mil_b_94228.html.
16. Milton Friedman, interview by Nick Gillespie, “The Father of Modern School Reform,” Reason, December 2005, in Hoover Digest 1 (2006), http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/ article/7122.
17. Anyone seriously interested in privatization of education—and public services in general— should read Milton Friedman’s “The Role of Government in Education,” in Capitalism and Free-dom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 85–108.
18. Milton Friedman, “Busting the School Monopoly,” Newsweek, December 5, 1983, The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, http://www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmanson-School-Choice/Milton-Friedman-on-Busting-the-School-Monopoly.aspx.
19. Frederick Hess, “Does School Choice ‘Work’?” National Affairs 5 (Fall 2010): 35–53, http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/20100918_Hess_pdf[1].pdf.
20. George Lakoff, with whom I talked during the writing of this chapter, has published extensively on “framing,” or on how metaphor and language in general guide the way we think, most often at an unconscious level, especially in The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (New York: Penguin, 2009). This passage comes from an excerpt of a Lakoff speech at University of California–Berkeley, “Privatization is the Issue,” Keep California’s Promise, August 7, 2009, http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/77/privatization-is-the-issue.
21. Taylorism was based on the theories of Frederick Taylor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its main goal was to apply scientific management techniques to maximize production in the workplace. For a brief overview of this concept, see Jonathan Rees, “Frederick Taylor In The Classroom: Standardized Testing And Scientific Management,” Radical Pedagogy 3, no. 2 (Fall 2001), http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue3_2/rees.html. Taylorism applied to education is essentially what Friedman prescribed. But, Rees, an academic historian, concludes in contradiction, “If teachers cannot choose methods and topics that engage both them and their students, education will suffer. . . . The reason for this is that contrary to the assumptions of standardized test advocates, education is not an ordinary commodity. It cannot accurately be measured in discreet units. Thus, it defies numerical measurement. Furthermore, there is no one best way to teach anything. Different content and different methods will work for different teachers in different settings. Destroying teacher prerogatives by introducing evaluation methods akin to scientific management will inevitably hurt production rather than help it along.”
22. Paul Thomas, Ignoring Poverty in the U.S.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Education (North Carolina: Information Age Press, 2012); and Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske, “Class Matters. Why Won’t We Admit It?” New York Times, December 11, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/ opinion/the-unaddressed-link-between-poverty-and-education.html?pagewanted=all.
23. Wayne Au, “Playing Smart: Resisting The Script,” Rethinking Schools 26, no. 3 (Spring 2012), http://rethinkingschools.org/archive/26_03/26_03_au.shtml.
24. See a pamphlet intended to provide advice for “turnaround” non-profits and corporations: Jeff Kutash et al., The School Turnaround Field Guide, FSG Social Impact Advisors, September 2010, http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/district-policy-andpractice/Documents/the-school-turnaround-field-guide-executive-summary.pdf.
25. “Obama’s State of the Union Address: Full Text,” CBS News Political Hotsheet, January 24, 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57365343-503544/obamas-state-of-the-union-address-full-text.
26. Joy Removits, “Race to the Top 2012 Invites School Districts to Compete,” Huffington Post, May 22, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/22/race-to-the-top-2012-schooldistricts_n_1534517.html.
27. “We cannot let another generation of children be deprived of their civil right to a quality educa-tion,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says, pushing for more charter schools to be opened in a press release: “States Open to Charters Start Fast in ‘Race to Top,’” United States Department of Education, June 8, 2009, http://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2009/06/06082009a. html.
28. Liz Dwyer, “Let’s Stop Comparing Education to the Civil Rights Movement,” GOOD, May 25, 2012, http://www.good.is/post/let-s-stop-comparing-education-to-the-civil-rights-movement.
29. Friedman and Gillespie, “The Father of Modern School Reform.”
30. “Breitbart Announces His Next Big Move: ‘Go After the Teachers,’” Media Matters for America, April 18, 2011, http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201104180045.
31. Google Trends is a free search function that allows users to see the traffic on a specific term, along with key articles that used that term. See http://www.google.com/trends.
32. Paul Fahri, “Flunking the Test,” American Journalism Review (April/May 2012), http://www.ajr. org/Article.asp?id=5280.
33. Mickey Huff and Adam Bessie et al., “Framing the Messengers: Junk Food News and News Abuse for Dummies,” Censored 2012: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis 2010–11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 183–228.
34. John Sexton, “Liberal Graduation Speakers Outnumber Conservatives 7 to 1,” Big Government (blog), May 15, 2012, http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/15/Examiner-Liberal-Graduation-Speakers-Outnumber-Conservatives-7-to-1.
35. Fahri, “Flunking the Test”; Louis Gerstner, interview by Fareed Zakaria, “Restoring the American Dream,” GPS with Fareed Zakaria, CNN, October 30 and 31, 2010, http://www-cgi.cnn. com/video/#/video/podcasts/fareedzakaria/site/2010/10/31/gps.podcast.10.31.cnn, http:// transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1010/30/fzgps.01.html. It is also worth noting the cross ownership of media outlets here as CNN and Time are owned by the same parent corporate company Time Warner, as one can see with NBC, MSNBC (owned by General Electric and Microsoft), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a major contributor to the “education reform” movement which also has the popular show Education Nation on the NBC networks which promotes “reform” policies).
36. “Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education,” GPS with Fareen Zakaria, CNN, November 11, 2011, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1111/12/fzgps.01.html.
37. Julie Zeveloff, “These Are the Worst Teachers in New York City,” Business Insider, February 25, 2012, http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-25/lifestyle/31098426_1_math-teacherspublic-school-teachers-zero.
38. “Too Unreliable,” Room for Debate, New York Times, May 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/ roomfordebate/2010/09/06/assessing-a-teachers-value/value-added-assessment-is-too-unreliable-to-be-useful. Here you can find a debate on “value-added analysis,” at which prominent Stanford University Education professor Linda Darling-Hammond cites this study.
39. See note 21 in this chapter for more on this concept of the pedagogy of Taylorism.
40. Alexandra Zavis and Tony Barboza, “Teacher’s Suicide Shocks School,” Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/local/la-me-south-gate-teacher-20100928.
41. Paul Thomas, “The Bully Politics of Education Reform,” The Daily Censored (blog), http://www.dailycensored.com/2012/04/06/the-bully-politics-of-education-reform.
42. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, [1946] 1950), http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/ english/e_polit.
43. “StudentsFirst Six-Word Essay Contest,” StudentsFirst.org, http://www.studentsfirst.org/pag-es/official-rules.
44. StudentsFirst.org homepage and staff page, http://www.studentsfirst.org/ and http://www.studentsfirst.org/staff.
45. “Pay Effective Teachers What They Deserve,” petition sponsored by StudentsFirst, http://www.change.org/petitions/pay-effective-teachers-what-they-deserve.
46. For a definition and thorough discussion of “Astroturf,” see Anthony DiMaggio, “A Tea Party Among Us: Media Censorship, Manufactured Dissent, and the Right-Wing Rebellion,” Censored 2012: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2010–11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 351–66.
47. Adam Bessie, “Our Cutthroat Curriculum,” Answer Sheet, Washington Post, May 6, 2011, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/our-cutthroat-curriculum/2011/05/05/ AFuiFP3F_blog.html.
48. Jack Gillum and Marisol Bello, “When Standardized Test Scores Soared in D.C., Were the Gains Real?” USA Today, March 30, 2011, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/201103-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm; Michael Winerip, “Amid a Federal Education Inquiry, an Unsettling Sight,” New York Times, February 26, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/ education/duncan-and-rhee-on-panel-amid-dc-schools-inquiry.html?pagewanted=all; and M. Catharine Evans and Ann Kane, “D.C. Cheating Scandal: A Conspiracy of Silence,” American Thinker, March 22, 2012, http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/dc_cheating_scandal_a_ conspiracy_of_silence.html.
49. Sommer Mathis, Sarah Larimer, and Kevin Robillard, “D.C. Teachers Fired by Rhee to Be Re-instated,” TBD/News Channel 8, February 8, 2011, http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/02/d-cteachers-fired-by-rhee-to-be-reinstated-51340.html.
50. Kyle Olson, “AFT’s Anti-Michelle Rhee Website Illustrates Unions are Buckling Under Reform Pressure,” Big Government (blog), September 7, 2011, http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2011/09/07/AFT---s-Anti-Michelle-Rhee-Website-Illustrates-Unions-Are-Buckling-Under-Reform-Pressure.
51. Stephanie Simon (Reuters), “Activist Targeting U.S. Schools, Backed by Big Bucks,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 2012, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-15/news/sns-rt-us-usa-education-rheebre84e1oa-20120515_1_michelle-rhee-studentsfirst-grade-level.
52. Joanne Barkan, “Hired Guns on the Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reform,” Dissent, Spring 2012, http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=4240.
53. David Halperin, “Scams and Frauds (Plus George W. Bush and Michelle Rhee) at Upcoming Subprime College Conference,” Huffington Post, April 20, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/davidhalperin/scams-and-frauds-plus-geo_b_1441368.html.
54. “White House Visitors Database,” Washington Post, http://apps.washingtonpost.com/svc/politics/white-house-visitors-log/searchResults?query=Michelle+Rhee&ignoreTours=true. Rhee visited the White House on December 14, 2009.
55. Valerie Strauss, “Guess What Michelle Rhee Charged a School to Speak,” Answer Sheet, Washington Post, October 26, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ guess-what-michelle-rhee-charged-a-school-to-speak/2011/10/24/gIQAen6GJM_blog.html.
56. Simon, “Activist Targeting U.S. Schools, Backed by Big Bucks.”
57. Stephen Sawchuk, “Relationship Between Advocacy Groups, Unions Uneasy,” Education Week, May 22, 2012, http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/23/32adv-union_ep.h31. html?r=366288102.
58. Sharra Weasler, “One Million Strong,” StudentsFirst.org, January 6, 2012, http://www.stu-dentsfirst.org/blog/entry/one-million-strong/. As of June 1, 2012, the petition “Pay Effective Teachers What They Deserve” had 492,771 signatures of the 500,000 goal.
59. Hess, “Does School Choice ‘Work’?”
60. Diane Ravitch, e-mail message to Adam Bessie, December 27, 2011.
61. Hess, “Does School Choice ‘Work’?”
62. Ravitch, e-mail to Bessie.
63. Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (New York: Basic Books, 2010). See this excerpt—and more—at the National Education Association, http://www.nea.org/ home/39774.htm.
ADAM BESSIE is an assistant professor of English at Diablo Valley College, a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been a full-time public school educator, teaching courses on writing, reading, and literature, for the last decade, teaching also in high school and four-year colleges. Adam has contributed to the Project Censored series for the last two years, and has published essays on the Daily Censored blog, Common Dreams, the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet,” Truthout, and many other sources. Most recently, Adam coauthored with Dan Archer the first work of graphic journalism on education reform: “The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price of Education Reform,” in which you can see many of the issues discussed here illustrated, online at Truthout.
Special Thanks: I had many discussions with scholars, activists, and journalists that helped in shaping this chapter, especially veteran Oakland educator and Education Week writer Anthony Cody, New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, University of California–Berkeley cognitive linguistics professor George Lakoff, Dissent magazine editor Joanne Barkan, and graphic journalist Dan Archer. A special thanks goes to “Stacey,” who had the courage to speak up—and to do so eloquently. Also special thanks to my editor and friend Mickey Huff, for encouraging me to write the chapter, and for helping to polish it. Most of all, though, a very special thanks to my wife, Corin, a public high school social studies teacher, whose insights and editing help were invaluable. This chapter is dedicated to our son, Sol, born during its writing, who is my inspiration.