Education professor says Arne's plans not unique to U. S., previously carried out in Chile.

[madfloridian]

Democracy Now's Juan Gonzalez today interviewed:

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union

Lois Weiner, professor of education at New Jersey City University.

I was especially interested in the comments of Lois Weiner.

From the transcript:

Educators push back against Obama's school reforms

She points out that these reforms are going on worldwide. She discusses the Race to the Top program.

Gonzalez asks her to compare not only what’s happening here in the United States, but around the world, in terms of these so-called reform initiatives.

LOIS WEINER: Absolutely. And I think it’s important to understand that Race to the Top is not unique to the United States, and what Arne Duncan did in Chicago is not unique to Chicago. And in fact, the contours of this program were carried out first under Pinochet in Chile. And this program was implemented by force of military dictatorships and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Latin America. And the results have been verified by researchers there. They produced increased stratification. So I think what we’re seeing right now are the results of that increased stratification, a stratification, inequality of results, because if you think about it, No Child Left Behind is almost a decade old. And what are the results? The results are a growing gap between poor minority—achievement of poor minority kids and those kids who come from prosperous families who are—who live in affluent suburbs and in those suburban schools.

She says it is a way to prepare students for jobs in this economy.

And I think it’s also very important to understand that this focus on educational reform is replacing, is a substitute for, a jobs policy. We need to understand that. Education can democratize the competition for the existing jobs, but it cannot create new jobs. And when most jobs that are being created are by companies like Wal-Mart, education cannot do anything about that. So, we need to—we really need to look critically at Race to the Top and understand the way that it fits into this new economic order of a so-called jobless recovery and that what’s really going on is a vocationalization of education, a watering down of curriculum for most kids, so that they’re going to take jobs that require only a seventh or an eighth grade education, because those are the jobs that are being created in this economy.

That is stunning to hear an education professor say those words, though many of us feel that way.

Gonzalez asks Weiner to discuss the impact of No Child Left Behind on teachers. Again many have felt that way, but it is still hard to believe it is happening.

LOIS WEINER: Well, I think it’s important to understand that there are—No Child Left Behind is part of this global project to deprofessionalize teaching as an occupation. And the reason that it’s important in this project to deprofessionalize teaching is that the thinking is that the biggest expenditure in education is teacher salaries. And they want to cut costs. They want to diminish the amount of money that’s put into public education. And that means they have to lower teacher costs. And in order to do that, they have to deprofessionalize teaching. They have to make it a revolving door, in which we’re not going to pay teachers very much. They’re not going to stay very long. We’re going to credential them really fast. They’re going to go in. We’re going to burn them up. They’re going to leave in three, four, five years. And that’s the model that they want.

So who is the biggest impediment to that occurring? Teachers’ unions. And that is what explains this massive propaganda effort to say that teachers’ unions are an impediment to reform. And in fact, they are an impediment to the deprofessionalization of teaching, which I think is a disaster. It’s a disaster for public education.

She's right about teachers' unions being the target. Arne started out confronting them, then backed off when he got a little heat....but then he was right back at it again.

Arne warns states not to "water down" education plans to please unions.

Here is the money quote from Arne in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Duncan said in an interview that he welcomed the friction between union and state officials but warned against states weakening their overhaul plans simply to win buy-ins from unions. "Watered-down proposals with lots of consensus won't win," he said. "And proposals that drive real reform will win."

He continued that theme of not "watering down" plans in more recent quotes.

After staying out of the Race to the Top round-two fray for weeks, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is finally starting to take the gloves off and wade into the middle of a big debate over just how important "buy-in" is in a state's application.

Today, in a routine conference call with the business community (he does this sort of outreach regularly), he declared: "At the end of the day we're going to (fund) the strongest proposals whether they have tremendous buy-in or not." (The department invited me to listen in on the call, which was to encourage business leaders to support states' Race to the Top efforts.)

Although broad collaboration and buy-in should remain a goal, he said, if a state's proposal is "more consensus but watered-down reform, that's not going to be a winning application."

This administration is not going to back down on these reforms. It simply does not matter if teachers don't like it, and parents are also getting alarmed.

In one of her previous interviews on Democracy Now former Bush assistant Secretary of Education had this to say.

DIANE RAVITCH: “The Billionaires Boys Club” is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.

These foundations have direct access to the Secretary of Education, and they are on the inside deciding vital policy for education's future.

Thanks to Lois Weiner today for reminding us that it is a world-wide movement to make schools more profitable and more malleable for the billionaires leading the reform.