Censored 2012 (35 page)

Gates’s and other billionaires’ PR investment in
WFS
has paid off, as the myth of the Bad Teacher, the Broken School, and the Evil Union blanket the corporate and even so-called liberal media—CNN, the
Huffington Post, The Colbert Report, Oprah, and Real Time with Bill Maher
—have all uncritically repeated the claims made in
WFS
, as
Daily Censored
blogger, veteran teacher, and education professor Paul Thomas points out in his numerous essays analyzing media coverage on education.
¹¹¹
Thomas observes that Rhee and other
WFS
and
Education Nation
supporters made a “celebrity tour” of the corporate media, where they promoted the claims from the film without serious analysis.
¹¹²
Even NPR, which Republicans routinely attempt to defund for being too liberal, “offered Rhee an unchallenged forum for spouting common sense without a shred of evidence.”
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WFS
, in conjunction with heavy promotional support, created a largely uncritical media circus that ended up promoting stereotypes about public school teachers, unions, the education system, and even charter schools themselves. In his satiric review of the film, AEI’s Hess snidely jokes, “Happily, my earlier skepticism is gone. Much like Winston in
1984
, I now feel pleasantly persuaded. You see, the peer pressure finally got to me and, just hours ago, I walked out of the theater with my eyes, finally, wide open.”
¹¹⁴
And as the “goopy groupthink” faded, as the “celebrity tour” ended, and critical reviews of the film’s factually distorted arguments by scholars like Diane Ravitch and others began to come out, film critic Roger Ebert—who had originally given the film a “thumbs up,” took back his review, writing on Twitter: “Why maybe ‘Waiting for Superman’ wasn’t all that it seemed. If I’d known, my review would have been different.”
¹¹⁵

Sitting alongside Hess at an AEI session entitled “The New Normal:
Doing More With Less,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech on how to make public education work in tight budgetary times. During the course of the speech, Duncan said “productivity” seventeen times and “learning” five times.
¹¹⁶
Indeed, Duncan’s speech at a neoconservative think tank reveals a “New Normal,” where the language and policies of the corporate world and the free-market are being proposed as the only solutions to what ails education. Duncan’s corporate pose is unsurprising, as his boss President Obama has been applauding the corporate reform message, according to Hess. “Interviewed in October on the
Today Show
, President Obama seemed to be channeling a generation of conservative education analysts in stating bluntly that more money absent reform won’t do much to improve public schools.”
¹¹⁷
And the “corporative takeover of American schools,” as Paul Thomas calls it,
¹¹⁸
has gone all but unchallenged in most media, as a result of powerful advocacy not only from the Obama administration but three billionaire venture philanthropists.
¹¹⁹

In the last year, education reform has become a euphemism for a very specific philosophy: a free-market one, which Fred Hiatt of the
Washington Post
called “the Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee philosophy of education reform.”
¹²⁰
As Joanne Barkan observes in a comprehensive investigative report on private spending in education policies, reform has come to mean “choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making.”
¹²¹
In other words, this means supporting policies that either privatize public education, or turn public education into a simulation of the private sector. This includes, as Barkan shows, “charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher.”
¹²²
In other words, the “Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee” education reform movement means pushing public schools from a model of cooperation to one of competition, as Ravitch points out, “turning schools into a marketplace where the consumer is king.”
¹²³

The “Big Three”—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation—have invested billions in trying to turn schools into a marketplace, and tens of millions in advocacy to influence national policy, according to
Barkan.
¹²⁴
The editors of the Hoover Institution’s education journal
Education Next
agree: “Prodded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other veteran private-sector reformers, the Obama administration has lent unexpectedly forceful support to such causes as common standards, better assessments, charter schools, merit pay, refurbished teacher preparation, and the removal of ineffective instructors.”
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In her research, Barkan found that Gates and Broad joined forces, “funding a $60 million campaign to get both political parties to address the foundations’ version of education reform.” In their annual report, the Broad Foundation claimed that “the stars have aligned” with the election of President Obama and Secretary Duncan. And according to Barkan, the foundations got a return on their investment, as the Obama administration’s education plan titled “Race to the Top,” “came straight from the foundations’ playbook, including testing-based accountability and charter schools.”
¹²⁶
This should not be surprising, as Duncan, before coming to the White House, referred to his work with Gates in the Chicago school system as a “partnership.”
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In much the same way, “The Billionaire Boys Club” (as Ravitch has called them), has heavily invested in public advocacy, working to sway media coverage toward corporate education reform, often covertly. According to the
New York Times
, the Gates Foundation has spent seventy-eight million dollars on education advocacy, which includes a vast intellectual and communication infrastructure. “It’s easier to name which groups Gates doesn’t support than to list all of those they do, because it’s just so overwhelming,” noted a graduate student who had studied the Gates Foundation’s advocacy in the article.
¹²⁸
This funding has gone to support research, the major education publication
Education Week
, proxy bloggers, and has gone to develop a Koch Brother’s-style Astroturf organization called Teach Plus, which, according to its website, supports teachers in writing op-eds, and creating and influencing policy.
¹²⁹
In one striking example covered by the
New York Times
, Teach Plus members spoke against tenure, describing “themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform,” without mentioning their affiliation or training. Teach Plus, which has received over four million dollars in grants from the Gates Foundation claims that “none of Teach Plus work in Indianapolis is supported by Gates funding.”
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(Within days, this statement disappeared from
its website). As the
New York Times
article reports, “Few policy makers, reporters, or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.”
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Hess—a recipient of a half million dollars from the Gates Foundation—also acknowledges how the influence of educational venture philanthropists like Gates works to dull or silence criticism. Both Barkan and Ravitch cite Hess’s book
With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy is Reshaping K-12 Education
, in which he finds that “[A]cademics, activists, and the policy community live in a world where philanthropists are royalty—where philanthropic support is often the ticket to tackling big projects, making a difference, and maintaining one’s livelihood.”
¹³²
Because academics can only take on projects with money, Hess contends, they are hesitant to bite the hand that may feed them. “Not a single book has been published that has questioned their education strategies,” Ravitch paraphrases Hess.
¹³³
Further, Hess found that the corporate media also avoided criticism of the “Big Three’s” educational advocacy: in a study from 1995 to 2005 of the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles
Times, the
Washington Post
, the
Chicago Tribune, Newsweek
, and Associated Press, Hess found that there were “thirteen positive articles for every critical account.”
¹³⁴
Hess himself acknowledges that he feels “constrained” by taking money from Gates: “There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.” Hess concludes in the
New York Times
article that “everyone is implicated” in what he called, in
The Best of Intentions
, an “amiable conspiracy of silence.”
¹³⁵

“Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” Secretary of Education Duncan told
Newsweek
senior editor Jonathan Alter. The interview, in an editorial blog which attempted to debunk Ravitch, was titled “Don’t Believe the Critics: Education Reform Works.”
¹³⁶
Alter published the blog for Bloomberg News, a media organization owned by billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who instituted “the Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee philosophy
of education reform” in New York City. In the blog—and another
Newsweek
editorial—Alter applauded the reforms made in New York, the very same reforms Ravitch spends a chapter critiquing in
The Life and Death of the Great American School System.
¹³⁷
This coordinated attack on Ravitch illustrates what happened when she broke the “conspiracy of silence,” around the free market education reform movement. In the last year, Ravitch was ignored, censored, and when given a voice, publicly flogged for critiquing the policies heralded in
WFS
.

Ravitch’s
The Life and Death of the Great American School System
is the product of what she calls an “intellectual crisis.”
¹³⁸
An education historian who studied trends in American education over the last hundred years, Ravitch was a fierce advocate of free-market reforms, worked for George H. W. Bush as Secretary of Education, promoted George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) policy, and helped found the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. “Like many others … I was attracted to the idea that the market would unleash innovation and bring greater efficiencies to education,” she says.
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Ravitch had her “epiphany around NCLB in November 2006” at an AEI conference focused on NCLB: “I went to a meeting … to hear a series of studies of how NCLB was working.… They were not, and at the end of the day, I concluded (and said publicly) that NCLB was not working.”
¹⁴⁰
She began to see the free-market movement she supported as another one of the ill-fated education fads that she had studied throughout her career, and found, “I had drunk too deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intracticable [sic] problems. I too had jumped aboard a bandwagon.”
¹⁴¹

With
The Life and Death
she jumped off the bandwagon, and was consequently no longer welcome on the national stage. In
Education Nation
, “she was represented in a thirty-second-long clip, and otherwise completely blocked from participating.
Waiting For Superman
director Davis Guggenheim refused to share the stage with her on any program,” Anthony Cody, a veteran urban public school teacher observed in his blog for
Education Week
.
¹⁴²
Pop musician John Legend played a far more prominent role in the program on education reform than did Ravitch, as did the CEO of Netflix.
¹⁴³

Further, in an e-mail conversation with coauthor Bessie, Ravitch claimed that she was censored from debating free-market reformers
in the corporate media. Ravitch claimed, “My book publisher has tried repeatedly, but I can’t get onto any of the national TV shows to challenge Gates, Rhee, et al.”
¹⁴⁴
Further, Ravitch noted: “I have published many, many op-eds in the
New York Times
, but for the past year, my editor rejected every idea, proposal, suggestion. So I stopped offering, realizing that the door was closed.”
¹⁴⁵

Months after the PR blitz of
WFS
, Ravitch broke through the corporate media blockade with an appearance on
The Daily
Show, NPR, and finally the
New York Times
.
¹⁴⁶
In her op-ed, “Waiting for a Miracle School,” Ravitch claimed that both President Obama and New York Mayor Bloomberg inflated the results of the studies they cited
¹⁴⁷
in order to better promote the success of their free-market reforms. Ravitch went on to discuss the studies in more detail, providing readers with a more complete picture of the research. Arne Duncan and Jonathan Alter made scathing critiques immediately following Ravitch’s op-ed. Both attempted to discredit Ravitch’s work and her personally. Alter claimed, “She’s the education world’s very own Whittaker Chambers, the famous communist turned strident anti-communist of the 1940s,” and accused her of using “phony empiricism.” Yet, just two weeks before, Ravitch was awarded the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The Board of Directors includes esteemed social scientists from Harvard and Yale and the award is given to those “who champion the use of informed judgment to advance the public good … while contributing to the civility of public discourse and pursuing a bipartisan approach to society’s most pressing problems.”
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And while AEI’s Hess thinks Ravitch is misguided in her analysis, he nonetheless appears to agree with her concerns that proponents of corporate reform—like Duncan—may be “overpromising” on the results of these education policies.
¹⁴⁹
In a 2010 essay, Hess even foreshadows Ravitch’s 2011
New York Times
essay by suggesting that reform proponents, when faced with criticism, may “oversell ideas as miracle cures.”
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