John King's 'worries' about DeVos don't include "choice" or vouchers

Duncan & King

As N.Y.'s Education Commissioner, John King's top-down imposition of corporate-style reform policies, including Common Core testing mania, led to a revolt among parents and teachers.

As Arne Duncan's appointed successor to a short-lived stint as Pres. Obama's Ed Secretary, King continued Duncan's push for mass closings of public schools in black communities and replacing them with privately-run charters. In many ways, the Duncan/King failed Race to the Top program, set the table for Betsy DeVos' current school "choice" agenda which now threatens to decimate public schooling altogether.

As his reward for causing all this mayhem and division, King landed softly at the top of the Education Trust, which supposedly looks out for poor and minority children but instead has been a bulwark of destructive, top-down imposed testing madness going back to the now thoroughly-discredited No Child Left Behind law.

While King and Duncan have been critical of DeVos, they have steered clear of saying anything strongly critical about the bedrock of her "reform" strategy -- privatization, "choice" and vouchers.

In an interview with EdWeek's Alyson Klein, King reveals his and Ed Trust's affinity with Trump/DeVos on ed policy by omitting any criticism or even mention of their push for privatization and school vouchers. While King shares some of his legitimate "worries" about the DeVos administration's funding cuts to education and it's recent moves when it comes to civil rights enforcement, his concerns sound rather tepid.

"All of those things suggest that there's not a full commitment to civil rights protection," King said.

Not a full commitment? A duh statement if I ever heard one. Especially when you consider the lengths to which Trump/DeVos have already gone to turning the Office of Civil Rights into its opposite. 

And then there's the reality that King and Duncan's regimes also failed (by Duncan's own admission) on what Duncan called "forced integration", at times disparaging Obama's own Justice Department on civil rights enforcement.

But King's main concern isn't about the Trump regime's bent toward white supremacy. Rather it's that DeVos may not be tough enough on states and school districts when it comes to enforcing test-score accountability,

He tells Klein that he concerned that DeVos and even Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown aren't intervening severely enough in low-performing (high poverty) schools --"intervening" meaning labeling them as failures, closing them, and replacing them with charters.

"I am worried about the clarity for parents about school performance ... I'm very worried about the California dashboard," he said, referring to the state's proposed accountability model, which considers school performance on a host of factors, but doesn't come up with an overall rating. "I think it's very confusing."

While in previous interviews, King has called the voucher issue a "distraction", his list of current concerns expressed in the EdWeek interview include not even a mention of "choice" or school vouchers. This omission is most revealing. 

These Schools Belong to You and Me

My old and dear friend Deb Meier and her former Mission Hill School colleague and co-writer, Emily Gasoi have a new book out and it's well worth the read. These Schools Belong to You and Me is an elegantly-written call to defend and preserve the public or democratic part of what's left of public education itself.

They cover a lot of ground in 180 pages, including a biting critique of Trump's Ed Sec. Betsy DeVos, privately-run charter schools, the misnamed "accountability" wave, and Deb's reflection on the cooptation/disembowelment of the small schools movement which she helped launch at Central Park Elementary School in East Harlem more than 40 years ago.

Deb and Emily are among the few practitioners still writing about democracy and education. John Dewey lives.

Crisis and/of Leadership

"Don’t follow leaders
 Watch the parkin’ meters"
-- Robert Zimmerman

In '65, a prophetic Dylan must have had vision of Chicago which included Mayor Daley's notorious parking meter deal. But it's the first line that should generate the most reflection on our part.

Joshua Rothman might well be describing today's corporate-style school reformers when he writes in the New Yorker:

People who fetishize leadership sometimes find themselves longing for crisis. They yearn for emergency, dreaming of a doomsday to be narrowly averted...

...Elizabeth Samet writes, in the introduction to “Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers” (Norton). “If we live in a world of crisis, we also live in a world that romanticizes crisis—that finds in it fodder for an addiction to the twenty-four-hour news cycle, multiple information streams, and constant stimulation.” 

Many of today’s challenges are too complex to yield to the exercise of leadership alone. Even so, we are inclined to see the problems of the present in terms of crises and leaders.

She quotes John Adams, who suggested, in a letter to a friend, that there was something both undemocratic and unwise in the lionization of leadership. The country won't improve, Adams wrote, until the people begin to "consider themselves as the fountain of power."

Plenty to think about here, especially when the two leading candidates for president are campaigning on the promise that they and only they, have the power to "make deals" (Trump) or "get things done" (Clinton). Here in Chicago, we have institutionalized the lionization of leadership by giving the mayor autocratic power over our public schools.

It also brings to mind power philanthropists, like Gates, Broad, and Walton, who hide their wealth in huge tax-exempt foundations and leverage it to erode and override public space and public decision making.

Duncan big on accountability. But not his own.

Arne Duncan is the great educational know-nothing. As a result, he loads his speeches up with empty clichés and meaningless phrases in place of solid dialog about teaching and learning.

In a speech Monday at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Duncan tells his faithful,

"When students enroll in college, he said, the chances of a successful outcome — getting a degree — amount to “a coin toss.”

“The challenge we face is easy to articulate, if not to solve.” There is, he said, “a lot of heavy lifting and culture change ahead.”

 "This is not a free lunch for higher education by any stretch."

He goes on to decry the "lack of accountability" (not his own) in public ed. He blames it all on "politics" and "bureaucracy". This coming from Pres. Obama's chief political appointee to the top of the one of the world's biggest bureaucracies.

It all reminds me of when Duncan was Mayor Daley's patronage pick to run Chicago's schools back in 2001. He had been the protege of investment banker and Daley pal Jonathan Rogers, who Duncan claims, taught him "the business of education."

When I proposed putting a new small public school inside of shuttered Austin High School, Duncan said he would get the board to okay it, but warned that it had to be charter school. When I asked why, he explained that otherwise, "the bureaucracy will f_ck with you". I rejected the idea and responded: "But Arne. You are the bureaucracy. Why don't you just not f_ck with us?"

He seemed puzzled, but relented.

Accountability?

Students protest re-closing of Duncan's turnaround school. 

In 2008, Dodge Elementary was where then president-elect Barack Obama, after drinking the "Chicago Miracle" kool-aid, announced Duncan as his pick for Secretary of Education.

“He’s shut down failing schools and replaced their entire staffs, even when it was unpopular,” Obama said at the time. “This school right here, Dodge Renaissance Academy, is a perfect example. Since this school was revamped and reopened in 2003, the number of students meeting state standards has more than tripled.”

But fast forward another five years, Dodge was closed again.

CPS spokesperson at the time said there was no one available to speak with the media on the record about the closing. She said CPS is “focusing on the challenges of today.”

Translation -- We don't need no stinkin' accountability.