Re: Fw: [AERA-CESJ] New Website of Interest

[aburke5054@aol.com]

 The Tough Choices report doesn't say what the reviewer says it does at all.? Not even close.? Art


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Monty Neill <monty@fairtest.org>
To: ndsgroup@yahoogroups.com; ARN-L <arn-l@interversity.org>; arn2-strategy <arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 3:02 pm
Subject: [arn-l] Fw: [AERA-CESJ] New Website of Interest










Here is part of a message I got followed  the text of a review of the Mark 
Tucker/NCEE "tough choices" report - you may be interested in bookmarking the 
site or on this review of Tucker. 

Colleagues:


I am part of a small group that has just launched a new book review website 
intended to counter some of the stuff coming out of conservative think tanks.  I 
hope you'll:  a) take a look, b) help us spread the word, and c) help support 
our efforts by putting a link to us on your own websites, or by recommending 
works to be reviewed, or offering any constructive feedback you may have.


Enjoy!  http://www.book-smarts.net/ 

Patricia H. Hinchey
Associate Professor of Education, Penn State 


      touch choice or tough times:  the report of the new commission on the 
skills of the american workforce

      national center on education and the economy

        San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-Bass, 2007
     
          
      Tough Choices or Tough Times contends that the global economy (especially 
India and China) is producing highly skilled workers who will work for low pay, 
putting pressure on the U.S. workforce to outwit its global rivals for the best, 
most creative work. According to the authors, the education system is the 
principal means to achieving such a talented workforce. Morever, they assert 
that producing the desired workforce is the primary responsibility of schools. 
The book equates national educational well-being with the health of the U.S. 
economy and claims that the U.S. educational system is presently ill-prepared to 
compete globally for these scarce jobs; hence the country is at risk of a 
drastic decrease in material living standards. Once this strictly economic view 
of education's potential is claimed with gusto, vitriol, and reference to other 
scary reports like A Nation at Risk, the report goes on to call for radically 
transforming public education as we know it. 

      However, the radical remaking that the report calls for looks nearly 
identical in substance to the privatization-oriented reform trends that have 
been gaining ground for the past fifteen years. There is little new here. The 
remedy to the declared crisis relies heavily on business metaphors, assumptions, 
and logic (and relies on a standby crew of privatization advocates like 
Hanuschek and Finn). It includes, for example, the idea that what schools need 
is deregulation: public schools should be transformed into charter school 
networks (that the authors handily call "performance schools" so they can avoid 
the bad news that charters have gotten in performance studies).These charters 
would be run by for-profit companies and other companies composed of teacher 
groups and non-profits; parents would shop for schools "among the available 
contract schools"; the schools would be made to compete against each other until 
the bad ones went out of business. The authors further suggest introducing 
teacher merit pay as well as removing local school boards and their democratic 
governance: "Schools would no longer be owned by local school districts. 
Instead, schools would be operated by independent contractors, many of them 
limited-liability corporations owned and run by teachers." 

      There are three basic problems here. First is the idea that the crisis of 
the global economy and the problem of providing good jobs and high standards of 
living, explained by the report, should be solved principally through 
educational reform rather than through a number of comprehensive checks and 
controls on the excesses of neoliberal globalization and on authoritative 
government action in a number of public and private realms. Tough Choice 
participates in the endless call for educational remodeling as a response to the 
failures of business to compete internationally and the failures of government 
to check the damaging effects of globalization. There are a number of other 
places to look if one wants to understand why, for example, real wages and 
income have steadily declined since the 1970's while CEO pay has increased 
exponentially. The book fails to engage with the tremendous bodies of literature 
in the social sciences and humanities that engage this broad economic question 
and it certainly has little to say about the growing global trend away from the 
neoliberal "Washington Consensus" model of economic development characterized by 
the WTO, World Bank, IMF dictates for widescale privatization and trade 
liberalization-a program that results in a global race to the bottom as capital 
becomes increasingly mobile and wages are suppressed by this mobility. 

      Second, the book mistakenly suggests that the educational system should 
principally be understood for its economic role of preparing workers for a 
business-dominated economy as opposed to, say, preparing citizens for 
participation and self-governance in a democratic society or preparing human 
beings to improve themselves and others through free and creative work. The use 
of people for the continued profitability of business becomes the be-all and 
end-all in this stunted partisan view that the reader is expected to accept as 
universal. 

      Third is an essential weakness of the remedy proposed: there is no 
evidence that the charter schools, for-profit educational management companies, 
and/or the school choice called for by this plan provide any benefits. In fact, 
there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Some of the abundantly dubious 
research relied upon in the book includes unpublished research from Eric 
Hanushek and other Hoover Institution "luminaries" who provide a chart that 
attempts to show that GDP growth correlates to educational quality rather 
educational quantity. While this is a convenient way to justify the 
methods-not-money mantra of right-wing educational policy, it decontextualizes 
the numerous factors involved in economic growth while failing to comprehend the 
vast limitations of economic growth viewed as an end in itself. These 
conveniently ignored byproducts include environmental devastation, cultural 
devastation as consumerist values are universalized and exported, and the 
idiotic equating of public schooling with private service provision-as if the 
private accumulation of profit and the public service goals of public schooling 
are the same. Other purported research study cited in the book attempts to 
correlate NAEP scores to per pupil expenditure to suggest that quality is not 
closely correlated to educational investment. Rather bizarrely, the only scores 
used to make the claim are 4th grade reading scores. More importantly and still 
more bizarrely, as many readers will know, NAEP score comparisons between 
traditional public and charter schools have shown that the charter experiment 
has had unimpressive outcomes to date-though that doesn't stop the authors of 
Tough Choice relying on them as one of the primary solutions to the problems of 
public education.


      The brand of market fundamentalism that calls for privatization and trade 
liberalization and that equates education with business profit is the 
inspiration for this book. Such market fundamentalism undermines public sector 
protections and supports, and it has made tough times for more and more people. 
The proposals in this book call for undermining rather than strengthening public 
schools. 

      Readers are advised to stick to somewhat tough-minded educational policy 
authors who address these issues in a serious way. The following readings offer 
examples.

      Suggested readings:

        On charter schools:

      Carnoy,M., Jacobsen, R., Mishel, L., & Rothstein, R. (2005). The charter 
school dust up: Examining the evidence on enrollment and achievement. 
Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute Washington.

      Wells, A.S. (2002). Where charter school policy fails: The problems of 
accountability and equity. New York: Teacher's College Press.

        On globalization and education:

      Lauder, H., Brown, P. Dillabough, J. & Halsey, A.H. (2006). Education, 
globalization and social change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

      Robinson, W.I. (2003). Critical globalization studies. New York: 
Routledge.

      On the issue of the economic misframing of educational and other social 
questions:

      Apple, M. (2001). Educating the right way. New York: Routledge.

      Bourdieu, P. (2005). The social structure of the economy. New York: 
Polity.

      Giroux, H. The terror of neoliberalism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

      Saltman, K. (2005). The Edison Schools. New York: Routledge.
     



 


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