St. Louis Schools Taken Over By State

The publicly-elected school board for the city of St. Louis has been completely stripped of power. A three-member board will take over the schools on June 15th. Of the three members, one is appointed by voucher-loving and pro-privatization Republican governor Matt Blunt. Another is appointed by voucher-loving and pro-privatization Republican mayor Francis Slay.

Current St. Louis Public Schools Board member Peter Downs wrote an eloquent history of the current situation and a powerful defense of the democratically-elected board. Find it here.

A lot of people framed this issue as one concerning a dysfunctional board, i.e., it was largely a matter of personalities and people not being able to get along. What they forget is that the board was in the middle of regaining control from Mayor Slay. They forget the havoc that Slay had created in bringing in Bill Roberti and his crew and dismantling the board once before. (Roberti and his company are now at work in New Orleans, doing to it what they did to St. Louis) They forget that it was going to take a long time to undo what Slay and Roberti had done. But they were making slow, steady progress. Had the board not been rendered powerless by the state's usurpation, the elections in April would doubtless have completed the process. The people of St. Louis spoke last year and kicked two of Slay's candidates off the board. They would have completed that work this year, leaving Slay with no more puppets on the board.

Rather than risk this, Slay helped to orchestrate this coup d' etat. This is naked political aggression, pure and simple. It's framed as an attempt to help the schools. But when any attempt runs directly counter to the expressed will of the voters, one has to wonder about the real motivations behind these actions.

What troubles me most about these attempts to "help" -- in St. Louis, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Oakland, in New York City -- is the extent to which they mirror the racist prejudices seen in "the white man's burden" typical of colonial rule. The British colonialists of the 19th and early 20th century were not explicitly racist in their beliefs and practices. Far from it. But their actions belied their inherently patronizing and self-serving ideology that consciously and unconsciously framed "the colonial other" as inferior. Clearly, in the eyes of the state board and everyone who supports this take-over, the people of St. Louis are incapable of governing themselves and solving their own problems. It just so happens that the majority of people in the city of St. Louis are black, and the vast majority of students affected by this decision are black.

Such an act would be literally inconceivable in a district where the majority of students were white.

Jeff Smith and the Neo-Liberal Assault on Public Education

In announcing his support for pay-based teacher incentives, recently-elected Missouri state senator Jeff Smith (a Democrat) at last showed his true colors. The fact that he is a co-founder of Edison-run Confluence Academy and serves on its board certainly gave me pause. But he's so nice, his supporters said. And cute! And funny! And he likes gay people! And he worked to raise the minimum wage! So surely he's not really that bad, right? Well, welcome to the wonderful world of neo-liberalism.

Ever wondered what happened to what Howard Dean called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party"? It was replaced -- sold out, some might say -- by a guy named Bill Clinton. Clinton was a "new Democrat." A neo-liberal. He could support socially progressive issues while minding the books and bills. He seemed like the ideal compromise between the left and the right: he could be pro-choice, but he could also be pro-trade and pro-big-business.

The hallmark of neo-liberalism is the complete and utterly unquestioned faith in "the free market" to correct the ills of society. In the realm of education, neo-liberalism shows up around vouchers, "school choice" debates, charter schools, and market-based logic and incentives to fix what's wrong with schools. We see "good Democrats" like Smith, Eli Broad, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama doing some inexplicable things. They're inexplicable to us because we normally associate the Democratic party with the public good. We associate things like public schools, public health clinics, public transportation, and public housing with the folks that were largely responsible for bringing these things into existence, i.e., Democrats.

But here's what we need to get: the old Democrats were about defending the public space. The new Democrats -- the neo-liberals -- are about turning the public space over to private, for-profit forces that will leverage the power of "the free market" to bring about effective and efficient change. This is the newer, fresher, smarter side of "progressivism."

Except what, exactly, made Clinton a progressive? Remember the way he handled the issue of gays in the military? The "don't ask, don't tell" policy he implemented is a perfect metaphor for Clinton's brand of "progressivism": acknowledge there is an issue, but make it official policy to ignore it. In ignoring it, it will surely go away, so the belief goes. So we can look at other Clinton accomplishments through the same lens. He "ended welfare as we know it" and accomplished the rather astonishing task of removing the goal of eradicating poverty from the national agenda. It wasn't until Hurricane Katrina that the country remembered that poor people still exist, that they are disproportionately black, and they are sequestered in squalid ghettos all across the country. It was Clinton who preached the idea of high educational standards and gave pretty speeches about Goals 2000. Again: acknowledge there is an issue -- e.g., there is an achievement gap between the haves and the have nots -- and make it official policy to do nothing about it. And in doing nothing about it, the problem will go away.

So now neo-liberals like Jeff Smith, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama want to do something about education, which is to say they want to do nothing about it and therefore hope the problem will go away.

Smith and Obama are talking from the same play book. Obama also wants to pay teachers more based on performance: "High-performing teachers would be eligible for pay increases of 10 to 20 percent of their base salary. These innovation districts would be required to implement systemic reforms and show convincing results."

The idea seems plain enough, almost common sense: give teachers an incentive to teach better. If they are rewarded for working harder, then they will work harder. And if they work harder, all of the problems associated with public education will magically disappear.

But we all know that teachers can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to close the achievement gap and still come up short. We know that there is only so much a gifted -- even a highly-paid -- teacher can do.

What's insulting about this proposal is that it assumes that most teachers are not working hard, that they are holding back on their students. It assumes that teachers are not motivated to do well, but if they were offered more cash, then suddenly they'd start putting in the hours and the effort. This simply does not square with the teachers that I know that are already working 60 to 80 hours per week. They are not motivated by the pay, for God's sake. If they wanted to make more money, they would have left the profession long ago and gone into investment banking.

Most teachers I know don't want to make more money. They want to make a difference. In order to make a difference, they have to have the partnership of local, state, and federal government to provide essential social services to families in need, to provide the funds to reduce class size, to provide ongoing professional development and support in every school, as well as a host of other policies. These policies will actually DO something about the problem.

Of course, the most damaging part of this plan is that it continues to lay the blame for the problems of public education at the feet of teachers. There is no other employment sector that gets bashed so consistently and so viciously. Yet teachers, afraid to "politicize" their classrooms, largely stand on the sidelines and wait for the neo-cons and the neo-liberals to decide their fate for them.

The days of passive inaction and appeasement have got to end. As my colleague Bill Bigelow from Rethinking Schools reminds us,

"Teaching is political. In the classroom teachers make dozens of daily decisions that affect whether students accept the status quo or choose to work for a more just society. From the books we select, to the history we teach, to the way we 'correct' our students’ papers, we not only offer them content, we also promote a particular view of the world."

If opportunists like Smith weren't so serious and so widely celebrated, we could all have a good laugh at their idiocy. But his proposal has the potential to become local, state, and federal policy -- a policy which does nothing and hopes the problem will go away.

One last observation. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on the Smith plan, "The justice center was chosen for the press conference to symbolize the connection between student failure and the crime rate." As with other neo-liberal propaganda, the consistent motif is not to appeal to our sense of justice, but to whip us into panic states of fear. Forget the idea that public education is about creating greater opportunity. Public education, in the eyes of neo-liberals, is a way of preventing crime. High crime rates dissuade investors from investing in places like downtown, inner-city St. Louis. Better to incarcerate students in chain-gang schools like Edison-run Confluence, which Smith helped to found. I can attest to one thing at this school: the children certainly do as they are told, march in orderly lines, and do not speak out of turn. Such schools are the absolute antithesis of democracy. But for neo-liberals like Smith, that's just fine.

The Dark Side of Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education

Students enrolled in colleges and universities want service. They want a result. They want 42" plasma TV's. They want to learn as little as they need to learn so they can acquire stuff. Sure, there is a micro market of whizz kids who want to learn, but the vast majority of kids are dying to slop at the trough of consumer culture. Forget learning. Forget studying. "Gimme my degree. My Jag is waiting for me."

Faculty rail against these lazy, consumer-oriented students ad nauseum. But you cannot beat them. They have already won. So if faculty members want to keep their jobs, they better get on the customer service bandwagon pronto. Otherwise, there are plenty of raw, hungry, recently-graduated PhD's from State U. who will gladly replace them as adjuncts.

These green labor cogs know not of the tony, tenured world of pensions, stipends, sabbaticals, and 3-martini lunches paid for on the department charge card. As grad students, they know hourly wages. They know large lecture classes. They know what it means to work as a knowledge WORKER. Assuming a position as an adjunct WORKER in one of the myriad institutions out there is simply more of the same. Hey, they have $79,000 worth of student loans to pay for. They're desperate. They're just looking for a way to maintain (or sanitize, as the case may be) their credit rating score, the contemporary version of Debtor's Prison.

In the end, I recognize this process as an inexorable change in the institutional arrangement of labor in the higher education market. In short, union members may bitch today. But they are old and getting older. They will go away, as unions continue to lose power in this country. Those that replace them will be eager to serve as "Learning Service Managers." (For a glimpse of the future, check out Western Governors University -- wow. Scary.) Truth be told, their eagerness will not be a choice. It will be a requirement of the job.

I recognize that, for this market, the purpose is not really "enhanced teaching and improved learning outcomes." There is no demand for this product in this market. The K-12 market does demand this. But in higher ed, what is required is SERVICE. Those of us in my position, it seems, are to help our institutions SERVICE their markets. Higher ed will work even more directly than it already is with corporations, business interests, etc., in producing products they are looking for, i.e., trained workers ready to hit the ground running. The students in the higher ed market want the same thing, i.e., to be trained enough to get the job to get the stuff.

So there are 2 customers in this market: students and corporations. The entire higher ed experience is becoming increasingly synonymous with job training and preparation. Therefore, the student asks, "What can I do now while at this institution of higher ed to increase the likelihood that I will land the job that will get me the stuff?" The corporations ask, "What indication is there that this student has been sufficiently trained and prepared to hit the ground running as an employee in my business?"

So here's the question: what products and services can fulfill this need for (1) the student to prove his/her mettle and for (2) the employer to evaluate the mettle of this student?

Answer: an electronic portfolio tied to specific, measurable goals/outcomes.

The spectacular irony here is that, even though students could currently give a flying #$@* about learning and instructors could give a fruitless #$@* about teaching, both will have to focus on improving their learning and teaching (respectively) to satisfy their own personal interests. And why? Because now that the student's accomplishments, worth, mettle, know-how, and abilities are subject to scrutiny by an outside entity for real purposes, i.e., by the prospective employer who either will or will not hire this student, the student actually has to accomplish something that can be tangibly demonstrated and proven. The instructor has to be able to help the student accomplish this or will be fired and replaced by yet another cog fresh from grad school. In other words, the instructor has to provide a service which can be tangibly and demonstrably measured or be terminated.

Inside this environment lies the heart of new products and services for higher ed. So while there are those in this field that are committed to using technology to enhance teaching and learning, and while there are others that are focused on forming a conduit between what happens in the classroom and what happens outside the classroom, there are still others committed to developing a profitable business. They believe that they can enhance teaching and learning in higher ed by leveraging the nascent labor market forces currently at play and by tapping into the unspoken role that higher ed has played in the last two decades, i.e., as the primary entity charged with preparing students to enter the work force.

In the end, I believe the following:

• students will learn more and will learn better under this scheme
• students will have a more satisfying experience in higher ed because it will directly serve their needs and desires
• instructors will become more effective in teaching students what they need to know
• institutions of higher ed will develop mechanisms for assessing instructor effectiveness and student preparedness
• corporations and other business interests will have confidence that graduates from these institutions are well-prepared
• citizens will have greater confidence that funds spent on higher ed are well spent
• all participants in the domain of higher ed will enjoy a greater degree of transparency and accountability

In serving these interests, there will be highly profitable ventures that generate significant value for all stakeholders. And which will also simultaneously burn in hell.