Hired Guns on Astroturf: How to Buy and Sell School Reform
from Dissent magazine:
Hired Guns on Astroturf:
How to Buy and Sell School Reform
By Joanne Barkan
If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled education reform movement. As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. Theyve gone political as never beforelike the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers unions.
Devolution of a Movement
For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teachers worth based on student test scores. Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called advocacy) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010 critics of the movement saw reform-think dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.
Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money, whereas government expenditures on K-12 schooling are about $525 billion a year. Nevertheless, a half-billion dollars in discretionary money yields great leverage when budgets are consumed by ordinary expenses. But the reformerseven titanic Bill and Melinda Gatessee themselves as competing with too little against existing government policies. Hence, to revolutionize public education, which is largely under state and local jurisdiction, reformers must get state and local governments to adopt their agenda as basic policy; they must counter the teachers unions political clout. To this end, ed reformers are shifting major resourcesstaff and moneyinto state and local campaigns for candidates and legislation. ...................(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=4240