Long long ago, when Jeb! Bush still had White House dreams, he cooked up a Floridian reform group, which then scaled up to national status as the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which has now become ExcelInEd. Headed up by Patty Levesque, the organization remains a clearinghouse for education disruption ideas pushed by well-heeled, well-connected education amateurs. It is hard to pretend any more that these are serious people who have goals other than breaking up public education so that the private market can profit from the pieces.
Their website is still chock full of carefully twisted stats (Florida is first in AP test participation!) and same old baloney talking points (US students rank 38th internationally in math on the PISA scores--which is of course right where they've always ranked). The message remains as always that public schools are failing and we must open education to the privateers who want access to all those sweet, sweet tax dollars. (It also includes some celebrity bad quotes).
The group is busy-- they push policy ideas out into the states and have been busy filing briefs in support of ESAs (the newest flavor of education voucher) and just generally supporting the privatization agenda whenever they can. And they put on an annual gathering of privatizers and profiteers called, seriously, EdPalooza.
Recently Levesque was interviewed by Rick Hess. As with his recent exit interview with Betsy DeVos, this is Hess being uncharacteristically soft and fuzzy, allowing his subject to spin her tale without ever questioning or challenging her story. The end result is illuminating only because it gives us an unvarnished picture of the alternate reality that Levesque wants to promote.
Levesque's account of what EIE has done is standard reformy fare-- they're "developed policy solutions" that are "based on research, proven success, creative problem solving and learning from other states." Well, the "creative" part is right, anyway. And the usual claim that they want systems "centered around children and their needs" which sounds so much better than "we want to crack open an educational marketplace where entrepreneurs can make a bunch of money with education-flavored products."
Levesque is ostensibly talking to Hess in conjunction with a new EIE five year plan (though I can't find any such plan on their website), and as the plans are teased out, they turn out to be the same old baloney.
There's the usual empty language about equity-- "We believe that too many children—especially low-income students, students of color, and rural students—do not have access to a high-quality education, but we aren't proposing that we get them that education by fully funding schools in their communities." Instead, Levesque is one more edu-disruptor who thinks Covid smells like another Katrina, a "massive disruption" from which they should "seize the opportunities." So she'll use some of the newest marketing bullshit-- the McKinsey report on the Days of Learning that students have "lost." Here's an explainer of why that's bunk, but the short answer is that McKinsey's days of lost learning are really hypothetical lost points on the Big Standardized Test, computed using numbers that are all made up. But one of the rules of education reformstering is that you have to sell the big scary problem and thereby avoid providing evidence that what you propose is actually a solution.
And don 't miss this sentence at the end of that graph: "We have a responsibility to turn that around and to act quickly." Who is the "we" in this sentence? Is it EIE, because that's a group of educational amateurs who appointed themselves overseers of US education. There isn't a person in a leadership role with a shred of actual education background (okay--there's one who was actually in a classroom). This remains, for me, one of the astonishing features of the ed reform movement. If I walked into my local hospital and announced, "I have a responsibility to show you how to improve the way you perform brain surgery" or walked into a court and declared, "I have a responsibility to show you how to improve the conducting of trials," I'd be shown the door, not treated as if I were an expert that everyone needed to listen to.
Anyway.
Levesque's next problem to fix is pandemic-lowered college admissions, so EIE has a goal to "strengthen college and career pathways." Fun phrase. Takes me right back to the days that Jeb! embraced Common Core as a pathway to the White House and the whole thing turned around and bit him in the ass. But she moves right on to a desire to "empower families with the opportunity to find the best fit for their child's educational needs" aka "we are all in on backing education vouchers," which further adds to my sense that the ed disruption crowd is leaving charter schools behind in pursuit of vouchery dreams. She has no argument that vouchers work well, but instead falls back on "because pandemic." Seize the opportunities. Ka-ching.
Other key goals? She's going to rattle some off.
"To close learning gaps" which actually means test score gaps, which nobody has successfully honestly done in the whole modern ed reform era.
Third grade reading, an idea that highlights some folks inability to distinguish between correlation and causation, not to mention an inability to recognize bad policy when they see it.
High quality teachers in every classroom, which is an odd one to toss out there if you're backing current voucher theory, which requires no teachers or classrooms at all. At any rate, another idea that reformsters have been pushing for decades b ut have no idea how to execute (perhaps because they think "high-quality" means "whose students get high test scores").
Digital divide. Yeah, that is an actual problem, and most folks see it, but it's an infrastructure problem, like building an interstate highway system, and so nobody wants to talk about seriously because we all know that the one actual solution is a buttload of money.
"Reimagine learning." Curious phrase, since I seriously doubt that the nature of actual learning has changed, ever. What she really seems to mean is how we deliver credits, and so her examples are "flexible paths to mastery, credit for work experience, opportunities for teachers to change their role in education, and allowing students to learn anywhere." So, vouchers, unbundling, and putting teachers out of work. She will double down on this "learn anywhere" thing in the next paragraph. Another way to understand this vision of unbundled free-market anywhere education is this way-- the state hands each parent a stack of money and says, "Your kid's education is now your problem, not ours. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom." What could possibly go wrong?
Asked about success stories, Levesque cites Mississippi, which is not where I would have gone in her shoes. But she brags that Mississippi got its Fourth Grade NAEP scores up. There is no trick to that- you hold back all the third graders who are going to do poorly on the test. It's like raising the average height of fourth graders by flunking all the short third graders. It is also a meaningless achievement--who cares that your fourth graders do better is all the gains have disappeared by graduation? But Levesque wants EIE to get some credit for all that.
Levesque also owns Florida's Schools of Hope, a policy that allows charters to open up right across the street from struggling public schools, so that the attacks on the most vulnerable public schools can be more efficiently accelerated. Levesuqe says this policy is "working," which doesn't seem to mean that students are being educated so much as charter profiteers are getting to expand their market. EIE, she says, worked hard to get charter operators a "fast pass" to open, so that public education can be dismantled that much more quickly.
There's some quick stroking of Jeb! Bush, and then on to underlining what we are seeing to be true--that the emphasis on pushing education disruption has now shifted to the state level. Levesque notes that they work with partners across the political spectrum, so, everyone from Republicans who support privatizing to Democrats supporting privatization? Don't get me wrong--I think it is possible to have useful dialogue with some ed reformsters, even find areas of agreement about improving education in the US. But when I think of those kinds of conversations, I don't think of Levesque, Bush, or Excel In Ed. Their goals are pretty clear, and their vision of the future is one in which, if it exists at all, public education is a low-cost warehouse for Those Peoples' children.
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