Lumping, Hyperbole, and Education Disruption

I get the occasional note pointing out that I use what appears to be wishy washy language with "some reformsters this" and "a few right wingers that." and while I generally try to avoid fuzziness, this particular fuzziness is deliberate and, I think, necessary.

It's incorrect to lump all education disruptors together, because there's a wide array of folks who want a piece of the education disruption action. But they don't all want the same thing, and not only is it unfair to lump them all together, it's just not accurate.

There are people who believe in choice, in the idea that there should be a broad selection of options for students. I'm actually one of these people; I just happen to believe that providing those options under one roof is the best, easiest, most efficient way to provide those choices. 

There are people who believe in the power of the free(ish) market. They believe in competition and lifting all boats and all that fun stuff. Most sincere free marketeers have no real beef with public education; mostly they would just like to see it as one of many options. I think their model is flawed and would ultimately do more damage than good.

There are people who are concerned about something going on in their own local schools, from bullying to some educational choices they disagree with. More than once I have been one of these people, too (I think pretty much every single teacher has been). These people, I want to note, are different from the people who have heard something on Fox News or a Twitter thread about some terribly awful thing happening in some school somewhere else and here are 143 signs that the same thing is about to happen in your local school (though 142 of the signs are unrelated to the actual awful thing).

There's a whole other broad spectrum of people who don't know what they're talking about, but who are sure they know just what education needs, and they range in levels of effectiveness in bollixing things up from the powerful (Bill Gates and Common Core) to the merely annoying (that lady who comes to every board meeting to demand that cursive, Latin, and sentence diagramming be required in grades K-12). 

There are privatizers who, by and large, want to skim off the profitable bits 

There are grifters. They don't have any particular ideological beliefs; they just smell a chance to make some money. T. C. Weber has convincing argued on his blog for ages that Tennessee's education leaders are not interested in any particular aspect of education reform as they are in just running whatever grift looks most promising this week.

So far we're talking about people pursuing policies that have a variety of negative consequences, from wasting resources on ideas that simply won't work, to making the work of teaching and operating a school that much harder, to removing accountability and democratic processes from school, to crippling a public school's ability to function. 

It's hyperbole to say these folks are "destroying" public education; they are making it suck more and weakening it in ways that make it easier to destroy. The hyperbole comes from many quarters, from public ed teachers who are very alarmed to public ed supporters who want to raise an alarm (these days, if you aren't yelling about a Major Crisis, how do you even get anyone's attention) and reformsters who have at time used the language of destruction, assuming, as many do, that you can't really destroy public education because it's just indestructible.

And while many of these folks have not intended to destroy public education as we know it, they have provided cover for lots of folks who do. 

You can find them at places like FlashPoint 2022, swearing their fealty to God and the Constitution and their intention to take back the United States. You'll hear these folks talk about reconquering the Seven Mountains-- business, government, family, religion, media, education, and entertainment. They've been talking about this for a long time, courtesy of such shadowy groups as the Center for National Policy. Read Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. 

These are the folks who envision a completely different education world. Education as a private good that you buy yourself with the aid of a government voucher (and if you can't afford more than that, well, your lack of wealth is your own fault and other people shouldn't have to pay to make up for it). Education used to sort people out into their proper level in life. Education under the control of religion. 

Disruptors come in a variety of flavors, from those who think they're in the early stages of a game of Jenga and they can yank out planks here and there without really compromising the basic structure, to those who just want to take a sledgehammer to the whole tower. The education disruption field includes the same range, and it's not useful to lump them all together.

It's a tricky balance (which should probably be the official motto of this blog). On the one hand, it's useful to know which kind of disruption you are--or are not--facing. On the other hand, many disruptions don't intend to trash education entirely, but they provide cover and plough the field for those who do. And many of these disruptors and privatizers have been trying to change the whole purpose and premise of public education in this country without any sort of public conversation about that change, and it's hard to predict how significantly altering the foundation of public education will affect the structures resting on that foundation. Easy answers are almost always wrong (maybe that should be the official motto of this blog).