Taxonomy of Education Disruptors (2022 Edition)

First of all, I wish we could retire the term "reformers" as a catch-all, because it's no longer truly applicable. Much of what reformsters pushed is now status quo (e.g. high stakes testing), which means that I'm technically an advocate for education reform. Meanwhile, many folks whose predecessors were ed reformsters are no longer claiming that mantle. 

The world of ed reform was never a uniform unified whole. Alliances between folks with different aims, folks with different styles of advocacy, even alliances between unprincipled opportunists and sincere true believers have always marked the reformster territory, and many of those alliances have not stood the tests of time and changes fortunes (not to measure the Trump administration). 

So what does the landscape look like now? Here are some of the groups of education disruptors out there these days. 

The Data Miners

This group has always been part of the picture, and it's important to remember that they have not gone away. They used to have lots of vocal allies, but they have learned to keep a lower profile. But behind every single digitized, computer-delivered education program is a whole industry excited about the data that can be thereby collected. The dream of conception-to-casket pipeline of data still lives. 

Every time a digitized education tool shows up, someone should be asking what will happen to the data it collects. How will it be kept secure? How will it be shared? Pro tip: "We will only share the data with trusted partners" is a weasel-word answer that means "We will do whatever the hell we want." Another pro tip: The data that is being captured from your five year old today? Nobody anywhere on planet earth has the slightest clue what will become of that data twenty years from now. Question every digital tool that your school proposes to use.

Charter School Advocates

Pity the charter school advocates. When vouchers were off the table, charters had the support of a lot of folks who hoped they would be a Next Best Thing, a foot in the door. But now that vouchers are having their day in state legislators, Freedom Fans have left charters behind. Which is not to say that there isn't strong support for charters; they're still a great way to get your hands on taxpayer dollars, and there are still those who believe that charters are the best way to lift some students out of underfunded, under-resourced public school systems. 

But charter supporters are in an awkward spot. They've long pretended to be public schools except when it suits them not to be. SCOTUS may soon rule on this distinction, but in the meantime, charters' desire to be "public" puts them in the path of those who want to burn the public system to the ground. The charter movement is where most of the people who actually want school choice can be found these days.

The Fighters for (Some) Parents Rights

First they wanted schools open and masks put away. Then they went after a straw version of critical race theory, which somehow expanded to include anything about race, gender identity, or sexual orientation. You've heard about Moms for Liberty, but they are just one of the more visible groups of culture warriors. You've heard of Betsy DeVos, but she's just one of the more visible rich elites backing this play. 

It's easy to mistake these people for choice fans because they use some of the rhetoric and they back vouchers. But this group is not interested in school choice. Instead, they would like to commandeer and/or tear down the public system. Their dream appears to be a world in which getting an education for your kid is your own problem; your child will be entitled to the best education you can afford for them. Vouchers will take a bit of the sting off self-serve education for the poors (but not enough for them to afford top schools), and provide a nice kickback for the non-poors. The government will not be allowed to tell vendors what they may or may not do, what religions they may push, what people they may discriminate (though culture warriors will work hard to eradicate all choices of which they do not approve). And government will not be forcing me to pay too many tax dollars to educate Those Peoples' Children. 

Implicit in this crowds' beliefs is that only certain values should be represented in education. They are not pro-choice, just as they are not pro-democracy. Education (and government) are legitimate only when they align with the Right Values. And the political opportunists allied with this movement are busy convincing anyone who will listen that public schools are aligned with all the wrong values and can't be trusted and so must be abandoned, dismantled, and replaced with an unregulated free marketplace-- no matter what other families and parents want.

Voucher Advocates

See above. Voucher advocacy is largely reduced to its true final form--a desire to defund public education, remove government from any and all education policy, and reduce education to a commodity that citizens must procure on their own. The key problem with selling that was answering the average citizen's question, "Why would we want to do that?" The [Some] Parents' Rights movement has provided an answer for that question, so voucher fans are going for it.

Techno Education

The pandemic did not help the cause of computer-delivered education business, but it's still around because A) we are pretty sure that the youngs think computers are really cool, B) computer-delivered education answers the question "What kind of education am I supposed to get for my kid with this tiny little voucher," C) software is cheap and doesn't unionize and so would solve all our HR problems and D) collecting that data!

Free Marketeers

The reformy movement used to include lots of people who said that choice must be pursued because it would bring with it better student achievement, more equity, better results for everyone, and some folks still try to make those points from time to time, but after twenty years the data simply doesn't support any notion that choice makes life better for students, nor does it save money, nor provide any of the other benefits.

As those arguments have worn away, some choice advocates have fallen back to what is, I think, a more honest argument. They believe that choice is, in and of itself, an important value that should be part of the education landscape regardless of outcomes, because it's just right. 

However--and I've long puzzled over this--that invariably comes with a belief that choice must be yoked to some sort of free market mechanisms. The free market is a lousy match for any critical human service. It's not evil; it's just a bad match for any system that needs to deliver an essential service to all members of society. 

Science of Reading

Want the emperor of the universe to force everyone to use SOR in their school, because whatever they're doing its's probably terrible and wrong. Do not engage. Just walk on by.

Test O Crats

They emerge every time that new test results are released. We've made some progress here; after the last NAEP test results were released, some folks actually managed to discuss them without using phrases like "student achievement" or "school effectiveness." But the spread of Learning Loss as a marketing term over the last year tells us that there are still people insisting that the only purpose of schools is to get students to crank out higher test scores. It's particularly appealing to folks who think anything that matters can (and must) be measured (makes me wonder how they measure family success at home), and to people who want to market a solution that can move those numbers.

Nothing pushed on education since the days of A Nation At Risk has done more damage to actual education than high stakes testing. It should be fought at every possible level, from pointing out that the pursuit of test scores has not improved anything to demanding that people say "raise test scores" instead of "improve student achievement." 

Improve student outcomes

There are days when I think that maybe, just maybe, the disintegration of the education reform movement has left room in the center for people who actually want education to work, and by "work" I don't mean "raise test scores" or "creates entrepreneurial opportunities for education-adjacent businesses." I mean "help students learn and become their best selves while growing in understanding of what it means to be fully human in the world." 

Crazy hopeful talk, I know, but I like to think that there's a possibility that supporters of public education and people who have been associated (through personal preference or by employment) with the reformster movement could have productive conversations, precisely because some of the most destructive disruptors have moved farther afringe. Kind of like planting a garden in pasture after a wildfire has come through. 

I think there are people out there who actually want to do the best by students and aren't just saying so to back their latest political or marketing play. I know being cranky is on brand for me, but I've always been a hopeful kind of crank.

This isn't the full range of disruptor out there (prediction: within twelve hours of posting this, I will realize there's a group I need to add). And as the education debates have atomized all over the country, your local experience will vary (some folks are up to their neck in anti-freedom groups like Moms for Liberty, and some are not).