NY: Competition, Shmompetition

Eva Moscowitz has some kind of magical power. Maybe it's money or pheremones or some sort of magical aura, but her record in getting New York leaders to roll over and play fetch for her is impressive.

At the beginning of the month, NY court declared that her Success Academy is not accountable to the taxpayers when it comes to her Pre-K program; the city can not hold her to any sort of performance requirement. That flies directly in the face of the old ideal that a charter works by promising the taxpayer certain results and then is held to those results. Not for Moscowitz-- she remains free to do as she pleases.

Lawmakers in Albany handed her another win. Buried amidst new legislation dealing with mayoral control of schools, there is reportedly this nugget:

The SUNY Charter Institute, the regulations read, “acknowledges that many schools and education corporations it oversees that have demonstrated strong student performance have had difficulty hiring teachers certified in accordance with the requirements of the regulations of the commissioner of education.” SUNY is now planning to create “an alternative teacher certification pathway to charter schools.” 

So New York joins the roster of states where anyone with a pulse and a degree can be certified a teacher.

There are many reasons to be annoyed by this. It degrades the teaching profession, codifying that it is a job that literally anybody could do. It thumbs its nose at all the teachers who went to the trouble and expense to get real certification. And it underlines how charter backers often support ideas for charters that they would never accept in the schools attended by their own children.

But I'm also wondering-- what about the competition?

Charters, particularly in markets like NYC, were supposed to spark competition, as each school worked hard to become the very best, to chart new courses to the Land of Excellence. But isn't that supposed to work like a high jump competition? You know-- we keep setting the bar higher and higher and the jumpers improve their skills-- literally up their game-- to meet the new requirements.

This is the opposite. This is "We can't clear the bar at that height, so we'd like the legislature to lower the bar for us." This is "We'll settle for what the leaders of the best schools and the parents who send children to them would never settle for. We will deliberately not live up to that standard."

Competition is allegedly supposed to weed out those who can't cut it. If you can't manage to adequately staff your school, you aren't cutting it.

PA: How Charters Damage a Public School System

Erie has come a long way since the days that visitors would travel to the beaches just to be appalled by the dead fish on shore, the days when Western Pennsylvanians called it "The Mistake on the Lake." The waterfront is now pristine and beautiful, the city now boasting great theaters, hotels and recreation. But public education is still struggling.

Just two and a half years ago, the previous superintendent of the district was asking his board to consider closing all of Erie's public high schools and just farming the students out to surrounding districts. The move may have been a play for attention, but it grew out of real problems.

Erie suffers severely from issues felt across Pennsylvania. The state is near the bottom of US states in its support for local districts (generally around 36% of school money comes from the state). That means that local districts must supply the bulk of district finances. The ability of local districts to come up with money varies wildly from place to place, which is why Pennsylvania has had the greatest gap between rich and poor districts in the nation. Governor Tom Wolf entered office announcing his intention to fix that, but so far progress has been minimal. In the meantime, Erie is not exactly a rich district, and it has gotten poorer as charter schools (both brick and cyber) have popped up in the area, moving more and more money away from the public schools.

Charter school advocates have long argued that competition will unlock excellence and general awesomeness. The plight of Erie's public schools gives us a hint about how that actually works.

Last month the Erie Times-News ran a piece by Ed Palatella looking at the possible fate of one Erie charter-- the Erie Rise Leadership Academy Charter School. The K-8 school of over 400 students has ranked consistently low in its test scores (last year found only 6.9% of the students scoring proficient or advanced on Pennsylvania's big standardized test). The Erie School District will hold hearings to decide whether or not to pull the plug; that plug-pulling almost certainly would come with court challenges and appeals, so the district has to weigh many factors.

The current superintendent, Brian Polito, is not hostile to charters, but he can't ignore the threat they pose. Last year Erie lost $23.5 million to charter schools, and in the face of financial and enrollment losses, it has closed or consolidated numerous schools. In Pennsylvania, a regular education student is worth around $10,000 to a district while a special education student is worth $20,000 (gaming that difference in funding by enrolling students with low-cost special needs can help a charter bring in a truckload of revenue).

This is the situation that's supposed to fuel competition. But how do Erie schools compete when they are already academically beating the socks off Erie Rise, even as they struggle to get by with limited funds?

That's the issue Polito is trying to address: reducing charter bleed for the district. Polito started in the job just over a year ago and he's been looking for the answers. The district has surveyed the charter families, and they'll use those responses for a campaign slated to start in 2019 that will include a variety of approaches right down to sending district employees to knock on doors.

The state has given Erie schools an extra $14 million in state funding to help rescue the district, and with that comes Charles Zogby, a state-appointed financial administrator to oversee district finances. Palatella reports Zogby's response to the plan unveiled at the December 1 board meeting:

“You must fight fire with something,” Zogby told the School Board of focusing on charter schools. “It is not as if any of the charters are blowing the doors out compared to any Erie School District School.”

The CEO of Erie Rise says they will run their own counter-program.

And so Erie is poised to see the same kind of competition that has broken out in other cities where charter schools are crowding the public system--a marketing competition. One may argue that having schools market more aggressively will result in schools that are more responsive to the families who are their "customers," and that may be true but there are several points worth remembering.

First, the marketing will be aimed only at the desirable students, and not the ones who are more difficult or expensive to educate. Second, taxpayers without children will find themselves shut out of the conversation about education in their city. Third, marketing costs money--money that could have been spent educating students. And perhaps importantly, just because a school markets itself well, it does not follow that it is a good school.

Lots of terrible products are well marketed, and lots of great products fail in the marketplace. This is Greene's Law: the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

Erie's public schools have been to the brink of destruction. Next year will be a test of whether or not competition can actually save public education or will simply drive it that much further from its original purpose.

Originally posted at Forbes

Demonstrating Why Business Ideas Don't Help Public Education (Example #3,244,781)

As always, let me say up front that I don't hate the free market and business, and that I believe there are things that they do pretty well. But the free market does not belong within six-to-ten feet of public education (or health care or basically anything that involves taking care of human beings, but let me try to retain some focus here).

We are living through yet another demonstration of the ways in which market-based approaches fail, and in some cases, fail really hard.

Long Term Preparation Is Inefficient But Essential

Back when I was a stage crew advisor, there was a pep talk I had to give periodically to crew members, particularly those working in the wings as grips or fly. "I know that you sit and do nothing for a lot of this show," I'd say, "but when we need you, we really need you. In those few minutes, you are critical to our success." In those moments we were talking about, every crew member was occupied; there was no way to double up or cut corners.

Emergency preparation is much the same. It's economically efficient to, for instance, keep a whole stockpile of facemasks or ventilators. Big-time businessman Trump justified his cuts to various health agencies by citing business wisdom:

And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.

This turns out to be just as smart as disbanding the fire department and figuring you'll just round up personnel and equipment when something is actually on fire. It doesn't work. And as we have witnessed, it leaves you unprepared to deal with the critical moment when it arrives.

But the market hates tying up money in excess capacity or emergency readiness, because you're spending all that money on capacity that isn't being used this second. Are those guidance counselors and school nurses seeing students every single minute of the day? Well then, we should be able to cut them back. Are we sure that every teacher is teaching the maximum number of students possible? Couldn't we just put some of those students on software? This is why so many business heads are convinced that public education is simply filled with waste--because there seems to be so much excess capacity in schools.

But in many schools, there's not enough excess capacity. When a student is in the middle of a crisis, we should be able to respond immediately, whether it's a personal crisis, a medical crisis, or an educational issue. The response should not be "tough it out till the counselor is on duty tomorrow" or "we'll just wrap that in some gauze until the nurse comes in three hours from now" or "I know you need help with the assignment, but I can't take my attention away from the other thirty-five students in this classroom." And that's on top of the issue of preparedness, or having staff and teachers who have the capacity--the time and resources and help-- to be prepared for the daily onslaught of Young Human Crises. When wealthy people pay private school tuition or raise their own public school taxes, this is what they're paying for-- the knowledge that whenever their child needs the school to respond, the response will come immediately.

Sure, you can cut a school to the bones in the name of efficiency, but what you'll have is the educational equivalent of a nation caught flatfooted by a global pandemic because it didn't have the people in place to be prepared.

Competition Guarantees Losers

Ed Reformsters just love the bromide about how competition raises all boats and makes everyone better. And yet, the pandemic's free market approach to critical medical supplies doesn't seem to bear that out. States are being forced to compete with each other  and the federal government, and all it's doing is making vendors rich. This is free market competition at its baldest-- if you have more money, you win. If you have less money, you lose. At some point, if it has not already happened, some people in this country are going to die because their state, municipality or medical facility will not have enough money to outbid someone else.

The free market picks losers, and it generally picks them on the basis of their lack of wealth. The notion that losers can just compete harder, by wrapping their bootstraps in grit, is baloney. It's comforting for winners to believe that they won because of hard work and grit and not winning some fate-based lottery, and it also releases them from any obligation to give a rat's rear about anyone else ("I made myself, so everyone else should do the same").

A system built on picking losers and punishing them for losing is the exact opposite of what we need for public education. You can argue that well, we just want free market competition for schools and teachers, but if that kind of competition is in the dna of the system, it will stomp all over students as well, just as all free market businesses pick customers to be losers who don't get served because they aren't sufficiently profitable. Kind of like a low-revenue state or old folks home that can't get its people necessary supplies because they don't have enough wealth to bid with.

"Compete harder" just means "be richer." It is not helpful advice.

Expertise Isn't Always Marketable

May I introduce, once again, Greene's Law-- "The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing."

Now sure, marketing can sometimes be based on actual quality or expertise. But that's not always the best way to sell your stuff, and we are living through a yuge demonstration of the results of a focus on marketability over actually knowing what the hell you're talking about. It gets us things like a movement by anti-vaxxers to replace Dr. Fauci with a miserable quack. It gets us Fox News and an endless parade of ignorant talking heads who can sell the heck out of their ill-informed answers to the current crisis. It gets us officials whose scientific illiteracy informs a parade of bad decisions because they pick based on what appeals to them, based on their deep distrust of "experts."

Letting these kinds of forces loose in public education is not now, nor has it ever been, a good idea. The notion that schools should be devoting time and money to marketing themselves is a dumb idea. It's not just the waste-- it's the tendency of the marketplace to favor what is sexy and truthy and appealing to biases over what is actually recommended by actual experts.

We are living through the kind of mess created by devaluing expertise. Public education would not be helped.

None Of This Is New

These are not new reasons to reject free market businessized thinking for public education (and, for that matter, for private education as well). But we are living through a full-scale demonstration of what happens when you try to apply free market business-ish philosophy to the care and support of actual human beings in a functional free society. We can do better than this.

The Walton Billion Dollar Plan

It's only eight pages long, but it is simultaneously depressing and disturbing. It's no fun to read, but if you want to understand how the charter boosters are coming at public education, you need to read it. It's the Walton Family Foundation 2015-2020 K-12 Strategic Overview, and yes, I've read it so that you don't have to, but you probably should, anyway.

This is the story of how The Walton is going to spend $1 Billion-with-a-B on charter schools over the next  five years (twice as much as Eli Broad is spending to take over the Los Angeles school district). And when that much money talks, we need to listen. Here's what it's saying.

The Baloney Kickoff

The plan kicks off with some basic background, and we know immediately that we've entered a zone high on spin and low on reality. What's the WFF mission?

They aimed to improve lives by expanding access to educational and economic opportunity. Since then, the Walton family has carried forward this vision — working to foster equal opportunity and build a more just society. 

They believe they are "uniquely qualified" for this work. You know what the largest private employer in America is uniquely qualified to do? Make sure that all of its employees have a great living wage and superior benefits package. But no-- we're just going to blow up the building that is Retail America, make a bundle off the demolition, and spend a fraction of that just cleaning up the shrubberies around the charred ruins.

WFF Education History Baloney

The Walton wants to provide a little background. They've spent $1 Billion-with-a-B "investing" in order "to improve educational opportunities for America's children-- and to prove wrong the prevailing wisdom that poverty and ZIP code determine destiny." Which leads me to ask, where exactly does that "wisdom" prevail? With a billion dollars, could you not attack actual problems rather than going toe-to-toe with a big straw man?

Fun fact: One out of every four charter schools has gotten Walton money.

Next, the Walton repeats some dubious research about how awesomely better charters are, including a silly study from CREDO that claims that charters give students extra "days" of learning. The Walton blithely skips past all of the issues with charter claims to assert that if you just put poor kids in a charter school, they do way better. "Charter schools are proving that these students can learn at levels comparable to, or even higher than, their peers with greater advantages. Today, there are hundreds of examples of schools beating the odds, and doing so at scale." Well, no. There aren't. But it's a useful rhetorical strategy. I saw a dozen Yeti in my backyard this morning. I did! Go ahead and try to prove I didn't. Wiser men than I have laid out the problems with studies "proving" charter swellness, but the bottom line is that charters do not have any more success with students than public schools, and often they have considerably less.

The Walton is also proud to have helped create an entire shadow network of unqualified teachers and administrators, citing support for Relay Graduate School of Education, Teach for America, and The New Teacher Project (TNTP), all exercises in giving unqualified people a huge budget to hand each other accreditations.

Next comes the scary statistic parade to show that there's still a crisis a'brewin'. Here's the College Board's bogus "only 43% of high school students are college ready" and some chicken littling about the PISA scores-- they're low low LOW! (but we'll not mention they always have been). Achievement gaps! Opportunity gaps! Waiting lists! Teacher shortages! Every reformy talking point ever launched, no matter how often it has been debunked, is here, leading us to the overwhelming question, "How will America's schools survive?"

Lessons Learned

Okay, I know you were nodding off at the billionth re-singing of the Reformster Chorus, but now you need to sit up and pay attention, because the Walton is going to tell you what they've learned. They understand now that their old theory of change was flawed. 

The thought was that more choices would generate more competition. Competition would catalyze systematic improvement. 

Let's think about this for a second. Let's really think about whose theory this was. This was the Walton theory, the theory of people whose entire fortune is built on being hugely competitive, leading to several results, over and over-- the systemic destruction of most retailers in a community who aren't Wal-Mart. Nor have they achieved this by pursuing excellence-- raise your hand if you associate the Wal-Mart brand with excellence. No, the Wal-Mart brand is built on "broad mediocirty that's cheap and good enough for unwealthy people" and the very goal of their competitiveness has been to win the retail competition by eradicating other choices. Wal-Mart's business plan is not, "We will go into a community, compete by providing excellent products to the community, and when we're done, there will be a broad range of excellent choices among many retailers."

I continue to be gobsmacked that the Waltons, of all people, would imagine that school choice would spark competition that would lead to excellence, because these are people who seem to have a pretty good idea of how the free market works-- and the free market does not work in ways that go well with public education.

But they have figured out that competition is not enough, and so they have a new theory.

In order for choice and opportunity — the ultimate forms of parent empowerment — to spur change, cities need to create environments that support choice. This means creating enrollment platforms, equitable transportation access, fair funding and readily accessible, current information on schools and student performance for families and other stakeholders.

Under its 2015-20 K-12 Education Strategic Plan, the Walton Family Foundation is aiming to enhance choice, spur innovation and build more of the environmental factors that support choice in cities. It will invest $1 billion over the five-year period to expand educational opportunity across the United States. 

So here come the four initiatives, the four horsemen leading the billion-dollar Walton school choice charge.

Investing in Cities

This has become evident in the new vision of Walton and in that of Eli Broad in LA as well. It's not enough to buy your own school district-- you need to own a piece of the city it's in as well. The Walton lists some cities that make the grade with "conditions supporting systemwide educational improvement and where the foundation can have the greatest impact."

This is by far the largest section of the four, and the Walton targets several areas for investment.

* Supply. They want to "build and sustain high-quality schools." This would be a better idea if they knew how to identify such schools.
* Talent. Recruit and train "more effective teachers and school leaders." We've seen how much they know about this.
* Enabling choice. Pushing systems like, presumably, unified enrollment.
* Policy. Get local lawmakers to rig the game more in favor of charters and choice.
* Community support. "Organizing, communicating and engaging directly with people who live and work in cities to understand their needs and build authentic community partnerships." This presumably does not include asking them if they would rather not have a bunch of charters move into their community, or if they can think of other ways that their slice of Walton billiony largesse could be used to help them.

Supporting the High-Quality Choice Movement

More giving devoted to creating "local environments that are friendly to choice." That means "advocating for favorable policies," as well as supporting reformy groups, and supporting organizations that help choice/charter schools "find" the facilities they need. Nice choice, that "find," as it covers building new facilities or just wrestling existing school buildings away from the public schools that already occupy them.

Also, "investing in communications to build awareness and support for high-quality choice." So, more money for lobbying, advocacy, and PR.

Innovation

The Walton would particularly like to support "novel school models" (such as those focused on career and technical education), "citywide enrollment models," and-- uh-oh-- this last one is even more Reformy 2.0:

New ways — beyond test scores — to advance long-term success, including understanding noncognitive attributes 

So Competency Based Education or Performance Based Learning or whatever we will eventually call all testing, all data collection, all the time. PLUS doing the same for personality traits!

When considering innovative ideas, The Walton will ask, "Does it solve a problem? Does it fit the WFF theory of change? Is there potential for a breakthrough? Is the idea transferable? Can its success be tested objectively?"  Only one of those is a legitimate question-- does it solve a problem. But "can its success be tested objectively" guarantees that whatever they fund, it won't be particularly useful.

Research and Evaluation

The fourth horseman will be arranged around initiatives centered around:

1. Research that provides rigorous, actionable informationto inform the foundation’s city, high-quality choice and innovation investments.
2. Research investigating big questions related to the foundation’s theory of change.

So, research that supports how right The Walton is about what they're doing. They propose to use evidence to "refine" the theory of change and to "identify and support the most effective grantees" and that all is exactly the right thing to say and would be very heartening, except that the earlier section covering the Waltonian version of education history shows that they are not so much interested in following the evidence wherever it might lead as they are interested in finding evidence to prove what they have already concluded is the truth.

The Wrapup

We will work to help create an environment that fosters choice and opportunity, and we will empower more low-income, high-needs students to perform at the same level of excellence as students at today’s best public schools. 

Again, note that it's no longer enough just to boost choice/charter schools-- we are now targeting the entire "environment." And the theory of change still assumes that once we get low-income, high-needs students out of those awful public schools and into awesome choice/charter schools, they will be "empowered" to do better because, I guess, it's the public school that's holding them back. The Walton, while acknowledging that "change takes time," ends with a call for urgency and a declaration that "we cannot and will not stand by while the extraordinary talents of children are squandered and the quintessential American dream of opportunity goes unfulfilled.

Should we conclude that public schools are doing the squandering? I guess so. But I can't help pointing out again that if they were really concerned about the effects of poverty and the opportunity gap, the largest private employer in America could certainly help by making it that much easier for folks to find full time jobs with better-than-minimum pay and full benefits. 

Field Guide To Choice Advocates

The world of choice/charter/voucher advocacy has always been a barely-tacked-together quilt of varying interests and goals. The elevation of Betsy DeVos to Secretary of Education under His Royal Trumpness has stretched-- and in some cases snapped-- those bonds. When choicers appear in your neighborhood, you could find yourself dealing with select sub-species of the breed; you can use this handy field guide to determine what, exactly, you're dealing with.



Concerned Parents

In the charter-choice world you will form time to time encounter parents whose frustration and bad experience with their local school district has driven them to seek alternatives. They want charter schools because they want to put their child in one. Many of these choicers spend only a short time in the movement, lasting only about as long as it takes them to discover that their charter presents all the same problems they encountered in public schools, except for communication and responsiveness, which is worse.

A key identifying feature is that these choicers actually have actual children in the local system. This is the only choice variety that cannot be faked. It is always appropriate to open a dialogue with Concerned Parents-- they have real issues, real concerns, and the highest sincerity index of anyone we'll encounter on this list. They have something to say about your local public school, and you should listen to them.

Social Justice Advocates

Similar to the concerned parents, but without the actual local children. They have noticed on the federal, state or local level that systemic racism and neglect can cause, in particular, major urban school districts to fail the non-wealthy and the non-white, and they have concluded that an alternative system might be the better choice.

This is a dwindling species. Charter/choice advocates had a chance to ally with these folks, but steadily scamming, failing, and silencing local voices, the larger movement has lost credibility with the people at ground level (see also "NAACP Charter Moratorium"). You can spot authentic SJA's because they can stop talking about charters and choice long enough to also discuss equitable funding. You can also spot them by looking at whose voice is actually being amplified. Fake SJAs are sure they know what's best for Those People. Real SJAs actually let Those People lead the conversation.

Competition Junkies

Their argument is that everything is made better by competition. They will complain about the "monopoly" of "government" schools. The strong should thrive and the weak fall under the wheel. With a competitive choice system, schools will sharpen their edges to become the best, cutting open the veins of mediocrity so that all the boast are lifted on a rising tide of the losers' blood.

Ask the competition junkies what should become of the losers and the students who go to school in them. The unspoken assumption of competition junkies is that there are winners and losers and if you lose, it's because you deserve to lose, which means you deserve whatever bad things happen to you because of it. Cookies are for closers. If you are trying to argue that this system is unfair or damaging, expect some mansplaining about weakness and snowflakes.

Free Market True Believers

The government should be taken completely out of the education business, education should be provided by a broad assortment of providers (not just schools, but companies that provide courses and microcompetencies as well). Education is a big beautiful $600 billion marketplace, and for too long entrepreneurs have been forced to gaze at that lush field longingly, drooling through an impenetrable wall of rules and regulations. Tear down that wall! Give vendors free and unfettered opportunity to get onto that playing field. The corollary is that parents should also be free to spend money at any of those newly-free companies.

If all of this flexibly creative disruption results in more students getting a worse education, that's completely beside the point for the FMTB. For them, there is no higher value than unrestrained vendors and unaided buyers chasing each other through rolling fields of money.

The Brilliant CEOs

These guys aren't ideologues-- they're just businessmen who would like to make a buck and run an edu-business. Unlike the Free Market True Believers, CEOs believe there should be some rules, because it's bad for business when you let a bunch of undisciplined incompetents and fraudsters ruin the brand. Plus they're pretty sure they can take everyone else in a fair fight. The CEOs are pretty sure they're the smartest guys in the room, and the system they like is the one that lets them implement their personal vision without having to answer to other people, whether it's the damn teachers (doesn't the help know its place?) or the idiot elected officials (Can't we get rid of elected school boards?).

It's not that they want to make more money; it's just that money is how you keep score, and they are playing to win, to show the world that if Brilliant CEO was given complete control, the freedom to hire and fire and set hours and wages. Brilliant CEO wants choice because he wants to be able to create his school system from the bottom up rather than dealing with any system that already exists. You can't really debate or discuss with these guys because, sorry, you're just beneath them.

Jesus School

I've heard it more than once from folks in my own neck of the woods. "Originally, most societal organizations were para-church groups. We lost the government, the schools, the hospitals. The country would be better if we took them back."

When implemented, vouchers have proven to be a windfall for private religious schools, sometimes pulling them back from the financial brink. But these choicers are not in it for the long haul. They would like to get tax dollars directed away from public schools and toward private religious schools (where they feel that money rightfully belongs) until, some day, the Christian schools are big enough and successful enough that the public system can be shut down-- or at least scaled back until it's a lightly-funded holding pen for the children of infidels.

These folks have been around for a while, consigned to the fringe both by public attitude and the law. But now that one of their own is the Secretary of Education, they're feeling pretty feisty.

Separatists

The most notable example would be the segregation academies that sprang up across the South after Brown v. Board. Their basic position is that we need choice because they don't want their kids mixing with Those Other Children. They would also rather not pay taxes to support the schools for Those Other Children. This group tends to speak in dog whistles because they know that, even with Trump as President, open racism is only socially acceptable under select circumstances. Expect to hear about letting students find the school that is the best fit, or which gives them the most comfortable social experience.

Union Crushers

We can't fix the existing system because of the union. The teachers union controls everything, from selecting school board members to setting their own wages to taking advantage of a tenure system that keeps even the worst teachers on the planet fully employed for a full decade after they die. This group is pretty sure that the whole public school system is a scam set up by NEA and AFT, a fake "education" system set up so that a bunch of lackluster halfwits can steal public tax dollars that they turn around and hand over to the damn unions. The only possible solution is to burn the public union-infested system to the ground and replace it with one where teachers are paid $1.50 an hour and like it and don't act so smug all the time just because they went to college.

Frauds and Charlatans

They really only have one goal, and that is to run an education-flavored scam that puts more money in their pockets. They will gladly pretend to be members of any or all of the above groups as long as it gives them an angle they can play that will get them what they want. And since now it's apparently okay to use even the highest public office in the land to enrich friends and family, these guys will be more brazen and omnipresent than ever, from the legislators in Florida who make sure their family charter business is well-cared for to Buffalo school board member whose board position helps him make big bucks from charter business and says, when called on it, "I'd be a friggin' idiot if I didn't."

They close their schools mid-year, make themselves filthy rich with public tax dollars, implement education plans with no educational experience or training, use charters as a tax dodge, and run every kind of scam you can imagine. Often they are shameless, but just as often they pretend to share the goals and values of whatever charter-choice advocates are leading the charge that particular day. You can't really talk to them, because they will either keep changing their story or, when pinned down, will just not care.


Charter/choice advocates can take any of these forms, and they can hold these positions with varying degrees of sincerity. These different varieties of advocate also come with a full range of knowledge, from a handful with actual education experience and training all the way to the many clueless amateurs who think that because they once went to school, they know everything. Learn to recognize the difference between these breeds so that you know whether to approach with caution, conversation, or stubborn contrariness.

Another Free Market Competitive Fail

Word came yesterday that my county will join the list of communities that no longer has a Sears. It has been an anchor store at our one mall since that mall opened a few decades ago. Now, come October, it will gone. And there are lessons here for education reformsters.

Coming to a mall near me

Folks have been tracking Sears' growing problems for years, and while there are a variety of diagnoses, most agree that CEO Eddie Lampert was a huge part of the problem-- if not all of it.

Lampert masterminded the K-Mart/Sears buyout in 2005 when he was just your typical hedge fundy master of the universe. Before long, the board had made him the fifth CEO since the merger, though reports are that he was running the show before he grabbed the crown. Lampert had no experience in retail, but equipped with a hedge fund manager's confidence, he retooled the company.

Here are some of the features of Lampert's version of Sears. See if any of it sounds familiar.

He did little collaboration, preferring to impose his own grand vision of how the retail chain should work. Despite his lack of retail experience, Lampert reportedly lectured veterans about how retail works. He put huge value on the opinions of outsiders.

He ignored the physical plant of stores, instead focusing his attention on a new program for guiding the whole business (the "Shop Your Way" rewards program).

He rarely met face to face with anyone, not even upper management, but prefers to manage by screen, believing that if he could collect lots of "deep data" that would tell him all he needed to know.

And most of all, he created an atmosphere of competition instead of collaboration, splitting the store into thirty divisions that had to compete with each other for resources and funding. This was disastrous, with divisions and departments undercutting each other, benefiting themselves, but damaging the store as a whole. If you want to see just how badly internal competition and divisional performance incentive system can screw up an organization, read about the death of Sears.

Oh-- and as outlined in a lawsuit by stockholders, Lampert used his hedge fundy skills to create a deal for himself by which his personal financial interests can be served by moves that are bad for the company.

So, a Bold Visionary with no actual knowledge of the institution or respect for people who work there (but confidence in his own financier background) decides to impose his own program which will be managed by boatloads of data. His own financially interests are not really aligned with those of the institution, and he decides to drive quality by pitting his employees against each other to serve their own interests. That could describe the last decade at Sears, or it could describe any big charter entrepreneur with no education background who decides to craft his own program, pit his teachers against each other for merit pay, run the whole thing by crunching numbers in a computer, and make certain that he makes bank on the business, whether it works for the students or not.

Lampert's Sears is an Ayn Randian free marketeer technocratic competition-unlocks-greatness wet dream, and it is a disaster that is slowly but surely dying. There are many lessons to learn here, but one of the biggest is that unfettered free market competition doesn't end well for the community in which it exists. Do you want to claim that schools are different? I totally agree with you-- but the business-minded reformster point all along has been that schools are just another kind of business, and they can be run in a businesslike way.Businesslike like Sears? Because that would seem to be a bad idea.

Look, you may say, Sears was a goner anyway, destined to be crushed between Amazon and Wal-mart. But that's a free market lesson, too, a reminder that in the free market there are winners and losers, and the losers have to be crushed into pieces, the people who depended on them scattered to the wind. Is that really what we want for schools? Do we want to sort schools into winners and losers and crush the losers, or is it perhaps a better aspiration to make all schools winners? I'd like to throw a party for the second choice-- let's just hope our K-Mart is still open when I go there to buy supplies.

Baradaran: The Neoliberal Looting of America

Mehrsa Baradaran, who wrote The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (a properly self-explanatory title), had a great piece this week in the New York Times-- not directly about education, but involving many points that folks in the education world will recognize. "The Neoliberal Looting of America" is behind the usual paywall, and if you have means to get past it, I recommend that you do. If not, here are a few key points.

Baradaran traces the history and growth of neoliberalism's "ideological coup" that transformed our society, rising out of post-war concerns about them damn commies, rising through the sixties, until

By the 1980s, neoliberalism was triumphant in policy, leading to tax cuts, deregulation and privatization of public functions including schools, pensions and infrastructure.

Ronald Reagan aimed to unleash "the magic of the marketplace," and "neoliberalism led to deregulation in every sector, a winner-take-all, debt-fueled market and a growing cultural acceptance of purely profit-driven corporate managers." The rise of private equity firms have squeezed every last drop out of some businesses (see Toys R Us, J Crew, Hertz, etc). And while Baradaran notes that 2019 was the best year yet for the Captains of finance, she also notes that time has been hard of some of their favorite theories. See if you can recognize some of these terms from the neoliberal assault on public education:

An examination of the recent history of private equity disproves the neoliberal myth that profit incentives produce the best outcomes for society. The passage of time has debunked another such myth: that deregulating industries would generate more vibrant competition and benefit consumers. Unregulated market competition actually led to market consolidation instead. Would-be monopolies squeezed competitors, accrued political power, lobbied for even more deregulation and ultimately drove out any rivals, leading inexorably to entrenched political power. Instead of a thriving market of small-firm competition, free market ideology led to a few big winners dominating the rest.

Perhaps the ultimate argument against the privatization of public education, the championing of choice, the childlike faith in putting the invisible hand in charge of an education marketplace is that beyond the questions of ethics and morality and the mission of public education in this country, above all those arguments, is the fact that it simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce better schools. The profit motive does not drive better educating. Competition does not drive excellence. Even if the neoliberal promises for education are made in good faith, they simply don't deliver.

Baradaran offers some examples, like the banking collapse of 2008 in which the feds picked up all the risks on the theory that the invisible hand would "discipline risky banks without need for government oversight." This is another huge falsehood that neolibs love; Baradaran doesn't quite name it, but it's that belief we've heard over and over, that no accountability system is needed because the market will hold people accountable. Except it doesn't.

We've been trying neoliberal market-driven invisible-handy McKinsey-embracing privatization for at least half a century; it has been really good for folks at the top, and lousy for everyone else. Baradaran's prescription is simple--take things that belong in the public sector back to the public sector.

We can have competitive and prosperous markets, but our focus should be on ensuring human dignity, thriving families and healthy communities. When those are in conflict, we should choose flourishing communities over profits.

Amen to that. Nobody in the US should have to do without basic services, such as education, just because they can't make some hedge funder a few more bucks. And now I'm going to go order Baradaran's book.

Teaching Legacies

It's easy as a teacher-- particularly if you've taught in a single school for a lot of your career-- to think of your legacy being in the building or in some program that you created or nurtured. But that's not it.

As you approach retirement, you may notice (if you haven't already) that no matter how ever-present and plugged in you may be, no matter how many invaluable extras you provide, once you are gone, every trace of you vanishes pretty quickly. Your room is redecorated, your furniture gets divided up by your former colleagues, and as for your standing within those four walls...

The year you announce your retirement: The Legendary Mrs. McTeach

First year you're gone: It's so weird without Mrs. McTeach here.

Second year: Yeah, I sort of remember a Mrs. McTeach

Third year: Mrs. McTeach? Didn't she used to teach here?

Fourth year: Who?

It's the nature of schools-- students pass through pretty quickly, even though they feel like they've been there for a thousand years. 

Actually, your legacy has left the building long before you have.

Right now I'm in the middle of overseeing a local writing competition, operated for twenty-some years now in honor of Margaret Feldman. Let me tell you about her.

She was born and raised in this small town. Her father made a smallish fortune by inventing and selling a watch lubricant and running a jewelry store (most of the smallish fortunes in my area came from something to do with oil). He was also an accomplished musician. Margaret was an athlete in high school, graduated early, and attended college. From there, she eventually ended up in DC working for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) which she did for many years, before finally coming back home and teaching English at the high school where I graduated and taught. She was fearless and feisty, but also very proper. By the time I was a student, she was occasionally subbing. By the time I was on staff, she had stepped back from that, but she still ran a summer literature program for some students. She copied off the New York Times crossword puzzles and put them in teachers' mailboxes, and stopped by to chat. 

She new all sorts of people, mostly from her time in DC, and she was a source of inspiration to the generation of students who had her in class. When Aunt Peg passed away, the most immediate reaction of those students (now long-matured men and women) was to collect money to set up a foundation in her name. One ongoing function of that foundation has been to stage an essay competition for students throughout the county in her name. 

Keeping that competition afloat this year is a labor of love for me on two counts. The competition has been run by a woman who came to town and was befriended by Peg, who then recommended her to the district when an opening appeared in the department--that was my long-time teaching partner, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly less than a year ago. So I'm working to keep the project afloat in memory of both of them.

That is what a teacher's legacy looks like-- grown-ups out in the world making use of the tools that teachers gave them years ago. If you teach in a small town, you get to appreciate that legacy a bit more. My hair is cut, my teeth cleaned, my car fixed, my food prepared, and my path just regularly crossed by students that I have taught over the decades. That, and the internet makes the whole world a little smaller, too. 

Teaching is one of the rare fields in which, like a blindfolded gardener, you never get to see the end product. You get a hint, a glimpse of the outlines, as the students head out the door. But so often you don't get to know the rest of the story. You can look around your room, your building, but your legacy is not there. It's out there, somewhere, in the world. Maybe a bit in your colleagues. A foundation funded by former students is nice, but not everyone gets that and anyway, you aren't around to see it. 

This is why, for years, I've said the best Teacher Appreciation Week gift is a personal, handwritten-on-paper note. Though advocating for public education is right up there, too. And some folks would do well to spread their appreciation out over the year, rather than being appreciative for one week and a jerk for the other fifty-one. 

But a note. A note is nice. You are somebody's legacy, and it means something to them to hear that you appreciate their role, back in the day, in your life. I guarantee it.

Aunt Peg: An Appreciation

Margaret Feldman was born and raised in my small, the daughter of a musical family. Her father led the Baptist Sunday School Orchestra, and by recruiting members for that group brought a great deal of musical talent to the area. Like many folks in this area, her father had struck it rich in the newly burgeoning oil business. In his case, he developed a method of refining oil into a lubricant for watches and founded the Fulcrum Oil Company. It made him a healthy income, as did the jewelry store his father had started years before.

Margaret was a standout athlete at our local high school. After graduation she went on to Vassar. When she graduated, the second world war was heating up in Europe, and she went to work in DC in the office William Donovan at the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor for the CIA. Through her work, she came to know a wide variety of people from many walks of life and parts of the world (including Moe Berg, the baseball player who was also a spy).

But at the end of the war, her father had passed away, and so she came back home to run Fulcrum, becoming one of the few female CEOs in the country. Along with other women running a company, she was profiled in a Dun and Bradstreet publication in 1959. 

She got her teaching papers and went to work at Franklin High School, the same school she had graduated from years before. She taught English and quickly became department head. She retired in 1970, only because the district at that time had a mandatory retirement age for teachers. Several board members voted not to accept her resignation. 

Aunt Peg (her nickname by this point) stayed involved in the district. She substituted, and even when she was not working, she stopped by. Never married, no children of her own, she watched over those of us following in her footsteps. She dropped copies of the New York Times crossword in some teachers' mailboxes. Her ability to reach out to a vast web of contacts was legendary; she once presented a teacher with a baseball newly signed by a major league player. She held a summer "reading club" for select students from the school, a combination special tutoring and summer school program. When a new teacher arrived in town and made Peg's acquaintance, she lobbied hard for her hiring. That was Merrill, my work sister, about whom I have written before. 

When Peg passed a little more than thirty years ago, many of her former students gathered together, raised funds and created a foundation in her name. That foundation funds an annual essay competition for students in all of the county's high schools. They get a prompt, the essays are submitted, the director of the competition whittles down the stack, and then a group of local high school teachers judge the essays and select a winner. There are scholarship dollars, and a pair of traveling trophies that are engraved with winners' names and which sit at the school of the year's winner. 

For years, Merrill was the director of the competition. Now I do that job. We had the reception for the finalists and winners last night. As we heard each finalist read their essay, I looked around the room and realized that I was the only person there who had met Peg face to face. 

It is hard to estimate the reach of some teachers. I never had Peg in class, other than as a substitute, but I got to know her more as a teacher. Some of the teachers who inspired me were inspired by her, so I guess I was a sort of professional grandchild of hers, and my own students-now-teachers are great-grands and so on. Peg was old school, neither warm nor fuzzy, but fiercely dedicated to literature and writing and what we could learn from them about ourselves. There was never nonsense in her classroom, not even when she was subbing, but there was plenty of humanity, and a demonstration of how wide and deep and rich a life could be, even if it started here in our small town.

When you retire, you become a sort of ghost. You step off that boat careening downstream and you are left behind, out of sight around the bend, so swiftly it can take your breath away. Every year, the competition gives me the chance to remind a few people about who Aunt Peg was, but it's clear that her influence has mostly outlived her name, her memory. 

That, of course, is the gig. Most teachers don't even have a tiny award named after them; they do the work, exert the influence, fire up another set of students, and the effects of their work get passed along, hand to hand, linking an unforeseeable future to an unfathomable past. Happy teacher appreciation week!

Florida Really Is The Worst

There are plenty of states in the country that are not very friendly to public education, but Florida under its new governor has established itself as the very worst state for public education. The worst. Its hatred of public school teachers and its absolute determination to dismantle public education so that it can sell off the pieces to privatizers and profiteers puts the sunshine state in the front of the pack.

The Newest Baloney

The latest nail in the coffin is Senate Bill 7070, a bill that adds yet another school choice program to the Florida portfolio of choiceness. That bill was passed today and now needs only Governor DeSantis's signature, which it will get quickly. The bill offers up vouchers that can be used for private schools, including the religion-based ones, like the ones that teach dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and the ones that maintain their right to discriminate against, well, whoever. The vouchers will be one more drain on the public tax dollars intended to fund public education, but then, a key feature of the Florida approach has been to keep underfunding public schools so that charter and private schools can look better by comparison.

No signs of help for education anywhere on the horizon

One Democratic representative during the discussion of this bill pointed out that Florida has been proud of its accountability system (the stupid test-score based awarding of letter grades to schools) and these vouchers will completely circumvent that system.

"What are we doing?" Montford said. "We're allowing them to take public funds to go to schools where the standards are not as high, or maybe don't have any standards. And worse than that, we don't even know what those standards are. Why are we supporting allowing parents to take their children to schools that don't fit the accountability system that we all are so proud of? Why are we doing that?"

Just spitballing here, but I'm betting the answer is "The accountability system was just a tool for dismantling public education, and once we've cracked open that piggy bank, we don't much care how good or bad the schools are."

The bill was "delivered" by one member of the DeSantis all-star team, Jennifer Sullivan, the 27-year-old homeschooled college drop out (and we're talking Liberty University here) who heads the House education committee. DeSantis also banks on . There's the longtime grifter and profiteer Richard Corcoran, who, after being term-limited out of the legislature landed a new job as state education chief (here's another take on just how bad Corcoran is). The legislature itself is loaded with reps with a family stake in the charter biz (which is not a new thing in Florida). 

But the most important team members for this play are the three new state supreme court justices that DeSantis installed. In 2006, Jeb Bush tried a similar move, and the court recognized the obvious-- that the law violated the state constitution (they didn't even get to the problem with public money for religious education). DeSantis is expecting friendlier judges to see things his way. 

About That Teacher Pay

Meanwhile, Florida has fallen to 46th place in rankings for teacher pay. The legislature wanted to-- oh, I don't know what they wanted to do. Look like they're addressing Florida's problem in recruiting people to work under their lousy job conditions? At any rate, the same bill that added vouchers also tweaked Florida's boneheaded teacher bonus program. Now a Florida teacher's bonus is not based on her SAT scores, but instead we're back to the old student test score baloney. 

What's key remains the same-- it's a bonus. It doesn't help you build a pension or buy a house, and you can't count on it to feed your family in the future. It's almost as if the legislature doesn't actually want to attract people to come teach in public school.

Killing Competition

Local school districts had, in fact, decided to address the teacher problem on their own, with voters in several counties giving themselves a tax increase in order to attract more teachers.

One would think that free market competition-is-good legislators would applaud this move. It is, after all, exactly what they've said all along-- charters and choice would spur competition and make public schools better. 

But rather than applaud, the legislature is in the process of stifling that competition in a piece of brazen thievery. HB 7123 has passed in the house, and it requires public schools to share any increased tax levy money with charters. This tweet thread of the discussion shows just how ballsy and cynical the charter thieves have been. Charter supporter Rep. Bryan Avila argued that the voters didn't know why they voted for increased taxes, so maybe they did mean to give charters some of the money (they didn't). Avila is asked repeatedly what mechanism will be used to hold charters accountable for using the money for its intended purposes; he has no answer for that, because the answer is that charters will be free to use the windfall for whatever they wish.  An amendment to require accountability from charters is called "unfriendly" and denied. And in perhaps his most ballsy comment on the purpose of the bill, Avila says, "We don't want school districts acting on their own." 

Oh, and the tax grab would be retroactive.

And The List Just Goes On

The legislature seems likely to pass a bill arming teachers with minimal training. Because irony is still legal in Florida, yesterday a school resource officer accidentally fired his gun while it was still in the holster.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has some ideas about how to significantly ramp up Schools of Hope. Schools of Hope is a cynically designed program for bypassing local elected school districts by using state authority to plunk new charters directly across the street from struggling public schools. Too bad, voters. 

But that doesn't stomp on locally elected school boards hard enough, so there's also a bill to impose term limits on school board members. School boards are a problem because they don't always approve charters. You see the repeating theme-- the Florida legislature just finds the democratic process to be a big problem.

A bill that will make it a felony to provide students with banned books. It also gives any citizen the right to challenge any material, as well as forbidding any pictures of naked folks (good luck in your Florida physiology classes). And the book banners behind this bill already have a list ready to challenge, including Angela's Ashes and The Awakening. Banning the latter is-- well, something. I've taught The Awakening for decades, and it doesn't have anything remotely graphic in it (generally I have to explain to most of my students "Between the end of this chapter and the beginning of the next one, sex probably happens"), but it does have a married woman who has an affair.

And That's On Top Of

The American Federation for Children School Guidebook reminds us that Florida is already awash in school choice. Florida has every flavor of choice we know of-- ESAs, vouchers, tax credit scholarships-- and leads the rest of the country by a wide margin. By AFC's figuring, Florida spent 39% of all the voucher money in the US in 2018-- that's $956 million out of $2.4 billion.

Florida teachers were stripped of job protections (what folks sometimes call tenure) years ago.

Florida has one of those stupid third grade test failure rules-- third graders must pass the Big Standardized Test in reading to be promoted to fourth grade. Never mind that this is a bad rule; they have adhered to this rule with stunning determination, and justified it by arguing in court that teacher-given grades are meaningless.

Florida consistently ranks close to the bottom in spending-per-pupil.

Peak Cynicism

There's so much more, but these lowlights give you the idea. Talk to some charteristas on line and get a feel for just how deeply some of these folks hate teachers and teacher unions and public education. But nothing captures the cynicism driving the privatization of Florida education like the moment DeSantis explained "If the taxpayer is paying for education, it's public education."

Sure. The best way to steal something is to gaslight your audience and tell them, "What? I didn't steal it. It's still right there." Don't tell the public you're ending public education; just redefine public education as a private business with no meaningful transparency, oversight, or democratic local control, and which the public does not own or operate.

There are lots of places in this country where public education is under assault, hampered by privatizers and profiteers, and in the past, I wouldn't have tried to pick a Worst, but I'm ready now. I have no doubt that there are many good teachers, many good schools still hanging on and doing their best in spite of it all. But I wouldn't send my worst enemy to raise children in Florida, and I wouldn't send my worst enemy to get a teaching job there. Openly hostile to public education and systematically trying to break it down and replace it with privatized businesses while degrading and attacking the people who do the actual work, who actually care about education. Florida really is the worst.


  

Competing Globally

On the list of empty rhetoric that's thrown into the ring for the reformster dog and pony show, we should include "compete globally."

It is frequently used as the bottom line for the reformster argument. We need standards so we can raise test scores so we can prove that students are career and college ready? Why? So that they can compete globally.

What does that even mean? Compete with which parts of the globe? Compete at what?

I mean, there are many areas in which we are not winning global competitions. While Americans go hungry and tons of tons of edible food end up in landfills, France has made it illegal for stores to throw food away. While Americans (and their government) try to get rich off of men and women trying to get a college education, many countries recognize the benefits of making it easy to home-grow educated adults with no-cost colleges. And while we commit so many acts of policy and profit "for the children," we remain one of the absolute worst countries in the world for child-care leave. Anything for the children-- except letting them have their mothers handy during the first months of life.

And Estonia? That country we're worried about catching up to? I learned this week that they are the leaders in free wifi for everybody (instead of preserving it as private source of corporate profit).

Nevertheless, aren't we still a major world power? Is China not still trying to imitate us economically? Are we not among the world's leaders, economically and politically? Also, our women just won the world cup, so in your face, global competition.

So what do our students need to be doing about competing globally?

No, when reformsters talk about competing globally, they're generally talking about jobs and economics. Like this sentence that leads off a White House essay about competing globally:

To create true middle class security, we must out-innovate, out-educate  and out-build the rest of the world, positioning American companies to thrive in a 21st century economy. 

There are two problems here.

The first is the use of the term "American companies." I'm not sure that anybody even knows what that means anymore. GE is a quintessential American company; we can all remember various GE products being advertised no matter how old or young we are. But of GE's roughly 300,000 employees, fewer than half (about 134,000) are in the US. "American" automaker Chrysler barely employs more Americans than "Japanese" Toyota.

Five years ago, when McKinsey was beating the drum at the front of the reformy parade, they weren't even bothering to talk about "American companies" so much as "multinational companies headquartered in the US."

Multinationals owe no allegiance to a particular country, nor even to a particular way of life. Robert Reich included this quote in a 2012 look at the issue:

An Apple executive says “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” 

Nor, for that matter, is Apple obliged to solve China's problems either, and so Apple, like many companies, benefits from a culture where sacrificing one's life for a meager paycheck. China's working conditions suck, but that's not the multinational's problem. It is, in fact, to their benefit. 

And that brings us to the second problem with the White House statement. 

Reformsters repeatedly talk about this global competition as if it's just a matter of education instead of a matter of controlling costs. This "paper" by the Center for American Progress gives exactly one sentence to the issue

We are quite familiar with what economists call “global labor arbitrage,” the substitution of high-wage workers in advanced economy countries with low-wage workers in developing economies.

Having noted their familiarity, the writers spend the rest of the paper speaking as if competitiveness is strictly a matter of education and training, and not a willingness to provide labor at the lowest possible costs.

The examples are endless. GE is sitting on a mountain of money, and yet they even as they have moved jobs to cheaper overseas locations, they have slashed benefits and created two-tier pay systems for their American workers. Does the recent kerfluffle about Microsoft laying off workers with one hand while pressing Congress for more guest worker visas with the other-- does that all seem familiar? That's because we went through exactly the same kerfluffle a year ago. Google "do we need more STEM workers" and watch the arguments line up.

We aren't losing jobs because we can't "out-innovate, out-educate or out-build" the rest of the world, but because we don't have enough people willing to work for far less money in far crappier conditions. (Even if we were, you don't raise people who can out-innovate anyone by forcing students through a one-size-fits-all, test-driven straightjacket of an education program-- even China understands that.)

Competing how?

It is true that American students are poorly equipped to compete in a marketplace when what they've been told is, "I've got ten Chinese workers willing to live in a dorm away from home and work 80-hour weeks for peanuts. Can you beat that?" But it's not entirely clear how college and career ready standards, backed up by high stakes testing fueling a big stick threat-heavy approach to public schools will help.


I can find plenty of writing about the issues in big broad terms, but try as I might, I can't find somebody who lays out the direct connection. I'm eighteen and I've proven I can pass a test about literature taught the David Coleman way-- exactly what will that allow to say in a job interview that will make a potential employer say, "Yes, I definitely want to hire you, and not that guy in China."

Exactly what is the connection between passing PARCC and scoring a good middle class job?

Reformsters keep trying to frame the issue as an issue or worker worthiness. Surely our American workers would be better paid at better jobs if they deserved to be. The fact that they aren't is proof that they don't deserve to be. I have no doubt that when Jeb Bush says American workers should work more hours, he's displaying the reformster disconnect, not even noticing that 1) vast number of employers won't hire people for more than part-time jobs and 2) employers just fought hard for their right to screw workers out of overtime pay.

In other words, we have somehow taken a broad economic problems-- the human costs of corporations that want to pay absolute bottom dollar for labor-- and turned it into the workers' fault. Don't whine to me, Mr. Smith-- if you had gotten a better education, working part time at the widget store would pay better.

The global competition is to scour the globe to find the cheapest good-enough labor to be found so that corporate coffers can be crammed full. Multinationals are on their way to reducing national governments to the role of human resources department-- get us a good applicant pool for jobs, take care of health care costs and any other maintenance costs for keeping the human capital in working order. And so nations are in a global competition to see which can bring the most good-enough human capital under budget. Who's going to compete for the job of looking out for the interests of the human capital. Turns out that there is no global competition to be best at that job.