Professor's Post: Why These Videos?

The videos we watched in class today focused on the role of privatization in education, which is often called, rather benignly, 'education reform.' While some of the videos criticized the role of state and city governments, others blamed the Republican Party or the corporate-political hybrid group ALEC. I simply want to state that by showing these videos I endorse neither party, and that my own understanding of the situation concerns the conflict between business and democracy within contemporary conversations about education. This includes for-profit testing, standardized testing generally, and the level of control available to parents and communities over the school curriculum.

As an educator in a unionized public college, my biases would seem obvious. I'd like to explicitly state, though, that my model of education rests on the production of creativity, justice, and skills in the classroom. Guided by philosophers like Moffett, I start from the premise that student-centered learning is the goal. I then work backwards into methods that might produce it. I then work backwards once more into imagining what kind of political economy might best give students the opportunities I believe are best for learning.

I should say that I'm interested in one key contradiction: Sir Ken Robinson is clear that public education stamps out creativity (in part through it's emphasis on testing!), but he isn't clear at all one why public education has become such a crucial location for (for-profit) testing. He doesn't call out the school boards that recommend new rules on high-stakes testing and the influence of corporate lobbyists. In some ways this is why Moffett appears interesting, and this is why CUNY is interesting, or could be, or should be: they call(ed) for a creative public education. I'm not sure Robinson is - I genuinely don' t know. And this is where "Khan Academy" also comes in: he believes he can achieve a free education through online tutorials. My question for Khan is whether this makes sense for all students or just some students. And my question also concerns whether or not he envisions the Khan Academy replacing public schools, transforming them, or what. I don't know this answer either.

It's also strange that one leg of corporate-education reform seems to insist on for-profit testing, which alienates children and opens up the need for charter schools, while another leg of for-profits open the doors to charters to collect kids fleeing the public schools. It seems corporate reform is manipulating both the 'disease' of public education and its 'cure,' and profiting from both. I wonder if some of the same testing companies are also sponsoring charters. Does anyone know?