When we put the plutocrats in charge, we get their crackpot ideas on matters like education

Washington Post's Tom Toles's "outtake" for yesterday.

by Ken

Here in the Wall Street bunker (no, I'm not in the financial-services industry; my company just rents space here), the barriers are still up, as I reported last night, and the police contingents are still in place keeping people confined to the minuscule spaces alloweds under occupation rules, but today's overcast and rainy weather lessened the crush from yesterday. One of my coworkers wondered today how long this will last. My concern is that now that our custodians of "order" have discovered how easy it is to get New Yorkers to accept this kind of lockdown, it's likely to become permanent.

As I wrote last night, I suspect that the tourists from home and abroad who daily flock down here to see -- on diagonally opposite corners of the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets -- Federal Hall and the New York Stock Exchange -- are getting an eyeful of American-style "democracy" to take back home, where it's likely to be noted more than it is here.

Now that we've more or less officially put the plutocrats in charge of the country, I'm thinking back to an observation I passed on awhile back from my friend Peter: that the likes of Mayor Michael Bloomberg is probably about the best we can hope for now in a mayor, or perhaps public servants generally -- someone who's not only rich enough to stand above the public fray but really does try to see beyond the parochial interests of his own socioeconomic class. Not seeing the job in terms of the grubby everyday political realities, he does try to set priorities and develop initiatives in line with some vision for the future, and some good things unquestionably come out of that.

At the same time, we can't ever forget what a particular kind of vision his is: that of a billionaire elite white male, who may try in some ways to imagine the effect of his policies on people who aren't safely ensconced in their opulent protected pockets of privilege, but the effort doesn't get him much beyond such things as public anti-smoking policies and dedicated bike lanes and pedestrian plazas. These are nice things, but not determining factors in the way most of us live our lives, and in general the plutocratic class and their hangers-on and fluffers, for all that they see themselves as the hardest-headed of hard-headed "realists," have little or no idea how most real people live.

One area in which the vision gap has become explosively evident is in education, where a weird convergence has developed, what actual education authority Diane Ravitch describes -- in an important piece in the current (September 29) New York Review of Books, "School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade" (for once actually available free online!) -- as "the improbable consensus among conservative Republicans, major foundations, Wall Street financiers, and the Obama administration about school reform."

I'll be talking about the piece more, but for tonight I just want to share a chunk of the piece that frames the role being played by these financial types, most of them nominal Democrats, who have declared themselves not just interested parties but full-blown experts in education, about which they clearly know nothing in real-world terms, and have embraced the anti-teacher ideology of the Hoodlum Right, who are the heroes of a hagiography on this school "reform" movement by plutocrat fluffer Steven Brill, in a book called Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools.

Brill, notes Ravitch "lavishly praises the billionaire equity investors and hedge fund managers who have financed the reform movement," including Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, about whom she quotes an unintentionally hilarious encomium from Brill. Curry IV, he writes,

seems the typical preppy socialite. He and his wife have homes in Manhattan (Central Park South), East Hampton, and the Dominican Republic. His father, Ravenel Curry III, also runs a money fund. He and his wife frequently appear in society columns, and she’s a well-known high-end interior decorator.

Well, we should thank our lucky stars that such a one would deign to take such an active interest in school "reform." I put reform in quotes here because, as Ravitch notes, these fake-reformist vandals have coopted the word to the extent that anyone who disagrees with their program is automatically "against reform."

Anyway, this is the chunk I wanted you to consider tonight.

The financiers of public school reform described here live in a world of spectacular wealth. They believe in measurable outcomes; their faith in test scores is greater than that of most educators, who understand that standardized tests are not scientific instruments and that scores on the tests represent only a small part of what schools are expected to accomplish. The Wall Street men have found a cause that is both “exciting and fun” and, as [Ravanel Curry IV puts it, “because so many of us got interested in this at the same time, you get to work with people who are your friends.” It is unlikely that any of them have close personal connections to public education, yet they have made it their mission to change national education policy. School reform is their favorite cause, and they like to think of themselves as leaders in the civil rights movement of their day, something unusual for men of their wealth and social status.

In 2005, the financiers formed an organization called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) to promote ideas such as choice and accountability that were traditionally associated with the Republican Party. They set out to change Democratic Party policy, which in the past, as they saw it, was in thrall to the teachers’ unions and was committed to programs that funneled federal money by formula to the poorest children. DFER used its bountiful resources to underwrite a different agenda, one that was not beholden to the unions and that relied on competition, not equity.

While it was easy for the Wall Street tycoons to finance charter schools like KIPP and entrepreneurial ventures like Teach for America, what really excited them was using their money to alter the politics of education. The best way to leverage their investments, Brill tells us, was to identify and fund key Democrats who would share their agenda. One of them was a new senator from Illinois named Barack Obama, who helped launch DFER at its opening event on June 3, 2005. The evening began with a small dinner at the elegant Café Gray in the Time Warner Center in New York City, then moved to Curry’s nearby apartment on Central Park South, where an overflow crowd of 150 had gathered.

DFER also befriended Congressman George Miller from California, the powerful leader of the Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee. DFER supported Cory Booker, who eventually became mayor of Newark. A DFER fund-raiser produced $45,000 for Congressman James Clyburn, “the most influential member of the Congressional Black Caucus,” who returned home to South Carolina to champion tuition tax credits and charter schools. Brill writes that DFER sent a memo to the Obama team immediately after the presidential election, naming its choice for each position. At the top of its list, for secretary of education, was Arne Duncan.

Notice how it all fits together. The only thing that's left out of this brave new world of "education" (I'm afraid I have to put education in quotes too, for the same reason) is actual students engaged in actual learning, not to be confused with test prep. I'll be coming back to this important piece. Meanwhile the simplest thing you can do is read it for yourself.

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