From Diane Ravitch, Death & Life of the Great American School System, pp. 61-62
The teachers and principals. . . were bitter about the high-handed way in which the reforms were imposed on them. Teachers, especially veterans, spoke about being harassed. They complained about mandates and directives that narrowed what they were permitted to teach. The Bersin era, several said, was a "reign of terror." Those who didn't go along were bullied. Teachers were punished by grade switching: A first grade teacher might be reassigned on short notice to teach sixth grade, while a sixth-grade teacher would be reassigned to teach kindergarten or first grade. Principals spoke in hushed voices about the abrupt public removal in June 1999 of the fifteen administrators. The theory behind these tactics, several said, was "culture shock," keeping everyone on edge, afraid, insecure.
One principal who was promoted to the central office by Bersin spoke with regret about the district's 90 percent turnover in principals. When the fifteen administrators were fired, he said, it sent a message: "Comply or be destroyed." The influx of large numbers of new principals brought new problems. They had no "deep reservoir of experience" and felt "intense pressure to push change," so they bludgeoned people" when they walked through classrooms, thinking that by taking harsh actions, they could forcibly change people's beliefs. "people complied because of fear, " he said. "All up and down the system, there was fear." . . .
This administrator was blunt about his time as a principal under the Blueprint. "Putting coaches in every school," he said was "a great idea, badly implemented." The coaches sowed animosity, especially among experienced teachers. The coaches made teachers feel less competent, not respected. Teachers saw them as policemen and did not trust them. . . . The general sense among teachers was that the coaches were there to catch teachers making mistakes, to report them, not help them.
. . . He said, "Survival became paramount. Everyone was afraid of speaking out. We were muzzled." He survived, he said, because his teachers united to protect hm, and he protected them.
This excerpt from Ravitch's book describes the reign of terror that the San Diego Schools experienced under its Robespierre, Alan Bersin, a lawyer and former prosecutor whom San Diego hired as its superintendent from 1998 to 2005. Bersin during this time and following has been onsidered a courageous reformer, and his methods were praised and emulated by those in the 'ed-reform' community throughout the country.
So have these tactics been emulated in Seattle Public Schools? Maybe not to this extreme–yet. Or maybe it's deliberately more subtle so as not to call too much attention to itself. But talk to an experienced teacher, and if she's candid, she'll tell you that these tactics are not uncommon within our district. And I would suggest to you that it is a template that you can use to begin to understand what was going on regarding the firing of Ingraham's Martin Floe.
Have you heard of the Broad Superintendent Academy? It's a place where America's "most talented executives" go to be indoctrinated and trained in the ways of "education reform". (Seattle's recently departed super Marie Goodloe-Johnson was trained there.) What is education reform? It's based on Republican, anti-union and market-centered talking points about how to improve schools coupled with trendy, leftish, rigidly scripted constructivist (i.e, "fuzzy math:) curriculum ideas. In other words the worst of both the political right and the cultural left.
Whatever you might think about one or another of the ideas embraced by these education reformers, here's what you need to understand about the culture of education reform: It's driven by arrogant, technocratic elites, who know nothing about education, but think they know better anyhow, and who therefore have no compunction about forcing their ideas on experienced, effective teachers and principals without even attempting to persuade them to buy in. And when these reforms don't work, as they almost never do, they blame the teachers or whomever, but never themselves–because they are rich, smart people who just know better.
David Halberstam classic, The Best and the Brightest, was all about this mentality. It's about how very smart technocrats with rigid top-down ideas think they can bend reality to their wills. The book was about the mess created by the technocratic Democrats in Vietnam, but it could have been written about the mess Republicans created in their social engineering experiment in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ravitch's book is very much a description about how this top-down, social-engineering mentality is making a mess of the American education system.
In Seattle Public Schools we're lucky that the Broad-trained Marie Goodloe-Johnson was fired. Her firing, of course, had more to do with a culture of cronyism that has infected SPS, but it gives us now the opportunity to change directions, but she was a member in good standing of this education reform community, and we are fortunate she did not have more time to implement her agenda. The school board that Seattle elects this fall will have to take aggressive steps to clean up the cronyism, but the more important task is to hire a superintendent who does not live in this ideological "education-reform" bubble.
Americans across the country have suffered the leadership of people who lived in this bubble for most of the last decade because they know that the schools have problems, and they were willing to give these "reformers" a shot. These reforms have failed across the board, and now it's time to change the model.
I hope to make clear in future posts what I think that model should look like.
(Cross posted at Jack Whelan for School Board)
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