Bill Moyers interviews Diane Ravitch

The high cost of turning our schools into profit centres:

• Public education is one of the foundations of a democracy, and America's public education is under assault.
• Charter schools are booming and controversial. There are 6000 in the United States -- double from a decade ago. They are publicly funded and privately run.
• Wall Street is drooling over investing in for-profit education companies.
• Profit$ not pupils are driving Corporate School Reform.
• Profiteers and privatizers see a gold rush in American K-12 Public Education which pulls in over $500 billion in taxpayers revenue.
• Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error is a must read. 
• The Department of Education, led by Arne Duncan, has become an enemy of American public education.
• If we continue down this path, many cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, etc. will have no public schools. And if there are any, they will become a dumping ground for the children that the charter schools deem inconvenient or too expensive to educate. 
• American public schools are not broken and they are not failing. American public schools are dealing with some major challenges, including the fact that 1 in 4 children in the US live in poverty. Where there are public schools that are in trouble, there are communities that are in trouble.
• Charter schools were suppose to collaborate with public schools by seeking out innovations that the public schools could learn from but charter schools have become cut throat competitors, poaching public funds.
• If you make test scores the purpose of education, you don't want the children with disabilities,
  
  you don't want the children who don't speak English, you don't want the trouble makers, you don't want the children with low scores. You want to keep those kids out of your school.
• Not all charters are bad, but even the non-profit charters are typically owned by for-profit corporations. 
• Charter schools are not public schools, and in many states, charter schools are not required to hire credentialed teachers.
• The problem with turning over public education to the private sector is that they don't know anything about education.
• The American Legislative Exchange Council creates model legislation that states legislators copy to privatize public education, end collective bargaining, end due process for teachers, and merit pay for teachers.
• The assault on public education is a bipartisan effort.
• The Network for Public Education is a network of people who are fighting back against Corporate School Reform.
• Judging teachers via standardized test scores is wrong -- so there is now a mass exodus of people from the teaching profession.
• The Opt-out movement from standardized testing is growing and becoming main stream.

PART II

• The American Indian Model Charter School has been praised as one of the best charter schools in the country. In 2000, the school changed its demographics from predominantly Native American to Asian American. The change allowed the school to now brag about its test scores, which are some of the highest in California. They changed their student population to chase high scores.
• Some of the charter schools have CEO who are making $400,000 per year. 
• We are abandoning civic responsibility for consumerism. 
• Charter schools have select and conditional admissions which means they choose which children to admit or deny and which children to keep and expel.
• We should take billionaires advice for how to invest our money, and ignore their advice for how to teach and how to manage public education.
•  When Americans are asked about public education in general, they recite what corporate billionaires and corporate media tell them -- it's terrible. But when Americans are asked about their own public school, they say their public school is great.
• School choice is a synonym for segregation. The Charter movement is rolling back Brown vs Board of Education which led to the de-segregation of schools.
•  If we never change our mind, why have one? 

3 Things I learned from Network for Public Education Conference

I spent the weekend in Austin, Texas at the first Network for Public Education (NPE) and it was fantastic. You can find my day 1 post here and my day 2 post here.

Here are 3 things I learned from The Network for Public Education Conference:

1. Relationships. I was so happy to get a chance to meet some very cool people that, until this weekend, I had only known as avatars on Twitter. Don't get me wrong, I love social media -- while social media can help connect people by removing the obstacles of time and place, it is no substitute for real life, face to face relationships. I was so happy to meet and spend time with Kirsten Hill, Adam Holman, Jose Vilson, Stephanie Cerda, Xian Barrett, Audrey Watters, Sabrina Stevens, Katie Osgood and Phil Cantor.

I got to briefly meet Deb Meier, Anthony Cody, Diane Ravitch, and Chris Lehmann.

2. Assault on Public Education. As the token Canadian at the conference, I was struck by the raw emotion that dominated the conference -- teachers are saddened and angered by the assault on public education lead by profiteers, politicians and privatizers.

The politics and problems killing American Education is complex, but here's my Wikipedia version: For a long time, public schools in the United States had been a public good. Schools were about pupils. However, Corporate School Reform has become the status quo -- public education is being bastardized into a private interest where schools are about profits.

Essentially Corporate School Reform is led by three foundations: Gates, Walton and Broad -- who have allied with the Federal Government, effectively making the United States Department of Education an enemy of public education.

Common Core, high-stakes standardized tests and Teach for America are a money grab for Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Democratically elected school boards are replaced with Charter CEOs who have absolutely no accountability to the public. Public schools who have a responsibility to take all children who show up are closed and turned into private charters with select admissions. Every dollar from tax payers for public education should go to public schools not into the pockets of CEOs and investors. Private schools should not be publicly funded.

The Charter school movement in the US is re-segregating America and rolling back whatever gains were made from Brown vs Board of Education. Experienced and educated teachers are fired in exchange for well-intentioned but grossly ill-prepared youngsters whose effectiveness have been grossly overstated. Public Education is being strangled to death by Corporate School Reformers who provide an opportunity-rich education for their own children while imposing other people's children with schools that are marinated in acquiescence and testing. Education excellence requires equity.

The Corporate School Reform is a part of the Global Education Reform Movement which is built on a contradiction:

Use PISA scores to show that public education in the United States is failing but then implement market-based reforms that are almost entirely contradictory to the reforms and policies found in high achieving countries.

3. There is hope. The only thing necessary for destructive mandates and cancerous education policies to succeed is for good teachers, parents and students to say and do nothing. When distant authorities invoke their ignorance with the force of law, remember that your silence is read as assent -- and at some point your silence is betrayal to those who do speak up and take action.

The Network for Public Education is the loud speaker for people who support public education. Rather than remain as individual pockets of resistance to Corporate School Reform and GERM, NPE is a way to organize and mobilize a movement that will save public education.

NPE concluded its first National Conference with a call for Congressional hearings to investigate the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation's K-12 public schools. The consequence of all this is that testing has become the purpose of education, rather than a way of measuring education.

NPE is encouraging everyone, including Congress to ask some tough questions:

• Do the tests promote skills our children and our economy need?

• What is the purpose of these tests?

• How good are the tests?

• Are tests being given to children who are too young?

• Are tests culturally biased?

• Are tests harmful to students with disabilities?

• How has the frequency and quantity of testing increased?

• Does testing harm teaching?

• How much money does it cost?

• Are there conflicts of interest in testing policies?

• Was it legal for the U.S. Department of Education to fund two testing consortia for the Common Core State Standards?

If Congress has the time, effort and resources to investigate baseball players using steroids, they can surely find the time, effort and resources to investigate the misuse and abuse of testing.

The Pitfall of PISA Envy

Whether it be business, education or life in general, it often makes sense to figure out what you want to do and what you do not want to do. It's also a good idea to figure out how you are going to assess your success.

This is good, but I would like to add one more step.

I think it's also important to decide how you will not assess what you've done. I think Maya Angelou provided us with a wonderful example of this when she said:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away.

In one sentence, Angelou helps us to see what we should be doing (living), while simultaneously showing us how we should and should not measure the quality of our lives.

For the last decade, Finland has been the model nation for education systems around the world. Finland should be applauded for resisting the urge to invest in the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and instead pursuing alternative policies. Perhaps most notably, standardized tests are almost completely absent from Finnish schools.

And yet, world attention has been focused on Finland mostly because of their high scores on PISA's standardized tests. 

See the contradiction?

PISA's 2012 rankings show Finland has been replaced at the top with a handful of Asian countries (and a city). By idolizing the rankings, people might drop Finland like a hot-potato to chase after Asian countries who achieve their high scores with very different priorities and questionable means.

Recognizing people or nations for doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can be misleading and ultimately unsustainable. PISA's rankings on their own are useless. The real lessons from PISA are found from researching how each nation achieved their results and then assessing their methods via ethical criteria that is independent of their results. (Things go very wrong when we allow education policy to be driven by circular logic: define effective nations as those who raise test scores, then use test score gains to determine effective nations.)

We need to recognize Finland for doing the right things with their schools for the right reasons, but that means we need to move beyond reducing learning to standardized test scores and PISA rankings. Until then, we run the risk of chasing high performing nations that score well and rank high with methods that are less than enviable.

Assessing the quality of education by how many questions we answer correctly is kind of like judging a life by the number of breaths we take -- both are clear, simple and wrong.

Shameful infographic from StudentsFirst

Here is a shameful infographic from StudentsFirst.

This is the kind of shallow and superficial rhetoric that encourages people to focus on competitive ranking while ignoring the real lessons of PISA.

I find it sadly ironic that organizations like StudentsFirst use PISA to advance an agenda of privatizing education, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, closing schools and firing teachers when in fact PISA shows us that not one of these strategies is supported by evidence.

Organizations like StudentsFirst need to keep people frantically distracted with a kind of hysteria and fetishization of international test scores so they can dupe us into their cancerous education policies. Desperate people can be convinced to make desperate decisions. Infographics like this are nothing more than fear mongering that distracts people with clawing over each other so we can chant "We are number umpteenth!"

While Canada has been able to avoid some of these fruitless distractions, it's disappointing to see John Manley, CEO and president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, get duped into thinking the sky is falling. "This is on the scale of a national emergency,"this ridiculous response from Manley is eerily similar to some of the hysteria Americans have exhibited when they compared America's low PISA scores with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Organizations like StudentsFirst only get away with spreading the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) if people limit their knowledge of PISA to infographics like this. The real lessons are found from researching how each nation achieved their results. According to PISA, Finland and Asian countries are high achievers, but they became high achievers by focusing on very different priorities. While you will see StudentsFirst make their own infographics like the one above, you will never see them share PISA reports with titles like Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed.

I hope we can all look past shallow and superficial infographics like this one from StudentsFirst and fear mongering from John Manley so that we can find the real lessons of PISA. I'm not saying its going to be easy, but it's going to be worth it.

Looking for the real lessons of PISA. Start with this video:

Ravitch's Reign of Error: The best book on education you can read today

Diane Ravitch's latest book Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools is available today.

I had the good fortune of getting a review copy in advance so that I could write a series of posts (starting today) about how important this book is to public education and our democracy.

Let me start off by saying that this is the most important book on education I have read since Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve. While Kohn's book focuses intensely on what classrooms should look and feel like, Ravitch's Reign of Error articulates what a progressive and democratic education system should look and feel like.

Who should read this book? 

School reform's reign of error is not confined to the United States. Pasi Sahlberg has rightfully identified the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) that has infected public education systems worldwide. Anyone and everyone who cares about our public education and democracy needs to read this book.

Diane Ravitch writes:

The corporate reform movement has a well-honed message: We are the reformers. We have solutions. The public schools are failing. The public schools are in decline. The public schools don't work. The public schools are obsolete and broken. We want to innovate. We know how to fix schools. We know how to close the achievement gap. Great teachers close the achievement gap. Teachers' unions are greedy and don't care about children. People who draw attention to poverty are just making excuses for bad teachers and failing public schools. Those who don't agree with our strategies are defenders of the status quo. They have no solutions. We have solutions. We know what works. Testing works. Accountability works. Privately managed charter schools work. Closing schools with low test scores works. Paying bonuses to teachers to get higher scores works. Online instruction works. Replacing teachers with online instruction not only works but cuts costs while providing profits to edu-entrepreneurs who will spur further innovation.

This book was written to challenge those who believe in the corporate reform movement. This book was written for those who are aware of the ills of the corporate reform movement but need more facts to articulate a sound argument. This book was written for those who suffer from apathy and cynicism. This book provides the energy and encouragement we need to provide schools that all of our children deserve.

The only thing necessary for destructive mandates and cancerous education policies to succeed is for good teachers, parents and students to say and do nothing. When far-off authorities invoke their ignorance with the force of law, remember that your silence is read as assent -- and at some point your silence is betrayal to those who do speak up and take action.

It is said that Franklin D. Roosevelt once met with a group of activists who sought his support for legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, "You've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it." The spirit of Roosevelt's advice is likely what inspired Robert Reich to say, "Nothing good happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington become mobilized, organized, and energized to make it happen."

Like democracy, public education is reserved for those who fight for it, and Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error is the rally cry we can use to mobilize, organize and energize the fight for our public schools.

New GERM outbreak in Scotland

This was written by Niall MacKinnon who is a Scottish school principal Niall MacKinnon highlights the need for rigorous GERM infection control measures in education reform programs. You can read Niall MacKinnon's extended version on this article here.

By Niall MacKinnon

In his speech to the Scottish Learning Festival this September, cabinet secretary Michael Russell claimed that GERM is not for Scotland. The Global Education Reform Movement is a concept of Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg, presented in his recent book Finnish Lessons. The features of GERM are standardizing teaching and learning, a focus on literacy and numeracy, teaching a prescribed curriculum, management models from the corporate world and test-based accountability and control.

Scotland’s recent tightly controlled educational landscape of attainment targets, performance indicators and inspection judgements was an example of GERM. But Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) opened up a different pathway in the central “four capacities” concept, emphasizing and integrating wider focuses of linkage and personal development in revisioning pedagogy. CfE showed close affinity with the Finnish Way, outlined by Sahlberg as the antidote to GERM.  Finland encouraged risk-taking, learning from the past, owning innovations, shared responsibility and trust through professional dialogue. A central feature of decluttering for CfE was to focus on innovative approaches, emphasizing practice innovation and local professionalism, termed ‘building the curriculum’.

But just as this was coming together, linking proactive innovation, evaluation, and school systems to CfE, it fell apart. This was because of layers of prescription to different performance criteria in new multiple audit schedules, inspection templates and standards and quality reporting, to non-CfE criteria. The main emphasis was not exploring pedagogy, but micro-specification to serve the needs of external control and standardized calibration of schools. Then came hundreds of  “Es and Os” (experiences and outcomes) as a curriculum specification ‘painting by numbers’ kit. CfE was further lashed down to seven “required characteristics of successful implementation” framed in a product model of curriculum, delivery model of schooling and behaviorist model of audit. Self-evaluation split two ways, one as evaluation taking the concepts, principles and purposes, applying them evidentially yet discursively – GERM-free. The other, calibrating audit prescription to fixed, outdated notions and applying these in absolutist terms – GERM. This set up a huge conflict within CfE in Scotland, one which Sahlberg took from me in the chapter defining GERM in Finnish Lessons:

“Niall MacKinnon, who teaches at Plockton Primary School, makes a compelling appeal for “locally owned questions and purposes in realising practice within the broader national policy and practice frameworks.” He gets right to the point of how GERM affects teachers and schools: “There is the real practical danger that without an understanding of rationale and theoretical bases for school development, practitioners may be judged by auditors on differing underlying assumptions to their own developmental pathways, and the universalistic grading schemas come to be applied as a mask or front giving pseudoscientific veneer to imposed critical judgments which are nothing more than expressions of different views and models of education. Through the mechanism of inspection, a difference of conceptual viewpoint, which could prompt debate and dialogue in consideration of practice, is eliminated in judgmental and differential power relations. One view supplants another. Command and control replaces mutuality, dialogue and conceptual exploration matched to practice development. Those who suffer are those innovating and bringing in new ideas.” ” (p 104)

The paragraph came from my 2011 paper ‘The Urgent Needs for New Approaches in School Evaluation to enable Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’ in the international journal Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. My argument there was that specifications, grading and judgementalism destroy conceptual innovation and local practice professionalism, thereby negating CfE. Torridon Primary School and its headteacher Anne Macrae was my inspiration for that paragraph, now the case exemplar of GERM worldwide in Finnish Lessons.

Sahlberg shows how Finnish education placed central focus on professional dialogue, enabling pedagogy to link modern innovations to a long history of educational ideas. The central conceptual genius of CfE was the “four capacities” concept. It is not a slogan but a clarion call to get to know our pupils, and construct learning pathways by reaching out and revealing the dispositions latent in their potentials. These extend in so many ways out beyond conventional notions of learning, set in terms of delivery, targets and specifications.

We need to unpack learning, garner systemic understanding and enable formative development progression, for pupils, educators and institutions working together, not a “clear plan from A to B” as the Scottish schools’ inspectorate currently mandates. Scotland is now in the midst of GERM warfare between specifications compliance and pedagogic innovation, fought out over the morale and professionalism of Scotland’s teachers. As Dr Sahlberg said of GERM on his blog (30 June) “As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less”.

Sadly GERM is for Scotland, and the case study of GERM is Scotland. But it could so readily not be, once this is ‘seen’ and something done about it, or rather undone, simply by removing the specificatory shroud and control freakery of judgmental absolutism to outdated notions. Let us ‘build the curriculum’ as intended and envisaged.

The central lesson from Finnish Lessons is not what Finland did, but rather what Finland did NOT do to its education system. “Transformational” change in the nature of curriculum and its realization in school education, which Scotland “says” it is undertaking, is not going to come about without similarly transformational change in the means of getting there.

How GERM is infecting schools around the world

This was written by Pasi Sahlberg, author of “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? and director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation. He has served the Finnish government in various positions, worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and for the European Training Foundation in Italy as senior education specialist. Sahlberg has also advised governments internationally about education policies and reforms. He is also an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi. You can follow Pasi Sahlbeg on Twitter here and read his blog here.

by Pasi Sahlberg

Ten years ago — against all odds — Finland was ranked as the world’s top education nation. It was strange because in Finland education is seen as a public good accessible to all free of charge without standardized testing or competitive private schools. When I look around the world, I see competition, choice, and measuring of students and teachers as the main means to improve education. This market-based global movement has put many public schools at risk in the United States and many other countries, as well. But not in Finland.

You may ask what has madeFinland’s schools so extraordinary. The answer has taken many by surprise. First, the Finns have never aimed to be the best in education but rather to have good schools for all of children. In other words, equity in education comes before a ‘race to the top’ mentality in national school reforms.

Second, Finns have taken teachers and teaching seriously by requiring that all teachers must be well trained in academic universities. All teachers should enjoy professional autonomy and public trust in their work. As a consequence, teaching has been a popular career choice among young Finns for three decades now. Today the Finnish government invests 30 times more in professional development of its teachers and administrators than testing its students’ performance in schools.

Third, Finnish educators have learned systematically from other countries how to reform education and improve teaching in schools. The United States has been a special source of inspiration to Finland since John Dewey a century ago. Such American educational innovations as cooperative learning, problem-based teaching and portfolio assessment are examples of the practices invented by teachers and researchers in the United States that are now commonly found in many Finnish classrooms.

One thing that has struck me is how similar education systems are. Curricula are standardized to fit to international student tests; and students around the world study learning materials from global providers. Education reforms in different countries also follow similar patterns. So visible is this common way of improvement that I call it theGlobal Educational Reform Movement or GERM. It is like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus. It travels with pundits, media and politicians. Education systems borrow policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less.

GERM infections have various symptoms. The first symptom is more competition within education systems. Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

The second symptom of GERM is increased school choice. It essentially positions parents as consumers empowering them to select schools for their children from several options and thereby promotes market-style competition into the system as schools seek to attract those parents. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for families with the perceptions that market mechanisms in education would allow equal access to high-quality schooling for all. Increasing numbers of charter schools in the United States, secondary school academies in England, free schools in Sweden and private schools in Australia are examples of expanding school choice policies. Yet according to the OECD, nations pursuing such choice have seen both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation.

The third sign of GERM is stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students. Just as in the market place, many believe that holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ learning will lead to improved results. Today standardized test scores are the most common way of deciding whether schools are doing a good job. Teacher effectiveness that is measured using standardized tests is a related symptom of GERM. According to the Center for Public Education, standardized testing has increased teaching to the test, narrowed curricula to prioritize reading and mathematics, and distanced teaching from the art of pedagogy to mechanistic instruction.

Healthy school systems are resistant to GERM and its inconvenient symptoms. In these countries, teaching remains an attractive career choice for young people. My niece Veera is a good example of this.

Seven years ago, when she was graduating from a high school in Helsinki, she called me and asked my advice on how to get into the teacher education program in the university where I had been working as teacher educator earlier. I told her that as a straight-A graduate, she should feel comfortable with the entrance examination and be herself in the interview.

In Finland primary school teacher education is a master’s level academic research-based degree similar to degrees in law, economics or medicine. She read required books, took the exam and was invited to the final interview where only the top candidates were selected. A month later, she called me in tears and told me she was not accepted. I asked her what was the toughest question in the interview. She said: “Why do you want to become a teacher when you could become a lawyer or doctor instead?”

Afterwards she wrote me a letter about her interest in teaching. This is what she wrote: “First is the internal drive to help people to discover their strengths and talents, but also to realize their weaknesses and incompleteness. I want to be a teacher because I want to make a difference in children’s lives and for this country. My work with children has always been based on love and care, being gentle and creating personal relations with those with whom I work. This is the only way that I can think will give me fulfillment in my life.”

The following spring she applied again. She was accepted from a ten-fold number of applicants and she recently earned her master’s degree as a primary school teacher. If the Finnish education system had been infected by GERM like many other countries, Veera and many of her peers would never have chosen teaching as their life career.

Addressing pandemic disinterest in the teaching profession with Teach for America and Teach First programs may be a solution to local shortcomings but will not cure the systemic infections that cause current educational underperformance in many countries. We should instead restore the fundamental meaning and values of school education. Without public schools, our nations and communities are poorly equipped to value humanity, equality and democracy. I think we should not educate children to be similar according to a standardized metric but help them to discover their own talents and teach them to be different from one another. Diversity is richness in humanity and a condition for innovation.

A growing number of students in Korea and Japan are taking their own lives because they can’t take the pressure by the adults anymore. Recent suicides of two 14-year-old Kenyan schoolgirls, Mercy Chebet and Sylvia Wanjiku, add a sad chapter in the book of the victims of GERM.

We must stop the GERM that puts such a pressure on children in schools through competition, choice, and accountability. Choosing collaboration, equity and trust-based responsibility as the main drivers in education reforms enhance immunity of our school systems to stop GERM and have good school for all children.

Jeb Bush and Global Education Reform Movement (GERM)

Will Richardson shared this video and called it required viewing for every parent and educator who wants a better picture of the global education reform movement (GERM), and I agree.



If I can find the time, effort and patience, I really want to go through this video and offer some line by line critique.

Mike Thayer left this comment on Will Richardson's post. I think it speaks volumes:

The bottom line to me is, this is a talk about tactics; the fundamental strategy of the new educational reform movement is left unsaid.

According to Gov. Bush, the tactics for the new reformers are pretty simple. Tactically, the strategic goals will be achieved if the "reformers" are able to: 

1) Create the perception that "higher, better" standards will help solve the problems of education.
2) Create the perception that (public, only public) schools are failing.
3) Create the perception that there just need to be great teachers in every classroom, and all will be well.
4) Create the perception that technology will be the panacea. 

Here's the great part: For no particularly good reason, I actually believe that Gov. Bush believes each of these (that is, remove the words "create the perception" from each of the items above). And he has the conviction of the true believer. Anyway... 

The strategic goals are, as far as I can tell: 

1) To privatize education completely, or at least to corporatize it to the point that the contrast between public vs. private/charter/whatever schools would be a distinction without a difference.
2) To treat education as a field that could become a source of major profits for large corporations.
3) To make students who view knowledge as purely pragmatic, rather than providing them with means to be more critical or holistic thinkers. Having future consumers with a very simplified view of the world is good for business.
4) Etc. 

I think if we care about the ideal of truly public education, we need to develop strategies and tactics of our own. We are way behind the other side on this one, in my view.

I would also add Alfie Kohn's article Beware of School "Reformers" as required reading. With chilling accuracy, Kohn identifies the ingredients to be a school "reformer":

* a heavy reliance on fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests to evaluate students and schools, generally in place of more authentic forms of assessment; 

* the imposition of prescriptive, top-down teaching standards and curriculum mandates; 

* a disproportionate emphasis on rote learning—memorizing facts and practicing skills—particularly for poor kids; 

* a behaviorist model of motivation in which rewards (notably money) and punishments are used on teachers and students to compel compliance or raise test scores; 

* a corporate sensibility and an economic rationale for schooling, the point being to prepare children to “compete” as future employees; and 

* charter schools, many of which are run by for-profit companies.

Marion Brady on Education Reform

Marion Brady's post on Truthout.org titled Education Reform: An Order-of-Magnitude Improvement is a brilliant read.

He starts off by challenging the conventional wisdom around today's education reforms (what Pasi Sahlberg calls GERM):

Imagine the present corporately promoted education reform effort as a truck, its tires nearly flat from the weight of the many unexamined assumptions it carries. 

On board: An assumption that punishment and rewards effectively motivate; that machines can measure the quality of human thought; that learning is hard, unpleasant work; that what the young need to know is some agreed-upon, standard body of knowledge; that doing more rigorously what we've always done will raise test scores; that teacher talk and textbook text can teach complex ideas; that ... well, you get the idea.

In similar fashion, I wrote a post titled You say you want this, so then why are you doing that? that attempts to myth-bust some of the knee jerk reactions we have towards what a good education looks like.

Brady not only criticizes today's top-down mandated, content-bloated, prefabricated curricula, but he also provides a feel for what real learning looks and feels like:

Our sense-making system - like the concept of gravity before Sir Isaac Newton - is so familiar we don't think of it as a system. And, when it's pointed out, we tend to dismiss it as too simple and obvious to be important, much less the key to educational transformation. But made explicit and put to work, our implicitly known knowledge organizer moves learner performance to levels far beyond the reach of the measurement capabilities of standardized tests, including the ones on which international comparisons are based. 

Skillful use of the system can't be taught in the usual sense of the word - can't, that is, be transferred in useable form from mind to mind by words on a page, images on a screen or lectures from a stage. Learners have to construct understanding for themselves. 

To appreciate the teaching-learning challenge, imagine trying to explain water to a fish. Success requires that the utterly familiar be made "strange enough to see." A five-hour lecture to a fish on the subject of water wouldn't match the memorable experience of being lifted out of the water for a five-second exposure to air. 

Experience is the best teacher, but attention must be paid. Adolescents, encouraged to look long and hard at particular, ordinary experiences - and to think and talk about what they're doing - eventually discover their basic, five-element approach to sense-making. They've lived long enough to have experiences they can analyze, are mature enough to examine those experiences introspectively and haven't yet been programmed by schooling to sort what they know into disconnected boxes with subject-matter labels. 

Reasoning their way to those five distinct kinds of information, they "own" the foundation of their knowledge-categorizing and -manipulating system. No reading from a textbook, no listening to a lecture, no viewing of a video production, will ever match the level of understanding of ideas that emerge from firsthand experience refined by dialogue.

For more on rethinking curriculum and lesson planning, check out this page.