Teachers Beware! New tutoring program hides its disastrous agenda... 'Tough Choices' and the National Center on Education and the Economy
On March 20, 2008, the Chicago Tribune ran a front page story that rained accolades upon ‘America’s Choice’, a program that pays 1,000 high school freshmen, from six Chicago Public Schools, to tutor elementary school students in reading. According to the program’s parent company, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), the initiative helps adolescent tutors improve their own academic skills when they teach younger children. While America’s Choice may help older students who are tutors increase their reading skills, the article never reveals the larger objectives of the program. In fact the NCEE seeks to transform traditional public schools in order to create a competitive and technologically savvy work-force.
Graphic shows one of the mayor's staged media events promoting "Turnaround" schools and denigrating veteran teachers.
One way they expect to achieve this goal is to eliminate teacher job security, pensions and union membership. The NCEE lays out its strategy in a report released in 2007 called ‘Tough Choices.’ In the report [which we’ve reported on several times in the pages of Substance], they promote an educational system that is intimately tied to the interests of the business community; in fact the study itself was financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The report claims that schools should produce workers that can provide value to the global economy, candidates who have strong skills in “English, mathematics, technology, and science, as well as literature, history, and the arts” and be able to learn “very quickly and work well as a member of a team and have the flexibility to adapt quickly to frequent changes in the labor market as the shifts in the economy become ever faster and more dramatic.”
In other words ‘America’s Choice’ is the work of a conservative think tank in disguise that has infiltrated the Chicago Public Schools through what appears to be a benign tutoring program. The National Center on Education and the Economy would like nothing more than to incorporate the interests of free market fanatics into school design. Forget an education that helps young people understand and shape the world they live in, instead business mandates will determine the instructional program. Perhaps the most frightening aspects of ‘Tough Choices’ is its argument for how to transform the role of teachers in the school system. In the report, the NCEE argues that “our education and training systems were built for another era, an era in which most workers needed only a rudimentary education.” As a result, Tough Choices goes on, “we recruit a disproportionate share of our teachers from among the less able of the high school students who go to college” and therefore “tolerate and enormous amount of waste in the system.”
The report asserts that practically all teachers in the public schools are from the lower rungs of their graduating classes. It contends that many teachers in our nation’s public schools are “unqualified” for their jobs. To rectify this “problem,” the report suggests that school districts “recruit from the top third of the high school graduates going on to college for the next generation of school teachers.” Forget the notion that students in under-funded and institutionally neglected public schools should have a shot at being teachers in their own communities. It will not matter how hard these students work if they cannot make it to the “top third” of all high school graduates because the NCEE would have them removed from contention. The architects of the report also aim to substantially reduce teacher pensions. They claim that most college graduates seek employment that is strong in cash incentives and current teacher compensation is too “heavy on pensions and health benefits for the retired teacher.” Instead the NCEE pushes for a new package that disguises the loss of benefits through cash increases to attract younger teachers who tend to over-look their long term interests for short-term gains. Their mechanism for doing this is to “make retirement benefits comparable to those of the better firms in the private sector and use the money that is saved from this measure to increase teachers’ cash compensation.” In what could be their scariest proposal, the NCEE hopes to change school boards so they “would no longer be owned by local school districts” and instead would “be operated by independent contractors, many of them limited liability corporations owned and run by teachers.”
Beware of this language! Though the last part of this school board proposal may appear to empower educators, teachers will be appointed only after their protections are completely dismantled. Teachers who work on such a board would make “decisions” in a system dominated by management prerogatives. The report also assumes that all of the new schools in the system would be contract schools (that’s right you read correctly 100 per cent), which means they could all be run by for-profit entities, and none would be subject to the Chicago Teacher Union contract. As teachers and PSRPs (Professional Support Personnel) in a system that is increasingly controlled by corporate interests, we must be extra vigilant and suspicious of every single new program introduced into our schools. To protect our interests against this wave of trendy reforms will require the utmost caution and focus. If we do not quickly organize ourselves to fight this threat the wave could very quickly become a veritable tsunami and wash away all that teachers have achieved through years of struggle and resistance.
This article was originally published on Page Five of the April 2008 print edition of Substance.
