Politics of Fear

Somehow, I have become a centerpiece in the 2008 elections. The McCain/Palin campaign has targeted me, along with Small Schools Workshop founder Bill Ayers, as part of a vicious guilt-by-association campaign against Senator Obama. Victims of the campaign's collateral damage also include the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the Woods Fund, ACORN, Rev. Wright, Chicago school reform and the small-schools movement.

The fear campaign has been gleefully carried on by a bevy of right-wing bloggers, and other usual suspects like FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew McCarthy, Stanley Kurtz, Sol Stern and other Swift-boat types. So far it appears that the overwhelming majority of the American people (and voters) have rejected the attacks of Obama. But my reputation and that of the Small Schools Workshop where I have worked for the past 17 years, has been damaged.

I have chosen not to respond openly to specific charges until after the November 4th elections. I want to thank all those friends and supporters of me, my work and of the Small Schools Workshop, who have stood by us through these difficult times.

Quoted in Edweek

Edweek’s Eric Robelen, writing about charter school management companies (CMOs), finds a critical voice. It’s me.

…critics say that CMOs are a far cry from the original idea of charter schools, and that the networks have attracted oversize support from foundations. Michael Klonsky, the director of the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago and a longtime adviser to small-school startups across the country, including some charters, says CMOs go against the idea that grassroots communities should play an integral role in creating charter schools. “Somebody with a big idea about schools and a million dollars from Mr. Gates or Mr. Broad comes into a community and plops it down,” he says.

Nothing I haven’t said a million times, including in our latest book.

Reviewed in Horace

Horace Book Review Horace Summer 2008, Vol. 24 No. 2

Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society by Michael Klonsky and Susan Klonsky (Routledge, 209 pages, $26.95)

Mike and Susan Klonsky’s Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society deserves to have sunscreen stains on its pages and sand within as an unlikely recommended summer read for CES network educators. Okay, if there’s a great novel that you’ve been saving for the week that school’s out, read that first. But before school starts up again,* read Small Schools to get angry and radicalized, to remind yourself of the extraordinary value of your work, to cheer for yourselves as worthy alternative underdogs, and to rekindle your fire.

A nightmare gallery of monsters menace public education, and the Klonskys invoke some of the most frightening: the gang of politicians, foundations, think tanks, and corporations that have invaded schools during the still-current Bush administration. Documenting the ways that “the progressive grassroots educational reform movement for small schools has been hijacked by business groups, right-wing ideologues, and the ideology of the Ownership Society,” the Klonskys throw readers into the deep end of the small schools movement, the threats posed by corporate and governmental encroachment on public education, and the toxic ground on which privatization forces have co-opted small schools for corporate gain, both in the authors’ home turf of Chicago and elsewhere.

The breathless pace slows in the first chapter, which unpacks small schools’ “traditional democratic values of Deweyan progressivism combined with Information Age notions of professional community, personalization, and safe learning environments in an unsafe society.” This chapter focuses on the story of opposing school reform movements in Chicago, serving as a useful primer on that city’s tension around school size, control, and ideas of whom its schools are for. This inside baseball of Chicago politics, school reform, and role of the Klonskys’ Small School workshop is contextualized within the movement that includes Deborah Meier’s work in New York’s District Four, southern Freedom Schools, and other results of progressive efforts around the country. This chapter also captures the “politics of disaster” that have been created in response to public schooling’s complex challenge, describing how a deficit model of education has evolved to dismantle existing public systems.

The sprawling second chapter details and defines the forces and practices of the Ownership Society and its “all-out assault on teachers, public schools, and public space in general.” Featured in President Bush’s 2005 inaugural address, the term was intended to sell the idea that individual citizens should control health care, finances, education, and other key factors of their lives. The Klonskys vehemently oppose the political practices that exemplify the Ownership Society, and their arguments effectively encapsulate the rhetorical co-option of words and ideas—such as the very concept of small schools—that may have originated from the grassroots progressive education movement, but have come to be fully integrated into the current administration’s “demagoguery.” This is compelling stuff. It’s also densely written and presented in a careening trajectory that might have benefited from chapter headings.

The third chapter deals with the privatization of our school systems. When the Klonskys write, “In many districts around the country, the best of the small and charter schools have indeed become agents of change, responding to a national sense that the traditional system of public education needs transformation,” you’ll think “Hey, that’s us! That’s CES.” But such schools are anomalies whose existence emphasizes the gulf between intended purpose of charter schools—to provide stimuli to the system and grassroots-driven alternatives—and their current uses as for-profit collectives that rob the public system.

The book concludes with considerations of the role of philanthropy, with most of its attention on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (a CES funder). “It’s hard to say whether the world’s richest man has been part of the problem or part of the solution,” the Klonskys observe. They are far less ambivalent on the role of conservative think tanks that rose to power on a tide of private funding and adept use of technologies that allowed them to emerge from the shadows.

The conclusion “Alternatives to Top-Down Reform,” offers a welcome, and familiar, note of hope, with its faith in the power of professional learning communities. Critical Friends Groups to the rescue! Though its documentation of the forces that oppose what we know works to educate children, and preserve and improve the intellectual and other forms of health of their communities, is daunting and at times heavy-handed, you’ll finish Small Schools with renewed faith in your work as a CES network educator, and a healthy infusion of anger and energy.

* Year round schools: the bane of the education book reviewer. Sorry to slight those of you who are at year-round schools, but you still experience summer, yes? And you still read? Apply this as you see fit (Horace suggests liberally).

This resource last updated: July 24, 2008

Database Information:

Source: Horace Summer 2008, Vol. 24 No. 2
Publication Year: 2008
Publisher: CES National
School Level: All
Audience: New to CES, Teacher, Parent
Issue: 24.2

Quoted in Gazette.Net (Maryland)

...Beginning in the 2009-2010 school year, the students would be separated into smaller, 400-student clusters within the school buildings.

...‘‘It enables teaching to become personalized and enables teachers to connect the curriculum to kids’ own experiences and lives, and research shows that’s key to the intellectual development of youngsters, especially kids from low-income families and minority students,” said Michael Klonsky, director of the Chicago-based Small Schools Workshop and author of ‘‘Small Schools: The Numbers Tell a Story.” Klonsky has also co-authored ‘‘Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society.”

Reviewed in Teachers College Record

By Clive Harber — June 30, 2008

Title: Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society
Author(s): Michael Klonsky and Susan Klonsky
Publisher: Routledge, New York
ISBN: 0415961238, Pages: 209, Year: 2008
Search for book at Amazon.com


The title of the series in which this book is published is “Education, Politics and Culture” which suits the lively and politically committed content very well. Fundamentally, the book is about how a progressive educational movement aimed at facilitating smaller and more democratic urban schools in America became hijacked by the neo-conservative agenda of the Bush administration and its many powerful allies. In so doing it cannot fail to tackle the wider educational and political issues of the last eight years and their antecedents, which it does with admirable clarity and detail.

Although school size is important, the small schools movement has traditionally been more about a democratic ideology of education that rejects the mass, bureaucratized authoritarianism of many large publicly funded schools. Smaller schools potentially make it more possible to organize education in a more supportive, inclusive, egalitarian and humanitarian way. Moreover, this smaller scale is also seen to have significant curricular advantages in that learning can be cooperatively designed to meet personalized learning needs rather than the ‘one size fits all’ approach of larger, more conventional schools. The democratic ideas behind the small school movement stem from both the ideas of John Dewey and progressive educational writers of the 1960’s and 70’s and the practical realities of trying to provide a higher quality and more meaningful educational experience for alienated and marginalized young people in American cities. Indeed, the book reviews evidence that suggests that small schools of this sort were indeed providing better learning outcomes and a safer and friendlier learning environment.

The problem that the book confronts is that the notion of freedom contained in the decentralized ability to set up small, but still essentially public, schools concerned directly with issues of social justice has come up against another notion of freedom based on the private market and a consumer notion of freedom. The book discusses how the original small school movement grew in strength, size and influence via the introduction of public Charter Schools, and how the Bush administration and its local allies in big cities have used the greater autonomy of these schools to essentially privatize them by bringing in private management companies with many close ties to the administration itself. Ostensibly these are “not-for profit” organizations but there are many indirect ways of making considerable sums of money from the now essentially privately run schools such as:

•Creating non-profit organisations to obtain the charter and then hiring themselves to run the school

•Hiring younger, less experienced and less qualified staff which are therefore cheaper

•Charter companies teaming up with developers to offer home buyers an upscale amenity – tuition-free, taxpayer-funded schools for their developments

Moreover, in the increasingly privatized context of a single-minded focus on standardized test scores and a punitive approach to low-performing schools, there is little time or concern for children with special needs or children with English as a second language.

Rather than reduce the role of the state, except in terms of the funding of public schools, the Bush administration has used the power of the state embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act, to control education by enforcing a “teaching to the test” mentality that reduces both the range and depth of the curriculum. In this way schools can be compared in the market place via their test scores, and closed or taken over by private management companies as appropriate. Thus the Ownership Society, the term that the authors use to describe what has happened, uses government as a conduit for public funding of politically aligned private enterprise. In order to justify this they use a post-9/11 language of permanent crisis in education, further hijacking the radical critiques of conventional schooling, to provide a narrow, privatized alternative of their own making.

However, the book argues that most of the resulting privatized small schools have become big schools with authoritarian principals, disempowered and uninspired educators, dubious high-stakes tests and Eurocentric curricula. Indeed, the need to keep costs low through economies of scale has also meant that the size of the schools has inevitably started to drift upwards.

Chapters 4 and 5 provide interesting reading on the role of both philanthropists and well-funded conservative think-tanks in the top-down nature of the whole process. The first by holding the purse strings and setting non-negotiable conditions—making schools offers they can’t refuse—and the second by providing the philosophical underpinning of the changes and by dominating the discourse of educational reform. The final chapter strikes a more optimistic note about the future and the need for democratic civic engagement with public education by parents, teachers and students, trying to get the initiative back into the hands of the key participants and stakeholders.

For all those in America and elsewhere concerned about not simply giving into the models of education that have been imposed from above by a decidedly right-wing government, this is an informative and useful book. It may even be that the ushering in of a new administration in January 2009 will create a political environment where the original small school ideas of democracy and social justice can flourish and grow once again. However, experience in the UK where a right-wing government gave way to a supposedly centre-left one in 1997 does not make me particularly hopeful, as the educational machinery stayed essentially the same and some screws were even tightened. One thing that is for certain is that the arguments will go on and the supporters of democratic small schools will need to mobilize to put pressure on the new administration. I wish them luck from afar.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: June 30, 2008
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 15296, Date Accessed: 7/6/2008 4:52:05 PM


Purchase Reprint Rights for this article or review

Now Available

Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society
By Michael & Susan Klonsky

ISBN: 9780415961233
ISBN-10: 0415961238
Publisher: Routledge
Pages: 224
List Price: $26.95

When education activists in New York, Chicago, and other urban school districts in the 1980s began the small-schools movement, they envisioned a new kind of public school system that was fair and equitable and that encouraged new relationships between teachers and students. When that movement for school reform ran head-on into the neo-conservative takeover of the Department of Education and its No Child Left Behind strategy for school change, a new model of federal power bent on the erosion of public space and the privatization of public schooling emerged. Michael and Susan Klonsky, educators who were among the early leaders of the small-schools movement, tell the story of how a once-promising model of creating new small and charter schools has been used by the neocons to reproduce many of the old inequities. Small Schools is the engaging story of what happens when the small-schools movement meets the Ownership Society.

Order here or email us at smallschoolsworkshop@yahoo.com

Small Schools and Social Justice

A Simple Justice: The Challenge for Small Schools

by William Ayers (Editor), Gabrielle H Lyon (Editor), Michael Klonsky (Editor)

About this title: Written by major players in the small schools movement, this collection of essays points to the ways school restructuring strategies connect to the ongoing pursuit of social justice. Building bridges to their fellow educators, these essayists make powerful arguments in favor of smaller school size as an achievable reform goal.

The "Politics of Disaster" at AERA

March 28, 2008

Schooling and the Politics of Disaster: The Privatization of Civic Life and the Destruction of Community

Schooling and the Politics of Disaster: The Privatization of Civic Life and the Destruction of Community

Session Participants:

Chair: Kenneth J. Saltman (DePaul University)

Capitalizing on Disaster: Public School Privatization From the Gulf Coast to the Persian Gulf
*Kenneth J. Saltman (DePaul University)

Feasting on Disaster: Urban School Policy, Globalization, and the Politics of Disaster
*Pauline Lipman (University of Illinois - Chicago)

The Small Schools Movement Meets the Ownership Society *William C. Ayers (University of Illinois - Chicago)

The Small Schools Movement Meets the Ownership Society *Michael Klonsky

Benign Neglect? Drowning Yellow Buses, Racism, and Disinvestment in the City That Bush Forgot *Kristen L. Buras (Emory University)

The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind: Standardization and Deracialization Breed Inequality *Enora R. Brown (DePaul University)

Discussant: Michael W. Apple (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

Abstract:
This highly original panel addresses how disaster is being used for the radical social and economic engineering of education. From the natural disasters of the Asian tsunami and the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast to the human made disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan, Indonesia, the United States, and around the globe, disaster is shaping politics. Terror and security dominate political debates and frame issues while the spectacle of disaster sells policy and commodities alike. Following both the invasion of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina school privatization advocates took advantage of disaster to implement charter schools, voucher schemes, and deregulation of education while educational profiteers secured exclusive rebuilding contracts.The panel is important, topical, and related to the annual conference theme as it recognizes not only a new form of educational privatization, but it is also important for intervening in what is an attack on community and civic life. While Iraq and New Orleans may seem like rare and isolated cases of privatization advocates capitalizing on disaster, the papers in this panel illustrate that these extreme examples typify a much larger and even dominant domestic trend in education. Indeed as some papers contend, on a national level No Child Left Behind sets schools up to be designated as “failed” to be closed and then reopened in a number of experimental forms including charter schools and for profit schools. Under the current guidelines of NCLB most public schools in the U.S. are headed for this outcome. On a local level such mass closures and experimental reopenings are already happening in major cities such as Chicago, Boston, and Portland, Oregon. As communities suffer the dismantling of public schools and coordinated assaults on public housing and other public services, the possibilities for democratic civic life and participatory forms of democracy are imperiled. This phenomenon involves much more than privatization including matters of school funding, the culture of schooling, organizational models for school systems, educational leadership, the role of think tanks in policy and reform, the relationship between educational politics and foreign policy. Panelists address concrete and specific examples of how natural and unnatural disaster is being used to transform education including No Child Left Behind, the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the making of educational funding crises in the U.S., the role of educational think tanks in planning for disaster response, and the Iraq War. Some papers take a broader perspective on disaster including consideration of how schooling has been shaped by the disasters produced by globalization and the legacy of colonialism, ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and how media spectacle of disaster functions pedagogically to educate the public about pressing matters. Papers range from policy oriented to philosophical, employing political economic anaylysis, discourse analyis, ethnographic research, and conceptual theoretical argumentation drawing on critical theoretical traditions inside and outside the field of education.

Where did it go?

September 11, 2007

The Ownership Society goes underground

"To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools, and build an ownership society." President George W. Bush, Inaugural Address, 2005.

Where did it go? I mean, all that talk about the Ownership Society. Remember, It was the bumper sticker cliché Bush used to campaign with in 2000 and 2004. The neo-cons wanted to "reform" Social Security by replacing it with individual investment, stock market accounts. They wanted to turn public schools over to private managers. They wanted to contract out the Reading First program to crony contractors.

"Private ownership trumps social ownership," "Risk trumps security," shouted the neo-cons. Whether talking about public schooling or rebuilding post-Katrina New Orleans, we were told that privatization would make all of us healthier, wealthier and wiser if we would only take a risk and rely on the market, rather than on government, to solve our problems.

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, said that Bush's Ownership Society speech in 2005 ushered in "the new gilded age," an era where nearly all new federal initiatives, whether in war planning, tax incentives, health or education policy, were aimed at transferring as much wealth and power as possible away from the public sector and into the private.

Fast forward to now…with the country headed full-steam into another economic recession, stocks tumbling, thousands of people losing their jobs and homes to bank repo's , and 79 million people without any health insurance, the Ownership Society rhetoric has suddenly gone underground. Not even the most conservative of presidential candidates dares whisper the OS slogan.

From the SmallTalk blog

Catalyst Chicago

Guest Column

Too few cooks in school reform

by Michael Klonsky September, 2007

I have been working in and with Chicago’s public high schools and Chicago’s small schools movement for the past 20 years. It is ironic that since the start of Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative, no one connected with the School Board, CPS leadership or education foundations has asked my opinion about small schools or anything else.

I’m not complaining. Our Small Schools Workshop has been busy, and I have had plenty to do in school districts around the country. But I am making a point about the narrow base of Chicago school reform these days.

There are lots of folks at the top, talking to each other. Critical views don’t seem to be held in high regard on Clark Street. Sounds a lot like Pennsylvania Avenue. All you have to do is read the Ren10 website. CPS culture has become a fantasyland where things are always moving forward, test scores continually rising and everyone feels good about it. What a far cry from the days just after the 1988 reforms, when researchers flocked to Chicago and there was lively debate and district transparency.

It was not so long ago that Chicago had a broad and vibrant school reform coalition that spanned ideological lines and included large, active parent organizations, reformers in the teachers union, business groups, university researchers and community-based organizations. Decisions were made democratically—maybe more democratically for some than others.

That coalition helped take CPS from the bottom (remember Bill Bennett’s speech?) to near the top of large urban school systems. Hundreds of schools made significant, measurable improvements in a relatively short time, as research by Designs for Change and the Consortium on Chicago School Reform shows.

Today that coalition is long gone. It’s been replaced by a small group of political insiders and business cronies gathered around the Civic Committee, who seem to make all the important decisions. And when those decisions go south—arbitrary school closings mainly in black communities, for instance, that led to increased violence at high schools like Wells—there is zero accountability. The district just moves on to the next big idea in reform: High School Transformation with its pre-packaged curriculum; charter schools, which are sprouting faster than Starbucks or Walgreen’s.

When Renaissance 2010 was first announced, we at the Small Schools Workshop were excited. We had encouraged the Gates Foundation to come to Chicago to support what we thought was going to be a flowering of teacher- and community-empowering small schools. We had envisioned that these new small schools would be models of democratic schooling, open to all students, equipped with cutting-edge technology and staffed with excellent, highly skilled teachers and principals. The neediest kids, including special education and English language learners, would be served.

In other words, we thought Chicago’s new and restructured schools would be built on the strong foundation already established in 1988, one of the most radical and democratic school reform efforts in the nation—a real renaissance for Chicago.

Boy, were we wrong.

Instead, it seems that Schools CEO Arne Duncan and the board have taken their cue from the test-crazy No Child Left Behind crew in Washington and the privatization folks here who seem more interested in top-down reform, busting unions and eroding public space than in transforming our factory-model high schools. What a shame! What a waste of potential and local resources!

My hope for the future lies in the creation of a new, broad-based reform coalition and a new school reform strategy aimed at new small schools and charter schools with strong community organizations and empowered teachers to support them. By empowered, I mean teachers who have collective-bargaining rights and who are not banned from joining the existing teachers union as they are now.

There are interesting things along those lines, happening in Los Angeles with Green Dot charters, and in Boston with the pilot schools, that Chicago should be looking at. An expansion of a federal grant initiative that creates smaller learning communities would also be beneficial.

Despite these problems, there are a number of exciting things happening in Chicago’s public schools.

New small high schools and career academies, such as the soon-to-be-opened Austin Polytech (not a charter) offer great potential for neighborhoods trying to rebound from economic devastation and isolation. The new Little Village High School, the result of powerful organizing by parents and community activists, holds promise as a model of community-based transformation. Some of the small schools that opened a decade ago are still managing to survive bureaucratic interference and have emerged with strong academic programs intact.

But sustaining these promising programs in the current environment will be difficult. Continued school closings, federal testing madness and a disproportionate share of district funds earmarked for charters and politically connected after-school providers will make the going difficult for small schoolers.

My hope, as always, is that the best reform will be the result of an engaged community, along with teachers pushing for change from below. Regime change in Washington in 2008 and radical changes to No Child Left Behind, may ease the testing pressure and help Arne Duncan’s team get back on the right road. A solid alternative reform initiative on the part of the CTU in partnership with Green Dot and/or the pilot schools could help turn things around.

Michael Klonsky is a founder and director of the Small Schools Workshop and a professor of education at Nova Southeastern University. He is a consultant to Miami/Dade and other urban school districts on high school restructuring, and author of “Small Schools: The Numbers Tell a Story.”

© Catalyst Chicago.