An Interview with Susan Ohanian: About Bashing Our Schools
Michael F. Shaughnessy
Senior Columnist EducationNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico

Susan Ohanian is the co-author of the book "Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools?" with Kathy Emery. This text published by Heinemann is a highly acclaimed book that has influenced many writers, other authors and theorists in America, and literally around the world. She maintains a website of resistance at http://www.susanohanian.org.

1.  First of all, when you say "corporate America", who or what are you referring to?

The Business Roundtable, made up of elite Fortune 500 companies.

2.  In a sense, why shouldn't any sane America be bashing our public schools? By any ruler or yardstick, we do not seem to be doing very well..

It certainly depends on who makes the yardstick and who's doing the measuring. In his monthly column in Phi Delta Kappan , Gerald Bracey does a great job of debunking the generalized claim that our public schools are lousy. But such arguments are for people who take education seriously and speak in something other than soundbites.

Many of our schools are quite wonderful-or were until they got caught up in the treadmill of foolish test prep. Even so, most do fine on any standardized measurement device you'd care to use.

Of course, we must acknowledge that some of our schools are quite terrible. We've known this for decades, and we don't need a grandiose testing scheme to identify the schools filled with kids in trouble. Just look for poverty zip codes. What these schools need is not more testing, scripted curricula, uniforms, and removal of staff. What these schools need is families earning a living wage. Poverty is a condition over which teachers have no power. This is a statement fact, not an attempt to "make excuses." Families living in the security of a living wage have the ability to acquire cultural capital, masterfully described by Professor David Berliner. He has also described what the absence of this cultural capital does to educational possibilities. It's all about money-and not money going into the pockets of tutors, coaches, consultants, curriculum writers, and test preparers-but money going directly into the pockets of the poor.

3.  On the other hand, shouldn't we really be bashing our legislators who started the process of deinstitutionalization many years ago? Teachers are now confronted with children with autism, mental retardation, deafness, blindness that were once educated in residential treatment facilities?

This is a complicated issue, Mike. First of all, blind and deaf children should not be lumped in with children with mental retardation and autism. Physical differences are a totally separate issue from mental retardation and/or severe emotional distress. I have welcomed both deaf and blind students into my classrooms, and can offer frontline evidence that they do very well. (I acknowledge that opponents of simultaneous communication would disagree and would insist that deaf children do need specialized schools. This is a matter for parents to decide, not a matter for federal fiat.)

After more than a decade welcoming students with mental retardation and/or severe emotional distress into my classrooms, I tried to stand outside the issue and examine it closely. My article "P.L. 94-142: Mainstream or Quicksand?" created somewhat of a flap after it was published in Phi Delta Kappan. For those interested in such issues, it is reprinted in my book Who's In Charge? A Teacher Speaks Her Mind (Heinneman, 1994). At the time I was roundly denounced by professors of special education and roundly supported by parents and the Special Olympics folk. Today, the issue is still current, still controversial. It was devastating for me to admit that my inclusion of students with serious learning and emotional difficulties had a dark side, that in attempting to help them in the mainstream I might be hindering their learning of the basic skills they needed to learn, skills they could learn (if they weren't so busy trying to memorize Washington's Battle Plan and the parts of a cell). As I said, the issue is still depressingly current. Every few years I write an op ed for a local paper, and, without fail, I hear from desperate parents who want to get their special needs children out of the mainstream. Parents of middle schoolers will tell you what hell the mainstream is.

The fact that the mainstreaming fiat is wrongheaded and damaging doesn't make a return to institutionalization right. Such a move would be dead wrong. We need to search carefully for the practicalities and subtleties to make mainstreaming both limited and workable. For starters, every case must be decided individually, with care taken to ensure that each child has an advocate. That said, teachers also need an advocate. How revolutionary: declaring that teachers have needs, too.

4,  Perhaps we should be bashing our schools of education- they do not seem to be doing a good job of teaching the increasingly heterogeneous population of students that arrive at our schools?

Until you names names, as in just which schools of education aren't up to snuff, I can't entertain the question. I am as guilty as anybody of making jokes about some of my education courses. But that was eons ago. My observation of recent courses in a number of states shows me lots of schools of education are doing a very good job.

5.  Shouldn't we be increasing our school day or school year in order to better educate our children?

Where's the evidence that a longer day/year would better educate anybody? If a traditional (and moribund), college prep curriculum isn't working for everybody in six hours a day, why would lengthening the day help? Instead of piling the offal higher, we should consider cleaning up the stables. On her website Summer Matters, Billee Bussard offers compelling evidence of the corporate agenda behind the marketing of year-round schooling.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060701114821/http://www.summermatters.com%20/

6.  Let's talk about words and language. It seems that people or should I say politicians are being increasingly trained to use language as a weapon. Am I off base on this?

"Words that Bind," the first chapter of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools, is devoted to this issue, providing lots of the words Newt Gingrich told Republican leaders to use when describing themselves-as well as the words they should use to describe Democrats. And Democrats are using the same technique. New Yorker writer George Packard refers to this technique as the danger of clarity , observing that seemingly simple and tough-minded words blow out as much theatrical smoke as the jargon of the Pentagon of decades past. And nowhere is this theatrical smoke thicker than in the lingo the corporate-politico-media squad uses when talking about public schools. In the hands of the U. S. Department of Education, the very title No Child Left Behind, hijacked from the Children's Defense Fund, has become the moral equivalent of the Pentagon's pacification . Of course, other verbal pyrotechnics are at work here-what Orwell called doublespeak. No Child Left Behind means the opposite of what it says. It is a plan not to help every school succeed but to declare public schools failures and accelerate the use of vouchers, turning public education over to private, for-profit firms.

Even worse, it is also a plan to blame the victim: the government declares it's leaving no child behind, so if a kid ends up on the streets after tenth grade, it must be his fault.

There's nothing new about politicians using slippery language to round up and herd the citizenry. What is of interest to me is the corporate agenda driving the politicians. Both Democrats and Republicans kneel at the pockets of corporate contributors. It was very hard to distinguish between Bush the Younger's education platform and Kerry's in the recent election-except that Kerry seemed to want more testing. This is because both parties feed at the trough laid out by Corporate America.

7.  Why should we look for the footprints of the business roundtable? And who exactly is sitting at this roundtable?

As CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner was an important player, joining hands with Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and President Bush the Elder to bring corporate honchos together with politicos to craft a high stakes testing and standards agenda at the infamous corporate-politico-education summit in Charlottesville in 1989. As we show in our book, Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools ? these test-and-punish tenets (as well as a whole more) come right out of the California Business Roundtable, Restructuring California Education: A Design for Public Education in the Twenty-first Century . They were picked up by the national Business Roundtable, were circulated at Charlottesville to the nation's governors, and became known as America 2000, which Clinton renamed Goals 2000. NCLB picks up from where Goals 2000 left off.

By the time Congress passed President Clinton's Goals 2000: Educate America Act in March 1994, the infrastructure was already in place. Take a look at Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools , by Louis Gerstner, Jr., chairman and CEO of IBM (with Roger Semerad, Denis Doyle, and William Johnston) The fact that it was published within a month of the passage of Goals 2000 is no coincidence. One of the noteworthy features of Goals 2000 is that Gerstner and his cronies got to name the problem as well as define the solution: claiming the need for choice, competition, and technology in the schools; defining students as human capital and the teaching/learning compact as a "protected monopoly" offering "goods and services"; describing the relationship between teachers and the communities they serve as that of "buyers and sellers." Gerstner and company talk about measuring school productivity "with unequivocal yardsticks" (p. 69). They speak of the need for national tests and "absolute standards," insisting that schools must compare themselves to each other the way "Xerox, for example, compares itself to L. L. Bean for inventory control" (p. 70). Now that's a fine notion: teaching as inventory control.

I know, I know, we must work for the greatest good. But maybe it's time that we question whose good is being served when 98% of the schools in a state fail the test. Whose good is being served when educrats buy these tests and base promotion policies on the results because if they don't, they won't get their federal Goals 2000 lucre? Whose good is being served when, instead of denouncing and dismantling high-stakes testing, quisling academics publish books on how to train children to feel better about taking the tests? Whose good is being served when hapless teachers are manipulated into teaching from an impossible canon decreed by the politico/corporate cartel? Members of Congress and executives at IBM can sleep easy, knowing that every seventh-grader in the land will soon be trained to identify William Tindale. (For a reason known only to them and the Almighty, the California Standardistos who wrote this curriculum imperative insist on this third-alternative spelling.)

This is what big business did. Now you have to ask yourself why they did it. Why is it in their interest to cripple our public schools, to have the public lose confidence in those schools? Why do they want kindergartners seeing themselves as failures? Why do they want 522 African-American kids in Birmingham, Alabama pushed out of high school onto the streets? Two agendas intersect: Schools have long been the institution for training the workforce, and now more than ever, it is in the corporate interest to have a scared, obedient workforce. The greatest number of jobs over the next 15 years will be in the service industry, where corporations refuse to pay a living wage. High school pushouts, blaming themselves for not succeeding in the schools for the global economy, won't be in any position to unionize, to demand decent wages. It is also in the corporate interest to claim that everybody needs a college degree, with a specialty in science and technology-at the same time jobs are being outsourced. With an increasing number of technologically astute college grads competing for fewer and fewer jobs, corporations can apply any salary and benefit squeeze they want. You think I'm off my rocker? Read Clint Boutwell's chilling and convincing Shell Game: Corporate Americas Agenda . Published by Phi Delta Kappa, it's now out of print but you can get a used copy on amazon.com for under $2.00. Its message is exceedingly current.

There isn't room to name all the names here. For starters, take a look at Edward Rust: CEO State Farm Insurance; Chair, Education Task Force, Business Roundtable; Co-Chair Business Coalition for Excellence in Education; Chair, National Alliance of Business; Co Chair, Subcommittee on Education Policy, Committee for Economic Development; Member of board, Achieve; member of board, McGraw-Hill; member, President-Elect Bush (the younger)Transition Advisory Team Committee on Education; board of trustees American Enterprise Institute.

Whew! Just name this makes me dizzy. Dizzy and sick at heart. The real question here is not what corporate big-wigs are doing. The real question is why more teachers and parents aren't refusing to cooperate. After all, our children get only one chance at childhood!