Over the course of a year, the media-driven education reform debate has evolved into an often repeated narrative expressed by the new reformers--Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and a growing chorus of celebrities--that has risen to the level of truth with few highlighting that the story just doesn't hold up against evidence.

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Over the course of a year, the media-driven education reform debate has evolved into an often repeated narrative expressed by the new reformers--Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and a growing chorus of celebrities--that has risen to the level of truth with few highlighting that the story just doesn't hold up against evidence.

At the center of the new reformers' message are a false dichotomy and a powerful refrain--"the status quo." The false dichotomy fulfills the public's need for a simple good v. evil plot; we are always game for an "us v. them" approach to anything.

Ironically, the reformer's dichotomy is both misleading and inherently contradictory, if we look carefully at their characterization of the status quo and their insistence that the new reformers are in a battle with defenders of the status quo.

The nature of the false dichotomy is reflected in President Obama's and Secretary Duncan's responses to the civil rights framework presented by the National Opportunity to Learn (OTL) Campaign, a coalition of organizations committed to civil rights:

"The comments that follow offer critiques of federal efforts that would: distribute resources by competition in the midst of a severe recession; advance experimental proposals dwarfed by the scope of the challenges in low-income communities; and promote ineffective approaches for turning around low-performing schools and education systems."

To these critics, Obama sent this message on 29 July 2010: "... But I know there's also been some controversy about the initiative [Race to the Top]. Part of it, I believe, reflects a general resistance to change ; a comfort with the status quo [emphasis added]. But there have also been criticisms, including from some folks in the civil rights community, about particular elements of Race to the Top."

Just two days before, Secretary Duncan offered a similar refrain: "We have to challenge the status quo [emphasis added]--because the status quo in public education is not nearly good enough--not with a quarter of all students and, almost half, 50% of African-American and Latino young men and women dropping out of high school."

The status quo, then, that the new reformers are presenting with little resistance includes some basic characteristics that are repeated by Duncan, Gates, and Rhee while also being reinforced by the media and celebrities claiming education as their cause. The new reformer narrative goes like this:

Based on international test score comparisons, public schools are failing children and U.S. economic competitiveness because those schools are bogged down with "bad" teachers being protected by the teachers unions and because the U.S. has failed to identify high standards and rigorous tests in order to hold those schools and teachers accountable for their failures.

If this status quo were true--and it is not--we should be truly disturbed by the other claim of the new reformers, expressed directly in a blog posting at The Huffington Post, titled "New Book Takes Aim at Ed Reformers and Status Quo Defenders," about Rick Hess's book, praised as a criticism of the new reformer movement:

"What I find most refreshing about The Same Thing Over and Over --in part because I didn't expect it--is that Hess is almost as skeptical of today's self-labeled 'reformers' as he is of status quo defenders."

Status quo defenders? Who would defend that status quo and for what purpose?

Who in this mythical education establishment wants children to fail? What sort of person would defend the abysmal status quo identified by the new reformers?

Just as the new reformers are misleading the public about education reform, they are also misrepresenting their critics, demonizing them, in fact, by associating any rebuttals as defending the status quo--or as the president himself stated, being comfortable with failing children.

So let's step back for a second and reconsider the new reformers' narrative, first by clarifying just what the status quo of U.S. public schools constitutes.

The status quo of the struggling public education system is not a crisis. The central problems we are facing in schools are historical patterns--student achievement being strongly correlated with out-of-school factors (such as poverty); disproportionate drop-out rates among marginalized populations of students; inequity of teacher assignments to the disadvantage of students living in poverty, students of color, and ELL students. The most recent fact of the status quo of schooling is the crippling bureaucracy faced by schools during the past 30 years of accountability (ironically, the exact components of which are at the center of the claims of reform coming from the new reformers).

And herein lies the discordant nature of the false dichotomy and distortion masked by the "status quo" refrain.

The status quo of the U.S. includes a tremendous equity gap that benefits the ones at the top--including all of the faces on the new reform movement--and that is maintained when schools remain overburdened by poverty and bureaucracy. The new reformers are perpetuating inequity through their misrepresentation of failing schools, "bad" teachers, and corrupt teachers unions; in effect, then, the new reformers are the true defenders of this status quo: U.S. public schools are a mirror held up to political and corporate failures that have created a stratified society, with the gaps widening; the achievement gap in our schools is evidence of an equity gap in our society, not a direct commentary on teacher or school quality.

This irony is chilling as well because the sincere critics of social failures in the U.S. and bureaucratic mismanagement of public schools are being demonized and marginalized. But the new reformers are allowed to create crisis and recommend reform that appears more likely to benefit the reformers than impact positively the schools:

"Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K -12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation--working in sync, command the field . Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don't rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher."

While the media continues to perpetuate the new reformers' false dichotomies and mischaracterization of defenders of the status quo as well as never questioning the reformers' motives, the new reformers' solutions for their manufactured status quo fail to stand up to evidence:

"'Race to the Top' and Waiting for Superman made 2010 a banner year for the market-based education reforms that dominate our national discourse. By contrast, a look at the 'year in research' presents a rather different picture for the three pillars of this paradigm: merit pay, charter schools, and using value-added estimates in high-stakes decisions. . . .Overall, while 2010 will certainly be remembered as a watershed year for market-based reforms, this wave of urgency and policy changes unfolded concurrently with a steady flow of solid research suggesting that extreme caution, not haste, is in order."

2010 has offered us an ironic lesson, but one that isn't very appealing. The public seems willing to accept anything repeated by the elites--millionaires, politicians, and celebrities--but just as quick to disregard evidence from sincere reformers.

Authors Bio:
An Associate Professor of Education at Furman University since 2002, Dr. P. L. Thomas taught high school English for 18 years at Woodruff High along with teaching as an adjunct at a number of Upstate colleges. He holds an undergraduate degree in Secondary Education (1983) along with an M. Ed. in Secondary Education (1985) and Ed. D. in Curriculum and Instruction (1998), all from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Thomas has focused throughout his career on writing and the teaching of writing. He has published fiction, poetry, and numerous scholarly works since the early 1980s. Currently, he works closely with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as a column editor for English Journal, Challenging Text, and the SC Council of Teachers of English (SCCTE) as co-editor of South Carolina English Teacher. His major publications include a critique of American education, Numbers Games (2004, Peter Lang); a text on the teaching of writing, Teaching Writing Primer (2005, Peter Lang); and books in a series edited by Thomas, Confronting the Text, Confronting the World--his most recent volume being Reading, Learning, Teaching Ralph Ellison (2008, Peter Lang). He has also co-authored a work with Joe Kincheloe (McGill University), Reading, Writing, and Thinking: The Postformal Basics (2006, Sense Publishers), and Renita Schmidt, 21st Century Literacy: If We Are Scripted Are We Literate? (Springer, 2009). His next books include Parental Choice? (2010, Information Age Publishing) and the first volume in a new series he edits, Challenging Genres: Comics and Graphic Novels (Sense Publishers). His scholarship and teaching deal primarily with critical literacy and social justice. See his work at: http://wrestlingwithwriting.blogspot.com/