{"id":422,"date":"2012-07-05T14:50:58","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T14:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/managingtoteach.org\/?p=422"},"modified":"2012-07-05T14:50:58","modified_gmt":"2012-07-05T14:50:58","slug":"what-contribution-does-the-fight-club-make-to-progress-in-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/?p=422","title":{"rendered":"What Contribution does \u201cThe Fight Club\u201d Make to Progress in Education?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On May 17, 2012, political science professor Patrick McGuinn posted a paper titled: <em>F<a href=\"http:\/\/educationnext.org\/fight-club\/\">ight Club Are advocacy organizations changing the politics of education?<\/a><\/em> where he discussed a network of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) that regularly meet to plan strategy for advancing their agendas that includes charter schools, alternative teacher preparation, and an emphasis on test scores. \u00a0It is a fascinating account of a network of organizations that many people know little or nothing about and yet have been busy over the last several years with ambitious and in some ways aggressive advocacy.\u00a0 <!--more-->Fight Club was also the title of a movie that featured a group of young rebels who get together in secret to fight in protest to advertizing and an age of cynical commercialism.\u00a0 The movie Fight Club features eight rules, the first two are that one should ever talk about the fight club.\u00a0 McGuinn\u2019s short feature helps peel back the curtain on this world \u2013 a community heavily funded by foundations with business connections \u2013 and some of the themes that run through this broad community as well as some of their differences.\u00a0 This paper should be required reading for an education policy student. \u00a0It has received only modest, but high-profile attention.\u00a0 Diane Ravitch blogged a critical response of these organizations and their funders.\u00a0 I believe McGuinn\u2019s <em>Fight Club<\/em> raises important questions about how the field approaches reform efforts and the organizations attempting to achieve them as well as how we understand these organizations.\u00a0 I have three types of questions about the Fight Club article.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First, the Fight Club paper and the type of information McGuinn provides in his account is an important contribution and one that should be an example for more studies.<\/li>\n<li>Second, I have concerns about the \u201cFight Club\u201d name as well as other types of names McGuinn uses, including \u201ccorporate reformers,\u201d \u201cblobs,\u201d and \u201cthe big three.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 As any school child knows, sticks and stones can break bones, but names never hurt. \u00a0I argue that the names <em>do matter<\/em> in these discussions and there are questions about how we use such labels.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, I am interested in how the \u201cFight Club\u201d organizations \u2013 the ERAOs \u2013 intersect with educational research and contribute to the research knowledge base.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1>The Fight Club Paper<\/h1>\n<p>There are reasons that this paper was written by a political scientist and not an educational researcher.\u00a0 Educational researchers almost exclusively work inside of traditional educational organizations of districts and schools. While some educational researchers have made reference to a complex world of \u201cexternal organizations\u201d that help influence education, it is rare that those accounts are specific or detailed as McGuinn\u2019s paper is. \u00a0McGuinn discusses different organizations and who their funders are.\u00a0 He discusses that coordinate in some respects, but often differ in their focus.\u00a0 My sense was that this was a balanced account; that McGuinn wrote in a way that allowing the reader to ask important questions as a result of his paper.<\/p>\n<p>This paper provides some cultural context and the name Fight Club both evokes the sense of a club and also that the members of this club do not always agree, except in the need for reform. \u00a0Without quoting anyone specifically, it talks about how those working in the ERAO community see themselves working against the traditional education stakeholder community of unions and trade associations that some refer to as \u201cThe Blob.\u201d\u00a0 Later in the paper, McGuinn brings out this term again in referring to a \u201cReform Blob.\u201d\u00a0 He discusses how the largely white, young, and well schooled staff at ERAOs are met with suspicion by others in education who are often older, more experienced in schools, and frequently of color. He talks about the common thread of funders:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Many reform groups are funded by the same foundations, particularly the \u201cbig three\u201d\u2014Walton, Gates, and Broad. The support of conservative foundations and the embrace of market-based school reforms have led some observers\u2014and many critics in the education establishment\u2014to label the ERAOs \u201ccorporate school reformers.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is a valuable a paper and I found myself wanting more information and more detail about this aspect of the educational world that is rarely discussed in the educational research literature. \u00a0\u00a0I believe that at a minimum they are shaping the conversation and applying pressures that cause other organizations to need to respond.\u00a0 Perhaps they are doing much more.\u00a0 Without more studies and papers like McGuinn\u2019s <em>Fight Club <\/em>it will be hard to tell.\u00a0 It is an important piece of the educational landscape that should be required reading of education policy scholars.<\/p>\n<h1>The Fight Club Name<\/h1>\n<p>While I think McGuinn\u2019s piece is an important contribution to the field, I am conflicted about the use of the name Fight Club.\u00a0 On the one hand, it conveys much about the nature of this group if it is accurate.\u00a0 But it is not clear that it is.\u00a0 I am also uneasy about other terms used by McGuinn and others, including The Blob, The Big Three, Corporate Reformers, and Ravitch\u2019s famous Billionaire\u2019s Boys Club.\u00a0 The issue for me is not only that these names can be pejorative.\u00a0 It is really that they are vague and are often not attributed to specific individuals.\u00a0 While McGuinn\u2019s paper gives us a hint as to who might have coined the term Fight Club, there is no quote from any individual using this term.\u00a0 Would the ERAO community consider themselves this way?\u00a0 The same is true for the other terms.\u00a0 Are they widely used in this community or only by some members?\u00a0 As readers we are given a general impression \u2013 often not a good one \u2013 without much detail that would help us to draw our own conclusions.\u00a0 It should be expected that in a area as important as education that there will be different views and McGuinn gives us some glimpses of the variation among the EAROs in terms of priorities.\u00a0 \u00a0However, is it appropriate for scholars and researchers to use these types of terms in describing others?\u00a0 What are the impacts of these choices in language to describe another\u2019s work?<\/p>\n<p>Educational research suffers from many problems.\u00a0 It is often disconnected from other research.\u00a0 It is usually divided itself into small communities that rarely overlap and many important topics fall outside of established communities and are easily bypassed in the constant churn of familiar studies for the audiences that grant tenure and promotion.\u00a0 These are reasons why McGuinn\u2019s focus on ERAOs is so important.\u00a0 Educational research also suffers, in my view, from a problem with <em>overgeneralization<\/em>.\u00a0 Small samples of teachers can be represented as \u201cTeachers\u201d in a study neglecting to show how those observed teachers relate to the 3-4 million that work in many different types of classrooms.\u00a0 Similarly, concepts such as schools and districts are frequently used in research with little attention to the tremendous variation that exists across the areas studied.\u00a0 I believe this over generalization is one of the reasons much of educational research is has been difficult to apply productively in practice.<\/p>\n<p>McGuinn\u2019s Fight Club paper then seems to fall into this same trap.\u00a0 While at the same time he does discuss the variation that exists in the ERAO organizations and its bipartisan constitution, he uses broad terms like Corporate Reformers and in ways that contrast with democrats.\u00a0 His reference to the \u201cbig three\u201d foundations is reminiscent of the three leaders of World War II \u2013 Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin \u2013 leaves the reader with an impression that these foundations have made a pact to support ERAOs.\u00a0\u00a0 Do we know that this is this case or is this speculation?\u00a0 If we look at the funding that different ERAOs receive would we find some measure of predominant support from these foundations over others?\u00a0 As with many types of educational research, this excellent paper stops short of the kinds of specifics that could allow the reader to make their own judgments about what level of influence these foundations have and how coordinated their work is.\u00a0 It is not that McGuinn\u2019s portrait isn\u2019t valuable.\u00a0 I believe it is.\u00a0 It is that these types of general terms without attribution can get in the way of deeper understandings about important aspects of the complex educational ecosystem by using a character concept like the fight club.<\/p>\n<h1>The Value of Fight Club Organizations<\/h1>\n<p>One of the biggest questions those inside the ERAO community, their funders, and those who oppose them are interested in is what difference they are making.\u00a0 Are the millions \u2013 hundreds of millions \u2013 that are being donated to these organizations doing more than providing employment for young and well educated staffers?\u00a0 Are they leveraging public opinion and changing laws that lead to changes in education and are these changes the ones anticipated?\u00a0 Do these changes lead to the desired results in terms of policies and student success?\u00a0\u00a0 For many of these questions where one stands will likely depend on where they sit with traditionalists and reformers (oops broad categories) seeing the same policies differently.\u00a0 However, for both cases we may often not know enough to be able to form a clear judgment as there has been little study of the work that ERAs do.<\/p>\n<p>The ERAO organizations, even as they gain influence, may not be as well informed by research as they could be.\u00a0 There is a divide between those who work in and fund the ERAO community and educational researchers.\u00a0 Some educational researchers ignore or resist these organizations rather than looking for ways to develop partnerships and provide these organizations with relevant research.\u00a0 In an age where education schools and education researchers are under greater pressure to prove their worth;, there is much to be gained by engaging this community that bring important perspectives and funding to the table.\u00a0 That engagement will no doubt be more difficult whenever broad and pejorative terms are used and also when these organizations are written about without consultation.\u00a0 I ran into this with my own recent book that discusses the roles of some of these foundations and advocacy organizations and I took care to include these organizations in the study and get confirmation from them that what I was writing was accurate.\u00a0 I believe the book will be much better for it.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of the day, I am a believer in acknowledging and seeking to understand those who we might not always agree with.\u00a0 As McGuinn does show us, this community of ERAOs is complex and has many different interests just as educational researchers do.\u00a0 We should not hesitate to work across these communities and use specifics rather than broad generalizations.\u00a0 While they are easier for the reader and author, they are often wrong and can be unfair.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On May 17, 2012, political science professor Patrick McGuinn posted a paper titled: Fight Club Are advocacy organizations changing the politics of education? where he discussed a network of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) that regularly meet to plan strategy<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/?p=422\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edinfoconnections.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}