CorpoRat Reform ("Deform") Schematic

(Original chart by Morna McDermott, Power Point reproduction by Karen Bracken with permission by M McDermott.)

This'n's Right in yer ol' perfesser's wheelhouse:
The "reform/deform" strategies are nothing but hyped-up, fancified, spuriously "researched" versions of the repressive, subordinating pedagogies which Paolo Freire led the way to decry as destructive of the emancipatory possibilities of education more than 40 years ago...See, e.g., "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."
The "standards" curricula basically hypostatize ED Hirsch's 'laundry lists' of "what Americans need to know," while the pedagogical methodology echoes the failed, "deficit" model by which students are thought to be 'empty' vessels in need of filling from the teachers' stores of 'approved' knowledge.
There is nothing "reform" about ANY of it, unless it is to reform the method by which Private Interests extract public money for their 'charter" schemes--a large number of which are effectively real estate scams along with being educationally suspect--and abandon the neediest students. (I shall only note in passing that Prof. Ravitch was once (circa 1980-1990) one of the foremost advocates of what she is now criticizing.)