Dave Murray and I are having a great discussion about the future of public education in Michigan.
He has been interviewing conservatives about my blogs that describe the death of public education and local control in Muskegon Heights and Highland Park, Michigan, where emergency managers have decided in their wisdom and total control to close down the public schools and give the community’s children to for-profit charter operators.
He quotes someone from the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy who says he has no problem with for-profit charters taking control of the children and asks how that is different from buying textbooks or food from for-profit companies. Well, why not just sell the children? Some years back, Jonathan Swift had a modest proposal for the starving people of Ireland. He suggested that they fatten their children and sell them as meat for the rich. (Satire, in case you didn’t know.) In Michigan, conservatives evidently think it is just fine to hand them off to a profit making corporation that runs low-quality schools and makes money doing it.
I haven’t decided whether the embrace of for-profit schooling is reactionary or radical. I don’t think it is conservative. Conservatives typically respect traditions and institutions and small-scale human values. They are not, one supposed, amenable to wiping out traditions and institutions to satisfy the demands of the marketplace, otherwise we too would be selling our children.
One thing I know for sure: Michigan has an obligation to educate its children, even if the people representing their parents failed to balance the books. If the government of the great state of Michigan has determined that public education doesn’t work and that democracy doesn’t work, then the problems of Michigan run far deeper than the fate of these two small districts.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The thing that people really need to think hard about here is what a private corporation is. For one thing, a private corporation is a commodity that can be traded and bought by a bigger private corporation, and so on, and so on, until no one knows who or what really owns it.
Just like my credit union, which I otherwise like well enough, one time sold my car loan to Comerica on account of me being such a preferred risk, and suddenly I’m sending my payment coupons (think “vouchers”) to a mega-corporation that I had not “chosen” to do business with.
And pretty soon we won’t what know foreign corporations are in charge of our local schools, just like it happened with mortgages in the housing industry.
If you believe that just can’t happen here, please let me know, because I can give you a really good deal on a Gateway* computer that I unknowingly bought from a Chinese import-export outfit that sold my credit card number to some offshore pirates.
* Michigan readers will know that our current “Governerd” was CEO of Gateway during the time it was sold to China.
This is an excellent point! I was thinking of that w/regard to a group of conservatives here who were placing ugly newspaper ads under one name. People got wise to them, so they put more ads out, but under a different name.
I’m wondering when Pearson is going to do this? Let’s be on the lookout!
We need to distinguish between the original model of charter schools, where the demand for experimental variation came from the community of educators, parents, and students, and the current “weaponized” model of charter schools, where the demand is being driven by big-money media-blitzing privateers with an ideological agenda who just keep pushing their “relentless program” in spite of what the voters have said time and again.
If I am a business owner (e.g., one of these private charters) and I have no competition then my top priority is not going to be providing quality in my monopoly; rather, my priority is to increase profits. I increase profits by lowering the quality of teacher I hire (i.e., offering a lower salary) and decreasing the supplies and materials in the classroom along with a host of other cuts. And, if I decide that special education and other aspects of schooling are too expensive for my business some time in February then what is to stop me from throwing in the towel and leaving the communities with no school? It would take much time to get a traditional public school up and running again.
What we have here is a relentless program of “Starve and Supplant”.
The Governor and his Privateers are starving the Public Sector in Michigan out of existence for a reason, so that private corporations can complete their hostile takeover of all public services. They stopped being content with tax abatements, bailouts, incentives, kickbacks, and worker concessions a long time ago — they want nothing less than the automatic funneling of tax dollars directly into their private corporate bankrolls without the annoying interference of all us pesky commoners.
(NB. This has the potential to be a very good public discussion, but MLive seems to have very finicky comment software or maybe moderators, so I’ll continue to simulcast my comments on this blog.)
Parents have always been free to direct their personal funds to the private schools of their choice, for what they see as the additional private benefit of their own children.
But people pay taxes to support the public school system whether they are parents or not. If only parents are given a choice in the type of school system that tax dollars support, then only parents of school-age children should pay school taxes, and based on the number of children in school.
Private individuals are not entitled by any consideration of the common good to divert public funds for the sake of private corporate profit and personal religious preferences.
When people start seeing education as a private commodity that parents buy for their own children — just another personal choice, like whether to buy designer duds or that hot new toy — then we are going to see a taxpayer revolt like we have never seen before, and public-funded education will cease to exist.
Reply to Dave Murray (I would give a link but it appears to have disappeared).
If you think we have any scarcity of Billionaire “Venture Philanthropists” — Broad’s words not mine — and big money corporate media from NBC to Murdoch, Inc. hawking the “Waiting 4 Ubermensch” cure-all medicine show, then you are free to add some more.
All I did is give a couple of links to one cottage blogger and a pilot GAO study that gave us some hints about the less magical cloud around the golden lining.
OIC. Dave’s remark was on the other article.
It’s worth noting here that, according to research performed by Gary Miron (of Western Michigan U.) and colleagues for NEPC, Michigan has both the largest number of for-profit EMOs operating in the state (ahead of Arizona) and the largest number of charter schools operated by for-profit EMOs (ahead of Florida, a much larger state). Depending on precisely how you define it, between 70% and 80% of Michigan charter schools are operated primarily or entirely by for-profit entities. As statistics show, we are somewhat unique in this respect.
There is an ideological link between shifting away from control by elected bodies toward management by for-profits: as the lobbyist for Michigan charter schools said at a legislative hearing, education in Michigan is a $14 billion market.
For-profits are presumed to be more efficient, and this approach fits neatly with the idea that the market should be the ultimate arbiter. Proponents attempt to blur the issue by trying to compare purchases from for-profit textbook publishers with outsourcing all instruction to for-profit companies. One of the bills recently enacted to uncap charters in Michigan (SB 618, for those interested) originally had a provision to allow all public schools to contract out instructional services. That provision was only removed on the Senate floor to gain more votes.
My organization, Michigan Parents for Schools, worked with legislators to offer amendments that would require new charters to be self-managed or have a non-profit EMO. (New York did this as part of the increase to the charter cap there.) All these efforts were defeated, largely along party lines. Proposed amendments to the state constitution which would accomplish the same thing have been proposed in each chamber, but will never see the light of day without majority leadership support.
We feel that the issue of school governance (community-governed versus charters accountable only to their authorizers) cannot be clearly debated until the profit issue is off the table. As long as for-profit companies, whose internal workings are not subject to public oversight, can profit from public school financing and also make political contributions to solidify that situation (as they do), this debate will never be about the education of children. It’s about shifting a public responsibility, and the money that goes with it, to the private sector for no other reason than to enhance opportunities for private business.
The NEPC study can be found here: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/EMO-profiles-10-11
Many thanks, that’s the clearest analysis of the situation that I’ve read so far.
I’ve been having trouble posting comments on Dave Murray’s article at MLive — don’t know if it’s technical or another type of filtering — but you might try posting your comment there.
This is a really important report! I hope Diane will devote a post to it.
“Diane Ravitch’s Blog” is anchoring a vital real-time discussion in Michigan, which might not have been possible without it. Is it possible to put a feature on the sidebar which would highlight a few ongoing “live wire” threads like this, so the whole set of posts would come up together?
The furious pace of the posts makes following up on hot threads a little daunting. How about grouping just a few them at a time, including an informative, specific information piece and follow-ups? Local writers and bloggers can use a reference point and information in one nationally recognized place, to launch their local media discussions (at last).
Chicago, DFER, and the emerging civil rights suits are some that occur to me now.
(If anybody following this thread hasn’t opened the link to the awe-inspiring MLive discussion, you should do so. They come up on Google News!)