Corporate reform privatizers like Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, Michael Bloomberg, and Mitt Romney like to boast of the glories of a marketplace for schools. They want parents to be consumers, armed with test scores and school report cards and grades. In that great come-and-get-it-day, all schools will be excellent when they compete. That’s why all those programs on all those channels on your TV dial are excellent, and why every product in the marketplace is excellent. Ah, the glories of deregulation!
This teacher describes the new marketplace:
I just spent this past weekend in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Visiting several Autumn festivals I noticed private and charter schools had set up tents in every festival/fair I attended. Right next to the honey and jewelry dealers these ‘privateers’ were peddling their wares. I even saw one at a tag sale!
The good news is that they all were sitting there with no one at their tent.
Wonder if they were unionized Mitt?
What does it say when you need to sit in a tent and peddle the virtue of your school?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wish this teacher would have taken a picture of the “tag sale” spectacle.
There is already an extensive marketplace for higher education. I am always amazed that what seems to work reasonably well for 13th grade is seen as an impossibly stupid thing to do for 12th graders.
We buy higher education to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether the institution is private or public. No one is promised a college education. We have to pay for it directly. We have provided for a free public education system at the undergraduate level through our taxes so that everyone has access to an education.
If billions of dollars in student loan debt for degrees that don’t guarantee jobs is “reasonably well”, I don’t want any part of it in K-12 schools. I’d prefer for my 7 year old to not have to start taking out loans to get into a good primary school. Maybe if Mitt gets elected he can get a t-ball scholarship?
I do not think that the fact that no one is promised a college education is important in the debate about a marketplace for education.
Many have proposed that we make a promise of providing a college education for all that desire it. It seems to me that you are arguing that such a promise would require we shut down programs to pay tuition at private institutions like Harvard or Reed College and we move to a geographically based admission system for public institutions of higher education.
I do not think it necessary or desirable to do either, though I certainly do think that every student who desires it should be able to go out to 13th grade.
@teachingeconomist – Wait a minute. “Work(s) reasonably well”?
Aren’t college completion rates the worst ever and the number of freshman entrees the highest ever?
If this was K-12 schooling, they’d shut us down.
Not the worst ever. Not declining. Not growing.
Another reformer myth. If college were more affordable, more would go.
Diane
Indeed the six year graduation rate low, especially at my institution, but we do have a 93% acceptance rate.
The colleges and universities in the US set the standard for the world. That is why the six teaching assistants for my introductory course come from six different countries and five continents (six if you count sub-continents as continents)
Good news for those of your worried about debt. The median level of debt for a graduate from the state flagship university I work for is 0.
According to NCHEMS (2012), college going freshmen are the largest ever, yet attainment is low, in fact I thought it was the lowest ever given the number that enter.
@teachingeconomist – we have a 100% rate of acceptance at my high school and over 80% completion.
And I agree that the colleges and universities in the U.S. set the bar. Just wait until Obama and Duncan sink their grimy hands into them.
Diane I think you are correct. This data goes back to at least 1997 and there is only a 3% different in completion rates (6 year).
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/?year=1997&level=nation&mode=graph&state=0&submeasure=27
Sorry Diane, I definitely think you are right now – I was getting confused with college completion versus remediation.
Although more high school graduates are enrolling and attending college than ever before (63% in 2009 compared to 54% in 1992) (NCHEMS, 2012), more incoming freshman require remediation (52% in two year colleges; 20% in four year colleges) (CCA, “Remediation – The Bridge to Nowhere”, 2012).
College completion is stagnant.
But think of this. Our college completion rate is much higher than Germany, which has most powerful stable economy in Europe.
Diane
I think the college completion rate in Germany is in part a function of the low costs of attending college there. Students attend because it sounds fun and they give up very little to go.
Because the whole point of public education is neighborhood schools are a part of a community. The “customer service” garbage peddled by privatizers DESTROYS communities and neighborhoods.
That is the difference.
@Me,
You certainly do not admit 100% of potential students. Most of the students in your state would be rejected because, if you are in a zoned school system, they do not live in the right place.
We are using logic here. Most kids in the USA attend their neighborhood, town or regional school and we accept all of these children. They can’t fly in daily from out of state. You are always such a wet blanket.
Linda,
Students need not fly to change schools. For some, a better school may actually be closer to their home, but because it is across a political boundary, that public school will not accept the student.
In these comments I am just pointing out that the public school system does not accept all students to all schools, it accepts a students to a single school that may or may not be the school that is best for that student. I am fairly sure that many more students would wish to go to New Trier High School than are allowed to go there.
“We have provided for a free public education system at the undergraduate level through our taxes so that everyone has access to an education.”
I was not making a comment about higher education at all but about our choice to place so high a value on an undergraduate education that we fund a system open to everyone through our taxes. I understood that you were implying that since there is an extensive marketplace for higher education the same system ought to work well at the undergraduate level. Rather than go through a litany again of the value of a free public education to society, I will leave it to you to revisit the myriad of postings that enumerate the numerous reasons for maintaining our public education system.
I think we certainly agree about the value of primary, secondary, and postsecondary education to both the individual being educated and society as a whole. The title of this post was “A Marketplace for Schools?”, and in my initial response was to point out there there was a large marketplace for schools in the United States.
I think you believe that universal education is incompatible with the kind of market we have in postsecondary education. I don’t understand why that would be the case.
What works “reasonably well” for 13th graders (an arguable point, but I’ll go with it) includes the premise that many reasonably-gifted students who don’t have money, just won’t attend college. That’s reasonable for colleges; it’s not reasonable for elementary schools.
Primary/secondary education is supposed to be universal, or at least, universal-access, in the US. College competition is based on the premise that it’s *not* for everyone–for many reasons. Setting up competitions won’t fix the schools that are failing to teach because they lack resources. Giving prizes to the ones that are in high-income districts that can afford new books every year won’t help low-income families get their kids educated.
There is nothing about America’s primary/secondary education problems that can be fixed by rewarding the schools that do well; that assumes that the schools that are doing poorly, “just aren’t trying,” rather than that they have limited resources and children living in crushing poverty, which has a big impact on test scores.
What works “reasonably well” for 13th graders (an arguable point, but I’ll go with it) includes the premise that many reasonably-gifted students who don’t have money, just won’t attend college. That’s reasonable for colleges; it’s not reasonable for elementary schools.
Primary/secondary education is supposed to be universal, or at least, universal-access, in the US. College competition is based on the premise that it’s *not* for everyone–for many reasons. Setting up competitions won’t fix the schools that are failing to teach because they lack resources. Giving prizes to the ones that are in high-income districts that can afford new books every year won’t help low-income families get their kids educated.
There is nothing about America’s primary/secondary education problems that can be fixed by rewarding the schools that test well and punishing the ones that don’t; that assumes that the schools that are doing poorly, “just aren’t trying,” rather than that they have limited resources and children living in crushing poverty.
When Texans get riled, it gets interesting 🙂 I will pass on the link when I get it
“American GI Forum of Texas
In today’s Senate Hearing on Virtual Schools, there was a moment worth searching for in the public comments sections. A representative for the American GI Forum of Texas addressed the committee that included Senator Dan Patrick. I can not get the link to come back and find the spot where his comments start but I can tell you what was said. Opening remarks centered around the need to fund schools and that he did not believe in the cuts and idea that virtual schools were an improvement in the education process. The topic turned to our Governor, Lt. Governor and new Senate Public Ed Chair.
“Mr Dewhurst made the statement that he and Governor Perry will not be around forever, that is a bit of good news and they can take Senator Dan Patrick with them. Mr. Patrick, the ideas you are promoting may be good for your political future but they are not good for the students of the great state of Texas!”
I didn’t know what Romney was Pres.! I wasn’t aware that he appointed Duncan asked Secretary of Education. All this is happening under Obama.
Yep, I just gotta wonder if Mitt will retain the services of Arnie Duncan? Obama should be ashamed of himself for this appointment.
The business marketplace is full of failure, corruption (S&L, mortgage/banking scandals), and gov’t entitlements for corporations as incentives (without accountability). The business marketplace is full of mindless “yes men”, afraid to ask questions for fear of losing one’s job (this is beginning in K-12). Poor communities and companies in them are avoided. Failing CEO’s are rewarded with multi-million dollar “buy-outs” and signing benefits- yet this is OK?
Would it be ok if this were to occur in an Educational Marketplace? .While the business marketplace has set the bar with Google, Apple and Microsoft, it has also given us Enron, Countrywide Mortgage, AIG and the Dot.com fluff. Is this the model we want in K-12? Are we to treat students like BAIN Capital?
Isn’t learning an intellectual endeavor and an investment in the future? What do they say about Kharma? We just might get what we deserve.
And yet the market feeds you, clothes you, provides you with shelter. provides the energy to heat your home, the energy to write this comment, and the device you are writing on.
Markets work well in some situations, work poorly in others. Markets sometimes fail. Many of the posts here are bout how government fails. We need to think carefully and experiment a little to find out what works.
Yet vouchers have shown to fail over and over and over again. We don’t want vouchers. We didn’t get into this business to get rich. All students deserve a well funded, well staffed school. If people want different they can pay for it. My parents did it, and I am willing to do it. I also see very large value in preserving and investing in public schools, although my kids may not attend one.
I did not say anything about vouchers, I made a more general comment about the market in the same way that Mark Webster made.
Agreed. But teaching and learning have very little in common with “business”. The financial aspects, perhaps. Educators/Educational experts should steer education, just as economists, doctors, lawyers, and scientists tend to steer their specialties. Yet, the “reformers” (who have little education expertise) espouse business to be “the” model for education reform. One size does not fit all. There are amazing success stories in American education.
It would be so much easier and more effiecient to focus on, to improve and to “reform” the bottom than to force the whole (even the well performing and effienct) into the same mold.
Lastly, “educational reform” in 2012 has very little to do with improving teaching and learning. It’s more about power, control, and creating an industry from which to profit.
My point is that teaching and learning have often gone together with choice, at least at the schools where I have taught. The ability to choose is at the core of a market.
It seems to me that many posts here complain about the increasingly centralized nature of education in the US. One misguided official in the state government causes havoc in the system, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Perhaps a marketplace might allow students to opt out of the silly policies coming out of state departments of education.
They are creating the “silly policies” so they can close schools and so families will leave. Haven’t you been paying attention?
Then we will only have public schools for the poorest, the most disabled and the throwaways.
It is survival of the fittest and a creation of the new American caste system.
Schools aren’t businesses; they are a public good. Schools are part of neighborhoods, of communities, and public schools are vital to community cohesion.
Please read up on the history of public education and then perhaps you can intelligent discuss the purpose of public ed.
Schools are not really a public good, though they do provide large positive externalities. Education is excludable, so it can be provided in a market situation. Zoned school systems exclude people who are not in the geographic area determined by the political system.
What are you talking about? Where do you live? A political system did not determine where my children attended school. Maybe we have not been communicating on the same planet.
Linda
I live 300 feet from a school district line that determined where my children went to school. That is the essence of a zoned school system. Do your children go to a charter or other non-zoned school?
I wrote a post a few months back on a very similar topic entitled “Legalized Theft of School Tax Money” after I heard an advertisement on the radio for a local cyber-charter school: http://teacherslifeforme.blogspot.com/2012/06/legalized-theft-of-school-tax-money.html
In my opinion, it’s criminal to use money that should be going toward educating our future generations on advertising of any kind.
Lol! This is funny!
Feed your faith and your doubts will stave to death.
A market only works efficiently when, among other things, all/most buyers have access to all relevant information and when all/most buyers act rationally in making their purchases. Clearly, neither of these conditions applies to charters and/or voucher-supported privates competing for students with neighborhood public schools. Most parents — even well-educated, concerned, motivated parents — cannot reliably evaluate the quality of education that a given school will provide for their children. At best, parents will be able to evaluate how successful other students have been on standardized test scores at the school in the past — and, that obviously speaks more to the quality of the students than to the quality of the education provided by the school. Equally importantly, many parents — perhaps most inner-city/low-SES parents — will not act rationally (that is, based on an assessment of relative school quality) in making their school selections; they will either select the school that their firends or their children’s friends select or they will simply select the school that is located closest to their home. For these reasons, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is unlikely to insure the survival of the best schools.
Moreover, most Americans have long viewed our public schools as serving a valuable melting-pot/common-values purpose. Publicly-financed school choice will inevitably result in schools segregated by parental attitudes — the religious will send their children to religious-oriented schools, the concerned/motivated/functional parents will send their children to charters where all the children have parents who are concerned/motivated, and the unconcerned/unmotivated/dysfunctional parents will send their children to whatever the default school is — usually the neighborhood public school. No more melting-pot/common-values. And, public support for the default school — financial and professional oversight — will gradually whither away, resulting in a permanent separate and unequal school system for which society will pay a high price in future years in terms of too many unskilled workers, teen pregnancies, welfare costs, criminal activity, and prision expense.
Education is a public good, not a business, and it cannot be run on business models. We are learning this through failure after failure of neoliberal education “reform.”
In other words, a new form of dual system of schooling based on class, not race
Diane
Certainly an informed parent is very important,but your pessimism about the ability of parents to judge the quality of schools seems misplaced.
For example, if it is the case that well educated parents have no knowledge of what makes a good system of public education, we would expect that the school districts where parents have high levels of education like Montgomery County in Maryland would be no more likely to have good education systems than school districts where parents have low education levels.
The parents in Montgomery county would simply be blindly throwing darts at the educational policy menu with no more likelihood of hitting a good outcome than the parents in the least educated districts in the state.
I do think there is the issue of segregation by parental attitude. The question that society needs to answer is what sacrifice will we require of the children of competent parents in order to improve the chances of the children of incompetent parents.
What kind of society will we create by segregating children by economic class?
It is the society we have in public schools today. If you want to go to a school with few free and reduced price lunch students, no problem. Just move to the right part of town and pay attention to those district lines.
In many cases, yes, we do have schools segregated by class, and as we have seen in Chicago, the incursion of charter schools has exacerbated the problem. Do we want to encourage resegregation of schools? Market economics certainly will not address inequities unless we accept “survival of the fittest” as an appropriate model for our educational system. Yes, I know we are far from achieving a democratic ideal, but that is a poor reason for not working toward it. There are communities that manage to maintain socio-economically, integrated populations in their schools.
Keep in mind, however, that we are not going to solve all of society’s problems through the educational system. There are things that we can do that have been more than adequately discussed on this blog. Fighting the purposeful destruction of public schools seems like an admirable goal. I am not ready to passively accept a hostile takeover of public education.
The Church of Friedmanology will destroy this country.
So watch out for that …
It is pretty routine for public schools in California to attend these kind of fairs. They are countermarketing against the charter schools, of course, and to some extent against each other. I live in an area near a district boundary and schools in this area trade students back and forth readily. Sometimes it’s for a logistical reason, like that the parent works near the new school, or because the kids go to grandma’s after school. Sometimes it’s just because the other school is a better fit.
It’s not a bad thing to market yourself to your community. It is sadly time consuming in a long list of things that need doing, and of course marketing can be at odds with the reality. But it’s important for the community to know the good things that go on in your school, and since we don’t let them on campus every day, no one will know unless you tell them.
My parents’ generation was taught that a high school education was the minimum educational requirement needed to function as a full-fledged citizen in a democracy. That minimum education is a civil right on a par with the right to vote. More than that, it is a civic duty, compulsory in a way that voting is not.
By the time my generation came of age, there was already the dawning of consensus that the bar might have to be raised if the nation was going to meet the challenges of the future. Several states were gearing up to make the 13th year a fully funded option, as California had already done. Ronald Reagan set the clock back on that dawning, and the Great Dumbing Down began.
Civil rights and civic duties are basic to life in a civilized society. Markets have their function in a civil society, but civil societies cannot live inside a market. You cannot put a price on civic rights and civic duties. You cannot put them on the auction block and trade them like market commodities. There’s a name for a society that tries to do that. And it’s not a pretty name.
We need to stop going in that direction …
I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that children should not get educated, perhaps requiring them to go to school beyond the age of 16. I think the discussion here is about how to best do that.
I assume that everyone here would agree that choice of curriculum is a good thing inside a high school building, and also agree that it has not lead to the wholesale destruction of civilization. I fail to see why allowing students to choose between buildings will result in the wholesale destruction of civilization.
Are you refering to the choices made in schools as pseudo-choices, the choices between schools as pseudo-choices or both as pseudo-choices?
You continue to describe the situation in ways that obscure the reality. But most folks here have seen the man behind the screen and no amount of paste up work will patch that screen again.
The real choice we the people have is between corporate governance and democratic governance. The choice we make as a nation about what sort of educational system to maintain determines and enables the choice we make about what sort of country we want to go on being. Those are not choices that we delegate to children, parents, and the wiles of the marketplace, on a par with their consumer choices and religious preferences.
The choice about school systems is not a choice about “corporate governance” vs. “democratic governance”. It is about how to best educate children.
The idea that society should disregard the the individual’s desires and hopes (“Those are not choices that we delegate to children, parents, and…”) for their education is a little scary, and has the makings of a tyranny of the majority.
What other decisions are ordinary citizens not to be trusted to make?
You conveniently left out the last phrase of John’s sentence: “…on a par with their consumer choices and religious preferences.” I believe that gives a different flavor to his response (although it would have been more politic to limit the comparison to consumer choices. I assume many people who consider themselves to be religious might think that they put more thought into those convictions than what soup to have for dinner.). At no point does he advocate disregarding “…the individual’s desires and hopes…” for an education. We as a society provide access to a public educational system. Whether you choose to pursue a private approach is your business. I hardly think that contains “the makings of a tyranny of the majority.”
It is the choices about the educational system that J Awbrey does not want to delegate, at least that is how I read his post.
I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but I think his position would be that allowing private education is potentially just as damaging as the charter movement. The only difference is relatively few choose private education. If more families choose private education, the state would lose control over the curriculum, perhaps creating the sort of citizens that J Awbrey is concerned about.
I left the last part out precisely because the grouping of religious belief together with what type of pizza to buy seemed a little odd.
Whoa! I think Jon has to speak to his feelings about private schools although I haven’t noticed any diatribes against Catholic schools (that are slowly losing out to publicly supported charters). Comments on the blog about private schools tend to be in relation to which one what public official is sending his/her children to, and why public schools can’t have the same quality programs.
Private schools are largely free from community input and control, so I believe they suffer from the same anti-democratic issues that J Awbrey detects in charter schools.
Jon, you have said it well. If we want a real life road map just look at Rwanda, Ethiopia, and the Sudan. Oligarchs rule, few are educated, most are shamelessly exploited. It might not get that bad here, but as the saying goes, it won’t end well. Anyone remember the French Revolution?
Anyone remember the Civil War?
Re: Teaching Economist
The only tyranny that wins in the end is the Tyranny of Reality. All human tyrants fall before it — the only variables are how long the fall and how many innocents get taken down with it.
Learning to live with that ultimate tyrant is what the three C’s of civilization, community, and culture are all about — and transmitting what we learn about reality for the sake of their being any future generations is the main thing that education is about.
That makes the question of “how to best educate children” a lot like the question of “how to save the planet”, and there we have to decide “who best to teach us the truth about that”
Edit — “for the sake of there being any future generations”
I blame the cold I’m getting … let me redo that whole last paragraph …
That makes the question of “how to best to educate children” a lot like the question of “how best to save the planet”, and there we have to decide “who best to teach us the truth about that”.
Take your cold remedy of choice and go to bed. I don’t have a cold, but I still don’t want to deal with the tyranny of reality. I live on a lower plane most of the time. Fell better.
Feel better.
Re: Teaching Economist
I don’t know how you got from “not delegating” to “disregarding” — there is a big gap between those two things.
We delegate some of our powers to our various representatives in government and it is their duty to represent the concerns and interests of their constituents in various assemblies, courts, and executive offices. That is how representative government works. At any rate, supposed to work — there is of course a big problem with representatives who fail to understand their duties and who choose to act as representatives of alien concerns and interests.
But the citizens of a school district do not delegate their say in determining the character of their community schools to 51% of the transient student population. That is a prescription for disaster, and we know exactly what alien interests are feeding the people that prescription.
I am curious if you think I correctly characterized your position that extensive use of private schools would be equally dangerous to society as the charter school movement. Citizens in the local community would have equally little role in determining the nature of those schools.
For most people I know, there was never any problem with private schools, charter schools, and all sorts of alternative, experimental, and laboratory schools. My own education, though mostly public, included detours through a parochial school and a private military school.
But no one back then was asking taxpayers to savage the mainstay public schools in order to fund private schools and religious schools. Charter schools were even more tightly accredited, their faculties state certified or credentialed at the university level. And everyone understood that it was in the nature of experiments to be marginal, controlled, and carefully observed, not a toss of the dice to bet a whole generation on.
All of that has changed now. The very words “private” and “charter” no longer mean the same thing. Cynical exploiters have weaponized the original ideas for malfeasant agendas of their own.