Helen Ladd and her husband Edward Fiske are distinguished observers of American Education. Ladd is a Professor of Economics at Duke University. Fiske was education editor of the anew York Times.
Together they describe a fork in the road for our nation’s public school system.
Will we continue towards free-market privatization or will we revitalize public education?
This is what they see ahead as the risks in the privatization agenda:
“First, it severs the connection between public schools and the civic purposes for which they were established and that justify the use of taxpayer dollars to fund them. Implicit in this vision is the notion that the benefits of education accrue first and foremost to individuals and that public benefits are simply the sum of private ones.
“Second, it rejects the notion of an education system. Those who view education primarily as a collection of independent schools serving private interests have few incentives to assure that multiple stakeholders — students, teachers, administrators, policy makers, the business community and others — work together through democratic institutions in pursuit of common goals.
“Third, the private education vision leaves little room for principles of social justice and the commitment to equal educational opportunity for all children. By emphasizing privatization and competition rather than community and cooperation, it trivializes the whole notion of “public” education. Nor does it take responsibility for addressing the special challenges that disadvantaged children bring with them when they walk through the schoolhouse door.
“Public schools in the U.S. have always operated at the intersection of two sets of legitimate rights: those of individuals, including parents, to pursue their own best interests and those of society as a whole to perpetuate democratic values and to promote collective prosperity.
“By and large Americans have found ways to strike a balance between these two objectives. Public schools have served as engines of upward mobility for millions of individuals, including waves of immigrants, while driving economic growth by providing an educated workforce. By emphasizing private interests almost entirely at the expense of public ones, the private vision, with millions of dollars behind it, threatens to undermine this historical balance.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am so grateful for Helen Ladd’s voice and work.
Here is a letter I just sent to Senator Harkin, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health and Education:
Senator Harkin,
I urge you to hold a senate hearing to investigate the closings of hundreds of public schools this year around our country. They will be replaced with privately-for-profit managed Charter Schools with no community oversight or process for ever returning them to neighborhood public schools.
Permanent, irreversible damage is happening to our local schools without policy review, or public awareness of the way this movement is being engineered by outside interests.
Please help defend our families and children from this onslaught to break our public schools.
Billions of dollars are being spent by private individuals and corporations to influence this process, along with engineered legislation sponsored by ALEC and other foundations intent on replacing public schools with their own version of education. This is not an innocent pilot project to help our schools.
I urge you to begin the process of investigating this issue that concerns the very heart and soul of our nation.
Sincerely,
Steve Cifka
Retired Classroom Teacher
Parent, Grandparent, Vietnam Vet and father of a soldier leaving for Afghanistan next month.
Thank you for your diligence, Diane. Having you on the side of public schools is the best gift we could ask for…
I hope you have a blessed holiday.
“Pride in our School.” The idea behind this comes from the community spirit/commitment necessary to sustain public schools. Call it the social contract. In my small, rural northern California community, two threats to the success (dare I say existence) of traditional public education are: No Child Left Behind (“NCLB”) and charter schools/school choice. Fortunately, NCLB is not long for this world.
My message: send your kids to your local/closest public school, not a charter; second, if you think a charter school or out-of-district school is a good idea, at least try your local public school first. Investigate your local school by meeting with administration, staff, teachers, and elected school board trustees. Please carefully consider the benefits of sharing your little blessing(s) (your child/children), along your your own hopes, dreams, and invaluable energy with your community (school). It’s a win-win!
Sending kids to the local public school allows parents and their children to learn about their very own community in the deepest and most intimate ways possible. It’s similar to attending church, except 5 days a week instead of one day a week — for those who even attend church. Our children are our ambassadors. They pull us from our other duties and onto the schools grounds, playgrounds, and the playing fields of our towns. This is how my family has come to know so many others in our community. This daily contact in the midst of the push-me-pull-you, hustle-bustle world we live in is a blessing we share, and one that is being threatened by school choice, among other things.
My aim moving forward as a parent and elected school board trustee is to learn more about how I can encourage people in my community to support our local schools — to really get involved in their local schools, that is.
Max Broome
This thoughtful post requires a thoughtful reply.
Without knowing what the authors had in mind as civic purposes, it is hard to evaluate the public schools system’s effectiveness in fulfilling those purposes. I hope some might be able to articulate these purposes and offer an evaluation of the effectiveness of the public schools as the stand now.
The implicit in the vision is an understanding of the large externalities education creates and that, among other things, is the justification for sharing the expense of education. If the view was that the public benefit was simply the sum of private ones, there would be no economic argument for sharing expenses.
As currently constructed, we do not have an education system, but a large number of relatively autonomous school districts. What we have now is a collection of school districts that have little incentive to look at the concerns of those outside the district and take their interests into account. Within a district, parents with students who require special needs often have had to bypass the democratic process and use the courts to force the public schools to recognize their children’s right to a suitable education.
The public schools as currently constituted leave little room for equal educational opportunity because of their use of geographically determined entrance requirements and local funding of schools. This reinforces the racial and income segregation in housing in the United States, limiting the opportunities for students whose parents live in high poverty districts.
Allowing students to choose which school to attend will result in a better match between a student’s needs and desires and the capacity of the school to fulfill them. No one would dispute that allowing students in high school, for example, to choose between different courses of study is a good for the individual student and society in general.
teachingeconomist,
When you say, “Allowing students to choose which school to attend…” I’m assuming you mean allowing the parents to choose as most six year olds would not understand the steps involved. How will your system work? Will you eliminate “geographically determined entrance requirements and local funding”? Would parents choose any school or would they have to enter a lottery? Will the state or federal gov’t provide funding for students to ride the bus to their school of choice? Will enrollment be guaranteed no matter where you live? Who will help parents who don’t speak English? Who will help parents who don’t understand the differences between schools? Who will help students who are wards of the state? Who will help students whose parents work 2 or 3 jobs to put food on the table and don’t have time to choose a school? Who will help students whose parents are substance abusers and forget to pick a school? Will your system benefit everyone or just those who already have the resources and know how to understand the system? Just asking?
Would you like me to do this one at a time?
Will you eliminate ” geographic……”
Yes
Would parents choose any ……
Parents would need to enter a lottery if there are more applicants than available seats.
Will the state or federal gov…..
Not an issue in urban areas where this is of largest concern.
Will enrollment be…..
I refer you to my answer about entry
Who will help parents questions, basically the same people who help now.
Will you system benefit everyone….
Those that already have the resources and the know how to understand the system already benefit by buying their way into better schools.
Because you don’t address my major point, do you agree that it is far from clear that the existing public school system does not obviously represent a commitment to equal educational opportunity and never has really taken that idea seriously?
If you eliminate geographically determined … then you will need to provide transportation. No one is helping the parents right now when it comes to choice. I work in an all choice system so I am aware of the help given to people. Not sure what you mean by “Those that already have the resources and the know how to understand the system already benefit by buying their way into better schools.” Are you talking about private schools? Is it a failure of the public school system or a failure of society to commit to equal educational opportunity?
The transportation problem would be minimal in densely populated areas, but perhaps we should expect higher transport costs with choice, either born by the state or the parents.
If we need counselors to help parents make these decisions, we should hire them.
I am not talking about private schools, but parents ability to choose school districts and individual schools by choosing a place to live. Every real estate and rental agent can tell you about the school district for that property. A friend of mine moved a half mile so her son could change from one high school to the town to the other high school.
-So, eliminate geographical restriction and local funding thus eliminating the value of local community support and cooperation. Education is to serve private interests that have no vested interest in promoting democratic values or the prosperity of society as a whole. I fail to see how eliminating local funding is going to improve the economic viability of your system. Who is going to pay for it? Funding is already inequitable because of government inaction.
-If children can go anywhere to school, why is transportation not an issue. You need to research that claim.
-People will be aided in making choices in schooling using the current so successful system. In other words, Your system would not serve those who cannot navigate the system on their own; it is available only to those who have the resources. This is an improvement over the public schools that have, no matter how inadequately, have made an attempt to provide education for all our children.
No doubt you are correct that local control and local financing contributes to a feeling of community. There is also no doubt that it contributes to the gap in resources available to community schools, making it impossible to provide “equal educational opportunity for all children”.
In an effort to address this in my state, local districts are PROHIBITED from raising local taxes higher to pay for local schools because it will increase the funding gap too much. Local parents are not pleased. You can have schools based on local resources or you can have schools that provide equal opportunities for every student in the country, but you can not have both.
The current system does not serve the interests of those that can not navigate it on their own. Perhaps a system allowing choice will be no better.
Funding is not an either or. Local districts contribute to the extent they are able. State governments make sure that everyone is funded to a certain level. My state is supposed to have the major responsibility for funding. They have done a woefully poor job of it. Since most politicians plan to make “public service” their career, they are very vulnerable to cronyism and corruption. I think it is well past time to institute term limits.
That is exactly my point. The more equality of funding you want, the less local control and community building you get.
Huh? The state contributes through a general aid formula. The amount of state control is not dependent on the amount of state dollars.
Please consider sharing this petition We the People: Your Voice in Our Government – https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/cease-harmful-public-education-policies-relying-standardized-testing/w8ZrZwVT
WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
CEASE THE HARMFUL PUBLIC EDUCATION POLICIES RELYING ON STANDARDIZED TESTING
Current education policy has taken the focus off the learner and the common sense out of education in public schools. By basing public school funding and educator evaluation decisions so heavily on standardized tests, the end product of an education is diminished. Instead of using tests to inform and empower professional educators in public schools, or focusing on developing capable and motivated life-long learners, policy is imposing standard goals and mandating a time consuming barrage of testing-locking teachers and students into a school year focused on data benchmarks instead of appropriate learning goals. To allow bad policies, for-profit testing and publishing companies, and school reform/privatization groups to further diminish our public schools is wrong.
Ladd and Fiske correctly identify the four risks to the public education system of the privatization movement, but they assume that the public education system is an unqualified “good.” What if privatization produces different and better goods? Public education implements mainly a “progressive” philosophy of government. By the word “democracy” it means government control of education and almost everything else it can get its hands on. “Social justice” is the well-worn substitute term for ‘redistribute the wealth.’ I mean no name calling to point out that has been the communist agenda from the beginning and remains the communist agenda.
The whole point of privatization, then, is to free American education from the statist agenda (which implies ‘community’ responsiblity for every individual and submission of every individual to the tyranny of the community). Most here see public education as an unmixed good. It’s opponents think otherwise, and their motives are clear.
What is most surprising, however, is to find the Obama Education Department so staunchly behind the measures that we ALL agree are destroying the public school systems. NCLB? RTTT? CCSS? What true educator can support that testing to extinction? It baffles me why Obama/Duncan want to eliminate the public school systems when their objectives in every other area of life, especially health care, is anti individual freedom.
Ladd and Fiske, then, are totally correct in saying that the privatization movement sees public goods as merely the sum of the individual goods arising from education. I say that is the way it should be in America. What are claimed as social goods lost by privatization are, in my view, really social “bads.” They are mainly accustoming citizens to acquiesce in state control of their lives. There’s been enough of that already.
The movement for school choice does not see the value of education as simply the sum of individual benefits. The reason why I happily help pay for the education of others is that I will gain because others are educated. I will be more productive and live in a better society because you have more education. There are significant positive externalities to education.
So, how is that educated masses thing working out for us?
I think you missed my point. Education creates a positive externality, so we want people to educate themselves because it helps us.
For “positive externalities” read “societal benefits”?
Yes, I would go along with that phrase. Social benefits often arise from private action. If I walk decide to walk to school, I leave an empty parking spot for someone else to use.
Give me small town tyranny over corporate oligarchy any day. Capitalism is an economic system not a government model. Today’s capitalism without ethics (Social Darwinism) allows too many people to be eaten by predators. It is destroying the middle class and will turn us into a feudal society where we are all dependent on the company store (Walmart?).
Actually capitalism is a government model. Free exchange between free citizens, subject only to contract law. Public education is (was) monopoly education, known otherwise as socialism. As bad in education as it will prove in medical care.
There are too many ways that markets fail for this simple idea to make a workable society.
Markets fail when governments distort information exchange. Otherwise they work fairly well don’t they? Teach us how they fail in other ways.
Markets fail to adequately coordinate economic activity in a large number of cases. The most obvious evidence of this is that companies exist. The boundary of the firm gives us a rough idea of the point at which a hierarchical organization is more efficient than a market organization of economic activity.
Other traditional reasons for market failure are externalities, public goods, and asymmetric information issues. Note that these information issues have nothing to do with the government. The fact that the person selling an automobile typically knows a good deal more about the qualities of the automobile than the potential buyer has nothing to do with the government.
Either/Or?
Ravitch’s guests write — “Public schools in the U.S. have always operated at the intersection of two sets of legitimate rights: those of individuals, including parents, to pursue their own best interests and those of society as a whole to perpetuate democratic values and to promote collective prosperity.”
Ravitch says we’re at a “fork in the road” regarding education — one or the other.
This imagery reminds me of the song “Crossroads Blues” by Robert Johnson. Legend has it he sold his soul to the Devil at some junction of Mississippi roads to gain the gift of playing beautiful guitar.
Well, I like this visual because I do believe to choose the “collectivist” road IS to sell your soul to the Devil. Look at all the predators and baggage — vested interest groups, big taxpayer costs, political disputes, massive bureaucracies, regulations, experiments, etc., etc.
The individual route should be the starting point as a model for education.
My involvement with the home education movement convinces me that the aggregate contribution by this subset yields far more public good than any other model of education provision anywhere.
Besides, the collectivist route results in monopoly predispositions and limits on consumer choice. Both these behaviors are very damaging to civil society and the public good.
The only good I see in the collectivist route is the massive employment service it provides for large hosts of public servants. But, this is costly to the public purse #1. And #2, the government should not be in the business of “make-work” projects.
I am in general agreement with commenter Harlan Underhill who sees collective progressive education as “anti individual freedom”.