This is a brilliant, stunning analysis by a reader, who explores the goals of corporate reformers–using the template of Schumpeter’s ideas–and contrast them to the ethics of educators. She says that the market reformers and educators are necessarily at odds because their basic values are in conflict.
Read the whole post, not just my excerpts.
I wish I had written this. I am glad I had the opportunity to read it, you should too. You will come away with a deeper understanding of the appeal and the danger of market-based reforms.
Here are some excerpts:
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“The corporate reform movement is an attempt by a group of wealthy philanthropists to impose market forces where there had previously been none or had protections against them. The policy instruments they support are: data-driven management designed to weed out undesirable employees and reward superstars; school choice models(1) designed to foster competition for student enrollment and their tax dollars to bring down costs and improve customer satisfaction(2); weakening teacher unions to allow for greater labor market flexibility(3).
“This tribe of reformers resolves that market-oriented reforms will offer a better, more varied and customer-pleasing product. Or, it will deliver at least the same quality of product for less money. And, in doing so, these reforms will yield a more equitable education for children in low-income households because parents will not be forced to send their kids to the substandard schools available in their neighborhood…
“The argument that such reforms will be disruptive, lead to job loss, would cause total havoc to the education system as a whole falls on deaf ears. One of the staggering capabilities of markets is their capacity for creative destruction, a term popularized by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Because of the efficiency of markets to adapt to consumer demands, the products, services, and firms of one era will almost certainly fall prey to the changing needs of the markets. One company rises (Microsoft), another falls (IBM). An innovation captures the imaginations of millions one generation only to crumble mere decades later (Polaroid). This is good for us because we reap the benefits of this relentless creative thrust. Things get better, faster, and cheaper, and our lives are made easier and more fun.
“For market-based reformers, the destruction of public education is not a bug; it’s a feature. Like a phoenix out of the ashes, a new, robust, monetized educational system is something to be desired so that — finally — schools can harness the awesome power of private markets.
“In order for markets to work and not descend into some corporatist public-private hybrid, the role of the entrepreneur is essential. They are the risk-takers. They strategically gamble on the novelty of their ideas, on the notion that there is a group of people out there who want what they can provide and that no one else is providing what they’ve got. In the last half-century, these are the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerbergs of the world, risking the security of a sure-thing job at an established firm for the possibility of striking gold on your own. This risk is what makes innovation possible and is what drives the dynamism of markets.
My question is this: are the roles of educator and entrepreneur mutually compatible? Can one be both risk-taker and caretaker?…..
“The market doesn’t care about equity, period. The market responds to the demands of its consumers….Contrary to the theoretical model put forth by free-market ideologues, markets do not yield more equitable results. The gulf between the “good” and “bad” schools widens because of the inherent segregating properties of market forces…..
“Let’s think about what is lost in this creative destruction.
“First and foremost, kids lose. Since charters are not public schools, they will lose their constitutional rights. Many more kids will lose art, physical education, music, journalism, debate, dance, creative writing, a variety of foreign languages, and any other class that is not tested, not considered “essential.” Students will profound special needs will be further segregated from non-disabled peers because so few schools will want to take on the additional responsibility. Students with language needs will languish trying to find a school that will take them and meet their needs appropriately.
“Parents lose their voice. They are granted a voice as customers, but this is illusory. They are subject to the availability of what the market provides. If they are dissatisfied, they move to another school. This is rough on the kid and on the parents who now have to shop for this other school, possibly in a neighborhood they or their child can’t get to easily. If the school is not satisfied with the student, the student can be booted out in spite of parental protest.
“Teachers lose their voice. As labor participants, we are given a choice of where we want to work, but without organized labor to speak on behalf of workers, the market will dictate wages and hours. The private school, either for-profit or not, will have incentive to remain competitive, trimming the fat wherever possible. The bulk of a school’s operating cost goes to personnel. This means teachers get their salaries cut and their hours extended. And when that happens, it’s our fault because these are the schools we chose to work in. This is what we signed up for….
“I don’t want to suggest that no one would gain from such a system. Parents of certain religious inclinations would now have government funds to send their children to parochial schools, and market reforms would certainly aid those parents who wish to include a spiritual element to their child’s curriculum. However, there’s the whole separation of church and state thing to worry about, not to mention the lunatics who teach creationism as science. With vouchers, parents who already send their kids to private schools now have a subsidy to do so. So it’s regressively redistributive, but hey, rich people get harangued all the time, isn’t it time they got a break? And, let’s not forget the windfall of business opportunities for-profit endeavors would have access to(7)….
“The risks are too great to pursue the destructive ends a market will wreak. The stakes are far too high to pursue anything less than equity for our kids.”
Once more time, it’s a fallacy to describe the Military Industrial Complex as a market-based system.
And it will be just as bad a complicity in mystification to describe the Training Industrial Complex as a free-market arena.
Isn’t it possible that the current public education system IS the “Polaroid” and that something better that provides students and parent choices is possible and needed to today even if that is not charter schools?
Just in case you couldn’t tell this from the name, but Progressive Educators have always been champions of alternatives, diversity, experimentation, innovation, and all that good stuff when it comes to education. And charter schools were originally conceived as one form of experimentation on the margins of the tried and true ways.
But experimentation on human beings, especially developing human beings, follows different rules than mixing chemicals in a darkroom, wiring VLSI chips on a breadboard, or running a charge through patched together bits of cadaver parts.
John, compared to the education I received, I consider what is in existence now in many public schools as “creative” and an “experiment”. These are strategies and curriculum being employed and championed by educators.
Is there no room for parents to have a choice? Why is the first time we have a choice at the college level, where our lack of choice at the lower levels may exclude our kids from truly having a choice of colleges?
Well, I got my K–12 education so long ago that we didn’t even get the K bit yet, but what I’ve learned about Other People’s Education in the mean time makes me ever more grateful with every passing day for what I was lucky to get.
Anyway …
Parents continue to have a wide range of choices in how they spend their private funds. My own parents subjected me to brief experiments with a parochial school and a highly-regarded military school. Interesting experiments, and parts of my life now, but neither turned out to give me as good an education as I got on the whole from my mainstay public schools. Still, it was their own money to risk in the hopes of that elusive “value added” Luckily, we all had the ability to learn from the data of experience.
That’s the way it is with ones private funds — within reason and a wide margin of error, nobody’s business but ones own.
But public funds have a very different justification for their collection and distribution — the “strings” attaching to the public purse remained attached through the entire process of collection and distribution.
I don’t think we need to speculate about the impact of a market in education, there is one today in private schools. Lets think about the authors biggest loser. He states
“First and foremost, kids lose. Since charters are not public schools, they will lose their constitutional rights. Many more kids will lose art, physical education, music, journalism, debate, dance, creative writing, a variety of foreign languages, and any other class that is not tested, not considered “essential.” Students will profound special needs will be further segregated from non-disabled peers because so few schools will want to take on the additional responsibility. Students with language needs will languish trying to find a school that will take them and meet their needs appropriately.”
In my town there is a private Montessori school, a private Waldorf school, a private progressive school, a catholic school, a fundamentalist Christian school, and a small college prep high school, along with the public school system. The private schools can specialize because they are open enrollment. They can provide a better fit for the children of those that are willing and able to pay the $9,000 a year tuition that most of these schools charge. The private schools offer art, music, etc.. I don’t see why charter schools would be compelled to offer any less.
Public schools have been forced to give special needs students appropriate education by the courts and it is likely that the same kind of regulatory requirements need to be placed on charter schools. There is, however, always a trade off between segregation of special needs students and improved education that might be available through specialization. Schools for the deaf, for example, completely segregate but are viewed as justified because of the special communication requirements. Should schools that specialize in educating special needs students be banned or only available to the relatively wealthy?
But how can the parents of these private school students sleep at night knowing that their children have no constitutional rights?
The difference is in the emergence of for-profit charters. You say “I don’t see why charter schools would be compelled to offer any less.” Profit is why.
If your bottom line is cost, then you don’t offer anything that isn’t tested. You offer only the bare minimum, or possibly advanced versions of science and math. You’re fortunate that the private schools in your town offer “art, music, etc.”–in many places this is not the case. And most private and charter schools nationally are not “open enrollment.” When you can get rid of kids who score poorly on tests, or just not admit special learners in the first place, test scores are likely to go up.
The real mystery with charters is that with all of these “advantages,” they still underperform public schools on average. Why doesn’t this fact get more coverage? Hmm. Maybe the corporate media doesn’t like reporting this short coming of the corporate ed movement?
You may want to eliminate for profit charter schools and just allow not for profit charters.
Even if the private schools don’t offer the full range of activities that a traditional public school offers, they can offer things a traditional public school can not offer: a Montessori, progressive, or Waldorf education. Many parents might be willing to give up a junior high football team to get a Montessori education and I would have a hard time arguing that they are making the wrong decision for their students.
The problem with “non-profit” charters, such as we have in New York State, is that they pay their leaders hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, engage in sweetheart deals with for-profit management companies, family or marriage-related vendors and landlords.
That’s not even considering how they bleed resources from actual public schools.
Some may do that, but a solution might be found in the appropriate regulatory structure.
The only charter school I have ever been in is the Community Roots charter school in Brooklyn. Is that a school that should be shut down?
I won’t say that Community Roots should be shut down, but it most certainly should be prevented from invading and appropriating public school facilities, which it is in the process of doing.
As for “regulatory structures” for charter schools, dream on: charter schools are being aggressively promoted by the Overclass precisely because they sidestep regulation. After all, deregulation is a primary tenet of neoliberalism, which charter schools are a manifestation of.
The market reform model for schools will give us exactly the same outcomes we now have in our financial industry- crooks & liars. Here are some harsh words from that Marxist* Jeffrey Sachs about the sociopaths running our economic & political systems:
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/top-economist-jeffrey-sachs-says-wall-street-is-full-of-crooks-29230434.html
*sarcasm
Private schools that operate over and above a universally available free public school system, drawing like all other enterprises on the common resource base that universal education provides, do not tell us what a pure private system would be like, any more than non-union shops operating in a union-floored economy tell us what it would really be like to return to the days before labor rights.
But we don’t have to speculate what it would be like to regress to a society where the amount and quality of education you get is proportional to the inherited wealth into which you exercised your “choice” to be born.
Because we have been there, done that, and it weren’t so nice we’d want to do it twice.
If you don’t like private K-12 schools, what about higher education? Have we seen the problems that the author of the blog post worries about?
One more time …
I can’t remember any folks I know having a problem with private schools, subject to the usual considerations of child protection, so long as they are privately funded.
The word “private” has a meaning. It implies the right to tell other people to butt out of one’s business. Ergo, a business can’t be private if it taps public funds.
Most American families cannot afford even a pvt schl tuition bill of “only” $9K, which is very low BTW. Median family income in US is about $53K/yr, but when racially disaggregated it comes to about $59K/yr for white families, around $44K/yr for blacks and hispanics. $9k/yr tuition is too big a bite for families in bottom half, so going all pvt would mean eliminating half American kids or more and most of them will be dark-skinned. Jon Awbrey above is exactly right, too, that for 100 years or more Progressive Educators have sought to innovate, democratize, and make child-friendly the mass educ system in our pub sector. Like parents, we insist on small class size to start, something the authorities won’t even discuss but demand for their own kids who they send to pricey pvt schls. Another dimension to add to the fine blog above: the corporate rampage across public schools opens cloistered public sector to runaway profiteering but is also an extension of urban gentrification. City life was abandoned and left to rot by business and authorities from 1950s-1980s, then gentrification began. The poor were ghettoized in places cheated of good schls and other city services; then the poor wound up in close-in urban areas desirable as renovated high-rent disctricts for new urban development. Policy became one of removal of the poor and working class to periphery so that gentry could re-colonized and renovate rundown areas, which would require high-budgeted pub schls to attract gentry, lots of police to make the new areas safe for brunch. NYC is good place to see public school policy built around gentrification which is an urban market strategy to increase rents. Chicago is destabilizing the inner-city areas of its urban poor and working-class out of which will come high-rent gentrified schools and neighborhoods.
I agree that $9,000 is going to be more than many households are willing and/or able to pay for education. That is why the children of those households will never have access to a Montessori or any other more specialized approach to education under the traditional geographically zoned school system. I think they should have access to the more specialized education that having choice in schools would allow.
The concentration of poverty is at least as important as the number of poor households. If everyone around you is poor, there will be less opportunities available for you to leave poverty. This is primarily a problem of rural poverty, a subject not often discussed here. Being poor in NYC is very different from being poor in Starr County Texas or Buffalo County South Dakota.
Here is an interesting map of poverty concentration on a county basis:http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2013/4/6/where-do-the-rich-and-poor-live
“the children of those households will never have access to a Montessori or any other more specialized approach to education under the traditional geographically zoned school system”
I think we have had this conversation before, TE.
Several of us gave you concrete examples of “traditionally zoned public schools” offering Montessori, single gender, progressive, and several other specialized approaches to education (I cannot remember all the other posters specific examples, but there were many, as I recall). These were requested by the communities and implemented in buildings along side the “regular ” program.
There can be and has been access to specialized approaches. Especially in the days before permanent test prep took over.
Endless choice, no.
You can spend your own money for that.
But not fair or accurate to indicate no choice.
I think that allowing students to choose among public schools and public school options would be great, it is just not widespread yet. It is also subject to at least some of the criticisms made here about charter schools. The need for an application process, for example, as well as the lack of community cohesion when children in the same neighborhood go to different schools.
I couldn’t print the whole post, maybe you can try, so I’ll print the excerpts that Ravitch provides.
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One of the best lines I’ve ever read regarding this whole reform mess;
“My question is this: are the roles of educator and entrepreneur mutually compatible? Can one be both risk-taker and caretaker?…..”
In truth, the answer is obvious.
Caretakers are very thoughtfully risk-averse when dealing with those they care for.
Risk takers are excited by new, but unproven possibilities. It’s easy when you are a software designer, who’s not looking at the faces of students; or one running for reelection who’s never taught a day in your life.
The worst part of this is being derided as status quo, when proven practices support the student’s entire well-being.
One problem with edupreneurs is that they are risking the public’s money.
As always seems to be the case with the crony capitalist system that we find ourselves in, the risks and losses are socialized, while the profits are private.
Michael,
I really appreciate your posts.
Thank you.
Michael Fiorillo: your first line sums up the real peril the heavyweights among the edupreneurs are confronting—NONE! They are looking for ROI without risk.
And just whose kids are they risking in their bizarrely uninformed experiments in $tudent $ucce$$? Just who are the guinea pigs? Let’s see…
Classes for the masses—30 or 40 or 50 or 60 students in a room with a VAManiacally certified ‘great’ teacher. **Except for a small sliver that will be attending the selective Centers for Compliance that are generously funded and political well connected.**
But for the children of the Educrass: let’s just take an example from The Great Rheeformer herself. One of her children attends Harpeth Hall where the teacher-student mean ratio is 8:1 [look at their website, click on “About Us” and then “50 Reasons”; reason #29].
When you don’t have skin in the game, “Creative Destruction” looks very appealing. “By trying, we can easily endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.” [Mark Twain]
Brave souls, no?
🙂
Another salient point from this post:
“How do I know my school is successful? The caretaker will talk to you about conversations they have had with parents and students, the sense of joy and love they have in their work, the great progress their students have made towards adulthood which may or may not be college-focused. The risk-taker will point to their numbers: test scores went up, student enrollment went up, revenues went up.”
herein lies the conflict. true educators know the tests and the data are only of small importance to the overall education of the student.
Several private schools have opened in my town in the 20+ years I have lived here, including a Waldorf school. Do you think the Waldorf school was founded by a numbers oriented risk taker who focuses on standardized tests?
Kadar,
Educators always put a positive spin on whatever policy is shoved down their throats. It seems to be only the retired educators that are free to say what they really believe one way or the other.
There is no free market in the United States, anymore than there will be one in the education system that is being devised. Schumpeter’s world is a fairy tale.
The goal is to destroy public education for the masses except for a talented tenth in some magnet schools.
I think you give away to much of the game when you grant the opposition the right to claim competition and a free market. In fact, corporations tightly manage competition and use monopoly and patent law to strangle the exchange of ideas. Corruption and criminal activity is rife in many if not all major Fortune 500 companies, and a chief source of profit is through externalities.
I’m glad someone else gets it.
I think we have to give Mches credit for teasing out the consequences of a free market model for education, but all that work is beside the point if it assumes the premiss of the propaganda narrative and fails to notice that the game is not aimed at anything like a free market at all.
Schumpeter was, indeed, a real twit.
But it is not Schumpeter’s ideas that drive the corporate-style “reformers,” especially those in the political realm, though they may like the term “creative destruction.”
They are guided more by the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman.
And you are correct….the so-called “free” market is a myth.
I think part of the problem in these posts and comments is that everyone is speaking from their own regional experiences. What many of you describe is so foreign to me from my small, Midwestern school district perspective.
The parents who help out here see the poorer children falling further and further behind and the more progressed kids being held back because of the curriculum. The students in our school are NOT taught by rote or “drill and kill” and all of the “new age” techniques are being employed. The only standardized testing is the MEAPS given in the fall (similar to the Iowa tests I used to have back in the day).
Many of you talk about NYC schools and other large city schools. How many who post regularly here live in towns with 2,000 or 3,000 people in them and send their children to school districts comprised of many small towns which have less than 2,500 children in them total K-12? Should those of you who live in the city and have your beefs with how things are run there affect the educational policies of the rest of us out here in rural America?
There are no choices other than public school here except private, parochial schools and homeschooling. The only Montessori school goes only to 8th grade only and it is very expensive. Therefore, there is no pressure on the schools to change (except what the state puts on them or is threatening to) regardless of what parents say or desire. It is incredibly maddening.
I am in a college town of around 80,000 in a big square flyover state on the plains. The lack of student density (the median high school in my state has fewer than 250 students) is one reason I look more favorably on virtual classes than most of the other folks here.
As a teacher I have often told my students that there are no stupid questions. As an adult, talking to another adult, I would have to say that your question is not only stupid, it is beside the point TE. You seem like a smart enough guy/gal. Your twisted attempt at sabotaging logic doesn’t embarrass you?
To which question are you referring?
There is no mystery to the global rending of education systems for the ultimate benefit of For Profit industries, in particular technology corporations. The questions surrounding how this will result in an equitable education for all children is what is at stake. Who will live and who will die?, much like the title of Kozol’s book Death At An Early Age, comes to mind. Sorted out before the individual child has time to mature and explore, we will simply ignore! Children as fodder for industries and politics. A discarding of the nonessential non value added for the scrap heap child. Not your child, of course, but someone else’s. Maybe someone of less importance, not a valuable or needed human being as determined by the architects of this shift in civilization. Purpose and profit wrapped around children like so many widgets needed and so many made obsolete by the power of, not just the wealthy, but truly powerful. Forget the sentimentality of thinking education is for the whole, not sure it ever was, and not sure it will ever be again. Maybe we have been living in a fools paradise or one of those golden ages which come to the world every so many years. For some cultures it has never happened.
Democracy is under attack when education, media, social services and systems, safety nets for the financial security of the masses, on and on, are threatened and tampered with. Get the point? The personal power we might have thought we had is being stripped away and threatened. And who are these mighty manipulators of entire cultures and countries? Does this sound like a conspiracy theory or has being under attack these days feel real enough to the readers to recognize the ground really is shifting under your feet and security? Worse, the children’s futures are at stake and we are responsible for that. This is a wakeup call of epic proportions! And yes, it is the Civil Rights Issue of these times.
I am an advocate for challenged learners of all severity (I work in an urban school district) and I am helpless before this stripping away of their rights by an unwritten and unspoken overturning of the laws that are supposed to protect them. They are on the unseen list of those to be discarded through the measurement instruments of tests and those that believe them not worth the expenditure of dollars for their education growth or futures. They are not included in the For Profit Charter creation but they are included in the For Profit Prison industry. We are back before the laws and once again in the face of ignorance and prejudice. This is about commercialism and profit bearing interests, not humanity or Democracy. What to do about it and how to survive it are the questions? Glad to take any answers or suggestions.
I mean no disrespect to the blogger, but corporate-style “reformers” are not guided by the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter (though Schumpeter might fit right in with them…he headed a bank that failed, was a poor classroom teacher, was egomaniacal, and dismissed out-of-hand economic ideas and policies that proved effective in the wake of the Great Depression).
Instead, when those who cite “market” forces and privatization and “choice” as the means to improve education are willing to source their ideas, the names that emerge are von Mises, and Hayek, and Milton Friedman. The more daring will even cite Ayn Rand,
More importantly, what the blogger and the corporate “reformers” omit is that public education in a democratic society has a special place and purpose. Aristotle grasped this important concept more than two thousand years ago in arguing for a system of public education in Athens, saying that “education should be one and the same for all…public, and not private.” He
Aristotle perceived the importance of public schooling to democratic citizenship, noting that “each government has a peculiar character…the character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarch creates oligarchy, and always the better the character, the better the government.” Democracy is government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” while oligarchy is government by a relatively small (and usually wealthy) group that “exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.”
Early state constitutions in the U.S., like those of Massachusetts (1780) and New Hampshire (1784), set up and stressed the importance of a system of public education. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided for public school financing in new territories. In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson sought a publicly-funded system of schools, believing that an educated citizenry was critical to the well-being of a democratic society. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1794), Jefferson wrote “The influence over government must be shared among all men.” Many early advocates for public schools –– Jefferson, George Washington, Horace Mann, for example –– agreed that democratic citizenship was a – perhaps THE – primary function of education.
Aristotle believed that that a democratic society was contingent on a citizenry that understood and was committed to democratic values. Pericles had defined them four decades earlier: openness, popular sovereignty and majority rule, equality, justice, tolerance, and promoting the general welfare. They are written into our Constitution. In any democratic society, the people are the government (or at least, they’re supposed to be). Aristotle and many of the Founders knew that if all citizens are part of self-rule, then they are “a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.” That is the essence of the social contract.
And that is precisely why public education is so important. It’s also what the oligarchs and ideologues (and a slew of the Wall Street crowd) – the corporate-style “reformers” – are determined to unravel. And privatize. For their own personal gain, and for even more power.
The well-orchestrated and -financed effort to force the “market” into public education (witness the UVa Curry-Darden “partnership” to bring the “business” model to public school classrooms), is not just about schooling.
It’s also about the very nature and health of democratic governance, and of a society dedicated to the democratic ideals of its founding.
Exactamundo —