Anthony Cody explains
here the sustained assault on the commons, the effort to
privatize institutions that were long considered public.
He considers what happens when prisons
are privatized, creating profits by reducing the quality of service
and care. He shows why the post office is being privatized and who stands to gain.
And he summarizes the ongoing effort to privatize public schools and turn them over to corporate control.
He writes:
“It has
been decided in the halls of power, governmental and corporate,
that the way to improve schools is to unleash the power of the
marketplace. We are undergoing a transformation of huge proportions
in order to allow this to occur. Through the Common Core State
(sic) Standards, we are creating a single national marketplace for
tests, technology and curriculum – all three of which are
increasingly intertwined and removed from the control of teachers
and local communities….
“Meanwhile, our leaders
have unleashed “austerity” on the public sector, schools included.
In Chicago, the bulldozers destroyed a community reading center
treasured by local parents, capping off the closing of more than 50
public schools by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In Philadelphia, the mayor
has been working to abandon public schools in favor of charters,
and the underfunding of the city’s schools has clergy there calling
for a student boycott.”
He concludes:
“Our schools are part of a public
heritage passed down to us. They were built in our communities with
a vision of bringing all children under the same roof to learn
together. Privatization replaces this model of the commons with one
ruled by marketplace “choices.” As we know, some people always wind
up with many more choices than others. Interviews with parents
reveal that their first choice is almost always a high quality
local public school for their children. If we shifted our public
policies away from attempting to discredit and replace these
schools, and towards supporting and strengthening them, we would be
far better off.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Anthony Cody. This needs to be read by all.
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Prisons are a big public sector target for privatization because of the vast public monies spent on them. Today’s Sat 8/24 NYTimes has a news report indicating NYC prisons cost $168,000/inmate. Like public schools’ $600billion annual budgets this is an alluring target for corporate takeover. Hollowing out the public sector by absorbing these public functions into the market system will shrink “the commons” as Anthony says, meaning that we will have fewer rights and less say on the policies that run them.
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Economists have long thought about the line between what markets can do and what governments can do. It is usually about the possibilities of market failure verses government failure
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We aren’t seeing politicians pushing for free market alternatives. What we’re seeing is crony capitalism. It’s no accident that big charter systems and big virtual school systems are run by former politicians and by the brothers, cousins, or uncles of currently powerful, influential politicians. It’s no accident that many of these public/private partnerships pushing various reform agendas have people on the private side who stand to gain a LOT from the new policies, and it’s no accident that those policies often have the effect of erecting barriers to new market entrants. It’s a mistake, a really BIG mistake to frame this in traditional right-left terms. Cronyism is cronyism. It doesn’t matter whether the official rhetoric is capitalist or socialist, the actual modes of operation are the same.
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The reform crowd often uses free market rhetoric, often talks the language of classical liberalism, but when you look at the actual operations that they are supporting, these are not free market at all. A small group of people meeting in a room and deciding for everyone else what standards we’re going to follow, how those are going to be tested, who is going to provide the testing, how everyone is going to be evaluated, what centralized database of test scores and responses and is going to be linked to curricula from what sorts of suppliers, what charters are going to be approved run by what highly connected folks, and who is going to profit from all that–there’s nothing at all “free market” about such activity. I look at what’s happening and say to myself, what free markets? I see totalitarianism. I see cronyism. I see the fix in here and the fix in there. I think it much more likely that I shall encounter fairies in my garden than that I shall see anything like free markets emerging from the current “reform” initiatives.
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I really wish that one could edit these posts. Sorry about the awkwardness of this last one. I was writing hastily.
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Right wingers often invoke the tragedy of the commons in order to argue against the very idea of a commons, but what they do not recognize is that the commons does not get exploited if it is locally controlled because of one of the most powerful forces influencing human behavior–social sanction. Big, distant authorities are stupid. They don’t take into account local conditions because they don’t understand them.
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I want to draw people’s attention to the note, quoted by Cody from Arne Duncan’s chief of staff:
“The adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.”
Let me translate that for you: “The adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that a few very large corporations with the assets to approach large (scaled up) markets will get all the business.”
Has it never occurred to people that there is a reason why a few large corporations that now control almost all of the educational materials market have poured so much money into the development of national standards and tests and into supporting the various groups who are pushing these so-called “reforms”? Has it never occurred to people that these just might be part of a strategic plan put into place in reaction to the emergence of an enormous threat to their traditional business model–online materials offered at low cost or even for free (open source) by small competitors?
Follow the money. Who paid to develop the Common Core? The new tests? The new national database of student responses? Why would it be in these people’s interest to do so? It’s not hard to figure out that all this has NOTHING to do with creating free markets. Precisely the opposite is true.
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So, there’s this great, dark irony at the heart of the reform movement–free market rhetoric being used to push forward an agenda guaranteed to shore up monopoly control.
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Let me put it this way: If you wanted to ensure that there would not, in the Internet age, emerge many, many small, innovative companies offering low-cost, high quality COMPETING materials, the smartest thing that you could do would be to work for the passage of national standards, the adoption of national testing and evaluation systems, and the creation of a national database of student responses linked to curricula from a few vendors. In such a situation, you can throw your enormous resources into creation of a single national product and you won’t have small, competing vendors fragmenting the market by doing a better job of meeting local requirements. And in every case, if the market is standardized and national, you can out-market the small entrants because you can spend more. In fact, you will spend less on your marketing than you did before because of the new economies of scale. Small entrants to the market won’t be able to do that, so they will be shut out and your monopoly position will be safe.
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As a child of the holocaust, I do not throw these words around with ease or superficaility.
The destruction of La Casita, in the night and against the will of the people in the neighborhood, continually brings to my mind Kristalnacht. Destroying books that were lovingly brought together to support a meaningful venue is an act of violence.
Rahm Emanuel, I can only say to you, HOW QUICKLY WE FORGET.
Never Again.
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http://arcchicago.blogspot.com/2013/08/architectural-destruction-as-political.html
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I never quite understood the viability of choosing a school. If you chose a school across town and bypass the one down the street from your home, aren’t the children who get stuck there getting a bad education? Aren’t they getting what you don’t want your kids to have? ALL of our public schools need to be viable, education rich institutions, not just of education but of our local, thriving communities.
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Some in my community want their children to have a Waldorf education, some a Montessori education. Others don’t want that. Allowing students to go to the schools that best match their own individual needs and desires seems like it would be the best for all.
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