Professor Mario Waissbluth of Chile wrote three blog posts
previously about Chile’s choice-based free-market schools (see
here
and here
and here).
Here he adds a fourth, summarizing the results of recent studies:
Previously,
I wrote in this blog a 3-part sequence describing the Chilean
educational system, its consequences, proposing some ways to run
away from this malignant design. Recently, Universidad de Chile
published the results of a survey on adult literacy and numeracy
skills, following the exact methodology of SIALS, the Second
International Adult Literacy Survey published in
1998. Within
the survey data, it is shown that 15 years ago, 45% of young people
in the segment between 15 and 24 years, i.e., the generation that
was graduating or recently graduated from high school, had no
comprehension of language and arithmetic… whatsoever, not even
the ability to read and understand a very simple text or balance a
checkbook. Today, this same age segment shows, tragically and
exactly, the same results. With one of the highest high school
attendances in the world, we now find that these young people spent
12 years sitting passively at a desk, not achieving improvement
even in their most basic skills.
Even worse, in the segment of higher
education graduates, only 10% show adequate or complete
understanding of prose and numeracy, similar to what happened 15
years ago. This is the result of market system debauchery and
completely unregulated exploitation of students who pay and/or get
indebted to obtain these spurious titles. So far, only 20% of
higher education programs, most of them for-profit, have some sort
of voluntary accreditation.
This does not happen by chance, it
is the result of a market-based educational model, with extreme
segregation based on academic and socioeconomic skimming,
curricular overload, with students spending most of their time
training as parrots to answer standardized tests, with public
education and the teaching career virtually demolished.The basic
organizational and financial rules of our model do not exist
anywhere in the world and are full of perverse incentives.
We’ve been
hearing self-congratulatory messages from succesive governments for
more than fifteen years, with some people even traveling around the
world to brag about the “chilean model”. This failed model ran its
course, and it seriously threatens the future of millions of
people, as well as chilean labor productivity (stagnant for more
than a decade) and its international competitiveness. Time to
accept and embrace failure and change course.
I wrote in this blog a 3-part sequence describing the Chilean
educational system, its consequences, proposing some ways to run
away from this malignant design. Recently, Universidad de Chile
published the results of a survey on adult literacy and numeracy
skills, following the exact methodology of SIALS, the Second
International Adult Literacy Survey published in
1998. Within
the survey data, it is shown that 15 years ago, 45% of young people
in the segment between 15 and 24 years, i.e., the generation that
was graduating or recently graduated from high school, had no
comprehension of language and arithmetic… whatsoever, not even
the ability to read and understand a very simple text or balance a
checkbook. Today, this same age segment shows, tragically and
exactly, the same results. With one of the highest high school
attendances in the world, we now find that these young people spent
12 years sitting passively at a desk, not achieving improvement
even in their most basic skills.
Even worse, in the segment of higher
education graduates, only 10% show adequate or complete
understanding of prose and numeracy, similar to what happened 15
years ago. This is the result of market system debauchery and
completely unregulated exploitation of students who pay and/or get
indebted to obtain these spurious titles. So far, only 20% of
higher education programs, most of them for-profit, have some sort
of voluntary accreditation.
This does not happen by chance, it
is the result of a market-based educational model, with extreme
segregation based on academic and socioeconomic skimming,
curricular overload, with students spending most of their time
training as parrots to answer standardized tests, with public
education and the teaching career virtually demolished.The basic
organizational and financial rules of our model do not exist
anywhere in the world and are full of perverse incentives.
We’ve been
hearing self-congratulatory messages from succesive governments for
more than fifteen years, with some people even traveling around the
world to brag about the “chilean model”. This failed model ran its
course, and it seriously threatens the future of millions of
people, as well as chilean labor productivity (stagnant for more
than a decade) and its international competitiveness. Time to
accept and embrace failure and change course.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Chile also launched a failed experiment of privatizing social security. Even with the example of this petry dish of radical privatization of the public sector, cheerleaders of public school and other privatizations proceed undaunted.
To understand the roots of Chile’s neoliberal experiments in many sectors read William Blum’s “Killing Hope” (check out his site: http://williamblum.org/ ) and read “The Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by John Perkins. Google the title and there are some good videos of interviews (some lengthy) with him as he explains US “secret” some not widely known foreign economic activities by the US government.
Also suggest Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Lengthy discussion of Chile, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys.
A good video summary of her points. From a lecture she gave in 07, I believe.
Sadly, I think it’s reformers themselves who have to admit this, and they’re such big, powerful players that I don’t know that they will.
I recognize that I’m writing this on a blog run by a reformer who changed course, but Dr. Ravtich was never Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Arne Duncan or Mr. Broad.
These folks may LITERALLY be too big to fail.
We’ve seen this kind of lock-step bipartisan lunacy before, deregulating financial markets is one example and Iraq is another.
It had to collapse before they would admit error. Some of them still won’t.
As yes. Theory meets the real world.
The classical liberal idea that one gets innovation and improvement when free entities compete with one another is a powerful one. However, there are a number of practical problems with this notion. Two deserve particular mention:
1. When there are vast socioeconomic disparities, as there are now in the United States, with its vast inequalities of income and of wealth, those at the bottom of the economic scale, even if they are receiving vouchers, do not have anything like the “choices” that the wealthy do. Often, the responsible parent or guardian doesn’t have the education to make the right choices. The poor are often prey to profiteers. And, that parent or guardian’s choices are terribly constrained by other factors. Even if a voucher enables that parent or guardian to pay tuition at a school across the city or in the next town over, he or she might not routinely have the bus fare or gas money to send the child there daily or the money to buy books and supplies.
2. In a country like ours, in which there is a great deal of crony capitalism–legislators who are the wind-up toys of their corporate contributors and pals–there is great potential for corruption from these public-private arrangements whereby public money, via vouchers, is paid to approved providers. The whole charter school/voucher approach is an invitation to the same sort of corruption that one gets in defense contracting (some 3 trillion dollars worth of no-bid contracts for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example). It is no accident that many of the physical and virtual charter school systems and many of the approved vendors of educational materials are headed by a) brothers, sisters, cousins, or whatever of politicians and b) former politicians and high-level bureaucrats. The U.S. is becoming a banana republic. We are well down that path. When Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire quit the Senate, he gave a press conference in which he said, basically, that when he started as a Senator, every bill would have a few riders. And then those started growing, exponentially, from tens of riders to THOUSANDS. And if you look at any one of those, he said, it’s a deal. Someone’s cousin is profiting. This is not, he said, something that a person with any integrity can take part in. He was talking about the United States Senate. Having politicians decide who the approved educational vendors will be and having a voucher system for distribution of money to those vendors is a recipe for turning the education of schoolchildren into a vehicle for shameless profiteering.
Chiara, they are not too big to fail. They are to big to admit failure. They fail everywhere their ideas are applied. They are losers. They will give up because the bad results will embarrass them. They are losers.
Diane,
I concur. They are losers afraid to admit their failures, because of egos and greed…sad people. In the meanwhile, their failed education policies enrich the few and keep the oligarchy in place.
“Ravitch”, I intended. Sorry.
We should also note that the Milton Friedman school voucher plan was foisted on Chile by the brutal Pinochet military dictatorship. And let us also remember that vouchers were foisted on several of our states (Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana) by conservative politicians who lacked the courage to submit their plans to the voters, doubtless because they knew they would be defeated, as has happened in 27 statewide referendum elections between 1966 and 2012, from Massachusetts to California and from Florida to Alaska, whenever voters were allowed the chance to say yea or nay on vouchers or their variants. And the average negative vote was two to one, almost the same as the 70% opposition to vouchers registered in the 2013 Gallup/PDK poll. (Details on the 27 referenda may be found in my monoigraph “the Great School Voucher Fraud” at arlinc.org.)
The free marketers, libertarians, right wingers, Ayn Randians and the laissez-faire social Darwinist predatory capitalists just loved, adored and doted on Pinochet (though they now try to deny their complicity in the death and destruction that was Pinochet). They willfully ignored the blood, torture, disappearances and outright murders of anyone who stood in the way of his fascist regime. One columnist for the NYT whose name I forgot, wrote a glowing column about how wonderful was the Chilean privatization of their version of Social Security; except that it’s a great failure for the great mass of the people. The same now is true for school privatization, “choice” would bring Nirvana except when it doesn’t. William F. Buckley was an admirer of Pinochet and Franco because they were “bulwarks” against the communists, if you ignored the piles of corpses..
Unfortunately, it was not just the usual right-wing suspects who supported the fascist coup in Chile: the AFL-CIO’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD),on whose Board sat Albert Shanker, worked with the CIA to overthrow Allende’s government. Among other things, it funded a trucker’s strike that created artificial shortages – the supermarkets were full the day after the coup – that undermined the government.
Shanker was a true and accomplished trade unionist, unlike the so-called reform collaborators we have in the UFT and AFT now, but he was also a stalwart Cold Warrior, supporting the Vietnam war to the bitter, bloody end, the 9/11 coup in Chile, the murderous government in El Salvador and the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980’s.
If people REALLY wanted to apply free market principles to education, here’s what they would do:
They would give local districts the authority and autonomy to choose their own standards and curricula and curricular materials and pedagogical approaches, VOLUNTARILY, from among COMPETING models and products.
The result would be a great deal of innovation in standards, curricula, curricular materials, and pedagogical approaches.
And the mechanism for crony capitalist exploitation of public educational funds would be eliminated.
Sure, there would still be local corruption, but there would also be local social sanction, which is powerful. Profiteering flourishes when the decisions are made by distant authorities.
And states and the feds would still have the right to step in when basic liberties were being violated at the local level.
But wait! Wasn’t this what we had before we found out how desperately we needed corporate reform? Hmmm . . .
Robert,
Would you want a school that is in the “all and only” traditional school district to become a military school? Would all your neighbors be happy that the “all and only” traditional school becomes a progressive school? How would your neighbors react if the “all and only” traditional school decides that require students to read “Dreaming in Cuban”?
It seems to me that there is so much disagreement about what is a good education for their students that either 1) schools must reflect the least common denominator in the community or 2) we need to provide a little lubrication that will allow parents to send their students to schools that have standards that best fit their students.
I hope that you can find a third possibility. It will be the beginning of an interesting conversation.
This is a conversation, TE, that I am very much interested in having. But again, the public schools have traditionally served us very, very well. The schools that ban Dreaming in Cuban generally get shamed into rescinding the ban, and the controversy just makes kids want to read it, and I have never known a local public school to become a military school. But it is definitely true that kids differ, that they differ a lot and that one size does not fit all. Alternatives are important. I have always been a big fan of alternative schools started by public school districts as ways of differentiating their offerings. And I am a big supporter of vocational schools. I would love to see every community in the country have a strong vocational school alternative to the traditional liberal arts high school. I know that that is not a popular position here in the U.S., but my position, there, is the consensus in most other democratic nations.
I’ve seen many, many examples, over the years, of kids who were, in their local public school, round pegs in square holes but who had, because of their parents’ lack of wealth, no alternatives. Those situations are just terrible. Children’s lives get wasted, at enormous cost to everyone in prisons, crime, etc. Surely things don’t have to be like that. This is something that we all need to think creatively about.
I would agree that public education has traditionally served some of us very very well, but much of the tension and turmoil in public education over the last 50 years has come from efforts, often imposed from above, to serve all of us well.
I think we are in agreement that having alternatives available for students is valuable, with the value probably increasing as the student becomes older. It seems to me that the sort of system Joe Nathan talks about in Minneapolis St. Paul, with teacher organized charter schools and students having the right to cross district lines to attend schools that best suit their individual needs and interests, would be very appealing to you.
WARNING! TE BREAKS FOR CHARTER SCHOOLS!
And don’t get caught up in the magnet school debate either. He may claim to support them but then he totally discounts magnets by referring to “all and only” schools providing certain programs, when existing neighborhood magnet schools, which have several different kinds of programs, have been described to him in detail.
And he provides no argument in support of democracy in education, when magnets with diverse programs often have democratically elected Local School Councils, with representative parents, educators and community members, while the charters he wants typically have unelected boards filled with outsiders, and the family and friends of executives, whether non-profit or for-profit.
Cosmic,
Perhaps I have not been clear. When I say “all and only” I am referring to school buildings where all students from a geographic area attend a particular school building and no students outside the geographic area attend school in that building. Magnet schools BY DEFINITION are not ” all and nothing” schools. I apologies for the confusion.
As for democracy, you might not live in a state where your position is a distinctly minority opinion. My state tries to skate just as close to any line a court creates trying to separate church from state. If you really allowed majority rule to prevail in my state, I doubt you would recognize a science class as science. I have found enthusiasm for majority rules depends a great deal on what the majority decides.
I should add that I have always been told which school and teacher my students would have in public schools. If it made a difference, if one teacher ran his or her class like a military academy, and the other ran his or her class like a Waldorf school, I would have strong preferences. The only way to keep parents happy is to make sure that the assignment of students to a class or school DOES NOT REALLY MATTER.
Good luck with that. I’ve never heard of any P-12 schools that routinely let parents or students choose teachers, whether public or private –and I’ve worked at a lot of private schools. Only in college, though it’s not guaranteed there either.
But surely parents choose to enroll in the neighborhood magnet classrooms in these magnet programs you describe in the traditional zoned schools?
Funny, TE! You want to be able to choose your mail carrier, too? Just like they let you choose who delivers your packages at UPS, FedEX and DHL? Oh wait, no choice there either…
I am not sure what your point is.
Parents choose schools all the time, either private schools or by choosing a place to live. I just suggest we might unbundle the choice of school and the choice of residency.
And it doesn’t matter if the whole system is destroyed for everyone else in the process, just as long as you get your way. Damned be to everyone else! You sound like a tantrumming child. Well there are many of us who care enough about the greater good to not want our system of public education to turn out like Chile.
I am making an argument for things that I believe will improve public education, not destroying it. Do you see some problems with allowing students from relatively poor households some choice in schools they attend?
BS. You want to pick schools and teachers and it’s just too bad if that means our country ends up like Chile, as long as you get your way. Milton Friedman was wrong. And you are very self-centered.
I am confused by your characterization of my position. If you actually mean that I personally want to choose schools for my students, my household income is high enough for me to be able to do that.
My thought is that others might benefit from that ability to choose. Language immersion programs, magnet Montessori schools, high schools that gather academic high performing students together in one place and vocational schools all seem like good ideas.
You’re full of it TE. We’re not stupid. You’ve been arguing for charter schools for your own kids for a long time, not magnet schools so everyone has more choices within the public schools.
I have been arguing that students should be given more freedom to choose schools, and that includes magnet schools. Many of the criticisms of charter schools given here apply equally to magnet schools (destruction of the community, skimming, etc.), so I propose counter arguments. That might have lead to your confusion about my position.
There are fewer than 20 charter schools in my state and my youngest is a high school junior, so this really has nothing to do with what my own children will do.
You have complained many times about the limited choices you think you’ve had for your own kids and you don’t typically write about magnet schools until someone else mentions them. You have given no indications that you have any interest in preserving public education and sound much more like you are willing to sacrifice it for the free market.
Magnet schools are neighborhood schools that also accept children from other communities in the district. They do not tear apart neighborhoods. The only controversies around magnet schools that I know of are for people who don’t want desegregation, as well as for those who do not understand the issues around educating highly gifted students.
If your kids are almost fully grown now, then it sounds like you’ve become a very spiteful man who is out for revenge on the system that you think wronged you, certainly not an advocate of public education.
I think you will find that I typically post about choice schools, which I take to mean magnet and charter schools.
Magnet schools are certainly controversial, at least if you think that “creaming” or “skimming” from the best students from neighborhood schools is a problem. Magnet programs typically require parents to apply, and that act of applying is often taken by posters here as an effective screen, leaving the children of less motivated parents behind in the neighborhood schools. Some magnet schools even have stringent admission requirements that include standardized admission exams. Those schools are perhaps the worst at “creaming” the top students out of the neighborhood schools and are opposed by some posters here like Joe Nathan.
Well-funded public schools, run locally, have served us extraordinarily well, historically. And they continue to serve us well today. If you correct for socioeconomic status, our students are among the best in the world on the international exams. We do have problems in underfunded inner-city and rural schools. The problems, there, are due to poverty, not to having a public school system. Well-funded public schools are key to lifting people out of poverty. They are a necessary but not sufficient condition of that.
That New York Times columnist who praised the privatized Chilean social security system was John Tierney in 2005 (when Bush was trying to privatize/destroy/obliterate Social Security). From Media Matters, 6-15-05: “New York Times columnist John Tierney praised Chile’s privatized pension system for providing financial incentives to work longer and delay retirement. In fact, many Chileans who continue working into their 60s do so because they are too poor to retire. Tierney also falsely suggested that Chile’s system replaces a larger portion of workers’ pre-retirement income “than what the typical American gets from Social Security. [snip]
In his June 14 column, Tierney credited Chile’s system with “a big change in working habits” among elderly workers, including “a 30 percent increase in the labor force participation by workers in their 60’s.” By contrast, Tierney wrote, most elderly Americans are capable of working beyond retirement age, but choose not to because Social Security “in practice promotes greed and sloth.” He offered the Chilean system as a work-promoting alternative:” John Tierney, another corporate whore/stenographer posing as a journalist.
From corpdict.com
Journalist, n.
1a. Corporate whore/stenographer. 1c. Political whore/stenographer. 1c. Oligarchic whore/stenographer. 1d. Plutocratic whore/stenographer
2. Corporate/Political/Oligarchic/Plutocratic brown nosed ass kisser.
3. Republicrat/Dimocan brown nosed ass kissing whore/stenographer.
Guess who suggested vouchers just a few months after hurricane Katrina wiped out the New Orleans school systems?
Yep, that old disaster capitalist himself…Uncle Milton! The same guy who helped push Chile into various economic “reforms”.
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part7/chapter20/friedman-promise-vouchers
Hummm.
Something going on here, just cannot put my finger on it.
We have to face a harsh reality – a lost generation of students who will struggle with just about everything as they reach adulthood because they cannot do the “basics” to be self-sufficient. Chile sounds like a warning to Americans of what “not to do” yet we continue toward privatization. Students cannot write because they have not learned grammar, punctuation and have learned only writing that is short response with canned intro lines and conclusion phrases for high stakes tests. They cannot do basic math because the corporate world pushed horrific curriculum .. since when did learning math facts by memorization become bad??? Sure beats a life-time of counting on fingers and not being able to understand higher concepts in math. I always see proof of the effects of top-down non-teacher designed curriculum and methodologies and its harmful effects on students. I worked on a creative project with 5th grade students that required them to use a ruler to measure 1 inch increments. Not only could they not hold a ruler properly to draw a line between two points, they could not consistently and accurately mark correctly 1 inch increments. Neither the students nor their classroom teachers are negligent here. Grades earlier, they learned to measure in accordance with a pre-planned pacing curricular calendar which teachers are required to follow. If it is the first week in October, the teacher must do “this”.. second week, they must “do that”. Then it is onto the next topic. Learning to use a ruler and measure takes practice and classroom teachers know it. But with the punitive high stakes tests coupled with faced-paced pacing calendars more concerned with coverage of a wide array of subject topics, there is no time to review anything learned. If you learn something new you really haven’t “learned” it if you do not have a change to practice the skill in various ways over time. People like Coleman do not teach and do not understand this … how title one students because of language issues, long-term untended to health issues etc might need more time than a typical middle class student. When I saw 5th graders (in several different title one schools) struggling in the same way, I knew it was not a student or teacher failure in a particular school… it was and remains a failure of those who create curriculum and the attached pacing calendars for the purpose of passing these onerous and useless high stakes tests. WE TRULY HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO WITH A LOST GENERATION OF STUDENTS UNFORTUNATE TO HAVE BEEN SCHOOL AGED DURING CORPORATE “ED REFORM” in AMERICA. And of course, if we do not change course, “that generation” will grow exponentially.
Thank you for providing a specific example of the general problem of the ways in which well-intentioned but extraordinarily misguided reform efforts end up distorting pedagogy and hurting kids. This is, of course, the general case, but people like Arne Duncan and Jeb Bush and Bill Gates are SO FAR REMOVED from classrooms that they haven’t a CLUE as to the ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES of their “reforms.”
One size does not fit all.
@Robert D. Shpherd… indeed “one size does not fit all” and we have title one kids who barely speak English racing through way too much material because it “looks good” for some bureaucrat without ed experience like Arne Duncan! Although I am not sure the motivation is “well-intentioned”.. I believe it is strategic and designed to reign in privatization. I wound up telling the students that neither they nor their teachers are at fault for this inability and then asked them if they had any family members or friends who were carpenters or had jobs requiring math. When hands went up, I told them they should ask these friends and family to help them with measuring! Imagine the irony of racing through a wide girth of material superficially because so much material is on these hideous tests. Even more ironic is the need to suggest they learn what they haven’t been able to learn by telling them to ask family and friends! Whole curriculums are created around these baloney tests – how sad! Ughhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The people behind this mess are trying to expand privatization, not reign it in.
Per the mentioning of Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys, we have, in our country, the same government-enabled vulture capitalism that has been incubating in public schools (and other public agencies) in Chile for almost half a century.
Looking at the big picture, which included the US-backed military coup and installation of Pinochet, the privatization of education is a domination tactic to control the people and the public’s resources. Sadly, Chileans have been the lab guinea pig for so many US social experiments. The price? Silencing the voices of dissent and giving the perception of totalitarian power to a few. Carefully, paid-for propagandists are selected to choose and groom the promising future leaders and policy makers (TFA example). This is using a simple formula, folks, betting on the weaknesses of human behavior. Don’t forget, the Chicago boys were economists. I find it ironic that so many privatized “public” schools have closed accounting books–clearly they are economically successful, too successful.
THIS TYPE OF PRIVATIZATION IS ACTUALLY AN ARM OF THE WAR MACHINE. Whether or not we can admit [in a timely way] that this is now happening in US schools, has everything to do with the degree to which this same, insidiously-growing pedagogy of oppression will control our public resources, destroy our sense of community, and close our children’s minds to the wonder, ideas, and joy a public education should hold.
I reference Paulo Freire’s work.