Bill Boyle writes that it is time to get over the illusion that privatization is “for the kids.” That privatization will “save poor kids from failing schools.”
After reading Ruth Conniff’s writing about the Economic Policy Institute’s study of privatization in Milwaukee, Boyle says we are “sacrificing our kids,” not saving them.
Boyle asks:
“Can we finally be honest about that fact that for profit charters simply move money from that which is set aside for the common good to corporate profits at the expense of children, particularly those in poverty and of color?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mr.Boyle shouldn’t limit his critique to “for-profit” charters, since even the so-called non-profit schools grossly overpay their executives, make sleazy deals with for-profit management companies, and function as fronts for real estate development and gentrification (see Teacher’s Village in Newark).
We need to hold fast to the message and get it across that – whatever the naive, manipulated idealism of some charter school teachers and proponents – charter schools are not “for the kids.”
Period.
Michael Fiorillo: what you wrote was a needed addendum to this posting.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
If we are realistic, we will see there is no stopping the billionaire reform movement. It is like an out of control California wildfire, and continuing to throw buckets of water on it won’t stop it. Even if NPE is successful in getting Congressional hearings, that will be a long and painful process of grandstanding. Do we really trust our lobbyists supported Congress to acknowledge the battered children and battered teachers, since they are the ones who have allowed and promoted this battering? Do we really trust in anyone in Washington DC to care about the welfare of children more than they care about preening their big egos or their pocketbooks.
Bill Gates, the robot who thinks he is God and expects to create all children in his image, “owns” the US Congress, as well as the White House. Bill Gates is the personification of evil, and the best dystopiian example of how money can corrupt.
I think we all see what’s happening here. And this would link to New Orleans’ claims of school improvement.
The narrative is that public schools fail and charters are magnificent. It’s repeated endlessly through selective statistics. New Orleans will proclaim constant improvement no matter what. They already are.
Then everyone will realize that not much has changed in terms of performance and schools aren’t any better. But by then it will be too late to move back to traditional public schools. It would be massive public undertaking.
There is this belief that somehow every student is incredible. Opportunity is important is reality but not everyone is gifted. Ultimately, people will be stuck with the school system that isn’t enriching (must focus on reading and math), filled with endless drills and drudgery and leads to children hating school more than they currently do.
Or it will be an online model that only works for the truly self-motivated. The entrepreneurs will make their money and not really care. The system isn’t about creating choice. It’s about limiting choices (by getting rid of traditional public schools). Again, New Orleans is the example of how everyone will want to go. A bunch of schools that do essentially the same thing, a few that provide trade or vocational education and the appearance of choices when the similarities are so great that the differentiation between schools isn’t noteworthy. But those schools will make money for someone who will control the message and claim awesome growth.
If New Orleans is improving so fast, I would expect them to have the best urban scores in the nation inside five years. Somehow I doubt that will be the case but they’ll latch on to some other statistic to justify their methods.
“NOT for the kids”
So true! But that won’t get in the way of a daily flow of vested interest propaganda.
For the kids, or per pupil spending, are code words used like a silent dog whistle to
act like an emotional marker for those “attuned” to “moral” issues. The emotional cards
are rolled out to hide the underlying connection to capital entitlement preservation.
In the end, ANY metric can be manipulated to create or preserve the “Franchise”.
A sense of justice entangled with their conviction of personal merit or excellence,
fuels the delusion, where the greater concern is with imagages not realities, since
most of their time is spent in front of screens of one kind or another.
In recent decades, criticisms of American K-12 public schools have steadily increased and driven families away from the institution, creating further disengagement from and deterioration of the system. Reports like A Nation At Risk use the failures of public schools to explain the nation’s economic decline (Urban & Wagoner, 2009). In order to address these failing schools, government task forces like the National Partnership for Reinventing Government were created to adapt private sector management techniques to the public sector (Ravich, 2010). In line with this collaborative philosophy, various combinations of state and non-state actors have joined forces to form what are known as public private partnerships (PPPs). According to Robertson, Mundy, Antoni & Menashy (2012):
At the broadest level, PPPs can be defined as ‘cooperative institutional arrangements between public and private sector actors’, or more elaborately as ‘…cooperation of some sort of durability between public and private actors, in which they jointly develop products and services and share risks, costs and resources which are connected with these products’(pg. 1).
While these PPPs are purported as tools of governance developed to resolve problems facing the development of a community, they do not always accomplish this outcome, and sometimes hurt both the public and private actors engaged in the partnership.
Many private agencies believe that the core of educational practice should orient around the principles of the marketplace in order to generate more efficient solutions than could be reached by the public sector alone. There is both a supply and demand side of this privatization. As such, for-profit firms that sell accountability commodities (i.e. – textbooks and testing services) have grown, increasing both profitability and policy influence for these firms. Similarly, other firms have provided services to districts which allow them to expand into charter management organizations and human capital providers (Bulkley & Burch, 2011). This private involvement has not necessarily inspired confidence in the community’s perception of public schools. In fact, K-12 public schools are now mired in test and accountability measures that have further disengaged the public school community, leading families that have money and a different taste for education to explore and select other K-12 schooling options (Buddin, Cordes, & Kirby, 1998; Gladwell, 2013; Ravich, 2010).
To make matters worse, obtaining this profit can come at a cost for private businesses as well, as it requires them to spend time acting as inefficient governmental bodies working outside of their own area of competence (Sasse & Trahan, 2007). One example of this is the role that the Ford Foundation played in schools in the 1960s, wherein it was rebuked by all sides for having instigated racial tensions due to its involvement in the schools. At the time, “…the leadership of the demonstration districts felt betrayed by Ford, because their efforts at community control were thwarted, and criticisms of decentralization blamed Ford for encouraging the militants who demanded community control” (Ravich, 2010, p. 197). In short, some educational PPPs can become lose-lose situations that are driven by profit and /or that are veiled attempts by firms to encourage families to opt for other education models and undermine the K-12 public school system. In these situations, neither the public schools nor the private firms are made better by their role in the partnership.
It goes without saying that failed partnerships and the flight from our K-12 public schools has a disproportionate impact on certain groups, most notably students from the lower socio-economic class, who do not have the ability to access other education options. These students are left to obtain their education from a “failed” public-school system where private partners are less interested in student rights to a good education and more interested in increasing profit for their firms (Noguera, 2003).