Peter Greene read about a charter school in Philadelphia that was closing, leaving its students and teachers in the lurch. At first glance, this might seem surprising, but it is actually a feature of the free market in education, not a bug.
Charters close because charter schools are businesses, and businesses close when it is not financially viable for them to stay open.
The free market will never work for a national education system. Never. Never ever.
A business operating in a free market will only stay in business as long as it is economically viable to do so. And it will never be economically viable to provide a service to every single customer in the country.
All business models, either explicitly or implicitly, include decisions about which customers will not be served, which customers will be rejected, because in that model, those customers will be detrimental to the economic viability of the business. McDonald’s could decide to court people who like upscale filet mignons, but the kitchen equipment and training would cost a whole bunch of money that would not bring a corresponding increase in revenue, so they don’t do it.
Apparently some 2,500 charters had closed by 2013. Obviously there have been numerous closings since then, although the U.S. Department of Education won’t release data on how may of the charters it funded have closed.
This is business. Where is Eastern Airlines, Pan American Airlines, Braniff? Where are the small stores that disappeared when Walmart opened? Google the term “brands that disappeared” and you will find dozens of familiar, once iconic brands that no longer exist. Kodak. Woolworth. Tab. Chiclets. All gone.
Public schools are not supposed to open and close in the twinkling of an eye. They are not supposed to compete for survival. They are public services, designed to serve every child in the community who wants to enroll. There is no lottery to enter.
Peter Greene writes:
The first question of the public education system has to be, “How can we get a great education for every single child in this country?” The first question for a business has to be, “What model can we use that will keep this business economically viable?’ And the answer to that question will never, ever be, “By providing an education to every child in this country.” There will always be students who live in the economic cracks, niche customers that no business wants because there will never be money in them. Some charter fans suggest, either explicitly or implicitly, that educating those students will be the job of public education. But that represents a dramatic and complete re-imagining of the purpose of public education, and to repurpose an entire public sector without a public discussion is irresponsible and undemocratic.
In the meantime, charter schools will continue to close when it makes business sense to do so, no matter what sorts of promises they made to the families of their students. Charter schools think like businesses, not like schools, because charter schools are businesses. We cannot be surprised when they act like businesses, and we cannot keep hiding from a discussion about the implications of turning that business mindset on a public good.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent summary of the issue with the for-profit model.
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The Best and the Brightest already know this from health care. Why they have decided to turn the US K-12 system into the US health care system is beyond rational explanation.
It isn’t “the best health care in the world”. It’s ruinously expensive and tragically unequally delivered.
You want to scream “stop! you will REGRET this!” but the train just keeps rolling. The most remarkable part if the OBAMA Administration backs and promotes each and every step. They “reformed” health care and then set out to turn K-12 INTO the broken healthcare system. You can’t make this stuff up. No one would believe it.
I don’t think people who valued public education in the first place could be so reckless. I think they had to start with complete contempt for existing schools, or they wouldn’t just pitch them in the trash. People don’t take huge risks with things they actually value.
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From the moment public education became monetized, many policymakers became cheerleaders for charters. While we did have an economic meltdown, many states continue to cut budgets and services despite an improved economy. Now we see public education being considered a poor foster child. Monetization has devalued our public schools. http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/most-states-have-cut-school-funding-and-some-continue-cutting
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Why should any of these people value or care about public schools?
Few of them, Barack Obama notably, ever attended them. Fewer still send/sent their children to them. And a so-small-as-to-be-meaningless number of them have spent any real time working in a public school classroom.
These people are so removed from the realities faced by most Americans, and so convinced of their personal merit and superiority, that they see public school school students and teachers as losers who deserve the contempt they are shown.
Add the near-limitless dollars offered them by the Overclass patrons of so-called reform, combined with a narrative designed to mask their smash-and-grab policies, and it’s no wonder that education today is overrun by transient naifs (who never intended to stay or else are chewed up and spit out) passing through, many career opportunists, and a hard core of monsters who will bring the entire edifice down in order to try to satisfy the insatiable greed and will to power of a few.
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Correction Public schools strive…
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Once again, it’s not a free market if depends on involuntary contributions via taxation.
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I don’t think there’s much hope for our side if we cannot disentangle our minds from the web of warped semantics spun by the arachno-capitalists.
No offense to natural-born spiders, of course …
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The Mayor of Detroit said that yesterday. He said a billion dollars in taxpayer funding isn’t a free market.
This statement of the obvious is now considered “brave”, I guess.
Nothing like a government-created market that is wholly manipulated and managed by a small group of elite engineers and then everyone works very, very hard to pretend it’s not!
Thank God everyone hasn’t lost their minds and someone busts thru this nonsense.
They should stop calling themselves “agnostics” and use the proper term- it’s “potted plant”.
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Can anyone give me directions to the “Free Market”?
When I “flew to it” on google earth it took me to 13, 33 14.99 North and 29 29 42.44 West. Pretty hard to drive there.
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You gotta go by Lazy Fare Airlines ✈️
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It’s a rigged market if wealthy people pour millions into ensuring that their views prevail at any cost. How is buying the media and influencing policymakers to demonize public education a fair form of competition for public schools? I know capitalism often works that way, but public schools have neither the means or interest in competing on that level. Democratic public education is supposed to be for the common benefit of all. Our leaders should be working on ways to integrate them and equitably fund them, not how to undermine and destroy them.
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Duane,
Look for the source of free energy and there you will find the free market.
Rumor has it it is in Stanley Pons’ old lab in the chemistry building on the University of Utah campus.
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Jon Awbrey,
Re “You gotta go by Lazy Fare Airlines ✈️”
Very Clever!
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We closed a public school here because we’re building a new one. The school has been operating since 1906 so thousands of people went there and they are attached to it.
It took 2 votes, a series of community meetings and a “goodbye” ceremony to ease them into letting go of this part of their lives and we are replacing the school with a public school!
I thought about Chicago, where they just ripped into those neighborhoods and tore them asunder I can’t help but notice the difference. This is a brutal ideology. It’s reckless and uncaring. I know they pat themselves on the back and crow about their “toughness” and deliver scolding lectures everytime they’re challenged, but this is a bad way to operate.
Public schools are more than contract service providers. They’re wrong.
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What’s sad is the appalling disregard the privatization industry has when eradicating institutions that have been around for 100 years or more, that have served generations upon generations in the same exact buildings, or some of the same buildings (mixed in with newer ones.)
What was once a unifying stabilizing force in the community and in democracy (many are used as polling places, for example) is gone. The school is cited for failure, when in actuality, the school has been systematically defunded and starved of resources, and even propagandized against by corporate forces that have seized control of the district.
It’s similar to the spectacle of U.S. Post Office officials telling people, “This place where I work sucks in delivering your mail and packages. Go to Fed Ex down the street. It’s so much better.” Joel Klein in NYC even sent letters to that effect to parents.
Some buildings are given over to Acme Charter, Inc. Some are just left empty. With schemes like “unified enrollment”, students have to travel miles for the school that has been chosen for them, and have to pass buy the closed institutions.
In many instances, Acme Charter, Inc. folds just a few years later, and Ronco Rent-A-School Charter takes over, and that school, under newer management, closes just a few years later.
Everyone recalls how in late 2008, just after his election, Obama used one of these schools as a photo op to announce Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Ed. He bragged about how Arne made the tough decision, firing all the teachers, putting Acme Charter, Inc. (not the real name), and how the new school was an improvement over the older one.
Just a few years later, that photo op school went to Hell and closed, and another private management group took over. The process is likely to repeat itself.
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One of my sisters thinks it’s partly because the elite in the US don’t really live anywhere long. You see it with top ed reformers and people in business. They do “job stints” in places. They wouldn’t have any kind of experience with that multi-generational sense of place.
The school CEO in Chicago, the one who was indicted, went from NYC to Detroit to Cleveland to Chicago. Where does she “live”? How can she get any sense of these places or what’s important to people?
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The point about “no attachment to place” is interesting and very similar to the one that David Korten makes in What If Trade Agreements Helped People, Not Corporationsabout corporations and trade agreements like TPP
“a transnational corporation is a pool of financial assets with no attachment to a particular place. Unless its employees are owners, they are subject to instant dismissal. Captive to the demands of global financial markets to maximize short-term financial return, transnational corporations are prone to exploit every opportunity to shift costs from themselves to the communities in which they do business. They seek to employ the fewest possible workers wherever they can pay the lowest wages, provide the fewest benefits, pay the lowest taxes, and most freely exploit nature”
//end quote
When people (or corporations) have no stake in the communities they are interacting with, they simply don’t care what happens over the long term.
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Well, as always, if we’re going to talk about “failure” or “success” we have to talk about what it is that we’re trying to do in the first place. The free market has been quite successful for a lot of people involved in education because providing good learning opportunities for all children was never what they were trying to succeed at in the first place.
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It’s always been disturbing to me that supporters of charters have never been able to acknowledge that market forces are the reason for charters and not altruism. Are the Walton family, the Koch Brothers, and the hedge fund crowd really concerned with the state of public education? Come on. How much of that fake narrative of unions vs. children– a favorite of billionaires– have we heard? Yet how often do we hear about the very real and frightening issue of profit driven investors vs. what is in the best interest of children? Just the fact that children are transformed into data points like factory widgets is disturbing enough. You’d think more people would get it.
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Good posts prior to mine. I’ll add something here: note how it’s always called “school choice.” Not “parental choice.” Because ultimately, in a free market system, the schools will be the entities that choose. They will be privately run and can decide who they want to serve.
Charters, in many cases, already do this by reverse engineering their student bodies and not backfilling seats. Sure, anyone can be in the lottery, but can you withstand the pressures if you don’t fit their “model”?
A fully privatized system can never happen because many would be denied an education. Imagine a troubled student who keeps getting shuffled from school to school. They’ll give up often. Public schools are on their way to being dumping grounds for the academically expensive, struggling and troublemakers. You know, the tough kids to educate. The very kids charter operators insist that they are saving. And this is a feature according to guys like Petrilli from Fordham (schools for strivers!).
In many urban areas, it’s already a dual system. Everyone knows it and no one says it.
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“In many urban areas, it’s already a dual system. Everyone knows it and no one says it.”
Steve, does this quality as my saying it?…
We also now have in “Poverty Absorption Efficacy: Clayton County Public Schools vs. Atlanta Public Schools” (pdf, ppsx) a voice saying the usually more extensive variation among Atlanta “low academic performance” elementary and middle schools highlights not only the existence of more cost- and waste-producing processes Atlanta has compared with Clayton, but also highlights the common view that Atlanta is two disparate systems in one: One North, one South. One rich, one poor. One White, one Black.
Read more…
https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/84d7bc98-11a4-4205-8d4d-a3fff0749726
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What you describe provides fuel for the privatizers to justify their market based approach. It is a form of social engineering. Once they sort and rank students, they then ration out opportunity. This is wrong. Public public strives to provide opportunity for all, but it is a difficult task to accomplish when the people that control the purse strings don’t support equality and opportunity for all. Change is needed!
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“Michael Fiorillo
June 3, 2016 at 10:22 am
Why should any of these people value or care about public schools?
Few of them, Barack Obama notably, ever attended them. Fewer still send/sent their children to them. And a so-small-as-to-be-meaningless number of them have spent any real time working in a public school classroom.”
My husband attended private schools and it really is a different mindset. He had to get used to the idea that it’s a public school and everyone doesn’t get everything they want- there are CONSTANT trade-offs and compromises- and everything is endlessly debated.
I run into it with friends. There’s a religious school here that has very loyal parents and I’ll mention something good that happened in the public schools and they’re always skeptical- they say things like “I’m surprised there are volunteer parents”. You just get the sense they’ve bought into this “public school as barren hell-hole” idea completely.
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One more FAIL. One more SCANDAL.
Just another day in Reform-Land.
This time its one of the Koch brothers:
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Many hundreds of traditional public schools close every year, as this table from NCES illustrates: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=619
Some school buildings may be taken out of service to be replaced by a new facility, as Chiara notes. But many likely close because there aren’t a sufficient number of students available to the school to make it operationally viable, and a district is either consolidating entirely with another district, or consolidating schools within itself (this was the case when the traditional public elementary school I was attending as a child abruptly closed).
It’s disappointing and unfortunate that in some responses to other reader comments, Greene chose to go the “charter school parents are dupes” route, saying that they are falling for slick marketing campaigns. As if Greene would ever in a million years consider sending his grandchildren to the types of neighborhood public schools that charter school parents are opting out of. As if those same parents haven’t been hearing for decades that all those neighborhood schools need is more money and more time. As if we don’t have New Jersey as a model of how agonizingly and incrementally slow improvement happens, if it happens at all, when we increase funding (by a lot) and don’t do much of anything else.
There already was an educational market firmly in place before charter schools came along–public schools determined by residence. It is why we have segregation, period.
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That isn’t how it went in Chicago, Tim. What I said was that I was struck by how carefully this community treated the closure of a school compared to how brutally “transformation” was engineered in Chicago.
Ed reformers in Chicago had a choice. They chose to go in there like a freaking conquering army and close those schools. Rahm Emanuel got glowing reviews in the political press for his “toughness”. Yeah, he’s a real tough guy.
You know what happened here? They gave older people bricks from the school to take home. We had a photo exhibit that a depiction of horse-drawn milk delivery to the school. THAT’S the history. The whole thing was handled with respect and a recognition that that place means something to them.
That isn’t how you treat “owners”, Tim. You don’t charge in and take their property. THEY OWN those schools. They built them and paid for them while Rahm Emanuel was living elsewhere. They should have been asked.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes and how inconvenient it is. Treating people decently is not optional.
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Tim, I currently teach in a working class district that has seen decreases in enrollment. We have closed schools. It has been an agonizing process. Here’s why: the district has to sit down with the public, the community, and decide which schools to close and/or consolidate.
The elected board has to hold open meetings and listen to community voices before making decisions. So, even though we have no choice but to close buildings, it was a community effort and decision. We had to close a high school, and that was very emotional. And not everyone is getting what they want. But they received the opportunity to make their case and present to the board.
Charters can just close. No discussion with stakeholders. No reason has to be given. Traditional public schools serve the community. Charter schools serve themselves. I’ve seen charters close in nearby areas. I’ve had friends who taught at those charters hear about the upcoming closure the last week of school. The reason in every case was financial viability. The unelected board simply decided to close. They can simply pack up and leave because they are often not part of the community.
In the one case where an entire district (Muskegon Heights, Michigan) was handed to a charter operator, they backed out of their agreed upon contract early (and were stupidly allowed to do so). The reasons that Mosaica wanted out? It was no longer financial profitable for them to run the schools. They were, in fact, pretty open about that. So even when they were supposed to serve a community, they abandoned it because of $. And they disappeared and not a word was said about it.
So, I’m not going to say that all school closures are created equally. But I will say that the processes and the reasons are significantly different between most charter closures and most public school closures.
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Also, in reference to the “slick marketing campaign” par that you question, we see it all the time in Michigan. A new school opens, recruits neighborhoods. Promises things, which can’t be refuted because the school is new, fails to deliver but keeps suckering people in once its established.
A nearby charter overwhelmingly flyer-ed an apartment complex full of Asian students. But didn’t do the same across the street, literally across the street, with an African-American apartment community. Wonder why they recruited one demographic and not the other?
And this happens a lot. Not all public schools are perfect but you act like charters don’t execute sleazy practices. They do and there are countless examples.
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When charter schools close, they simply dump kids back into the public school. When public schools close, they remain responsible for the education of those children displaced. Therein lies the difference.
Its the difference between a babysitter and a parent.
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Tim,
Clearly the answer to the problems is to open privately managed schools that are allowed to cherry pick their students and that are more segregated than public schools. Oh, yes, and let the CEO earn half a million or more and spend $700,000 on political rallies. That makes sense (not).
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NYS Parent, it is astonishing that reformers like Tim demonstrate their ignorance so blatantly.
If you are a charter school and you don’t want to serve a more “costly” kid, the system Tim is cheering on INCENTIVIZES you to get rid of him. The reason no-excuses charters “succeed” is that no-excuses simply is a way of weeding out the students who don’t do well academically. So they need to treat the kids who they want one way (to get them to stay) and the kids that they don’t want another way (to get them to leave). When you are a reformer, you love it! Because you think if the charter doesn’t want a kid, he wasn’t worthy in the first place and deserves as little as possible.
In the public system, if you start putting lots of kids on “got to go” lists, you pay the $100,000 bill for each of them to get the special private school education you are telling their parents they need to get them out of your school. But charters — once they are out, you don’t pay a penny for their cost. Funny how the same people who love the “free market” completely ignore one of the primary ways the free market works. Only serve the customers who are financially worth serving.
It’s like a bus company who is supposed to take each passenger to their home for the same price. The “charter” bus company has an incentive to treat the kids who live 20 miles out of the way like dirt to get them to “choose” another bus company. But free snacks to the kids who live near by! No wonder the bus company rewards drivers who are the best at getting the “out of the way kids” onto a different company’s buses. Sound familiar?
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[start] “charter school parents are dupes” [end]
A clumsy distortion that is merely a projection of rheephorm attitudes onto their critics.
All to pit targeted groups of present and potential customers/clients against those in favor of a “better education for all” in order to achieve those marvelous metrics of $tudent $ucce$$ aka ROI.
From whence proceeds what passes for wisdom among the purveyors and enforcers of corporate education reform? Perhaps one of those founts has been brought to light…
Today’s LATIMES, David Lazarus, in an article entitled “Lesson 1 at Trump University: The hard sell.”
Link: http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-trump-university-20160603-snap-story.html
It mentions a playbook. Perhaps it is making rheephorm rounds as I write this…
😎
P.S. The heavyweights and shot callers of corporate education reform were known long long ago.
Take a very dead and very old and very Roman guy:
“For greed all nature is too little.” [Lucius Annaeus Seneca]
😏
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How are you a “dupe” if you have an easy to teach kid and the charter school offers you a “free private school education”? How are you a “dupe” if, as the affluent parents of kids who go to charters publicly write, your kid is celebrated and all is done to make sure their special needs don’t make them feel bad about themselves. Instead of being suspended as the low-income unwanted kids are, your special needs kid experiences “the exhaustive consideration he gets from the entire staff to reach him, and teach him, where he is. Once they figured out his optimal learning style, they swiftly adapted so he could progress along with his peers.” Wow! I bet those parents whose kids were on the got to go list didn’t find the charter school quite so accommodating, but then, they didn’t run finance and consultant companies or have their own tv shows. How ironic that charter schools prefer to serve the kids with the MOST choices rather than the ones with the least!
I think what Tim means is that you are a “dupe” if you are a parent who can see the bigger picture and understand that your kid’s “free private school education” is coming at the expense of the unwanted kids on the got to go list, who are far more likely to be at-risk and have special needs.
Caring about those kids when your own kid can benefit if you ignore their plight makes you a “dupe”. What is very sad is that charter schools have forced parents with few choices into such a choice by doing their best to make sure that they do everything possible to take money out of the struggling public schools.
The brilliance of the charter school movement is to appeal to the majority of kids while not caring one whit about what happens to the kids who hurt your bottom line. That’s why people like Tim adore the “free market”. Because the schools who are best at marketing to the easiest kids and dumping the most expensive will always flourish. Until they have saturated the market and the expensive kids are concentrated exactly where those charter school supporters think they belong — in dumps and prison schools.
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Tim,
NB: “when we increase funding (by a lot) and don’t do much of anything else.” Why aren’t there more so-called reform types working for much of anything else?
A GOP gentleman in NJ often tweets Why does Bernie resonate? to GOP leaders. Is it because Sanders cites the need to do anything else/provide living wage, universal healthcare, infrastructure?
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booklady,
Those types of reforms are extremely difficult because of the politics involved, and I suspect many wealthy donors don’t think their money can make any difference (although that hasn’t stopped Mike Bloomberg from spending a ton of money on gun control).
Some specific reforms that would address education — eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, e.g., which is a prime driver of segregation and educational inequity (http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-26/the-mortgage-interest-deduction-is-bad-for-schools-and-education), or eliminating the connection between residence and school assignment, as Elizabeth Warren and Mitt Romney have proposed — are probably political non-starters.
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The phone number for Albright Stonebridge is 1-202-759-5100. They are the influence peddlers who have, hedge funder Paul Singer as a client. In addition to his charter school promotion, he is instrumental in bankrupting Puerto Rico. Hillary Clinton appointed two employees of Albright Stonebridge, to the DNC platform committee. DNC, vetoed the participation, of leaders from industry trade unions, on the platform committee (report from Campaign for America’s Future).
In the management photos at Albright Stonebridge, only one woman, other than Albright, made the gallery. “There’s a special place in hell” for Madelyn Albright.
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I think what’s happening to traditional and stable public education has more to do with artificially manufacturing disruptive innovation than anything else thinking that it will lead to a better world but for who? It’s all about forcing consumers (with an emphasis on being forced to do what you don’t want to do) to buy into the next big thing even if people don’t want to buy the next big thing, because they are comfortable and satisfied with what they already have.
The rest of my comment is an angry ran to support what I think is happening. If you don’t want to read an angry rant stop here.
For instance, I didn’t want a smart phone but ended up with one several years ago anyway because it came heavily discounted when we changed our mobile phone plan. That irritating smart phone I seldom used hung on my belt up until a few weeks ago when I walked into the mobile phone store and told them I was going to close my account if they didn’t have a dumb flip phone to replace the irritating smart phone that I had learned to despise. To keep me as a consumer of their service, I walked out with a dumb flip phone that is a lot less irritating to my lifestyle choices.
And that is what it is all about, choice. We want to make our own choices, but they want to make our choices for us.
Then I recently turned in the car I’d been driving for eleven years. I was comfortable with what that car offered. It just didn’t have the cargo space I wanted. The new car I leased had the cargo space but it was loaded with irritating high tech consumer crap worse than that smart phone I recently trashed — the simpler to use dumber tech for my lifestyle choices wasn’t offered with that car.
I’m starting to regret the loss of my previous car and I am learning to hate Toyota and detest its management and the rest of the corporations for what they are doing to disrupt our lives and force us out of our comfort zones to increase their profits, wealth and power. If I want to leave my comfort zone, that decision should be up to me, not some autocratic corporate CEO or money sucking greedy billionaire.
These SOBs are stealing our right to have a choice by making our choices for us through their so-called disruptive innovation movement, and this is what’s at the core of the autocratic, for profit at any price corporate war being wage against democratic, community based, transparent, non-profit public education.
When surveyed by Gallup or Pew annually, it is clear that an overwhelming number of parents are comfortable with and trust their local community based public schools and the professional teachers that teach in those schools — even after decades of propaganda funded by coronations/billionaire oligarchs that’s designed to stereotype and demonize traditional public education, public school teachers and teachers’ unions.
There is nothing organic going on here. This artificial and manipulative disruptive innovation movement from the top down is being driven and controlled by a few at the top who are following an agenda that the rest of us have no voice in. We are being treated like a herd of sheep and the Eva Moskowitzes, John Kings, Arne Duncans and Michelle Rhees of the United States are attach dogs trained to make sure the rest of us go where Bill Gates, the Waltons, Broads, Koch, etc. want us to go even if it means running is all off a cliff to die.
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I’m also tired of being told public schools must “learn” from charter schools. I live in Ohio. I don’t want my public school to turn into a charter school. White Hat isn’t my idea of “good government”.
Thanks but no thanks, Governor Kasich and President Obama. We’ll just soldier along without the ed reform crew. I’m not real impressed with the Ohio “charter sector” and I don’t want or need innovations like paying teachers 15k less or ducking regulation.
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What about the innovative “mouth bubble”?
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The ed reform club itself admits what anyone with eyes and ears already knows: there is no real debate in DC. Bush is Obama is the next President.
“At first blush, there wouldn’t seem to be much that George W. Bush and Barack Obama share in common. The two presidents differ not only in style and temperament, but also in their approach to economic policy, health care reform, and foreign affairs. But in a new article in Education Next, Paul Peterson argues that the two presidents pursued the same basic strategy when it comes to education policy – and that a new approach will be required to put American schools on the right track.”
The one and only question is whether or not the echo chamber goes full-bore vouchers.
There’s no real debate on anything else.
They’re ga-ga over this dogma in DC. It’s hopeless. There isn’t a single dissenter. It reminds me of the 1990’s and financial deregulation. They were like a pack of lemmings running off a cliff. You couldn’t even question it- they were too busy worshipping at the altar of Greenspan.
http://educationnext.org/ednext-podcast-shared-legacy-of-bush-obama-education-policy/
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Chiara,
You are completely right. There are no dissenting voices in DC, except the Economic Policy Institute, which does not get Gates funding. All the other think tanks, and the leaders of both parties are “all in” for corporate reform. For Common Core, for high-stakes testing, for “rigor,” for VAM, for charters. Vouchers is only a step away.
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Will someone please explain to me how extracting profits (by any other name) from a non-profit enterprise can make things better? Is it magic?
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The reality of what gets better is the balance sheet of the profit extractor, especially when tax breaks, credits and write offs are part of the deal. As someone stated here before,”the risk is socialized, and the profit is privatized.”
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This discussion has taken me down memory lane to the public schools I attended. One of these, Hillsborough High School in Tampa Florida, has been rehabbed several times, but it remains a landmark in school architecture from an era when attending and completing “high” school was a major achievement. The website has a curated collection of documents showing the history of the school’s founding and various locations before the current building was built, with magnificent Gothic architecture, refelecting some high aspirations for the experience of going to school. The school has been rehabbed several times, with “moderate”but important attention to preservation. The International Baccalaureate program is thriving, but that seems to have created a school within a school and conflicts among the students and the faculty.
http://www.tampapix.com/HHS.htm
Then there is the story of what Bill Gates did to the Hillsborough County Schools and the demoralization that his money has created–his demand for pay-for-performance, worship of metrics especially test scores, the wholesale destruction of morale, and now a budget that is busted. Bill Gates did serous damage to a decent school system. For him, there was not an ounce of value to this particular high school. It could have been a big box store.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-schools-shouldering-millions-more-than-expected-in/2246528
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