Alex Molnar, research professor and publications director at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, writes here about the privatization movement and its sustained attack on public education.
He writes:
Today, politicians in thrall to neoliberal ideology seek to subordinate the democratic mission of public education to a theory of market-driven economic development and social organization. Policy deliberations are now dominated by of econometric modeling and production function research. This modeling and research is often used, inappropriately, to make decisions about the value of education reforms. The mathematical models used by researchers are made to “work” only by assuming away much of the real world in which people live and students learn. The phantasmagorical belief in neutral “scientific” expertise as the primary basis for policymaking has, therefore, profoundly antihuman as well as antidemocratic implications — a topic Sheila Dow takes up in “People Have Had Enough of Experts.”[5]
The major education reforms of the past 35 years — education vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, and education savings accounts — all seek to remove public schools from the control of elected bodies; to subject them to the “laws” of the “market”; and to put them at the service of the economic elite. The world being called into existence is based on the belief that anyone, but not everyone, can succeed—a world of winners and losers, each of whom has earned his or her fate.
Of course, if the privatizers actually believed in science or evidence, they would have already abandoned vouchers, which has no research to support it, and whose results have been shown in some places to actually harm students. In effect, students are given a low-cost voucher to spend in a school where teachers are usually uncertified and the curriculum is based on 19th century ideas that have been long disproven. It is ideology, not science, that drives the voucher movement, and its wicked stepsisters, tax credits and education savings accounts.
Those who believe in evidence would also demand transparency and accountability from privately managed charter schools, which in many states are excused from such inconveniences and use their freedom to kick out and exclude students they don’t want.
Molnar examines the policies of the past 25 years and their neglect of the lives of people affected by them.
He writes:
Over the past two and a half decades, the poor in privatized urban schools have been successfully harnessed to the delivery of reliable profits to investors and munificent salaries to executives. At the same time, the working class has discovered that schools in their communities often cost more than they can afford to pay. The decades of wage stagnation, unemployment, and tax shifting have taken their toll. Teachers and the unions that had won them the relatively high wages, job security, and benefits that are a distant memory for many blue collar workers became a useful target for the ideologues and politicians pursuing neoliberal reforms.
The neoliberal argument is that public schools cost too much (the largest item in a school budget is for teacher salaries) and performed too poorly to justify the tax dollars they commanded. If “star” teachers could be freed from the union wage scale to earn what they were worth, the resulting competition would create incentives for better teacher performance. Mediocre teachers would earn less, and low performing teachers would be fired. The mechanism proposed for measuring teacher performance was assessing the performance of their students on standardized tests. So began the policy embrace of “Value Added Assessment” (VAA). In the kind of methodologically sophisticated, intellectually fatuous study that has become all too common, Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff claim to have found long-term economic benefits for students whose teachers have higher “value added” scores.[22]
This is a valuable overview of the recent past, the present, and the likely future. Unless we fight back hard.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Cross posted his article at Oped news :https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Dismantling-Public-Educati-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Economic_Public-Education_Public-Education_Public-Interest-170309-885.html
So-called education reform is based on “… a theory of market-driven development and social organization.”
Well, theoretically, everything works in theory, right?
The willful obtuseness, hypocrisy and/or straight-out lying of so-called reformers knows no limits. After all, mention the profit (“market-driven”) imperatives of so-called reform, the linchpin of the whole shebang, and you get chided for impugning the motives of so-called reformers, despite their open worship of profit as be-all and end-all.
What’s to be said? Lying liars lie; it’s what they do.
Good overview of what we have been talking about here for years. However he misses one point: the reform movement’s complete dominance, and unchallenged even to today, of the narrative surrounding education.
This morning my father and I had an argument about how he saw no problem with charters and vouchers, and the entire scheme of privatization for the following 2 reasons:
1) if you are a good teacher the free market will reward you (insane, I know.)
2) “you are damn right I want to be able to choose where my money goes!”
Both of these arguments are absolutely ridiculous to most of us here, but to the general public they are absolutely compelling. Our side now has to deal with how to counter them. Academic studies and papers is not going to do it obviously. In fact, no appeals to the basic virtue of the idea of public education will do it either. Nor will systematic explanations of their falsehoods. No….in fact the only real choice against simple-as-dirt, “common sense”-ish, financially empowering (“my money!”) rhetoric deployed by privatizers was to not let the rhetoric turn into a broad based narrative in the first place.
This is a problem the left has with right wing narratives in general but ours is particularly acute.
You make a very good point about the logic of the argument from the other side. It is one of the same arguments made by Ryan and company as they dismantle the ACA. There will be more choices, and aren’t choices wonderful? He fails to mention that millions will pay more for less, and some will be unable to afford insurance at all. Our position is authentic, but much harder to explain. People tend to understand things from their own perspective, and they see charters and vouchers as “free” as public schools are to them. They don’t get the consequences of all this choice.
Alternative narratives:
The free market offers low wages to teachers, good or bad –just look at Mississippi or your local charter school. Low-wage schools will not attract the brightest. Collective bargaining raises wages and thereby attracts talent.
Proliferation of competing schools could mean that none will thrive –like seedlings that have not been thinned.
What neoliberal or apparently almost any other politician fails to recognize about teachers in their ignorant and insulting push for “motivating” good teaching with “merit” pay: kids are diverse, nonstandard, unique and unpredictable. There may be teachers who match each child’s needs at different times in each child’s life but there IS NO STANDARD “STAR” TEACHER. Such a model cannot be produced or replicated.
Agreed. I sat on the building IST that reviewed class lists. The princiipal had letters from parents with requests which only she reviewed. The principal and committee moved a couple of students after teachers’ names were on the lists because a change of teacher made more sense for some students. We tried to head off conflicts early without making students and teachers suffer. It was not a perfect system. but it was better than doing nothing.
IST = ???
Thank you for bring this excellent history and summary to the blog.
Not mentioned enough perhaps is that the econometric turn in education has been enabled by the testing regime with “big data” ready-made for slicing and dicing by economists.
Now the biggie is “innovation” in education, preferably disruptive, with new metrics that will rate cities on their innovation in education. The drumbeat for innovation is almost exclusively on behalf of expanding market-based education. The venture and vulture capitalists are rushing in, including billionaire-funded non-profits who are “impatient” with the deliberative work that is so vital to a democratic form of governance and decision-making.
In one of the newest schemes cities are being ranked by their innovation in education. No, this is not another of Richard Florida’s ideas about “creatives” being the key to economic prosperity. The new scheme of rating cities on education innovation rests in large part on finding locales where there are a high proportion of failing schools, especially schools that have not closed the achievement gap in the last five years. That failure means the city gets a high rating on potential for innovation.
In this new US Education Innovation Index, charters are viewed as innovative, so are districts with Gates compacts (e.g., charters can co-locate and get other perks from public schools). Makers of the index favor mayor control of schools and look for other conditions that favor market based education, including the incubators and ready-to-tap venture capital. Innovative experiments are highly praised. Promoters give only lip service to the principle of “do no harm.” Here is the first draft of the US Education innovation index from (drumroll) Bellwether Education, one of the go-to firms for publicity about anything but public education.
http://bellwethereducation.org/publication/us-education-innovation-index-prototype-and-report (web overview) .
What a horrible idea! We do not need more biased big data based on erroneous assumptions. Gates gets a pass on all his lousy ideas because he has more money than any one person should have, and markets don’t solve educational problems; they help create them.
Innovation just means “new”. “New” often means “worse”. Common Core is an innovation. In my view, it is no good. The project-method was an innovation in 1915. I think it has done more harm than good in American education. Fetishization of innovation is an American cultural pathology.
Old axiom:
What is new is not necessarily true.
What is true is not necessarily new.
Innovation for the sake of innovation is nonsense.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report that, because of their lack of accountability to the public, charter schools pose a risk to the Department of Education’s goals. The report finds that “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of financial fraud and the artful skimming of tax money into private pockets.
And the Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Court, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools at all because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. That’s common sense to any taxpayer: Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money but have virtually no public record accountability of what they do with the tax money they divert from genuine public schools.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its favorable reporting on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax dollars that are intended to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets and to the bottom lines of hedge funds.
You must be familiar with the tactics employed by many charter school operators to gain profit from the schools, such as private charter school boards paying exorbitant sums to lease building space for their school in buildings that are owned by corporations that are in turn owned or controlled by the charter school board members or are REIT investments that are part of a hedge fund’s portfolio. There are many other avenues of making a hidden profit from operating private charter schools.
In addition to the siphoning away of money from needy schools, reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children of color; and, very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students. Based on these and other findings of racial discrimination in charter schools, the NAACP Board of Directors has passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice.
Therefore, in order to assure that tax dollars are being spent wisely and that there is no racism in charter schools, charter schools should minimally (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that the charter schools are accountable to the public; (2) be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) be required to operate so that anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
Those aren’t unreasonable requirements. In fact, they are common sense to anyone taxpayers and to anyone who seeks to assure that America’s children — especially her neediest children — are optimally benefiting from public tax dollars intended for their education.