Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote an analysis of the major problems with school choice that advocates refuse to address.
She begins by writing that privatized school choice directly threatens public education:
Privatized school choice is the public financing of private alternatives to public schools. Examples include charters run by corporate boards, private schools funded by vouchers, online learning charters and publicly subsidized home schooling. Then there are the disguised voucher plans such as Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, which give taxpayer money on debit cards to parents with little oversight as to how it is spent.
Privatized school choice, in its various forms, has been rapidly gaining ground in many of our states. The thinly veiled agenda of privatized choice is the destruction of public schools, which Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her allies refer to as “government schools.”
What the privatizers never talk about is that every dollar that goes to school choice is taken away from public schools. To adjust for the loss of revenue, public schools have to lay off teachers and close down programs. So the great majority of students are injured so a few can attend a charter or use a voucher.
Voucher programs almost always begin small–targeted at poor children, or children with disabilities, or foster children, or military children–but then expand to apply to all students. Sometimes the privatizers admit that they are pursuing a camel’s nose-under-the-tent strategy, but usually they claim to want “only this small program.”
Unaccountable, unsupervised privately-managed schools waste taxpayers’ dollars with bloated administrative salaries and overhead. In these conditions, without public oversight, fraud and corruption go undetected, and when a whistleblower complains, we learn that hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars were squandered or stolen.
She writes:
When we turn our backs on our public schools, we turn our backs on our most profound American values. We are not embracing conservatism; we are embracing consumerism. It is as simple and sad as that.
I would put it somewhat differently. I would say that the privatizers’ goal is not only to destroy public education but to encourage us to think as consumers, not as citizens. As citizens, we support public services that are for everyone, even if we don’t use those services. Thus, childless people pay taxes for public schools, even though they don’t use them, as do people whose children are grown. But consumers take care of themselves only. In the future, if this movement for privatization prevails, taxpayers may well reject bond issues because they don’t want to pay taxes for private choices. If we think only of ourselves, we lose the sense of civic responsibility that a democracy requires in order to protect and serve the interests of all its citizens.
“to think as (deep in credit-card debt) consumers, not as citizens (with critical thinking and problem-solving skills)”
I agree but want to add that billionaire oligarchs like the Walton Family, the Koch brothers and the Betsy DeVos-Anway clan want those consumers to be brainwashed fundamentalist Christians that think/believe all life bloomed in a few days about 6,000 years ago and dinosaurs and humans lived side-by-side.
Most if not all literate life-long learning critical thinkers will never buy into the evangelical fundamentalist agenda that armageddon is what we should all strive for so we can be with God in Heaven after we die from global warming, viral diseases, and nuclear weapons.
Imagine a time when a velociraptor/tyrannosaurus rex went to church and shared a pew alongside someone that looks like Betsy DeVos or Agent Orange, that malignant narcissist in the White House who is groping a young woman he doesn’t know who is sitting beside him.
Like the not so subtle humor!
Bill Clinton is back in the White House?!?!
Crossposted at Oped, https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Three-big-problems-with-sc-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Agenda_Education-Vouchers_Fraud_Privatization-Of-Schools-170504-819.html
with this comment , which has embedded links ta tOped.
JUST LOOK AT THIS EXAMPLE FROM PENNSYLVANIA: this article explains how the formula cripples public schools.
AND HERE, Politico: New Study Shows Negative Effects of Vouchers in D.C. Program: https://dianeravitch.net/2017/04/27/politico-new-study-shows-negative-effects-of-vouchers-in-d-c-program/
The ‘reform’movement, is one more Orwellian name, like “school choice’ to bamboozle the public
The school choice fraud only enrichs the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and the hedge funds devoted to making schools into a market-place.
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who may be thinking of a run for Governor of Ohio, launched a four-city speaking tour across the state, castigating the corruption in the charter industry at every stop. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/04/24/dennis-kucinich-back-his-sights-set-profit-education
It just seems so incredibly short- sighted to me.
If ed reformers are able to persuade people that there is no “common good”, we’re all just selecting a school service, what will happen when people refuse to fund vouchers?
Why should anyone contribute to anything they don’t directly benefit from?
They may really, really regret settling on this “market” approach. I think it leads directly to “I got mine, you go get yours”.
They always point to colleges as an example of “choice” but all colleges did was shift the funding burden to students. College is WILDLY inequitable. The students are picking up the shortfall. That’s exactly what will happen with K-12 schools, except of course it will be the parents.
They couldn’t offer 7k vouchers in Ohio without a huge public school system to back up the “choice” schools. It would be a catastrophe.
They have this backward. Public schools don’t need “choice”. “Choice” needs public schools. The public schools they disdain and demean are absolutely essential for their choice schemes to work AT ALL.
Q
Why should anyone contribute to anything they don’t directly benefit from?
END Q
People pay taxes because they are compelled to by law. Nevertheless, the USA tax system depends primarily on voluntary compliance. Most people are honest. And since our tax rates are set by our democratic process, the people can always demand a change in the tax rates. We demand a certain level of spending, and we do not demand a concurrent level of taxation. That is why our nation is $20 Trillion dollars in debt. It is all a matter of spending money that we do not have.
Still, I pay for schools, even though I have no children in the schools. I want to live in an educated society. I know it is more economical to educate children, than to incarcerate adults. Spending on education is more cost-effective, than spending money on welfare and food stamps. If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
I pay for prisons and a legal system, even though I have no relatives in the state prison. I want to live in a society with less crime. I pay for national parks, knowing that I may never see Yellowstone.
“. . .knowing that I may never see Yellowstone.”
I sure hope you make the effort to get there, along with the Gran Teton park and many others that are in the vicinity! (vicinity meaning within a couple of hundred miles, a days drive) It will be well worth it!
My wife is an adopted American. I hope that she can see some of the natural wonders of her new country. Now that she is a “Stockholder” in the corporation.
I have been to several national parks, I grew up near Mammoth Cave National Park, and I enjoyed it immensely.
It’s not only the subjective/individual experience of consumer vs. citizen, but how that plays out en masse, socially and politically: citizens have rights that are (or should be) inalienable, whereas consumers are always subject to the vagaries of marketing, policy and the whims of management.
“Reform” represents a disinvestment in the common good. It allows private interests access to public funds that should be for all students. Privatization creates more winners and losers, more segregation, and reduces the capacity of public education to do its best work. With little to no oversight, there are many opportunities for waste or fraud, and public school students are being cheated so that money can be siphoned off for private interests. Privatization is anti-democratic as it removes responsibility for education from local communities and hands it over to private entities. It places individual interests above those of others resulting in greater inequality.
Some people keep running for fear of the alternaitve.
The marketing of politicians and marketing of government services has a long history, but it has become much more sophisticated in the last several decades. One result is the near obliteration of any distinction between a customer and a citizen who is considered as a taxpayer, voter, and participant in direct or indirect governance of a community.
Here is an example. Today, when anyone calls city hall in Cincinnati to inquire about blight caused by graffiti, or about sewer overflows, or status of a building permit, the call is answered this way: ” City of Cincinnati , customer service: How may I help you?”
I am treated as if a customer when the actual relationship is quite different: I am the employer, paying the bills for services provided to more than one person within the city-including the contract for the voice on the phone (now a recording).
I know how “Customer service: How may I help you?” arrived in our city. It came about sometime in the 1980s during the term of mayor who persuaded the city council that taxpayers needed a more rapid and effective response to questions and problems. The mayor was spurred into action by a member of council (different party) who had guaranteed that people who called his office about a problem would get a solution (or path to one) within two days. He had campaigned on that promise.
With that well-publicized challenge as a starting point, the Mayor and council recruited some then-current talent to address this problem. They offered a contract to the Disney Co, Imagineers. The Imagineers met with the council and city administrators to show them how techniques for rapid and effective response to “customers as guests in Disney World” could be applied to city governance.
All city administrators were given some incentives to improve “customer service.” Improvements could be documented by “customer surveys” in addition to data gathered on new computing systems.
There are many ways to trace the blurring of the lines between customer and citizen, and other once clear distinctions. Under the Trump regime the meaning of “citizenship” is stripped of nuance and reduced to one’s current status as a real American or an immigrant.
This article, like many articles in opposition to school choice/vouchers, work up false and “bogus” issues, instead of facing the reality.
When a student leaves a public school, whether to get a voucher, or to move across the country, the school loses the student. The school also loses the per-pupil funding that the student would have brought in. The per-student funding for the school, is unchanged. The school still must pay the electric bill, and the upkeep on the building. These are “sunk costs”, and they are still borne by the school system. This is why, when a school population declines, the school system must downsize.
Teachers will have to be laid off. School buildings will have to sold or destroyed. This is the process of “creative destruction”.
I believe parents are capable of making a choice for the best schools for their children. Trusting our children’s parents will not lead our country into disarray and chaos. Why should we systematize a fight against parental choice, especially when so many of our public schools are not serving their students well?
JD, public funding will not gain them the same choices as the rich. That is a foundational lie of the choice movement. Choice impoverishes the majority to enable a small number to go to schools with uncertified teachers and no curriculum.
jd: I tend to agree with you. I believe that most (not all) parents have the ability to select the appropriate education for their children. Non-public schools, are on the “bell curve”. Some are terrific, some are good, some are terrible. With school choice, parents can leave the bad (non-public) school. Under the current system, parents are stuck if their children are in a bad public school.
A revised quote from Lincoln fits when it comes to trusting all parents to make good choices for their child’s education.
Lincoln’s original quote: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Revised quote. “Corporate charter and voucher schools can fool all of the parents some of the time, and some of the parents all of the time, but corporate charter and voucher schools cannot fool all of the parents all of the time.”
This is why we can not trust that all parents will make good choices for the education of their children.
Q This is why we can not trust that all parents will make good choices for the education of their children.END Q
I am a little frightened by this statement. I agree, that there are some parents, who are unable to make good choices for their children. (I am a non-parent, but I can see this phenomenon).
Unless the parents are “crackheads”, or alcoholics, or otherwise mentally impaired to make such judgments, who should be making the decisions with respect to the education of children?
Social workers? School officials? Government bureaucrats?
“Government is like fire, a dangerous servant, and a terrible master”- G. Washington
The less education a parent or parents have, the higher the odds that they will follow the suggestions/advice of one or more of their child’s teacher, school counselor, or administrator.
The foundation of those suggestions is based on what is in the best interests of the child and those interests will change as the child ages and becomes more mature. The older and more mature a child is, the more they are involved in the choices they make. That doesn’t mean they are going to be right all the time. After all, we are human.
There is a huge difference between the maturity of a five-year-old in kindergarten and a 10th-grade high school student.