Amy Shuffelton, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, asks why PBS chose to air “School Inc.” when it was so clearly biased and evidence-free. The three-hour program began to air in April, although some local PBS affiliates chose not to show it. In New York City, it is airing now, on Saturdays.
She writes of its thesis and its many errors of fact and interpretation.
Episode One, The Price of Excellence, starts with Coulson wearing 1970s attire and holding an early Sony Walkman. When the Walkman was invented, he points out, it was expensive, but thanks to entrepeneurial inventiveness it soon became widely affordable. Because competitors were hard at work on cheaper replications, Coulson explains, quality improved as prices dropped. Why hasn’t education followed this trend?…
Over the course of three hours, Coulson revisits the story of Jaime Escalante, the real-life Los Angeles teacher whose success preparing low income public school students for the AP Calculus exam was made famous in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. He visits Cranbrook Schools, an elite private institution in Michigan. Then he turns to charter schools, which aren’t limited by commitments to tradition as schools like Cranbrook are.
What makes the series truly provocative is that Coulson doesn’t stop there. In Episode Three, Forces and Choices, he visits for-profit private schools in Hyderabad India, Sweden, and New Orleans. And in the last ten minutes of the series, he brings his argument to its conclusion: the key to scaling up educational excellence is free market competition between for-profit schools.
The answer is as obvious as Andrew Coulson’s devout belief in the free market as the answer to everything: Follow the money. The series was paid for by a group of libertarian foundations that are hostile to government and specifically to public schools.
The central thesis of Coulson’s series is that public schools are the same as they were 100 years ago because they don’t compete. Competition, he says again and again, drives innovation. Yet, he does not show a single example of innovation in the private sector schools he lauds. Not one, unless you count the class sizes of 12 at the private Cranbrook School in Michigan, where tuition is $29,000 a year and the endowment is $200 million. The private sector schools, at best, look just like public schools, but without the drama club, the marching band, the robotics classes, the sports teams, and the many activities other than drilling students to take tests.
Please email PBS and let them know how you feel about airing bought-and-paid-for rightwing propaganda.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can we please stop using the term “free market”, at least without quotes and “[sic]” after it? There is no such thing as a free market – the government sets the market. It’s just a matter of whom that market benefits.
Yes and not to mention that the government prints and mints the currency. Or would these so called free marketeers [sic], [sick] like to have Walmart be in charge of the currency?
Ha, the Walmart Walton family would love to be in charge of printing the U.S. currency with their mugs on each bill. All the former presidents and founding fathers currently on the American dollars would be removed and replaced with a Walton family member.
Joe: You are right–no “free market.” Actually, Adam Smith’s major work on economics was one of a pair where the other, similar in length, was about the development of the moral sentiments of those who were involved. Smith thought they should be read together. What came to be known as ‘the invisible hand” was a hand nevertheless, attached to a person. To think otherwise is like saying a corporation has nothing to do with the people involved in running it, not to mention the other people who buy stocks in the company.
Catherine,
That “invisible hand” was mentioned once by Smith. The meaning of that once mentioned oft quoted two words is something akin to “there is an ‘invisible hand’ that guides well-intentioned actions to unforeseeable results.”
hear, hear
How about (I know it doesn’t rhyme but) “Anarchy Market”?
Here is the answer. The EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX owns the airwaves and everything you see on public tv is at their discretion.
https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf Also http://https://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/24/the-educational-industrial-complex/
To quote Caitlin Johnstone .How You Can Be Absolutely Certain That Mainstream Media Lies About Everything https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/how-you-can-be-absolutely-certain-that-mainstream-media-lies-about-everything-a5eec69a9264
“The extremely powerful corporate conglomerates which comprise the mainstream media are lying to you about everything. By this I don’t mean that the individual stories reported by corporate media outlets have no basis in fact, I mean that they’ve been lying to you about your world, your country, your society, your government and the way it all works for as long as you’ve been alive. They are more or less telling the truth when they report that a celebrity has died or that a cute little white kid has gone missing, but they are knowingly lying about the big picture within which those small events happen”
Re “Episode One, The Price of Excellence, starts with Coulson wearing 1970s attire and holding an early Sony Walkman. When the Walkman was invented, he points out, it was expensive, but thanks to entrepeneurial inventiveness it soon became widely affordable. Because competitors were hard at work on cheaper replications, Coulson explains, quality improved as prices dropped. Why hasn’t education followed this trend?…”
Uh, doctoring? lawyering? CEOing? Consulting? We should be getting these for pennies on the dollar we used to spend according to this idiot.
Good points and I would add that the prices of medications continue to be confiscatory.
Usage Note 📝
If it depends on tax dollars, it’s not free market.
Your link to emailing PBS just yields a 404 “not found” error.
This is the right link
https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2017/06/9479/
Singapore was #1 on the 2015 international PISA test. There is no competition among schools there. The schools are public schools managed by the state. There are also strong teachers’ unions in these countries.
The same goes for other top scoring countries in Math, Reading and Science.
Japan
Canda
Finland
South Korea
Switzerland
Ireland
Vietnam
New Zealand
Estonia
Germany
http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-math-science-reading-skills-2016-12
Oh, and where public money is allowed to follow the children to private schools, like in Finland, there are few private schools. The founding of a new private comprehensive school requires a decision by the Council of State. When founded, private schools are given a state grant comparable to that given to a municipal school of the same size. However, even in private schools, the use of tuition fees is strictly prohibited, and selective admission is prohibited, as well: private schools must admit all its pupils on the same basis as the corresponding municipal school. In addition, private schools are required to give their students all the education and social benefits that are offered to the students of municipal schools. Because of this, existing private schools are mostly faith-based or Steiner schools, which are comprehensive by definition
Diane “Coulson explains, quality improved as prices dropped. Why hasn’t education followed this trend?….” Maybe becauuuussssse . . . children are to phones as rabbits are to rocks?
Who ever said there was no such thing as a bad question?
Oh, it’s a good question! It’s just that Coulson’s answers are wrong.
So the prices of inventions like Sony Walkmans drop when they are new as supply increases when more and more of the products are made. But when was the last time the price of a Corvette dropped? Can you remember a time when the cost of a lightbulb decreased? A pack of chewing gum?
Education is not a new invention, so, you can’t get the price to drop by making it more ubiquitous. We will always get what we pay for.
Episode One, The Price of Excellence, starts with Coulson wearing 1970s attire and holding an early Sony Walkman. When the Walkman was invented, he points out, it was expensive, but thanks to entrepeneurial inventiveness it soon became widely affordable. Because competitors were hard at work on cheaper replications, Coulson explains, quality improved as prices dropped. Why hasn’t education followed this trend?…
So he sounds exactly like all ed reformers at the local, state and federal level?
PBS didn’t need to subsidize this. You can hear the exact same thing from a thousands of ed reform politicians all over the country.
Indeed we hear NOTHING else. This is a recitation of the dogma that is the majority view. They quibble over how to get there but they’re all in agreement on privatization.
What would be really brave would be if PBS found someone who values public education. Now that would be different than the status quo.
I listened to the Trump pitch on apprenticeships last week. His daughter recites the exact same words and phrases that Duncan did on the “skills gap”, which are also identical to what Scott Walker says. There’s no “debate”. It’s all the same. This isn’t “smart” or “rigorous”. It’s elite group-think. They all read the same things and talk to the same people and recite the same slogans.
The contrast between what reformers say and what they do is remarkable. Several years ago, a guy named Whittle who was a friend of Lamar Alexander got the bright idea to give TVs to,all the schools if they would let him play some commercials during a news show called Channel 1. We did it and got some TVs and some restrictions as to,when they had to be left on. I did not use mine much, but some people got to watch some video.
Meanwhile, it came out that Whittle’s kids went to a traditional Latin school in New York, a vine covered place where TV was so far away that you thought you were in the fourteenth century. He promoted George Jetson Ed and chose Harry Potter. What was good for him was not good for all.
The Silicon Valley vultures (with apologies to actual vultures) who are forcing this “blended learning” (sic) and “competency based education” (sic) on public schools across the nation are some of the biggest users of Waldorf education (which uses no tech at school and strongly encourages parents not to allow tech at home) for their own kids.
Could it be beause PBS is not PUBLIC Broadcasting anymore?
Plutocratic Broadcasting System
As a product of an old traditional school that came out of the Civil War as a for profit in Middle Tennessee, I feel compelled to suggest that there is a place for private education. The school where I went was founded by a man who had a vision and sought to make it reality. He reasoned that, in a South destroyed by war, people would pay for education. His profit was his living, a good living, but not one to compare to his students after they graduated. He took exactly zero public dollars. His income allowed him to buy some land around the community. Seeing the success of his school helped to create the support for public education in the county as the turn of the century approached. He supported this investment as a public figure.
Thus the difference between modern private institutions and his: His sprung from the devestation of war in an educational vacuum. Modern charter schools spring from already functioning educational societies and seek to skim off the easy pickings for a good name. Some of them seek to make huge profits while they pay teachers poor wages. Many of them use public money. Some, noted on this website, have made very handsome livings. Some have defrauded the government.
There is still a place for private education. A good friend of mine started his own school years ago. He has yet to accept public money to fund his vision. If private schools were the answer to mass education, schools like the one I describe above would be the norm all across the country. But they were not the answer.
Now that I have spent 30 years in public schools teaching, I can tell you what I would change and what I would keep. Like so many Americans, I love my community school and what it does for the community. Doing away with its tradition in the community would take us back to the days when the American Civil War was fought here, and community was destroyed. That dreadful error took us generations to overcome. Why would we want to let free market ideology take us back there educationally?
Ah yes, the SONY Walkman – prices went down and so did the quality.
I have it stored with my SONY Betamax, my SONY video camera, my SONY tape player, and my SONY 8 Track Tape Player.
PBS top management and some local stations positioned the American people between a rock and a hard place. Last year the richest 1% shifted $4 tril. from the nation to themselves. Their plot to take the bandwidths of PBS stations is the rock. And, use of the bandwidth to attack common goods, is the hard place.
As the author of the The One Percent Solution describes, it’s a one-way construct… The richest 0.1% drive their fellow citizens into a chute for slaughter.