John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reviews an important new book.
Lawrence Baines’ Privatization of America’s Public Institutions: The Story of the American Sellout combines analyses of assaults on four public sectors, the military, corrections departments, public schools, and higher education, to reveal the immense scale of privatization and its dangers. Dr. Baines, the Associate Dean of Education at the University of Oklahoma, shows that “Privatization is no longer an occasional strategy to help improve efficiency of a particular public service.” It “has become an automatic response to any perceived governmental inefficiency.” Baines carefully documents the ways that “Privatization is changing the nature of America’s public institutions and consequently, the character of the country.”
The first chapter, “Privatizing the Military: Profiting from the Carnage of War,” foreshadows a frightening pattern that explains why I, for one, was slow to see the full nature of the threat. It starts in 2007 with the killing of 17 persons in Baghdad by mercenaries employed by Erik Prince’s Blackwater. The people I know were horrified by that and other behavior of contract fighters when Dick Chaney, formerly of Halliburton, was Vice President. I had no idea, however, that by 2015, private contractors in the Mideast would outnumber soldiers by a 3 to 1 margin.
By that time, 44% of Department of Defense discretionary spending went to private contractors. As one military analyst said, contractors had become “the fifth branch of the military.” Baines explains how the inability to hold contractors accountable leads to an unknowable number of killings, meaning that we can’t evaluate the human and moral costs of military privatization any more than we can calculate the true financial costs.
Baines reports that we have reached the point where ROTC officer training is contracted out. Since the program acculturates cadets who will become the leaders of our democracy’s armed forces, an analyst says, this form of privatization may produce “‘longer-term effects on the overarching values that motivate military service.’”
This reader thought he had a more thorough understanding of the topic in the next chapter, “Privatizing Corrections: Making Money from Misery,” which documents the costs in money, lives, and our values of privatized prisons. I had read about numerous individual scandals, such as Montana Two Rivers Detention Center which was funded with a $27 million bond issue in 2007, but I had not seen the bigger picture described by Baines. Two Rivers remained vacant for 9 of 10 years but the private corporation which ran it still made money. Similarly, Mississippi had to pay off the debt of about $121 million for a closed prison, but its operators, Geo Group made over $2 billion. And with the scandal-ridden Pennsylvania institution, where the program was dubbed “kids for cash,” private operators walked away with profits for a million-dollar condominium and a $1.5 million yacht.
It’s bad enough that private operators charge more for detentions that were more brutal towards adult inmates, but since crime has declined, they’ve moved into even more disgusting systems for making big bucks, such as juvenile detentions. More than half of incarcerated juveniles are locked up for nonviolent crimes; 21% committed no crime. They are locked up due to “technical violations,” and “status offenses.” So, an institution profits from detaining a 13-year-old who didn’t show for a hearing about a fight he didn’t witness and a 15-year-old girl who ridiculed an assistant principal on social media.” The median time for a juvenile for status offense is 128 days.
Then the story grows more horrific. As states like Oklahoma over-incarcerate on the cheap, fees and fines become an essential funding source. I knew how cruel the situation is in Oklahoma, where we are #1 in the world in incarceration rates, but I had no idea that 48 states have gone down that path. And since fees and fines are a doomed method of funding the overgrown incarceration complex, monitored release of inmates is growing. That creates another market for privatizers, electronic bracelets to oversee parolees. And, surprise!, the lucrative, private market for monitoring those devices is “subject to virtually no judicial oversight.”
And the story became even more unconscionable as private prisons moved into another growing market, immigrant detentions. Since 2003, 176 immigrant deaths have gone largely unreported by for-profit institutions. And private prisons have enabled Trump’s attacks on immigrant families.
Moreover, the dangers and costs of privatized prisons, like those of privatized schools, have grown worse during the Trump administration. And that leads to Baines’ concise indictment of the privatization of public schools through charter schools and vouchers. Readers of this blog are well-versed in the ways that privatization has undermined public education, so I will merely touch a few of Baines’ insights in Chapter Three, “Privatizing K – 12 Public Education: How the Profit Motive Is Changing Schools,” as well as recommend a full reading of his evidence.
The use of privatization as a tool for corporate school reform has denigrated teacher quality and fostered dumbed-down education. It uses technology to reduce number of teachers needed in the culture of data-driven competition it created. It has gotten to the point where 5,000 emergency certificates were issued in Oklahoma in 2017 and 2018. Next door, Texas adjudicated 222 cases of teacher misconduct in 2016, with most involving sex acts with minors. The backlogged caseload is over 1,100.
And privatization has increased inequality and segregation. Baines offers a corrective to the spin of charter advocates who deny they have promoted segregation, “Most minority students who attend privatized schools have few white classmates; most white students who attend privatized schools have few minority classmates.”
The next topic that Baines analyzes, higher education, is intertwined with the legacy of privatization by charters and vouchers, as well as the budget-cutting that has devastated k – 12 education in Oklahoma and many other states.
Early in the chapter, “Privatizing Public Education: Selling Off the Alma Mater,” Baines lists the ten states that have cut higher education by 26% to 54% from 2008 to 2017. Oklahoma is 6th, with cuts of 34%. In 1996, higher education privatization was basically limited to five support services. By 2017, there were 17 categories of privatized services, culminating with academic programs. Moreover, in 2016, 1/3rd of universities outsourced their online programs.
Public school teachers have more than enough experience with the testing toxicity pushed by the Pearson corporation and Eli Broad. Less well known is their intrusions into universities. Privatizers have even moved into micro-credentialing, making money off of credentials for skills like “Checking for understanding using whiteboards.” Moreover, when these online providers are both a private company and a LLC (Limited Liability Company), they aren’t obligated to reveal their instructors’ qualifications.
To take just a couple of Baines’ examples, the Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University gets 32% of the gross revenue in partnership with Bisk, “a corporation specializing in curricular design, online education, and student support,” which gets 68% of the gross revenue from the Business Analytics master’s program. Baines notes that most students probably don’t know that they will not be taught by M.S.U. faculty, as opposed to Bisk employees who may not have a degree in the subject they are teaching.
A similar lack of transparency is illustrated by Arkansas State University’s Academic Partnership program where students aren’t told that they may not have instructors from their university, and that A.S.U. program’s website is virtually identical to its counterpart at U. of Texas, Arlington, which has 18 tenure-track faculty and a 1000-1 ratio for tenure track faculty.
Finally, Baines listed the costs to graduates, and students who failed to graduate from our privatized universities. Ironically, these debts are, in large part, a legacy of corporate school reform which claimed to be a “21st century civil rights movement.”
From 2010 to 2016 individuals with at least some college “captured 11.5 million of the 11.6 million jobs available.” Pay for workers without a high school diploma is less than half of that for workers with a college degree, so access to high-quality education should have been an important tool for achieving equity. But even when a student earns college degree, privatization has undermined the prospects for many or most graduates. Pell Grants used to pay 75% of 4-year college costs but now they only pay for about 30%. Consequently, former university students have accumulated $1.5 trillion in debt.
Too often, the value of university degrees has been compromised. Today, 70% of higher education instructors are adjuncts. The university’s mission of service to society has been de-emphasized. College is supposed to be a transformational experience “a rush of unfamiliar people, cultures, knowledge, relationships, and interactions.” But now, the “collegiate experience is becoming commercialized, standardized, and monetized.”
Baines wraps up his account of the human and financial costs of privatizations by illustrating ways that the military, prisons, public schools, and higher education are being undermined by interrelated forces. Just as the military’s belief in service to the U.S. is put at risk, the university’s contributions to the public good are being undermined. Privatized prisons lead to more segregation of inmates by race as a means of self-protection. Similarly, privatized schools increase segregation as they foster a culture of competition that increases inequality. And the tragic tale all comes together in the final chapter about the privatization of universities.
Baines explains that, “Privatization is happening so quickly and on such a colossal scale in higher education that it is difficult to stay current.” To take one example of how it is interconnected with k-12th grade schools, he shows how teacher certification is “being transmogrified into a product traded on the open market, teachers are circumventing universities and teacher preparation completely and moving straight into the classroom.” This has led to unqualified teachers being rushed into many states’ classrooms, pushing down school quality and enabling privatizers to blame the public schools.
Privatization of America’s Public Institutions is so full of memorable characterizations of the tragedies of privatization that it is difficult to select one as a concluding statement. So, I’ll borrow Baines’ quote of the Commissioner of U.S. Bureau of Education, whose words from 1891 would be equally true if applied to today’s armed forces or the penal system. The commissioner said, “let us hope, that the time is not far distant when an untrained teacher will be considered a greater absurdity than an untrained doctor or lawyer.”
Shout out to Bill Gates- the most misunderstood man in America (due to his colossal PR machine and the gullibility ($) of people and outlets like AARP, Vanity Fair, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen Degrees, Big Bang Show, Town and Country and every journalist who labels him a philanthropist instead of the villainthropist he is.
Should be mandatory reading.
When oligarchs ignore U.S. Supreme Court rulings, we get vouchers like Ohio’s EdChoice. When conservatives deny the rule of law, we get vouchers like EdChoice.
Oligarchs use theocracy i.e. evangelicals and the Catholic Leonard Leo and Paul Weyrich to dismantle democracy and the common good.
Not sure I buy “Oligarchs use theocracy… to dismantle democracy and the common good.” Oligarchs seem to get by just dandy using their money clout alone to buy the policy they require to keep increasing their assets at public expense.
I looked up Leonard Leo– the top SCOTUS-candidate picker in DC– what a sleazebag. The way he twists his religion to fit his ultra-conservatism makes me ill. He’s no theocrat, just a political hack peddling Catholic-sector voting strategy to candidates and policy-makers. I don’t see any actual church backing there, but I’ve love it if the church would disown him in a public statement.
The odds for the disavowal?
In Ohio, the estimates range from $50 mil. to $130 mil. for vouchers which go mostly to Catholic schools.
One measure of morality- what a person/group refuses to do even if it means losing the opportunity for a handout of money.
80% of evangelicals voted for Trump and approx. 60% of other Christian denominations (whites) voted for him. The “religious” leaders provide cover for predatory thieves robbing America of its values. And, their flocks vote for the barbarians.
With vouchers, God-spouting ideologues get it both ways, they get the money taxpayers intended for community public schools and, they get the opportunity to indoctrinate students into authoritarianism and worship for holders of capital.
” the opportunity to indoctrinate students into authoritarianism and worship for holders of capital “? Oh come on. That sounds as silly as the rwnj’s claiming pubsch teachers indoctrinate kids into socialism.
Yet…Students from Covington Catholic (all boys school) rode a bus together to D.C. where they wore MAGA hats and joined a campaign against abortion.
Do you think the boys thought through the implications- their mothers, forced to sustain medically risky pregnancies that could cost them their lives or that their sisters might be forced to bear a rapists’ child (different race) at the age of 13 or, that a girl in one of Cov Cath’s sister schools might be pregnant as the result of incest?
The reaction of Cov Cath’s community to the perceived threat against one of its own was described as tribalism.
Have you considered that you might be the outlier?
It “has become an automatic response to any perceived governmental inefficiency.”
Absolutely. It’s embarrassing how often it’s presented as “innovative”, too.
Hiring government contractors is not “innovative”. It’s just hiring government contractors.
What amazes me is one of the more high-profile charter and voucher proponents assures us we won’t miss public schools, because we don’t have public health care and look at how great that’s worked out.
Really? The ed reform promise is to get rid of our public education system and replace it with a model like our ABSOLUTE DISASTER of a health care “system”? Good Lord.
Our health care system isn’t equitable, it isn’t affordable and it isn’t efficient. We pay more than anyone else in comparable countries for worse outcomes. Ed reformers hope to do the same to public education? No thanks.
Exactly. Our healthcare system costs TWICE as much per capita and arguably has worse outcomes when compared to those of other countries in the OECD.
And just consider that laws covering government contractors are far stricter than the thin legal gruel pasted over charter & voucher schools– they’re not govt contractors, they’re favored-status public-tax siphons. Granted, govt-contractor laws don’t count for much when enforcement is ignored/ unfunded. But at least they’re on the books, & could be brought to bear with public pressure. To pull charters/vouchers in line via reasonable laws/ regs protecting the public will be a herculean effort starting almost from scratch.
By the by – related, I think: in NJ we have an ongoing scandal relating to the fraudulent personnel shenanigans of the most-recent [now mostly fired/ resigned] admin of a public-school agency, the School Development Authority (facility construction for our 31 poorest school districts). What I’m loving about it: it only took 8 months of this SDA leadership, & a couple of anonymous whistle-blowers [plus a now-Dem state admin] to blow them out of the water. That accomplished, the peccadillos of the last decade of profligacy under other leadership is flowing right into the headlines. THIS IS DEMOCRACY IN ACTION! Public agencies are transparent. It is not hard for investigative reporters to dig up documented proof of mismgt of public funds, which immediately provides public pressure on elected reps to right the ship. Compare to corporate-veil-protected charters/ vouchers, whose misdeeds remain curtained for charter renewal after charter renewal until they either go belly-up or somebody finally notices the rich lifestyle of charter operators of D-F-rated schools…
If I said to you “I have a idea plan to replace public schools- it will involve hiring hundreds of government contractors to deliver educational services” no one would give me an award or a foundation or billions in funding.
But that’s all charter schools are and that “innovation” somehow merits 50 university departments devoted to promoting charters and vouchers and thousands of paid “policy” people.
They lobby just like government contractors, too. They have the contract and they lobby to 1. be paid more and 2. keep the contract.
In Ohio at the start of this thing ed reformers sold this nonsense that we would be rid of those icky, low class labor union lobbyists and just have pure charter and voucher advocates, who are 100% well-intentioned. Instead we got a new whole private group sector that revolves around charters and vouchers and is wholly dependent on government contracts to survive. They’re all lobbyists. It’s just that ed reformers insist THEIR lobbyists are a “cut above” the lowly labor lobbyists. They’re snobs, basically. They think they’re better than public school advocates or employees.
“Icky, low class”- if that describes a working collective of public school teachers, what do you call the school administrators, overwhelmingly Catholic, who get an estimated $50,000,000 in voucher money from Ohio taxpayers while allowed to keep their financial records secret?
Fordham’s own study found Ohio vouchers are worthless in terms of outcome. So, why are Ohioans doling out welfare to Catholic schools ($8,000-$10,000 per high school student) which, if like their Kentucky kin, encourage their students to convene in D.C. to get legislation that denies women their rights?
New poll-
People in both parties have more favorable views of unions – the approval rate reached a 16 year high, attributed in part to teachers’ strikes.
Which do Catholics support- The free market dogma that led to 1,000,000 Irish dying OR, labor unions that enable people the dignity they deserve for toiling to make the bread that Bill Gates and Charles Koch eat?
I’m having trouble relating the action [inaction] of the Catholic church in a predominantly Catholic country [Irish potato famine] 170 years ago to the rather minimal role of the RC church in our country’s politics, which has only recently reached 20% Catholics.
A 1997 editorial in the respected Brit-Catholic organ “The Tablet” lays blame on the church, Irish landowners (some of whom were Catholic), & notes Tony Blair’s contemporary message “in which he freely accepted English guilt” for that country’s role in the Famine. “Above all, however, blame for the Famine must be laid at the door of the prevailing economic and political ideology of the time. Free trade was never to be interfered with, the rights of property were paramount, and laissez-faire economic theories were sacrosanct. The consequences of these theories, no matter how harsh, “were regarded as the working out of God’s will”. I suspect you would find American attitudes in the 1840’s quite similar, at which point we were only 7% Catholic.
The similarities I see relate to the return of laissez-faire capitalism here, in the US, promoted by neoliberal/ libertarian policies pursued since the ‘80’s, hardly guided by the hand of Rome. “The consequences of these theories, no matter how harsh, ‘were regarded as the working out of God’s will'” could be a page taken from today’s “prosperity gospel” which is controversial even among Evangelicals, and runs opposite of Catholic thought since 1890’s; the church has been staunchly & consistently supportive of unions & workers’ rights globally as evidened by encyclicals as recent as 2009.
Ultraconservative Catholic handmaidens to the 1% like Leo and Weyrich are outliers. And frankly, the buying into charters/ vouchers by local Catholic parishes reflects the desperate desire to prop up the remains of sectarian schools which have been failing and closing for decades. They are opposed by many among national clergy who have published in the Commonweal & elsewhere against tax-supported Catholic schools. Those religious understand that public financing sooner or later brings mandated curriculum & rules that run counter to the mission of Catholic schools.
Bethree
Recommended reading- Education Next, Spring 2011, “Catholic Ethos, Public Education”. BTW -was the Mark Eden, “Catholic Schools…”, Manhattan Institute article posted at EdNext too?
I ask because below Eden’s name, the identifier was Fordham.
The primary beneficiary of Ohio vouchers* is Catholic schools. The Plain Dealer wrote in 2013 that Ohio has more than any other state.
For the sake of argument, let’s say the largesse befell the schools without any complicity by anyone. In justice systems like those of the 50 states, there’s culpability for a person who receives stolen property. At a minimum they have to return the property.
Anticipating your next point, it’s not that the Catholic schools are preferred, it’s that the policy makers hate common goods. Is there anything the Catholic schools could do for the greater good so that the increase they received, 10 fold in 9 years will not continue or escalate?
*Fordham was chagrined to find that a study about vouchers which they funded found that vouchers don’t improve outcomes. Yet, Ohio increased funding for vouchers even after the Senate Education Chair said it didn’t’ make sense. Fordham was founded in Ohio. IMO, the bio’s of Fordham management have become briefer, not permitting deductions about demographics.
A suggestion to prime the pump- Don’t send representatives and school superintendents from the church to meetings between privatizing governors and DeVos when the subject is public schools. And, don’t become Fellows of the Gates-funded Pahara Institute, founded by the same person who founded New Schools Venture Fund.
“Just as the military’s belief in service to the U.S. is put at risk, the university’s contributions to the public good are being undermined.” It’s a change of principle at the very core of our motivations:
Public service/good-for-all VS using others for private profit/transactions/zero-sum-game. CBK
It’s amusing to watch how ed reform lobbyists are treated differently than public school lobbyists within ed reform.
In any given legislative session in Ohio there will be charters (and aligned businesses) lobbying for public funds, voucher proponents and private school advocates lobbying for public funds and public schools and allies lobbying for public funds.
Only public school advocates are demonized as icky, dirty labor union members. The other two sets of lobbyists are portrayed as self-sacrificing, noble folk who operate purely on a cloud of data and love of children.
They simply believe they are intrinsically better people.
The pure snobbery in ed reform doesn’t get enough attention. It permeates the whole “movement”. They had to pull public schools away from those local dummies who attended less selective colleges and hand it to the self-described “best and brightest” – it’s really insufferable and none of them see how awful it is.
Chiara Yes; and it seems these “snobs” don’t realize the HUGE “switcheroo” of basic principles that has occurred at the core of their own comportment, which then becomes the source of the whole gamut of their motivations and specific arguments:
Public service/good-for-all (democratic principles) VS using others for private profit/transactions/zero-sum-game (current capitalist principles).
Again, this change of principles often occurs in covert and indirect fashion, and can happen without our knowing it . . . precisely because it occurs at the level of learned principles that, in turn, tend to govern our thought, even before we think it. Again, that switch is evident in statements like this one from the article:
“Just as the military’s belief in service to the U.S. is put at risk, the university’s contributions to the public good are being undermined.” CBK
Such an important book.
Oh, and btw, the next time you hear some Ed Deformer spouting the nonsense that the US education system is failing, share with them the following from Dr. Baines:
On the test, the average American 15-year-old (PISA only tests 15-year-olds)
scored 500, 39 points behind top-scoring South Korea. Table 4.1 indicates the
score of the average American in comparison with 15-year-olds in other countries.
Country Score
1. South Korea 539
2. Finland 536
3. Canada 524
4. New Zealand 521
5. Japan 520
12. United States 500
Table 4.1. Top Five Scores on PISA Reading Assessment by Country
Using a mean score obscures a rather startling fact: many Americans are
among the highest-achieving students on the planet. Students who have wealthy
parents, for example, scored an average of 551 on the exam, which would make
them the highest scoring group in the world. Just below rich Americans are Asian
Americans and white Americans, who scored an average of 541 and 525, respectively,
good enough for second and fourth best in the world (see Table 4.2).
Country Score
1. Rich Americans (5,000,000 students of all races) 551
2. Asian Americans (all schools, 4,000,000 students) 541
3. South Korea (7,500,000 students) 539
4. Finland (850,000 students) 536
5. White Americans (all schools, 28,000,000 students) 525
6. Canada (5,500,000 students) 524
Table 4.2. Top Scores on PISA Reading Assessment by Country, with Wealth
and Ethnicity Added for the United States
So, what’s going on in the US? Well, we have public schools that serve an extremely diverse student population, many of whom are very poor, are recent immigrants, or have special needs (we serve such children within our standard public school system and require them, for the most part, to take the same standardized tests).
Here’s his full essay: http://www.lawrencebaines.com/mean-scores-in-a-mean-world.html
These are PISA scores, btw.
PISA reading scores
It’s so relentless, the endless (and politically motivated) public school bashing.
The US Department of Education is apparently unable to find a single strong public school or successful public school student.
Come on- this is nonsense. It’s pure politics. It’s also brutally unfair to public schools and public school students, who are apparently going under the ‘ol ed reform bus for the Higher Cause of privatization.
The US Department of Education Secretary conducts multi-million dollar tours to go out to public schools and list this litany of how they’re all failing and will never find employment. Who, exactly, does this benefit, other than conservative ideologues? It sure isn’t helpful to our kids. They’re props. In attendance to be told they are “trapped” in “government schools” and DOOMED.
And we’re paying for it! We’re paying 10,000 public employees for this. Ludicrous.
The analysis you did may appear on an education blog, but we never hear that America’s schools are doing the best they can with the diversity and poverty we have. Mainstream media rarely tells that story. Mostly what we hear is about our public school failures which is the messaging of the billionaires that seek to destroy public education.
The rich Deformers work to get their version of the story out–the one that says that the public schools are failing and so need to be privatized. Journalists rarely look below PR from the Deform organization and the average scores on tests.
The Catholic Church lobbies HEAVILY for vouchers in midwest states. They basically ran Illinois school funding process. Every demand they made was met. In fact, public school students could not get funding until voucher demands were met. Every public school student in the state was held up on funding until vouchers to contractors were distributed.
Yet ed reformers insist I believe that this VERY wealthy and powerful non profit is somehow vastly superior to a teachers union lobbyist. Why? Other than their innate sense of superiority and the fact that they’re snobs – are these people all volunteers? Why don’t THEY get the same “greedy and self-interested” label ed reform slaps on public school advocates?
Thank you Chiara for calling out the self-serving elephant in the billionaire funded campaign against the common good.
The only religion represented in the meeting about public schools held by Ky. Gov. Bevin and Betsy Devos was Catholic.
Illinois’ state superintendent of education attended, 3 Catholic schools to get her 3 degrees- Mundelein, Dominican and Loyola.
Neoliberals and Libertarians love to tout the virtues of privatization. It subjects services, they say, to the wise, invisible hand of the market. They neglect to mention that it makes those services into vehicles for private profit and changes the incentives to accord with the following formula:
Provide the least service you can get away with in order to extract as much profit as possible.
Who needs a theater or a gymnasium or science labs or art labs in a school when the money for those could go into buying new cars for the ne’er-do-well relatives of the CEO of the for-profit management company? And your great aunt Sally doesn’t need that operation as much as the CEO of the healthcare insurance company needs refurbishing of the tarmac on the heliport at his ski lodge in Montana.
I sometimes think that Economics departments in the United States should be given new names like “The Koch Center for Corporate Apologetics.”
I check the US Department of Education social media accounts to see if they have yet gotten around to accomplishing one thing on behalf of the students in the unfashionable public school sector on any given work week:
“U.S. Department of Education
While service members fight and defend our freedoms abroad, military families are too often denied education freedom at home. #EducationFreedom Scholarships could help military-connected children access the education that’s right for them! Learn more:”
Literally all these people do is promote private school vouchers. We’re all paying a huge group of public employees to lobby for charters and vouchers. The capture is complete. You won’t find a single dissenter. Twenty years of stacking employment with True Believers in ed reform has worked. They’re no longer relevant to 90% of students and families. 100% echo chamber. If you’re not a charter or voucher family, they’re not interested in doing any work on your behalf.
Conservatives have been creating the narrative that big government is wasteful and ineffective. They prefer a small, weak government that will not regulate or get in the way of endless profiteering. Privatization is often a sneaky process in which public services are farmed out to private contractors, and the public hardly notices the change. Often the service is no better, and it may be worse. The public winds up paying more for a worse service.
Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the military industrial complex in 1961. Since that time privatized military contractors have grown tremendously, and we are paying a lot more for services. I live in a military community where there are many military contractors. My husband has done taxes for these contractors. He has heard how many contractors take advantage of the system by overcharging for routine items and services. The system is corrupt.
I believe that private contractors should not provide services where the health and well being of others are at stake. They will always put profit ahead of people. We know this from our health care system, privatized education, prisons and other essential services.
retired teacher I wonder if the oligarchs, who want to kill all-things-public (and publicly funded), realize they are one huge stepping-stone to the emergence of a fascist state? CBK
Privatization is often a sneaky process in which public services are farmed out to private contractors, and the public hardly notices the change. Often the service is no better, and it may be worse. The public winds up paying more for a worse service.
I agree. A first move in marketing some privatization plans is to call the venture a public-private partnership. The phrase neatly disguises who is responsible for which facets of a venture. The meaning of “partner” is often stretched to imply equal concerns, interests, and obligations when the reality is a transfer of management from a public agency to a private operation.
SETDA, funded by Gates, is the poster child for public employee complicity within an oligarchy. If governors weren’t pawns of the rich, they would pass legislation that prohibited and punished activities by public employee associations like SETDA.
Prof. Baines is my friend, and I know his heart is fiercely supportive of public education. My review was…more emotional, and less complete.
https://fourthgenerationteacher.blogspot.com/2019/08/privatization-of-americas-public.html
Thanks for the link and the article. My son graduated from college a few years ago. I noticed that a number of the cyber options in various programs were actually from a private vendor, not the college itself. Some of these courses cost more than courses that were available from the college. When education is subcontracted, who is in charge of quality control?
One of the members of the Vet Center PTSD support group I belong to is a former Marine and served in Iraq when he was active as a Marine.
He said when he was out on a patrol with his unit, they could tell by the sound of a firefight ahead of them if paid mercenaries were involved and then the Marines went out of their way to detour around that fight and avoid going anywhere near them because he said the mercenaries shoot everyone and everything they can hit and do not take time to identify even real U.S. Troops. The mercenaries will open fire even when no one is shooting at them. They open fire just because they think there might be a threat.
He said US troops have rules of engagement that say you don’t open fire until you are fired on first. Mercenaries do not have any rules of engagement and no one is monitoring what they do like US troops are monitored.
But, but, privatization has worked SO WELL in healthcare in the United States LMAO.
Permit me to explain why we need private, company-paid health insurance instead of a national system like those in every other OECD country, where healthcare has BETTER OUTCOMES and costs HALF AS MUCH:
It’s important to be able to divert healthcare dollars from delivering care into private profits. Why? Well, who cares whether your Aunt Sally can get her dental work or that child can get spinal surgery when there important matters to worry about, like whether the president of that health insurer can get the tarmac refurbished on the heliport at his ski lodge in Montana?
And it makes so much sense to have the incentives in healthcare be to deliver as little care as possible in order to maximize profits. That’s the Murikun way!
Oh, and, of course, you want an insurance company and not your doctor deciding whether you can get care. Because the insurance company will do what is most profitable for it, and we are all allowed to exist as long as we serve the masters. Don’t be selfish!
Oh, and for those of you who have employer-paid health insurance, it makes so much sense, doesn’t it, for your employer to pay you less so it can pay insurance premiums, and if you have employer-provided health insurance, who cares if your deductibles go up every year, and to hell with all those who don’t have insurance as you do. They are losers. You’ve got yours. Survival of the fittest and all.
A spotlight should be shone on religion’s role in school privatization.
From Education Next, Spring 2011, “Catholic Ethos, Public Education…several trends in American education…made a Catholic operated public school seem increasingly possible…(one was) a burgeoning charter school movement”.
An example of a bridge between anti-union bias and a private Catholic school was made by a writer, Maureen Sullivan, who answered a question she posed to herself after Arne Duncan selected, as a blue ribbon school, the Catholic school her daughter attended.
Sullivan answered her question about what made the school superior. She wrote that one of the 5 reasons was the school “taught religion”. In a subsequent article, Sullivan wrote a diatribe against unions.
Citizens in a nation with a constitution separating church and state deserve and have a right to expect, public education policy that is secular. If, instead, policy is being steered from think tanks and by state superintendents who have an agenda to increase Catholic school enrollment or a plan for religion to be part of the public school system, it betrays our republic. If religious congregations fail to shame those involved, it diminishes the values and hopes of the United States of America.
I have been busy, and missed the wonderful conversation here… if only I heard this anywhere else.. or EVERYWHERE.