Peter Greene once again nails a basic fact: education is not a business, and it can’t be run like a business.
Business ideas work well in the world of commerce, where businesses compete to provide a better product or better service. Probably there will be readers who question how well business is functioning right now, as megastores like Walmart gobble up neighborhood stores, destroying Main Street, and as online giants like Amazon threaten to gobble up all brick-and-mortar stores, even Walmart.
Greene writes, and I quote him in part:
We are living through yet another demonstration of the ways in which market-based approaches fail, and in some cases, fail really hard.
Long Term Preparation Is Inefficient But Essential
Back when I was a stage crew advisor, there was a pep talk I had to give periodically to crew members, particularly those working in the wings as grips or fly. “I know that you sit and do nothing for a lot of this show,” I’d say, “but when we need you, we really need you. In those few minutes, you are critical to our success.” In those moments we were talking about, every crew member was occupied; there was no way to double up or cut corners.
Emergency preparation is much the same. It’s economically efficient to, for instance, keep a whole stockpile of facemasks or ventilators. Big-time businessman Trump justified his cuts to various health agencies by citing business wisdom:
And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.
This turns out to be just as smart as disbanding the fire department and figuring you’ll just round up personnel and equipment when something is actually on fire. It doesn’t work. And as we have witnessed, it leaves you unprepared to deal with the critical moment when it arrives.
But the market hates tying up money in excess capacity or emergency readiness, because you’re spending all that money on capacity that isn’t being used this second. Are those guidance counselors and school nurses seeing students every single minute of the day? Well then, we should be able to cut them back. Are we sure that every teacher is teaching the maximum number of students possible? Couldn’t we just put some of those students on software? This is why so many business heads are convinced that public education is simply filled with waste–because there seems to be so much excess capacity in schools.
But in many schools, there’s not enough excess capacity. When a student is in the middle of a crisis, we should be able to respond immediately, whether it’s a personal crisis, a medical crisis, or an educational issue. The response should not be “tough it out till the counselor is on duty tomorrow” or “we’ll just wrap that in some gauze until the nurse comes in three hours from now” or “I know you need help with the assignment, but I can’t take my attention away from the other thirty-five students in this classroom.” And that’s on top of the issue of preparedness, or having staff and teachers who have the capacity–the time and resources and help– to be prepared for the daily onslaught of Young Human Crises. When wealthy people pay private school tuition or raise their own public school taxes, this is what they’re paying for– the knowledge that whenever their child needs the school to respond, the response will come immediately.
Sure, you can cut a school to the bones in the name of efficiency, but what you’ll have is the educational equivalent of a nation caught flatfooted by a global pandemic because it didn’t have the people in place to be prepared.
Competition Guarantees Losers
Ed Reformsters just love the bromide about how competition raises all boats and makes everyone better. And yet, the pandemic’s free market approach to critical medical supplies doesn’t seem to bear that out. States are being forced to compete with each other and the federal government, and all it’s doing is making vendors rich. This is free market competition at its baldest– if you have more money, you win. If you have less money, you lose. At some point, if it has not already happened, some people in this country are going to die because their state, municipality or medical facility will not have enough money to outbid someone else.
The free market picks losers, and it generally picks them on the basis of their lack of wealth. The notion that losers can just compete harder, by wrapping their bootstraps in grit, is baloney. It’s comforting for winners to believe that they won because of hard work and grit and not winning some fate-based lottery, and it also releases them from any obligation to give a rat’s rear about anyone else (“I made myself, so everyone else should do the same”).
A system built on picking losers and punishing them for losing is the exact opposite of what we need for public education. You can argue that well, we just want free market competition for schools and teachers, but if that kind of competition is in the dna of the system, it will stomp all over students as well, just as all free market businesses pick customers to be losers who don’t get served because they aren’t sufficiently profitable. Kind of like a low-revenue state or old folks home that can’t get its people necessary supplies because they don’t have enough wealth to bid with.
“Compete harder” just means “be richer.” It is not helpful advice.
Please open the link and enjoy the rest of his good essay on why business thinking and cost cutting doesn’t work in education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Personally, I abhor competition.
So TRUE, “Competition Guarantees Losers.” Thank you, Peter Greene.
Life is a Race
Life is a race
A race to the death
And Heaven can’t wait
To smother your breath
As I have frequently said, competition is what you do with members outside of your in group. Collaboration is what you do with people inside of our in group.
Capitalism defines in groups and out groups via markets. If we are in the same businesses, striving to connect with the same customers, you are not in my in group, so we compete.
So, are our children in our in group? Are our schools in competition? Should they be?
This is one of the best, certainly a timely post from Peter Greene.
If anything, the current health crisis demonstrates that we need a functioning, well-funded public sector. We need to accept that some services are more efficient and humane when handled by public employees and paid for by public dollars. Tossing everything into the inhumane hands of capitalism is a mistake. Public services support the common good. Marketplaces support profit over people which creates winners and losers. The losers are always the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
Capitalism does not function well when the health, well-being and essential services are at stake. Privatization leads to “service deserts.” If the postal service is privatized, rural post offices will die since they do not make money. In rural areas there is shortage of medical services and hospitals because it is not profitable to serve them. Drug companies have taken advantage of people by charging exorbitant prices for life saving drugs such as insulin. They are putting profit over people and some people are needlessly dying. If their guiding principle “whatever the market will bear,” profiteers are free to take advantage of sick people. Unfettered capitalism allows the strong to eat the weak, and it is immoral in my opinion.
The people trying to make public education like a business flunked Econ 101.
It is impossible to both act in the way that is most profitable and act in a way in which you must serve every single child regardless of whether teaching those children is profitable.
The fact that the ed reform movement has been able to get away with their Trump-like claims is primarily a failure of the ignorant education reporters who are either too scared of numbers to understand how nonsensical those charter claims are, or are simply so co-opted that they will report what powerful people what reported.
Science reporters who wrote stories hyping new medicines based on the “studies” that ignorant education reporters at major media outlets dutifully hype and give legitimacy to would be drummed out of the reporting business.
Education reporters write articles hyping charter schools in the exact same manner that Donald Trump hypes hydroxychloroquine as the cure for Covid-19.
Like Donald Trump, education reporters are awed and amazed at “success” stories of charters and like Donald Trump, they are far too lazy – and far too ignorant but absolutely certain of their own superior intelligence — that the huge red flags in what they are hyping are meaningless to them.
Just like Trump knows that hydroxychloroquine is great, education reporters just know that charters are great. After all, there is some study somewhere that hasn’t been peer reviewed that says so and they really don’t want to take the time and effort to consider that just because SOME students might do okay in charters, perhaps the huge red flag that so many other students just “disappear” might be something that would make those reporters skeptical. It doesn’t. That lack of skepticism seems racist to me — because by writing stories where the reporter clearly believes that the number of students who disappear is irrelevant, it implies those reporters have a belief that those parents who leave really don’t care about their kids getting a good education. If those reporters did not believe that, they would obviously notice the huge red flag and question the very results their story prominently hypes.
Can you imagine if the science reporters at the NYT had the lousy (or lazy) journalistic instincts of education reporters? They would write article after article about the patients who did well on hydroxychloroquine and the focus of every single story was about how marvelous this drug was, quoting the patients who say it saved their lives, with a single disclaimer in the story that said “people who hate Trump disagree”?
Because that is exactly how the education reporters cover the hypes of charters about their miraculous success. They run stories with parents talking about how their children’s lives were saved by the charter that is hyping its miracle education, and they include a single disclaimer that “unions who hate charters disagree”.
The significantly superior science reporters at the NYT wrote many articles explaining that Trump’s hyping it was not based in real peer-reviewed studies and the focus was to explain to readers about all the patients who were NOT helped by this drug that Trump was claiming was a miracle cure. The significantly superior science and medicine reporters did not do what education reporters at the NYT (and other major media reporters do) and focus only on the patients who say they were helped by the drug, and play up their recovery as a miracle, as if all the patients who were NOT helped do not exist to them. That would be terrible reporting.
That would be exactly the kind of terrible and awful reporting that the education journalists specialize in and insist is “excellent journalism”.
And can you imagine the science reporters saying “what’s wrong with showing how great this new drug that Trump is hyping works? What is wrong with writing lots of stories with patients talking about how it saved their lives, because we included a disclaimer that the people who hate Trump don’t agree? What matters is that patients are helped, and they say they are. We’ve done our job by prominently featuring the stories of the patients who know they received a miracle cure that saved their lives, just like Trump said, and how dare you expect us to actually take the time to present a story that makes it clear that the patients who are helped are a small number and many more patients are not helped? We don’t have to because we included a disclaimer that the people who hate Trump disagree.”
I guess we can be thankful that education reporters aren’t covering the COVID-19 response. since they would have already written dozens of stories interviewing the families who are absolutely certain that hydroxychloroquine saved their lives. And in the manner of Eliza Shapiro, when challenged on all the stories they wrote about how wonderful this new drug was and how many people’s lives were saved, those reporters would tweet that they had a disclaimer that mentioned that critics of Trump disagreed, so their story was absolutely “fair and balanced”.
Thank goodness education reporters aren’t assigned to report on whatever drug Trump hypes, because the PR folks can always trot out some patients who just know their lives were saved and the former education reporters would rush to feature their stories prominently as miracles. With their disclaimer that “Trump haters disagree”, which they would insist is sufficient to be “fair and balanced”.
The media has contributed to a lot of the disinformation disseminated by charter supporters. Many of them jumped on the privatization wagon with zero evidence to support its value. At least today fewer of the mainstream media writers are bashing public schools as more evidence emerges about the waste, fraud, lies, embezzling, profiteering and segregating tendencies of private charter schools.
Public schools offer students predictable stability which is what students with unstable home lives need. As Diane has said, schools that open and close like daylilies are not helpful.
Who owns the companies that these reporters work for? the likes of Murdoch and Bloomberg. This is not new, of course. There was a time in the U.S. when what newspapers promulgated were the views of William Randolph Hearst, who used his papers to peddle the racist notion that blacks and Mexicans were dope fiends because he wanted to keep people from switching to paper made from hemp (Hearst owned forests and paper mills as well as newspapers; he was a pioneer of “vertically integrated business”). Like Trump, he found it useful to spread racist notions to advance his personal agenda.
‘Students’ is not a word in business vocabulary. They think of young people as ‘customers’. So instead of fulfilling students’ rights, they seek to give customers choices. People can choose to waive their rights to make choices. Rights disappear.
My daughter had a little girl last year, or as we like to think of her, our new acquisition of human capital, lol.
How joyous! May your human capital yield plentiful data and make Zuckerberg even richer. Many happy returns — on investment.
Thank you, LeftCoast. Her name is Abby, and she is so strong and aware and beautiful. We are blessed.
Good one, Bob. How about kindergarten teachers starting the day with. “Good morning, human capital. Let’s get you hooked up to your devices so that the 1% can start data mining and profiting from you.”
This blog is called “A site to discuss better education for all.” And there you are, nailing it. LMAO!
Wise words, again, Peter, and extremely well chosen. Kudos!
I agree you can’t run education like a business, but this argument is not convincing.
You can’t compare anything unfavorably to business the way it’s run today,. For four decades it’s been a failed model that skates along on low inventory unprepared for a bump in the road, let alone a serious challenge. It “passed” Digital Revolution 101 and Globalism for Beginners only by cheating– mere technical success at the cost of lowering the QOL for the vast majority of Americans. Aided and abetted by its cheerleading handmaiden, the US govt: since the late ’70’s we’ve had a string of booms, busts, and recessions typical of the mid-19thC.