A few days ago, I spoke to a statewide group of public education advocates in Texas, brought together by my friends at Pastors for Texas Children.
For some reason, Texas is ground-zero for the charter industry right now. Betsy DeVos has given over $250 million to the IDEA charter chain (the one that wanted to lease a private jet for its executives, and she recently gave $100 million to the State Commissioner Mike Morath to expand charter schools. Morath was in business; he was never an educator. Businessmen like competition; educators know that competition belongs on the sports field and is not a way to improve schools.
I did my due diligence comparing charter schools to public schools in Texas and this is what I found: charter schools have lower test scores than public schools; charter schools have lower graduation rates than public schools; charter school graduates enter college with lower GPAs than public schools; charters have no effect on test scores and a negative effect on earnings after school. All of these articles and studies were published on my blog.
So, why, I wondered are billionaires like John Walton, Tim Dunn, the Waltons, and DeVos expanding this low-performing sector? What smart businessman would continue to pour money into a failing enterprise?
Public schools are better than charter schools by every measure, but they are underfunded. The Legislature cut the school budget by $5.4 billion in 2011 and has still not restored that funding, even though enrollment has grown.
If competition worked, Milwaukee and Detroit would be the best districts in the nation. Milwaukee has had vouchers and charters for more than 20 years. Sadly, all three sectors perform about the same, and Milwaukee is one of the lowest performing districts in the nation.
I asked the Texas audience whether it would make sense to fund two or three different police or fire departments in the same community. Would that improve their performance? Of course not! It would be a duplication and triplication and would be wasteful. I remembered that in the early 19th century, New York City had multiple fire departments. They would race to the scene of the fire, then fight each other for the right to fight the fire while the buildings burned down.
The Pastors for Texas Children turned these thoughts into a delightful article.
Public schools are a public service. They should be properly funded because they are creating the future. The teachers of Texas and every other state are developing their future leaders and citizens. They are heroes and should be respected and professionally compensated.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wonderful post, Diane.
Love that article. I’ve sent it to others.
Thank you, Pastors for Texas Children.
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GREAT title. BRILLIANT analogy!!!
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It makes no sense for communities to have competing public services. More choice is a recipe for built in inefficiencies and waste that will result in higher costs or worse service. Competing fire departments, for example, would result in service duplication, and none of the competing fire companies would be able to afford decent equipment and perhaps a much needed but costly hook and ladder for higher structures.
The privatization that has been imposed on public schools has had the same effect. So-called choice is imposed inefficiency for diluted services and worse results. More choice has resulted in the disinvestment in public education. Services and supports for students have been reduced or eliminated. Privatization is not a need. It is an ideological scheme to transfer public funds into private pockets. The public should wake up to the fact that privatization is a massive transfer of value out of communities and the working class and into the pockets of the already wealthy.
Democratic and accountable public education is part of the public trust. It was never intended to operate in a marketplace. Through pooling resources, it was intended to serve communities needs efficiently and effectively which it has done for more than a hundred years. Public schools are valuable resources that have built this nation, educated its citizens and sent its young people off to fight our wars. Public schools are not pizza restaurants, and they must not be ridiculously treated as such. They are the hub of community life and the backbone of our democracy.
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Great question. We have various systems of colleges and universities in this country. IN many states, including this one, they both collaborate and compete.
Personally I am in favor of, and have worked for public schools of choice, open to all. So one part of higher education that I do NOT think should be adopted in K-12 is the ability of colleges to screen out certain students.
But colleges & universities don’t draw lines – or have lines drawn for them – as districts do. So Mn and some other states, young people can move across district lines if the receiving district has room.
At some colleges, faculty and encouraged, and provide time & opportunity, to create new programs. In some districts such as Boston and LA, faculty have similar opportunities. Some smaller districts have given faculty opportunities to create schools within schools All good ideas. All empowering educators, families and students.
We call this freedom. We call this opportunity.
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First, let’s use precise rather than Orwellian language. Charter schools are not public schools. They are charter schools. They are not public because they are not run by the public. They are also not always open to all students, as has been well documented. Additionally, since charter schools being superior is revealed by massive amounts of research to be no better than public schools, since charters take funding away from public schools resulting in a downgrade of the quality of education for the whole of society, and are not open to all students, they are not an ‘opportunity’ for anyone but moneyed investors. And the only ‘freedoms’ enjoyed by charter school students is the freedom to self-segregate and the freedom to be taught by less experienced teachers.
As for higher education, there was a time when California public universities were tuition free for residents. If you lived within state border lines, you could receive a world class education, paid for by property taxes on wealthy corporations. If you came from outside the state, it wasn’t free. That benefited Californians a great deal. What we have now is a more expensive system that is of greatly reduced quality. That’s what a business model does.
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Pardon my hurried lack of editing.
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Yes, let’s be precise. In 43 states, the legislature has adopted chartering as part of public education.
Let’s also be clear that there are other parts of public education that are not run by boards elected by the local community. Many states have schools focused on young people who are hearing impaired, or students who are blind. Several states have statewide public schools focused on the arts or math.
Some of the nation’s largest cities have district public schools that are run by people appointed by mayors.
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You can call a camel a horse, but it’s still a camel. You can write a law calling a camel a horse, but it’s still a camel.
Joe, I’m so disappointed to see you aligned with Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump.
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There have been only two state referenda on charter expansion, in Massachusetts and Georgia. Despite heavy spending by billionaires like the Waltons, both were defeated by the public.
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Public school students do not find any “freedom” when they lose art, music, libraries, school nurses, social workers, counselors and large class sizes to pay for someone else’s opportunity. Privatization allows the interests of a few to take priority over the needs of many. Every dollar that goes into privatization often comes out of an under funded public school budget with vast needs. This system gives the neediest students less “freedom” and opportunity.
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That “freedom to choose” disadvantages the vast majority and increases inequity.
The old Milton Friedman con job.
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Joe Nathan,
I can’t think of anything more disingenuous than you comparing fire departments and public schools to colleges. Fire departments have to go to every fire and they don’t get to say “sorry, we want to brag that we have 100% success in putting out fires and your fire isn’t worth our time to put out, let someone else do it.” Fire Departments have to address every call out, big or small. Fire Departments don’t get to come to a fire, realize it’s too hard, and say “that person told us they didn’t want our 100% successful fire department to put out the fire and if they tell you we threatened them to get them to agree that we’d go home, they are big liars”.
If even one person showed that a public fire department had pushed a homeowner into “voluntarily” refusing to have their fire put out by the fire department, the fire chief would be fired. Even if that fire chief kept bragging “but we have 100% success in putting out the fires of all the people who really want their fires put out and the rest don’t matter”.
No one would believe them.
And all colleges do something that charters have spent an inordinate amount of money lobbying and contributing to politicians to prevent. Every college has to publish its 4 year and 5 year retention and graduation rate of the students who enter as first year students. No fudging by saying “just look at how many of the students in the senior class graduate” like charters do.
It is impossible to get that information from charters. It’s basic information that any consumer would want, but charters won’t provide it because doing so would ruin their bragging rights, and bragging rights are far more important than children to them.
When fire departments get to pick and choose which fires to put out, you can rightly compare them to charters. I’m sure if President Trump is re-elected, you’ll get “charter” fire departments as well.
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We agree that the data you mentioned should be easily available for every public school, district or chartered. In many states, the information that you request is part of reports filed with and published by state departments of education.
Here’s a link to the Minnesota Education Report card, which provides graduation data and a lot of other data by individual district and individual school
https://rc.education.mn.gov/#mySchool/p–3
Does New York not provide this data?
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Oh, this headline of this cracked me up. I have a collection of short stories about a fictional volunteer fire department written in the dialect of my home region in Germany. It’s called Haut ab! Des iss unner Feuer!, which translates something like Git outta here, this is our fire!. It’s about two neighboring fire departments who fight over who will put the fire out in a two apartment townhouse, half of which is in one community, the other half in the other. Thanks for the reminder. Will have to reread this weekend to give myself a much needed chuckle.
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Sounds like Bayerisch.
I spent a summer during high school living with a family just outside Muenchen In a town called Groebenzell (Not far from Dachau)
Luckily the family spoke Hochdeutsch or I would not have been able to understand a word they said.
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Unterfränkisch. Gel! One of the reasons I wish I could understand other languages is to appreciated the nuance of dialect. American English has no dialects, only accents. Dialects are different languages that can neighbor each other. Truly a joy to be able to understand (or at a minimum, have great appreciation when one can’t understand).
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I once had a virtual encounter with a libertarian space cadet, and that’s giving him too much credit. Public schools? Pfft, he said that why should his money go to someone else’s kids. He said that all education should be privatized, no publicly funded schools whatsoever. Send your child to a private school, religious school or home school, it’s all on the parents to educate their children, period! The same for police and firefighters, he felt that the Pinkerton’s were a great idea. He didn’t seem to realize that volunteer fire departments get public funds to support the whole fire hydrant infrastructure, fire houses, fire engines and all the equipment that firefighters need to put out fires. He kept referring to the government as the “gooferment.” He was the goof and an idiotic goof at that.
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The article is a delight and remarkably comprehensive. I was also impressed with some of the other articles at the website, especially this one attempting to explain which evangelicals are the strongest supporters of Trump.
Who are these ‘evangelicals’ pollsters keep talking about?
NEWSMARK WINGFIELD | OCTOBER 20, 2020
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“why, I wondered are billionaires like John Walton, Tim Dunn, the Waltons, and DeVos expanding this low-performing sector? What smart businessman would continue to pour money into a failing enterprise?”
Because the intention of these people is simply to kill off public schools.
They don’t care if what replaces them is better from any objective standpoint.
People need to stop assuming ignorance and stupidity and start assuming malice.
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Correct. It’s a hostile takeover model that anticipates using the Hegelian Dialectic when phase one, destruction of public education is complete. Phase two is grabbing up more taxpayer money to ‘fix’ the intentionally ignored, self inflicted problems of phase one.
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“I remembered that in the early 19th century, New York City had multiple fire departments. They would race to the scene of the fire, then fight each other for the right to fight the fire while the buildings burned down.“
That is precisely analogous to what is happening in education today.
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Only today they are fighting for the right — and the money — to start the fire that burns the school down, so the construction company that they own can build condos in its place.
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How many billionaires like the Trump family, the Walton family, the Koch family, the Betsy DeVos family never earned there wealth but inherited it? In Donald Trump’s case, he failed repeatedly and was bailed out by his father and then went through six large bankruptcies.
I think inherited wealth is like a plague on humanity and should be taxed. Every time a wealthy person dies that earned his or her wealth on their own, that fortune should be taxed at a 99% rate with no way to shelter that wealth from that tax.
As of June 2020, Gates’ net worth was estimated at roughly than $110 billion, according to Forbes.
When BG dies, his children and wife would still inherit $1.1 billion. I wonder how many people on the planet get to inherit that much money.
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From CNN Business, 8-27-20: Jeff Bezos was already the world’s richest man. Now his net worth has skyrocketed once again, setting another new record.
On Wednesday, the Amazon CEO’s wealth reached an estimated $202 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index, as the company’s shares soared. That’s up about $87 billion since January.
The explosive growth in Bezos’ fortune is being driven by his holdings in Amazon (AMZN). The company’s stock is up about 25% over the last three months and 86% so far this year, according to data from Refinitiv. end quote
These filthy rich economic royalists should be paying a top marginal tax rate of 91%, you know from the 1950s DDE era.
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It wouldn’t make much difference because most of their wealth is in stocks, bonds and real estste which are only taxed when they sell them and then only at the lower capital gains rate of only 23.8%
What needs to happen is that for those whose wealth is greater than some value (a few million, say) the increase in “capital” value needs to get taxed not just when they sell it, but every year. If that rate were set at 91%, they would not increase their wealth nearly as quickly.
And the estate tax for people like Bezos needs to be 100% for everything over a few million, with no possibility of evasion by donating the money to a foundation that he set up for that purpose. People should not get tax breaks on money contributed to their own foundations.
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I’m posting this link to a rather good discussion of the many disconnects in the idea that you can run government or parts thereof the same way you can run a business. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/should-government-be-run-like-a-business/
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This article and corresponding comments are spot on! This brilliant analogy should go viral!
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