Chris Lubienski is a professor of education policy at Indiana University. He wrote recently with Amanda Potterton and Joe Malin about the deceptive rhetoric of school choice rhetoric. Thirty years ago, the school choice movement boasted that charters and vouchers would “save poor children from failing public schools.” They claimed that private schools outperform public schools. Now we know that school choice does not produce academic improvement for students; that many pick their students and discriminate against the children they don’t want. “Success” for school choice means expansion of charters and vouchers, not better education for students.
Last week, Forbes magazine published an article on how “School Choice Keeps Winning.” Interestingly, “winning” isn’t defined as helping kids learn. Indeed, the article avoids that issue because evidence indicates that school choice is actually failing on that front. Instead, Forbes uses the term to celebrate the expansion of choice programs in many GOP-led states.
The language used in the Forbes article reflects a rhetorical strategy that school choice advocates have adopted in recent years. We (Joe Malin, Amanda Potterton, and Chris Lubienski) analyzed how language favoring educational choice is increasingly shaping U.S. educational policy for a new article published in the journal, Kappa Delta Pi Record. Key features of some dominant narratives include shifting the focus away from academic results (where choice advocates had, for years, insisted there were great gains). Instead, in view of a slew of recent studies showing students in choice programs experience a relative decline in learning gains, choice advocates like Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump have been moving the goalposts to focus on personal narratives and claims of school choice as “liberty,” “freedom,” or a “civil right.” Public schooling is often framed as a “failing” enterprise, and thus a burden on the taxpayer and on poor families. This language often implies that education should be organized like a “business,” with families as “consumers” of the privatized benefits of schooling.
But we also note emergent, counter-narratives which support and envision a strong, broadly supported public education system. For example, in 2019 in Kentucky, superintendents joined together to oppose a bill that would create a scholarship tax-credit program for private schools. They engaged in urgent news press gatherings and via social media to highlight the importance of adequate funding for the state’s public schools. One superintendent said:
We’re all in this business to help students, we are in public education. And it’s a very simple fact that over the last ten years the percentage of funding from the state has continued to dwindle. The burden on local school districts has continued to increase. Teachers feel it the same that we feel it. Every one of our employees feels it. So, we feel very passionate and we’re all very united for this idea that we cannot continue to allow the state to siphon funds away from public education.
Another superintendent, illustrating real-time funding concerns they have, said:
You need to prepare and provide for all of our students, all of our learners, and 21st century learning is much more diverse than what it was 20 years ago. So to provide them specific needs at the expense of another funding mechanism or while we are losing specific funding streams has made it difficult. We are faced a choice: do we keep Read to Achieve or do we buy textbooks? Do we buy textbooks or do we offer in-house professional development? Those are difficult decisions, decisions that have been made, will continue to be made by myself and colleagues, to benefit our children. But it’s beginning to become very difficult, because you are getting to the meat of services to kids, and when that becomes a problem it inhibits their learning, it inhibits their opportunities, it disallows us to create additional avenues that they would be interested in pursuing, be it career choices or whatnot. So, it does become a very problematic scheme when you look at it in that way.
And this was all before the pandemic. So, now in 2021, we believe these concerns regarding public school funding are clearly still relevant.
The analysis finishes with talking about what lies ahead and why words matter in policy and practice amid continued, evolving efforts by some to further privatize public resources.
The recently published article is available here. If you can’t gain full access, a pre-print version is also available here — or, feel free to email Joe at malinjr@miamioh.edu
Citation
Malin, J. R., Potterton, A. U., & Lubienski, C. (2021). Language matters: K-12 choice-favoring and public-favoring stories. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 57(3), 104-109. https://doi.org/10.1080/00228958.2021.1935175
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This article is worth reading. It repeats an important argument that Diane Ravitch has made eloquently for many years now, that Education Reformers, who would lose if people made decisions based on the facts, nonetheless win again and again due to their superior ability to marshal deceptive language to their ends. Turning over public education dollars spent transparently to private hands, where they are spent secretly, becomes “parental choice,” for example. Providing universal access to healthcare, as every other industrial democracy worlldwide does, becomes “Socialized medicine” with “Death Panels.” “CRT” is no longer an obscure academic framework but a supposedly almost universal system of indoctrination to children to hate their country and their whiteness. The important addition of this article to the Resistance to the disastrous privatization of U.S. education is that it notes how recently, privatizers have started dropping their unsupportable argument that charter and private schools get better results than do public schools (a recurring theme in Diane’s recent work) in favor of language promoting “choice for its own sake.” This constant reframing enables right-wingers to continue to win even when they have so clearly lost.
Diane has long been at the fore in the war against such deceitful language. My one suggestion to the authors of this paper is that they acknowledge that.
Oh, and here is my meager addition to this critique:
I posted this at OpEd News. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/The-Deceptive-Language-of-in-General_News-Deceptive-Business-Practices_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-Costs-210723-495.html
Albert:
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”
The “we know what’s best for you” narrative/strategy
vs
The supposedly “superior ability to marshal deceptive language to their ends.”
On the other hand,
a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.
Effective marketing starts where critical thinking
(faculties of discernment) ends.
Lubienski and McShane (author of the Forbes article) -why are they avoiding the mention of a critical variable in the “winning” strategy?
The billionaire-funded Bellwether advised ed reformers to reach out to churches to achieve their goals.
Who amplifies the billionaires’ privatization narrative in the states that McShane mentions? The answer is state Catholic Conferences (with some support nationally from those employed in Catholic universities.) In fact, at least two state Catholic Conference executive directors publicly took credit for the school choice legislation in their states.
Mc Shane wrote that Gov. Dewine signed a recent bill favorable to school choice. Dewine, father of 9, is Catholic as is the Ohio Senate Chair, Matt Huffman. Huffman and his first cousin, Steve, also a Senator, are eager proponents of school choice. Steve was in the news last summer for racist comments in a hearing that resulted in him being fired by his private employer.
The interview (2014) that Pat Buchanan has posted at his site is worth a read. The interview was conducted by Ryan Girdusky who started a PAC to fund school board candidates opposed to CRT.
Particularly now that the conservative Catholic SCOTUS majority has delivered wins for their church (Biel v. St. James Catholic school and Espinosa v. Montana in 2020), historians will in the future puzzle at why Americans allowed common goods to be eliminated at the hands of the conservative religious who are less than 40% of the population.
Ryan Girdusky is interviewed at Catholic Vote.
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
I presume the author of the Forbes article, Mike McShane, is the same Mike McShane profiled at the University of Notre Dames’ Alliance for Catholic Education, 10-2016. “One Step at a Time: Mike McShane’s Journey with Catholic Education…While Mike may have lacked a definite plan, God supplied one…”
McShane attended Catholic schools and went to Rex Sinquefield’s University of St Louis. He went to the Walton’s University of Arkansas for his doctorate. He had a stint at the Show-Me Institute, an organization founded by Sinquefield. Sourcewatch describes the Institute as, ” led by conservatives and Republican campaign staffers.”
As predators boast, to the victor go the spoils. And, as Jefferson said, in all times and all countries, the priest aligns with the despot.
Correction: It is St. Louis University, a Catholic institution run by Jesuits.
The privatization of public education co-opted the language of civil rights. We all heard the hype. “It’s the civil right issue of our time. No child should be trapped in failing schools by their zip code. “The market will force schools to compete.” etc.
In reality private schools do not offer students the same legal protections that public schools do. The real real objective of privatization is a PR campaign to convince the public that charters or vouchers have some type of intrinsic value than public schools do not possess. The big play is really about diverting public money out of public institutions and into private investments under the guise of education. It is an elaborate scam designed to cheat the working class.
Some people pick up fat paychecks from right wing billionaires to sell out American democracy and then use their religion to justify what they do.
“Key features of some dominant narratives include shifting the focus away from academic results (where choice advocates had, for years, insisted there were great gains). Instead, in view of a slew of recent studies showing students in choice programs experience a relative decline in learning gains, choice advocates like Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump have been moving the goalposts to focus on personal narratives and claims of school choice as “liberty,” “freedom,” or a “civil right.” Public schooling is often framed as a “failing” enterprise, and thus a burden on the taxpayer and on poor families. This language often implies that education should be organized like a “business,” with families as “consumers” of the privatized benefits of schooling.”
So true. One can see examples of “the dominant narrative” in all ed reform groups. It’s remarkably consistent.
I think ed reform is so much an echo chamber they don’t even realize the anti-public school bias in everything they produce, but it just jumps out to an ordinary reader.
There’s even a form to the ed reform essays and op eds. They all start with the promotion and marketing of vouchers and charters and end with an afterthought paragraph about “district schools”. It’s literally like a 90/10 ratio- that predictable.
Reading ANY ed reformer no ordinary person could have any doubt which schools they prefer- charters and voucher schools. Public schools are either actively denigrated, given one throwaway mention at the end of the article or completely ignored.
Here’s what I would like public school leaders to do. Turn the ed reform “analysis” around.
Ask a really simple question- has this “movement” improved any part or facet of PUBLIC schools since it started? What are the gains to either public schools or public school students as a result of the billions of dollars and several decades we have devoted to following the ed reform echo chamber?
Has it benefited your students? If not, why not cut it loose? Is it the duty of public schools to assist ed reformers in privatizing public school systems OR is it the duty of public schools to serve public school students?
Ed reformers do NO advocacy for students in public schools. They exclusively promote charters and vouchers. If public school leaders don’t do it either, who will?
We have the ed reform echo chamber serving charters and vouchers. Who works for public school students? Why do we take policy direction from a group of people who have an ideological belief that our schools should no longer exist? How can that possibly serve our students?
Here’s a typical ed reform “discussion”. Limited to current echo chamber members and true believers and completely excludes public schools:
“Bree Dusseault joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss how large school systems are spending their federal pandemic aid dollars. ”
How did it happen that we have a huge group of people who insist they should be running public schools yet they completely exclude actual public school leaders?
It’s nuts. No public school should accept this. They won’t even allow you at the table. Why they heck are you listening to them at all?
Imagine this in some other sector. We will now set policy for “large hospital networks” but we will deliberately and carefully exclude anyone who 1. runs one, or 2. works in one. No one in health care would accept it. Why do public school accept it?
Run your own schools. You cannot do worse than allowing these people to run them for you. They don’t even value the whole CONCEPT of public schools. They literally don’t share your mission.
exactly what I have thought for two decades: WHY DO PUBLIC SCHOOLS ACCEPT IT
Charters and vouchers are winning. They are fracking deep. They win when they drill, baby, drill. Sure, dangerous forever chemicals seep into the roots of civilization and we all see the effects of the destruction privatization caused, but there was some money made, so, winning! We make our money, and when everything is in ruins and there’s nothing left to sustain us, we put on our goofy looking cowboy hats and ejaculate to Mars on our anthropomorphic rockets!
It’s really no different than what the conservatives want to do with Medicare. Senior citizens would get a voucher, and good luck finding a private (i.e. charter) health insurance company to pay for your healthcare unless you happen to be one of the healthiest senior citizens.
The conservatives believe very strongly in “freedom” and “liberty” — conservatives believe private health insurance companies and charters should have the freedom and liberty to dump any patients or students that cut into their profits. It’s all good, as long as you stay very healthy or don’t have a kid who cuts into their profits or public relations campaign.
When conservatives talk about freedom and liberty, they hope that they can con people long enough to make them forget that their “freedom” and “liberty” to choose ends at the moment that a corporation or charter school decides it does.
“freedom and liberty”
Republicans and DINOS entrenched in their religion are America’s Taliban.
Public schools were mostly closed in 2020-21 while private and charters open
Let’s see who’s how farther behind now