Stephen J. Klees is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of International Education Policy at the University of Maryland. Klees recently gave a talk at the Comparative and International Education Society’s (CIES) annual meeting in Washington D.C.. He considers the privatization of education to be a juggernaut of patriarchal racial neoliberal capitalism. Dr. Klees shared his talk with me.
Privatization is a scourge. Basic services should be public, publicly owned and run. It is not a question of effectiveness or costs. Privatized basic services are inequitable and violate human rights.
In education, the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s drastically changed the narrative. Before neoliberalism, it was generally believed that basic education (primary and secondary) should usually be provided by governments, with private schooling mostly the preserve of the wealthy and religious schools. The changed narrative brought by neoliberalism no longer asked whether privatization was necessary; instead, it asked when and how should we privatize? This assault on public sector motivations, competence, and budgets happened almost overnight – due completely to ideology, there was no evidence for this shift.
This shift has led to the massive expansion of private schooling around the world, most especially in developing countries, with critics fighting a rear-guard action against this juggernaut. The fight has given us efforts like the work of PEHRCand others that led to the Abidjan Principles, Education International’s Global Response campaign, high-level reports by UN Special Rapporteurs, as well as groups in most countries challenging the privatization of education. Have all these efforts slowed the juggernaut? Perhaps, but not noticeably. Have they changed the narrative? Perhaps some, but certainly not enough.
Critical researchers have responded to the slew of studies by privatization advocates pointing out their ideological biases and methodological flaws and pointing to contrary evidence. While we critics must respond to the advocates, to me, all this research is in many ways a waste of time and money. In terms of the narrow measurement of “learning,” embodied in test scores in a few subjects, the conclusion is what we all know – with similar students, sometimes private schools perform a little better, sometimes public schools do, and often there are no important differences. The other conclusion, hardly challenged by the right, is that privatization, even with low-cost private schools, further stratifies the system exacerbating inequality. But has this critical research changed the narrative or slowed the juggernaut? Perhaps a little, but far from enough.
What can slow or stop the juggernaut and change the story? I see more hope in increased mobilization across sectors. In 2019, there was a conference in Amsterdam that brought together public service advocates and this past December an even bigger one in Santiago, Chile that had over a thousand representatives from over one hundred countries fighting for public services in education, health, water, energy, housing, food, transportation, social protection, and care sectors. The Global Manifesto produced prior to the meeting and the Santiago Declaration produced after are marvelous documents with excellent analyses of the problem and principles for universal quality public services that will hopefully serve as a rallying cry for cross-sector mobilization by civil society and social movements around the world. The argument that there is not enough money to fund needed public services is simply a refusal to change priorities and tax those who are well-off.
However, the underlying reason we don’t have essential basic public services – the big picture – are the structures of patriarchal racial neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism exalts the market, but what does this mean? The market is a euphemism. It means the private sector should basically run the world. Critics of capitalism are accused of believing in a conspiracy by the rich and powerful; the critics response is there is no need for conspiracy. The reproduction of poverty and inequality, environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and more are built into the very structures that surround us.
Yet let’s not dismiss conspiracies too soon. What is the World Economic Forum but the rich and powerful getting together to set an agenda for the world? How many have heard of the Trilateral Commission? It’s the same people as the WEF getting together without much publicity each year to do the same. The WEF has been pushing its 2010 Global Redesign Initiative which essentially wants to turn the UN itself into a giant PPP – with quite a bit of success. These patriarchal racial capitalist institutions, run essentially by rich white men, may not have bad intentions but they are deluded into the self-interest of believing that all we need are win-win solutions to reform current polices, supposedly for everyone – without, of course, changing any of the structures that maintain their wealth and power.
We will not stop or reverse the privatization of education juggernaut without system change. Under patriarchal racial capitalism, especially the neoliberal version, privatization is the solution to most of our ills. But business leaders are singularly unqualified to deal with education or other social problems that have no simple bottom line (like profits) and whose real solution may threaten their dominance and power. While system change is very difficult, there are many groups, organizations, and movements around the world working on exactly that. The Santiago Declaration explicitly recognizes that the battle for public services means we need to “move away from the racial, patriarchal, and colonial patterns of capitalism and towards socio-economic justice, ecological sustainability, human rights, and public services.”
In what kind of world is it considered legitimate to charge the poorest for basic services? The answer is in a patriarchal, racist, capitalist world. I hope and believe that future generations will look back in horror at the fundamentally uncivilized nature of today’s world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think the explanation is very simple: PROFITS!!! Nothing that serves the public interest should ever be privatized. EVER!
Vera, I agree. Greed is a destructive motive.
By privatizing any enterprise the public is left without defense. How to fire a CEO?
Systems change requires: 1) a system. 2) Systems thinking 3) Seeing things public as an eco-system (not silos of serving the pubic) (think community schools). 4) Professionals and professionalism. 5) Public, teacher, union, student engagement – routinely. 6) Showing up.
This is similar to the superintendent criticism in yesterday’s blogs (just responded to that one).
Many business leaders don’t have a clue how schools or public anything works. And then there are those who just want to make a buck off of schools now that there’s money to be found and tax credits to receive and “savior” language to use as a front. The former are disengaged in many communities. The latter have found a new pot of gold and a political party to support them.
There are ways, many proven ones, to make it work.
But public leaders need to be speaking-out public leaders (and academics) and the public – students – parents – unions need to show up as overtly as the astroturf-moms and the outrage crowd.
Certainly the roots of privatization were steeped in racism, but I suggest that around the 1960’s it was transformed into a goal of the rich. Leading into the 1970’s and the Powell Memo as a focus for repealing the New Deal, the rich felt that they shouldn’t have to pay for their children’s private educations and the public educations of the unwashed, too. It was unfair, don’t you know. (The rich are biggest snowflakes.) They were rich because they were favored, due to their overall brilliance and, well God’s favor, too. (When was the prosperity Gospel first formed . . . about this time, I think?)
The student “revolts” of the 1960s cemented the issue for many of this crowd. The rich were paying for their educations and this was the thanks they got?
From Prosperity Theology/Gospel:
“According to historian Kate Bowler, the prosperity gospel was formed from the intersection of three different ideologies: Pentecostalism, New Thought, and “an American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility”.[13] This “American gospel” was best exemplified by Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth and Russell Conwell’s famous sermon “Acres of Diamonds”, in which Conwell equated poverty with sin and asserted that anyone could become rich through hard work. This gospel of wealth, however, was an expression of Muscular Christianity and understood success to be the result of personal effort rather than divine intervention.[14]
The New Thought movement, which emerged in the 1880s, was responsible for popularizing belief in the power of the mind to achieve prosperity. While initially focused on achieving mental and physical health, New Thought teachers such as Charles Fillmore made material success a major emphasis of the movement.[15] By the 20th century, New Thought concepts had saturated American popular culture, being common features of both self-help literature and popular psychology.[16]
E. W. Kenyon, a Baptist minister and adherent of the Higher Life movement, is credited with introducing mind-power teachings into early Pentecostalism.[17] In the 1890s, Kenyon attended Emerson College of Oratory where he was exposed to the New Thought movement. Kenyon later became connected with well-known Pentecostal leaders and wrote about supernatural revelation and positive declarations. His writing influenced leaders of the nascent prosperity movement during the post-war American healing revival. Kenyon and later leaders in the prosperity movement have denied that he was influenced by the New Thought movement. Anthropologist Simon Coleman argues that there are “obvious parallels” between Kenyon’s teachings and New Thought.[18]
Kenyon taught that Christ’s substitutionary atonement secured for believers a right to divine healing. This was attained through positive, faith-filled speech; the spoken word of God allowed believers to appropriate the same spiritual power that God used to create the world and attain the provisions promised in Christ’s death and resurrection.[19] Prayer was understood to be a binding, legal act. Rather than asking, Kenyon taught believers to demand healing since they were already legally entitled to receive it.[20]
Kenyon’s blend of evangelical religion and mind-power beliefs—what he termed “overcoming faith”—resonated with a small but influential segment of the Pentecostal movement.[21] Pentecostals had always been committed to faith healing, and the movement also possessed a strong belief in the power of speech (in particular speaking in tongues and the use of the names of God, especially the name of Jesus).[22] Kenyon’s ideas would be reflected in the teachings of Pentecostal evangelists F. F. Bosworth and John G. Lake (who co-led a congregation with New Thought author Albert C. Grier prior to 1915).[23]
That’s from Wiki.
The Prosperity Gospel by any other name is fund-a-mental to the Protestant Ethic and its psychodynamic springs and catches are traced out in detail by Max Weber.
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
We need to understand that “Privatization” is a really deceptive misnomer for what is really going on here and that Public Education is just one of many fronts in the hostile takeover of the entire public sector — from the government on down — by capital corporate forces. Privatization of a good would mean no tax dollars go into funding it. But that is not the corporate plan. The goal to keep the tax dollars flowing, all the more so with each new diversion, so long as it’s all shunted through corporate sluices. To do all that corporate capitalism must destroy not just public education as we know it, but democracy, journalism, and science in the public interest as well.
“The goal to keep the tax dollars flowing, , ,”
Kind of like with the Military Industrial Complex.
Yes, indeed — I have often referred to the Defense Industry Model (DIM) as the sweetest of all sweetheart deals any capital industry can set its cap for. And I suspect that hook is already set in the Nation At Risk rhetoric. Minimal token “oversight” (a very choice word) and bought politicians to do their bidding — How Sweet It Is! the Fat Dude sings.
““Privatization” is a really deceptive misnomer ”
We should use a less gentle term than privatization, like taxheist. How else can we express the large scale of this operation which can be expressed only in trillion dollars per year.
Scientific publications on the subject could use the less emotional taxflow redirection term.
We are in end stage capitalism. Unfortunately, the only way for this to end will be a ” great depression” followed by a “reset/redo” of the economy. Wouldn’t it be nice if a great economy were based on how many of its citizens were living decent lives instead of how well the stock market and businesses are doing financially.
Yes, that would be a nice change.
Comrades Lisa and Duane, you guys are such socialists! You’ll burn in Hell for it—with me. 🙂
Comarades Lisa and Duane,you guys are such socialists. 🙂
The campaign to privatize public education picked up steam about the same time that demographics showed that more than half the students in public schools are poor. Of course, many of those poor students are Black or Brown. The most vicious democracy crushing assaults on public education have been centered on urban schools where most of those students are students of color. This is not an accident, and it is no accident that racist test scores are used as a vehicle to justify the hostile takeover. Low scores are then used to justify to place students of color in separate and unequal schools. “Separate is never equal.”
The absurd claim behind the billionaire-funded “reform movement” is that a good school and good teachers will ensure that every single student is above average. If any are not, the school and its teachers are “bad.” Close them, fire the teachers, hire TFA, and voila, miraculous transformation. The fact that their formula has never worked anywhere doesn’t faze them.
Do they have “before and after” stats for the race of students and teachers in charter schools that came about after public school takeovers? If I remember correctly, in Memphis, when they created the Achievement School District, they fired the black teachers and they were replaced by mostly white TFA teachers. Students in the schools taken over by ASD were black.
In some cases, the turnaround involved not only replacing the teachers but the students as well.
Best comment/reply I read today, retired teacher and Diane.
Thank you!
Dr. Klees is right! But I would change one thing in this discussion; let’s call reactionary policies what they are–“reactionary”–an effort to take us back to the times–turn-of-the previous century, 1899-1900–when children provided cheap labor, had few bothersome rights, and so on. There were no troublesome teachers’ unions. “Neoliberalism” is from Britain, where “liberalism” means businesspeople having freedom from interference by the King, i.e., government. In America, Lincoln described himself as a liberal. So did FDR. So did Johnson of the Great Society. In the US, liberalism has been a good thing, and we could use a new version of it, perhaps as advocated by Sen. Bernie Sanders et.al.
And note: The policies advocated by the American “Right” are not “conservative,” except that they do help conserve super wealth. In the US, conservative has traditionally meant cautious. I’m conservative in that sense–don’t like government to waste money. No one does.
I hope this response in not a quibble; I do think terminology is important. But then, I’m a recovering English teacher who also taught social studies.
Glad to see someone else that understands that terminology is important. Yes, they are reactionary xtian fundie theocrats who seek to, as you note, take us back in time to a time that never really was nor ever will be.
I might have the dynasty wrong, but I think it was the Han Dynasty. One of the emperors that ruled for decades created a public sector to control prices of essentials that even the poor people needed to survive, like salt and iron.
I think it was Emperor Wudi.
“Wudi, Wade-Giles romanizationWu-ti, original name Liu Che, (born 156 bc—died March 29, 87 bc), posthumous name (shi) of the autocratic Chinese emperor (141–87 bc) who vastly increased the authority of the Han dynasty (206 bc–ad 220) and extended Chinese influence abroad.”
When Wudi died, the lobbyists (yes, lobbyists were around more than 2,000 years ago and they bribed government workers to get what they wanted, too, jus tlike today in the U.S.) for the salt and iron industries convinced his replacement to lift those price controls. Once the price for salt and iron was beyond what the working class could afford, there was unrest and insurrections that eventually led to the collapse of the dynasty. Note that in China at that time, 95% of the people were the poor working class.
Greed didn’t create the market that has parents abandoning the public schools.
Greed created the charter industry, where CEOs can receive $1 million a year. Greed created the voucher movement, which is paying the tuition of kids enrolled in private schools who never attended public schools.
Greed is responsible for billionaires refusing to pay taxes to improve the public schools, pay teachers a professional salary and reduce class sizes.
Yes, but the choice movement would failed without a large number of dissatisfied parents. Corporate greed simply preyed on unhappy parents looking for options.
Yes, Raged, that’s how marketing works. Play to people’s naïveté, their fears, their uncertainty, and sell them horse manure about the grass on the other side of the street. Next thing, they are using tax money to go to a third rate private school that pledges to educate them for only $7,000 a year! Do the parents notice that their kids are falling farther behind. Do they know that the voucher won’t get them into the Lakeside School where Bill Gates sent his kids or the elite private schools in any city or state.
Or they will be lured by charter promises to enroll in a school that closes a year or two later. Or they may find their children may get stuck in a no-excuses school where they are trained to obey.
Why do people fall for slick advertising? We have large industries designed to make people believe that that they can’t live without that shiny new object.
This is really amazing!
It does need to be said somewhere in this discussion, though, that beyond greed, a major contributor to the privatization movement, was the racism of the old system. Across the nation, in most places before the Brown decision, minority kids went to schools in older buildings with less equipment and fewer books, and often with less experienced teachers. It’s noteworthy that Sen. Ted Kennedy was a chief sponsor of the so-called No Child Left Behind legislation. I believe he did so in good faith, hoping to help public school kids and help end racism. But Sen. Kennedy was a product of privileged, private schools, as I believe were some of his staff. Then we had Race to the Top, from President Obama’s group, which over-represented private school experience. A major goal of both laws, of course, was to level the playing field as much as possible. But the sponsors and some of the Education Department operators put in place lacked the experience needed to bring about the goals sought. In fact, of course, no one had that experience, and the above laws, though well intentioned, were harmful. Nor can all change come top down.
The story can also be traced back instructively to the divide between the two major teacher unions, NEA and AFT. Originally, NEA favored, pushed for, and won from President Carter–following NEA’s first-ever Presidential endorsement–an independent Department of Education. AFT favored leaving education within a department, as it had been since Eisenhower–Health, Education, and Welfare, reflecting both the Federation’s connection to the larger AFL & the labor movement, while stand-alone NEA favored a separate department–signaling that education was so important that it should have its own department. AFT argued that education is closely tied to community and workforce economics, and that education would do best to be considered as a part of the overall society, not separate.
Ultimately–and I say this though I worked in the NEA system–the education as a standalone department probably was a mistake. Schools are part of their communities and must be. Education is part of our economic and social systems and must work with them. Not that schools are factories. Education is subtle, mostly, and isn’t amenable to dictates from any camp, really. So, schools shouldn’t be expected to solve our deep racial problems, heal a wounded society, or jump-start a struggling or inadequate economy. But they have often been asked to do all that, sometimes all at once.
What we need to do is just love all our kids and give them all kinds of positive activities within a healthy community and school environment. That would require money for better school buildings and adequately financed teachers. The kids and the teachers would do the rest.
Once Clinton and the New Democrats won the White House, everyone from Ted Kennedy to even Jesse Jackson fell in line with deregulation, privatization, micro loans, anti-labor, mass incarceration, outsourcing, and the rest of the Republican Lite ways, shredding the New Deal, unions, and the Civil Rights Movement. The NCLB was bipartisan because the entire government took human rights for granted and handed the keys to the car over to tech and investment banking so-called philanthropists, thinking they were the new geniuses of the time. Now, we all live in Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg’s fantasy world, without even putting on the VR headsets.
My point–not made well–is that freedom for “whom” has to be asked. American conservatism seeks freedom for business leaders. Liberalism and progressivism seek freedom for ordinary folks of whatever race or gender.
As a history guy, I do believe looking at the past can give some (not all) guidance. So, if we look the 20th century in politics in the US–and to a certain extent, Britain–we can see which governments–and parties–followed what philosophies and enacted what policies. In the US, Republicans ruled in the 1920’s and drove America into a Depression. Not only the poor were suffering, but so were many of the wealthy, with not enough customers to buy their goods and services. FDR’s New Deal put some money in the hands of the poor, helping not just them but businesses, as folks had more money to spend–and poorer folks spend their money quickly on basic goods & services. That pattern continued throughout the century, though irregularly and with varying emphasis. The differences between the parties, especially in economic policies, is real and is quite clear today.
In education, however, the differences blur, as Democrats and Republicans fail, through the 20th Century, to improve America’s public schools. With the exception of the Brown decision in the Supreme Ct.–desegregation–both parties have over relied on top-down approaches and elements of privatization in attempts to improve–or exploit–education and our kids.
Jack, “the history guy”-
How does the chronology identified by Betty Clermont, who writes for Church and State, factor in?
A synopsis for one of her books includes the following, “…the essential role played by Catholics in instituting and directing the religious right as a means for the neoconservative takeover of U.S. government.”
Clermont wrote the book in 2009, the same year that a current member of the Massachusetts BESE wrote a paper claiming that competition from Catholic schools improved public schools.
A second statement from the Clermont book’s synopsis follows, “At the start of the 1980’s, the Church’s social justice agenda had been committed to alleviating poverty, to demilitarization, to affirmative action,… an agenda antipathetic to the Republican platform. By the end of the 90’s, its justice agenda was marginalized and political action was mobilized around concern for …the unborn… Clermont’s rigorous and extensive research examines how it was done.” (book title- The NeoCatholics Implementing Christian Nationalism in America)
The campaign against government has as foundational justification/propaganda, opposition to the conflation of common good with big government. Conservative Catholic framing focuses on the notion that social safety nets deny dignity. Their agenda which forced taxpayers to make Catholic organizations the nation’s 3rd largest employer relies on private charity (tax deductible). Private charity provides opportunity for indoctrination into colonialism and opportunities for financial and other exploitation.
I agree with the basic gist of this. I do think a shift also occurred when Eisenhower won the Presidency, as he managed to get “under God” into our Pledge of Allegiance–which was, ironically, written by an agnostic socialist. (I’ve written about this in “Church and State”, as well). The conservatives–the Republicans–have been more adept at being patient and careful over the years, working slowly to change our society back to something before the New Deal. (Maybe because wealthy people can be comfortably patient, while the poor, served by the left, are never able to be quite comfortable and thus want change to be immediate).
A bigger shift occurred when Reagan’s appointees eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in media and pulled the NLRB to the management side. Also, Republican leaders and planners set up reactionary “think” tanks, bought media, closed newspapers, and, of course, went after schools. Telling us our nation was at risk because of our “poor” public schools was part of that.
As to Democrats, the leaders have come mostly from wealthy, ruling class families. And, most of the top leaders are from a church-based culture, typically Catholic. It’s interesting to note that while JFK was almost a Catholic anomaly when he ran for President, now we don’t seem to question the loyalty of anyone because of religion–in one way a good thing, but not in all. In the end, a thought process guided by belief that all wrongs will be righted in the NEXT world, tends to downplay the human suffering and the potential of the less fortunate in this world. Religion also teaches, mostly, that there are right and wrong answers to just about everything. They can be found by prayer. So you get schools that provide top-down instruction with testable answers. A very different education that what many received when schools were more democratic and progressive.
Thank you for your reply. There is evidence that the right wing Catholic Church has protectors in media and among influencers. Almost total omission of the substantial role right wing Catholics have played in the undermining of public educations is one indication. The second is the exclusion of Catholic when the discussion is Christian nationalism. The public understands the word Christian as protestant.
Charles Koch funded Paul Weyrich who was a right wing Catholic. Weyrich co- founded the religious right, ALEC and the Heritage Foundation. The Mass. BESE board member I referenced receives grant money from Koch.
The EPPC’s program for journalists was described by David Brooks as having singular impact, “huge leverage,” in American culture. A conservative Catholic leads EPPC.
Every American should read the Ryan Girdusky interview (2014) posted at the Pat Buchanan site. It shows readers the plan that got the nation to the point where there is a neoconservative takeover of the government and courts.
Btw- Ryan Girdusky founded the PAC that funds right wing candidates for school boards.
Every American (especially historians) should familiarize themselves with the research of Betty Clermont.
This week, while Josh Hawley trots out propaganda about “anti-Catholic” bias to misdirect the public, Americans should not be in the dark about how Hawley beat McCaskill. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote about it, including a description of the voter mobilization effort of the Catholic League.
Kimberle Crenshaw, Guardian interview, 3-4-2023
“If parents can be convinced that there is a wrong happening in public schools, they might be convinced to agree to the dismantling of public ed. across the board.” Crenshaw talks about race, anti-wokeness and opposition to CRT in the interview.
The conservative religious EPPC in Washington D.C. posted 6-29-2021, “Why States Should Bar CRT.” The opinion was submitted by a senior fellow at EPPC to the Ohio Legislature.
Complete total nonsense. Milton Friedman was right. You either believe in freedom or you don’t. Clearly, Stephen J. Klees doesn’t. That is the clear and present danger to our society.
You either believe in freedom or you don’t. That may be true, but only if you don’t know the difference between fascist freedom and democratic liberty. You either believe in democracy or you don’t.
Milton Friedman was wrong about many things. I believe in freedom but I also believe that government has an obligation to serve its people and protect their well-being.
Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys were given a free hand by Pinochet to recreate Chile’s economic system—including its ed system. Public spending on education dropped 40% in just 16 years [from 3.8 to 2.3% GDP ’74 – ’90]. When democracy returned in 1990 some general economic improvement was effected through tweaks, but much of the Chicago neoliberal set-up stayed in place.
By 2011 the biggest street protests since 1990 began [and continued for years], by students demanding free public education. Some of the banners read “Se Vende Educación” (Education for Sale) and “Ciao Chicago Boys.”
The list of demands for K12 level are instructive: end public vouchers to for-profit schools, increase state spending, more vocational schools, moratorium on new voucher and charter schools, and higher teacher pay. [Sound familiar?]
Right on, Ginny.
Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys were a disaster for Chile.
Education was a disaster, except for the rich.
Here at home, he was an advisor to President Reagan. He wanted to get rid of Social Security and Medicare.
Interesting!
Does Prof. Klees have knowledge about the state Catholic Conferences’ political actions initiating and advancing privatization legislation in states? If not, he could read “Election 2022: Catholic Money Power Support the GOP” ( 9-24-2022 at Church and State). The article written by Betty Clermont, the author of rigorously researched books, references political influence by the Church in many areas. One of the topics is public education.