We previously read an article claiming that for-profit entrepreneurs are necessary to reform American schools. The article began, in its original version, with a vulgar and gratuitous insult directed at Anthony Cody.
Here are two great responses. The first is by Anthony Cody.
The other is by Audrey Watters.
A reader shared his response to the article praising the profit motive in education.
Hi Diane. I wrote the following reply to Tom Segal on their web page.
Eight years ago, I would have agreed with you on your perspective, Mr. Segal. Unfortunately, your efforts to paint the public education community as in dire need of the profit motive are profoundly misguided. I have spent the last 8 years teaching in public charters, which are nothing more than privatized public schools. My experience, and the data, show that they rarely perform any better and in 1/3 of the cases, perform worse than traditional public schools.
Your error lies in in your belief that the dynamics of a capitalistic market apply within the mandate of the public education sector. They simply do not. By law, schools must accept all students that walk through their doors. Name me one company that has that mandate. There simply isn’t one. A competitive market is based on choice. Choice by the vendor to offer the product and choice by the consumer to reject the product. At the end of the day, the vendor doesn’t have to sell to everyone and the consumer doesn’t have to buy anything (whether because they don’t want it or can’t afford it). In education, this is unacceptable. The entire basis of public education is anti-competitive by design, and with good reason. In competition, someone always loses out. When you are dealing with children, this is unacceptable. If education becomes for profit, we will end up with the same thing we have in health care–40 million people who are left with nothing while for profit care providers make enormous profits. For our country, this would be incredibly destructive.
There is also a huge difference between schools working with for profit vendors and schools themselves becoming for profit vendors. For profit vendors will do whatever it takes to maintain the highest profitability. Cut wages, eliminate less profitable products, close down entire production facilities, etc. This type of instability may work in a world where companies are dealing with widgets. However, introducing this type of volatility into the education world is extremely destructive. I have seen students suffer through the poor performance of their school, the subsequent closing, and their shuffling to yet another poorly performing school. This is not “market efficiency” that is necessary in education. It is instability introduced at the most vulnerable time in an adolescent’s life.
Lest you think that I’m simply ignorant of business, I should say that I earned an undergraduate integrative Business/Econ major and am currently earning my MBA. Over seven years ago, I charged into battle with the same cry of privatization and “for profit” motive you are espousing here. My direct experience showed me the folly of this type of thinking.
If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to earn your credential and go and teach in the public education classroom for at least five years. I don’t believe anyone who has not actually taught in the public school has any right to authoritatively criticize it, especially from a perspective as potentially detrimental as introducing for profit motives into public education. I find it remarkable that people who have no education experience act as though they know what’s best for the education profession itself. No other profession would tolerate this type of behavior. Imagine if I would presume to criticize the methods general practitioners use to treat their patients. Imagine if I presumed to suggest sweeping changes to the investment banking world, having no experience at all as an IB. Even worse, imagine if I not only criticized it, but had billions of dollars to begin altering those professions and their economic structures. Yes, the “Market” might push me out after I had failed, but at what cost was I proven a failure? How many lives did I affect negatively? What types of damage may have been irrevocably done?
Children are not test subjects for the mega wealthy and for venture capitalists. If someone wants to bring change and “reform” to public education, they should start by getting deep experience in the classroom to learn first hand what the real challenges are. No one who hasn’t paid their dues in the “trenches” as a Private has any right to presume to take the title of General and to lead an army.
This is the most revolting article I have ever provided a link to. It is written by some money-grubbing entrepreneur who boasts that for-profit businesses are necessary to provide the innovation that education needs.
His insult to my friend Anthony Cody sets the tone (the article originally had the subtitle “How I Kicked Anthony Cody’s Ass,” but it was changed by the editors as “playful” but “out of bounds”</).
Apparently this guy was annoyed when Cody had the nerve to challenge the Gates Foundation for facilitating the privatization of public education.
I say we need more teachers like Anthony Cody and fewer profit-seekers.
For-profit businesses are valuable for supplying goods and services but I have not seen any evidence that for-profits should run schools. Their bottom line is making a profit, not making good education. The way they make a profit is by cutting costs, and they do this by replacing experienced teachers with low-cost, inexperienced teachers, or replacing teachers with technology. They don’t ask whether it’s good for children or whether it improves education, but whether it increases the ROI (return on investment).
The entrepreneurs create these sham schools for other people’s children, not their own.
The online for-profit corporation K12 wants to grow its business in Florida but school boards are opposing it. The online charters poach students and funding from public schools while providing a poor quality of education.
They do, however, have one big political advantage. They have the fervent support of former Governor Jeb Bush, who is a political powerhouse in the state.
Independent studies have found high dropout rates, low test scores, low graduation rates, and inflated billing at the virtual charters. K12 is under investigation in Florida. But it is so profitable that it is undeterred by little issues like poor results and the harmful effects on the entire structure of public education. These guys are corporate raiders of the public purse. A “school” that recruits only 10,000-15,000 students will draw $100 million in revenues while having no maintenance costs, no nurses, no social workers, no library, nothing like the fixed costs of real schools. And what profits!
Yesterday I wrote a post about how the Pennsylvania Secretary of Education was pulling a few fancy tricks to inflate the scores of charter schools. This makes it easier to claim that they are incredibly successful (when they are not) and persuade the Legislature to add many more.
But it turns out that Louisiana is even slicker than Pennsylvania when it comes to playing games with the data. One of our readers, whom I deduce is or was an employee of the Louisiana Department of Education, has the goods.
Read this post and please be sure to open the link for more chicanery in Baton Rouge. The bottom line: Now that Bobby Jindal and John White control the State Department of Education, don’t trust the data they produce.
Actually, John White and Louisiana have already perfected several of these techniques and added a few twists of their own. I’ve documented some of the tricks being used here:
Basically they are defining schools they take over and/or turn over to charter operators as “Turnaround” schools for two years and don;t report any data on them. If the scores don’t improve they plan to reassign them to a new charter. Only schools that do well will ever get reported. Additionally, all of the recovery school district in New Orleans is defined as a small school district, less than 1000 students. Even though taken together they easily exceed that coun. Several of the sub-districts like Algiers have multiple sites and exceed that number, but for purposes of reporting the data for these districts LDE has decided to count the schools as their own district. I’m pretty sure even then we have one or two schools with more than 1000 students, but this has been reported by our departing accountabilty folks to USDOE with no apparent effect.
PA’s only mistake is not reporting what they were doing, USDOE doesn’t care if you cook the numbers, as long as you tell them you are I guess.
Edushyster has done it again.
Here, Edushyster defends Joel Klein against the outrageous claim that Rupert Murdoch is trying to make a profit by selling lots of stuff to the schools. It’s all about collaboration. It’s all about replacing teachers with technology to help with budgetary issues. It’s all about reform.
Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute summarizes “What’s Next” for reformers (some prefer to call them privatizers).
Race to the Top was a great coup for the privatizers/reformers.
Now they plan to follow up with a direct assault on schools of education, abetted by NCTQ’s forthcoming rankings, to be published by US News. NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation a dozen years ago, and saved at the outset by a $5 million grant from Secretary of Education Rod Paige. In 2005, it got caught up in a federal investigation for taking money from the Department to speak well of NCLB. Read here to learn more about NCTQ.
The privatizers intend to move on principal evaluation, to make it more like teacher evaluation (test scores matter).
Pension reform will be high on their agenda.
Privatizers will promote digital learning by removing seat time requirements and following the guidance of former Governor Jeb Bush on this subject. No mention is made of the negative evaluations of cyber charters, both by Stanford’s CREDO and the National Education Policy Center, or of exposes that appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post about the awful performance of cyber charters.
Gird your loins, folks, the privatizers are flush with victories in Wisconsin, Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan, Maine, Florida, and other states, and they are coming back to do some more reforming.
Here’s a hard-hitting investigative report on the money pouring into California to beat the unions by cutting off dues collections. The face of this campaign is Gloria Romero, who flipped to the right and is now the face of Democrats for Education Reform, the pro-privatization Wall Street hedge fund managers’ group.
Seems the Koch brothers tossed in a few million, which makes it hard to maintain the pretense that the anti-union campaign is warm, fuzzy and progressive.
The only error that I spotted is calling ALEC “neoconservative.” It is a reactionary organization pushing radical schemes to suppress voter rights, relax gun control, crush unions, relax environmental regulation, and privatize public education, among other things.
The Mercury of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, has an editorial describing the devastating effects of budget cuts and tax caps on Pennsylvania’s public schools.
The cuts threaten the future, says the editorial. Class sizes are growing. Thousands of teachers have been laid off. On the chopping block and already cut are music and art, sports, kindergarten, early childhood education, after-school activities.
State budget cuts, combined with the transfer of public funds to charter schools and voucher schools, are eroding public education for the vast majority of the state’s children. The great many are suffering because of privatization.
What is at risk?
“Public education is the foundation of our democracy,” said William LaCoff, Owen J. Roberts School Board member. “You need an educated populace to make good decisions about the nation’s future and education is expensive. If we have no public schools, or if they are the school of last resort, not everyone is going to get an education and then we have a permanent under-class? That’s the last thing we want.”
My comment on the editorial: as privatization expands, public education will implode. And maybe that is the goal of the privatizers. As they grow, they are plundering a basic democratic institution.
The reform/privatization strategy is now in full operation is states across the nation.
This is the way it works:
First, set an impossible goal, say, 100% proficiency for all students.
Second, say that there can be “no excuses,” no reference to social conditions in which children live.
Third, insist on accountability for schools, teachers, and principals. If they can’t meet the impossible goals, fire the staff and close the school.
Fourth, hand the school over to private management.
Mission accomplished!
Oklahoma is in the midst of this process, as this teacher describes here. The schools will be graded. Many will fail, by design. Does anyone still believe this is about improving education?
You know what comes next. This Oklahoma teacher writes:
Oh, it’s much worse than just testing…the use of this data will “fail” schools and then trumpet their failure. In order to earn an “A”, a school must score nearly 94%. The easy-to understand resources on the OKSDE website are anything but simple and transparent. The district Superintendents (nearly 200, I believe) who objected to the release of scores have been called names by our State Super and our Governor. Dedicated professional educators have been attacked personally.
The State Superintendent likened them to the kid who runs home to white-out his report card before his parents get home. Remember, she’s speaking to career educators…which she is not. She was a speech pathologist for a few years, became a dentist, and helped open a charter school in OKC because her own children were struggling in public schools. She sees herself as the heroine of DON’T BACK DOWN.
The spokesperson for the SDE says they’ve worked with districts, getting their input. I was at the Public Comments meeting, at the SDE…scheduled by the SDE. NO ONE representative from the SDE attended the meeting except the lawyer who pushed ‘play’ on the tape recorder. We all spoke to a tape recorder…superintendents, principals, school officials, legislators, PTA state officers, and I was the lone teacher…we were all ignored. Is THIS how our SDE works with us? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘yes’.
Our state officials are bullies, and they bully with smiles on their faces, with the knowledge that the media won’t pursue the story to the ultimate truth.
Tomorrow the grades come out…the same grades Mitt Romney thinks are such a good idea. My firm belief is the grades will show exactly what high-stakes testing shows: poverty matters. So, once again, schools and teachers and districts will be punished and publicly shamed because we serve poor children.
Pray for us.
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