I read Romney’s education agenda carefully.
It’s pro-privatization.
It repeats the myth of “failing” public schools.
There is not a good word in it for public education.
Romney is avid for charter schools and vouchers.
Here is the analysis of his agenda that I wrote for the New York Review of Books.
Someone tweeted me a few days ago and asked “what’s wrong with privatization?”
I didn’t have time or space to respond in 140 characters, but fortunately someone else has done it for me.
Let me be clear. I believe in the value and strength of the private sector. Long ago, I traveled in the Soviet Union and in China, and I developed a deep respect for the efficiency of the private sector in supplying goods to markets for consumers.
But I believe that a healthy and decent society has a strong private sector to provide goods and services (contractors, plumbers, electricians, repairs, etc.), and a healthy public sector to provide essential public services, like public education, roads, postal service, parks, beaches, transportation, government, police, military, fire fighting, libraries, and healthcare for those who can’t afford to buy it in the private sector. I may be forgetting other essential public services, but you get the point, I hope.
Privatization of public services is not in the public interest. The services are inevitably more expensive to the consumer and the taxpayer, who must now pay profits as well as the cost of the services. And the services are not more efficient; they are even less efficient because there is less money available to pay for the same service. And as the enclosed article shows, there is actually an incentive for failure. Privatized schools want public schools to fail so they can get more customers. Privatized prisons want more criminals for them to house.
We need a healthy private sector and a healthy public sector.
Unfortunately, there is a movement to privatize public education. Big money is going to fund political candidates in both parties who are committed to privatization.
The privatized schools–whether voucher or charter–do not outperform our public schools.
We must resist the current well-funded effort to privatize our public schools.
David Reber is a teacher in Kansas who happens to be a terrific writer.
His articles are always insightful.
This one is about the relentless advertising campaign in Kansas of the online giant K12.
As the privatization movement gathers steam, as equity investors launch their latest scheme to extract profits from the public schools, we will be bombarded by even more appeals to go digital. Of course, we are all going digital. But there is no good reason to home school children who don’t need to be home schooled. Virtual academies get terrible results for children. This has been documented by the National Education Policy Center and in exposes in the NY Times and the Washington Post.
Home schooling by computer may be right for some, but it is not right for most students. Don’t buy their con job.
This reader offers a succinct summary of the reformers’ game plan. He might have added additional elements: a) budget cuts to disable public schools; and b) laws that remove accountability and transparency with privately managed charters; c) evaluating teachers on a bell curve, so that half will always be “below average,” thus creating a “crisis”; d) demanding 100% perfection, 100% proficiency and saying that anything less proves failure.
You can see it played out in state after state, especially in those with Republican governors, and in the pronouncements of the U.S. Department of Education, and it is fully developed in the Romney education agenda. They think that that private management of public education is the wave of the future, preferably it is generates profits for investors, and they are doing their best to make it happen:
First, the reformers have yet another scapegoat [to blame] for poverty. Now it’s the schools that are at fault, not the destruction of our social safety net, not the elimination of worker protections, not the imposition of fair taxation that enables the government to maintain our national infrastructure, and certainly not the actions of the 1% to extract all of the wealth of the U.S. economy for themselves alone. We don’t need to fix the failed and irrational policies of the past thirty years. No! We just have to reform the schools with for-profit charters, voucher plans and virtual “distance learning” that just happens to divert more tax money to … wait for it … the 1%!
And of course, never mind how all of these reforms are failures. By the time the public is fully aware of that fact, it will be too late to change and we’ll be on to the next scapegoat.
Second, this is just another impossible goal against which to conclude our schools are failures. The logic here is brilliant: Set the standard so impossibly high that the schools will be failures by default. Keep the focus on the unions and test scores, so the public won’t make the real connections between the economics policies of the past three decades but instead will follow the reformers in blind rage.
This article was published in 2007. David Gelernter, a brilliant computer scientist at Yale with strong conservative views, asked why we could not have a world without public schools.
Imagine every school run by private entrepreneurs, private managers, religious groups, whoever, whatever.
Or every student with a voucher.
Why have public education at all?
Sometimes it seems that this is the true goal of faux reformers today: a world of privatized schools, perhaps with a few public schools remaining as repositories for the students that no one wants. Sort of like New Orleans today.
I read this article when it appeared in 2007 and remember being astonished by its audacity. It basically suggests that democratic control of education is a failure, and that the private sector is superior.
Of course, this was before the collapse of the economy in 2008, caused entirely by deregulated private banks and greedy individuals. It takes a vigorous public sector to rein in the predatory greed of some institutions and individuals. Not every private institution is greedy or predatory, but why should we trust our children to the whim and competence of the private sector?
We now see private equity investors looking at the schools as opportunities to make money. This is alarming, because whatever profit they extract is money taken away from the education of children. And we know that they will aim to cut costs by increasing class sizes or using technology to reduce the number of teachers.
It bears mentioning that every nation with a high-performing education system has a strong public school system.
Public institutions are committed to equity. Private institutions seek excellence, but they operate in a market that is guaranteed to produce winners and losers, not equity. If markets produced equity, no one would ever lose money in the stock market and the market would only go up, never down.
Our challenge is to pursue the changes that strengthen our public schools and nurture both equity and excellence.
As it happens, we have ample evidence that neither charters nor vouchers have produced either equity or excellence.
Joe Bower is an educator who wants to reform education. But he has no sympathy for the rampant privatization that is now overtaking U.S. education with the support of the Obama administration. And it will only get worse under a Romney administration. In the post linked here, he has a video showing an advertisement for one of those aggressive for-profit operations now targeting American school children.
Why isn’t Secretary Duncan on the stump warning parents about these educational predators?
Technology is a good thing when used appropriately. But when advanced as it is now to lay off teachers and close schools, it is a disgrace. As Bower writes, children need real teachers, not home schooling by computer.
Time to say no. And say it loud.
Matt Mandel is a National Board Certified Teacher in the Philadelphia public schools.
He has figured out reform.
He explains it here for those who were puzzled.
The most important thing you need to know is this:
“It’s not about the children.”
The reason reformers keep saying that it is “for the children,” is because it’s not.
They say that to confuse people.
Read Matt Mandel and learn what it would look like if it were really “about the children.”
This could be a very long post, but this is a blog so I’ll keep it short.
Almost every day there is a new scandal about a public service that was privatized: prisons, hospitals, schools, preschool programs.
Today it is the prison half-way houses in New Jersey, which were privatized and are now plagued with drugs, corruption, and various other problems.
The New Jersey legislature wants to impose greater supervision.
Governor Chris Christie, that tower of rectitude, won’t permit it, if it includes closer supervision of existing contracts.
One of his close political associates runs half-way houses in New Jersey.
Last week we saw a report from Reuters about the conference for equity investors held at the posh University Club in Manhattan.
And we learned there about the many new frontiers for making a buck by jumping into the public education marketplace.
Here is another article from the same conference, this one in Education Week, reporting with a straight face that the equity investors see new opportunities to make money when the new national tests inevitably produce low scores.
Message: Never let an opportunity to make money off other people’s misery go to waste!
A bonanza, to be sure!
If we let this happen, shame on us.
Shame on state education departments.
Shame on the U.S. Department of Education.
Shame on Arne Duncan and President Obama.
And shame on the investors who want to take a cut of the dollars intended to educate America’s children.
Are they part of the reform movement too?
Coach Bob Sikes put together a blog about the corporate supporters of Jeb Bush’s crusade for digital learning.
If you go back and read the report of the “Ten Elements of Digital Learning,” I suggest you scan the acknowledgments and you will find a representative of almost every corporation trying to sell hardware or software to the schools.
The other thing you need to know about the report is that it is based on zero evidence. It cites a US Department of Education study of evidence-based policy for online instruction, and that is supposed to impress the casual reader and make him/her think there is evidence to put every child online as much as possible. But I read that study and it says (p. 53) we don’t know enough about online instruction to make decisions in the K-12 area. There have been only five studies, not enough, the report says.
The accumulating evidence from places like Ohio and Pennsylvania is that online virtual schools are driven more by profit than by a desire to produce better education.
I just finished a chapter on this subject, and feel incensed that so much effort is being expended to spread the gospel on virtual schooling in the absence of evidence about where, where, and to whom. Certainly online instruction is important and necessary, but there is no support in research to have millions of chlldren home schooled in front of a computer, with the virtual school collecting millions of dollars while teachers have classes of 60:1, 100:1, even 200:1, at low pay.
Diane Ravitch's blog 