Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

by Diane Ravitch

  The proliferation of charter schools contributes to the problem. Minnesota is the state with the longest history of charter schools. The Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School issued critical reports on the state’s charter schools in 2008 and 2012, questioning both their performance and their high levels of segregation. The reports concluded that charter schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin Cities, consistently underperformed comparable public schools. The charter schools make bold promises to minority parents, but those promises are broken. The 2008 report found that “most offer low income parents and parents of color an inferior choice—a choice between low-performing traditional public schools and charter schools that perform even worse.” The charters are characterized by intense racial and economic segregation: “The data show that charter schools are … even more segregated than the already highly-segregated traditional public schools. In some predominantly white urban and suburban neighborhoods, charter schools also serve as outlets for white flight from traditional public schools that are racially more diverse than their feeder neighborhoods.” In its 2012 update, the Institute on Race and Poverty found that charter school enrollment had grown sharply and that these damaging trends continued: charter school students were severely segregated, and the performance of students in charter schools lagged behind that of students in traditional public schools.4

  John Hechinger of Bloomberg News visited the charter schools of the Twin Cities, including an all-black school in St. Paul dedicated to children of East Africa, where students learn Arabic and Somali; a German-immersion school that was 90 percent white, where children studied with interns from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and learned to waltz; and other schools that were nearly all Asian, Hispanic, or Native American. Referring to national trends, he observed that “six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down ‘separate but equal’ schools for blacks and whites, segregation is growing because of charter schools, privately run public schools that educate 1.8 million children.”5

  The UCLA Civil Rights Project noted that “the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, has taken no significant action to increase school integration or to help stabilize diverse schools as racial change occurs in urban and suburban housing markets and schools. Small positive steps in civil rights enforcement have been undermined by the Obama Administration’s strong pressure on states to expand charter schools—the most segregated sector of schools for black students.”

  Despite loud cries about the need to reduce achievement gaps related to race, ethnicity, and income, the one issue that few in the corporate reform community discuss is desegregation. This is odd because, as the Civil Rights Project notes, “schools of concentrated poverty and segregated minority schools are strongly related to an array of factors that limit educational opportunities and outcomes. These include less experienced and less qualified teachers, high levels of teacher turnover, less successful peer groups and inadequate facilities and learning materials. There is also a mounting body of evidence indicating that desegregated schools are linked to important benefits for all children, including prejudice reduction, heightened civic engagement, more complex thinking and better learning outcomes in general.”6

  In the absence of active leadership by federal officials and the judiciary, the public is apathetic about racial and ethnic segregation, as well as socioeconomic segregation. The more that public officials assume nothing can be done, nothing is done, and these problems grow worse. Neither of the major federal efforts of the past generation—No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—has even mentioned segregation, let alone attempted to reduce persistent racial and ethnic isolation. Both programs are silent on the subject. While these programs directed billions of federal aid, they did not leverage any funding to promote desegregation of schools or communities, and in their demand to expand the charter sector, they may have worsened the problem. As black and Hispanic students remain segregated in large numbers, their academic achievement remains low. Then federal law stigmatizes their schools as “failing” and recommends firing their principals and their teachers and closing their schools. By punishing those who teach low-performing students of color, these federal programs contribute more instability to the students’ lives and discourage educators who might want to work with these students.

  The evidence for the value of integration has grown stronger with the perspective of time. Social science research shows that peer effects matter. When students go to school with others who are highly motivated, it lifts their performance as well. Schools attended by affluent and academically successful students not only tend to have a richer curriculum and smaller classes but also have the benefits of a better school climate and positive peer effects. The schools for the poor are likeliest to sacrifice time for the arts and other studies to make more time for standardized testing and test prep, for fear that if scores don’t improve, the staff will be fired and the school will close. Segregated schools are also more likely to have harsh discipline policies, higher rates of suspension and expulsion, metal detectors, and high rates of teacher and student turnover.

  As the Civil Rights Project report notes, nearly all of the nation’s two thousand so-called dropout factories are “doubly segregated by race and poverty.”7

  The Civil Rights Project summarizes a rich body of research that demonstrates the positive value of desegregation on academic achievement, fostering critical thinking skills, and learning to work and communicate with people from different backgrounds. Black students who attended desegregated schools are more likely to have higher test scores and graduate from high school and college, in part because of the quality of their schooling but also because of the positive effects of having friends and associates who are academically engaged and headed to college.

  Rucker Johnson, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, has identified specific lifetime gains for blacks who attended desegregated schools. He examined the outcomes for children born between 1950 and 1970, throughout their lives, up to the year 2007. Johnson found that “school desegregation and the accompanied increases in school quality resulted in significant improvements in adult attainments for blacks … school desegregation significantly increased educational attainment and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status; desegregation had no effects on whites across each of these outcomes. The results suggested that the mechanisms through which school desegregation led to beneficial adult attainment outcomes for blacks include … reductions in class size and increases in per-pupil spending.”8 Based on his longitudinal studies, Johnson concluded that the positive effects of school desegregation endure across generations: “I find a considerable impact of school desegregation that persists to influence the outcomes of the next generation, including increased math and reading test scores, reduced likelihood of grade repetition, increased likelihood of high school graduation and college attendance, improvements in college quality/selectivity, and increased racial diversity of student body at their selected college.”9

  David L. Kirp, referring to Johnson’s studies, laments that our society has “turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation.” This approach, he argued, “has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments.” He regretted that the current crop of school reformers treats integration as “at best an irrelevance,” a contrivance that diverts attention from their obsessive focus on bad teachers. He cited the latest research to show how the black-white achievement gap narrowed between 1970 and 1990, the high-water mark for integration, and how black children benefited. “The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children—and in the lives of their children as well.”

  Kirp cited recent studies that show how African American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools and graduated at greater r
ates from high school and college. The analysis of his colleague Rucker Johnson revealed that “black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier—the equivalent of being seven years younger.”10

  Kirp pointed out that after the federal courts retreated from enforcing desegregation in the 1990s and allowed districts to abandon their desegregation efforts, the black-white gap stalled and, by some measures, widened. He concluded that “the failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn’t the answer. If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.”11

  Richard Rothstein, one of our nation’s leading authorities on race, class, and schooling, points out that schools alone can never substantially narrow the achievement gap. He maintains that many of the allegedly “failing” schools are doing as well as they can in the light of enormous challenges of educating black children who live in poverty. He is convinced that the possibility of changing their life trajectory depends on “breaking up heavy concentrations of low-income minority children in urban schools, giving these children opportunities to attend majority middle-class schools outside their distressed neighborhoods.” It is not busing that he wants, but residential integration. In his recent work, he reviewed the history of efforts in the 1970s to increase residential integration. As it happens, the most outspoken proponent for this idea was George Romney, first as governor of Michigan and then as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President Richard M. Nixon. George Romney recognized that the intense segregation experienced by blacks in urban districts was not the result of choice or accident; it was the consequence of decades of discrimination, of federal, state, and local policies permitting or ignoring racial restrictions in public housing, zoning ordinances, urban renewal programs, and highway construction projects that intentionally isolated blacks in cities and kept them out of the suburbs. He became convinced that only the federal government could break up residential segregation and enable or compel communities to desegregate. Romney and his staff shaped a program called Open Communities, with the intent of denying HUD funding to communities unless they agreed to accept subsidized low-income housing. Unfortunately, Nixon did not endorse Romney’s bold idea, and it was quickly forgotten.12

  Just as school integration proved to be politically unpalatable, so too did efforts to integrate housing. Faced with political intransigence, our leaders have dropped both goals. Instead, they promote ideas like the Common Core, increased testing, privatization, and competition. They offer Band-Aid solutions through No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

  But the wounds caused by centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination cannot be healed by testing, standards, accountability, merit pay, and choice. Even if test scores go up in a public or charter school, the structural inequality of society and systematic inequities in our schools remain undisturbed. For every “miracle” school celebrated by the media, there are scores of “Dumpster schools,” where the low-performing students are unceremoniously hidden away. This is not school reform, nor is it social reform. It is social neglect. It is a purposeful abandonment of public responsibility to address deep-seated problems that only public policy can overcome.

  The tragic legacy of our history cannot be overcome by inexperienced college graduates who volunteer for a tour of duty in Harlem or Watts or the Mississippi Delta or by billions of public dollars diverted to vouchers and charters. We may look back, twenty or thirty years from now, and wonder why we abandoned public education and why we thought that privatization would end poverty.

  What can we do?

  We should set national goals to reduce segregation and poverty. In combination, these are the root causes of the achievement gaps between economic and racial groups. No child should grow up without medical care, go to bed hungry, or arrive in school without the necessary clothing. Our families need basic economic security. A child poverty rate in excess of 20 percent is shameful in one of the world’s richest nations.

  Education is a basic human right. It is impossible to imagine a modern society that does not educate its children, equitably and systematically. Our goal should be to provide a good school in every community. The quality of one’s education should not be determined by one’s zip code or by one’s ability to pay taxes, fees, or tuition. To assure that all children arrive in school prepared for learning, we should provide universal high-quality preschool education. To meet the needs of children, every school should have a nurse, a social worker, after-school programs, and a library. Every school, regardless of its location, should offer small classes—small enough to allow teachers a chance to teach and students a chance to learn. Poor children need even more personal attention from their teachers and more academic support than affluent children. Instead, most of the large urban schools that children of the poor attend have classes of thirty or more students.

  All children deserve a curriculum that includes the arts, history, civics, geography, the sciences, foreign languages, mathematics, and literature. Children of the poor need good schools and adequate resources as much as—perhaps even more than—children of the affluent, especially since they are far less likely to have their education supplemented by private art or music lessons after school or in the summer, as afforded the children in well-to-do families.

  Federal, state, and local policy should be designed to remove every vestige of racial and ethnic discrimination from our public institutions. Public policy should leverage federal and state funding to reduce poverty and racial isolation in schools and housing and reduce the income inequality that has increased rapidly in recent years and is a plague on our society.

  We cannot expect the schools alone to shoulder the burden of social change. They are part of the solution, but only a part. Neither addressing poverty alone nor focusing solely on schools is likely to transform children’s lives sufficiently and give them the opportunities they need to succeed.

  Are all of these changes expensive? Yes, but not nearly as expensive as the social and economic costs of crime, illness, violence, despair, and wasted human talent.

  To accomplish these ambitious goals, we need leadership. We need leadership by the president, Congress, the judiciary, governors, state legislatures, and all our elected leaders at the state and local levels. We need the business community, foundations, academia, and the media to recognize that they have roles to play, that preserving public education and strengthening it rather than privatizing it is critically important to preserve our democracy. And that blaming and punishing the people who work in our neediest public schools for the persistence of social, economic, and educational inequities is not just wrong, but will further damage the children in whose interest the corporate reformers claim to be acting. We do not help children by demoralizing those who do the most difficult work with them under the most difficult conditions, every day.

  Without a vision for a better society, without the leadership to turn the vision into reality, any talk of reform is empty verbiage.

  CHAPTER 32

  Privatization of Public Education Is Wrong

  SOLUTION NO. 11 Recognize that public education is a public responsibility, not a consumer good.

  In 1991, a businessman named Jamie Vollmer gave a speech to a group of teachers in Indiana. He was an executive at an ice cream company who had come to conduct an in-service program for educators. He told them they needed to operate more like his company, whose blueberry ice cream had been recognized by People magazine in 1984 as the “Best Ice Cream in America.” He told the assembled teachers, “If I ran my business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn’t be in business for long.”1

 
As he later told the story, he explained to the teachers that the schools were obsolete and that educators resist change because tenure protects them from accountability. Business, he thought, had it right. It operates on principles of “Zero defects! TQM [total quality management]! Continuous improvement!”

  Not surprisingly, the teachers reacted with sullen hostility. When he finished his speech, a teacher innocently asked about his company’s method of making the best ice cream. He boasted of its “super-premium” ingredients, nothing but the best. Then she asked a question:

  “Mr. Vollmer,” she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, “when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?”

  In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap … I was dead meat, but I wasn’t going to lie.

  “I send them back.”

  She jumped to her feet. “That’s right!” she barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!”

  In an explosion, all 290 teachers, principals, bus drivers, aides, custodians, and secretaries jumped to their feet and yelled, “Yeah! Blueberries! Blueberries!”

  Jamie Vollmer had an epiphany. From that day forward, he realized that schools could never operate like a business because they do not control their “raw material.” They cannot sort the blueberries and reject those that are bruised or broken. They take them all.