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

by Diane Ravitch

  He did not conclude that schools are fine the way they are. He concluded that they “must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission, and active support of the surrounding community. For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.”

  Vollmer understood what today’s reformers do not. Public schools must accept all children. They cannot pick and choose among them. They cannot reject those who are homeless and those who don’t speak English. They cannot “counsel out” those with low test scores or those with profound disabilities. They must find a place for students with behavioral problems. They are responsible for educating them all. Obviously, schools with selective admissions policies and schools with lotteries, whether they are public or private or charter, will have higher test scores and fewer discipline problems. It is easy to get high test scores when the students are ready, willing, and able to learn.

  When corporate executives look at the public schools, they cannot understand why they move slowly; they want them to produce rapid and dramatic changes. They demand results, not explanations. They want scores to rise overnight. They believe in transformative change and disruptive innovation. They see this kind of lightning change in their own businesses. A hedge fund manager may place a bet and make millions of dollars in a few days, perhaps even overnight. An executive in the high-technology sector may introduce a new design or application that takes the market by storm in a matter of weeks or even days and changes the industry. Why can’t schools work like that? Why can’t we just break up the existing system, reinvent it, and start fresh?

  Business leaders talk a lot about innovation and creative disruption. Sometimes it works; sometimes it produces spectacular failures. They accept the risk because they want the rewards, the possibility of hitting it big in the marketplace. Creative disruption does not work well in education, however, because education is a slow and incremental process of human development. Children learn one day at a time. Test scores are only one metric, the one that is easiest and cheapest to obtain, but they say more about the background of the student body than about the quality of the school or its teachers.

  Whatever the flaws of the tests, they determine whether a school remains open or is closed. But any method designed to boost test scores in a short time will depend on memorization and rote drill and will not be educationally sound. Answers to multiple-choice questions may come quickly, but understanding comes slowly. Real education is about understanding and knowledge, about habits of mind and the ability to think independently, not the ability to click quickly through test questions and find the right answer. The current obsession with test scores is educational malpractice; it discourages creativity, thoughtfulness, ingenuity, and risk taking. These values, habits, and character traits matter far more in life than test scores.

  Today, many private sector leaders feel sure, as Jamie Vollmer once did, that business has the right approach. Focus relentlessly on quality control, keep close watch on the metrics, manage the process, rank and rate the workers, reward the workers who get results, and fire those who don’t. The formula for success in the competitive global marketplace of the twenty-first century requires businesses to pay close attention to their bottom lines. They must cut costs to succeed, and usually the highest cost is labor. To succeed, they must cut the number of employees, replace them with technology, or outsource their jobs to lower-wage nations. The equity investor Steven Rattner said in an interview with Fareed Zakaria: “Every company in America or, for that matter, every part of the world, they’re tasked with looking at their costs and always say to themselves, is there a way to lower our costs? You, better than many—if not everybody in the world, knows we are living in a global world and companies have to produce efficiently in order to compete. And if you don’t have the lowest costs, you will simply fail in the marketplace.”2

  Business leaders expect schools to compete by cutting their costs. The only way to do this is to reduce the number of teachers or lower the cost of teachers. That means schools must have larger classes or must replace teachers with technology or substitute low-wage, inexperienced teachers for costly experienced teachers. But does this produce better education? Small classes matter, especially for minority students in the elementary grades, students who don’t speak English, students with disabilities, and students who can’t keep up with the pace of instruction. There is no evidence that students learn more or better when taught on computers. Computers have many exciting uses in the classroom as a supplement to good teaching, as a vehicle for research and exploration, as a means for cooperative learning and student projects. But computers are not a satisfactory substitute for a human teacher.

  What does the business model mean in educational terms? It means an obsessive devotion to testing, accountability, and data. Devotees of the business approach like to say, “You measure what you treasure.” Believing this, they have fastened a pitiless regime of testing on the nation’s schools that now reaches down as low as kindergarten, where children of five who should be playing and using their imaginations are being assessed for their “readiness” skills, sometimes several times a year. Some states even have standards and assessments for prekindergarten students. This is developmentally inappropriate. Children of this age need nurturing and play, not testing.

  But is it true that we “measure what we treasure”? I would argue the contrary. What we treasure most are human relationships, friends and family, and we would never subject those relationships to any kinds of metrics. We do not measure how much we love our parents or spouses or children or friends. We may love some more than others, but we don’t have a standardized gauge for that love, and if we did, we would never publish it to them or to the world. It would be cruel if we did something so foolish. If we treasure music or art or travel or home or a pet, how do we measure it? Why should we? Can anyone honestly say that a test score in reading or math is what they “treasure” more than anything else? The things we treasure most are the very things that cannot be measured with a yardstick or a scale or a test.

  The current obsession with data and data-based decision making is not twenty-first-century thinking. It reflects the views of early-twentieth-century efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor, who carefully monitored the output of laborers, developed time-and-motion studies, and created benchmarks by which to judge the productivity of workers. Taylorism, as it is now known, encouraged educators to think of students as raw material to be shaped by the demands of the school, exposed to instruction, then tested for their powers of retention. Students, like laborers, were ranked and sorted, some fit for work on farms or in factories or in offices, some for college, others for menial labor. In the industrial age, this model met the needs of the economy. Young people, whether they knew it or not, were sorted for their “place” in society. Today, our society expects all students to be equipped with the skills and knowledge demanded by an advanced postindustrial society. Today, no one knows what the jobs of the future will be, so all people must be equipped with the ability to think for themselves, to solve problems, to make informed decisions, and to carry out the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society. They need a sound education, with the vocabulary and background knowledge in fields such as history, mathematics, and science, to adapt to a changing world.

  The free market works well in producing goods and services, but it produces extreme inequality, and it has a high rate of failure. That is not the way we want our schools to work. The core principle of American public education is supposed to be equality of educational opportunity, not a race to the top or a free market of choices with winners and losers. Our goal as a society, which we have never achieved, is to pr
ovide an education of equal quality to every child so that each of them has an equal chance to succeed in the world. The business model of choice and competition, testing and accountability, moves us even further away from that goal; as communities dissolve, students and families sort themselves into schools that reflect differences in race, ethnicity, and class. As communities and schools become more segregated, they become more, not less, inequitable. The goal of equality of educational opportunity is impossible to achieve to the extent that we remain in thrall to standardized testing, which calculates the gaps among different groups but does nothing to close them.

  The business world is rife with innovation and failure. Every year, hundreds of thousands of new businesses open, and every year hundreds of thousands of businesses fail. Businesses come and go. Over the years, household names disappear, like Woolworth’s, Pan Am, Bethlehem Steel, Polaroid, TWA, and Borders. Some disappeared because they became obsolete. Some lost to the competition. Others disappeared because of corrupt activities, like Enron and Madoff. Many thousands of restaurants open and close every year. Big national corporate chain stores eliminate mom-and-pop stores; Internet businesses eliminate national corporate chain stores. Business leaders accept instability and risk and hope not to be caught in the next round of closures. They call it “creative destruction,” as one enterprise replaces another. They pride themselves on their ability to “reinvent” themselves every two or three years, with new products, new services, and new ideas. They engage in risk management and cut their losses; they must discard the damaged blueberries, close the failing chain stores, get rid of the losers in their portfolios.3

  But children do not thrive on turmoil and instability. Chaos is not good for children. Chaos and disruption are not good for families and communities. There is nothing creative about closing a school that is a fixture in its community. If it is struggling, it needs help. It may need extra staff, extra resources, and expert supervision. It doesn’t need to be shuttered like a shoe store. No school was ever saved or improved by closing it.

  Schools should be places that provide a respite from the uncertainty in children’s lives. They should be safe havens from what is often a heartless world. They should be institutions that change with the times when it is necessary to change. They should be up-to-date with technology, they should welcome evidence-based innovation, and they should be receptive to the best ideas about meeting the needs of children, but they should not be treated like fast-food franchises. Businesses come and go, but families should not, nor should schools. Schools should be the center of the community, akin to the public library and the public park, stable institutions that serve the needs of the community.

  Privatization does not work well in providing public services. The need to cut costs and generate a profit for shareholders is inconsistent with the need to assure a reliable, dependable, and equitable public service. Deregulation unleashes enterprise, but it also means less oversight of funds and practices. Sometimes privatization of public service produces efficiency, but it may also produce corruption and a low quality of service, due to the lack of oversight and lack of regulation of private vendors. When The New York Times surveyed prison privatization, it concluded that privately run prisons cost more than state-run prisons and avoided the sickest and the costliest prisoners.4

  When New York State’s comptroller general audited the state’s privately run program for preschool students with disabilities, he discovered numerous examples of fraudulent practices. The owner of one company pleaded guilty to defrauding the state of $800,000; among other abuses, he had hired his wife at a salary of $150,000, even though she already earned $90,000 a year as a full-time professor at a local university. Other private vendors had billed the state for jewelry and expensive clothing, vacations, and no-show jobs. Some had “funneled public money into expensive rents paid by their preschools to entities they personally control.” The cost of the program in New York State had doubled in only six years to $2 billion. The bulk of the spending was in New York City, which was spending about $40,000 per child, or $1 billion for twenty-five thousand children. By contrast, Massachusetts spent less than $10,000 per child for what experts considered a “resource-rich” program. The state of New York allowed the private vendors both to evaluate the children and to provide the services that they prescribed. According to The New York Times, the private contractors, “who have their tuition rates set by the state, have become an influential lobbying force in Albany, where they have regularly rallied parents of disabled children to protest spending curbs in the program.” Privatization was a boon to the vendors but was far more costly to the taxpayers and of a lesser quality than the same program offered by public agencies in other states.5

  Just as the private contractors expanded and protected their program by lobbying and putting pressure on legislators, charter operators have persuaded legislators to increase the number of charters by lobbying and by mobilizing their students and their parents to lobby for them.

  When charter schools were first opened, they claimed they would provide better education at a savings to the taxpayers. To date, there is no evidence that charter schools provide better education than public schools when they enroll the same kinds of students. And the promised savings have never materialized; once they are established, charters demand equal funding. Meanwhile, the charter sector has become a formidable political force. Charter corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit, and members of their boards of directors make contributions to candidates for school board races, for the legislature, for the governorship, and for referenda about the future of charter schools. When public hearings are conducted about charter schools in New York City and Los Angeles, charter operators send busloads of their students and parents wearing identical T-shirts to the hearings to demand more charter schools, more funding, and less regulation and oversight. When New York City held public hearings about closing public schools, the same brigades of charter students and parents arrived in buses to support the school closings to provide more free space for charters. If public schools used their students to engage in the same political lobbying, their principals would be brought up on charges and fired.

  Despite the problems associated with privatizing public services, some elected officials insist on turning public dollars over to private organizations and businesses. In the spring of 2012, Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana pushed a “reform” bill through the state legislature that made more than half the children in the state eligible for vouchers and encouraged the creation of numerous boards to authorize new charter schools. In addition, his legislation authorized payment of public funds to private vendors. The costs of these alternatives to public schooling were supposed to be paid from the state’s “minimum foundation budget” for public schools. Because the state constitution says that the money in the minimum foundation budget is dedicated specifically to public schools, teachers’ organizations and local school boards sued to block the funding of the vouchers and vendors. In 2013, the state’s highest court ruled that it was unconstitutional to divert money dedicated to public schools to vouchers and private vendors. Even after the funding was put on hold by the court, the state board of education authorized forty-five vendors, all of whom would be paid from the state’s public education budget. Only thirteen of the forty-five were “face-to-face” programs; twenty were virtual programs, and twelve were a blend of online and face-to-face classes. The vendors included a program to teach barbering, cosmetology, and “oil and gas production”; one was a course to prepare young people to work in construction trades; some offered to teach test preparation or credit recovery for failing students; some were courses offered either online or in person by a single tutor; and there were applications from the online for-profit corporation K12.6

  Two of Louisiana’s eleven board members voted against authorizing the vendors. They objected not only because a judge had ruled that their funding was unconstitutional but because at least five of the other state board member
s had accepted campaign contributions from some of the vendors. A spokesperson for the state board of ethics said those board members did not have a conflict of interest because they were not employees of the vendors.7

  As the privatization movement in education gained momentum, its wealthy supporters poured large contributions into state and local political races to elect like-minded allies and to pass initiatives. In 2011, out-of-state donors gave unprecedented sums of money to elect a state board committed to Governor Jindal’s sweeping privatization plan. Jindal’s slate was buoyed by contributions from some of America’s richest people, including Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the Walton family, outspending supporters of public education by twelve to one to gain control of the state board. The director of Teach for America in New Orleans won a seat on the state board by outspending her opponent by thirty-four to one. The amount spent to elect unpaid state board members—$2.6 million—was ten times greater than the total spent for the same races only four years earlier.8

  In Georgia, contributions of millions of dollars from outside the state ensured the passage of a constitutional amendment empowering the governor to create a commission to authorize charter schools over the objections of local school boards. This proposal, which echoed model legislation by the right-wing ALEC organization, demonstrated that the free-market reformers valued privatization over local control of schools. They are free-market radicals, not conservatives. According to The New York Times, donors to the pro-charter campaign included “Alice Walton, the daughter of the founder of Walmart, Sam Walton; Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers; and several companies that manage charter schools and stood to benefit directly by passage of the amendment. Supporters of the amendment outspent opponents by about 15 to 1.”9