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

by Diane Ravitch

  In the state of Washington, a handful of billionaires, led by Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and the Bezos family of Amazon.com, in 2012 raised $11 million to support a charter school initiative that had previously been rejected three times by the state’s voters. This time, although the initiative was opposed by the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, teachers’ unions, local school boards, and parents’ associations across the state, it passed by a small margin.10

  In Tennessee, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst spent $900,000 in 2012 to enable conservative Republicans to attain a supermajority of the state legislature. Their agenda included vouchers and the creation of a state charter board to override local school boards. Nationally, Rhee’s organization supported 105 candidates, of whom 90 were Republicans and supporters of charters and vouchers.11

  In some political contests, the champions of privatization were defeated, despite their huge financial advantage, by voters who saw through their rhetoric and rejected their goals. The veteran educator Glenda Ritz defeated Indiana’s state superintendent of education Tony Bennett, even though he outspent her by ten to one. Bennett was a national hero to conservatives for his advocacy of privatization and his antagonism to collective bargaining.

  In Idaho, the reddest of red states, Republicans swept to victory in every statewide office, yet voters repealed three “reform” laws passed by the legislature in 2011 at the behest of the conservative state superintendent, Tom Luna. The Luna laws, as they were known, were intended to tie educators’ evaluations to student test scores, to cripple teachers’ unions, and to digitize the schools by requiring every student to take two online courses to graduate.12

  In Santa Clara County, California, the charter lobby targeted a school board member, Anna Song, who had voted in 2011 against authorizing twenty new Rocketship charters in the district. Wealthy out-of-district contributors gave nearly $250,000 to Song’s opponent. Song spent less than $10,000. Despite the twenty-five-to-one imbalance against her, Song was reelected.13

  In Bridgeport, Connecticut, corporations and wealthy donors funded a campaign to eliminate the local school board and turn the schools over to the mayor. Voters were asked in a referendum to give up their right to elect their local school board, and they said no.

  When Los Angeles held its election for school board in 2013, a small group of very wealthy people raised nearly $4 million, with half the amount targeted to defeat Steve Zimmer, a one-term incumbent. Zimmer began his career in Teach for America but remained as a classroom teacher in the Los Angeles public schools for seventeen years. After his election to the city’s school board, he became concerned that the district had more charter schools than any other city in the nation but no policy for oversight. He proposed that the school board create such a policy and, until it was finalized, set a moratorium on new charters. This angered the charter school lobby, which determined to unseat him. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa assembled a fund with large contributions from Eli Broad, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, Rupert Murdoch, the California Charter Schools Association, and others; New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg added $1 million. Zimmer was supported by the United Teachers Los Angeles, even though he was not a reliable supporter of the union. Outspent by at least two to one, Zimmer pulled an upset and won by a margin of fifty-two to forty-eight.14

  While the media noticed the large contributions from out-of-state donors to high-profile races in Los Angeles and Louisiana, little notice was paid to out-of-state contributions to local and state school board races in less-prominent races. A candidate for local school board in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, received nearly $50,000 to run in a contest that normally costs $5,000; most of the donors to the Perth Amboy race were residents of California. Why the sudden interest in Perth Amboy? Bloggers discovered that many of the same California donors made campaign contributions to school board races in Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, New York, and Indiana. It is a troubling pattern that raises questions about who is bundling the money and why it is sent to certain races. It is not illegal to give campaign contributions to races in other districts and states, but local and state school board races should be determined by those who live in those districts and states, not by the organized power of big donors.15

  The issue for the future is whether a small number of very wealthy entrepreneurs, corporations, and individuals will be able to purchase educational policy in this nation, either by funding candidates for local and state school boards, for state legislatures, for governor, and for Congress or by using foundation “gifts” to advance the privatization of public education.

  If we take seriously our national commitment to equality of educational opportunity, then we must reject the effort to privatize public education. Privatization will not produce equality of opportunity, nor is it “cost-effective,” in business terms, to provide the high-quality education needed for children whose families are poor, who have disabilities, and who struggle to learn.

  At present, our national policy relies on the belief that constant testing will improve the education of children in the poorest neighborhoods. But this is the cheapest way to supply schooling, not the best way or the right way. The children with the greatest needs are the most expensive to educate. They will not have equality of educational opportunity if their schools focus relentlessly on preparing them to take state tests. Like children in elite private schools and affluent suburbs, they need the arts and sports and science laboratories and libraries and social workers; they need school nurses and guidance counselors. They need to learn history and civics, to read literature and learn foreign languages. They need the latest technology and opportunities to learn to play musical instruments, to sing in groups, to make videos, and to perform in plays. They need beautiful campuses too. It will not be cost-effective to give them what they need. It is expensive. What is needed most cannot be achieved by cutting costs, hiring the least experienced teachers, increasing class size, or replacing teachers with computers.

  The movement toward a free market is inconsistent with our commitment to provide high-quality public education for all. The more that policy makers promote choice—charters and vouchers—the more they sell the public on the idea that their choice of a school is a decision they make as individual consumers, not as citizens. As a citizen, you become invested in the local public school; you support it and take pride in its accomplishments. You see it as a community institution worthy of your support, even if you don’t have children in the school. You recognize that the school is educating the children of the community and that this is good for everyone, not just for the child and his or her parents. You think of public education as an institution that educates citizens, future voters, members of your community.

  But as school choice becomes the basis for public policy, the school becomes not a community institution but an institution that meets the needs of its customers. The school reaches across district lines to find customers; it markets its offerings to potential students. Districts poach students from each other, in hopes of getting more dollars. The customers choose or reject the school, as they would choose or reject a restaurant; it’s their choice. The community no longer feels any ties to the school, because the school is not part of the community. The community no longer feels obliged to support the school, because it is not theirs. It belongs to its board and to its customers, not to the community. When a bond issue comes up for a vote, will the public support schools that belong to corporations and private boards?

  We must pause and reflect on the wisdom of sundering the ties between communities and schools. Choice erodes those ties. It creates and reinforces a consumer mentality. It encourages instability as parents shop for schools after scanning the latest report cards and test scores. It encourages school districts to waste precious tax dollars advertising their wares in hopes of luring student “customers” from other school districts. This is American consumerism run amok. This is American consumerism at war with the need to establish stable communities.

  The p
rinciples of competition and choice sound good, because they echo what we expect when we shop for clothing or automobiles. Competition is expected on the sports field or in science fairs and debates. But competition among schools for students does not improve the quality of education. Nothing inherent in competition guarantees that students will learn about history and government or the principles of democracy, nor will it assure that young people are prepared to vote wisely or to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Competition and choice erode trust and community. Competition and choice exacerbate inequality and segregation by race and class. “Creative disruption” is certainly disruptive, but it is not creative. It is not what children and adolescents need. It is not what families and communities need. It sacrifices social and human values that are more important to children and to society than consumerism, competition, and choice.

  The best schools value quality over cost. They honor experienced teachers. They do not judge them by their students’ scores on tests. They do not substitute computers for teachers. Nor do they subject their students to multiple bouts of standardized testing. Nor are they focused on data. The best schools in the nation have small classes, experienced teachers, ample resources, a rich curriculum, well-maintained facilities, many opportunities for students to engage in the arts, and daily physical education. These are ideal conditions for a good education. This is what we should want for all children.

  CHAPTER 33

  Conclusion: The Pattern on the Rug

  When I wrote The Death and Life of the Great American School System, I thought that two very different reform movements just happened to converge in some sort of unanticipated and unfortunate accident. There was the testing and accountability movement, which started in the 1980s and officially became federal policy in 2002 as part of the No Child Left Behind law. Then there was the choice movement, which had been simmering on the back burner of education politics for half a century, not making much headway. Though it had been a cherished belief of the far-right wing of the Republican Party for decades, it had never achieved a popular base. Some supporters of testing and accountability were not supporters of school choice; some supporters of school choice were not supporters of testing and accountability. Each thought its own approach was the cure-all for public education.

  NCLB breathed new life into the choice movement by decreeing that schools persistently unable to meet its impossible goal of 100 percent proficiency be handed over to private management, undergo drastic staff firings, or be closed. For the first time in history, federal law decreed that privatization was a viable remedy to improve low-performing public schools.

  Now the two movements are no longer separate. They have merged and are acting in concert. Many of the original sponsors of NCLB might not have intended to encourage the privatization of the nation’s public schools, but that has been its outcome. Supporters and critics of the law may argue about whether it has produced higher scores and whether the scores represent anything other than intense test preparation and rote learning. But no one thinks that the law was a success other than the handful of people who designed it. Even supporters of the law recognize that it is so unpopular that it should be “rebranded.” The fact that the nation remains gripped by increasingly shrill and increasingly radical demands for “reform” indicates how little NCLB accomplished.

  With the distance of nearly a dozen years, we can see the damage done by NCLB to the nation’s educational system. Race to the Top actually doubled down on the wrongheaded assumptions of NCLB and further promoted its demoralizing and punitive policies. The practice of closing schools because of low test scores has become routine, barely getting notice in the media; before the year 2000, it was a rare occurrence. In the past, those in charge of school systems were expected to fix troubled schools, not shut them down.

  NCLB centralized control of public education in Washington to an extent that was unimaginable when the U.S. Department of Education was established in 1979. When Congress debated whether to create a cabinet-level department of education, opponents warned that the mere fact of having a department would lead to federal control of education, but its proponents insisted this would never happen and federalism—a calibrated balance among federal, state, and local governments—would always prevail. Today, however, thanks to the philosophical and political alignment of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, federalism has been all but abandoned. The Department of Education now routinely imposes its preferred reforms on states and districts, using the bait of billions of federal dollars to win supposedly “voluntary” assent to its decrees.

  The Common Core State Standards are an example of the Department of Education’s muscular use of federal funds to push a policy on the states that may or may not be wise. Nonfederal organizations led the effort to develop the standards over an eighteen-month period, although it was well understood by all concerned that these groups (the National Governors Association and Achieve) had the strong support of the U.S. Department of Education and heavy funding from the Gates Foundation. When the Obama administration put forward the criteria for Race to the Top grants, one of the primary requirements was that the state adopt a common set of high-quality standards, in collaboration with other states, that were internationally benchmarked and led to “college and career readiness.”1 These were widely understood to be the Common Core standards. In short order, almost every state agreed to adopt them, even states with clearly superior standards like Massachusetts and Indiana, despite the fact that these new standards had never been field-tested anywhere. No one can say with certainty whether the Common Core standards will improve education, whether they will reduce or increase the achievement gaps among different groups, or how much it will cost to implement them. Some scholars believe they will make no difference, and some critics say they will cost billions to implement; others say they will lead to more testing. But the pressure by the federal government to adopt these standards was intense, and many states adopted the standards even though they won no Race to the Top money. The states wanted to be eligible for the money that was on offer, not recognizing that the federal funds could be used only for the purposes approved by the federal government, not to plug holes in the state budget.

  NCLB created the unrealistic expectation that all students should be proficient, as judged by state tests, and Race to the Top built on that assumption—while encouraging a shift to “value-added” measures to rate schools and teachers. Secretary Arne Duncan allowed states to get waivers from the goal that all students should be proficient but replaced it with an equally unrealistic measure: that students must improve their test scores every year. If they don’t, then someone must be “held accountable.” Someone must be blamed and punished. Heads must roll. No consideration would be given to the possibility that test scores may not go up every year, often for reasons beyond teachers’ control. Some students will not be proficient on the standardized tests no matter how hard they try, no matter how talented their teachers or how dedicated their principal. Some students will be distracted by crises in their lives; some will lack motivation or interest; some will inevitably land in the bottom half of the bell curve because the bell curve always has a bottom half. There is no way that schools and their staffs can control for all the external factors that contribute to test results.

  NCLB created—and Race to the Top sustained—the unwarranted belief that standardized tests are an accurate, scientific gauge of educational achievement. They are not. They provide information about whether students on one particular day answered particular questions in the way the test makers decided was correct, which may or may not be useful to the teacher in assessing what students know and can do, let alone provide help in addressing deficiencies. Often the test results arrive too late to be helpful to the teacher in addressing the needs of students. Different tests in the same subject, or even the same test on different days, often yield different results. The test scores provide a way to rank children, but the labeling in and of itself se
rves no valid educational purpose. The tests do not measure the many dimensions of intelligence, judgment, creativity, and character that may be even more consequential for the student’s future than his or her test score.

  NCLB validated the patently false narrative that American education was failing. Year after year, the number of “failing schools” increased in every state as more and more schools failed to meet the unreachable goal of 100 percent proficiency that NCLB demanded. Race to the Top and the Obama administration’s associated School Improvement Grants program imposed harsh penalties on schools that may indeed be struggling, due to serving at-risk students in overcrowded conditions with scarce resources, by sentencing them to additional chaos, disruption, and, in some cases, closure.

  Together, these federal programs have fueled and accelerated the privatization movement. The constant barrage of bad news, based on unrealistic goals, was used to justify hostile takeovers, profiteering, mass layoffs, and a death sentence for too many schools, in an effort to convince the public that this was the only way to address low achievement. The stories of escalating failure acted as a sort of “shock doctrine” that made almost any remedy seem palatable. The promoters of privatization promised miracles that would shame snake-oil salesmen. Their remedies, they claimed, would produce a dramatic increase in test scores and graduation rates. The media, always suckers for “miracle” claims, retailed stories of charter schools or so-called turnaround schools where everyone succeeded, without bothering to examine even the most obvious evidence suggesting exclusionary policies, expulsions, or attrition rates.

  The charter movement paved the way for the resurgence of the voucher movement, as its advocates insisted that “choice” was far more important than investing in public education. This was precisely what the far-right wing of the Republican Party had been saying for decades, without winning public support. When the evidence for the superiority of charter schools or voucher schools was scant, shaky, or even nonexistent, the champions of the free market insisted that choice itself was an important value. They held that as long as parents chose to send their children to schools that taught creationism or that global warming was a hoax, their choices should be respected, over the time-honored value of public responsibility for a well-run system of public education.