The free-market reform movement had more than federal mandates on its side. It had big money. The billions dangled before cash-hungry states by Obama’s Race to the Top made states compete to accept market-based, test-driven policies. The nation’s largest foundations—Walton, Broad, Gates, and dozens of others—used their billions as well to reinforce the free-market agenda, subsidizing the operations of schools and districts that implemented privatization and high-stakes testing, hired their favored administrators, and put in place the policies they favored. They funded think tanks in Washington, D.C., to put out reports and host conferences, spinning the benefits of such programs, despite the lack of any solid research evidence. The privateers produced slick movies to disseminate their message and found willing supporters in the mass media, such as NBC’s annual “Education Nation” program.
Though the partisans of choice and privatization may have political power and money, their cause lacks one crucial ingredient: it does not have a popular base. Its proponents, most of them extremely wealthy, number in the thousands, yet they aim to control the fate of a national school system with many millions of students, parents, and teachers. To overcome this significant handicap, the corporate reform movement has used the vast wealth of its members to contribute to political campaigns to elect its allies to state and local offices and to pass referenda on behalf of privatization. A small number of billionaires have poured millions of dollars into political campaigns across the nation, using the positive rhetoric of “reform” and images of happy children in neat uniforms to advance their agenda. And always, the reformers speak of “putting children first,” “students first,” “kids come first,” as though the teachers and principals were only concerned with their own selfish interests, and only the reformers really care about the children. Such rhetoric is divisive and hollow, because parents know that most teachers work hard every day and do their best to help their children learn. The horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 dented that absurd image, at least temporarily, and reminded the public that educators are willing to die for their students, as several did on that terrible day.
Across the nation, in state after state, and in city after city, parents and community leaders are beginning to realize that education policy has been hijacked. They are starting to organize against high-stakes testing and privatization. Parent organizations, educators, students, and local school boards are rebelling against the amount of time given over to prepare children for the tests and the resulting loss of time for the arts and other programs. As more of the public understands that charter schools do not produce miracles, their luster will fade; one hopes that only those that are truly devoted to the local community will survive. As more stories appear about corruption and self-dealing by charter operators, the public will realize the risks of deregulation. As more journalists ask questions about attrition rates and low numbers of students with special needs and English-language learners, their mystique will dissolve. The public is beginning to understand, to see the pattern on the rug, and to realize that they are being fooled into giving up what belongs to them.
In the fall of 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took action against the agenda of the privatization movement. More than 90 percent of the union’s members voted to strike a school system run by the Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who had served as President Obama’s chief of staff. The union was striking not for more money but for improvements in the schools for their students. The city’s public schools had been a playground for corporate reform for nearly twenty years, accomplishing little. The reformers placed their bets on closing schools and opening schools but paid little attention to deteriorating conditions within the schools, intense segregation within the school system, and gang violence that took the lives of many adolescents. Many public schools had no libraries, no art or music teachers, no social workers, and overcrowded classes. The CTU decided enough is enough. The union won some concessions from the mayor, and it shone a bright light on the essentially elitist indifference of the mayor, his school board, and by implication the Obama administration. But the CTU’s main victory was the example of unity and militancy that it offered to dispirited educators across the nation.
However, the CTU was unable to dissuade the mayor from his plan to close scores of public schools. Rahm Emanuel, like Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and other proponents of privatization, continued to be wedded to the belief that the private sector has a “secret sauce” (Emanuel’s term) for school success, not realizing (or pretending not to realize) that the great results he admired were usually obtained by skimming the students they want and exclusion, attrition, and expulsion of those they don’t want. More of this “secret sauce,” and the nation’s cities will be left with a dual school system of haves and have-nots, reinforcing the structural inequalities of American society, leaving many children not only behind but hopeless, and destroying public education in the bargain.
In time, perhaps, legislators will demand proper oversight of charters so that they are expected to collaborate with the public schools, so they take a fair share of the neediest students, and so their finances are transparent. If charters could be freed from corporate control and freed from the profit motive, if they became stand-alone, community-based organizations that meet the needs of the community, they might yet become a useful part of the landscape of public education.
The overwhelming majority of the American public were themselves educated in public schools and, once informed, will not readily hand these valuable public assets over to entrepreneurs, profit-making organizations, or well-intentioned amateurs. They want better neighborhood public schools, not chain-store schools that pick and choose their students. Despite the grandiose promises made by charter corporations and their political allies, the public is awakening to the threat posed by privatization.
The corporate reform movement has capitalized on the American public’s infatuation with consumerism. Consumerism is as American as apple pie. People shop for their shoes and their jeans and their homes, say reformers, why not shop for their children’s schools? Competition may produce better shoes and jeans, but there is no evidence that it produces better schools.
The advance of privatization depends on high-stakes testing. The federally mandated regime of annual testing generates the data to grade not only students and teachers but schools. Given unrealistic goals, a school can easily fail. When a school is labeled a “failing school” under NCLB or a “priority” or “focus” school according to the metrics of the Obama administration’s program, it must double down on test preparation to attempt to recover its reputation, but the odds of success are small, especially after the most ambitious parents and students flee the school. The federal regulations are like quicksand: the more schools struggle, the deeper they sink into the morass of test-based accountability. As worried families abandon these schools, they increasingly enroll disproportionate numbers of the most disadvantaged students, either children with special needs or new immigrants who can barely speak English. Low grades on the state report card may send a once-beloved school into a death spiral. What was once a source of stability in the community becomes a school populated by those who are least able to find a school that will accept them.
Once the quality of the neighborhood school begins to fall, parents will be willing to consider charter schools, online schools, brand-new schools with catchy, make-believe names, like the Scholars Academy for Academic Excellence or the School for Future Leaders of Business and Industry. In time, the neighborhood school becomes the school of last resort, not the community school. When the neighborhood school is finally closed, there is no longer any choice. Then parents will be forced to travel long distances and hope that their children will be accepted into a school; the school chooses, not the student.
Does it matter?
Yes, it does.
Public education is an essential part of the democratic fabric of American s
ociety. Nearly 90 percent of American students attend public schools, whose doors are open to all, without regard to race, ethnicity, language, gender, disability status, national origin, or economic class. Control of public education is democratic, subject to decisions made by elected or appointed officials, rather than by private boards and for-profit corporations. Community schools are controlled by residents of the community, not by corporate chains. In 95 percent of the school districts in the United States, if the public does not like the decisions of their school boards, they can vote them out of office.
The goal of our public educational system, evolved over many decades, is equality of opportunity. Have we met our goal? Absolutely not. But choice will not bring us any closer. Choice does not produce equality; choice exacerbates inequality, as a free market produces winners and losers. Choice intensifies racial and ethnic segregation, as well as segregation by class. Both choice and high-stakes testing erode equity by encouraging self-segregation and by ranking that reifies socioeconomic status.
Liberals should be at the forefront of the effort to defend public education, because public education has been a force for social and intellectual progress, a force to achieve a more just society. Liberals should understand that the public schools are an integral part of the commons that belong to us all and should oppose any efforts to give them away to entrepreneurs.
Conservatives should be at the forefront of the effort to oppose privatization because the public school is a source of community, stability, and local values. Conservatives do not tear down established institutions and hand them over to the vagaries of the free market or the whims of financial and political elites. Conservatives do not destroy communities. What we are witnessing today is the Walmartization of American education, an effort to uproot neighborhood schools and Main Street businesses and outsource their management to chain schools and chain stores run by anonymous corporations. If they do not make their bottom line, they may pull up their stakes and abandon the community, leaving it bereft, as many chain stores and charter chains have already done. Conservatives protect their community and its institutions. There is nothing conservative about the chain-store mentality that is now being introduced into the control of schooling.
Ours is a diverse nation that respects the choices that people make about their children’s education. We respect the right of parents to send their children to private and religious schools. We respect the right of families to homeschool their children. Yet more than a century ago, our nation decided to separate church and state, to restrict the allocation of public funds to public schools, and to keep religious doctrine out of public school classrooms. The public schools became the schools where children of all religions and no religion could learn together. Those who wanted a religious education for their children were free to seek it elsewhere, at their own expense. Catholic education has been especially valuable for the families and children it serves; the best way to maintain Catholic schools is to keep them independent. Where public funding goes, public accountability must follow. Here is a principle that might be useful in our present debates: public money for public schools; private money for nonpublic schools. If Catholic and other religious schools received even half of the munificent private philanthropy now directed to charter schools, they would have the financial stability they require to continue their mission for many decades into the future. Meanwhile, the principle of separation of church and state that has served our nation well would remain intact.
Why do we have public schools? In the early decades of the nineteenth century, most children were schooled at home by their parents, by tutors if their parents could afford it, in private academies, or in church schools. The children of the poor were schooled, if they were lucky, by charitable and religious organizations. As communities grew, parents and concerned citizens realized that educating children was a shared public responsibility, not a private one. The private, religious, and charitable schools were largely replaced by public schools, paid for with taxes raised by the entire community. For many years, the public schools were known as common schools, because they were part of the public commons. Like parks, libraries, roads, and the police, they were institutions that belonged to the whole people. Some people complained that they didn’t want to pay taxes for other people’s children either because their own children were in private school or because they had no children. But most people understood that paying for the education of the community’s children was a civic duty, an investment in the future, in citizens who would grow up and become voters and take their place in society.
Public education has enlarged our democracy since the mid-nineteenth century. It was the public schools that assimilated millions of immigrant children from Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by teaching them how to speak English and how to participate in American democracy. The public schools were the immigrants’ ladder of social and economic mobility into the middle class. The Brown decision of 1954 ended the rigid, legally mandated segregation of public schools in the South, a historic change that eventually desegregrated not only schools but other public institutions, and eventually most of American society. The integration of large numbers of African Americans into the middle class began in the public schools. Similarly, the public schools were the first major public institution to insist upon gender equality in American society. At the same time, the public schools opened their classrooms to students with disabilities of all kinds, which paved the way for their integration into other sectors of our society.
None of these advances happened without court orders and legislation, but no other institution could have done it except the public schools. A century ago, John Dewey explained the connection between democracy and education. He wrote:
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.2
What Dewey taught us, which we have spent the past century trying to incorporate into our way of life, is that democracy is more than the institutional arrangements for governing and voting. It requires that decisions be made with the involvement and participation of those who are affected by them. Democracy functions most effectively when people from different backgrounds interact, communicate their interests, and participate in shaping the purposes by which they live. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln put it best when he described American democracy as that “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
More than any other institution in American life, the public schools have broken down the barriers of class, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, language, and disability status that separate people. They have not eliminated those divisions, but they have enabled people from different walks of life to learn from one another, to study together, play together, plan together, and recognize their common humanity. More than any other institution in our society, the public schools enable the rising generation to exchange ideas, to debate, to disagree, and to take into account the views of others in making decisions.
Over time, as the public schools opened their doors to all, they expanded opportunity to more people, distributed the benefits of knowledge to more people, and strengthened our nation. Public education has been an American melting pot, an American salad bowl, an American orchestra, an American mosaic. The public schools have
taught us how to be one society, not a collection of separate enclaves, divided by race, language, and culture. They have contributed directly to the growth of a large middle class and a dynamic society. Our nation’s public schools have been a mighty engine of opportunity and equality. They still are.
But no matter how much we improve our public schools, they alone cannot solve the deeply rooted, systemic problems of our society. Federal, state, and municipal policies have isolated many children, especially in urban districts, into schools that are segregated by race, class, and income. Many of our public schools have also been badly underfunded and regularly pummeled by budget cuts, rising class sizes, and damaging mandates that have undermined their mission. The inevitable result of such segregation and underfunding is low academic performance, which is then blamed on the schools. The failure of public policy is not the failure of the public schools. The challenge to our society today is to repair public policy and to give our public schools the care and support they need to thrive, in all communities and for all children, rather than abandon them to the idiosyncrasies of the free market.
Our communities created public schools to develop citizens and to sustain our democracy. That is their abiding purpose. This unique institution has the unique responsibility of developing a citizenry, making many peoples into one people, and teaching our children the skills they need to prepare for work and further education.
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools Page 39