Profit-seeking in the banking and health care industries has victimized
Americans. Now it’s beginning to happen in education, with our children
as the products.
There are good reasons – powerful reasons – to
stop the privatization efforts before the winner-take-all free market
creates a new vehicle for inequality. At the very least we need the good
sense to slow it down while we examine the evidence about charters and
vouchers.
at Stanford revealed that while charters have made progress since 2009, their performance is
as that of public schools. The differences are, in the words of the
,
“so small as to be regarded, without hyperbole, as trivial.”
Furthermore, the four-year improvement demonstrated by charters may have
been due to the
that
underperformed in the earlier study, and also by a variety of means to
discourage the attendance of lower-performing students.
Ample
evidence exists beyond CREDO to question the effectiveness of charter schools (although they continue to have both
supporters and detractors). In
Ohio, charters were deemed
inferior to traditional schools in all grade/subject combinations. Texas charters had a much
lower graduation rate in 2012 than traditional schools. In Louisiana, where Governor Bobby Jindal proudly
announced that “we’re doing something about [failing schools],” about two-thirds of charters received a D or an F from the
Louisiana State Department of Education in 2013. Furthermore, charters in
New Orleans rely
heavily on inexperienced teachers, and even its model charter school
Sci Academy has experienced a skyrocketing suspension rate, the second
highest in the city. More trouble looms for the over-chartered city in
a
lawsuitfiled by families of disabled students contending that equal educational access has not been provided for their children.
2. The Profit Motive Perverts the Goals of Education
Forbes notes:
“The charter school movement began as a grassroots attempt to improve
public education. It’s quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate
profit.” A
McKinsey report estimates that education can be a $1.1 trillion business in the United States. Meanwhile, state educational
funding continues to be cut, and budget imbalances are worsened by the
transfer of public tax money to charter schools.
Education funding continues to be cut largely because corporations aren’t paying their
state taxes.
So philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch and
Jeff Bezos and the Walton family, who have little educational
experience among them, and who have little accountability to the public, are riding the free-market wave and promoting “
education reform” with lots of standardized testing.
—–Just Like the Fast-Food Industry: Profits for CEOs, Low Wages for the Servers
Our
nation’s impulsive experiment with privatization is causing our schools
to look more like boardrooms than classrooms. Charter administrators
make a lot more money than their public school counterparts, and their numbers are rapidly
increasing. Teachers, on the other hand, are
paid less, and they have
fewer years of experience and a higher turnover rate. The patriotic-sounding “Teach for America”
charges public school districts $3,000 to $5,000 per instructor per year. Teachers don’t get that money, business owners do.
—–Good Business Strategy: Cut Employees, Use Machines to Teach
The
profit motive also leads to shortcuts in the educational
methods practiced on our children. Like “virtual” instruction. The
video-game-named Rocketship Schools have $15/hour instructors monitoring
up to
130 kids at a timeas they work on computers. In
Wisconsin,
half the students in virtual settings are attending schools that are
not meeting performance expectations. Only one out of twelve “cyber
schools” met state standards in
Pennsylvania. In
Los Angelespublic money goes for computers instead of needed infrastructure repair.
K12 Inc., the
largest online, for-profit Educational Management Organization in the U.S., is a good example of what the
Center for Media and Democracy calls
“America’s Highest Paid Government Workers” — that is, the CEOs of
corporations that make billions by taking control of public services.
While over
86 percent of K12′s profits came from taxpayers, and while the
salaries of K12′s eight executives went from $10 million to over $21 million in one year, only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc. online schools
met state standards in 2010-2011, compared to 52 percent of public schools.
It gets worse with the
Common Core Standards, an unproven
Gates-funded initiative that requires computers many schools don’t have. The
Silicon Valley Business Journal reports
that “Next year, K-12 schools across the United States will begin
implementing Common Core State Standards, an education initiative that
will drive schools to adopt technology in the classroom as never
before…Apple, Google, Cisco and a swarm of startups are elbowing in to
secure market share.” States are being hit with unexpected new
costs, partly for curriculum changes, but also for technology upgrades, testing, and assessment.
—–Banker’s Ethics in the Principal’s Office
Finally,
the profit motive leads to questionable ethics among school operators,
if not outright fraud. After a Los Angeles charter school manager
misused funds, the California Charter Schools Association insisted that charter schools are
exempt from criminal laws because they are private. The same argument was used in a
Chicago case. Charters employ the privatization defense to justify their
generous salaries while
demanding instructional space as public entities. States around the
country are being attracted to the money, as, for example, in
Texas and
Ohio, where charter-affiliated campaign contributions have led to increased funding and licenses for charter schools.
3. Advanced Profit-Making: Higher Education
At the college level, for-profit schools eagerly clamor for low-income students and
military veterans, who conveniently arrive with
public money in the form of federal financial aid.
For-profit colleges get up to
90 percent of
their revenue from U.S. taxpayers. Less incentive remains for these
schools after tuition is received, as evidenced by the fact that
more than half of the students enrolled in for-profit colleges in 2008-9 left without a degree or diploma.
As
with K-12 education, the driving need for profit directs our students
to computer screens rather than to skilled human communicators. A
Columbia University study
found that “failure and withdrawal rates were significantly higher for
online courses than for face-to-face courses.” The University of Phoenix
has a
60 percent dropout rate.
The
newest money-maker is the MOOC (Massively Open Online Course). Thanks
to such sweeping high-tech strategies, higher ed is increasingly
becoming a network of diploma processors, with up to a
90 percent dropout rate, and with the largest business operations
losing the most students. For a 2012
bioelectricity class at Duke, for example, 12,725 students enrolled, 3,658 attempted a quiz, and 313 passed. Yet
‘schools’ like edX are
charging universities $250,000 per course, then $50,000 for each
re-offering of the course, along with a cut of any revenue generated by
the course.
4. Lower-Performing Children Left Behind
The
greatest perversion of educational principles is the threat to equal
opportunity, a mandate that was eloquently expressed by Chief Justice
Earl Warren in the 1954 Supreme Court decision on Brown vs. the Board of
Education: “Education is perhaps the most important function of state
and local governments…Such an opportunity…is a right which must be made
available to all on equal terms.” But we’re turning away from that
important message. The
National Education Policy Center notes
that “Charter schools…can shape their student enrollment in surprising
ways,” through practices that often exclude “students with special
needs, those with low test scores, English learners, or students in
poverty.”
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), perhaps the most acclaimed charter organization, says it doesn’t do that. KIPP has its
supporters, and it proudly displays the results of an independent study by
Mathematica Policy Research,
which concluded that “The average impact of KIPP on student achievement
is positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.”
But
funding for the Mathematica
study was provided by Atlantic Philanthropies, the same organization that
provided$10-25 million in
funding to KIPP.
According to a 2011
study by
Western Michigan University, KIPP schools enrolled a lower percentage
of students with disabilities (5.9%) than their local school districts
(12.1%), enrolled a lower percentage of students classified as English
Language Learners (11.5%) than their local school districts (19.2%), and
experienced substantially higher levels of attrition than their local
school districts. For charters in general, the CREDO study found that
fewer special education students and fewer English language learners are served than in traditional public schools. And charter schools serve fewer
disabled students. According to a
Center on Education Policy report, 98 percent of disabled students are educated in public schools, while only 1% are educated in private schools.
In
New York City,
special-needs students and English-language learners are enrolled at a
much lower rate in charter schools than in public schools; and
Over the Counter students
– those not participating in the choice process – are
disproportionately assigned to high schools with higher percentages of
low-performing students. Special education students also
leave charters at a much higher rate than special education students in traditional New York public schools. In
Nashville, low-performing students are leaving KIPP Academy and other charters just in time for their
test scoresto
be transferred to the public schools. And Milwaukee’s voucher program,
which has been praised as a model of privatization success, has had up
to a
75 percent attrition rate.
Equal Access to Education?
It’s
been 60 years since Chief Justice Warren declared education “a right
which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Belief in
the American Dream means that anyone can move up the ladder. But today
only
4 percent of
those raised in the bottom quintile make it all the way to the top as
adults. Two-thirds of those raised in the bottom of the wealth ladder
remain on the bottom two rungs.
Compared to
other developed countries,
equal education has been a low priority in America, with less spending
on poor children than rich ones, and with repeated cutbacks in state
funding. But there’s no market-based reform where children are involved.
Education can’t be reduced to a lottery, or a testing app, or a
business plan. Equal opportunity in education ensures that every child
is encouraged and challenged and nurtured from the earliest age, as we
expect for our own children.
(Credit: AP/Susan Walsh)
Profit-seeking in the banking and health care industries has victimized
Americans. Now it’s beginning to happen in education, with our children
as the products.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered