Young People's Socialist League

Neoliberals around the world have been pushing for privatization of services in the public sector since the 1980s. And Milton Friedman was ahead of his time; promoting privatized education since the 1950s. Education is an $850 billion industry in the United States alone. This can only mean one thing to businessmen: a new market to exploit! If only they could gain access to it! One website reports that “for-profit education companies are multiplying, with revenues of $100 billion in 2001.” There may be other ulterior motives behind education privatization, in addition to the profits to be reaped. Some teachers perceive the trend as an attempt to break up teachers' union—the American Federation of Teachers being the largest union in the country and a major contributor to the Democratic Party.

Some suggest that there exists a right-wing strategy to deliberately underfund public schools, so that the perception of them as dysfunctional will be reinforced, and the public will opt for privatization measures. The No Child Left Behind Act can be seen as an example of this. Though the federal government only contributes about 7% of the total spent on education in the country, the act has drastically extended its oversight. The NCLB implemented new standardized testing requirements, and makes funding contingent on positive results. Critics say that the federal government hasn't provided adequate funding for the goals it has set for public schools to be reached, meanwhile, the pressure to pass standardized tests in reading, math, and science push a homogenization of the curriculum. President Bush recently proposed new provisions for the reauthorization of the NCLB act, among them that schools continuously failing to meet NCLB standards can be taken over by mayors, turned into charter schools, and that education vouchers be offered to students of those schools. These consequences may not seem so austere, but when it's taken into account that these schools aren't given the resources to succeed in the program to begin with, it isn't unreasonable to suspect that they're being set up for failure for the benefit of capital.

Corporate involvement in education isn't a new phenomenon – business interests have lobbied for stronger math and science programs, as well as the cultivation of better “workplace attitudes” for many decades now. Predictably, corporate involvement increased in the Reagan years, and Elizabeth Ulseem notes in her article on corporate elites in education that by 1984 there were already over 30,000 school-corporate partnerships across the country. Today many school districts have already incorporated a voucher system, and some have started to outsource services such as school lunches to cut costs, or to seek additional funding by allowing corporations to advertise in schools through course materials, sponsorship of sports teams, and even on school buses. In some states charter schools may be run by for-profit corporations, and in these states instances have been recorded of these schools cutting programs or rejecting special needs students to maintain their profit margin. In states where for-profit corporations can't receive their own charters, school districts or individual charter schools may contract “Educational Maintenance Organizations” to manage the school and its curriculum–with the public funds.

Proponents of education privatization cite the greater choice such a system gives to parents, and claim that it would be free from the bureaucracy of public schools and therefore more flexible and efficient, while increased competitiveness would improve the overall quality of the education system. But one should always be wary of capitalists, and, since they have the money to push their own agenda, I'm not going to waste time and precious mental energy considering their point of view, but focus on the potential drawbacks of privatization, all the while angry that I've been put on the defensive and allowed the powers that be to determine the nature of the education reform debate.

So what might be some of the horrible outcomes of privatized education? The most obvious answer that comes to mind is that a portion of expenditure on education would be withheld for profits. In the worst case scenario, the biggest and most efficient corporations would be best able to expand, resulting in a corporate chain of schools, a Wal-Mart of education. This is already happening to some degree in higher education with chain-universities such as DeVry University and University of Phoenix, which are able to drastically cut costs by offering distance learning and standardizing the curriculum – which in an online format becomes more susceptible to managerial oversight. Such a monolithic monstrosity on the K-12 level could potentially serve to teach values such as materialism and competition, and implement entrepreneurship classes in primary school. Minority opinions could be more suppressed than they are in public schools, because private institutions aren't bound to protect First Amendment rights. Private institutions also may be selective, admitting only those likely to do well and augment the school's reputation. A study of Chilean education's move towards privatization by Martin Carnoy found that the private, for-profit schools were more likely to locate themselves in wealthy neighborhoods where students were already likely to be successful, and this was primarily what accounted for their outperforming public schools. Furthermore, Carnoy found that the decreased cost in per student spending in these private schools was primarily due to cuts in teacher salaries. And what is to stop the government from underfunding a voucher system, just as it presently underfunds public schools?

Well, if privatization isn't the answer, what is? Something has to be done about the state of the States' public school system. I suggest that we take some hints from Finland, where the education system is hailed as the best in the world (mostly according test scores). I once had the opportunity to ask a Finnish diplomat why her country's system is so successful, and her answer to me was simple: because each school receives equal funding. Finland also spends a greater percentage of it's GDP than the United States does. Another aspect they attribute to their success, according to a BBC report on the subject, is their “unified system,” where pupils remain in the same school from the time they are seven to sixteen. School sizes are also relatively small, and meals are free to the students. Most interestingly, Finnish students spend the least amount of time in school of any in the industrialized world, suggesting that longer days could actually be harmful to the learning process.

But maybe what works in a small and relatively egalitarian country won't necessarily work in the United States. The question of how to go about education reform in this country is a daunting one. Ulseem notes in her article that during the 1980s interests in education became much more complex, with advocacy groups from across the spectrum vying to be heard. She writes that,

“The complicated governance structure of contemporary public education itself has been described as 'an organizational theorist's nightmare'” She quotes:

“Rube Goldberg himself could not make an organization chart of the official—not to mention the private and informal—lines of authority, regulation, and accounting that now exist in American public education... It would take a political scientist's lifelong work to disentangle even the local story. [Tyack and Hansot, 1982:248].”

I can't imagine that this situation has improved much in the past twenty-five years, or how difficult these complexities must make attempts at reform. To their credit, private corporations managing charter schools seem to have been able to bypass many of these, allowing for more experimentation and implementation of newer research-based models of education. But this begs the question: if private companies are able to bypass byzantine bureaucracies and interest networks, why can't a public school? Probably because they're accountable to more state and federal mandates than are private schools! But if private schools are to be funded with public dollars, is it fair to make more demands of public schools than private ones?

In one success story of school district reform, Chicago's public schools improved after the mayor took over the district and appointed a five person board with a CEO to oversee reforms. With this centralization of power and establishment of accountability, the board was able to drastically restructure the district. Though his strategy wasn't strictly to privatize, it did include the outsourcing of some services and partnerships with private institutions.

Sources:

Carnoy, Martin, and Patrick McEwan, comps. Does Privatization Improve Education? the Case of Chile's National Voucher Plan. 1 Feb. 2007 .

"Finland Tops Global School Table." BBC. 7 Dec. 2004. 1 Feb. 2007 .

Ritter, Jana. "Privatization of Education: Applying Our Problem Solving Skills." The Galt Global Review. 2 Sept. 2002. 31 Jan. 2007 .

Tabb, William. "Globalization and Education as a Commodity." 31 Jan. 2007 .

"The Case for Separation." The Alliance for Separation of School and State. 7 Dec. 2006. 31 Jan. 2007 .

Ulseem, Elizabeth L. "The Limits of Power and Commitment: Corporate Elites and Education in the 1980s." Power Elites and Organizations. Ed. William Domhoff and Thomas R. Dye. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, Inc., 1987. 152-168.

Comments

Ishi on May 14 2007 21:18:26
I dont think that private education is all bad, but i agree that we cannot allow a "Wal-mart of education". Only single school private schools should be allowed.

Lark on August 03 2007 11:09:16
Some of the best arguments about this have been made by Anthony Crosland, he was a moderate reform socialist from the UK, and kept returning to the earliest arguments made by parliamentary socialists and one nation conservatives that nationalised services, whether it was schools or whatever, were meant to provide the model to which the private sector would aspire. It never happened. In part because a lot of people working in the public, nationalised services were bad appointments or gave up the ghost on the idea.

The best argument Crosland made however was to middle classes who felt that they would opt for public services if there were no alternative but felt that while an alternative existed they felt obliged to send their kids there and pay the bills for doing so or feel like they were falling behind the jones or neglecting their kids, Crosland said they'd misunderstood the point of public policy, it wasnt to ease their consciences and if even when a good public service existed they opted for private ones for the sake of their egos it was their choice.

Personally I find the relentless search for investment opportunities, mainly by privatisation, is a pretty desperate move on the part of government and the banks to prevent the economy stagnating as opportunities for profit run out.

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