Diane Ravitch, a preeminent historian of public education in America, wrote the following article in
The New York Review of Books last month: "When Public Goes Private, as Trump Wants: What Happens?"
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12...t-happens/
It's the kind of long-form reading that I find most edifying. Below are excerpts, though I would encourage anyone interested to read the article in its entirety. I have added
boldface for emphasis.
The New York Times recently published a series of articles about the dangers of privatizing public services, the first of which was called “When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers.” Over the years, the
Times has published other exposés of privatized services, like hospitals, health care, prisons, ambulances, and preschools for children with disabilities. In some cities and states, even libraries and water have been privatized.
No public service is immune from takeover by corporations that say they can provide comparable or better quality at a lower cost. The New York Times said that since the 2008 financial crisis, private equity firms “have increasingly taken over a wide array of civic and financial services that are central to American life.”
Privatization means that a public service is taken over by a for-profit business, whose highest goal is profit. Investors expect a profit when a business moves into a new venture. The new corporation operating the hospital or the prison or the fire department cuts costs by every means to increase profits. When possible it eliminates unions, raises prices to consumers (even charging homeowners for putting out fires), cuts workers’ benefits, expands working hours, and lays off veteran employees who earn the most. The consequences can be dangerous to ordinary citizens. Doctors in privatized hospitals may perform unnecessary surgeries to increase revenues or avoid treating patients whose care may be too expensive.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons recently concluded that privatized prisons were not as safe as those run by the bureau itself and were less likely to provide effective programs for education and job training to reduce recidivism. Consequently, the federal government has begun phasing out privately managed prisons, which hold about 15 percent of federal prisoners. That decision was based on an investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, who cited a May 2012 riot at a Mississippi correctional center in which a score of people were injured and a correctional officer was killed. Two hundred and fifty inmates participated in the riot to protest the poor quality of the food and medical care.
Since the election, the stock price of for-profit prisons has soared.
There is an ongoing debate about whether the Veterans Administration should privatize health care for military veterans.
Republicans have proposed privatizing Social Security and Medicare. President George W. Bush used to point to Chile as a model nation that had successfully privatized Social Security, but
The New York Times recently reported that privatization of pensions in Chile was a disaster, leaving many older people impoverished.
For the past fifteen years, the nation’s public schools have been a prime target for privatization. Unbeknownst to the public, those who would privatize the public schools call themselves “reformers” to disguise their goal. Who could be opposed to “reform”? These days, those who call themselves “education reformers” are likely to be hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs, and billionaires, not educators. The “reform” movement loudly proclaims the failure of American public education and seeks to turn public dollars over to entrepreneurs, corporate chains, mom-and-pop operations, religious organizations, and almost anyone else who wants to open a school.
In early September, Donald Trump declared his commitment to privatization of the nation’s public schools. He held a press conference at a low-performing charter school in Cleveland run by a for-profit entrepreneur. He announced that if elected president, he would turn $20 billion in existing federal education expenditures into a block grant to states, which they could use for vouchers for religious schools, charter schools, private schools, or public schools. These are funds that currently subsidize public schools that enroll large numbers of poor students. Like most Republicans, Trump believes that “school choice” and competition produce better education, even though there is no evidence for this belief. As president, Trump will encourage competition among public and private providers of education, which will reduce funding for public schools.
No high-performing nation in the world has privatized its schools.
The motives for the privatization movement are various. Some privatizers have an ideological commitment to free-market capitalism; they decry public schools as “government schools,” hobbled by unions and bureaucracy. Some are certain that schools need to be run like businesses, and that people with business experience can manage schools far better than educators. Others have a profit motive, and they hope to make money in the burgeoning “education industry.” The adherents of the business approach oppose unions and tenure, preferring employees without any adequate job protection and merit pay tied to test scores. They never say, “We want to privatize public schools.” They say, “We want to save poor children from failing schools.” Therefore, “We must open privately managed charter schools to give children a choice,” and “We must provide vouchers so that poor families can escape the public schools.”
The privatization movement has a powerful lobby to advance its cause.
Most of those who support privatization are political conservatives...
If the privatization movement were confined to Republicans, there might be a vigorous political debate about the wisdom of privatizing the nation’s public schools.
But the Obama administration has been just as enthusiastic about privately managed charter schools as the Republicans. In 2009, its own education reform program, Race to the Top, offered a prize of $4.35 billion that states could compete for...
Charters have several [unfair, I would add]
advantages over regular public schools: they can admit the students they want, exclude those they do not want, and push out the ones who do not meet their academic or behavioral standards. Even though some public schools have selective admissions, the public school system must enroll every student, at every point in the school year. Typically, charter schools have smaller numbers of students whose native language is not English and smaller numbers of students with serious disabilities as compared to neighborhood public schools. Both charters and vouchers drain away resources from the public schools, even as they leave the neediest, most expensive students to the public schools to educate.
Competition from charters and vouchers does not improve public schools, which still enroll 94 percent of all students; it weakens them...
Given the near-complete absence of public information and debate about the stealth effort to privatize public schools, this is the right time for the appearance of
two new books on the subject. Samuel E. Abrams, a veteran teacher and administrator, has written an elegant analysis of the workings of market forces in education in his book
Education and the Commercial Mindset. Abrams is now director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. The other book,
School Choice: The End of Public Education, was written by Mercedes K. Schneider, a high school teacher in Louisiana with a doctorate in research methods and statistics who left college teaching to teach adolescents...
In his final chapters, Abrams offers Finland as a nation that has chosen a different path and avoided school choice. It performs well on international tests, even though its students seldom encounter standardized tests. Its national goal is to make every school a good school. Teaching is a highly respected profession, requiring five years of education and preparation. While many American schools have abandoned recess to make more time for testing, Finnish schools offer recess after every class. While American students begin learning their letters and numbers in kindergarten or even in pre-kindergarten, Finnish students do not begin formal instruction in reading and mathematics until they reach the age of seven. Until then, the focus in school is on play. The schools emphasize creativity, joy in learning, the arts, and physical education. Child poverty is low, and children get free medical care. Teachers are trusted to write their own tests. Critics say that American society is too diverse to copy a nation that is homogeneous, but it is hard to see why racial and social diversity cancels out the value of anything done in Finnish schools to make children healthier, happier, and more engaged in learning...
Why is Wall Street willing to spend millions of dollars to promote charter schools? As Schneider shows,
charters can be a very profitable business. Unlike the Edison Project, which first banked on vouchers, then entered into contracts with school districts to run low-performing public schools, the
charters get public money, and they start fresh, free to exclude the students they don’t want. These are huge advantages...
At present, proponents of school choice have the upper hand because they are backed by some of the nation’s richest people, whose campaign donations give them an outsize voice in shaping public policy. The issue that the American public must resolve in local and state as well as national elections is whether voters will preserve and protect the public school system, or allow it to be raided and controlled by the one percent and financial elites...
As the recent state election returns in Massachusetts, Georgia, and Washington State suggest, the tide may be turning against privatization as the public recognizes what is at stake. This shift of public opinion was surely advanced by the national NAACP in October, which called for a moratorium on new charter schools until they are held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as public schools, until they stop expelling the students that public schools are required to educate, until they stop segregating the highest-performing students from others, and until “public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system.”
Whatever its faults, the public school system is a hallmark of democracy, doors open to all. It is an essential part of the common good. It must be improved for all who attend and paid for by all.
Privatizing portions of it, as Trump wants, will undermine public support and will provide neither equity nor better education.
Generally speaking, I am not for the
expropriation of private property, as pure socialism dictates, though in the case of the bank bailouts of 2008-09, I could have been persuaded to
nationalize the worst actors (Citigroup, Chase...). But neither am I for the privatization of public services, given the spotty record so far. And I am definitely not in thrall to the ideological notion that private enterprise is the ultimate good. Some--if not most--public services the government can--and does--deliver more equitably and efficiently than private enterprise could ever hope to do.
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