Allowing the Market, Failing Kids
The Detroit Free Press has come out with a scathing indictment of charter school operations in the state of Michigan. The series reveals the greed and almost total lack of oversight that has allowed charters to churn over $1 billion in public money spent into private profit. The series is well-done and a necessary must read. However, because this report accepts the basic assumptions that allow for privatization in the first place, it also dangerously obscures the pattern of elements that continues to decimate public education.
Education as an Economic Utility
The first assumption that the Free Press uncritically accepts as normative is the idea that the purpose of education is economic. That is, education serves to allow for individuals to have access to our economic system. That the purpose of education is to allow for students to make money in the future and drive our country’s economic engine. In his introduction to the series, Free Press editor Stephen Henderson starts with the presumption that charter schools are in theory, as he puts it in the first two words of his article, a “Great idea.” He references positively former Michigan Governor, and current President of TheBusiness Roundtable, John Engler’s push for charters in 1993- a push that was motivated by economic utility. (And the Business Roundtable continues topromote the idea that we need a solid education system because, “America needs a world-class, skilled workforce to lead in global innovation, ensure future economic growth and drive…”) Henderson later writes that children’s future success, “… is largely determined by the quality of public education.”
The problem is that this frame of economic utility and the idea that “future success is largely determined by the quality of education” are what allow for the privatization of education in the first place.
Education is important. Among other things, it’s important as a foundational Allowing the Market, Failing Kids | educarenow: