4 ways privatization is ruining our education system - Salon.com:
4 ways privatization is ruining our education system
Its most deleterious effect: The proliferation of charter schools means underperforming children get left behind
PAUL BUCHHEIT, ALTERNET
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
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.
1. Charter Schools Have Not Improved Education
The recently updated
CREDO study at Stanford revealed that while charters have made progress since 2009, their performance is
about the same as that of public schools. The differences are, in the words of the
National Education Policy Center, “so small as to be regarded, without hyperbole, as trivial.” Furthermore, the four-year improvement demonstrated by charters may have been due to the
closing of schools 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
