Framing education as a business attracts the wrong people
Today's guilty plea by Barbara Byrd-Bennett, in the wake of revelations that she has proved a strident (albeit inept) recipient of bribes, obviously represents another in a too-long litany of our city's public officials who prize personal gain over their pledge to be of service to us.
Is it dispiriting? Very much so. Does it strain our by now threadbare capacity to continue placing any faith in those charged with leading our municipality? It does. Once again. And we, the governed, grow more numb in the face of these enormities, and less willing to grapple with the conditions that permit the wrong people, with the wrong priorities, to maintain a hold on positions of prominence.
The word "municipal" is from the Latin root "municeps," meaning "citizen with privileges." Ms. Byrd-Bennett and her cronies clearly regard themselves as such, but their sense of what constitutes "privilege" is the rankest perversion of the original sense of the word. In the city-state of antiquity, free citizens were clear on the correlation between the prosperity they enjoyed and an abiding sense of duty that impelled them to be of service to their city. Sad to say, there is precious little of this sense of citizenship and allegiance among the appointees of an administration that can ill afford further degradations.
Quite plainly, the misdeeds of Byrd-Bennett represent the avarice of an individual—but they are also emblematic of a much larger failure—a failure of philosophy. Individuals, whatever their excesses, operate within systems—I'm not talking here of the culture of cover-up that has prompted a cash-strapped CPS to funnel an additional $150,000 to the legal defense of Byrd-Bennett's aides, or the mayor's office stonewalling on the release of its records on the episode—I'm talking about a wrongheaded approach to education more broadly.
Photo by AP ImagesByrd-Bennett with Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2012.
Byrd-Bennett's woes are rooted in her greed, yes (and her tone deafness to irony—"tuition to pay and casinos to visit?" Comeon—you might as well throw in a cackling "And your little dog, too!") But she has also acted as a foot soldier in the decades-long march toward privatization and misapplying the precepts of business to the complex (and in many cases generations-long) problems facing our schools.
Her downfall may be read as the logical extension, and, one hopes, the last gasp, of a badly flawed and shortsighted approach: namely the fallacy that business principles are well suited for every aspect of society.
Business, the thinking goes, being hardheaded and practical, is driven by results, and is therefore infinitely capable of tackling any issue. But business is geared toward maximizing a return in the near term, and effective education policy is akin to building a cathedral—the Framing education as a business attracts the wrong people - Opinion - Crain's Chicago Business: