Ideology Drives School Privatization without Much Attention to the Real Consequences
Whether school privatization involves expansion of various kinds of vouchers or the proliferation of largely unregulated charter schools, the policy tends to be driven by its proponents’ ideology, not careful policy analysis. That is, promoters believe in an idea—They usually call it the expansion of parents’ choice rather than naming the privatization that is happening.—and they push that idea without describing, or worse without even examining, the side effects on individuals and institutions. Economists call these other implications externalities, and they may be positive or negative. In the area of education, because the expansion of the privatized education marketplace has implications, budgetary and otherwise, for the public school system that is expected to continue to serve the mass of children in any locality, the externalities are too often negative.
Members of the Texas House of Representatives recently defeated a bill for statewide education savings accounts, a far-right proposal from the American Legislative Exchange Council. (Education savings account vouchers are explained here in the Network for Public Education’s new toolkit, School Privatization Explained.) The Texas bill to establish education savings account vouchers had passed the state senate and been declared by the state’s lieutenant governor as “the civil rights issue of our time.” But then the Texas House began considering the negative externalities for schools in Texas’s hundreds of small towns and rural areas.
Reporters for the Austin American-Statesman describe what happened: “An effort to redirect state money to help students pay for private school tuition—a favorite cause of conservative education activists in Texas and nationally—seemed to have momentum at the beginning of this year’s legislative session… But after sailing through the Texas Senate, the effort has run aground in the House, thanks to pushback from rural Republicans and Democrats… The Ideology Drives School Privatization without Much Attention to the Real Consequences | janresseger: