Monday, January 12, 2015

4 ways privatization is ruining our education system - Salon.com

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





This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
AlterNetProfit-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
The profit motive also leads to shortcuts in the educational methods practiced on our children. Like “virtual” instruction. The video-game-named Rocketship Schools have $15/hour instructors monitoring up to 130 kids at a timeas they work on computers. In Wisconsin, half the students in virtual settings are attending schools that are not 4 ways privatization is ruining our education system - Salon.com: