The Corporate Takeover of Education One State at a Time

There has been much public praise for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to reform public education. However, few scholars have engaged substantively and critically with the organization’s work. While the Gates Foundation is the single largest supporter by far of "choice" initiatives particularly with regard to charter school formation, it is pushing public school privatization through a wide array of initiatives and in conjunction with a number of other foundations. What are the implications for a public system as control over educational policy and priority is concentrated under one of the richest people on the planet in ways that foster de-unionization and teacher de-skilling while homogenizing school models and curriculum? The Gates Foundation and the Future of US "Public" Schools addresses this crucial, unanswered question while investigating the relationships between the Gates Foundation and other think tanks, government, and corporate institutions. - How Bill Gates Plans On Privatizing us Public Schools, The Frustrated Teacher, November 22, 2010

Michigan Bill to Privatize Public School Teaching Sparks Concerns

September 2, 2011

Huffington Post - Michigan state Republicans said this week they are preparing a package of bills to privatize public school teaching -- eliciting concerns about working conditions and trading academic quality for cost effectiveness.

The legislation prepared by state Republican Sen. Phil Pavlov, who chairs the state Senate's education committee, would allow private, for-profit companies to compete for teaching jobs in public schools and would limit the power of teachers unions in seeking compensation packages.

But few specifics are known about the bill package, which has yet to be officially introduced. And Pavlov isn't divulging much more -- for now.

"I don't mean to be vague about this," Pavlov told The Huffington Post. "I can tell you everything on Wednesday."

Pavlov did provide a general outline of the plan, but with minimal details.

"This package of bills will increase choice in many facets in Michigan in a way that has been necessary for long," Pavlov said. "We want a large comprehensive choice package that includes the expansion of charter schools and dual enrollment, to really put more opportunities in front of parents and students in Michigan."

Michigan has seen major school reform this year, passing a law with bipartisan support that limited teachers' collective bargaining and made it easier to fire teachers based on performance.

In Pavlov's eyes, this newest package is the next step in Michigan's cost-cutting track. This year, Michigan cut about $500 million in public education from its budget.

"We've had the conversation in Michigan for a long time about bidding for non-instructional services, food services and custodial work," Pavlov said. "People are looking at this as a front for privatization, but it's giving school districts the opportunity to exercise flexibility."

Pavlov noted that Michigan already supplies its substitute teachers through private organizations. Non-traditional teachers from sources like Teach for America and The New Teacher Project have long been serving school districts nationwide. But this measure would be the first of its kind in the country, allowing for-profit companies to compete against unions to have its teachers placed in public schools.

"I don't think it's a privatization as much as it is competitive bidding," Pavlov said.

Union leaders worry that the measure could drive down teacher pay and eliminate collective bargaining altogether.

"What Sen. Pavlov seems to be talking about is handing the education of our children over to the lowest bidder and letting for-profit companies take over our classrooms," said Doug Pratt, spokesman for the Michigan Education Association, according to the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals.

Pratt could not be reached by HuffPost for comment on Friday.

"In Michigan, we're taking it piece by piece," Pratt previously told HuffPost about the state's education reform strategy. "It's a dangerous strategy, because it doesn’t get everyone excited at the same time. That's the genius of how they're doing things here."

Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University teacher evaluation expert, said he doesn’t think the bill -- which is not expected to go far -- has been thoroughly vetted.

"You can't just legislate better schools," he said. "I think it would be more interesting if they allowed these outside companies to hold teachers responsible for their performance."

The History of the School Privatization Movement

March 15, 2011

The Most Revoluntary Act - Neoliberal Republicans and Tea Partiers (and now Barack Obama and Department of Education director Arne Duncan) give lip service to improving achievement levels for students in inner city schools.

However instead of improving funding to these struggling schools, the one intervention supported by statistical research, they continue to aggressively shift education funding from public schools to private charter schools – despite the Stanford study showing that charter programs don’t improve achievement levels (see previous blog). In my mind, this is totally consistent with what I believe is their real agenda – namely privatizing public education.

Neoliberalism seeks to privatize all public services (education, social security, water, prisons, public transportation, welfare services) – leaving a bare bones government with a strictly security and military role. Neoliberals argue that public provision of these services is inefficient and wasteful – problems that can only be corrected by subjecting them to free market competition. But as we have seen in the case of prison, water, and welfare privatization, there are always windfall profits for businesses and corporations when billions of public, taxpayer dollars are transferred to private hands.

Milton Friedman: the Father of School Privatization

Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberal economics, is also the father of the school privatization movement. He initially envisioned (in 1955) using a school voucher system to incrementally privatize public schools. Under such a system a student receives a voucher valued at the “per pupil equivalent” (i.e. the amount the government would pay for their public education – when the first voucher programs started in the 1990s, this was between $2,000-3,000). The child’s parent then applies the voucher towards the $10,000-20,000 private school tuition.

Shortly after his election in 1980, Ronald Reagan and his secretary of education William Bennett (who coined the term “throwing money at schools”) began an unprecedented and far reaching attack on teachers, teachers unions and school district bureaucracy. Bennett liked to refer to school boards and school districts as “the blob.” One of the goals of school privatization is to replace democratically elected school boards – accountable to both parents and the public – with a more efficient corporate-like board, which meets in secret and isn’t open to public scrutiny or freedom of information.

Reagan accompanied his public attack on teachers and public schools with a simultaneous 50% cut in federal Title I funding for schools in low income districts. His attempt to push voucher legislation through Congress failed, owing to concerns that vouchers subsidizing tuition at private religious schools violated constitutional separation of church and state provisions. At this point Reagan backtracked, promoting school choice via the creation of privately run “charter” schools, subsidized with state, local and federal education funds.

Right Wing Think Tanks Behind the Charter School Movement

Bush senior restored Reagan’s cuts to Title 1, though he promoted the concept of school choice and the development of voucher programs on a state-by-state basis. It was right wing philanthropists and their corporate funding think tanks who provided most of the momentum behind the charter school movement when the first charter school opened in 1991.

The long list of conservative think tanks involved includes the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, Black America’s Political Action Committee, the Cato Institute, Center for the study of Popular Cultures, the Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, Hispanic Alliance for Progress Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and the Hoover Institution. (See http://www.counterpunch.org/weil08262009.html).

To be continued, with a discussion of the billions of dollars of private funding going to charter schools – and why.

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