NEOLIBERALISM,
PRIVATIZATION, AND THE CRISIS OF EDUCATION (posted on November 14, 2015)
Introduction
In August, 2015 12 parents in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago launched a 34 day hunger strike to protest the closing of a neighborhood high school. Their demands, along with its reopening, included the establishment of a green jobs oriented curriculum that would train young people for the needs of the 21st century.
In Seattle, Washington in September, 2015 teachers went on
strike to demand fair wages and working conditions in their new contract.
In the summer, 2014 again in Chicago, the teachers union went on
strike to push back against school closings, stagnant teacher wages, and
closed-door policymaking to consciously limit the influence of parents in the
community. This strike had the support of teachers, parents, and children.
During the spring, 2015, parents all around the state of Indiana
were keeping their children home during school days as a mark of their
resistance to painful, frustrating, ill-conceived, and misused batteries of
tests that state/federal policymakers were imposing on young people.
These
are just a few examples of rising anger at the threat to the tradition of
public schooling, big corporate efforts to privatize schools for profit, the
denial of communities of parents any influence over educational policy, and
campaigns to destroy teachers unions. A key component of the struggle to save
our schools has been to defend the rights of all children to quality education
not limited by race, class, gender, or ethnicity.
The neoliberal design
In the
1970s powerful economic and political elites began a sustained campaign to
shift more of the wealth of society from the many to the few. A new policy
agenda, sometimes called neoliberalism or austerity, was initiated that called
for a variety of attacks on government policies that had been instituted over
the prior thirty years.
In
general, the neoliberal policies called for downsizing government (except for
the military), cutting public services and programs to provide for the human
needs of the population, deregulating banks and corporations, and privatizing
public institutions. Roads, libraries, parks, prisons, and particularly schools
were being shifted from public ownership and control to private corporations,
mostly to make a profit. While these policies have encountered public
opposition and have not been fully implemented, they have dramatically affected
the quality of our public life and our communities.
The Threat to Public Schools
Since
the dawn of the twentieth century the anchor of most communities in the United
States, has been its public schools. Schools help raise, nourish, mentor, and
educate the youth of America. Parents, as best they can, participate in
supporting school systems and provide input on school policy. Teachers and
school administrators sacrifice time and energy to stimulate the talents of
young people. And teachers through educational associations and trade unions
organize to protect their rights in the workplace, always mindful of the number
one priority; serving the children and the community.
Beginning
in the 1970s, various special interest groups, many well-funded, began to
advocate for the privatization of education. Looking at aggregate data showing
some failing school performance, they argued that private corporations, charter
schools, could educate children better. They blamed the lack of marketplace
competition for waste of taxpayer dollars for poor performance. The arguments
ignored the fact that failing schools were schools underfunded by state
legislatures and were often in communities where resources were scarce because
of inequalities of wealth and income. Most often under-performing schools were
underfunded schools: underfunded because of racism and patterns of segregation.
The
neoliberal answer was to shift public funds, formerly from public schools, to
private corporate charter schools. Along with the creation of charter schools,
voucher systems were established by state legislatures and school districts
allowing parents to place their children in any school they could find; often
difficult to access and sometimes far from the child’s neighborhood. The
introduction of charter schools and vouchers began the process of shifting
resources from public education to private schools.
Shifting
resources from the public to the private sector served to destroy adequately
performing public schools and weakened nearby communities.
The
data on the shift from public schools to charters is shocking. For example in
Detroit between 2005 and 2013 public school enrollment declined by 63% and
charter school enrollments rose by 53%; in Gary the decline in public schools
was 47% and the rise in charter school enrollment rose by 197%; and in
Indianapolis the decline in public school enrollments totaled 27% and the rise
in charter schools was 287%.
This
historic transfer of public funds for education to privatization would often be
sped up by local crises. The biggest crisis in an American community in decades
occurred in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck that city in August,
2005. In its aftermath 100,000 citizens were forced to leave the city because
their homes were demolished. Over 100 public schools were destroyed in the
disaster. Subsequently virtually all those schools were replaced with charter
schools, run by private corporations for a profit, devoid of teachers’
organizations and parental participation in the revitalization of educational
institutions. Commenting on the New Orleans experience Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan suggested that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to
the educational system of New Orleans.
The
human tragedy of Katrina was also a metaphor for what was to follow all across
the nation: powerful forces swept away vibrant publicly controlled and
accountable educational institutions, replacing them with new profit-driven,
non-transparent, non-union, corporate schools that did not serve the needs and
desires of the remaining members of the community. Public education is being
uprooted, transformed, and destroyed all across the United States.
To
facilitate the privatization of schools cities everywhere have begun to close
public schools. Detroit, New York, and Chicago have closed over 100 schools per
city in recent years. Several cities have closed at least 25 schools in recent
years. In Philadelphia, municipal funds for a prison came from the closure of
50 schools. The impacts of school closings is reflected in the essay “Death by
a Thousand Cuts,” produced by the Journey for Justice Alliance: “Closing a
school is one of the most traumatic things that can happen to a community; it
strikes at the very core of community culture, history, and identity
and…produces far-reaching repercussions that negatively affect every aspect of
community life.” www.empowerdc.org/uploads/J4JReport-Death_by_a_Thousand_Cuts
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Harry Targ
The political economy of public sector failure is wholly ignored
when schools are declared failing and threatened with closure. Further,
parents, guardians, community members, educators, and youth are systematically
excluded from decisions to close schools and plans to redesign their
replacements. The cover story about saving communities from educational crisis
grows a bit suspect when the very communities presumably being saved are kept
out of the process--and their children are often denied admission to the
replacement schools. (Michael Fabricant and Michelle Fine, Charter Schools and the
Corporate Makeover of Public Education, Teachers College, Columbia University,
2012, p. 98. These comments were made about New York but are relevant almost
everywhere. ht).
In a
prior essay, I discussed the connections between the neoliberal agenda
characteristic of the changing political economy since the 1980s, the move toward
privatization of public institutions, and the threat to public schools. www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2015/11/neoliberalism-privatization-and-crisis.html
In this
essay I discuss some impacts of these policy changes in the United States and
proposals for mobilizing for policy change in Indiana.
First,
the shift of scarce state budget funds from public to charter schools has meant
a significant decline in resources to maintain and improve public schools. If
funds for new charter schools and increased money for vouchers are transferred
from adequately performing public schools to under-performing charter or
religious schools the changes in educational policy would lead to a decline in
the quality of education provided to all students. For example, in the
2014-2015 Indiana budget, $115 million was diverted by the state legislature
from public education to the growing voucher program.
Therefore,
as money is withdrawn from K-12 public education the traditional schools have
reduced resources with which to do their job. This leads to declining performance.
Then privatization advocates call for further reduction as well as school
closings, rather than increasing resource allocation to public schools.
Second,
a high percentage of school closings occur in poor and Black communities. These
closings create what the Journey for Justice Alliance calls “education
deserts.” Parents have to find adequate, affordable schools elsewhere in the
cities in which they live. Oftentimes charter schools refuse to admit
particular students because of biased estimates of their probability of
success, disabilities they may have, insufficient English language proficiency
or other reasons. “Charter schools use a variety of selective admissions
techniques, such as targeted marketing strategies, burdensome application
processes, imposing academic prerequisites, and the active discouragement of
less-desirable candidates.” (Journey for Justice Alliance, Death By a
Thousand Cuts, May, 2014, pp.11-12). In some cases parents cannot find
adequate schools for their children anywhere near their community.
The
closing of schools, the struggle for admission to new schools, the increased
class sizes of new schools, the adjustment to a new school culture, along with
the inexperience of new teachers, all impact in negative ways on the educational
experience of children. Education writer, Scott Elliott reported that of the 18
charter schools operating in Indianapolis in 2015, half of them had test scores
in 2014 that registered a “fail” in state examination of their children. The
failing charter schools served children from poorer backgrounds and/or were
children with special needs such as language training. Several of these failing
charter schools had been operating for several years and some had been part of
national charter networks.
The Center
for Tax and Budget Accountability summed up studies of the impacts of voucher
programs on educational performance: ‘None of the independent studies performed
of the most lauded and long standing voucher programs extant in the
U.S.--Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.--found any
statistical evidence that children who utilized vouchers performed better than
children who did not and remained in public schools.”
Third,
as parent and student protests in Chicago, in various cities and towns in
Indiana, and elsewhere suggest, there is an inverse relationship between the
spread of charter schools and voucher systems and citizen input into
educational policy-making. Historically, while many parents chose not to
participate in school board decision- making, the prerogative existed for
parents, and even students, to provide input into educational policy. It was
assumed that members of communities had the right and the responsibility to
communicate their concerns to school administrators, elected school boards, and
teachers. Most school districts have active parent organizations.
The
documentary Education Inc. demonstrated cases in which the frequency of
public school board hearings was reduced and meetings were summarily adjourned
to avoid debate on controversial issues. And legislatures, such as in Indiana,
have prohibited state executive or legislative bodies from regulating the
“curriculum content” of private schools that accept vouchers.
Fourth,
the neoliberal design referred to in the prior essay is based upon the
proposition that institutional and policy success is best measured by the
profit accrued to the corporate bodies involved. In the field of education,
neoliberal policies seek to shift accountability from the public to the private
sector; from professional skills to market skills; and from participation by
the professional and union organizations of teachers, parent groups, and
engaged students to corporate executives of private corporations. The
neoliberal design regards educational professionalism and training and
teachers advocacy associations as impediments.
Therefore
the full force of state educational policy includes transferring status,
respect, adequate remuneration from long time public school teachers to marginalized,
under-trained new workers in charter schools. Also the charter school movement
is avowedly an anti-teachers union movement.
Documentaries
on education such as Rise Above the Mark and Education Inc.
illustrate that career teachers find demoralizing the repeated and
dysfunctional testing of children, declining resources for their schools, and
repeated public statements devaluing and demeaning teachers. Educational
spokespersons in these films speak in the most glowing terms about the passion
to teach, commitment to children, and talent of staffs under their leadership.
School superintendents in these documentaries also speak about the
contributions which teachers unions make to the enhancement of school
performance.
The sum
total of the thirty year effort to transform the educational system under the
guise of “reform” are the following: the tradition of public education is being
destroyed; access to quality education is becoming more difficult and more
unequal; transparency and parent input into policy making is becoming more
difficult; and the attack on professionalism and teachers unions is making it
more difficult to teach.
How to respond?
The
November 14, 2015 essay and this one only begin to tell the story about the
attacks on the educational process and quality education. Other issues need to
be discussed including testing, evaluations based on dubious metrics, charging
parents for text books, inequitable access to school supplies by district and
by public versus private schools, inadequate funding, the development of
curricula appropriate for a twenty-first century educational agenda, and the
need to combat the “school to prison pipeline” that seems to undergird much of
urban education. Responses to protect and enhance the quality of educational
life for children require the following:
Creating
an educational movement in the state of Indiana that says “enough is enough” to
those advocates of so-called education “reform.” That means developing inside
strategies that include running and electing legislators and executives who
believe in public education. It means lobbying at the State House during the
legislative season. It means launching litigation when politicians and
educational privateers violate the Indiana constitution’s guarantee that all
children have a right to a quality education.
The
educational movement must also embrace an outside strategy, building a
social movement. It should include education, agitation, and organization.
Pamphlets, speakers, videos, and other public fora need to be organized all
around the state. Educators and their supporters need to rally and protest so
that the issue of quality education is discussed in communities and the media.
And
organizationally, an educational movement should draw upon the militancy,
passion, and expertise of educational organizations around the state that are
already engaged in this work. Strengthening the movement for quality education
is more about bringing existing groups together than creating new ones. That is
the vision of Indiana Moral Mondays and the idea of “fusion politics.” Assemble
those who share common values and a vision and build a mass movement such that
as the old slogan says: “The People United Shall Never Be Defeated.”
What Specific Policies and Programs to Support?
1.Increasing,
not decreasing, federal, state, and local funding of public education.
2.Prioritizing
the funding of traditionally under-funded schools in economically disadvantaged
communities. Resources should include salaries to encourage experienced
teachers to remain in disadvantaged communities. Funds should provide equal
technologies, including libraries, computers, and other tools, for schools in
lower income communities equal to those provided for wealthier communities.
Resources should provide for language training, math education, and programs in
the arts.
3.Policy-making
bodies in all branches of government should be open and transparent so that
parents, teachers, and students can observe and participate in decision-making.
4.In
school districts where teachers choose to form unions or other professional
associations these organizations should be recognized partners in the
policy-making process.
5.Assessments
of school performance should be determined by teachers, school administrators,
and parents, not politicians or educational corporations. Teachers should not
be forced to “teach to the tests.”
6.The
goal of the educational process should be the full development of the potential
of each and every student irrespective of race, gender, class or other forms of
discrimination.
