Donald Cohen is the executive director of “In the Public Interest” and co-author of an important new book The Privatization of Everything. He titled this column, which originally appeared in the Washington Post.
He writes:
Reforming public education with market-based reform is “like using a hammer to cook an omelet”
Trying to fix public education with market-based reform is like using a hammer to cook an omelet. It’s just the wrong tool.
That’s one of the main points in The Privatization of Everything, a new book that I co-authored with Allen Mikaelian, which explains why market rules don’t apply to every single aspect of human activity—including education.
The recent announcement by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg that he’s investing $750 million to expand student enrollment in charter schools was a harsh reminder that the decades-long experiment with market-based education reform isn’t working. Charter schools have been in existence for decades, but they haven’t proved to be the panacea their supporters claimed.
To the contrary, many communities see charter schools (and voucher programs) as harming district schools that educate most American schoolchildren.
That’s why what a growing number of public schools are doing to actually improve educational outcomes—and create strong ties among families, students, educators, and communities along the way—is so promising and refreshing.
Over the past few years, public schools from places as diverse as the suburbs of Tampa and Los Angeles have been implementing what’s called the “community school” approach.
Community schools bring together local nonprofits, businesses and public services to offer a range of support and opportunities to students, families and nearby residents. Their goal is to support the entirety of a student’s well-being to ensure they are healthy, safe and in a better position to learn.
These benefits then extend to the surrounding community—which has been especially crucial during the pandemic.
Like, Florida’s Gibsonton Elementary, which organized an effort to have the local government install new streetlights near campus, immediately increasing attendance—which, among other things, helped improve test scores.
And Texas’s Reagan High School, which doubled enrollment, increased graduation rates, and avoided closure by launching mobile health clinics and parenting classes, changing its approach to discipline, and expanding after-school activities.
And so many more community schools around the country.
Many of these schools are succeeding because the community school approach treats public education as the public good that it is. Like with coronavirus vaccines and other public health measures, no child should be excluded—there should be no winners and losers.
In his recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg concludes, “We need a new, stronger model of public education that is based on evidence, centered on children, and built around achievement, excellence and accountability for all.” I agree.
Read the full version of this article in the Washington Post.
You can buy The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back at your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.
Stay in touch,
Donald Cohen
Executive Director
In the Public Interest
Good for him for submitting something positive on public schools.
The public should be getting a much, much more balanced picture. If ed reform intends to present a 100% negative snapshot of public schools and a 100% positive snapshot of charters/vouchers there should be a contribution from someone outside ed reform.
We should be hearing from people outside the ed reform echo chamber before we do something as radical and profound as eradicating public schools. It will be irreversible – when public schools are gone, they’re gone, and the only people we hear on it are people who are already convinced public schools must be eliminated.
We don’t need “balance” between Republican ed reformers and Democratic ed reformers- they’re almost identical anyway- we need people OUTSIDE the echo chamber for real viewpoint diversity.
There’s a pro public school argument. At the very least it should be heard. To dump a universal public system in the trash based on the views of 150 high profile ed reformers who all cheerlead privatized systems and bash public systems would be tragic, and we’ll regret it.
Market based school deform did not ” fail.”
It made billions of dollars for the companies and individuals that sold it to the public.
It was never intended to do anything else.
And the latest new deform offering (which is really just the same thing in different clothes) — personalized learning — will do the same.
Only the name of the policy has changed to protect the guilty.
The problem with representing market deform as mere “failure” is that it clouds the basic purpose of the endeavor and the fact that it was dishonestly represented as being “all about the kids”, which it wasn’t.
It was all about the dollar$.
Markets are ALL about money. Nothing else.
So true SDP. The intention was not to improve public schools. The intention was to destroy and replace them with privatized profit producing centers operated by education amateurs working for lower wages.
Point well taken, SDP — Ed Reform has been a rousing success.
Yes, I keep saying this.
We need to understand they are succeeding wildly at their purpose — the cons who are pushing it all know this, if not all their marks.
We need to know this in order to understand why they will keep on pushing it and they will never ever stop until public education is dead.
yes, my first thought with that title: “reform” was an invasion MEANT to do what it did…
Deform is a Virus
Deform is a virus
Infecting the schools
That’s meant to en-wire us
With tech edu-tools
To open the markets
For soft-ware and hard
And open the charters
Where money is God
“To start the year off on an upbeat note, Colorado’s muscular effort to improve K–3 reading curriculum finally appears to be paying off. One of twenty states that passed or recently considered measures related to the science of reading, the Centennial State began cracking down on how its teacher preparation programs cover early literacy. It is now in the process of requiring teachers to demonstrate more in-depth knowledge about reading pedagogy as well as tightening the reins on which reading programs may be used by districts. Last year, barely two in five of the state’s many local districts used reading curricula from the state’s list of approved programs. That has already risen to 63 percent.”
One really wonders when it occurs to ed reformers that the privatized, fragmented systems they all promote, market and lobby for are inconsistent with their penchant for “cracking down” on public schools.
How do they imagine this is going to work in a universal voucher system? They’re planning on ordering publicly funded private schools and thousands of private contractors to adopt a micro managed reading regime?
Of course not. All of these regulations and mandates will apply only to public schools. The privatized sectors won’t be regulated at all. They’re frantically privatized a public system that serves 50 million students and they don’t even have a halfway coherent idea of what it will look like. The “accountability” piece is completely inconsistent with the “choice” piece and there’s not even a recognition that it’s cotradictory.
Diane Ravitch clearly does not understand the magic of “free markets.” The magic consists in serving the deserving few and ruthlessly weeding out the rest. That magic is why we should replace public schools with private ones and silly notions about love between romantic partners with prostitution. Hey, don’t attack me. I’m just applying “free market principles” to human mating, with a noble purpose in view.
As John D. Rockefeller once told a Sunday school class that he was teaching:
“The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest. . . . The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grew up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
Applying this to education, one comes to the following: rooms full of Prole children working at computer terminals, gritfully applying themselves to whatever arbitrary tasks are assigned to them by their betters, and schools with real teachers for the worthy children of the wealthy. Hey, it’s just business. And the law of nature. And of God.
By coincidence I was just yesterday cutting firewood and contemplating what situations of human relations are actually reflective of the economic theories related to free markets.
While I do not think that a chainsaw is necessarily the best arbiter of truth, it occurred to me that perhaps one of the only places free markets make sense was in rural America where very little of economic exchange takes place. Farmers, unfortunately, do not deal in a free market for the major income on agribusiness. I met a guy back in 06 who claimed to be the last independent hog producer in Illinois. All chickens are contract raised. So where is there even the illusion of market?
This happens in personal exchange items that are a very small part of the actual economy. It takes place when I get Eddie to work on my chainsaw. I see some free market when I go to Jack Kershaws in Nashville to get brisket. But big money passes through market organized by either government or industry acting as government. Whether it is health care or hardware, there is not very much competition in a free market.
This is possibly why private concerns want to get into education. It would be nice to have use of a trillion dollars a year.
Ready Made For Community Based, Pandemic-Afflicted Public Schools. NOW really is the National Moment for the up close and personal power of Community Schools.
Seymour B. Sarason & Elizabeth Lorentz’s THE CHALLENGE OF THE RESOURCE EXCHANGE NETWORK, 1979.
With service coordination, a model is provided by the resource exchange, schools, colleges, hospitals, social, welfare or counseling agencies, businesses– who voluntarily join together to exchange knowledge, services, products, personnel, and other resources to accomplish a common goal–barter-style.The synergies enable network members to mount programs that would otherwise have been impossible.
The Challenge of the Resource Exchange Network is the “how-to” book, containing numerous case examples of resource exchange networks in action. It offers practical step-by-step guidelines for overcoming the obstacles to network development and operation.
In a time of reduced funding and tighter budgets, the resources exchange network offers public and private institutions more effective use of their resources.
Market based education was designed to starve public schools to make them collapse and fail while it generated profit for privatizers. It allowed private companies to use young people to generate profit. It was a political and economic scheme rather than an educational plan. Public schools are community assets, and as such, they serve community needs. Our young people do better when they attend students that serve the whole student.
We need other ways to evaluate students and schools other than test scores. Project based learning is a much more meaningful and humane way for students to demonstrate understanding, and it is far more personalized than so-called personalized learning where students interact with a computer. The best learning is active and social, and it includes human engagement and interaction which our students today need more than ever.
cx: attend schools that serve the whole student.
Ready Made For Community Based, Pandemic-Afflicted Public Schools. NOW really is the National Moment for the up close and personal power of Community Schools.
Seymour B. Sarason & Elizabeth Lorentz’s THE CHALLENGE OF THE RESOURCE EXCHANGE NETWORK, 1979.
With service coordination, a model is provided by the resource exchange, schools, colleges, hospitals, social, welfare or counseling agencies, businesses– who voluntarily join together to exchange knowledge, services, products, personnel, and other resources to accomplish a common goal–barter-style.
The synergies enable network members to mount programs that would otherwise have been impossible.
The Challenge of the Resource Exchange Network is the “how-to” book, containing numerous case examples of resource exchange networks in action. It offers practical step-by-step guidelines for overcoming the obstacles to network development and operation.
In a time of reduced funding and tighter budgets, the resources exchange network offers public and private institutions more effective use of their resources.
Need more voices like this! Love the analogy.
Call me conspiratorial but I can’t help but think, given the behavior of so many of these corporate “reformers”, that privatization was never intended to make the public schools better, but to enrich the few who have resources to develop charter networks whether they are for profit or non-profit. Combine this with religious interests, whether evangelical or Catholic, and you have a coalition that has little interest in developing public schools that promote anything but their bottom line. Going into the last decade parochial schools were struggling. The disruption of NCLB put them back on the map as a viable option to public schools. The Devos obsession with charters in Michigan and elsewhere was simply a continuation of their pyramid enrichment scheme learned with Amway Corp. I once attended a principals’ conference at the height of the Gates invasion where superintendents, many trained by the Broad Foundation, were openly salivating over the opportunities to gain private access to the approximate 700 billion the US spends on public education per year for personal gain or access to executive positions with the tech industry. Even Rupert Murdoch tried his hand at education for riches investments. We are now confronted with a political class that is more about gaining influence for wealth partnered with an investment class that is the height of corporate welfare. The issue isn’t whether privatization works, it’s whether the fever of predatory capitalism can break before it is too late.
Well said. The corporate privatizers include both ideologues and Wall St. vandals seeking to transfer public funds into private pockets, aka, corporate welfare.
companion “intention” – rewards for the colonialists’ best friend, conservative Christian/Catholic religion
Coincidence? The autocratic/authoritarian Gates hired an assistant principal from a Catholic military academy to lead the Foundation’s education campaign.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
Looking forward to a potential Cohen sequel which could be titled, “The Autocrat’s Consort.”
Chap. 1, Melinda’s $1 bil. bounty on public schools- Main Street’s assets become Wall Street’s.
Chap. 2, Melinda’s hatchet to equality- the teaching profession which lifted the most women into financial independence- outsourced.
Chap. 3, Illiberal Mrs. Gates- absent when theocrats came for public school boards. Koch’s anti-CRT rolled through the towns and states and met no resistance from the Gates overlords of education.
Chap. 4, Big surprise- the education campaign of Melinda’s Foundation was steered by an assistant principal from a Catholic military academy. (Melinda received her education from the school of conservative religion.)
Chap 5, Melinda and Betsy- fraternal twins. Their husbands and Charles Koch-triplets.
Or, the title could be, “Democracy’s Artery Severed- Melinda wields machete.”
“Community schools bring together local nonprofits, businesses and public services to offer a range of support and opportunities to students, families and nearby residents. Their goal is to support the entirety of a student’s well-being to ensure they are healthy, safe and in a better position to learn. . . . Like, Florida’s Gibsonton Elementary, which organized an effort to have the local government install new streetlights near campus, immediately increasing attendance—which, among other things, helped improve test scores.”
The supposedly new “community school” practices have been being done, albeit, in a haphazard fashion by many public schools (especially small town ones) for quite a long time now. But as with all good practices finding the monies and resources to do so has been the challenge.
Those practices did not include “improve test scores” as a rationale. No need to. If anything improving test scores is at best an educational malpractice and should be completely eliminated. Why so many see improving academic achievement via test scores as a positive is light-years beyond/behind my understanding.
To hell with improving test scores. Sick, effin Sick.
People repeat the goal of “improved test scores” without even giving it a thought.
That’s what happens when something gets repeated enough times. It becomes a part of speech.
The think tank wankers at both right and “left” wing tanks know this very well. In fact, it’s their primary strategy.
Anyone who believes in identifying and supporting the common good such as public schools, transportation, clean water, community health, etc. should read The Privatization of Everything, but I warn you, it is maddening to read page after page how Americans have been fooled into believing that privatization is more cost-effective and efficient than our government at providing these services. The authors have opened my eyes to the myriad of ways privateers, often with the help of government officials, are supping at the taxpayer trough and endangering our lives while getting paid for it! I like to buy books so I can mark up particular paragraphs and salient sentences. I have never underlined, checked, and starred pages in a book like this one. I’m ticked off on every page, but we all should be ticked off at what the authors are reporting on, literally, the privatization of nearly everything in our country.
The Rhetoric of Failure only plays into the mystification of the suckers, shoring up the myth that the corporate raiders of public education really have good intentions and all they need is more time and tax dollars to prime the pump and begin paying off.
We need to stop calling them failures at something they have no intention of doing and keep pointing to the real goal they have always been aiming at.
The Mystique of Failure
I wonder why they fail
And fail and never stop
The well-worn “Failure Trail”
Is leading to the top
They fail to make the grade
And fail until we blush
But failure is a spade
And five of them a flu$h
The Business of Failure
They fail and fail again
And ask us for some more
Cuz next time , they will win
And pay us back , for sure
SDP, Thanksfor pointing out that the well-heeled “reformers” fail and fail and fail again. As long as the money keeps flowing, they keep trying and failing.
Failure is Everything
The markets, they fail
But long live the mall!
The markets we hail
Cuz failure is all