EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'
- Cornel West: Obama 'Is a War Criminal'
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
ALEC Exposed: Starving Public Schools
This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.
Public schools,” ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, “meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone.” A better system, the organization argued, would “foster educational freedom and quality” through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this “choice”—and vouchers “scholarships”—but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.
The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985. It was championed by then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member, who once said he “loved” ALEC meetings, “because I always found new ideas, and then I’d take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine.”
ALEC’s most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state. That year Georgia passed a version of ALEC’s Special Needs Scholarship Program Act. Most disability organizations strongly oppose special education vouchers—and decades of evidence suggest that such students are better off receiving additional support in public schools. Nonetheless, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Indiana have passed versions of their own. Louisiana also passed a version of ALEC’s Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (renaming it Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence), along with ALEC’s Family Education Tax Credit Program (renamed Tax Deductions for Tuition), which has also been passed by Arizona and Indiana. ALEC’s so-called Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act has been passed by Arizona, Indiana and Oklahoma.
ALEC’s 2010 Report Card on American Education called on members and allies to “Transform the system, don’t tweak it,” likening the group’s current legislative strategy to a game of whack-a-mole: introduce so many pieces of model legislation that there is “no way the person with the mallet [teachers’ unions] can get them all.” ALEC’s agenda includes:
§ Introducing market factors into teaching, through bills like the National Teacher Certification Fairness Act.
§ Privatizing education through vouchers, charters and tax incentives, especially through the Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act and Special Needs Scholarship Program Act, whose many spinoffs encourage the creation of private schools for specific populations: children with autism, children in military families, etc.
§ Increasing student testing and reporting, through more “accountability,” as seen in the Education Accountability Act, Longitudinal Student Growth Act, One-to-One Reading Improvement Act and the Resolution Supporting the Principles of No Child Left Behind.
§ Chipping away at local school districts and school boards, through its 2009 Innovation Schools and School Districts Act and more. Proposals like the Public School Financial Transparency Act and School Board Freedom to Contract Act would allow school districts to outsource auxiliary services.
ALEC is also invested in influencing the educational curriculum. Its 2010 Founding Principles Act would require high school students to take “a semester-long course on the philosophical understandings and the founders’ principles.”
Perhaps the Brookings Institute states the mission most clearly: “Taken seriously, choice is not a system-preserving reform. It is a revolutionary reform that introduces a new system of public education.”
ALEC’s real motivation for dismantling the public education system is ideological—creating a system where schools do not provide for everyone—and profit-driven. The corporate members on its education task force include the Friedman Foundation, Goldwater Institute, Washington Policy Center, National Association of Charter School Authorizers and corporations providing education services, such as Sylvan Learning and the Connections Academy.
From Milton Friedman on, proponents of vouchers have argued that they foster competition and improve students’ learning. But years of research reveal this to be false. Today, students in Milwaukee’s public schools perform as well as or better than those in voucher schools. This is true even though voucher schools have advantages that in theory should make it easier to educate children: fewer students with disabilities; broader rights to select, reject and expel students; and parents who are engaged in their children’s education (at least enough to have actively moved them to the private system). Voucher schools clearly should outperform public schools, but they do not. Nor are they less expensive; often private costs are shifted to taxpayers; a local school district typically pays for transportation, additional education services and administrative expenses. In programs like Milwaukee’s, the actual cost drains funds from the public schools and creates additional charges to taxpayers.
But a deeper crisis emerges when we privatize education. As Benjamin Barber has argued, “public schools are not merely schools for the public, but schools of publicness: institutions where we learn what it means to be a public and start down the road toward common national and civic identity.” What happens to our democracy when we return to an educational system whose access is defined by corporate interests and divided by class, language, ability, race and religion? In a push to free-market education, who pays in the end?
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
33 Comments so far
Show AllI'm sure that privatizing schools will go as well as privatizing prisons.
They could even use the same staff and facilities.
Yeah, ctrl-z, that's about how well it'll go. And I agree about the staff and facilities. I wonder if Cheney's investing in this game.
Onward and upward with Connections Academy! Centralized instruction for all--it's so democratic! More testing--we have to know how many prisons to build! More money pushed to the private sector! Less control for the educator! Hell, who needs all those educators?—the corporatocracy knows what schooling’s all about!
“For instance, if the managerial promise of computer workstations is realized—hooking children into automatized learning systems which have been centrally engineered—then great numbers of schoolteachers and school administrators who were hired for a computerless moment now passed will melt away like ice in spring to be reabsorbed into the leveled and featureless common proletariat. My guess is that this process is already well underway. Low-level school administrators are a class facing imminent extinction if I read entrails correctly.”--From The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, 1998
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/
ELIZABETH H: Does the material exposed in this article, and on further threads about ALEC alter your view about home-schooling? I mean ultimately, that, too, works the wonder of gutting public education, in terms of both funds and its founding ideology. It thwarts the premise of The Public Citizen, after all. Each home schooling "classroom" becomes its own ideological fiefdom.
Siouxrose: What's wrong with parents educating their own kids? If the right wing assault on democracy continues, we may want to counter the nationalistic/capitalistic propaganda they want to spoon feed our kids with at home education. I also see a place for non-profit charter schools as long as they aren't exempted from the salary/benefits for normal public schools.
Schools are not just about learning. They also have to do with socialization, cooperation, and working towards shared goals. Take a high school drama production: All students involved learn to work together, set high standards for themselves, and perform in front of the entire community. What better way to learn what it is like to be a functioning member of a community! Schools bring students together, students from different backgrounds and holding different values. Homeschoolers are, well, naive in that they imagine everybody is like their parents and siblings. I would argue it is better that they are exposed to people of different races, religions, political orientation, sexual orientation than it is to be schooled in a homogeneous environment. Not all home schools create that sort of environment, but many of them do. The same with private, some charters, and some parochial schools.
Would it have been better if G.W. Bush was educated in a school that had more diversity? He went to private schools, if I am not mistaken. The same with Obama. Maybe they would have had more empathy with those at the bottom of society if they had experiences interacting with them. Home schooling is only okay if students interact with others unlike themselves.
Very impressive.
I trust that your wife handles the English Composition part of the curriculum.
Hilarious!
Church AND fire-arms. Aren't you just the cat's pajamas.
How many Americans can home school or even want to home school? Most Americans have to work, often at two jobs, where do they get the time to home school? There are many single parent households and that parent has to work. If you have the time and you have the desire, then go for it. But home schooling is not a solution or a panacea. Top performing Finland does not have home schooling; home schooling is illegal in Germany. In any case, Stephen Krashen, USC professor of education, has found through research that middle class US kids score better than most foreign schools. The problem is poverty, for the most part, in this country.
Siouxrose, I normally agree with your perspectives on most issues; however, speaking with the authority that comes from 41 years in public secondary classrooms as well as with an extensive private education of my own, and having the experience of my wife, an academic Ph.D., teaching my youngest son at home with Wise & Bauer's _The Well-Trained Mind_ as a guide, I differ on the issues of home schooling and charter schools. Parents as educators might have worked well in Old England (not too old) when people read widely and carefully in their own home libraries. But, unlike my wife and I, today's parents are, by and large, lacking such facilities and practices. Our son's success is not the rule.
When my wife and I were caught up in the local and statewide "home-schooling movement", we found many textbooks, curriculum guides and programs as well as met many parents whose primary focus is religious fundamentalism. Beers' _The Latin Road to English Grammar_ and, a particularly egregious violation, Wilson and Nance's _Logic_, not to mention our French by CD course were all heavily infused with such items as teaching the principle of Contrariety:
Jones: All the baptisms in the New Testament were by immersion. All New Testament baptisms were immersions. All B were I.
Smith: Nobody in the New Testament was baptized by immersion. No New Testament baptisms were immersions. No B were I.
I will spare you the torturous explanations, but the point I'm making is that the curriculum is heavily invested with religious paraphernalia. Logic itself becomes proselytization.
My public high school recently experienced the creation and fallout of a Charter School. You use the word "non-profit". It doesn't happen. The Charter School's management and owners tap into the largest public taxpayer fund there is anywhere in America--taxes for education. Teachers are hired and fired at whim as well as paid with individually-negotiated salaries. Most people in charge are even less well-equipped educationally than publicly-elected school board members. The public school district pays for transportation, most texts, and for all the students expelled or otherwise excluded from the charter school. They are indeed "exempted from the salary/ benefits for normal public schools." Furthermore, they bleed off the students most likely to keep the public schools normal. My public school's AP programs were decimated and finally disposed of. Students' overall behavior deteriorated to ridiculously immature levels.
Public school teachers in my district are severely restricted of late against encouraging "critical thinking" and alternative views. No longer eclectic, teachers are encouraged to push the narrow values demanded by the Christian Coalition, and, in our community, the Tea Party's nationalistic/ capitalistic propaganda.
So, I believe there's a lot wrong with parents educating their own kids. In general, they are quite a cut dumber than most public school teachers and much more apt to be part of the "right wing assault on democracy". Not having the balance of the regular schools, charter schools get away with everything they can. And the real point of vouchers is to open the huge coffers of taxpayer education money and put it in the pockets of private (not teacherly) pockets.
DWYER: I am having trouble associating the fine points you made with any critique of MY position! Perhaps I was not clear. I have noticed that Elizabeth H, who also posts MANY fine comments, and is also an educator, happens to advocate FOR home schooling. At issue to me, is not the relative wisdom of one set of parents or another (and I am keenly aware of the pressures on many families to provide income which leaves precious little free time for such things as home schooling), my point is more about the cessation of the commons. To the degree public ed is morally or fiscally abandoned, the corporate hoodlums will stake their claim upon its remains.
One staple of any would-be free & democratic nation would be an INFORMED citizenry. Public education is a very significant IDEAL. Some in this forum, confuse the state of public education today, which is largely the result of inequities in property tax collections, added to the inane curriculum requirements imposed by right wing "manager" types (who seem to think education can be run as a business) with what it's intended to be. My concern is that as more and more persons choose what to me appears as a libertarian route (I'll just take MY kids out of the system, and where possible obtain financial assistance through a voucher) less money is left in the pot to improve upon the public school system.
I've thought of leaving the U.S. That insistent prod was felt every day that Bush dismantled the nation's laws, liberties, and principles. I NEVER thought the craven path would continue under Obama. I thought a Democrat would at least put the brakes on, and allot our nation a relative pause, allowing for some THOUGHT to shape debates and provide for the necessary course correction. Now, upon seeing Earth changes and dangerous oil spills, as well as nuclear accidents peppering the global landscape, I realize there IS no where to run.
I share that comment because I believe it affords an analogy to public schools. Instead of so many running away from them, perhaps there is the need to stay, and as is the case with our country, remain to FIX the damage.
Our world is genuinely coming apart. So many systems are collapsing with much infrastructure to follow. Harvest cycles will not prove as reliable as once they were, and dangerous particles are now circling on our wind and water currents.
In the midst of these compromises to sentient life, our "wise" leaders are cutting back on regulatory agencies and those that would be first in line to help when disaster strikes. Only the military, added to a huge array of armed guards (in departments that go by a list of endless names) are being paid to stand guard. Just as the military went into Haiti and New Orleans to preserve the goods of the shopkeepers, while leaving citizens to survive if they could... the M.O. appears to be in place and waiting.
Perhaps conditions will make education moot. Still, I see in those who advocate for home schooling, charter schools, and applications that will further decimate public education (which is NOT the same thing as suggesting I agree with the current elites' in the bogus testing rites they purchase politicians to further). THAT is not, and never can be, good news to a would-be democratic society.
I am also WELL aware of the Christian fundamentalist pabulum that is part and parcel to some of the favored homeschooling textbooks. Just what we need... the Christian Theocracy that Chris Hedges has so presciently warned against, that The Southern Poverty Center has legally struggled to thwart, and that John Dean exposed in his seminal work.
Are we on the same page? If not, it's close... thank you for sharing your thoughts and concerns.
dwyerj1: I cannot speak for Siouxrose but I suspect she would agree with you. You replied to my post (ctrl-z). On the issue of home schooling, I have no personal experience. It seems to me the issue hinges on the same principles as the rights of parents who believe medical treatment is an attempt to thwart God's will. The parent is free to practice what they believe up to the point that it causes great harm to the child. It is very difficult to find the proper balance between the rights of the parents, the rights of the students and the 'rights' of the society at large. I think a free society should include the right for a parent to educate their child as they see fit, up to the point where it is proven to be very damaging to the child.
As for charter schools, I have ongoing personal experience. It is totally the opposite of yours. My child is in a non-profit charter school that is ranked among the best schools in the state. The school is in a depressed rural area where the School Board and most locals value sports more than education. The school gets only 80% of the funding that regular public schools receive for most students. It's one of only two schools in the area with a foreign language requirement. The school is not able to exclude applicants for any reason but can give a preference to the siblings of current students.
The school does more with less because of the dedication of the all volunteer board, the Director (a former teacher) and the teachers and staff. Enthusiastic, caring people who keep the school going. A lot of parents also contribute time and effort. Since people have to make a special effort to get their children into the school, the parents of students there tend to be the type who are concerned about their children's education. Involved parents. Are these parents who would otherwise be contributing to other public schools? Yes. They would be frustrated in their attempts to make changes to more traditional schools where many of the parents think what was good enough for them is good enough for their kids.
So, in the case of my child, the best education is provided by a non-profit charter school.
I’m happy to argue with anyone my ideas about education; see yesterday’s rather impassioned posts between Tom Larsen and me: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/13-9
I’m not looking at the situation from the same angle as most progressives are, as the above posts make clear, as do others I’ve posted on the issue. The progressive supports teachers’ unions and looks the other way when asked about the student (whose situation isn’t so bad, I endured it, blah blah blah). They tend to see teaching as a political act but give short shrift to learning as a political act as well, and one I suggest we put more focus on. I hardly think my thin voice will spell the death of public education—that’s already being done by a massive corporatist wrecking ball, and few people can be convinced that they could teach even their own children because they’re not “experts,” a meme I hear constantly on this site. The forced schooling in this country was designed by the same corporatists that drive our “left” media via NPR and PSB, by the way: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, etc. No doubt the new money flowing in, via Kraft, Gates, Walmart, etc. will make everything better. Right. Then we can cream Findland’s ass.
This is the only thing I have suggested: consider how to get our young people (or any people) to learn. And to ask what they should learn. But of course, most progressives would rather leave that question to the experts because it's merely an "educational"problem.
" The forced schooling in this country was designed by the same corporatists that drive our “left” media via NPR and PSB, by the way: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, etc. No doubt the new money flowing in, via Kraft, Gates, Walmart, etc. will make everything better. Right. Then we can cream Findland’s ass."
Elizabeth H., I don't know ... I thought public education was for child laborers taken from the maws of corporations and for all children as equal opportunity. And today, the move to "reform" public education is driven by corporatists who seek to profit handsomely by the reforms, to hell with the kids. Also, the rich don't want to be taxed to pay for education for the poor (competition for their earnings).
.
Look at Matthew Arnold and his campaign in America.
Home schooling can range all the way from very good to very bad. I have neighbors who home schooled their children until high school. They were very well taught. They were also encouraged to take part in social activities. In high school, they were at the top of the class. I know of another family who grounded their children in religious beliefs and otherwise left them functionally illiterate. It depends of why and how the home schooling is done.
Fukushima puts the lie to education...
Fukushima puts the lie to pretty much everything...
And Bhopal - or the Traingle Shirtwaist Fire - far more costly in terms of loss of life - too?
Julie, I have written about how America's corpocracy is ruining education and what needs to be done about it. Please go to my website, www.democracypowernow.com and on the first page click Please Click Here and then go on to sign the petition to unite the NGO's fighting the corpocracy but so far mostly like lone rangers.
Gary Brumback
soooo . . . what's the difference between ALEC and Oblahblah on this issue again?
Bill Gates is another proponent of this kind of "education reform". i have taught in mainly public schools for forty years, and would recommend that they be funded and made good enough that most people want their children to be educated in them and thereby learn social and democratic lessons so many prefer not to learn at the moment.
Right on Rosemerry ~
To any who demand alternatives to public education: It's called "private school (UPay the Tuition)."
Homeschoolers should not be paid by taxpayers.
The ruling class is working against public schools in both parties. Watch the video showing Stand for Children's Jonah Edelman bragging about the millions of dollars his organization spent to buy Illinois politicians from both parties to pass education legislation exactly like ALEC's legislation. He plans to replicate his success across the country in cities with strong teacher's organizations.
In his words at the Aspen Institute:
"we hired 11 lobbyists, including four of the absolute best insiders, and seven of the best minority lobbyists – preventing the unions from hiring them. We enlisted a state public affairs firm. We had tens of thousands of supporters. … We raised $3 million for our political action committee. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.
...we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down their throats the same way pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier."
Watch this privileged brat, who never spent more than a nanosecond in a public school, gloat here:
http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/stand-for-children-stands-for-the-rich-and-the-powerful/
The article from the Chicago Tribune has one key paragraph. His bribe money came from the billionaire boys club (e.g., business roundtable, corporations, the gates foundation, the walton foundation, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists...)
"Stand for Children quickly went from a political startup to a key player in the negotiations over one of the most contentious issues in Springfield, largely because of money. It raised more than $3.5 million from some of the Chicago area's wealthiest families."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-madigan-education-reform-0713-20110713,0,4603449.story?track=rss
But it's for the kids...
Here is the reality 'progressives' don't want to face - our urban public school system is screwed. I'm the original believer in public education, I went to school with the poorest kids in the country and thought it was a great, but next year I'll spend $13,000 to avoid 'diversity' that is bused in from across town to my neighborhood public grade school. The 'conservatives' are killing public education in the US, but the 'liberals' are, what's the word, enablers.
POVERTY - what do you expect the schools to do with that? Suburban schools with the same or less money per FTE are doing just fine. Children of poverty have more needs, and nobody wants to pay to meet them. Quit blaming the damned schools for everything.
"In a push to free-market education, who pays in the end?"
answer: Only those who can afford it.
Yes, Jessia. To work and war for the rest.
All those mythical rich folks who can afford to send their children to the best private schools don't seem to be getting them what I call a good education.
They may score well on the SAT's and other standardized tests, but they are woefully ignorant, so ignorant that many willingly sell themselves to corporations or stand on the street with the Tea Partiers or go to law school so they can continue their stupidity as rich legislators bent on serving the corporations.
All that "good" education the wealthy buy seems to be producing myopic, narrow-minded, prejudiced rather ignorant snobs--"conservatives" much like Tom Buchanan in _The Great Gatsby_. I think that, if they read at all, their reading is slight, shallow, and tasteless. They tend to point their fingers at the rest of us and call us what they actually are: looters, moochers, and parasites.