Disaster capitalism: the corporate takeover of public education

We’ve all heard the many criticisms of U.S. education, how it’s going downhill, not competitive with the rest of the developed world. But how true is that? And how did it get so bad?

Yes! Magazine devotes most of its spring issue (“Education Uprising”) to such questions and tells stories of schools and people who are doing creative work at educating students in new, effective ways.

In his article “The Myth Behind Public School Failure,” Dean Paton notes that until around 1980, America’s public schoolteachers were held in high esteem. He traces the turn in public opinion to a PBS series in 1980 called Free to Choose, in which Milton Friedman devoted one episode to “the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Kozol, an author and advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.”

Then, in 2001, comes “No Child Left Behind,” which tied federal funding for public schools to student scores on standardized tests. It also, writes Paton, “guaranteed millions in profits to corporations such as Pearson PLC, the curriculum and testing juggernaut, which made more than $1 billion in 2012 selling textbooks and bubble tests.”

In 2009, after the economy collapsed, came a program called “Race to the Top,” which provided grants to states for their public schools.

Both programs measured school success based on students’ standardized-test scores.

Then, in early 2012, then-Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott called such high-stakes exams a “perversion.” Many Texas school boards agreed that tests were “strangling education.”

In January 2013, teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School announced they would refuse to give their students the Measures of Academic Progress Test. That school’s boycott “triggered a backlash to the ‘reform’ that began with Friedman and the privatizers in 1980,” writes Paton.

He calls this education crisis a “manufactured catastrophe,” part of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” This follows a formula, writes Paton: “Underfund schools. Overcrowd classrooms. Mandate standardized tests sold by private-sector firms that ‘prove’ these schools are failures. Blame teachers and their unions for awful test scores. In the bargain, weaken those unions, the largest labor organizations remaining in the United States. Push nonunion, profit-oriented charter schools as a solution.”

Why do corporations want to get involved in charter schools? Because, says Chris Hedges, the federal government spends $600 billion a year on education.

A few corporations already control the $20 billion to $30 billion a year textbook and standardized-testing industry, writes Paton.

He offers examples: In Michigan, charter schools cut instruction money, raised administration costs and came out ahead by $366 per student. In Ohio, charter school teachers make 59 percent of what public schoolteachers make.

And are the charter schools making a significant difference? A Stanford University study showed that in reading, 25 percent showed better results, while 75 percent showed no improvement or “significantly worse” results. In math, the numbers were 29 and 71 percent.

Many factors affect education. One of the biggest is poverty. In another article in the Yes! issue, Lennon Flowers writes that “in many high-poverty schools, up to 60 percent of children experience stress levels that can impair functioning.”

Education is a huge, important issue with no easy answers. But there are encouraging signs that changes are happening.