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.

Only the news that's allowed

I imagine few of you read Columbia Journalism Review, which I receive at work and which is a key periodical in my profession as a journalist. This mag offers insights into trends in the industry and uncovers interesting stories of journalists and their work.

One point CJR makes often is that the industry has changed dramatically over the years in ways that have serious consequences for our citizenry and learning the truth about what’s happening in our country and around the world. For example, here’s a quote from CJR I’m using in the magazine I help edit, The Mennonite (in our August issue, page 11): “Six companies dominate TV news, radio, online, movies and publishing. Another eight or nine control most of the nation’s newspapers.”

What this means is that for much of what you read in these media, “the news that’s fit to print” (the tagline for the New York Times) means the news that won’t hurt the business of the corporation that runs that news outlet. There are alternative sources of news out there, but they don’t reach many people, and their funds are limited.

Anyway, the July/August issue of CJR offers an example of this in a story called “Cell Coverage.” CJR’s Alysia Santo interviews Paul Wright, who began his journalism career behind bars. He spent 17 years in prison and was released in 2003. While in Washington State’s prison system, he co-founded Prison Legal News.

PLN began as a 10-page newsletter but is now a 56-page monthly magazine (hmm, just like The Mennonite) with subscribers in all 50 states and several other countries.

In the interview, Wright tells how he came to start this newsletter. He says he was surprised by the treatment of prisoners and decided that “regardless of what I’d been convicted of, I deserved to be treated better than I was.”

Wright studied law in prison and filed complaints about the violence and racism he witnessed. In 1990, he witnessed a beating of a black inmate by white guards and wrote press releases about it to all the media outlets he knew but got no response. So he ran the story in PLN, and prison officials “infracted” him for “lying” about staff. Later they put him in solitary confinement.

Wright says: “One of the ironies was that I got no media interest in the beatings themselves, but my being retaliated against for writing about the beatings made it to the front page of The Seattle Times.”

He says one of the reasons he started PLN was to make people aware of what happens in American prisons, which he says is “pretty indefensible.” He says he can only try to make people aware of what’s going on. “If people don’t care about it once they know, I can’t do anything about apathy. But I can do something about ignorance.”

Wright talks about private companies profiting from using prison labor, including some of the world’s largest. “Microsoft and Starbucks used prison labor for packaging,” he says. “Boeing had prisoners making aircraft parts. Planet Hollywood, Eddie Bauer and Union Bay were all using prisoners as garment manufacturers. The height of irony was when Nintendo was using inmates at Twin Rivers Correction Center, which houses Washington’s sex-offender treatment program, to package children’s video games.”

In 1994, Wright says, a conservative Republican named Jack Metcalf was running for Congress in the district where Wright was in prison. Metcalf campaigned on being tough on crime and supporting the death penalty. But he was using a company that employed prisoners to do his telemarketing.

Wright called a lawyer friend who had media contacts about running a story about this. But The Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer said this was not a noteworthy issue. So two alternative papers, Counter-Punch and The Stranger, broke the story a week after the election. Eventually it became a page one story in The Seattle Times.

Let me add one more of Wright’s stories, and then I’ll stop.

In 2007, PLN settled a censorship lawsuit against the state of California. But when Wright talked to the Los Angeles court reporter for the LA Times, he said, “Well, we don’t really think this is of interest to our readers.” Wright points out to him that “Los Angeles County sends more people to prison than any other county in California, so surely those prisoners have family members that are going to be affected by these changes.” The reporter says, “That’s not really our advertising demographic.”

There it is in a nutshell. It’s about the money and about what’s good for the corporation that owns the media outlet. I know there are many dedicated reporters that want to break such stories, but in many cases their hands are tied. The advertisers pay the bill and get to make the rules. It used to be that subscribers paid the bill, but too few people subscribe nowadays.

If you want to take this as encouragement to subscribe to a newspaper, go ahead, though I’m not too hopeful. If you want to take this as encouragement to dig for sources that tell us what’s happening to mostly voiceless people such as prisoners, please do. Dig.