Shall We Dance? (The Privatization of Education) --

I was steered to this older item by a post at Susan Ohanian's site. As she says, this is a must read and it is. It is about Canada but offers some real insights into what is happening in public education in the U.S. today. Read it all, but here are some excerpts as motivation...

At a 1998 Education Industry Summit, Charles Ivey was perplexed that so little of his dream of privatizing Canadian education had come to pass...

AT A 1997 investment seminar, promoted as "The First Canadian Education Industry Summit," an American analyst claimed that Canada's schools were ripe for the picking. Canadians, he noted approvingly, were not encumbered by all the political baggage that Americans bring to the privatization debate.1

The sold-out audience did nothing to contradict this assessment of Canadian complacency. Participants from the education sector exchanged business cards just as enthusiastically as those whose interest in education was limited to how it could contribute to their clients' bottom lines. There was no scent of animosity in the room, no evidence of values in conflict. When the chairman of the summit, Charles Ivey, claimed that "the sound you hear is an industry about to be blown up," no one rushed for cover. (All emphasis is mine.)

Everyone took notes when Stephen Beatty, from the investment house KPMG (one of the summit's sponsors), patiently explained that "the value of an education is what people are willing to pay for it" But Canada has been giving it away for free, Beatty complained, which really isn't fair. The champions of the for-profit education market are out to level the playing field. They have found eager allies in what Michael Apple calls the conservative alliance -- even though this club is not restricted to conservatives.2 Entrepreneurs, free-marketers, right-wing ideologues, fed-up taxpayers, religious fundamentalists, and radical education reformers may make strange bedfellows, but they have found a common mission: dismantling the monopoly of public education so that market rules can be applied to the business of schooling
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Politicians, opinion leaders, and the media have promoted these reforms as apolitical, efficient, and empowering. Any suspicion that they have been intended to imitate privatization, at best, or induce it, at worst, is not part of the authorized debate. Parents can easily be persuaded to focus on new curricula, new report cards, and new standards -- reforms that are much more concrete than the philosophy of school governance. Criticism has been muted. What reckless politician or union leader would challenge "parent involvement"? Yet public education is public only if it is governed democratically. Quasi-volunteer parent councils, no matter how dedicated their members, are not elected by the public and have neither the mandate nor the mechanisms to be held accountable to that public. Forced to concentrate only on their school's market share and competitive advantage, parents soon lose interest in what misfortune befalls other schools and other people's children.

This is how the public is groomed to accept privatization, because privatization starts with perception. In rhetoric and reality, education is recast as a private good, not a public service. Those who have children in school are urged to judge the curriculum, teachers, and even other students on their contribution to the bottom line of personal advantage. Those who have no children in school get the message that what happens there is of no consequence to them, since they are no longer shareholders. Surely it is only a matter of time until this substantial majority of nonparents concludes that it no longer wishes to pay taxes to support an institution it neither uses nor influences. Then the other shoe drops. If parents are the school's only customers, let parents be the only ones who foot the bill.
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Privatization also ducks behind the confusion that thrives when everything is reformed simultaneously. Critics have had their hands full merely keeping track of new developments, let alone linking them to a common agenda. In systems where school secretarial work has been shifted to volunteers granted easy access to confidential student records, there has been controversy over privacy, but not privatization.
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Canada participates in a variety of alliances in the Americas, among Francophone countries, and within the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), but its participation in APEC influences government policy most directly. This opinion is not widely shared among Canadians, perhaps because our governments dismiss APEC as merely an opportunity for good friends to exchange deep thoughts about mutual economic advantage. Few find reason or opportunity to challenge this official position, and APEC activities are hardly the focus of daily newscasts.
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According to APEC, the goals of education and their achievement must be subjected to market forces: "Decisions must be taken by a school system for good business reasons with maximum business intervention." The paper criticizes the teaching of "concepts and theories" and "learning for the sake of learning" -- wasteful activities that could be eliminated by subjecting schools to "business practices."

There is of course much more. Please, read it for yourself.
anti nclb