EAA: Eminent Domain For Public Schools

In a 2005 book titled The Fox In The Henhouse, authors Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich detailed how private, for profit interests move against publicly owned institutions. One of their primary strategies is called disinvestment which means--usually through the cooperation of complacent legislatures--pulling public money out of the institution until it can no longer operate without relying on private funds, or it collapses and is taken over completely.

Here in Michigan we have seen the state steadily fall through the rankings of support for public schools coming in at 31st last year according to a study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And it doesn't look like things are going to change any time soon as the state reduced funding by 4.4% between FY 2011 and FY2012. This reduction of support has pushed schools into partnerships with private, for profit businesses, and hence the rise of exclusive contracts with beverage companies and privatization of things like janitorial and food services. And while this was going on the legislature took the limit off the number of charter schools that could be opened forcing public schools to divert scarce resources to advertising because competition in the market place makes everything better.

Apparently the piecemeal dismantling of the public school system wasn't fast enough for some and the Synder administration created the Education Achievement Authority, an innocuous enough sounding name for an organization that, under the guise of student improvement, essentially privatizes entire school districts in one fell swoop, disenfranchising elected school boards and replacing them with a Chancellor, in this case a fellow named John Covington, ex superintendent of Kansas City schools who comes with a fair amount of baggage and some ethical questions.

It probably won't surprise you the the EAA set up shop in the Detroit area, taking over 15 schools in poor and minority areas of the city. Certainly those schools were hurting and those children under served, but it wasn't because the state had failed to provide an outsider with the power to suspend democracy, abrogate contracts and just generally remove people's ability to participate in the education of their sons and daughters. Now there are Bills in the legislature to take the EAA idea statewide in order to, as one article put it:

...[A]llow new forms of schools, expand on-line options and expand opportunities for for-profit ventures – all of which makes many within traditional K-12 public schools nervous.

 It should make all of us nervous. I titled this post Eminent Domain For Public Schools because that's essentially what it is, local public schools being taken by the state and their operation delegated to third parties--third parties whose concern is not education as a public good, but as a profit center.

Children long ago became the target of corporations. Channel One invaded classrooms back in 1989 bringing advertising right into the school house. According to Michael Sandel, writing in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits Of The Market in 1983 Companies spent $100 million on advertising to children. By 2005 that had grown to $16.8 billion. The EAA is just consolidating the market.

There are problems when education is taken out of the realm of public good and turned into a commodity though, and Sandel lists several of them in his book, not the least of which is that when children grow up in a system that has profit as the highest determinant of value; a system that rates a person's worth on his or her ability to contribute to someone's bottom line; they conflate consumer and citizen, replacing democratic values like equality, justice and fairness with market values like standardization, efficiency and profitability.

We are facing that quintessential choice our Civics teachers challenged us with, back when there were Civics classes: As a citizen in a democratic society, what do you want on your tombstone, Here Lies John Smith. He Made A Million, or Here Lies John Smith. He Made A Difference?

By educating children in a system where everything of value can be measured in dollars and cents we are teaching them there is no such thing as a legacy, no need to think about the future beyond the next profit and loss statement, and certainly no need to concern themselves with those who are less well off.

This is not the value system that brought us the Civil Rights Act, or helped end the war in Vietnam, it's the value system that brought us Citizens United and Voter ID laws aimed at disenfranchising minorities.