When Is A School Not A School? When It’s A Profit Center

Privatization  \pri·vat·i·za·tion \prī-və-tə-zā-shən\ n: The process by which a public good is dismantled and sold for private gain. See also: commodification. 

OK, so that’s not the definition you’ll currently see in your Webster’s, but if the education reformers have their way it soon will be. No matter what direction the so called reform comes from and no matter what level it’s aimed at, all the solutions to what ails education in America today have one thing in common: taking money from public institutions and putting it in private pockets.

Giving up on public schools altogether? Let’s open some privately owned ones—funded with taxpayer’s money of course. Want more accountability? Need more tests. Someone has to produce those tests and score them of course, and for that they’ll want to be paid—handsomely. Oh and by the way, you’ll need to buy some programs linked to those tests so you can prepare students to take them. And don’t forget to buy the latest textbooks that coordinate with the new curriculum.

And the latest iteration: Want to know if a new teacher should be licensed? Don’t ask the university that trained him or her, pay us to decide.

The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts could slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous. Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.

And for those of you who may be naive enough to assume that because Stanford University is involved the resulting process will have a degree of educational validity—fuhgeddaboudit. I’ve been invited to participate those types of “partnerships” and mostly teachers are brought in for cover, and their input, while effusively appreciated, is largely ignored. I was part of the team that created the original state writing assessment here in Michigan. We put together an instrument that we felt reflected best practice in the field. When we weren’t being told our suggestions were too expensive we were being told what we were attempting to measure couldn’t be measured, which brings up an interesting subtext to all this and that is the rather unexamined premise that if it can be measured it has value, along with a coda, if it can’t be measured it doesn’t have value. Might be worth looking into a little more thoroughly, but that’s a post for another time. As for the high stakes writing test here in Michigan, within about five years, almost all of the recommendations we did manage to get through the process had been abandoned.

Want more proof?

Pearson advertises that it is paying scorers $75 per assessment, with work “available seven days a week” for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators.

That’s right teachers, your career has a market value of $75. Puts all those years taking classes, doing internships and student teaching in perspective doesn’t it, knowing that after all that somewhere a person will be paid less than $100 to decide if you're qualified to teach or not.

It is an essential aspect of the commodification of education that teachers be devalued. After all, in order for "educational entrepreneurs" to sell their products a need has to be created--that's just Marketing 101. Since teachers are such an visible part of the process it's only logical that this need be created by convincing the customer that teachers are ineffective, inefficient and may actually be destructive--as least as far as they take money from the kids by wanting things like salaries and benefits. It is also important that the fix for this need come from outside the schools, that's why teacher training has to be attacked as well. After all, if we supported teachers, and the training of teachers, there would be no reason to buy teacher proof curricula; no reason to buy tests from outside vendors, or  software programs that take the place of classroom instruction.

On a more fundamental level, this switch from the democratic values that created public education to the priorities of the market economy means the long term goal of education in creating skilled, literate citizens capable of maintaining and improving our democracy has been replaced by the short term, myopic goal of improving the quarterly balance sheet.

In a larger sense, capitalism has become cannibalistic and is devouring the very body that created it, or perhaps it is more accurate to say what used to be a symbiotic relationship between our economic and political structures has become parasitic and what Franklin Roosevelt called the "real safeguard of democracy" (education) is being slowly bled away.