Of Fish, Ducks And Schools

Time for a little civics lesson. Capitalism is an economic theory. It’s concerned with things like the means of production, cost control and profit. Democracy is a political theory. It’s concerned with things like equality, justice and freedom. Capitalism is great at making affordable, efficient toasters, not so good at creating a just and vibrant society. Democracy can lead to a just and vibrant society, but affordable, efficient toasters…not so much.

In America these two systems live side by side and theoretically Capitalism’s resource exhausting hunger for greater and greater profits at lower and lower costs is mitigated by Democracy’s boundary setting functions, which we commonly call laws. These laws theoretically protect the most vulnerable in our society, both people and resources. They assure fairness in the dealings of capitalistic enterprises and monitor the quality of its products.

Theoretically.

The reality is that you don’t have to look very far in America today to see that the relationship between Capitalism and Democracy is, at best, dysfunctional. From home lending practices to food safety requirements market driven values have invaded and replaced democratic ones, so instead of justice for all we get buyer beware as a national motto.

Democratic values contain a concept called the common good. The common good is what everyone in the society benefits from whether they are directly affected by it or not, like the fire department, which, hopefully, most people will never directly benefit from. To maintain the common good everyone is asked to throw some money into the pot and we call that process taxation. The important thing to remember is that in a democratic society the people get to decide what the common good is, and how important it is to the overall function of the society. This requires a literate and aware citizenry which is why the fundamental democratic common good is education. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Capitalistic values have a common good too, it’s called profit and it’s arrived at by any (hopefully legal) means necessary.

Which brings us to charter schools. On the surface, charter schools are schools in which public money (taxes) is given to private entities (school management companies) but more fundamentally what this means is that schools based on the democratic value of the common good are replaced by schools based on the capitalist value of profit. Democratically based schools attempt to educate all students with an eye towards the development of individual potential. Capitalistic schools value cost containment, operational efficiencies and standardization. Some results of the change in value systems are immediate and unsurprising. There are whole web pages devoted to the scandals and failures of school management companies—some have been accused and/or convicted more than once. These companies have caused students to be discriminated against, schools to close with little or no warning, and money to disappear.

All of which calls into question the central selling point of charter schools which was that being organized like a business, they were in a better position to improve educational outcomes than the “dinosaur” public school system.

So, are they better? We’ve had charter schools since the mid 90’s and according to the most recent study done by CREDO, the Stanford University based research organization,  Charter Schools are no better than public schools (pdf):

CMOs on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning. The difference in learning compared to the Traditional Public school alternatives for CMOs is -.005 standard deviations in Math and .005 in reading; both these values are statistically significant, but obviously not materially different from the comparison.

Translated from the edu-speak what that means is there are good charter schools and bad charter schools but when you look at them as a whole, not much difference between charter and public. Here’s my question: Where is this promised nirvana of education that was supposed to be brought about by applying free market principles to schools?

We started down this path in the 80’s with the Nation At Risk report which told us our economy was in trouble if we didn’t improve our schools. Then came the boom 90’s, but no one tried to attribute that to the schools. Now the economy is a mess again. Is it the schools? Well, if you accept that Hedge Fund Managers, Bankers and their political enablers all presumably went to school, then yeah, I guess the economic mess is the schools’ fault. Truth is the whole business does it better mantra is code for we’re looking for new markets to exploit. America has never needed business values to make its schools better.

Saying Capitalist values can lead to better schools is like saying because fish can swim, ducks should be able to play violins. Education in a democratic society isn’t about profit—neither making it, nor providing it for others—it’s about seeing that the next generation has the tools to build a better democracy.

Schools that don’t respect democratic values can’t be expected to do a good job educating students in a democratic society, but schools that don’t respect education as a value in itself can’t be expected to do a good job at all.