Education You Can Bank On: Portfolio School Districts and the Bottom Lining of Public Schools

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

On Wall Street, it's all about the dollar. The bottom line matters most. Portfolio managers aim for the right balance of so-called instruments, ones that offer a profitable share in the market. It so happens that public schools are likewise considered instruments of profit and loss. Conservative educational reformers and state allies have created portfolio school districts, where "diverse providers" manage schools like brokers of schoolchildren. Through the adoption of specific policies—decentralization, closure of "failing" schools, private contracting and charter school expansion, test-based accountability, and teachers union busting alongside recruitment of new "human capital"—they promise to curtail the inefficiencies, abuses, and losses ostensibly fostered by a state monopoly on public education. Drawing on critical theories of political economy and race, data from ethnographic studies of portfolio school districts, education policy scholarship, and reports of districts, think tanks, and venture philanthropies, educational researchers in this session assess the practices and policies of portfolio school districts through panel discussion. They conclude that evidence supporting the implementation of portfolio school districts is weak and raise concerns about the production of higher student achievement as well as fiscal efficiency through this approach. They also warn against its expansion internationally, where it threatens to exacerbate already existing inequities wrought through neoliberal globalization.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Section 4: Social Context of Educational Policy, Politics, and Praxis

Chair

• Kristen L. Buras, Georgia State University

Papers

• Panel Member - Kristen L. Buras, Georgia State University

• Panel Member - Philip Edward Kovacs, The University of Alabama - Huntsville

• Panel Member - Alex J. Molnar, Arizona State University

• Panel Member - Jill Andrea Pinkney Pastrana, University of Wisconsin

• Panel Member - Kenneth J. Saltman, DePaul University

Discussant

• Kenneth J. Saltman, DePaul University