Privatization or Public Investment: An Inflection Point in U.S. Education

• In Event: 63.056 - Is the Invisible Hand a Magic Wand? Privatization Versus Public Investments in National Educational Systems

Abstract

The United States is at an inflection point in education. On the one hand, some have advocated for the application of business principles to education. They endorse market-based solutions to hot-button issues such as teacher compensation, tenure, and student enrollment. Conversely, those seeing education as a public good want the main system driver to be delivering high quality education to every student instead of profit. They think that a market-based system driven by competition produces winners and losers for both schools and, more importantly, for students.

Examples from this symposium show that Chile’s decades long investment in a market-based system has produced dramatically unequal education provision and civil unrest. However, Finland’s system, based on equity as a guiding principle, produces high levels of teacher preparation and professionalization that correspond to high levels of student achievement throughout its population. These international examples serve as examples of divergent paths the U.S. could follow in education – turning education over to privatizers or reinvigorating its status as a public good fundamental to a functioning democracy.

This paper will examine the trajectory of U.S. education by focusing specifically on the tension between these public and private perspectives in both policy and practice. First, it outlines how Reagan’s neo-liberal, supply side economics politically supplanted a socially focused Keynesian economic approach. Second, we discuss the translation of the tenets of neo-liberal economic into education at the federal and state levels. Finally, the paper analyzes specific cases of education privatization, classified in three categories: 1) voucher programs, 2) corporate charter expansion, and 3) system-wide change. Each example discusses the logic informing the decisions, the political and economic actors involved, and current debates and measurements of the efficacy of the programs.

At the discourse level, researchers have identified four different “mobilizing frames” for educational decision for increasing the private sector role in public education: scarce resources, efficiency, the competition/choice/quality axis, and social equity. Each frame has greatly influenced the rationales applied to the following three different categories of privatization: voucher programs in Milwaukee and Washington D.C., the emergence of corporate charter school management organizations nationally, and the cases of New Orleans and Detroit as entire school districts that have lost local control over education to state and private interests.

The paper applies these frames to analyses of the locus of funding (taxes, fees, foundations, private sources, etc.) as well as the economic drivers such as profit and regulations on profit for starting and maintaining schools in these different cases. Additionally, the authors focus on the different management responsibilities and degrees of autonomy present at the school, district, state levels. Results shows that these programs have exacerbated existing inequities in the U.S. and, when combined with the international evidence from Chile, demonstrate that continuing down a path of education privatization will further disenfranchise at-risk students.

Author

• Frank M. Adamson, Stanford University