The end of public schools? The corporate reform agenda to privatize education

Abstract

In this speech, Hursh shows how public education in the United States is undergoing profound changes. Education policy has been hijacked by the unelected and unaccountable corporate reformers who aspire to overhaul the education system through a corporate model of privatization and market competition. They aim to privatize education through expanding the number of publicly funded privately administered charter schools, and hand over making tests and curriculum to corporations. They desire to replace public state-run teacher education programs with programs run by charter schools, such as the Relay Graduate School. They shift where education policy is made: away from the local and public levels where parents, teachers, community members and students can have input, and towards private and often dark spaces where wealthy philanthropists, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and hedge fund managers dominate. He also shows how educators, parents, students, and community members have collaborated in pushing back against the corporate reformers and have repealed some of the corporate reforms.

I titled my recent book The End of Public Schools (Hursh, 2016) not only to get people’s attention, but because the nature of public education in the United States is undergoing profound changes—changes that were inconceivable not that long ago. I don’t think I can sufficiently emphasize the degree to which education policy has been hijacked by the unelected and unaccountable corporate reformers who aspire to overhaul the education system through a corporate model of privatization and market competition (Ravitch, 2013). They aim to privatize education through expanding the number of publicly funded privately administered charter schools, and hand over making tests and curriculum to corporations. They desire to replace public state-run teacher education programs with programs run by charter schools, such as the Relay Graduate School (Anderson, 2016; Zeichner and Pena-Sandoval, 2015). They shift where education policy is made: away from the local and public levels where parents, teachers, community members and students can have input, and towards private and often dark spaces where wealthy philanthropists, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and hedge fund managers dominate.

But before beginning with my critique of the corporate reform movement, I want to make clear that I don’t mean to imply that the public schools do not need reform. In fact, I have dedicated the last 45 years of my work to reforming K-12 schools, and have a long history of collaborating with Rochester city and suburban schools. And my sense is that in the years immediately preceding the rise of the corporate reform movement, schools were undergoing reform that improved student learning. Educators were combining theory and practice to make substantial improvements in teaching and assessment (Rose, 1995), as reflected in New York’s Performance Consortium Schools—a group of schools exempt from administering standardized tests and where students learn through interdisciplinary performance-based activities (performanceassessment.org). Much of what we have learned about teaching and learning is being undone by the corporate reformers, who have little interest in creating either teachers or students who are critical thinkers.

In my presentation, I want to argue that we need to work for reforms that have the support of parents, students, and educators. To fully appreciate how much education has changed, I think we need to know who are the corporate reformers and how have they gained power.

The corporate reformers are composed of five groups:

Philanthrocapitalists, who use their philanthropies to promote policies and projects that will transform society in their image (Tompkins-Stange, 2016). The most influential philanthropies include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (see Hursh, 2011), the Walton Family Foundation (heirs to the Walmart Fortune), The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and Mark Zuckerberg (Russakoff, 2015). Bill Gates, I suggest, has a greater impact on education policy than anyone in the US, including the US Secretary of Education (Schneider, 2014a, 2014b).

Nongovernmental organizations, many funded by the philanthrocapitalists I just mentioned, that aim to carry out reforms promoting and developing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), exams, and curriculum, increasing the number of and funding for charter schools, and, as in the case of Teach For America (TFA), replacing experienced unionized teachers with non-unionized, underprepared temporary teachers (see Klonsky, 2016 on Chicago).

Pearson Education, which as the world’s largest education company, aims to dominate the whole process of education including curriculum, assessment, and professional development. Pearson publishes almost all the textbooks used in the US (Hursh, 2016: 33) and makes and administers most of the standardized tests (Hogan et al., 2016; Junemann and Ball, 2015). Pearson hopes that the CCSS will enable them to team with Bill Gates’ Microsoft to deliver curriculum and assessments to every US classroom.

Hedge fund managers who use campaign donations to influence New York state legislators and Governor Cuomo to pass legislation making investing in charter schools and charter school real estate extremely profitable. Hedge fund managers have their own political organizations, Democrats For Educational Reform and Education Reform Now.

In May 2014 they co-sponsored a retreat, Camp Philos (WNBZ news, 2014), in the Adirondack Mountains to strategize how to fund more charter schools, eliminate teacher tenure, and reduce the power of unions. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was their featured speaker, but in response to public outrage, he decided to appear virtually rather than in person. Registration for the event was $1500, far beyond what most teachers could afford. Even then, when a few teachers sent in checks, the checks were returned as the retreat was closed to public school educators.

New York State Commissioners and Chancellors of Education, and the US Secretary of Education who pass regulations that, among other things, require students to take standardized tests that are used to assess not only the students, but also teachers, schools, and school districts. Furthermore, Commissioners manipulate the grading curves and cut scores to yield the desired passing rates, sometimes resulting in a low passing rate so as to portray public school teachers and schools as failing and therefore needing corporate reform, or sometimes resulting in improving passing rates, so as to portray the corporate reforms as working (Hursh, 2008, 2013).

As I will show, these groups coordinate their efforts. The potential payoff is huge, as, for example, Pearson collaborates with Bill Gates, with his $14 billion in Microsoft stock, on the CCSS with the goal of distributing the Common Core curriculum and assessments to every classroom in the US via Microsoft technology.

Together the corporate reformers aim to accomplish three main goals:

Profit from privatizing education by replacing publicly funded public schools with publicly funded privately administered charter schools. Furthermore, they are marginalizing the teaching profession by replacing teachers with corporate experts who are taking control of curriculum development and distribution, and privatizing student and teacher assessment via standardized tests.

Use standardized test scores to portray public teachers and schools as failing and blame teachers as the primary cause for the high degree of economic inequality and childhood poverty in the US (Hursh, 2008, 2013). Among industrialized countries, the US child poverty rate is exceeded only by Romania, which seems to me nothing to boast about. If, claim the corporate reformers, we just had better teachers, our social problems would disappear!

Corporate reformers use this faulty reasoning to dismiss criticism from teacher and community groups, such as the Alliance for Quality Education, and New York State United Teachers, that we need to reduce, if not eliminate, poverty. In my conversations with Commissioners and members of the Board of Regents, when I raise the issue of poverty, the immediate response is “I don’t want to hear about poverty.” The attack on public schools serves, in part, as a purposeful distraction from the real crises in the US: racism and sexism, massive economic and racial inequality, and inadequate housing and health care.

1. Portray public school teachers and their unions as the cause of failing schools so as to eliminate teacher tenure and destroy unions. Furthermore, their aim is to transform the teaching profession so that it is modeled after TFA: Six weeks of preparation over the summer before placing teachers on their own in urban schools where teachers implement scripted lessons and impose harsh discipline. TFA teachers are expected to teach for no more that 2–3 years, when they can go on to their real careers, which is why some educators refer to TFA as Teach for a While. TFA teachers are not unionized, do not negotiate contracts, and have no rights. In Chicago, Detroit, and other cities, unionized teachers are laid off and replaced with TFA temps (Klonsky, 2016). The corporate reform initiative in education is a concerted attempt to weaken, if not destroy, a professional, public service union.

The corporate reformers’ goals fit into the larger goals of neoliberal economics. Neoliberals believe that, according to economic law, publicly provided services are necessarily inefficient, and that all goods and services should be privatized and provided through competitive markets. Ideally, for neoliberal corporate reformers, government should be reduced to only that required for public safety and military defense and even that, as we have seen with the use of mercenaries in the military, can be privatized. Furthermore, neoliberals believe that to operate efficiently, markets should regulate themselves and that any governmental interference necessarily undermines efficiency.

However, we have ample evidence that neoliberalism as an economic philosophy is both theoretically contradictory, and harmful to society and the world. Neoliberalism changes not only the structure of society, but also the relationship between the individual and society. The individual is reconceptualized not only as making choices within the limits of those provided by the market, but also as an autonomous entrepreneur responsible for his or her own self, success, and failure. Society has no responsibility for people’s welfare beyond that provided by the market.

Furthermore, neoliberal markets focus on generating private profits, ignoring other societal goals, and externalizing costs. Consequently, neoliberal markets create but cannot respond to environmental and social problems such as climate change (Klein, 2014), toxins in our environment such as fire retardants in clothing and furniture, and lead and other toxins in the water as in Flint, Michigan. We should not forget that the disaster in Flint is minor compared with how many children are poisoned every day in the US and across the globe. Neoliberal reasoning is also reflected in the Supreme Court’s injunction blocking President Obama’s efforts to regulate emissions from coal-fired plants, therefore demonstrating the court’s prioritizing profits over planetary survival (Block and Somers, 2014).

Moreover, we have ample evidence that contrary to neoliberal orthodoxy, markets cannot govern themselves, with the economic collapse of the 2008 as the prime example. The housing and banking markets collapsed in part because banks rushed to make subprime loans and resold them in packages, called tranches, that served to disguise their dangers but spread the poisonous loans throughout the banking system. For an entertaining and educational portrayal and analysis of neoliberal banking, see the movie The Big Short or read the book on which it is based (Lewis, 2010)

Prize-winning author Jane Mayer shows in her book Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right (2016) how billionaires such as the Koch brothers create and use philanthropic organizations—such as The Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley Foundations—to control the political process, and transform government with the aim of reducing taxes, eliminating governmental and environmental regulations, spreading the gospel of free markets, and, increasing their profits and wealth.

To understand the extent of the challenges we face in education, I think we need to uncover the role of philanthropic, corporate, and Wall Street money in education. Setting education policy—what education is for, how students are taught and assessed, what teachers can and cannot do—has been taken over by wealthy philanthropists, heads of corporate-friendly nongovernmental organizations, and hedge fund managers. The most influential players in setting education policy include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, whose names you will often see funding privatization efforts.

But the Gates Foundation is the mother of all education foundations, funding literally thousands of other groups. The CCSS would not exist if it were not for Bill Gates, who also funds numerous organizations that work to privatize American education and place privateers as key advisors to the US Secretary of Education.

For example, we have Bill Gates to thank for the CCSS and exams. The CCSS were fading into non-existence when Gene Wilhoit, director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, and David Coleman, promoter of standards and now president and CEO of the College Board, met with Bill Gates to ask for his help in reviving the CCSS. In response, Gates more than revived the CCSS, and it would be unlikely that they would exist if not for his providing $2.3 billion to promote the CCSS, including providing funds to 1800 organizations. The CCSS survived and were incorporated into Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) competition as the preferred and often only way for states to meet the requirement of implementing common standards and assessment, and, therefore, “winning” RTTT funding (Layton, 2014).

Gates continues to fund the CCSS, which are co-owned by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association. In January 2016, Gates gave $15.4 million to the CCSSO for their “general operating budget,” which usefully disguises how the money is to be used.

The Gates Foundation also influences education policy by funding numerous nongovernmental organizations, such as the New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF), to which Gates gave $20 million in 2006 with the goal of developing 200 charter schools. In 2014, the CEO of the fund, Ted Mitchell, resigned to become the undersecretary of education under Arne Duncan. Ted Mitchell’s aim is to turn all public schools into charter schools. In addition, Mitchell’s goal of privatizing public education is matched by all the other senior administrators in the Department of Education. Why the fact that the federal department of education aims to privatize the public schools is not a major political issue only reflects the stealth nature of the corporate reform movement. After Mitchell left the NSVF, he was replaced by Stacey Childress, who was, not surprisingly, a top official in the Gates Foundation (Schneider, 2014b).

While Gates is the largest foundation, there are many others that substantially influence policy. For example, the Walton Family Foundation recently announced that they will spend $1billion over the next 5 years to “work on expanding opportunities and empowering children and families with choice,” code for increasing the number of charter schools. The foundation claims that it has supported a “quarter of the 6,700 charter schools created in the US” (Ravitch 2016a).

Likewise, in 2010 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leveraged a donation of $100 million to reform the Newark NJ public schools by privatizing them, only to have the money misspent on expensive consultants rather than winning the support of the community (see Russakoff, The Prize). Zuckerberg recently announced that he and his wife Priscilla Chan will donate 99% of their Facebook shares to charitable organizations. However, that’s not quite true. They are not putting their funds into a nonprofit organization but a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC). If they had placed the money in a nonprofit, there would be limits to how much of it they could use for political advocacy. But by putting it into an LLC, Zuckerberg can more easily, as he said, “participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates.” Also, with an LLC, the organization’s spending can be more easily hidden.

Other corporate heads and billionaires seeking to transform, if not end, public education include Reed Hastings, CEO and founder of Netflix, who plans to spend millions on his favored reforms by creating a philanthropic foundation. As Diane Ravitch (2016b) reports, “the CEO of Hastings’ new foundation formerly ran New Schools for New Orleans, the charter-promotion agency in that city.” In the past, she says

Hastings has expressed his hope that one day every school in the nation will be a charter school and that local school boards will disappear. This is the culmination of the reform dream of abolishing local democracy and supplanting it with consumer choice.

While the activities of Bill and Melinda Gates, the Walton family, Reed Hastings, and Mark Zuckerberg are covered in the mainstream media, the activities of other foundations are less visible. Eli Broad (who recently pledged $4.9 million to privatize the Los Angeles public schools) (Ravitch, 2015), Laura and John Arnold, Michael and Susan Dell are just a few of the large foundations actively involved in privatizing public education by using their financial clout to influence policy.

While the philanthrocapitalists play a major role in promoting what I have described elsewhere as the corporate reform agenda, a group deserving equal attention are the hedge fund managers and financiers who fund groups and politicians in an effort to develop policies that will turn publicly funded schools into investment centers. I have already mentioned their organizing Camp Philos in summer 2014. In summer 2015, the Gates and Walton Foundations funded a meeting in New York City titled “Of Bonds and Blackboards,” where financiers strategized how to influence, through political donations (Gonzalez, 2015), New York policy makers, including Governor Cuomo, to pass legislation enabling them to earn greater profits from charter and private schools.

Since, as I have argued elsewhere, standardized tests have played a key role in achieving their goals, it is important that I briefly describe how the corporate reformers manipulate test scores to fool the public into thinking both that the public schools are failing, when previous to the recent reforms the schools were improving, and that the corporate reforms are succeeding.

The scores on New York’s standardized tests as required by No Child Left Behind and RTTT are manipulated to promote the careers of politicians and commissioners of education. For example, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Commissioner of Education John King for several years took credit for improvements in scores that were, critics contended, manipulated and completely unrealistic. They were so unrealistic that finally, in 2010, even Chancellor Tisch, consistent defender of standardized testing, had to admit that the scores were ridiculously inflated and should not be believed. She rescaled the tests to lower the passing rate. My view is that the scores are so unreliable that no one should be blamed for their fall or take credit for their rise. They should just be ignored (Hursh, 2013).

Sometimes politicians and commissioners of education desire low passing rates so as to create a manufactured crisis. For example, the cut score on the first round of the Common Core exams was set with the knowledge that they would produce a passing rate of about 30%. Not surprisingly, when the results were published the statewide passing rate was about 30%, with a much lower passing rate in the large cities, of around 5–10%. We knew the results before administering the exam!

Such a high failure rate has two benefits for the corporate reformers. First, the corporate reformers argued that such low scores called for even more corporate reforms, emphasizing holding teachers accountable through test scores, and more funding for charter schools. Second, commissioners and chancellors could promise improving scores over the next years, as indeed happened, in part because the cut scores were lowered to improve the passing rate.

The only standardized exam that provides some useful information is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which administers tests to representative samples of students and constructs the tests so that the scores from one year can be compared with the next. Under the regime of high-stakes testing, the NAEP scores were rising, but at a lower rate than pre reforms, and the gap between white students and students of color is not closing at the rate it was previously. However, over the last the last two years, they have declined (NYC Public School Parents, 2016).

Yet, even though the NAEP provides information that allows us to compare students by race and ethnicity, and state to state, the scores are typically interpreted by the media in a way useful to the corporate reformers who want to portray schools as failing. Diane Ravitch (2013), who was appointed by President Clinton to the board that created NAEP, writes that proficiency on the NAEP is equivalent to the grade of B+ or higher, NOT “scoring at grade level,” as is often described. Typically, only 30–40% of the students achieve “proficiency,” but that does not mean only that number are at grade level; in fact, they are B students or above. The next time you hear or read a report citing NAEP, I will bet they equate proficiency with grade level and conclude that most children are not at grade level (Loveless, 2016).

While the standardized tests, contrary to the claims of corporate reformers, may tell us very little, those of us who work in schools or have children attending school can tell that the curriculum has narrowed, learning is increasing equated with answering multiple choice questions, and teaching with scripted lessons.

Given what I have said, what can we do to counter the privatization of education and education policy?

First, we need to critique the cult of market fundamentalism. As I have already described, the 2008 economic recession proved that corporations, particularly financial institutions, could not govern themselves. In the film The Big Short (McKay, 2015), bankers made highly risky subprime mortgage loans because the lenders were getting paid by the loan, not whether it was a loan that could be repaid. Also, in the film, an administrator at one of the rating agencies, perhaps Moody’s, is asked why they continued to assign triple AAA ratings to clearly undeserving mortgage securities. She responded that if they did not, the banks would take their business to another rating agency. All the rating agencies were handing out inflated ratings.

Near the end of the movie, one of the main characters asked how many of the bankers went to jail for breaking the law, to which, in the US, the answer is none. Continuing, they stated that blame was placed on “immigrants, the poor, and teachers,” which is about how it had turned out.

Neoliberal policies also contribute to increasing economic inequality. A recent Oxfam report reveals that the wealthiest 62 people in the world own as much as the poorest 50%. In the US, in 2011, Forbes magazine, not a liberal magazine, reported that, “Six Waltons have more wealth than the bottom 30%. The wealthiest 20 people are as rich as the poorest 50%.” I find it interesting that Forbes is measuring inequality in units of Waltons (Worstall, 2011).

As appalled as you and I might be by the vast inequality, now more than even during the Gilded Age, market fundamentalists argue that inequality is “natural” and that intervening in markets creates inefficiencies and distortions. Besides, they argue, wealthy people give some of the wealth back to the community, for which we should thank them. However, philanthropists’ gifts have significant benefits for the donor. They can deduct their donations from their taxes, which mean less going into state and the federal treasuries and, therefore, to make up the shortfall, higher taxes from us. And, as Gates, Zuckerberg and others demonstrate, they use their wealth to buy access to the politically powerful and to shape schools and society in their own interest.

Second, we need to counter the neoliberal vision of privatization, austerity budgets, markets and competition with a social democratic imaginary of providing for everyone’s welfare. We have to dispel the myth that corporations can govern themselves and that minimal social services are sufficient. The countries that have the most successful education systems and the highest quality of life are the ones with the lowest rates of inequality and poverty. We need to demand that schools and social services are more than adequately funded.

We must expose the ways in which wealthy philanthropists have hijacked the political system for their own purposes. Bill and Melinda Gates, the Walton Families, and Mark Zuckerberg are not neutral observers but wealthy individuals who promote policies that reflect their own conservative agenda.

Third, we must educate ourselves regarding how test scores and other data are often manipulated by the corporate reformers and the media to promote privatization and portray teachers and schools as failing. We should establish standing citizen committees that critically analyze data coming from State Education Departments, think tanks, etc.

Fourth, we need another committee with the task of uncovering how “dark money” influences federal and state education policy. For example, in 2013, it was revealed that for the previous 3 years, New York State Education Department received millions from the Gates, Tisch and other foundations to fund 23 secret advisors for over $200,000 a year per person with the task of efficiently implementing the Common Core exam. If that was their task, the evidence is that they failed (Odato, 2013).

Earlier this year, the Gates Foundation granted New York State Education Department $369,000 to

support NYS to launch, execute, and utilize implementation data collection (sic) at the state level. The primary areas for data collection will focus on four key areas: implementation of NYS’s curriculum frameworks, improved educator development and supports, robust education evaluation system and use of Engage NY. (Elia, 2015)

What exactly this means, even people who should know have not been able to tell me.

Fifth, educators, parents, students, and community members must collaborate in pushing back against the corporate reformers. In New York State the commissioner of education has been unresponsive to the pleas of parents, students, and teachers regarding the negative consequences of the Common Core standards and exams, except when parents have opted their children out. The opt-out movement must be made larger.

Indeed, the opt-out movement in New York State is the primary reason we might be optimistic about undoing the corporate agenda. Last year, the Commissioner and Chancellor, and some school administrators, threatened parents who opted their children out. But parents have not been deterred, and in 2016 parents opted out 265,000 children from the exam. The opt-out movement represents one of the most successful grassroots movements in New York and elsewhere in the US (New York State Allies for Public Education, 2016).

Last, and most importantly, we need schools that are inclusive and integral to creating a just society, schools that support students in engaging in real, critical learning, where parents and other community members play a central role in creating excellent schools that are more than adequately funded, and work toward developing trust rather than suspicion and competition between teachers, parents, students, and the community.

We are in a battle for the future of public education. We need to develop collaborative organizations to work together fighting the neoliberal agenda and the privateers. This includes better sharing of information, analysis, and communicating with the media and public. We need to critique both the neoliberal and corporate agenda. We need to create schools that encourage critical thinking in the teachers, students, and the community. We need to create the schools our children deserve.