Beneath the Radar / Charter Schools, A Way-Station to Privatizing Public Education
By Lolly DePaulo


Billionaire John Walton, the head of Walmart, is well known for his cutthroat labor practices, predatory price cutting, appalling Chinese sweatshops, aggressive anti-unionism and far-right ideology. But, what most corporate watchdogs don’t know is that Walton is also one of the big players in the current move to privatize public education. Walton, in alliance with billionaire financiers and extremist Christian groups has organized and funded organizations such as American Education Reform Foundation (AERF), Education Alternatives, Center for Education Reform and Children’s Scholarship Fund. These groups and others like them, numbering in the hundreds, are hard to track with their constantly shifting names and addresses, however, all promise to increase student achievement and to “empower” parents through privatization. According to non-profit watchdog, People for the American Way Foundation (PFAWF), these groups “expose the interlocking goals, leadership, and strategies of allied organizations such as the Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF), CEO America, and a network of statewide and local groups, including shared CEO/CSF affiliates, to turn public education money over to private schools and entrepreneurs.

Their buzz word is “choice” couched in the vague words of Caprice Young, CEO of the newly organized California Charter Schools Association. She states, “We believe that all students can learn, that educators' innovative spirits should be embraced, that local communities should be engaged in the educational process and that parents must have the ability to choose the public school their child attends."

It would be hard to argue against such high-minded objectives and even some progressives have been fooled by the claims of charter proponents. However, a bit of digging will lead one to the true motive behind the enthusiasm so many billionaires have for “improving” education: making money, particularly through the use of vouchers. However, the failure to get substantial backing for vouchers has led many who favor the privatization of public education to back charter conversions and start-ups. According to Education Week, “If only for pragmatic reasons, many groups that once supported vouchers are now throwing their weight behind the charter movement … In part, it’s because charters are politically palatable to a wider audience.” David Brennan, a wealthy Ohio businessman who helped rally support for a voucher law has said, “Charters are a way station on the way to getting full choice through vouchers.”

Because public schools are perennially short of money, observers might fail to see the relationship between privatization and profit. The financiers who recommend investments in this new arena of opportunity, tell prospective clients that teachers and the teacher’s unions are the primary impediment to profitability, and encourage them to support legislation that undermines teachers. In fact, Walton contributed $360,000 of his own money and $50,000 from his American Education Reform Foundation to California’s anti-union Proposition 226. Conferences are frequently held by the privatization networks to promote ways of reducing the high cost of labor by separating “learners” from teachers. Education Evolving, which is linked to Young’s charter organization, publishes literature that states: “Traditional high-labor cost model (of education) is no longer sustainable.” And, labor costs will be reduced “as electronics separates ‘teacher’ and student.” Such groups are particularly enthusiastic about on-line instruction, rhapsodizing about scenarios where one teacher oversees hundreds of students. For example, Dennis Zuelke, professor of educational administration at Alabama’s Jachsonville State University wrote, “In the twenty-first century people won’t need schools as physical structures…..people won’t go to schools, the schools will come to them in cyberspace.” According to an article in School Reform News, “It’s all in the economics ….if superior teachers are free to educate hundreds of students at a time rather than 30 or less their services become more and more cost effective.” According to Deborah Seder, writing for Education Industry Leadership Board, “Right now, teachers unions use the community's naiveté to their advantage to accomplish what the union wants, not provide what the students need, and the community needs to become more savvy.” This “savvy” according to Seder, is education through the Internet, which would be run by private firms. However, one thing such views fail to address is that high school teachers already teach hundreds of students at a time. In fact, any average high school teacher will regularly have more than 200 students in her classroom daily. Furthermore, countless studies have demonstrated that of all factors pointing to higher student achievement in public schools, reducing classroom size appears to be the most effective one.

Nevertheless, proponents of privatization tout the immense profit potential in schools. Wall Street has identified education as “the next big growth industry.” According to one analyst, “education today has the growth potential that health investments did twenty years ago.” Jeffrey AF Romm, president of Knowledge Quest LLC, writes, The education industry represents a $740 billion dollar market, second only to healthcare as a percentage of gross domestic product.” Michael Milken, the former junk bond king, who spent two years in federal prison, has already invested $500 million into education-related companies. Ted Forstmann, billionaire venture capitalist, has invested $50 million to the CSF and $10,000 in California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, which passed in 1998. Walton has many companies, including CEO, CDA, TesseracT Group (formerly Education Alternatives) and School Futures Research (currently running King/Chavez Academy and East Palo Alto Charter School). He is also on the Board of Directors of California Charter Schools Association, the parent organization of the largest charter school in the United States, Granada Hills Charter High School in southern California, an upscale urban high school which was granted charter status last May of 2003.

Granada, which was one of the top ranking schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, does not fit the usual charter conversion criteria of poor, urban and struggling. Nevertheless, the faculty voted to convert to charter status based on a laundry list of grievances against LAUSD and because the principal, Brian Bauer, a close associate of Young, made many promises to improve the quality of life for teachers and students at Granada. So far, few of the promises have been kept.

However, it is still too early to tell if GHCHS will live up to its goal of providing a superior education to suburban children. The track record of charters has not been good. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) conducted a study in 1998. The report was based on an analysis of 17 schools in 10 California school districts. The team of researchers concluded, “Charter schools in California have not yet lived up to their promise.” While a Cal State Los Angeles study, conducted in 1999-2001 found that small, poor and urban schools have shown improvements under charter conversions, whereas large schools do not. The results of the study stated: “The Charter schools lost approximately 4.5 API (Academic Performance Index) points for every increase of 100 students in school enrollment size.” Despite the lack of evidence of improved “outcomes,” proponents of the charter movement still claim that such schools are better. This faith in the diversion of tax dollars into private industry has been sold to the public on the basis of several fallacies.

One, that taking money out of the general educational fund, which serves many children, and using it to pay for schools that serve only a few, will “fix” the system. According to special education assistant Maggie Romero, formerly of Granada, “If these self proclaimed do-gooders were so concerned with student achievement they would give money to programs that were beneficial to all of the students in a public school district, not just the kids in certain schools.” Indeed, Romero’s sentiments are echoed by Carole Shields of PFAWF, she wrote in a letter to Billionaire Ted Forstmann, in response to his support of privatization, “To make a difference in children’s education requires us to put our money where the children are – and for the vast majority of children, that means the public schools.”

Two, that privatization will create competition. Proponents of conversions claim that charter schools and vouchers will force public schools to improve. However, according to Shields, “The challenge for all of us is to make all of our children’s public schools as good as the best public schools.” This sentiment is supported by a recent PFAWF article title Privatization of Public Education, which concludes, “the bottom line remains the same – diverting money and support from public schools provides new barriers to the improvement of those schools.”

Three, blaming public schools, with their complex student populations, for all of the ills of our society is another popular strategy used by those who favor privatization. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB), which was passed in 2001, with its focus on mandated testing, which determines if a school is making “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) is the best example of this. Many commentators have observed that NCLB is really a “Trojan Horse” offering the “gift” of ruin. In the words of Gerald Bracey, author of What You Need To Know About the War Against America's Public Schools, NCLB is “a weapon of mass destruction, and the target is the public school system.”

The reasons for this are manifold: Tests are forced on communities without state or local review and neither the public nor those who administer the tests have a right to examine them. These tests mandate that scores rise yearly without any recognition of where a school may have been ranked before the initiation of testing. According to Susan Ohanian, writing in The Nation, “In a small rural district, a couple of kids having an off day can cook a school’s goose.” This could also create a situation where a very high-ranked school, which failed to raise scores, would get an F grade. In the same article, Ohanian added, “One of Palo Alto’s top schools received a scarlet letter because some students skipped the test to study for AP exams.”

Furthermore, the demands of administering the tests, plus other provisions of NCLB, particularly the one requiring that all classrooms have “certified” teachers, are extremely expensive. The Federal Government has not given the school districts funds to pay for the costly provisions of the act, thus many districts are being forced to curtail art and music programs to pay for NCLB requirements; but this is just the beginning. What is so disconcerting about this provision is that it ostensibly supports teacher’s unions, when in fact it is undermining them. For example, next fall, teachers currently working with emergency credentials won’t be allowed to stay in their classrooms. Many schools will be forced to make do with substitutes. What's more, poor working conditions and low pay cause teacher shortages in all but the richest schools. Without increases in pay and better working conditions there is no incentive for people to go into the teaching profession, thus teacher shortages will remain a reality for the foreseeable future. Consequently, for most districts, complying with this provision of NCLB is impossible. The writers of NCLB had to have known they were setting up a Catch-22 situation when they crafted the statute. “I can just imagine them slapping each other on the back with the deviousness of this one,” a teacher at Granada commented.

Finally, private and charter schools do not have to comply with NCLB. They are exempt! This is perhaps the most flagrant provision of Bush’s law, for it reveals the true motives behind NCLB. In fact, it gives credence to the opponents of NCLB who have argued that the real intent of the act is to bankrupt public school districts. Ultimately, cash-strapped school districts may have no choice but to embrace privatization as a way of coping with the mounting burden of satisfying the statute’s draconian requirements. This will become increasingly true, as NCLB regulations require that states come up with a plan for 100 percent student proficiency by the years 2013-14. Since every educator who has actually worked in a classroom knows 100 percent student proficiency is an absolute impossibility (children aren’t products, they are people), public education will take the same road as private medical practice.

If the failure of corporate medicine, which promised to provide Americans with decent health care at reasonable costs, is any indication of what is to come, the public will end up paying a premium for inferior schools, as they now do for inferior medical care. Indeed, if NCLB and charter business tycoons are counting on cyber-education to take the place of traditional education, so their corporations can reap fat profits, they are in for a rude awakening. Good teaching requires constant monitoring of student’s work, incremental mastering of a subject, and constant support. Certainly, highly motivated and highly ambitious students, who have strong parental support, can prosper with less supervision, but most students need a good teacher constantly guiding their progress. And although parents and educators might wish that students were self-motivated, wishing doesn’t alter the reality of being a kid. Changing this model of education would require a lot more than platitudes and simplistic, self-serving profit-driven educational solutions.

The only real solution to the myriad problems facing public schools is giving them the money required to really leave no child behind. Until and unless communities realize that educating children should take priority over military spending, welfare for the rich and corporate handouts, privatization of public education will threaten this fundamental equalizer, and bring the United States that much closer to a caste society.