Privatizing Public Education

Even though I am a staunch supporter of Public Education, I am very aware of the problems that plague traditional schooling. I believe that school needs to look a lot less like school. Like Sir Ken Robinson, I too am a supporter of a learning revolution where the goal is public schools that provide students with an opportunity to pursue their passions while nurturing competency, creativity and critical thinking.

However, there is more than one revolution afoot.

The promise of technology and personalization is being co-opted by the perils of profiteers and privatization where one goal is "an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards." Another, more ominous goal is to use technology to cut costs by replacing teachers.

Consider three quotes and a video:

 The first is from Joanne Weiss, Chief of Staff to U.S Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and previously led the Obama administration's Race to the Top program:

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

The second is from Rupert Murdoch:

When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching. Wireless Generation is at the forefront of individualized, technology-based learning that is poised to revolutionize public education for a new generation of students.

In her post Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market, Stephanie Simon writes:

Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into -- fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast. 

Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They're pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.

Watch this one-minute commercial:



Look, I'm the first in line to talk about how cool technology is and how it's improved my teaching and learning. However, there are a couple lines from the video's script that concern me. At 0:24, a little girl says, "If you have this (tablet), you don't need this (brick and mortar school)". Then at 0:27, a little boy looks around the classroom and says "this place is dumb". And then at the end, two boys agree that they should "get out of here".

I'm all for a learning revolution but not like this.

This is scary.

I'm the first to criticize elements of traditional schooling but you don't fix public education by destroying it, abandoning it or throwing it to the free market.

You'll notice that the video features children sitting in what looks like a college or university classroom. Can you see how the video implicitly and explicitly undermines both K-12 and post secondary education? Would this video be as successful if they showed the same children in their developmentally appropriate classrooms and playgrounds while saying "this place is dumb, let's get out of here"?

It's ironic that "this place is dumb, let's get out of here" is precisely what children tend to say when they enrol in virtual classrooms that make those smart and bright computers and tablets the end rather than a means to an education. Simone Harris writes:

Online or virtual schools typically have high withdrawal rates, and that’s not surprising. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It must be very tempting to drop out of a “school” when there are no human beings there in person to make you feel connected to a real community, no gym, no playground, no student art on the walls, and no teacher to get to know you, to care, to see who you are and who you might one day become. 

The bitter irony is that these online schools are marketed to English learners who need the exact opposite of isolation, who benefit most from cooperative strategies in natural, not virtual, settings. 

Or they are preposterously promoted as beneficial to low income students as though it were a good thing to get education at a discount, off the rack. As Diane Ravitch warns of the educational dystopia that is fast gaining on reality, “the poor will get computers and the rich will get computers and teachers.”

Public education is not a business and it's not a private venture -- it's a public good. I have no doubt that some very crafty entrepreneurs will profit from all this but I'm not convinced that our children and our society will.

It's one thing to suggest that students should be encouraged to become entrepreneurial but it is quite another to unleash entrepreneurs to profit off of children and public education.

Like democracy, public education is reserved only for those who are willing to fight for it.

Are you fighting for either?