|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Part 2 - Privatization and American Public Schools
Proposals for privatization of public education in the United States are not new. The proposal to use government funded school vouchers to pay for the cost of education was put forward by Adam Smith in his 1776 publication, The Wealth of Nations. Smith called for the government to give money directly to parents for the purchase of educational services in order to prevent the development of a monopoly over the provision of such services which he felt would inevitably develop. During the early debates over the creation of public schools several critics charged that education like child rearing, was a private matter, and therefore not an activity over which the government should assume responsibility (Cremin, L. 1970: 285). Particularly given the control that churches previously held over the provision of instruction to children, many opposed the rigid separation between church and state called for by advocates of public schools such as Horace Mann.(4) Irish Catholics were often among the most ardent opponents of public education, fearing as they did that the commitment to secularism was nothing more than a cover for a socialization process dominated by Protestants. (Katznelson and Weir, 1985:39) For this reason, the Catholic church was among the first to call for public funding of parochial schools, which it put forward as a way of countering the advantages accrued to Protestants who largely controlled the newly created public schools.
By the end of the civil war, the arguments favoring public schools were clearly more compelling and persuasive than those of the critics, and by the end of the nineteenth century a system of public education for white American children was firmly in place. Even in the South, where resistance to mass schooling had been greatest, the much maligned reconstruction governments managed to successfully establish public schools in several municipalities.(5) Beaten but unconvinced, opponents of public education withdrew from the fray and set off to establish private schools which suited their needs and values as the march toward a larger, more encompassing system of publicly financed and controlled education proceeded.
The opportunity to raise anew the debate over public education did not present itself again until the 1950s. By this time public schools were well entrenched throughout the nation, however, there were growing signs of failure associated with the enterprise particularly in urban areas. The combination of Black migration to northern cities and white flight to adjacent suburbs, gradually began to expose some of the tremendous problems confronting urban public schools. Where they had once served as the conduit to the assembly lines for European immigrants, introducing the children of the foreign born to American culture, and providing the essential social inputs to a modern industrial workforce (Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. 1976: 182 -186), many urban schools were by now little more than warehouses for children, often lacking even the promise of a decent job for their graduates.
By the 1950s, the shrinking demand for unskilled labor in the post-war economy left urban schools largely incapable of satisfying the aspirations of a clientele, who like the immigrants before them, had come to the cities in search of opportunity and mobility. Instead of a better life free from discrimination, Black migrants from the South found their housing options limited to the tenements of city slums, and the educational opportunities for their children once again limited to a substandard schools that were either segregated or racially stratified through rigid tracking systems.(6) As the Civil Rights Movement came to the north, suddenly the public schools, which previously had been viewed as primary avenues to opportunity and mobility, now became a major focal point of demands for change, community control and racial equality (Walters, R., 1984:3).
At approximately the same time that the Civil Rights Movement was generating new interest in public education as a vehicle for addressing racial inequality, calls for privatization began to resurface. As early as 1955, Milton Friedman argued for publicly financed education provided by private schools in an article entitled: "Capitalism and Freedom". Friedman argued that the monopoly held by public schools over the delivery of instructional services led to inefficiency and a lack of innovation. He suggested that the quality of educational services available to the public could be improved if the government ceded control of education to private suppliers in a competitive market. In his view, the government's role should be limited to financing the cost of education and "to insure that the schools meet certain minimum standards, such as it now inspects restaurants to insure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards." Friedman, 1956: 12)
It is not coincidental that Friedman's call for privatization occurred at an historical moment when more and more demands were being placed upon public schools to address social problems created by inequalities related to race and class. Many of the social programs that were created as a result of the Civil Rights Movement focused on the public schools. Federally financed compensatory educational programs, Project Headstart, and a number of other state and federal programs were established during the 1960s to promote social equality through educational opportunity. The logic behind these measures was that local public schools, supplemented with special funds from the state and federal government, which were targeted to serve disadvantaged students, could reduce the degree of inequality between racial groups. However, despite a significant increase in the expenditure of public funds on education, by the late 1960s and '70s several critics charged that there was little statistical evidence to prove that these programs had positive effects on educational achievement and attainment (Coleman, J. 1966 and Jencks, C., 1972).
Though many of the reform programs had only been in place for a relatively short period of time, evidence of their failure was quickly put to use as ammunition by those calling for privatization and cuts in state and federal spending. Arguing that "the large national compensatory educational programs have shown no beneficial results on the average" (Coleman: 125) critics of these programs began calling for a change in public policy based on a redirection of public funding. In response to these criticisms, the Office of Management and Budget spent several million dollars sponsoring voucher demonstration projects in the 1970s which provided subsidies to parents who elected to send their children to private schools instead of public ones. (Lee, D. 1991) Despite some interest in these programs, the idea failed to spread due to intense lobbying against voucher programs by teachers unions and educational organizations who perceived the proposal as a direct attack on their livelihoods.(Lee, D.1991)
Since the 1970s, proposals for radical reform based on privatization, have continued to be discussed, but until recently have largely remained marginal to the ongoing debate over school reform. During the 1980s the conservative critique of the social programs created during the 1960s to reduce poverty and racial inequality successfully provided the justification for the dismantling and elimination of those programs by the Reagan administration. However, proposals for privatization of public schools which were also put forward during those years were not able to produce similar results(7) . In part, this is because large segments of the middle class have continued to rely upon public education, and though many have at times been dissatisfied, the quality of education in many predominantly white suburban schools has remained sufficiently high to prevent a massive exodus to private schools or a decline in local support. Because of the support among the white middle class, the call for vouchers and "choice", which are now the two most prominent and far reaching of the proposals for privatization, has tended to be interpreted as nothing more than a ploy for reducing the financial burden on families that send their children to private schools rather than as a serious strategy for educational reform. Until recently, it seemed as though the revolution in public policy based upon a combination of supply-side economics, de-regulation of industry, free trade and varying forms of privatization, which started under Reagan, would be unable to reverse the historic support for publicly financed and controlled education. However, huge cracks are now appearing in the walls that once supported public education, and the tide of privatization now seems poised to finally engulf the opposition.
"The cure for the problems of a socialized monopoly is a good dose of competition." (Gross and Gross, 19885:352) Such reasoning has provided the ideological justification for privatization of public education, and in many communities has generated considerable interest and receptivity to the idea. As the problems confronting urban schools in particular have become more acute, the idea that privatization can serve as a panacea has come to be more widely embraced by a growing number of scholars, policy makers and interest groups. The persistence of high drop out rates, crime and delinquency, and academic underachievement has contributed to the perception that workable solutions to these problems can not be found within the present structures. In poor communities privatization has been marketed as an opportunity for parents to become empowered consumers who will be able to "vote with their feet" by choosing schools which best meet their children's needs. Such advertising has proven effective as a means of drumming up support for privatization given the tremendous frustration of many poor parents over the quality of public education in their communities.
Forward to:
Back to:
Dr. Pedro Noguera is a professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also past president of the Berkeley School Board.
This article was originally published in 1993. It is published here by In Motion Magazine because the arguments it makes are as pertinent today (1998) as they were then.. The portrait of Dr. Noguera is by freelance photographer Kathy Sloane (kataphoto@aol.com).
If you have any thoughts on this or would like to contribute to an ongoing discussion
in the In Motion Magazine E-mail, Opinions & Discussion column
send e-mail to publish@inmotionmagazine.com.
