Privatizing schools shifts the control of schools – from how they are funded to what gets taught to who can attend – out of public decision-making and into the hands of whoever runs the school. Privatizing schools converts education from a social good that benefits everyone to a private good necessary for the sake of individual’s interests Three main ways that school privatization happens are through vouchers, charters, and increased calls for school “choice.”
Vouchers
Vouchers (and neo-vouchers like “private school tuition credits”) apply publicly funded dollars to tuition at private schools. Frequently, vouchers don’t cover the full cost of tuition, and in many places, don’t cap the income limits of who can use them. This means they function like a discount coupon for wealthy families, who can use vouchers to reduce the sticker price of a school and afford to pay the rest, while imposing financial burdens on low-income families who opt to use them. These families may take on debt to cover the full-cost of tuition for their child, without any guarantee that the school has licensed or appropriate services for their children, especially if their children have special education needs. In reality, most students who use vouchers already attend private schools, as recently shown in Wisconsin, debunking the claim that vouchers provide options for poor families to remove their children from “failing public schools.”
What’s more, vouchers have no oversight over how they’re run. So even though 95% of a school’s funding can come from public money through voucher programs, there are still defined as private – there is no public oversight or regulation to how the school actually functions. As Barbara Miners says, “As a result, a voucher school can ignore basic constitutional protections such as due process and freedom of speech. It does not have to provide the same level of special education services. It can expel students at will. It can ignore the state’s open meetings and records requirements. It can discriminate against students on the grounds of sexual orientation. The list could go on.”
Vouchers, in essence, function as a blank check from the public to private schools to do whatever they want. And there’s no evidence that students do any better in voucher schools than public schools – in fact some research, like this and this, suggests they may actually do worse on certain measures. Vouchers use the façade of school choice to mask what they really are: separate and unaccountable.
Charters
Charter schools are alternative schools that use public money. Some charter schools offer a progressive alternative to public schools, providing things like language immersion environments or alternative curriculums in an experimental way that can be scaled-up if successful and incorporated in public districts. But there is a different type of charter – independent charters that operate independent of public regulation – that blurs the space between public and private.
What makes charter schools unique from public schools is what authorizes them: how they’re opened, approved, closed. Unlike a public school (unless it’s a public school that’s been taken over by mayoral control), which has some degree of public oversight, charter schools can more or less do what they want, including what they teach and how they operate. This means that when charters schools fail to perform (i.e. test scores aren’t high enough) they can be closed down as quickly as they opened, leaving students, families, and communities worse than if they had never opened their doors. Young, inexperienced, and uncertified teachers with little to no training on the art and skill of teaching often staff charter schools through controversial alternative certification programs like Teach For America. What’s more, charter schools are free to teach whatever information they want, regardless of its accuracy. Charter schools in Texas, for example, use creationism curriculum to present evolution as a scientific controversy!
Independent charters make up a centerpiece of school choice regimes, and as such, are subject to many of the pressures of choice, such as increased reliance on standardized tests, teacher evaluation practices, excluding students with significant needs or behavioral problems, and restricting employee unionization efforts. The laws around charter schools vary greatly from state to state, but the evidence of their success has been inconclusive at best, and in many instances shows negative impacts for students, especially for under-served students. See here, here, here for more information. Like vouchers, charters form a new type of school system: separate and unaccountable.
“School Choice”
Though choice can be a good thing, “school choice” as a program of school reform raises a number of questions. “School choice” converts schools into a consumer product. As education scholar Michael Apple says, “In effect, education is seen as simply one more product like bread, cars, and television. By turning it over to the market through voucher and choice plans, education will largely be self-regulated. Thus democracy is turned into consumption practices. In these plans, the ideal of the citizen is that of the purchaser… Rather than democracy being a political concept, it is transformed into a wholly economic concept.”
Converting schools to a product for individual consumption, rather than a public good for all, has a number of unpleasant side effects. Schools enter the field of market competition, and must be subject to market discipline. Their viability corresponds with their marketability, which may or may not correlate to other things like their quality, how well they meet students’ needs, teachers’ job satisfaction, etc. As such, schools increasingly rely on performance indicators such as high stakes test scores in order to distinguish themselves from other “products” on the market, despite the fact that the indicators have often ill-suited for the aims of public education.
What’s more, school choice enhances racial segregation, as noted here and here. In Michael Apple’s words, “the result is even more educational apartheid, not less.” Under school choice regimes, schools must work to attract the highest performing students from well-resourced families to ensure that the school’s performance metrics are top notch. This means middle class and wealthy families get to choose schools for their children, without much trouble. And it means that schools in turn get to choose which student they accept.
Without public oversight, school choice programs can freely reduce resources away from students labeled as special needs or with circumstances requiring additional support – not only are these students more expensive to educate, they also tend to bring down a school’s average test scores. As a result, students with special education needs, behavioral issues, complicated or unstable home lives tend to be forced out – or, put more delicately, “un-chosen.” And the end result is that school choice programs – from vouchers to charters – increase segregation based on race, class, ability, and language. The bottom line? There is no mechanism in school choice to ensure equity.
