Civics and the public good
Fair warning. Civics rant ahead.
Who owns your local schools? Pondering an abandoned school in his neighborhood that kids once used as a playground, the Washington Post’s Matt Bai reviews what he considers “basic civics.” His local school system is sitting on the property like “a real estate concern or a conglomerate” rather than turning it into green space “for the greater good.” Local governments “are just as apt to forget that those taxes aren’t meant to perpetuate fiefdoms and amass capital.”
Neither is private capital entitled to pillage the public good for private profit.
My new North Carolina state representative Caleb Rudow is a former Peace Corps volunteer who holds a masters degree in Global Policy Studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. The greater good is in his blood. Coincidentally, he tweeted last night about the funding for North Carolina schools.
[Clears throat]
Here’s what we are doing. The collective We are abetting the investor class in raiding the public purse for its own gain. Investors have coopted religious conservatives to help divert funds from public schools the country has supported since the Articles of Confederation to private school vouchers and to charter schools.
Why? They want the billion$. Public education is required by 48 state constitutions. It’s the largest annual budget item in all 50 states. Here’s a recent one from Noth Carolina. Your state budget looks similar.
If you think the conservative furor over critical race theory and grooming and book bans is about culture war issues, you probably think George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security was about getting you, Average Taxpayer, a better long-term return on your paycheck witholdings.
It’s about the money. What stands between the investor class and the hundreds of billions states spend, not-for-profit, on public education annually are teachers and school custodians and school administers and state boards of education. They’ve got to go.
Just as Republicans spent decades undermining public confidence in free and fair elections to pave the way for a one-party state, the investor class has worked quietly at diverting more and more public tax dollars away from public schools to charters and voucher programs. Religious conservatives are useful idiots in the project.
Just as conservative politicians swear that goverment doesn’t work and, once in elected office, set out to prove it, investors mean to hollow out public schools until they dry up and blow away like Matt Bai’s abandoned local school. But since kids still have to be educated and state constitutions require it, the private sector in its magnanimity will step in to provide that service. At a markup, of course. Investors will profit from the predictable, government-guaranteed, near-recession-proof stream of public tax dollars. Your kids are their cash cows.
Jonathan Kozol explained it in Harper’s in August 2007:
Privatizing advocates tend to employ a familiar set of strategies in their campaign to replace public education, which they deride as “Soviet” or “socialist” in nature, with a market system in which public dollars no longer go to public schools but are distributed directly to parents, who in theory will be free to spend the money at either a public school or a private institution.
Private education advocates know what sells. They sell their program as choice, innovation, opportunity. A chance for black and brown children to escape “failing” public schools.
The idealistic motives that are commonly identified with inner-city Catholic schools are seized upon in order to position the discussion on an elevated ground of seemingly unselfish, and high-minded goals. Meanwhile, in writings narrowly directed at investors, all of these higher motives disappear, and other benefits to be derived from vouchers suddenly emerge. This is where the masks come off and all pretenses of altruism.
Let’s get to the meat of it:
Some years ago, a friend who works on Wall Street handed me a stock-market prospectus in which a group of analysts at an investment-banking firm known as Montgomery Securities described the financial benefits to be derived from privatizing our public schools. “The education industry”, according to these analysts, “represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control” that “have either voluntarily opened” or, they note in pointed terms, have “been forced” to open up to private enterprise. Indeed, they write, “the education industry represents the largest market opportunity” since health-care services were privatized during the 1970s. Referring to private education companies as “EMOs” (“Education Management Organizations”), they note that college education also offers some “attractive investment returns” for corporations, but then come back to what they see as the much greater profits to be gained by moving into public elementary and secondary schools. “The larger developing opportunity is in the K-12 EMO market, led by private elementary school providers”, which, they emphasize, “are well positioned to exploit potential political reforms such as school vouchers”. From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada”.
The Progressive sounded the same alarm in August 2014:
Over the last decade, the charter school movement has morphed from a small, community-based effort to foster alternative education into a national push to privatize public schools, pushed by free-market foundations and big education-management companies. This transformation opened the door to profit-seekers looking for a way to cash in on public funds.
In 2010, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. has been an ALEC member, declared K-12 public education “a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
“Venture capitalists and for-profit firms are salivating over the exploding $788.7 billion market in K-12 education,” reads the subhead on Lee Fang’s warning in The Nation the next month. President Donald Trump installed privatizer Betsy DeVos as secretary of education in 2017.
Just as movement conservatives coopted the religious right to further their free-market wet dreams, the investor class has used them to help get its hands on that money. All the rest of the culture war bullshit is just that. A smokescreen.
Americans have supported public schools since before ratifying the U.S. Constitution. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided in dividing up public lands in new states that “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 states, “Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” By that legislators meant public schools operated in the public good. That was then.
Americans in name only want to see that public-minded tradition in eliminated. They’re working hard at it.
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