In their new book, The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen (In The Public Interest) and author Allen Mikaelian trace the U.S. shift toward private ownership and operation of services that have long been considered public goods. The list is long, from prisons to municipal water systems to city parking lots. and it includes charter schools and education voucher programs.
The authors describe in detail what they see as the many drawbacks of a system that “encouraged a language and mindset in which public goods are transformed into consumer goods,” and investor concerns are elevated above the needs of citizens. But while that field of debate is well-trod, Cohen and Mikaelian raise some other issues, two of which have a direct bearing on the selling point of charter schools as laboratories of innovation.
Charter schools often claim to be public schools, and they are funded with public taxpayer dollars, but they are privately owned and operated.
Barack Obama touted charter schools as “incubators of innovation,” but as Cohen and Mikaelian show, innovation is often stifled in favor of set formulas that work the system for some predictable level of success. The writers show how some DC charters succeed not through innovation, but by strategically angling for market share—an innovation of sorts, but not an educational one.
While some charter schools may well innovate, it is hard to gauge how much and how successfully, because privately owned and operated enterprises are averse to transparency.
Transparency is often an issue with charter schools. The authors cite one court case in which White Hat, a charter school management organization operating in Ohio, argued in court that certain information about how they spent taxpayer dollars should be kept secret because the information, if released, “could be used to convince someone that White Hat Management Companies are doing something improper.” Transparency would damage their PR.
Charters have often resorted to declaring that their operating information must be protected because they are a private business. In 2014, the court ruled that the New York state auditor could not audit the books of Success Academy charter schools, effectively barring the state from discovering how taxpayer dollars were being spent. As the authors point out:
Opacity is a private-sector reflex. When you are locked in competition to sell a car or a smartphone, you don’t want the competition to know too much about your operation. But it is exactly the wrong model for a democratic public sector, which relies on a flow of information... to the citizens who are paying the bills.
But while “sharing successful lessons is, for most teachers, second nature,” charter schools often “lock down the laboratory.” Some charters require teachers to sign non-disclosure agreements that cover “trade secrets” such as instructional and curriculum programs, even lesson plans and teaching materials. Charter schools have even been found contractually requiring teachers not to take a job elsewhere; Summit Academy Schools of Ohio sued fifty teachers in a three-year period for leaving for better jobs.
Protecting trade secrets can reach absurd heights. When the Commonwealth Charter Academy put a large Jeremy the Bookworm balloon float in the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Parade, Education Voters of Pennsylvania filed a Right To Know request asking for information about the cost of that float entry. CCA replied that they would not respond to the request because the “records would reveal a trade secret and confidential proprietary information.”
All of these issues are magnified in voucher or education savings account systems, where the schools are actual private schools that reserve the right, a right often explicitly protected in state voucher laws, to conduct their business as they see fit without any state oversight.
The lack of transparency means that once public tax dollars enter the privately owned and operated system, taxpayers no longer have the ability to see how the money is used. Equally problematic is that when charters do find educational ideas that work, these are squirreled away to benefit only that operation, and not shared to the benefit of students elsewhere. There is a great deal of information to absorb in Cohen and Mikaelian’s new book, with insights beyond the education field, but the implications for the privatization of education are not encouraging.
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January 05, 2022 at 11:23PM
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School Choice Has A Transparency Problem - Forbes
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