When Public Goes Private, as Trump Wants: What Happens?

Mercedes Schneider’s book examines the contradictions of school choice, which is now the rallying cry for those who call themselves reformers. She documents the history of this idea, beginning with economist Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay advocating school vouchers. It appeared by happenstance in the immediate aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring legally sanctioned racial segregation unconstitutional. Whether or not southern white politicians read Friedman, they became the leading proponents of school choice. After a period of insisting that they would never comply with the Brown decision, they became outspoken advocates of school choice, expecting that white children would stay in all-white schools and black children would be fearful to seek admission to white schools. School choice was their strategy for evading desegregation.

Schneider recounts the original idea of charter schools, as it was first developed in 1988 by Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Ray Budde, a professor at the University of Massachusetts. They hoped to enable greater teacher participation in decision-making and less bureaucracy. Shanker used his national platform to propose charters as schools-within-schools, staffed by union teachers, free to try new methods to educate reluctant and unwilling students, and encouraged to share what they learned with the host public school. By 1993, Shanker realized that his idea had been adapted by businesses that thought they could manage public schools and make a profit. At that point, Shanker renounced charters and declared they were a threat to public schools, like vouchers.

The first state to pass charter legislation was Minnesota in 1991. What began as a bipartisan measure soon became a favorite of conservative politicians, who realized that they could replace “government schools” with private management and at the same time, get rid of teachers’ unions. As a result of the financial inducement of President Obama’s Race to the Top program, almost every state now authorizes privately managed charter schools. In some states, like Nevada and Ohio, charter schools are among the lowest-performing schools in the state. Few of these states established any process for oversight or accountability, so thousands of charters sprang up, deregulated and unaccountable to public authorities. In Michigan, about 80 percent of charters operate for-profit. They perform on average no better than public schools, and according to a yearlong investigation by the Detroit Free Press, they make up a publicly subsidized $1 billion per year industry with no accountability.

Schneider documents the encouragement provided by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama for the growth of the charter industry. And she follows the money trail, showing the millions poured into charter proliferation by the Waltons and other billionaires. Charter advocates say that they support charters because they want to “rescue” poor and minority students from “failing” public schools. Walmart employs an astonishing 1.4 million people in the United States alone, many of whom are paid less than the minimum wage. The Waltons would have a more dramatic impact on the well-being of children by paying their workers a minimum wage of $15 an hour than they do by opening charter schools and enfeebling community public schools.

Why is Wall Street willing to spend millions of dollars to promote charter schools? As Schneider shows, charters can be a very profitable business. Unlike the Edison Project, which first banked on vouchers, then entered into contracts with school districts to run low-performing public schools, the charters get public money, and they start fresh, free to exclude the students they don’t want. These are huge advantages.