Loyal defenders of our nation'spublic schools have for decades ar-dently opposed the concept of "schoolvouchers" and other privatizingschemes that threaten to dismantlethe democratic legacy of public edu-cation. In recent years, however, evenas privatizing forces have made massiveinroads into public schools, many ofthose who profess to believe in publiceducation have been lulled into a puz-zling passivity and silence on this issue.But the voucher movement has notgone away, and the threat it representsto democratic education is more dan-gerous than ever.

Privatizing advocates tend to em-ploy a familiar set of strategies in theircampaign to replace public education,which they deride as "Soviet" or "so-cialist" in nature, with a market sys-tem in which public dollars no longergo to public schools but are distributeddirectly to parents, who in theory willbe free to spend the money at either apublic school or a private institution.Recognizing as they do that vouchershave had little appeal to parents insuburban areas, where public schoolsare highly funded and the kids gener-ally do well, voucher advocates focusinstead on winning over parents of poorchildren in the inner-city schools,whom they promise to deliver from theclutches of a failing "state monopoly."

To that end, one of the primary ar-guments made on behalf of vouchers isthat schools receiving them will beopen to low-income children of all lev-els of ability and will not favor the chil-

Jonathan Kozo!'s new book, Letters to aYoung Teacher, will be published thismonth by Crown.

NOTEBOOKThe Big EnchiladaBy Jonathan Kozol

dren of better-educated and more"savvy" parents. What is never ex-plained is how exactly the forces of se-lection will be circumvented. Even inthe public system as it stands, and evenin nominally non-exclusive schools,self-selectivity manages to guaranteethat children of the more effective par-ents are more likely to get into whatare often called "the boutique schools"within any given neighborhood. In al-most every case in which a limitednumber of such schools exist, it is themore aggressive and more knowledge-able parents who hear about them firstand navigate the application processmost successfully.

Advocates for vouchers nonethelessinsist that any difficulties presented byself-selectivity will cease to be real prob-lems once market mechanisms are inplace. One of the most influential ofthese advocates, a skillful and politicallysophisticated propagandist named JohnChubb, dismisses any likelihood thatparents who are overwhelmed by prob-lems in their private lives may be in-capable of making wise decisions--or,more important, that they may find itdifficult to act on these decisions. "It isreally hard for me to believe," Chubbonce told the New York Times, that ifvouchers were available to parents ofpoor children, "those people couldn'tdecide on what they prefer." He ac-cused critics of voucher schemes of be-ing condescending to the poor, of ar-guing, in essence, that poor parents are"too stupid" to select the schools theywant their children to attend.. But Chubb, who is now a top exec-

utive at Edison Schools, one of thelargest private education corporations,does not hesitate to contradict himself

when speaking to a different kind ofaudience. One of the disadvantages ofpublic schools, Chubb has said ina more candid statement he co-authored with another voucher advo-cate, Terry Moe, is that they "musttake whoever walks in the door" and"do not have the luxury of being ableto select" their students. By compari-son, they note in the pages of a right-wing policy review unlikely to be seenby parents of poor children, under avoucher system a "constellation of ...different schools serving different kindsof students differently would probablyemerge." And in a book advancingprivate education markets, Chubb andMoe have made the additional argu-ment that schools "must be free to ad-mit as many or as few students as theywant, based on whatever criteria theythink relevant-intelligence, interest,motivation, behavior, special needs."

Obviously, the exercise of schoolchoice under a market system wouldbelong only in small part to the parentsof the poor. The ultimate choices wouldbe made by those who own or operatethe schools. This is a rather differentnotion of school choice from the onemost voucher advocates put forth inseeking popular support, but it is notthe only example of a noticeable se-mantic shift they make in turning theirattention from one audience to an-other. Frequently, for instance, advo-cates for vouchers point to RomanCatholic schools as the sort of privateinstitutions that might flourish in a sys-tem based on market competition,whereas they rarely speak of profit-driven schools, run by private corpo-rations, as potential beneficiaries of thesystem they propose. The idealistic rno-

NOTEBOOK 7

tives that are commonly identified withinner-city Catholic schools are seizedupon in order to position the discussionon an elevated ground of seeminglyunselfishand high-minded goals.Mean-while, in writings narrowly directed atinvestors, all of these higher motivesdisappear, and other benefits to be de-rived from vouchers suddenly emerge.This is where the masks come off andall pretenses of altruism are replaced

by practical considerations

S of a wholly different kind.

ome years ago, a friend whoworks on Wall Street handed me astock-market prospectus in which agroup of analysts at an investment-banking firm known as MontgomerySecurities described the financialbenefits to be derived from privatiz-ing our public schools. "The educa-tion industry," according to these an-alysts, "represents, in our opinion,the final frontier of a number of sec-tors once under public control" that"have either voluntarily opened" or,they note in pointed terms, have"been forced" to open up to privateenterprise. Indeed, they write, "theeducation industry represents thelargest market opportunity" sincehealth-care services were privatizedduring the 1970s. Referring to pri-vate education companies as "EMOs"("Education Management Organiza-tions"), they note that college educa-tion also offers some "attractive in-vestment returns" for corporations,but then come back to what they seeas the much greater profits to begained by moving into public ele-mentary and secondary schools. "Thelarger developing opportunity is inthe K-12 EMO market, led by pri-vate elementary school providers,"which, they emphasize, "are well po-sitioned to exploit potential politicalreforms such as school vouchers."From the point of view of privateprofit, one of these analysts enthusi-astically observes, "the K-12 marketis the Big Enchilada."Language as outright cynical as this

is never heard in the benign and civic-minded arguments that voucher ad-vocates present when speaking to poorparents, who are unlikely to respondwith favor to the notion that vouch-ers could unlock a new "frontier" for

8 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / AUGUST 2007

profit-making companies with an ap-petite for big (or little) "enchiladas."The black and Hispanic kids withwhom I've worked for forty years inBoston and New York have no rea-son to suspect that their little des-tinies, downgraded and diminishedfor so long by governmental penury,have now become the object of solarge a corporate appetite.Voucher programs, admittedly, have

yet to be instituted on the widespreadscale that privatizing interests hopefor. Only a few urban systems, notablyin Cleveland and Milwaukee-and,on a limited scale, in New Orleans andWashington, D.C.-have put intoplace explicitly labeled voucher plans,and these have produced very mixedresults. Elsewhere, conservative polit-icalleaders, such as former Florida gov-ernor ]eb Bush, have tried and failed toinstitute voucher programs in theirstates. The consequent impression thatthe danger has now passed, however,is naive. In spite of setbacks in secur-ing vouchers in the open and unvar-nished form originally conceived byChicago economist Milton Friedman,the ideological father of the move-ment, the private sector has nonethe-less moved into the daily operation ofour inner-city schools through a mul-titude of avenues of which the largerpublic is almost entirely unaware.One of the early strategies em-

ployed by private corporations to soft-en resistance to their presence in ourpublic schools was the creation of so-called business partnerships betweenthe poorest inner-city schools andlarge companies. The financial sideof the partnership usually turned outto be inconsequential. Kerr-McGee,the multinational petrochemical gi-ant, gave one impoverished publicschool in Oklahoma City the trivialannual sum of $36 for each pupil. Inreturn, one of the company's execu-tives was appointed to direct a "gov-ernance committee" to oversee theschool operations, and the school con-sented to be known not simply as apublic elementary school but as an"Enterprise School."Throughout the 1990s, many inner-

city schools underwent the same ac-commodation to the goals and evento the lexicon of their benefactors inthe private sector. "Academy of En-

terprise" became a common termadopted by such schools in genuflec-tion to their corporate patrons. Prin-cipals I met in schools like these wouldtell me they wished no longer to beknown as "principals" but preferred tobe known as "Building CEOs" or"Building Managers," in which casestheir teachers frequently would be de-scribed as "classroom managers." Mis-sion statements heralding the need forchildren to be trained to serve our na-tion's interests in "the global market-place" were posted on the walls ofmany schools I visited. In practice,however, students were more often be-ing trained for careers at supermarketcheckout counters or for the bottom-

level "service jobs" at nurs-rJ" ing homes.

~ese rather tentative partnershipswere only the beginning of a trendthat rapidly took on more serious di-mensions. The next and more ambi-tious stage in the introduction of theprivate market and its values into pub-lic schools did not become possibleuntil the voucher advocates made thewell-timed marketing decision to re-nounce the terminology of "vouchers"and to forgo temporarily their efforts toassume the outright ownership ofschools. They settled instead for themanagement of schools that techni-cally remained within the public sec-tor. Newly created corporations, whichcharacteristically adopted such acade-mically impressive names as "NobelLearning" or "Edison Schools," beganconvincing officials in minority dis-tricts-first Miami, later Chicago, thenBaltimore, Philadelphia, and manyother cities-to contract with themto operate at first a few, then largernumbers, of their schools. At present,forty-one Philadelphia public schoolsare being run by Edison and anotherprofit-making firm, along with a hand-ful of nonprofit private groups. Almostsimultaneously, as states were pres-sured to test and measure childrenmore relentlessly, to institute the same"goal-setting" mechanisms that areused in private industry, the testingaffiliates of some of our largest text-book publishers, as well as the majortest-prep companies (The PrincetonReview and Kaplan, for example), be-gan to move into our public schools,

primarily in urban areas. By 2005, theschools were generating $2.8 billion ayear for the testing industry.

In both these areas-testing servicesand the management of schools-theencroachment of the private sector onpublic education has been mightily as-sisted by provisions that the Bush Ad-ministration managed to insert intothe No Child Left Behind Act. Amongthe various "sanctions" that this high-ly controversial law imposes upon low-performing schools are two provisionsthat have opened up these schools tointerventions by private corporationson a scale that we have never beforeseen in the United States.

The first of these provisions stipulatesthat if a school receiving federal fundsunder what is known as "Title I," thenation's largest program of assistance forlow-income students, fails to raise itstest scores by a fixed percentage with-in three years, it must then use a por-tion of its funds to purchase what thegovernment describes as "supplemen-tal services." These services must beprovided outside of the normal schoolday and, among other options, by a so-called third-party provider. Althoughsuch "services" are defined somewhatambiguously, most low-income districtshave interpreted the term to mean thatthey must force these schools to insti-tute test-preparation regimens gearedexplicitly toward raising scores on stateexams. Increasingly, too, schools havebeen pressured into contracts with pri-vate corporations that provide theseservices. Meanwhile, the test-prep com-panies are actively promoting their suc-cess in raising scores to principals wholive in terror of the more alarming sec-ond stage of federal sanctions they willotherwise incur.

If, despite their expensive test-prepprograms, low-performing schools failto pump up test scores fast enough tomeet specific goals within five years,school boards are obliged to shutthem down and dismiss their facultiesand principals. Such schools will thenbe either operated directly by thestate or reconstituted under an "alter-native governance arrangement."Although the provider of such "gov-ernance" might be a nonprofit corpo-ration (one that operates a chain ofsemi-private charter schools, for in-stance), it is the profit-making firms,

with their superb promotional ma-chinery, that are best positioned toobtain these valuable contracts.

It is this prospect-and the evenmore appealing notion that companiesthat start by managing these schoolsmight at some future point achieve theright, through changes in state laws,to own the schools as well-that helpsexplain why EMOs like Edison, whichhas yet to tum a profit, nonetheless at-tract vast sums of venture capital. The"big enchilada" represented by the cor-porate invasion of public schools, evenif it takes place only in progressivestages, is sufficiently enticing to in-vestors to keep the money flowing inanticipation of a time when privatecorporations will not merely nibble atthe edges of the public system but willdevour it altogether.

No Child Left Behind, with its dra-conian emphasis on high-stakes testingas the sole determinant offailure orsuccess within a given school, wassigned into law in 2002. The warningperiod for the first wave of low-performing schools is now coming toan end. Thousands of schools that ex-clusively serve black and Hispanic chil-dren have failed to meet their federal-ly mandated goals.

All of these schools, under the stip-ulations of No Child Left Behind, willsoon be ripe for picking by private cor-porations. Progressive citizens who saythey believe in public education, aswell as the erstwhile liberal Demo-cratic leadership in the U.S. Houseand Senate, have failed to recognizeand confront this looming crisis.Mean-while, the richly funded and well-oiledjuggernaut of privatization continues tomove forward, carving out increasing-ly large pieces of the public system. Ifthose of us who profess to value pub-lic schools and the principle of demo-cratic access they uphold cannot findthe courage or the motivation to fightin their defense, we may soon wakeup to find that they have been replacedby wholly owned subsidiaries of Me-Donald's, Burger King, and Wal-Mart.Some $490 billion (4 percent of GNP)is spent on education yearly in theUnited States. It will be an act of so-cial suicide if liberals blithely contin-ue to dismiss the opportunities thisvast amount of money represents forcorporate predation. _

NOTEBOOK 9

"An eloquenthomage tothe power ofstorytelling. "

-Booklist, Starred Review

MisterPipa novel by

Lloyd JonesAn eccentric outsider takesover the education of thechildren on a war-ravaged

tropical island - withonly Charles Dickensand Great Expectations

to guide them.

.' -.=""""""'!!!!I!".,. =========~