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Education, School Privatization

A controversial and often politically tinged idea, school privatization in the United States describes a range of proposals to transfer K-12 education from the public to the private sector. These proposals stem mostly from conservative critiques of public education that in turn sparked reforms such as school vouchers, charter schools, and school choice. Such measures attempt to bring public schools into the sway of market forces—supply and demand—in a bid to reward good educational practices and penalize bad ones.

Implicitly, such measures usually reflect the belief that the public sector is less efficient and less effective than private institutions, whether the latter are nonprofit or for profit. They may also draw on the libertarian notion that education and social programs are not a proper concern of government, which should be limited to only the most basic necessities of public order and defense. Privatization plans also appeal to advocates of religious education as a means to fund and legitimize their cause, and such plans offer an opportunity to circumvent certain teachings in public schools that they oppose on religious grounds, like human evolution and sex education.

Chartered and Privately Managed Schools

Charter schools represent the most widespread effort at privatization in the United States. As of 2007, an estimated 4,000 elementary and secondary charter schools were in operation. Charters first appeared in the 1990s as a solution to various problems perceived in the public schools. Some are effectively private, whereas others are more directly supervised by a local school district. A related practice is privately managed public schools, where a so-called education management organization (EMO), often a for-profit company like Edison Schools, Inc., runs one or more schools in a district. In either case, these schools may depart from certain rules and practices of ordinary public schools to carry out innovations as their organizers see fit. For example, charters usually have different rules for admission, different staffing and management policies, and not infrequently, they are run entirely by EMOs. Often they adopt a mix of several “alternative” practices, either in pedagogy or management, although some adopt few or no such measures at all. In theory, though, all are held accountable for student progress and risk losing their charter if students fail to meet state-mandated levels of achievement.

In fact, the sheer breadth of different organizations, structures, curricula, and pedagogies of these schools poses a major hurdle for evaluating their effectiveness. Although they all have special legal status with respect to public schools, they are far from having a single, coherent policy or educational strategy to assess. To treat them all as one method of schooling is to ignore the vast differences among them.

Research Evaluations

Social scientists have not, for the most part, painted a flattering portrait of either the motives or the outcomes of privatization efforts. Public schools, however imperfect, have long been perceived as a leveling mechanism to reduce inequality in society; some social philosophers argue that education is a basic right and a requirement of democracy, no matter how inefficient public schooling may be. In the ideal case, public schools allow people of limited means to develop skills and talents which, in turn, allow them to compete effectively for placement in higher education and desirable jobs. Public schools' success at attaining this ideal, though, has been roundly criticized; according to many observers, they have not leveled the playing field enough. Hence one rationale for privatization: If public schools have not lived up to their promise, so the theory goes, more rigorous and dynamic private schools could fill the gap. However, this is not the conclusion of most scholars when considering the question from the standpoint of equal opportunity for socially and economically disadvantaged groups. To the contrary, privatization appears to them a retreat from the goal of universal education. Drawing on theories of class and inequality, they argue that privatization only widens the opportunity gap. Moreover, some scholars dispute the free-market logic on which most privatization plans are based. They cite imperfect information about which school is “best” and wealthier parents' ability to intervene more effectively to have their students placed in the preferred schools, thereby reproducing inequality along class lines. Meanwhile, on the supply side, scholars question whether a truly competitive industry could ever emerge to set off a “race to the top” in terms of quality, as opposed to a “race to the bottom” aimed at consolidating profits and market share.

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