School Privatization Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

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.

Depending on the locale, privatized schools can “drain” the public schools of better prepared students, who, for example, may seek out a charter school for higher academic quality. This appeared to happen in Arizona, where white, non-Hispanic students disproportionately chose charter schools over regular public schools, and these same students were more likely to have higher test scores. But privatized schools might also have higher concentrations of students who are struggling, as in cases where a charter school has replaced a local public school that was considered below par. In either scenario, the population of the privatized school is unlike that of surrounding schools, the result of a selection bias that can affect both privatized and public schools. Studies also show that the rise of charter schools may have a negative effect on student-teacher ratios at nearby conventional schools. Thus the problem becomes one of finding an adequate comparison to measure any private school advantages over conventional schools.

One solution is to compare student achievement within categories of ethnicity, sex, language background, and past academic performance—for example, comparing high-achieving black students at a charter school with high-achieving blacks at a conventional public school. Other approaches include comparing learning growth rates to national averages and following individual students through school to measure their particular gains. In the case of vouchers, random assignment—the optimal solution—has led to more compelling data in cities like New York. In short, any meaningful comparison must take both policy differences and potential selection bias into account. Unfortunately, some published evaluations have failed to do so, leading at times to prematurely negative or positive assessments of the benefits they might offer.

Overall, research in this area has been contradictory despite the level of funding and attention directed toward charter schools, vouchers, and similar efforts. Most careful studies on these issues find that privatization has, at best, a small advantage, usually as measured in performance on standardized tests. Still, a few well-researched econometric studies attribute higher student gains to privatization measures, although not always across all groups of students. Most often, comparisons turn up essentially no difference between privatized ventures and conventional public schools, and in a few cases, the private efforts appear worse. Strikingly similar results appear in studies of voucher programs (e.g., Wisconsin), charter schools (Arizona), and privately managed schools (multiple sites managed by Edison Schools, Inc.). Further dampening the prospects of privatization reforms is evidence that private efforts, and specifically charter schools, can actually harm public schools by taking away resources and increasing ethnic segregation. In short, the upside for privatization appears to be small, and it may be outweighed by the potential downside.

Bibliography:

Carnoy, Martin. 1998. “National Voucher Plans in Chile and Sweden: Did Privatization Reforms Make for Better Education?” Comparative Education Review 42:309-37.
Dee, Thomas S. and Helen Fu. 2004. “Do Charter Schools Skim Students or Drain Resources?” Economics of Education Review 23:259-71.
Hoxby, Caroline M. 2003. The Economics of School Choice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miron, Gary and Brooks Applegate. 2000. An Evaluation of Edison Schools Opened in 1995 and 1996. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, The Evaluation Center.
Sanders, Nicholas M. 2002. “Would Privatization of K-12 Schooling Lead to Competition and Thereby Improve Education? An Industrial Organization Analysis.” Educational Policy 16:264-87.
Travers, Paul D. 1996. “Academic Privatization and Choice in Public Education, K-12.” Education 116:471-75.
Woods, Philip A., Carl Bagley, and Ron Glatter. 1998. School Choice and Competition: Markets in the Public Interest? New York: Routledge.

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