Continuously throughout the semester, we have read articles that demonstrate how public education is being turned into a business. What Kovacs, Christie, and Saltman demonstrate is that through things such as venture philanthropy and business terms such as “choice, competition, efficiency, accountability, monopoly, turnaround, and failure” (55) are the ideas that are beginning to define education. Money gives the private sector power to persuade schools to agree with their ideas. There will always be a need for money and that provides the perfect leverage to force changes. The idea of turning schools into investments and franchises is a direct result of neoliberal policies. As Saltman discusses, foundations such as the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation describe their policies on the surface as being beneficial, but in reality use manipulative tactics that are grounded in already failing ideas. This foundation claims that problems are administrative and result from bad management. In addition, the only beneficial reform is top-down with quality understood through standardized scores and achievement. However these foundations have policies that are problematic from the beginning.
Broad proposes a leadership agenda, which makes leadership military based, implying that the natural discipline for all children should be modeled by the military. However symbolic social conditions inside and outside the school that are the real reasons for making schooling difficult are being ignored. (61) The problem becomes racial as it claims that those who are struggling are struggling because of a lack of discipline. What is needed instead is critical dialogue that does not force everyone into capitalistic conversations that turn everything into terms of money and business. The public sector almost becomes the private sector’s puppet as the ideal becomes centered on “if only the public sector can be made to look and act like the private sector.” (63) However, the public is fundamentally different from the private sector with different goals. Private represents private, which by definition excludes, while the public represents the community, and essentially or ideally everybody within it. You cannot assume that public teachers, and therefore part of the leadership in education, function the same way as private teachers. From the beginning they operate on different curriculums and training.
In addition, these neoliberal foundations turn knowledge into a standardized product that ignores conversation in schooling and exactly whose knowledge and values should be taught and learned. In this manner, everyone strives for the exact same knowledge, despite cultural, familial, intellectual etc. background, and then you are judged on it. In addition, conversations continuously fall back on who gets to decide and what gives them that power. The Broad foundation really emphasizes the importance of money by actually giving prizes to schools that achieve the best test scores and therefore “achievement”. I had a conversation with someone the other day about how people who are not “that intelligent” can do better than someone “very intelligent” just because of knowing how to take the test. With this idea in mind, how can we declare that a school is bettering their achievement in education if the tests themselves do not actually measure intelligence. Isn’t intelligence a key factor in education? In addition, Saltman states, “how children see the world informs how they act on the world.” (70) We are teaching our children that the only thing that is important is to test well and memorize specific techniques. All they need to do to succeed in our world is follow a specific script. This idea assumes that a test is a universal value, undermines public aspects of public education by suggesting private businesses have the power to determine what is valuable knowledge, and that schools are teaching conformity while ignoring the rising cost of college tuition and a student’s ability to afford it.
We are constantly seeing money from powerful people such as Bill Gates being funneled into the school system, which looks all well and good. However, who is actually receiving it, and what is the value of that money where it is placed? Is it actually bettering education? Public education needs to be public and stop ignoring the children that actually need it most. The private sector has individual ideals, goals, morals, and motives that do not always reflect the collective, common good. It is the foundations like Broad and powerful, individual people who funnel money into public education that mask the real issues that are at hand: education is now a business that can be traded and taken away from those who are not in a powerful position.