Gerald Bracey has an interesting report out this morning.
When people think about the groups or individuals who wish to privatize public schools, they probably think of only a few foundations and people. The late Milton Friedman and John Walton and the living Paul Peterson; the Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institution, Heartland Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Goldwater Institute, Bradley, Scaife and a scattering of others.
This is a mistake. A recent study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy studying the years 2002 to 2006 identified 132 separate school choice organizations (www.ncrp.org, “Strategic Grantmaking”). One hundred and four of these 132 received grants from 1,212 foundations with total contributions exceeding $100,000,000 in some years. The Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart) dwarfed all others with grants often exceeding $25 million.
These foundations also funded candidates, political parties, political action groups and 501(c)4 organizations. Overwhelmingly, the recipients of this largess were Republican candidates and causes.
… [There’s] a common flaw in the reasoning of the privatizers: it assumes that there are enough private schools to go around. In fact, the existing private schools, even if they wanted these poor kids, which most of them don’t, could accommodate no more than 4% of students now in the public schools. In the early years of the privatization movement, analogies were often drawn to fast food restaurants—new schools would spring up as fast as McDonald’s or Starbucks. The privatizers have apparently gotten past that particular stupidity and realize that a school is a large and complex ecosystem which requires expert knowledge not needed for hamburger flipping.
The privatizers can be critical of how conservatives fund voucher movements. Many think it is silly to fund the large think tanks such as AEI and Heritage, because they end up forming partnerships with people whose primary interest is in maintaining the status quo. Many advocate small funding to, say, parents, who have a direct interest (it is alleged) in change. In fact some people have accused the large conservative think tanks with having a basic distrust of democracy. Giving money directly to parents, on the other hand, reflects a belief that parents can select the schools best for their children.
It is interesting in this connection that supporters of the oldest (18 years) and largest (19,000 students) voucher program in the country, that in Milwaukee, have just begun a million-dollar campaign to build support for the program. According to an article in the January 28, 2008 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the group “will sponsor television, radio and print advertising over the next four months as well as undertaking other activities aimed at increasing positive opinions of the program.”
Of course, the simplest way to build support would be to show that the program works. This has not been done in Milwaukee or elsewhere (the alleged big gains Paul Peterson found for blacks in New York City disappeared when proper statistical techniques were used). Evaluations of the program after five years reached contradictory conclusions, the most reasonable one being, in my opinion, that the program had no impact on reading achievement and a small impact on mathematics achievement. The researcher, Cecilia Rouse of Princeton, observed, though, that voucher students attended smaller classes and that class size could easily be the source of the voucher students’ advantage. After that evaluation, voucher supporters in the legislature expressed their confidence in the program by killing any further funding for evaluations.
And of course the other meme that will come to be employed with increasing frequency in the future, is the one that says education evaluation is not a science and therefore can’t be trusted. Except of course when it’s your own think tank that produces the results that confirm the efficacy of the voucher program you hope to promote.
Robert Godfrey
AMPS 