Privatizing public schools involves changing school words to reflect a business-like environment. There’s nothing wrong with these words in general, but when applied to schools, they change the nature of schooling and the way we look at teachers and students.
Business-like terms used with schools increased during the 1980s and 1990s. They are so frequent now they’re taken for granted.
Phi Delta Kappan’s October issue is called School for Sale. They discuss the role of business in schools. Did you put the For Sale sign in the front yard of your democratic public school? Probably not, and neither did I.
Privatizing public schools has not worked well, but business words and their meanings have reshaped how we look at public education.
1. Accountability
Accountability is considered critical for the high performance of an organization. It leads to student expectations and a definition of success.
Accountability applied to schools means that teachers and school officials are responsible for the child’s learning. Standards in the form of test objectives become the measure for success and accountability.
The problem lies in the fact that children might not reach the same standards, the standards themselves might be questionable, and children are often successful in that which is not measured.
Also, many variables affect how a student learns.
2. Alignment
Some coordinating of what’s taught and tested is necessary, but matching everything to standards leaves little opportunity for creativity and acknowledging children’s differences. Standards aren’t always good standards.
Aligning material is used with direct instruction, where teachers use manuals and online learning. Anyone can follow the manual’s directions or the computer, and a qualified highly trained teacher isn’t needed.
3. Benchmarks
These are standards to compare or assess product results based on data. Careers that use benchmarks include technology, financial, marketing, processes, cities, government, and now schools. Schools are compared to each and made to compete.
4. Best Practice
Strategies and resources that work well might be reasonable solutions, but using best practice implies a one-size-fits-all program that works best, which is often not the case. Children learn differently and not always in lockstep.
Most well-prepared teachers understand which practices work, and they may have come up with their own.
There’s always something new to learn and great ideas to share, but often when someone is touting best practice, there’s a program they’re selling.
5. Brand
School brands are about competition and marketing schools through advertisements to get customers. Advertising brands have become popular during the pandemic.
Parents used to learn about their public school through other parents, like the Parent Teacher Association (PTA). A good PTA brings together those vested in the school to keep it working well.
6. CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
The label CEO of schools replaces the label superintendent, the top manager of the school district’s daily operations. CEO is a business word referring to the leader of a corporation.
Schools aren’t corporations selling a product; they bring together individuals who are supposed to care about children.
7. Customers
With privatization, parents are customers who choose the school they want because the school is a business.
When communities are devoted to their public schools, they follow and attend Friday night football games. They attend class plays and cheer for student accomplishments. They visit student art fairs and help with school fundraisers. Public schools can be a source of pride for the community.
Parents and those in the community never used to be called customers because they had ownership of the schools. The schools belonged to them.
8. Data-Driven
Teachers always study student information. Technology permits the collection of more data, raising student privacy concerns. Read Steven Singer’s The Six Biggest Problems with Data-Driven Instruction. Data can be unscientific, unproven, and dehumanizing. Those are just some of the problems.
9. Disruption
The late Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation went from the boardroom to the K-12 classroom. He predicted a radical shift from brick-and-mortar schools to online learning.
The K-12 ed-tech market has ballooned in the past decade to an estimated $7 billion.
But there’s little proof that only online learning improves how students learn, and the pandemic has shown that parents want their schools.
10. Entrepreneurs
Privatizing schools permits start-ups or promotes change in public education by entrepreneurship. Because an entrepreneur is a business-like word, it has been called edupreneur. This role sometimes creates confusion.
Entrepreneurs tied to education may have never worked with children in a public school. They may never have studied child development and how children learn.
Teachers remain essential for working with students. Their ideas, knowledge, and ability to relay instruction to their students are at the heart of education.
11. Next-Gen
Next generation learning claims to break away from traditional education, but it’s mostly about technology. It uses a host of other business terms like collaboration, agile, and personalized. Its focus is largely on college and career readiness.
12. Partnerships
Those who offer to help fund a school or school district become partners (or stakeholders) and are given a say in running the school. Partnerships are useful if those partnering help fund a problem or need facing the school or support a teacher or school plan.
A school partner threatens the school when they seek to control or change the school to follow their unproven, untested vision. They might support a business-like agenda. They might be more concerned about making a profit.
13. Portfolio
Instead of the community controlling their public schools, businesses run charter or private schools. Parents choose from a portfolio of schools like they’re choosing stock options on Wall Street.
Parents become customers.
Breaking schools up this way changes school ownership and involves profit-making for those who own the schools.
14. Stakeholder
Stakeholders in business mean employees, customers, suppliers, investors, the community, the general public, etc. It’s is considered a good thing in business.
School stakeholders include outside interests who might seize control of the school. They can use the school to promote their ideas.
The real stakeholders of public schools are parents, children, teachers, and the community.
In the past, we understood this to be true. Parents and the community gain ownership access to their schools through the local school board.
________
These are just some of the business words. Most are connected, and their purpose is to transform schools. Maybe you can think of others. Let me know, and I will add them to the list.
Here’s a list of business words that include some of the above terms. The article is titled The Ultimate List of 119 Most-Hated Business Buzzwords. Business people don’t like these terms, so why are we using them in schools?
Several years ago I read a powerful and insightful book titled Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (2009) by Janine Wedel, an anthropologist. Here are some excerpts I think are relevant here:
In Chapter Seven: “Accountability in the Age of Flex Nets,” Wedel explains the origins of the economic/audit/accountability paradigm as introduced into England and America by Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan, respectively.
p. 196
“… In the go-go 1980s, when Thatcher and Reagan were at the helm in the United Kingdom and the United States, the goal of refashioning the state in the image of the private sector motivated the migration of audits from their original association with financial management to other areas of working life.”
p. 197
“… [t]he idea of audits exploded throughout society and permeated organizational life as the chief method of controlling individuals. The tools and approaches of accountancy became the means through which ‘the values and practices of the private sector would be instilled in the public sector,’ as several anthropologists studying the subject have assessed. For instance, the UK’s Audit Commission, created in 1983 to ensure that local authorities used resources efficiently, took audit functions beyond the traditional role of financial accounting to encompass such tasks as monitoring ‘quality’ and ‘performance,’ and identifying ‘best practice.’ Ensuring ‘value for money’ through measuring performance outputs and the ‘effectiveness of management systems’ became the hallmarks of ‘good government.’ The new definition of audit was soon applied widely: Audits were employed in public sector arenas such as education to evaluate employees, training, curricula, and research. (emphasis added) … In the United States, …, it was not until the early 1980s that the UK-style audit began to be adopted widely in American government.4 [Is it just my paranoia or do the machinations of the Englishman Sir Michael Barber, profiled on Foundation for Excellence in Education’s website: “head of McKinsey’s Global Education Practice and chair of the Pakistan Education Taskforce, one of the worlds’ leading education reformers,” as well as Chief Education Advisor of Pear$on since 2011 (test/test prep, curriculum, and data analysis of the poorest quality, monumental harm, and greatest profit for Pearson)—dovetail with Wedel’s analysis?]
“Auditing, which derives from accountancy, breaks things down into observable, isolated, and often quantifiable pieces, and then scrutinizes the pieces—typically with little or no regard for the whole. ‘Audit has thereby become the control of control,’ as Power writes, ‘where what is being insured is the quality of the control systems, rather than the quality of the first order operations.’ “ [i.e. as applied to education, the quality of the teaching and learning experiences of real human beings.]
[All of the ills of the corporate deform movement seem to me to stem from this ill-considered audit/accountability approach that should never have been applied to a public good, particularly one that is responsible for the healthy upbringing of our nation’s children: incessant use of high stakes tests (produced and analyzed as cheaply as possible) to control students, teachers, schools, and neighborhoods; closing of neighborhood schools and creation of charter schools, many of which pursue wholly inappropriate teaching paradigms and enable the school to prison pipeline; standardization of curriculum (i.e. Common Core State (sic) (Stealth) Standards, which had virtually no input from those with extensive backgrounds in child development, language and literacy development, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities) and which denies dignity and respect to students of diverse backgrounds; ignoring the actual strengths and needs of students with IEPs under the guise of forcing high expectations as measured by the same inappropriate tests used for the general population of students; use of poorly trained TFAs in primarily high poverty schools; and doing away with tenure and seniority protections with the aim of destroying teachers unions. Is this the America that people struggled, fought, and died to protect and preserve? Or is this the fulfillment of decades of a readily imagined dystopia, profiting the very few at the expense of the very many?]
Thank you for sharing, Sheila. There’s much interesting information here. You reminded me that I’d heard the term audit used in education in a way that didn’t seem like my idea of an audit. Thank you for sharing. I think these changes happened without anyone questioning the word usage.
Also, an interesting sounding book to check on.
This is a relevant conversation to tell Biden/Harris what we don’t want and how their terminology or application to public education has not changed or reformed education, It’s still in the red.
Thank you, Khem. I appreciate your comment. I agree, and I hope they change the narrative.
“Strategery!”
That’s right! I forgot that one. Ha. Thanks, Patrick!
If I hear the fake work accountable one more time uttered by one who is trying to pass the buck as it usually is in education I think I will scream, loudly, perhaps, so that everyone knows that intellectual bankruptcy is not a measurable thing.
I agree. And it is usually said by someone not held accountable or even working in the school. Thanks, Roy. Hope you’re feeling better.
Thanks, I am back at it, against the advice of my cousin
Oh no. I always side with cousins. Take it easy.
Requiring that schools (NCLB) and teachers (CCSS/ESSA) had to be be held “accountable” using standardized test scores has probably been the most damaging policy in the history of US education.
Test score “accountability” gained traction because, superficially, it made sense to politicians, pundits, think tankers, business leaders, parents, local taxpayers, and even some school administrators. Enough traction that despite 20 years of evidence proving it has been a misguided policy failure, those same groups still cling to it.
Test based school/teacher “accountability” has been such a powerful idea that the logi of the *counter-arguments still can’t shake it.
*
Nearly 70% of teachers do not teach tested subjects
Only two subjects tested
Forced narrow and constrained curricula
Expanded the null curricula and lost opportunities
No-stakes tests for students
Zero accountability for the test takers
Bad standards (CC) produced even worse tests
Arbitrary cut scores used to show public school failure
Students were asked to work for their teachers
Significant instructional time lost to test-prep and testing
Very expensive with almost zero ROI (take that you business people)
My thanks to Diane Ravitch.
https://dianeravitch.net/2020/11/18/nancy-bailey-business-terms-should-be-expelled-from-our-schools/
My thanks to Garn Press.
https://www.garnpress.com/news/business-terms-used-to-privatize-public-schools