I wish that everyone who sees
the PBS program “School Inc.”–which airs nationally this month–knew who was
funding this error-ridden attack on public education.
Please watch my 10-minute interview with New York
City’s PBS affiliate, WNET, where I gave a concise response to
this meretricious three-hour program. It airs locally, not nationally.
Public education today faces an
existential crisis. Over the past two decades, the movement to transfer public
money to private organizations has expanded rapidly.
The George W. Bush
administration first wrote into federal law the proposal that privately managed
charter schools were a remedy for low-scoring public schools, even though no
such evidence existed.
The Obama administration provided hundreds of millions
each year to charter schools, under the control of private boards.
Now, the
Trump administration, under the leadership of Secretary of Education Betsy
DeVos, wants to expand privatization to include vouchers, virtual schools,
cyberschools, homeschooling, and every other possible alternative to public
education. DeVos has
said that public education is a “dead end,” and that “government sucks.”
Most states already have some form of voucher program that allow
students to use public money to enroll in private and religious schools, even
when their own state constitution prohibits it.
The Republicans have skirted
their own constitutions by asserting that the public money goes to the family,
not the private or religious school. The longstanding tradition of separating
church and state in K-12 education is crumbling.
And Betsy DeVos can testify
with a straight face that she will enforce federal law to “schools that receive
federal funding,” because voucher schools allegedly do not receive the money,
just the family that chooses religious schools.
Advocates of the privatization
movement like DeVos claim that nonpublic schools will “save poor children from
failing public schools,” but independent researchers have recently concurred
that vouchers actually have had a negative effect on students in the District
of Columbia, Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio. Charters, at best, have a mixed
record, and many are known for excluding children with disabilities and English
language learners and for pushing out students who are troublesome.
This is a time when honest,
nonpartisan reporting is needed to inform the American public.
But this month the Public
Broadcasting System is broadcasting a “documentary” that tells a one-sided
story, the story that Betsy DeVos herself would tell, based on the work of
free-market advocate Andrew Coulson. Author of “Market Education,” Coulson
narrates “School, Inc., “ a three-hour program, which airs this month
nationwide in three weekly broadcasts on PBS.
Uninformed viewers who see this
very slickly produced program will learn about the glories of unregulated
schooling, for-profit schools, teachers selling their lessons to students on
the Internet.
They will learn about the “success” of the free market in
schooling in Chile, Sweden, and New Orleans.
They will hear about the
miraculous charter schools across America, and how public school officials
selfishly refuse to encourage the transfer of public funds to private
institutions.
They will see a glowing portrait of South Korea, where students
compete to get the highest possible scores on a college entry test that will
define the rest of their lives and where families gladly pay for afterschool
tutoring programs and online lessons to boost test scores. They will hear that
the free market is more innovative than public schools.
What they will not see or hear
is the other side of the story. They will not hear scholars discuss the high
levels of social segregation in Chile, nor will they learn that the students
protesting the free-market schools in the streets are not all “Communists,” as
Coulson suggests.
They will not hear from scholars who blame Sweden’s choice
system for the collapse of its international test scores. They will not see any
reference to Finland, which far outperforms any other European nation on international
tests yet has neither vouchers nor charter schools.
They may not notice the
absence of any students in wheelchairs or any other evidence of students with
disabilities in the highly regarded KIPP charter schools.
They will not learn
that the acclaimed American Indian Model Charter Schools in Oakland does not
enroll any American Indians, but has a student body that is 60% Asian American
in a city where that group is 12.8% of the student population.
Nor will they
see any evidence of greater innovation in voucher schools or charter schools
than in properly funded public schools.
Coulson has a nifty way of
dismissing the fact that the free market system of schooling was imposed by the
dictator Augusto Pinochet. He says that Hitler liked the Hollywood movie “It
Happened One Night” (with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable); should we stop
showing or watching the movie?
Is that a fair comparison? Pinochet was directly
responsible for the free market system of schooling, including for-profit
private schools. Hitler neither produced nor directed “It Happened One Night.”
Thus does Coulson refer to criticism (like Sweden’s collapsing scores on
international tests) and dismiss them as irrelevant.
I watched the documentary
twice, preparing to be interviewed by Channel 13, and was repelled by the
partisan nature of the presentation. I googled the funders and discovered that
the lead funder is the Rose Mary and Jack Anderson Foundation, a very
conservative foundation that is a major contributor to the Friedman Foundation
for Educational Choice, which advocates for vouchers.
The Anderson
Foundation is allied with Donors Trust, whose donors make
contributions that cannot be traced to them. “Mother Jones” referred to this
foundation as part of “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.” Other
contributors to Donors Trust include the Koch brothers’ “Americans for
Prosperity” and the Richard and Helen DeVos foundation.
The second major funder is the
Prometheus Foundation. Its public filings with the IRS show that its largest
grant ($2.5 million) went to the Ayn Rand Institute. The third listed funder of
“School Inc.” is the Steve and Lana Hardy Foundation, which contributes to
free-market libertarian think tanks.
In other words, this program is
paid propaganda. It does not search for the truth. It does not present opposing
points of view. It is an advertisement for the demolition of public education
and for an unregulated free market in education. PBS might have aired a program
that debates these issues, but “School Inc.” does not.
It is puzzling that PBS would
accept millions of dollars for this lavish and one-sided production from a
group of foundations with a singular devotion to the privatization of public
services. The PBS decision to air this series is even stranger when you stop to
consider that these kinds of anti-government political foundations are likely
to advocate for the elimination of public funding for PBS.
After all, in a free
market of television, where there are so many choices available, why should the
federal government pay for a television channel?