Nick Covington explains how the privatization movement is taking education backwards.
“After 40 years, trillions spent, and declining test scores, doing more of the same isn’t just failing – it’s insanity,” Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds shared in March 2025, “The status quo is unacceptable. It’s time to put parents and local communities back in charge.”
The cost of our public schools keeps going up and test scores don’t, the argument goes, so we should give public money to private schools to see if they can deliver better educational outcomes for less money. (Hint: they do not) Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, weighed in on the debate about “school productivity collapse” over thirty years ago:
There is a widespread perception among the general public, policy makers, and even education professionals of a ‘school productivity collapse.’ It is based on the belief that real elementary and secondary education spending per pupil has doubled in the last quarter century, and that school outcomes have not improved to justify these new investments.
Is every dollar spent on public education justified? Of course not. But it’s exactly because this difference between costs and tested outcomes has been misunderstood and exploited year after year, and because that difference hides the values of our public education system, that it deserves an explanation from public school advocates. “[School productivity collapse] assumes that all school spending aims for a single outcome—improved academic achievement of regular students,” Rothstein argues, “But schools actually seek a variety of additional outcomes as well: training of the disabled, student health and nutrition, vocational education, assimilation of the non-English speaking, etc.”
In the second half of the 20th century, we recognized the rights of Black families to integrated schools, of bilingual students to comprehensible instruction, of students with disabilities to a free and appropriate public education, and the promise to children in poverty that school could not offer them less because their families had less. The costs of public education have expanded in proportion to its constitutionality. Each expansion required public schools to add staff, programming, buildings, transportation, and technology, and expanded federal accountability to ensure the rights of students and families were being met.
Costs rose faster than test scores largely because our rights-based obligations expanded, and intentionally expanded to include children who require more from school than what they may produce on a scorecard, not because schools became less efficient.