November 7, 2022
Nora De La Cour: Neoliberal Education Reform Is Killing Public Schools — and It’s on the Ballot Nationwide
Published by Peter Greene
Writing for Jacobin, Nora De La Cour explains why neoliberalism has been chipping away at public education. This piece focuses on Wisconsin, where the Democratic incumbent governor is facing a challenge from Tim Michels, who is already singing from the Chris Rufo songbook.
It’s not a new thing. Scott Walker implemented a not-very-subtle attack on public schools, first by cutting school budgets and cutting the tax base needed to support them.
To offset his cuts, Walker gave districts “flexibility” to slash spending on employee benefits and retirement. His signature Act 10 eliminated public sector unions’ capacity to automatically collect dues, restricted collective bargaining to wages capped at inflation, and required annual union recertification and contract renegotiation. Public sector union membership plummeted from 50 percent in 2011 to 22 percent in 2016, largely driven by shrinking teachers’ unions.
As teachers lost the ability to negotiate for favorable working conditions like smaller class sizes, their ranks were literally decimated: more than 10 percent fled the profession in the year following Act 10’s passage. Borsuk told
Jacobin that teacher preparation programs saw roughly a one-third enrollment drop. Act 10, which inspired similar anti-worker bills elsewhere, promoted
volatility and inequality by increasing market-style competition in the labor market. Better-resourced districts poached effective teachers from struggling ones, leaving high poverty and rural schools with
lasting scars .
De La Cour puts that history and the current race (both in Wisconsin and in various other elections around the country) in a larger perspective.
As voucher programs spread across the United States, pushed by breathtakingly well-funded pro-privatization networks, Milwaukee was held up as an example of vouchers’ ability to improve educational attainment for disadvantaged students. But the program’s initially encouraging (at least, given certain statistical treatments ) results haven’t held up, while the proof that vouchers cause damage has continued to accumulate.
Josh Cowen is an education policy expert who has spent nearly two decades studying the impact of vouchers, including as part of the Milwaukee program’s official evaluation. At first Cowen was, in his own words, “cautiously optimistic” that vouchers could help disadvantaged students. But in July of this year, Cowen wrote in a widely circulated op-ed :
In 2022 the evidence is just too stark to justify the use of public money to fund private tuition. . . . Vouchers promise low-income families solutions to academic inequality, but what they deliver is often little more than religious indoctrination to go alongside academic outcomes that are worse than before.
Cowen told Jacobin that since 2016, evaluations in Washington, DC , Indiana , Louisiana , and Ohio have found “catastrophic academic results” for voucher programs like Milwaukee’s. He says test score data show that these programs, which now exist in fourteen states and are a cornerstone of right-wing political platforms, cause learning loss on a scale only comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Katrina. This loss can be attributed to a range of factors, including that voucher schools aren’t subject to the same oversight and requirements (e.g. teacher certification) as public schools, and voucher students don’t have the same rights as their public school counterparts. For example, 96 percent of states with voucher programs do not preserve disability protections for children claiming tuition assistance.
Vouchers have turned out toe be destructive of public education, and provide very little in return–unless, of course, you want to replace public education and a shared responsibility to educate all children with a market based system that treats education as a commodity that is the responsibility of parents alone to somehow acquire.
Read the full article here , and vote wisely this year.
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