Profits r us: Notes on the commercialization of America’s schools

The primal force that John Stuart Mill called “a social act” and Ralph Nader dubbed “the mercantile juggernaut” is engulfing much of public education. Since the court-ordered separation of religion from the schools in the 1960s, no outside influence has been as pervasive as that of the nation’s commercial interests. Nor does any other domain touch the lives of so many schoolchildren so insistently and in so many disorienting ways.

Whether Channel One is beaming its television commercials to captive audiences in classrooms or Campbell’s is urging children to peel the labels from soup cans, the conclusion is the same: business is in the schools to stay. Less widely recognized is the degree to which the values of business may be shaping children’s attitudes. With its truckloads of superbly packaged goods, state-of-the-art services, and brilliant promotions, American business can be overwhelming. And even in our skeptical society, young people are still impressionable.

The convergence with business, which has become part of the social architecture of public education, takes a variety of shapes and directions. As we approach what George Kennan calls “a century’s ending,” three closely linked forms appear to be dominant: relatively stable, if diverse, patterns of school/business partnerships; in-school plugging of products by companies intent on grabbing an ever-larger slice of the huge youth “niche” markets; and the highly publicized but still-nascent phenomenon of privatization, which in today’s flexible interpretation can signify anything from outside management of a single school to the establishment of chains of private, for-profit schools dedicated to the proposition that risk-taking investors deserve appropriate rewards.

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The popular phrase “school/business partnership” can be misleading. It camouflages the crazy-quilt nature of the connection, which ranges from genuine altruism to cynical exploitation. Typical of the altruistic side of the ledger are such sterling examples as those of a bank and a paint company quietly teaming up to bankroll repairs to a vandalized Long Island high school or a consortium of Maryland-based businesses updating a school system’s ponderous managerial practices. Then there are the other instances: advertisements adorning school buses in Colorado Springs or the spectacle of sales representatives from Eli Lilly shilling for the antidepressant drug Prozac in a high school in the Washington, D.C., area. By some reckonings, all these arrangements fall under the “partnership” umbrella. And there are thousands more like them on both sides of the balance sheet.

At its most principled, the school/business partnership can be a joy to witness: enlightened firms of all types and sizes donating no-strings-attached cash, equipment, and expertise to needy schools; Fortune 500 CEOs entreating Congress to retain and expand federal programs for underserved children; and national associations of business leaders — the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Roundtable, and the National Alliance of Business, to name just three — issuing reports backing sensible-sounding school reforms. As Ted Kolderie of the Center for Policy Studies in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 1987, “Business has come in offering to help and wanting to be liked.” Little has changed since then. This level of partnership can be a credible catalyst for school reform. It adds heft and legitimacy to a difficult cause. If big-time business leaders are pitching in, the reasoning goes, the chances are pretty good that they will stamp an endeavor as worthy and politically respectable. When their ranks include such dedicated pro-school executives as Owen Butler, William Woodside, John Clendinin, and Robert Kennedy (past or present bosses at Procter & Gamble, Primerica, BellSouth, and Union Carbide respectively), American business deserves applause. Michael Usdan of the Institute for Educational Leadership makes the point that many of the most prominent corporate advocates supporting the schools are themselves grateful products of public education who want to give something back.

In many communities, though, the past 15 years have too often yielded less elevated types of school/business links. The cosmic concerns of national economic health and global competition (the latter a demonstrably questionable rationale)¹ recede as on-the-scene reality takes over. No longer do business leaders and schoolpeople always sing from the same hymnal. They may share the larger goal of improving schools and preparing an educated citizenry and work force, but their slants on how to pull it off in the field are often markedly different. Much of American business views the schools as a farm system designed to fill roster slots in its plants and offices. Students are seen as future employees and customers. But local schoolpeople have a different take, according to a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, which found that principals saw school/business ties as a direct route to donations of equipment, awards, grants for teachers, and other “tangible, material outcomes.” Only 6% wanted commercial interests represented on the education committees or task forces that normally plot a school system’s trajectory toward reform.²

The tacit deal between business and public education seems at first glance to be stacked in favor of the schools. They get financial help in the range of $400 million annually, plus scholarships, tutoring, work/study arrangements, help for children with special needs, and manifold other benefits. Better yet, much corporate aid comes with few conditions or requires only that schools or students meet mutually acceptable achievement levels. This is a far cry from the case of higher education, which receives five times more direct assistance from business. Large chunks of university life — notably the engineering, science, and business sectors — are often in thrall to commercial interests, with some colleges taking on the protective coloration of the marketplace. ³ In addition, the fact that many colleges and universities hold large portfolios of equities and corporate bonds bespeaks a vested interest in the well-being of business. While schools would be ill-advised to depend on an unbroken flow of corporate largesse, at least their key staff members are not preoccupied with producing industry-friendly research or hustling grants and lucrative consultantships with business firms.

The school/business nexus at the level of the local school features visible transactions negotiated by both parties with a reasonably clear sense of what their tangible gain is likely to be. Any school board would have to think very hard about rejecting freely offered computers, scholarships, or math and reading tutors. And if, as a kind of quid pro quo, the donor wants recognition for public-spirited generosity, then so be it. It’s still a mostly fair exchange, and it might even contribute to a sense of community.

But a dollop of cynicism, or at least of skepticism, may not be out of line. In today’s “get it while you can” economic climate, it is doubtful, to take one example, that we will see another George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, who by 1932 had donated more than $100 million (at least 10 times that in 1996 dollars) to schools, to the University of Rochester, and to local hospitals and had provided an enviable role model for harmonious business/community links.⁴ The imperatives that drive commerce today are only vaguely compatible with such public-spiritedness. Across the country, what the political scientist Benjamin Barber calls “the bloodless economics of profit” is worsening imbalances that the culture is already experiencing. Along with corporate downsizing (i.e., firing people) and adjustments in benefits (i.e., shortchanging the survivors) have come attitudinal shifts in many parts of the business community. The present head of Kodak, a Midwesterner who came from Motorola in 1993, believes that the city of Rochester will be helped more by a lean and competitive company than by giving out right financial help to local people and institutions. And wherever one turns, workers are no longer lifelong company loyalists but are increasingly regarded as human capital — faceless, movable, and, above all, expendable.

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Of the diverse yields from the school/business connection, one that will probably endure is the assumption that a system that delivers the goods with minimal red tape or bureaucratic obstruction — as business profess es to do — merits a lot of respect. If this is how successful firms operate, the reasoning goes, then let’s have more of it. Already exposed to television and radio saturated by commercials and to a merchandise-obsessed universe beyond the schoolyard, most young people no doubt accept a role for business in the classroom as part of the natural order of things. Even the Religious Right, which fluoroscopes the ideological content of every corner of school life, has maintained a decorous silence about the premises of the skybox crowd, though judged by its straitjacketed moral criteria such premises could be seen as a toxic force in the classroom if not in the larger society. On the contrary, while some of the Religious Right’s name-brand leaders may oppose the dubious messages of Channel One’s commercials, as a bloc these ideologues display “slavish support for a corporate economy that undermines [their moral preachments] at every turn.”⁵

With scattered exceptions — Alex Molnar of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is the most conspicuous example — analysts of commercialism as a force in public education have prudently avoided listening for philosophical or ideological overtones. As a society, we rarely question what Robert Boyls calls the “behaviors, beliefs, rituals, symbols, and myths” of our avowedly capitalist culture, preferring to accept at face value the unspoken premise that its historic balance of profits, product value, and civic responsibility comes out about right.

Public education has seldom turned commercial contributors away from the schoolhouse door.

Short of a massive multi-year research effort, there is probably no valid way to gauge how thoroughly the mentality of corporate America has suffused nearly every household and institution in the country. As the 20th century winds down, we seem to be returning to what the political analyst Michael Barone has described as “something resembling the country that the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831 …  egalitarian, individualistic, decentralized, religious, property-loving, lightly governed.” With lingering reservations about “egalitarian,” this short list probably continues to fill the bill. Even as we debate values — family and others — we are loath to criticize any side of the bedrock American devotion to the free-enterprise system and its multiple benefits.

Long before today’s conservative mood took hold, we had learned to accept — even to be enthusiastic about — the debatable commonplace that capitalism equates to democracy, or even to “market democracy,” a hopeful formulation floated by the Clinton Administration to refer to the emerging economic systems of nations receiving U.S. assistance. By extension, we presumably take as a given the consumer benefits from megamergers and acquisitions and the array of anti-union, anti-intellectual, antienvironment, and antigovernment policies that still characterize much of American business. Whether warranted or not, these examples of the corporate mindset of the mid-1990s are implanted in our collective consciousness. More than ever, over the past 15 years or so, this belief system has been seeping into the nation’s classrooms.

Public education has seldom turned commercial contributors away from the schoolhouse door, particularly in the half-century since World War II. But until the Reagan Administration arrived in 1981 with its near-Biblical mistrust of public institutions and its pledge to unshackle the private sector from the chains of big government, transactions between schools and business were pretty much as they had always been. School systems remain multibillion dollar markets for a huge assortment of goods and services, and their purchasing practices are generally serviceable, sometimes even quite sophisticated. Astute suppliers, whether of school buses or cafeteria food, show their gratitude in diverse but usually ethical ways. Reports of scandals or instances of corruption — the stray case of a cheating book supplier, questionable ethics in the bond market, or an easily bribed procurement official — occasionally creep into the media, but they do not normally alter the social landscape.

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A brief personal digression may be useful here. Among the moments of truth I experienced during diplomatic postings to then-communist Czechoslovakia and Romania in the 1960s was the realization that I missed garish billboards, offensive television and radio commercials, and advertising-saturated newspapers and magazines — indeed, the whole often-invigorating, even life-giving presence of basic American-style commercialism. I found myself almost yearning for the uninhibited product-hyping that the conformity of life under totalitarianism had banned. American toddlers may be conscious of brands before they are toilet-trained, but that is not all bad. At least they are beginning to learn, after a fashion, about making choices instead of having faceless authority make them in their name.

To an alarming degree, though, commercialism sets the tone for informing tomorrow’s citizen/consumers — today’s schoolchildren — about the world in which they will all too soon be deciding how to order their lives. In one of his patented outbursts, Ralph Nader recently noted, “Any culture that surrenders its vision and its self-sustaining human values to the narrow judgment of commerce does serious damage to the SUBSTANCE of democracy . . . if not to its form.”⁶ Nobody has ever accused Nader of understatement in his lacerating 30-year indictment of the excesses of American business, but neither has anyone proved that he is aiming at entirely undeserving or defenseless victims.

On the scale of 1 to 10 used by television’s Mclaughlin Group, schools and their young occupants, with their own clear market identity, would probably rate as an 8 or 9 in their appeal to American mercantilism. Mike Searles, former president of Kids R Us, put it bluntly: “If you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come. Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own this kid younger and younger.'”

Pandering to the youth market — especially its big-spending teenage slice — has a long, if largely undistinguished, history. It probably began near the turn of the century when the noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall, deciding that teenagers had become an identifiable group with distinctive characteristics, published his Adolescence — Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. The segmentation Hall had begun to describe picked up speed in the 1920s with the spotlighting of college students, notably young women, who had developed their own dress codes. By the post-World War II years, high school students had come to constitute what Ellen Wartella has labeled “a clearly separate subcultural group in American life. They had their own language, style of dress, values, and behaviors. Teenagers also provided an attractive market for new products and businesses such as the early fast-food restaurants.”⁷

In today’s vigorously pro-business climate, serious inquiry into stepped up commercialism in the schools is episodic or nonexistent. The matter hasn’t been even a blip on the screen in 28 years of the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup surveys of public attitudes toward education. The altogether exemplary Zillions magazine — an ad-free bimonthly published by Consumer Reports that gives children straight and attractively presented information about youth-targeted products, nutrition, personal safety, and a range of environmental matters — regrettably reaches but a microscopic fraction of the nation’s 46-plus million public schoolchildren.

Were it not for such groups as the ever-vigilant Consumers Union and the Center for the Study of Commercialism, an offshoot of the feisty Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the issue would probably still be closeted far from public view. Even though both of these advocacy bodies published cogent, reader-friendly analyses of the central problems in 1995,⁸ neither provoked mass indignation over — or even general public awareness about — this loaded topic. Consumers Union, a legitimate pioneer in pinpointing the perils of out-of-control commercialism of all kinds, is still known mainly for its authoritative evaluations of automobiles and appliances, while CSPI is vaguely recalled as the killjoy that declared Chinese, Mexican, and Italian food to be nutritionally hazardous.

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The direct annual purchasing power of those between the ages of 4 and 12 is believed to exceed $10 billion per year.

Precisely how powerful and prestigious commercial interests have become in school life is doubtless open to question. In an era of business-friendly societal shifts, when children are becoming product-wise shoppers at ever younger ages, business should have little cause for complaint. Though estimates vary, the direct annual purchasing power of those between the ages of 4 and 12 is believed to exceed $10 billion, while the actual influence of these preteens on family buying is probably in the area of $150 billion per year. Such clout, which is but a small fraction of the buying power of teenagers, won’t weaken soon. Smaller families ordinarily mean a larger role for children, and the proliferation of one-parent families expands the number of children who do some of their own shopping. Unsurprisingly, parents are coming to regard decisions on what and how to buy as a natural feature of their children’s overall responsibility.⁹

Where better to find these “captive kids” than at their daily workplace, the American classroom, where commercial inducements are becoming irresistible? Beset by uncertain school budgets, the smothering embrace of commercialism throughout contemporary life, and ferocious competition for the fast-growing youth market, most educators have long since come to terms with the blandishments of business.

The story is all too familiar. Over the past decade or so, schoolpeople across the country have observed a growing parade of advertisements on or near school property, heavy product promotion in classroom materials, and a stupefying variety of business-sponsored contests and incentive programs. The breadth and intensity of this barrage are flabbergasting. Moreover, as Alex Molnar elaborates in his new book, Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America’s Schools, much of this enticingly displayed stuff seems, on first encounter, to fill authentic school needs in an unbiased fashion. Without it, many teachers and administrators would feel deprived a grievous but all too realistic commentary on the dependent status of public education.

If there is a gimmick for pushing products in the schools that business does not employ, it is only because no one has thought of it yet. From direct-mail marketing to merchandise saturated contests, from outright bribery to playing on adult guilt, from multi media “infomercials” to obligatory viewing of Channel One’s often tasteless hawking of useless goods the inter play of school and business offers a staggering range of temptations. It is a safe bet that most of these ploys for pushing products (including, it must be emphasized, some beneficial ones) are finding their way into the curriculum right now somewhere in the nation’s 15,000 school districts.

Social ostracism and worse await nonparticipating students. Teachers and parents who dare to wonder aloud about the powerful presence of Pizza Hut or Campbell’s “family of prepared foods” obviously don’t get it. Indeed, they may even be portrayed as opposing improved literacy (a Pizza Hut cause) or being foolish enough not to appreciate the Campbell Soup Company’s offer presented in a compelling advertisement in the October 1995 issue of the American Federation of Teachers’ American Teacher of FREE (the company’s capitalization) school equipment for “over 90,000 organizations just like yours.” These lucky recipients, Campbell’s asserts, “will be receiving …books, computers, sports equipment, and more! In fact, in the last 22 years, Campbell’s Labels for Education^TM has awarded nearly $70 million worth of equipment-ALL FREE in exchange for labels and other proofs of purchase from our family of quality products.”

This pitch encapsulates the issue. It ran as a full-page ad in a publication of the country’s second-largest organization of educators, which presumably did not find its contents fraudulent or misleading. Yet the sponsor produces prepared foods that are heavily, possibly unhealthily, loaded with fat and sodium and are of decidedly questionable nutritional value. (The familiar standard-sized can of Campbell’s popular Chicken & Stars Soup, for ex ample, provides 1,010 milligrams of sodium per portion, half of an adult’s recommended maximum daily consumption.)

What makes this ad unforgivably objectionable is the phony claim that the commodities the schools receive are free. They are nothing of the kind. They cost many thousands of soup labels, while their “donor” shamelessly exploits unwitting children and teachers who often desperately need the goods the company offers. The children, of course, must collect labels (and pressure their parents to buy Campbell’s canned soups) in order for their schools to become Campbell’s-approved charity cases. It is hard to imagine that Camp bell’s would run such a campaign had it not yielded at least $70 million worth of offsetting gain, whether in profits, tax breaks, cut-rate advertising, public relations, or simple visibility. Getting children to become consumers-in-training is not enough for Campbell’s. Proclaiming its Prego spaghetti sauce superior to Ragu, its more successful competitor, Campbell’s distributed promotional posters to 12,000 elementary and secondary teachers, complete with a lesson plan, a slotted spoon, and a coupon for a 30-ounce jar of Prego Traditional Sauce. Ostensibly created to teach children about the rigorous world of science through a carefully designed “experiment,” the text and illustrations are a shameful scam to have children demonstrate “scientifically” the supposed inferiority of Ragu.¹⁰

This kind of corporate attitude is also evident in “partnerships” between schools and supermarket chains that “give” computers to needy schools in exchange for cash receipts from the stores. Molnar ran the numbers and found that, for one Wisconsin school, receipts totaling $500,000 earned two computers supposedly worth “more than $3,000” each, or seven-tenths of one cent of credit for every dollar’s worth of receipts. By some calculations, though, the company’s gains are even larger, and the computers the schools received are worth far less than $3,000 apiece.

In Maryland, two chains conducted similar, highly praised “receipts-for computers” programs at exactly the time when Gov. Parris Glendening was promising the owner of the Cleveland Browns football team a new, state-financed $200 million stadium and $75 million more in “secondary benefits” to move the franchise to Baltimore (where it will play a grand total of eight regular-sea son games annually). One can only speculate about how far $275 million might go toward getting contemporary technology into needy schools in the state.

A week after the governor’s announcement, I happened to visit a Maryland elementary school located in an area populated predominantly by minority groups and immigrant families. The first objects I saw on stepping into the front hall were three large cardboard cartons, two for supermarket receipts and the third for Campbell’s Soup labels. Who could object when even President Clinton has publicly applauded computers-for-receipts schemes? The gradations within this all-fronts commercial assault on schoolchildren are both subtle and blurry. At the other end of the spectrum from the hard sell of Campbell’s (and AT&T, Fleischmann’s Yeast, Hartz Mountain Corporation, and hundreds more) are some thoughtfully conceived campaigns that offer useful instruction while at the same time discreetly promoting an industry or company -a fair exchange by most calculations. For example, in a poster kit called “Less Is More Learning About Source Reduction,” the DuPont Company properly high lights two key “R’s” of conservation  — reduce and repair — and even resists placing its company logo anywhere on the poster. Similarly, materials developed by the American Chemical Society for Dow Chemical teach that “everything is made up of chemicals and students should understand how they work and their impact on their lives and society.¹¹

To their credit, DuPont and Dow do not feature their products in these materials, but neither do the materials or the regular curriculum provide even a hint of the rough passage both firms have historically encountered in their dealings with government regulators seeking to see that congressionally mandated laws on pollution and hazardous waste disposal are obeyed. No company is likely to cough up such information voluntarily, but neither should teachers and students get the misleading impression that their benefactors are entirely unselfish do-gooders or even law-abiding corporate citizens.

The same kind of potentially contradictory message issues from other educational packages that appear to be beyond reproach by most measures. Two sets of materials distributed by McDonald’s — one on helping children “develop healthy practices and attitudes that will stay with them for a lifetime” and the other designed to help them to “learn how to practice good eating and fitness habits” — were judged by Consumers Union to be “objective and not commercial.” One was even endorsed by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. But, like a kit offered for middle-schoolers by Anheuser-Busch on the dangers of drinking and another by Kellogg’s urging fitness and sound nutrition for children in grades 3 and 4, these offerings cannot be considered entirely benign. Unless these firms have totally changed their product profiles, their presence in classrooms in any guise implies at the least that school leaders are not averse to sharing class time with the purveyors of alcoholic beverages and sugar-packed nutritional nightmares. No end to this brazen proselytizing is in sight. A few more, of several hundred, current and recent illustrations:

• Scholastic, I, provides schools with guides to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secrets of the Ooze and ) Jetsons: The Movie that bill them as courses on environmental issues.
• The National Soft Drink Association offers teachers a poster called, unbelievably, “Soft Drinks and Nutrition,” which blithely compares the heavily sweetened products of its member companies to milk and fruit.
• The M&M-Mars candy company actually trumpets nutritional values.
• Procter & Gamble disseminates “Coping with Growth,” which depicts the company’s bloody labor wars of the late 19th century as a family spat.¹²
• Mobil issues an unabashedly proNAFTA packet at a time when the merits of that landmark foreign trade pact are being debated across the political

Not to be outdone by its corporate peers, the Weekly Reader, “that rite of school passage” — owned by a subsidiary of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Company (K-III), the former owner of RJR Nabisco, the nation’s second largest cigarette maker — echoed the tobacco industry’s viewpoint in an astonishing 68% of the stories it ran on smoking from 1989 through 1994.¹³ Meanwhile, the corresponding figure for the competing but less-known Scholastic News is 32%. The Weekly Reader described the case against the evil weed in but 38% of its stories, as against 79% in Scholastic News. One 1994 story in Weekly Readers fifth-grade edition -headlined “Do Cigarettes Have a Future?” — somehow overlooked the link between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease. But it did report that 47,000 people could lose their jobs if the industry were to go under (presumably done in by liberal wackos in Congress and ecofascists at the Food and Drug Administration) and that taxes on cigarettes (which the companies have fought since the third century A.D.) had raised nearly $12 biIIion “that governments have used for such things as health care and school funding.” When last tallied, the 10 editions of the Weekly Reader, which begin at the prekindergarten level, had a combined circulation exceeding eight million.

A co-author of the University of California, San Francisco, study that produced these sobering results points out that, before K-111 bought Weekly Reader, 62% of its articles on tobacco-related subjects had an antismoking bias. After the purchase, the figure dipped to just 24%.¹⁴

Neither parents nor educators seem able to devise coherent counterstrategies at the national level. Perhaps not enough of them care. Popular resistance, such as it is, comes principally from suburban, educated, white-bread sources — people represented by the likes of the National Resources Defense Fund, Greenpeace, the Center for Media Literacy, the Environmental Defense Fund, Consumers Union, CSPI, and UNPLUG (a California-based group formed initially to fight Channel One). But these worthy, if chronically underfunded, groups have had no measurable impact, and commercialism in the schools is not always a issue, even for them.

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It looks like a long jump from corporate infiltration to the privatization of public schools, but in reality it may be just a short step. Despite persuasive contrary evidence, the notion that American education has collapsed inspires politicians and journalists of all political stripes, as well as venture capitalists, to pine for alternatives to what The American Enterprise terms the “child-dooming nightmare of urban schools.” Their motives cover a wide range, including honest ideological conviction about the mission of education, a ferociously held belief in free markets, a desire to eliminate government fat (though not subsidies for business), and — by far the strongest of the lot — a quest for profits.

Education still represents only a tiny slice of a mammoth pie. From Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom of the 1980s to the former communist dictatorships of Europe, new privatized forms of once-public institutions are visible everywhere. What used to be a utopian fantasy of laissez-faire economists is becoming routine. Indeed, the word privatization now enjoys almost talismanic stature.

True believers are unshakably convinced that today’s wave of privatizing will become a tsunami that will inevitably drive much of public education (referred to as “government schools” in “Mr. Quayle’s Neighborhood”) into private hands. They visualize massive economies of efficiency, lower taxes, smaller bureaucracies, greater consumer satisfaction, and higher test scores.¹⁵ Chester Finn, Jr., the well-known education policy analyst, has declared in Education Week that private control (of anything) is nearly sublime and public management nearly all wrong. The almost religious fervor of the antigovernment crew that currently dominates the U.S. House of Representatives and many state houses guarantees that the debatable blessings of some kind of privatization will be thoroughly explored, if not bestowed, in the years immediately ahead.

For American education, more than for almost any other sphere, such an examination must confront the fact that the privatization of education has only the flimsiest of track records. And previous performance, more than almost any other criterion, is what normally guides investment decisions. Few self-respecting corporations capable of performing even the most rudimentary market analysis would be tempted to step more than tentatively into waters as poorly charted as these. As Finn and Diane Ravitch point out, “True ‘privatization’ means selling or otherwise transferring a public asset to private owners who henceforth bear sole responsibility for its existence and are accountable to no one save the stockholders.”¹⁶ This is privatization as endgame, and it is the real goal of many of public education’s most devout critics.

What currently passes for the privatization of American education is distinctly different from the model of the purists. So far, it has been little more than a variation of the widely followed practice of contracting out or outsourcing that is becoming a staple at all levels of government — for transportation services, trash collection, parking garages, some public housing, certain types of social services, and even prisons. But drop education into the mix, and pandemonium reigns. No longer are we talking about waste disposal; now we’re talking about kids, our kids, and emotions run very high. Taken as a whole, the performance data for contracting out lead to no credible conclusion, pro or con. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. In case after case in the 1990s, privatization is being advanced as a magic cure for the putative incompetence of government. In fact, its guiding principles are often more closely linked to religious or political ideology than to market forces or improved management. Some proponents are so deeply attached to philosophy over pragmatism that they oppose undertaking the careful cost analysis that should precede such a drastic shift. When asked to explain why Gov. William Weld of Massachusetts had opposed a state law to mandate such studies, a senior state official replied, “The governor has said that privatization may make sense if it delivers better services, even if there is (sic) no budget savings.”¹⁷

The still-ripening model of education as a fat target for the privateers demonstrates how gospel and gain can intersect. Whatever form its divorce from public stewardship might take — anything from private management monitored by the state or the community to the promised land of Finn and Ravitch is theoretically possible someone figures to make big money. There is really no other way it can happen. To Milton Friedman, the champion of unchained free enterprise who “knows” that public education has fallen apart and that children attend “wretched schools,” form is less important than substance. Labeling private school vouchers as only “a means to transition from a government to a market system,” Friedman envisages creating “a much larger, more vigorous private enterprise system” of education. And, he implies, we need it right away.¹⁸

Though still going strong at 84, the godfather of educational choice is no longer the reigning guru of a future commercial takeover of the schools. For better or worse, that distinction goes to the somewhat battered Chris Whittle, creator of the aborted plan for a billion-dollar chain of 1,000 forprofit schools that transfixed the education policy community only a few years ago. Gloating over Whittle’s ensuing misfortunes may be a favorite pastime for schoolpeople these days, but in one key regard he has been consistent and possibly prescient. Whatever the eventual fate of the heavily ballyhooed, if drastically reduced and reshaped, Edison Project may be, Whittie has wisely portrayed it in public as a vehicle for reforming education and only secondarily as a prospective money-maker. This spin, as well as Whittle’s financial reverses and showy style, may have scared off skeptical investors, whose bottom-line fixation has presumably caused the scuttling or indefinite postponement of a potentially epochal experiment in school governance. Alex Molnar believes that Whittle’s idea that reform can be profitable was a breakthrough that fused two national obsessions: to improve education and to make big bucks.¹⁹ This thesis seems unassailably accurate.

The print media and television have been mostly oblivious to the stepped up commercial assault on classrooms and only incidentally sensitive to the expanded corporate involvement in school improvement (as well as in local “partnerships”) of the past decade plus. Instead, they have gone full throttle on covering privatization. The casual reader or consumer of TV network news could easily be duped into believing that a blizzard of play-for-pay schools was about to descend on us and that private school choice is scoring success after success across the nation.²⁰

Such messages have undeniable zing, but they do not track with the situation on the ground. Not only do the locales where private school choice exists in late 1996 still number in the low single digits, but there is no living embodiment of what full privatization really means not yet. Nor do we hear a loud chorus of public calls for such practices as hiring private firms to operate public schools. Polled by the widely respected Public Agenda Foundation in 1995, only 10% of a representative group of issue-aware respondents favored such a move.²¹ A year earlier, Public Agenda had found that in Connecticut, where the debate over hiring Education Alternatives, Inc., of Minnesota to run Hartford’s decaying schools for five years had created a heavily reported dustup, only 24% of those polled favored the hiring of EAI. Well over half opined that private companies would “care more about profits than about the education of children “²²

The debate over commercialism in public education still has an anticipative flavor. After seven years of monitoring Channel One’s invasion of as many as 12,000 schools, through which it reaches 40% of U.S. high school students, there seems little doubt that its daily two-minute diet of judiciously targeted commercials remains popular with advertisers, whose main beef is with the steep rates, now in the rarefied $200,000 bracket for a 30-second spot. But Channel One’s black ink and the accompanying assault on classrooms by hundreds of firms vying for the youth market have only whetted entrepreneurial appetites for the supreme prize: the schools themselves.

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The beginning of the 1995 96 school year saw what the Edison Project’s founder, in a case of accurate Whittlespeak, labeled “the birth of a new industry,” the opening of the first four Edison Schools, products of the company’s drastic reconfiguration and downsizing. It also signaled the start of the fourth year of the management of nine schools in Baltimore by EAI and the first year of the closely watched effort by the fledgling Alternative Public Schools, Inc., of Tennessee to run Turner Elementary School in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, in the Pittsburgh area. Though the differences among them were substantial, notably in the extent of actual private control, these initiatives represented a kind of harmonic convergence of motive and operational mode.

The central common characteristic of the new breed of risk-takers is still their attraction to the prospect of sizable financial gain if not immediately, then surely in a few years. Otherwise, they would not be testing these waters. Whittle foresaw returns in the billions when he was rustling up support for his pie-in-the-sky 1,000 school chain. The top brass of American business thought differently, though, and school finance analysts, including the usually pro-business expert Denis Doyle, publicly questioned the economic grounds for Whittle’s optimism. Whatever the numbers eventually re veal, the companies involved have been understandably loath to talk about prof its. When the subject arises, as in a flurry of stories about huge profits allegedly racked up by EAl’s chief executive, John Golle, it is clear that this is not a favorite topic for open discussion, even though EAI is a publicly traded company.

Rancorous debate has accompanied every attempt by commercial firms to take over taxpayer-supported schools. The issue has fragmented communities, as mayors, school boards, superintendents, teacher unions, and school activists patch together once-unthinkable ad hoc alliances for and against the newcomers. The most stridently negative voices have been those of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their local affiliates. Their presidents, Keith Geiger (no longer in office) and Albert Shanker, have denounced the private firms in advertorials that have appeared in influential newspapers and magazines, bearing such headlines as “Baltimore’s Private Hell,” “The Coming Scandal,” and “The Track Record Gets Worse.” Advocates of privatization claim that, during the 1995 school board elections in Hart ford, the AFT local fielded 20 candidates and spent some $64,000 (as against its opponents’ $6,175) to defeat pro-EAI incumbents. In the Wilkins burg elections, the NEA reportedly out spent its opponents those in favor of turning one elementary school over to outsiders by $40,000 to $8,000.

The early entrants in the privatization sweepstakes have shown no reluctance to mount figurative raids on the file cabinets (and a few waste baskets) of educational research centers and laboratories. They have plainly dipped deeply into the bountiful “good schools” literature on innovative educational practice. Tons of material on school improvement are available for the asking, and the neophyte companies have helped themselves. Electronic holdings appear to be safe for now; many of the items visible in the inventories of the for-profit reformers predate the computer era or seem to come straight from business school textbooks.

Very little in EAl’s instructional/managerial model or in the high-tech emphasis in the handful of schools the Edison Project now operates is fresh or ground-breaking, certainly not to researchers in education. In a uniquely American turnaround, the merchandisers of commercial-style school reform may even wind up selling government-funded research products back to the people whose taxes paid for them in the first place. In fact, some reputable firms have developed lucrative sidelines packaging such materials for commercial sale. And it’s usually legal.

As aspiring privateers have painfully discovered, though, peddling products in and to schools is child’s play compared to pulling off even a partial takeover. Despite their vulnerability and the patent willingness of some communities to pass their school systems’ headaches off to others, schools remain less-than-alluring prospects for the nation’s top corporations. A certain amount of risk always exists in new acquisitions or startups, but our commercial giants are by and large turned off. Although Whittle initially attracted substantial financial participation by Time Warner, among others, much of Edison’s funding has come from overseas — from Great Britain’s Associated Newspaper Holdings and from Philips Electronics of the Netherlands. Time Warner displayed skepticism in the game.²³

* * *

At a 1989 conference of Wyoming’s top 700 movers and shakers, 18 months before he became U.S. secretary of education (after less-than-thorough confirmation hearings by the U.S. Senate revealed that he had become wealthy during his service as governor of Tennessee and later president of the University of Tennessee), Lamar Alexander advanced the then-radical notion that firms such as IBM, Burger King, and Federal Express should hatch and operate schools. Free of degrading politics, nonstop budget hassles, capricious elected school boards, and teacher unions (Public Enemy Number One), these schools would be models for all our tattered school systems to emulate. Once in place, they would thrive and proliferate, and public education would at long last face the competition from which its state-conferred monopoly status had historically sheltered it.

Seven years later, Alexander’s proposition remains what it was in Casper: an intriguing trial balloon that deflates upon close inspection.²⁴ Except for pilot programs, such as Disney’s experimental school project in Celebration, Florida, and the prospect that AT&T and one or two “Baby Bells” will equip boutique schools to pitch their new products, the top echelons of commerce remain underwhelmed by the prospect of creating and running new schools. The instructive collapse of Whittle’s original from-scratch venture seems to have put the kibosh on such risk-taking at least for the interim. But American business is resilient and sometimes unpredictable. Even now someone in a Fortune 500 company’s strategic planning division is probably crunching new numbers to justify a nationwide franchising plan for 5,000 McSchools.

For business to take the big plunge, planners and decision makers must reckon with some formidable, perhaps insurmountable, forces and trends along the school/business divide. Just thinking about the crazy demographics and one-of-a-kind culture of public education could cause otherwise rational investors to weep uncontrollably. Whether starting new schools or, far more likely, negotiating to run existing ones, business people accustomed to reasonably clear formulations and responses will have to get used to behavior that is utterly alien to their experience. Decisions by school communities take a lot of time and a peculiar brand of heavy-duty politicking. Once made, seemingly binding commitments can come unstuck or be stalled at the next school board meeting or election. And long after closure is promised, nothing may happen. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Add the uncertain roles of tenured teacher power, an array of legal and possibly constitutional issues, and the ominous threat of guerrilla action by rogue citizens’ groups — and even the most casehardened industrialists would have to think twice about buying in.

There is a growing, if grudging, acknowledgment that public education is not terminally ill.

Silhouetted against this imposing backdrop are the forces and trends that seem to be driving prosperous corporations in the mid-1990s. More and more, companies are pursuing a “dominate-or-exit” strategy: decide what you do best, stick to it, get rid of the rest, and don’t take on dicey or low-profit endeavors. In the early 1980s General Electric’s John Welch, Jr., who enjoys near-iconic stature in the corporate world, told his managers and stockholders that any part of the company that was not at or very near the top of its market should be sold off.²⁵ This dictum reinforces a winner-take-all mentality that now dominates boardrooms and executive suites. If these are the overall thrusts of today’s business titans, it is difficult to imagine that they would put too high a priority on penetrating the stubborn morass of public education.

Paralleling these impediments to a high-volume takeover are two more arguable and annoyingly elusive factors: the growing, if grudging, acknowledgment that public education is not terminally ill and the ticklish matter of what the mandarins of big business think is the mission of the schools. The first issue, the health of the schools, is always ripe for debate, but most current surveys and test scores, as well as a growing body of upbeat literature, suggest that, while expert outside help is usually welcome and public support tends to be shaky, a huge majority of communities and school systems are doing their job at least satisfactorily.²⁶ Though there is always limitless room for improvement, the schools may be less attractive acquisitions than they would have been in the late 1980s when Whittle burst onto the education scene.

Any contemplation of bringing business into education also rekindles the timeworn argument about whether to prepare young people “to enter the world,” as Benjamin Franklin urged, or to teach them “how to work out their greater happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson preferred.²⁷ Permitting the ethical value system of business anywhere near the schooling of small children would not have pleased Jefferson.

These details have not deterred EAI, the only publicly held company to date to snare contracts for more than a token effort. The trailblazing EAI’s tenacity is commendable, but what a ride it has taken! Whether in Salt Lake City, Duluth, Miami Beach, Baltimore, Hartford, or in numerous other jurisdictions, including the District of Columbia, its odyssey has sparked controversy and unleashed bitter passions. Just about the only aspect of EAI that has escaped scalding criticism is its Tesseract learning system, copied from “a term used in Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time, to describe a fictional corridor for dimensional travel .”²⁸ Tesseract uses the same curriculum as other schools in the district but emphasizes computer-driven instruction along with individual attention and parent participation. At the center of this approach is a “personal education plan” for each student — shades of P.L. 94-142, the federal legislation of 1975 calling for precisely that for children with special needs. Originality is in the eye of the beholder.

If the EAI experience is not yet a full-blown case study of the perils and rewards of turning public schools over to for-profit companies, it is close enough. The two systems with which it has done the most business, Baltimore and Hartford, repeatedly sought huge changes in fully negotiated contracts. Within a three-year period, trading in the company’s stock was suspended twice, as its value per share reached $48.75 before sinking to $3.25. Accusations of financial skullduggery plagued the firm’s top gun, while the chief executive officer (a former school superintendent in St. Paul, Minnesota) and the chief operating officer depart-ed within four months of each other at a time when the Hartford deal was shaky and the Baltimore operation needed close monitoring. Political backing, never to be taken for granted, fluctuated in both cities. Even the pro-EAI mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, withdrew his once-enthusiastic backing as problems multiplied. In fairness to EAI, though, the problems were mostly political and managerial. Though student performance showed little, if any, overall improvement, the EAI schools had become models of cleanliness and student-friendly ambience.

In an almost clinical example of nail-biting brinkmanship, the voters of Hartford remained pro-privatization, by a bare 5-4 margin, in the November 1995 school board election, which focused almost entirely on the EAI issue. The split in the outgoing board had been seven for and two against. Paradoxically, however, the outgoing board had already cut the contract back, and by early 1996 EAI was gone. After laying out some $9 million for equipment, renovation, and other expenses in anticipation of managing six schools and the whole system’s budget in the 1995-96 school year, the company was still arguing with the school system about financial responsibility.²⁹

Such examples are merely illustrative, but they and others like them have dogged EAI throughout its relations with school systems. After two years of the Baltimore contract, the company and the superintendent, Walter Amprey, an unabashed EAI booster, proclaimed gains in student achievement that the Tesseract schools had not actually scored; then they recanted; then they announced a few months later that what had appeared to be major progress was in reality a slight rise in math scores and a drop in reading. Was this a costly wash? Or did the improvement in school climate offset the lackluster academic performance? Can there even be a credible answer to the question? Baltimore’s response came on 22 November 1995, when it terminated its contract with EAI.

* * *

Writing in the New York Times, Alan Ehrenhalt, the editor of the respected nonpartisan magazine Governing, said, “The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation, busting up neighborhoods and communities and eroding traditional standards of personal conduct. . . . It is the tyranny of the market that has destroyed the loyalty of corporations to their communities; customers to their neighborhood merchants; athletes to their local teams; teams to their cities.”³⁰

Even a diluted version of these observations should give school leaders cause to wonder if education is not also at risk of being swept into the maw of the “unfettered market.” With only irregular regulation of the commercial content of materials that are brought into most classrooms every day and with scores of new companies poised to try their hands at running schools as commercial ventures, heady, if unsettling, days may lie ahead for those firms that can adjust to the culture of public schools.

John Mclaughlin of St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, who monitors “the education business” and edits a monthly newsletter called The Education Investor, has established the “El Index” of 25 companies that reflect “the emerging education industry.” This index includes firms as varied as KinderCare Learning Centers, ITT Educational Services, Nobel Education Dynamics, and EAI, the only one that has ever actually contracted to transform public schools into money-makers for a company’s stockholders. Most of the others are producers of materials, providers of specialized services, trainers of various types, or child-care chains. Although their collective performance far outstripped that of the Nasdaq Composite Index in 1995 (a stupendous 65.47% increase, besting Nasdaq’s already stunning 39.9%), the prices of “El Index” stocks have been all over the block, with some gaining as much as 250% in a year and others evanescing into virtual nothingness. This suspicious volatility exposes the youth and still-small size of most of the companies represented as well as their extreme sensitivity to changes in a market that may not reach respectable stability for some years to come.

Undeterred by such swings, two major New York investment houses, Smith Barney and the venerable Lehman Brothers, ran separate, well-attended seminars in 1996 to explore and explain this emerging market. Neither meeting yielded sensational revelations, but participants seemed to share a guardedly optimistic view that forprofit companies could gain access to a larger slice of the $340 billion annual school budget than the roughly $30 billion they currently share. What may have been the most encouraging (or perhaps discouraging) note was sounded by a Lehman Brothers managing director who saw education’s potential as being in the same league as that of health care when the emergence of HMOs and hospital management companies created “enormous opportunities for investors.”

* * *

This nation faces a clear choice, according to the Center for the Study of Commercialism: taking the path of “continued commercialism and wasteful consumption” or building a society “more concerned about personal development and satisfaction of common needs.” While we live with elements of both today, the commercial bunch is claiming the high ground at a time when doubting the blessings of the free market is viewed in some quarters as only slightly less reprehensible than committing treason. To watch the 104th Congress as it tried to wipe out 60 years’ worth of well-meant, if sometimes haphazardly administered, laws and regulations designed to protect consumers was to behold a dedicated effort to return us to a time when restraints on business were cosmetic or nonexistent and our priorities were geared mainly to the needs and demands of mercantilism.

Regrettably, this simplistic code of values could one day become the prevailing wisdom in public education. All but free to press its policies of caveat emptor on struggling schools — especially those in economically distressed areas that welcome help from any source — business has little to fear from educators, parents, or elected officials. Efforts to curb Channel One have kept it out of New York and California for the time being, but it remains a pipeline of the debatable benefits of school-sanctioned commodification across the country — even though half of the major national education organizations oppose it and none consider it to be “a valuable teaching tool or an important part of the school day.” To their credit, the NEA, the National PTA, and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development have taken strong stands against most kinds of commercialism in the classroom.³¹ At the same time, the national and regional associations have no problem with “partnerships” that, as the NEA put it, are “meaningful and noncommercial.”

But there is no consensus within education’s household. Though the national associations appear ideally positioned to suggest tough guidelines to their members, most are far from prosperous themselves and, in various ways, have long since yielded to commercial temptations — some without blinking an eye, others at some cost to their integrity. With memberships sagging in the 1990s and attendance at nominally profitable conventions down or at best unpredictable, some associations have made a habit of accepting (or soliciting) corporate sponsorship of their events, awards, and other activities. They are hardly likely to take uncompromising stands against most kinds of commercial influence. Swimming against the tide, the NEA again deserves special mention, this time for a record that stretches back to 1929, when its Report of the Committee on Propaganda in the Schools set forth the principle that business materials should be excluded from classrooms unless their use was “indispensable to the education of children.”³² Where else outside of religion has a policy statement held up for 67 years?

To try to squeeze the genie of commercialism back into the bottle would be unwise and probably impossible. The business interest in schools as markets is legitimate, and the unselfish help that thousands of companies provide to underequipped schools is nearly always welcome. And while educators are properly grateful, recognition has been too slow to come to employers, tutors, volunteers, and others from local businesses who have donated time, expertise, and much-needed goods.

It is those other folks, the hard-sell merchants who try to shape children into rookie consumers, who must be watched. Sadly, even the most concerned education activists are not sufficiently fearful of the commercial gorilla. Keeping schools on an even financial and academic keel is rightly at the top of their agenda. Being able to exploit these preoccupations frequently enables the marketers to fly under the proverbial radar. It is one of the chief strengths of American business that it knows exactly how to get at markets wherever they may be. And this is what is happening in many of our schools today.

Until the 1990 Milwaukee Conference on Corporate Involvement in Schools and the publication in the same year of Consumer Union’s Selling America’s Kids, commercialism in the schools was not a combustible policy issue. Were it not for the great adventures of EAI and the Edison Project (which evidently performed admirably in four schools in the 1995-96 school year), school/business connections of any kind might never have hit front pages and TV screens across the country. Lacking the immediacy and the dedicated constituencies of such hot-button items as religion in the schools, technology, violence, sexual harassment, or school finance, the impact of commercialism remains a second or third tier issue. Even the time-honored practice of putting together a foundation-backed blue-ribbon commission to study and report on its implications would not guarantee the adoption of standards or principles for facing this growing phenomenon.

Commonsense guidelines do exist, though they are among education’s best-kept secrets. The Milwaukee Conference issued an eight-point set of criteria that constitute “a set of principles to which educators and businesses can subscribe, which will distinguish those areas in which both can cooperate.” The hardly revolutionary main themes of these criteria are that the education of children must come first and that the promotion of commercial products (not necessarily the products themselves) should be banned from the classroom.³³

Such criteria are laudable — as far as they go. In calling for curbs on often outrageous commercialism in the classroom, they also constitute an implicit acknowledgment that, whether we approve or not, marketing of one sort or another is ubiquitous and rooting it out indiscriminately is ill-advised and probably impossible. This is, after all, a nation that welcomes 25,000 new products annually and takes it for granted that each of us watches an average of 100 TV commercials and is assaulted by some 1,500 different messages a day.³⁴ ‘This is a nation where bumper stickers proclaim, “Born to Shop” or “I Shop, Therefore I Am.”

The evangelical pastor Jim Wallis suggests, only half-jokingly, that the successful principles of Alcoholics Anonymous might be followed in meetings that would begin, “Hi, my name is Bill, and I am a materialistic overconsumer.”³⁵ Wallis’ fictitious Bill had realized that commercialism is more than advertising and buying. For many Americans it is a philosophy of life that exalts an affluent lifestyle as the cornerstone of success and happiness. Materialism has become a national addiction. Celebrities embody it as the primary way of belonging.

If commercialism has gone too far, both in the culture and in the classroom, we have no one to blame but ourselves. After all, we accept and glorify it. But our collective response should not be to bash or ban it. Business is a powerful contributor to our national health, as well as to the health of public education, and it does not prosper under onerous regulation. The real mission for teachers, parents, elected officials, the clergy, and representatives of the media is to reaffirm what democracy and civic life are all about and to make sure that the message reaches children in the classroom. A key component of that message is that we must above all be responsible citizens and not gluttonous, unthinking consumers.

1. See Alfie Kohn, “Save Our Schools . . . from Business,” Schoo1 Administrator, October 1995, 36.
2. Reported in P. Michael Timpane and Laurie Miller McNeil!, Business Impact on Education and Child Development Reform (New York: Committee for Economic Development, 1991), p. 11.
3. John Watson, “The Academy in Peril,” In These Times, 18 September 1995, p. 40; and Lawrence C. Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower (Boston: South End Press, 1995).
4. Milt Freudenheim, “A Doting Uncle Cuts Back, and a City Feels the Pinch,” New York Times, 8 October 1995, 3, p. 1. My reference to Eastman is not meant to overlook the generosity of the Annenberg Foundation, whose $500 million contribution to school reform in the 1990s is being distributed across the country rather than in a single community, as was the case with Eastman’s donations.
5. Jonathan Rowe, “This Smut’s for You,” Washington Monthly, June 1995, 53.
6. Michael Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur, Marketing Madness: A Survival Guide for a Consumer Society (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), p. 3.
7. Ellen Wartella, “The Commercialization of Youth: Channel One in Context,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 1995, 448.
8. Captive Kids: Commercial Pressures on Kids at School (Yonkers, Y.: Consumers Union Education Services, 1995); and Jacobson and Mazur, op. cit.
9. James McNeal, “The Littlest Shoppers,” American Demographics, February 1992, pp. 48-50.
10. David Shenk, “The Pedagogy of Pasta Sauce,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1995, pp. 52-53.
11. Captive Kids, 47.
12. With $11 million worth of advertising between January and July of 1995, Procter & Gamble was the principal sponsor of the sleazy television talk shows of Jenny Jones and Ricki See John Leo, “Putting the Money Where the Trash Is,” Washington Times, 9 November 1995, p. A-l7.
13. Howard Kurtz, “Weekly Reader Puffing for To­bacco?,” Washington Post, 2 November 1995, p. C-1.
14. Jessica Portner, “Study Chides Weekly Readers Tobacco Coverage,” Education Week, 15 November 1995, 10.
15. John Goodman and Guy W. Laveman, “Does Privatization Serve the Public Interest?,” Harvard Business Review, November/December 1991, p. 2b.
16. Chester Finn, Jr.. and Diane Ravitch, Education Reform, 1994-1995 (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1995), p. 27.
17. Elliot Sclar, “Public Service Privatization: Ideology or Economics?,” Dissent, Summer 1994, 330.
18. Milton Friedman, “School Change Begins with Free Enterprise,” School Administrator, August 1995, 44.
19. Interview with Alex Molnar, 30 August
20. Education Week and the daily newspapers in New York City, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Hartford have done a superior job of reporting on these developments and placing them in For a thorough and authoritative analysis of school privatization, see Craig E. Richards, Rima Shore, and Max Sawicky, Risky Business: Private Management of Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1996).
21. Jean Johnson et al., Assignment Incomplete: The Unfinished Business of Education (New York: Public Agenda, 1995), p. 15.
22. John lmmerwahr et al., The Broken Contract: Connecticut Citizens Look at Public Education (New York: Public Agenda, 1994), 26. In this well-designed survey, Public Agenda polled community activists, educators, and the general public in an effort to gauge the sentiments of an informed audience.
23. Keith Kelly, “Whittle’s Bridges Falling Down,” Advertising Age, 18 July 1994, pp. 1, 8.
24. Early in his tour as secretary, Lamar Alexander proposed that Congress appropriate $1 million to each of the nation’s 435 congressional districts and $2 million to each state (thereby taki ng care of any senators who might have felt slighted) to start up any kind of totally new school. The idea died a quick death.
25. Stephen Pearlstein, “Big Retailers Rewrite Rules of Competition,” Washington Post, 13 November 1995, p. The value of General Electric stock rose more than 41.2% in 1995.
26. In addition to the annual Bracey Reports in the Kappan and the analyses of numerous other researchers, see two recent examples: David Berliner and Bruce ). Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995); and Mike Rose, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995). See also Stanley M. Elam, Lowell C. Rose, and Alec M. Gallup, “The 28th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 1996, pp. 41-59.
27. Nicholas Lemann, “Grading the Public Schools,” New York Times Book Review, 12 November 1995, 14.
28. Robert Sela, “The Private Management of Public Schools,” Issues in Brief, National Association of State Boards of Education, September 1994, 6.
29. Mark Walsh, “Despite Election Win, EAi’s Business Picture Far from Bright,” Education Week, 15 November 1995, 14.
30. Alan Ehrenhalt, “No Conservatives Need Apply,” New York Times, 19 November 1995, p. E-15.
31. Mary W. Tabor, “Investors Look to Education as Possibility for High Flier,” New York Times, 29 May 1996, p. B-9.
32. Captive Kids, 34. 33. Ibid., pp. 34-35.
33. Michael Weiss, Latitudes and Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 7.
34. Jim Wallis, The Soul of Politics (New York: New Press/Orbit, 1994), p.