NEW YORK
Community vote cans schools for profit
By Paddy
Colligan
New York
In late March, parents voted down a proposal by the New York
Board of Education to turn five city elementary and middle
schools over to the for-profit Edison Corporation.
Some 2,200 parents voted, 80 percent of them against the
private takeover of public schools. It was a major defeat for
the national campaign to present privatization as a solution
for troubled schools.
Edison is the biggest of several private managers of public
schools. While their own public-relations departments portray
them as innovative, dedicated saviors of education, these
companies are strictly for-profit operations responsible to
their stockholders for their performance.
Edison's stock is traded on the NASDAQ. Its board of
directors, including top executives, holds about 20 percent of
its stock.
Major Wall Street institutions like J.P. Morgan SLIC and
U.S. Trust Co. of New York hold millions of additional
shares.
The schools run by these for-profit companies differ from
traditional private schools in that tuition remains the
responsibility of local governments rather than the students.
For the five schools involved in the New York venture, Edison
would have received $250 million to carry out the
conversion.
The public schools involved receive about $10,000 per
student, or a total of $50 million a year for the current
combined enrollment of 5,000 students.
Edison and similar companies promise to both improve
schooling and cut costs. Since as a corporation Edison has yet
to show a profit, it has had nothing to share with the boards
to reduce costs.
In schooling too, Edison is short on success stories. The
company has operated over 100 formerly public schools located
in several states. It claims to have raised test scores in some
of its schools, but parents, teachers and community school
boards have disputed its methods.
An independent study by Western Michigan University
determined that student performance has been the same or
dropped in seven of the 10 Edison schools it reviewed.
San Francisco, Baltimore
A report by the San Francisco Unified School District issued
the last week of March charged that by using discriminatory
practices and pressure, Edison pushed low-performing students
out of its school in San Francisco in order to appear to have
raised student test scores. The next day the San Francisco
Board of Education terminated Edison's contract early, though
Edison has appealed to the California state authorities.
The Maryland State Board of Education has a contract with
Edison to run three low-performing schools in Baltimore. At a
time when all eyes are on such experiments and Edison is trying
very hard to establish the success of its role in running
troubled schools, the state board seems determined to make
Edison look good.
Without fanfare the Board has guaranteed adequate
expenditures for 85 disadvantaged Baltimore students who need
intensive--and costly--special education services. All 85
attend the schools run by Edison.
Services for students with similar problems are not funded
in the rest of Baltimore's public schools.
Edison's board chair is Benno Schmidt. In 1997 Schmidt led a
commission that ended remediation in the senior colleges of the
City University of New York. Two years later New York Gov.
George Pataki made Schmidt vice-chair of CUNY's board of
trustees.
Schmidt's report claimed that ending remediation at CUNY
would improve the system's reputation. Yet many highly
respected private institutions across the country offer such
classes to teach basic subjects not mastered before college
entrance.
Complex social issues behind failing schools
There are schools that fail to educate children in many
places, urban and rural, in the United States. Critics point
fingers of blame at parents, teachers, administrators,
students, neighborhoods, and the general social malaise.
Many U.S. schools are short on staff, resources and often
space. High-school teachers in New York, for example, often
have more than the contractual limit of 34 students in each of
the four classes they teach. There are real physical
constraints on how much attention one teacher can give to each
student in a crowded classroom.
One solution to this would appear pretty simple: smaller
classes. Funds could be made available to hire more teachers
and build more classrooms, more schools, rather than privatize
to siphon off already scarce resources.
But there are more problems affecting students' lives than
could ever be addressed in school. Outside of school, students
exist in the real world of early 21st-century America--they
face poverty, drugs, social alienation, unemployment,
homelessness, police violence, racism, sexism, and lesbian,
gay, bi and trans oppression. Some students have serious
emotional, physical and learning disabilities. Some are held
back by past years of poor education. Many new immigrants lack
adequate English-language abilities.
Many students face a combination of issues that are
heartbreaking and enraging. It is unrealistic to ever expect
schools to be able to address all this. Adding the profit
motive will not solve any of them.
And that's the conclusion a coalition of activists from the
United Federation of Teachers, community organizers from ACORN
and parents came to in order to defeat Edison's attempt to
privatize five of New York's schools.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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