State budget enabling education industrial complex

Following up on an earlier piece by William Phillis, Ohio E & A

Remember the news articles about military contractors charging the military $100 for a $2.98 hammer and $600 for toilet seats and $3,000 for a coffeemaker? The military is a government function but the size of the defense budget attracted lots of private operators to the table. Contractors developed cozy relationships and deals with government officials which cost the taxpayers heavily.

The size of America's collective education budget has gotten the attention of private operators in recent years. Much of the charter school money in Ohio goes to for-profit operators. State officials have allowed the "nonprofit" charters to be managed by companies whose bottom line seems to be profit-at any cost.

Campaign contributions from for-profit charter operators may be the reason that Ohio's charter school laws are, for the most part, not rational.

The corporate operation of charter schools may be just the tip of the iceberg. Pearson, the world's largest education company has operations throughout the world. This company continues to commercialize education by suggesting that every teacher and student in the USA is a potential customer. Pearson has been buying up the competition. This company is engaged in all facets of education-testing of students and teachers, virtual schools, textbooks, digital texts, online learning tools, etc.

The privatization movement, (i.e.) the Education Industrial Complex, seeks to eliminate the current practice that communities, through their boards of education, operate their schools for the benefit of all their students. The greatest discovery of mankind-the public common school-is being replaced. Unfortunately, state officials throughout the nation, particularly in Ohio, are enabling the demise of the public common school system through enactment of policies that open the door to the complete privatization of education.

As the privatization movement blossoms, there will be fierce competition among the private schools, nonprofit charters, corporate charters and huge education groups like Pearson. In this environment, the losers will be taxpayers, students and all who cherish democracy.

Voucher welfare for big business

State Representatives Brenner, Patmon, Driehaus, Barnes, Butler, Maag, Newbold, Henne, Yuko, Young, Sears, Wachtmann, McClain, Huffman, Boose, Adams, J., Beck, Uecker, Stebelton, and Blessing have introduced HB242 which will "authorize nonrefundable tax credits for donations to nonprofit entities providing scholarships to low-income students enrolling in chartered nonpublic schools".

According to LSC the bill will;

• Allow a nonrefundable credit against the income tax or certain business taxes for taxpayers who donate to nonprofit educational scholarship organizations that provide scholarships to lower-income students attending chartered nonpublic schools.
• Authorize annual credits of up to $1,000 for individuals and $2,500 for joint filers, if the individual or joint filer is not a pass-through entity owner, and up to $300,000 for other taxpayers.
• Limit the total amount of such credits to $20 million in fiscal year 2010, and increases the credit ceiling each year by 20% over the previous year's ceiling if the previous year's ceiling is reached.
• Prohibit credits for donations designated for a specific child.

There is nothing in the bill however the limit the institution where the money can flow to. One can easily see the scenario where a "business" donates the maximum $300,000 to a fund, and gets a full tax credit for that amount - i.e. free money - and that business donation flows right back to a specific school.

In effect this bill simply expands the pool of voucher money by another $20 million - with a provision that it can grow by an additional 20% each year after the first.

This bill is nothing more than corporate welfare for the donors and the recipient private schools. Tax payers dollars should be used to fund public schools. That is the constitutional duty of the legislature, not to dole out precious money to private enterprise.

How to Buy and Sell School Reform

If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions.

Devolution of a Movement

For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teacher’s worth based on student test scores. Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called “advocacy”) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010 critics of the movement saw “reform-think” dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.

Ed reformers spend at least a half-billion dollars a year in private money, whereas government expenditures on K-12 schooling are about $525 billion a year. Nevertheless, a half-billion dollars in discretionary money yields great leverage when budgets are consumed by ordinary expenses. But the reformers—even titanic Bill and Melinda Gates—see themselves as competing with too little against existing government policies. Hence, to revolutionize public education, which is largely under state and local jurisdiction, reformers must get state and local governments to adopt their agenda as basic policy; they must counter the teachers’ unions’ political clout. To this end, ed reformers are shifting major resources—staff and money—into state and local campaigns for candidates and legislation.

Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for Children ($5.2 million from Gates, 2003-2011), sums up the thinking: “We’ve learned the hard way that if you want to have the clout needed to change policies for kids, you have to help politicians get elected. It’s about money, money, money” (Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2010).*

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