The Privatization of Public Education
2016 Reading List

Page

Books about the Privatization of Public Education 2

  • David W. Hursh, 2016: The End of Public Schools... 2
  • Megan E. Tomkins-Stange, 2016: Policy Patrons... 2
  • Wayne Au; Joseph Ferrare(Eds.), 2015: Mapping Corporate Education Reform... 2
  • Diane Ravitch, 2014: Reign of Error... 3
  • Kristen L. Buras, 2010: Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City... 3
  • Lois Weiner; Mary Compton, 2008: The Global Assault on Teaching... 3
  • Dave Hill (Editor), 2008: Contesting Neoliberal Education... 4
  • Alfie Kohn, 2002: Education, Inc.,... 4
  • Gerald Bracey, 2001: The War Against America's Public Schools... 5

Books Related to the Privatization of Public Education 6

  • Jesse Hagopian, 2014: More than a Score... 6
  • Christopher Tienken; Donald Orlich, 2013: The School Reform Landscape... 6
  • Wayne Au, 2010: Unequal By Design... 7
  • Sharon L. Nichols; David C. Berliner, 2007: Collateral Damage... 7
  • David Berliner; B.J. Biddle, 1995: The Manufactured Crisis... 7

Articles about the Privatization of Public Education 8

  • Charles P.Pierce, 9/19/16: Don’t Believe the Charter School Hype: ...it’s all about profits. 8
  • Jeff Bryant, 7/20/16: Charter Schools and the Waltons... 8
  • Peter Greene, 6/23/16: Privatizing Primer 8
  • Kristen Steele, 7/14/15: Education—the Next Corporate Frontier 8
  • Lee Fang, 9/25/14: Venture Capitalists Poised to ‘Disrupt’ Everything About the Ed Market 8
  • Gordon Lafer, 4/24/14: Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education Than Rich Kids?... 9
  • Anna Simonton, 12/5/13: Wall Street is designing the future of public ed as a $-making machine 9
  • Ruth Conniff, 5/8/13: How School Privatizers Buy Elections10
  • Lois Weiner, 2012: Privatizing Public Education: The Neoliberal Model 10
  • Julie Underwood; Julie Mead, 3/12: A Smart ALEC Threatens Public Education... 10
  • Joanne Barkan, Winter 2011: Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools 10
  • David Sirota, 9/12/11: The bait and switch of school “reform”... 11
  • Danny Weil, 11/24/09: Neo-liberalism: The Leveraging of Charter Schools w/ Public and Private Funds 11

Exposing How Privatization of Public Education is Done, Step by Step 12

  • Peter Greene, Updated 6/23/16: Privatizing Primer 12

BOOKS ABOUT THE PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

The End of Public Schools: The Corporate Reform Agenda to Privatize Education

David W. Hursh, 2016

Publisher description:

  • “The End of Public Schools analyzes the effect of foundations, corporations, and non-governmental organizations on the rise of neoliberal principles in public education. ...(I)t describes how specific policies that limit public control are advanced across all levels. Informed by a thorough understanding of issues such as standardized testing, teacher tenure, and charter schools, David Hursh provides a political and pedagogical critique of the current school reform movement, as well details about the increasing resistance efforts on the part of parents, teachers, and the general public.”

Chapter 1:

  • “...(C)urrent reforms have transformed the purpose of schooling, teaching, and learning. The curriculum is being reduced to what will be tested, teaching to implementing lessons designed to resemble the test questions and often scripted by someone else, and learning reduced to test taking strategies and memorizing for the test. Good teachers are retiring early or finding other jobs and enrollments in teacher education programs are declining...”
  • “... (W)e can continue pursuing the neoliberal agenda that aims to create a society in which decisions about how we are to live are made through unregulated markets, with a diminished governmental role as what was once public is privatized, schools focus on holding students and teachers accountable [through a system] in which students and teachers are infinitely examined… and the rich and powerful become even more so. (Or we can pursue an) ...agenda in which the government plays its required role in the creation and development of markets, provides services that are best provided through the government, creates schools as learning communities that support the development of trusting and caring relationships, and aims to create democratic institutions and structures so that everyone has opportunities to participate in democratic processes...”

Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence
Megan E. Tompkins-Stange, 2016

Publisher’s Description:

  • “Policy Patrons offers a rare behind-the-scenes view of decision making inside four influential education philanthropies: the Ford Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The outcome is an intriguing, thought-provoking look at the impact of current philanthropic efforts on education. ... The picture that emerges reveals important differences in the strategies and values of the more established foundations vis-à-vis the newer, more activist foundations—differences that have a significant impact on education policy and practice, and have important implications for democratic decision making...”

Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policy Networks in the Neoliberal State

Wayne Au and Joseph Ferrare, Eds., 2015

Reviews:

  • Wayne Au and Joseph Ferrare’s collection charts the upward redistribution of money, influence, data and governance from public education into private [white] hands, with brilliant, multi-site network analyses. A "must read" for pre-service and contemporary educators, parents, organizers and school board members who are being recruited into reform efforts, this book reveals the slow violence of privatization, displaying the hollowing carcasses of public institutions and documenting the profoundly uneven collateral consequences. --Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology and Urban Education, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
  • Mapping Corporate Education Reform is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the neoliberal state’s shift from government to governance has transferred democratic control of public education to corporate interests. This book’s rich case studies concretely map the networks of powerful individuals and organizations that are now making key education policy decisions in favor of education markets, as well as the broader neoliberal restructuring of public education around the world. --Pauline Lipman, Professor of Educational Policy Studies, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago

Reign of Error:The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

Diane Ravitch, 2014

Publisher’s Description:

  • “From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, an incisive, comprehensive look at today’s American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools. In a chapter-by-chapter breakdown she puts forth a plan for what can be done to preserve and improve our public schools. She makes clear what is right about U.S. education, how policy makers are failing to address the root causes of educational failure, and how we can fix it.

Pedagogy, Policy, and the Privatized City: Stories of Dispossession and Defiance from New Orleans

Kristen L. Buras, 2010

Publisher’s Description:

  • “In cities across the nation, communities of color find themselves resisting state disinvestment and the politics of dispossession. ‘Students at the Center’, a writing initiative based in several New Orleans high schools, takes on this struggle through a close examination of race and schools. The book builds on the powerful stories of marginalized youth and their teachers who contest the policies that are destructive to their communities: decentralization, charter schools, market-based educational choice, teachers union-busting, mixed-income housing, and urban redevelopment. Striking commentaries from the foremost scholars of the day explore the wider implications of these stories for pedagogy and educational policy in schools across the United States and the globe. Most importantly, this book reveals what must be done to challenge oppressive conditions and democratize our schools by troubling the vision of city elites who seek to elide students' histories, privatize their schools, and reinvent their neighborhoods.”

The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and their Unions: Stories for Resistance

Lois Weiner and Mary Compton (Eds.), 2008

Publisher’s Description:

  • “Public education's character is increasingly under assault as privatization of education is advanced. This collection of essays by noted scholars, teacher activists, and teacher's union leaders from around the world fuses insights with background and analysis to make real the goal of quality education for all the world's children.”

Chapter Two: ‘Remaking the World’: Neo-liberalism and the Transformation of Education and Teachers’ Labour (Susan L. Robertson

  • “In the introduction to his short book on a brief history of neo-liberalism, David Harvey

(2005: 1) begins by arguing: “Future historians may well look upon the years 1978-80 as a

revolutionary turning point in the world’s social and economic history”...Three decades later, few disagree that the globalisation of a neo-liberal utopia... has become hegemonic. In doing so, its promoters have remade the world, including the world of education. Out with the collective and welfare; in with the individual and freedom. This tectonic shift has transformed how we talk about education, teachers and learners, unions, parents’ groups and professional associations. In short, it has altered the conditions for knowledge production, along with the spaces and sites for claims-making around education. With education yoked more closely to national and regional economies, schools and universities are now universally mandated to (efficiently and effectively) create the new breed of entrepreneurs and innovators; the value-driven minds who will spearhead the battle for global markets and consumers, and a bigger share of the spoils.Education, once untrammelled virgin territory, is also being initiated into the world of property rights, markets, trade and rating agencies (Molnar, 2006; Hentschke, 2006; Ford, 2006; Hatcher, 2006); a pre-pubescent services sector that offers the promise of wealth creation in a utopia of endless wealth creation (Bourdieu, 1998).

  • “...A core argument of this paper is thatthe mobilisation of neo-liberal ideas for reorganizing societies and social relations, including the key institutions involved in social reproduction (schools), is a class project with three key aims:
  1. the redistribution of wealth upward to the ruling elites through new structures of governance;
  2. transformation of education systems so that the production of workers for the economy is the primary mandate; and
  3. (the) breaking down of education as a public sector monopoly, opening it up to strategic investment by for profit firms.
  • “To be realised, all three aims must break down the institutionalised interests of teachers, teacher unions, and fractions of civil society who have supported the idea of education as a public good and public sector, and as an intrinsic element of the state-civil society social contract...”

Contesting Neoliberal Education: Public Resistance and Collective Advance

Dave Hill(Editor), 2008

Publisher’s Description:

  • “Neoliberal education policies have privatised, marketised, decentralized, controlled and surveilled, managed according to the business and control principles of new public managerialism, attacked the rights and conditions of education workers, and resulted in a loss of democracy, critique and equality of access and outcome. This book, written by an impressive international array of scholars and activists, explores the mechanisms and ideologies behind neoliberal education, while evaluating and promoting resistance on a local, national and global level.Chapters examine the activities and impacts of the arguably socialist revolution in Venezuela, the Porto Alegre democratic community experimental model in Brazil, the activities of the Rouge Forum of democratic socialist teachers and educators in the USA, Public Service International, resistance movements against the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), and trade union and social movement and community/parental opposition to neoliberal education policies in Britain and in Latin America.”

Education Inc., Turning Learning into a Business

Alfie Kohn, 2002
Publisher’s Description:

  • “While educators want their students to grow into thoughtful and curious people, the overriding objective of corporations is to maximize their own profits. From that fact alone we can predict what is likely to happen to the nature and purposes of our schools when business becomes involved in the education of our children. This unique and timely anthology chronicles the extent of that involvement, along with the troubling consequences it has already brought.

Author Alfie Kohn and professor of education Patrick Shannon have assembled a provocative collection of articles, including

  • an analysis of the racial implications of voucher programs
  • vivid accounts of how schoolchildren are targeted by advertisers
  • descriptions of how corporate propaganda is insinuated into classroom curriculums
  • an expose of the political connections enjoyed by giant textbook and test publishers
  • a critical look at the process whereby teachers are turned into grant writers.

This book builds a convincing case against those who see children as "customers" or "workers"-and those who would turn learning into a business. As Kohn notes, "[Corporations] are not shy about trying to make over the schools in their own image. It's up to the rest of us to firmly tell them to mind their own businesses."”

The War against America's Public Schools: Privatizing Schools, Commercializing Education

Gerald Bracey, 2001
Publisher’s Description:

  • “This book provides a comprehensive view of forces such as charters, vouchers, educational management organizations (EMO's), and private schools that are altering the future of public education. Gerald Bracey describes why Americans are nervous about their public schools and examines whether their anxieties are justified. In the first section, the book looks at education reform efforts such as privatization. It then concludes with an overview and analysis of how American schools actually perform on achievement tests and international measures. In the second half of the book, Bracey explores the alternatives to public schools that have sprung up in recent years.”

BOOKS RELATED TO THE PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Authoritative books on the use of high stakes testing, etc., against public schools to serve privatization schemes.

More than a Score, Uprising Against High Stakes Tests
Jesse Hagopian, 2014

Publisher’s Description:

  • “For too long so-called education reformers, mostly billionaires, politicians, and others with little or no background in teaching, have gotten away with using standardized testing to punish our nation’s youth and educators. Now, across the country, students are walking out, parents are opting their children out, and teachers are refusing to administer these detrimental exams. In fact, the “reformers” today find themselves facing the largest revolt in US history against high-stakes, standardized testing. More Than a Score is a collection of essays, poems, speeches, and interviews—accounts of personal courage and trenchant insights—from frontline fighters who are defying the corporate education reformers, often at great personal and professional risk, and fueling a national movement to reclaim and transform public education. Along with the voices of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and grassroots education activists, the book features renowned education researchers and advocates, including Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Karen Lewis, Carol Burris, and Mark Naison.”

The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth & Lies

Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich, 2013

Publisher’s Description:

  • “In The School Reform Landscape: Fear, Mythologies, and Lies, the authors take an in-depth and controversial look at school reform since the launch of Sputnik. They scrutinize school reform events, proposals, and policies from the last 60 years through the lens of critical social theory and examine the ongoing tensions between the need to keep a vibrant unitary system of public education and the ongoing assault by corporate and elite interests in creating a dual system. Some of events, proposals, and policies critiqued include the Sputnik myth, A Nation At Risk, No Child Left Behind, the lies of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, and other common reform schemes. The authors provide an evidence-based contrarian view of the free-market reform ideas and pierce the veil of the new reform policies to find that they are built not upon empirical evidence, but instead rest solidly on foundations of myth, fear, and lies. Ideas for a new set of reform policies, based on empirical evidence and supportive of a unitary, democratic system of education are presented.

Unequal by Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality

Wayne Au, 2010

Publisher’s Description:

  • “(The book) critically examines high-stakes standardized testing in order to illuminate what is really at stake for students, teachers, and communities negatively affected by such testing. This thoughtful analysis traces standardized testing’s origins in the Eugenics and Social Efficiency movements of the late 19th and early 20th century through its current use as the central tool for national educational reform via No Child Left Behind. By exploring historical, social, economic, and educational aspects of testing, author Wayne Au demonstrates that these tests are not only premised on the creation of inequality, but that their structures are inextricably intertwined with social inequalities that exist outside of schools.”

Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools

Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner, 2007

Publisher’s Description:

  • “Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system.

For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue and powerful ammunition for opponents of high-stakes tests. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell’s Law, which posits that the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted—and the more likely it is that the use of the indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.”