If you’re a supporter of public education, it has been a tough summer. And if you, like me, have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of school privatization, it’s impossible to ignore the sense that the future we’ve been warning about has arrived.
Five years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote a book called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School that culminated in a sort of Black Mirror chapter titled, “Education, à la Carte.” In it, we described how the ultimate vision of school-privatization advocates wasn’t simply to shift the nation’s youngsters into private schools but to “unbundle” education into a vast array of products for consumers to purchase on Amazon-like exchanges. Lest you think we were exaggerating, turn your attention to Florida, where, as Sue Woltanski documents, Project Unbundle has arrived with a vengeance.
Florida, as usual, is slightly ahead of the curve. But the accelerating collapse of public schools in the state, chronicled in a recent New York Times story pushed along by the now-universal school-voucher program will, soon be coming to a state near you. The Times piece was just one of many “Are public schools over?” stories to drop in recent weeks. The Washington Post version headed to Arizona to peer beneath the hood of the GOP vision for education; it entails replacing public schools with “a marketplace of school options.” Then there was the annual PDK survey of attitudes toward public education, which found both sinking approval of the nation’s schools (with the usual exception for local schools) and rising warmth toward the idea of private-school vouchers. As legal scholar Derek Black put it, “The deep well of…
Auteur: Jennifer C. Berkshire
