Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have again touched on the issue of privatizing public schools in NYC, aka Mayor Bloomberg’s demolition derby. Ravitch wonders where the charter school movement is heading:

We keep alluding to the “Tough Choices or Tough Times” report….In my view, the most radical proposal of that commission was that every public school should be operated by an “independent contractor.” Maybe they meant groups of teachers, but I rather think they meant the big chains of charter school operators that have been growing by leaps and bounds.

Meier responded that a voting public can grow weary of reacting to alarms about “crises” and “emergencies,” and lose the will to resist, relinquishing control to “corporate giants.”

I’m paying attention to the privatization discussion after reading an interview with Jeremy Scahill, in which he reported the activities of a private US security force “doing business” in Iraq:

…what these companies do is they give the Bush administration extraordinary political cover. Their deaths don’t get counted, their injuries don’t get counted, their crimes don’t get reported, they don’t get investigated, they don’t get prosecuted….the Bush administration has given them almost total free-for-all environment where there’s no accountability, there’s no oversight, there’s no effective laws governing their presence there.

Blackwater CEO, Erik Prince says that private security forces are “more efficient than the military” and that “Blackwater understands the value to the government of one-stop shopping.” Scahill tells a story of corporate greed and official silence over the deaths of four civilian contractors in Fallujah.

Scahill notes that heavy reliance on mercenary forces supplants the need to marshall domestic support for this foreign policy debacle, allowing the president freedom to pursue this unpopular foreign adventure. More at The Nation, on NPR’s Fresh Air, and Democracy Now.

I’d heard about the private security forces, but I didn’t know the extent to which they were deployed, or the license they were given.

This may be an unwarranted leap, but I wonder whether the same dangers to democratic processes apply to privatizing public education. Like many people, I’ve assumed that NCLB reforms were (mistakenly) intended to improve educational outcomes. But test scores and accountability appear to be only a small part of a larger plan. The Educator Roundtable recently posted this quote about educational entrepreneurship:

“There are steps that would make K-12 schooling more attractive to for-profit investment, triggering a significant infusion of money to support research, development and creative problem-solving. For one, imposing clear standards for judging educational effectiveness would reassure investors that ventures will be less subject to political brickbats and better positioned to succeed if demonstrably effective. A more performance-based environment enables investors to assess risk in a more informed, rational manner (Educational Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, Possibilities, edited by Fredreck M Hess, p 252).

Aren’t ‘political brickbats’ what we like to think of as the democratic process? Hang onto your brickbats.