The Other kind of private school

I've been reading an article in The Nation about Community Education Partners, a corporation that sets up alternative schools for "disruptive and low-performing students." CEP gets paid in the range of $9,000 to $13,000 per student per year, often twice what the public schools receive per pupil, but yet it pays its teachers less than the public schools. After all, CEP is a private corporation that expects to make a profit, which it sets about doing by raising its prices and slashing quality. As a private school, it is not subject to No Child Left Behind and in fact has no apparent "accountability" requirements, no test scores to worry about, no Adequate Yearly Progress goals to meet.

The catch is, CEP is paid by taxpayers. The money which would have gone to the public schools for that pupil is instead sent to the corporation, with the remaining cost being picked up by state government.

I suppose this sort of rip-off was inevitable. After the military and social security, the next biggest governmental program is public education (though of course most of the money is from local and state governments, not the feds). The wealthy always want to know how to funnel some of that taxpayer money into their own coffers. On the military front this is increasingly accomplished by the likes of Lockheed Martin and Kellogg, Brown, & Root, while on the Social Security front, Bush has a plan to channel money straight out of our paychecks into Wall Street. The push to privatize public education is just another attempt at a straight money grab, from your property taxes to their executives' bank accounts. This is perhaps the real purpose of NCLB, to encourage privatization by punishing public schools while exempting alternative private schools. Coming from the "free markets" party, this is a bit rich, since it's obviously not a level playing field or a fair competition between public schools subjected to NCLB and publically-funded private schools.

But some folks would still find all this acceptable if the CEP schools were effective. Unfortunately, they are not. When CEP first started up in Houston, there was a period where they were using corrections officers as teachers (unbelievable...). Two different professional educators assessed CEP in Houston and found that student performance deteriorated the longer they remained in a CEP school. The Dallas school district broke its 5-year contract with CEP a couple of years early, citing the reliance on non-certified and unqualified teachers and poor student academic performance.

The CEP schools are filled with disproportionately black and Latino students, and I personally object to them because they are run as soft prisons, with students required to remove shoes and jackets and go through a security checkpoint each day. Students cannot bring money to school, have no opportunity to mingle or chat with one another, virtually never leave the classroom (often these schools are set up in former Wal-Marts or literal warehouses), are escorted to the bathrooms in small groups, cannot take school materials out of the school, and so on. A certain racism is involved here, as I have a hard time picturing a similar acceptance of white students being treated as criminals, mainly because they have poor grades in school.

In Atlanta, a grassroots objection to CEP schools has arisen:

CEP's Atlanta school was the target of community organizing in early 2005 after the Atlanta Voice, a black newspaper, ran a series exposing serious inadequacies at the CEP school. The articles were based on the accounts of former CEP principal Mitchell and of a former teacher. "It became a dump for human waste," Mitchell said....

Atlanta schools deputy superintendent Kathy Augustine called Mitchell "disgruntled." She said she was unaware that students could not take books home, that there was no homework or that there was a teacher shortage. "I think we're improving," Augustine said....

In Philadelphia:

In March Philadelphia released an evaluation of CEP's two schools conducted by researchers at Temple University.... In evaluating student academic growth, the report relied entirely on CEP's own Plato data, which claim astounding gains of three to four "grade levels" in reading and math for students who spend 180 days at CEP--but there's no indication of how many students actually stay that long. The school district itself partakes of the statistical spin. Paul Socolar, editor of Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an independent newspaper, noted that in 2004 the district issued a CEP fact sheet that excluded CEP scores on the statewide standardized test for eighth graders, which had gone down; in January of this year the district excluded results for CEP eleventh graders, which had gone down. "It's a total manipulation of data," Socolar said. And as for meeting the AYP standards, CEP's Philly schools don't.

So public schools not meeting AYP standards two years in a row begin to lose funding, while CEP schools continue to suck in $11,000 per pupil per year (that's the figure in Philly, where public schools receive $7,000 per pupil) with no accountability whatsoever.

State governments presumably pick up the tab for CEP schools because they insure that a greater proportion of public school districts can meet AYP and other NCLB requirements, insuring more federal funding. Without CEP to absorb poor test takers, lost federal funding could amount to just as much money (I have no idea, I am speculating here). In any case, individual schools in this NCLB climate of fear certainly have incentives to ship the worst students off to alternative environments.

NCLB is in fact the perfect privatization plan. It creates an incentive for alternative private schools, punishes traditional non-profit public schools, funnels taxpayer money to testing outfits (who also, frequently, produce corresponding textbooks and study materials), and ultimately channels more and more public money into private hands. Communities aren't necessarily up in arms that private schools pay teachers less, then suffer resulting staff shortages and unqualified instructors, and therefore do a disservice to their students. The sinister thing about NCLB is that it sweeps out the most disadvantaged students, with fewest resources and least visibility in the media, into these private warehouses where students' knowledge actually decreases over time.

Previous privatization efforts such as the Edison schools failed because they targeted children from middle- or upper middle-class families, and when they were shown to be no better than public schools, the whole idea sort of fizzled out. Now we have a situation where students can be pushed out by a hundred and one means (disciplinary action or the threat of such, for instance).

Round Two is privatization not through slick marketing, but through preying upon the disadvantaged.