Stealth privatization

Suppose that a company provided a school with textbooks, curriculum, guidance for teachers, grades, and the criteria used to award diplomas. Suppose that, nationwide, revenues from similar products and services were in the billions of dollars per year. Would we consider that school to be privatized?

If that sounds like privatization to you, then many American schools have indeed been privatized, right under our noses. The three biggest educational testing services, which account for close to 100% of all standardized tests administered in the US, are Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin (source).

I don't know about you, but I recognize those names. Harcourt? McGraw-Hill? Houghton-Mifflin? Those were the names written on the spines of my public school textbooks.

Textbook publishers don't merely provide passive information, to be used as the schools and teachers see fit. They provide discussion topics, summaries and highlights, selected vocabulary terms, and homework sets-- as well as (in the teacher's guide) quizzes, lecture suggestions and classroom activities. John Gatto has written about how "school editions" of literary works control classroom learning:

Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick I realized that the school edition wasn't a real book at all but a kind of disguised indoctrination. It provided all the questions... [and] if you read those questions, let alone answered them, there would be no chance ever again for a private exchange between you and Melville.

The editors of the school edition had provided a package of prefabricated questions and over a hundred chapter-by-chapter abstracts and interpretations of their own. If I didn't assign them the kids wanted to know why, and unless everyone duly parroted the party line set down by the book editor, those used to getting high marks became scared and angry.

There was no avoiding the conclusion that the school text of Moby Dick had been subtly denatured and was worse than useless -- it was dangerous. So I pitched it and bought a set of real Moby Dick's with my own money. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don't do that. Real books demand that people actively participate, ask their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren't just stupid, they hurt the mind under the pretext of helping it just exactly the way standardized tests do.

Now, in addition to this control of the classroom, teachers are often "teaching to the test." Three companies decide what goes on the test, and therefore what information is of importance, and furthermore, they dictate how we assess educational achievement. Some schools, in an effort to boost scores, purchase supplementary materials such as lesson plans, workbooks, and practice exams, provided (naturally) by the designers of these tests. These preparation materials then dictate, even more meticulously, what will be taught in the classroom.

With an increasing number of states now relying on high school exit exams which must be passed in order to obtain a diploma, these same three companies are also setting criteria for graduation. Some states place test scores on the students' high school transcripts (e.g. Washington). Such scores then provide a measure akin to an SAT or ACT score, likely making them more important than individual semester grades to many employers or college admissions boards.

This is assuming things work correctly. Gross mistakes have been made. For example:

School officials yesterday revised the number of students mistakenly assigned to summer school upward to more than 8,600, but Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Board of Education officials argued that parents of those children should be grateful for the mix-up because the faltering children were given a chance at more schooling.

"If I were a parent of one of the children, I would say, 'Thank you for having the child in summer school' because the child got more education," the Mayor said at a City Hall news conference....

The Mayor, who had strongly pushed the summer school program as a way of getting tough with failing students, spoke in response to questions about the revelations by Chancellor Rudy Crew that thousands of students in the third and sixth grades were erroneously required to attend summer school because of a scoring mistake by CTB/McGraw-Hill, the company based in Monterey, Calif., that designed the exam.

So, to recap:

Three companies write the books, heavily influence classroom learning, encourage teaching to the test, design said tests, decide who is promoted, decide who must attend summer school, decide who graduates, and label students with numbers that play a significant role in their future prospects.

How is that not privatization?