2

The Squandered Brilliance of Our Disposable Youth

Many young people across the United States are able to take for granted that their schools will provide them with a healthy, supportive learning environment in which they can thrive. It is simply assumed that they are being set up for success. When these students walk into their school buildings every morning, they know that their education is valued. They know that they are valued.

In other communities, however, the day-to-day reality for many young people is quite different.

Many of these children and youth wake up and go to dilapidated school buildings, with leaky roofs, broken heating and cooling systems, and no drinkable water. When they pass through the doors of their schools in the morning, they are greeted not by the smiling faces of trusted adults but rather by police officers, security guards, metal detectors, and surveillance cameras. Their schools and classrooms are so overcrowded that they can’t even maneuver down the hallway or find a desk at which to sit. They go to class only to find that their teachers aren’t given nearly enough resources and support to meet their needs. Young people across the country are routinely subjected to a mind-numbingly tedious curriculum that is largely irrelevant to their lives and dominated by filling in bubble sheets. In many schools, the few parts of the day that make such conditions bearable for students—such as art, music, and drama classes, PE, recess, and extracurricular activities—have been cut back or even eliminated. And far too often, when students’ lives outside of school make things difficult for them in school, or they have a bad day, or they simply make the same type of mistakes that young people have always made, there are no counselors, social workers, school psychologists, or other supportive adults to help them through it. Instead, they are often suspended, expelled, or taken out of school in handcuffs and brought to jail.

While there are children of all races and ethnicities who encounter some of these obstacles, the millions of young people who encounter many or even all of them on a daily basis are overwhelmingly youth of color. Rather than being set up for success, these young people have, quite simply, been set up to fail. Rather than being able to attend schools in which every student is valued, these young people are treated as if they were disposable.

There is a sad reality that all Americans have to own up to, which is that perhaps the defining feature of our education system is it has never been equitable. At no time in US history have we been willing to put children of color on equal footing with white children. There is simply no “golden age” of education equity that we can point to, no moment in time in which you could go into schools within communities of color and expect to find the same level of educational opportunities that you would find in schools within predominantly white communities.¹ For literally hundreds of years, people of color have been fighting for the same opportunities to learn that white Americans have enjoyed, and they have been met with massive resistance at every turn. This long and shameful legacy has been created and sustained through numerous policies and practices over the years. Modern-day policies such as school funding inequities, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the overuse and misuse of high-stakes standardized testing are direct descendants of policies such as the legalized segregation of schools during the Jim Crow era and the extreme opposition to school desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education. The end result is a long-standing, largely separate and thoroughly unequal system that has left deep wounds in students, parents, and other community members across the country.

For nearly twenty years, I have been working with black and brown communities across the country to address education inequities. Over that time, I have spoken with countless students, parents, and other community members and asked them about their schools, the challenges they face within them, and how they think they should be improved. We have talked at length and in great detail about major deficiencies they experience with regard to their schools’ facilities, class sizes, curriculum, learning materials, instructional practices, professional development, support for English learners, disciplinary practices, wraparound supports, special education programs, assessments, accountability systems, school climate, family and community involvement, funding, and numerous other factors. However, at no time in any one of those conversations did any of the students and parents point their fingers at the public administration of their schools as the culprit for inadequate education. None of these people ever suggested that privatizing their public school—such as by turning it into a charter school or providing its students with vouchers to attend private schools—would address their needs. Instead, perhaps the most common and urgent concern in recent years has been about what happened to their school systems after they were privatized.

Tatanisha Jackson’s top priority in buying a new house in her home city of New Orleans was finding one with good local schools. Like many parents, she shopped around until she finally found the right one in the right neighborhood. Not only was the local elementary school very well regarded, it was just half a block away from the house. Tatanisha was thrilled about what this move would mean for her two young daughters. Being able to spend their early years in a good school within walking distance of their house—that was the type of solid foundation she wanted for them. It would put them on a good trajectory. So immediately after closing on the house, Tatanisha went directly to the school, eager to enroll her older daughter, Janelle, in kindergarten.² That is when she learned about the system of “school choice” in New Orleans.

What Tatanisha hadn’t known was that the New Orleans school system was the subject of an ongoing “experiment.” While there had long been some individuals on the fringes of education policy discussions pushing for the privatization of public schools, they had made very little progress in putting their theories into practice. That all changed after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans in 2005. Shortly after the storm, the famed right-wing economist Milton Friedman, who initiated the idea of school vouchers back in the 1950s, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that argued against rebuilding the New Orleans public schools. He proposed that the devastation caused by the storm presented “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”³ Before long, school privatization advocates had descended on New Orleans, eager to use the city as their laboratory for the types of reform that they favored. While there were already charter schools and voucher programs scattered across the country, this was their opportunity to take their ideas to scale. Eventually every public school in the city was closed, and New Orleans became the first 100 percent charter school district in the country. It also became the poster child for the school privatization movement, and the “New Orleans miracle” was touted nationally and internationally, paving the way for many more districts nationwide to replace traditional public schools with charter schools.

What that meant for Tatanisha was that when she went down the block to enroll her daughter in the local elementary school, she was told that all the schools operated on a lottery system, and families weren’t guaranteed slots in their local schools. She was surprised and disappointed by the news, but she went ahead and entered the lottery, hopeful that it would all work out. However, when she got the lottery results, she saw that Janelle didn’t get into her school of choice. So she entered the second round of the lottery, which was for those who didn’t get into any of their top choices in the first round. Still she wasn’t able to get into the school down the street.

There was one final round of the process, in which parents could try to secure a slot in one of the few schools that still had openings. It was scheduled to start one summer day at 8:00 a.m., and it was done on a first-come, first-served basis. Tatanisha is a tough-minded and thoroughly practical woman, and she wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. She was standing outside the office, first in line, at 4:00 in the morning. Once the doors opened, though, she learned that none of the remaining schools were close to her house. Without any other options left, she went ahead and enrolled Janelle in the best and most convenient of the remaining schools. “I wanted to trust the system,” she says. “I wanted to trust that they were looking out for my child’s interests.”

However, her faith was tested immediately. To get to her new school, six-year-old Janelle had to wake up by 5:30 a.m. to leave the house—in the dark—and catch a 6:00 bus for an hour-long ride across town. After school was even worse. Once school got out at 3:30, it took a two-hour or even a two-and-half-hour bus ride for her to get home. Thus, this kindergartner’s school day was essentially 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Tatanisha was in disbelief that the school system would place such extreme demands on their students. “That’s longer than an adult’s day, and you want to put that kind of strain and stress on a child?”

That wasn’t the end of it, however. Because New Orleans schools were under extraordinary pressure to raise student performance and validate the “experiment” they were conducting, many schools substantially ratcheted up the workload of educators, students, and their parents. For Janelle, what that meant was that even though she was only in kindergarten, she typically had several hours of homework every night. Thus, by the time her homework was done and she had eaten dinner, taken a bath, and gotten ready for bed, it was often between 11:00 p.m. and midnight. That left her with precious little time to sleep before she had to be up and start over at 5:30 the next day. “Most adults can’t even function on that little sleep,” Tatanisha says. “How can you expect a small child to work up to their full potential and be able to give their full attention on that little rest, day in and day out?”

Aside from the grueling demands on such a young child, this arrangement posed a number of other challenges for the family. For example, because the school was so far away from home and Tatanisha’s workplace, if Janelle missed the bus or had to come home early, it was a multiple-hour process to shuttle back and forth to the school. “I don’t have a huge support system,” Tatanisha says, “so if my child gets sick, how am I going to get to her?” Plus, it was impossible for Tatanisha to be as involved in her daughter’s education as she wanted to be. If she had to meet with Janelle’s teacher or wanted to attend a parent-teacher organization meeting, she would have to take almost a half day off of work to get to the school in time. “You can’t communicate and have the proper relationship with your child’s teacher when they’re all the way across town,” she says.

However, by far the biggest complication concerned Janelle’s health, and in particular, her sickle cell disease. For her, the combination of long bus rides and lack of sleep was toxic. They triggered numerous agonizingly painful sickle cell crises. Thus, while her classmates were learning their ABCs and how to add and subtract, Janelle was often in the emergency room or forced to stay in the hospital for multiple days until her pain subsided. The New Orleans system of “school choice” was literally making her sick.

To relieve some of Janelle’s symptoms, her pediatrician suggested to Tatanisha that she enroll her in a school closer to home and recommended to the school district that they show the family some leniency. So Tatanisha immediately got to work. She met with every school district staff member who was willing to talk with her about her options. She attended numerous school board meetings to plead for assistance. Finally, after months of advocacy for her increasingly ill daughter, she was provided with an alternative: a school that was ten to fifteen minutes away from her house. That was the upside. The downside was that the slot was available only because the school was rated as failing within the district’s ranking system. So Tatanisha had to decide: Should she prioritize academics by keeping Janelle at the higher-rated school that was compromising her health, or should she prioritize Janelle’s health by switching schools and compromising her academic progress? “What do you do as a parent in that situation?” Tatanisha asks. “And how can this be the only choice that we’re given? It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” She sighs wearily. “It just leaves you feeling … hopeless.”

She’s right, of course. The choice she was given was an impossible one. It is also one that no one should ever have to make.

School privatization and the fight over charter schools and voucher programs have dominated the broader education policy discourse for most of the past two decades.* “School choice” has been the magic bullet that has been put forward by Republicans and, increasingly, by Democrats as a solution to the despicable history of undereducation of youth of color. What is particularly notable here is what hasn’t been part of that conversation. There has been virtually no serious attention given to what the ingredients of a high-quality, equitable education system would be, or how we can create schools and communities that can better meet the developmental needs of youth of color. Instead, an education holy war has erupted around who should be managing the education of our children: public officials or private operators.

I realize that there is considerable public support for charter schools and some support for vouchers. I also realize that, as with all wars, the proponents for each side have very deep and heartfelt beliefs about the righteousness of their cause, and often refuse to engage with any information that might conflict with their beliefs. Thus, there are many diehard supporters of charters and vouchers who may be inclined to shut this book right now because they can sense that they are behind enemy lines. Please don’t. What follows in this chapter doesn’t come from a rigid ideological perspective. While I think there is plenty to be said about the relative merits of the private and public sectors as they relate to education, that isn’t the primary focus here. My main priority is the same as that of the parents and students I work with: to simply ensure that the young people in their communities are able to have the same high-quality educational opportunities that exist in so many predominantly white communities. I, for one, don’t believe that there is only one way to make that happen.

Additionally, what follows doesn’t come without empathy for views on both sides of this holy war. Thus, if you are a parent or student who has had a positive experience with a charter school or voucher program, or who is considering such a program, you won’t find any judgment here. I know how difficult it can be to make these choices for your kids, how limited the options that have been provided for many parents and youth are, and how that can make anyone desperate for any hopeful possibility. I also know from personal experience that the overriding concern has to be what is best for the child, not how that decision factors into a political debate.

If you are an educator or community member who has become personally invested in a charter school or voucher program and are proud of the work you have done, please know that the intent here isn’t to criticize your efforts. There is no dispute that many charter schools—like many public schools—do an excellent job, and it is not difficult to understand the many reasons one might have to pursue nontraditional routes for meeting the needs of children and youth.

If you are a policy maker who has supported charter schools or voucher programs because you wanted to help students of color, then please don’t mistake the following for an attack on your work. I understand how artificially limited the options for addressing education inequities have become, as well as the impulse to want to do something different, to want to disrupt the status quo.

If you fall into one of these categories, or any other that makes you predisposed to reject what follows out of hand, I would ask that you suspend your judgment for a bit. I would also ask that you be open to the idea that the reforms proposed by school privatization advocates, even if implemented to perfection, are nowhere close to being responsive to the challenges presented by deep-seated education inequities. Additionally, I would request that you consider how, alongside whatever benefits you have witnessed from school privatization, this set of reforms has also brought widespread devastation to students, families, and communities of color across the country. Indeed, those who have been harmed the most are the young people who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of school choice.

Finally, I would ask that you be open to the idea that your benevolent intentions in supporting charter school and voucher expansion may not align with the aspirations of those who are most responsible for pushing this agenda forward. School privatization is unquestionably a billionaire-led effort, and for many of these individuals, the primary motivation isn’t to raise overall educational quality or remedy education inequities. Instead, charter schools and voucher programs are being used as a Trojan horse. They have been weaponized in order to advance a massive money grab that threatens the educational opportunities of almost every child in America. And rather than being a solution to systemic racism, as is often claimed, school privatization has instead been a quintessential example of strategic racism in action.

As will be discussed, there are strategies available to us that would truly address the massive education debt we owe to our nation’s youth of color and ensure a high-quality education for every child in the United States.⁴ We can eliminate these disgraceful obstacles to learning and opportunity that far too many children and youth have to confront. However, we will never get there unless we all put down our swords for a bit and investigate the real motives behind school privatization efforts, the risks they pose, the harms and benefits that they have produced, and how they have enabled a small group of billionaires to exploit many well-intentioned people along the way.

A National Epidemic

A useful place to start in examining school privatization is with the impact it has had on public school systems. All across the country, public schools are being closed in huge numbers and essentially replaced with charter schools and voucher programs. Sometimes public schools are simply converted to charters. Other times, charters schools and voucher programs are brought in and put in direct competition with public schools. Regardless, it has produced a national epidemic of mass public school closures. For example,

•Chicago—at least 126 school closures since 2009

•Detroit—more than 200 public schools closed since 2000

•Saint Louis—at least 44 schools closed since 2003

•Kansas City—28 schools closed in 2010

•Cleveland—at least 22 schools closed since 2010

•Philadelphia—at least 29 schools closed since 2013

•District of Columbia—at least 39 schools closed since 2008

•Flint—more than 20 schools closed since 2003

•Oakland—24 schools closing beginning in 2019⁵

While these public school systems are being decimated, the charter systems within these and many other communities of color are expanding rapidly. For example, in addition to New Orleans, which is 100 percent charter, the school systems in Detroit, Kansas City, and Washington, DC, now have over 40 percent of their students in charter schools. Both Los Angeles and New York City now have more than one hundred thousand students in charters, while Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Houston all have at least fifty thousand. As can be seen in table 1, the charter sector is rapidly swallowing up school systems in cities nationwide. In fact, as of 2017–18, there were 214 districts with at least 10 percent of their students in charter schools, compared to just 64 districts in 2007–8.⁶

Charter schools also continue to spread to new states across the country.⁷ In particular there has been a remarkable increase in the number of students attending virtual charter schools, or “cyber-charters,” despite the notoriously poor quality of many of these schools.⁸ Additionally, state legislatures and governors continue to push for more charter schools and expand the exemptions that charter schools enjoy from the regulations that public schools must follow.⁹ A number of states have also created, or are considering creating, state-run school districts that take over schools deemed to be low performing.¹⁰ Typically, these initiatives have resulted in states converting large numbers of public schools within communities of color into charter schools.¹¹

As for vouchers, there are currently twenty-five such programs operating in fourteen states and the District of Columbia.¹² Voucher-like programs that redirect public money to private schools (such as “education savings accounts,” “scholarship tax credits,” and “tuition tax credits”) are also proliferating.¹³ The political push for voucher or voucher-like programs was particularly aggressive after the 2016 elections. The Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress made the expansion of these programs a priority, and numerous other states attempted to create or expand voucher programs.¹⁴

Table 1 Our disappearing public schools

It is important to remember that school privatization efforts were initially billed as seeking to provide a few “laboratories of innovation” that would better meet the needs of a small number of students of color forced to attend “chronically failing schools.” However, the goal of that sector is now quite clearly to simply take over large chunks, if not the entirety, of public school systems. That has been made apparent in post-Katrina New Orleans and elsewhere. For example, in 2015, the superintendent of the Palm Beach County (Florida) Public Schools, home to over 180,000 students, sought permission from state lawmakers to turn the entire school district over to charter schools.¹⁵ Additionally, in 2015 the Los Angeles Times uncovered a secret plan being developed that sought to place half of all students within the Los Angeles Unified School District (the second-largest district in the country) into charter schools over the following eight years.¹⁶

Within school privatization circles, the replacement of public schools with charter schools or voucher programs is seen as a positive development. It is even celebrated, and there is a seemingly never-ending torrent of news stories and advocacy reports that highlight the successes of charter schools and voucher programs, most of which focus on reportedly higher standardized test scores and graduation rates. These results are often attributed to the introduction of “market dynamics” to the education system, which, it is said, spur greater innovation, competition, and performance. To be fair, there are some studies that support their claims around test score improvements (though there are significant concerns with the validity and significance of these findings, which will be discussed later). There are many other studies that don’t support their claims. Taken as a whole, the overall body of research is inconclusive as to how being in a charter school or voucher program affects test score or graduation outcomes.¹⁷ And there have been some deeply concerning findings, such as the study showing that one-quarter of all charter schools graduate fewer than half their students.¹⁸ Nevertheless, those facts are almost never acknowledged in the public narrative around school privatization, and the fact that charter schools and voucher programs are being used to replace public schools is virtually ignored altogether.

Additionally, as someone who has spent many years working closely with the residents of numerous cities that have been heavily affected by school privatization, witnessing the public discussion around the shift away from public schools has been difficult to process and tough to swallow. The glowing media reports and even outright glee within policy circles simply didn’t match up to the lived experience on the ground in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, Washington, DC, and other cities. Over the past decade, I have attended dozens of community meetings, surveyed thousands of parents, students, and community members, and interviewed scores of residents in the communities most affected by these dynamics. The disconnect between what they describe and what is typically reported publicly is striking.

While there are undoubtedly students within those communities who have benefited from being able to attend some of the new charter schools or receive vouchers, the impact of such an enormous change to the education system goes well beyond those individual students. It also goes well beyond charter schools’ or voucher recipients’ overall academic outcomes, though unfortunately that is all that most commentators and even researchers typically explore. Focusing just on test scores or graduation rates when examining the consequences of mass school closures and radical shifts in school systems is like dumping a vat of chemicals into a stream and then measuring the impact by merely counting the number of fish that are still alive. Sure, that matters, but the implications go well beyond that one metric.

If we take a more holistic view, what can be observed is a catastrophic impact on many low-income communities of color due to the expansion of charter schools and vouchers.¹⁹ (To illustrate the impact of school privatization, the text boxes that follow include excerpts from interviews or surveys that I have done with community members from some of the cities most affected by school privatization.)

Harm to Community Health and Well-Being

Public schools are typically the backbones of communities. More than any other institution, they connect people around shared goals and interests. They anchor our communities and knit our families and neighborhoods together. They are also often the hubs of community activity and resources, and the source of considerable local pride. When they are closed down, it can be extremely destabilizing for the entire community, triggering a whole series of harmful effects. People lose their jobs, community bonds are severed, families are strained, people and businesses often leave the area, property values are often reduced, community violence often increases, and those neighborhoods become less desirable places to live. Overall, there are very few things that are more traumatic to communities than closing their schools.

Harm to Remaining Public Schools

When schools are closed, the remaining public schools often have to assume a substantial additional burden. They have to absorb many of the students displaced by the closures, creating overcrowded schools and larger class sizes. They typically become even more underresourced as funds are siphoned off to charter schools and voucher programs.²⁰

Plus, as the student population becomes split across charter schools, private schools, and public schools, it is the public schools that often wind up with a heavy concentration of the highest-need students. The combination of these effects almost inevitably results in diminished teaching and learning in those public schools. When these dynamics are coupled with persistent public criticism of public schools and educators, the frequent result is the loss of many high-quality teachers and staff members. Even very good schools, and schools that are taking the necessary steps to improve their performance, are harmed by these dynamics.

Harm to Students

Closing schools can have a devastating impact on the children and youth who are displaced as a result. All at once, some of the most important relationships in their lives—with friends, teachers, and mentors—can be severed. For many young people, the loss of their school also represents the loss of a reliably safe and stable place in their lives. For some, it means losing the only such place they have.

In other words, while school closures are often treated as a simple bookkeeping matter of shifting bodies from one building to another, in reality they are a form of trauma being inflicted on—typically—youth of color from low-income and working-class neighborhoods.

Plus, when public schools are closed, many students find that there aren’t even any charter schools nearby that will serve them, particularly if those students have disabilities, are English learners, have had behavioral challenges, or aren’t perceived to be academically inclined.²¹ The problem is often even worse for private schools, which have virtually unfettered discretion to deny admission to or push out students for almost any reason. Students with disabilities, in particular, are frequently excluded from voucher programs.

Furthermore, most voucher programs don’t cover the entire cost of tuition at private schools, leaving many families to make up the difference out of pocket, which obviously affects low-income, working-class, and middle-class families the most, and oftentimes prevents them from participating at all. Thus, the students with the fewest educational opportunities are often effectively shut out of many voucher programs.

For those students affected by school privatization who are able to find a new school, they often find—as Tatanisha Jackson did—that they have to travel much farther to get there. Along with the obvious inconvenience, this frequently puts children and youth at significant risk. This isn’t hypothetical, either; children and youth have died as a result of these dynamics, often because their new commute forced them across or into neighborhoods where they weren’t safe.²²

Because of all these dynamics, not surprisingly, there is frequently an alarming number of students who, when their schools are closed, fall through the cracks and never make it back into school.²³

Harm to the Overall Education System

Across the overall education system, including public schools, charters, and vouchers, there has been clear, and very concerning, harm caused by increased privatization:

•Creating an entirely new system of charter schools—with fewer regulations in place that ensure a baseline level of performance—has unsurprisingly led to an extremely wide range of quality in the schools being created. Some are excellent, some are terrible, and most fall somewhere in between. However, while most of the public attention is focused on the top-performing schools, we must not lose sight of the fact that many parents have been lured into sending their children to new charter schools that have absolutely no business educating children, or that don’t even fall within our broadest definitions of what schools are and should do.²⁴ One example: There is a charter school network called Learn4Life that operates fifteen schools in California. The schools, which claim to provide “personalized learning,” are located in office buildings, strip malls, and former liquor stores. At one such school, Desert Sands Charter High School in Lancaster, California, there are no dedicated teachers or classrooms. The “school” is merely the place where students pick up and drop off their paper packets of work, take tests on those packets, and occasionally meet with tutors. The 2015 four-year graduation rate at Desert Sands was 11.5 percent.²⁵

•While charter schools have certainly attracted good, new teachers to the profession, the mass closure of public schools has also resulted in the loss of many highly effective and experienced educators, and particularly black and Latinx teachers, within communities that can ill afford it. Overall there has been a noticeable deprofessionalization of the teaching profession, making it more difficult to attract and retain excellent teachers. As a result, within many of the communities most affected by school privatization, there are severe teacher shortages.²⁶

•Because public schools and charters schools have been pitted against each other in a competition for scarce resources and their very survival, there has been even more emphasis put on standardized test performance, resulting in an increasingly narrow, unengaging, and test-driven curriculum in many schools, across both public and charter schools.

•More students have been pushed out of school and into the school-to-prison pipeline because of particularly harsh disciplinary practices in charter schools, overburdened public schools, and private schools.²⁷

•Overall funding for both public schools and charter schools is, in many communities, being reduced, resulting in fewer resources for instruction, student support services, extracurricular activities, and other vital wraparound supports.²⁸

•The creation of high-quality schools is fundamentally about building high-quality relationships between educators and families. For many schools that have been closed, important relationships that had been built across many years, and even generations, were ruptured almost instantly.

•Another predicable result of the Wild West landscape of charter school expansion has been the widespread waste, fraud, and abuse among many charter operators across the country, leading to hundreds of millions of misspent taxpayer dollars.²⁹

•There has been a noticeable loss of transparency and democratic accountability in our school systems. First, privatization has often been achieved only after the implementation of antidemocratic measures, such as the mayor or the state taking control of the school system. Second, charter schools are often (though not always) less accountable to the public, and less open to community involvement, than public schools. And third, the private schools receiving public resources as a result of voucher and voucher-like programs are subjected to even less public scrutiny.

Overall, school privatization frequently triggers a downward spiral from which many communities never recover.³⁰ There is now a familiar pattern to how these dynamics take place. The public schools are systematically underresourced and overly maligned as “failing,” which drives many families away. Desperate for better options, many of those families go to the shiny new charter schools or voucher programs that are being touted by policy makers and are receiving glowing media coverage. The remaining public schools are then further strained as a result of the dynamics described above, which often leads to their closure. However, that only deepens the spiral as the remaining public schools are increasingly overburdened, more families and educators are driven away, there is additional harm caused to the surrounding community, and thus more closures. As a result, one of the most likely outcomes from school closures is that additional closures will soon follow, with the collateral damage expanding exponentially.³¹

When you add all that up, no matter how much weight is given to any innovations or competition-related advances that may have occurred as a result of school privatization, no one could reasonably suggest that the changes were worth the enormous harm that has been caused. That in itself should be more than sufficient to invalidate, and put an end to, this series of “reforms,” particularly as the harm threatens to become increasingly severe as charter schools and voucher programs proliferate further. Nevertheless, school privatization efforts have dramatically intensified in recent years, and as a result we now spend approximately $50 billion in local, state, and federal funds per year on charter schools, vouchers, and voucher-like programs.³² This is despite the fact that the proponents of those efforts have, since the beginning of the school privatization effort, been repeatedly warned about the risks involved and made aware of the destruction they are causing.

Indeed, the severe harm caused by school privatization has led to a fierce backlash from the communities most affected by it. For many years, there has been an unmistakable public outcry from parents, students, and community members. All across the country, they have been speaking at school board meetings, city council meetings, town hall meetings, and every other venue available to them to inform their elected officials of the irrevocable and often catastrophic harm that would result, and has resulted, from school privatization. They have engaged in protests, picket lines, hunger strikes, sit-ins, walkouts, walk-ins, and boycotts.³³ At least a dozen cities filed complaints with the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.³⁴ Prominent national organizations with membership in the most affected communities, such as the Movement for Black Lives, the NAACP, and the Journey for Justice Alliance / We Choose Campaign have all called for a moratorium on school privatization because of the harm being inflicted. The damage has been so severe that school privatization has provoked the rise of two other national campaigns, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) and the Network for Public Education, to oppose these efforts and promote public schooling. School privatization and its effects were also invoked as one of the key reasons for the wave of teacher strikes and walkouts across the country in 2018 and 2019.³⁵

Despite this resistance from the very communities that school privatization claims to benefit, and some promising victories in slowing down that agenda, advocates for charter schools and vouchers haven’t been deterred.³⁶ Thus, there continues to be a legitimate concern that the public schools in many more communities of color across the country will soon be eliminated. Plus, if there is one thing that school privatization advocates have made clear over the years, it is that they are willing to be patient and play the long game. Indeed, while their efforts have been primarily directed at black and brown communities thus far, as will be discussed later in this chapter, it is clear that school privatizers have their ultimate targets set much more broadly than that.

From Gates to Koch: A Billionaire-Led Effort

Given the extensive harm caused by school privatization and the fervent opposition to it from the communities where it is being implemented, it is fair to ask how it continues to receive such broad bipartisan support, and what continues to drive the charter school and voucher agenda forward. The answer is simple. The school privatization agenda is being led and aggressively funded by a very small group of American billionaires.

Virtually all of the most prominent supporters for charter schools and voucher programs come from the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.³⁷ In fact, supporting school privatization has become almost a defining feature of US billionaires. Of the fifty wealthiest individuals listed by Forbes in 2017, at least forty-two of them have been directly connected to school privatization efforts.³⁸

However, to fully understand the impact the ultra-wealthy have had on the education system, one must dig deeper into the extent of their investments, and the strategy behind them. (I recognize that most people’s eyes glaze over once they start to see data and financial figures. Try as they might, once they see those little numbers on a page, they immediately feel compelled to find something—anything—else to do. If that applies to you, I would strongly urge you to fight that inclination and plow through the next several pages. Trust me—you will soon understand why I risked making almost every reader miserable to include it.)

The following individuals and foundations have been among the main drivers of the school privatization agenda (to give a sense of the extraordinary levels of wealth involved, I have included their Forbes ranking):

•The Walton family, whose wealth comes primarily from Walmart, is the richest family in America (net worth $130 billion) and has seven members of the family among the eighty-five wealthiest individuals. By 2016, the Walton Family Foundation had invested more than $1.3 billion in school privatization efforts, and individual family members have invested large sums on top of that.³⁹

•Bill Gates (Forbes #2, net worth $106 billion), founder of Microsoft, is cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which invests hundreds of millions of dollars a year on K–12 education issues, primarily to promote or support school privatization.⁴⁰

•Eli Broad (#84, $6.8 billion) is the former head of home builder KB Homes and the annuities company SunAmerica. Through his Broad Foundation, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to a wide variety of organizations advancing a school privatization agenda.

•Charles Koch (#13, $41 billion) and his late brother David Koch, who formerly shared majority control of Koch Industries, have invested heavily in school privatization, particularly in the promotion of voucher programs. They also organized a network of “dark money” donors to support their agenda.⁴¹ Leaked documents have indicated that it includes hedge fund manager Ken Griffin (#38, $12.7 billion); the former head of ABC Supply roofing company, Diane Hendricks (#79, $7 billion); the head of oil and gas company Continental Resources, Harold Hamm (#55, $8.8 billion); the president and CEO of Menard’s home improvement stores, John Menard Jr. (#41, $11.5 billion); hedge fund manager Paul Singer (#239, $3.5 billion); and the head of the well-known discount brokerage firm, Charles Schwab (#63, $7.7 billion), among other multimillionaires and billionaires. Until his death in 2018, it also included the billionaire cofounder of Amway (and father of former US secretary of education Betsy DeVos) Rich DeVos.

•Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (#4, $69.6 billion) and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (#239, $3.5 billion) both invest heavily in school privatization through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which also pools investments from other wealthy Silicon Valley investors.

•Michael Dell (#18, $32.3 billion), the chairman and CEO of the computer company Dell, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a multifaceted school privatization strategy.

•Former hedge fund manager John Arnold (#261, $3.3 billion) has been investing heavily in school privatization only since 2012 but has made major investments in that agenda in recent years.

•Gap cofounder Doris Fisher (#355, $2.4 billion) and her late husband, Donald Fisher, were among the earliest and most dedicated investors in the expansion of charter schools.

•Former hedge fund manager Julian Robertson (#154, $4.4 billion) has been a major investor in national school privatization efforts through his Robertson Foundation. He also founded the Tiger Foundation, which focuses specifically on New York City–based efforts and is also supported by his former hedge fund colleagues.

•The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (which was formed from wealth generated by Allen-Bradley, a manufacturer of factory automation equipment) has been a significant force in advancing various right-wing initiatives, including school privatization.

There are many other billionaires who have devoted millions, and even tens of millions of dollars, to school privatization efforts. However, to give a sense of the impact that just a very small number of individuals have had on public education, the tables in this chapter show the funds donated in recent years by the individuals and foundations listed above to fifty organizations of various sorts that are highly influential in the school privatization effort.⁴² It is important to note that this represents just a small fraction of the organizations supported by these individuals. It also doesn’t include the considerable resources they spend on political donations and lobbying in this area. Nevertheless, this sample serves to illustrate the incredible impact that even a very small number of ultra-wealthy individuals can have.

Table 2 shows the donations (listed in millions of dollars) from these ten sources to some of the more prominent school privatization advocacy organizations. These organizations represent some of the most influential voices in this field, owing in significant part to the fact that they have collectively received over $730 million from just these ten sources. For many of these organizations, the donations reflected in table 2 represented a substantial percentage, or even a majority, of their funding.

Similarly, table 3 lists the donations provided to certain think tanks—including those considered to be progressive and those considered to be conservative—that have been active in advancing school privatization. (Note that not all the donations listed are necessarily directed at school privatization–related projects. That wasn’t possible to determine through tax filings. However, even if some of these grants weren’t directly related to school privatization, the donation of such large sums can still be influential in shaping organizational positions on these issues and can also free up other organizational resources to be devoted to school privatization efforts.)

Table 2 Prominent school privatization advocacy groups

Table 3 Select think tanks promoting school privatization

Many of the largest investments have been reserved for individual charter schools and charter school management organizations. They are often funneled through charter school investment organizations such as the Charter School Growth Fund or the NewSchools Venture Fund, which subsequently invest in what they determine to be the most promising charter school organizations. Note that over $761 million has been invested in these two organizations by these ten sources (see table 4).

In addition, the ultra-wealthy individuals driving the school privatization effort often invest directly in charter school networks. Table 5 shows their donations to ten prominent networks nationwide.

To get a more complete picture of some of the large-scale investments going toward these individual charter school networks, table 6 provides the same list of ten charter school networks with (a) their direct donations from these ten ultra-wealthy sources; (b) the donations they have received directly from the Charter School Growth Fund and the NewSchools Venture Fund (much of which comes indirectly from the same ten sources); and (c) the grants each received from the US Department of Education from 2010 through 2018 (which are, in significant part, the result of extensive lobbying and advocacy efforts by these ten sources or organizations funded by them).⁴³

Note that these ten charter school networks have received over $1.4 billion in supplemental financial support beyond what they receive from their state and local governments to operate their schools. KIPP, by itself, has received almost $643 million from this small group of donors. (Let this be the end of any attempts by wealthy individuals to claim that school quality is unrelated to school funding.)⁴⁴

In addition to funding charter school networks, these billionaires frequently invest heavily in state charter school associations to support lobbying, advocacy, and charter school operations within that state. Table 7 presents examples of three such organizations, from California, Colorado, and Illinois.

The ultra-wealthy have also recognized that in order for their strategy to work, they also need (a) low-cost teachers to replace those who are laid off or pushed out of the profession by school privatization efforts, and (b) public school administrators who will be supportive of school privatization. Thus, these ten sources have contributed over $443 million to Teach for America and $105 million to the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems (see table 8).

Some of the savvier school privatization investors have also recognized that they can expedite their reform efforts by investing directly in local school districts—or organizations closely related to district leadership—that express openness to school privatization. These investments may not always go directly toward charter school expansion, but they do serve the purpose of creating relationships with what the billionaires view as “soft targets.”⁴⁵ These ten sources have made such investments in a number of urban areas across the country. Table 9 shows three examples, from Chicago, Denver, and Philadelphia.

Table 4 Charter school investors

Table 5 Select charter school networks

Table 6 Select charter school networks

In addition to all these other types of organizations, the ultra-wealthy have invested significant resources in the education media to support coverage that is aligned with their agenda. Table 10 gives examples of five such media outlets. Note that there are many others. For example, Eli Broad has funded education coverage at the Los Angeles Times.⁴⁶ It is also worth noting that many of the wealthiest Americans own or are heavily invested in media outlets that have taken pro–school privatization positions, such as Michael Bloomberg (#8, $53.4 billion) and Bloomberg News; Rupert Murdoch (#24, $19.1 billion) and Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post; and the Koch family and Time Inc., which includes Time magazine, People magazine, Fortune magazine, and numerous other publications.

If you add up all these investments across all these tables, these ten sources have, by themselves, invested almost $3.2 billion in just these fifty organizations. Again, this represents just a small percentage of the entire field being funded by the ultra-wealthy to advance the school privatization agenda. Nevertheless, this small sample can provide a sense of how these individuals use their wealth in ways that create an exponentially greater role for themselves in shaping education policies than the parents, students, and community members who are most affected by those policies.

Table 7 Select state-level charter school associations

Table 8 Educator-focused organizations

Table 9 Select investments in local school privatization efforts

Table 10 Select education media outlets

There are several important features to note about the strategy reflected in these investments. First, when viewed as a whole, their approach has been remarkably comprehensive and strategic. These aren’t billionaires mindlessly spreading their money around to a variety of unrelated or loosely connected organizations. In fact, this is as far removed from that model of philanthropy as can be imagined. In this sector, the ultra-wealthy are laser-focused on using their wealth to create the greatest possible systemic change. Their investments are designed quite intentionally to reshape the education system through the promotion of charter schools and school vouchers. Their goal is to create an echo chamber of supportive individuals and organizations at every level so that their vision of change becomes inevitable. Thus, they don’t just fund organizations; they fund ecosystems of organizations. And because of their extraordinary wealth, they have been able to create and sustain an entirely new sector of organizations that didn’t exist previously and wouldn’t exist now without their support.

This strategy is particularly noticeable at the local level. The Gates Foundation, for example, has identified a number of large, urban districts that it deemed to be hospitable environments in which to implement its agenda. Within those communities, the foundation doesn’t take the usual approach of philanthropic organizations and fund a small number of advocacy organizations working on a particular issue. The Gates Foundation funds everyone who has any influence on the school privatization debate, including school districts, charter schools, charter school associations, grassroots organizations, policy advocacy groups, research organizations, Teach for America and other educator-based organizations, local media outlets, etc. It has spread so much money around so broadly that it has been able to create dramatic shifts in policy within relatively short amounts of time. For example, in cities like Chicago, Denver, and Philadelphia, among others, the Gates Foundation has invested tens of millions of dollars in each to cultivate a network of organizations that have all advanced the school privatization agenda in recent years. Other billionaires have taken notice and employed similar strategies, including Mark Zuckerberg, who invested $100 million in a school privatization strategy in Newark and then another $120 million in Northern California’s Bay Area schools.⁴⁷

A second feature to notice about this school privatization strategy is that the individuals behind it have increasingly been using their staggering wealth to influence elections. For example, school board elections used to be low-key, low-budget affairs. Now, billionaires are pouring in hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars into school board races that are strategically important to their agenda.⁴⁸ For example, in the 2017 Los Angeles Unified School Board elections, school privatization supporters spent nearly $10 million to win control of the board. Among the largest donors were members of the Walton family, Reed Hastings, Doris Fisher, Michael Bloomberg, and John Arnold, none of whom lives in Los Angeles.⁴⁹

The level of wealth brought to bear on these issues is so extreme that it can be used to simply overwhelm any opponents. In Washington State, supporters of efforts to change state law and allow charter schools to be created within the state were continually defeated in the legislature and by voters through state ballot initiatives. Nevertheless, they kept raising more and more money until finally, on their fourth attempt to pass a ballot initiative, they eked out a victory after repeatedly, and soundly, outspending their opponents. The vast majority of the financing for that multiyear effort came from billionaires such as Gates, the Walton family, the Fisher family, Reed Hastings, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (#9, $51.7 billion).⁵⁰

Third, it is important to note that the Corporate America and Wall Street executives who are advancing the school privatization agenda are also often the same individuals who are impeding efforts to ensure that public schools have adequate resources to serve their students. Of course, where education dollars are finite, all of the efforts to push for investments in charter schools and voucher programs necessarily result in reductions in public school funding. Beyond that, though, many of these billionaires have directly opposed efforts to generate new revenue for public schools. For example, a 2010 ballot initiative in Washington State directed at raising taxes on those earning more than $200,000 in order to increase funding for schools and other priorities was opposed by Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen, each of whom made six-figure donations to the opposition effort.⁵¹

Another approach the ultra-wealthy have taken is to push for tax cuts that reduce revenue that can be used for schools and other priorities. For example, Kansas’s extreme 2012 tax cuts were heavily influenced by the Koch brothers and have led to such severe financial straits and budget cuts that the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that the state’s public education funding is unconstitutionally low.⁵²

Sometimes the undermining of public school funding can be more indirect. When corporations secure tax breaks from states and localities, that results in lost revenue for school systems. Similarly, when the ultra-wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes due to various loopholes or the use of offshore tax shelters, they deprive schools of much-needed resources.

A fourth feature to note about the billionaire-led school privatization strategy is that these individuals have exploited any available opportunity to advance their agenda. In the case of New Orleans, it was Hurricane Katrina that created the opportunity to close down the public schools and reopen them as charter schools. In Puerto Rico, it was Hurricane Maria.⁵³ In other cities, it has been budgetary challenges, declining enrollment, or public school performance that have been used to justify school privatization. Most recently, it has been the COVID-19 pandemic.⁵⁴ In virtually all instances, the “crises” that supposedly necessitate privatization have been largely manufactured and pretextual.⁵⁵

Fifth, the school privatization strategy is remarkable for how it has brought together some strange bedfellows. Consider the dramatically different public reputations of Bill Gates and Charles Koch. Gates is viewed as politically progressive, receives very favorable press for his philanthropy, and is widely admired by the public.⁵⁶ Koch, on the other hand, is often portrayed as the arch-villain of conservative politics, the dark, sinister force behind an ambitious right-wing agenda. (Fun fact: the fortune inherited by the Koch brothers from their father, Fred Koch, was accumulated in part through lucrative business relationships with the regimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.)⁵⁷ Note, however, that as it relates to school privatization, Gates and Koch are quite aligned. They fund several of the same organizations, and beyond that direct overlap, the additional organizations they each fund work with each other as allies in promoting school privatization. As will be discussed later in the chapter, though their end goals may be different, there is very little space separating Gates and Koch on this issue.

Finally, it is important to recognize that there has been absolutely no sign of the ultra-wealthy changing course or relenting in their strategy. On the contrary, they are escalating their efforts. The Walton Family Foundation announced that it plans to spend $1 billion over the five-year period from 2017 through 2021 to create new charter schools.⁵⁸ The Koch network is wielding far more money and influence than it was a decade ago and is increasingly using that clout to advance school privatization.⁵⁹ And younger billionaires, such as Mark Zuckerberg and John Arnold, are aggressively expanding their influence.

Additionally, school privatization advocates have been increasingly successful in getting their allies into positions of power. For example, Betsy DeVos, the US secretary of education in the Trump administration, is not only the daughter of one of the Koch brothers’ former allies, Rich DeVos; she is also the former board chair for the Alliance for School Choice and American Federation for Children, two of the prominent school privatization organizations that received over $40 million in donations from the ten sources highlighted earlier.

One of the primary vehicles for aggressively pushing this agenda has been ALEC, which is heavily tied to the individuals and organizations discussed previously. For example, as was already mentioned, Gates, Koch, and the Bradley Foundation have all donated directly to ALEC. Additionally, Microsoft, Walmart, the Walton Family Foundation, Facebook, the Bradley Foundation, and Dell have all been members of ALEC, and some of the most prominent school privatization advocacy organizations, such as the Alliance for School Choice / American Federation for Children, the Center for Education Reform, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, have also been active within ALEC.⁶⁰ To give a sense of the impact of their collaboration, consider that just in 2015, at least 172 bills were introduced in forty-two state legislatures around the country that reflected ALEC’s school privatization priorities.⁶¹

Make no mistake: School privatization efforts may have garnered support from various stakeholders over the years, but it is unmistakably a hostile takeover of public schools that is being led by a small group of billionaires. If not for the staggering financial investment of this small group of individuals, there is simply no way that charter schools and school vouchers would have caused such extensive harm in black and brown communities across the country.

Superficial Reform and the Illusion of Progress

Nevertheless, these billionaires and their grantees continually make lofty claims about how their efforts are improving education quality and addressing racial inequity. The obvious question to ask in response would be, “How?” If they are going to insist that school privatization is the magic bullet, they have to be able to provide an explanation for it. How does privatizing schools improve the quality of teaching and learning? How is it making the education system more equitable? What is the secret that would allow them to achieve such results? And what is it about public schools that doesn’t allow for the same results?

If you strip away all the noise surrounding these issues, the premise advanced by school privatization advocates is this: if you shift from public to private management and eliminate some regulations that the schools have to follow, then education quality will improve dramatically, and the impact of generations of multifaceted racial inequities will be eliminated, or at least substantially reduced. The entire idea is ludicrous on its face. There is no way that any thoughtful observer could examine the challenges faced by the students, families, and educators within low-income communities of color and conclude that privatization would magically solve them. It simply doesn’t compute. A + B ≠ C.

This is the dirty little secret of school privatization advocates, that their “movement” is based on hype, not substance. This becomes obvious when you go to the websites of the most prominent school privatization advocacy organizations to learn about what they claim to be the value provided by charter schools and vouchers.

For example, here is the entire response of the National Association of Public Charter Schools to the question “What makes charter schools different than other schools?”

Each of the more than 6,900 charter schools is unique—both inside and out. Some may focus on college prep, some follow a Montessori curriculum, and others integrate the arts into each subject. Most charter schools are located in urban areas, but there are charter schools in suburban and rural areas as well. Some charter schools require uniforms, others have longer school days, and some teach their entire curriculum in two languages. The possibilities are endless, but charter schools aim to provide a range of options so that parents can choose the school that best fits their child.⁶²

There isn’t a single characteristic in that paragraph that is unique to charter schools. Every one of them is also true of some public schools. Indeed, while we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that more variety necessarily produces better quality, it is nevertheless true that public schools have been adopting a variety of pedagogical methods and curricula for decades. While school privatization advocates frequently assert that charters represent choice, and public schools represent a monolith, it’s just not supported by the facts. More broadly, everyone can agree that parents should have meaningful choices when it comes to their children’s education. However, while many ingredients are necessary to make that happen, privatization isn’t one of them.

Similarly, if you look at the websites for the Center for Education Reform and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, the only identifiable explanation for school privatization improving overall education quality is that charter schools are supposedly superior because they face fewer regulations and are more accountable for results. The Center for Education Reform says that charters “are judged on how well they meet the student achievement goals,” and if they cannot perform, they will be closed. It also says that being freed from “red tape” allows charters to focus more on “educational excellence.”⁶³ The Foundation for Excellence in Education says that, in contrast to public schools, charter schools are provided more “operational autonomy” in exchange for being “held accountable for student success.”⁶⁴

Once again, the rhetoric doesn’t match reality. Regarding their supposedly greater accountability, anyone who has monitored the education policy debates for the past twenty years should know that there is no basis for suggesting that public schools face less public accountability than charter schools. While there are serious concerns with regard to the methods by which we hold public schools accountable for their performance—see more in the following pages—there can be no denying that they face rigorous scrutiny.

Also, it is deeply concerning that this sector is so nonchalant about simply closing charter schools that don’t “perform.” The harms that often result from the closure of public schools can also be triggered by the closure of charter schools. These are schools after all, not pop-up businesses.

As for the claim that fewer regulations produces higher-quality education, that is also unfounded. Many of the regulatory areas from which charters seek exemptions often have no connection with education quality at all.⁶⁵ For example, many charters have sought to become exempt from various school disciplinary protections for students. However, making it easier for charter schools to exclude and push out students using suspensions and expulsions doesn’t translate to educational improvement, though it can be useful in creating the appearance of educational improvement.

To be fair, there are regulations from which charter schools often receive exemptions that can have some impact on student learning. For example, having greater freedom to select the teachers for a school can be beneficial when there are excessive staffing barriers that have been put in place. Also, under certain circumstances, providing quality educators with greater autonomy can have merit. However, in the grand scheme of challenges facing our education system, and in particular facing low-income students of color, these are relatively minor issues. The idea that we would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and cause massive harm in creating a parallel, privatized school system to address these issues is absurd. That would be similar to commissioning the entire Seventh Fleet of the US Navy to kill a mosquito. Where there are real concerns around such issues, there are far more efficient and less damaging ways to address them than school privatization.

Ultimately, while there is no shortage of bluster surrounding charter schools and school vouchers, the reality is that they do virtually nothing to address the most significant issues facing our education system, and racial injustice within that system. Privatizing schools doesn’t even represent a serious attempt at addressing the challenges faced by many youth of color.

Nevertheless, the school privatization effort continues to grow because its proponents continue to seek out, and highlight for the public, examples in which students in charter schools or voucher programs scored higher on standardized tests than students in public schools. That supposed test score superiority is the foundation on which the entire school privatization “movement” is built. However, as mentioned earlier, such claims are unfounded. But what if they were right, and charter schools and private schools were somehow inherently better at raising test scores than public schools? How would we use that information? These are important questions to ask because of how central high-stakes standardized test scores have become in the public conversation around school privatization and the education system more generally. We put an enormous amount of weight on these metrics, so it is critically important that we all understand what they actually mean and the purposes for which they can reliably be used.

Brief personal confession: I love data. I have spent many a day with an Excel spreadsheet on my computer and a smile on my face. But after many years of analyzing standardized test scores in cities and states around the country, the conclusion I have reached is this: They tell us virtually nothing of value about education quality in a particular school or school district. We simply don’t have any large-scale data systems that can reliably tell us where high-quality education is happening, where it isn’t happening, and why it is or isn’t happening. Even the best standardized tests can’t be depended on to tell us whether students are receiving a well-rounded education. They can’t tell us whether students have mastered content or simply mastered taking a test on that content. They can’t tell us whether a school is overly focused on rote learning and “drill and kill” activities designed specifically to raise test scores at the expense of higher-order thinking. They can’t tell us with any certainty what a school or a teacher has contributed to students’ knowledge and ability versus what those students already knew or could do when they walked in the door. They can’t tell us if students are being pushed out of school to boost results. They can’t tell us if some schools are doing better than others because they are provided with more resources and institutional support than others. They can’t tell us how many students have lost or gained a love of learning as a result of the education they received prior to the test. They can’t tell us if the student body in a charter school is truly representative of the larger community. They simply can’t tell us most of what parents want to know about how their child is being educated.

That is intuitively obvious to most adults. Life isn’t like an episode of Jeopardy, or a game of Trivial Pursuit. Adulthood isn’t a long series of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Being a high-functioning adult means being able to think critically and creatively. It is being able to work collaboratively with people. To communicate effectively. To apply academic learning to real-world situations. To be a problem solver. To be able to build healthy relationships with others and be an engaged global citizen. The world doesn’t need people who can provide the “right” answers to standardized test questions. We need people who can seek out multiple answers, who can identify the flaws in the questions they are being asked, and who can point us to new and different questions that we should be asking instead. We need people who are willing to pursue knowledge independently and are able to think deeply to find it. We need people who are conscientious and compassionate and can effectively navigate the world and put their education to use in serving their communities. Unfortunately, ever since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, anyone who has been paying attention knows all of the following to be true as a result of our national obsession with high-stakes testing. It has led to

•severe undervaluing of the many aptitudes, skills, and curricular areas that are untested;

•a great many young people doubting their own abilities and value, and becoming disengaged from school as a result;

•many other young people developing a false sense of superiority over their peers;

•educational opportunities being unjustifiably rationed out on the basis of test scores;

•many schools and educators being punished for the failure of policy makers to provide them with the resources necessary to meet their students’ needs;

•degradation of the quality of education nationwide;

•the worst consequences falling on students, families, educators, and communities of color.

On the flip side, it is difficult to point to any significant systemic benefit that has resulted from the explosion of high-stakes testing. The most common justification for these tests is that they highlight inequities in educational outcomes. However, we already had many years of low-stakes data demonstrating the exact same thing. Plus, attaching high stakes to standardized tests hardly serves any function at all that isn’t negative or punitive. Rarely are the results used for anything beyond shaming, punishing, or preventing the advancement of students, teachers, schools, and school systems.

To be clear, standardized tests can serve a limited purpose as a diagnostic or formative tool. However, it is a profound misuse and abuse of these instruments to make important decisions on the basis of them. School accountability is far too important to be based on such shoddy evidence. While we must of course ensure that schools are doing what the communities they serve need them to do, that accountability should be based on factors far more meaningful than the ones we use currently.

Ultimately, then, it comes down to this: virtually the entire justification for school privatization can be boiled down to the claim that it can raise test scores. But not only is that claim unsubstantiated, even if it were true, those gains are of such limited educational value that using them to make enormous policy decisions is both irresponsible and indefensible. Frankly, if small, inconsistent standardized test score differences are all that you have to point to as evidence of your value, then you don’t really have anything. And even if you disagree with these assessments of the evidence and believe that school privatization does improve test scores in ways that are connected to actual improved school performance, then those marginal gains would still not even come close to overriding all the harm that has been created in the process.

This isn’t the only fundamental flaw of school privatization efforts. In fact, the entire endeavor is riddled with hypocrisy. For example, school privatization advocates claim that shifting from public to private management and reducing bureaucracy are the keys to school success, yet they neglect to explain how all of the thousands of high-achieving public schools across the country are able to achieve their results despite those “challenges.”

The hypocrisy certainly doesn’t end there. School privatizers often blame public school “failures” on the existence of large bureaucracies, and thus for many years they have argued that the remedy is small, personalized, community-based charters.⁶⁶ Also, for many years, charter school advocates claimed that their intent was to create a small number of charter schools as a supplement to, not a replacement for, the public school system. However, the reality is that the school privatization sector has invested particularly heavily in creating massive corporate charter school franchises that are already larger than almost all the public school districts in the country and continue to grow dramatically.⁶⁷

The original charter schools were intended to try out new, innovative instructional strategies that could be employed in the public school system more broadly. However, after thirty years of charter schools, advocates have shown no interest in taking whatever they have learned and applying it to public schools. They also haven’t been able to identify a single education innovation that couldn’t be easily implemented in public schools if those schools were provided the appropriate resources.⁶⁸ Plus, for all the talk about innovation, the school privatization sector really only has one idea. Whatever problem arises with a public school system, their proposed remedy is the same: privatization.

Additionally, school privatization advocates often claim that they are focused exclusively on the interests of children while their opponents are focused too much on the interests of educators.⁶⁹ Yet these individuals are typically silent when public school budgets get cut, when public schools get closed, and when students in public schools suffer as a result of the expansion of charters and vouchers.⁷⁰ Also, if young people really were the primary concern, why not just use all the billions of dollars invested in school privatization to improve existing schools and address students’ other developmental needs rather than creating a parallel system of schools that competes for resources?

Moreover, if their primary interest really were children, then one would think that they would be laser focused on supporting those who have dedicated their careers to educating those children. However, a key tactic in advancing school privatization has been attacking and deprofessionalizing teachers and teacher unions, and using the expansion of charter schools as a union-busting tactic. While there are undoubtedly some local unions that have made some highly questionable decisions over the years, which can occasionally be a problem, teachers’ unions as a whole have often been treated as if they were the problem.⁷¹ In other words, school privatization advocates have located the epicenter of our education inequities squarely within the teaching profession, and not, for example, with the policy makers who repeatedly undermine and underfund public schools, or the ultra-wealthy who avoid paying taxes that would support education. Moreover, privatization advocates have yet to explain how they intend to attract and retain quality teachers after waging a long, sustained attack against the teaching profession that has led to cuts in teachers’ wages and benefits, and deterioration in their working conditions. (Also, it is worth mentioning that teachers unions have played a central role, and perhaps the most significant role, in preventing school privatization advocates from causing even more harm to students, families, and communities than they already have.)

Another one of the key arguments made in support of privatized education is that it will use resources more efficiently and cut costs. Yet there is absolutely nothing efficient about creating a separate, deregulated system of schools in which waste, fraud, and abuse are prevalent and taxpayer dollars are being used to support fly-by-night charter school operators.⁷² And with regard to cost cutting, school privatization advocates have dramatically changed their tune in recent years. Now, instead of arguing that they can educate children more affordably, they claim that it is unfair if they receive less funding than public schools and thus have been mounting advocacy campaigns aimed at receiving equal funding.⁷³

Furthermore, if the goal is to ensure that every child has access to a high-quality education, as school privatizers claim, then how does it make sense to replace public schools that have been charged with serving all students—including students with many different types of disabilities and English learners from all over the world—with charter schools and private schools that haven’t been so charged and that often aren’t equipped to do so?⁷⁴

The No-Excuses Trap

Perhaps the most damaging hypocrisy of school privatization advocates is that the most celebrated charter schools, the ones that are lifted up as models and used to justify expansion of the whole sector, are frequently the ones that are the least accommodating for the full range of student needs and learning styles. The networks that are proliferating the fastest are the “no excuses” charter schools such as KIPP, Success Academy, Aspire, Idea, Mastery, YES Prep, and Achievement First that often employ narrow, strictly regimented curricula and heavy-handed, deeply harmful disciplinary methods.

For example, remember Anna Jones from chapter 1, whose children were severely affected by school closures on the South Side of Chicago? Many of the public schools that were closed were essentially replaced by charter schools, and many of those new schools were Noble Network schools. In recent years, Noble has expanded from a single school to a network of eighteen schools on the South Side and West Side of Chicago. Noble’s growth has been fueled by the enormous private donations it received, including more than $155 million it collected from 2006 to 2018.⁷⁵ As mentioned earlier, Noble has received $1.8 million from the Gates Foundation, $2.1 million from Michael Dell, almost $14 million from the Charter School Growth Fund and NewSchools Venture Fund, and almost $20 million in grants from the US Department of Education since 2010.

Noble has long been a darling of the school privatization community and has been heavily supported by both Republicans and Democrats. For example, former mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel (D) has been a longtime fan, claiming that Noble has found the “secret sauce” of school success and has “the most successful high schools he’s seen.”⁷⁶ Before he took office, former Illinois governor Bruce Rauner (R), a billionaire former private equity executive, donated $3.5 million to Noble.⁷⁷ The family of the current governor, J. B. Pritzker (D) (Forbes seventh-richest family in America, $29 billion), has also made sizable donations to Noble.⁷⁸ (Two of the Noble schools are even named after Rauner and the Pritzkers.) And in 2015, the Broad Foundation awarded Noble with the national Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools as the “best-performing large public charter school system in America.”⁷⁹

So what did all this support from Noble’s wealthy and politically powerful benefactors go toward building? What was the model of education that they were so excited to replicate that they subjected residents like Anna Jones to tumultuous school closures?

Well, perhaps the most notable feature of Noble’s model of education is how many of their students they choose not to educate. For example, according to data from the US Department of Education, Noble’s expulsion rate in 2015–16 was over seven times higher than the national average.⁸⁰ That year, out of the 575 schools in Chicago, the eight schools with the highest number of expulsions across the city were all Noble schools.⁸¹ Even Noble’s own teachers have described their methods and high rates of student push-out as “dehumanizing.”⁸²

Additionally, Noble received national condemnation in 2012 for its extreme approach to school discipline that involved imposing monetary fines on students for even the most minor disciplinary infractions. Noble collected almost $400,000 from its student body, which was overwhelmingly composed of black and Latinx youth from low-income families.⁸³ Even after it became a national news story, Noble refused to change its practices until state legislation outlawing disciplinary fines was introduced.

Moreover, Noble is known for devoting much of its curriculum to standardized-test preparation. In fact, teacher pay has been linked to test performance at Noble, creating even more incentives to use “drill and kill” methods that may produce more superficially impressive data but don’t actually improve the quality of teaching or learning.⁸⁴

Nevertheless, as a result of the largesse of their ultra-wealthy supporters, Noble schools and others like them have expanded dramatically in Chicago in recent years. Meanwhile, it is families like Anna Jones’s that suffer the consequences from the city’s unwillingness to build a system that provides a high-quality education for all children.

Similarly, at the national level, KIPP schools have been perhaps the most high-profile and most highly decorated charter schools in the country. KIPP schools are consistently cited as examples of charter school excellence, have been featured in hundreds of news stories lauding their academic performance, and their network has now grown to 242 schools serving over one hundred thousand students.⁸⁵ (Eight of those schools were among those that replaced the public school system in New Orleans, causing severe hardship for Tatanisha Jackson’s family and so many others.)⁸⁶ As described earlier, they have received enormous financial support from both the ultra-wealthy and the federal government—almost $643 million just from the aforementioned ten billionaire sources, the Charter School Growth Fund, the NewSchools Venture Fund, and the US Department of Education. However, like Noble, they are well known for their extremely strict and punitive disciplinary approaches, along with a highly regimented, standardized-test-focused curriculum.

For example, despite serving a heavy concentration of elementary school students, according to the US Department of Education, in 2015–16 KIPP schools issued out-of-school suspensions at nearly twice the national average.⁸⁷ Examining individual schools can be even more illustrative. In Baltimore, the school with the most suspensions and expulsions in the entire city during the 2015–16 school year was a KIPP school.⁸⁸ In Boston, a KIPP school had the third-highest out-of-school suspension rate in the city during 2014–15.⁸⁹ In Washington, DC, where charter schools suspend students at higher rates than public schools, five of the ten highest-suspending charter schools in 2015–16 were KIPP schools.⁹⁰ And a KIPP school in Oklahoma had the third-highest suspension rate of black students of any charter school in the country.⁹¹

Beyond these high suspension rates, KIPP schools, like many “no excuses” charter schools, have cultivated ultra-strict learning environments. They have embraced the “broken windows” theory of cracking down on even what appear to be trivial rule violations. Many KIPP schools have also embraced methods such as requiring students to walk silently through the halls on one side of a painted line.⁹²

When I first saw those lines, and watched a row of black children being marched down the hall of a KIPP school with their heads down and their hands behind their backs, I actually had flashbacks to a time in my career when I spent a lot of time working with, and representing, inmates within maximum security prisons. The method used by the prisons for moving inmates from one place to another was identical. The parallels didn’t end there, however. KIPP’s extreme focus on social control of its students and the strict enforcement of its rules was startlingly similar to how those prisons were run. It was also hard to miss the stark contrast between the predominantly white teachers and the predominantly black students at many KIPP schools, and how that compared to the racial makeup of the prison guards and the inmates. It was almost as if KIPP had modeled much of its educational approach after what were quite literally the worst places I have ever encountered. Considering that prison administration is, in practice, largely based on the fear of, and contempt toward, inmates, seeing elementary schools employing the same techniques was jarring.

More broadly, the aggressive expansion of charter schools like Noble and KIPP is troubling because they are not offering a model of education that is going to fit the needs of most students and families. They are essentially the modern-day equivalent of the old Catholic schools where the nuns would rap you across your knuckles with a ruler. Their no-excuses approach and “weeding out” of students who don’t measure up may appeal to a small number of parents who haven’t been provided with any better options for their kids. However, they are not going to be a desirable option for most parents and students, who may rightly question whether those methods are developmentally appropriate or healthy for their children.

This should be especially concerning because, unlike the old private Catholic schools, these “no excuses” charter schools are being funded by public dollars and should thus be serving public purposes. Instead, they are being used as models to expand the entire charter school sector and replace the public schools that are charged with educating all children.

This also demonstrates the ever-increasing problem with comparing the academic results between charter schools and public schools. KIPP operates like a network of private schools, and most parents now know what sending their children there entails, just as parents in the 1950s knew what sending their children to the nuns was going to entail. Thus, schools like KIPP are going to attract students who will thrive in schools like KIPP. If parents don’t think that a school like KIPP will be appropriate for their children, they won’t send them there—unless, of course, they are not provided with any other viable options. Public schools, on the other hand, have to serve students from across the entire spectrum of human diversity, representing an incredible array of interests, aptitudes, and needs. Comparing the test scores of those students to the test scores of KIPP students, and then using those comparisons to justify privatization, is supremely disingenuous.

Moreover, imagine that you assembled two teams of educators that are of equal quality. The first team is put in charge of a school that uses various methods to shape its student body in favorable ways, is given broad discretion to push out low-achieving or challenging students, is encouraged to focus its curriculum on the improvement of standardized test scores, and is given millions of dollars in private money to supplement its budget.⁹³ The second team is put in charge of the nearby neighborhood public school that is facing annual budget cuts and has to accept everyone that walks through the door throughout the year, including the students that leave or are pushed out of the first school. Under those conditions, the first team of educators wouldn’t have to do anything extraordinary to achieve better results. In fact, it would be shocking if that team didn’t post higher test scores, given the enormous advantages it had been provided.

That, in a nutshell, is why the battle between charter schools and public schools is a farce. Charter schools are starting off at third base and acting like they hit a triple. Public schools are being labeled as failing, but in reality, they are being sabotaged. If you really step back and analyze it honestly, the unavoidable conclusion is that the entire school privatization “movement” is a scam, a fraud perpetrated on the American public. Privatization has been presented as a solution to failing schools and education inequities, but it is clear that for many of the key individuals advancing this agenda, privatization isn’t a means to an end; it is the end itself. Privatization itself is the goal. It doesn’t matter that it is not based on sound research or reasoning. It doesn’t matter that it is a house of cards that does nothing to address the root causes of education inequities while causing catastrophic harm in communities across the country. It doesn’t matter that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that this is a school improvement strategy on which we, as a country, should be spending massive amounts of time and billions of dollars in public and private resources. All that matters to the leaders of the school privatization movement is that the agenda moves forward, even if that means millions of people are harmed along the way. Even if that means that what they have advertised as an effort to benefit communities of color is, at its roots, profoundly racist.

The Racism of School Privatization

Many readers are already probably recoiling at the use of the “r word.” But consider the following:

1.The harms caused by school privatization have been overwhelmingly concentrated in communities of color.

2.While school privatization has been advertised as a racial justice effort, its actual impact has been to suck up much of the oxygen within education reform conversations over the past twenty years and divert attention from the most pressing issues facing students of color.

3.If, as school privatizers suggest, charter schools are inherently superior to public schools, then why have their most aggressive initial efforts been directed entirely at communities of color? If there were truly something intrinsically special about the charter school model, then don’t predominantly white, affluent suburbs also deserve to benefit from it? If these schools are so effective, why didn’t these billionaires fund privatization efforts in their own communities? And why aren’t the residents of predominantly white, affluent communities in the offices of their school superintendents and elected representatives clamoring for more charter schools? The answer, of course, is that communities with well-resourced public schools aren’t interested in those superficial and harmful reforms, and everyone who has been paying attention knows that black and brown communities were targeted for school privatization efforts because (a) they have been so thoroughly disempowered politically over the years that they wouldn’t be able to provide as much resistance as other communities; (b) school privatizers wouldn’t face as much public scrutiny for implementing their “reforms” in communities of color; and (c) after enduring decades of neglect and the undermining of the public schools within communities of color, many people in those communities would be desperate enough to try anything. Thus, these youth of color have been used as a proof-point so that charter schools and voucher programs could gain enough of a toehold to subsequently expand more broadly.

4.What school privatization efforts have demonstrated is that, rather than requiring that education reforms be based on sound, research-based practices, our policy makers are very comfortable in conducting education “experiments” on students of color. (If you analyze this situation and catch a faint whiff of a modern-day Tuskegee syphilis study, you are on the right track.)

5.While there are certainly many individual charter school operators that work with the communities they serve in a responsible, accountable fashion, at the broader, systemic level, school privatization efforts have been done to, and not with, black and brown communities.⁹⁴ In many instances, these communities were robbed of their democratic control over their schools in order to implement school privatization efforts.

6.Here is what the billionaires funding school privatization didn’t do: They didn’t go into communities of color and explain that they were interested in using their wealth to improve education quality and equity. They didn’t engage in a participatory process in which community members could share their views and experiences with inadequate educational opportunities. They didn’t create processes by which community members could help to develop and lead processes for school improvement. They didn’t enable parents, students, and other community members to use their extensive local expertise to inform reform efforts. They didn’t create an authentic, collaborative process by which the benefits associated with great wealth could be leveraged to greatest effect through thoughtful, responsible partnership with communities. Instead, they typically went into communities of color that they identified as low-hanging fruit with a predetermined set of reforms that they wanted to implement, and then used their extraordinary wealth to essentially bully communities into going along with their agenda.

7.This is a question that doesn’t get asked enough: Why do communities of color not have the same rights to self-determination that other communities have? Why do Bill Gates, the Walton family, Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, and other ultra-wealthy hedge fund managers and corporate executives get to decide what the school systems are going to look like in the Bronx, South LA, Chicago’s South Side, West Philadelphia, New Orleans, Newark, and other communities of color across the country? No one elected them. The parents and students in those communities never consented to having them implement their vision for social change. They never agreed to “reforms” that would affect not only the so-called failing schools but also trigger massive ripple effects across entire education systems and communities. These billionaires typically aren’t knowledgeable about the neighborhoods they are destabilizing, the schools they are closing, the teachers who are being fired as a result of their efforts, and the students who are being harmed in the process. What right do they have to essentially do whatever they want to communities of color? Why is this assumed by so many to be an acceptable use of one’s wealth and political influence? If you don’t think the answers to those questions have a strong racial component, and instead believe that ultra-wealthy people should simply be trusted to do good things with their money, then ask yourself this: What would be the public reaction if it was divulged that Oprah Winfrey was targeting predominantly white communities across the country to work behind the scenes and transform their public school systems? (In a word, hysteria. And people love Oprah.)

8.When communities of color push back on school privatization, they have typically been ignored. However, on those rare occasions when school privatization advocates have felt compelled to respond, they have often replied to well-founded concerns with shameful attacks. For example, as the NAACP was considering its call for a moratorium on charter school expansion, the editorial board of the Washington Post wrote a piece that was shocking in its condescension. It began by suggesting that NAACP board members “might want to do a little homework,” made the claim that charter schools have “reshaped education” in Washington, DC, and said that “hopefully” it is “not lost on an organization that is supposed to be looking out for the interests of minority people” that the beneficiaries of this “rich school choice” are children of color.⁹⁵ Similarly, while he was board chair for the Success Academy charter schools in New York (featured earlier), hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb (#306, $2.8 billion) attacked a black state senator for opposing school privatization efforts, referring to her as a “hypocrite” who “does more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood.”⁹⁶

9.As described earlier, many of the charter school networks that are being pushed aggressively within communities of color aren’t the types of schools that most parents truly want for their children. It is never a parent’s first choice to send their child to a “no excuses” charter school that uses prison techniques to maintain order and aggressively pushes students out using harsh disciplinary methods. Those are decisions made out of necessity, when parents haven’t been given a real choice of high-quality educational options for their kids. Unfortunately, many parents have been forced into this position, where they have to select the “least worst” option available to them. However, make no mistake: this is an authoritarian model of education that is focused on creating docile, obedient citizens, not critical thinkers. It’s about achieving compliance, not liberation.

10.On one side of this equation, you have white billionaires bankrolling school privatization efforts, while individuals such as former US secretary of education Arne Duncan, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and now even President Trump defend their school privatization agenda by claiming that it addresses the “civil rights issue of our time.”⁹⁷ On the other side, there is a massive resistance from people of color around the country who have made it abundantly clear that school privatization is harming their communities, and yet they are treated as if they were collateral damage in the quest to remake our education system.

11.No one can reasonably claim that the communities most affected by school privatization don’t need substantial improvements to their education system. But as decidedly imperfect as these public schools are, they are still the product of decades of collective school improvement efforts by students, parents, and community members within black and brown communities. People have worked very hard for a very long time to create higher-quality schools in their neighborhoods, often while facing stiff resistance and major obstacles put in place by some of the same individuals who are now responsible for school privatization. Tragically, many of those hard-fought victories are being washed away as their public schools are closed and undermined by school privatization.

For example, over the past twenty years, there has been a major, nationwide movement that has been built to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Leading this effort have been students, parents, and community members from the black and brown communities most affected by zero-tolerance school discipline. Together, they achieved remarkable results, substantially shifting policies and practices in schools nationwide. However, charter schools and private schools promoted by voucher programs are largely exempt from, and resistant to, these advances. Also, as described already, the charter school sector stands in direct opposition to these changes by aggressively promoting schools that employ the same harmful, punitive approach that communities of color have been fighting against in public schools. Thus, the school privatization effort is a direct affront to the efforts of all the people of color who have been fighting for years to ensure that their schools are respecting each young person’s right to an education.

12.Public school closures and the expansion of charter schools have led to many experienced teachers of color being replaced with inexperienced, nonunionized white teachers.⁹⁸ Among many other effects associated with these dynamics, this has meant that there has been a significant loss of unionized teaching jobs within communities of color, which constituted one of the most stable, well-paying careers available within many communities. The ripple effects of this loss have been substantial, affecting not only these teachers, but also their children, families, and communities.

13.Sadly, one side effect of the school privatization effort is that it has divided communities by turning quality education into something that is generally understood to be scarce. In other words, people are forced to fight over limited spots at the “good schools” because the school privatization effort hasn’t been directed at taking the necessary steps to ensure that every child has access to high-quality educational opportunities.

14.During the civil rights movement of the 1960s and throughout history, there were many critical moments in which local, state, and federal government officials stepped up on behalf of children and youth of color who were facing the threat of racist education policies and practices. Now, by aggressively pursuing the privatization of education for children of color, the government is essentially abdicating responsibility for their education.⁹⁹ Government officials are washing their hands of what was formerly their responsibility and handing off their duties to private actors without any legitimate reason to believe that it will lead to better results. This represents a painfully ironic twist in the struggle for racial justice because the origins of “school choice” lie in attempts by white communities to avoid integrating their schools after Brown v. Board of Education.¹⁰⁰ In other words, school privatization is being sold to the public as an attempt to achieve racial equity when it was initially conceived as an effort to resist racial equity, and our government is a willing partner.

15.Advocates for school privatization say that they want to provide parents with school choice, but what about the vast majority of parents whose choice is to have their children educated in high-quality neighborhood public schools? Why do so many parents in black and brown communities not get to make that choice when parents in predominantly white communities can take that as a given? In many communities of color, the “choice” is now between underresourced public schools and a profoundly harmful privatized system, which is no choice at all.

I am not suggesting here that the billionaires who are advancing the school privatization agenda are closeted racists who believe in the inherent inferiority of people of color. I am suggesting that if you target communities of color to implement an unsound, deeply harmful set of reforms in a nondemocratic way, ignore the harm you cause, fail to respond appropriately to community pushback, and use those communities as your guinea pigs to justify the further expansion of your agenda, all the while neglecting to address, and even exacerbating, the serious, long-standing inequities faced by those communities, then you simply haven’t valued the lives of the residents of those communities appropriately, and you have contributed to systemic racism.

For too long, communities of color have been treated as speed bumps in the school privatization process. They have been continually exploited and treated as undeserving of the respect and even deference typically afforded predominantly white communities. Indeed, there has likely never been an example of a predominantly white community being treated the way school privatization advocates have routinely treated black and brown communities. The thought itself is practically unimaginable.

This is a different form of racism from what most people are accustomed to. However, modern-day systemic racism rarely involves anything like an angry white bus driver telling a black seamstress to get up from her seat. Instead, it often looks like this: While rolling out the No Child Left Behind Act, which set into motion or dramatically accelerated many of the school privatization dynamics we are facing today, President George W. Bush repeatedly spoke of the law as a racial justice effort, and famously decried the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that it would address.¹⁰¹ Instead, what has resulted from school privatization has been, at best, the soft bigotry of destructive, paternalistic reforms. Quite often, it has been the hard bigotry of deliberate indifference.

To be clear, if a community comes together and legitimately decides that school privatization represents the best path forward for advancing its children’s educational opportunities, then so be it. But that hasn’t been how these dynamics have played out. The reality is that school privatization efforts have simply replaced one form of educational neglect in communities of color (underresourced and inequitable public schools) with another. Both can, and have, ruined the lives of many youth of color. And it should be indisputable that moving forward with either will inevitably lead to more children of color being tragically undereducated. Thus, both are unacceptable, meaning we are in dire need of a “third way.” Unfortunately, our public debate around these issues has been so thoroughly distorted by school privatization advocates that even the most obvious truths can be difficult to see.

Manufacturing White Consent

Given the context around school privatization, how has it been able to receive so much public support? Specifically, how has it been able to generate so much support among white people, and particularly those who identify as being liberal or progressive, which has been the critical element in transforming school privatization from a right-wing and Republican priority into an issue that has received widespread bipartisan support over the past fifteen years?

The answer is marketing. School privatization’s billionaire benefactors have funded a highly sophisticated, multifaceted, and hugely expensive public relations campaign to advance their efforts. This hasn’t been, and couldn’t have been, a communications campaign based on meaningful reforms and authentic progress. It’s been Don Draper selling cigarettes by focusing consumers’ attention on anything but the fact that they are poisonous. In short, the public has been misled—oftentimes deliberately—and their sympathies for children have been exploited.

The mechanisms that the ultra-wealthy have used to achieve this shift in public narrative include flooding the media with stories and ads that are favorable to their agenda, utilizing their control and influence over media outlets to shape public opinion, using popular culture to reinforce their messages, funding charter schools to implement advertising and direct marketing campaigns, capitalizing on the long-standing failure of mainstream media outlets to cover the issues and priorities of communities of color on equal footing with those of other communities, and ensuring that individuals favorable to their agenda—such as former US secretaries of education Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos—are in positions of power where they can guide the public narrative around these issues.

Through these mechanisms, school privatization advocates have focused on a number of key messages, such as the following:

Message 1: Public Schools Are Failing

Central to the school privatization strategy was creating a perceived need for an alternative to public schools. Privatization advocates had to actually create a new market. They had to make people believe that they needed something new. That could only be achieved by convincing people that public schools are irretrievably broken, or at least fundamentally flawed. Thus, every school privatization advocate has made it a consistent habit to reference “failing public schools” or “the crisis within our public education system” at virtually every opportunity. Within just a two-year period in 2016–17, those (or closely related) terms appeared in US newspapers over five thousand times.¹⁰²

Of course, while it is certainly true that public schools have failed many children, and especially youth of color, that doesn’t mean that the entire institution is irredeemable. There are many flaws in the system, but they are not attributable to its being a public system. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, if you repeat a lie enough, it eventually becomes the truth. So the notion of “failing public schools” began to creep into the rhetoric of more and more people until it became nearly axiomatic that families need other choices beyond the public school system.

Message 2: Charter Schools and Vouchers Are Directed at Meeting the Needs of Poor Children of Color

Many of the savvier communicators among the ultra-wealthy class and the policy makers who support their agenda have learned that they can dramatically increase their chances of implementing their right-wing agenda if they claim that it is being done out of compassion for low-income and working-class families, even if that is patently false. That is, in short, how the “No Child Left Behind” Act got its name. It is why Arne Duncan largely insulated himself from criticism over his role in dramatically expanding school privatization by continually talking about it as a racial justice issue. It is also why former President Trump recycled Duncan’s talking points to announce his plans to make unprecedented federal investments in vouchers.¹⁰³

These are all just manipulative word games. Frank Luntz, who specializes in messaging that makes the policies supported by the ultra-wealthy more palatable for the public, years ago instructed school privatization advocates to say “equal opportunity in education” rather than “school choice,” and “opportunity scholarships” instead of “vouchers” (similar to how he reframed the “estate tax” as the “death tax” and named a bill that allows more pollution the “Clear Skies Act,” among many other examples).¹⁰⁴ Continuing on that path, school privatization advocates have skillfully exploited people’s natural compassion and empathy by crafting compelling messages and marketing techniques centered on the need to promote education equality. Over and over, they reference the urgent need to help children of color “escape their failing public schools” and “close the achievement gap.”¹⁰⁵ Most of the organizations pushing this agenda have sophisticated websites featuring an abundance of photos of what appear to be happy, studious, black and Latinx children. They also all operate off the same talking points. Consider the home pages and tag lines of several of the most prominent school privatization advocacy organizations:¹⁰⁶

•National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: “Every Child Deserves a Great Education—We are working to grow the number of high-quality charter schools available to all families, especially those who do not have access to high-quality public schools.”

•Families for Excellent Schools: “A movement to ensure all kids have great schools.”

•American Federation for Children: “Every child deserves a world-class education. The American Federation for Children, the nation’s voice for educational choice, works across the country to ensure every child has equal opportunity to obtain a quality education.”

•50Can: “Hi there! We’re 50Can! We’re a nonprofit network of local leaders advocating for a high-quality education for all kids, regardless of their address.”

These are persuasive messages that virtually no one with a beating heart can oppose. Which is precisely the point—to make the public believe that this is a social movement on behalf of needy children and not a billionaire-led privatization effort.

These techniques are evident in the policy debates happening across the country. For example, in Massachusetts, a ballot initiative called Question 2 that would have raised the state’s cap on charter schools was brought to a vote in 2016. The effort was led by Great Schools Massachusetts, which ran numerous TV ads featuring almost exclusively black and Latinx families who, the ad claims, “need your help” because they are “trapped” in “failing” schools.¹⁰⁷ They are meant to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings, and they do. In fact, they bear a certain, likely intentional, resemblance to those commercials that ask you to donate your coffee money to help starving children in Africa.

However, those pro–Question 2 ads weren’t paid for by black and Latinx parents from Massachusetts who believed that additional charter schools would benefit their communities. In fact, much of that expensive ad campaign wasn’t even paid for by Massachusetts residents. Great Schools Massachusetts collected $21.7 million in donations for their campaign, $15 million of which came from the New York–based Families for Excellent Schools, which collects money from Wall Street hedge fund managers and other ultra-wealthy donors to support school privatization.¹⁰⁸ (As described above, Families for Excellent Schools has received almost $15 million in donations from the Walton Family Foundation, as well as grants from Eli Broad, Julian Robertson, the Koch network, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.) Following the Question 2 campaign—which was defeated by voters—Families for Excellent Schools received the largest fine in state campaign history for hiding the identity of its donors to the Question 2 effort. As part of the settlement, the organization was forced to disclose its donor list, which revealed that among the largest benefactors behind the effort were Michael Bloomberg, former CEO of Continental Cablevision Amos Hostetter (#225, $3.6 billion), Walmart heiress Alice Walton (#11, $51.4 billion), Doris Fisher and her son John Fisher (#342, $2.5 billion), and billionaire hedge fund manager Seth Klarman, among many other multimillionaires and billionaires who gave hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to raise the cap on charter schools.¹⁰⁹

The message that school privatization is fundamentally a racial justice effort has also been infused into popular media. For example, the 2010 movie Waiting for Superman brilliantly dramatized the desperation that many black and Latinx families feel about their children’s education while identifying charter schools as the solution. The film—as well as the similarly themed 2012 movie Won’t Back Down—was produced and distributed by Walden Media, which is owned by Philip Anschutz (#41, $11.5 billion). There was a massive public relations campaign surrounding its release, much of which was financed by Bill Gates, who gave $2 million to Participant Media—whose chairman is Jeff Skoll (#131, $5 billion)—to “execute a social action campaign that will complement the campaign of Waiting for Superman.”¹¹⁰ Gates also appeared in the film, along with many other grantees of the Gates Foundation.

Beyond the blatant manipulation of these efforts, what is also noteworthy about them is what they demonstrate about the potential for white people to step up on issues of racial equity. All across the country, there are white folks who are working passionately to build and expand charter schools because they truly believe it to be a racial justice fight. It’s a shame, of course, that as a result of their being lied to or misled by the billionaires driving this agenda, their idealism has been channeled into a different form of racial injustice. Nevertheless, for anyone who doubts the willingness and capacity of white people to tackle issues of race in America, school privatization is, in many ways, Exhibit A in the case for hopefulness.

Message 3: Charter Schools and Voucher Programs Are Innovations That Produce Better Results Than Public Schools

People like new or innovative things. It is far more exciting to say that you have a fresh idea for meeting a need than talking about how you are going to work out the kinks in the old thing. In education, charter schools and vouchers have been treated as the shiny new thing for around twenty-five years, but especially in the past ten years. There has been an endless string of puff pieces with cherry-picked data and stories from high-achieving charter schools that are intended to give the impression that charter schools are inherently better than public schools. Some of the most popular are the “miracle schools” that send all or most of their graduates from communities of color to college.

What is particularly notable about this charter school media coverage is what isn’t included. For example, what you will almost never see mentioned is how there were typically large numbers of students who were pushed out or weeded out of those “miracle schools” before graduation and thus don’t factor into those impressive graduation and college attendance statistics.¹¹¹ Similarly, within this media coverage you will almost never see an article highlighting the many decidedly unsuccessful charter schools or the many public schools that are just as successful as, or even more successful than, the best charter schools.

Message 4: It Is Parents Who Are Demanding More Charter Schools and Vouchers

About the only thing Americans love more than fresh new products are fresh new products that are scarce. We might get excited about buying our kids the hot new toy for Christmas. However, if we are told that there is only a limited number of them, we will literally wake up in the middle of the night, stand outside in the dark waiting for Walmart to open, and then run faster than we have in decades across the store to make sure that we get one.

School privatization advocates have learned this lesson well and have thus taken to using the waiting lists at some charter schools to create the impression of exclusivity.¹¹² They also now cite the existence of such waiting lists as a reason to expand the charter school sector.¹¹³ In other words, they exploit many families’ short-term desperation—created by the failure to provide all children with high-quality public schools—to create radical, long-term change. Considering the central role of school privatization advocates in creating a system in which high-quality education is artificially scarce, this tactic is unseemly at best. It is also disingenuous, because there is no apples-to-apples comparison available. Public schools will never have waiting lists because they have to enroll any eligible young person who walks through the door. Plus, if we did have a system where students could shop around across all public schools, there would undoubtedly be many who would gladly line up to be admitted to public schools that aren’t their home schools.

Moreover, while there are charter schools that have fewer open slots than applicants, the reality is that many charters are struggling to fill their classrooms. In fact, an entire public relations industry has been developed around supporting charter schools with direct marketing strategies that will increase enrollment by poaching students from public schools. (Go ahead: Google “charter school marketing” and see for yourself.) It has now reached the point where K–12 schools are being hawked like any other consumer product.

For example, a “Digital Marketing 101” presentation at the 2015 California Charter School Conference advised attendees that a “digital marketing strategy can help your charter school overcome obstacles such as fundraising, enrollment, and gaining necessary support from the community.” Charters are given marketing tips for their websites and promotional materials, such as using words like “motivating,” “challenging,” “stimulating,” “effective,” “options,” and “choice,” but staying away from words like “competition” and “experimentation.” They are encouraged to use the power of marketing to vanquish their adversaries—namely, public schools (“Don’t let your competition win” exhorts one marketing company focused on charter schools). Some schools even give out gift cards to families that enroll in their school or refer other families to them.¹¹⁴

It is worth pointing out that it is often taxpayer dollars that are being used for these marketing campaigns. A study of cyber-charters found that just ten schools spent a total of $94.4 million in public funds on advertising over a five-year period.¹¹⁵ Not only does this demonstrate that this sector is often seeking to create demand rather than responding to demand, but it also raises important questions about whether this is what public resources should be spent on, particularly when already underresourced public schools are having their budgets cut. (It also further exposes the hypocrisy of celebrating the “efficiency” of charter schools.)

Message 5: Charter Schools Are Public Schools

In recent years, there has been a decided shift in tactics among charter school advocates. It used to be the case that charter schools wanted to distinguish themselves from public schools. However, in recent years they have begun insisting vehemently that charter schools are public schools.¹¹⁶ In the 2016 campaign around Question 2 in Massachusetts, one of the slogans used by school privatization advocates was “Yes on 2 for Stronger Public Schools.”¹¹⁷ Additionally, consider how many school privatization advocates describe themselves. Democrats for Education Reform identifies its mission as this: “We are Democrats leading a political reform organization that cultivates and supports leaders in our party who champion America’s public school-children.”¹¹⁸ Similarly, Stand for Children’s motto is “We work to improve public education.”¹¹⁹ Indeed, for many of the advocacy organizations in this sector, it can be difficult to even discern where they stand on school privatization issues from what they state on their websites and in other materials.

One has to question the integrity of these organizations when they are reluctant to even be transparent about the major social change they are trying to create. Nevertheless, this trend clearly demonstrates two things. First, that school privatizers have apparently recognized that the public actually likes public schools, and they are hoping to leverage that to their advantage. Second, it demonstrates quite clearly that, for all the talk from school privatization advocates about how the education sector needs the competition of market dynamics to improve, school privatizers aren’t actually interested in competing. They don’t want to be Pepsi battling it out against Coke for market share. They want to change their name to New Coke to trick customers into buying their product instead of the product that they really want.

Message 6: Any Dissenting Voices Are Misguided Defenders of the Status Quo

One of the key strategies used by school privatization supporters to advance their agenda has been to marginalize their opposition. Thus, any dissenting voices are either ignored or dismissed as mere “defenders of the status quo.”¹²⁰ Plus they use their resources to lift up the perspectives of their allies while there are precious few opportunities provided to their opponents to share their experiences with school privatization.

For example, consider how pro-privatization pieces like Waiting for Superman are covered compared to the coverage of dissenting views from organizations representing thousands of residents from the black and brown communities most affected by school privatization. Waiting for Superman was featured in hundreds of stories within major newspapers across the country, even years after it was released.¹²¹ In contrast, when the Movement for Black Lives called for an end to school privatization in the policy platform it released, there were precisely zero stories in major newspapers around the country that mentioned it.¹²²

Similarly, in 2014, the Journey for Justice Alliance, which represents parents and students from dozens of cities that have been affected by school privatization, released a report titled Death by a Thousand Cuts: Racism, School Closures, and Public School Sabotage. In it, they cataloged the extensive harms associated with school privatization and declared a state of emergency in communities of color around the country, yet it wasn’t covered by a single major newspaper in the country.¹²³

Even outside of major events like movie and report releases, the voices that are typically covered in the media around these issues skew heavily toward pro-privatization advocates and rarely feature anyone from the communities most affected by the expansion of charter schools and voucher programs. For example, the heads of prominent pro-privatization organizations like the Foundation for Excellence in Education, StudentsFirst, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Center for Education Reform, and the Success Academy (all of which have been heavily funded by the billionaires highlighted earlier) were all mentioned or quoted between 27 and 194 times in major newspapers during the three-year period of 2015–17. Meanwhile, Jitu Brown, the head of the Journey for Justice Alliance, was mentioned or quoted only seven times during the same time period (see table 11).¹²⁴

Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” What she failed to mention was the devastation that could be caused by a small group of ultra-wealthy, committed citizens who seek to change the world and, in the process, ignore or marginalize the large group of people who are most affected by those changes.

Table 11 The voices we hear on school privatization

Message 7: There Are Only Two Choices: School Privatization or the Status Quo

A critical element in the school privatization playbook is using the echo chamber proponents have engineered to create a false choice for the public: you either support failing public schools, or you support the innovation and equal opportunity created by charter schools and vouchers. Those are, typically, the only options that are presented. Thus, if the message around failing public schools sinks into the public narrative effectively, as it often has, then school privatization comes across as the only viable alternative. Indeed, it comes across as an almost evolutionary inevitability.

Message 8: The Billionaires Backing School Privatization Are Benevolent Philanthropists

The billionaires who are financing school privatization efforts have received an abundance of media coverage extolling their generosity and leadership in spearheading bold, social change efforts. Some of this coverage is undoubtedly fueled by the egos involved. However, it also serves a strategic purpose. The notion that they are advancing school privatization out of benevolence serves to divert attention from some of the other reasons they have for pushing this agenda. And those other reasons may not sit as well with the public.

Strategic Racism in Education: Who Benefits?

What all the previous messages have in common is that they mislead and confuse the public. As with all policy issues, and particularly issues of systemic racism—where advocates and policy makers have learned to talk a good game without backing it up with action—we have to train ourselves to focus far less on what these individuals are saying and far more on what they are doing.

We must also not allow our attention to be diverted from the most important questions that should be asked about any social policy: (1) Who benefits? and (2) Who is harmed? Question 2 has already been covered at great length, but there is more to say about Question 1.

As discussed earlier, there have been some individual students, parents, and educators who have realized (often very limited) benefits from school privatization. However, those gains are miniscule in comparison to the enormous benefits realized by the ultra-wealthy. School privatization has already dramatically expanded the wealth of corporate and Wall Street executives, and that is just the tip of the iceberg compared to how they intend to profit from the dismantling of public education in the coming years. Of course, the billionaires driving the school privatization agenda undoubtedly have a variety of motivations, and there are some critical differences among them. Some of them are more altruistic; some are more obviously self-interested. Some are motivated by radical, decades-old political ideas; others are grounded in short-term political expediency. Some limit their support to charter schools; others have their hearts set on vouchers. But one thing they all have in common is a profound economic interest in school privatization, and the overwhelming majority of their actions have been in alignment with that interest, not in opposition to it.

This might not seem all that relevant for many Americans. Predominantly white communities, in particular, have thus far been largely unaffected by school privatization, at least in terms of the most direct effects. However, the opportunity for these issues to be “out of sight, out of mind” for so many Americans is quickly coming to an end, as many of the most powerful school privatizers have made it clear that they have their sights set not just on the schools within low-income communities of color, but rather on all public schools. Getting their agenda adopted within black and brown communities was merely the ruse that allowed them to get through the door. They are now aggressively pursuing the real goal, which truly is colorblind in that it would affect all, or virtually all, children.¹²⁵

In short, there is blood in the water, and the sharks are circling. While the threat of a dramatically expanded charter school sector is itself extremely serious, it is now apparent that many of the most prominent charter school supporters within the school privatization sector see charters merely as the gateway drug toward their even more radical goals.¹²⁶ Now that “school choice” has achieved considerable traction nationwide, they are beginning to show their true colors and advocating for universal voucher programs.¹²⁷

Regardless of their preferred destination, school privatization advocates are rapidly accumulating the wealth and political power to spread their agenda far and wide, while their shock-doctrine tactics for implementing it continue to be effective.¹²⁸ And as bleak as the results from school privatization have already been in communities of color, the implications of expanding charter schools and vouchers further would be substantially more devastating.

The Doctrine of Corporate Greed

While it can be tempting to view school privatization solely as an education issue, it is actually part of a much larger ideology and strategy. To understand what is driving the privatization process and why it is such a threat, it is helpful to understand some of that broader context. In particular, it can be valuable to tease out how it fits within the primary Corporate America and Wall Street political agenda.

Within the swirling winds of politics, that agenda has been the one constant in recent decades. While it has been presented to the public in a number of different ways over the years, the actual content of it has been remarkably consistent and predictable. It has invariably focused very narrowly on the economic interests of large corporations and Wall Street. While its proponents often portray their efforts as part of some deeply principled ideology, ultimately what it amounts to is perhaps best characterized as the Doctrine of Corporate Greed. What that doctrine includes, and what is advocated by its proponents—including many (but certainly not all) top executives from the country’s largest corporations, banks, and investment firms—is a series of policies whose common denominator is that they all allow Corporate America and Wall Street executives to expand their wealth, often at the expense of everyone else. This agenda has dominated Republican politics for decades, and elements of it now hold sway over segments of the Democratic Party as well.¹²⁹ It prioritizes the following types of policy positions:¹³⁰

1.Lowering taxes on the wealthy and on corporations

2.Fighting increases to the minimum wage

3.Cutting public services that benefit low-income, working-class, and middle-class individuals

4.Promoting the creation of new profit-making opportunities (such as through privatizing public services and tapping into “new markets” in the United States or abroad)

5.Reducing business regulations (particularly those that impede wealth accumulation)

6.Opposing labor unions (thus facilitating wage cuts and reductions in worker protections)

7.Convincing the public to subsidize corporations (either directly, such as through tax breaks and bailouts, or indirectly, such as through publicly funded services that favor corporate interests)

The dominant forces that have been driving this agenda forward include ALEC; corporate lobby groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce; advocacy groups such as Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform, and FreedomWorks; and right-wing think tanks such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the State Policy Network and its affiliates.¹³¹ These organizations haven’t always had the political majorities necessary to fully implement their vision of unfettered capitalism, but they have taken the long view, and through massive financial investments in their efforts they have successfully made the profitability of large corporations arguably the single most dominant consideration in contemporary American politics.

You will note that many of the organizations listed here have been very active in promoting school privatization, and the billionaires most responsible for school privatization have funded nearly all of these organizations quite heavily. So what do the priorities reflected in the Doctrine of Corporate Greed have to do with the education system?

The Education Cash Cow

To understand why school privatization is such a high priority for this sector, it is important to first understand how many Corporate America and Wall Street executives view public services such as the public education system. When the government uses tax dollars to provide a service for free, many within the billionaire class view that as wasting several opportunities to increase their own wealth: (1) the opportunity for businesses to provide the same services for profit; (2) the opportunity to restructure those services so that they better support corporate priorities and generate additional corporate wealth; and (3) the opportunity to lower their own tax bills—and potentially increase their own profits—by providing those services more “efficiently,” such as by cutting wages, eliminating “nonessential” services, and having more people pay for those services. Thus, when these individuals look at the public education system, they don’t see a public good or a vital hallmark of a democratic society. They see a massive, untapped market just waiting to be exploited.

For example, school privatization creates the possibility of transferring the assets and revenue of a $600+ billion industry from public to private hands, and of being able to realize corporate profits from activities that are currently performed by public employees. Here are just some of the myriad ways in which the ultra-wealthy have already profited from school privatization:

•Creating for-profit charter and private schools, including cyber-charters (note that one in five charter schools nationally are run by for-profit companies)¹³²

•Developing curricula and other educational programming used by charter schools and private schools¹³³

•Producing the standardized tests that drive the school privatization agenda¹³⁴

•Providing cleaning, food preparation, student transportation, security, accounting, legal, and consulting services to charter and private schools¹³⁵

•Investing in government-backed bonds from charter schools¹³⁶

•Investing in real estate and leasing space to charter schools¹³⁷

•Creating for-profit companies to manage charter school chains or conduct real estate deals (and often exploiting the intricacies of municipal bonds and complex real estate transactions to garner substantial private profits from the use of public resources)¹³⁸

•Providing construction loans to charter schools¹³⁹

•Claiming generous tax credits for investing in charter school construction¹⁴⁰

•Using the tax credits for voucher programs to reduce their own tax bills and even turn a profit¹⁴¹

•Collecting taxpayer-funded interest payments from struggling public school districts that were forced to take out loans¹⁴²

•Exploiting the gentrification that is often associated with school privatization¹⁴³

It is little wonder that all the major investment banks have established special funds devoted to profiting from school privatization.¹⁴⁴

Another way in which the ultra-wealthy benefit extensively from school privatization is through their successful effort to have the education system subsidize corporate operations. Throughout the privatization process, as the ultra-wealthy have gained more and more influence over education policy, they have used it to convince education policy makers throughout the country that K–12 curricula should be aligned with employer needs.¹⁴⁵ While most people would agree that the education system shouldn’t be oblivious of the future job market of students, Corporate America has successfully convinced many Americans that such job training is the most important, or even the sole, purpose of our education system, at the expense of many other facets of education that are needed to create well-educated youth and adults. As just one example, consider the decreased emphasis in recent years on the arts, social sciences, and physical education alongside the surge in attention given to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), such that there are now even day care centers and preschools that market themselves as STEM focused. These types of dynamics are immensely valuable to Corporate America because they essentially shift the cost associated with job training to the general public (which may just represent our country’s largest social welfare program).

The ultra-wealthy also prioritize school privatization because it enables them to reduce the cost of the education system. For example, this sector has aggressively pursued both deregulation and deunionization in education because, from their perspective, it is expensive and inefficient to have to meet the full set of educational needs for all students and to pay experienced teachers appropriate wages. Thus, they are advancing a privatized, deregulated education model that is primarily nonunionized and has fewer protections for students’ educational opportunities, particularly for students with special needs, immigrant students, and students who are considered to be challenging to teach.¹⁴⁶ Each one of these actions promises to reduce the cost of education, with the vast majority of benefits being enjoyed by the ultra-wealthy and virtually all of the extensive harm flowing to everyone else.

Similarly, the desire to cut education costs is why the ultra-wealthy are making such a strong push to expand voucher programs, home schooling, cyber-charters, and online education generally.¹⁴⁷ Widespread voucher programs would result in millions of families having to pay at least some of the cost of the education that they currently receive for free. From the perspective of the ultra-wealthy, that both creates new profit-making opportunities and reduces their tax liability. Additionally, the more students there are who are homeschooled, the fewer students there are who have to be budgeted for with public dollars. Similarly, widespread online education allows for the elimination of many of the costs associated with traditional schools, such as school buildings, teachers, and support services. Not only does this again translate to lower taxes, but it also creates vast profit-making opportunities. For example, the infamous “junk bond king” Michael Milken (#217, $3.7 billion) and other Wall Street investors founded the online education service K12, Inc., which takes in close to a billion dollars in revenue annually, produces dismal results, and nevertheless plays a leading role in expanding online education through ALEC.¹⁴⁸

The Fast Food Model of Education

If you follow the Doctrine of Corporate Greed to its logical conclusion, there is every reason to believe that the continued expansion of charter schools and vouchers would result in a severe reduction in services for virtually all students. Ever since our public education system was created, our wealthiest and most politically powerful citizens have had every opportunity to support efforts to fund schools adequately and equitably, and they have consistently failed to do so. Instead, they have continually impeded those efforts. Does anyone truly believe that they would voluntarily advance education equity now that they have gained substantially more power over schools than they have ever had before? On the contrary, the ultra-wealthy will continue to do the same thing they do in every other area of policy, which is try to limit their tax bill by cutting government spending in areas that don’t benefit them. And the private sector will do, and already is doing, what it always does when it enters a market, which is attempt to maximize its profits. In practice, what this means is that the ultra-wealthy will continue to look to cut education spending for the vast majority of students, secure as much of the available education revenue for themselves that they can, and find as many areas to cut costs as they can.

In fact, that is precisely what has happened where the school privatization agenda has taken hold, even though we are still just in the early stages of implementing a privatized system. To illustrate, note that immediately upon coming into office, the Trump administration prioritized the aggressive promotion of vouchers and charter schools, the slashing of education funding, and the rollback of important regulations that protect students’ right to an education.¹⁴⁹ These efforts come on top of other federal cost-cutting measures that have been led by school privatization advocates in recent years, such as expanding the reliance on low-cost standardized tests and developing a standardized, “Common Core” curriculum. At the state and local levels, as described previously, policy makers have typically responded to school privatization by devoting less funding to schools overall, using narrower and more regimented school curricula—such as those based on Common Core—and cutting back on student services.¹⁵⁰

What this looks like on the ground is that within the districts most affected by privatization, the public schools have often had to cut student services to the bone, and the charter schools have typically reduced labor costs by paying teachers less and using a higher percentage of inexperienced and uncertified teachers.¹⁵¹ These local school systems are increasingly dominated by schools offering second-rate education, if not worse. It’s a “fast food model” of education, where schools offer standardized, relatively low-quality products delivered by inexpensive, inexperienced workers.¹⁵² There are still, of course, some higher-quality schools, but the vast majority of students in these districts are getting the McDonald’s hamburger of education, not the prime rib.

To be sure, there are some charter schools that are able to offer some services and opportunities that other schools cannot, primarily because of the substantial private donations that they receive. However, one shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that those bells and whistles will be permanent features of those schools, or that all the schools within an expanded charter school sector would also have those traits. Those schools are funded the way they are in significant part because it is strategically beneficial to have schools that can be the poster children for the school privatization agenda. These schools are the “loss leaders” of this effort; they are the products sold at a loss to attract future customers and secure a larger share of the “education market.” The vast majority of charter schools don’t receive anywhere near the same level of private donations, and the amount of private donations the average charter school would receive in a dramatically expanded charter school sector would be even less. Thus, as the charter school sector expands, the best features of many charter schools are far more likely to disappear entirely than they are to be replicated widely. Plus, the idea that billionaires would permanently fund all schools the way they have funded schools like KIPP is simply unfathomable.

Ultimately, if you have any doubt about the direction that school privatization will take, all you have to do is examine the other priorities of most of the leaders of the effort. The members of the Koch network, members of ALEC, and Republican Party leaders have made it very clear where they stand with regard to services for low-income, working-class, and middle-class families. They have consistently advocated against the minimum wage, welfare benefits, environmental protections, and affordable health care coverage, among many other vital services and protections.¹⁵³ Thus, it would be foolish to think that the furtherance of the school privatization agenda will be the one exception to these well-established patterns.

These billionaires leading the school privatization effort have demonstrated no interest in creating a rising tide of education quality. Instead, they have recognized that it is far cheaper to cut an occasional check to a particular charter school or network of schools than it is to actually pay for high-quality, equitable educational services for all children. To illustrate, imagine that you make $100 million per year. If there was a proposed tax increase of 5 percent for individuals in your tax bracket to generate more money for local schools and other priorities, it would cost you $5 million more per year. If your priority is to maximize your wealth, it is far preferable for you to oppose the tax increase but make a $5 million donation to local charter schools. You can deduct it on your taxes, make use of the variety of mechanisms available to profit off the increasingly privatized system, and cut your tax liability further by facilitating the effort to undermine public schools. You come out way ahead financially, and you may even turn a profit. You also reduce the likelihood that the public will bother you about not paying your fair share of taxes. In fact, you will likely even receive some favorable publicity and maybe even win an award for your “humanitarianism.” Of course, the only students who benefit are the ones in the individual schools you donate to, while lots of other students and the surrounding community will probably be harmed in the process. Plus, unless you plan on making the same type of donation on a recurring basis, whatever benefits you create are going to be short-lived.

In other words, it should be no surprise that members of the billionaire class are leveraging their resources to essentially buy our education system because doing so creates an enormous economic bonanza for themselves. They get to appear to be philanthropic heroes for funding charter schools and private schools without actually having to address the real, underlying challenges facing our education system, and they are able to get even wealthier in the process. In short, they have figured out how to make money off rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while they are the ones who are sinking it.

Reading the Tea Leaves

Where is this agenda ultimately headed, unless and until it is stopped? All indications are that it is somewhere between a virtually all-charter school system, like that of New Orleans, and a voucher-dominant system, such as the one implemented by Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.¹⁵⁴ Some of the billionaire benefactors of school privatization, particularly those who identify as Democrats, are clearly more supportive of charter schools than they are of vouchers. Their preference is to continue expanding the charter school sector broadly, and even if they may not support a mostly or fully charterized system, that outcome is likely inevitable if current trends continue. Charter schools have such substantial built-in advantages over public schools that the “competition” between them is a profoundly unequal one, thus fueling charter expansion. Plus, most of the power and the wealth are on the side of those with an unquenchable appetite for growth, and so they would almost certainly overwhelm those with more measured aspirations.

On the other end of the spectrum are those who are very clearly pursuing a universal voucher system. This has been the goal of the far right for decades, and many highly influential figures in conservative politics—including the Koch family and Jeb Bush, among many others—are committed to this vision.¹⁵⁵ For example, when David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, not only did their platform oppose all personal and corporate taxation and the elimination of most of the government services provided to low-income, working-class, and middle-class families; it also called for an end to compulsory education laws and publicly funded education.¹⁵⁶ In other words, they didn’t want any public money being used for education, not even for charter schools or voucher programs. While the campaign was an abject failure because of the public’s thorough rejection of their ultraconservative ideas, the Koch brothers and their allies have nevertheless spent the years since then working largely behind the scenes to advance this very agenda.¹⁵⁷

While the implementation of either a charter- or voucher-heavy system would have devastating consequences, it is important to distinguish their supporters, as the billionaires driving school privatization are certainly not monolithic. For example, the ideologies motivating Charles Koch and Bill Gates are quite different. With regard to Koch, there is scant evidence that he is motivated to improve the educational opportunities of youth of color and abundant evidence that he is driven by an ideology that favors his own economic and political interests and those of other ultra-wealthy individuals. With Gates, it is the opposite. There is nothing to suggest that he is anything but sincere in his stated desire to improve education quality and equity. Unfortunately, he has been severely misguided in profoundly harmful ways. While he doesn’t publicly express support for vouchers, and most of his investments have been connected to charter schools, he has nevertheless provided tens of millions of dollars to organizations that are aligned with the Koch voucher agenda, including Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. Moreover, his support for charter schools has been critical in paving the way for the more radical school privatization goals of those like Charles Koch, the Waltons, and Betsy DeVos. Thus, while the intentions of Gates and others like him may have been pure, he has contributed to “letting the monster out” and advancing the agenda of those who want to tear down the entire system of public education. In other words, he has been doing Charles Koch’s work for him.

The Education Hunger Games

Unless we change course, the future of our education system looks terrifyingly grim. To illustrate, consider that New Orleans has been the focus of the absolute best the charter school sector has to offer, and even so, it has produced a system of schools that evaluators have found to be highly stratified by race, class, and educational advantage and where rich educational experiences are reserved for the highest tier of students, where student push-out and exclusion are rampant, where the graduation rate is the lowest in the state of Louisiana, where severe logistical burdens have been placed on families, where mismanagement is severe and widespread, and where there has been extreme dissatisfaction from the families who were supposed to benefit from the “New Orleans miracle.”¹⁵⁸

Similarly, in Chile, after that country switched to a system that was 54 percent voucher schools or private schools, the remaining public schools mainly consisted of students from families that couldn’t afford admission to the other schools even with the vouchers.¹⁵⁹ Public funding of education dropped dramatically, education inequality was exacerbated, and public schools declined substantially in quality.¹⁶⁰ Meanwhile, teachers’ salaries in the country dropped by 70 percent, and there was an overall degradation in many aspects of the teaching profession.¹⁶¹ As a result, indicators of education quality demonstrated relatively poor results for Chile, especially compared to countries that didn’t embrace the privatization agenda.¹⁶² Dissatisfaction with the stratified, voucher-based system was so severe that hundreds of thousands of Chileans organized a massive series of protests and boycotts in 2011–12 to demand the end of education profiteering.¹⁶³

To understand the direction in which this agenda is headed, it can be instructive to consider the type of education system that best aligns with the Doctrine of Corporate Greed and the interests of its proponents. From that perspective, the goal for constructing an education system is to make it as “efficient” as possible in meeting the economic needs of corporations. The most “efficient” system would match people’s education levels with what is needed by the jobs they will fill. Thus, for the limited number of high-skill jobs that are available, corporations need highly educated people to fill them. However, for the many lower-skilled jobs, they don’t need highly educated individuals. If fact, those individuals are undesirable, because highly educated people expect to be paid well. It is far preferable, from this perspective, to have a large number of fungible, low-skill workers who can be paid low wages. In other words, the economic interests of the ultra-wealthy are to provide children with only as much education as is necessary to maximize corporate profits. (This isn’t to say that other interests beyond the purely economic ones don’t occasionally rise to the surface. They do, but far more often than not, they get overwhelmed by the interest in accumulating wealth.)

Thus, for these very wealthy and politically powerful individuals, providing a high-quality, equitable education for all children is inefficient. It is inefficient to invest in a rich, well-rounded curriculum for every child. It is inefficient to ensure that every child is able to access a high-quality teaching and learning environment staffed by well-trained professionals earning a living wage. It is inefficient to commit to meeting the particular needs of every child and ensuring that children with disabilities and English learners get what they need to maximize their potential.¹⁶⁴

None of this should be surprising. These dynamics have been reflected in policy for a very long time.¹⁶⁵ While the private schools attended by many children of wealthy families often cost $30,000 to $50,000 or more per year, our wealthiest and most politically powerful citizens have never deemed it to be an efficient use of resources for the children from low-income, working-class, and middle-class families to receive a comparable level of educational investment. This is why the expensive education enjoyed by children from wealthy families has typically prepared them for prestigious jobs, why the children from low-income and working-class families have typically received relatively low-quality education and disproportionately wind up working in low-wage jobs, and why the children from middle-class families have typically received intermediate-level educational opportunities that prepare them for jobs comparable to those of their parents. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to these generalizations, and there has been some allowance for upward mobility. But it has nevertheless largely been the reality that most US residents have experienced.

What would be different under a more privatized school system is that the stratification and inequities within our education system would be exacerbated, the overall quality would be diminished, and many fewer students would receive the type of high-quality education that all parents want for their children. In other words, there would be even less of a societal commitment to the education of all children, and even more rationing of educational opportunities, than there are currently. As privatization increases, education would increasingly become a Hunger Games–like competition in which students would vie for the opportunity to receive the scarce spots in the few schools providing the highest-level corporate job training, and the many “losers” would receive only the level of education that was necessary for their future as relatively low-skill, low-wage workers. In some instances, that could mean little to no formal education at all, particularly if Charles Koch and his allies get their way. Of course, this wouldn’t apply to the children from wealthy families. They could continue to use their wealth to pay for the highest-quality educational opportunities at expensive private schools (or even use taxpayer dollars to subsidize their children’s education through private school vouchers or charter schools that are designed to function like exclusive private schools). Everyone else, however, would face a future of even less upward social mobility and, in the case of the middle class, far more downward mobility. Only those children who demonstrated substantial talent, docility, and “grit” would be able to “rise above their station.” In other words, non-wealthy children would increasingly be treated as most low-income children of color are treated; they would have to prove themselves to be truly exceptional in order to be provided with high-quality educational opportunities.

This is what privatization and efficiency look like in education. It is a race to the bottom in which the vast majority of children are consigned to a fate that is not of their choosing. It is an education system in which the brilliance of even more children will be squandered. It is an escalation of the tendency to treat young people as if they were disposable, with even larger cracks for students to fall through and even fewer protections and services for the students who are most resource-intensive and challenging to teach. It is the decimation of even more communities around the country. It is a future in which those who start off with the greatest disadvantages, such as the residents of low-income communities of color, would suffer the most, and become a virtually permanent underclass. It is the rejection of the idea that we should be enabling all children to reach their full potential in favor of the treatment of children as commodities, as mere cogs in the wheel of our economy.

Thus, the school privatization debate isn’t just a fight to save public schools in communities of color, or even public schools overall. It is a fight to ensure that we even have a meaningful right to education in this country. Those rights are already being severely undercut, and once again there are highly powerful billionaires who are exerting enormous influence over education policy decisions across the country and don’t believe that the government should be making any investment in education at all.¹⁶⁶ Thus, we have reached a critical tipping point in this education holy war because those individuals and a great many other allies of theirs are both winning and escalating their efforts to expand school privatization broadly. It is now clear that these individuals won’t stop on their own; they will have to be defeated. And everyone whose family doesn’t have sufficient money in the bank to pay for expensive private school education has a very direct interest in ensuring that they are defeated.

This fight is both necessary and, fortunately, highly winnable, because there are exponentially more people who stand to lose from expanded school privatization than there are who stand to gain from it. But winning will require the residents of the communities that are next on the school privatization chopping block—namely, predominantly white communities—to join the communities of color that have been on the front lines of this struggle.

The Path toward Excellence and Equity

The target of such a unified, multiracial struggle is obvious: the end of school privatization. What is less clear is the alternative vision that we should be advancing. In other words, if charter schools and vouchers aren’t the answer to creating high-quality, equitable schools, then what is?

Based on our history with school privatization, it is clear that our best chance for providing all our children with the education that they deserve, that every parent hopes for, and that best serves the interests of society overall, is through our neighborhood public schools. This isn’t to suggest that we need a cookie-cutter system of identical schools throughout the country. Far from it. We need to promote innovation and experimentation, and we should be flexible when necessary, but all of that is fully compatible with a school system centered on neighborhood public schools as its primary delivery mechanism.¹⁶⁷ Thus, there can and should continue to be public schools that explore different educational methods, adopt different areas of curricular emphasis, and focus on meeting particular sets of student needs. (And any high-quality charter schools that fulfill such functions should be absorbed into the public schools system.) Plus, children need not be locked into their home schools when other schools have programming that would be a better fit. All this can all be achieved within a public system that, as a baseline, guarantees all children a high-quality education at the public schools in their neighborhood.

Of course, while a robust public education system represents our best approach, the long-standing and grossly inequitable educational opportunities offered within that system continue to be unacceptable. The students and parents in low-income communities of color, and all communities, deserve much more than a school system in which children’s educational opportunities and outcomes are largely determined by their race and the zip code in which they live. All parents in the United States should be able to expect that their children will receive a high-quality education. How could we possibly be willing to accept anything less than that? Shouldn’t that be a fundamental guarantee that we, as a society, offer to every child? That no matter who you are or what your life circumstances are, you will receive an education that allows you to live just as good of a life as anyone else?

Unfortunately, while most constitutions in the world recognize an explicit right to an education, the US Constitution does not.¹⁶⁸ We all do have a right to an education under our state constitutions, but those rights are so weak that even the abominable conditions described earlier that exist in many schools have not, with rare exceptions, been found unconstitutional.

So how do we address these problems? Here are three very simple suggestions:

1.Let’s create schools based on what parents and communities want for their children, not on what the ultra-wealthy want.

2.Let’s design our education policies around students’ developmental needs.¹⁶⁹

3.Let’s collectively repair the harm caused by racial inequities and address the education debt owed to communities of color across the country.

With regard to no. 2, for too long we have designed our schools as if students are mere empty vessels that we can just fill up with knowledge. But as every parent knows, the reality is that meaningful learning and academic growth can happen only if we pay attention to the whole child. As Ken Robinson says, children aren’t just brains on legs. That means that all of their social, emotional, physical, psychological, moral, and intellectual needs must be addressed for them to thrive in school. Unfortunately, while most parents think of their public schools as youth development systems—as places devoted to supporting children in becoming healthy, successful human beings—that that has never really matched up with how the education system has been governed and resourced. Our schools have never truly been structured around comprehensive youth development.

Thus, when students come to school suffering from hunger, unmet health needs, or unstable living environments, our schools too often aren’t equipped to help them. When young people are struggling with the impact of community violence, the mass incarceration system, or anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, our schools typically aren’t designed to meet their needs. And when students are experiencing anxiety, depression, or low self-worth, are having difficulty managing their emotions, or are struggling to develop healthy, positive relationships with their peers and their teachers, our schools frequently struggle to provide them with the assistance and support they need. Over and over, our education policies simply fail to account for students’ developmental needs and the reality of what they are dealing with on a daily basis.

However, while the world outside of schools has undoubtedly created a great many challenges for educators within schools, that doesn’t mean that we are doomed to see broader societal inequities re-created in the education system. On the contrary, there are a number of effective strategies that can used by schools and other youth-serving systems to effectively mitigate the thoroughly inequitable difficulties that students face. Unfortunately, there are also many other commonly used strategies that instead exacerbate students’ challenges. All of these educational strategies, as well as the experiences that students bring with them to school, can be thought of as “developmental inputs.”

Children are in large part a product of these inputs. Some of them are positive, meaning they are responsive to children’s developmental needs. Many positive inputs are received outside of school, such as prenatal care, a stable living situation, quality health care, and enriching early childhood opportunities. Other positive inputs are often received within schools, such as well-rounded, engaging, and culturally responsive curricula, small class sizes, social-emotional learning supports, and quality afterschool enrichment opportunities.

On the flip side are negative developmental inputs, which are those that work in conflict with students’ developmental needs and that inflict harm on them or otherwise compromise their learning and growth. Examples from outside of school include the effects of poverty, trauma, toxic stress, and systemic racism, such as those mentioned previously. Examples from within schools include overcrowding; the lack of student support personnel such as school psychologists, social workers, and nurses; narrow, ponderous, and standardized-test-driven curricula; unnecessary reliance on suspensions, expulsions, and the justice system for school disciplinary matters; and the instability created by the constant threat of school closure.

It is the allocation of those inputs that determines the size of our education inequities and how they either grow or shrink over time. For example, the children from relatively affluent communities already tend to come into school with an abundance of positive developmental inputs and very few negative inputs, and their school experiences typically replicate and reinforce those ratios. However, there are many young people who come into school with fewer positive inputs and more negative inputs. Their schools could help, and in some cases do help, to counteract those inequities by investing in an abundance of positive inputs that they need to essentially make up developmental ground. More common, however, is that students who enter school with a greater set of developmental needs receive fewer positive inputs and more negative inputs than their peers, thus exacerbating our education inequities and deepening our broader social inequities.

These are the dynamics that absolutely must be addressed. In other words, if we want our schools to serve all children well, then they have to be structured around the needs of all children. That is the one and only one surefire way to create a truly equitable education system: we have to start with an assessment of students’ developmental needs and proceed from there. Everything else is a waste of time and resources. Indeed, if you are not using that as your starting point and making the appropriate investments in young people, you are simply not making a serious effort at addressing the real challenges and conditions they face, and you have absolutely no right to complain about the subpar academic outcomes that will inevitably result. Unfortunately, while we know from the experience of the many “sustainable community schools” around the country that taking this approach will succeed, as a society we have been unwilling to actually do it for all children.¹⁷⁰

So to truly address the root causes of education injustice, we need all our schools to be resourced, staffed, structured, and managed in ways that can address the disparities in developmental inputs. For the young people who have been most harmed by social inequities, we should be dramatically pumping up the number of positive inputs they receive in schools. Plus, we should be eliminating all the negative inputs that they and all students receive from their schools. Then, when students make their developmental needs apparent, as they inevitably do, we must refuse to allow them to fall through the cracks of the system. Instead, our focus should be on addressing the root causes of those behaviors and ensuring that each and every child feels truly seen and cared for. And then we should get to work in eliminating those cracks entirely, so that never again will we allow children to fail because the adults charged with their education and development neglected their needs.

A Student Bill of Rights

One strategy that would allow us to prioritize the views of those who have the most invested in their schools, to center students’ developmental needs, and to do so equitably would be to finally create and actualize a more meaningful definition for the right to an education. We could decide collectively: What should be included in a high-quality, equitable education system? What should students, their families, and their communities be entitled to expect? What should educators and education policy makers be expected to provide?

These are essential questions, and ultimately, they are ones that communities will need to answer together for us to address the challenges described earlier. As a model for what the product of such discussions can look like, the following text box shows a sample Student Bill of Rights that is based on similar documents I helped to create through participatory processes with students, parents, educators, and other community members in various cities across the country. I include it in the hope that it won’t discourage readers from answering the above questions for themselves, but rather that it will serve as a starting point for conversation. It reflects the views of a great many stakeholders, as well as our best research on what we know works in creating excellent, equitable schools that meet the needs of all children.

Implementing what is reflected in the Student Bill of Rights would benefit every single public school student in the United States. Of course, the degree to which students would benefit varies widely. Within many communities, what is reflected in the Student Bill of Rights won’t strike residents as particularly noteworthy or extravagant. Their schools already largely meet this standard. However, for many others, and particularly the residents of low-income communities of color, the type of education reflected in the Student Bill of Rights can seem virtually unimaginable, like something out of a dream. Their schools have never come close to resembling anything quite like this. That, in brief, is why there is such urgency to act, so that we can provide all students, parents, and communities with the guarantee they deserve that their schools will be equipped with what they need to create thriving families and neighborhoods.

Not only should we develop such a Student Bill of Rights, but we must also take the steps necessary to ensure that it is put into action in ways that benefit all young people. That will require developing a truly equitable school funding system that aligns with students’ developmental needs, prioritizing additional resources and supports for those young people who have been most affected and marginalized by systemic racism, and paying down our long-standing education debt that is owed to communities of color in particular. Anything less will never fully remedy the massive, multigenerational harm that has been done to these communities.

Of course, even top-notch schools can only do so much by themselves. We won’t be able to maximize our schools’ or our children’s potentials unless we address the issues driving the inequitable developmental inputs that students are receiving outside of school, such as the shortage of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, adequate health care, prenatal care, affordable child care, and other vital social services.¹⁷¹ We also need the policies and practices of all youth-serving institutions—including law enforcement and the child welfare and juvenile justice systems—to be aligned with the developmental focus of our education systems.

In short, we need to address these issues holistically. To pay for the necessary improvements in educational and developmental opportunities, we can start by reinvesting the approximately $50 billion in taxpayer dollars that are currently spent each year on school privatization. Beyond that, chapter 5 addresses how the implementation of a Student Bill of Rights and a comprehensive youth development agenda is eminently feasible if we finally make the education of all children a national priority.

This course of action may not be as sexy as launching a bunch of new charter schools and voucher programs. There is no billionaire-funded army of advocacy groups and think tanks that is pushing for it. It certainly doesn’t benefit from a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign. But if we are serious about doing what is necessary to once and for all address our despicable system of separate and unequal education, then there are no shortcuts. Gimmicks won’t undo the damage caused by generations of undereducating youth of color. And there is simply no magic that comes from restructuring the management of our schools.

There is only one viable path forward, and that requires making a commitment to every single child in the United States that we are going to dedicate the appropriate resources, and employ our most effective strategies, to ensure that they all get the education they deserve. We have been able to do that—or at least something very close to that—within predominantly white communities across the country, so we had better be able to do it within predominantly black and brown communities. If we do, we will finally be able close the book on our shameful legacy of education injustice. Then, at long last, we can usher in a new golden age of education equity in which demography will no longer equal destiny and our schools can be what we want them to be, not what a small group of billionaires wants them to be.

*Throughout this chapter, I will distinguish between “public schools” and “charter schools.” Though I recognize that this is itself controversial, and charter schools have taken to referring themselves as public schools, for the sake of clarity it is important to be able to distinguish between the two. Additionally, the facts remain that charter schools have chosen to differentiate themselves from the public system and have sought to exempt themselves from many of the characteristics we expect of public institutions.