Kozol on Privatization of Schools

Jonathan Kozol has an essay in the current edition of Harper's, which, unfortunately requires a subscription for on line access. The gist of his argument is that we need to be aware of what's going on with the charter school movement and NCLB, that the ultimate goal is to corporatize public education to the benefit of private school management companies like White Hat, for example. (Threw that in there so the folks at White Hat would find me when doing their oppo research. Thanks Scott. Hi guys!)

I managed to locate the essay on line at Mahablog, but even that site won't allow me to cut and paste. Kozol argues that we are seeing the increasing corporatization of American schools through vouchers and charter schools, and that those who care about public schools should not be naive about the ultimate goal of some policy makers and management groups, and that goal is to fully privatize public education in the U. S. He even shows how investment companies have measured the untapped profit potential from public schools. So go read it, but first, I have a few more thoughts about how testing ties in to the corporatization of education. You see, standardized testing mandated by NCLB (but which most states were already doing anyway) is absolutely integral to corporatization of schools, because it provides the justification. Without the low test scores in many (primarily urban or poor or both) schools, why would anyone consider something so radical as privatizing a public school.

But Kozol doesn't talk about how passage rates lend to this definition of failure in public schools. Think about this: in your local school, or your child's classroom, how is a passing standard set? Well, usually there is an established grading scale, right? 60% score on a test or assignment is considered passing, or something like that. In some schools it's higher, but whatever the number is, everyone knows ahead of time that they have to earn 60% in the class to pass it.

How is a passing standards arrived at on, say, the Ohio Graduation Test (OGT)? It isn't a standard pecentage like 60. It's one of the least transparent aspects of the testing program itself. In fact, on the first administration of the OGT, the cut scores--the score that would determine whether a student had achieved "proficiency" and thus passed a section of the OGT--wasn't even determined until after the administration of the OGT itself! Was there much of a chance, you think, that the cut score was going to cause widespread failure among wealthy suburban districts? Why is the cut rate set where it is? It has to do with setting it where a certain number will pass--in other words, it isn't standards based at all . You can't call it a "standard-based" test if it's designed so that 90% of the students will pass.

My point is that this testing mechanism, which ensures that poor and urban schools will have high rates of failure, essentially provides the justification for corporatizing schemes like the ones that allow White Hat to take over schools and make a profit on them.

So go see a little of what Kozol has to say about it.

UPDATE: After reading some of the comments I want to clarify one point. I'm not suggesting that the ODE intentionally sets passing rates so that poor schools are labelled as failures. I'm just suggesting that the effect of the bar-setting is to allow the majority of suburban districts to be successful. And the act of establishing cut scores is not something that's out in the open. Granted, it's not very exciting, so it's not going to get news coverage, but it sure has a profound effect on students and teachers.