Page Content
Koni Macdonald
Public education advocate Alex Molnar compares privatization to cocaine—a burst of euphoria not worth the risk.
Molnar believes passionately in public education. Teachers who were fortunate to attend his sessions at the Calgary City Teachers' and Greater Edmonton Teachers' conventions will not easily forget him.
"...the cost of funding all private and religious schools would be astronomical. At some point taxpayers will say, 'How do we put this genie back in the bottle?'"
—Public education advocate Alex Molnar
In his soon to be published book, Giving Kids the Business, Molnar documents his rebuttal to right-wing forces seeking to turn public schools into private sector captives. He has studied corporate involvement, privatization and market-based reform in public schools around the world.
Molnar, a professor in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has been featured on 60 Minutes and the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour. He has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and various educational journals. Recently, he initiated a state school reform project which shifted concerns to children in poverty and reduced class sizes to a ratio of 15:1 for students in kindergarten to Grade 3.
Molnar is concerned about the dismantling of financial and public support for public schools. He says Alberta is suffering from the backwash of what's been happening in Great Britain, United States, New Zealand, Australia, Chile and other countries.
"In terms of student achievement, there is no success to these reforms—period," Molnar asserts. "If by success you mean more affluent kids being peeled off from poorer kids into different kinds of schools, or the erosion of broad-based public support and funding for public education—then yes, it is successful. It depends on what you mean by success. The effects you see are fiscal and political, not educational."
In industrialized countries, achievement test results can be predicted by social class. Offering parents a wide variety of choices funded by tax dollars tends to physically separate the data but overall statistics remain the same, he says.
"The privatization of schools," says Molnar, "unleashes a dynamic in which public schools, because they offer equity and access, slowly but surely become the repositories of the most difficult, the least able, or the most impoverished students."
Private school voucher initiatives and charter schools are part of the same privatizing agenda. He calls them "market-driven, fiscal, governance reforms" that are essentially non-educational.
At best, Molnar says these reforms are revenue neutral—they take money earmarked for public schools and distribute it to alternative schools, leaving less money to educate the remaining children.
Molnar contends privatization communicates the message that it's better to disengage. "People are encouraged to carve out a separate destiny—to say 'to hell with everybody else. Don't get involved, don't struggle with those less fortunate, don't do all the things that really are necessary to keep a democratic society vital.'"
He believes privatization provides a comforting illusion of change without any sacrifices necessary to bring about real improvement. "Privatization," says Molnar, "helps perpetuate the myth that the fundamental problems of public schools are caused by bureaucracies, incompetence, and the self-interested greed of unions instead of crushing poverty, racism, and a lack of jobs."
The question is not whether dramatic change will occur overnight but whether, over years, the fate of more affluent families and their children will be disconnected from the fate of less privileged families and their children.
"Generally speaking," says Molnar, "most people say choice in schools is good. But when you think about it, the cost of funding all private and religious schools would be astronomical. At some point taxpayers will say, 'How do we put this genie back in the bottle?'"
According to Molnar, charter schools in the United States started as nothing more than souped-up site-based management—a way for faculties, school administrators and parents to have more control over daily decision making. Initially, charters gave more control to teachers. That agenda was then adapted to meet a variety of mandates—usually right-wing and market-driven. Now, 22 states offer a hodgepodge of charter school legislation. "In Arizona, anybody who can pass a criminal record check and fog a mirror can start a charter school. You don't have to be certificated to teach, you don't have to be anything, all you have to do is attract students," says Molnar.
Education reforms have nothing to do with education successes, he says. These reforms are driven by social policy imperatives.
Public education works, he says. Public schools are educating more diverse, less affluent students to a higher level of academic attainment then ever before. Public education is blamed for students graduating but being unable to find a job or support themselves. This phenomenon is related to economics and has nothing to do with public education, he maintains.
"It is impossible for schools to do what some people believe schools should do. Schools do not drive the national economy."
Order forms for Molnar's book, Giving Kids the Business, are available through the Public Education Action Centre, 11010-142 Street, Edmonton, AB T5N 2R1. Telephone: 453-2411 in Edmonton; 1-800-232-7208 from elsewhere in Alberta.
