Category Archives: Economics

“We feel this is the watershed moment,” said Richard Garrett, vice president and principal analyst for Eduventures and the report’s author. “After years of endless growth, we’re definitely coming to more of a plateau situation.”

“Mature Market for Online Education,” Paul Fain

I’ve said before that the online higher education system is, in part, driven by a race between the public and not-for-profit tortoises, slow and steady, and the more nimble private hares. The hares are slowing down. I taught at for-profits for several years but, after being laid off by the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division last February, am now teaching exclusively for not-for-profit institutions. It’s not just my impression that the for-profits are not hiring; the facts back me up, at least in the study described by Fain in Inside Higher Education.

Another piece in the IHE (“More Selective For-Profits“)suggests that, while enrollment are down in the for-profits, they are not going away– at least, not all of them. In an emerging market, it’s a free for all because there’s so much growth; everyone can grab a piece of the ever-expanding pie. In a mature market, schools have to compete in a more or less fixed pool of students. The for-profits’ recent bad public press should make it easier for the not-for-profits, including public schools, to make some inroads. The hares could catch up.

The problem, as this debate in California shows (“Who’s in Control?“), is that many of the pubic schools are too mired in budget problems to take full advantage of the moment. The irony is that one of the City College of San Francisco’s main strengths, it’s (relative) reliance on full-time faculty, is under fire. The political temptation will be to balance the budget on the backs of part-time faculty. That should not happen; this is exactly the sort of selling point that public and not-for-profits ought to be using to attract students.

Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system–i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.

“Public Schools: Make Them Private” Milton Friedman

Emanuel in fact has built a strong base of donors outside the labor movement, including corporate and cultural icons and even some prominent Republicans. He received a $50,000 donation from real estate magnate Donald Trump, who flirted with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, a disclosure to the elections board showed.

“Wealthy base helps Emanuel take on Chicago teachers union,” Nick Carey

“The new vision, championed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who used to run Chicago’s schools, calls for a laser focus on standardized tests meant to gauge student skills in reading, writing and math. Teachers who fail to raise student scores may be fired. Schools that fail to boost scores may be shut down.

And the monopoly that the public sector once held on public schools will be broken with a proliferation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run— and typically non-union.”

“Chicago Teachers Striking Out on Education” Jayne Matthews-Hopson

I’ve been reading pieces by Doug Henwood, Corey Rubin, and then Jane Van Galen on why, despite the Chicago Teacher’s Unions’ strong progressive record and detailed, reasonable agenda for the Chicago public schools, so many liberals seem to echo the traditional conservative hatred for both teachers and for teachers’ unions. This liberal mistrust seems to have deep roots in class bias as much as in economic and political opportunism.

Mayor Emanuel, and Jayne Matthews-Hopson, one of his many allies at the Democrats for Education Reform, seems to sit right at the crossroads of several important currents in U.S. culture. Van Galen and Rubin both suggest that many upper middle class or wealthy Americans have long felt a powerful disdain towards teachers, people who have in their view “opted out” of the race for wealth and so are either failures or simply mediocre.

Friedman offers intellectual cover for these attitudes and hints in a not so subtle fashion that an enormous amount of money could be made if the economic potential of the public education system were “unlocked.” Buried down there somewhere is that freakish worship of markets and private enterprise, a religious fanaticism that, after the collapse of so many countries and businesses, ought to be transparently grotesque but somehow isn’t yet.

The teachers, and the teachers unions, are scapegoats, stand ins for the larger issues of the concentration of wealth and the rise in poverty. This is the story, as Corey Rubin reminded me, of Diane Ravitch’s description of the strange love some have for the reactionary documentary, “Waiting for ‘Superman'”. Mayor Emanuel, and the DER, want us to forget that we can’t fix education unless we are willing to try to ameliorate poverty.