If you listen in on academic discussions– online, in electronic lists, and conferences– you quickly see the ways that proprietary education has become a kind of stand in for the ongoing problems in U.S.higher education. The destruction of tenure, rising tuition, student debt, less access for working class and poor to educational capital. These are all problems endemic to our system but too often it sounds as if proprietary education invented all of them.

The dangers of this shortsightedness is reflected in the ongoing response to new regulations designed to “rein in” proprietary education. As it turns out– no one should be surprised by this– it’s not just the for-profits that have been given a free regulatory ride (“As Costs of New Rule Are Felt, Colleges Rethink Online Course Offerings in Other States“). The public schools have flaunted regulations too and the shift to the new regulations is going to be expensive for everyone.

We don’t need rules to “rein in” proprietary education and we certainly don’t need a nightmare regulatory scenario– parallel to the history of the credit card industry–in which states “compete” to be the higher education friendly state” and so  on. We need  a federal system that addresses problems shared by public and for-profits alike: the availability of affordable, online education for working class people and the poor, the over reliance on loans, the loss of full-time positions and tenure.

Here’s the right-wing plan for our schools: First,  cut off as much money as possible so that schools have to fight for every penny of funding. Second, destroy the teachers unions to destroy tenure and seniority.  Teachers will then have to fight to keep their jobs from the first day they are hired until their last day of work. Third, judge the resulting competition almost solely on a single measure: the standardized test.  Fourth,  wherever possible, dismantle public schools when you can and sell them off to private interests.

Last, exaggerate  and publicize the failures of the public schools while obscuring the failures and exaggerating the successes of the charter schools. This is not a conspiracy. This is simply the practical results of a “market-based” approach to public education rooted in a system of so-called “accountability.”  It’s hyper-competition. Markets are a-moral; ethics matter only if ethics can be used to increase profits. Markets are also never free; they are shaped by the participants in that market to maximize profitability. Right and wrong is secondary.

If the participants in a market are allowed to fully maximize their potentials for profit, that is, to fully deregulate the market, corruption is inevitable. The financial markets were radically deregulated– on the behest of Wall Street– and it led to the rescission and to ongoing fiscal crises all over the world. That’s what is happening more and more in the increasingly “market driven” public education system (see here and here).  If the corruption of financial capital caused catastrophic problems, imagine the results of this corruption of human capital.