A Modest, and Perhaps Naïve, Proposal

Yesterday the Board of Education for the city of Los Angeles voted to allow private operators to run up to one third of the district’s public schools. The decision comes on the heels of other major cities – New Orleans, Philadelphia, the District of Columbia – who decided to hand significant portions of their public schools over to charter companies. And in some cities, notably Milwaukee, major voucher programs continue.  With these developments as backdrop, and more sure to come, the elite debate that pits proponents of privatization against opponents is sounding increasingly antiquated.

The fact is, the line between public and private in American education has always been blurred, and it is only growing more so.  But when reforms are contemplated that would transfer responsibilities across the public-private divide, the ensuing debate almost invariably pits one group sounding the wonders of choice and competition against another insisting that we recommit ourselves to a system of education that is essentially public in nature.

None of this is especially useful.  And the arguments that are offered are almost never new.  Like our health care system, our education system, through and through, contains a mix of public and private operators offering a range of services, often within the same building, to America’s children.  The real question is not whether our system of education will be public or private, but what kinds of regulations the state will impose on America’s schools, and what aspects of education will be subject to collective bargaining arrangements.

Unfortunately, the public debate rarely gets around to these important details. And so they are left to elected officials and teacher unions to haggle over in the quiet solitudes of back boardrooms—like Superintendent Ramon Cortines is doing now in Los Angeles.

With the hopes of shifting the public debate onto more productive ground, I’d like to suggest the following: those who traditionally argue on behalf privatization should come forward and suggest an area of private schools that the state should regulate; and those who put their stock entirely with traditional public schools should recognize an aspect of education that decidedly should not be regulated by the state.

At the end of this exchange, it may turn out that proponents of privatization only offer anti-discrimination clauses on the basis of race and religion, and stalwarts of traditional public schools insist that every protection of teachers remain in force. But I suspect, and I suppose hope, that some among the two sides will find areas of agreement that their public rhetoric entirely belies—and that this might serve as a basis for a more fruitful exchange, which, heaven forbid, might productively inform the important decisions that Cortines is making about which schools will be operated by which private operators under what kinds of contracts and with what system of oversight.

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