Published: January 15, 1997

Obfuscation, Rubber Yardsticks, and Double Standards

At the end of last year, Education Week , The New York Times , and several other national news organizations gave prominent coverage to a new book entitled Hard Lessons: Public Schools and Privatization , by Carol Ascher, Norm Fruchter, and Robert Berne. ( "Privatization Found To Fall Short of Billing," Nov. 6, 1996, and "What May Be Lost Through Privatization?," Dec. 11, 1996.) The book concludes that privatization does nothing to improve education, harms the poor, and threatens democracy.

This report cannot be taken seriously as an inquiry into the risks and benefits of privatization because it appears that the authors assembled evidence to support a predetermined point of view. The report's problems stem from an elastic use of the key term--privatization. At the beginning, it is sharply defined as "tax credits or other educational vouchers given directly to families to be spent on either private or public schools, or contracting out public schools or school systems to be run by for-profit companies." However, the authors' definition changes when they review programs dating back to the 1970s. Whatever they do not like is called privatization. Government contracting for special instruction for students attending regular public schools is called privatization, as is a business-run private school and an experiment that gave parents vouchers allowing them to choose any local public school. But programs they do like, such as open-enrollment plans that allow state money to follow students to any public school in their metropolitan area, are not considered privatization.

Their review is biased and selective. It details Education Alternatives Inc.'s failed efforts to run schools in Baltimore but says nothing about the apparent success of contracted-out public schools in Springfield, Mass., and Wilkinsburg, Pa., or about community satisfaction with the first Edison Project schools. The review of failed experiments does serve a valuable purpose, however: It shows how school board and union harassment has prevented many private groups from serving students and families as they had promised. It also shows how foolish it is for anyone to take responsibility for a public school without getting ironclad advance agreements about staffing, evaluation,...