The Privatization Infatuation

Should We Buy What Think Tanks Are Selling?

By Kevin G. Welner & Alex Molnar

President Truman is said to have wished that his advisers had only one arm—so he didn’t have to repeatedly hear, in response to his policy questions, “on the one hand this, and on the other hand that.”

Half a century later, a phalanx of “one-armed” policy analysts are plying their trade in free-market-oriented think tanks. For these analysts and their think-tank sponsors, privatization is the preordained solution for each new educational problem. Indeed, time spent reading their reports leaves the unmistakable impression that the public nature of public education is the root problem for all that ails schools. Everything else is just a symptom.

In 2007, the second year of our Think Tank Review Project ( thinktankreview.org ), we reviewed 18 think-tank reports about education policy. Time after time, our reviewers identified analyses that led inexorably to a privatization prescription. Even reports that offered a reasonable analysis of the No Child Left Behind Act ( “End It, Don’t Mend It: What to Do With No Child Left Behind,” from the Cato Institute) or the dropout problem ( “The High Cost of Low Graduation Rates in North Carolina,” from the Friedman Foundation) suddenly and groundlessly identified as the key policy implication of their findings the need for vouchers or...