Tag Archives: privatization

A Little-Noted Lesson from the Fiscal Cliff

Apparently, the country will be taking a leap off the so-called fiscal cliff, since–despite a flurry of last-minute activity and a vote by the Senate–midnight came and went without passing anything. (And even the Senate’s measure didn’t remotely resemble a “grand bargain.”)

For most of us, the tax consequences are likely to be short-term. Incredibly, a significant number of Representatives refused to vote in 2012 to terminate the Bush tax cuts for rich folks, but are perfectly willing to come back early in 2013 after the cuts have expired and vote to reinstate them just for the non-rich. Why is that, you might reasonably ask, when the result will be exactly the same? Because they can then tell their constituents they never voted for a tax increase. They evidently think the American public is really, really stupid–and we elected them, so maybe they’re right.

Then there’s the issue of spending cuts. If a larger deal cannot be negotiated, and the dreaded “sequester” goes into effect, we’re told that government spending will be sharply reduced. And that’s true–as far as it goes. But the nasty little secret is that government is no longer a word that describes…government. As in public sector employees and elected and appointed officials. After decades of privatization and contracting out, government is all of us and everywhere–defense contractors, civil engineers, social service agencies and other for-profits and nonprofits that depend upon government contracts to survive. The last analysis I saw–and it is now several years old–counted some eighteen million people working full-time at ostensibly private and nonprofit sector jobs that were wholly supported by our tax dollars.

Retrenchment in those government contracts–required by the sequester–will affect more than just those 18+ million people who are employed in what we might call the “quasi-government” sector. When the defense contractor loses his biggest customer, his suppliers lose theirs, and so on down the line. The economic contraction would be rapid and severe.

I say it “would be” because I believe that the reality of that outcome will quickly become apparent even to the less-than-brilliant policymakers in Congress. (Their constituents can be counted on to point it out, if they somehow don’t get it.) Call me Pollyanna, but I think we’ll see some sort of acceptable-but-not-ideal agreement early in January.

Even if we evade economic disaster via fiscal cliff-diving, however, it may be worth pondering the largely unrecognized extent to which the private and nonprofit sectors are now part and parcel of that “bloated and wasteful” government we routinely excoriate, and the extent to which demands for cuts in “government spending” threaten to reduce our own incomes. That’s certainly not an argument for unrestrained spending; it is, however, an argument for recognizing economic reality and the extent to which “privatization”–which has increased, rather than reduced, the size of government–has made necessary spending cuts infinitely more difficult.

Happy New Year.

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School Choice of Fact

Yesterday, I noted that school privatization brings with it a number of unintended–and unfortunate–incentives. In Ohio, those incentives were financial; the Ohio Superintendent forced to resign was gaming the system for money.

Today’s lesson, children, centers upon a different incentive: the opportunity for proselytization. Welcome to Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana.  

Mother Jones reports on Jindal’s sweeping voucher program, which has received glowing reports from advocates of school choice and privatization. There is no doubt that Louisiana schools are in need of dramatic reform, but as the article notes, the state is poised to spend billions of tax dollars with virtually no accountability.

The early result? Of the 119 private schools participating in the program, at least 19 teach creationism in lieu of science, and substitute religious dogma for documented history.

These schools rely on textbooks and curricula produced by Bob Jones University. (The texts are quoted and referenced in the article available at the hyperlink.) They teach bible-based “facts,” including:

Dinosaurs and humans were on earth at the same time.

God used the Trail of Tears to bring Indians to Christ.

Most slave masters “treated their slaves well.”

In some areas of the country the KKK “tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters and immoral movies.”

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was part of a propaganda campaign to make the Depression sound worse than it was.

If rejection of science and rewritten history aren’t your thing, the schools also teach law (“Ignoring 3,500 years of Judeo-Christian civilization, religion, morality and law, the Burger Court held that an unborn child was not a living person…”) and literature (“Mark Twain’s outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless”…Emily Dickenson’s poems “show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny…she never accepted [the bible] as an inerrant guide to life.”)

Louisiana tax dollars at work.

I’d worry about this more, but global climate change is a sign that the Rapture is imminent…..

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Solutions with Problems

It’s probably human nature to believe that solutions we propose to “fix” problems are simpler than they are. And in fact, the less we know about the complexities of our problems, the surer we are that “all we have to do is X.” (I’m sure my students get tired of hearing me say “it’s more complicated than that.”)

Education has always been an arena where simple answers flower. If we “just” imposed discipline…if we made parents sign a contract…if we administered more standardized tests…if we let parents choose their children’s schools…that would solve the problem.

The people advocating for the “school choice” solution, especially, have always seemed oblivious to the myriad of practical problems involved, from transportation, to what you do about children being raised by uncaring/absent parents, to how you insure that the parents who do care have the necessary information about their choices, etc.

I am emphatically not saying that the fact that suggested changes bring their own complexities is a reason not to try them. I am simply pointing out that change, even for the better, introduces its own challenges. Teacher accountability, for example, is important–but we need to be sure the system we use genuinely reflects the performance of the teacher–not the prejudices of a principal or the poverty of the students.

Similarly, charter schools offering public school choice can be important laboratories for new educational approaches, and they can offer parents a better “match” for their children’s specific needs. But the sponsors need to insure accountability there, too, and as we have seen in Indianapolis with the decision to close the Project School, objective evaluation often runs smack into parental emotion–and creates disruption for the children who must then be enrolled elsewhere.

A recent story from Cleveland points to a more serious problem.

Ohio has enthusiastically privatized schools, bringing in private-sector management companies to turn many of them around (“if we just ran schools in a business-like way, then we’d see improvement…”) A few days ago, the Superintendent of Ohio Schools resigned, under fire after the state’s inspector general found he’d been improperly lobbying for a private education company he planned to work for. He had also allowed the company to pay for his travel.

Does this mean that private companies should never be allowed to manage public schools? No. It does mean that a decision to hire such companies should be made very carefully; such a decision brings risks of its own and we aren’t necessarily equipped to deal with those risks. (Someone might mention that to Indiana Superintendent Tony Bennett, but he doesn’t appear to listen to anyone.) There is no magic bullet, and solutions–even good solutions–usually bring their own problems.

If solving our social and political problems was as easy as some people seem to think, wouldn’t we be further along toward solving them?

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Audacious in Chicago

This morning’s New York Times reports that Rahm Emmanuel will announce a 7.1 billion-with-a-b infrastructure improvement plan for Chicago. Improvements will be made to everything from the water system to the airport, from public transportation to parks. The improvements will be financed primarily through a public-private investment trust, details of which Mayor Emmanuel is supposed to announce later today.

I found this paragraph particularly interesting:

Some public-private partnership projects have been criticized as giveaways to the private businesses that take them over — including two prominent cases in Chicago itself, the privatized Chicago Skyway and the city’s parking meter system, which obligate the city to leases that span generations. Mr. Emanuel says that the city has learned an important lesson, and that “I am not leasing anything,” or selling off the city’s assets, he said in an interview. “I’m using private capital to improve a public entity that stays public.”

Great cities are places people want to live. As former Mayor Hudnut repeatedly reminded us, livable cities are first and foremost “cities that work.”

Most of us don’t want to live in housing that is unkempt and run-down, but we also understand that we aren’t improving our situation if we sell the stove to pay for new carpet.

In order to build a great city–especially in these days of fiscal hurt–its leaders need vision, and the audacity to insist that investment in the public square is both necessary and important. The audacity to refuse to sell off public goods to private profiteers.

The audacity to defend and maintain great urban spaces for the generations of citizens who will enjoy them.

There’s No “We” in Mitch Land…

When Steve Goldsmith was Mayor–talking incessantly about government’s “customers” while shifting costs from the operating to the capital budget in order to “reduce” taxes (i.e., push the costs to the next administration)–I used to grouse that his vision of the ideal government would be one that eliminated all municipal services so that the City-County Building could be rented out to give taxpayers a rebate of 50 cents each.

I’ve often considered Mitch Daniels to be a Goldsmith clone. They share a touching belief that privatization cures cancer–a belief that appears unshakable no matter how many times they’ve been bitten by poorly-thought-out contracts. (They also share a patronizing attitude that lets you know they think they know more than anyone else–and most definitely more than those annoying yahoos elected to legislative bodies.) I’m not the only person who has noticed the resemblance: the joke that made the rounds when Mitch was first elected was that he was Steve Goldsmith with a personality.

Now Mitch has confirmed my snarky “rent out the City-County Building” description of their shared governing philosophy.

According to the Governor, Indiana has suddenly “discovered” 320 million dollars that we somehow didn’t know we had. Assuming the accuracy of his description–i.e., assuming the administration really didn’t know the money was there–most of us would first question the competence of the administration employees involved. After all, how do you “lose” 320 million dollars? Then–in a sane universe–we might begin a discussion to see which of the recent, draconian cuts to public services we might mitigate. Our bridges are crumbling, our parks are untended, our schools struggling, early childhood education still largely unfunded. Foster parents have just taken a big hit, and the administration has continued its unremitting war on Medicaid recipients. Granted, 320 million won’t restore all that–or even come close–but it would help.

But that’s not the way officials think in “Mitch land.”

Mitch doesn’t want to apply that money to improve the state’s infrastructure, or to ameliorate the suffering caused by cuts to social services during an economic downturn. He wants to trigger an automatic “rebate”–to return it to individual taxpayers. Rather than applying the windfall to improve public services or the public goods we all share, he wants to give each taxpayer a refund. Elementary math suggests that refund might be enough to buy a couple of coffees at Starbucks–it certainly won’t be enough to repair that tire you ruptured on one of our neglected roads, or to pay the tutor you hired to supplement your child’s inadequate math instruction.

In Mitch land, government can do no good and the private sector can do no wrong. Applying “found” money (forgive the quotes and my skepticism) to education or infrastructure is “waste”–but sprinkling it among hundreds of thousands of taxpayers is “good government.”

Maybe Mitch can rent out the statehouse, and send each of us enough to buy an hour or two of privatized parking.

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