DON'T PRIVATIZE PUBLIC EDUCATION
by Peter Moss

Education is one of the principal targets of privateering (formerly privatizing), because it is large and manipulable. The K- 12 education market is estimated at $350-billion. The purpose of privateering, as always, is a profit opportunity for big business, and elimination of public scrutiny and control. In Vermont, two highly visible attacks have been made.

First, the privateers have exploited the national dislike for taxes in general, and were on their way to set the "have" towns against the "have-not" towns. But by replacing the school financing in Act 60 with Act 68 which ends the "sharing pools" under which rich towns had to subsidize non-rich towns, this issue was defused.

Second, the privateers have put on the March 2, 2004 town meeting ballot a new school authority to create a Regional Technical Academy (RTA), to train pupils directly into jobs, best expressed by the Champlain College advertisements saying "We know what business wants, and we teach it." Sounds very appealing, but why should apprenticeships into business jobs be financed by parents and students? In Europe, big companies hire salaried staff to be apprenticed to the employer's needs. More importantly, the manipulators are presenting the RTA as a public benefit when, in fact, businesses are trying to pass the cost of apprenticeship onto parents and taxpayers. Also, and almost surreptitiously, RTA will siphon students and money away from public schools and thus promote school privateering to create profit opportunities for big business and to eliminate public scrutiny and control of education.

Although most people seem unaware, there have already been some spectacular failures in privateering education: Edison Schools, Inc., Chancellor Beacon Academies, National Heritage Academies, etc. Details are on the www.multinationalmonitor.org web site. Roderick Paige, Bush's secretary of education, said that "all things being equal, I'd prefer to have a child in a school where there's a strong appreciation for values, the kind of values that I think are associated with Christian communities." Washington Spectator, 5-15-03. Responding to Paige, the New York Times said in an editorial, that Paige has reinforced "suspicions that the administration is in sympathy with the religious right's drive to undermine the public school system in favor of a voucher-financed national network of religious schools." Needless to say, the drive against public schools is not only to privateer education for private profit, but is also to indoctrinate youngsters into the conservative mindset [Christian values being code for conservative], which supports enriching the top 2% rich at the expense of the 98% unrich, as by tax cuts for the rich and war without end to support global corporations in exporting good jobs to low wage countries, and oil plunder. Bush's class warfare against the unrich must be answered by determined resistance.

The British have a new word and a new concept: de-privatizing. The non-profit company responsible for managing Britain's rail system decided in October 2003 to bring rail maintenance in-house by curtailing contracts with seven for-profit companies. Network Rail's decision will transfer about 18,500 workers out of the private sector, as it pledged to reduce the cost of rail maintenance by $550 million. In 2003, British rail maintenance contracts were worth $1.65-billion. We all know that by de- privatizing U.S. health care by single payer, enough private profit and waste would be eliminated to cover every American's every medical need.

If I am elected in 2004, I will introduce legislation and forge a coalition to prevent the privateering of public services in general, and of public schools in particular, by proposing economic disincentives that will make school privateering unprofitable.