Abstract
The book contains a passionate critique of the movement for the privatization of K–12 education. The main argument formulated by the author is that for-profit educational management organizations (EMOs) received substantial support by policy-makers and opinion leaders but failed to produce the expected positive results, that is, better academic results at a lower cost. At a system level, the promise that more competition between private and public schools, coupled with a wider adoption of managerial principles and practices, could lead to better performance has also failed to materialize. On the contrary, EMOs contributed to the diffusion of a culture of heavy academic testing limited to some core subjects, with an excessive emphasis on efficiency, which overall undermine the greater aims of education in promoting civic ideals and empowering more equitable societies. As a consequence of this great failure, the federal government of the United States and the single states should learn important lessons from other educational systems around the globe, with a final objective of undertaking radical reforms to change the direction of the educational policies’ evolution. In this spirit, the example of the Finnish educational system is described and promoted as a gold standard. By studying this case, U.S. policy-makers should obtain suggestions and operative indications to adopt more successful strategies for improving the effectiveness and equity of educational performance. In particular, testing should not serve as an accountability measure, and investment in better training and pay of teachers should become a priority.
The book is organized in four main parts. The first and longest (Chapters 1–7) is dedicated to the description of how for-profit EMOs created their influence and operated their business. This objective is pursued by employing an effective narrative structure, namely by following the story of one specific company, named Edison, from its inception in 1991 to its collapse in 2013. The case of this company is illustrative of the various phases that constitute its life cycle: from the opening of its first schools in 1995 and its great success in obtaining backing on Wall Street and support from governors and mayors across the country to disappointing academic and financial results that spell the company’s demise. All along, the author mentions other cases of EMOs and uses the comments about single episodes for suggesting his interpretation about why private, for-profit providers cannot survive in the education sector. The picture that emerges underlines why the activity of privately managed public schools is detrimental to a positive dynamic in improving the educational system’s performance.
All across the book, the author proposes a series of causes that are related to the failure of the for-profit operators in the educational arena. I mention here the two main points that induced me to profound reflections. As I am an economist, I focused on these two issues raised by the author in Chapter 8, which is the second part of the book and its keystone. This part of the book concerns economic theory. On one side, the profit objective motivates the school managers to behaviors that are inherently contrary to the spirit that animates the key players of the education process: teachers. Indeed, they perceive a strong misalignment between their own objectives, which are related with a “mission” in educating young generations to a wider set of values (with a long-term perspective) and the objectives of the managers, which are instead short-term and measured in terms of enrolments, economic sustainability, and academic performance on national tests. This misalignment leads to a loss of buy-in and motivation, with clear implications to the life of the schools—as, for example, high turnover of teachers. On the other side, the economic model of the schools’ activities is not able to produce the expected profits. When considering revenues, it must be acknowledged that school districts contracting with EMOs are not willing to pay premiums for schools that do not show clear performance advantages. At the same time, an excessive dependence on states’ funding is too risky and subjected to exogenous determinants (for example, political support of privatization) that prevent any planning of medium- and long-term financial sustainability. The cost side of the story is equally discouraging: the cost per student is not drastically lower in schools run by EMOs and imposes on their managers the regular and difficult task of negotiating with politicians to obtain more generous funding—which, of course, proved unsustainable after a while. Overall, the cases reported by the author are such that the schools were never able to achieve economies of scale, even after years of operations.
The third part of the book (Chapters 9 and 10) describes an alternative paradigm for “management-based” educational provision that emerged in the U.S. context, namely, the creation and diffusion of non-profit charter management organizations (CMOs). These organizations, although publicly funded and regulated, and despite their public nature, are governed and managed by private actors with a conventional managerial approach with a focus on results in the form of test scores. This condition stems from their particular legal status and from the special autonomy that have been granted them by legislation. The author judges the CMO story as more positive than that of for-private EMOs. Nevertheless, he still highlights several weaknesses that are related to a distorted idea of academic success induced by the managerial approach, with its heavy emphasis on test scores.
Lastly, the fourth part is composed by the final two chapters (11 and 12), which propose the examples of two very different educational systems: the Swedish and the Finnish. The reforms adopted in the former have been inspired by an attempt at privatizing and liberalizing the educational sector. This aim was reached through encouraging the entrance of private schools in the field and by creating a voucher system for stimulating school choice. The results that were obtained were poor, however, as Sweden was the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country for which the academic standards consistently declined, according to the international comparisons provided by the Programme for the International Student Assessment (PISA), with results dropping in each subject on each administration of the exam from 2000 to 2003, 2006, 2009, and 2012. The author suggests this decline may be attributed to the reforms inspired by the privatization of education. Instead, the author attributed the very high academic standards of Finnish students to a completely different attitude, based on the nation’s focus on better teachers’ preparation and pay along with the educational and personal experience of students rather than on testing and obsessive evaluation of students themselves, teachers, and schools.
Reading this book has been a provocative and interesting experience for me, for two main reasons.
First, as an Italian scholar who devotes a substantial part of his research to studying the organization and performance of European educational systems, I found the detailed description of the evolution of the policy context in the United States extremely informative. The critical discussion of the movement for the privatization of the K–12 educational system in the United States is surely a strength of this book, which would be very much appreciated by an international audience. The stark differences between the European and the U.S. contexts allows reflection about the role of societal values behind educational policies. These common values can shape the way in which legislation creates incentives or obstacles towards the proliferation of private actors in the educational area. It appears clearer to me how European policy-makers are much more resistant to pass reforms that can help the creation and development of privately managed schools of the kind adopted in the United States and described in detail in Abrams’s book.
Second, my personal beliefs are generally supportive of policies that foster competition between schools and that provide incentives for an increase in the number of privately managed schools. Thus, reading the book has been an exercise of comparing my cultural position with an explicitly contrary conceptual framework. Honestly, I approached the book with some skepticism about its theoretical premises. I must confess, however, that once I finished reading it, I concluded that the author was able to promote his view using a clear and convincing argument, supported by examples and cases, and discussing counterarguments with robust evidence and theoretical rigor. In this sense, this is a book that all supporters as well as opponents of school choice and educational privatization should read, because the hypotheses and findings of the author are expressed so convincingly that they may serve as a field trial for testing one’s own opinions—and in my case for interpreting the results of my own research.
An open issue would deserve further reflection and investigation. Even accepting that the examples of privately managed schools reported in the book were unsuccessful, several alternative explanations could be proposed other than a general incompatibility of the privatization model with educational activity. For example, it can be the case that the managers of the investigated EMOs did not have the necessary skills to succeed—something that would be related to the economic results. Training managers with adequate competencies for running a school business would be an obvious implication. Alternatively, the details of national policies could be reformed to mimic a market more similar to the conditions of “perfect competition” that are necessary to allow school choice to work properly. At this stage, many of the requirements prescribed by the theory are not met (for example, the existence of a huge number of companies that drive the prices down to marginal costs). Or the consumer behavior of students and parents might not be matured enough to acknowledge the value added by the activity of private schools (information asymmetry), for example, the degree of innovation in content and teaching methods. Again, cultural barriers could impede a full exploitation of the benefits brought by private schools because the evaluation system is too narrow to individuate and measure the performance in areas that go beyond academic and economic performance—for example, the development and consolidation of noncognitive skills. If one or more of these factors are at play, the results of EMOs would be structurally undervalued or misinterpreted, inducing failures that are not imputable to the model of privately managed schooling and to policies of school choice in itself.
Whatever the case, Abrams’s book has the evident merit of representing an authoritative and rigorous contribution to the research of this complex topic. School choice and privatization, in turn, are issues that continue to deserve maximum attention for their influence on policy.
