Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children by Joel Bakan

Author:Joel Bakan [Bakan, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2011-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

In the spring of 2008, a symposium was held at Chicago’s exclusive Mid-America Club to celebrate the first three years of Renaissance 2010’s operation. The name of the symposium, “Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market of Public Education,” captured its animating idea that public schooling should be governed by private sector values and goals. Arne Duncan, the symposium’s star attraction, delighted his audience, composed mainly of representatives from corporations, right-wing think tanks, and school privatization philanthropy and advocacy groups, with his all-business message.5 “We’re trying to blur the lines between the public and the private,” he told them. “I am not a manager of six hundred schools. I’m a portfolio manager of six hundred schools and I’m trying to improve the portfolio.” He might have added, as further proof of his business credentials, that he was not a school superintendent, but a chief executive officer, his official title as head of the Chicago public school system.6

Renaissance 2010 was created by the city’s business elite, as represented by the Commercial Club of Chicago. The club’s clear and stated aim was to reform Chicago’s school system so as to make it run more like a business. To that end, it commissioned top business management firm A.T. Kearney to do the plan’s detailed drafting. “Drawing on our program-management skills and our knowledge of best practices used across industries,” A.T. Kearney would later boast of its work in Chicago, “we provided a private-sector perspective on how to address many of the complex issues that challenge . . . large urban education transformations.”7

At the heart of Renaissance 2010’s “private-sector perspective” were three fundamental ideas. First, failing schools, like failing businesses, should be closed down; second, the measure of failure (or success) should be students’ performance on standardized tests; and third, new schools should be run by private organizations.8 More than sixty schools were closed and 100 opened in their place under Renaissance 2010. The new schools were all run by private organizations—for-profit corporations among them—rather than the public district. Unlike the schools they replaced, none had unions. Chicago’s business elite, once again through the auspices of the Commercial Club, was instrumental in raising funds for the transformation, as well as in deciding which schools should be closed down, what organizations should develop and run new ones, and how accountability and performance should be measured within the new schools.9

Renaissance 2010 transformed a quintessentially public institution—public schooling—into a market-driven partnership with business. It jettisoned unions, invited for-profit corporations to play increasingly substantial roles in schools, and destabilized, sometimes with harmful and tragic effects (such as the violence that claimed Albert’s life), the lives of students, teachers, parents, and communities. Despite all of that, Renaissance 2010 did little to improve Chicago’s public schools. The program’s few bright spots (and even these are contested) were offset by failures, and the aggregate performance of its newly opened schools turned out to be no better than that of the schools they replaced. “Overall it wasn’t the game changer

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