The Economic Policy Institute released a shocking report last week, detailing how the national charter school company Rocketship makes its money by shortchanging Milwaukee's poor kids. "Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education Than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin" documents the effects of both for-profit and nonprofit charter schools that are taking over struggling public schools.
Milwaukee is ground zero for school privatization, the home of the first private voucher plan in the nation. Now the rest of Wisconsin is bracing for the expansion of the Milwaukee model, as our state Legislature pushes forward bills to take vouchers and charters statewide, close low-performing public schools, and replace them with these less accountable, privately run enterprises.
The Economic Policy Institute asked political economist Gordon Lafer, a University of Oregon professor who has advised Congress, state legislatures and the New York City mayor's office, to take a look at the effects of privatization on the children of Milwaukee. The results are not pretty.
Rocketship, which started in California and has made a big expansion push into Milwaukee and other cities, is "a low-budget operation" that uses Teach for America recruits to replace more experienced and better-paid staff, Lafer found. These young teachers monitor students, who spend much of the day in front of computer screens. Rocketship has reduced curriculum "to a near-exclusive focus on reading and math" and replaced real teaching with digital applications that focus on test prep.
With no gym, no art class, no librarians and no significant science or social studies, Rocketship provides a stripped-down program of study that no upwardly mobile suburban parent would accept. But it's actually even harder on poor kids.
"The education model of the Rocketship chain of schools, a company central to the education reform push in Milwaukee, is particularly ill-suited to providing the city's children with a high-quality education," Lafer found.
Because of its extraordinarily high teacher turnover, its large classes and its reductive curriculum, Rocketship subjects kids most in need of consistent, nurturing adult attention to low-quality instruction and neglect.
That model, which is also on display in Milwaukee's low-performing voucher schools, is demonstrably harmful to children who already don't have enough stability or enrichment in their lives. But it has generated big profits for wealthy investors.
From 2010 to 2013, Rocketship increased it assets from $2.2 million to $15.8 million, according the Lafer's report. And while it posted impressive test scores at its first schools in California, over the last four years test scores have fallen at every Rocketship school. All seven Rocketship schools failed to make adequate yearly progress, according to federal standards for the last school year.
"Given that Rocketship places such a strong emphasis on standardized testing, it is telling that, even by this measure, the company has faced struggles and disappointments," Lafer writes.
While Rocketship is a nonprofit, its business model enriches its directors through a deal with a licensed software company called DreamBox, supplied by for-profit vendors, who happen to also sit on Rocketship's board.
"The more Rocketship expands, the greater DreamBox's profits," Lafer writes.
According to a 2013 Department of Education evaluation, DreamBox has "no discernible effects on mathematics achievement for elementary school students."
"It appears the question [Rocketship] aims to answer is not simply, 'How can we do better by poor kids?' but rather, 'How can we educate poor kids while generating a 15% rate of return for investors?'" Lafer writes.
Both the rapidly growing private charter industry and other school privatization efforts, Lafer shows, have failed to produce quality schools.
Worse, in pushing these efforts, politicians, right-wing think tanks, chambers of commerce and, most of all, the American Legislative Exchange Council are actually creating the very problem of failure in the school system they claim their privatization plans will help solve.
A recent proposal by state Sen. Luther Olsen, which is expected to come up again next session, would mandate that 5% of Wisconsin's public schools receive "failing" grades. These schools would be forced to close after the third F. Schools deemed "failing" would be replaced by charter schools such as Rocketship. By contrast, the charter schools, a majority of which failed to meet state expectations in 2012-2013, would get an eight-year grace period and could not be closed until their ninth year, no matter how many F's they received.
The resource drain from the public schools, as public funds go to more private business ventures, makes the rank unfairness of this proposal even worse.
In his report, Lafer outlines how the corporate lobbyists and their allies pushing school privatization are manufacturing failure for poor communities in a broad, coordinated way, including "the dominant role of corporate lobbies in promotion of online learning and privately run charter schools; the corporate lobbies' support for dramatic cuts in funding for public services, including education; and these same lobbies' advocacy for an economic agenda that makes it harder for many families to work their way out of poverty."
"The idea that what chamber of commerce lobbyists lie awake at night thinking about is what will help poor kids.... I mean, we're adults, right?" Lafer commented when I interviewed him by phone.
That pretty much sums it up.
Ruth Conniff is the editor of The Progressive.
