by Gail Collins
When a reporter asked when there was going to be a highway for the ever hopeful, very needy Rio Grande Valley, the governor’s good friend, Ric Williamson, a member of the Texas Transportation Commission, allowed as how he was getting a little tired of people asking when their turn was going to come. “And that question is predicated upon the central planning theory of government, which makes central plans for everybody to get a piece of the pie. But we’re not central-planner people. We’re market-driven Republicans.”
The market-driven Republicans drove right over a cliff. Private enterprise liked the idea, and a construction company from Spain won the initial bid to partner with the state in making plans for the first section, from San Antonio to Oklahoma. But average Texans, it turned out, hated it. Hated having their towns and farmlands chopped up by an impassible 1200-foot-wide concrete serpent. Hated the idea of a foreign company owning a Texas thoroughfare. Hated pretty much everything but that 85 mph speed limit.
The Texas right wing once again demonstrated its genius for finding a sinister plot in everything, including a road proposed by Rick Perry. The far right decided the Corridor was actually going to be part of a “NAFTA superhighway” that would end the United States’s life as a sovereign nation and turn the continent into a North American Union. At a protest march to the state capitol, radio host Alex Jones yelled, “Down with the North American Union!” and—yes!—“Remember the Alamo!” Once again we see that there is nothing that will not remind Texas conservatives of the Alamo. European golfers, airport security checks, supersized highways. Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie would have known what to do with them all.
The state legislature gave in, and finally an election-bound Perry was forced to sign a bill backtracking on the whole idea.
Privatizers were bloodied but unbowed, at least in the state legislature, which was working on a plan of its own that would put for-profit companies in charge of eligibility screening for state social services. “We’re talking about a system for the future,” a state official enthused when the bill passed in 2003. The plan was supposed to save the state $600 million by replacing a large number of public workers with a handful of call centers around the state, run under a contract with Accenture, a huge consulting company headquartered in Ireland. “It was like turning Texas’s social service program over to Wal-Mart,” sniped the Texas Observer.
The call centers were overloaded, the call center workers undertrained. People lost their benefits for no good reason and delays abounded. “Most infamously,” noted the Dallas Morning News, “applicants for a time were given a wrong fax number for sending pay stubs and other private documents.” The documents ended up in a Seattle warehouse, where employees tried but failed to get the state to do something about the piles of official paper pouring out of the warehouse fax. When no one paid any attention, they shredded the whole pile in despair.
The Republicans held firm for a while. In a conference call with legislative leaders, Susan Weddington, then chair of the state party, said that parents whose children lost health care coverage could just buy private insurance and “maybe have a little less disposable income, or a little less inheritance from Mom and Dad.” Eventually the public outcry grew too great, and the embarrassment of the privatization disaster too . . . embarrassing. The legislature went into retreat and in 2007 the state threw in the towel, ending the contract with Accenture, which blamed state funding problems for the debacle.
“Kids that aren’t practice learning!”
None of these disasters have stopped the Texas love affair with privatization, which it’s helping to export to public education. For instance, Texas is now a leader in the new world of for-profit teacher certification companies—a business sector I bet you didn’t know existed. Forty percent of the state’s new teachers are being produced by for-profit certification, and IteachTexas, a totally online program, is now operating in Louisiana and Tennessee, with more territorial expansion in the works.
There was a time when teachers got certified through a procedure of classes, practice teaching, tests, etc., usually under the supervision of a college. But when No Child Left Behind pushed schools to put a certified teacher in every classroom, some states tried to expand the supply by creating alternative routes. Some pioneered ambitious programs to take people with careers outside of academia—particularly careers that involved math and science—and give them the training needed to transfer their skills into the classroom. Other states seem to have created alternative certification programs with requirements discernibly lower than what you need to qualify as a personal trainer at the gym.
Texas added another fillip. For-profit companies were not just allowed to run the classes. They could also decide whether the state’s requirement for “field-based experience” meant supervised teaching in a class or something less structured, like chaperoning a field trip. Once students achieved the state standards as the companies translated them, they got certification that allowed them to take over a public school classroom with no regular supervision, as provisional teachers.
“Ever since then, the innovation and competition has been phenomenal,” claimed Vernon Reaser, the president of A+ Texas Teachers, the largest of the state’s alt-cert companies, whose ubiquitous billboards demand: “Want to Teach? When Can You Start?”
In 2011, state representative Michael Villarreal of San Antonio made the revolutionary proposal that would-be teachers should spend at least half of the required thirty hours of “field-based experience” actually doing supervised teaching in a classroom. At a hearing on Villarreal’s bill in the capitol, Reaser vigorously denounced the whole idea as putting “practice teachers in front of kids that aren’t practice learning!” The bill never made it out of committee. Eventually, Villarreal managed to stick in an amendment requiring that the field work at least include some “instructional or educational activities.”
It’s not exactly as bad as discovering that Texas brain surgeons could get their license online without supervised practice in a real operating room. But still.
“I feel fine about that”
The No Child Left Behind law opened the door to nearly endless for-profit opportunities. There was, of course, all that testing. Pearson, the London-based education giant, signed a five-year contract in 2010 to both create and administer the Texas tests. It was worth $470 million, and no one seemed entirely clear whether the state legislature’s insistence on sticking to the high-stakes testing route was due to pressure from the Bush-era education reform community or Pearson’s lobbying efforts. When a (doomed) bill to decrease the state’s reliance on testing came up for a hearing in Austin a few years back, Representative Scott Hochberg, the Democrats’ education expert, gently forced one of the witnesses testifying against it, Sandy Kress, to acknowledge that besides being an accountability advocate, he was also a Pearson lobbyist.
Kress, you will remember, is the former Bush aide who was a point man for the administration in the No Child Left Behind negotiations with Congress. “In my mind he was doing a lot of stage directing,” said Charles Barone, who worked for the House Democrats on the Education Committee at the time. “I don’t mean that pejoratively. There was a lot of presence.” Kress was always a big advocate for the business community’s accountability concerns in school reform. After leaving the White House, he became a lobbyist, representing private enterprise players in the education game. Let me see a show of hands of all you who think this is a coincidence.
Kress has no apologies. “When I got out of the White House I found a lot of people were doing important work and wanted my help in doing it better. I tend to pick clients who are working in my areas of fascination. I feel fine about that,” he said.
The privatizers found another big treasure chest in the No Child Left Behind rule requiring that failing schools provide tutoring services for children with low test scores. “I think they were trying to figure out how to wrestle money out of the public schools and give it to the private sector,” Represen
tative George Miller acknowledged. The cost of those services hit $1 billion in 2009–10, and the door was opened to pretty much anybody—faith-based, for-profit, whatever—who could get on a state approval list.
Making that list was apparently not all that rigorous in most states, where overstretched departments of education already had enough on their plates before tutoring services entered the menu. In Columbus, Ohio, city officials found that more than half of the tutoring groups working with Columbus kids were “ineffective.” In Colorado, a Department of Education study found that none of the tutors, whose fees ranged from $20 to $89 an hour, seemed to make much difference. There have been repeated complaints all around the country about students being lured to for-profit tutors with the promise of a complimentary cell phone or laptop. But given the options, a free laptop might be as useful a standard for choosing as any. The Obama administration found the whole tutoring program ineffective and put it on the list of federal rules for which states could request a waiver.
“It was a war every two years”
The ultimate goal for a really ambitious privatizer would be to take over the public schools themselves, with their steady stream of federal, state, and local funding. You will remember that during the No Child Left Behind debates, the Bush administration tried but failed to include a voucher plan. Vouchers were the holy grail for many social/fiscal conservatives. They didn’t think of the public school system as a precious resource to be protected; they saw it as a gluttonous slug, gobbling down resources that could be better used by private, or for-profit, or faith-based alternatives. They dreamed of the day when American children would go off to shop for a school armed with their voucher, just the way they now go off to Target toting a debit card and looking for a new notebook.
“I can afford to send my children to a private school if I think that’s what’s best—any place they need to go. And I think that every child in America ought to have that same opportunity,” voucher champion James Leininger told PBS in 1998. A wealthy San Antonio physician, Leininger was one of many extremely rich Texans who used the wide-open campaign finance rules to make his needs felt in the capital. Leininger had made his original fortune with a hospital bed that was supposed to prevent bedsores. By the 1990s he had moved into everything from real estate to mail-order turkeys to the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. He was also financing any number of conservative causes, from supporting Christian ministries to demolishing the Endangered Species Act. Above all else, however, he had two major political passions: restricting civil lawsuits through tort reform, and school vouchers. He was very generous to Texas politicians who shared his sentiments.
In 1998 Leininger provided Rick Perry, who was running for lieutenant governor, with a last-minute $1.1 million loan for a final media buy that may have made the difference in Perry’s narrow victory over Democrat John Sharp. (Perry, who continued to be a beneficiary of Leininger’s generosity, once traveled with his wife to the Bahamas on the magnate’s dime. There Perry and Leininger joined with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist for what Perry called a “real, progressive conversation” about school finance.) The ever-popular Wendy Gramm once served on the board of Leininger’s corporation, Kinetic Concepts, and went on to chair the think tank he founded and endowed, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Arlene Wohlgemuth, a former right-wing state legislator who had championed that dreadful plan to privatize social service eligibility screening, became director of the foundation’s Center for Health Care Policy. George W. Bush, another recipient of Leininger’s donations, once sat on the foundation’s board of advisors.
As soon as Bush was inaugurated governor in 1995, Leininger got his reward. You will remember that one of his obsessions was tort reform. Bush jumped into that battle, declaring the state’s judicial system to be in a crisis from which it could only recover if the legislature immediately made it difficult for consumers to sue companies that sold them defective products or services. It worked.
Vouchers turned out to be a much tougher sell. In Texas, as in most places, there are quite a lot of people who like their local public schools and are resistant to any plan that might take money away from them. The voucher proposals came up regularly in Austin and failed just as consistently, although usually by narrow margins. (In 1999, Perry blamed the loss to a random senator who had “flaked” at the last minute.) “It was a war every two years,” said Carolyn Boyle, who assembled a cadre of anti-voucher groups called the Coalition for Public Schools. “We worked our asses off.”
To inspire lawmakers to rethink their opposition, Leininger unveiled a $50 million pilot program in San Antonio that made available more than 2,000 vouchers a year for low-income students who wanted to leave their local public schools. “If you got to meet the kids and talk to them you would do anything you could for ’em, just like I would,” he told the Associated Press.
But the bill never passed and in 2008, Leininger pulled the plug on his San Antonio voucher program.
“He said, ‘Let’s get the charters’ ”
George W. Bush gave up his own personal voucher crusade much sooner. In 1999, when the newly reelected, suddenly-looking-at-the-presidency governor was trying to put together a big Texas education bill, Bill Ratliff, the Republican chair of the senate Education Committee, told him that he would have to choose between vouchers and charter schools because he definitely could not get both.
“He said, ‘Let’s get the charters,’ ” Ratliff recalled.
This is an important moment. One of George W. Bush’s contributions to American education was to take the struggling voucher movement and turn it into a burgeoning national charter school crusade. He wanted to bring the accountability and efficiency of the business world into the public education mix, and if vouchers didn’t work, charter schools would be fine.
Charter schools are another way to get choice, or new ideas—or, if you’re somewhat paranoid, the clutches of moneymakers—into public education. They’re part of a public school system, but sometimes only in a very tenuous way. They generally get most of the standard per-pupil aid, but they’re exempted from the regular rules and oversight in favor of a special charter written by the sponsors.
Encouraging charter schools became an important part of Bush’s proposals for the No Child Left Behind law. Democrats, who desperately wanted to avoid vouchers, were receptive. “Charters were sort of a middle ground. They’re part of the public school system,” said George Miller. “And we were trying to make room for some entrepreneurs.” They’re still a bipartisan favorite in many parts of the country today. When the Obama administration tried to tweak the federal education initiative with its Race to the Top contests, room to expand charter schools was a critical way to make points and win big federal grants.
When the federal government started prodding the states to do charters, the states got considerable leeway in how closely they wanted to monitor what the charters were doing. The Bush vision was to have as little bureaucratic oversight as possible. We can see that from what W. did during his last days as governor, when the Texas charter plan was being approved. “I tried to get a lot of protections from the beginning,” said Representative Hochberg, who had been an early charter school advocate. “The governor’s position was basically that we should have no rules. They wanted to eliminate the requirement that kids have immunizations.”
Within a few years, Texas had about 200 charters, and many disasters, some due to ineptitude and some due to corruption. A reporter visiting a school in Arlington found “no desks, no chairs”—only a single aged sofa and an expansive cement floor on which to sit. The building also lacked a lunchroom, computers, textbooks, chalkboards, and a well-functioning bathroom. A school in Dallas called P.O.W.E.R. had done its budgeting based on an enrollment of 300 but recruited only what the state counted as thirty-five students. (P.O.W.E.R. officials said there were 129 but that they couldn’t back up their numbers because a burglar had stolen the attendance records.) In 2001, a Houston TV station
ran film of students at Prepared Table, a large charter run out of a church, where students slept, talked, or sat on the floor while they used the pews as worktables and teachers attempted to run several different grades in the same space. The founder of Prepared Table died before he could be tried, but three of his relatives eventually pled guilty to swindling the state and federal government out of at least $5 million.
Texas was hardly the only place where minimal oversight produced maximum headaches. Over in Florida where the president’s brother, Jeb Bush, was overseeing his own education initiatives well before No Child Left Behind became law, nearly a quarter of the charters that were opened wound up shutting down. That meant chaos for the schools that had to accept the suddenly homeless students, and often heartache for the students themselves, who sometimes wound up having to repeat one or more grades.
Starting a successful charter school turned out to be way more difficult than some people had imagined. The president, however, didn’t look back. And he kept walking on the sunny side of the street.By 2010 there were 5,000 charter schools operating around the country, educating about 1.5 million public school students
“You can take this to the bank”
We can argue for hours—days!—months!—about whether charters are a good thing. Overall, the evidence seems to suggest that charters are, on average, having about the same success as the public schools they’re supposed to be replacing. The best charters do an absolutely terrific job. But the jury is still out on whether they do so well because they’re not under the thumb of the regular school bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions, or because they receive extra financial support from enthusiastic donors and have charismatic principals and dedicated staff—something that also makes for stupendous traditional schools.
