proponents of school vouchers were adamant about the passage of school voucher policies. These reasons, opponents argued, had little to do with success or increase in educational achievement of poor black children. Rather, support for vouchers as opponents see it was steeped in the desire to break up what proponents see as an educational monopoly and hopefully jettison public schools from the community thus allowing for markets to thrive and the
entrepreneurial spirit to prosper. Miner states “privatization, while couched in rhetoric extolling the ability of the marketplace to unleash creativity and innovation, at heart is a way for for-profit
companies to get their hands on a bigger share of the $350 billion K-12 education industry” (2002). Evidence suggest that vouchers and the ability to garner public funding by private organizations has led to a widespread effort by EMOs to stake personal claims to the monies by gaining control over many public schools. Also, vouchers were also seen as a method of funding religious education. Opponents argued that since funds were not directly funneled into the schools by the government and was left up to the devices of the parents as to where they wanted to utilize that funding, the question of separation of church and state was moot. However, upon closer examination, one could surmise that there was some validity to the opponent’s argument. 6.3.1. EMOs
Aside from Brennan’s EMOs in Ohio which will continue to grow due to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the school choice movement has led to EMOs across the country attempting to gain contracts to control schools or to start up schools of their own. While many of those schools are not voucher schools, the idea that education can operate under a free market system has
galvanized many to create charter schools, secure consulting contracts and bids to run schools in failing districts. In Philadelphia, with the backing of Republican Governor Mark Schweiker, the for-profit Edison schools attempted to secure a six-year $101 million consulting contract and a separate deal to run as many as 45 of the 60 district schools due to be privatized as partnership schools.
EMOs are seen as detriments to schools and its students because EMOs will not live or die on their educational record but on their ability to generate profit. Therefore EMOs will do whatever is necessary to generate those profits. Miner posits that because education is a labor- intensive industry, there are only two ways to make money: cut wages or cut services. Cutting
wages would be akin to hiring younger, lower-paid staff, while a variation of cutting services would be controlling student admissions so that more-difficult-to-teach students are discouraged.
All altruistic rationale for wanting a market-base education system aside, EMOs are in the business of making money. Rethinking Schools published a report stating that 650,000 shares of stock indirectly belonging to Edison founder Chris Whittle were sold for more than $15 million in March of 2001, as of 2002 Whittle still owned 3.7 million shares of Edison’s publicly traded stock. EMOs do not operate in a vacuum, for EMOs to continue to operate there has to be unwavering political support, and they have to be viewed as good social policy
otherwise they have no chance of succeeding and their existence would be ephemeral.
Up until a little over a decade ago EMOs were not in existence. However, in the last six years according to an Arizona State study, the number of public schools operated by EMOs has more than tripled with a total enrollment of more than 200,000 kids.
Due to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) EMOs are scrambling to take advantage of a potential $2 billion market in “Supplemental Educational Fund” made possible through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. NCLB has left the door open for private companies to offer tutoring to students who attend failing public schools. What complicates matters is that there is not a universal operational definition of ‘failing schools’ as defined by NCLB. NCLB provisions allow each state to operationalize ‘failing schools”.
EMOs gain acceptance by promising rapid increases in student achievement, a promise that evidence suggests does not often come to fruition. Regardless, EMOs function well because they are viewed as a mechanism through which failing public schools will be forced to compete with private schools and private industry thus raising the quality of those schools.
Not only do EMOs continue to garner support despite their apparent failures to meet certain claims and assertions, EMOs are also virtually exempt from many state and federal accountability provisions to which public schools must adhere. EMOs are often allowed to self- govern and to conduct their own accountability measures. While Metcalf and his research team was conducting their study on the CSTP commission by the Ohio Department of Education HOPE school officials refused to allow them to test their students, instead they were provided with data collected from a self-evaluation of the HOPE schools.
EMOs continue to thrive because there is a strong anti-public school among major stakeholders, oftentimes for good and valid reasons. These stakeholders are not anti public schools in good communities, they are anti public schools in poorer mostly minority
communities where they feel the money allotted to those schools are mismanaged or goes to waste. The poorer communities are also attractive to EMOs because residents of those
communities are often unsatisfied with the poor achievement of their children and with how poor a job the schools are doing educating their children. Therefore those communities become easy prey for EMOs, who may not often provide a better way of doing things, just a different one. Most of the time different is enough to gain acceptance because many in those communities are willing to try anything to provide their children with better educational opportunities which will hopefully lead to more life and employment options.
This researcher opines that given the fact that EMOs only target public schools in poor communities speaks to a deeper problem which has its core at the issues that poison our society (there will be further discussion on this later in the chapter).
6.3.2. The Catholic Gain
Although their voices were relatively silent during the voucher debate in Cleveland, one of the unexpressed outcomes of the CSTP has been Catholic schools becoming the primary destination of voucher users.
In the program’s first year, 1996-97 76.8 percent of participating students attended religious schools, a number which has since then risen steadily to 79.1 percent in 1997-98; 84.9 percent in 1998-99; 99.0 percent in 1999-00; and 99.4 percent in both 2000-01 and 2001-02 (Hanauer, 2002). In the 2002-03 school year, of the 4200 students in the program, only twenty- five attended non-sectarian schools. This number is down from the 609 non-religious students at the peak of secular enrollment in the 1997-98 school year. In the 1996-97 school year there were eight secular schools participating in the Cleveland voucher program; ten in 1997-98; eleven in 1998-99; four in 1999-00; and three in both 2000-01 and 2001-02. It is the contention of many that due to the Zelman ruling by the Supreme Court, true gains by the Catholic Church and schools will only be realized in years to come.