Great education scandal: around 375 million children still out of school… who is selling the world's children down the river?

New Internationalist, August, 1999 by Chris Brazier

It is a small step from this to class apartheid. It doesn't take an expert to recognize that a school in a middle-class area will have more resources to call on than one on a deprived housing estate, whether it is in Auckland or in Rio de Janeiro. Schools in comfortable suburban settings will sail blithely into the sunshine while those in the inner cities will sink even deeper into the hole.

Of course, for some people this is not a horrifying prospect: it is their whole life's work, a paradise of `free parental choice'. All over the rich world, breeding fast in the febrile climate of globalization and free-market faith, advocates of privatized education are crawling out of the wood-work. In Sydney, for example, the Australian Council of Educational Research conference was told last year that public and private schools should be merged into a single system with most parents forced to pay fees. As you might expect, though, the greatest enthusiasm comes from the United States.

In 1993 the last New Internationalist issue on education carried a fascinating article by the eminent US educationist Jonathan Kozol about the threat to public education being posed by corporations such as Burger King taking over schools. He focused on plans to open 200 new profit-making schools by 1996 and to have as many as 1,000 serving two million children by early in the next decade. He argued that a radical reprivatizing of public education was on the way - and that progressive people in and outside education underestimated the power of this corporate lobby at their peril.

Thankfully Kozol's nightmare scenario has not yet arrived. The Burger King schools loomed large in the imagination because of the sheer horror of a fast-food company hijacking children's education for profit. But the greater threat came from two businesses which launched themselves into education in the early 1990s as the outriders of a new apocalyptic free-market model.

Education Alternatives Incorporated (EAI), started by former Xerox salesperson John Golle in 1986, initially ran private schools for profit. But in the early 1990s Golle moved into the public sector, claiming he could run public schools and improve their results while still turning a healthy profit. He told Forbes magazine: `There's so much fat in the schools that even a blind man without his cane could find the way'. (3)

In 1992 he was given his chance as EAI won a contract to run nine schools in Baltimore for five years - and were given 11-per-cent more money with which to do it than the regular public schools. By 1995 Baltimore had terminated the contract, explaining that not only were EAI students doing worse in reading but the company had falsified data - in one case having to repay the city $338,500 after it had claimed for non-existent students. In Hartford, Connecticut, where EAI contracted to run all 32 schools, the experiment ended in a similar debacle, as the company tried to increase profitability by sacking 300 teachers. The company still exists under the name Tesseract but is currently only running 12 schools.