A few days ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., announced a far-reaching plan to reform K-12 education, and he’s coming for charter schools.
Sanders wants to halt federal funding for new charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, and ban for-profit charter schools outright. For many education activists, this change is more than welcome. As education consultant Andrew Rotherham put it in a column for U.S. News & World Report, “For-profit charters are barely more popular than cancer among the education crowd.”
But all of these folks seem to have the wrong idea because profit isn’t a bad thing.
Sure, at first glance, the aversion to for-profit charters seems understandable. After all, areas with higher concentrations of for-profit charters sometimes see poorer results on standardized tests than those with higher proportions of nonprofit charters. Also, the thought of turning a profit from educating our children seems a bit underhanded and ripe for corruption. But critics aren’t seeing the forest for the trees. Profit is already everywhere in education, and standardized test scores don’t tell the whole story. The best way to hold those low-performing schools accountable is to provide more choice, not eliminate options that some students are benefiting from.
Sanders is running with the popular idea that profit is wholly incompatible with public education. But if that were actually true, an ideologically consistent Sanders would have to oppose nearly every aspect of the public school system. Profit-motivated contractors serve students all the time, from the production and sale of textbooks and school technology, to the construction and renovation of school buildings, to food services, to transportation, and more.
Sanders’ opposition to profit motivation isn’t just limited to the education arena. He doesn’t like corporations anywhere. But he seems to forget that for-profit firms are vital to the functioning of every layer of government. The Washington Post reported that nearly 10,000 private companies that contract with government agencies were affected by the federal government shutdown early this year. On the local level, profit-driven private contractors accounted for nearly 40% of municipal services in 2012, often delivering better services at lower costs. There’s no reason the same concept can’t be applied to our school systems.
Profit shouldn’t be a dirty word in education. Regardless of how a school is run, there’s always a risk of corruption. For each instance of fraud at a for-profit charter, there are several more examples within normal public school districts.
Meanwhile, for-profit charters can deliver strong results for students. For example, a recent study of 44 Michigan for-profit charter schools established that attending those schools led to greater math scores and steady performance on reading tests. Of course, like any other type of school, not every for-profit charter has been a success. The misguided push to eliminate for-profit charter schools is, in part, grounded in the legitimate need to hold poorly performing schools accountable.
But if that’s the true aim of Sanders and company, they should support the best accountability mechanism there is: increased school choice.
This means caring less about the tax status or the model of a school and more about whether it’s a school that parents want to send their kids to. Rather than just looking at test scores or other achievement metrics, supplying more choice is a better, more holistic approach to school accountability. When selecting a school for their child, parents take academic outcomes into account, but they also consider a wider range of factors.
Any other accountability measure is based on the misguided notion that technocrats, policymakers, or even presidential candidates know what your child needs better than you do. Even if for-profit charters don’t always produce superior test scores, parents are choosing them for a reason — whether it be safety, an emphasis on college preparation, sports, or any other factor.
For-profit charters educate 18% of the nation’s charter school students. So, politicians and education reformers can’t dismiss the fact that thousands of families are finding value in the for-profit model. They wouldn’t be attending them otherwise. If Sanders wants better schools for kids, he should focus on expanding the options afforded to families, not reducing them in favor of a plan that’s doomed to fail.
Christian Barnard (@CBarnard33) is a Young Voices contributor and an education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation.
