Publically Financed Private Charter Schools

This article reports on some studies on the performance of charter schools.  The research tells us what we might expect.  That is, some of them do OK and others do not.  The charter schools that under perform are not being closed down.  That is in violation of the charter that they were granted upon authorization.  This is not news either.  The concept of charter schools, and the use of vouchers to fund for-profit schools with public funds is entirely based upon ideology.  The fundamental premise is that the profit motive, and competition between schools, is only effective way to serve "consumers".  Public education is fundamentally flawed, and they should all be closed down and turned over to private enterprise.

Milton Friedman, and conservative economists centered in the University of Chicago's Economic Department were the architects of the privatization movement in the US.  Its important to understand their ideology because it has been successfully sold, with the help of the US government, to economists and governments in the rest of the world.  The basic idea is that private markets, unconstrained by government regulations, are the best of all possible ways of satisfying individual needs.  The true believers recognize that this is an ideal, and that there are few examples of markets that meet all of the assumptions in their idealized version of a free market.  Deviations from the ideal are regarded as market failures.  They regard government intervention in markets as the major source of market failure.  For example, the Great Depression is not possible in a totally free market system.  Therefore, there must have been a market failure.  Many conservative economists argue that government policies were responsible for the Great Depression.

The aftermath of the Great Depression was a disaster for the true believers in free markets.  The New Deal, that was developed by government in response to the Great Depression, increased the role on government in the economy.  This was, and still is, anathema to true believers in the ideal of free markets.  According the their belief system, the proper medicine should have been even less government involvement in the economy.  Unfortunately for them,  the economy turned around and most of the public came to believe that the New Deal facilitated the recovery.  That has not dissuaded the true believers.  They were provided a new opportunity during the cold war.  Communism, which is an idealized system, much like the system of free markets,  was their new enemy.  Fortunately for the free marketers,  the US government welcomed their assistance in the war of ideas.  For example, Milton Friedman and other economists from the University of Chicago were given the opportunity to inculcate free market ideology in South America.  Over one hundred graduate students in Chile were awarded PhD's from Chicago.  The Ford Foundation and government agencies provided the support and funding for their indoctrination.  The graduates from this program supported the military junta that overthrew the social democratic government of Chile, and they developed the economic plan that was followed by military dictatorship.  The government privatized social security, and it replaced the public education system with charter schools and school vouchers among other things.  It took a military dictatorship to implement the ideal of free markets in Chile.  Predictably, when things went bad in the economy there was a simple explanation for the problem.  Defenders of Communism argued that the ideal of Communism was never realized in the Soviet Union, and that is why it failed. The free marketers from Chicago made a similar argument.  Milton Friedman told the military dictator to work harder to achieve the idealized free market.

The threat of Communism has gone, but the free marketers have a new enemy.  They abhor social democracy.  They had no problems with a military dictatorship in Chile as long as it supported the ideal of free markets.  But democratic governments that regulate the economy;  provide social welfare programs, and deliver public services that could be turned over to private enterprise must be changed.  A democratic government, that does not support their ideal of totally free markets, must be subverted, or captured by private enterprise.  The ideology of free markets is still the religion that is sold to the public in the war against social democracy.  It is primarily an economic ideology, but the concepts of individual liberty, and freedom from centralized government, are part of the ideology that make it appealing to much of the public.  The government is the enemy of freedom, unless of course, when it provides funds to private enterprise, or when it shapes the rules by which the economy operates to benefit those who preach the virtues of freedom.