Many times, the public gets surprised by some educators’ desire to support “privatization” or convert public schools into private schools. We don’t generally think about handing over education into the hands of for-profit, private organizations. Therefore, the news of a full-blown movement in progress for privatizing the country’s K-12 school system completely comes as a shock.

Since none of the attempts to develop public education has succeeded over the years, we can assume that the attempt to privatize public schools would also fail. The privatization movement doesn’t provide a plan to rectify the actual issues in the systems, such as standardized test scores’ pressure, but rather makes blanket claims that the schools aren’t performing well and privatization is the only means to save them.

Performance of Public Schools

The movement’s foundation is its ability to fully reform the public schools and protect them from their poor performance. But what poor performance are they pointing at? Public schools are demonstrating improvement. During the past couple of years, dropout rates have lowered to 6.1% from 7.4% in the country and are still decreasing. While the rates changed depending on ethnicity, each experienced an average drop of 2%, with the maximum difference being around 4%.

The entire board has experienced improvement instead of within just a single social group, gender, or ethnicity. Nothing’s perfect, but at present, public schools are prospering. Students earned the maximum test scores ever with the highest graduation rates and the lowest dropout rates. What exactly are the privatizers planning to improve in our schools that aren’t already present?

Money Talks

It’s quite easy to identify the truth behind privatizers. The truth lies in the money. Privatizers view reform to hand over public schools to private management, which’s a common practice amongst religious schools. Schools that serve a particular religion lack public funding because taxpayer dollars cannot be utilized to maintain and develop these schools.

Among all the students that attended private schools, 36% attended Catholic schools, with 39% attended another religiously affiliated school. With the rise of pressure on the government to eliminate the bans keeping religiously affiliated schools from public funding, together with the number of households concentrated on religion-based learning, we can easily opine that these privatizers might have become slightly influenced.

The government was developed around the value of separating state and church and the concept of religious freedom. If government funding isn’t available to our religions, what’s the meaning of religious education?

Experiencing the Hard Truth of Privatization

Private schools like charter schools or religious schools don’t favor inclusion. Public schools accept everyone and offer a comfortable environment for everybody to obtain an education regardless of their background, ethnicity, or affiliation. In fact, 90% of the population obtained a public education. Would all of them have obtained an education in case all K-12 schools became private? Probably not.

Presently, our taxes help our public education system’s foundation and the maintenance of our public schools. Some states give funding to charter schools (institutions that aren’t bound to adhere to education requirements) and have already delayed the development of public schools. It’s vital to understand the meaning of privatization for our educational system before the movement progresses and ruins our public.