Corporate privatization of public education would have seemed inconceivable 15 years ago. The special interest of maximizing profits for external stockholders biases inquiry and instruction against whatever does not promote this overriding interest. But the corporate privatizers want public education as well as public health dollars. It is their next global market outlet for government guaranteed profits.
Bear in mind that the military provides well over a billion dollars a day to NATO corporations. Public health and education are even greater prizes for secure and growing profits. They are worth over $2 trillion annually across the world. In Canada, they are a $60 billion "gold mine" (Shaker, 23).
Corporate globalization is driven by the money code of value, by which money-demand, not life need, is the regulating objective of thought and action. Decisions, whether conscious or unconscious, are based on this overriding value program. There is only one law of thought: to maximize revenues to corporate stockholders. "Globalization" is the term used for transnational corporations roaming the world seizing opportunities for the largest dollar output with the smallest dollar input.
Public Versus Privatized Education
Canada's Caledon Institute for Social Policy lists the contributions that public education can make to the public good:
High-quality public education advances the well-being of all citizens and helps us to accomplish some of our most cherished public purposes.
Public education is necessary to the economic health of both individuals and nations.
The privatizing of education does not, as sales myths of local community control would have us believe, smash the educational bureaucracy. It transfers power from publicly accountable management to for-profit "education management organizations" (EMOs). Modeled on the health management organizations (HMOs) in the United States, these private, for-profit corporations run a school board or a university like a business, looking for the largest money output with the smallest cost input or, in other words, the largest profit for the smallest amount of education provision.
Charter Schools and EMOs
The charter school represents the application of market principles to education while remaining outside any collective agreements or community control. New Zealand's experience with charter schools should provide a warning to Canadians. In that country, every public school was turned into a charter school, which resulted in the middle class "shopping" for schools for their children, while the poor and the less mobile were left in ghettoized neighborhood schools. As a result of this restructuring, 1,000 teachers left the system and one out of every five principals quit (Little 1997).
The United States provides another warning of the privatization of public and secondary education through the example of Education Alternatives Inc. (EAI), a corporation that privatizes the management and operation of public schools, and only accepts contracts that allow it to use its own employees and curriculum. The American Federation of Teachers produced a report exposing EAI's management of Baltimore schools, citing staff cuts, increased class sizes, replacement of paraprofessionals with low-paid interns and diversion of classroom funding for overhead, lawyers, accountants, corporate travel and profit (CUPE 1997).
Compulsory Corporate Ad Watching
The occupation of the public education system by corporate globalization may be most poignantly evidenced by the spread of the Youth News Network (YNN) into Canada's classrooms themselves. A private commercial network, YNN provides Canadian schools with televisions, audio-visual equipment and computers in return for airing its 12.5 minute "newscast" and its 2.5 minutes of advertisements in all classrooms for at least 80 percent of the academic year (Schofield 1999).
A Dow Chemical-sponsored video, Traces of Today, marketed by Modern Talking Pictures Service to 35 million students, teaches that: "Scientific studies and practical experience around the world has [sic] shown that incinerators are an environmentally safe method for disposing combustible material, including plastics." Major forest extraction corporations tell classrooms that "clear-cutting is good for biodiversity." Johnson Wax promotes educational videos on the ozone layer; the American Coal Foundation teaches about the positive relationship between the coal business and the environment; and Exxon Oil boasts of its "responsible energy choices" (Barlow and Robertson 1994).
A Channel One clone in Canada, Youth News Network (YNN) was at first outrightly rejected by Quebec Minister of Education, François Legault, on the grounds that it was contrary to Article 94 of the Education Act, "commercial solicitation contrary to the mission of the school." But Trojan horse tactics compelled review of the decision, and three Quebec schools had YNN by 1999.
Ontario's Harris government, fronting the agenda of its Bay Street financiers, and now historically distinguished by its incompetence at every level of governance, has been specially open for business. The Peel Board of Education has already built YNN into its school classrooms. It prescribes compulsory ad-watching, while ad volumes and student attendance are enforced by school principals (Moore 2000).
These corporate-school partnerships demand compulsory in-class rather than after-class viewing - a fact which contradicts the claim of free market and free speech ideals. Yet the supportive Information Teaching Association of Canada (ITAC), led by AT&T, Bell, IBM and Northern Telecom declare the future of education "will be realized through the full integration of information technology in the delivery of education." Since it is not, in fact, information, but propaganda, that is delivered, and since education can never be delivered to anyone in any case, one gets the point. Public education is not only being invaded by the corporate agenda. It is being liquidated.
References
Barlow, Maude and Heather-Jane Robertson. Class Warfare: The Assault on Canada's Schools. Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited, 1994
Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). "Corporate Cash-In." Global Teach-In: Challenging Corporate Rule. University of Toronto, Canada. November 7-9, 1997.
Little, Doug. "Charter Schools - Making Public Education Private." Global Teach-In: Challenging Corporate Rule. University of Toronto, Canada. November 7-9, 1997.
Moore, Beverley. The Extent and Impact of Communications Cartels on Public Education: 1980 - 2000. PhD dissertation, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. 2000.
Shaker, Erica "Privatizing Higher Education: Profiting From Public Loss", Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations Forum, Fall, 2000.
Schofield, John. "Ads Come to Class: Cash-strapped Schools Take a Closer Look at YNN." Macleans, April 5, 1999.
Torjman, Sherri.. "Education and the Public Good." Caledon Institute of Social Policy, Communities and Schools Series, April, 2000. Available at: http//www.caledoninst.org.