Being a US Consumer Sucks, Yet We’re Turning K-12 into a Consumer Good

Being a consumer in the US sucks. It’s not just because prices are high. Buying has become harder.

Food deserts abound; neighborhood stores close. Shrinkflation and shortages are common. Self check-outs and robots have replaced trained staff. Locked shelves and cameras make us suspects while apps mine our data to make us marks. Price-fixing and surveillance pricing thwart comparison shopping. Products are built to not last; digital services are “enshittified.” Costs are hidden, repairs and refunds onerous, scams hard to spot.

High quality, durable products and hands-on, personal services? Reserved for the wealthiest. Meanwhile, much of the time-consuming aggravation and expense the rest of us experience is sold as “convenience” and “choice.”

The Unequal Labor of “School Choice”

Now consider the schoolhouse. At the turn of this century, most parents expected to send their children to their assigned neighborhood, local, or regional public schools. Though not always easy and rarely equitable, accessing education, transportation and extracurriculars was pretty straightforward. Today, with the expansion of “school choice,” many parents don’t find it so.

For her book Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality, Bailey A. Brown spoke to parents forced to navigate elementary school admission in New York City, where — even without vouchers — families face more “choice” than did previous generations. She found parents under great stress, spending long hours researching schools and managing a complex process strewn with trip wires, especially for those less monied and connected.

Here’s where it is impossible to ignore the discourse launched this fall by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s New York Times essay expressing regret over decisions she made about her daughter’s education. Predictably, the mea culpa was pounced upon by “school choice” proponents as evidence that public schools are indeed terrible and “woke” attitudes about them harmful to children.

But as educational leadership professor Julian Vasquez Heilig wrote, for Hannah-Jones and the majority of parents:

There was never a perfect choice available. That is the real indictment. And it is not an accident. For generations, American education policy has created and maintained systems in which access to rigorous coursework, experienced teachers, enrichment, safety, social capital, and opportunity too often follows race, wealth, and geography. Parents are then asked to make intensely personal choices inside inequalities they did not create.

The labor involved in making these choices and managing their consequences, Brown’s book highlights — including the emotional toll of worry, guilt, and blame — lands most heavily on women, especially women of color.

Treating education like a business, for business

Much of this century’s education reform has been a bipartisan effort to treat education like a business. Conservatives and libertarians embraced Milton Friedman’s notion that forcing public schools to compete with private schools would — through the magic of the market — produce improved results for all. Centrist Democrats became convinced, with help from magic men such as Bill Gates, that corporate management techniques and tools applied to education would close achievement gaps between rich and poor.

This ideology led to the punishing standardized test regime of the aughts and the teacher evaluation debacle of the teens, an explosion of “mostly useless” edtech and today’s AI push. The excesses of each phase — testing, standardization, austerity, data collection, and automation — arose from publishers, tech bros, and other profiteers exploiting vast new markets these reforms opened to them.

By lots of angles, it looks like race and gender all the way down. The corporate ed reform movement has been driven by men, mostly White men, at the highest ranks of business, philanthropy, government, media, and think tanks. Hence the attitude linked to the ideology: female-dominated K-12 is too soft, too homey, too childlike. It needs grown-ass, hard-nosed businessmen to whip it into shape.

And as Josh Cowen relates in The Privateers, the billionaires pushing for “school choice” happily joined forces with the segregationists and churches clamoring for private school vouchers. Segregation academies founded in North Carolina in response to integration are now happy beneficiaries of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, ProPublica has found. Harnessing the fears and bigotry of the religious right and the disaster of the pandemic, wealthy elites have made big strides over the past decade in expanding voucher programs.

We knew before the pandemic that the various strategies of corporate reformers had failed to close the achievement gap, yet the belief persists that unfettered private enterprise does all things better. So here we are now — with public schools competing not so much with private schools for students, but with moneymen for public dollars in a dual system created as a result of “choice.”

What education “enshittification” looks like

When education becomes a consumer product, parents become consumers. What does that mean for them? For children, too easily left out of the equation when education is viewed as a transaction between a buyer and seller? There is way too much to cover, but what follows is a glimpse.

“School choice” proponents argue that voucher and other “choice” programs allow parents to take their business elsewhere if they’re dissatisfied with the education their child is receiving. The blitheness with which this claim is made suggests that changing schools is as simple as changing internet companies. The work mostly women do to manage this process is invisible, but the corporate reformers should know that the economic concept of “switching costs” applies: changing providers, especially service providers, can cost money, time, and effort. And switching schools is of course far more difficult and circumstantial than getting new cables installed. Children who change schools often suffer from anxiety, depression, reduced motivation, lowered achievement, and more.

Like stores, private schools can close without warning, even mid-school year, making parents scramble and causing students social, emotional, and academic disruption and distress. Josh Cowen found that in Wisconsin, 4 out of 10 private schools that took vouchers closed. Meanwhile, public school closings are accelerating in states such as Texas, where politicians have squeezed public school budgets while spending on charters and vouchers has ballooned.

Just as there are food deserts, there are “school choice” deserts. For most rural families, public schools are the only option; just a third have a private school within five miles. Private schools, like retailers, can choose where to locate. Another ProPublica investigation found that in Arizona, geography is deciding which parents can take advantage of the state’s vouchers — only six of 200 private schools in Phoenix are in lower-income zip codes. Transportation, which private schools don’t typically provide, then becomes a cost and time barrier or burden (one that is, again, borne mostly by women.)

Proponents claim that vouchers rescue children from bad schools. But while in many voucher states, public schools and districts deemed failing are tightly policed through state takeover or strict accountability measures, the schools and microschools that get voucher monies are subject to de minimis oversight and transparency. This means parents can have little to go by to assess quality or safety. This is especially true as new ventures without track records pop up to avail themselves of taxpayer dollars via expanded voucher programs. Another ProPublica investigation found that in 13 voucher states, roughly 1,500 new private schools opened in the past five years, an increase of almost 19%. (Yes, ProPublica.)

When funds are given out with lax oversight, fraud and abuse follow. Arizona’s voucher program, as do many others, provides funds to parents for more than tuition, encouraging scammers to be creative about what’s “educational.” The state has had repeated problems with providing funds for fraudulent purchases including hotel stays, amusement park tickets, even a home generator.

And some of the same companies selling to public schools, like edtech firms and curriculum providers, are making additional profit from vouchers. Vouchers incentivize venture capital firms to buy more education companies, and we know how those served by other caring institutions such as hospitals fare when those are run by venture capitalists.

There’s fraud and exploitation. Then there’s abuse. Because while public schools need to do more to protect children from sexual predation and other violence, most voucher states allow just about anyone to start something called a “school” and start accepting vouchers, as ProPublica (Have you subscribed to ProPublica yet?) has demonstrated. This has led to known child abusers receiving taxpayer dollars to teach children without safety oversight from the state.

And what happens to the public schools that do lose students to voucher-taking organizations? These include students unable to use vouchers due to their zip codes but also because religious schools — and two-third’s of US private schools are religious — can discriminate against LGBTQ+ students or children of LGBTQ+ parents, students with disabilities or of various religious beliefs in admissions. Most students, then, whether they choose to or not, remain in public schools that lose funding: class sizes grow, courses and extracurriculars are cut, teachers are paid less, buildings suffer disrepair. IOW, they are enshittified.

The tuition is too damn high

Depending on how they are described in a given survey, plenty of parents think vouchers sound good. They are really great for some, mainly parents who can already afford private schools: Most who use vouchers already have their children enrolled in them. And as voucher programs once directed at lower income families expand to become “universal,” all but the top 10% of households in terms of wealth are eligible.

Don’t worry about the top ten percenters, though: they are the most able to take advantage of the tax shelters that voucher “scholarship” programs provide, facilitating the diversion of public funds to private hands. And they can afford to send their children to the most elite, brand name private schools, which tend not to accept vouchers. "First-class” schools, whether public or private — with modern facilities, small class sizes, an array of challenging academic offerings, and the most vibrant extracurriculars — are largely restricted to America’s Platinum Members: those who can spend big on real estate or tuition or both.

Meanwhile, even parents using vouchers aren’t necessarily getting the tuition break they may have expected — because voucher-accepting schools are raising tuition, siphoning off public funds for themselves. In Iowa, universal vouchers led private schools to raise tuition 21-25%. (In Iowa, 9 out of 10 private schools are religious schools. Vouchers are helping associated churches survive. This is no accident: church leaders recognized decades ago that vouchers could counteract declining finances.) The upshot: tuition prices that well outstrip vouchers, preserving private schools primarily for the more affluent.

School Vouchers and the Threat to Religious Freedom

Using school vouchers to weaken the wall between church and state

Nobody Wants ThisAnne Lutz Fernandez

What now?

With the GOP controlling all branches of the federal government, “school choice” advocates have an unfolding victory: a federal voucher law that offers more nice tax breaks to wealthier Americans and provides a Trojan Horse to get vouchers into states where voters and their leaders have eschewed them. To entice the governors in these states, the program provides some funds for public school parents and public school programs to grease the wheels of a voucher program that its proponents hope will create dependency and demand. But we know what the results will be: the gradual turning of education into a consumer good.

The same political, business leaders, and donors encouraging school vouchers under the guise that doing so will increase competition, choice, and quality are the same people working against antitrust actions that prevent monopolies and regulations that protect consumers. So the federal voucher program, like those in the states, disallows regulation and meaningful oversight of voucher recipients.

Can we prevent citizens’ relationship to K-12 schooling from a full turn into the kind we have with consumer product and service companies? Some things to do right now:

• support those governors who have not opted in to the federal program (check your state’s status here),
• make ourselves heard by those who have, and
• campaign and vote for those federal and state candidates — like Gina Hinojosa in Texas and Rob Sand in Iowa — who understand the stakes.