Capitalism Plagues Public Education: The Charter Industry in Chicago
By Antek Kozlowski
Public education in the US is preyed upon by profit-seeking capital interests at every turn. Underpaid and overworked staff, expensive loans for maintenance, privatization, mass layoffs, spiraling academic performance, and perennial deficits are frequent discussions had by communities and school boards throughout the country. While public education may be a pillar of society, to the capitalist it is a means to reproduce labor as cheaply as possible, but also a market to profit from directly. The charter school movement has become one of the most direct methods to extract profits from public education, and its existence has rapidly accelerated the hollowing out and cheapening of our education and, thus, the cheapening of our labor-power by the bourgeois class. Recent developments in Chicago's public school district cast a light on how capital's need to expand is producing a crisis that threatens to hollow out public education even further.
Public school systems in the US, plagued by limited funding resources, are often run as lean as possible to balance their budgets each year. For Chicago's school district, the third largest in the country, this financial burden forces annual borrowing of billions to meet payroll, severely limiting its ability to lower classroom sizes, equitably distribute enrichment programs, maintain buildings, and provide services to students. Cost-cutting efforts rise to the top of the list of hard decisions for district leadership, who must consistently seek greater "efficiencies" that ultimately undermine the district's workforce and hand more operational control over to private business interests. These ubiquitous financial conditions significantly contributed to the emergence of the charter industry, which was marketed as both a financial and academic boon for failing public schools.
The charter movement rapidly grew through the early 2000’s by exploiting low-income communities where public schools struggled to perform due to the combined forces of historically inadequate funding levels and, in Chicago particularly, deep-rooted segregation. Self-styled “reformers” claimed the introduction of “competition, autonomy, and choice” in public education would lead to better academic performance and cost-efficiency for both tax payers and districts with aging infrastructure. In reality, it was an investment opportunity for capitalists to establish new business ventures in a market that was previously held at arms length from their direct control. The venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and real-estate investors who operate charter schools secured favorable laws and state funding from bourgeois politicians eager to promote a low effort solution to the “public education problem,” enabling greater private investment opportunity with less oversight and further dividing labor into smaller camps, now reliant on the success of these business ventures and separated from established labor unions.
While many charters are established as non-profits, they act as any capitalist enterprise would. Illinois charter schools operate within the boundaries of existing public school districts on a contractual basis. For each seat the charter fills, they receive tuition payments from the public district, valued at the cost of producing one year of education for each student. Denying services to students with disabilities, outsourcing administrative and operational functions, charging additional student fees, and, most consistently, blocking unionization efforts are the typical ways the charter industry maximizes that value. The surplus that is generated is then fed into an ecosystem of for-profit enterprises and finance capital developed alongside the charter industry, with many companies directly connected to the board members and executives governing the schools.
Charters attract families in several ways: slick marketing campaigns claiming they will vastly outperform their local public school (a claim not supported by Illinois School Board progress data), newly constructed buildings that contrast with aging public infrastructure, "alternative" learning programs, and the latest learning technology. Much of the large investments are paid for in debt backed by the promise the charter will continue growing. Consistent enrollment growth being key to their survival, charters often rapidly expand the numbers of seats they can offer, expanding further into multi-campus "districts within a district." Fabricating enrollment figures or swiftly expelling students after reporting deadlines are also strategies employed in order to produce growth by any means. From 2000 to the present, nearly 100 charter schools have opened in Illinois, with enrollments growing seven-fold. Nearby public schools swiftly see their enrollments decline and, thus, the amount of funding left to them. As the number of near-empty public schools increases, their limited program offerings, waning academic performance, and high maintenance costs become hard to ignore for the community and district officials alike, and talks of closure consistently swirl about.
As enrollments decline overall as they have in Chicago over the last ten years (roughly 20 percent of the total student body), the competition for resources between public schools and private charters builds to a crisis point. Over the past two years, nearly a dozen Chicago charter schools have closed their doors, leaving hundreds of families at the whims of school leaders who, so far, seem listless in their ability to manage the waves of instability. The debt holders, angel investors, and web of industries tied to the charter schools demand their return on investment. They need it to survive; the growth necessary to the survival of the charter industry continues to drive their actions.
Month after month, charter industry representatives and labor partners present themselves to the Board of Education, demanding higher payouts for each student enrolled; some receiving mid-year bailouts to keep their doors open. By controlling nearly a fifth of the total student body, their demands hold significant sway, as allowing their failure would cost thousands of teachers and staff their jobs and tens of thousands of students their opportunity for a stable education.
Chicago Teachers' Union leaders and board members have rallied around new policies proposed to implement additional financial accountability measures and community engagement, in order to "more proactively assess" charter stability. But this is a crisis brought about by the very essence of capitalist production; it will not be resolved through reforms or feedback loops. The charter industry will continue to operate as they must, seeking any means to increase their enrollment, increase the value for each enrolled student, and further drain public school systems of their already limited resources.
There is no stable coexistence between such forces of capital and the means of our own subsistence as a working class. On the contrary, our subsistence is subservient to the needs of the capitalist system to expand production, discover new markets, and cheapen what is left to us. In short order, capital has expanded its control over public education, further hollowing out its value to us and developing yet another financial crisis that workers and their families must bear.
Through the struggle to build socialism-communism, we are positioned to bring a permanent end to the rapaciousness and inherent instability of capitalism that plagues and degrades every facet of our lives. We cannot accept the complete degradation of our education, which will result in the arrested development of future generations. When we have freed ourselves from the dominance of the bourgeois class, education will go far beyond preparing us for a life of wage labor, instead serving as the bedrock of a society that prides itself on developing well-educated and well-rounded people working for our collective benefit rather than yet more exploited workers to amass more profit for the wealthy few.