Foundations and Feds Push “Freemium” Deals on Districts to Privatize Policymaking

Foundations, Feds, and interest groups have a plan that will create more room for private companies to influence what schools buy.  And in an effort to facilitate such relationships, the Education Industry Association (EIA) has announced a new initiative aimed at helping education companies sell more to public schools by changing the rules on how sales get approved. EIA, in fact, has been awarded a special grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under an initiative created by the Feds to spur digital innovation in schools.  The problem (as defined in the announcement):

Why should it take 6 months, 10 months or even longer to complete deals with school districts? How can a start-up lacking [a] national sales force and without an established rep gain traction with school buyers?  How can companies access educators and hope to have them fall in love with your solution, and convert these pilots and freemium deals into revenue?

Put differently, the established public policy process for getting buy-in from district staff and teachers before large purchases (for which principals can’t just write a check) is, according to the EIA, too cumbersome. It is, as we have heard so many times in reference to public policy and its perceived failures, overly bureaucratic.

To date, EIA’s marketing campaign to influence the procurement process has been slow but steadily building, most recently through its announcement of an alliance with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), which represents over 13,000 school district superintendents.  In this scheme, EIA offers school districts a list of approved members (business seal of approval) in exchange for more open access to districts by those vendors. Vendors, in turn, secure district contacts whereby district administrators purportedly get providers with a demonstrated record of effectiveness.

In May 2013, the Education Industry Association wrote to its members,

EIA will recommend high quality suppliers of school services and products, who are in good standing with EIA, for the AASA School Solutions Center, the go-to resource used by district buyers when they seek vendors. This is the first-time the SSC will promote instructional services, ed-tech solutions and academic products. Accepted companies may promote this AASA connection to local district decision-makers and AASA will make door-opener introductions on your behalf. In addition, vendors receive booth space at the annual conference and are highlighted in AASA publications to their membership.

There is a lot more going on here than chummy relationships to reduce red tape. There is a long history of schools purchasing textbooks, test scanners, and grade books.  But we are at a very different juncture– a kind of watershed moment in which the private industry is focused on transforming the agenda and policy adoption process at the local level.

It is a brilliant strategy really. If you can find a niche as a broker between vendors and schools, much else opens up in the way of recommending the purchase of particular products and transforming contracts from one-time purchases to expensive leases that require upgrades. This post here is part of a longer chapter through which, as Gary Anderson, Stephen Ball, and Christopher Lubienski, among others have written, the very nature of public policy is transformed.  Accordingly, privatization is not limited to goods and services, rather, it includes policymaking itself. The private sector’s involvement with point-of-sale processes brings it one step further into decision-making around the use of public funds– beyond influence on agenda setting and policy adoption and deep into policy formulation and evaluation.

The stakes are high everywhere but particularly in big central cities. Providers gravitate to cities like New York and Los Angeles because cities with more students mean more revenue.  For example, many companies selling technology charge by user fees.  That is, the more students or teachers in a district, the higher the revenue – even if the unit price is low.  Charter schools get money based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA) or seat time. If we follow this thread further, we can see why organizations like EIA would want more influence over the rules for contracting in public education. Streamlining public policy around the procurement process opens up markets, and not just for the start-ups referenced in the EIA announcement. 

Streamlining could eventually involve making big sales as customers click “BUY” rather than having to go through multiple presentations to district leaders in an effort to maintain transparency. But, making the decision about whether every child in a school district should have a tablet over a music program or smaller class sizes is very different from making the decision to purchase staples and pencils. The interest of education foundations – like the Gates Foundation – and the Federal government in the EIA initiative is telling. It suggests a broader agenda at play in reimagining the local in local governance. The marketing letter from the EIA announcing the partnership uses the language of a “freeium offer.”  But public policy is meant to be deliberative and transparent. It shouldn’t be for sale.

by Patricia Burch

"muscular philanthropy"

Posted, too, at SM:
Muscular philanthropy--that's what Fred Hess calls the kind of Walton-Broad-Gates phalanx that has as one of its goals the charterizing (rhymes with cauterizing) of American public schools, beginning first in the urban schools where voucher efforts have been unsuccessful so far. Bill and Melinda, the darlings of the neoliberal set, are a bit queasy regarding vouchers, having the ongoing history that they do with the education establishment. See, too, "How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System," NY Times Magazine, 3/9/08.
Now charter schools are a different matter, particularly as we have elements of the AFT and the head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, on board with Steve Barr, Eli Broad, and the Gates Foundation to craft a corporate-controlled version of public schools for the poor and working classes at a 20 percent savings to the taxpayer (and a 20% cost to teachers). Bill and Melinda, in fact, gave $7.8 million to Green Dot Public Schools, Inc. last July. That's a nifty complement to the $20+ million already dished up by the Broad Foundation for the LAUSD charter takeover.

(Photo: Andy Stern (SEIU) looks on as Steve Barr, CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, Inc. presents Eli Broad a plaque for $10 million given at the first annual Green Dot Ball, November 2007, Los Angeles).

Now I don't know if you would label corporate control of the public schools as social control. I guess some would call it corporate socialism or just plain fascism. For those, however, seeking more evidence of Bill's boyish, if slightly creaky, charm applied to using private billions to buy the public good, here are a few additional links here, here, here. I wish I had time to summarize them for Dr. Anonymous, but I am going the beach in few minutes.

The saddest part of all this is that the corporate media outlets offer ample opportunity for Broad and others of his ilk to pump the KIPP charter chain gangs (Bill and Melinda gave $7.9 million to KIPP in 2004) as the modern day solution to the "negro problem." Ed Week has only a slightly more nuanced approach, as Tmao Essj points out in this blog entry from last June:

The June 13 issued of Education Week published an article on student attrition at KIPP schools, particularly the two in San Francisco and one in Oakland, that didn't bury the lede as much as it pretended it didn't exist. Somewhat surprisingly, all manner of bloggers and commenters performed the same intellectual sleight-of-hand.

The article is trapped behind a subscription wall, making it unlinkable, but Ed Week correctly reports that fewer than half of the kids that begin the Bay Area KIPP schools as 5th graders in 2003 make it to 8th grade in 2006. In the Oakland incarnation, the attrition rate climbs to 75 percent. The article ignores the fact that these lost students are overwhelmingly African-American males. The three Bay Area KIPPs lost 77, 67, and 71 percent of its Young Black Males (YBMs) during this time period.

That's the story Ed Week. That's the story Eduwonk. That's the story, KIPP PR fixers.

There's more Black males on the KIPP website than in the KIPP. . . .

Admittedly, these attrition rates for KIPP in the Bay Area are not as bad (or good) as they were at the Hampton Institute in 1900 in Virginia (or the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama), when one out of five students who entered those industrial education/teacher training camps earned certificates to permit them to brainwash black children throughout the South in the "dignity of labor," but you have to admit the KIPP numbers are pretty impressive stats. The washouts, of course, have an economic function, too, providing as they do the future customers in the privately-managed prison industrial complex that the technocrats have devised to replace, yet another, civic responsibility.

You can be sure, however, that those black and brown KIPP-sters who make it through the direct instruction gauntlet are no less ready than the Hampton graduates to do, as Booker T. Washington did, the work that is offered by the overseers whose respect must be earned--repeatedly. WORK HARD, BE NICE--indeed.