Morning Shots

In a 1970 article entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” economist Milton Friedman famously argued that a business exists for one purpose: to maximize returns for its shareholders. If shareholders want their money to go to social causes, he said, they’re perfectly capable of making that decision themselves, and the businesses they invested in have no right to make that decision for them – it simply isn’t what a business is set up to do.

Given this line of thinking (which remains widely held even today), many people assume that business’ interest in education is simply one more case of companies looking for new markets to conquer.

But is it really that simple?

Certainly there are companies that sell to the school market, and companies that want to manage schools. But they represent only a small segment of the total business community. The profit motive of this small group of companies doesn’t explain why businesses in almost every industry contribute billions each year to support education, nor does it explain the widespread political support that NCLB, vouchers, and other reform tools receive from businesses that have no interest in running schools.

Rather, it is the widely acknowledged crisis in public education that drives the business community – which is essentially both an investor in, and customer of, our schools – to see involvement as an imperative, literally something that must be done to ensure its own future. They see involvement in public education as an investment in the short- and long-term health of their companies, and in the continued strength of the markets they serve.

They look for the following returns on their investment in education:

• Workforce development – Employers are already complaining about their inability to find qualified workers in nearly every industry, and projections show this shortage

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Four years ago I moved my family to Angel Fire, New Mexico, to create a charter high school.  Two teachers with whom I had previously worked ten years earlier in Alaska moved to New Mexico to work at the school I was creating.  By the second year of the school, we had the created the highest ranked public high school in New Mexico based on Jay Mathews’ Challenge Index.  The third year, we ranked among the “Top 100 Best Public High Schools” on Newsweek’s list.

But at that point, I had been forced out by the state of New Mexico because I was not a licensed administrator.  When I had moved to New Mexico charter school administrators did not need a license.  But the law had changed, and I would have needed seven years’ experience as a licensed public school teacher in order to enter an administrative licensure program.  Despite the fact that my work as an educator has been praised by leading educational theorists and practitioners, and despite the fact that I have achieved spectacular results, it is not legal for me to lead a charter school in New Mexico.  Moreover, beyond spectacular academic results, my focus as an educator is always first and foremost on developing adolescent happiness and well-being.  It is inexcusable that it is not legal for me to lead schools.  We need to legalize markets in happiness and well-being.

There is a distinction between “decriminalized” markets in, say, prostitution and drugs, as compared to full legalization. In Holland, for instance, while it is legal to sell small quantities of cannabis products, it is not legal for these retailers to buy wholesale quantities nor to advertise. A commercial market in cannabis remains illegal; the cannabis industry does not benefit from the investment capital, economies of scale,

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On Thursday, July 13th, a group of New Jersey parents filed a class action lawsuit against the New Jersey Commissioner of Education, 25 Boards of Education, and numerous other public officials.  The lawsuit, Crawford v. Davy, identifies a class of students attending the state’s 96 worst schools: those where more than 50% of tested students have failed both their language arts and math assessments for the past two years, or 75% of them have failed one of these assessments during the same time.  A little more than 60,000 students attend these schools. Just under 6% of the state’s k-12 population.

The lawsuit has caused quite a stir in the state’s education circles.  The New Jersey Education Association thinks it’s a “PR” stunt, quite possibly because their members are in front of these children in these educational deserts.  The school board president in Camden thinks the lawsuit is “outrageous.”  He doesn’t, however, believe it’s outrageous that there are nine schools under his leadership that meet the lawsuit’s criteria.  Not to mention so much dysfunction overall that Camden has become a case study in exactly how not to run a school district.  The Superintendent of one of the districts named recently said she doesn’t think the answer is to take away money from the public schools.  Another school board member in another district believes we all need to work together and make the public schools better, not abandon them.  A professor at a local university believes that neighboring districts won’t take these kids anyway.

Notice something about all of these assertions–something missing, perhaps?

If anything, Crawford v. Davy has given all the institutional players a chance to show just where their interests lie: with the institution.  The “something missing” to which I refer is any substantive reply to the complaint being brought to

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