Privatization and its impact on urban school reform: Table Top Theory as a guiding conceptual framework

Abstract

This article focuses on the growing role of the private sector in public education and the implications of this role on issues of social justice and leadership in public schooling. In the USA, until the early 1980s, teachers, school administrators, and professional school staff provided leadership in areas of curriculum and instructional development. However, increasingly curriculum and instructional development is being outsourced to national and internationally based private firms. Numerous public school systems have begun to engage in outsourcing and privatization of academic functions at an unprecedented rate. The author sheds light on one example of a privatization strategy in urban school reform by drawing from research conducted in 2003–2004 in the St Louis Public School District. From both an academic and democratic standpoint, the reform effort was a disappointment. Through his conceptual framework Table Top Theory, the author explains why the strategy did not succeed and what this may mean for privatization and urban school reform initiatives across the United States.

Keywords:

• business and education
• learner‐centered schooling
• social justice
• school leadership
• transactional leadership and decision making

Notes

1. Prior to St Louis, Alvarez & Marsal had no experience in school management. Since the St Louis experience, the firm has secured a $17 million no‐bid contract to engage in its turnaround work in the New York City school system and a $16.8 million no‐bid contract to manage and administer the operational facets of the New Orleans school system (Jones 2007).

2. The newly elected school board majority claimed that the district was facing a $70 million deficit. In support of this claim, the mayor declared that the outgoing‐retiring Superintendent ‘spent money like a drunken sailor’. However, an independent state audit revealed otherwise. According to the state audit, the district actually had a $38 million deficit that was the direct result of cuts in state funding allocations to the district (McCaskill 2004). The outgoing Superintendent was, contrary to the political rhetoric of the mayor and newly elected school board, quite thrifty (Jones 2007).

3. Sunshine laws require public disclosure of governmental agency (including schools) policies and procedures. Such laws require governing authorities of school systems to post meeting dates and agenda for public viewing in advance of said meetings.

4. The school district was provisionally accredited during this time period.