StickWithANose

The old grey lady has published yet another celebratory article built around a narrative of zealous do-gooding entrepreneurs striving to re-make public education… in the “Life & Style” section of all places! From a broad perspective, the message here is clear: Introducing entrepreneurial spirit into public education will spark educational gains, especially among those least served by current public schooling. However, by tearing into the mechanics of how this message is constructed, it becomes clear that this assertion is not only demonstrably false, but that the purpose of this message [sociologically speaking] is to conceal an operative structure in the name of informing readers of news-worthy happenings.

THEIR company names were conspicuously absent from their nametags, but that is how these hedge fund managers and analysts — members of a field known for secrecy — preferred it. They filled the party space at the W Hotel on Lexington Avenue in late October, mostly men in their 30s. Balancing drinks on easels adorned with students’ colorful drawings, they juggled PDA’s and business cards, before sitting down to poker tables to raise money for New York City charter schools.

Working the room, the evening’s hosts, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt, who are partners in the hedge fund Gotham Capital, had an agenda: to identify new candidates to join their Success Charter Network, a cause they embrace with all the fervor of social reformers…

Mr. Petry, 38, and Mr. Greenblatt, 52, may spend their days poring over spreadsheets and overseeing trades, but their obsession — one shared with many other hedge funders — is creating charter schools, the tax-funded, independently run schools that they see as an entrepreneurial answer to the nation’s education woes. Charters have attracted benefactors from many fields. But it is impossible to ignore that in New York, hedge funds are at the movement’s epicenter.

OK… The first issue here relates to incentives. The implicit message is that these hedgies are motivated by civic duty, but there is a good deal of evidence pointing toward the growing connections between corporate charters and Wall Street. [See here & here] Hedgies are motivated by profit. They are the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism and to assign any other motivations to them outside of that context is pure folly… which leads me to my second point.

That hedge fund multimillionaires have embraced the charter movement may seem odd: their own children are unlikely ever to see the inside of a neighborhood school, and there are more traditional routes to social prominence through philanthropy, like support of hospitals and cultural institutions. But to those who know the sociology of Wall Street, it makes sense. Charter schools appeal to the maverick instincts of many who run hedge funds.

Really? What is the sociology of Wall Street?! Do we really want to unleash the spirit of the market on public schooling? The implicit message here is that would need to do so. However, the “market” in which these hedgies live and work is a chaotic social institution built on short-term incentives that “represents the collective wisdom of 10 million panicked monkeys.” Introducing short term, numerically-driven metrics into public schooling will only lead to predictable results… again obscured by this article.

Whether charters do a better job of educating children, even with the extra help from private donors, is much debated. A study released in September by researchers headed by Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, concluded that on average New York City charters outperform local schools. But another study by a different group of Stanford researchers last summer suggested that nationally the numbers are muddier.

Presented in the now standard “he said / she said” narrative, the message here is that the New York charters that are the subject of this article are out-performing traditional public schools… that other study just “muddies” the water a bit. In fact, it didn’t take long for Hoxby’s “study” [that was not peer-reviewed] to be de-bunked, and the CREDO study mentioned in passing is part of a larger body of research that demonstrates that over 40% of charter schools under-perform while another 50% are on par with traditional public schools. [See here & here]

While it may be easy to dismiss an article in the Life & Style section, this article is but one piece of a larger puzzle that is dynamic and symbolically defined. Colonization is ideological as well as materialist. This article is constructing “common sense” in its truest sense, and it is there that political and economic power is being activel constructed.