My Own Private School District

The latest – and most dramatic – example of the continued privatization of the nation's urban public school districts came in June from the mouth of Chicago's Mayor Richard M. Daley.

"We must face the reality that – for schools that have consistently underperformed – it's time to start over," said Daley, who proceeded to announce that the city's school district, home to nearly 450,000 students and 602 schools, would shut down 100 poor-performing schools, turning two-thirds of those schools over to private management companies.

The private management companies, which operate charter and contract schools, "can shake things up and experiment with new approaches and new thinking," Daley says. Chicago, he believes, will become "the national laboratory of innovation for education – a place where the best ideas take root and bloom."

He's not alone in placing his faith with private companies to turn around failing public schools. Boston, Los Angeles, New York and – most significantly – Philadelphia are some of the big cities that have turned over some of their schools to private managers in recent years.

"There's a lot of pressure in large urban districts to do something different, and this is one of the things to do different," says Katrina Bulkley, an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy at Rutgers University, who studies the role of charter schools and Education Management Organizations (EMOs) in school reform efforts. Contracting schools out to private companies is "an idea that makes sense to a lot of people outside the education community and that gives it an inherent appeal," she says.

In the case of contract schools, private management companies take over an existing public school with the understanding they can run it with greater efficiency and with better student performance results than the school district. The relationship between the school district and the management company is typically negotiated on a yearly basis.

Charter schools, on the other hand, usually start from scratch with a five-year charter from their home school district. Free from some state and federal education mandates, charters traditionally have a less formal relationship with their school district than contract schools.

While charter schools have certainly gained ground in recent years and show no immediate signs of retreating, it's the Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) – both for-profit and non-profit – that have made the biggest splash in the country's urban schools.

Greg Richmond, head of Chicago Public Schools' Office of New Schools Development, says in the time since Daley's announcement several EMOs have already contacted him. "Those conversations have been very preliminary and until they advance further, I'd rather not be publicizing them by name," he says, via e-mail.

The push toward privatization is, not surprisingly, coming from outside the education world, says Jeff Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University's Teachers College. Henig is also a faculty associate at the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College.

"In a lot of instances, Chicago is the latest example, the movement toward reform and privatization is coming from the mayor and the business community," says Henig.

"That's a reflection, in part, or made more feasible, by the increasing marginalization of the school board and the political isolation of education professionals locally," he says. Decision-making in a lot of large cities, says Henig, has shifted to a new set of actors, who are willing and interested to "shake things up."

But other than offering to shake up what some see as a moribund education system, what if the EMOs can actually do a better job of educating students?