Financing Reform

Private Sector

• Education-Corporate Partnership
• Public Education and the Private Sector
• Private Sector Schools Serve the Difficult to Educate
• Public-Private Partnerships: The Private Sector and Innovation in Education
• The Private Sector and Public Higher Education

 

Education-Corporate Partnerships

Reduced funding for curriculum development and for the purchase of high-quality materials makes it more likely that school boards will enter into agreements that expose students to curricular materials that promote corporate interests.
The Canadian Teachers' Federation believes that materials intended for classroom use should be subjected to rigorous evaluation.  

Public Education and the Private Sector

With current public concern over government spending, funding for education has been carefully scrutinized. Often schools are struggling to meet their financial needs. Current leaps in technology makes the pressure on schools even more acute. This resource crisis has many school administrators investigating the possibilities of education-business partnerships.

Schools engaging in a partnership can benefit in many ways. Schools are often the recipients of computer hardware and software. Businesses can also provide guest lecturers, mentors, school-to-work experiences, books and more.

Private Sector Schools Serve the Difficult to Educate

The private sector, including private sectarian schools, religious schools, nonpublic agencies, and home schools, offers a wide variety of education programs for this difficult-to-educate population. When public schools or agencies cannot serve a particular student, they sometimes contract with a private sector group to do the job. The Directory for Exceptional Children lists roughly 3,000 special education schools and facilities in the private sector nationwide. Their costs of educating a student vary widely, depending in large part on the nature of the disability category served, and may also include the cost of medical care and transportation.

 

Public-Private Partnerships: The Private Sector and Innovation in Education

Continually rising costs, coupled with constraints on revenues, leave many school districts with few options other than to cut back expenditures on classes, teachers, teachers' salaries, and infrastructure; or to raise money through additional taxes. Neither option is desirable nor simple to implement.

There is, however, a third viable option—partnerships between the public schools and the private sector—that may alleviate some of the pressures on school districts, enabling them to continue to provide vital services and infrastructure.

Private provision of infrastructure may be one of the more politically acceptable methods of private-sector involvement in education, since neither teachers nor students are directly involved. School districts are struggling to raise money to maintain existing buildings and to build new schools in order to keep up with increasing enrollment. In California, for example, the backlog in public school infrastructure needs in 1992 is estimated at around $5 billion. A 1983 survey showed that the average school in the United States was built in the mid-1940s. In older urban school districts, almost 50 percent of facilities are 60 years or older.

 

The Private Sector and Public Higher Education

One of the most shopworn criticisms of college professors, and of historians in particular, is that, rather than addressing any segment of the public, we specialize in the arcane, producing a literature intelligible only to ourselves. In reality, most historians, the majority of whom teach in and work for public institutions and agencies, present themselves constantly to a variety of publics. Moreover, in most of the contacts between the profession and the public, the public perception of the profession is positive. According to a recent study by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public opinion and research organization, the general public regards higher education with esteem.¹ College students, our more immediate public, consistently report a high degree of satisfaction with their own higher education experiences. Nevertheless, there is a small but very powerful stratum of the "public" that offers a far less generous assessment of the world of higher education: the private business sector.