Rethinking Schools- Opportunity you can taste

Shock-Doctrine Schooling in Haiti

Neoliberalism off the Richter scale

By Jesse Hagopain

Illustrator: Brian Stauffer

When I was looking through articles, I chose charter schools as a topic to explore. I used to work for one, and it's a topic that I am more interested in learning about. They primarily pop up in areas of low income as an alternative to struggling public schools. When looking through the articles, I saw many articles not talking about low income but rather the privatization of education in communities that recently experienced natural disasters: Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the earthquakes of Haiti in 2010. Seeing that trend, I was curious to learn more. 

The author first speaks about the tragic loss of the island. The Haitian Government estimated that at least 38,000 students and more than 1,300 teachers/educational personnel died in the earthquake. This is tragic and almost hard to imagine happening in the United States. I can't recall a natural disaster that caused the death of over 38,000 children; it’s unimaginable to me. It reminds me of an earthquake in China that disproportionately affected school buildings and brought up the question of safety in building codes for school buildings. 

“The buildings may have collapsed, but the truth was that the seismic activity of free market principles had shattered the educational system in Haiti long before Jan. 12, 2010” 

Even though the earthquake destroyed many of the school buildings, shutting down the education system, over 90% of the schools in Haiti before the earthquake were private schools. Parents, on average, spend 40% of their income on schooling for their children, and unfortunately, can not afford to educate all their children. 

-Only ⅔ of Haiti’s kids were enrolled in school

-less than ⅓ made it to the 6th grade

-Secondary schools only enroll 20% of eligible children

This lack of access to education and Poverty has created a system of domestic servitude called the restavek system,  in which parents send their children to work for a host household in exchange for a place to live and food to eat. A breakdown in the education system has forced Haiti into a system of indentured child servitude as a way to help care for children. About 225,00 Haitian children are estimated to be living in this system of servitude. These statistics are shocking and highlight the role public education plays in society, which I think in the US is so often overlooked and taken for granted, given the strong push for voucher systems in some parts of the country.

Who is coming to save Haiti’s school system?

The answer, Paul Vallas Former CEO of Chicago and Philadelphia Public School Systems, and also who Louisiana hired in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to restructure the New Orleans school system. 

I found it interesting that one person seemed to be at the center of all this reform in inner city and post-disaster school systems. Jumping from city to city, remaking them in his image. As I went down this twisting rabbit hole of school reform, I was only more confused as time went by… By some reports, school districts touched by his reform had their test scores increase, and budgets were suddenly balanced. Sounds great, but when I looked further in another article (linked here) Vallas took funds that were specifically designated towards teacher pension programs to balance the deficit in the general budget in Chicago. In Louisiana, he completely disbanded all New Orleans public schools and made them over as charter schools. The Programs he led fired all the former unionized teachers, who were primarily black middle-aged professionals, and replaced them with inexperienced, mostly white Teach for America recruits (anti-affirmative action).  It is clear that the more I read about him, I know he has an anti-teacher's union standpoint and is an advocate for charter schools and school choice.

The Article repeatedly refers to his views as neoliberal, which I had to look up. 

Neoliberalism- a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism.

Now that I had the definition, I began to understand that Vallas thinks open competition between schools (charter model) is better because it makes education into a free market where competition creates a better and better product. Except students aren’t products, they are people, people struggling with poverty or in the wake of natural disasters. Vallas treated them as an opportunity to experiment with his free market theory of education. His own words here are rather odd when taken in with full context “There's a real opportunity here. I can taste it. That is why I’ve flown [to Haiti] so many times.” I don’t know if that comment was made after the earthquake, but it's a little disturbing. Later in the article, the author criticizes the United States and the international community as having an “Impulse to dominate rather than to aid” when working with Haiti. 

Specifically in Haiti, Vallas’ model was to keep the model of 90% of the schools being private, but have the government subsidize many of those schools with the promise of reduced tuition. Vallas’ program did not deliver on the promise of creating a quality education system with their 4.2 billion dollar plan. Trailers were brought in to serve as classrooms for the students. These trailers had inadequate ventilation and sometimes would reach temperatures of over 100 degrees, and students had to be moved outside. Many of the trailers had high levels of formaldehyde, and students reported often getting headaches and needing medication to continue lessons. Vallas is quoted as saying, “there  are ways to create a classroom learning environment that can be a superior learning environment, even if that classroom is an inadequate building. “  In addition to the trailer issue, many schools reported that the payments from Vallas’ program didn't arrive on time, and they had not received the promised textbooks or supplies. It was also reported that Vallas' program paid private school teachers about 6x more than teachers from the public schools. 

The Last thing about the article I found really interesting is the money. Of all the federal aid to Haiti, just 48.6 million or just over 2% has gone directly to Haitian organizations and firms. Comparatively, more than 1.2 billion or 56% has gone to firms located in Washington DC, Maryland or Virginia.” In reality, very little of this money is going and staying in Haiti. Most of the money comes right back to the US, and all Haiti gets to keep are some trailers with extra formaldehyde. 

The book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is referenced and quoted in the article, and I found the book on an online library here.