Phony Privatizers

Brad Spangler wrote up an interesting post yesterday about how some reforms that are labeled as "privatization" don't really involve actual privatization at all. Not only do such faux privatization plans suck due to their nature and the fact that government intervention may still exist, but also because they give the concept of privatization a bad name. This ends up making it harder to make free enterprise seem appealing to those who currently support statist institutions.

Now we have Robert Murphy at the Mises Institute blog chiming in with a post about "private" schools in Pennsylvania that have been a complete failure. This CNN story about the schools refers to an experiment in privatization, although the following excerpt reveals that the truth is rather different:

Edison also found itself in a perpetual three-way power struggle with the board and the central administration. The contract did not allow Edison to hire or fire teachers. The company also did not control the district's finances and had limited ability to shift resources to places that needed them. It was not involved in generating the faulty information that hid the system's budget deficit.

Just as with Dubya's "privatization" of Social Security and the typical forms of "deregulation" that occur with various utilities, this experiment in "privatization" of schools is bunk. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the experiment failed.