Privatization in the United States

From one of its leading international proponents comes this comprehensive, coherent guide to privatization -- its background, theory, and practical reality. In this new book, E.S. Savas explains --using a straightforward, all-inclusive approach --what, why, when, and how to privatize. Contracting services, using franchises and vouchers, divesting government-owned businesses, privatizing infrastructure through public-private partnerships, reforming education, privatizing the welfare state, and overcoming opposition to privatization are just some of the many aspects discussed in detail.

This book is a timely response to the current U.S. crisis in public funding. Offering a new philosophy of public service that defies the old categories of conservative and liberal, this practical book shows how the problem-solving abilities and profit-making discipline of the business community can make it a productive alternative for meeting public needs.

Nationally recognized scholars and practitioners examine opportunities in which services traditionally provided by local governments are offered by the private sector though a contract or are transferred to a private business completely. Many large U.S. cities have contracted services for many years. With the movement to rightsize governments in recent years there has been renewed interest by local governments in similar ventures. Privatization, in its many forms, is now seen as a viable alternative to traditional ways of providing public services and can bring substantial benefits to residents. With greater accountability being demanded and pressures on local officials to hold the line on or reduce taxes, efforts to find innovative service delivery methods will probably increase. Cities, such as Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Charlotte, are examples showing that contracts with private businesses can work to benefit all parties. Local officials must move ahead cautiously, and not all attempts at privatization or contracting have succeeded. Some cities, after an evaluation, have decided to provide services with municipal employees.

Throughout the world, politicians are dismantling state enterprises and heaping praise on private markets, while in the United States a new rhetoric of "citizen empowerment" links a widespread distrust of government to decentralization and privatization. Here Joel Handler asks whether this restructuring of authority really allows ordinary citizens to take more control of the things that matter in their roles as parents and children, teachers and students, tenants and owners, producers and consumers. Looking at citizens as stakeholders in the modern social welfare state created by the New Deal, he traces the surprising ideological shifts of empowerment from its beginning as a cornerstone of the war on poverty in the 1960s to its central place in conservative market-based voucher schemes for school reform in the 1990s.Handler shows that in the past the gains from decentralization have proved to be more symbol than substance: some disadvantaged members of society will find new opportunities in the changes of the 1990s, but others will simply experience powerlessness under another name. He carefully distinguishes "empowerment by invitation" (in special education, worker safety, home health care, public housing tenancy, and neighborhood organizations) from the "empowerment by conflict" exemplified by the radical decentralization of the Chicago public schools. What emerges is a map of the major pitfalls and possible successes in the current journey away from a discredited regulatory state.

Privatization began in the 1970s with Carter's deregulation of some business, and increased with the Thatcher administration in the United Kindgom, the Reagan administration in the United States, and many communist and socialist countries. One area of concern in privatization is transportation--airports, water ports, roads, and mass transit. Privatization can be implemented in financing, construction, operation, and maintenance of the transportation system, the main motives being the belief that the private sector can be more efficient than the public sector, and because public funds are becoming less plentiful for a variety of reasons. These original essays, contributed by a distingushed group that includes the 1996 Nobel Prize in Economics co-recipient William Vickrey, focus on ideas and innovations for expanding the private role in transportation.

In the United States, private ownership of land is not a new idea, yet the federal government retains title to roughly a quarter of the nation's land, including national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. Managing these properties is expensive and contentious, and few management decisions escape criticism. Some observers, however, argue that such criticism is largely misdirected. The fundamental problem, in their view, is collective ownership and its solution is privatization. A free market, they claim, directs privately owned resources to their most productive uses, and privatizing public lands would create a free market in their services. This timely study critically examines these issues, arguing that there is no sense of "productivity" for which it is true that greater productivity is both desirable and a likely consequence of privatizing public lands or "marketizing" their management. Lehmann's discussion is self-contained, with background chapters on federal lands and management agencies, economics, and ethics, and will interest philosophers as well as public policy analysts.

This book challenges readers to consider the consequences of commercialism and business influences on and in schools. Critical essays examine the central theme of commercialism via a unique multiplicity of real-world examples. Topics include: privatization of school food services; oil company ads that act as educational policy statements; a parent's view of his child's experiences in a school that encourages school-business partnerships; commercialization and school administration; teacher union involvement in the school-business partnership craze currently sweeping the nation; links between education policy and the military-industrial complex; commercialism in higher education, including marketing to high school students, intellectual property rights of professors and students, and the bind in which professional proprietary schools find themselves; and the influence of conservative think tanks on information citizens receive, especially concerning educational issues and policy.Schools or Markets? Commercialism, Privatization, and School-Business Partnerships is compelling reading for all researchers, faculty, students, and education professionals interested in the connections between public schools and private interests. The breadth and variety of topics addressed make it a uniquely relevant text for courses in social and cultural foundations of education, sociology of education, educational politics and policy, economics of education, philosophy of education, introduction to education, and cultural studies in education.

A heated debate is raging over our nation’s public schools and how they should be reformed, with proposals ranging from imposing national standards to replacing public educationnbsp;altogether with a voucher system for private schools. Combining decades of experience in education, the authors propose an innovative approach to solving the problems of our school system and find a middle ground between these extremes. Reinventing Public Education shows how contracting would radically change the way we operate our schools, while keeping them public and accessible to all, and making them better able to meet standards of achievement and equity. Using public funds, local school boards would select private providers to operate individual schools under formal contracts specifying the type and quality of instruction. In a hands-on, concrete fashion, the authors provide a thorough explanation of the pros and cons of school contracting and how it would work in practice. They show how contracting would free local school boards from operating schools so they can focus on improving educational policy; how it would allow parents to choose the best school for their children; and, finally, how it would ensure that schools are held accountable and academic standards are met. While retaining a strong public role in education, contracting enables schools to be more imaginative, adaptable, and suited to the needs of children and families. In presenting an alternative vision for America’s schools, Reinventing Public Education is too important to be ignored.