When Schools Are Businesses

Tech writer Cory Doctorow writes a lot these days about enshittification, for instance in this piece that spins from Prime's continued addition of advertising to the content you thought you had already paid for. The explanation isn't complicated:

The cruelty isn’t the point. Money is the point. Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you — your time, your attention — to the company’s shareholders.

There's a lot to read about digital rights and chokepoints and music and videos and books, and there are some implications for education there (like, what happens when IP rights destroy your ability to use or adapt materials in any way other than that proscribed by the manufacturer, or require you to use standardized tests in ways that are not useful for you, but preserve the company's IP), but I want to focus on one aspect of enshittification-- the state where your "victory condition" is “a service that’s almost so bad our customers quit (but not quite).” As he explains:

The reason Amazon treated its workers and suppliers badly and its customers well wasn’t that it liked customers and hated workers and suppliers. Amazon was engaged in a cold-blooded calculus: it understood that treating customers well would give it control over those customers, and that this would translate market power to retain suppliers even as it ripped them off and screwed them over.

But now, Amazon has clearly concluded that it no longer needs to keep customers happy in order to retain them. Instead, it’s shooting for “keeping customers so angry that they’re almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite).”

So imagine this principle becomes a guiding principle for charters or voucher schools that are aimed at turning a profit, either directly or by the companies that run them. There is, as we often note, a zero sum problem there-- every dollar spent on students is a dollar that doesn't go into the company's bank account. 

Things would be hunky dory to start, with the choice school working hard to make customers happy. But the thing about schools is that the switching costs are large, so the point of "so angry that they're almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite)" is a bit further along than for say, ordering books. Switching to buying books at bookshop.org rather than amazon is easy (and you should do it). Pulling a child out of class in the middle of the year and leaving behind friends, activities, academic processes-- that's pricey. 

Choicers love to talk about how market forces will create accountability because schools will work hard to keep those families delighted. This is a delightful fantasy, but the fact is that choice school-flavored businesses only have to keep families just happy enough. And choice schools have a couple of advantages over amazon. One, there's the human tendency to convince yourself that the choice you've made is great (choice-supportive bias). Two, choice schools only need to capture a small slice of the market to be successful. 

Someone is going to say, "Well, the same enshittification applied to public schools." It does not. There is no profit to be wrung out of public schools. If I skimp on materials for my classes, neither I nor anyone else get to pocket the savings. Administrations may be motivated to keep expenses down because the public won't give them the money to do more, but there is nobody calculating "I bet I could cut calculus classes, bank the money I would have spent on them, and no families will be upset enough to bail." It's a different calculation. If you give a public school more money, it goes to operating the school, but if you give an edu-business more money (or extract more money by making your product worse), somebody pockets it. 

Doctorow's ideas about enshittification explain a great deal of what sucks about the world we live in and why the invisible hand is not your friend. I hope it doesn't come to explain more about how education works.