The Selling of Public Services.
By Seth Sandronsky
Do failed policy proposals
from public education officials enjoy an afterlife when their creators depart
Washington for the private sector? This is no academic question. In fact, the
career arcs of two former federal policymakers may well have foreshadowed the
life-or-death clash over the accreditation of San Francisco City College
(CCSF), one of California’s 112 community colleges. The state is home to about
10 percent of America’s 1,100 two-year colleges.
As San Francisco Superior
Court Judge Curtis Karnow’s ruling on the Accrediting Commission
for Community and Junior College’s bid to decertify CCSF draws
near, the story of Margaret Spellings becomes instructive. Spellings, who was
George W. Bush’s second-term Secretary of Education, commissioned a
controversial 2006 report called “A Test of Leadership:
Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.”
The report’s language was
very much in tune with the pro-business Bush zeitgeist. The commission’s
chairman was Charles Miller, a private investor who was joined by Nicholas
Donofrio, the executive vice president of IBM Corp., and by James J.
Duderstadt, the corporate vice president for Microsoft Corp. Their report
predicted disaster unless colleges began protecting their “market share” by
preparing students for the “global marketplace.”
