Citizens Media Resource: How Many Jobs Will Tennessee Lose because of Bills that Would Outsource Education?

Thursday, February 28, 2013

How Many Jobs Will Tennessee Lose because of Bills that Would Outsource Education?

I thought this was a legitimate question as many bills that are being steamrolled ahead in the Tennessee legislature would take education delivery away from Tennessee, resulting in Tennessee jobs being lost as we seem to be intoxicated with outscourcing.

I sent a short piece to Tennessean opinion page, and below is what I wrote...and a couple of posts down is an expanded version of this question that we put to the governor, house speaker and house and senate education commuttees. click here for a link to the short piece in The Tennessean.

What is TN's Economic Loss from Outsourcing Education?

How much money will Tennessee lose to further education outsourcing if voucher school bills are made law?

Local CEO Bob Higgins made a good point in a recent Tennessee Op-Ed when he asked for impact studies to "better inform legislators about how changes in state law might affect Tennessee’s economy."

While some of our legislators seem to be in a great hurry to run off the voucher cliff without due diligence, our state is already paying an estimated $16 million a year to a Virginia corporation, K12Inc., for its poorly performing online school. What about the effects of even more out-of-state, for-profit corporations, which would be allowed via the vouchers? How many administrators, teachers, support staff and allied services would be taken out of Tennessee, and what would be the economic impact of those lost jobs?

Add to that charter management corporations and charter schools based out of state. Great Hearts Academy, which includes Tennessee in its national expansion plans, is based in Arizona. For each charter school they might place in Tennessee, how many Tennessee jobs would be lost, and what would be the economic impact on our state?

What would it hurt for our legislators to be more deliberative and look before they leap?

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Wish List of Research

1. Who makes money on war? And on military buying, protecting and occupying? Yeah, we already know, but let's audit this with excellent research that lays out who profited and continues to profit from our invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afganistan....or any other military activity and occupations, past or present. We have at least 823 foreign bases that the U.S. admits to; those are paid for by taxpayers, and the military bases are there principally to guard the oil for Exxon-Mobil. I believe we will find that taxpayers spend a huge amount on corporate welfare and subsidies to giant corporations, whose profits obviously are more important than the lives and limbs that are sacrificed in military actions. While we are at it, we should study who makes money from natural disasters, and how they get handed huge government contracts---in a no-bid rush, of course, since it is an emergency. There are capitalistic exploiters who feed off this as an industry; they are just not so long-established as what President Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex."

2. Economic impact of legalizing use and sale of marijuana. There's another economic stimulus and revenue raiser. It would be regulated for safety and legal for individuals and small outfits to grow and sell. With the chance for broad participation, and the exclusion of monopolistic takeover of the market, many Americans would have the opportunity to be entrepreneurs.