Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In recent years, we have heard and read a lot about the failure of public schools in the United States. “Our schools are failing” has almost become a mantra with members of the media, many of our politicians, and the advocates of school reform. I have seen few people who have questioned the assertions made by the media, elected officials, and school reformers that schools in this country are not adequately educating our youth and that our educational system is a total and abject failure.
Many of those who criticize our public education system offer charter schools and the privatization of public schools as solutions to the “education problem” in this country.
I’m a retired public school educator. I have known and am friends with many current and former public school teachers. I know that there are many fine classroom practitioners working in our public schools today…and many excellent schools where our children receive a quality education. I am aware that there are also many schools where children may not be receiving the highest quality education. (What often go unmentioned in the media are the real reasons—including poverty—why some schools in this country may be failing.)
One problem with the “our schools are failing” mantra—as I see it—is that all our schools are lumped together in one basket labeled “failing.” How did this come to be? Do we Americans really believe that NO public schools in this country provide their students with an adequate education? Do we believe that all schools need to be reformed? If not, do we believe that even the schools which are actually doing an estimable job of educating their students need to be reformed?
I think it is time we start taking a good look at the individuals and organizations that are behind the push to establish thousands of charter schools and to use taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools as the means of raising the quality of education in this country.
ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council)
Last May, education historian Diane Ravitch wrote the following about one group that has been driving the school reform movement:
Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.
This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own “reform” ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the “reform” agenda for education.
Ravitch continued:
A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “reform” legislation is modeled on ALEC’s work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.
ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.
ALEC Exposed provides a wealth of information about how—through ALEC—“corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers’ unions…” (You can find the information in Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers–the ALEC report prepared by The Center for American Democracy.)
Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst
In addition to ALEC, there is another organization called StudentsFirst that has been helping to spearhead the effort to “reform” our public schools. According to Stephanie Simon, Michelle Rhee, founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, has “emerged as the leader of an unlikely coalition of politicians, philanthropists, financiers and entrepreneurs who believe the nation’s $500 billion-a-year public education system needs a massive overhaul.” Simon added that Rhee, the former chancellor of the D.C. public schools, “has vowed to raise $1 billion” for StudentsFirst, and “forever break the hold of teachers unions on education policy.”
Simon continued:
StudentsFirst has its own political action committee (PAC), its own SuperPAC, and a staff of 75, including a cadre of seasoned lobbyists Rhee sends from state to state as political battles heat up. She has flooded the airwaves with TV and radio ads in a half dozen states weighing new policies on charter schools, teacher assessment and other hot-button issues.
To her supporters, Rhee is a once-in-a-generation leader who has the smarts and the star power to make a difference on one of the nation’s most intractable public policy issues.
But critics say Rhee risks destroying the very public schools she aims to save by forging alliances with political conservatives, evangelical groups and business interests that favor turning a large chunk of public education over to the private sector. She won’t disclose her donors, but public records indicate that they include billionaire financiers and wealthy foundations.
In January the National Opportunity to Learn Campaign published its review of Rhee’s StudentsFirst State Policy Report Card for 2013:
Here’s an excerpt from the summary of the campaign’s review:
On Monday, the pro-privatization education group StudentsFirst, led by former D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, released a State Policy Report Card, ranking states and giving each a letter grade based on their implementation of a slew of education reform policies. Rather than focus on issues facing students and families, particularly those affected by unequal access to school resources, the policy benchmarks in the new report reveal StudentsFirst’s obsession with charter schools and de-professionalizing the teaching profession. The report pushes policies that are either untested or disproven — but happen to be welcome in the halls of right-wing think tanks and politicians.
The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign listed five reasons why the StudentsFrirst Report Card is “a veritable wish list for privatization advocates and a recipe for failure for everyone else”:
1. Ironically, It Ignores The Needs of Students
2. It Opposes Personalized and Student-Centered Learning
3. It Argues That We Don’t Have Enough Quality Teachers… While Advocating That We Lower the Bar for Teacher Preparation
4. It Continues the Disastrous High-Stakes Testing Drumbeat
5. It Advocates “Equal Funding” and “Equitable Access” for Charter Corporations and Private Schools, Not Students
The DeVos Family
In May of 2011, Rachel Tabachnick wrote an article for AlterNet about the DeVos family, a wealthy family that has “remained largely under the radar, while leading a stealth assault on America’s schools” that has the “potential to do away with public education as we know it.”
Quoting Tabachnick:
Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But “school choice,” as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.
The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.
According to Tabachnick, the Devoses, who are big contributors to the Republican Party, spent millions of dollars “promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000.” Following that defeat, Tabachnick claims that the family decided to alter its strategy.
Tabachnick:
Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.
Dick DeVos advocates “stealth” strategy, Heritage Foundation, December 3, 2002
Last April, Daniel Denvir wrote an article for City Paper about the push for a school voucher program in the state of Pennsylvania. He said that names on the fliers of “legislative hopefuls” sounded like the names of “homegrown” candidates. He said that a “different picture” emerged when one followed the money:
…that of a statewide campaign, funded by wealthy donors, to stack the Pennsylvania primary battles on April 24 in favor of those supporting school vouchers, which allocate taxpayer funds for private and religious school tuition. The pro-voucher political action committee (PAC) Students First — funded by Pennsylvania hedge-fund managers and American Federation for Children, a Washington, D.C., pro-voucher group headed by Amway heiress and major right-wing donor Betsy DeVos — emerged on the state’s political scene with a bang for the 2010 elections. And they are back to spend big in 2012.
Lawrence Feinberg, co-chairman of the anti-voucher Keystone State Education Coalition, said, “I see a move by essentially a handful of very wealthy people who want to privatize public education for a wide variety of reasons. Not the least of which has to do with crushing labor unions, but they also want tax dollars going to private and religious schools.”
School Reform and The Profit Motive
In his Salon article The Bait and Switch of School “Reform,” David Sirota writes about the profit motive behind some of the reforms being advocated by “Big Money” interests.
Sirota:
As the Texas Observer recently reported in its exposé of one school-focused mega-corporation, “in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom — most of it supplied by private companies.”
A straightforward example of how this part of the profit-making scheme works arose just a few months ago in New York City. There, Rupert Murdoch dumped $1 million into a corporate “reform” movement pushing to both implement more standardized testing and divert money for education fundamentals (hiring teachers, buying textbooks, maintaining school buildings, etc.) into testing-assessment technology. At the same time, Murdoch was buying an educational technology company called Wireless Generation, which had just signed a lucrative contract with New York City’s school system (a sweetheart deal inked by New York City school official Joel Klein, who immediately went to work for Murdoch.
Such shenanigans are increasingly commonplace throughout America, resulting in a revenue jackpot for testing companies and high tech firms, even though many of their products have not objectively improved student achievement.
At the same time, major banks are reaping a windfall from “reformers’” successful efforts to take public money out of public schools and put it into privately administered charter schools. As the New York Daily News recently reported:
“Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years…
“The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation. By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
“No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.”
SOURCES
Ravitch: A primer on the group driving school reform (Washington Post)
Activist targeting schools, backed by big bucks (Reuters)
5 Ways Michelle Rhee’s Report Puts Students Last (National Opportunity to Learn Campaign)
Right-Wing Campaign to Privatize Public Ed Takes Hold in Pennsylvania (AlterNet)
Big corporate money in support of school vouchers hits primary races statewide. Will it tip the scales in Philly? (City Paper)
The bait and switch of school “reform” (Salon)
The Deep Pockets Behind Education Reform (Forbes)
Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers (The Center for American Democracy)
Elaine,
Hyperbole is the correct word.
Elaine,
Simply a brilliant guest blog and one that I’ll keep referring to in the future on educational issues because it covers the privatization scheme thoroughly. Thanks to Bruce E. Woych who provided excellent supplementation to Elaines piece. Between you two you have exposed the “Our Schools are failing” con game. Gene and I have frequently written about propaganda and mythology and the “failing schools” meme is a major piece of propaganda that has become mythic. The problems with our public school systems have been manufactured by thieves who want to get their hands on the money. Charte Schools don’t work and school vouchers are a cruel hoax.
wow! thanks for that incredible article. I really liked it to the core. Hope you keep posting this sort of astonishing article
U.S. Schools Have a Poverty Crisis, Not an Education Crisis
By Michael Rebell & Jessica Wolff
2/1/12
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rebell/us-schools-have-a-poverty_b_1247635.html
Excerpt:
In America, we don’t have an education crisis; rather we have a poverty crisis. The latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores indicate that American schools that serve few low-income students rank higher than the world’s top-scoring advanced industrial countries. But when they are averaged with the scores of schools with high poverty rates, the United States sinks to the middle of the pack. At nearly 22 percent and rising, the child-poverty rate in the United States is the highest among wealthy nations in the world. (Poverty rates in Denmark and in Finland, top global performers on the PISA exams, are below 5 percent). In New York City, the child-poverty rate rose to over 30 percent in 2010. Like other aspects of the inequitable U.S. distribution of wealth, our child poverty crisis seems to fall within a national blind spot.
Childhood poverty has a profound impact on learning. Achievement gaps for disadvantaged children begin before they start school and widen throughout their school careers. But research shows that change is possible.
Most non-poor students in this country come to school equipped with the basics for success. They arrive with the preschool experiences they need to be ready for grade-level work; their health and mental-health needs are largely being met; they enjoy a range of both academic and nonacademic learning experiences beyond the school day that complement what they learn in class; and they receive the family support that ensures they are motivated and prepared to learn during the school day. Children raised in poverty cannot count on these advantages. As a result, too many are unprepared, inattentive, or chronically absent.
Michelle Rhee: Wrong again
Her education “reform” movement sends the lovely message that communities should stay out of their schools
BY DAVID SIROTA
2/26/13
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/26/teaching_kids_to_hate_democracy/
Excerpt:
Most who are reading these words will probably agree that our country is facing a democracy crisis, thanks, in part, to the dominance of money in our political process. Many who read these words will also probably insist that our country is facing an education crisis (though many try to deny the actual cause of that crisis).
Getting past the denial stage and acknowledging both of these problems is certainly a step toward one day fixing them. However, there’s another more subtle and self-reinforcing form of denial that makes getting to those solutions more difficult. That denial — or perhaps cognitive dissonance — evinces itself in an American psyche that tends to perceive the democracy and education emergencies as separate and distinct.
Essentially, we see the cause of voting-rights activists, get-out-the-vote pushes and same-day registration crusades (among others) as divorced from the concurrent education policy fight between public school advocates, teachers’ unions and corporate education “reformers.” We see them as disconnected from one another even though the two battles are fundamentally fused by a simple truism: Basically, you can never hope to have a functioning democracy over the long haul if your education system is trying to convince students and parents to abhor democracy.
That, of course, is exactly what is happening right now thanks to a scorched-earth campaign by the corporate interests that see big potential profits in privatizing public schools.
Like so many other industries currently waging a war on democratic institutions that get in the way of bottom-line concerns, this Wall Street-backed education industry sees democratic forces — elections, collective bargaining, local control, etc.— as obstacles to private profit. Thus, the industry, through financing the crusades of education “reform” advocates, is trying to maximize its bottom line by reducing democratic control of the most local of local institutions: the schoolhouse. In the process, the “reform” movement is forwarding an extremist message to kids and parents that runs counter to the most foundational ideals of American democracy and self-governance.
You can see that message in myriad actions over the last few years.
For instance, at the behest of corporate education “reformers,” more and more cities are moving to eliminate the democratic process of electing school boards, effectively telling students, parents and the larger community that republican democracy cannot be trusted to manage fundamentally public institutions. Similarly, corporate “reformers” are constantly demonizing teachers’ unions, effectively telling students and parents that the major vestige of workplace democracy in schools must be crushed.
Then there is corporate “reformers’” push to replace publicly run schools with privately run charter schools, even though the charter schools typically perform worse than the public ones. That tells students that a public institution with some modicum of democratic control is inherently less ideal than a private, undemocratic tyranny.
Likewise, as shown most recently in this recent Reuters investigation, those charter schools often “screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship” — and then hand-pick only the students the school administrators want. That tells students and the community at large that the core democratic notion of equal opportunity for all shouldn’t be honored even in public education. Just as problematic, as Andrew Hartman noted in his incisive Jacobin magazine report on Teach for America, many of the most hyped charter schools force families to “sign contracts committing (their children) to a rigorous program of surveillance,” thus sending the additional message to low-income kids that to succeed in America, they must be willing to submit to “institutionalization” and give up their most personal democratic freedoms.
Taken together, the education “reform” movement is waging a comprehensive war on the most basic notions of democracy — and not a secret war, either. It is quite explicit, as evidenced by the comments of the most famous and politically renowned leader of that movement, Michelle Rhee.
During her tenure as the head of the Washington, D.C., public schools, Rhee engaged in mass firings and school closings; helped private testing companies impose a strict standardized testing regime on students; did nothing about a massive cheating scandal in her midst; and, as PBS Frontline notes, produced an academic achievement record that leaves “Washington still among the worst in the nation and D.C.’s high school graduation rate dead last.”
rafflaw,
And what about our American educational gulags with their hysterical mandated reporters? Did I correctly sense a touch of hyperbole?
The goal of these idiots isn’t just privatization of education. That’s just one part of it. Other parts are things like:
* tax disparity – poor and working class people pay all the taxes, the rich pay none
* denial of voting rights – it’s not just the barring the poor and non-whites, it’s the criminalization of the populace for petty charges, the permanent denial of the right to vote
* the partitioning of society and the deliberate destruction of the middle class – the rightwingnuts want apartheid, the separation of Americans into the few wealthy elite and the majority poor
The goal of rightwingnuts, planned or unplanned, is a return to England of the 18th century. They want to go back to the bad old days of huddled masses with no rights or protections, who work in “satanic mills”, in unspeakable conditions (unsafe and unhealthy) for little or no pay. Only the wealthy elite will have rights and can vote, and the majority with no rights who can be abused with impunity, and killed if they step out of line.
The “police” will be the same as they are now – nothing but a rabble of violent thugs attacking and violating the rights of those who question the regime, willing kapos who participate in their own oppression.
Milton Friedman? Really?
You seemed to have struck a nerve Elaine!
A little confused here: what was the purpose of this article? Was it to show us steps to improve the failing Saint Louis Public School System (SLPS)? Chicago Public School System? Cleveland Public School System? D.C.’s? Jennings (for those who know Saint Louis County in Missouri), Wellston/Normandy’s? Or to show us that there are public schools that are not failing?
Are we opening the doors to compare private religious schools (like the Jesuits and Catholics); private, non-religious schools (charter schools), great public schools (for those who know STL & St. Charles County: Clayton, Ladue, Fort Zumwalt, Francis Howell); decent public schools (again for those who know my area: Hazelwood, Ferguson-Florissant), and the very poor ones, mentioned above? Or is this article stating that privatization with or without religious affiliation, of public education is another dead end to resolving the many problems circumnavigating the failing public school districts, mentioned above?
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, particularly of how public school funding in Missouri was a disgrace and challenged in court (funding formula was found constitutional, but everyone knew that we are heading back to the days of separate-but-unequal), our public education system is doing what it is supposed to do for certain ‘groups of people’, (mostly women and minorities): fail, fail, and continue to fail them.
Leftist pro union propaganda.
No one is saying do away with public education, what they are saying is that education source should be a choice of the parent, not mandatorily funneled into one modality by force and coercion.
Notwithstanding the quality control problems of our current public education system, our public schools have now become the modern gulag of America with our children as the defenseless innocent victims of violations of all kinds of civil rights.
Worse, it is the nexus where hysterical ‘mandated reporters’ pull children into the so-called child protective service tarpit, and then demand parents force medicate their children with psychiatric drugs for any incorrigibility they claim, under threat again of CPS involvement.
So for more than one reason, and on several levels, it makes no sense to campaign against freedom of choice of where to have one’s child educated. To demand otherwise is simply childish and controlling, and obviously driven by agendas having little to do with education.
http://walmart1percent.org/education/
Education
Introduction
“Before considering the specific goals and activities of these foundations, it is worth reflecting on the wisdom of allowing education policy to be directed or, one might say, captured by private foundations. There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people.”[1]
– Diane Ravitch, education historian and Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush
When the richest family in the country inserts itself into the education policy debate, ordinary Americans have reason to be concerned. Why should one family’s overwhelmingly deep pockets give them the right to play such an outsized role in determining how the next generation of American students is educated? What are they really trying to accomplish?”
ttp://walmart1percent.org/education/
http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2013/02/19/reducing_students_to_a_commodity
FEBRUARY 19, 2013 5:23PM
Reducing Students to a Commodity
“From the economic conservative and neo-liberal perspective, educational assessment and world class standards must be linked to what it means to be successful in the new global economy. Through their efforts, they have created standard and assessment think-tanks, such as Achieve Incorporated, a non-profit creation by a group of CEO’s and the National Governors Association that is currently co-chaired by IBM’s Chief Executive Officer, Louis Gerstner Jr. and Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, as well as the National Education Goals Report, launched in 1989 as a result of the controversy over the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. The Goals Report announces its mission as:
“By the year 2000, American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography; and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern society (National Education Goals Report, 1991).”
“By adopting what they like to call “world class standards”, these corporate and business leaders are working to identify what post-Fordist skills will be necessary for the workplace of the future (Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory,1997).”
http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2013/02/19/reducing_students_to_a_commodity
http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2013/03/02/the_corporate_takeover_of_higher_education
MARCH 2, 2013 6:26PM
The Corporate Takeover of Higher Education
This is Part I of a two part guest post by Dr Danny Weil. It’s a repost of an article Cornell University to Offer the “Hypodermic Needle Theory” of Education in an Attempt to Colonize Consciousness and Groom Future Elites originally published at Daily Censored
Understanding history: The Powell Memo and the Growth of the Reactionary Right
By Dr Danny Weil
In order to understand how America’s ruling elites are bivouacking at elite universities with the aim of taking them over and assuring ideology replaces education, it is necessary to understand the historical development of the current colonization of consciousness.”
http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2013/03/02/the_corporate_takeover_of_higher_education
http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2011/03/15/the_history_of_the_school_privatization_movement
MARCH 15, 2011 1:48PM
The History of the School Privatization Movement:
The Neoliberal Goal to Privatize All Public Services
The Neoliberal Goal to Privatize All Public Services
“Neoliberal Republicans and Tea Partiers (and now Barack Obama and Department of Education director Arne Duncan) give lip service to improving achievement levels for students in inner city schools. However instead of improving funding to these struggling schools, the one intervention supported by statistical research, they continue to aggressively shift education funding from public schools to private charter schools – despite the Stanford study showing that charter programs don’t improve achievement levels (see previous blog). In my mind, this is totally consistent with what I believe is their real agenda – namely privatizing public education.”
http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2011/03/15/the_history_of_the_school_privatization_movement
Bruce,
Thanks for the link to the Friedman “think tank” paper.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-023.html
Public Schools: Make Them Private
by Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976.
CATO Institute Briefing Paper No. 23
http://thinktank-watch.blogspot.com/2007/12/sir-anthony-fisher.html
Think Tank Watch
“Litter the world with free-market think-tanks”
Sir Anthony Fisher (1915 – 1988)
“In 1943, in an analysis of Hitler’s programme in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the word ‘privatisation’ entered the academic literature for the first time. The author, Sidney Merlin, wrote that the Nazi Party ‘facilitates the accumulation of private fortunes and industrial empires by its foremost members and collaborators through “privatisation” and other measures, thereby intensifying centralisation of economic affairs and government in an increasingly narrow group that may for all practical purposes be termed the national socialist elite’.The gung-ho free marketeers who rode to power with Thatcher in 1979 don’t seem to have been aware of the Nazi prelude, although they would have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile.”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n17/james-meek/how-we-happened-to-sell-off-our-electricity
Great job Elaine! As usual, follow the money and you find the wealthy and private corporations attempting to make a buck!
TLDR:I am a former public school teacher. My life was meaningful, and those who say public schools are failing are really propagandizing for purposes of profiting by providing children with choices in education. Parents must not have choices in their children’s education if profit is the result, unless it is union members and not corporations who benefit.