Mitt Romney's old MI school District keeps its buses, but orders lunch out, not knowing what else to do.

It is now considered a "best practice" for School Districts to review outsourcing services (transportation, food, custodial work, etc.). Some 60% of Districts in Michigan have gone that route. 

My own affluent district in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan -- once home to Mitt Romney -- just finished their latest due diligence, deciding to keep their superb in-house transportation service and, with some tweaks, their custodial and grounds team. They did decide to "outsource" their food services program to a giant provider. 

The bus question was not too hard. The District has a perfect record going on 21 years and the savings for privatizing would have been $6,000.

$6,000.

In Bloomfield Hills, 6k is called a Wednesday night out.

Still, the language of austerity and privatization has been thoroughly naturalized even by the decent and well meaning.

"We have to cut somewhere," said one board member, repeating the language and logic of board members across the country for the last 15 years. "We have to protect the classroom."

Here's what's weird. Privatization has not worked. Not at all. Not a lick. Not only are public school systems not saving anything  they are losing money.

 Indeed, every school District in Michigan is worse off financially and in terms of services provided since this "best practice" became adopted some 15 years ago. 

As I approach 50 I do find myself quoting Republicans more so let's ask the Ronald Reagan question to public school Districts: "Are you better off now than you were 15 years ago?" 

The answer would be a resounding no.

Here is what is weirder. We keep trying this, saying the same things, making the same arguments, and, to top it all off, calling this "innovative" and "outside the box" thinking. 

Did I mention my District also has started a "foundation" so that private donors can supplement the District which is limited in how much it can call for taxes? How is that for "outside the box" thinking? Heard that one before, too? How's that working out for ya?

But my point is this: It is not really known how outsourcing became a "best practice." Considering outsourcing was not a "data-driven" process as we say today. That is, there was no systematic study to see if it would work. The push began before big data. It was purely ideological. It was an act of quasi-religious faith in free markets

Let's keep getting weird as this is, after all, also where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen.

While nobody every determined this "best practice" through systematic study we now have to show -- through "data" and an assortment of consultants -- that the in-house systems work better than the free market systems that have never worked. 

I don't fault my school board members. 

They are serious, thoughtful people who serve the District in very strange times, often taking extraordinary abuse from Tea-Party types (yes, even in Bloomfield, et ego Arcadia or something like that). I know some personally, and helped them get elected. I don't have the luxury, in short, of imagining them politically demonic forces "other" than me, either on the left or the right. They are neither, in our outsized political rhetoric, "fascists" or "whacky socialists." They are experienced in both schools and business, decent and well meaning, remarkably civil when civility is in short supply.

But they, like all of us, are utterly bereft of political and economic imagination right now. They are crying to "think out side the box," when thinking outside the box only means what it has only meant since its insipid inception in to the lexicon. It means privatize, even privatizing has been a disaster.

We may be demanding our children perform so miraculously, achieve flexibility and creativity in  a globalized, 21st century world because we have so little imagination left of our own to give.

We here in metro-Detroit are perhaps more prone to this than some, having lived with the "boom and bust" of the auto industry for decades. There is nothing more natural, no more characteristic gesture of fiduciary responsibility than to tighten up in lean times and save for the future.

Here's the weirdest thing though. The ur-Weird. The Weird that is so weird we can't even think it.

There is no imaginable public education future to save for if your only thought to save public education is privatization. These cuts are now, literally, for the sake of cutting, not for saving. The cuts are transformative only in the sense that they render what they were supposed to preserve as unrecognizable.

 As one board member said, "The state is never going to give us more money so we have to cut somewhere."

But if there is truly no future -- and I don't disagree with this -- why in the world and what in the world are public school systems saving for? And if at this the case we need to drop the 20st century cut and save, outsource mentality fast and do what we tell our kids to do: think critically.