Privatization of education and the literacy crisis

Anyone who is currently studying law or has considered pursuing a career in the legal field probably knows how expensive having such goals is. Just to show how expensive it can be, I’d like to introduce anyone who isn’t familiar with Westlaw Legal Research to the website. 

‍Westlaw is a legal database that provides everything from state and federal statutory law, cases, common legal precedents and secondary sources. As UAA students, we have access to Westlaw Campus Research, which is specifically tailored for legal students here at the university. 

Outside of any connection to a government agency, academic institution or law firm, Westlaw is a subscription based service that starts at $136.80 a month for primary law for just one state! 

If you're like me and have bills to pay, you’d probably see that price and already be looking for alternatives. Of course, you can always individually search for  the aforementioned information through state and government websites, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that there’s already a free alternative in the form of Casetext. 

Even though I have access to Westlaw through the university, I would often use CaseText for quick searches — utilizing its better formatting. 

I wouldn’t have to worry about the site automatically logging me out after five minutes of inactivity, and the load time was much quicker between pages. It became a comfortable alternative when I didn’t have time to go through the entire process of logging into Westlaw through the Consortium Library — which you have to do every time!

So imagine my surprise and dismay when I tried using CaseText this past week only to find that the site had been entirely shut down. 

Anytime I tried to click the old link, it would redirect me to a Thomson Reuters page that promotes a generative AI system titled: “CoCounsel.”  

This was how I found out about Thomson Reuter’s acquisition of CaseText in 2023 and its gradual phasing out of the old company’s free resources in favor of an AI assistant that’s only accessible through a subscription. I was pissed. 

The exorbitant costs of higher education coupled with the fact that institutions refuse to make it more accessible has plenty of consequences for lower-income and working class people — a population that has been growing exponentially for years. 

While the United States Census Bureau declared that about 36.8 million people were in poverty in 2023 — about 11.1% of the population — determining poverty is much more complicated than that. The poverty line for a single person household in Alaska is $19,550  a year. 

When taking out the annual cost of rent for an average Anchorage apartment — $1,200 give or take — you’re still only left with a little over 5,000 dollars to handle car insurance, groceries, gas, electricity, water, savings and recreational activities. 

No one should have to survive like that, and it’s not like making $1,000 more is going to make much of a difference. 

If you do make more, however, then that automatically disqualifies you from various types of state and government aid. 

We have a system of calculating poverty that grossly undermines the experiences of people who don’t fit within those specific guidelines, leading to more people experiencing financial instability than is actually reported. 

Because of this, quality education and learning is inaccessible to a vast majority of Americans. I don’t think it's much of a coincidence that this is occurring in the midst of a nationwide literacy crisis. 

Nearly 23% of adults in the U.S. have “low” performing levels of literacy as of 2023,  according to the National Center For Education Statistics. 

The center defines basic literacy  as the skills “necessary to perform simple and everyday literacy activities.” This includes being able to “read and understand information in short, common place prose text” as well as “simple documents.” 

Having so many adults falling behind under these standards points to a number of external factors, with socioeconomic status — SES — being a huge one. 

An article written by Maren Blanchard of the Michigan Journal of Economics explicitly discusses how a person’s SES status affects their literacy and reading comprehension. 

In the article, she states that “being born into a low SES likely means one will attend a school with lower levels of funding, creating a learning environment that is not as strong as their middle or upper class peers.” 

It’s no secret that schools with lower funding lack access to adequate resources and materials. That leaves schools with student populations far outnumbering their teachers, not enough books for supplies to go around and no counselors or resource options for students that are struggling — all of which are just a few problems out of many. 

Without the resources needed to succeed, students tend to fall behind in their studies, which in turn leads to deficient literacy rates. Studies conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics back this up as well. 

A compilation of this data, created by Sean Reardon, Rachel Valentino and Kenneth Shores — a professor and two doctoral students in educational administration at Stanford University — points out how “low income eighth graders are roughly five years behind high income eight-graders” regarding basic literacy and comprehension. This trend is reflected across all age groups. 

Throughout history and across all civilizations, education has always been reserved for the wealthy, with general education becoming a cultural norm shortly after the first industrial revolution. 

A population that lacks literacy and comprehension skills is easy to manipulate and control. Our elected officials understand just how powerful a tool education is, and their attempts to keep those resources away from the impoverished and minority populations is only another way for them to keep their political and economic power consolidated. 

Don’t let this be all doom and gloom though! There are plenty of ways to resist. The attention economy is powerful, and so much of our literacy crisis is also reliant on how short our attention spans are. 

If reading physical books is difficult, try finding the audio versions of your favorite books on YouTube. Listen to podcasts and video essays about topics that you normally have a hard time paying attention to. Visit the public libraries around Anchorage, if you have the means to do so, and try to see what resources are available to the community. 

Taking back power is a slow process. Change will never happen overnight. It takes a long-term, collective effort to reach the desired results, and it won’t happen until we decide to make it happen.