The Privatization of School Counseling

There is a growing movement toward privatization of part or all of public education worldwide. Although privatization in education continues to grow, there has been no study of the extent of this movement in school counseling. All 300 school district superintendents in the state of Washington were surveyed anonymously concerning the extent of privatized counseling within their schools. The empirical findings suggest that privatization is already a reality in the school counseling profession. Thus, further research on the questions that emerged from this study is important because of the nature of the ethical, economic, and service quality challenges that privatization seems to pose for school counselors and school systems.