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Part 1 and Part 2: Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through "No Excuses" Teaching
Chapter
3
Neoliberalism
Goes to School
by Scott Ellison
...just as modern mass production methods require the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called ‘equality.’ –Eric Fromm (Brookfield, 2004. p. 161)
In popular debates over education policy, it has now
become quite common to see terms such as neoliberalism and neoliberal education
reform bandied about in political debates in order to describe this current era
of education reform. The neoliberal descriptor is indeed apt, but there is a
problem with its common usage. Unfortunately, it is all too often the case that
this terminology is used as a substitute for analysis, a pejorative shorthand
used alongside terms such as corporate reform and privatization.
This
unfortunate use of terminology obscures the reality that neoliberalism
represents a dynamic political ideology, with a specific intellectual and
political history, that has come to dominate not only debates over education
policy but the political discourse and major institutions of American
society. This chapter will attempt to
flesh out what is known as neoliberal education reform by tracing three
overlapping, mutually reinforcing societal trends that have fundamentally
restructured the landscape of education policy over the past 30-40 years.
The
first section will trace the development of a political convergence around a
set of education policy reforms in the United States informed by neoclassical
economic theory and globalization practices that have radically shifted
education policy talk and implementation to the political Right. The second
section will examine the power dynamics behind this political convergence by
examining the emergence of an increasingly assertive business and philanthropic
community that has constructed a private superstructure around public education
policy in order to transform America’s schools.
The third section will look at how economic globalization and orthodox
neoclassical economic theory entered into popular discourse and how these ideas
came to define both the “why” and “how” of public education.
It is, of course, not possible to give an exhaustive
account of the broad transformations taking place in the politics of education
policy over the past 35 years in the space provided here. However, what will be
made evident in the chapter that follows is that the No Excuses school model
can be viewed as the paradigmatic institution of an education reform movement
shaped by neoliberal ideology.
Or, to
be more precise, the KIPP charter school model is one very prominent
manifestation of an on-going political project to remake American society in
the image of an imagined marketplace of rationality and human liberty.
Unpacking this political project will amplify the analysis in the chapters that
follow to provide new perspectives on the KIPP model.
Political Convergence
The purpose of public schooling is often treated as being
self-evident or commonsensical: to transmit to the young the skills and
knowledge they will need as adults. This may seem rather straightforward, but
it papers over the complexity of the question. The kinds of knowledge and
skills we believe young people will need to enter into adult life are
predicated on a specific set of assumptions about the nature of social reality,
in terms of ‘what is’ and what ‘should be,’ and the nature of the individuals
who inhabit it.
This is
not a trivial point to consider. As John Dewey (1944) went to great pains to
point out, the ends and means of public education are reciprocally determined,
each informing the other. That observation is nowhere more true than current
debates over public schools and reform.
In the second decade of the 21st century, the intended
outcomes of public schooling are conceptualized from an economic perspective.
Leaders and public intellectuals may offer hollow platitudes to citizenship and
human development, but it is increasingly the case that the ultimate goal of
public schooling is to produce good workers for a social reality defined by
economic globalization.
The
common sense answer to the question of why we educate is so that young people
can prepare for the workplace. In the
modern parlance of education policy, the task of schools is to prepare children
to be “college and career ready” competitors in the global economy. The
politics of the shifting discourse in and around public education takes us back
to the Reagan Era and to what David Berliner and Bruce Biddle (Berliner &
Biddle, 1995) referred to as the manufactured crisis emanating from A Nation at Risk (ANAR) (1983).
The
Manufactured Crisis and A Nation at Risk
Published
in the format of an open letter to the American public, ANAR painted a dire picture of American
education, and it identified a litany of ills threatening the nation,
including 1) low academic achievement of American students in comparison to
their international peers, 2) low student achievement on standardized
assessments (particularly among minority populations), 3) a lack of “higher
order” skills among high school graduates, 4) falling achievement of college
graduates, 5) the large number of functionally-illiterate adults, and 6) a
workforce lacking the skills for a high-tech economy.
The picture
that emerged from ANAR was an education system in crisis, and this
tragic situation was attributed to several causes. First, ANAR singled out high school
curricula as being "homogenized, diluted, and diffused to the point that
they no longer have a central purpose..., a cafeteria-style curriculum in which
the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses"
(NCEE, 1983, p. 18).
ANAR
painted a picture of a high school curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch
deep, allowing students to earn a high school diploma without having mastered
even the basics of learning. ANAR pointed toward the low number of
students taking challenging math or foreign language courses and the
corresponding ease of general track studies, in which credits are earned for
"physical and health education, work experience outside the school,
remedial English and mathematics, and personal service and development
courses," as evidence of a general decline in academic standards (p. 19).
Second, alongside this watering down of high
school curricula, ANAR argued that American high schools could be
characterized as having shockingly low expectations of its students. The amount
of homework expected of high school seniors had plummeted while overall grades
were rising, despite declining overall achievement. Further troubles were
located in easy high school graduation requirements, "minimum
competency" examinations that were too easy, low entry requirements for
four-year colleges and universities, and inadequate textbooks (pp. 20-21).
Third, ANAR
argued that American students spent much less time in school than their peers
in other industrialized nations and much of the time they spent in school was
wasted due to inefficiency and superfluous activities, such as driver’s education
and home economics (pp. 21-22). Finally, while arguing against scapegoating any
one particular group, ANAR did single out teachers as being one of the
big problems in education.
ANAR
characterized teachers as being poorly paid professionals drawn from the lowest
achievers in college, who have taken large numbers of courses "in
'educational methods' at the expense of courses in subjects to be taught,"
such as mathematics and science (p. 22). To anyone following current debates in
education policy, the problems identified in ANAR are all too familiar.
The concepts of standards, excellence, assessment, and accountability continue
to dominate public debates over education and schooling, and each of these
concepts can be traced directly back to ANAR.
The
publication of ANAR spawned a flurry of reports, research, and opinion
that were both supportive and critical of the report (Holton 1984, Tomlinson
1987, Bennett 1998, NCEE 2007). Then and now, critics charged that ANAR
used misleading and imagined statistics to paint a dire picture of American
schooling that looked nothing like reality and that offered nothing new beyond
the ‘more math and more science’ mantra of the post-Sputnik era. As Gerald
Bracey (2003) noted:
[T]he report’s recommendations were, as [William
F.] Buckley and others observed, banal. They call for nothing new, only more of
the same: more science, more mathematics, more computer science, more foreign
language, more homework, more rigorous courses, more time-on-task, more hours
in the school day, more days in the school year, more training for teachers,
more money for teachers. Hardly the stuff of revolution. And even those mundane
recommendations were based on a set of allegations of national risk that Peter
Appleborne of the New York Times
later called “brilliant propaganda.” Indeed, the report was a veritable
treasure of slanted, spun, and distorted statistics” (p. 617).
Nevertheless,
despite its numerous flaws and somewhat clichéd recommendations, it is clear
that, as an historical document, ANAR constitutes a clear turning point
in the history of American education in that it sparked a three decade march
toward reform (Hunt & Staton, 1996) by the way the report framed
educational failure and defined the resulting “risk” facing the nation.
The success of ANAR can be attributed to the way
in which it constructed linkages between the economic malaise and
de-industrialization of the 1970s with the purported decline in public
schooling. ANAR made the explicit argument that the economic troubles
facing the nation were in large measure educational problems. This frequently
quoted passage from ANAR gives the reader a taste of the overall
economic framing of the document:
The world is indeed one global village. We live
among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete
with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but
also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighborhood workshops. America’s
position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few
exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer. The risk is not only
that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have
government subsidies for development and export. It is not just that the South
Koreans recently built the world’s most efficient steel mill, or that American
machine tools, once the pride of the world, are being displaced by German
products. It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of
trained capability throughout the globe. Knowledge, learning, information, and
skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce and
are today spreading throughout the world as vigorously as miracle drugs,
synthetic fertilizers, and blue jeans did earlier. If only to keep and improve
on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate
ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all - old
and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the
indispensable investment required for success in the “information age” we are
entering. (NCEE 1983, pp. 6-7)
ANAR was
able to successfully tap into Americans' anxiety over economic turmoil at home
and increasing economic competition from abroad, particularly from Japan and
the other so-called "Asian Tigers", in order to make a case for
large-scale education reform. ANAR successfully established linkages
between the economic malaise of the time with educational failure and, in so
doing, gave rise to the looming specter of an existential crisis in the
not-so-distant future. More importantly, the global economic framing of ANAR
changed the way we, as a society, talk about public education by introducing
new concepts that are now dominant in the field, such as the 'knowledge
economy', 'life-long learning', and the 'information age'. In the post-ANAR
era, the name of the game in education policy and reform is globalization.
Shifting
Politics of Education Policy
The political rhetoric of the late 1970’s was still
largely defined by the post-World War II divide between the progressive
liberalism of the Democratic party and the neo-classical liberalism of the
Republican Party. Dominated by the legacies of Roosevelt’s New Deal and
Johnson’s Great Society, the progressive liberalism of the Democratic Party
understood public schooling as a functional mechanism to alleviate societal
ills and resolve social conflict.
Liberals
envisioned a positive federal government role in providing adequately resourced
public schooling as a means for ensuring equality of opportunity and, as a
result, the smooth functioning of a liberal democracy. The neo-classical
liberalism of the Republican Party was defined by a strong commitment to an
absence of federal obstacles to public schooling, which was viewed as a state
and local issue. Conservatives opposed federal initiatives in public education,
and (at the state level) they argued for a “traditional” education to produce
good citizens and workers.
On the
surface, the rhetoric of education politics offered Americans two very
different visions for public schooling, although the reality of educational
politics was always more dynamic and complicated. However, shifts taking place
within the Republican Party and the conservative movement would ultimately
shift American politics further to the political Right and, with it, the
political landscape of education policy (Mehat, 2013).
Berliner and Biddle (1995) identified three overlapping,
and somewhat contradictory, groups within the conservative movement that gained
ascendancy over education policy after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The Far Right was the libertarian-leaning wing of the Party that rejected all
federal involvement in education: “At a minimum, this mean[t] abolishing the
Department of Education, closing down federal support for educational research,
eliminating funds for categorical grants in education that support minorities,
and reducing the influence of federal courts” (p. 134).
The
Religious Right, the second group, was represented by national religious
figures, such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. From this perspective, many
of the social ills that had befallen society were the product of public
schooling and its commitment to humanist principles and cultural relativism:
“In general, the Religious Right argue[d] that federal controls have been used
to deny students the “right” to pray in schools; to restrict unfairly the
teaching of “scientific creationism;” to encourage the appearance of “dirty,”
“anti-family,” “pro-homosexual,” and “anti-American” books in school curricula;
and to enforce “cultural relativity” in courses on values and sex education”
(p. 136).
Railing
against “secular humanism,” the Religious Right carved out a rather
contradictory space in the conservative movement that, on the one hand, argued
against further federal intrusion into public schools while, on the other hand,
argued for federal and state government to mandate policies, funding, and
curricula that reflected its values, including school choice and voucher
programs that would allow parents to send their children to parochial schools
at the taxpayers’ expense.
The
third group, the Neoconservatives, was the new up-and-comers in the Party. They
rejected any perceived attempt at social engineering in federal policy,
asserting that it inevitably led to a lowering of standards and achievement.
That said, the Neoconservatives envisioned a strong role for the federal
government in public schooling to ensure that they were reaching the following
goals:
[S]chools should recommit themselves to academic
excellence and require a larger number of basic-skills courses; higher academic
standards should be encouraged through tougher grading procedures and national
tests of student achievement; schools should maintain discipline and reassert
their rights to discharge students who cannot meet reasonable standards for
behavior; stress should be given to competitiveness and other values thought to
be “traditional” in America; and greater effort on the part of teachers should
be encouraged through merit pay, competency testing, and stronger requirements
for teacher certification” (p. 137).
The
Neoconservatives were, by far, the most comfortable with the idea of a strong
federal role in public education, seeing it as a mechanism for accountability
and ensuring that schools are fulfilling their institutional mission. It is
important to note that the Neoconservatives were heavily influenced by an
increasingly assertive business community concerned about workforce skills, and
it is clear that the Neoconservatives saw human capital development as integral
to the mission of public education.
The Reagan Revolution of 1980 brought to the Department
of Education this unwieldy and rather paradoxical coalition of groups that
advocated for strict federalism (Far Right); groups that argued for rolling
back federal involvement in public schooling while also arguing for using
federal leverage to encourage “traditional” curricula and school choice
policies (Religious Right); and groups that envisioned a strong federal role in
public education in order to ensure system accountability and human capital
development (Neoconservatives).
In an
impressive feat of political maneuvering, Terrell Bell was able to successfully
negotiate the Reagan White House and use the publication of A Nation at Risk to unify the three
divisions of the Right that made up the Republican coalition of the early 1980s
(Bell 1988/1993). Bell was able to unify the party in openly criticizing public
schools and teachers, articulating a relatively unified vision for education
reform, and advocating for using the leverage of the federal government to push
these reforms at the state level. Bell was able to carve out a federal role in
education policy by, in effect, becoming its biggest critic.
Policy
changes during the Reagan years, however, remained modest at best. Resistance
from the more libertarian-leaning members of the Republican coalition and
out-right opposition from liberal Democrats in Congress quickly cooled the jets
of education reform. However, the political legacy of the Reagan Revolution for
education policy wasn’t so much one of radical change as it was the emergence
of a new vision of federal education reform centered on the ideas of internationally
“competitive” standards, assessment and accountability, and school choice. It
was a vision that would come to influence the presidential administrations that
followed, both Republican and Democratic.
President George H.W. Bush campaigned as the “education
president” in 1988 and, upon winning the election, set about establishing a
governor’s conference to chart a course for education reform during his
administration (McGuinn, 2006, p. 216). The Charlottesville Education Summit of
governors was held in September of 1989, and the six principles that emerged
from that conference formed the backbone of Bush’s America 2000 education
initiative:
Annually increasing the number of children
served by preschool programs with the goal of serving all ‘at-risk’ 4-year-olds
by 1995.
Raising the basic-skills achievement of all
students to at least their grade level, and reducing the gap between the test
scores of minority and white children by 1993.
Improving the high school graduation rate every
year and reducing the number of illiterate Americans.
Improving the performance of American students
in mathematics, science, and foreign languages until it exceeds that of
students from ‘other industrialized nations.’
Increasing college participation, particularly
by minorities, and specifically by reducing the current ‘imbalance’ between
grants and loans.
Recruiting more new teachers, particularly
minority teachers, to ease ‘the impending teacher shortage,’ and taking other
steps to upgrade the status of the profession. (Vinovskis, 1999, p. 37)
The
America 2000 initiative scored few legislative victories. However, the
Charlottesville Summit was successful in further nationalizing the issue of
standards-based education reform, and the Bush administration was able to successfully
launch federally-funded programs to assist states in developing national
standards (DeBray 2006, pp. 27-28). States across the union began reform
efforts to raise academic standards, develop assessments, and experiment with
new teacher evaluation methods. The push for standards-based education reform
and test-based accountability was on, and the administration of President Bill
Clinton took up the cause with zeal in 1992.
As the embodiment of “third way” education policy
enactment and the rightward shift of the Democratic Party, President Clinton
scored a legislative victory in 1994 with the passage of his Goals 2000
legislation and major revisions to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA), which had been a bedrock of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives.
Goals 2000 sought to use federal funding (specifically Title I) to push states
toward developing higher academic standards, rigorous assessments, and
accountability policies for schools and teachers.
Unfortunately
for Clinton, resistance from Congress was successful in loosening the
requirements of Goals 2000, and the entire project appeared to be threatened by
the dramatic Republican takeover of both the House and Senate in the
1994-midterm elections. Led by firebrand Newt Gingrich, Congressional
Republicans pushed for, among many other legislative goals, the abolition of
the Department of Education and the rollback of the standards based reforms
implemented by Clinton.
However,
after two years of legislative clashes with the White House and the defeat of
Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election, polling data showed that education
was an important issue for strategic voting groups, such as suburban women.
This, in turn, led to a strategic shift in American politics. Congressional
Republicans “accommodated themselves to the continued existence of federal
education programs but set out to reform them in line with conservative
principles” (Debray-Pelot & McGuinn 2009, p. 24) that focused on school
choice initiatives and test-based accountability.
This
shift opened up a space in American politics for the emergence of a new, and
somewhat unlikely, coalition of interest groups to push for standards based and
business-friendly education reform and for using federal Title I funding as
leverage to initiate reform and “innovation,” the new buzzword of the education
reform movement at the state level. Despite the increasing rancor in
Washington, D.C., the two parties had found one arena in which compromise had
become possible. Federal education reform increasingly became a bipartisan
initiative that defined a “third way” previously uncharted.
By the turn of the century, the political landscape of
education policy had been fundamentally transformed. As Debray-Pelot &
McGuinn (2009) note, the new bipartisan consensus over education policy was
possible due to an unlikely convergence of political interests. The business
lobby had played an important role in publicizing A Nation at Risk and contributed to standards based reform
initiatives at the state level during the Reagan and G. W. H. Bush
Administrations.
However,
by the late 1990s, the Business Roundtable of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce had
lost faith in the efficacy of state level reforms and began to advocate for
federal intervention to push for tougher standards, market based education
solutions, and a greater focus on “21st century job skills” in Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). At the same time, civil rights
leaders were growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress in
resolving long-standing educational achievement issues in urban school
districts.
Liberals
in Congress worried that the lack of movement on addressing these issues might
strengthen arguments for voucher programs (long popular in the conservative
movement), and the growing interest in a new urban school model that promised
local control and latitude for pedagogical innovation, the charter school
concept, created a new space for political compromise among progressive, civil
rights, and business elites. The stronger appetite for reform among the liberal
wing of the Democratic Party led by Ted Kennedy strengthened the position of
the more "centrist" Third Way wing to push for stronger enforcement
of Goals 2000 and the revisions to ESEA that called for more testing
accountability. The stage was set for dramatic change in 2000.
Touting his success as governor of Texas, George W. Bush
came to Washington with education reform at the top of his agenda. The
signature legislation of the Bush Administration, the No Child Left Behind Act
of 2001 (NCLB), was a political compromise that built on an ideological shift
in Washington politics toward using Title I funding to pressure states into
creating internationally “competitive” standards and accountability policies
for teachers and schools.
Specifically,
NCLB mandated the development of “challenging state standards,” “annual testing
of all students in grades 3-8,” and for states to develop “annual statewide
progress objectives ensuring that all [racial and ethnic] groups of students
reach proficiency within 12 years” (p. 1).
Schools and school districts identified as not making Adequate Yearly
Progress (AYP) became subject to an increasing array of penalties for each
successive year of “failure.”
These
“corrective actions” the following: 1) restructuring (where entire school
staffs are replaced), 2) state or mayoral takeover (where entire school
districts are put under state or mayoral control), and 3) school closures
(where traditional public schools are closed and students are shifted into
charter schools or rezoned to another traditional public school). The Bush
Administration was able to forge this political compromise by bringing on board
the more libertarian-leaning and religious wings of the Republican Party by
pushing for expanding school choice in the forms of charter schools and voucher
programs for students in schools identified as failing.
At the
same time, the liberals of the Democratic coalition were able to continue their
push for raising standards for all and addressing funding inequities, both
important issues in the civil rights community. The symbolism of a conservative
president and former governor of Texas working with the so-called "liberal
lion" of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, to usher through one of the most
sweeping pieces of federal education policy since the 1960's is a powerful
testament to the convergence of interests among competing groups in American
politics, and the repercussions of NCLB would define the education politics of
the 2000's.
The wave of reform and changes in public education set
off by NCLB was unprecedented in the history of American schooling. Heated
debates broke out in state houses and school board meetings across the nation
as urban schools tried desperately to stay ahead of steadily escalating annual
testing targets. School leadership and teachers became increasingly focused on
test scores as a means of survival, and non-tested subjects and social missions
long associated with public schools were largely sacrificed to the NCLB demands
for Adequate Yearly Progress. Waves of school closures in “failing” school
districts were accompanied by the exponential growth of both non-profit and
for-profit charter schools, and politicians of all stripes voiced strong commitments
for the disruptive innovation introduced by the charter school sector.
While the post-NCLB era has been a time of dramatic
change for teachers and families in urban communities, it has proven to be
profitable for the new education industry that has emerged and grown up around
it. International publishing companies such as Pearson, CTB/McGraw-Hill,
Riverside, and Harcourt have carved out important lucrative niches in the
education market, producing standardized assessments, scripted curricula, professional
development materials, and test scoring services.
The
growth of charter schools in urban school districts has produced an
ever-expanding constellation of charter school networks and standalones that
have, in turn, fed into a growing sector of property management, real estate,
and supplementary education service, or tutoring, companies. Not surprisingly,
the exponential growth taking place in the education market and the increasing
demand for data collection, analysis, storage, and sharing have drawn the
attention of technology companies and investors on Wall Street.
As Jonathan Kozol (2007) noted, the Wall Street investing
class has come to see the K-12 market as being the “Big Enchilada” for
extracting profit from public tax dollars, while hardware, software, and
technology infrastructure companies see huge potential for growth in online
testing, virtual learning, and new forms of content delivery that are
advertised to increase learning while lowering costs. However, these dramatic
changes have also contributed to a growing chorus of criticism that NCLB was
just another unfunded or underfunded federal mandate that produced a good deal
of change in the structural makeup and steerage of public schooling without
producing substantive gains in academic achievement or reducing achievement
gaps among different student groups.
NCLB’s
fanciful expectations of 100 percent proficiency for all students by 2014,
regardless the circumstances, and the increasingly hostile rhetoric aimed at
public schools, teachers, and local school boards (an institution that
commentator Jonathan Alter (2010) pejoratively labeled “The Blob”) has led many
public school advocates and education researchers to see NCLB as a mechanism to
produce the failure it was supposedly designed to address—a Trojan Horse to
create the perception of educational crisis and, thereby, accelerate reform.
In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election,
then-candidate Barack Obama frequently characterized NCLB as being “flawed,”
leading many public school advocates to project onto him their hopes that his
presidency would reverse the tide of education reform sweeping the nation.
After all, education scholar and Stanford University researcher Linda
Darling-Hammond had advised Obama on the campaign trail and served in his
transition team. These hopes were dashed, however, when Darling-Hammond was
swept aside, and President Obama named as his Secretary of Education Chicago
Public Schools chief, Arne Duncan, a champion of high-stakes testing accountability,
school closures, alternative certification programs, test performance pay, and
charter schools.
Duncan
was given a chance to make his mark on American public schools early on in his
tenure, when the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009 set aside $4.3
billion in discretionary funding for school improvement. The money was used to
fund the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative that built on and
expanded the mandates of the supposedly “flawed” NCLB. States suffering from
budget crises brought on by the Great Recession of 2008 were incentivized to
compete for badly needed funding from the federal government.
In
order to be eligible, states had to sign on to the development and
implementation of a set of national standards; the development of high-stakes
assessments attached to those standards; the introduction of accountability
policies that would tie teacher evaluations to student test scores on those
assessments; improved data collection and storage systems; and to the lifting
of caps on the number of charter schools. More than anything else, the
indistinguishable overlay of Barack Obama’s education policies with those of
his Republican predecessor testifies to the dramatic transformation in
education policy since the Reagan administration and the publication of A Nation at Risk.
The new politics of education is defined by bipartisan
consensus and seemingly paradoxical relationships, and the nationwide tour to
promote charter schools featuring Reverend Al Sharpton, former Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich, and New York’s mayor Mike Bloomberg provide a good example
(Johnson, 2009). While the two parties go to great rhetorical lengths to
distinguish themselves on education, the reality of public school policy is one
in which the two parties draw from the same lexicon of business language to
justify virtually identical education policies built on standards, assessment,
accountability, and choice. This convergence is made possible in the post-NCLB
era by prominent advocacy and funding from an increasingly assertive business
community, along with the growing number of venture philanthropies and
corporate foundations.
Advocacy Research &
Philanthropic Entrepreneurship
In order to understand shifts in the educational politics
over the past forty years, it is important to consider the broader
transformations taking place in American society. The crises of the 1970s
marked the closing of the post-World War II era of industrial capitalism and
broadly shared wealth and the opening of a new era of economic globalization,
de-industrialization, and the re-emergence of an increasingly speculative
financial sector that has produced levels of economic polarization not seen
since the stock market crash of 1929.
As more
and more of the productivity gains have accumulated at the top of the economic
pyramid, the US has witnessed the rise of a newly assertive business community
that has sought to shape political policy and debate through an ever-expanding
sector of think tanks, policy institutes, and philanthropic organizations.
Today, the driving force behind the national conversation over public schooling
and education reform is a new elite that is using its economic and political
muscle to achieve political goals that will open up new revenue streams for American
business in the name of addressing educational inequality and preparing workers
for the new global economy.
The history of the think tank in the U.S. goes back to
the Progressive era and its faith in the use of newly emerging social sciences
to manage societal issues through policy. The idea behind the think tank was to
be a bridge between the academy and government that produced relevant
scholarship tailored to the particular needs of policymakers. Funded by large
endowments from the philanthropic organizations of industrialists and populated
by PhDs, these new institutions, such as The Bureau of Municipal Research,
carved out an important niche in the American political system.
Their
ability to gain access to policymakers and continued sources of funding hinged
on the credibility and neutrality of the research they produced (Rich, 2005,
pp. 34-40). To be sure, the relationship between think tanks and the power
elite in Washington, D.C. was always troubled, the strong ties between the
American military and the RAND Corporation being a good example. However, in
comparison to the politically polarized think tank sector of the early 21st
Century, the think tank model of the first half of the 20th century is now
widely regarded as somewhat of a golden age in which the research was measured
and ideologically tempered.
It was in the 1970s that conservative activists in
politics and business began what they understood to be a War of Ideas against
the perceived liberal and leftist ideologies dominating academia, media, and
popular culture. Drawing upon the ideas of luminaries, such as Frederick Hayek
and Walter Lippman, a new cadre of conservative public intellectuals set out to
reverse the tide of populism and legislation that defined the civil rights,
anti-war, and environmental movements of the 1960s.
These
efforts resulted in new institutions to promote what these “thought leaders”
saw as the spirit of free market capitalism. Feeling threatened by
“collectivist” ideologies and the growing regulatory framework of the post-New
Deal era, they were joined by the business community and the economic elite,
who were interested in building a counter-movement to the sweeping social
changes of the 1960s.
Gabbard and Atkinson (2007) point toward a memo written
in 1971 for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by future Supreme Court justice and
former tobacco industry lawyer Louis F. Powell Jr. as marking the starting
point of this counter-movement. Decrying an all-out attack on the free
enterprise system from the media, universities, religious institutions and
intellectual journals, the memo calls for the U. S. Chamber of Commerce to
become more politically active.
Powell
urged individual companies to set up well-funded public relations divisions to
counter attacks on free enterprise and for individual companies to take united
action in funding new research and policy institutions to “monitor schools and
universities, the media, the courts, and politics for anti-business ideas, and
aggressively target them for the distribution of pro-business/neoliberal ideas“
(p. 99). Powell called on the business community to create its own institutions
of knowledge production, policy development, and media out-reach to champion
free market ideology in order to play a significant role in public debate and
policy development. In retrospect, it is clear that Powell’s advice was taken
to heart by a broad swath of the economic elite.
The period from the early 1970s until the present has
been one of phenomenal growth in the number of think tanks, policy institutes,
and advocacy research centers funded by corporate money. Changes to the tax
code in 1969 that limited a traditional source of foundation funding for
established think tanks, along with the appearance of a newly assertive
business community led to a dramatic transformation in the think tank model of
the early 20th century and to the emergence of a new crop of think tanks and
policy institutes characterized by distinct ideological orientations and
sophisticated media out-reach operations (Rich, 2004).
Powell
had placed a good deal of faith in the growing field of public relations as
being the key component of the counter-movement, and that faith appears to have
been well placed. The significant advances in the field of marketing over the past
four decades have informed the development of the modern think tank. The same
tools used to market consumer goods are being employed to sell ideas and to
shape public debate. Think tanks are, in many ways, well-funded media
operations producing advocacy research aligned to the interests of their
funders.
The
modern think tank carries out a wide range of activities: producing issue
specific research that is marketed to major news organizations; hosting
conferences and seminars to disseminate ideas, generate media coverage, and
inform policymakers; and publishing books, magazines, webpages, and news blogs
to shape public debate. Whether concerned with a broad range of issues more
narrowly focused on one or two policy areas, think tanks rely on individual and
corporate funding aimed to shape public debate, gain access to policymakers,
and have an impact on policy development.
In the field of
education policy, the number of think tanks carrying out research and
disseminating policy proposals has grown significantly, and they have been
quite successful at shifting the tenor of public debate over schooling toward
the neoconservative ideas that emerged from A
Nation at Risk (Kovacs & Boyles, 2005). Even an incomplete listing that
focuses on the major players in the field offers the reader a good idea of how
large this sector has become:
American Enterprise
Institute
American Legislative
Exchange Council
Brookings Institution
Cato Institute
Center for American
Progress
Center on Education
Policy
Center on Reinventing
Public Education
Education Trust
Fordham Institute
Foundation for
Excellence in Education
Friedman Foundation for
Educational Choice
Heartland Institute
Heritage Foundation
Hoover Institution
Lexington Institute
Mackinac Center for
Public Policy
Manhattan Institute for
Policy Research
Mathematica Policy
Research
National Council on
Teacher Quality
New Teacher Project
Progressive Policy
Institute
RAND Corporation
StudentsFirst
Third Way
Beyond
the big national players, there are many more narrowly-focused regional and
local think tanks and advocacy groups working in the field. Together, they form
an expansive network of knowledge and opinion production, policy development,
and political marketing that dominate education policy at the federal and state
levels. Think tanks are closely associated with party politics and their
scholars and fellows enjoy extensive access to policymakers.
However,
their most significant avenue for promoting the interests of their funders is
through their access to media outlets. Think tank fellows maintain a
significant presence in popular news media. Cloaked in the patina of academic
legitimacy, think tank fellows are presented in popular news media as being
unbiased experts in the field of education (Haas, 2007), and they increasingly
offer a unified discourse of policy reform, regardless of their self-identified
political affiliations (McDonald 2013).
At the beginning of the contemporary education reform
movement in the 1980s, many of the policies that have come to dominate the
discourse of education reform were ideas closely associated with conservative
think tanks that had strong ties to the business community, such as the
American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. However, with the
rise of third way politics in the 1990s, corporate money began to flow toward
both traditional and new think tanks associated with the Democratic Party to
advocate for more corporate friendly policies, the Brookings Institution’s
Hamilton Project being a good example.
New
sources of wealth emerging in the 1990s from a post-industrial economy based on
financial innovation from Wall Street and technological innovation in Silicon
Valley helped to produce a new elite far less interested in social issues
associated with the culture wars than their industrialist predecessors. The
willingness of this new corporate elite to fund think tanks and advocacy groups
associated with the Democratic Party coincided with the political convergence
over education policy between the two parties.
Not
surprisingly, the culmination of this political convergence, NCLB, produced an
explosion of new education policy organizations and advocacy groups linked in
an increasingly complex web of money and social networking that has helped to
solidify a new paradigm for education policy based on standards, testing
accountability, and choice.
During the early years
of the 21st Century, three names came to dominate American education
reform: Gates, Walton, and Broad.
The
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the
Broad Foundation have achieved a dominant presence in political debates over
education reform and, as a result, wield a great deal of sway over policy
formation at the federal, state, and local levels. They represent a new form of
philanthropy that uses funding as investments to leverage fundamental societal
change, an important difference that distinguishes this model from the
traditional philanthropic model of the industrial era.
In its
most simple form, it can be understood as a shift from providing funds for the
public good, such as arts and cultural projects, to the strategic use of grants
and structural supports to bring about “disruptive” change to society that
favor corporate constituents. Janelle
Scott (2009) notes that, while this new form of philanthropy has certainly
generated a lot of attention (not to mention a good deal of criticism), the
break between these two institutional models of philanthropy isn’t nearly as
clear- cut as it would appear.
In many
ways, this model was pioneered by conservative institutions in the 1950s and
60s, such as the Olin and Bradley Foundations, which played a pivotal role in
funding the development of conservative think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute. Nevertheless, it is clear
that a new form of philanthropic organization has emerged with a specific
interest in education policy and reform. This new model of philanthropy takes
its ethos from the venture capitalist model of Silicon Valley and Wall Street,
where the majority of the funds that these organizations use originate:
Like venture capitalists, venture philanthropies
expect aggressive returns on their investments. They measure such returns not
necessarily by profit generated but by growth in student achievement, expansion
of particular educational sectors, such as education [management organizations]
or charter schools, and the growth of constituencies who will place political
support on public officials to support particular educational reforms (Scott,
2009, p.116).
A new crop of
billionaires emerging from the tech boom in Silicon Valley and the financial
“innovation” of Wall Street have created a new institutional model for
philanthropic organizations working in the education field, and this new model
is increasingly being adopted by more traditional, well-established
foundations.
Several characteristics distinguish venture
philanthropies from their more traditional cousins of the first half of the
20th century. First and foremost, these new players in the politics of
education reform have a clear preference for building new private sector
institutions to challenge the public sector. Venture philanthropies fund
charter school management organizations as well as individual charter schools
in order to build a hybrid form of schooling and school management outside of
the public sector.
Charter
management organizations or CMOs (such as Achievement First, KIPP, and Green
Dot) are non-profit entities that manage multiple charter schools, and
education management organizations or EMOs (such as UNO Charter School Network)
are for-profit entities that manage a much smaller number of U. S. charter
schools. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools,
management organizations “provide back office functions for charter schools to
take advantage of economies of scale, but some also provide a wider range of
services—including hiring, professional development, data analysis, public
relations and advocacy” (Warne 2013).
To
staff these non-profit and for-profit charter schools, venture philanthropies
also provide substantial funding for alternative teacher licensure programs
(such as Teach for America) as well as alternative leadership training programs
(such as the Broad Residency and the Broad Academy). Second, venture
philanthropies are enamored with the concept of innovation. They demonstrate a
clear preference for funding new approaches to schooling and student learning
that generate new efficiencies through computer and information technology.
“Blended” schools, virtual academies, and computer-based credit recovery and
“competency-based” programs receive substantial funding.
Finally,
venture philanthropies have worked to establish a new model for educational
research that works outside of the traditional peer-review process of academia.
Venture philanthropies provide targeted funding to national think tanks (such
as the Center for American Progress and Center on Inventing Public Education)
and even university based programs (such as the School Choice Demonstration
Project at the University of Arkansas) to conduct educational research and
publish reports on the initiatives pursued by the philanthropies. The
importance of this practice cannot be overstated.
Working
through think tanks, corporate foundations, and policy institutes with clear
ideological agendas, venture philanthropies are an important source of funding
for the production and marketing of educational research to build the
appearance of a consensus among the research community, often where none exists
(Lubienski et al. 2009). In order to build national support, think tank studies
that demonstrate the efficacy of the reform initiatives are aggressively
marketed by these foundations to news organizations. Of course, studies that
fail to demonstrate the efficacy of those initiatives are not aggressively
marketed to media outlets and subsequently disappear down our collective memory
hole.
According to the Foundation Center (2014), philanthropic
organizations spent a total of $2.4 billion dollars in 2011. The ‘big three’ of
the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations spent $448 million, $159 million, and
$42 million respectively. While this might appear to be a significant amount of
funding to drive educational change, it is important to note that total
educational spending in the U. S. is approximately $600 billion annually. This
raises the question of how large an impact these philanthropies really have if
the amount of funding they are providing constitutes a drop in the bucket of
total spending. The answer is that they have significant impacts.
Sara Reckhow (2013) points out that these new venture
philanthropies use their funds strategically to drive national change. Venture
philanthropies target their funding efforts toward large urban school districts
that are geographically representative of the nation as a whole in order to
create new institutional and organizational models that can be “scaled-up”
nationally. They demonstrate a clear preference for urban districts under mayoral
control with a robust network of partnering organizations and environments that
are supportive of their reform initiatives.
The top
five urban areas targeted by venture philanthropies are New York City, Los
Angeles, Oakland, Boston, and Chicago (pp. 35-51). Other notable test sites
include New Orleans, Houston, Memphis, and Washington, D. C. By focusing their
resources on specific sites, venture philanthropies use these districts as
models of reform that can be researched, managed, and marketed to policymakers
in order to foster change at the national level. The importance of these new
philanthropic organizations isn’t necessarily the dollar amounts they spend,
although they do spend a substantial amount of money. What makes venture
philanthropies important is their ability to leverage their funding to promote
national change.
Beyond funding advocacy research in think tanks that
principally target policymakers and news media organizations, the venture
philanthropists have several ways to promote their initiatives in popular
culture so as to build political support for education reform. The “big three”
of the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations figured significantly in the
production and promotion of the major motion picture Waiting for Superman, a film that was clearly designed to demonize
traditional public schools, teachers, and teachers’ unions as being
self-interested proponents of the status quo who remain resistant to
educational reform and equity.
At the
same time, charter schools and a new crop of educational leaders (such as
Michele Rhee and Geoffrey Canada) are portrayed as saviors of struggling urban
student populations. Promoters of the film were able to obtain prominent
feature stories in magazines, (including the
New Yorker and Time), national newspapers (The New York Times),
exclusive interviews with the film director Davis Guggenheim on the Oprah
Winfrey Show, and a nationwide speaking tour to promote the film put on by Bill
Gates, who appears in the film as an educational expert (Goldstein, 2010).
Similar strategies were used in the production and
promotion of the major motion picture Won’t
Back Down, a fictional story of a working class mom and burned out teacher
who win the battle to “pull the trigger” on a failing public school and
transform it into a privately run charter school. The film was a production of
Walden Media, which is owned by Philip Anshutz, a longtime activist known for
funding conservative causes such as school choice. The film was distributed by
20th Century Fox, a unit of NewsCorp that also owns the school technology
company, Amplify, which is headed by former New York City Department of
Education Chancellor Joel Klein.
In
2013, Amplify won contracts to develop assessment software and learning tools
for the federal Common Core Initiative (Cavanaugh, 2013). These media companies
partnered with CBS and the Walton family’s WalMart to broadcast the television
special, Teachers Rock, to promote
the release of Won’t Back Down.
Featuring performances by famous music stars, the television special was part
of a well-executed media strategy to use the guise of celebrating teachers in
order to promote the film and the education reform movement.
Other
notable successful marketing strategies funded by venture philanthropies in
recent years include MSNBC’s (and more recently sponsored by NBC) annual Education Nation series and nationwide
tour that aggressively markets advocacy research, standards-based education
reform, and charter schools. Then there
is the Center for Public Broadcasting’s on-going feature American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen, which put on the PBS
special Ted Talks: Education, which
was heavily funded by the Gates Foundation and featured Bill Gates as an
educational expert.
In short, venture philanthropies are one of the driving
forces behind the contemporary education reform movement. They pursue
disruptive innovation in public education by targeting urban school districts
as laboratories for reforms, using their significant funding as leverage to introduce
and expand charter schools and virtual schools. Venture philanthropies then
market their initiatives in these laboratories of reform by funding and
publicizing sponsored advocacy research by think tanks, which are, themselves,
sleekly styled marketing machines.
Neoliberalism & Education
Hailed by Edward Lazear (2000) as the triumph of
economics imperialism, the dominant ideas informing education policy in this
modern era of reform come from neoclassical economic theory (Allais, 2012).
Both the why and the how of public education are now defined by an economic
logic of global competition for human capital, whose worth is weighed by
knowledge acquisition. In the words of Barack Obama, it is now “an undeniable
fact that countries who out-educate us today are going to out-compete us
tomorrow” (Obama, 2011).
In this
new global reality, the goal of public schooling is to produce human capital in
the form of college ready graduates well versed in STEM curricula and eager to
pursue careers in science, engineering, and computer technology. As these ideas
have risen to ascendancy in recent years, a political convergence on education
policy emerged that is largely informed by human capital theory and
neoclassical economic theory. This convergence involved a coalescence around
three broad policy reforms: raise academic standards and create challenging
assessments to test student mastery; hold teachers and schools accountable for
student scores on these assessments, often by using value-added measures
borrowed from econometrics; and introduce market competition into public
education in order to produce innovation and to close persistent achievement
gaps between student populations.
These
three broad policy reforms are seen as being not only the key to producing human
capital but, also, for achieving equitable outcomes. The rhetoric of equity has
been adopted by a new breed of venture philanthropists and business leaders
whose neoliberal assumptions are shaped by neoclassical economic theory, and
whose money played a prominent role in bringing about a political convergence
over education policy. Over a period of time when real incomes stagnated in the
U.S., a new economic elite has set about re-making society in its own perceived
interests.
In this
New Gilded Age, the corporate philanthropic community has set about
constructing an elaborate architecture of think tanks and policy institutes to
shift education policy talk and implementation to the political right through
advocacy research and marketing. Venture philanthropies have chosen struggling
urban school districts as laboratories of education reform; have funded
sympathetic think tank research on the reforms being pursued; and have
aggressively marketed education reform and sponsored research results across a
spectrum of media.
Michael Peters (2011) traces the origins of neoliberalism
to a meeting of prominent philosophers, political theorists, and economists
organized by the French philosopher, Louis Rougier, in 1938. La Colloque Walter Lippmann was a
meeting of intellectuals held to discuss Walter Lippmann’s 1937 book The
Good Society. Lippmann argued for
the revitalization of liberalism as a middle ground between laissez-faire
capitalism and European socialism.
The
term “neoliberalism” was coined at La
Colloque Walter Lippmann by the future father of the West German state,
Alexander Rustow, who sought to differentiate a new form of liberalism marked
by a free economy AND a strong state from the small, laissez-faire state of
classical liberalism. Indeed, despite the more libertarian rhetoric often
bandied about in discussions on neoliberalism, the combination of a “free”
market economy and a strong activist state is a defining characteristic of
neoliberalism. The proponents of neoliberalism will frequently argue that their
goal is to liberate individuals from the burdensome regulations of an over
bearing nanny-state, but the liberty they envision is a peculiar one.
The nature of this peculiar form of liberty can be
located in the ideas of Frederick Hayek, a prominent thinker who was an
attendee at La Colloque Walter Lippmann
and whose work would come to have a profound influence on the American Right.
His Road to Serfdom (1944) argued that all forms of “collectivism” posed
the risk of a creeping authoritarianism that inevitably sacrificed the natural
rights of individuals at the altar of bureaucratic logic. For Hayek, the threat
from collectivism was everywhere, from the corporatism of fascism to the
communism of the Soviet Union to the Keynesianism of the welfare state. Each
represented a threat to the individual.
In
opposition to the creeping authoritarianism of collectivism, Hayek held up the
spontaneous order of the marketplace as the ideal model for organizing human
society so as to maximize individual liberty. For Hayek, markets are
information processors, or signaling machines, in which market actors
continuously “signal” the price/value of commodities to one another through the
buying and selling of goods and services. Left to its own devices, Hayek argued,
the marketplace would spontaneously achieve an equilibrium in which
intersecting supply and demand curves ensure the efficient and rational
allocation of resources.
More
importantly, individuals would achieve authentic liberty through the pursuit of
their own self-interested goals in a competitive marketplace. Hayek’s ideal was a spontaneous order of
rationality achieved through the (mostly) rational activity of self-interested
individuals, a market democracy in which the state was largely absent. Nevertheless,
there was a role for the state in Hayek’s work (Hoppe, 1994). According to
Hayek, the role of the state was to provide the legal and judicial
infrastructure to ensure the smooth functioning of markets and to provide the
services that, for whatever reason, cannot be taken care of by the market.
At the time, the attendees of La Colloque Walter
Lippmann appeared to be fighting an up-hill battle. It was an era in which
Karl Polanyi’s “Great Transformation” was very much in ascendancy and the
formation of the post-World War II welfare state was well underway. However,
what ultimately emerged from the colloquium was a political ideology that would
later influence a new crop of neoconservative thinkers and business leaders in
the United States and beyond. In the era of post-Fordism and the erosion of the
welfare state, the ideology of neoliberalism has risen to dominate the two
party system of American politics, the world of economics and finance, and the
world of high technology and social entrepreneurship.
Neoliberalism can be understood as an ideology that
adheres to a logic that divides social reality into two mutually exclusive
spheres: the public sphere vs. private sphere. This public-private distinction
separates out the functions of the state from the private individual and the
state from the marketplace, the sphere of self-interested individuals.
Neoliberalism asserts the primacy of the private individual over the state.
Through the pursuit of their own self-interests, individuals achieve authentic
liberty in the marketplace, and the outcome of this, shall we say, collective
activity is a spontaneous order that ensures efficient, rational outcomes. This
rationalizing function of markets is the foundation for neoliberal social
policy.
In order to rationalize society and maximize individual
liberty, neoliberalism advocates that the state should decentralize the
majority of the services it provides to the private sphere, where possible, and
to introduce quasi-market processes into the institutions of the state where
privatization, for whatever reason, is not possible:
Under neo-liberalism, the role of the government
shifts from regulating markets to enabling them, and replacing public services
with private enterprise, in the process, weakening the nation-state and public
political participation. The state becomes a handmaiden to the creation and
defense of markets and the monetary system on which they are based (Sleeter,
2008, p. 1947).
Neoliberalism
assumes that opening state institutions to market competition will bring about
the spontaneous rationality of the marketplace, all the while maximizing
individual liberty. However, these newly decentralized and quasi-marketplaces
look dramatically different from the popular notions of the marketplace still
colored by the legacy of classical liberalism.
The private sphere to which neo-liberalism seeks
to shift the responsibilities of the state apparatus is one that is actively
created by the state. Neo-liberalism tasks the state with creating the markets
that will deliver social services by determining which organizations are
allowed to compete in newly constituted marketplaces and by establishing the
roles and responsibilities of individual economic/political actors, both as an
individual consumer-citizen and corporation, in those markets. Behind the
populist rhetoric of ensuring individual freedom from the heavy hand of
governance, there is a perhaps smaller but intrusive government envisioned by
neo-liberalism that differentiates it from its classical predecessor (Ellison,
2012a, p. 131).
In
contrast to the image of the unrestrained individual pursuing her/his own
self-interest, the fetishized markets of neoliberalism are circumscribed places
of observation, measurement, and accountability. The privatization of state
services envisioned by neoliberalism requires that the state create, manage,
and participate in politicized markets that situate individuals in
circumscribed spaces designed to “rationalize” their behavior. John Clarke
(2004) explains:
Of course, this ‘privatisation’ is not merely a
process of transfer to an unchanged private space. The private is re-worked in
the process—subject to processes of responsibilisation and regulation; and
opened to new forms of surveillance and scrutiny. Both corporate and state
processes aim to ‘liberate’ the private—but expect the liberated subjects to
behave responsibly [as consumers, as parents, as citizen-consumers] (p. 33).
The goal of
neoliberalism isn’t to free the individual to participate in market exchange as
a consumer; the goal is to produce consumers of state services whose behavior
is structured by the rules of market exchange.
Clarke (2004) notes that neoliberalism is not so much a
description of social reality as much as it is a political strategy: “Put
crudely, neo-liberalism tells stories about the world, the future and how they
will develop—and tries to make them come true” (p. 30). Neoliberalism can be
accurately considered an ideology or a discourse. Both conceptualizations
provide rich avenues for further inquiry. However, from the time of La Colloque Walter Lippmann to the
present, it is important to remember this: neoliberalism is and always has been
a visionary political project to restructure society in the imagined image of an unfettered marketplace for others to emulate, even
if the visionaries’ own success in the marketplaces look dramatically different
from those of their imagined model.
The neoliberals’ task is
to remake the world in their own imagined image. However, it would not be entirely
accurate to characterize neoliberalism as the ideology of the elite.
Neoliberalism has proven to be a seductive ideology that speaks to the daily
experiences of the managerial class where competition, monitoring,
surveillance, quantifiable outcomes, and accountability measurements are common
practices. Neoliberalism speaks to technocratic assumptions as to how to
organize institutions, and the oft-repeated political bromide that we should
“run government like a business” resonates with many who view reality through
the corporate lens.
At its
core, neoliberalism is a political project that works to subsume human
societies beneath a distinctly corporate logic that entails setting measurable
performance goals for individuals, evaluating individual performance using
statistical analyses, and instituting carrot-and-stick incentive structures to
“rationalize” human behavior. It is a project that focuses on individual
performance within circumscribed spaces. Neoliberalism is not a
social-psychological theory that explains individual human behavior;
neoliberalism is a political project to produce “rational” human beings who
adhere to the “laws” of an imaginary marketplace.
Conclusion
This chapter has traced the political and ideological
development of the modern education reform movement. In many ways, the charter
school model represents the actualization of the dominant ideological and
strategic structures at work in the realization of the neoliberal values
applied to federal and state politics; it is, perhaps, the paradigmatic
institution of neoliberal education reform.
The KIPP model, specifically, provides an excellent example of
Foucault’s idea of productive power that works not to control or restrict but
to produce students/teachers with the specific aptitudes or habitus for the
imagined marketplace of a neoliberal social order.
This
new order is defined by hierarchy and domination and informed by the uniquely
neoliberal science of positive psychology (Ellison 2012b). When considering how
KIPP fits into the framework presented in this chapter, the No Excuses charter
school model should not be considered as an isolated unit of analysis to be
abstracted from the larger social reality presented here. Rather, it should be
understood as the most tangible example of a “singularity born out of multiple
determining elements of which it is not the product, but rather the effect”
(Foucault, 2007, p. 64).
In
closely examining the grueling experiences of former KIPP teachers and the
brutalizing experiences of students that these teachers recall, it will be
helpful to keep in mind that both teachers and students in these total
compliance schools are subject to an institutionalized exercise of power aimed
to coercively salvage the maximum amount of human capital from human beings
that are, otherwise, disposable:
The human body was entering a machinery of power
that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’,
which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born; it defined how one may
have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes,
but also so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed
and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and
practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body
(in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political
terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one
hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from
it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation
separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary
coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased
aptitude and an increased domination (Foucault 1995, p. 138).
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