The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality

Possibilities for Democratic Schooling

Sonya Douglass Horsford, Janelle T. Scott, Gary L. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317397915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In a context of increased politicization led by state and federal policymakers, corporate reformers, and for-profit educational organizations, The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality explores a new vision for leading schools grounded in culturally relevant advocacy and social justice theories. This timely volume tackles the origins and implications of growing accountability for educational leaders and reconsiders the role that educational leaders should and can play in education policy and political processes. This book provides a critical perspective and analysis of today's education policy landscape and leadership practice; explores the challenges and opportunities associated with teaching in and leading schools; and examines the structural, political, and cultural interactions among school principals, district leaders, and state and federal policy actors. An important resource for practicing and aspiring leaders, The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality shares a theoretical framework and strategies for building bridges between education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

CHAPTER 1

The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality

The growing problem of racial and social inequalities in the U.S. has taken center stage in the policy arena, providing an important opportunity for researchers, policymakers, and advocates to remind the public about the important role that public institutions play. Despite this policy window, school district leaders and education advocates face significant structural, economic, and institutional barriers that make it increasingly difficult for schools to serve as sites of opportunity, especially for the nation’s most disadvantaged students. Record levels of economic inequality and reduced social mobility amid widening and deepening class divides present tremendous challenges for school district leaders and education advocates committed to ensuring equality of educational opportunity for all students (Wilson & Horsford, 2013). In fact, the impact of rising economic inequality across the domains of health, social welfare, politics, and culture does not bode well for ending educational inequality, which continues to be fueled by resource and opportunity gaps (Carter & Welner, 2013; Darling-Hammond, 2010), and the troubling segregation of schools by race and class (Horsford, 2016; Reardon & Owens, 2014).

These trends and conditions have normalized race, gender, and class inequalities in ways that have likely convinced our children to believe such “social inequality and social divisions are the natural order of things” (Carter & Reardon, 2014, p. 2). There is a long-held belief in America that education has the potential to reduce inequality and expand opportunity in ways that advance the American Dream. But widening inequality in schools threatens not only America’s opportunity narrative, which has relied heavily on education as the “great equalizer” (Mann, 1849), but also obstructs the pathway to its proverbial dream (Putnam, 2015).

For decades, demographers have anticipated the “browning of America” and declining White population that would make the U.S. a “majority-minority” country by 2020. Indeed, the school-aged population has already reached that designation. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, since 2014, America’s schools have been majority nonwhite—49.5% White, 16% Black, 25% Latino, 5% Asian and Pacific Islander, and 1% indigenous, with the rest reporting two or more races—a significant change from the 1977–1978 school year, when 76% of public schoolchildren were White. While unsurprising for those educated in the U.S. within the last twenty years, a longer view of the history of American education reveals how markedly the racial composition of schools has changed and helps explain the movement to privatize and dismantle America’s system of public schools.

WHO IS LEADING AMERICA’S SCHOOLS, AND TO WHAT END?

Throughout this book, we will call for greater bottom-up change, led by educators, students, parents, and communities, but currently, education reform is being led largely by non-educators, mostly corporate leaders, venture philanthropists, and politicians who know little about education research and policy. The increased support of top-down approaches to school improvement led by powerful non-educators has shown limited consideration of teacher, principal, and district leader perspectives. What is the role and responsibility of educators, given the current policy context and how it plays out in schools? Neither teacher or leader certification agencies have made social and education policies part of the training of educators. While leadership theories address the role of school and district leaders in the implementation of social and education policies, with notable exceptions (Anderson, 2009; Green, 2017; Ishimaru, 2014; Theoharis, 2007), they are silent on how leaders might push back on or influence these policies.

We might hope to seek some clarification in the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL), which offers a broad articulation of what leaders must be able to do. PSEL views the role of education leaders as primarily being responsible for management of the school site (Murphy, 2016). Although PSEL, which is the 2015 revision of the previous leadership standards, focuses much more attention on instructional leadership and the ways in which leaders must engage in transformational practices to improve schools, it speaks very little, if at all, to the policy and political forces under which school leaders must lead. These forces have significant implications for each of the standards, which focus almost exclusively on management of the school site. In fact, one of the limitations of such standards is that they are grounded in “ideal theory” (Mills, 2017), assuming that equality, opportunity, and freedom are enjoyed by all when, in fact, the state of America’s schools and society reflects a very different reality.

For example, transformational leadership has long been a hotly debated notion. George McGregor Burns contrasted it with transactional leadership and its more “give and take,” don’t “rock the boat” approach. Transformational leadership emphasized the leader’s personality traits and ability to mobilize followers around a vision. But it begs the question of toward what end this transformation is directed. In this age of what business gurus call “disruptive innovation,” are transformational leaders those who disrupt the public school “establishment,” teacher unions, professional certification, and the welfare state? What are transformational leaders transforming, and why? Furthermore, how does a principal serve as a transformational leader in an education policy context where the proliferation of charter schools and privatization limit the growth potential of public education through limited resources and dwindling support from those politicians who seek to starve public schools in the interest of choice and competition? These factors contribute to a policy landscape where the influence of school and district leaders is diminished, despite how education policymaking might could benefit from their expertise, which again begs the question who is leading America’s schools?

What is the role of education leaders amid historic levels of inequality and reduced social mobility? We agree that, on matters of educational equity and social justice, the standards “have historically fallen short of providing concrete guidance for school leaders on how to carry out these responsibilities through the lens of social justice” (Scanlan & Theoharis, 2015, p. 2). A limited focus on preparing school and district leaders for the politics of education and education policy not only undermines their ability to be effective administrators, but also to demonstrate the leadership capacity, political awareness, and advocacy central to leadership for social justice.

We see a similar trend in teacher certification. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), under pressure from conservative organizations, agreed to take the word “social justice” out of Standard 4 of the 2008 standards. The previous language was that teacher candidates’ dispositions should be “guided by beliefs and attitudes such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility and social justice.” Right-wing organizations, such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), had released statements which linked the language of social justice to the promotion of political ideology in the education of teachers. While this occurred during the conservative George W. Bush administration, Heybach (2009) argues that the slow demise of philosophers and scholars in the social foundations of education meant that no one was able to defend the concept. She cites Butin (2008), who states, “there was no one who could speak to the ancient origins of, societal consensus around, and empirical evidence for social justice as a cause for all individuals (and especially for future teachers) in a democratic and pluralistic society.”

This book is an attempt to better understand how educators and school communities might take a more active role in education policy. While we take a standpoint that supports public schools, we do not defend wholesale public schools, which remain complicit in the reproduction of inequality. We will argue, however, that privatizing them and opening them up to profit seekers will only make things worse from democratic, quality, and equity perspectives.

Moreover, since 2008, public investment in education has plummeted, and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will only divert more funding away from public investment, promising to make the U.S. among the most unequal societies in the world. It locks in permanent and deep cuts to statutory corporate taxes (what corporations pay in reality, via loopholes, is half that amount), down from 52.8% in the 1960s to 32% during the last three decades to 21% in 2017. Meanwhile, rather than investing in research and development or the creation of new jobs, U.S. corporations are holding $2.1 trillion abroad to avoid paying taxes. The law also creates new exemptions in the estate tax and for pass-through corporations, which almost exclusively benefit the ultrarich, like the Trump family, which owns pass-through corporations. As a fig leaf, the bill temporarily reduces individual taxes for most, but by 2027, the richest 1% of Americans will see over 82% of its benefits. All told, this massive upward redistribution of wealth will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit, greasing the wheels for the cuts to Medicare and Social Security that Speaker Paul Ryan has already threatened (Kim, December 20, 2017, para 3).

Reformers have used a cynical discourse of “no excuses” to shame teachers and educational leaders into taking responsibility for the failure of the corporate sector and the state at all levels—local, state, and national—to provide an equitable society, especially in the last four decades. We will develop this argument in more detail later in the book, but it is evident that the public sector has become systematically vilified since the Nation at Risk report in 1983. In this book, we will highlight educators who have refused to be cowered by such language, and who are working to change conditions for children and families both within and outside of schools. We are also seeing the entry of for-profit and nonprofit organizations into the teacher and principal education fields. These alternatives, which include Kaplan, The University of Phoenix, and Laureate, to name only more reputable for-profits, and nonprofits like Relay Graduate School of Education and New Leaders for New Schools, have been actively supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Nor is this deregulation of teacher and principal certification a new phenomenon. According to Zeichner (2010),

In 2001, $40 million dollar non-competitive grants from the U.S. Department of Education led to the founding of the American Board for the Certification of Teaching Excellence (ABCTE) which currently certifies teachers in 9 states based on two online examinations in content knowledge and professional knowledge. ABCTE does not require enrollment in a teacher education program or demonstration of teaching competence in a classroom for a teaching license.

(p. 1545)

Smith and Pandolfo (2011) report that since 2007, the leading producers of teachers in Texas are two for-profit online programs, A+ Texas Teachers and iTeach Texas. The demise of professionalism across the public sector has been amply documented as teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, and police officers are increasingly controlled from a distance by narrow outcomes measures (Evetts, 2011; Muller, 2018).

ARE MARKETS THE ANSWER TO PUBLIC SECTOR PROBLEMS?

The aims of education began to change as education was viewed solely as linked to U.S. competitiveness in the global economy (Labaree, 1997). While education has historically been viewed as both a cost and an investment in the country’s future, the perception of its economic importance grew in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union put the first man into outer space and appeared to be surpassing us in math and science (Engel, 2000). Another jolt occurred in the 1980s as Japan and Germany appeared to be surpassing us in economic might. The rhetoric of The Nation at Risk report, commissioned by President Reagan in 1983, set off what we now think of as the current education reform movement that has transferred what many consider the failure of the corporate sector (Lock & Spender, 2011) onto public schools, replacing a public investment strategy with school choice and high-stakes testing (Adamson, Astrad, & Darling-Hammond, 2016; Mehta, 2013). In many ways, Milton Friedman’s (1962) argument, first articulated from the White House by Ronald Reagan, that markets should replace or supplement government in nearly all sectors of society has gone from a fringe idea of the Libertarian right to mainstream thought in a mere four decades.

But it is important to understand why a market-based approach to school reform is fundamentally flawed. It fails to understand that if people are treated as customers instead of citizens, the skills of citizenship and political engagement will atrophy. But it also changes the ethos of public service as commitment to a common good, changing what it means to be an education professional (Anderson & Cohen, 2018; Cuban, 2004). Moreover, market-based approaches do not support state intervention in redressing racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic discrimination. In the following section, we provide an analysis of how a public service ethos of improving education for all children has been eroded in the last few decades and replaced by an entrepreneurial model that incentivizes school administrators to maximize their own schools’ success (and their own careers) at the expense of others. We are not suggesting here that previous school administrators were not also career-oriented or, in too many cases, also constrained by biases of race, class, and gender. Rather, we want to highlight how leadership grounded in public service promoted a greater concern for the common good than a market approach does (Sullivan, 2004).

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION?

We have critiqued the use of markets to discipline principals and teachers, and create entrepreneurial and competitive forms of leadership. Yet older, public servant approaches to leadership have also been heavily critiqued as failing to challenge the grammar of schooling and the inequalities that public schools have reproduced (Callahan, 1962). The premise of public school leadership has generally been to serve and be an advocate for all children, though this has seldom been equitably realized. One might, then, rightfully ask if a market-based approach might better serve all children and lead to greater achievement and equitable outcomes.

Before the age of market reforms, teachers who aspired to be principals were taught that their central task as an instructional leader was to help a teaching staff improve their instruction, even with a staff composed of teachers ranging from incompetent to outstanding. If the incompetent ones (usually only one or two) could not improve after working with them over time, then the task was to counsel them out of teaching or use documentation to move them out (Bridges, 1992). These aspiring principals were not taught to harass them or scapegoat unions, but rather, how ...