The End of Public Schools

The Corporate Reform Agenda to Privatize Education

David W. Hursh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317619673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The End of Public Schools analyzes the effect of foundations, corporations, and non-governmental organizations on the rise of neoliberal principles in public education. By first contextualizing the privatization of education within the context of a larger educational crisis, and with particular emphasis on the Gates Foundation and influential state and national politicians, it describes how specific policies that limit public control are advanced across all levels. Informed by a thorough understanding of issues such as standardized testing, teacher tenure, and charter schools, David Hursh provides a political and pedagogical critique of the current school reform movement, as well details about the increasing resistance efforts on the part of parents, teachers, and the general public.

1 THE DEMISE OF THE PUBLIC IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315752983-1

We may be witnessing the end of public education in the United States. Not in the sense that public funding of schools will cease, although funding is likely to decrease. Rather, we will see the end of public education in two ways: first, more public funding will go toward privately managed charter schools and less toward publicly governed schools. Second, education will be less public in that students, teachers, school and district committees, and elected school boards will have less say over education policy. Instead, policy will be made by unelected and unaccountable individuals, corporations, and organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Pearson Education; state commissioners of education; the federal secretary of education; and Teach for America.

In New York, as I will detail, teachers and parents are increasingly at odds with the policies of the State Department of Education and the federal government. Recent federal policies, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT), impose standardized testing on students and limit teachers’ choices regarding curriculum content and pedagogy. Moreover, for almost the last two decades the New York State Department of Education, under the leadership of a commissioner and the directives from the Board of Regents, have manipulated tests scores to portray students as succeeding or failing depending on what best serves their own political ends (Winerip, 2011).

Most recently, as I will show, Governor Cuomo has hijacked education policy for his own political purposes. In response to the millions of dollars he has received from financiers and other supporters of charter schools, he introduced and signed into law regulations benefiting charter school investors. He also introduced and signed legislation intended to portray public schools and public school teachers as failing with the goal of ending what he calls “the public school monopoly” (Taylor, 2015).

My opening sentence is not meant to be hyperbolic. Rather, it is intended to alert the reader that public education has been radically transformed over the last few decades based on a corporate model of market competition, with quantitative evaluations of students, teachers, schools, and school districts based on students’ scores on standardized tests. Teachers have decreasing input on assessment and curriculum as those tasks are handed over to corporations. Moreover, both state and federal governments are pushing for converting public schools into publicly funded but privately managed schools. New Orleans has closed all its public schools and replaced them with charter schools (Buras, 2014, 2015). Atlanta, Georgia, plans to replace all of its public schools with charter schools (Atlanta Public Schools, 2015).

We need to understand that the education reforms are not minor changes in how schools are administered, or how tests and curriculum are created, or how teachers are evaluated. Instead, the current reforms have transformed the purpose of schooling, teaching, and learning. The curriculum is being reduced to what will be tested, teaching reduced to implementing lessons designed to resemble the test questions and often scripted by someone else, and learning reduced to test-taking strategies and memorizing for the test. Good teachers are retiring early or finding other jobs, and enrollments in teacher education programs are declining. In the Rochester-area teacher education institutions, enrollments in teacher certification programs declined on average by about 70% from 2008 to 2012, the most recent years for which data are available (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, 2014).

Moreover, the original rationale for charter schools has been transformed. Charter schools, as Kahlenberg and Potter (2014–2015) remind us, were originally proposed by the American Federation of Teachers, the union representing most urban teachers, as a way for teachers and community members to collaborate in creating innovative publicly funded and governed schools that would inspire reform. Instead, charter schools have evolved into privately managed schools that generally promote authoritarian models of teaching and treat teachers as commodities to be used for a few years and then replaced with younger and less expensive teachers (Taylor, 2015). In addition, in most states (laws governing charter schools vary by state, and charter schools differ from one another) charter schools, on average, have increased racial and economic segregation, enroll smaller percentages of students with disabilities or who are English Language Learners, and have failed to keep pace with traditional public schools in educating students (see Ravitch, 2013, chapter 16, “The Contradictions of Charters”).

Even worse, the increasing use of standardized tests to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable, along with the privatization of schools through charters and the takeover of education governance by unelected and unaccountable individuals, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations, has failed to improve educational outcomes or decrease economic and racial inequalities. There is little evidence that scores are improving at the rate they did prior to the reforms (Ravitch, 2013; Winerip, 2011). Moreover, if we look at schooling beyond test scores, the narrowing and simplifying of curriculum has undermined learning. At its best, states Giroux (2012), education should promote students’ “analytical abilities, thoughtful exchange and a willingness to view knowledge as a resource for informed modes of individual and social agency” (p. 1). Instead, education based on corporate-created assessments and curriculum results in an “education deficit” where the public suffers “from a growing inability to think critically question authority, be reflective, weigh evidence, discriminate between reasoned arguments and opinions, listen across differences and engage in mutually informing relationship between private problems and broader public issues” (Giroux, 2012, p. 1).

No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the rise of charter schools, and the increasing privatization and corporatization of public education are not accidental developments. Rather, I argue that the current debate over the direction of public education exemplifies a larger debate occurring in the United States and globally: on the one hand, we can continue pursuing the neoliberal agenda that aims to create a society in which decisions about how we are to live are made through unregulated markets, with a diminished governmental role as what was once public is privatized. In such a system, students and teachers are infinitely examined (Foucault, 1979; Hanson, 1993) and are held accountable through an “accountability synopticism” (Simmonds and Webb, 2013, p. 21). On the other hand, we can pursue what I will call a social liberal democratic agenda in which the government plays its required role in the creation and development of markets, provides services that are best provided through the government, creates schools as learning communities that support the development of trusting and caring relationships, and aims to create democratic institutions and structures so that everyone has opportunities to participate in democratic processes.

In suggesting that we face a choice between two visions of society, both shaped by different views of the appropriate economic and government structures and practices, I am asserting that educators need to become familiar with economic theory and history. In fact, we cannot leave economics to the economists, who, for the most part, assume that free market capitalism is the best of all possible worlds and the role of the economist is to develop models to increase the market's efficiency and produce evermore goods and services (Block & Somers, 2014; Hursh, 2014). Instead, I argue, educators cannot leave economic theory, policies, and practices to economists but must understand economic theory and policies so as to demystify them and the role they play in creating the world in which we live.

Therefore, to introduce the debate, I begin this chapter with a brief historical overview of social democratic liberalism as initially promoted under the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and neoliberal economic and political theory that arose in response. Then I will turn to providing examples of neoliberal education reform that has occurred at the state level, with New York as the primary example, and at the federal level. However, I will show that it is no longer sufficient to describe education and other policies as created at the local, state, and federal levels. Instead, policy is more often made outside of the governmental sphere as powerful groups, corporations, and individuals have gained inordinate access to both public officials and the media in ways that the public has not. Therefore, in the last part of the chapter, I will propose that democracy and social justice requires that we respond to the neoliberal agenda by (1) promoting a vision for society that opposes neoliberalism; (2) researching, publicizing, and working against the increasing social and economic inequality in our society and schools; and (3) creating political practices and institutional structures that promote democratic participation at the local, state, federal, and national levels.

Situating the Current Neoliberal Reforms within Three Conflicting Conceptions of Society

Classical liberalism emerged in the 1600–1700s in England with the Petition of Rights of 1628 and later in the United States with the Declaration of Independence. It remained the dominant economic and political structure in the United States and Western Europe through World War I and into the economic boom of the 1920s that was soon to go bust. Classical liberalism aimed to

[S]afeguard the freedoms of the individual against the arbitrary power of the sovereign's rule. Their freedoms included: government by the consent of the governed, the natural rights of citizens to private property which must be protected against infraction by any arbitrary acts of government, periodic popular elections to regulate the power of the ruling body through regular appraisal of the requirement to rule responsibly, and citizens right to revolt against the despotic rule who violate their natural rights.

(Olssen, Codd, & O'Neill, 2004, p. 80)

Because classical liberalism valued individual freedom over government intervention, ideally, government should have as small a role as possible in directing the economy and society. Consequently, public services, such as public schools (until the rise of the common school), public universities, pensions, and health care were nonexistent. In addition, as the economy experienced booms and busts, governments theoretically could not respond and, at least in the case of recessions, did not practically have sufficient revenue to do so.

However, with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 in the United States, President Hoover's cuts in the federal budget both prolonged the economic slump and failed to provide basic services to the unemployed and poor. Franklin Roosevelt, soon after becoming president, created policies based on the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, theories sometimes referred to as social democratic liberalism. Under Keynesian theory, the government has an obligation to intervene in the economy to create jobs and reduce the negative impact of economic recessions and depressions—and to do so even if it creates a budget deficit, on the reasoning that once the economy recovers, the budget deficit can be reduced or eliminated. Roosevelt transformed the relationship between the federal government, the economy, and citizens as he pushed through Congress programs that would give people jobs (Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps) and provide financial security for the elderly and widowed (Social Security). Just as importantly, Roosevelt signed into law regulations such as the Glass-Steagal Act (1933), which limited banks’ ability to make risky loans, and programs such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC), which insures deposits, therefore reducing people's fear that they would lose their savings if their bank went bankrupt.

As beneficial as these policies were, as Block and Somers (2014) point out, “market fundamentalists” (p. 3) remained convinced that markets and not the government should determine social and economic policies. Economists and politicians began to develop alternatives to Roosevelt's social democratic liberalism with, as I will describe later, alternative conceptions coming from two centers of neoliberal thought: the Mont Pelerin Society founded in 1947 under the leadership of Frederick von Hayek in Austria, and economists at the University of Chicago headed, after 1946, by Milton Friedman (Peck, 2010, p. 17). Some, like Hayek, feared that the social democratic policies becoming dominant in the United States and the United Kingdom after World War II would result in a planned society modeled after the communist Soviet Union. This fear is reflected in the title of his most renowned book, The Road to Serfdom (1944).

Even with the rise of the two centers of neoliberal theorizing, neoliberalism remained a subordinate ideology as Keynesian economic policies produced a growing economy. The policies of the 1950s and '60s raised the income and living standards of the middle class, which increased consumer confidence and consumption and led to increased corporate profits. As Block and Somers (2014) write,

[M]ost of the business community in the United States had made its peace with Keynesianism by recognizing the benefits of a substantial role for government in the economy. In the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, business leaders supported initiatives to expand public provisions of health care and social provisioning, as well as acquiesced to new environmental ...