Imagining the Future of Global Education

Dreams and Nightmares

Yong Zhao, Brian Gearin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351610872
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Imagining the Future of Global Education examines the Grand Educational Narrative (GEN) and the major institutions that shape and disseminate it. The book focuses on national visions of education and the imaginary futures that nations seek to make reality. It critiques how the GEN policy implementation process frequently turns dreams of upward mobility into nightmares. In this way, the book takes a distinctly different approach than most comparative and international education studies. Rather than being oriented toward the past and asking how education systems around the world ended up where they are, chapters in this volume seek an understanding of how various educational visions from around the world inform the present and shape the future.

Following an introductory summary of important concepts from scholarship on "imaginary futures" and global education reform, the book is organized around three themes: "What Dreams are Made Of," illustrating, through three case studies, what the GEN looks like at the national level and how it operates across national boundaries; "A Dream within a Dream," considering some of the more novel trends in international education reform in order to provide insight into how dreams seem to function; and "Keeping Dreams from becoming Nightmares," comprising three thematic essays that describe trends in education policy in one or more countries. The book concludes with lessons for scholars and policymakers.

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PART I

What Dreams Are Made Of

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1

EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

Hoping One Black Box Holds the Key to the Other

Brian Gearin

An ideological rift between Democrats and Republicans has been growing steadily since the end of World War II (Andris et al., 2015). It is often said that Democrats and Republicans now exist in ideological silos: they differ not only on political issues, but also in their core values, their personal preferences, and their media consumption habits (Pew Research Center, 2014). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans expressed unfavorable views of each other in 2016 (Pew Research Center, 2016). To find evidence of similar levels of political animosity in the United States, we would have to look to the time of the Civil War. Because of this political division, Congressional productivity has been historically low since 2011. As an article in The Atlantic aptly pointed out, the 114th Congress is one that cannot pass a budget, confirm political appointments, or even secure funds to combat the Zika virus (Ornstein, 2016). The 2016 Presidential election, meanwhile, has served as further evidence of the growing partisan divide. The victory of Donald Trump, and the success of the so-called “fringe candidate” Bernie Sanders, suggest the ideological center is becoming a political no-man’s land.

Considering the growing ideological divide, what are we to make of the mostly bipartisan support federal education policy has enjoyed over the past decade? The three most influential federal education policies in recent history have been the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the Race to the Top grant program (RTTT), and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2016 (ESSA). NCLB passed in the Senate with a 91 to 8 vote, receiving support from Senators ranging from Mitch McConnell, John Bohener, and John McCain on the right, to Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Joseph Biden on the left (Gov Track, 2001). The majority of the American public either supported RTTT or had no opinion about it in 2010 (Petersen, 2010). ESSA, meanwhile, a revised version of NCLB, passed in the Senate with a 81 to 17 vote (GovTrack, 2015) which news outlets and the Department of Education alike celebrated as “overwhelming” bipartisan support (King, 2016; Layton, 2015).

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What accounts for the cooperation on education reform? Could it be that Congress cares so much about education that they have consistently put aside their differences to do what’s right for American children? It is a pretty picture to imagine political adversaries coming together with Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All playing in the background, resolving that children are the future, and that America should teach them well and let them lead the way. However, goodwill can explain at most only a fraction of this trend. One of the underlying reasons why politicians can cooperate on education even when they cannot cooperate on most other issues is that Americans widely believe that education is the ticket to the “American Dream” (Immerwahr & Foleno, 2000; Newport & Busteed, 2013). The fact that the American Dream is just that—a dream—facilitates cooperation by serving as a space where imaginations can run wild (Labaree, 2012). Almost any education policy can be imagined in such a way that it will further the American Dream. Moreover, it can be imagined to function in such a way that it will somehow further both Democratic and Republican ideals—so long as theories of action are not considered in any detail.

By believing that education is the key to the American Dream, Americans have effectively come to believe that one black box contains the key to the other. This lack of clarity has allowed Congress and state legislatures to pass a series of incoherent policies that education reformers can proudly justify with incoherent rhetoric. The vague assertions made on behalf of specific reforms have broad appeal to a population which sees few other opportunities for upward mobility besides education. It is only once these policies begin to be implemented that their incoherent nature becomes apparent. Backlashes against the policies follow, and they fail to live up to the rhetoric used to justify them.

To illustrate the illogic that has been driving American education reform for the past three decades, this chapter begins by analyzing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s (2010) speech, “Education and International Competition: The Win-Win Game.” This speech is representative of the fuzzy thinking that permeates American education reform. It makes bold claims that are attractive and inspiring, but that are ultimately self-contradictory. The chapter then considers America’s Global Education Reform Movement-type policies (i.e., NCLB and RTTT) and explains how the same illogic that seems to drive Duncan’s speech doomed these policies to failure before they were even implemented. The chapter concludes by suggesting that if the United States is ever going to institute effective education reform, its people need to come to grips with some hard truths about the future of the American Dream, and what schools (as they currently exist) can be reasonably expected to do to achieve it. Specifically, they need to understand that the American tendency to view education as a potential panacea for its social and economic problems is a barrier to meaningful change.

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Education and the American Dream

The idea that American education reform has been an inherently flawed enterprise since at least the 1980s is not new. Neither is the idea that reform tends to fail because both the American Dream and education itself are vague abstractions. Scholars have been making variations of this argument for the past 20 years (Hursh, 2007; Labaree, 2012; Mehta, 2015; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Unfortunately, their warnings have largely been ignored. To summarize the thrust of their arguments, America’s approach to education reform underwent some major shifts during the Reagan presidency. Although Americans have long perceived a connection between education and economic success (Labaree, 2012), the federal report “A Nation at Risk” (Gardner, 1983) catalyzed a shift whereby it was increasingly taken for granted that the central purpose of education was to promote individual and national economic competitiveness (Hursh, 2007). Moreover, this economic purpose of education took on existential importance. The very future of the country depended on its ability to improve educational outcomes: Hordes of faceless foreign children were threatening to take jobs away from American children, and hostile nations were threatening to out-develop the United States in technological weaponry. By 2001 and the passage of NCLB, it was no longer totally absurd to imply that a child failing a reading test in third grade was essentially the same as a soldier dying on the Beaches of Normandy. Failure in school was a threat to both the child’s existence and his nation’s security.

Why did this shift take place? It is generally agreed that the shift had something to do with the Cold War, the triumph of Western political and economic systems, and an array of challenges surrounding racial integration. We need not concern ourselves with the specifics: others have already discussed the shift in detail (Bracey, 2003; Hursh, 2007; Labaree, 2012; Mehta, 2015; Olssen & Peters, 2005). What needs to be emphasized here is that this shift was ultimately (a) bipartisan in nature, and (b) based on faulty reasoning. These points can be most quickly illustrated with a rhetorical analysis of a speech by Secretary Duncan, one of the most influential education policymakers in the twenty-first century.

Duncan, who served in the cabinet of President Barack Obama, illustrates the illogic that has driven education reform over the past few decades in a speech entitled, “Education and International Competition: The Win-Win Game.” Throughout the speech, Duncan frequently appeals to upward mobility. Given that upward mobility is one of the few educational outcomes Americans universally desire for their children, it is understandable that it is a central theme in his speech. However, this ideal is no more attainable than the idea that all children can be above average. From the point of view of the state, this is a major problem. The only way the government can deliver this version of the American Dream is by ignoring or even subverting the American Dream as it is actually imagined by individual citizens (Scott, 1998). That is, the government must either pretend that I do not want my children to get ahead of yours, and then create the illusion that it is helping both my children and yours get ahead; or it has to commit to helping one family more than the other. This is the tightrope that Duncan is trying to walk.

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Equity and Achievement: A Win-Win Proposition?

Duncan begins his speech by stating his thesis which I must reproduce in full. He claims,

In a nutshell, my message is that policymakers and voters have treated international competitiveness for too long as a zero-sum game. The success of other nations at increasing educational attainment and economic competitiveness has been assumed to be America’s loss. The belief that another country’s gain in economic competitiveness is America’s loss is a remnant of the Cold War mentality and a protectionist ethic. It stems from a worldview in which prosperity depends on a state’s ability to preserve a finite amount of goods and human capital. I want to suggest to you today that enhancing educational achievement and economic viability overseas and at home is really more of a win-win game; it is an opportunity to grow the economic pie, instead of carve it up. On the whole, education and economic competition can produce enormous benefits for the world and for the United States. The U.S. reaps rich benefits when educational attainment rises—both from an influx of well-educated immigrants and from rising demand for American products from better-educated populations overseas.

(October 19, 2010)

There are several points to emphasize about Duncan’s opening. First, he positions himself in opposition to voters and policymakers given to a Cold War zero-sum logic. Second, he does not bother to define “international competition’ or “educational achievement.” Third, he alludes to trickle-down economics by claiming that improving educational achievement will “grow the economic pie” and that international competition is a win-win scenario. Fourth, he makes no claims about causal processes. Instead, he simply states that education and economic competition will provide the United States with access to well-educated immigrants and a demand for American products abroad. It is important to note that he does not describe how this will happen by improving education, or how these outcomes would benefit the average American or foreign nationals.

After his opening, Duncan transitions into an anecdote in which President Barack Obama has an exchange with President Lee Myung-Bak of South Korea, the leader of a country with “one of the world’s best-educated workforces and fastest-growing economies.” Duncan relates how President Obama asked President Lee what South Korea’s biggest education challenge was. Lee unhesitating replied, “The biggest challenge I have is that my parents are too demanding.”

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Duncan then laments, “I wish my biggest challenge—that America’s biggest educational challenge—was too many parents demanding academic rigor. I wish parents were beating down my doors, demanding a better education for their children, now!” Duncan goes on to say:

That is the reality of what U.S. schoolchildren are competing against in the global economy. And it is a reality that many parents, lawmakers, and voters in America still have not yet fully grasped. In practical terms, globalization means that U.S. students will have to compete throughout their careers with their peers in South Korea, Canada, China, European countries, India, and other rapidly developing states. This race to boost educational attainment and economic competitiveness is a race that—to be brutally honest—the United States is losing.

(October 19, 2010)

Duncan’s rhetorical crossover here could break Lebron James’ ankles. Despite opening his speech by positioning himself in opposition to policymakers and voters stuck in a Cold War mindset, his anecdote situates America as the loser in a race against other industrialized nations, thereby employing the very Cold War logic he only just critiqued (Tröhler, 2014). He also implies that educational attainment is in fact a zero-sum game, or at the very least a positive-sum game where rewards are distributed asymmetrically. This is not to say that Duncan is wrong to frame education this way (see Condron, 2011; Van de Werfhorst & Mijs, 2010, for instance). However, the possibility of losers in this global competition raises questions about what he meant by international competition being “a win-win game.” It also contradicts appeals that he makes later in the speech to educational equity. For instance, Duncan proceeds to rattle off some comparative education statistics that indicate that “We stagnated, we lost our way—and others literally passed us by.” These figures include Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings which will not be repeated here because they stand in defiance of research highlighting the danger in using them for off-hand policy prescriptions (Rutkowski & Delandshere, 2...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Imagining the Future of Global Education
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I What Dreams Are Made Of
• PART II A Dream Within a Dream
• PART III Keeping Dreams from Becoming Nightmares
• Conclusions
• Index