Reclaiming Education for Democracy

Thinking Beyond No Child Left Behind

Paul Shaker, Elizabeth E. Heilman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780805858426
• eBook ISBN: 9781135597047
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Reclaiming Education for Democracy subjects the prophets and doctrines of educational neoliberalism to scrutiny in order to provide a rationale and vision for public education beyond the limits of No Child Left Behind. The authors combine a history of recent education policy with an in- depth analysis of the origins of such policy and its impact on professional educators. The public face of these policies is separated from motives rooted in politics, profit, and ideology. The book also searches for new insights in understanding the neoliberal and managerialist assault on education by examining the psychology of advocates who demonstrate a special animus toward universal public education. The manipulation of public education by No Child Left Behind is a case study in the general approach to public institutions taken by the politicians and theorists in these camps. K-12 education has been subjected to deceptive descriptive analyses, marginalization of its professional leadership, manipulation of its goals, the imposition of illegitimate quality markers, a grab on its resources by corporate profiteers, and a demoralization of its rank and file. This book helps us think beyond this new commonsense of education.

Recipient: 2009 AERA Division K Award for Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education

Part I
Mechanisms and motivations of education policy

Chapter 1
Political advocacy versus academic authority

Defining educational inquiry and defending public education

Public intellectuals are obliged to practice self-restraint and attend to external criticism so that they do not adopt positions of assumed certainty in a simplified universe. This disposition reflects a delicate and important social contract, particularly within the professoriate. With these purposes in mind during the past century, educators have built an establishment of organizations, institutions, and publications that, for all their limitations, have effectively propagated, as both necessary and appropriate, professional practices such as self-restraint and attention to criticism. An air of transparency and concern for the public good has been sustained, as well as distance from conflicts of interest through the possibility of open debate, honestly brokered, and a process of inquiry that is not tainted by intervening agendas or censorship.

These dispositions and core values are challenged by the voices of the right. Student welfare, these voices would seem to say, is best served in a context framed by certain ideological assumptions. These advocates have such confidence in their assumptions that they appear willing to manipulate scholarly and popular media to advance their policies. The new advocacy academicians interpose values such as a preference for privatization and “free market” control, hostility to unionization, a romantic attachment to an idealized golden age of education and society, and a propensity for controlling and punitive strategies in relating to youth. In this environment the education policy debate is rapidly assuming a polarized form. The two parties to the discussion—the established education professionals and the new advocates—proceed from different sets of assumptions, target different audiences, employ different media, and measure success in different ways.

There are many disturbing messages found within the dialogue of the advocacy academicians. One troubling example is the manner in which their discrediting of public education serves to draw attention away from the social and economic problems of society. Despite the claims of the advocates in mainstream media, public education is not failing. Berliner and Biddle (1995) have carefully documented the falseness of the claim of failure, beginning with the publication of The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. David Berliner updated and expanded his analysis of the effects of poverty on education in a powerful invited presidential address at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in 2005; it became a featured article in Teachers College Record (Berliner, 2005) and the inspiration for a book, Collateral damage (Nichols & Berliner, 2007). Richard Rothstein, in his weekly column in The New York Times and his other writing, and Gerald Bracey in his monthly department, “Research,” in Kappan, also regularly submit hard evidence to support an objective appraisal of our schools. James Popham offers similar insights in Educational Leadership. Yet blaming social and economic troubles on failing schools and low Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) scores continues to be an extremely effective strategy by those Bracey calls the “Education Scare Industry” (2001, p. 157) for advocating that public education is failing. Discrediting public education has the added threat (or benefit, if you are a player in privatizing what have been long understood as “public goods”) of making the enormous education market vulnerable to corporate interests through the creation of vouchers and for-profit or charter schools and additional, expensive standardized tests and canned curricula.

Destructive politicizing

Another way people liked to refer to what we were doing is waging a ‘battle of ideas.’ That battle, at least among serious people, is now over. We have won it. [Midge] Decter went on to identify a new enemy: the American education system.

(Brock, 2002, p. 50)

Intellectuals of the right recognized that with the fall of communism a need emerged for another target to coalesce their rhetoric. During the past 20 years, U.S. public education has been increasingly used to fill this void. Undefended by corporate lobbying interests and identified as a Democratic voting block, educators and their institutions provide a useful object for reproach. Education is an institution about which most Americans care and feel informed, and thus it makes a broadly relevant tool as a target for propaganda. Discrediting public education also serves to draw attention away from many fundamental social and economic problems. “Trade deficits that ballooned 20 years ago,” Rothstein (2001) writes, “were caused not by low test scores but by corporate bloat, markets that were more open here than elsewhere and a budget deficit that pushed up interest rates and the dollar’s value” (p. A–4). These facts are rarely apparent to the average American, who has been conditioned through reductionist and misleading mass media and social studies textbooks that present failing schools, immigrants, and welfare mothers as the source of societal troubles (Spring, 2002, p. 176).

Add to “education as political opportunity” the economic fact that the K–12 education “market” of $732 billion (U.S. Department of Education, 2002c) is arguably the largest reservoir of public funds insulated from full development by corporate America. To the extent that political and economic motives are operating, the critics of public education are not satisfied with articulate responses by educators, well-meaning reforms, or even demonstrations of “results.” While educators may hope and assume that they are engaged in an honest policy debate with public-spirited critics, a more comprehensive view suggests other agendas are at work. Advocates dismiss evidence.

In the 1950s, the launch of Sputnik raised fears that U.S. public education was not keeping pace in science and technology with the schools of enemy nation-states. In retrospect it has been others who failed to compete successfully, both economically and technologically, in the race to the moon. Next came the great SAT debate in which it was alleged that declining college entrance examination scores demonstrated a decline in American education. On further examination (College Board, 1977), the Sandia study (Carson, Huelskamp, & Woodall, 1993), and, most comprehensively, the writings of Gerald Bracey convincingly argued for the following analysis: “If the standard-setting group is compared with a demographically similar group today, the mathematics scores show no decline and the verbal scores show only a small (22-point) decline” (1997, p. 56). Then, during the 1980s, critique of public education emanating from A nation at risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) stirred similar emotions by alleging that Japan, among other nations, was about to surpass the United States economically—again due to the failures of public schools. Yet education had very little to do with American loss of global market share in the late 20th century, and it was Japan that went into prolonged recession while the U.S. economy enjoyed what is arguably its decade of greatest prosperity. Oddly enough, public education received no noticeable credit for this economic boom although to a large extent it was a spinoff of academic culture and research.

All this is not to claim that educators and public education are not without flaws and imperfections or that the “old common sense” was without contradictions and denials. One such example of the flawed nature of the public institution of education is found in the ongoing union–board friction that has eroded citizen confidence in our public schools, as has cronyism and mismanagement of resources, particularly in urban centers. As scholars such as Jonathan Kozol and Gary Orfield, among many others, have documented, the quality of public education varies enormously, and far too many children attend schools without adequate funding, good teachers, or a meaningful curriculum. These are not, however, “manufactured” crises: They are actual problems and, therefore, can be deliberately addressed by citizens of good will. In contrast, the Sputnik/SAT/Nation debates are chimeras—impossible to resolve because they were largely rhetorical from the outset, the product of a variety of media hyperbole and scapegoating. These attacks parallel the negative political advertising that has been so successful for the right in general elections.

The loss of fundamental assumptions—the old common sense

Lost in these events are certain fundamental assumptions—the old common sense—on which the profession of education is thought to have been built. Chief among these is the idea that the interests of the student should be preeminent and put in every instance above those of the practitioner and other concerned parties. As members of a human service profession, educators and educational researchers are trusted to place students above profit, personal aggrandizement, or ideological victory. Students, to paraphrase Dewey, are not a means to an end but the end itself. This contradicts the caveat emptor of the marketplace. A student in our public schools should not have to “beware” of the motives or practices of his or her teachers and administrators. This is another of the dimensions of the “zone of protection” that has characterized our U.S. ideal of education. Would K–12 education that is driven by a free market ethos, motivated by profit, and characterized by winner-take-all competition have the benevolent values we presume denote a school environment for children? From what quarter would come restraint, for example, on the marketing to our students of bad food, expensive merchandise, and irresponsible bank credit?

Teacher unionization and the introduction of strikes by teachers to improve their economic conditions are argued by some as the actual turning point in the public’s view of education. Without question, union tactics, and particularly strikes, have damaged the public’s view of teachers. Further analysis would typically include, however, that ethical behavior does not preclude earning a living wage and that teachers may well have exhausted the systems provided to them by law and convention for addressing their economic plight. Again the questions arise: Did an actual crisis demand extraordinary response? Or were “manufactured crises” employed as a ruse to independently gain economic or political advantage?

A related concept lost in the current debates about education is that a key purpose of education in a democracy is to foster the creation of a critically thinking citizenry that is able to make informed, democratically derived decisions in response to an ever changing world. Though there continues to be a struggle to live by and reach this ideal, it continues to be widely valued. Yet, in contrast to the would-be tenets of democracy, current federal policy often does not welcome critical thinking and would seem instead to support unquestioned obedience to what are presented as taken-for-granted and inalienable truths. “The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not a personal opinion, but an eternal truth.” President George W. Bush advocates “clear instruction in right and wrong” (Issues—Education, 2001). Furthermore, education is explicitly articulated not as a right of the citizen, but as a national economic investment. As President Bush (2003) has framed the issue, “In return for a lot of money, the federal government, for the first time, is asking, are we getting the kind of return the American people want for every child?”

Historically, democracies have also been suspicious of and resistant toward the merging of state and business leadership. The concern has been—and, for many parents and educators, continues to be—that the private interests of business leaders and the influence and power that business undeniably yields would, in effect, present a very real threat of an undemocratically administered economy that is not compatible with the interests of the children, the parents, the educators, and the public. In the post-Nation at risk era both major political parties have moved away from this principle of separating state and business leadership. In NCLB, the concept of educating students for thoughtful participation in a democracy is muted or lost by an emphasis on standardized test results at the expense of higher-order curricula. Instead, education is unquestionably presented and therefore taken for granted as a means of serving economic interests, which begs the question: Whose interests are these, after all? Consistent with the views on education held by the Clinton administration, the Bush administration’s 2002 budget blueprint pointed out that “Our schools are not preparing our students adequately for today’s knowledge-based, technologically rich society or to become future scientists and engineers” and allocated $200 million to the National Science Foundation to strengthen mathematics and science education in grades K–12 (Blueprint, 2001). In a speech introducing the Education Act, Bush explained, “We’ll focus on teacher training efforts where the need is greatest, in early childhood education, special education, math, science and reading instruction” (Bush, 2002). NCLB legislation explains “America’s schools are not producing the science excellence required for global economic leadership and homeland security in the 21st century” (U.S. Department of Education, 2003e). While certainly the economy and security may be concerns of the citizenry, to isolate these as the named priorities for what is taught and learned in our schools creates an imperative to question the implications of leaving civics, social studies, multiculturalism, the arts, and literature conspicuously absent.

Equally cynical and misleading is the notion that the forces of the right are truly “free market” and opposed to government intervention. The separation of markets and government is a fundamental common-sense concept in the United States. Yet economic interests (and, again, this begs the question: Whose interests?) not only direct the curriculum described above; these interests are also used as a central metaphor to diagnose problems with education and to suggest reforms. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige (2003) explained, “The great companies confronted the realities of their situation in the marketplace, and they changed their entire system of operating in response. I believe our schools must do the same.” At the same time, however, private interests are deeply involved in using governmental authority in education to benefit their bottom lines, as can be evidenced by the de facto monopoly found in text...

Table of contents

• Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements, continued
• Part I Mechanisms and motivations of education policy
• Part II Distortions of the advocates
• Part III Visions for change
• References
• Index