The Risky Business of Education Policy

Christopher H. Tienken, Carol A. Mullen, Christopher H. Tienken, Carol A. Mullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367622480
• eBook ISBN: 9781000428605
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

The Risky Business of Education Policy focuses commentary and analysis on some of the most pressing policy challenges facing public school educators and those invested in a healthy, vibrant public-school system. The book shares insights and makes recommendations from leading scholar-practitioners, namely from educational leadership and science education, on ways to ponder, navigate, and challenge serious policy issues. The chapters present important policy topics and critical analysis of the topics from the authorial perspective of experienced educators leading the preparation of future school leaders and teachers.

Through fast paced, user-friendly chapters, contributors grapple with an education reform policy issue of the day, reflecting what is contentious territory while wading through it. These educational researchers also make evidence-informed practical recommendations for educators and policymakers on how to better approach the policy challenges presented, so public education can be improved for all children. Each chapter contains stimulating ideas, useful information, and practical tips for school practitioners, higher education faculty, and constituent groups.

1

CORPORATE NETWORKS’ GRIP ON THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SECTOR AND EDUCATION POLICY

Carol A. Mullen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108511-1

In this chapter, I address corporate networks’ grip on the public school sector and education policy. Corporations have a pervasive, often hidden, influence in education policy, and practice (Moeller, 2020; Mullen, 2017; Tienken, 2020). In actuality, “American corporate leadership is an extraordinary, well-financed, determined group of corporate millionaires and billionaires that are financing a self-serving, destructive doctrine on school leaders and public education in America” (English, 2014, p. 51). Public education in the United States and around the world needs to be defended against neoliberal policy making, as does our right as taxpaying citizens to keep public schools public. Well-intentioned people are trying to improve public schools in the education policy environment. But they are hampered without support from activists and policy actors. Committed educators and stakeholders are hitting a wall, so to speak: “The only pathways they can see are too often ones prescribed and scripted by others,” meaning that they lack the freedom to use their expertise and capacities to develop learner-centered programs (Bogotch & Shields, 2014, p. 2).

By neoliberalism, I am referring in this chapter to the political forces that control our lives, including in the educational sphere. These forces encompass “global capitalism, the economic ideological stances of free-market competition, and the privatization of state social services” in the context of “the rise … of neoliberal foundations and think tanks that privatize and commodify public spaces” (Mullen et al., 2013, p. 182; also, Ball, 2012).

Purpose

Here I grapple with complexities and nuances involved in the marketization or commodification, also known as the market takeover, of the public education sector in the United States. Three questions stem from my purposes to reveal dynamics of special interest groups and their influence on public schools and education policy:

1. What networks and entities are driving current school reform in the United States, and how are they functioning within, and affecting, the public education enterprise?
2. Whose interests are served by extracting revenues, labor pools, and services from the nation’s public school system?
3. What are the implications of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS); National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers (NGA & CCSSO, 2010) for social democracy and social justice in education?

I use the original concept “Public Education, Inc.” to frame the neoliberal takeover of public education and marketing of schooling as a commodity from which profiteers and some entrepreneurs benefit economically and politically. I connect various markets to evoke a picture of these dynamics. Because the markets and their influence are largely invisible, linking for-profit corporations and their supporting cast is a complicated task. A proliferating number of neoliberal corporations, councils, think tanks, and sponsors that favor free-market education reforms co-opt public school rhetoric, control curriculum, and pocket profits.

Feigning a concerned stake in public education and democracy, these entities, including for-profit lobbyists, in some cases directly influence or make education policy and curriculum, disguising their true intentions. According to Berliner and Glass (2014), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is in the business of treating public education as a business by influencing education policy reforms that give parents choice; by proposing schemes that claim to make schools more accountable, transparent, and efficient; and by paving the way for public funds to be redirected to private or semi-private education options. ALEC favors charter schools that make money for private management firms, not public schools that spend public money on public services (Ravitch, 2013). Prisons and tobacco are examples of other business priorities that overshadow ALEC’s interest in education. By lobbying “politicians to attach free-market reforms to state education laws” (p. 8), ALEC ventures to turn private prisons into big business by landing severer punishments for criminals. In the same way, they have turned schools into a marketplace.

Identifying the existence of Public Education, Inc. serves as a mechanism for forcing uncomfortable truths into the open about the influence of corporate agendas on public education policy. This provocative conception of public education as a tool to generate profits for the private sector provides a medium for equipping educators with ideologies and evidence needed to claim a greater stake in the public school sector and exert greater influence on policy making. Moreover, Public Education, Inc. should elicit a collective moral outcry against the destruction of public education.

I have organized this chapter by (a) introducing my concept of Public Education, Inc. as a jolt for anyone who wants public schools to thrive; (b) describing markets’ commodification of public schools; (c) summarizing CCSS as a policy issue of high relevance; (d) identifying this policy issue in broad terms, drawing on select literature in curriculum studies, educational leadership, and sociology; (e) addressing why key stakeholders should care about the issue; and (f) ending with a call to action.

Public Education, Inc. Concept

Public Education, Inc. allows me to critically speak to the dire situation of U.S. public schools. I do not see all corporations as automatically bad or somehow conspiring against public education. And I do not see entrepreneurial leadership as inherently wrong-headed or aimed at undermining public schooling or higher education. Those who authentically work to achieve social benefits as social entrepreneurs may be contributing positively to public education, but this is not my topic. Many educators use the services of corporations and have codependent relationships with them in roles as customers and investors.

Military–Industrial Complex

The military–industrialization of 21st-century American society provided a playbook for Public Education, Inc. by laying the groundwork for public schools to be sold to the highest bidder. The U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, 2012), under the Office of the Secretary of Defense, adopted the CCSS as did 43 states and the District of Columbia. The DoDEA, a federally operated school system, prepares children of military families for education in America, Europe, and the Pacific by operating many schools in 11 foreign countries. Attention is on a prescription for science in addition to language arts and math.

Government agencies like the DoDEA are supported with taxpayers’ dollars, yet their neoliberal ideologies and marketing tactics favor the private sector over public service. Taxpaying citizens, concerned about the health of public education, should want to know and do more to protect the legacy and future of public education: “The transfer of public funds to private management and the creation of thousands of deregulated, unsupervised, and unaccountable schools have opened the public coffers to exploitation by large and small entrepreneurs” (Ravitch, 2013, p. 4). Abuses of power in the misuse of the public school sector is a common refrain in the education policy domain.

Public Education, Inc. is a by-product of the “military–industrial complex” President Eisenhower (1961) coined in his farewell speech. He alluded to a “compelling” military–industrial need for the nation to “create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” arguing against the risks involved in “emergency improvisation of national defense.” Yet Eisenhower admitted that military spending was out of line compared to other priorities: “We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States’ corporations.” This admission made a domain comparison between the military world and the corporate world, in effect establishing an alliance. Additionally, he disclosed the high-priority investment of the government in the military and impact of that investment on increasing the wealth of U.S. corporations.

Eisenhower (1961) also alluded to “misplaced power” and its “total influence” on all sectors of society. Although he did not specify public education or repercussions for schools (or university-based teacher and leader preparatory programs), it seemed presaged. Today’s reigning megacorporations, Pearson Education, Google, and Microsoft among them, have invaded public school systems like a military campaign. They overpower the agency of schools to serve constituents and communities, and remold them to the self-serving, profiteering interests of the market economy. Arguably, Eisenhower’s speech revealed a neoliberal thrust. Profiting in the corporate structure by developing unneeded arms and ammunition has grave consequences for public education and its sustainability around democratic values and the common good.

Not all readers may be aware of the extent to which the corporate takeover of public schools has been occurring or its historic context, fueling my decision to tackle this topic. Readers may wonder what the moving pieces are, how they fit together, and what the possibilities are for new leadership in the roles of policy actor and advocate. To this end, Bogotch and Shields (2014) discussed the blindsiding of educators and education leaders who are “often swallowed up by dominant business and governmental interests which today often represent global, corporate, and capitalistic … interests gone awry” (p. 2).

As public school activists believe, corporations invade schools and destroy their integrity and the capacity of school people to do their jobs. The military take on this equation is very real, although from another perspective. James Heintz (2011) of the Political Economy Research Institute explained that heavy investment from the federal government in the military deprived the nation’s schools of financial support, robbing them of much-needed improvements in poor infrastructure. Michigan schools’ horrendous sanitary problems are among the countless examples.

Referencing governmental military investments and real costs to public schools, Heintz’s (2011) analysis is directed at the financial investment in the military since the 9/11 terrorist attack and the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Total military assets rose significantly starting in that time to “$1,245 billion ($1.2 trillion) by the end of 2009—an increase of $341 billion” (p. 4). Importantly, Heintz concluded that “these capital investments [could have been] made in U.S. education infrastructure” (p. 4). Without the investment of public assets in makeshift schools, the costs of the wars show up as dilapidated facilities in high-poverty areas, compounding the health and safety of poor children.

Outside-In Rewiring

In the modern-day military–industrial complex, public education leadership and policy are being rewired from the outside-in by external interest groups. Consider the Broad Foundation, Uncommon Schools, Success Academy, Teach For America—all corporately organized controlling giants. Just as we are being changed from the outside, we, the taxpaying citizens, are being altered from the inside by colleagues, supervisors, entrepreneurial leaders, and a new crop of neoliberal leaders trained by the corporate giants they quickly come to represent.

Critical awareness among educators, leaders, and professors means understanding such prevailing educational dynamics and doing something about them. People we know at work moonlight with marketeers (who sell goods and services in public schools and advocate for public schools to be made into a marketplace, e.g., Gates, 2009) and benefit financially while, importantly, fundamentally changing education’s value system. Yet it is those working in public schools whose jobs are on the line and whose schools are in jeopardy—they are the on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1. Corporate Networks’ Grip on the Public School Sector and Education Policy
• 2. Neoliberalism as a Policy Ventriloquist: Deconstructing the Discourse of Corporate America for Its Public Schools
• 3. Threats to Meaningful Reform of Civic Education
• 4. Brown versus Board Did Not Work: Finding a New Pathway to Educational Justice
• 5. Charter Schools’ Impact on Public Education: Theory versus Reality
• 6. OECD, PISA, and Globalization: The Influence of the International Assessment Regime
• 7. Students as the Missing Actor in Education Reform
• 8. “We Come from Everywhere”: Innovating Bi/Multilingual Principal Preparation Programs
• 9. Evaluating the Different SIDES of Education Policies: A Practical Policy Analysis Framework for School Leaders
• Contributor Biographies
• Index