The Commodification of American Education
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The Commodification of American Education

Persistent Threats and Paths Forward

T. Jameson Brewer, William Gregory Harman, T. Jameson Brewer, William Gregory Harman

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eBook - ePub

The Commodification of American Education

Persistent Threats and Paths Forward

T. Jameson Brewer, William Gregory Harman, T. Jameson Brewer, William Gregory Harman

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About This Book

A 2022 SPE Outstanding Book H onorable Mention For the last few decades, teacher preparation has increasingly aligned itself with "best practices, " standards, and accountability, and such policies became mandatory in P-12 schooling nationwide. Technical skills instruction and methods have become the common practice of teacher preparation and accreditation of programs. Teacher candidates are encouraged to be unquestioning servants of a school system rather than educators who govern the meaning of schooling. The purpose of this book is to present a view of how we got to where we are today and to offer strategies to bring the job of teaching back to its roots. It seeks to identify the conservative influences that treat students as a commodity rather than future citizen scholars. For teacher candidates, this has meant the excision of social foundations of education courses and any further explorations of the philosophy of education or the history of schooling in their curricula. The Commodification of American Education looks at ways to re-establish teachers as professionals rather than mere technicians, and to take back public education to transform schools into places that educate while eliminating inequality and oppression. Perfect for courses such as: Social Foundations of Education | General Methods

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Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
by W. Gregory Harman
The authors of this book concur that there is a problem with schooling in the United States. In the chapters, each author reflects on different faces of this same problem, offers explanations, and posits solutions or, at least, paths forward. Each author names the face of the problem they are confronting a bit differently. Jameson Brewer and Scott Grubbs locate credentialism as the engine for a reductionist view of merit, interpreted as smartness (Labaree, 1988, 1997a, 1997b; Maier, 2012). Denisha Jones offers means of recovering from GERM (Global Education Reform Movement) that has invaded early childhood education (Jones, 2017; Wasmuth & Nitecki, 2017). Greg Harman and Matthew Hayden describe neo-essentialism, the schooling ideology that propagates the problem (Imig & Imig, 2006; Kessinger, 2007, 2011). Ashlee Anderson and Andrea Arce-Trigatti point out manifestations of the problem as new managerialism, part of neoliberalism: standards, accountability, and competition. They describe how student teachers, having lived within this paradigm and discourse, tacitly accept it to the extent that other approaches become difficult to practice (Apple, 2005; Spring, 2015, 2017), although they offer some alternatives so we can start. Michael Shad and Kurt Stemhagen, to frame their proposal for improving school with the maker movement, note how standards and accountability have resulted in anti-educational and even dishonest school practices. Michelle Gunderson focuses on teachers’ encounters with corporate charter schools and the wider assumption of a business model. Bailey Smolarek, in her exploration of soft skills, illustrates how cultural capital, a concept intended to highlight cultural values, gets reduced to human capital, an approach that renders society only as market and individuals solely as consumer and producer.
Commodification, the theme of this book, is one name for the larger problem with which all the authors are contending. Commodification is the rendering of people or things into items of economic exchange, reducing humans and humanity into objects, and attaching human value to economic metrics.
To see why it is such a problem, we need to take a moment for a primer on subjects and objects. We do not mean the grammatical sense of these terms or the use of subject as belonging to (such as subjects of the United Kingdom). Rather, we mean the place of beings in terms of their meaning and value. In addition to exploring how meaning and value are assigned, it is worth understanding who is assigning such value and why.
Everything in the universe is a subject unto itself. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916/1998) pointed out that language influences us to forget this. The nouns we use are mere labels that group what are really unique entities. That which we name, put a signifier to, is not the thing itself, the signified. Calling my pet a cat merely associates the unique individual with a nonunique group. Even to tell you that his name is Leonidas, while allegedly pointing at his individuality, is actually another convenient and more specific way to point at him, not a way to encompass his meaning as a unique living being.
This idea about how we must be cautious and consider how words do this to us was not original to de Saussure. The Jewish faith expressed this concept in terms of God thousands of years ago. In their belief, the Word may be the sole means to know God, but there is no word that is the name of God. God is merely a label, a title. The faith is adamant that any word we use for God is a signifier, never the signified. We can see that demanding such a difference for what is sacred is valuable. Mere words cannot capture the sacredness that is in the living subject. Every living being is such a subject, and even nonliving entities often are better understood as subjects. This means that they have innate, self-contained meaning and value. They are who or what they are in a complete sense, without reference to others.
An object is anything that we use. To objectify is to render a subject into the value not in and of itself but into value for the use of others. For instance, a tree is a living being, and each one is a unique entity, a subject of its own. When someone looks at it and sees the lumber, they will get from it, the tree has been rendered into an object. Human beings are expert objectifiers. Anything or any person to whom we have access or even mere notice, we can objectify, and we most often do. Sometimes this is not harmful to the subject’s unique value, but quite often, it is. A word for objectification at the expense of the person or thing objectified, harmful to its subject nature, is exploitation.
A particular form of exploitation is commodification. This means understanding and using a being particularly as an economic object, as an item of exchange to realize profit. To say that the current problem is commodification means that we are in a situation in which every stakeholder, agent, and aspect is framed and treated in terms of a material exchange value rather than in terms of their self-meaning and value as subjects, as ends in themselves.
In schooling, we see this commodifying paradigm everywhere we look. It is there in the most direct and obvious ways, such as corporations seeking to make a profit from children’s needs in an entire range of ways, from curriculum materials to tests to vouchers to charter schools (Schneider, 2016). It is also there in less direct contexts, such as the application of all the facets of the business model to schooling and faith in quantitative measurement to capture education. The idea that schooling operates most effectively and efficiently when school is viewed as a paid service offered to parents as consumers is straight from the business model. Many school districts no longer have superintendents but, rather, chief executive officers who are atop the bureaucratic hierarchy and who often use business and economic terms such as return on investment when discussing policy. Within this sort of school-as-business, teachers are managed as laborers by applying standards and measurements and held “accountable” to the “outcomes” as determined by high-stakes standardized tests (Hall & Stahl, 2012; Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Ravitch, 2014; Stedman, 2011; Waldow, 2005; Webb et al., 2009). Also, the idea that the credential—a diploma or degree—is the ultimate goal of schooling because of its utility in getting a job stems from that model (Brewer & Potterton, 2020; Labaree, 1988, 1997a, 1997b; Maier, 2012). The assumption that competition is at the center of all human action, as the business world understands it, is presented as commonsensical and beyond question. The commodifying paradigm is necessary for the business model to seem applicable and for the logic to seem obvious. The commodifying paradigm is what makes the current schooling regime possible and to seem desirable.
The problem is not unique to schooling. Rather, it is a manifestation of the materialist cultural trend that launched in the 1980s in the United States and has permeated our society ever since. Most education scholars today identify the beginning of the standards and accountability movement as the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. This was a report from the U.S. Department of Education that was generated, in part, because President Reagan wished to dissolve the department and eliminate the secretary of education position from the cabinet. The report was dramatic in its language and heightened the drama by extensive misuse of data to paint an artificially dismal picture (Kamentz, 2018). However, it was not the first doomsaying evaluation of American schooling. It is just one of a string of critical reports and evaluations going back as far as the organization of the common schools in the 19th century. Even the recommendations that emerged from it, in and of themselves, were nothing novel. As Mehta (2013) describes, there were at least two other focused, long-term school reform efforts previously that relied upon similar mechanisms. The reason for today’s problem is not A Nation at Risk, but the singular grip on our schools obtained by one approach following it, a result of a shift in the culture that launched in the 1980s.
The election of Ronald Reagan reflected that the culture was changing, and the leadership of his administration spearheaded the movement. Reagan’s aphorism “greed is good” sums up the cultural change most succinctly. The cultural movement tied pre-1960s, dominant-culture values and mores to an ideology of extreme capitalist materialism—as espoused by, among others, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. This new conservatism was promoted not merely as an alternative set of ideas to add to the cultural conversation but rather as a cure for liberalism, which became shorthand for everything that stemmed from the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, both the enlightened elements and the misguided ones (Seib, 2020). Reagan (and, in the United Kingdom, Thatcher) conservatism claimed not to be the same old imperialist capitalism that had triggered the counterculture movements. It would not be the system that abused laborers and used genocide, slavery, racism, and sexism to make a few people vastly wealthy while producing “third-world nations,” two World Wars, and the Great Depression. Rather, it was a new form, as advertised by spokesmen such as Friedman, in which classical capitalism, and the elimination of government intervention, would lead to greater prosperity and choice for everyone on Earth. Forty years on, this approach has indeed spurred business to speculative heights that dwarf prior eras, as reflected in the stock and commodity market indices. It can be argued also that it has facilitated the increase in the world economic standard of living overall, although there are counterarguments that the same effect would have occurred without this cult of the market and commodification. It is certain that, rather than generate widespread prosperity, this approach has resulted in the concentration of wealth at levels unimaginable even to the robber barons at the turn of the prior century, as well as to consolidate privilege and maintain systemic oppressions, albeit in subtler forms than their prior incarnations (Pikkety, 2020). However, the story for schools has more to do with what this movement did to change what the culture takes for granted, to believe without question.
Relating this history highlights that the current paradigm of schooling is not inevitable or natural. Paradigm means the assumptions, beliefs, and values by which we interpret and construct. The model that has been in place for schooling, manifested as standards and accountability, corporate charter schools in our urban centers, and so on, comes from a paradigm singularly formed in the crucible of 1980s’ conservatism. It is not the way things always have been, nor the way things always have to be. This is important to assert because a frightening facet of the commodifying paradigm is how singular it has become. The language, the assumptions, and the values of that 1980s’ conservative movement have become the tacitly accepted norms of our world 40 years later (deMarrais et al., 2019). As they have worked their way past various forms of resistance, they have become not merely an argument for how we should proceed but also a set of assumptions that are unquestionable.
This is not the result of force in the Orwellian 1984 sense. At least it is not yet, although it might go that way. In the year of this writing, the president of the United States converted Homeland Security personnel into extralegal stormtroopers to attack peaceful protestors in Portland, Oregon, and created a commission and funding for an ideologically singular “patriotic” curriculum for the schools (Kanno-Young, 2020; Waxman, 2020). While part of the widespread compliance with commodification certainly has come from increased centralization of schooling policy and funding, up to this point, the new materialism had become a normalized state of affairs without much need for pressure from above.
Rather, it has crept in as the assumed reality, akin to the way society was made compliant in Huxley’s Brave New World. Much of it comes from the language and behaviors of those who had center stage for schooling matters over this time. While specific elements get described by those people, they have been careful never to label themselves as having a distinct philosophy or being a definite ideological group in their approach to schooling. This is key to having their approach normalized to become “common sense” or “the way things are.” They have presented themselves as merely practical and realistic and any alternatives as merely foolish or crazy. They monopolized the discourse without ever pointing it out as one possible discourse, so in accepting it, we lost sight of other possibilities. Foucault (1972) describes this phenomenon as an aspect of discourses: Not only do we frame all experience in terms of the discourse we have, but our imagination can also be locked up by them. In the absence of other discourses to refer to, what is outside our discourse remains outside of our reach, beyond our ability to imagine.
In prior eras, while essentialist views were usually the predominant ones in creating and carrying on schooling, they were part of a healthy back-and-forth with critical and opposing views not only from radical academics but within the policy community and schools themselves as well. There were alternative discourses through which to consider what would be the best schooling and what education really meant. This conversation and competition between approaches came to a standstill as we approached the current century and the federal government’s No Child Left Behind revision to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2001. Teacher unions joined into the commodifying paradigm, despite the majority of teachers not really believing in it. School administrators and boards got on the train as well, drawn by what Mehta (2015) calls “the allure of order.” Many academics, usually the more quantitatively inclined, clambered on as well, some because it fit their views and others to chase grant money.
This is how we came to where we are, locked in a prison of commodification of students, teachers, concepts, schooling, and education.
There are some opponents of the commodifying paradigm, although their views have been marginalized out of public schooling (for instance, the No Child Left Behind Act specified that only quantitative research could be considered in establishing best practices for teaching—qualitative research was explicitly forbidden from the conversation; see Denzin, Lincoln, and Giardina, 2011). The opponents have any number of labels for the monopolizing paradigm of commodification and its faces. Confusingly, they call it both neoconservative and neoliberal. Neoconservative refers to the renewal of a conservative focus on military and economic world domination as a central goal. Meanwhile, the term neoliberal does not refer to American liberalism but, rather, stems from the traditional British sense of the term: an ideology of open markets and free trade. To say that something is neoliberal is to identify it as ideologically extreme in its view that free markets are the answer to every question. Thus, it is quite likely for people and positions to be both neoconservative a...

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