Schooling in the Age of Austerity

Urban Education and the Struggle for Democratic Life

A. Means

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137032041, 9781137032034
• eBook ISBN: 9781137032058
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Through a case study in a Chicago public school, Means demonstrates that, despite the fragmentation of human security in low-income and racially segregated public schools, there exist positive social relations, knowledge, and desire for change that can be built upon to promote more secure and equitable democratic futures for young people.

Part I

Neoliberal Schooling and the Politics of Security

1

Securing Precarious Urban Futures

Security reasoning entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turn itself terroristic . . . Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics.

—Giorgio Agamben, “Security and Terror”

September 11, 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008 mark two transformative moments in the politics of security in the United States. On one hand, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 ushered in a stunning expansion of state security. We saw this in the passage of the USA Patriot Act; the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; the pursuit of the global War on Terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond; and the diversion of trillions of public dollars into the war industry and projects of domestic surveillance and policing. On the other hand, ongoing instabilities in global capitalism and continued fallout from the 2008 economic crisis have made visible a stark erosion of social and material security in contemporary life. While Wall Street and the corporate sector have resumed minting new billionaires and posting record profits (the top 1% now has a higher net worth than the bottom 90%), millions have been left with foreclosed homes, debilitating debt, vanishing jobs, and stagnating wages. Concurrently, a regressive politics of disinvestment and austerity continues to hollow-out commitments to public infrastructure, health care, child development, education, and labor and environmental protections further eroding the basis for securing human well-being and the future.

These developments signal an erosion of human security in late modern life that Feldman, Geisler, and Menon (2011) have identified as a crisis of social reproduction—that is, those “historically contingent processes by which we reproduce the conditions and relations of economic and social security” (p.2). This concerns not only “the physical integrity of our bodies, but also the methods by which we reproduce ourselves as political subjects—that is, the relations of rule we legitimate” (p. 2). As primary sites of social reproduction, schools have played a formative historical role in socializing and sorting young people into their future adult roles as workers and citizens. This process has always been contingent upon the demands of the market, property, and power relations immanent to a capitalist society (Bowles & Gintis, 2011). It has also always been a highly contradictory and contested process. Public school systems and schools themselves have historically operated to discipline and track youth disadvantaged by class and color toward the lower end of the employment structure or out of the formal economy altogether. However, while imperfect and at times oppressive, public schools have also functioned as sites where all young people, regardless of their social position, might develop their human potential and civic awareness in ways that prepare them for social and democratic engagement and ultimately unpredictable futures.

In this chapter, I examine the traffic between present articulations of security and urban educational change under neoliberal governance. I argue that expansionary processes of marketization, state security, and social control are eroding social democratic commitments and contributing to a crisis of human security in urban schooling. First, I discuss how neoliberal political economy and governance reframe questions of security from a social democratic paradigm to a market paradigm.¹ Second, I highlight extant patterns of social polarization, precariousness, aggressive policing, and criminalization in the neoliberal city. In the following sections, I bring these ideas into conversation with educational policy in the United States since the 1980s and explore the transformation of urban public schooling alongside current social conditions facing youth. In the final section, I highlight tensions in the historic socializing functions of public schooling in relation to the security of young people and their future.

Neoliberalism and Security Politics

The problem of neoliberalism is how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of the market economy. So it is not a question of freeing an empty space, but of taking the formal principles of a market economy and referring and relating them to, and projecting them onto a general art of government.

—Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics²

Neoliberalism is a term widely used in the social sciences to describe recent transformations in state restructuring and social life under globalization and advanced capitalism. It has been associated with the rejection of Keynesian economics and social democratic policy; the generalization of market logics and the commodity-form to all aspects of governance and daily life; and the deregulation of national economies and global trade under transnational institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. With the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, neoliberal ideology—a revamped form of classical economic liberalism—emerged out of neoconservative think tanks, corporate foundations, and academic departments such as the Chicago school of economics to become the driving intellectual and political force of the emergent global era. After the fall of the Soviet Union and “actually existing socialism” in 1989, Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “There is No Alternative” was broadly enshrined as accepted wisdom.

The political economy of neoliberal development is often associated with the crisis of Fordism in the early 1970s (Duminél & Lévy, 2004, 2011 Harvey, 2003, 2005). Fordism (1914–1973) is typically characterized as a mode of political economic organization that peaked in the post–World War II era. It was defined by national systems of standardized industrial production, the Keynesian mediation of labor conflicts and business cycles by the state, and social democratic commitments to public institutions and social investments within nationally bound projects of social and civic identification. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fordism entered a period of structural crisis due to growth stagnation, spiking energy costs, and falling profits. This was aggravated by widespread discontent over entrenched inequality and a wave of social unrest—civil rights, labor, feminist, and transnational anti-imperialist movements. These economic and social tensions provided rationale and context for the turn to post-Fordism, or what Harvey (1990) has referred to as “flexible accumulation”—a series of capitalist class strategies meant to offset the crisis under Fordism and return the system to profitability and growth, principally via market and labor deregulation along with opening up and colonizing new sites for profit-making across global space and time.

The shift to post-Fordism thus signals the emergence of the current phase of world capitalist development, or neoliberal globalization. This has been defined by the enhanced global mobility of production and capital across borders; extensive deregulation and the dismantling of welfare state protections; the reorganization and cheapening of labor on a global scale (outsourcing, automation, free trade/labor zones, reliance on temporary “flexible” contracting); and vast innovations in communications technologies and speculative finance. Over the last three decades, these economic and state transformations have opened up new spheres for capital largely through new deregulatory regimes and the privatization of public infrastructures signaling a new round of enclosures of the global commons in areas like health and education, utilities, transportation, communications, land, and natural resources (Mansfield, 2008).³ This has produced extensive uneven development marked by historic concentrations of wealth and power at the top of the global class structure and deepening social inequality across the global division of labor (today the richest 50 individuals in the world have a combined income greater than the poorest 416 million; 2.5 billion people—or 40% of the world’s population—live on less than $2 a day, while 54% of global income goes to the richest 10% of the world’s population). Further, the global economic crisis and recession have revealed new systemic instabilities for capitalism and a crisis of legitimation for the neoliberal project. This is visible in an eruption of protests from Cairo to London, Athens to New York, Santiago to Montreal, that have opposed the continued degradation of publics, people, and the environment across the Global North and South while advocating for a more just and democratic vision for the future (McNally, 2011).

Neoliberalism can be situated as the intellectual and political architecture that has underpinned much of this broader political economic landscape. In his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, Michel Foucault (2008) identified the emergent free market discourse as a distinct form of governmentality by which he meant an ensemble of institutional, legal, cultural, and political practices and rationalities marking out the broader terrain of governance.⁴ For Foucault, governmentality is both material, in the sense that it works within and through concrete activities (production, finance, trade, law, education, policing, etc.), and symbolic, in the sense that it is derived from as well as influences perceptions, values, and the social production of meaning and understanding. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism can be understood as implicated not only in global processes but in variable local transformations in everyday life including senses of self, ways of being, and the organization of sociality and community.

In his 1978–1979 lectures entitled “The Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault traced the development of neoliberal governmentality from the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson in the eighteenth century, through the postwar German Ordoliberals, to thinkers associated with the Chicago school of economics such as Milton Freidman and Friedrich von Hayek. In short, neoliberal rationalities take as given the natural efficiency and ethical neutrality of the market and the supposed inefficiency and corruption of the public sector. Here, all social relations from environmental protection, education, health and child care, to conceptions of democratic and civic engagement can and should be brought under the competitive domain of the market and the supposedly rational economic decision-making capacity of the individual citizen, who is recast as an entrepreneurial-consumer citizen. While neoliberalism rejects the Keynesian era diagram of a social democratic state operating to regulate capitalism and provide a modicum of security against its most destructive tendencies, it actively recruits the state to restructure society along economic lines. It does so by incorporating market logic into all aspects of governance and by creating markets where they previously did not exist. Synthesizing Foucault’s approach, Wendy Brown (2005) has suggested that neoliberalism represents a normative and constructivist political project that has emerged as a powerful form of “commonsense” across the political spectrum informing policy, culture, and everyday lived experience: “a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one that produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social” (p. 37).

This brief analysis concerning the intersection of neoliberal political economy and governance has profound repercussions for how we understand relations of security and human insecurity in the contemporary moment. For Foucault (2007), security was an essential element in the art of liberal government as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While sovereignty is concerned primarily with the rule of law, security is concerned with the management and regulation of populations—or what Foucault referred to as biopolitics—processes whereby some lives and forms of life are made more or less valuable than others.⁵ Under neoliberalism, security is privatized and desocialized. This means that risk and responsibility are increasingly transferred from the state and the public sphere onto individuals and communities as social provisions are cut and public infrastructures are deregulated and commodified. If security was once primarily imagined within a set of public values containing certain economic and social rights, protections, and responsibilities under Keynesian liberalism (however inadequate or problematic this may have been in practice), under neoliberalism, it is conceived largely in terms of market values, the privatization of risk and responsibility, and the criminalization of poverty and social insecurity.

Within this atomized vision of the social, what Ulrich Beck (1991) has referred to as the “risk society,” citizens are positioned primarily as entrepreneurial consumers who are held solely responsible and morally culpable for their own security and well-being regardless of the circumstances. Zygmunt Bauman (1999, 2001) has noted that as social democratic referents of security recede in the neoliberal consumer society, individuals must engage in hypercompetitive strategies of acquiring private security such as pursuing constant educational retraining, consumer lifestyle distinctions, and various forms of self-help so as to maximize personal fitness and market value while effectively outcompeting their rivals in an increasingly precarious and transient employment structure. This is reinforced by an array of cultural phenomena in mass media that celebrates market values and consumer identifications such as Oprah-inflected pop-psychology (If I just believe in me, I will prosper!), to Darwinian “reality” television shows, mass corporate advertising, and 24/7 news cycles. The inability of individuals and communities to meet normative criteria for entrepreneurial and consumer engagement can lead to the further withdrawal of state and social supports as they are viewed in neoconservative discourse as moral failings that breed “pathology” and “dependency” (Fraser & Gordon, 1996). In turn, social insecurity and abjection, particularly for economically and racially marginalized populations, become viewed as the private problems of failed individuals and communities as opposed to public problems and broader social concerns. This marks out divisions between affiliated consumers and dishonored populations of suspicion and criminality (Rose, 1996). Such divisions signal authoritarian tendencies inherent to neoliberal governance, where forms of social dislocation give way to state interventions aimed at policing those zones and identities perceived as threatening and/or as redundant to the global economic order (Dean, 2007).

Despite rhetorical commitments to “small government,” neoliberal governance has been marked by a significant expansion of state power. Pierre Bourdieu (1999) describes this as the simultaneous erosion of the state’s “left arm,” or social functions, and the expansion of its “right arm”—those capacities concerned with security, punishment, and policing. While the Keynesian state operated to regulate the market, under neoliberalism the market becomes the internal regulator of the state, reducing its role in social reproduction while expanding its security and disciplinary capacities. Harvey (2003, 2005) details how neoliberal formations have thus been inseparable from neoconservative politics and the new imperialism. For instance, in structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank, WTO, and IMF, where nations across the Global South have been made subject to coercive debt arrangements that enable greater transnational corporate control over their markets and natural resources. It is also visible in the Bush and Obama administrations’ efforts to retrench civil liberties, skirt the Geneva Conventions, engage in torture, and pursue extralegal detentions and drone-strike executions outside the rule of law as part of the global war on terrorism. Furthermore, as demonstrated by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Wall Street bailouts and turn to austerity, neoliberal capitalism relies on a strong state in order to ameliorate market failure while downwardly distributing fiscal austerity, debt, and risk onto an insecure and fragmented public sphere. Lastly, neoliberal governance has signaled an oppressive domestic law and order turn based on aggressive policing and mass incarceration as primary state strategies of social regulation of the poor and disenfranchised (Wacquant, 2009). As Harvey (2006) observes, “public-private partnerships are favored in which the public sector bears all of the risk and the corporate sector reaps all of the profit. Business interests get to write legislation and to determine public policies . . . if necessary the state will resort to coercive legislation . . . surveillance and policing multiply” (p. 26).

Securing the Revanchist City

As I have outlined above, the emergence of neoliberalism as a dominant political rationality has come to frame issues of security in specific kinds of ways. On one hand, individuals are increasingly made personally responsible and culpable for their own private security regardless of their social condition. On the other hand, as public values and social commitments fade in the neoliberal consumer society, the state has limited its involvement in social reproduction and extended its role in social control and policing. The contemporary city is a key staging ground for these trends. The urban sphere plays an increasingly central role in managing the flows of finance, technology, information, and labor that are the lifeblood of globalization. It is also a prime site for the implementation of neoliberal logic. Moreover, cities are also contested sites where the global and local coalesce in the everyday and where dominant sociopolitical processes intersect with various forms of cultural agency, identity formation, and democratic contestation. In this section, I outline the extension of market governance, social polarization, and the production of criminalized spaces of social insecurity and securitized containment in the urban sphere.

Neoliberal urbanism can be characterized as a general trend toward the “rolling back” of social democratic policy regimes and the “rolling out” of entrepreneurial and market-based governance (Cronin & Hetherington, 2008; Peck & Tickel, 2002). Liberal urban policy of the 1950s and 1960s was defined by strong commitments to public management, public oversight over capital and the rights of labor, and basic redistributive aims designed to promote economic development and ameliorate urban blight and poverty through investments in welfare programs, job training, and urban renewal. While this social democratic paradigm remained rooted in racial, gender, and class inequality and often contributed to the very problems it attempted to address, it nevertheless provided a set of referents for conceiving an urban social contract defined by commitments to collective security and human welfare. In contrast, Brenner and Theodore (2002) note that neoliberal policies have been characterized by:

the deregulation of state control over major industries, assaults on organized labor, the reduction of corporate taxes, the shrinking and/or privatization of public services, the dismantling of welfare programs, the enhancement of international capital mobility, the intensification of interlocality competition, and the criminalization of the urban poor. (p. 3)

Brenner and Theodore observe that “actually existing neoliberalism”—neoliberalism in practice as opposed to its rhetorical and/or doctrinal assertions—represents a contradictory process that manifests in uneven ways in specific geographical, institutional, and social contexts. On one hand, this has involved efforts to transform urban space an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Schooling in a Time of Crisis and Austerity
• Part I   Neoliberal Schooling and the Politics of Security
• Part II   Narratives of Enclosure and Possibility
• Conclusion: Public Schooling for a Common Security
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index