Neoliberal Education and the Redefinition of Democratic Practice in Chicago

Kendall A. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319989495
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319989501
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

The book uses Chicago as a case study to examine the cultural politics surrounding neoliberal education policy in general and the concomitant alterations to democratic practice in particular. After juxtaposing the numerous failures of neoliberal education policy and the language of democratic norms used by those who continually double-down on these same policies, it examines four distinct but related policy arenas. Each chapter begins with a vignette of a particular example of the neoliberal education policy in action. Taken together, Taylor illuminates the anti-democratic nature of neoliberal education policy and the toll it takes on democratic practice in urban space. The book concludes with a discussion of what resistance might look like in spaces which co-opt democratic concepts for anti-democratic ends.

© The Author(s) 2018

Kendall A. TaylorNeoliberal Education and the Redefinition of Democratic Practice in ChicagoNew Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98950-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Democracy and the Doubling-Down of Neoliberal Reform Failure

Kendall A. Taylor¹

(1)

Hubert Humphrey Elementary School, Albuquerque, NM, USA

Kendall A. Taylor

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

In 2012, the movie “Won’t Back Down” arrived in theaters. It told the story of a Pittsburg working-class mother, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, willing to buck the leviathan of the public school system to ensure a better education for her children. She teams up with the only teacher at her children’s school, played by Viola Davis, willing to give up her cushy union protection and do what is right for the community and its students. Together they wage a grassroots fight against intractable unions, uncaring administration, and lazy teachers to take advantage of a “parent trigger” law. In the end, they encourage the community to vote for a charter organization to run their school and, hopefully, improve the educational opportunity for everyone in the school. Of course, the protagonists are successful in their endeavor and the movie ends with a shot of the school halls, bathed in sunlight and adorned with student artwork.

The filmmaker and its actors presented the movie as a classic David and Goliath story. Daniel Barnz, the film’s director, claimed “The movie is about how parents come together with teachers to transform a school for the sake of the kids” (Sperling 2012). In a likewise fashion, Maggie Gyllenhaal focuses on the growth of her character from a single mother, alone and afraid, into a political activist. She states, “Jamie [her character in the film] begins really not thinking of herself as a political person at all. Or a hero or an activist. Her actions are just based on her own need and her daughter’s need. That’s what’s particularly heroic about her. It’s not even about herself; it’s about her daughter. She gets activated and politicized and becomes… a hero” (Gensler 2012). The focus of the movie, say those involved, is on parents doing their best for their children against all odds. It is not about school reform in general; rather it is about a particular situation in which parents and teachers come together to do what is right for a particular group of students. It is meant to be an uplifting story premised on a small-scale vision of social justice and the democratic principles of inclusion and empowerment.

Signed into law in 2010, the parent trigger laws allow for a parent vote to alter the governance of a public school. Under the law, parents can vote to replace the staff and principal, close the school completely, or bring in a charter operator to manage the school (National Conference of State Legislatures). Although similar laws are on the books in seven states, only California parents have implemented the law to date. In each case, Parent Revolution , an organization started by Ben Austin, a former operative in the Democratic Party who served in the Clinton Administration, was instrumental in facilitating the law’s implementation. The organization sees the parent trigger law as a means toward the empowerment and democratization of public education. According to their mission statement, Parent Revolution works “to empower parents striving to improve their children’s organization” (Parent Revolution). They see themselves, then, as a social justice proponent, striving to release the stranglehold on education and return it to the rightful hands of parents and community.

The reality of the parent trigger laws , however, is quite different. The first school to implement the parent trigger was Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto California during the 2012–2013 school year. ¹ Its experience is instructive. The law is framed around a voting mechanism. A petition was sent around Desert Trails seeking support to implement the trigger law. In a school of 600 students, 286 parents signed the petition which met the simple majority required. The next step was a vote between the governance options. However, only parents who signed the petition were allowed to vote, immediately disenfranchising a large portion of parents. Disagreement and disillusionment with the process led many parents to ask for their petition signature to be removed. Parent Revolution took the issue to court, which decided that petition signatures are the same as a vote and cannot be rescinded (Watanabe 2012). After the discord which led to parents leaving or abstaining from the process, only 180 of the parents who signed the petition could be certified to vote and of those only 53 voted for a charter organization to take over the school. Although it is too early to determine if opening as a charter improved student education, the disruption to the community is evident. Chrissy Guzman, a parent at Desert Trails and president of Desert Trails Parent Teacher Association, reported that “the parent trigger process has left deep wounds in the Desert Trails community” and that “no one talks to each other now, no one wants to be associated with each other” (Ravitch 2013). She recalled strong-arm tactics, intrusive advertising and organizing by proponents of the law, and confusion surrounding the process. Similar complaints were numerous enough that the Los Angeles School Board is considering a proposal to seek and disseminate more information on the law for parents and community members so that these problems will not be repeated in the future (Watanabe 2013). In the end, the parent trigger law was implemented and a charter organization did take over the school, but the consequences of doing so were dire, destroying the parent solidarity which existed at the school. In short, the only winner was the charter organization whereas the school culture and parent community were the losers . ²

1.2 The Failure of Neoliberal Education Reform

In the case of Desert Trails, the promise of increased parent control and involvement led directly to the dissolution of the parent community. This contradiction between the promises of neoliberal education reform and the outcomes are not isolated to this school, but rather form an overarching storyline within education reform over the last two decades. ³ These reforms are exemplified by punitive accountability measures based on ever-increasing amounts of testing, merit-pay schemes and evaluation rubrics designed to increase competition between and within schools, a drive toward privatization based on school closings and ever more lenient charter school laws and the inclusion of greater numbers of charter school operators, shifts in governance as the business community and philanthropic organizations are sought for public/private ventures, the replacement of publicly elected boards of education by either city administration or business interests, and concerted union-busting measures designed to reduce resistance. Reforms based on neoliberal logic seek to redefine both the purpose and provision of education through a focus on structural rather than pedagogic issues. In short, they reposition the historical goals of education under a single economic rubric and, at the same time, facilitate a shift from government to governance in the school system (Ball 1994; Lipman 2011).

These reforms operate within a strikingly a-historical framework which ignores past failures and the lessons which these failures might teach. ⁴ This a-historicity presents itself in two ways. First, proponents of neoliberalism ignore the dismal track record of reform, continually doubling-down on the same reform calculus. Take school closings for example. School closings involve the loss of institutional knowledge as well as sites of community identity and solidarity. In addition, for students, hard-won relationships with teachers, administrators, staff, and other students are disrupted as students are displaced to other institutions of learning. Even so, the policy of closing failing schools is growing. Cities across the nation are using the policy in ever greater numbers and consulting firms specializing in closings schools now shop their services to districts across the country (see, for example, Boston Consulting Group). Or look at the accountability craze. While accountability itself is a noble goal, coupling accountability with a fanatical focus on testing has done nothing but make schools who were already struggling ever more vulnerable. Faced with punitive mandates for testing failure, schools and districts have truncated the curriculum to focus on tested subjects to the detriment of science, social studies, art, music, and language courses (David 2011). The net result is that a multitude of students are provided with an education which is both limited and of limited value (Saltman 2012). Yet, school districts and the federal government are continuing to subject students to more and more tests, all in the name of accountability. Yet another example is the creation of charter schools . Although research has shown that charter schools offer no statistically significant benefit over public schools in terms of education achievement (Cremeta et al. 2013), charter schools continue to be a popular avenue toward reform. Charter schools do not significantly alter the ‘grammar of schooling’ for their students and faculty but when they do, it tends to be focused on discipline, playing on the worst stereotypes of youth in need of control and containment, leading to much higher suspensions, expulsions, dropouts, and ‘pushouts’ (Ahmed-Ullah and Richards 2014). Beyond individual schools, partnerships with Educational Management Organizations (EMOs), the corporate arms of the charter movement which oversee large numbers of schools, have proved disastrous for school districts (Saltman 2005). Still, however, school districts and legislatures across the country push for and accept new charter applications and relationships with EMOs, as if this time it will be different. This list is by no means exhaustive. Public/private partnerships, shifts in governance, the inclusion of philanthropy in policy decisions (Lipman 2011) and rabid antiunionism (Compton and Weiner 2008) all follow the same pattern of failing as reform policies and still holding on to their cache as viable options for districts.

Second, in addition to ignoring its own track record, neoliberalism operates as if in a vacuum, ignoring the historical residue of past policies which have led to the very problems neoliberal proponents seek to solve. School failure has a very specific history in the US which is tied directly to previous policy choices. The system of education in the US is a conservative one. Historically education has been positioned strategically, allowing for the continuation of whichever set of social relations was existent at the time. Put more accurately, the education system has historically served systems of both patriarchy and white supremacy. Jefferson proposed an education system designed to both search out the best qualified (that is the best qualified among white land-owning men) to run the country while providing just enough learning for the citizenry to make reasonable choices in their leaders (Spring 2010a). The common school movement positioned education as a binding agent based on cultural acculturation, thus seeking to smooth over the discordance of increased immigration (Spring 2010a). Education was denied those held in slavery and used as an acculturation tool to control the native populations (Spring 2010a, b). The administrative progressive movement sought to solidify the control over school districts and curriculum through centralization, reliance on “expert” knowledge, and bureaucracy (Tyack 1974). Vocational education sutured the education system to the needs of the economy (Labaree 1997), and neoliberal education introduces competition, hyper-individualism, and punitive measures to ensure that edu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Democracy and the Doubling-Down of Neoliberal Reform Failure
• 2. Shifting Rationalities and Multiple Democracies: The New Meanings of Neoliberal Democracy
• 3. Differential Citizenship in Neoliberal Chicago: School Reform and the Production of Antidemocratic Space
• 4. A Strike by Any Other Name…: Democratic Education and the Language of Hegemony
• 5. The Dissolution of Trust: Coercion and Chicago’s Integral State
• 6. The Antidemocratic Dialectic: Democratic Practices Within Antagonistic Space and the Never-Ending Way Forward
• 7. Coda: DeVos and the Future of Neoliberal Education Reform and Resistance in Chicago
• Back Matter