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PART I
What Dreams Are Made Of
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1
EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
Hoping One Black Box Holds the Key to the Other
Brian Gearin
An ideological rift between Democrats and Republicans has been growing steadily since the end of World War II (Andris et al., 2015). It is often said that Democrats and Republicans now exist in ideological silos: they differ not only on political issues, but also in their core values, their personal preferences, and their media consumption habits (Pew Research Center, 2014). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans expressed unfavorable views of each other in 2016 (Pew Research Center, 2016). To find evidence of similar levels of political animosity in the United States, we would have to look to the time of the Civil War. Because of this political division, Congressional productivity has been historically low since 2011. As an article in The Atlantic aptly pointed out, the 114th Congress is one that cannot pass a budget, confirm political appointments, or even secure funds to combat the Zika virus (Ornstein, 2016). The 2016 Presidential election, meanwhile, has served as further evidence of the growing partisan divide. The victory of Donald Trump, and the success of the so-called âfringe candidateâ Bernie Sanders, suggest the ideological center is becoming a political no-manâs land.
Considering the growing ideological divide, what are we to make of the mostly bipartisan support federal education policy has enjoyed over the past decade? The three most influential federal education policies in recent history have been the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), the Race to the Top grant program (RTTT), and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2016 (ESSA). NCLB passed in the Senate with a 91 to 8 vote, receiving support from Senators ranging from Mitch McConnell, John Bohener, and John McCain on the right, to Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Joseph Biden on the left (Gov Track, 2001). The majority of the American public either supported RTTT or had no opinion about it in 2010 (Petersen, 2010). ESSA, meanwhile, a revised version of NCLB, passed in the Senate with a 81 to 17 vote (GovTrack, 2015) which news outlets and the Department of Education alike celebrated as âoverwhelmingâ bipartisan support (King, 2016; Layton, 2015).
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What accounts for the cooperation on education reform? Could it be that Congress cares so much about education that they have consistently put aside their differences to do whatâs right for American children? It is a pretty picture to imagine political adversaries coming together with Whitney Houstonâs The Greatest Love of All playing in the background, resolving that children are the future, and that America should teach them well and let them lead the way. However, goodwill can explain at most only a fraction of this trend. One of the underlying reasons why politicians can cooperate on education even when they cannot cooperate on most other issues is that Americans widely believe that education is the ticket to the âAmerican Dreamâ (Immerwahr & Foleno, 2000; Newport & Busteed, 2013). The fact that the American Dream is just thatâa dreamâfacilitates cooperation by serving as a space where imaginations can run wild (Labaree, 2012). Almost any education policy can be imagined in such a way that it will further the American Dream. Moreover, it can be imagined to function in such a way that it will somehow further both Democratic and Republican idealsâso long as theories of action are not considered in any detail.
By believing that education is the key to the American Dream, Americans have effectively come to believe that one black box contains the key to the other. This lack of clarity has allowed Congress and state legislatures to pass a series of incoherent policies that education reformers can proudly justify with incoherent rhetoric. The vague assertions made on behalf of specific reforms have broad appeal to a population which sees few other opportunities for upward mobility besides education. It is only once these policies begin to be implemented that their incoherent nature becomes apparent. Backlashes against the policies follow, and they fail to live up to the rhetoric used to justify them.
To illustrate the illogic that has been driving American education reform for the past three decades, this chapter begins by analyzing Secretary of Education Arne Duncanâs (2010) speech, âEducation and International Competition: The Win-Win Game.â This speech is representative of the fuzzy thinking that permeates American education reform. It makes bold claims that are attractive and inspiring, but that are ultimately self-contradictory. The chapter then considers Americaâs Global Education Reform Movement-type policies (i.e., NCLB and RTTT) and explains how the same illogic that seems to drive Duncanâs speech doomed these policies to failure before they were even implemented. The chapter concludes by suggesting that if the United States is ever going to institute effective education reform, its people need to come to grips with some hard truths about the future of the American Dream, and what schools (as they currently exist) can be reasonably expected to do to achieve it. Specifically, they need to understand that the American tendency to view education as a potential panacea for its social and economic problems is a barrier to meaningful change.
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Education and the American Dream
The idea that American education reform has been an inherently flawed enterprise since at least the 1980s is not new. Neither is the idea that reform tends to fail because both the American Dream and education itself are vague abstractions. Scholars have been making variations of this argument for the past 20 years (Hursh, 2007; Labaree, 2012; Mehta, 2015; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Unfortunately, their warnings have largely been ignored. To summarize the thrust of their arguments, Americaâs approach to education reform underwent some major shifts during the Reagan presidency. Although Americans have long perceived a connection between education and economic success (Labaree, 2012), the federal report âA Nation at Riskâ (Gardner, 1983) catalyzed a shift whereby it was increasingly taken for granted that the central purpose of education was to promote individual and national economic competitiveness (Hursh, 2007). Moreover, this economic purpose of education took on existential importance. The very future of the country depended on its ability to improve educational outcomes: Hordes of faceless foreign children were threatening to take jobs away from American children, and hostile nations were threatening to out-develop the United States in technological weaponry. By 2001 and the passage of NCLB, it was no longer totally absurd to imply that a child failing a reading test in third grade was essentially the same as a soldier dying on the Beaches of Normandy. Failure in school was a threat to both the childâs existence and his nationâs security.
Why did this shift take place? It is generally agreed that the shift had something to do with the Cold War, the triumph of Western political and economic systems, and an array of challenges surrounding racial integration. We need not concern ourselves with the specifics: others have already discussed the shift in detail (Bracey, 2003; Hursh, 2007; Labaree, 2012; Mehta, 2015; Olssen & Peters, 2005). What needs to be emphasized here is that this shift was ultimately (a) bipartisan in nature, and (b) based on faulty reasoning. These points can be most quickly illustrated with a rhetorical analysis of a speech by Secretary Duncan, one of the most influential education policymakers in the twenty-first century.
Duncan, who served in the cabinet of President Barack Obama, illustrates the illogic that has driven education reform over the past few decades in a speech entitled, âEducation and International Competition: The Win-Win Game.â Throughout the speech, Duncan frequently appeals to upward mobility. Given that upward mobility is one of the few educational outcomes Americans universally desire for their children, it is understandable that it is a central theme in his speech. However, this ideal is no more attainable than the idea that all children can be above average. From the point of view of the state, this is a major problem. The only way the government can deliver this version of the American Dream is by ignoring or even subverting the American Dream as it is actually imagined by individual citizens (Scott, 1998). That is, the government must either pretend that I do not want my children to get ahead of yours, and then create the illusion that it is helping both my children and yours get ahead; or it has to commit to helping one family more than the other. This is the tightrope that Duncan is trying to walk.
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Equity and Achievement: A Win-Win Proposition?
Duncan begins his speech by stating his thesis which I must reproduce in full. He claims,
(October 19, 2010)
There are several points to emphasize about Duncanâs opening. First, he positions himself in opposition to voters and policymakers given to a Cold War zero-sum logic. Second, he does not bother to define âinternational competitionâ or âeducational achievement.â Third, he alludes to trickle-down economics by claiming that improving educational achievement will âgrow the economic pieâ and that international competition is a win-win scenario. Fourth, he makes no claims about causal processes. Instead, he simply states that education and economic competition will provide the United States with access to well-educated immigrants and a demand for American products abroad. It is important to note that he does not describe how this will happen by improving education, or how these outcomes would benefit the average American or foreign nationals.
After his opening, Duncan transitions into an anecdote in which President Barack Obama has an exchange with President Lee Myung-Bak of South Korea, the leader of a country with âone of the worldâs best-educated workforces and fastest-growing economies.â Duncan relates how President Obama asked President Lee what South Koreaâs biggest education challenge was. Lee unhesitating replied, âThe biggest challenge I have is that my parents are too demanding.â
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Duncan then laments, âI wish my biggest challengeâthat Americaâs biggest educational challengeâwas too many parents demanding academic rigor. I wish parents were beating down my doors, demanding a better education for their children, now!â Duncan goes on to say:
(October 19, 2010)
Duncanâs rhetorical crossover here could break Lebron Jamesâ ankles. Despite opening his speech by positioning himself in opposition to policymakers and voters stuck in a Cold War mindset, his anecdote situates America as the loser in a race against other industrialized nations, thereby employing the very Cold War logic he only just critiqued (Tröhler, 2014). He also implies that educational attainment is in fact a zero-sum game, or at the very least a positive-sum game where rewards are distributed asymmetrically. This is not to say that Duncan is wrong to frame education this way (see Condron, 2011; Van de Werfhorst & Mijs, 2010, for instance). However, the possibility of losers in this global competition raises questions about what he meant by international competition being âa win-win game.â It also contradicts appeals that he makes later in the speech to educational equity. For instance, Duncan proceeds to rattle off some comparative education statistics that indicate that âWe stagnated, we lost our wayâand others literally passed us by.â These figures include Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings which will not be repeated here because they stand in defiance of research highlighting the danger in using them for off-hand policy prescriptions (Rutkowski & Delandshere, 2...