The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education : Can Hope Audaciously Trump Neoliberalism? [1 ed.] 9781617354526, 9781617354502

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The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education Can Hope Audaciously Trump Neoliberalism?

A volume in Critical Constructions: Studies on Education and Society Curry Stephenson Malott, Series Editor

Critical Constructions: Studies on Education and Society Curry Stephenson Malott Series Editor Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-First Century: A New Generation of Scholars Edited by Curry Stephenson Malott and Bradley Porfilio Parental Choice? A Critical Reconsideration of Choice and the Debate about Choice By P. L. Thomas

The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education Can Hope Audaciously Trump Neoliberalism?

Edited by

Paul R. Carr Lakehead University

Brad J. Porfilio Lewis University

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for education : can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? / edited by Paul R. Carr, Brad J. Porfilio. p. cm. -- (Critical constructions: studies on education and society) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61735-450-2 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61735-451-9 (hardcover) -ISBN 978-1-61735-452-6 (e-book) 1. Obama, Barack. 2. Government aid to education. 3. Neoliberalism. I. Carr, Paul R. II. Porfilio, Bradley J. LB2341.98.P45 2011 379.1’1--dc22                            2011012500

Copyright © 2011 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to My long-lost cousins, Paul and Ellen —PRC To Barbara, my mother —BJP

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Early praise for The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education: Can Hope Audaciously Trump Neoliberalism?

The times call for audacious and courageous responses to an education reform agenda that, sadly even under President Obama, embodies standardization, privatization, and competition at the expense of equity and a democratic vision of education. The authors of The Phenomenon of Obama offer such a response and bring us back to the true purpose of education: to nurture teaching and learning, collaboration, community, and social justice. —Sonia Nieto Professor Emerita University of Massachusetts, Amherst *  *  * Waiting for Superman? Two years into the Obama administration, broad swaths of the youth and liberal set that hoped they had elected a man of steel to office in order to end the high crimes of the Bush-Cheney gang now recognize they voted in President Bizarro instead. Yet those who aren’t ready to simply hand the schools over to Arne Duncan and his corporate cronies now likewise seem happily poised to watch Diane Ravitch, a longtime foe of the educational Left, play public school’s version of Wonder Woman. Paul Carr and Brad Porfilio’s book is thus a desperately necessary shot of critical democratic sobriety on the confusing politics of U.S. public education. More than ever before, we need this type of serious institutional analysis, not mythmaking media points, if we are to dare a new social order (either with the schools or without them). —Richard Kahn Education Department Antioch University, Los Angeles *  *  * Who should read this book? Anyone who is touched by public education— teachers, administrators, teacher-educators, parents, politicians, and pundits—ought to read this book. It will speak to educators, policymakers, and citizens who are concerned about the future of education and its relation to a robust, participatory democracy. The perspectives offered by a wonderfully diverse collection of contributors provide a glimpse into the complex, multilayered factors that shape, and are shaped by, institutions of schooling

today. The analyses presented in this text are critical as globalization and neoliberalism exert increasing levels of control over the public institutions meant to support the common good. Readers of this book will be well prepared to participate in the dialogue that will influence the future of public education in this nation—a dialogue that must seek the kind of change that represents hope for all students. —Julie A. Gorlewski Faculty of Education SUNY, New Paltz *  *  * The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education provides a justified critical analysis of the antidemocratic education reform initiatives being launched by powerful elites in the United States. In times of increasing social, economic, and educational inequality, the sharp critique offered by this volume is one part lament, one part righteous indignation, and totally necessary. —Wayne Au Editor, Rethinking Schools Faculty of Education University of Washington–Bothell Campus *  *  * This urgently needed collection exposes the neoliberal architecture of the Obama administration’s initiatives within and beyond education. These careful essays describe the economic, political, and philosophical formations underlying this administration’s market-driven approaches to teaching and learning, as well as revealing the ideological strategies through which elites sell their one-sided policies to the public. Carr and Porfilio have compiled an engaging and indispensable resource for researchers, educators, and activists interested in understanding and confronting the contemporary corporatization and instrumentalization of education. —Noah De Lissovoy Faculty of Education University of Texas, Austin *  *  * The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education is an important contribution to the discussion of educational policy in the United States. It is also an antidote to the oversimplification of mainstream discussions of educational policy and reform.

Together, the contributors offer a wide-ranging discussion of the Obama administration’s approach to education that considers historical, economic, and political contexts, and makes space for a range of voices to be heard. The compilation not only presents a thought-provoking critique of the Obama administration’s approach to educational policy but fervently advocates for an equitable educational system and society. Using multiple levels of analysis, The Phenomenon of Obama showcases the too-often ignored voices in national (and local) policy debates and reveals not only what is misguided about Obama’s educational policies but makes a loud and impassioned call for socially just public education in the United States. By pushing the reader to challenge simplistic notions of evaluating education by what it can provide to the capitalist system and looking past the rhetoric of accountability to uncover the more complex motives that drive current educational policy, the book boldly challenges any reader to think deeply about what a fair and good public education ought to be about. I recommend The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education to anyone who wants to better understand what most media is failing to critique when it comes to educational reform. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the Obama administration’s educational agenda from the campaign through Race to the Top, exploring the ways current educational policy has embraced an economically focused agenda and what this really means for students, teachers, parents, and everyone concerned about education in America. —Carrie Freie Faculty of Education Penn State, Altoona

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Contents Acknowledgements............................................................................... xv Foreword: Challenging the Empire’s Agenda for Education.......... xvii Christine E. Sleeter Introduction: Audaciously Espousing Hope Within a Torrent of Hegemonic Neoliberalism: The Obama Educational Agenda and the Potential for Change.............................................................xxi Paul R. Carr and Brad J. Porfilio

Sect i o n I Using Historical and Theoretical Insights to Understand Obama’s Educational Agenda 1 More of the Same: How Free Market-Capitalism Dominates the Economy and Education................................................................. 3 David Hursh 2 Concocting Crises to Create Consent: The Importance of “The Shock Doctrine” to Understanding Current Educational Policy................................................................................ 23 Virginia Lea 3 Educational Hope Ignored Under Obama: The Persistent Failure of Crisis Discourse and Utopian Expectations...................... 49 P. L. Thomas 4 Competing Definitions of Hope in Obama’s Education Marketplace: Media Representations of School Reform, Equality, and Social Justice.................................................................. 73 Rebecca A. Goldstein, Sheila Macrine, Nataly Z. Chesky, and Alexandra Perry

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Sect i o n I I The Perils of Neoliberal Schooling: Critiquing Corporatized Forms of Schooling and a Sober Assessment of Where Obama is Taking Us 5 Charting a New Course for Public Education Through Charter Schools: Where is Obama Taking Us?................................................ 97 Mary Christianakis and Richard Mora 6 Manufactured Consent: Latino/a Themed Charter Schools, in Whose Interests?............................................................................ 121 Theresa Montaño and Lynne Aoki 7 Whose Schools are These Anyway—American Dream or Nightmare? Countering the Corporate Takeover of Schools in California........................................................................................ 147 Roberta Ahlquist 8 Obama, Escucha! Estamos en la Lucha! Challenging Neoliberalism in Los Angeles Schools.............................................. 169 Theresa Montaño 9 Standardized Teacher Performance Assessment: Obama/Duncan’s Quick Fix for What They Think it is That Ails Us........................................................................................ 187 Ann Berlak 10 The Political Economy of Educational Restructuring: On the Origin of Performance Pay and Obama’s “Blueprint” for Education...................................................................................... 211 Mark Garrison

Sect i o n II I Envisioning New Schools and a New Social World: Stories of Resistence, Hope, and Transformation 11 The Education Agenda is a War Agenda: Connecting Reason to Power and Power to Resistance..................................................... 227 Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross

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12 Connecting Communities and Schools: Accountability in the Post-NCLB Era.................................................................................... 249 Tina Wagle and Paul Theobald 13 If There is Anyone Out There . . ....................................................... 265 Peter McLaren Afterword: Working the Contradictions: The Obama Administration’s Educational Policy, and Democracy Will Come........................................................................................... 287 Dennis Carlson Biographies......................................................................................... 299

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Acknowledgements We would like to thank Christine Sleeter, Peter McLaren, Dennis Carlson, and the contributors to this book for their unwavering support, scholarship, and cultural work over the past several years. We are grateful to Shirley Steinberg, who has offered many insights and guidance, which has helped influence our thinking in shaping this book. Brad: I would also thank Laurie P. Hoffman and Jan Mines for supporting the academic programs, scholarship, and cultural work designed to challenge institutional injustices, promote diversity, and foster social justice and equity in schools and in society. Paul: I graciously thank Deborah Mower, Armando Labra, Bruno Malapou, and Jim Crawford, who offered friendship and engaging debate during my tenure at Youngstown State University, and also Mohamed Jadun and his staff at YSU for the infinite things they did to assist me in my scholarship. In Canada, I have received unwavering support from colleagues at Lakehead University (Orillia), and inspiration from, literally, the little people in my life, namely Noah and Luka. Chelsea and Sarah remain a guiding light for my work. Lastly, David Curtis was instrumental in finalizing the manuscript. We are also both very grateful for the support we have received from our families, and, in particular, our partners, Gina and Shannon. —Paul R. Carr and Brad J. Porfilio

The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, page xv Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Foreword

Challenging the Empire’s Agenda for Education Christine E. Sleeter

Shortly after President Barack Obama’s historic inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, I was commiserating with friends about the slowness of withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, his administration’s escalation of war in Afghanistan, and his policy of continuing the United States’ amorphous “War on Terror.” We were puzzled over his administration’s growing warmth toward health care reforms based on private insurance companies rather than a public system. We voiced perplexity at his education reform policies that continued Bush’s emphasis on charter schools rather than funding equity across schools and communities, and testing and standardization rather than contextually relevant and intellectually rich teaching for everyone. Then one friend put these concerns in perspective by pointing out that, after all, Barack Obama is now “President of the Empire.” And indeed, the United States is an imperial power first and foremost, and has always been so. The nation was born of British imperialism, its territories were/are acquired through imperialist wars and other forms of pressure and violence, and its government has always pursued an aggressive policy of expansionism in order to establish an “American” economic and political vision around The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages xvii–xx Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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the globe. While most U.S. citizens strongly deny the imperial agenda that fuels and frames U.S. policies at home and abroad, William Appleman Williams (1991) asserted that any such “intellectual, political, and psychological confusion” would likely be rooted in “our ahistorical faith that we are not and never have been an empire” (p. 72). In The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, Paul R. Carr and Brad Porfilio bring together a series of incisive essays that directly confront the realities of empire hiding behind slogans of “change” and “hope.” The purpose of the essays is not so much to critique Obama personally, but rather to draw attention to the powerful mechanisms of empire that shape the office of the president, and policies that flow from that office. Indeed, the voices behind change and hope indicate real human needs, such as access to good health care, access to work that pays decently, the rebuilding of schools and other public infrastructure, and ending exclusion by profiling (by race to deport immigrants, by sexual orientation to expel military workers). These are needs that Barack Obama as a community organizer faced more directly than probably any other U.S. president. But they have been displaced by the mechanisms of empire (both internal colonialism and external empire), corporate power to continue to build and maintain that empire, and fear of losing racial power among many whites. Merlin Stone’s (1981) insightful analysis of how empire based on racism works is useful. Stone explained that the underlying purpose of racism is economic: “the theft of land, property, resources and/or labour from people of a racial or ethnic group other than one’s own” (p. 2), which is initially accomplished through forms of violence that include “unprovoked aggression, invasion, full scale war” (p. 3). Theft is justified by the first stage of cultural racism (the belief system used to rationalize economic racism), which is to assert that “the victims of theft are innately immoral, even innately evil” (p. 3), giving the aggressor moral justification framed as “betterment” for humankind. Indeed, as Petras (2002) pointed out, during the first decade of the 2000s, “U.S. empire building has largely focused on military conquest, threats of regional wars and a massive enlargement of clandestine military and intelligence operations” (para 1). This empirebuilding is justified through discourse claiming a clash of civilizations in which Christianity and U.S.-style democracy are held up as morally superior to Islam and the cultures of the Middle East, while denying that U.S. policies have provoked retaliation. Empire-building is also propped up by discourse that attributes wealth in the United States to hard work rather than to exploitation. Stone explained that the second stage of economic racism involves consolidating long-term control through a variety of processes such as rewriting laws, and regulating and training subdued populations for the role of laborers. Writing about empire today, Petras (2002) highlights the role of U.S.

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economic pressure, often through diplomatic channels (such as the World Trade Organization), to maintain control over international policies that might interfere with wealth accumulation and U.S. military presence. In this second stage, the substance of cultural racism shifts from a discourse of moral inferiority to “the assertion that the members of the subjugated population are mentally inferior, e.g., less able to learn, less inventive, less creative, less motivated” (Stone, 1981, p. 4). Subjugated peoples are best controlled when they internalize “the conquerors’ assertions of their own superiority” (pp. 4–5). When they rebel, they are repressed with violence. Thus, at home we can understand policies and practices such as massive incarceration and lawful racial segregation as control mechanisms, justified on the basis of assumptions about cultures of violence in poor communities. The election of President Obama, like other historic events such as the Civil Rights Movement, can be viewed as a brief destabilization of a racebased empire. At least, as Will Bunch (2010) details in The Backlash, that is the way many white Americans have viewed it. In response, whites rapidly organized “tea party” politics, while denying that race has anything to do with it. Thus, Obama’s policies, rather than confronting systemic racism, shrinking the apparatus of empire, and placing more regulations on capitalism, take the form of fear management as they attempt to reshape actions that would address concerns of subjugated communities, so they align with those advocated by whites and by neoliberal corporate elites. The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education elaborates cogently on the implications of these processes for education. Chapters analyze issues such as corporate manipulation of public opinion, linkages between education and war policies, and escalating privatization of and control over education. Clearly, education policies are following a neoliberal agenda that links the purpose of schooling with expanding U.S. global hegemony, and uses public moneys not to equalize spending on schools across communities, but rather to secure compliance with neoliberal reform policies. Education policies over the past 2 decades have shifted to control curriculum at both the K–12 and teacher-preparation levels, reining in destabilizing critical multicultural discourses, extending ideological control over the range of what can be said and thought in schools. Increasingly, as justification for policies of control, a “culture of poverty” discourse has been in ascendance, most recently appearing in the New York Times (Cohen, 2010). Racial politics, however, are complex. It is true that urban and rural poor communities, especially where students of color are concentrated, have long been victimized not only by inadequate economic resources but also by racist assumptions held by many white educators. While increased testing, mandated curricula, and charter schools do not address systemic racism—indeed, these processes aggravate it, as shown in chapters in this book—naming and directly confronting racism, especially when done by

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a black president, fuels white backlash. For this reason, I see it as essential that progressives maintain a clear focus on policies that support social justice, with full awareness that such policies have the potential to disrupt empire and will be fiercely resisted. The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education maintains that focus, directly and clearly. References Bunch, W. (2010). The backlash. New York: Harper. Cohen, P. (2010, October 17). “Culture of poverty” makes a comeback. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty. html Petras, J. (2002). How the empire works: The second track. Centre for Research on Globalization. Retrieved from http://globalresearch.ca/articles/PET212A.html Stone, M. (1981). Three thousand years of racism. New York: New Sibylline Books. Williams, W. A. (1991). Empire as a way of life. Radical History Review, 50, 71–102.

Introduction

Audaciously Espousing Hope Within a Torrent of Hegemonic Neoliberalism1 The Obama Educational Agenda and the Potential for Change Paul R. Carr and Brad J. Porfilio

Introduction Barack Obama is known for mobilizing people of all stripes, especially the youth, and inspiring them to believe—he famously punctuated campaign speeches with “Yes, we can!”—that Americans could take back their country and that they could strive to meet the unfulfilled promises that framed the “greatness” instilled in the American people, their constitution, and their history (Au, 2009). While his campaign for U.S. President in 2008 was short on specifics in relation to reforming and ameliorating the educational system, it was clear that Obama represented, in the eyes of many, a progressive, forward-looking agenda, especially in juxtaposition to the The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages xxi–li Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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previous administration, albeit within the strict confines of neoliberal hegemony (Giroux, 2009). In a few words, and this perhaps captures his rise to the top, by way of the title of his famous book, he was about the “audacity of hope.” The United States, under the conservative, republican regime of George W. Bush, experienced intensified militarization, what Peter McLaren terms as the permanent war on terror, and also exhibited visible economic degradation, and an assault on public education (Giroux & Saltman, 2009; McLaren, 2009; Ross & Gibson, 2007). The virulent militarism and intense suffering global citizens experienced during the “Age of Bush” was due, in part, to the Bush administration’s unwavering allegiance to U.S. corporate and military domination of the globe (Carr, in press; McLaren, 2005). However, the economic and social policies and practices promulgated by the Bush regime, and, as illustrated in this Introduction, the educational policies promulgated by the Obama administration, are manifestations of the dominance of neoliberal ideology over most elements of social life for the past 30 years. According to Hursh (in press), neoliberal ideology is grounded in the belief that economic prosperity and improvements of segments of the social world, such as health care, education, and the environment, emanate from “unregulated or free markets, the withering away of the state as government’s role in regulating businesses and funding social services are either eliminated or privatized, and encouraging individuals to become self-interested entrepreneurs.” Since neoliberalism is a term rarely uttered in most dominant (mainstream) media outlets, most U.S. citizens are not cognizant of how it is linked to many deleterious economic and social developments at today’s historical juncture, such as massive unemployment, the swelling of home foreclosures, homelessness, militarism, school closings, maldistribution of wealth, and environmental degradation (Hursh, in press; McLaren, 2009; Ross & Gibson, 2007; Scipes, 2009). We have chosen to highlight neoliberalism’s impact on education because we believe that modern, progressive, highly functioning societies need a broadly responsive, socially relevant and socially just, and pedagogically engaged educational system; one that bolsters and cultivates critical teaching and learning, accepting that knowledge is socially constructed and mediated (Kincheloe, 2008c), and further, that education is a political project (Freire, 1973). Our interest in critical pedagogy helps us elaborate a conceptual framework of analysis and to identify the potential for transformation within schools and society; a connection that we believe is fluid and necessarily complex (see Kincheloe’s body of work, including 2008a, 2008b, 2008c). Ultimately, we believe that there is a link, as others have pointed out (including John Dewey decades ago), between education and democracy (Ayers, 2009; Carr, in press; Giroux, 2009; Porfilio & Carr, 2008). Thus, the spectacular victory of the first African American to become President of the

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United States, which was hailed by the media as well as the world, has been seen as a watershed moment in the political and historical development of not only the United States, but all nations. Given the dearth of critical analysis in relation to Obama’s leadership and his administration’s educational agenda, which we contend is fundamental to meaningful democratic development, we examine in this book, the meaning of potential transformation in and through the Obama administration’s approach to education. This book has, in addition to this Introduction, a Foreword, and an Afterword, three other sections, which address the following: (a) the question of Obama’s political ascendency in relation to democracy; (b) a critical analysis of how Obama’s social and economical policies are linked to the larger neoliberal agenda and education; and (c) a final section containing an analysis of neoliberalism, education, and democracy in the light of Obama’s message of hope. We believe that a more critical analysis of neoliberalism can assist educators, administrators, parents, and all those interested in education to strive for a more meaningful educational experience for all students and citizens, regardless of their origins, race, gender, social class, and other markers of identity (Russom, 2010). Importantly, an approach to education that considers critical pedagogy offers the possibility of hope and transformational change, and also what Freire called conscientization, the ability to reconceptualize and reposition the political and economic relations that impinge on a thicker, more robust notion of democracy (Carr, 2007, 2008). The 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: Electing Another Neoliberal President It has been over 2 years since Barack Obama defeated John McCain to become the 44th U.S. president. For many U.S. citizens and other social actors across the globe, Obama’s election signaled that there would be an end to the antidemocratic and authoritarian policies, practices, and mandates implemented by the Bush regime for 8 years. Unfortunately, they were incorrect in their belief that a new U.S. presidential administration would a priori disrupt the firm link between the state and transnational business leaders, who have increasingly wielded their power and influence to control labor, resources, wealth, and political decision making in various social contexts, effectively commodifying a range of elements of sociocultural life. Certainly, the people who imbibed Obama’s political handlers’ message of “hope” during his push to win the corporately sponsored political horse race of 2008 were correct that the Bush II regime “was shockingly extremist” compared with other U.S. (neoliberal) presidencies, including those led by Clinton, Bush I, and Ronald Reagan (Giroux, 2010). For instance,

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among numerous antidemocratic and authoritarian impulses, the Bush administration launched an imperial—some would argue, criminal—war; hijacked the mass media to fabricate how the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) would benefit urban children and urban communities; criminalized and demonized Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants; blamed African American residents for the poverty, suffering, and dislocation emanating from hurricane Katrina; curtailed U.S. citizens’ right to privacy and due process of law; perpetuated the prison-industrial complex; eliminated social entitlements for children, the elderly, and the poor; and gave the United States “the twin black eyes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo” (Cohen, 2007; Gioux, 2010; McLaren, 2005). Yet the pain, suffering, and misery encountered by working citizens in North America and so-called Third World regions, as well as the pollution ushered across the planet during the Age of Bush, cannot be reduced to merely the desire of one man and his followers to “drive the US to world supremacy” (Boggs, 2005, p. xi). Rather, there are constitutive forces and social relations that gave lifeblood to the dark times of the Bush administration and, as illustrated below, continue to do so at today’s historical moment (Giroux, 2004; McLaren, 2005; Porfilio & Malott, 2008; Ross & Gibson, 2007). In the George W. Bush era, the confluence of communications technologies, transnationally oriented state managers, and a cadre of supranational institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose chief purpose is to promote corporate imperatives over the needs of people and the environment, and a corporately controlled mass media meshed together to condition the public to acquiesce to the hegemonic consensus that the solution to economic and social problems is to allow the “free market” to be the central force in every aspect of social life, including education, catastrophes, prisons, imperial conflicts, and health care (Giroux, 2004, 2010; Klein, 2007; McLaren, 2005; Porfilio & Malott, 2008; Ross & Gibson, 2007). These constitutive factors are also responsible for “the unfolding global recession and sub-prime crisis” (McLaren, 2008, p. vii). During the U.S.’s presidential election of 2008, the U.S. populace and the global community may have allowed their alienation and disaffection of the pernicious state of global affairs to unflinchingly accept that this could be a new beginning, or at least the end of something entirely antagonistic to the interests of peoples around the globe. While concomitantly being enthralled by how Obama’s corporate handlers crafted an image of a rock star-like persona, positioning him as representing amorphous symbols of “Hope,” “Change,” and “Unity,” insufficient attention was paid to the substance, content, and rigor of Obama’s ideas for policy, often opting for the seductive allure of the message, which was decidedly more progressive and acceptable than what the United States had known in years, and, significantly, what the United

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States was known for abroad in some time. The question of the potential for democracy, and democratic change, is a still problematic one in this case, as Obama portrayed his campaign as one being hinged on the essence of democracy, yet it differed little for the traditional methods (for example, massive fundraising, message control, tightly restraining alternative options outside of the two traditional parties, or promises aimed at maintaining the supremacy of the status quo) (Carr & Porfilio, 2009). In essence, the U.S. presidential campaign of 2008 illustrates how the two-party system in the United States has become “organically linked to the exploitation of human labor and the well-being of corporate profits” (McLaren, 2005, p. 24). According to Noam Chomsky, U.S. presidential elections have become simply “moments when groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state and have quite the substantial predictive successes” (as cited in Goodman, 2008). It is, in fact, improbable to be elected U.S. president if a candidate fails to support “dominant authoritarian domestic and imperial structures and doctrine” (Street, 2008a). One might also imagine the almost impossible odds to surmount if the candidate proclaimed that he/she was not religious.2 Not coincidently, John McCain and Barak Obama both failed to address issues that would highlight how the actual working of the political economy favors the transnational elite at the expense of the many. Instead, the McCain campaign was honest enough to announce clearly that the election would not be about issues. Sarah Palin’s hairdresser received twice the salary of McCain’s foreign policy adviser, the Financial Times reported, which provides an improbable, if accurate, reflection of the significance for the campaign. While Obama’s message of hope and change offered a blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes, it remained vacuous in terms of public engagement. It is stunning that a 2-year campaign in which billions of dollars were spent could result in such minimal debate on the actual meaning of democracy, at least from a critical pedagogical point of view. For instance, the notion of peace as opposed to war did not seem to be an option, with all of the political class simply agreeing that war, the military, and a military economy cannot be challenged. Political candidates, newscasters, and political pundits were unwilling to question the social value of the United States having over 750 military bases in a hundred countries, of spending roughly half its budget on militarization of one form or another, or of providing massive amounts of military assistance to an assortment of regimes around the world. Another issue, and the focus of our analysis in this book, is that only the most superficial commentary is consecrated to the theme of education, which, we contend, must be linked with democracy for it to hold the promises of hope, change, and transformation. One could search Web sites for position papers, but correlation of these to policies is hardly spectacular, and in any event, the major influence over voters is the

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information placed front and center by the candidates, as party managers know well (Carr & Porfilio, 2009). The melding together of neoliberalism and education here takes place within the hegemonic, normative understanding that policies, actions, and decisions taken in the name of legitimate authority, structures, government, and the public good is acceptable because we live in a democracy. However, the thinnest wedge of democracy, being the quasiblanket that elections throw over public debate, is only weakly connected to providing an education to position the populace to critically understand what forces impact the unfolding of events within and outside of schools. Yet this sterile form of education becomes a key lever in presenting issues, problems, and debates, and works to block solidarity among populace and transformation in society. Critical pedagogy provides the potential for unmasking how this thin form of democracy perpetuates the neoliberal agenda and also has the power to elucidate how neoliberalism impacts the inner workings, purpose, and lived reality of schooling and education. Can there be economic and social transformation in education within a backdrop of neoliberalism? Is democracy achievable when neoliberalism is so tightly twined to the vine of neoliberal markets, practices, and inequitable outcomes? In Carr’s research (2007, 2008), he found a weak linkage among teacher-educators in relation to democracy and education, one that often overlooked social justice as a key feature of education, which raises questions about how Obama’s educational plans will redress critical issues of inequity and marginalization within the same framework that previous presidents promoted education (Giroux, 2009; Giroux & Saltman, 2009). The Age of Obama: Does Neoliberalism Trump Hope and Change? Since securing the White House, the Obama administration has done little to implement policies and practices based upon improving the lives of U.S. citizens but, arguably, has done a great deal to aid the corporate elite’s desire to garner labor power, extract resources, and control territories across the global landscape. As Englehardt (2010) puts it, the policies of Bush and Obama “often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them.” Specific party politics, however, do not account for the similarities of their policies; rather, they reflect political and economic systems with own their steamroller force, and their “own set of narrow, repetitive ‘solutions’ to our problems” (Englehardt, 2010). For instance, the Obama administration was complicit in creating BP’s gulf oil spill, which has caused colossal damage “to the shorelines of Gulf states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida,” to the sea floor, and marine life (Schoof & Adams, 2010). Not only

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did the administration cater to corporate interests by giving oil companies the power to “drill at depths at which current technology makes mistakes irreparable” (Ford, 2010), but it allowed millions of gallons of oil to leak into the Gulf. This is indicative of how the administration is concerned more with the economic viability of the corporation than catastrophic environmental destruction or the catastrophe impact to the livelihood of a range of workers (Henry & Reeves, 2010). Like his predecessor, Obama has also supported corporate and militaristic initiatives that propagate the interests of the global elite. He has supported Bush’s 2008 TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout, legislation designed to concede power to the capitalist class through the consolidation of the banking industry and allowing Wall Street to engage in speculative financial endeavors. Since Obama has been in office, Wall Street bankers have had free reign over the economy (Taibbi, 2010). Obama’s continued support of Wall Street has not only allowed many investors to “thrive right now” (Harvey, 2010), but, importantly, has put the banks and their leaders in a better financial position than before the financial collapse of 2008. Unfortunately, catering to the financial elite has done little to eliminate poverty, homelessness, provide jobs, rebuild the infrastructure, or develop “sustainable energy technologies” (Hursh, in press). The reasons for which unprecedented military spending on empirebuilding escapades seems to go unchecked and unquestioned by the political elites, media moguls, and business class to detriment of working people, minorities, marginalized groups, and others is a complex matter involving hegemony, hyperpatriotism, limited political rights and literacy, and a muzzled educational regime. Although, on the surface, the Obama administration looks as if it has retrenched the U.S.’s foreign policy of using the military to control labor, resources, and capital across the globe with its recent pledge to end combat operations in Iraq, the sad reality is the administration has opted to build upon a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military strategy—engaging in “shadow wars” across various sections of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (Shane, Mazzetti, & Worth, 2010). The Obama administration has acted surreptitiously in its economic and military support of government leaders and military officials in countries such as Yemen, social actors who are concerned about enhancing their own political and economic stature, and who are currently committed to destroying Al Qaeda networks. Concurrently, it has expanded military activities across Africa by providing training to soldiers, weapons to countries, and other assistance to governmental and business leaders who are committed to empowering themselves and an insurgent network that may threaten U.S. global hegemony. Contrary to rhetorical statements during the tumultuous campaign, the Obama administration has provided economic support and power to

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privatized military units for the purpose of garnering information about potential “enemies.” Significantly, it has also engaged in substantial drone warfare in Pakistan to allegedly quell militant networks that are against U.S. political and economic interests (Shane et al., 2010; Volman, 2010). While this brand of “shadow warfare” might momentarily alleviate the Western public’s growing displeasure of “the staggering costs of big wars that topple governments, require years of occupation and can be a catalyst for further radicalization throughout the Muslim world” (Shane et al., 2010), it does not fundamentally alter the hegemony of military and corporate interests over people and the environment. For instance, shadow warfare continues to exhaust natural resources; monetary resources on weapons, surveillance, and technology; fuels the possibility that additional conflicts will occur between Western powers and groups who face the brunt of the “shadow” military activities; and perpetuates additional abuses against political prisoners, men, women, and children who have been casualities of the U.S. shadow wars since the beginning of the Cold War Era. The political economy of democracy must, we argue, foreshadow any serious discussion of the role of education in contemporary times. Resources, priorities, decisions, actions, and outcomes related to education have, at their essence, the significant issues documented above. The Hour Glass of Educational Change and the Obama Revolution In education circles, the Obama administration has, arguably, supported and instituted policies and practices that may do more to undermine transformative forms of teaching and learning in K–12 schools than policies supported and promulgated by the Bush administration (Giroux & Saltman, 2009; Hursh, in press; McLaren, 2009). Democrats and Republicans, in lockstep together as the corporate entity controlling formal political life, along with Wall Street, realized that U.S. residents were preoccupied and disoriented by the economic crisis impacting their families and communities, which provided the impetus for them to act swiftly to implement a spate of corporatist initiatives in K–12 schools across the United States. In the past 2 years, they have gone far beyond what George W. Bush’s administration was able to do with its No Child Left Behind (NCLB)3 policy4 in terms of privatizing education (Russom, 2010; Scott, 2010). Below, we discuss how the Obama administration’s educational agenda is linked to further eradicating public education, promoting corporate interests over the needs of children and the United States at-large, and pressuring the public to accept the notion that corporate involvement will improve all elements in the social world. Before examining several specific educational policies currently

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supported by the Obama administration, we briefly present the educational initiatives supported by the major designer of the Obama’s administration’s educational agenda, Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Arne Duncan and Education Leadership The Obama administration is following in the neoliberal footsteps of its Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. From 2001 to 2009, Duncan, as CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), instituted sweeping educational reforms “steeped in a free-market model of school reform” (Kumashiro, 2008, as cited in Street, 2008b). According to Street (2008b), “Privatization, unionbusting (charter and contract schools operate union-free), excessive standardized testing, teacher-blaming, military schooling, and the rollback of community input on school decisions” were the hallmarks under Duncan’s corporate form of schooling in Chicago. One integral component of Duncan’s neoliberal schooling agenda is witnessed in Renaissance 2010. Under this directive, the corporate elite in Chicago were given the power to a set up a Commercial Club, which used its “leverage to dismantle the elected school board and replace it with the Chicago Board of Education, a body composed of their own representatives” (Hursh, in press). After garnering control of the chief educational authority, the elite showed little concern for establishing quality schools across the city (Lipman, 2003; Lipman & Hursh, 2007). Rather, they aimed to create a “twotiered educational system” in Chicago. After closing and consolidating numerous schools across Chicago, the leaders and politicians supported the creation of charter schools and additional academic programs in areas of the city where affluent people from the dominant culture lived or in areas that would possibly be attractive to affluent citizens who were considering locating to this “world-class city” (Lipman & Hursh, 2007). The additional resources parlayed into superior academic programs for mostly affluent residents, such as magnet programs, International Baccalaureate Programs, regional gifted schools, and Math and Science Technology Academies (Street, 2008b). Since many of the schools created under Renaissance 2010 were charter schools, school administrators were in the position to handpick affluent students from the dominant culture and hire teachers who were adept at creating educational environments that treat students as subjects rather than as objects. The schools commonly exhibit “a relaxed and open pedagogical environment that encourages free inquiry, critical and experimental thought, autonomous and democratic expression, and the collective sharing of ideas and knowledge” (Street, 2008b). On the other hand, minoritized and impoverished students and their educators and caregivers in Chicago were forced to grapple with their

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neighborhood schools being gutted and transformed into test-polluted, overcrowded, and debilitating commercial institutions. In the midst of being part of an environment where schools were deemed “underperforming and forced to close, . . . students were treated like cattle, shuffled around from school to school” (Brown, Gutstein, & Lipman, 2009). Not only did the privatization of the schools lead to “increased violence and put children’s lives at risk due to crossing neighborhood and gang boundaries” (Brown et al., 2009), it also ensured that the voices of community members were marginalized in terms of what resources, pedagogies, and programs are best suited to foster youths’ intellectual, social, and emotional growth. Furthermore, Duncan used Renaissance 2010 to militarize schools and build military academies in the most impoverished sections of Chicago. Duncan had no qualms about his plan to ensure that Chicago had “the largest JROTC program in the country in number of cadets and total programs,” because he feels military programs promote “positive learning environments” (Brown et al., 2009). However, what is missing from Duncan’s characterization of militarizing public schooling within impoverished contexts is that these youth have no more desire than their affluent counterparts to gain supposed “leadership” skills from military officials or to attend military academies. This form of schooling is only an attractive option for these youth because systemic barriers sap the degree of power they hold over their life chances. For instance, public schools routinely fail them; they grapple with violence and overpolicing in their communities, and the U.S. government fails to promote economic justice, which is at the core of the problem in relation to cultural capital, inequitable opportunities, and the dearth of social justice inside and outside of the classroom. The state intentionally keeps the minimum wage low, provides inadequate transportation, provides limited social services, and maintains inadequate housing options for impoverished urban residents (Anyon, 2005; Porfilio & Hall, 2005), all of which lead to reactionary calls for charter schools and military forms of schooling that, ultimately, plunge marginalized communities into inferior educational opportunities. Race to the Top (of What?), and (Neoliberal) Transformation On July 24, 2009, the Obama administration promulgated a new education policy, Race to the Top (RTTT), a $4.35 billion dollar “competitive incentive program” that is designed to further gut public schooling in the United States, structure schools on market ideologies and practices, and provide the corporate elite an additional avenue to profit off of children. To be “competitive” and bolster their chances of winning the education-

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al pot held by the Obama administration, numerous states in the United States have had to ensure that they would support “expansion of charter schools as well as high-stakes testing, and test-score driven accountability” (Christianakis & Mora, in press). Therefore, RTTT only exacerbates the testing, accounting, and competitive form of schooling that both political parties in the United States have touted as the panacea to eliminate the “opportunity gaps” plaguing the educational system for the past 2 decades (Ravitch, 2010). To be deemed “accountable” for student learning under RTTP, states, under the tutelage of the federal government, are linking teachers’ evaluations to their students’ performance on high-stakes examinations. The policy will surely widen the opportunity gaps that pockmark the U.S. educational system. Many minoritized and marginalized youth already attend underfunded, dilapidated, militarized, and overcrowded schools (Anyon, 2005; Kozol, 2005; Lipman, 2003; Porfilio & Malott, 2008; Ross & Gibson, 2007; Saltman & Gabbard, 2003). By implementing more examinations and linking teachers’ performance to how their students perform on those tests, teachers will only create a more alienating environment for students. As other critical scholars have shown, in a test-driven educational environment, teachers will feel compelled or, in some cases, forced, to implement pedagogies of silence and control to push students to simply regurgitate information in order to pass the exams because students’ poor test performances might cost them their jobs, close their schools, or nudge students to drop out of the formal schooling process (Au, 2008; Kozol, 2005; Mathison & Ross, 2008; Porfilio & Malott, 2008). Therefore, there will be numerous low-income students and students of color who will disengage from the instructional process and drop out5 of school because their ways of knowing, constructing identities, cultures, histories, and material realities will not be considered part of the “knowledge” that becomes standardized, and thus validated, on exams and in classroom discourse (Au, 2008, p. 118). The standardized exams also set up special-needs students and English-language learners for failure because they might lack the cultural capital or the physical capacity to demonstrate that they can offer the “correct” answers to the corporate test makers. Similarly, this exam regime pushes critical and engaged educators out of the educational system (Apple, 1999; Kozol, 2005; Porfilio & Malott, 2008). Significantly, business leaders who sell the exams and test-preparation materials to schools will benefit from the curriculum being tied to the examinations. Other neoliberal interests will benefit because they will be supplied with a cheap supply of labor to fill jobs in the contingent, serviceoriented economy; this expendable sector of the population could almost be red-circled from Kindergarten based on their cultural capital. The capitalist class will also employ the standardized exams to better “spot talent

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and recruit the cream of the working class that can be funneled into higher education and employment as technical personnel, frontline managers, and professionals” (Russom, 2010). Charter Schools and the Right to Choose (or the Right to Lose?) The Obama administration made good on its campaign promise to develop and implement “privately run charter schools” as a chief way to solve educational problems under RTTP (Russon, 2010; Scott, 2010). To be competitive for tapping the pool of federal funds available under RTTP, many states were compelled to give more access to charter schools. For instance, the federal government gave points to states for RTTP “if they had no caps or caps greater than 10% of their total public schools, medium points if they had caps between 5%–10%, and low points if they capped charter schools at 5% or lower” (Christianakis & Mora, in press). In fact, New York State passed a law specifically to increase the amount of charter schools in the state, which gave them a better chance to net federal dollars. The law “will eventually boost the number of charter schools in the state from 200 to 460” (Trapasso, 2010). Not coincidently, New York State’s commitment to opening more charter schools helped the state land almost $700 million on its second application to secure RTTP funds. Upon awarding New York State the funds, Duncan praised the New York State Teachers’ union and political leaders for having the “breathtaking courage” to tie teacher performance to students’ test scores and supporting more charter schools because he believes the initiatives have the power to dramatically improve student achievement (Blain, 2010). Despite the Obama administration’s contention that charter schools will transform education, critical scholars have shown clearly that the implementation of charter schools have not radically altered students’ performance on high-stake exams (Ayers & Klonsky, 2006; Booker, Gill, Simmer, & Sass, 2009; Christianakis & Mora, in press; Ross & Gibson, 2007). This is despite the fact that, unlike other public schools, charter schools have the power to exclude certain student populations, such as ELL and special education students, who may hinder the schools’ overall achievement on the examinations. Corporate leaders who delve into the charter school business generally manage their schools like the larger corporate world, which perpetuates a dehumanizing, alienating, and conformity-riddled environment for students and educators.6 For instance, they tend to fire and layoff certified teachers to reap more profits, in turn hiring nontenured teachers who are beholden to the corporate administration because their contingent job status positions them to fear reprisals for challenging their

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bosses’ mandates.They also use charter schools to sell standardized curricula, textbooks, and test-preparation materials. Not only does this give the elite the ability to reap handsome profits, but it, as illustrated above, also gives them the power to subvert teachers’ ability to implement pedagogies that guide students to reflect critically about self and Other, knowledge and power, and the role they and their students can play to eliminate oppression in their schools and their communities. In effect, these prepackaged, preevaluated, prescripted educational systems negate the social context and the generative themes that Freire (1973) located at the center of a socially relevant teaching and learning experience. Rather than developing a closer rapprochement with social justice, democracy, and critical engagement, the push toward privatization seems to favor the opposite, measuring success simply on neoliberal terms and standards. George Dei (Dei, Mazzuca, & McIassac, 1997) refers to dropouts as “pushouts,” and this characterization provides some context of the process of weaning the educational system of those who do not have the requisite cultural capital. For example, the drop-out rate for African Americans and Latinos is disproportionately higher than that for whites, yet the response of providing more school choice for those who are “underachieving” seems to miss the point that the problem is systemic, structural, ingrained, and relates to power. The reality that the first African American president seems aloof to discuss racialization, racism, and race relations, let alone noting how whiteness, power, and privilege in education works, is problematic at several levels. In the end, the Obama administration’s support for creating additional corporately run charter schools appears more in line with an overall vision of doing away with public education and having a “privatized education system.” For instance, in addition to supporting charter schools and other corporate schooling practices, the Obama administration’s support of the Rhode Island school board’s decisions to fire tenured urban school teachers, and blame them for the failure of their students on high-stakes examinations, indicates the desire of the administration and neoliberal supporters to gain the public’s favor in privatizing American schools. By scapegoating teachers for the unjust practices and systemic inequalities that set up minoritized youth for failure in schools and in society, the public will be more likely to support neoliberal policies and practices to (supposedly) fix the ills of the U.S. public school system. Leadership, and Seeking a Better Society Through Education The question of leadership is crucial to making education a forum for societal development and engagement. The Obama administration, gen-

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erally, has offered conflicting evidence of whether any existing forms of transformative forms of education exist in K–12 classrooms. Obama and his handlers seemingly accepted the provocative, unnecessary, and debilitating legislation proposed by Arizona lawmakers and Governor Jan Brewer: Arizona House Bill 2281, which effectively bans the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona’s public schools. They also remained silent when Tom Horne, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Arizona, chastised scholars, teachers, and other citizens for wanting to learn and teach about what forces, structures, policies, and laws are responsible for the oppression of Chicano people in the past and present as well as “learn[ing] about the cultures of themselves and others” (Hill, 2010). Horne also made egregious and sensational statements to the dominant media that were designed to demonize Chicano people and ethnic studies. He stoked the racist ire of members from of the dominant culture by claiming that ethnic studies courses will eventually become part of a larger movement to favor Chicano students over their white counterparts in schools through the creation of “Chicanoonly” classrooms. Horne also played upon many members of the dominant culture’s fear and hatred of foreigners, in general, and Chicanos, in particular, by linking ethnic studies as a part of the Others’ plot to indoctrinate “loyal” Americans in communist ideology and to “overthrow the United States government” (Hill, 2010). As Randy Acuña, Professor of Chicano studies at the University of California at Northridge, makes clear, Chicano people have been subjugated by the elite since “Columbus got off the boat in 1492,” and are oppressed today. All you have to do is “look at the demographics and you’ll see how Mexicans are the lowest in income, they come from the worst schools” (Smith, 2010). Furthermore, the elimination of ethnic studies and culturally relevant programs appears to be part of the broader neoliberal project to standardize and corporatize teaching, knowledge, and literacy. Instead of lending support for the Chicano people’s desire to empower themselves through critical forms of history and pedagogies, the Obama administration has criminalized Chicanos by supporting the 15-year U.S. policy of militarizing immigration along the U.S./Mexico border (Goodman, 2010). For instance, Obama signed into law a $600 million bill to “deploy some 1,500 new Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials along the border, as well as two aerial surveillance drones” (Goodman, 2010). Rather than providing economic and social support for Latino(a) migrants, whose communities have been devastated by neoliberal “free trade” policies, the Obama administration opted to treat Latino(a) immigrants as chattel. During Obama’s first year in office, more than 388,000 immigrants were deported to Mexico, a figure more than “any other year in the republic’s history” (Benjamin, 2010). Therefore, it would hardly be a stretch to state that the Obama’s “security first” approach to immigra-

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tion “makes it seem as though he’s trying to appease conservatives at the expense of Latinos” (Benjamin, 2010). Moreover, the Obama administration’s recent pronouncements to shut down 2,000 of the U.S.’s “drop-out factories,” schools that produce nearly half of the U.S.’s school dropouts, to fire teachers who are unable to guide their students to perform well on high-stakes examinations, and to tout extending the school year as a solution to improve student achievement, are all attempts to condition the public to believe that education is merely a competitive, individualistic, and corporate commodity (Simmons, 2010). Once again, through initiatives said to improve student achievement of U.S. students, Obama and his cabinet have failed to guide the public to conceptualize education as a social good that has to potential to guide students to become critically engaged and socially transgressive citizens. Tying Critical Pedagogy into the Contemporary Neoliberal Educational Agenda Education predicated on the ideals of love, democracy, and justice, as well as what Freire (1973) called “conscientization,” and geared to fostering students’ understanding of the larger forces responsible for injustice in schools and society, has the potential to eliminate students from dropping out of schools, unlike any of the Obama administration’s aforementioned policies to improve the U.S. educational system. Rather than treating students as objects who are valuable if they only perform well on examinations, educators could be given the power to open spaces in their classrooms to help students examine problems confronting the educational system and the wider society. Similarly, educators could generate pedagogical projects where students work with community members inside and outside of schools to examine why neoliberal policies, for the past 30 years, have ensured that students who are marginalized by race and class attend drop-out factories, while their affluent counterparts attend schools that prepare them for power in the business and social world; why corporate and government officials are unwilling to provide adequate resources in schools and social programs in communities that could place minoritized students in a better place to engage in the schooling process; and why teachers need to be accountable for preparing students to succeed on mindless, standardized examinations that do not foster students’ understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power, their openness to diverse intellectual ideas and peoples, or their thirst to join others in the collective struggle to build egalitarian schools and a just society.7 Critical pedagogy presents a framework to understand political literacy and social transformation, in which static representations of power, iden-

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tity, and contextual realities are rejected (Denzin, 2009; Kincheloe, 2008a). Critical pedagogy is not about providing a checklist against which one can determine the level of social justice within a given society (Carr, 2008). Rather, it is concerned with oppression and marginalization at all levels and seeks to interrogate, problematize, and critique power and inequitable power relations (Macrine, 2009). Giroux (2007) emphasizes that critical pedagogy “refuses the official lies of power and the utterly reductive notion of being a method. . . . [It] opens up a space where students should be able to come to terms with their own power as critical agents; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central” to an intellectually stimulating education as well as building a robust democratic society (p. 1). Critical pedagogy makes a direct, explicit, and undeniable linkage between the formalized experience in the classroom and the lived experience outside of the classroom, in which bodies, identities, and societal mores influence what takes place in schools (Giroux, 2007). Giroux (2007) boldly states that “Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, selfjudging, and independent—qualities that are indispensable for students if they are going to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform, and governmental policy” (p. 1). Significantly, Denzin (2009) provides a number of points that draw together the web of a “critical democratic pedagogy”: critical pedagogy encourages resistance to the “discourses of privatization, consumerism, the methodologies of standardization and accountability, and the new disciplinary techniques of surveillance. . . . Critical pedagogy provides the tools for understanding how cultural and educational practices contribute to the construction of neoliberal conceptions of identity, citizenship, and agency” (p. 381). Being conscious, able to read the world, immersed in humane acts, and engaged in a meaningful interrogation of what the purpose of teaching and learning is should be uppermost in the minds of decision makers as much as the populace in general (Macrine, 2009). Condemning those who would question hegemonic practices as cynical, negative, uncooperative, unconstructive (even destructive), and corrupted can only further widen the gap between those who enjoy comfort and those seeking a more just conceptualization of society. Education, which must underpin democracy for it to be relevant and consequential in favor of the masses, is a political project, one that needs to be understood as such for it to challenge systemically entrenched practices, values, norms, and conventions (Freire, 1973; Kincheloe, 2008a, 2008b). Comprehending the dialectical relations between oppressed and oppressor requires a rethinking of the premise of education, one that properly labels banking models of education.

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Some of the components of a critical synthesis of critical pedagogy, according to Kincheloe (2008c), are the following: 1. The development of a social individual imagination. 2. The reconstitution of the individual outside the boundaries of abstract individualism. 3. The understanding of power and the ability to interpret its effects on the social and the individual. 4. The provision of alternatives to the alienation of the individual. 5. The cultivation of a critical consciousness that is aware of the social construction of subjectivity. 6. The construction of democratic community-building relationships between individuals. 7. The reconceptualization of reason, understanding that relational existence applies not only to human beings but concepts as well. 8. The production of social skills necessary to activate participation in the transformed, inclusive democratic community. The inextricable linkage to the establishment of a more decent society is ingrained in the foundation of critical pedagogical work. The desire to enhance human agency, imbued in a process of theory and action, thus underscoring praxis and the libratory potential of critical engagement, is (and should be) a central consideration, not an afterthought. Political literacy and media literacy provide a mandatory platform from which education can be explored, cultivated, and transformed (Lund & Carr, 2008; Carr & Porfilio, 2009a). Critical pedagogy can assist us in asking questions that are far from the mainstream political process and the corporate media, and, importantly, but which resonate with the lived realities of the majority of people who do not partake fully in the myriad societal, institutional, political, economic, and cultural decision making fora that serve to shape their lives. As a cautionary note, as illustrated by De Lissovoy (2008), critical pedagogy is not disconnected from other critical theoretical frameworks but must be considered from a “compound standpoint,” which enhances its relevancy for the multidisciplinary study of democracy. The central question of the purpose of education is not the focus of the Obama educational reforms. We have argued that his vision is not (radically) different than that of his predecessors, who have all paid homage to the supremacy of the neoliberal market place. While rhetoric and a broad public willingness to accept that things should be different than they are, and, importantly, that we can do something to ensure that they are different than they are, should not obscure the lived reality that things are continuing on a trajectory that does not infer transformation in and through education. The policies presented at this early juncture in the Obama ad-

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ministration suggest corporate interests are taking a hold over educational aspects of the social world. The administration has not made it a priority to end senseless violence, aggression, militarization, and war. To consider that our analysis, or any analysis for that matter, has a political dimension is to state an obvious point, even if it is a popular contention within neoliberal circles to feign neutrality, objectivity, universal truth, and an allegiance to normative hegemonic values. Our fundamental argument is that power must become an integral part of the educational experience; it must be exposed, cajoled, challenged, and rendered bare so as to expose the existence of oppression, how it works, how it is sustained, and how it can be remedied. Will the proposals presented by Obama, as well as the concrete policies that he is enacting, provide for hope, change and transformation? We would argue that, without assessing in a most critical manner, the overarching neoliberal scaffolding framing how we conceive, develop, implement, and cultivate education, the potential for education to be the vanguard of meaningful change for society, for all people, is limited. Organization of the Book As outlined above, the chapters in this volume are divided into three sections. In the first section, David Hursh, Virginia Lea, P. L. Thomas, Rebecca A. Goldstein, Sheila Macrine, Nataly Chesky, and Alexandra Perry employ historical analysis and tap theoretical insights in order to aid us in understanding why the Obama administration’s educational agenda further guts the humanizing impulses from K–12 schools. These chapters also diagnose how the proposed and actual educational policies seek to aid corporations in their quest to profit off youths’ bodies and minds as well as, importantly, producing compliant teachers and students who lack the courage, passion, and intellect to question the social relations that cause human suffering, misery, and environmental degradation at today’s historical juncture. In the second section, Mary Christianakis and Richard Mora, Theresa Montaño and Lynn Aoki, Roberta Ahlquist, Ann Berlek, and Mark Garrison supply a microlevel analysis of how specific neoliberal educational policies embraced by the Obama administration, such as charter schools, standardized examinations, merit pay, and accountability schemes, are having a deleterious impact on minoritized students and communities across the United States. In the final section, Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross, Tina Wagle and Paul Theobald, and Peter McLaren design narratives of resistance for educators, caregivers, scholars, and other concerned citizens. Their visions and ideals give us hope that it is, indeed, possible to eradicate the commercial forces responsible for the proliferation of joblessness; homelessness; poverty; and militarized, underfunded, and commercialized educational spaces, as well as the school-to-

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prison pipeline within the United States, which frames the intense suffering, misery, and oppression infiltrating most social contexts across the globe. The critically insightful pieces bookending these chapters by Christine Sleeter, who discusses the conflictual relationships intertwined in empire, and Dennis Carlson, at the end, who highlights the nefarious nature of militarization and a hegemonic narrative that restricts debate, reform, and progressive action, provide the book with a robust theoretical framework. Section I: Using Historical and Theoretical Insights to Understand Obama’s Educational Agenda In the first chapter in this section, “More of the Same: How Free-Market Capitalism Dominates the Economy and Education,” David Hursh initially sets out to illustrate the power that neoliberal ideology has had in shaping the educational initiatives generated by the major two U.S. political parties for the past 4 decades. He then captures how, during the 2008 presidential campaign, President Barak Obama supported educational initiatives that had potential to “scale back or reverse many of the education reforms of the Bush administration.” Unfortunately, once Obama took over the Oval Office, he caved to the pressures of his neoliberal economic and educational advisors as well as to the vast majority of the U.S. populous, who have been conditioned to believe, through dominant media outlets and schooling structures, that “unfettered innovation and unregulated financial markets” are “good for America and the world.” According to Hursh, however, the strength of the neoliberal doctrine has merged with Obama’s procapital cabinet to put in practice commercialized educational initiatives under Race to the Top (RTTP) that “not even Bush dared to propose.” Next, Hursh illustrates how Obama’s neoliberal educational initiatives have “failed to achieve their ostensible goals of improving student learning, closing the achievement gap, and creating efficiencies.” The author concludes his chapter by providing emancipatory guideposts, which have the power to lead us beyond the neoliberal ideological doctrine that is responsible for intense human suffering and dark social realities coloring our social world. He pushes educators, concerned citizens, and youth to engage in authentic dialogue and critical reflection: We must rethink the nature of society, the role of the state, our relationship to the environment, and our educational system. We need to begin to describe what kind of society and world we want and how will we get there. We need to rethink how best to provide health care and financial security for the elderly, how to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, and our schools. Given the current

xl   INTRODUCTION divisive debate in the United States and the complexity of the answers, engaging in this discussion will not be easy.

In the second chapter of this section, “Concocting Crises to Create Consent: The Importance of “The Shock Doctrine” to Understanding Current Educational Policy,” Virginia Lea taps interconnected theoretical ideas—the shock doctrine, critical multicultural education, and modern disciplinary technologies of power—to capture how schools have become oppressive, authoritarian, and unequal institutions, as well as documenting how the public has been inculcated to support neoliberal ideologies and practices. Furthermore, Lea captures how most citizens in the U.S. were so alienated and dazed by “the corporate greed, imperial ambitions, and hectic hysteria” generated by the Bush regime that they believed that Obama would have the power and courage to subvert unjust policies and practices that are responsible for hypermilitarization; ecological devastation; elimination of social entitlements for working-class citizens, children, and the elderly; and extreme maldistribution of wealth. She then documents how the public was misled during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign to believe that an Obama administration would curtail the corporate takeover of K–12 school in the United States. Clearly, this is not happening, since the Obama administration “is also a neoliberal, corporate government, if somewhat less toxic, that largely defines student achievement in terms of readiness to meet the demands of the neoliberal corporate economy.” The author concludes the chapter by illustrating how teacher-educators can begin to guide preservice and in-service teachers to call into question the dominant discourses that position the public to support oppressive social and economic practices and relations that are perpetuating neoliberalism in schools and in the wider society. In the third chapter in this section, “Educational Hope Ignored Under Obama: The Persistent Failure of Crisis Discourse and Utopian Expectations,” P. L. Thomas provides a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s speeches and the Obama administration’s public and policy messages related to charter schools in order to illustrate how the Obama administration masks “the neoliberal assumptions” of how schools and humanity ought to function. The author also provides numerous examples of how the Obama administration continues to perpetuate the hegemonic discourses of underperforming public schools, combined with the supposed power the U.S. presidency has in ameliorating the numerous ills plaguing schools in the United States. According to Thomas, the political and economic elite propagate these discourses to assuage the “popular psyche that is culturally committed to a neoliberal view of the world and to rugged individualism.”

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Thomas also supports his contention that the Obama administration employs the aforementioned discourses to gain the support of the masses by providing a critical historical examination of how other U.S. presidencies have employed similar tactics to gain the consent of the governed. For instance, several successive U.S. presidential administrations in the mid1800s blamed schools for the U.S.’s social and economic ills in order to inculcate the public into holding this simplistic view of the relationship between schools and society. Thomas concludes his chapter by providing insight into how critical educators and scholars can push the political elite to promote educational and social change. He believes “the change we need from Obama/Duncan and all political leaders is to create social policy and then educational policy that expose deforming myths and leads to action overcoming those myths.” In the fourth chapter in this section, “Competing Definitions of Hope in Obama’s Education Marketplace: Media Representations of School Reform, Equality, and Social Justice,” Rebecca A. Goldstein, Sheila Macrine, Nataly Z. Chesky, and Alexandra Perry argue that dominant media outlets in North America are key culprits in perpetuating the support for “the underlying neoliberal principles of merit pay, charter schools, radically diminishing the power of teachers’ unions, and increasing accountability for teachers through tying student tests scores to individual teachers as commonsense school reform.” They also argue that the mass media is far away from functioning as a “fourth estate” in today’s neoliberal society, a social entity that provides independent analysis and supports intellectual debate surrounding the merits of educational and social policies and other salient issues. To support their contentions, the authors provide a brief historical overview of how the corporate elite has gained control of the mass media in the United States, and how the mass media serves the interests of corporate conglomerates in the age of neoliberalism. In the remaining sections of the chapter, the authors provide a thorough analysis of how dominant newspapers and television outlets have continually supported neoliberal educational initiatives since Obama became a candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2008. On the other hand, the authors show how the mass media has continually vilified politicians, educators, or commentators who oppose commercialized forms of schooling. They conclude the chapter by arguing that the mass media and Obama’s virulent assault on public education may lead to public schoolteachers becoming “the newest member of a very economically fragile club: professional itinerant workers.”

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Section II: The Perils of Neoliberal Schooling: Critiquing Corporatized Forms of Schooling and a Sober Assessment of Where Obama is Taking Us In the first chapter in this section, “Charting a New Course for Public Education Through Charter Schools: Where is Obama Taking Us?” Mary Christianakis and Richard Mora “analyze Obama’s education policies as they relate to charter schools.” They start out the chapter by connecting the charter school movement to the larger neoliberal and neoconservative agenda to privatize schooling and other social entitlements in the United States. Next, the authors capture how the corporatized and militarized schooling model concocted in Chicago by Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is serving as a blueprint for the spate of educational policies proffered by the Obama administration. Ultimately, Duncan’s leadership in Chicago has sparked further debilitating forms of schooling for minoritized and lower-class students. The authors illustrate how students, teachers, and administrators in Chicago were left with an “increase in both public and private charter schools and militarized public schools, as well as an increased frequency of high-stakes test taking.” In the third section of the chapter, the authors dispel the myth that “charter schools are better options than traditional public schools.” The effect of school choice for the past 20 years has only resulted in “administrative innovation, not in innovation within classrooms.” Christianakis and Mora conclude the chapter by gauging how schools, teachers, and students will be impacted if Obama’s neoliberal educational policies continue to be perpetuated over the coming years. Educators, scholars, and policymakers ought to be concerned because Under a market economy, charter school expansion will likely increase social inequalities by encouraging the shift from education as a public good to education as an investment. The expansion of charter schools through competitive market practices introduces capitalist Darwinism, which leaves urban minority youth, special-needs students, and English-language learners at “a competitive disadvantage.”

In the next chapter in this section, “Manufactured Consent: Latino/a Themed Charter Schools, in Whose Interests?” Theresa Montaño and Lynn Aoki provide a critical examination of how business leaders and politicians have conditioned some Latino/a citizens into believing that “the attainment of a quality culturally and linguistically responsive education can only happen in charter schools.” The authors begin their chapter by outlining the evolution of the charter school movement in the United States, capturing how charter schools have gone from being “student-centered and results-oriented” to being for-profit entities, run typically by EMOs (Educational Management Organizations). In the next section, they offer a critical

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examination of Obama’s educational policies in relation to how they are impacting Latino/a and other minoritized communities in the United States. They call on activists and educators to see beyond the rhetoric generated by Duncan and Obama so as to speak out against the Obama administration’s goal of supporting a “market-driven educational system.” In fact, according to the authors, Obama’s education plan might “destroy what is left of public education.” Montaño and Aoki conclude their chapter by shedding light on Latino practitioners’ and activists’ perceptions of “the impact that charter schools have on the Chicano/a community.” They document that “the majority of (their) practitioners saw benefit in the charter school movement, yet understood that charter schools were not the answer” in helping to eliminate the educational and social inequalities facing the Latino communities. The authors suggest that there must be more reflection and dialogue among the various stakeholders involved in educating Latino/a students if we are to “improve education for Latino/a and all students.” In the next chapter of this section, “Standardized Teacher Performance Assessment: Obama/Duncan’s Quick Fix for What They Think it is That Ails Us,” Ann Berlak provides a critcal examination of “the Obama/Duncan plan to impose a high stakes regime of standards and accountability upon teacher-credentialing programs.” Based upon personal observation and informal interviews with teacher-education faculty at five California State Universities, Berlak illustrates how the PACT (Performance Assessment of California Teachers), a high-stakes examination that has been used to “credential candidates in California for the past few years,” and will shortly be used to credential teacher candidates across the United States, is “an invalid and unreliable assessment instrument that, like K–12 high-stakes tests, promotes corporate and other neoliberal interests, not the interests of a viable and vibrant democracy.” The author provides compelling evidence that the PACT is not only reflexive of the neoliberal “audit explosion,” which recodes serious economic and social crises into issues of “standards and accountablity,” but also makes clear that PACT is a political spectacle, which is scaring “ordinary citizens as well as teacher-educators into thinking that what ails us as a society are that millions of unqualified teachers, having been miseducated by U.S. teacher-educators, are teaching U.S. children.” Berlak concludes the chapter by reminding us that high-stakes examinations, like the PACT, will in no way solve a key educational crisis facing us: the poor academic peformance of poor minoritized students. The crisis will be solved only if educators and concerned citzens start to focus on structural issues, such as “inequality, racism, and poverty.” In the next chapter of this section, “The Political Economy of Educational Restructuring: on the Origin of Performance Pay and Obama’s ‘Blueprint’ for Education,” Mark Garrison provides a critical historical analysis of the social, economic, and cultural forces that gave breath to performance pay

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“schemes imposed on English and Irish schoolteachers in the latter part of the 19th century.” According to Garrison, the British government enacted performance pay practices to “contain educational costs under the guise of accountability” as well as to provide the underclass a form of schooling that would keep them economically and social marginalized. Throughout the remaining sections of the chapter, Garrison not only provides a broad and deep analysis of “present neoliberal trends in schools across the globe, but also develops a critical platform to help us analyze the Obama administration’s Blueprint for education.” Section III. Envisioning New Schools and a New Social World: Stories of Resistance, Hope, and Transformation In the first chapter in this section, “The Education Agenda is a War Agenda: Connecting Reason to Power and Power to Resistance,” Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross lay bare the deleterious impact neoliberal globalization and U.S. imperialism have on working-class people internationally, and challenge educators and concerned citizens to engage in critical reflection. Specifically, the authors capture how the intense suffering and perpetuation of procorporate interests were supported through the 2008 U.S. presidential election and the 2010 election campaigns, illuminate how U.S. foreign policy is linked to the economic collapse in numerous regions across the globe, and spell out how the Obama administration supported the capitalist class over the working people with its economic bailouts. Next, the authors capture how many global citizens are cognizant of what is swelling human suffering, militarism, and misery, as well as how they are engaged in a collective struggle to overturn the social relations causing their oppression. For instance, in Greece, The fatal police shooting of a 15-year old in December (2010) sparked the country’s worst riots in decades, fueled by anger at economic hardships and youth unemployment. Anarchists and left-wing guerrilla groups have followed up with a wave of attacks against banks and police; Greek unions, representing about 2.5 million workers, have also staged repeated protests against the government, saying its measures to tackle the global crisis only burden the poor.

Gibson and Ross conclude their chapter by capturing how to resist the corporatist forms of schooling that are responsible, in part, for blocking a sustained social movement, which is predicated on building equalitarian schools and a democratic social world. They state that educators, youth, and activists have the power to “supersede capital—for freedom and equal-

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ity—if we do more than construct reason, but connect reason to passion, passion to ethics, ethics to organization, and organization to action.” In the second chapter of the section, “Connecting Communities and Schools: Accountability in the Post-NCLB Era,” Tina Wagle and Paul Theobald provide suggestions on how to build democratic schools and a democratic society in the post-NCLB era. The authors argue that “the improvement of political and economic life of the United States” cannot occur if new policy initiatives and practices are merely implemented in educational structures; rather, educators and concerned citizens must take “concerted action across the spectrum of modern institutions” to bludgeon commercialized imperatives and undemocratic structures. Wagle and Theobald suggest that there must be “a final and definitive separation of corporation and state” for the purpose of restoring and reinvigorating democracy. Moreover, they suggest that U.S. citizens must actively work together to challenge unjust policies and practices that spark oppression and injustice in their communities and in the wide social world, rather than sitting passively and voting for the dominant leaders of the U.S.’s two-party system, who are not necessarily interested in democratizing social and economic relationships. Next, they suggest the economy can become democratized if we begin to move it from “global production and distribution to local production and distribution.” They conclude their chapter by suggesting that educational leaders and concerned citizens must think about the potential of creating local educational systems, where policymaking is out of the purview of the political and economic elite. They believe that this form of schooling will “maximize the likelihood that all students will learn at a high level, that all students will receive the full power of education.” In the final chapter, “If There is Anyone Out There . . . ,” Peter L. McLaren illuminates that the trajectory of President Obama’s social, political, and economic policies since taking office over 2 years ago indicates his talk about veering from the neoliberal presidencies over the past 30 years was “just an affectation that he scrupulously and disingenuously applied to himself mainly for the purpose of winning votes.” However, McLaren also argues persuasively that even if the Obama administration had the best intentions to stop the corporate and military dominance over life in the United States and within other contexts, which consists of the United States building its empire through speed technologies; disposable bodies of minority men, women, and children who frequently toil in globalized sweatshops; and through furtive shadow wars in various sections of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, it could not be done amid the structures promoting neoliberal capitalism. McLaren reminds progressive educators and scholars that the hate, poverty, violence, racism, and fear mongering plaguing our planet today can be eliminated only if “we begin to look at organizing the struggle to overcome necessity outside the value form of

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labor in capitalist societies (such as in the case of a socialist alternative to capitalism), we will be locked in the prison house of endless exploitation and alienation.” McLaren concludes his essay by arguing that the radicalized discourses promoted by media moguls will possibly make it even more arduous to foster a collective movement to challenge the structures responsible for the dark social and economic realities at the present moment. Here, the author captures much of the impact of radicalized discourses in the United States: The same attitude today is reflected in the ratcheting-up of the racialization of the country, which we have witnessed in the attack on ethnic studies; the rollback of civil rights victories; and the repeal of affirmative action standards, racial profiling, and the expansion of the prison industrial complex used to warehouse “unruly” people of color. The official ideology of color blindness now makes it a cultural offense to speak out about racial prejudice against any specific group; except that now some aggrieved whites are often wearing the mantel of the oppressed and using the Tea Party and Republican platforms to air their grievances in the court of mainstream public opinion (fostered by the corporate media). Liberals are now derided as demonic socialists indistinguishable from Nazis, and new public programs sponsored by the federal government are seen as part of a communist takeover of the country.

Final Thoughts This book, as we were careful to point out at the beginning of this Introduction, is not about blaming one person for the state of education. Obama, although occupying a powerful position, is but one person. Our analysis illuminates the disconnection between his rhetoric, especially during the 2-year electoral campaign, and his policies. He has not sought to undo, dismantle, or even critique neoliberalism, which, as we argue individually and collectively throughout this book, is a serious concern. Without addressing neoliberalism in education, it will be very difficult to make meaningful, tangible gains in relation to democracy and social justice. If America the empire cannot be critiqued in and through schools, how can we expect that there will be significant change in relation to social inequalities, including poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of marginalization and oppression. A more open acknowledgement that education is a political project and that critical engagement means diverging from the prefabricated setting of neoliberal strictures, we firmly believe, is a prerequisite to bone fide hope and change within education.

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Notes 1. There are numerous scholars who describe and define the most dominant ideological doctrine impacting life in schools and in the wider society for the past 30 years as neoliberalism. For instance, Russom (2010) defines it as “a set of economic policies that emphasizes the minimization of state intervention in the economy, privatization of sectors of the economy once thought to be the domain of the public sector, deregulation of markets, slashing government spending, and promoting anti-union ‘flexible’ labor policies making it easier for employers to depress wages and fire workers at will.” To learn more about the historical forces impacting the development of neoliberalism, see B. Porfilio & C. Malott’s The Destructive Path of Neoliberalism: An International Examination of Education (2008). 2. The debate, and fury, around the request to place a Muslim cultural center with a prayer space, which has been labeled a mosque, within two blocks of Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center once stood, is very instructive in relation to the supremacy of the Christian religion within American political and social culture. Although there will be strip bars, fast-food outlets, souvenir stands, and many other establishments that raise questions about the sanctity of the area, the mosque has been singled out for special vilification. At the same time, a Christian pastor sought to burn the Koran on September 11, 2010, and a large percentage of Americans, at the time of the writing of this piece, still believe that President Obama is a Muslim, thus inferring, supposedly, that he is less American, less likely to support American values, and, ultimately, less worthy of being the president. 3. Many scholars have shown that NCLB has oppressed K–12 students on the structural axes of race and class. The legislation is responsible for some of the most qualified teachers leaving urban schools because they are forced to implement “drill and kill” curriculum to help ensure their students and schools do well on corporately produced standardized examinations, for more and more urban students failing to graduate on time or dropping out of school entirely, and for creating militarized school zones, where army recruiters are given free rein to cajole minority and poor students, who are desperate for funds to attend college, to join the imperial armed forces (Kozol, 2005; Mathison & Ross, 2008). 4. Please see N. Klein’s (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism to examine further how the ruling elite have used the public’s disorientation from perceived or actual global catastrophes to corporatize numerous segments our social life for the past 30 years. 5. According to Russom (2010), there is a “high school dropout rate of nearly 30 percent nationwide, and more than 50 percent in many major cities.” 6. There are exceptions to the rule, and a small number of charter schools focus on empowerment, social justice, and transformation, but these schools are generally not antagonistic to the public school system, which is the case for a large number of charter schools.

xlviii   INTRODUCTION 7. See Morrell’s (2008) Critical Literacy for Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access Dissent, and Liberation to examine how educators can establish community-based critical research for the purpose of guiding youth to understanding what causes injustice in schools and in the wider society.

References Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. (1999). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. New York: Routledge. Au, W. (2008). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. New York: Routledge. Au, W. (2009). Obama, where art thou? Hoping for change in U.S. educational policy. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 309–320. Ayers, W. (2009). Barack Obama and the fight for public education. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 385–395. Ayers, W., & Klonsky, M. (2006). Private management of Chicago schools is a long way from Mecca. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(6), 461–463. Benjamin, R. (2010, May 22). On immigration, Obama is bound by race and politics. All Salon. Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/05/22/obama_immigration_double_bind Blain, G. (2010, August 31). U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan credits NY’s breathtaking courage in Race to the Top effort. New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/08/31/2010-08-1_ ed_czar_gives_new_york_a_for_race_to_top_effort.html Boggs, C. (2005). Foreword. In P. L. McLaren (Ed.), Capitalists and conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire (pp. ix–xii). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Booker, K., Gill, B., Zimmer, R., & Sass, T. (2009). Achievement and attainment in Chicago charter schools. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. Brown, J., Gutstein, E. R., & Lipman, P. (2009). Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story: Myth or reality? Rethinking Schools Online, 23(3). Retrieved from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_03/arne233.shtml Carr, P. R. (2007). Experiencing democracy through neo-liberalism: The role of social justice in education. Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies, 5(2). http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageID= article&articleID=104 Carr, P. R. (2008). Educators and education for democracy: Moving beyond “thin” democracy. Inter-American Journal of Education and Democracy, 1(2), 147–165. Retrieved from http://www.ried-ijed.org/english/articulo.php?idRevista= 4&idArticulo=16 Carr, P. R. (2010). Does your vote count? Critical pedagogy and democracy. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Carr, P. R., & Porfilio, B. J. (2009). The 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, democracy and media literacy. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2(1), 119–

Audaciously Espousing Hope Within a Torrent of Hegemonic Neoliberalism    xlix 138. Retrieved from http://freire.mcgill.ca/ojs/index.php/home/article/ view/110 /51. Christianakis, M. & Mora, R. (in press). Charting a new course for public education through charter schools: Where is Obama taking us? In P. R. Carr & B. J. Porfilio, (Eds.), The phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for education: Can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Cohen, R. (2007, March 27). Bush the neoliberal. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/ AR2007052 801053.html Dei, G., Mazzuca, J., & McIassac, E. (1997). Reconstructing “dropout”: A critical ethnography of the dynamics of black students’ disengagement from school. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. De Lissovoy, N. (2008). Conceptualizing oppression in educational theory: Toward a compound standpoint. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 8(1), 82–105. Denzin, N. K. (2009). Critical pedagogy and democratic life or a radical democratic pedagogy. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 9(3), 379–397. Engelhardt, T. (2010, June 4). Living in a can’t-do nation. TimDispatch.com. Retrieved from http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175255/tomgram%3A_ engelhardt%2Cliving_in_ the_51st_state_(of_denial) Ford, G. (2010, June 3). Yes, Obama is engaged in a colossal crime. Black Agenda Report. Retrieved from http://www.opednews.com/articles/Yes-Obama-isEngaged—-by-Glen-Ford-100603-568.html Freire, P. (1973). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. (2004). Class causalities: Disappearing youth in the age of George Bush. A Journal of Academic Labor, 6(1). Retrieved from http://www.henryagiroux. com/online_articles.htm Giroux, H. (2007). Democracy, education, and the politics of critical pedagogy. In P. McLaren, & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy where are you now? (pp. 1–5). New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Giroux, H. (2009). Obama’s dilemma: Postpartisan politics and the crisis of American education. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 250–266. Giroux, H. (2010, February 15). Democracy and the threat of authoritarianism: Politics beyond Barack Obama. Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org/democracy-and-threat-authoritarianism-politics-beyond-barack-obama56890?utm_ source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TRUTHOU T+t+r+u+t+h+o+u+t+%257C+News+Politics Giroux, H., & Saltman, K. (2009). Obama’s betrayal of public education? Arne Duncan and the corporate model of schooling. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 9(6), 772–779. Goodman, A. (2008, November 24). Noam Chomsky: What next? The elections, the economy, and the world. Truth, war, and consequences. [Radio News Program]. Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. Retrieved from http://www. democracynow.org/2008/11/24/noam_chomsky_what_next_the_elections Goodman, A. (2010). Obama signs $600M bill to increase militarization of USMexico Border. [Radio News Program]. Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. Retrieved from http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/19/obama_ signs_600m_bill_to_increase

l   INTRODUCTION Harvey, D. (2010, March 13). Is this really the end of neoliberalism. Counterpunch. Retrieved from http://www.counterpunch.org/harvey03132009.html Henry, R., & Reeves, J. (2010, June 3). Gulf oil crisis could stretch into the fall. SFGate.com. Retrieved from http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-06-03/news/ 216556161oil-spill-gusher-tool-kit Hill, M. L. (2010, May 26). Ethnic studies is dangerous for the entire nation. Retrieved from http://www.theloop21.com/politics/Arizonas-ethnic-studies-ban-isdangerous-for-the-entire-nation Hursh, D. (in press). More of the same: How free-market capitalism dominates the economy and education. In P. R. Carr & B. J. Porfilio, (Eds.), The phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for education: Can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Book. Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Three Rivers Press. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008a). Critical pedagogy:Primer. New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008b). Critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century: Evolution for survival. In P. L. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are they now? (pp. 9–42). New York: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008c). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction. London: Springer. Lipman, P. (2003). High-stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. New York: Routledge Falmer. Lipman, P., & Hursh, D. (2007). Renaissance 2010: The reassertion of ruling class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago. Policy Futures in Education, 5(2). Lund, D. E., & Carr, P. R. (Eds.). (2008). “Doing” democracy: Striving for political literacy and social justice. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Macrine, S. (Ed.). (2009). Critical pedagogy in uncertain times: Hopes and possibilities. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Mathison, S., & Ross, E. W. (2008). The nature and limits of standards-based reform and assessment. New York: Teachers College Press. McLaren, P. L. (2005). Capitalists and conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. McLaren, P. L. (2008). Capitalism’s bestiary: Rebuilding urban education. In B. Porfilio & C. Malott (Ed.), The destructive path of neo-liberalism: An international examination of urban education. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. McLaren, P. L. (2009). Rehearsing disaster’s rehearsal: The election and its aftermath in Obamerica. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 9(6), 803–815. Morrell, E. (2008) Critical literacy for urban youth: Pedagogies of access dissent, and liberation. New York: Routledge. Porfilio, B. J., & Carr, P. R. (2008). Youth culture, the mass media and democratic education. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 12(4). Retrieved from http://www. rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/cho4255w9.htm Porfilio, B. J., & Hall, J. (2005). “Power city” politics and building of a corporate school. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 3(1). http://www.jceps. com/?pageID=article&articleID=38

Audaciously Espousing Hope Within a Torrent of Hegemonic Neoliberalism    li Porfilio, B. J., & Malott, C. (Eds.). (2008). An international examination of urban education: The destructive path of neoliberalism. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books. Ross, E. W., & Gibson, R. (Eds.). (2007) Neoliberalism and education reform. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Russom, G. (2010). Obama’s neoliberal agenda for education. International Socialist Review, 71. Retrieved from http://www.isreview.org/issues/71/feat-neoliberaleducation.shtml Saltman, K., & Gabbard, D. (2003). Education as enforcement: The militarization and corporatization of schools. New York: Routledge. Scipes, K. (2009, May 30). Neo-liberal economic policies in the United States: The impact of globalization on a northern country. ZNET. Retrieved from http:// www.zcommunications.org/neo-liberal-economic-policies-in-the-unitedstates-by-kim-scipes-1 Schoff, R., & Adams, C, (2010, May 31). TOP kill failure exponentially magnifies BP oil disaster. CDNN. Retrieved from http://www.cdnn.info/news/eco/ e100530.html Scott, N. (2010, June 2). Teaching under assault: Two visions of education clash as Bloomberg prepares to lay off 6,400 teachers. Independent. Retrieved from http://www.indypendent.org/2010/06/03/teaching-under-assault/ Shane, S., Mazzetti, M., & Worth, R. F. (2010, August 14). Secret assault on terrorism widens on two continents. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www. nytimes.com/2010/ 08/15/world/15shadowwar.html Simmons, D. (2010, September 27). Obama: D.C. schools don’t suit daughters. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtontimes.com/ news/2010/ sep/27/obama-dc-schools-dont-suit-daughters/ Smith, C. (2010, June 4). Author slams Arizona education boss over ethnic studies ban. Retrieved from http://www.kgun9.com/Global/story.asp?S=12593272 Street, P. (2008a, December 30). Arne Duncan and neoliberal racism. The Black Agenda Report. Retrieved from http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/ arne-duncan-and-neoliberal-racism Street, P. (2008b). Our challenge, not Obama’s: Hope and change beyond the great man theory of history. Znet. Retrieved from http://www.zmag.org /znet/viewArticle/19795 Taibbi, M. (2010, August 4). Wall Street’s big win. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/188551 Trapasso, C. (2010, September 20). New Race to the Top charter school application rules ensnare Queens Phoenix Academy charter school. New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/ queens/2010/09/20/2010-09-20_hard_lesson_for_school_new_requirements_may_have_kept_charter_from_approval.html Volman, D. (2010, April 3). Obama expands military involvement in Africa. AntiWar.com. Retrieved from http://original.antiwar.com/volman/2010/04/02/ military-involvement-in-africa/

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Section I Using Historical and Theoretical Insights to Understand Obama’s Educational Agenda

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Chapter 1

More of the Same How Free Market-Capitalism Dominates the Economy and Education David Hursh

Introduction During his campaign, presidential nominee Barack Obama, with Linda Darling-Hammond as his educational advisor, promised to scale back or reverse many of the education reforms of the Bush administration. This seemed especially prudent given the public’s increasing distaste for top-down reform emphasizing high-stakes testing and charter schools. Indeed, the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll (Bushaw & Gallup, 2008), taken just months before the election, revealed that 77 percent of the public felt that placing education policy decision-making in the hands of business and political leaders, effectively ignoring teachers, as was done with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (DeBray, 2006), was exactly the wrong approach, with only 16 percent of the public favoring continuing the law as is. Furthermore, 44 percent of parents believe that too much emphasis is placed on achievement testing, and 77 percent think that class grades, teachers’ observations, and students’ work provide a more accurate picture of students’ academic The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 3–22 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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achievement. Lastly, the public remained confused about the exact nature of charter schools, and support for them fell to the lowest level in 4 years, with only 51 percent in support. Obama seemed to be aware of the public’s criticisms of NCLB as he criticized the overreliance on standardized tests, or “students filling in bubbles,”1 and, in response, called for more useful formative assessments. In addition, he proposed improving the teaching profession by upgrading teacher education, developing mentoring programs, rewarding teachers through career ladders rather than individual bonuses, and engaging with teacher educators. Darling-Hammond appeared in a televised debate with John McCain’s education advisor (Education Week, 2008), and many educational professionals hoped that, if elected, Obama would choose DarlingHammond as his Secretary of Education. Instead, President Obama chose as his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who, previous to becoming CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, had little experience in education. Obama, as I will argue below, turned against Darling-Hammond and chose Duncan, who he knew primarily from playing basketball with, and together, they have promoted policies that are the antithesis of his campaign promises. Rather than supporting teachers as professionals, he is attacking teachers as the central problem, and along with Duncan, applauded the mass firing of teachers in Falls River, Rhode Island (Zezima, 2010). Furthermore, states now must compete for federal funding through Race To The Top (RTTT). For states to be eligible to “win” the competition, states must pass laws linking teacher compensation to students’ scores on standardized tests and, while there was no mention of charter schools in Obama’s campaign literature, states must not only pass legislation allowing for charter schools, states cannot place a strict limit on the number of charter schools. For example, New York State raised the limit on the number of charter schools from 200 to 460. Moreover, while states are falling over one another passing legislation linking teacher pay to test scores and authorizing charter schools, only about 15 states will receive RTTT funding. As a result, most states will have passed sweeping legislation creating radical changes in their education systems without receiving any of the funding promised. In a climate of financial desperation, extortion works. So, the question to be answered here is: How do we explain this drastic course reversal in which Obama is pushing education reforms that not even Bush dared to propose? The answer, I will suggest, can be found in understanding the degree to which neoliberal policies promoting unregulated markets, competition, privatization, and entrepreneurialism have come to dominate political and public discourse. In explaining the ability of Wall Street’s financial institutions to gain control of the federal government and the Federal Reserve System, Johnson and Kwak (2010), two mainstream economists, cite the extent to which “the ideology of Wall Street—that unfet-

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tered innovation and unregulated financial markets were good for America and the world—became the consensus position in Washington on both sides of the political aisle” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Since Obama’s election, the neoliberal ideology of Wall Street is, ironically, increasingly echoed by the groups such as the Tea Party, who represent primarily the white middle and working class. Neoliberal and neoconservative media commentators, as exemplified by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, are also critical of government spending for health care and other social services, and governmental regulation of corporations, including regulations aimed at protecting the environment or reducing global warming. Neoliberals and neoconservatives also criticize public education, which they sometimes pejoratively describe as “government schools” (Johnson & Salle, 2004), and instead, support charter schools and markets as ostensibly representing the will of the people. While some of this so-called grassroots movement also criticize corporate (especially Wall Street’s) governmental influence, a further irony is that some of their largest organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity and Citizens for the Environment, are funded by and serve the corporate interests of the Koch brothers, two billionaires who own the second-largest private corporation in the United States (Mayer, 2010; Rich, 2010). Consequently, what inclinations the Obama administration might have to reform schools, health care, environmental regulations, and the banking system to reflect more social-democratic principles in which government plays a proactive role in working for equal access to education and health care, or for regulations that protect us from toxins, global warming, or the predatory practices of banks, are undermined both by the ideology of Wall Street and what is presented as Main Street. Moreover, Obama has chosen to include in his administration economic and education advisors who have a shared ideology that markets operate rationally, that private is preferable to public, and that problems are best solved through technical solutions such as high-stakes standardized testing. Furthermore, many of Obama’s economic advisors previously held top posts in the nation’s largest financial institutions or the Federal Reserve Bank. Accordingly, they tend to take positions that favor the banks and marginalize individuals who hold contrary positions. For example, Jonathan Alter, in The Promise: President Obama, Year One (2010), portrays Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and Director of the National Economic Council Lawrence Summers as maintaining very narrow neoliberal economic policies that bail out Wall Street but fail to overhaul the financial system and inadequately fund rebuilding the infrastructure, creating jobs, or developing sustainable energy technologies (Krugman, 2010a). Also, writes Alter, Geithner and Summers have little interest in other viewpoints, including those of George Soros and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who have

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been ignored. Harshaw (2010) reports that even members of Obama’s own administration have been slighted by Summers and Geithner, including Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, who subsequently resigned. Similarly, education secretary Arne Duncan came to the White House from his position as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools where, as Pauline Lipman describes in High-Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (2004), schools were central to an ambitious effort to use neoliberal policies to transform Chicago into a global city focused on real estate, tourism, and retail. Therefore, in this chapter, I will begin by describing the ascent of neoliberalism as a doctrine to restore corporate profits in response to the pre– and post–World War II spread of social democratic liberalism. Social democratic liberalism, which in the United States is more commonly referred to as liberalism, endorses Keynesian economic policies in which governments should adopt economic policies to limit economic hardships and promote economic growth and individual rights. Subsequently, from the mid-1930s to the 1970s, workers, women, and people of color made substantial economic and political gains. In response to the negative effects such policies had on corporate profits, finance institutions have, over the last 4 decades, used their economic and political power to promote neoliberal ideology and policies, gaining hegemony over how we conceptualize economic and social policies. Johnson and Kwak (2010) argue, “Wall Street banks are the new American oligarchy” (p. 6), which use their economic power to gain political power, which they use for their own benefit. The major banking institutions have succeeded in concentrating power in their own hands to such an extent that, as of early 2009, the assets of the three largest banks equaled 44 percent of the nation’s Gross National Product (Johnson & Kwak, 2010). I will then show how neoliberal tenets are central to Obama/Duncan’s education policies, particularly with its emphasis on markets, competition, efficiency, merit pay, and privatization. However, neoliberal education policies, I will argue, have failed to achieve their ostensible goals of improving student learning, closing the achievement gap, and creating efficiencies. Moreover, Obama/Duncan’s obsession with using competitive grants has undermined public schools’ efforts to improve education and led to companies, with no experience improving schools, applying for federal financing to overhaul schools (Dillon, 2010). In addition, I will provide evidence that neoliberalism fails as a general economic and social policy. First, contrary to neoliberal ideology that markets will regulate themselves, over the last several decades we have experienced recurring financial bubbles that have destroyed jobs and the financial health of millions of individuals and families (Brenner, 2002; Harvey,

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2005, 2010). The most recent crisis resulted from the misuse of subprime loans and the way in which those loans were repackaged and sold to other financial corporations. Neoliberalism weakens our economy by enervating or removing regulations necessary to ensure a sound financial system. Second, neoliberals conceptualize our economic and social issues as technical problems to be solved through markets that ostensibly provide for rational and neutral decision making. However, as historian Tony Judt (2010) states, because neoliberal rationality does not consider what is important— fairness, quality of life, and how we are create a sustainable future—such a system is highly irrational. I will conclude by proposing that we need to counter neoliberal ideology with an approach that focuses on developing a more equitable and sustainable world. Furthermore, we need to counter the power of the oligarchs by reforming our governing structures so that wealth does not equal legislative control; by creating political alliances that work toward economic and social equality and environmental sustainability; and by reinvigorating democratic dialogue at the local, national, and international level. The Rise of Neoliberalism and the Current Fiscal and Social Crisis In the United States, neoliberal doctrine is often described and defined as free-market capitalism (Friedman, M., 1962; Friedman, T., 1999, 2005) in which economic prosperity is best achieved through unregulated or free markets, the withering away of the state as government’s role in regulating businesses and funding social services are either eliminated or privatized, and encouraging individuals to become self-interested entrepreneurs. Under neoliberalism, economic inequality does not result from unequal social structures that privilege the already advantaged but instead, from differences in individual choices and efforts. Inequality, therefore, is deserved and should not be a concern of government. Over the last 3 decades, neoliberal concepts have superseded the previous social democratic or liberal policies that first became prevalent in the United States during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and gained dominance in the United States and Western Europe during the first quarter century after World War II. Social democratic liberalism built on Keynesian economic theories in which the government was obligated to intervene in financial cycles to either spur or dampen economic growth and had responsibility for providing for the general welfare and education. Examples of President Roosevelt’s social democratic policies included his promoting fiscal regulations, such as the Glass-Steagal Banking Act of 1933, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Company and increased

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banking regulations, and his burgeoning governmental spending during the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, workers, women, and people of color struggled for and extended the gains made during the Roosevelt administration, expanding their personal and political rights to education, housing, health care, workplace safety, and the ballot box (Bowles & Gintis, 1986, pp. 57–59). The majority of Americans experienced improved standards of living as the middle class expanded and race and gender inequalities decreased (Hacker, 1993). School desegregation proceeded (de jure desegregation, if not always de facto), states expanded public postsecondary education, and workplace safety regulations and welfare benefits improved. During the 1960s and 1970s, because of the increasingly competitive and open world economy, corporations were less able to pass workers’ wage increases onto consumers. Therefore, while neoliberals claim that markets work best when governments stay out, in this and later events, such as the 2009 bank bailouts, corporate leaders urged governmental intervention. As a result, the federal government adopted monetarist and neoliberal policies supporting corporations over workers (Gill, 2003). In the United States, monetarist policies restored the power of capital by raising interest rates, thus inducing a recession that increased job scarcity, deflated wage demands, and reversed gains in social spending. These policies aimed to reduce the standard of living of all but wealthy Americans. Paul Volcker, Federal Reserve Board Chairman in 1979, pushed for a recession, asserting: “The standard of living of the average American has to decline. I don’t think you can escape that” (Parenti, 1999, p. 119). Such monetarist policies were soon linked with neoliberal goals of deregulating the economy; reducing, eliminating, or privatizing social services such as education, welfare, and incarceration; and elevating the free market above the public interest. Moreover, corporations began to reduce their costs by moving production to low-wage countries. This, combined with a false assertion that families’ incomes would rise through “trickle-down economics,” led to a continual decline in wages so that the current average wage is 8 percent below its peak in 1972 (Magdoff & Yates, 2009, p. 50). However, neoliberal economists seem not to understand that decreased wages result in dampened demand for consumer products, and this too curbs corporate profits (see also Johnson & Kwak, 2010). Not wanting to increase wages, the financial institutions and federal government have turned to other means of restoring profits. In the 1990s, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to encourage investments in financial assets, and consumers, looking for some way to improve their standard of living, increasingly invested in their own homes by buying more expensive homes through which they might make a profit and borrowing from the equity. The housing market boomed. Robert P. Brenner, interviewed by

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Seong-jin (2009), notes that “housing by itself accounted for one-third of the growth in GDP and close to half of the increase in employment in the years 2001–2005.” In addition, because banks could borrow money cheaply, they “were willing to extend loans to speculators, whose investments drove the prices of assets of every type ever higher [and] housing prices soared” (Seongjin, 2009). At the same time, the profits that could be made on guaranteed loans, such as U.S. treasury bonds, plunged, leading an increasing number of lending institutions to turn to “investments in dubious sub-prime mortgages. The housing bubble reached historic proportions, and the economic expansion was allowed to continue” (Seong-jin, 2009). The ongoing effort to make money readily available for investment in either real estate or stocks led to a rise in housing values and stock prices that could not be sustained. Eventually, more homeowners could not make their payments, housing prices fell and “the real economy went into recession and the financial sectors experienced a meltdown” (Seong-jin, 2009). “In the first twelve months of the recession, 2.5 million people lost their jobs” (Magdoff & Yeats, 2009, p. 86) and by June 2009, close to 7 million jobs had been lost. The housing bubble and collapse came about, argue Johnson and Kwak (2010), because the financial oligarchy “engineered a regulatory climate that allowed them to embark on an orgy of product innovation and risk-taking that would create the largest bubble in modern economic history and generate record-shattering profits for Wall Street” (pp. 120–121). However, even when the major financial institutions were responsible for the crash, “when the entire system came crashing down in 2007 and 2008, governments around the world were forced to come to its rescue, because their economic fortunes were held hostage by the financial system” (p. 121). Rescuing the Banks and the Rich at the Cost of Everyone Else In the United States, the federal government responded to the financial crisis by bailing out financial institutions such as Chase Morgan and Bank of America because they were “too big to fail.” The collapse of a major bank might bring to a standstill not only the economy of the United States but also the world. But rewarding financial institutions for their recklessness is unlikely to change their negative behavior. Therefore, many people have called for new banking regulations, including breaking up the banks so that their failure would not be as expensive to the taxpayer or as calamitous to the economy. However, the recent Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act tightened some regulations but failed to break up the “too big to

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fail” institutions, thus making it probable that we will repeat the same cycle of boom and bust and again will need to bail out the banks (Greider, 2010; Johnson & Kwak, 2010). While the federal government has quickly returned the banks to profitability, in part because the taxpayers took on the costs of the toxic assets, thus guaranteeing profits and a return to exorbitant wages and bonuses for bank executives, those who had no role in creating the financial collapse continue to pay for it through their taxes and with the loss of their homes and jobs. However, the federal government has been significantly less generous in their response to the increased unemployment and decreased revenues at the state level, providing limited funding to state governments for hiring teachers and rebuilding the infrastructure. Some Keynesian economists, such as Volcker, who has renounced his earlier neoliberal beliefs, Krugman (2010b), and former Secretary of Labor Reich (2010), argue that federal investments in jobs and the infrastructure have been inadequate and should be increased if we are to avoid a second recession. Raising False Fears Regarding the Deficit to Cut Funding for Social Services and the Infrastructure Nonetheless, such Keynesian policies calling for governmental fiscal stimulus have come under increasing attack from both Democrats and Republicans, who have become hostile to funding social services such as education, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and providing a safety net for the unemployed. While Democrats recently voted for legislation providing $10 billion to hire additional teachers, this was only half as much as the bill originally called for, and schools still face massive budget shortfalls. At the same time, Democrats have approved massive bailouts for banks and other financial institutions and have more recently continued the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Some, including Krugman, argue that some legislators and media pundits are exaggerating the danger of the federal deficit to argue against funding education and other social services and using the economic crisis that their policies created to push for reducing or privatizing social spending. Hayes (2010) argues, “Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don’t really care about deficits; they care about austerity—about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward” (p. 4). He adds: Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan

More of the Same    11 and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal crisis is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do. (p. 3)

Moreover, points out Hayes, “the public is nowhere near as obsessed with the deficit as those in Washington. According to a June 17, 2010 USA Today/Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans support “additional government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy” (p. 4), with 38 percent opposed. A Hart Research Associates poll published in June showed that two thirds of Americans favor continuing unemployment benefits. The results, then, of the last 4 decades of neoliberal economic policies have been dismal. The average wage has not increased in 40 years, the middle class has been decimated, our infrastructure is crumbling, and we have experienced several financial crises, including the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, in which “over 2,000 banks failed between 1985 and 1992” (Johnson & Kwak, 2010, p. 74), the technology bubble of the 1990s, and the current recession. Just as important, but rarely acknowledged by economists, is that, by prioritizing markets, economic growth, profit, and the entrepreneurial individual, neoliberalism ignores other values such as economic equality and the environment. Problems are to be solved, if they are to be faced at all, through the magic of the marketplace. We need not debate what obligation society or government has in reducing poverty or inequality. The individual entrepreneur seeking to improve his or her own economic situation places deliberation over our values and societal goals. Promoting Profit Over the Environment Similarly, because corporations’ only concern is the bottom line and desire to externalize environmental costs, such as pollution, neoliberalism excludes from its calculations damage to ecosystems and the biosphere, and destabilization of the environment. Such principles are evident when President George W. Bush argued against environmental policies that might limit corporate profits or prerogatives. Bush, in defending his veto of the Kyoto protocols that would limit carbon emissions, claimed, “I will explain as clear as I can today and every other chance I get, that we will not do anything that harms the economy. . . . That’s my priority. I’m worried about the economy” (McKibben, 2006, p. 18). And such arguments continue making it impossible for the United States to pass any bills instituting actions in response to global warming (Krugman, 2010a).

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Consequently, neoliberalism cannot solve but only exacerbate the environmental and economic problems we face and must be replaced with policies that situate people within the larger environmental system and aim to promote the common good. We need to reinvent democracy so that we deliberate over the issues, educate one another, and develop ways of interacting that result in a fair and sustainable society. If we are to take responsibility for our relationship with nature, writes Bill McKibben in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), we need to rethink our economic principles so that rather than focusing on the illusion of endless growth, increasing the Gross Domestic Product, and consuming more goods and services, we instead focus on improving the quality of our lives and our communities. We need to ask how we measure people’s quality of life and develop economic systems that work toward improving the well-being of everyone. James Speth, former Dean of Forestry and Environmental Sustainability at Yale, suggests that we need “a postgrowth society where what you really want is to grow very specific things that are desperately needed in a very targeted way—you know, care for the mentally ill, health-care accessibility, high-tech green-collar industries” (Goodell, 2008). We will need to substantially rethink democracy, economics, justice, and the very purpose of society, and incorporate new decision-making processes that work toward those goals. While the changes will require that we transform how we live in the world, doing any less is likely to result in a degraded society that we all should want to avoid (Hill, 2009). Neoliberalism and Education Over the last several decades, neoliberal tenets focusing on markets, competition, privatization, and accountability have dominated education policy. Beginning in the 1980s, states such as Texas and Florida, with George and Jeb Bush as governors, began to implement high-stakes testing as a way to hold students and teachers accountable. Both states began to require that students pass one or more standardized exams in order to graduate from high school. Similarly, in 1996, New York State began to require that students pass exams in five different subject areas in order to graduate (Hursh, 2008). Then, in 2001, No Child Left Behind was passed requiring not only that states require students to take standardized exams in English language arts and math, but also that schools and districts whose scores in any one student population group (by ethnicity, gender, and general and special education) did not meet a minimum threshold would face negative conse-

More of the Same    13

quences, including potential loss of funds and reorganization of the school into a charter school. President Bush also pushed for privatizing public schools by expanding charter schools but because of congressional resistance, could only use his executive powers to fund charter schools in Washington, DC (Bracey, 2004) and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, Bush used an executive order to disband the public schools and reopen most of them as charter schools. Further, he provided initially $20.9 million in additional funding to the charter schools and then added on $24 million (Center for Community Change, 2006). New Orleans charter schools have been able to choose which and how many students to admit, leaving the more challenging students to reenroll in the underfunded public schools. One of the most significant and fateful examples of the how education policies were incorporated into a larger neoliberal agenda occurred in Chicago under Renaissance 2010, wherein Mayor Daley appointed Arne Duncan, who had minimum education experience, as CEO of the public schools in June 2001. During Duncan’s term, control over the schools was handed over to the corporate elite. The Commercial Club, a by-invitationonly organization of corporate leaders, first created the Renaissance Schools Fund, which they used as leverage to dismantle the elected school board and replace it with the Chicago Board of Education, a body composed of their own representatives. Referred to in the press as a “secret cabinet,” this unelected body not only participates in the selection and evaluation of new schools, but also distributes Commercial Club funds to those schools (Cholo, 2005; Rossi, 2004). In 2004, the Commercial Club announced that it, along with Mayor Daley, would not only overhaul the public school system but also remake the city as a leading global city to attract the middle and upper classes as tourists, residents, and business leaders. In order to do so, whole swaths of the city occupied by the poor and people of color have been demolished to make way for condominiums, hotels, and high-end retail (Lipman & Hursh, 2007). While remaking neighborhoods, they also closed “failing” public schools (those generally attended by students of color) and reopened most of them as either privately run charter schools or schools governed directly by the Renaissance School Fund. Moreover, areas of the city in which white middle-class students made up most of the student population saw International Baccalaureate and other prestigious magnet programs open, while students of color were offered military academies. The Chicago Board of Education also sought to improve schools by holding teachers accountable through standardized tests, raising test scores through teaching to the test, and focusing on the “bubble students”—those who, based on previous tests, are just above or below the passing score. One

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teacher, Lipman (2004) reports, devoted the first half of the school year to developing students’ writing skills and familiarity with sophisticated literature, but then, for the third quarter, was pressured to shift to test preparation, which included familiarizing students with “the format of a short, mediocre selection of writing . . . to get them to recognize that this type of question is asking you for some really basic information you can go back to look for” (pp. 110–111). Another teacher said, They tell us . . . “We don’t want high kids and we don’t want the lowest kids, we want those kids that are just about to pass the IOWA [standardized] tests.” So here you have a third or a fourth of your classroom really needing help to be ready for the next grade level and they don’t get to go. (Lipman, 2004, p. 82)

The Chicago model of school reform became the basis for Obama’s current approach: top-down, standardized tests to hold teachers and students accountable, weakening teacher input, privatizing schools as charters or handing school governance over to business groups. After Obama won the election, there was significant public conjecture over whether Obama would appoint Darling-Hammond or Duncan. However, Darling-Hammond, who has worked for decades researching and improving teaching and learning in literally hundreds of schools, was criticized by neoliberal and neoconservatives as “wedded to the status quo,” while Duncan was described as the true reformer (Bracey, 2009). In the end, Obama chose his basketball playing partner, Duncan. Duncan has brought to his position as head of the federal Department of Education the same approach that he took in Chicago. As mentioned earlier, he has placed much of the blame for education’s failures (and we may question the extent to which it is education’s failures or the failure to provide jobs that provide a living wage, health care, and a toxin-free environment) on teachers and teacher educators, claiming, like the criticism of Darling-Hammond, that they support the status quo. Instead, he has placed his faith in privately run charter schools—in particular the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP schools)—and philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walmart Foundation. The education of our children is increasingly taken away from educators and handed over to individuals who are wealthy enough to have foundations, and entrepreneurs who run militaristic academies like KIPP (Hursh, 2011). The Race To The Top competition is especially pernicious. Such a competition, during an economic recession in which local and state governments have had to reduce school funding, only serves to increase schools’ economic distress. Furthermore, where once states could rely on federal funding, they are now coerced into legislating changes that further Dun-

More of the Same    15

can’s goal of privatizing education and controlling teachers through test scores. Race to the Top requires that states permit and expand the number of charter schools (publically funded and privately operated schools), and tie teacher assessments and salaries to their students’ test scores on standardized tests. Moreover, Duncan has widely proclaimed that he prefers that mayors from urban school districts dissolve the elected school boards and appoint their own boards, which often serve at the discretion of the mayor. The takeover of city schools by mayors has resulted in mayors dismissing school board members with whom they disagree (as in New York City) or hundreds of teachers (as in Washington. DC). Furthermore, mayors and their superintendents, in order to demonstrate that their “reforms” have succeeded, have placed even more focus on scores on standardized tests (Ravitch et al., 2009). One example of a current push for mayoral control of schools is occurring in Rochester, New York, where, in late 2009, Mayor Robert Duffy proposed disbanding the elected school board and replacing it with an advisory board with a majority of the members appointed by him and the remainder by the city council. He argues that mayoral control will be more efficient because the mayor will grant almost total decision-making power to the superintendent. Further, he argues, combining the city and school budgets will provide economic efficiency (Duffy, 2010). Since the mayor’s announcement, groups have criticized the proposal for disenfranchising the public and concentrating power in the hands of the mayor and superintendent. However, few have discussed how mayoral control is likely to lead to more than doubling the number of charter schools. Six months after announcing his goal of taking over the schools, he agreed to run for Lieutenant Governor alongside the heavily favored Democratic gubernatorial candidate, then-current Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo worked closely with hedge fund managers, who hope to profit from charter schools, to more than double the number of charter schools permitted by law in New York State. Consequently, New York State, partly in order to improve its chances of winning Race To The Top funding, lifted the cap on charter schools from 200 to 460 and allowed the evaluation of teachers based on students’ test scores (Gabriel & Medina, 2010). One might assume that Duffy hoped all along that if he could take over the city schools, he would convert many of them to charter schools. In fact, Rochester’s School Superintendent, Jean-Claude Brizard, recently confirmed that he is “a big fan of charter schools,” and declared that one of the several benefits of RTTT is that it has resulted in a national dialogue about education (Macaluso, 2010, p. 5). As of summer 2010, opponents of mayoral control and the state legislature’s own disarray prevented a bill granting the mayor control over the Rochester schools from coming up for vote in the Senate. However, the

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battle for mayoral control will intensify over the next year as proponents have formed Rochester Kids First, a coalition to “promote education reform.” Kids First has received funding from three sources: the Committee to Re-elect Joe Morelle, the bill’s chief sponsor, and Friends of Bob Duffy; and two-thirds of their funding came from the Committee for a Strong Economy, a PAC of the Rochester Business Alliance. Moreover, with the mayor joining Governor Cuomo in Albany, they will be able to better orchestrate the bill’s passage and push for vastly increasing the number of charter schools in New York State (see my blogs on mayoral control in Rochester and the future of charter schools at http://warner.rochester. edu/blog/warnerperspectives). The push for mayoral control, like neoliberal and neoconservative organizations like the Tea Party, are portrayed as grassroots efforts, but received most of their funds from corporations promoting neoliberal policies. Lastly, the debate over mayoral control and the push for high-stakes testing and privatization has been so deafening, there has been little substantive discussion about education. We neither discuss what should be the goal of education, how to improve schools, nor the relationship between an economically declining city and student performance (Ramos, 2010). Creating Alternatives to Neoliberalism Four decades of neoliberal policies have resulted in no gains in people’s incomes (except for the rich), increased economic inequality, global warming, an environment replete with toxins and in which species diversity is declining, and a school system in which the emphasis on test preparation undermines students tackling meaningful questions. Furthermore, financiers from the largest banks have successfully created in oligarchy in which they control the federal government, limit regulations that might be placed on them, and because they are “too big to fail,” are rescued from their own financial adventures. Lastly, our public discourse regarding who and what we want to be as individuals and a society has been limited by the dominance of neoliberal ideology promoted both by the finance institutions as well as spurious grassroots organizations and their corporate funders and media promoters, that assume that markets and competition are the preferred way to make all social decisions and that government, wherever possible—including the military, prisons, and education—should be privatized, and that regulations are harmful. However, neoliberalism, as David Harvey (2005) reminds us, is neither objective nor neutral. Neoliberalism provides a benevolent mask of wonderful sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstruction of

More of the Same    17 naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centers of global capitalism. (p. 119)

And neoliberalism has delivered. In 1970, after decades of social democratic policies and just prior to the rise of neoliberal polices, the wealthiest 1 percent only amassed 8 to 9 percent of the total annual income in the United States. “But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income re-concentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest one percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 per cent of the total” (Reich, 2010, p. 13). Similarly, writes Orlando Patterson (2010), blacks in general and the black middle class are losing ground. “A 2007 Pew Foundation/Brookings Institution study found that a majority of black middle-class children earned less than their parents and, even more alarming, that almost half of downwardly mobile offspring had fallen to the bottom of the income distribution” (p. 20). Neoliberalism, then, has had both real material and ideological consequences. It has increased economic inequality and poverty, as well as racial segregation. Moreover, observes Tony Judt (2010), after four decades of neoliberal dominance, We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? (pp. 1–2)

It is irrational to believe that a society can be based on the pursuit of material self-interest and that markets are the means through which decisions are made as to what services or goods will be provided. We must rethink the nature of society, the role of the state, our relationship to the environment, and our educational system. We need to begin to describe what kind of society and world we want and how will we get there. We need to rethink how best to provide health care and financial security for the elderly, how to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure and our schools. Given the current divisive debate in the United States and the complexity of the answers, engaging in this discussion will not be easy. Further, our political system is broken. We no longer have a democracy. Michael Kazin (2010), professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent, recently quoted Senator Richard Durbin as admitting that the barons of banking “frankly own” the most powerful legislative body in the world. Barbara Ehrenreich (2010) adds, “The government . . . has become a handmaid to corporate power—a hiring hall from which compliant officials are selected to vastly more lucrative private-sector jobs, as well as an emergency cash reserve for companies that fall on hard times.” We need, therefore, to redraw lobbying and campaign financing laws to empower individual citizens. We need to increase the voice of middle and working

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classes and reinstitute democracy. Again, this will not be easy, especially with corporations lined up against us. However, the United States was founded with the aim of limited centralized power, included the power of the bankers (Johnson & Kwak, 2010). Moreover, we face impending disasters brought on by our lack of respect and care for the environment. Our efforts to counter global warming are feeble. We are facing a continual rise in temperatures, droughts, floods, and sea levels (Orr, 2009). We are putting into the environment thousands of chemicals (including heavy metals, pesticides, pthalates, and prescription medicines), many of which we know are damaging our health by adversely affecting our cognitive abilities, our bones, and our endocrine systems, and others for which their effects are unknown because no research has been performed (Frumkin, 2010). Lastly, rather than focusing on test scores and privatizing schools, we need to think about what role schools might have in solving our problems. Schools can become places in which students examine local issues and take civic action. In my own work with schools, students examined local environmental problems such as pesticides, herbicides, and other toxins in the environment, and proposed remedies, including developing public policies (Hursh, Martina, & Fantauzzo, 2010). Furthermore, I am working with two schools—one in Rochester and one in Kampala, Uganda—that are installing alternative energy systems, rainwater harvesting systems, and organic gardens, with the students as energy auditors (Hare, 2010; Hursh 2010). Students are becoming researchers and stewards of their environment. I began by noting that the public has increasingly turned against highstakes testing, politicians and corporate executives deciding on education policy. Instead, the public and especially parents have more faith in teachers and their assessments. The most recent Phi Delta Kappa poll (September 2010) confirms that a majority of the public disagrees with current policy. Less than 30 percent of the public has a favorable view of NCLB and more think that it has harmed rather than helped education. Only 13 percent agree that the best way to improve failing schools is to close them and reopen them as a charter schools. Instead, for the public, the biggest problem that schools face is inadequate funding. Moreover, rather than focusing on creating better tests, the federal government should focus on improving the quality of teachers (Bushaw & Lopez, 2010). However, politicians and wealthy corporate philanthropists such a Bill Gates and the Walmart Foundation are ignoring the public in supporting charter schools and using standardized tests to assess teachers. In Rochester, New York, the Rochester Business Alliance is funding an ostensibly grassroots organization’s media campaign promoting mayoral control of the public schools. Increasingly, corporate interests dominate the debate over education, economic, environmental, health, and other policies. We

More of the Same    19

need to make sure that the general public is heard. Those against neoliberal policies and favoring social democratic ones cannot afford to remain the silent majority. The future is, at best, highly uncertain. We cannot hope to engage it, concludes Judt (2010), “if we confine ourselves to issues of economic efficiency and productivity, ignoring ethical considerations and all reference to broader social goals” (p. 8). We need to imagine and work for a new future, one in which we rethink and reconstruct the role of government, the nature of the economy, our relationship to the environment, and the purpose of schooling. Note 1. Obama’s education platform for his campaign has been removed from his Web site.

References Alter, J. (2010). The promise: President Obama, year one. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1986). Democracy and capitalism: Property, community and the contradictions of modern thought. New York: Basic Books. Bracey, G. (2004, October). The 14th Bracey report on the condition of public education. Phi Delta Kappan, 149–167. Bracey, G. (2009, January 4). The hatchet job on Linda Darling-Hammond. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/the-hatchetjob-on-linda_b_155104.html Brenner, R. (2002). The boom and the bubble: The US in the world economy. New York: Verso. Bushaw, W. J., & Gallup, A. M. (2008, September). Americans speak out—Are educators and policy makers listening? The 40th annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of the public’s attitudes towards the public schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 90(1). Bushaw, W. J., & Lopez, S. J. (2010, September). A time for change: The 42nd annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools. Phil Delta Kappan, 92(1). Available at: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/poll.htm. Center for Community Change. (2006, September). Dismantling a community. Washington, DC: Center for Community Change. Available at http://www.communitychange.org Cholo, A. B. (2005, February 23). Businesses help new schools. Chicago Tribune Online Edition. Retrieved from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-02-23/ news/0502230236_1_contract-schools-new-schools-regular-public-school

20   D. HURSH Debary, E. (2006). Politics, ideology and education: Federal policy during the Clinton and Bush administrations. New York: Teachers College Press. Dillon, S. (2010, August 9). Inexperienced companies chase U.S. school funds. The New York Times, p. A11. Duffy, R. J. (2010, January). Putting children first: A framework for change in school governance. Rochester, New York: City of Rochester Communications Bureau. Education Week. (2008, October 21). Education and the next president. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/marketplace/webinars/webcast_ed_next_ president_transcript.html Ehrenreich, B. (2010, September 30/August 6). Replies to Eric Alterman’s “Kabuki democracy.” The Nation, pp. 17–18. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, T. (1999). The Lexus and the olive tree. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Frumkin, H. (2010). Environmental health: From global to local (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Gabriel, T., & Medina, J. (2010, May 9). Charter schools’ new cheerleaders: Financiers. The New York Times, p. A20. Gill, S. (2003). Power and resistance in the new world order. New York: Palgrave. Goodell, J. (2008, September/October). Change everything now: One of the nation’s most mainstream environmentalists says it’s time to get a lot more radical. Interview with Gus Speth. Orion Magazine. Retrieved from http://www. orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5413/ Greider, W., (2010, July 19). Battling the banksters. The Nation, pp. 3–4, 6. Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com/article/36905/battling-banksters Hacker, A. (1993). Two nations: Black and white, separate, hostile. New York: Ballantine Books. Hare, M. (2010, July 27). Education should lead to real-life solutions. Democrat and Chronicle, p. B1. Harshaw, T. (2010, August 6). Obama’s endangered economists. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/obamasendangered-economists/ ?hp Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2010). The enigma of capital and the crisis of capitalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hayes, C. (2010, August 2, 9). Deficit of mass destruction. The Nation. Hill, D. (2009). Introduction: Neoliberal politics and education in the rich world. In D. Hill (Ed.), The rich world and the impoverishment of education: Diminishing democracy, equity and workers’ right. New York: Routledge. Hursh, D. (2008). High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching and learning: The real crisis in education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hursh, D. (2010, June). Education for global sustainability: A case study in Uganda. Paper presented at the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies, Istanbul, Turkey.

More of the Same    21 Hursh, D. (2011). The Gates Foundation’s interventions into education, health, and food policies: Technology, power, and the privatization of political problems. In P. Kovacs (Ed.), The Gates Foundation and the future of U.S. “public schools.” New York: Routledge. Hursh, D., Martina, C. A., & Fantauzzo, M. (2010). Toxins in our environment: Health and civic responsibility. In E. Heilman (Ed.), Social studies and diversity teacher education: What we do and why we do it. New York: Routledge. Johnson, S., & Kwak, J. (2010). 13 bankers: The Wall street takeover and the next financial meltdown. New York: Pantheon. Johnson, D. C., & Salle, L. M. (2004, November). Responding to the attack on public education and teacher unions: A Commonweal Institute report. Menlo Park, CA: Retrieved from http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/IssuesEducation.htm Judt, T. (2010). Ill fares the land. New York: Penguin Press. Kazin, M. (2010, August 30/September 6). Replies to Eric Alterman’s “Kabuki democracy.” The Nation, p. 17. Krugman, P. (2010a, July 25). Who cooked the planet? The New York Times, p. A23 Krugman, P. (2010b, August 8). America goes dark. The New York Times, p. A19. Lipman, P. (2004). High-stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. New York: Routledge Falmer. Lipman, P., & Hursh, D. (2007). Renaissance 2010: The reassertion of ruling class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago. Policy Futures in Education, 5(2). Macaluso, T. L. (2010, August 11/17). The “race” is on for education funding. City Newspaper, p. 5. Magdoff. F., & Yates, M. (2009). The ABCs of the economic crisis: What working people need to know. New York: Monthly Review Press. Mayer, J. (2010, August 30). Covert operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging war against Obama. The New Yorker, pp. 45–55. McKibben, B. (2006, January 12). The coming meltdown. New York Review of Books, 53(1), 16–18. McKibben, B. (2007). Deep economy: The wealth of communities and the durable future. New York: Times Books. Orr, D. (2009). Down to the wire: Confronting climate collapse. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Parenti, C. (1999). Atlas finally shrugged: Us against them in the me decade. The Baffler, 13, 108–120. Patterson. O. (2010, July 19). Inequality in America and what to do about it. The Nation, p. 18, 20. Ramos, N. (2010b, February 17). UR professor decries mayoral control. Democrat and Chronicle. Retrieved from http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20100217/NEWS01/2170331/UR-professor-decries-mayoral-control Ravitch, D., Meier, D., Avitia, D. C., Bloomfield, J. F,. Brennan, H. N., Dukes, L. et al. (2009). NYC schools under Bloomberg and Klein: What parents, teachers, and policymakers need to know. Lulu. Retrieved from http://www.lulu. com/product/paperback/nyc-schools-under-bloombergklein-what-parents -teachers-and-policymakers-need-to-know/4970767

22   D. HURSH Reich, R. (2010, July 19). Inequality in America and what to do about it. The Nation, p. 13–15. Rich, F. (2010, August 28). The billionaires bankrolling the tea party. The New York Times, p. WK8. Rossi. R. (2004, November 30). Civic leaders donating $50 million want accountability from schools. Chicago Sun Times Online Edition. Retrieved December 11, 2007, from http:www.suntimes.com/ouput/news/cst-nws-renai30.html Seong-jin, J. (2009, Februrary 9). Overproduction not financial collapse is the heart of the crisis: The U.S. East Asia and the world: Interview with Robert P. Brenner, Asia-Pacific Journal. Retrieved from http://www.japanfocus.org/Robert-Brenner/3043. Zezima, K. (2010, February 25). A jumble of strong feelings after vote on a troubled school. The New York Times, A14. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes. com/2010/02/25/education/ 25central.html

Chapter 2

Concocting Crises to Create Consent The Importance of “The Shock Doctrine” to Understanding Current Educational Policy Virginia Lea

Introduction In this chapter, I aim to illuminate how and why public schools have been sustained and/or strengthened over the last 40 years as hierarchical, inequitable, and undemocratic sites by drawing on three theoretical ideas: the shock doctrine, described vividly by Naomi Klein (2007); critical multicultural education (Lea, 2010); and the idea of modern disciplinary technologies of power (Foucault, 1995). I explore why most individuals, including members of the middle class and large numbers of poor and low-income people, have consented to a neoliberal, “free-market,” global order, with its associated educational systems, when the latter are defined in large measure by inequities; and I look at the role President Obama has played with respect to the current socioeconomic and educational order. Humans are intelligent beThe Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 23–47 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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ings who generally believe that their perceptions of reality are freely chosen. Many would resist the idea that they, or the institutions in which they participate, have been influenced by hegemonic processes as intentional as the shock doctrine. Finally, given my role as a professor of multicultural education, I suggest a few ideas for helping preservice teachers to see through the hegemonic processes that render laws, policies, and practices normal, natural, and commonsense, even though they function to reproduce hierarchy and inequality in an society that is decidedly economically undemocratic. How Public School Inequities Have Been Sustained and Strengthened The following is my own interpretation of a current shock doctrine: We are in danger! We are threatened by “terrorists” and immigrants jealous of our way of life, and, due to our failing public schools, we are losing in the competition for global political and economic leadership (supremacy). We have a socialist black president, and people of color are visible in the media and are taking white jobs. The white population is under siege. We must take action to address the threats of terrorism and the economic challenges to our (Eurocentric) way of life. We need to protect our social system and our economic and political hegemony through, for example, enacting specific educational policies and practices.

Throughout history, elites have concocted crises like the above, and/or taken advantage of “natural” crises, to manipulate populations into accepting policies and practices that have met the needs of these elites. Historical examples of these crises are given below. A recent example of a critical shock was hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005 and left the population, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, in a state of shock. Once populations were reeling from the shock of the flood in New Orleans—that could have been avoided if government had built levees, such as those erected by the British to protect London, or the Dutch to protect their lowlands some 25 years after disastrous flooding in 1954 (Broad, 2005)—corporate government and neoliberal corporate entities with the support of government, swooped in to effect a form of “structural adjustment.” Many people perished in New Orleans, and authorities effectively removed from the city to other parts of the country thousands of the remaining poor people, whose homes had been destroyed by the deluge. Most have not been able to get loans necessary to rebuild their homes and/or return to the city of their birth, while much wealthier citizens, who live in areas relatively untouched by the floods, have received hundreds of

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thousands of dollars in housing loans. When people are in a state of shock, in mind and body, they are only too pleased to have solutions provided to relieve their plight, and/or are in no position to contest these solutions. Who benefits from this adjustment and at whose expense the adjustment is carried out is, of course, the issue. The devastation that was Katrina has disproportionately impacted poor African Americans, thus starkly emphasizing the racist as well as the classist dimension of the shock process as applied in the context of Katrina (Buras, Randels, Kalamu ya Salaam, & Students at the Center, 2010). Much of the infrastructure of New Orleans has been privatized, transformed by corporations into a wealthy white playground, including the building of expensive condos and hotels that serve the corporate community. Public schools, which many consider to be the remaining hope of preparing citizens to resist the neoliberal matrix that is engulfing the world, have also been privatized under the rubric of public charters. In many instances, these charters have amounted to a corporate takeover in the form of EMOs, or educational managements organizations like Edison and Charter Schools USA, which use public funds to run public schools for profit (Bracey, 2004). Public charter schools comprise a central tenet of the educational agenda for “public” schools of Democratic President Obama, elected in 2009, and the first U.S. president of color. Many disaffected economically and politically by the corporate greed, imperial ambitions, and hectic hysteria of the administration of President Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, which was built on a manic manipulation of the horrendous events of 9/11, the attack on the twin towers in New York, believed in Obama’s persuasive, transformational rhetoric. During Bush, “people (were) bonded to the state not by social services or public health care, but by fear” (Roy, 2004). Anxious to be part of a saner, more progressive society, many of those who voted for Obama believed the new president would reverse Bush’s policies. However, the education agenda being pursued by Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is remarkably similar to that of the previous regime (Ravitch, 2010). Indeed, Obama’s emphasis on promoting charter schools is taking place in spite of the fact that studies show that charters are increasingly segregated (Blume, 2010), and research has provided conflicting results as to the effectiveness of these schools in promoting achievement on high stakes, standardized tests (Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2007). Standardized tests are the empirical measures, mandated by the 2002 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind, to assess students’ “educational” progress. What is rarely mentioned in a discussion of schools evaluated on the basis of these tests is whether their outcomes amount to real educational achievement, including critical and creative thinking (Bracey, 2004).

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In the case of New Orleans, the charter school penetration rate is much greater than even DC schools, where 3 in every 10 public schools are charters, a much larger percentage than in most cities: 53 percent of the postKatrina enrollment of 33,200 students, according to school officials. Before the hurricane, charters had about 2 percent of the city’s 67,000 public students. Many parents in the years since the storm have sought spaces in Roman Catholic and other private schools, but charters have become the most popular option because they are free. Charter leaders acknowledge that their schools must produce achievement gains or the experiment will flop. Nationally, research shows little difference between average test scores for charters and for regular public schools. Experts say the quality of charter schools varies as much as the quality of regular schools. Some critics call the charter invasion of New Orleans a challenge to democratic values. Writing about New Orleans in a new book, Leigh Dingerson, education team leader for the Center for Community Change in the District, says Louisiana school authorities have “opened a flea market of entrepreneurial opportunism that is dismantling the institution of public education in New Orleans” (Mathews, 2008). The recent economic meltdown has provided another shock for the American people in the wake of which President Obama’s administration has been able to increase funding for charter schools. The outcome of the George W. Bush regime’s removal of regulation from Wall Street was a series of irresponsible, greedy, housing loan projects, which effectively led to the 2008 global meltdown. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) was Congress’ response, strongly endorsed by President Obama, to the devastation wrought by the 2008 economic meltdown. In addition to bailing out the very corporations whose leaders had carried out the risky projects (at the expense not of themselves but of the public), the act allocated $300 million to local and state governments to support the development of charter schools, which Duncan and Obama claim to be the answer to closing the “student achievement gap,” again as measured by standardized tests. Signifiers like “student achievement” should not be taken at face value, particularly within this context. Modern social systems have been carefully structured and imbued with disciplinary technologies of power (described in more detail later in this chapter) to effect the greatest compliance possible from citizens to the projects of powerful elites. Colonizing the definitions of popular signifiers and disseminating new definitions through the corporate media is one way of appropriating meaning and gaining the consent and compliance of citizens. Indeed, the Obama election campaign was brilliant at carrying out this process, leading to the belief by more than half of the voting electorate that his administration would deviate from the Bush model in socioeconomic and military policy—and in education. However,

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it is becoming clear to those oppositional to the cynical, obscene advance of global capitalism that the Obama administration is also a neoliberal, corporate government, if somewhat less toxic, which largely defines student achievement in terms of readiness to meet the demands of the neoliberal corporate economy. It does not see student achievement as it is envisioned by critical multicultural education, which defines genuine education as a critical, creative, and culturally responsive process through which student and community needs for empowerment, equity, and greater equality in the socioeconomic and educational fields are met. Managing Critical Multiculturalism Critical multicultural education grew out of racial and ethnic struggle (Lea, 2010). Critical multiculturalists see the curriculum and pedagogy as the process by which racism, whiteness, and other forms of oppression and injustice are named and actively challenged, in the same way as students need to understand the toxicity of asbestos. Critical multicultural education is politically guided practice that goes beyond multicultural educational practice and often reproduces the status quo by tolerating difference and diversity and purports to legitimize diversity by inserting selective multicultural events into an otherwise Eurocentric curriculum (Nieto, 1994). Not so in the critical multicultural classroom, which is a place in which difference is consistently affirmed, and teachers and students engage in a critique of themselves and the world—the “word” (the skills and concepts introduced in school) is presented as a tool that students may use to meaningfully resolve problems in their real worlds (Freire, 1993/1970). However, in the wake of the current economic crisis, the ARRA accelerated the ideological trajectory, diametrically oppositional to critical multicultural education, initiated in the 1970s (Berlak, 2009). It created a $4.35 billion fund to bankroll the largest competitive education grant program in U.S. history with the goal of serving the corporate economy, not students and community needs. This program, titled “Race to the Top,” or “State Incentive Grant Fund,” was designed to provide incentives to states to implement large-scale, system-changing reforms that were supposed to “enhance standards and assessments,” “improve the collection and use of data,” “increase teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution,” and “turn around struggling schools.” Yet, again in terms of the way in which these signifiers have been defined rhetorically, and applied in recent practice, Race to the Top is another technique of power that will sustain hierarchy.

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Normalizing and Dividing: Laws, Policies, and Practices of History Derek Bell (2004) has suggested that the history of the United States is replete with governmental actions that offer a measure of redress and equity to the discriminatory practices of the past and then close the door on these practices when they threaten to restructure society, create greater equality, and wrest power from elites. Although always contested by those who recognize how knowledge and power work in the United States (Apple, 2004), the success of this process has been facilitated by the use of the shock doctrine. Most of the important policies and legal measures that have been effected in the interests of oligarchies have been taken following periods or events of shocking proportions, like Katrina. Elites have played on the fears and anxieties of existing populations to justify new laws, policies, rules and regulations. What follows are a few additional historical examples of this process. The Ideological Foundations of Public Education Following the socioeconomic disruption of the American Revolution, the founding elites were presented with structural choices in building a new society. In this context, Thomas Jefferson devised his “bill for a more general diffusion of knowledge.” Although it was not accepted without a struggle, this bill was premised on the idea that white children from all backgrounds should be prepared to participate in the new democracy by receiving 3 years of basic education so they could “learn to read the Bible, the newspaper, and their taxes.” In other words, the majority of those to be included in the new civic body, citizens who would have been deemed “producers” in Plato’s Republic (Spring, 2004), would receive enough “enlightenment,” in the form of knowledge and skills, to understand and consent to the principles of government dictated by their leaders. The most talented of these children were to be selected and educated at public expense at regional grammar schools. From this select group, the most talented were to be chosen for further education. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781/82), “By this means twenty of the best geniuses would be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at public expense.” (Spring, 2008)

From its inception, then, Jefferson’s education system was a public space in which representatives of the state—a few consciously, many unconsciously—would supervise the design of patriotic citizens and reproduce social hierarchy in the interests of an oligarchy of white and Eurocentric, upper-

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class elites (Spring 2008). Enslaved Africans and other children of color did not even get the 3 years of basic literacy, and girls were not considered “raking” material. More than 200 years after Jefferson’s system was put into place, who succeeds in the education system in the United States and Britain is still strongly related to race and class (Kohl, 2009). Modern technologies of power continue to survey; scrutinize; standardize and homogenize; exclude some students; classify everyone; distribute students according to their usefulness to the system; separate students from each other through notions of race, class, and individualism; and create a system that regulates and totally governs students’ waking lives (see Table 2.1). Table 2.1  Examples of Modern Disciplinary Technologies of Power Modern Disciplinary Technologies of Power (After Foucault, 1995)

Example

1. Normalizing and Dividing Language; appropriating signifiers; constructing and Discourses: Co-opting/ reproducing deficit discourses in terms of race, class, colonizing and legitimizing gender, sexuality, ableism, age that advantage elites and the hegemonic agenda disadvantage the many 2. Classification: Sorting “Race,” class, gender—via tracking, ability grouping, and function curricula content; course placements in terms of language arts, science etc. AP, honors, special needs; ESL/bilingual education; pedagogical strategies; high-stakes testing, grades 3. Surveillance: Monitoring, Students have no privacy, even in the bathrooms; school constructing and regulating building structures facilitate surveillance; dress codes, subjectivities codes of conduct strictly enforced 4. Standardization: Through Establishes power relations; acceptable school curricula and standards, homogenous, pedagogy and practice established through comparison scripted, Anglocentric with the “normal”; high-stakes tests curriculum 5. Exclusion: Often occurs Tracking; reading groups; “sheltered” & English-only with normalization classrooms of “English Language Learners (ELLs)” and Special Education students; some identities, practices, and ways of constructing knowledge 6. Distribution: Controlling Reading groups; grade-level groups, segregated schools and the agenda classrooms 7. Individualization: A form Competition, “me” versus “we,” “I,” rather than viewing the of exclusion historical, systemic nature of inequalities and inequities 8. Totalization: Consumes Students commit to various competitive, ego-invested student agenda & governs groups like year groups, teachers, fraternities, teams, and regulates groups debating groups, ethnic groups 9. Regulation: Erects the Refers to group rules, regulations, and sometimes reference limits of acceptable behavior to knowledge; related to sanctions, rewards, and to control and maintain the punishment (NCLB) existing system

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Slavery by Another Name Since the inception of the nation, Congress, presidents, and the Supreme Court have approved a number of constitutional amendments, laws, and policies that have contributed to this shocking pattern. Following emancipation from slavery, previously enslaved Africans gained access to a modicum of power and schooling during a period that has become known as the Reconstruction. However, this period was short-lived. Elites responded by representing emancipation to the white population as a crisis. Using historical, racist stereotypes that had been used to justify the hideous institution of slavery, free blacks were portrayed as dangerous and less than human. Narratives of hate and fear were disseminated, designed to shock white citizens and bolster their racism, including the belief that blacks should be kept in inferior economic, political, and cultural roles. Fearing for their economic, cultural, and political well-being, many poor, illiterate, and even middleclass whites were all too ready to consent to the passage of Jim Crow laws, even though the low-income folks among them would not gain equity with elites as a result of the laws (Anderson, 1988). In other words, even after the abolition of slavery, race and class continued to play a role to allow whites to gain wealth or eke out a living, depending on their relationship to the means of production. Racist and classist narratives were encapsulated in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, in which black people were portrayed as subhuman and the Ku Klux Klan was lauded as the savior of civilization. The film legitimized the Jim Crow laws, which lasted nearly 100 years after the official abolition of slavery in the United States. Douglas Blackmon, in his book Slavery by Another Name, wrote about his research into the Jim Crow legal system that allowed powerful companies, like the mining industry of northern Alabama, to exploit “convict slaves,” who “were beaten viciously, shackled to their beds at night and literally worked to death” (Blackmon, 2008). Blackmon’s book features the life of Green Cottenham, an unemployed black man who was supposedly guaranteed his civil rights by the constitution but who, (along with) more than 1,000 other black men, “toiled under the lash.” In March 1908 . . . Cottenham was arrested in Alabama and found guilty of the vague charge of vagrancy. Unable to pay exorbitant fines and fees that accompanied the conviction, he was sentenced to a year at hard labor and “sold” to a mining subsidiary of U.S. Steel, which agreed to pay his debts in return for his services and sent him in chains into a coal mine. In 1908 alone, almost 60 convict slaves died in the mine where Cottenham labored. (Barnes, 2008)

Indeed, Blackmon wrote that “by 1930, at least one state, Georgia, had more forced labor slaves than ever.” He continues that “certainly, the great

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record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the U.S. must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn’t end until 1945” (Barnes, 2008). The Eugenics Movement Some of the other measures that supported unofficial slavery in the United States, in spite of constitutional amendments, included the eugenics movement, based on the premise that race has a scientific basis—a notion now undermined by the human genome project—and that some human beings are biologically inferior to others. Eugenics purports to be able to measure this difference in order to support a hierarchical, white supremacist society. It was also a narrative that validated the growing colonial, imperial, and corporate interests of the United States and Western Europe in Africa, Asia, and South America. It sanctioned racist immigration policy in the United States and bolstered the hegemonic process. The movement was not just a movement of a few conservative extremists; it arose out of the racist, proslavery, and classist discourses and was shared by millions. It laid the groundwork for policies of ability-grouping and highstakes testing that are used in school today (Epstein, 2006; Winfield, 2007). Indeed, it was supported by some of the most respected writers, politicians, and scientists of the day, including Francis Galton. David Okuefuna, executive producer of the BBC series, Racism: A History, (Okuefuna, 2007) responding to the argument that “eugenics was not about racism,” drew attention to Galton’s own words in the chapter “The Comparative Worth of Different Races,” which appears in his most famous work, Heredity Genius (Galton, 1869). Galton makes several references to the relative superiority of Europeans compared with what he called “the lower races.” After insisting that “the number among the Negroes of those whom we should call half-witted men, is very large,” Galton (1869) went on to say that the behavior of “Negroes” was “so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like, as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species.” Plessy v. Ferguson The idea of racist classification, a technology of power, was given a great boost by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a Louisiana law mandating separate but equal accommodations for blacks and whites on intrastate railroads was constitutional. This decision provided the legal foundation to justify many other actions by state and local governments to socially separate blacks and whites during the Jim Crow era.

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Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education; however Brown II, a year later, gave power to those opposed to integration to create impediments to the implementation of Brown I. Chief Justice Earl Warren urged localities to move toward full compliance with Brown I “with all deliberate speed,” but the Court held that the problems identified in the Brown law required varied local solutions. So, the Court legalized delay in implementing the original Brown decision. However, it should be noted that integration has not been a panacea as far as educational empowerment for students of color and poor students. In the wake of World War II, and the Brown decisions, U.S. oligarchies were as intent as they are today on facilitating the U.S. global hegemony. The communist scare (real and/or imagined) was a perfect shock doctrine and critical backdrop to a number of policies that promoted U.S. economic growth and international hegemony though education. Interspersed with executive orders in relation to affirmative action and civil rights laws, the path to President Obama’s current neoliberal educational agenda was immersed in economic and military logic (Berlak, 2009). While President Obama did not initiate the following measures, which were enacted before his election as President in 2008, his administration is, in fact, fully participating in the realization of their goals. • In 1958, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed, the aim of which was to shape local priorities in terms of science and technology. It was to be the first in a series of legislation that moved schooling, in most instances, away from being a local responsibility to serve the national interest. • In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, replaced the NDEA in authorizing federal funding for schools and teacher education that had previously been state and local expenditures. The centerpiece of the Great Society, the ostensible aim of this act was to increase educational opportunity for “disadvantaged” children. • In 1982, A Nation at Risk laid the groundwork for future public discourse on education by focusing on “excellence” as opposed to equity, and “high standards” as opposed to critical multicultural education. Greater federal and corporate advocacy for the standardization of curriculum content and teaching approaches followed, encouraged by both Republican and Democratic presidents. • In 1989, an Education Summit, co-sponsored by then-Governor Clinton, the National Governors’ Association, legislators, CEOs of corporations, and members of the Business Roundtable, adopted six national goals. It recommended setting up a National (Congres-

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• •

•

•

•

• •

sional) Goals Panel to advise on the “desirability and feasibility of national standards and tests.” In 1992, the National Council of Education Standards and Testing proposed installing national testing tied to prescriptive content standards. In 1994, conservative activists in California, including Ron Uns, cleverly appropriated the meaning of civil rights and were able to gain the consent of the population for a “Civil Rights Proposition” (Proposition 209) that effectively “abolished” Affirmative Action in California. In 1995, Goals 2000: The Educate America Act was passed. This law revised six national education standards, and provided federal funds to states to develop curriculum “content standards,” tied to standardized tests. In 2001–2002, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—was passed. This new iteration of the education act passed in 1965, imposed the following mandates on states that took federal money (a) raise academic standards for all students; (b) insure highly qualified teachers in all classrooms; (c) increase educational opportunity and reduce the “achievement gap.” In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld, by a 5-4 vote, the University of Michigan Law School’s policy, ruling that race could be one of many factors considered by colleges when selecting their students, because it furthered “a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” In 2008, the actions of capitalists on Wall Street led to the worst recession (depression) since the Great Depression, with international ramifications. In 2009, the United States electorate elected Barack Hussein Obama, the country’s first black president. Since that election, members of the Republican party, and disaffected neoliberal, conservative, antigovernment right-wingers, including what has become know as the Tea Party Movement, have managed to disseminate several shock doctrines as part of backlash to President Obama’s election. Ironically, President Obama’s administration has embraced a shock doctrine not unlike that coming from the right wing: We are in danger! We are threatened by “terrorists” and immigrants jealous of our way of life, and, due to our failing public schools, we are losing in the competition for global political and economic leadership (supremacy). We have a black president, people of color are visible in the media, and race is not longer an issue in postracial America. An emphasis on affirmative action and diversity is no longer needed in economic and educational fields.

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• Finally, in 2010, “The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released a set of state-led education standards, the Common Core State Standards. The English-language arts and mathematics standards for grades K–12 were developed in collaboration with a variety of stakeholders including content experts, states, teachers, school administrators and parents. The standards establish clear and consistent goals for learning that will prepare America’s children for success in college and work (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010).” Why People Consent to Hierarchy, Inequity, and Lack of Democracy: Modern Disciplinary Technologies of Power The U.S. neoliberal, corporate, capitalist state requires inequalities to function, and race and class operate, along with other modern disciplinary technologies of power, to facilitate the work of socializing, controlling, and maintaining citizens as consenting members of the hierarchical, capitalist society (McLaren, 2005). In his later work, Michel Foucault looked at how since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing . . . the state . . . [T]he state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think, in the history of human societies . . . has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures. (Foucault, in Rabinow, 1984, p. 14)

It was the relationship of the state to the individual that interested Foucault, and that concerns me in my work with teachers. It is my argument that most of us who fill the role of teachers in public schools today are important frontline agents in the reproduction of the corporate-military capitalist state. Modern disciplinary technologies of power are embedded in the structures of school, and we submit our students to these structures early in their school lives. This process, usually experienced less than consciously, works on teachers’ as well as students’ minds and bodies so they consent to the existing socioeconomic system. These subtle and all but invisible “modern disciplinary technologies of power” have been institutionalized, allowing elites to gain the consent of populations to their agenda much more efficiently that in previous generations, especially once they have been rendered vulnerable by the shock process. Unless we learn how to interrogate what it means to uphold the disciplinary technologies of the state, and the modalities by which we are made teachers, we shall not real-

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ize the goal of a socially just state and egalitarian society to which so many of us ideally aspire. In what follows, I give some examples of how modern disciplinary technologies of power, after the application of the shock doctrine described at the start of this chapter, are currently playing out in the United States and the United Kingdom, since power should be seen as a global phenomenon. I shall then share a few ideas for interrupting the onward march of disciplinary power. Race and Class as Disciplinary Technologies of Power Inequalities in the United States based on race and class have not dissipated. In fact, global income inequality is probably greater than it has ever been in human history. There is some debate about whether it is getting worse or getting better. Currently, the richest 1 percent of people in the world receives as much as the bottom 57 percent. The ratio between the average income of the top 5 percent in the world to the bottom 5 percent increased from 78 to 1 in 1988 to 114 to 1 in 1993. Milanovic (1999) found that the richest 25 percent of the world’s population receives 75 percent of the world’s income, even when adjusting for purchasing power parity. The poorest 75 percent of the population share just 25 percent. This occurs because a large proportion of the world’s population lives in the poorest countries, and within the poorest regions of those countries, particularly in the rural areas of China, rural and urban India, and Africa (Milanovic, 1999). More recently, the Census Bureau released the 2009 poverty rates in the United States: The biggest news is the latest poverty rate figure: 14.3 percent, which means one in seven Americans are currently living in poverty. This is up from 13.2 percent in 2008, with more than 3.7 million more Americans crossing the poverty threshold in the last year. Admittedly, the new poverty rate is a bit below the 15 percent projections many had been making, but it’s still the highest rate since 1994. Moreover, the 43.6 million people living in poverty is the largest number of poor people in the United States in the 51 years that records have been kept. The poverty rate rose for every ethnic group except for Asian Americans. (Shoot, 2010)

Indeed, in terms of income inequality, the United States reflects the greatest disparity between the rich and the poor when compared with the following “wealthy” nations, listed from most to least unequal: United States, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Switzerland, Canada, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Aus-

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tria, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Japan (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). We have known for many years that this inequality plays out in education (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Kohl, 2009; Ravitch, 2010), and is not being addressed by Obama’s rush to create more charter schools. In their book, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2010), Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett wrote to examine the [international relationship with income inequality] among the fifty states of the USA, we combined maths and reading performance scores for eighth-graders (aged around 14 years old) from the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics for 2003 . . . The scores are significantly lower in states with wider income differences . . . As a further test, we looked at the proportion of children dropping out of high school in the USA . . . children are much more likely to drop out of school in more unequal states. (p. 107)

Race relates to these class disparities, as there are disproportionately more people of color who live in poverty. While the overall graduation rate in the United States in 2008 was 68 percent—a figure that represented little change in recent years—more than 75 percent of white and Asian students graduated, however the graduation rates of black, Native American, and Hispanic were 50 percent, 51 percent, and 53 percent, respectively. While there were regional disparities (from highest to lowest: Midwest, Northwest, West, South), graduation rates were lower for students in highly segregated, low-income, urban centers (NCES, 2008). For those working for low wages, whose labor has facilitated the prosperity of elites, the gap between rich and poor is increasing. Polly Toynbee (2010), who writes for the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, depicts society as a caravan moving across a desert, which would hold together only if none of the trucks rolled too far ahead, and none got stuck too far behind. However, according to the Guardian, the 22 June 2010 budget in the United Kingdom, presented by the newly elected Conservative/Liberal Democratic alliance and promising cuts in the infrastructure, “slowed the speed of the lagging wagons stirring worries about precisely what lies behind the government’s review of the official definition of poverty” (Poverty, 2010). This caravan metaphor might well be extended to the field of education. Research has made it all too clear that economic capital is the strongest indicator of educational success within the existing system, as measured by hegemonic assessments (Kohl, 2009; Ravitch, 2010). Within the context of the current cuts in educational spending, we may expect the “ships of school” to face even stronger waves than heretofore (Lea & Helfand, 2004, p. 11).

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How Disciplinary Technologies of Power Play Out in Schools Race and class are important dimensions of educational equality, but the process by which public education is sustained and/or strengthened as a hierarchical, inequitable, and undemocratic, neoliberal process, and why individuals who teach, study, and administrate in this field consent to this reality, is very complex. In my comparative, qualitative, narrative research over the last 18 years, I have sought to better understand this process and contribute to a growing body of knowledge. Through case studies— interviews of teachers and observations of their practice in classrooms and institutionalized school structures in the United States and in England—I have sought to contribute to our knowledge of how school functions as the setting in which the above disciplinary technologies of power (see Table 2.1) shape our subjectivities, the categories of knowledge we draw on to make sense of the world, the relationships that give meaning to our lives, and what we consider legitimate objects of difference. In “The Making of the Boy,” Phillip Corrigan (1991) describes the ways in which school attempted to make him into a male subject, digestible to the dominant culture of his society—to normalize him, classifying, surveying, and standardizing him to fit the homogenous, scripted, Anglocentric curriculum in which he was immersed. The process punished him when he did not obey by excluding him; it organized his life and controlled his agenda, insisting he become an individual so as to divide him from potential allies in resistance to the system. Finally, his time and body were consumed by a totalizing, regulating agenda through which the limits of acceptable behavior were set. [This] on-going project in English elite and mimicry-elite schools, entails (part of) the making of masculinities: the voice, dress, hands (cut your nails, boy), hair . . . shoes, caps . . . I was beaten through and through for not wearing my cap; I was beaten for talking when I should not, and not talking when I should. Likewise, I was denigrated for reading what I should not, and not reading what I should. Punished for being “too clever” . . . and punished for not being clever enough . . . this pedagogy works on the mind and emotions, on the unconscious, and, yes, on the soul, the spirit, through the work done on, to, by, with, and from the body . . . Subjection is thus the simultaneous bending of the knee/bowing of the head (metaphors and realities at the same time) and performing of the act in ways that make the bodily subject feel good and also Good . . . the contrastive couplet, Good/Bad, is the most powerful in the English language . . . It is the mundane, tedious ordinariness of this set of regulated relations and social forms that needs the closest possible attention (along with the complex uncovering that this form of social re-membering entails) if we are to make sense, different senses, of how schooling works to produce subjectivities. (Corrigan, 1991, pp. 211–212, emphasis added)

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In my own school experience, my peers and I inhabited a total institution from which there was no “escape”—no escape from the ideological onslaught; no escape from the sound and sight of the institutional discourses; no escape from our own powerlessness. The feminine “I” was not physically beaten, but was subjected to a very similar process of psychological deconstruction to that which Corrigan underwent. It was followed by the naming, the labeling of the new subject—a process that had, in some sense, already begun in the home and through the media. We learned that when we became adults, we were to embody some modern version of Victorian womanhood . . . that which was natural, spontaneous, pleasurable, that which meant something on an instinctive level was to be eradicated. In its place, on a newly formed tabula rasa, the school was to imprint the new, the semi-rational, the genderized, the racialized, the class explicit; the persona developed in binary opposition to a different, unacceptable other; a persona created to reflect the wishes of the god of reason, masculinity and Anglo-Saxon Europeanness (that which has come to be racialized and aspired to as “Whiteness”). (Lea, 1998)

In my research, I have discovered that language, race, class, and gender are powerful discourses in designing subjectivities and the cultural scripts through which teachers and students understand their educational worlds. I have also learned that many of the teachers I have interviewed see all of the above disciplinary technologies of power as normal, natural, commonsense, or impossible to interrupt. In the following, I focus on the disciplinary technologies of surveillance and standardization in relation to research I recently carried out: Case studies of two high schools, one in California and one in England. Surveillance In efforts to maintain the public educational process as a supply depot for human capital, agents of the state engage in surveillance. Herb Kohl wrote in an article titled “The Educational Panopticon” (2009) that: The notion of control and surveillance is pervasive these days. I believe that the consequence of scripted curriculum, teacher accountability, continuous monitoring of student performance, high stakes testing, and punishment for not reaching external standards is that schools become educational panopticons, that is, total control and surveillance communities dedicated to undermining the imagination, creativity, intelligence, and autonomy of students and teachers.

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The panopticon was the name Jeremy Bentham gave to the prison he designed in the 1780s to ensure complete surveillance of prisoners at all times. Built around a central well or viewing area, inmates would be observable at all times when not locked in their cells. In recent research I undertook in the United Kingdom, I found that the New Labour Government under Tony Blair had engaged in an extensive program of school building and renewal. After decades of neglect and dilapidation, a school building and renewal programme increased by sevenfold; making possible a systematic renovation and rebuilding of our entire secondary school estate nationwide over 10 to 15 years under the Building Schools for the Future programme. (Blair, 2004)

However, less happy in terms of the neoliberal project of privatization, totalization, and control, I found that the government had farmed out the building construction of schools to private firms. The high school in which I used to teach had been rebuilt by a Dutch corporation, and the conflict of interest, tensions, and contradictions existing between the for-profit goals of the corporation and the educational goals of many of the staff were palpable in terms of voiced concerns and complaints. In addition, the model chosen for rebuilding was the panopticon. Ideally suited to monitoring and regulating the behavior of students, it looked and felt like a prison. Some of the staff I spoke to were proud of the new facility, while others felt it had ushered in George Orwell’s 1984 in a concrete way. Surveillance in the California school was less sophisticated. Guards had been hired to keep the community off campus, although recent violence was a testimony to its lack of success. Additionally, attempts to mold students into a one-size-fits-all model of the acceptable citizen in the given economic system were being undertaken through the scripted curriculum, teacher accountability, continuous monitoring of student performance, high-stakes testing, and punishment for not reaching external standards that Kohl (2009) mentions above. Standardization In England, all high school-aged students were obliged to sit and pass state-mandated, “keystone” tests at age 13, in addition to GCSE exams at 16; in California, students were obliged to take and pass the multiplechoice California Standards Tests in English-language arts, math, science, and history-social science. These scores were used to calculate the school’s Academic Performance Index (API), and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), which in turn were used to rank the school and administer penalties.

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In the working-class English school, located in an urban center close to London’s Gatwick airport, high-stakes tests drove the content of courses. However, the teachers I spoke with tended to see themselves as enlightened in comparison with other schools in the school district. Most of the humanities teachers I interviewed saw their school as much more culturally sensitive and conducive to high-order thinking than other schools. At the same time, several acknowledged the lack of racial and cultural sensitivity expressed by a majority of faculty outside of their department, as well as many of the white students at the school. The majority of the student population was of white British origin, but a significant minority of students came from Pakistani, Indian, West Indian, and other more recent immigrant backgrounds. While multiculturalism was not a central philosophy in the National Curriculum, the teachers who volunteered to participate in my interviews were clearly concerned about the experiences of the recent Mauritian and Eastern European immigrants. However, concern and critical dialogue about racism and xenophobia were not the same thing. There was evidence that the teachers in the school felt it was unsafe to discuss in class the controversial issues that many of their students experienced on an ongoing basis. Since all students received a course in Personal and Social Education (PSE) led by teachers, there were many whose subject areas had not prepared them for critical dialogue about personal, social, and cultural issues of concern to their students. Yet they were supposed to engage their students in such a dialogue. Four of the humanities teachers mentioned the “Persecution and Prejudice Curriculum,” mandated by the national curriculum, to be taught in the equivalent of the 9th grade. Two of these teachers indicated that this curriculum was a clear, antiracist platform; on the other hand, two told me the subjects covered were unrelated to Britain’s colonial and racist history, and that teachers were encouraged to avoid discussing racism within local contexts that might create conflict in the classroom. Three female Muslim students confirmed this information in informal conversation, saying they did not get to discuss meaningful controversial issues in the classroom—issues related to their religion or the British colonial past. In fact, I observed a “think tank” humanities class, designed to encourage students to talk about moral issues, in which the teacher actually guided students away from discussion about Islam to the National Curriculum subject for the day—euthanasia. Two of the teachers felt comfortable telling me that the majority of faculty at the campus believed the campus should focus on white, Christian-derived (not religious) beliefs. Indeed, it became clear that for some of the teachers, if a subject was not on the National Curriculum, it was not on the class agenda. Three of the teachers brought up the discomfort that many teachers felt as a result of the large numbers of recent immigrant Mauritian students on

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campus. They felt that this growth in the immigrant population had been a barrier to addressing the cultural divisions on campus. In sum, although at least two of the teachers said they took risks and clearly tried to engage in dialogue with their students when controversial issues were brought up, and three teachers did tell me they would like to see more two-way multicultural education, which they defined as affirming immigrant students’ cultures and engaging them in discussion while introducing them to the host country’s culture, critical multiculturalism did not guide the pedagogy or curriculum in most of the classrooms. In the California school, there was no equivalent of the Persecution and Prejudice Curriculum—no curriculum that focused on racism even outside of the United States. I observed a history class studying the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. When the teacher asked the whole class why African Americans had decided to take this journey, one black female student replied, “To escape racism.” She was silenced when the teacher responded that they were not talking about racism and would talk about this matter later, as if the student’s analysis was wrong and the migration north had no association with racism. In informal conversation with the student, I learned that the class does not get to discuss controversial issues often or freely. In addition, in the U.S. school that two of my own children had attended, one of the white Language Arts teachers, who taught basic language skills, complained about the script she was obliged to follow, although she had not deviated from it. Another English teacher, of African American descent, was concerned about the lack of ethnic diversity in the authors of texts. Yet some 5 years previously, when one of my daughters had attended the school, I had made it my business to find out about this matter. I had been informed by one of my daughter’s English teachers that the district had actually adopted quite a diverse list of authors, but that he was not teaching a text by an author of color because he personally did not know the content. The contradictions between intention and practice were stark in both schools. It is much easier for human beings to resist rhetorically than to risk censure and job security by resisting in practice. Hegemonic barriers are much higher for the individual than they might be if individuals struggled to break down these barriers collectively, as is theoretically the case with union membership. However, hegemony has been successful is re-presenting unions to working people as associated with the political left, and thus un-American. The number of U.S. workers who are members of unions has drastically reduced since the 1980s, from 20 percent of workers to 12 percent. Committing to a union has become a process that risks alienation from one’s group. For some, it is a matter of challenging the hegemonic narratives that define one’s group perceptions.

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In the classes I observed in the California school, the fear on the part of teachers of moving outside of safe narratives was very real. There was very little critical dialogue. There was no equivalent of the Persecution and Prejudice Curriculum, even one that focused on racism outside of the United States. Some of the white male teachers acknowledged that while they recognized the diversity within groups at the school, they didn’t always understand issues of race. One of them acknowledged, “I have entitlement.” At the same time, I heard teachers express stereotypical deficit descriptions of students. Filipino students, who disproportionately made up Advanced Placement (AP) courses, were represented as the “model majority”; African American students, who disproportionately constituted “honors” courses (lower tracks) were described as “not hyped by the history of Africa.” I was told, without critical analysis, that the latter was the result of poverty. In the California school, there was less emphasis than in England on critiquing the national/state agenda, although not one of the teachers I spoke with, including the principal, told me that high-stakes testing made the school work better. The teachers of color expressed the importance of working with poor students to strengthen families and connect students academically. One African American teacher mentioned above advocated for the introduction of more culturally relevant literary texts, like Native Son, that moved away from the Eurocentric canon, although, as also mentioned, such books were on the district list of approved books. In sum, in both schools, disciplinary technologies of power were related to a system of hyperaccountability, which refers to the accountability measures mandated by recent government legislation: the 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind in the United States, and Every Child Matters in the United Kingdom (Mansell, 2007). Curricula and pedagogy, and processes of tracking testing were supported by sorting, surveillance, classifying, excluding, regulating, individualizing, and normalizing practices in both of the schools. Disaffected teachers were at a loss to know how to interrupt the onward march of power. Interrupting the Onward March of Power: Ideas for Helping Preservice Teachers See Through the Hegemonic Processes The above thesis has suggested that, in spite of the possibility for human agency in response to shock scenarios like Katrina, we should “not deny that (we) are often duped by culture” (Grossberg, 1994)—the discourses, narratives, scripts, ideas, beliefs, myths, commercial advertisements, media messages, school curricula, categories of knowledge, types of relationships, and other cultural forms and content with which we engage and interpret

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the world in which we live. In addition, an institutionalized system of disciplinary technologies of power, including curriculum and pedagogy that promote racist classist and sexist discourses, have a profound influence on the decisions people make in response to shock scenarios. Guided by narratives emanating from people and organizations in power, middle-class as well as poor people often accept socioeconomic, political, and educational systems that are not in their long-terms best interests. Discourses of power shape our sense of who we are, what knowledge is important, what relationships have value, and what we should objectify in the world. Many of us come to see the hegemonic, neoliberal narrative that promotes privatization, consumerism, and individualism, as commonsense, normal, and natural, and we identify with its tenets. After 2 years in office, it is becoming clear that President Obama, while rhetorically concerned about the plight of the dispossessed, has also embraced this cultural script. This hegemonic process (Gramcsi, 1971) must be consented to daily or it will break down. Each day upon awakening, most of us tacitly renew our agreement with the socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems in which we live. Granted, we grumble, we may even sign a few petitions online against British Petroleum’s egregious, environmentally toxic practices in the Gulf, but we rarely do more to interrupt the relentless functioning of institutions. On the other hand, most of us would claim an investment in “social justice” and “equal educational opportunity.” Even if we don’t take to the streets to express our fury concerning the ways in which the global, transnational, neoliberal economic system in which we teach and learn serves the interests of the few and has stolen the voices of the many, there are many actions that we can take inside of our classrooms to interrupt the disciplinary technologies of power, including the surveillance to which we are subjected, and the standardization of a hegemonic scripted curriculum— whether the script lies in ourselves or in the corporate-produced material resources with which we are supposed to educate our students. There is a growing collection of materials available for this latter purpose, including the following: Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org); Teaching for Change (www.teachingforchange.com); Ed. Change/Multicultural Pavilion (www.edchange.com); and Orate (www.oyate.org). The critical multicultural teacher associates a dynamic, activist conception of culture, identity, and lived experience with her/his professional practice. S/he consistently attempts to link the details of everyday school practice to the wider social structure, communities, and social relations in which students and their families live, work, and play. The critical multicultural teacher embraces the theoretical viewpoint that radical change in social structures is possible because human beings have historically demonstrated “agency,” and “a praxis of possibility.” S/he facilitates a classroom that allows for the possi-

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bility of alternative and hybrid ways of thinking, feeling, believing, and acting in the world. Critical multiculturalism is an answer to the question: “We may oppose practices that reproduce dominant discourse, but what do we put in its place?” Critical multicultural teachers and students look for solutions to local and global inequities and injustices. Below I suggest two ways in which the onward march of disciplinary power may be interrupted by the application of critical multiculturalism. The first is to use the model modern disciplinary technologies of power (see Table 2.1) to better identify the ways in which neoliberal hegemony is playing out on one’s campuses. I am currently inviting colleagues to join me in gathering this data in an effort to build a more coherent picture of hegemony at work in our schools and universities. The results of this research will be posted to a wikisite: Connect and Act for Educational Justice. If the reader would like to join this effort, please send the results of your research to [email protected]. Secondly, the more we are able to give voice to students and communities that have been disempowered by disciplinary technologies of power the better. Participatory Action Research (PAR) is not new but remains a valuable approach to empowering ethnically and economically diverse voices through problem-posing projects that generate themes of critical concern to students and their communities, and support them in using the WORD (literacy and other academic skills) to resolve these real-life (WORLD) problems. This type of collaborative project between the university/college/ school/ and community affirms the “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzales, 1992) embedded in communities, whose narratives have been traditionally silenced in schools, and/or given less value than Eurocentric definitions of reality in defining socioeconomic institutions. Conclusion It seems likely that in the pursuit of his socioeconomic and political goals, President Obama’s educational agenda will not radically deviate from the historical hegemonic trajectory that the educational system has taken in the United States (Wingfield & Feagan, 2010). In this agenda, students are seen largely as human capital (Spring, 2008), and the educational system is viewed as the venue in which this capital should be developed to support the corporate, capitalist economy. At the same time, there is an enormous number of counterhegemonic projects that are being enacted to interrupt the onward march of hegemony and its disciplinary technologies of power. It is important that those of us who strongly object to the current neoliberal project continue to develop effective ways of working together in resistance.

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References Anderson, J. (1988). The education of blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Apple, M. (2004). Ideology and curriculum. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Barnes, H. (2008, March). Slavery by another name. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved from http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/ reviews/article_0c1939ac-37a3-5510-b553-2fd0aea817d7.html Bell, D. (2004). Silent covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the unfulfilled hopes for racial reform. New York: Oxford University Press. Berlak, H. (2009). Education policy 1964–2004: The No Child Left Behind Act and the assault on progressive education and local control. Rouge Forum. Retrieved from http://www.pipeline.com/~rougeforum/PolicyandNCLB.htm Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of African-Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Random House. Blair, T. (2004, July 7). Fabian Lecture on education at the Institute of Education. Sponsored by the Sutton Trust. Retrieved from http://www.suttontrust.com/ research/tony-blairs-fabian-lecture/ Blume, H. (2010, February 4). Charter schools’ growth promoting segregation, studies say. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2010/ feb/04/local/la-me-charters5-2010feb05 Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Bracey, G. (2004, March). City-wide systems of charter schools: Proceed with caution. Policy Brief, Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU), Arizona State University. Broad, W. J. (2005, September 6). In Europe, high-tech flood control, with nature’s help. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/science/ 06tech.html?scp=1&sq=Broad,%20High%20Tech%20Flood%20Control,%20 2005&st=cse Buras, K. L., Randels, J., Kalamu ya Salaam, & Students at the Center. (2010). Pedagogy, policy, and the privatized city: Stories of dispossession and defiance from New Orleans. New York: Teachers College Press. Center on Reinventing Public Education. (2007). Quantity counts: The growth of charter school management organizations. University of Washington. Retrieved from http://www.uscharterschools.org/cs/r/view/uscs_rs/234132 Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010). National Governors Association and state education chiefs launch common state academic standards. Retrieved from http://www.uscharterschools.org/cs/r/view/uscs_rs/2341 Corrigan, P. R. D. (1991). The making of the boy: Meditations on what grammar school did with, to, and for my body. In H. Giroux (Ed.), Postmodernism, feminism and cultural politics: Redrawing educational boundaries. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Epstein, K. K. (2006). A different view of urban schools: Civil rights, critical race theory, and unexplored realities. New York: Peter Lang. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punishment: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Freire, P. (1993/1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

46    V. LEA Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences. London: Macmillan. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International. Grossberg, L. (1994). Introduction: Bringin’ it all back home—Pedagogy and cultural studies. In H. A. Giroux & P. McLaren (Eds.), Between borders: Pedagogy and the politics of cultural studies (pp. 1–25). New York: Routledge. Jefferson, T. (1787). Jefferson on race and slavery. Retrieved from http://pasleybrothers.com/jefferson/jefferson_on_race_and_slavery.htm Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Picador. Kohl, H. (2009, January 8). The educational panopticon. Teachers College Record. Retrieved online: http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=15477 Lea, V. (1998). Ideology, identity and practice: A study of white teachers as social and cultural agents in the classroom. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Berkeley. Lea, V. (2010). Empowering preservice teachers, students and families through critical multiculturalism: Interweaving social foundations of education and community action projects. In S. May & C. E. Sleeter (Eds.), Critical multiculturalism: From theory to practice (pp. 33–46). New York: Routledge. Lea, V., & Helfand, J. (2004). Identifying race and transforming whiteness in the class. New York: Peter Lang. Mansell, W. (2007). Education by numbers: The tyranny of testing. New York: Politico’s Publishing Ltd. Mathews, J. (2008, June 9). Charter schools’ big experiment: New Orleans’s post–Katrina test may offer lessons for ailing systems. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/ AR2008060802174.html McLaren, P. (2005). Capitalists & conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire. Lanham, MN: Rowman & Littlefield. Milanovic, B. (1999). True world income distribution, 1988 and 1993: First calculation based on household surveys alone. World Bank. Retrieved from http:// ucatlas.ucsc.edu/income.php Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzales, N. (1992, Spring). Funds of knowledge for teachers: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, XXXI(2), 132–141. NCES. (2008). Cumulative Promotion Index. Retrieved from www.edchoice.org/Documents/.../Interstate-Survey-1---State-Profiles.pdf Nieto, S. (1994). Affirmation, solidarity, & critique: Moving beyond tolerance in multicultural education. Multicultural Education, 4(1), 9–12. Okuefuna, D. (2007). Racism: A history. British Broadcasting Company. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/racism-history .shtml Poverty: Bending the yardstick. (2010, June 28). Guardian. Retrieved from http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/28/poverty-yardstick-equalityspirit-level Rabinow, P. (Ed.). (1984). The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Perseus Books.

Concocting Crises to Create Consent    47 Roy, A. (2004). Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public power in an age of empire. Retrieved from http://www.democracynow.org/static/Arundhati_Trans_stml. Shoot, B. (2010, September 16). U.S. poverty rate hits 14.3%; 44 million are poor. Change.org. Retrieved from September 17, 2010, from http://uspoverty. change.org/blog/view/us_poverty_rate_hits_143_44_million_are_poor Spring, J. (2004). The conflict of interests: The politics of American education. New York: McGraw Hill. Spring, J. (2008). American education. New York: McGraw Hill. Toynbee, P. (2010, April 10). Beware the ‘radical’ Tories: The reality is terrifying. Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/ apr/10/beware-radical-tories-reality-terrifying Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2010). The spirit level: Why equality is better for everyone. New York: Penguin. Winfield, A. (2007). Eugenics and education. New York: Peter Lang. Wingfield, A. H., & Feagan, J. R. (2010). Yes we can? White racial framing and the 2008 presidential campaign. New York: Routledge.

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Chapter 3

Educational Hope Ignored Under Obama The Persistent Failure of Crisis Discourse and Utopian Expectations P. L. Thomas

Introduction As President of the United States, he faced a dismal 35 percent job approval rating and the specter of an opinion poll showing that a significant segment of the country believed him to be a racist. While not a top priority, he called for school reform to benefit the future of a sputtering U.S. economy, calling for higher standards and competition as cornerstones of his plan for education. Barack Obama? No, these are facts from the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose January 1983 approval rating was 35 percent and who faced a 1986 poll revealing that 56 percent of African Americans labeled him a racist. These details of Reagan’s presidency are in stark contrast to the popular nostalgia offered in the 21st century during the administration of the first president “of color” facing low approval ratings, charges of racism The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 49–72 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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and socialism, a struggling economy, and a commitment to change educational policy (popularly called No Child Left Behind) that can be traced to Reagan’s own A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), which initiated the current accountability era in the United States. As with the popular debates surrounding Reagan and Obama specifically, the wider examinations of presidency and education share corrupting patterns in the language surrounding them—crisis discourse and utopian expectations. Characterizations of Reagan’s presidency are necessarily always shaded by context; such is the case with Obama as well. Glenn Beck’s populist hyperbole offers a distinctly different Reagan and Obama than many international perspectives of the two administrations. Nonetheless, Reagan and Obama are intertwined in their impact on education since the evolution of educational policy that began with 1983’s A Nation at Risk, accelerated through Goals 2000, and was codified without much critical concern (based on the misleading “Texas Miracle” under Governor George W. Bush and Superintendent Rod Paige) as No Child Left Behind when Bush became president and named Paige Secretary of Education (see Schmidt & Thomas, 2009). Here, I will explore the neoliberal assumptions that drive both the language and policies related to education coming from the Obama administration and guided by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The examination will unfold Duncan’s speeches and the realities of the charter school dynamics that the administration supports through policy and public messages. The dynamic established through crisis discourse about the public education system combined with utopian expectations for those schools help mask the neoliberal assumptions embedded in what Freire (1998) calls “the bureaucratizing of the mind”: “The freedom that moves us, that makes us take risks, is being subjugated to a process of standardization of formulas, models against which we are evaluated” (p. 111). The Lingering Legacy of Crisis Discourse and Utopian Expectations Barack Obama ascended to the presidency on messages of hope and change, and while the first year in office was dominated by economic challenges and a health care initiative, Leonhardt (2010), in The New York Times, declared the passage of health care reform under Obama as “the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.” If the Obama administration is seeking change, and part of that change is directly aimed at the momentum of the Reagan administration, then we might expect that change to include educational policy. But so far

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there is little to encourage hope for educational change—based on both the messages and the changes to policy. First, the crisis discourse and utopian expectations for the presidency and education are historical patterns, not simply elements of the past 30 years or the more recent years of Obama’s candidacy and presidency. Public education has been called a “‘dragon’ . . . devouring the hope of the country as well as religion. [It dispenses] ‘Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism—anything, everything, except religion and patriotism,’” explains Jacoby (2004, pp. 257–258). We have a long legacy of judging the quality of our public schools based on one data point such as graduation rates: “Only four out of ten U.S. children finish high school, only one out of five who finish high school goes to college” (Get adjusted, 1947). We must recognize that the demonizing of public schools and the condemnation of school quality (above, from the mid-1800s and 1947) are the ways we talk about and view schools in the United States as popular discourse and understanding—all steeped in crisis language and utopian expectations. For example, Vartain Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, claims that the state of literacy in the United States “should [be] view[ed] . . . as a crisis, because the ability to read, comprehend, and write—in other words, to organize information into knowledge—can be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill” (Graham & Hebert, 2010, p. 2, emphasis in original). While the report for which Gregorian is writing this foreword is itself an excellent study of the impact of writing on student reading development, the value of the study is immediately couched within a “crisis,” and finally the action needed is raised to utopian importance that is overwhelming: Those who enrich themselves by learning to read with understanding and write with skill and clarity do so not only for themselves and their families, but for our nation as well. They learn in order to preserve and enhance the record of humanity, to be productive members of a larger community, to be good citizens and good ancestors to those who will follow after them. In an age of globalization, where economies sink or swim on their ability to mine and manage knowledge, as do both individual and national security, we cannot afford to let this generation of ours and, indeed, any other, fall behind the learning curve. Let me bring us back to where we began: for all of us, the handprint must remain firmly and clearly on the wall. (p. 2)

Even those with the best intentions overstate the issues facing education and the promises that education can and should fulfill. Further, the popular psyche and the political discourse that inform the public are both wed to deep cultural commitments to a neoliberal view of the world that trusts the rugged individual and the private sector over com-

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munities, cooperation, and government (Giroux, 2010a). While a scholarly and evidence-based view of how the world works may present a more nuanced and complex picture, the popular assumptions and then the political rhetoric needed to court that public are both necessarily simplified (Gardner, 1996). In other words, Americans believe in the rugged individual, including the ability of each student through hard work to lift himself or herself up by the bootstraps. Thus, Americans are skeptical of welfare just as they are of social promotion in schools; within the cultural myth of the rugged individual, both appear to be unfair, endorsing laziness over hard work. The political elite fuel these assumptions in order to preserve the status quo that provides the elite their positions of power, reinforcing the assumption that poverty and failing are the fault of people living in poverty and unsuccessful (not the result of social or school inequities) who should simply work harder. But the conclusions that the public draws depend on the initial premise being correct. We never ask if rugged individualism is an accurate mythology to live by. Therefore, the clichés of popular discourse including “lift yourself up by the bootstraps” and “a rising tide lifts all boats” is not a trivial thing. We believe both sentiments as simultaneously true and the ideals to which all good Americans should aspire. These ideals color significantly how we view education along with the role of teachers and students. A central flaw in libertarian and conservative commitments to rugged individualism is normalizing exceptionality: All people in poverty must be lazy since we can identify one person who rose above poverty to succeed. Within American neoliberal commitments, then, the popular assumptions about school include viewing education as preparation for work (resulting in indoctrinating students into behaviors conducive to workforce productivity and profit, such as punctuality, compliance, and loyalty) and accepting mechanistic approaches to teaching and learning (supporting the uncritical acceptance of testing as a fair and accurate accountability tool for schools, teachers, and students). These commitments and assumptions shift all of the focus and blame on each individual in society (implying that people living in poverty somehow deserve their poverty), on each student in school (implying that students fail because they are somehow insufficient, either in effort or genetically), and on each teacher (implying that the teachers are culpable in the failure because they are unmotivated as a result of the public school status quo that is immune to market forces). This dynamic is further complicated as well by the simplistic popular perception of cause and effect. Most people assume that there exists a direct and singular cause-and-effect relationship between a teacher and a student. Accepting that teachers can cause a person to learn along with believing all students can choose to learn (despite the impact of their lives on that choice) is at the root of our pursuit of mechanistic accountability para-

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digms, such as the increasing call to link teacher pay and status to the test scores of their students, including value-added models endorsed by Obama and Duncan. The historical and current demonizing and condemning of schools are within a context of norms and assumptions that are rarely exposed or examined, and our political leaders are eager to exploit those proclaimed crises and assumptions since their claims of crisis effectively distract the public from challenging the balance of power. Few differences exist between the Time article on drop-outs (Get adjusted, 1947) and the report from Swanson (2008) titled Cities in Crisis—a study on graduation rates championed by Colin Powell—in terms of the language and the assumptions that schools and teachers are somehow the sole and direct causes of the drop-out rates instead of schools being the settings that expose a larger social problem. For decades, we have labeled schools as failures based on isolated data points—commonly drop-out rates or SAT scores—without considering the quality of the data or the relevance of the data as they relate to the conclusions drawn: What control does a school or can a school have over a student deciding to drop out? What does the SAT measure (GPA predicts better freshman success in college) and how does that measure correlate with the overall quality of a school or education system (considering that a small and unique population takes the test in varying percentages from state to state)? Why do we misuse SAT data to judge schools while ignoring that two of the most powerful correlations to SAT scores are parental educational level and parental income? For over a century, politicians, educators and scholars, and the public have questioned the quality of schools—from the Committee of Ten in the 1890s calling for a rigorous high school curriculum to prepare students for college to Barack Obama’s exact same call in the first decade of the 21st century. The discourse surrounding public schools has included charges of crisis for over a century, and simultaneously, schools have been championed as the solution to the problems that they are blamed for creating. This distorted dynamic has provided fertile ground for manipulative and misguided political discourse and policy, well represented by the connection between Reagan and Obama. Years after the experience, Gerald Holton (2003), a member of the commission formed under the Reagan administration that produced A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), offered insight into the influence of political agendas on educational reform: We met with President Reagan at the White House, who at first was jovial, charming, and full of funny stories, but then turned serious when he gave us our marching orders. He told us that our report should focus on five fundamental points that would bring excellence to education: Bring God back into the classroom. Encourage tuition tax credits for families using private

54   P. L. THOMAS schools. Support vouchers. Leave the primary responsibility for education to parents. And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education. Or, at least, don’t ask to waste more federal money on education—“we have put in more only to wind up with less.”

Both Holton (2003) and Bracey (2003) have revealed that the crisis discourse spawned by A Nation at Risk was not supported by the evidence the committee gathered; only one of nine trend lines in the data shed negative light on U.S. schools, but the report was manipulated to highlight only that single piece of evidence to match the political agenda of the Reagan administration—to make the American public doubt their schools. The underlying and complex problem with the demonizing of schools begun under Reagan is that Reagan’s agenda was in fact misleading, but the distraction created by A Nation at Risk and the subsequent accountability era lingering today have allowed critical evaluations of U.S. public education to remain ignored. Public schools in the United States fail students by perpetuating the neoliberal norms that ironically also support the ruling elite, including Reagan and Obama. Public schools reflect and reinforce social inequities through tracking, teacher assignments, authoritarian discipline practices, narrow standards-based high-stakes testing, and unethical teacher accountability mandates, all of which are central to bureaucratic reform policies begun under Reagan and continued by Obama. This pattern of misinformation, whereby political claims match popular assumptions, escalated throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, resulting in the Texas Miracle becoming No Child Left Behind. However, as the George W. Bush White House was fashioning No Child Left Behind, evidence revealed that the Texas Miracle was as much political manipulation as A Nation at Risk (Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey, & Stecher, 2000). Parallel to the public ignoring the evidence that Texas had produced no miracles, students themselves were caught in the distorted view of the power of accountability and the reality of being educated once moving on to college (Hacker, 2009; Thomas, 2004), as media stories captured student after student failing to survive college expectations after receiving a high school diploma steeped in high-stakes accountability standards and tests. The evidence did not matter because the power of language and assumptions about accountability are deeply entrenched in the American psyche, and studies have revealed that educational research is poorly reported and thus rarely well communicated to lay people (Molnar, 2001; Yettick, 2009). And this is the reality of discourse about education, pedagogy, and ultimately educational policy. As Gardner (1996) shows about all types of leaders, political discourse is most effective when it speaks to the black-and-white assumptions of the electorate. Schools in crisis, utopian expectations for schools, and narrow accountability all match perfectly with the 5-year-old

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mind of the popular psyche that is culturally committed to a neoliberal view of the world and to rugged individualism. Then, while Obama has achieved the mantle of changing the age of Reagan through health care reform, should we expect a sea of change in the discourse, expectations, and policies regarding education under Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan? The Irony of Educational Change Under Obama: Duncan as Real Reformer? Chapman (2010) offered a nuanced and confessional piece on educational reform that joins educational thinkers such as Diane Ravitch (2010) in acknowledging the flaws inherent in many of the most vocal calls for school reform, including the school choice movement. After noting the failure of Milwaukee’s school choice over 20 years to produce academic achievement better than the public schools, Chapman admits, “This is a surprise to anyone who originally supported the voucher idea—as I did. But it’s entirely consistent with the record elsewhere.” Chapman and Ravitch will likely have their realizations ignored, however, since their messages run against the tide of popular faith in choice, competition, and accountability. Ravitch (2010), in an unexpected shift away from her traditionalist stance supporting accountability and school choice, notes that the appointment of Duncan over Linda Darling-Hammond was a signal of Obama’s contrasting shift away from progressive approaches to education and toward “a ‘real’ reformer who supported testing, accountability, and choice” in Duncan (p. 22). Further, Ravitch focuses on the significance of Duncan as the leading voice for education: This rhetoric represented a remarkable turn of events. It showed how the politics of education had been transformed . . . Slogans long advocated by policy wonks on the right had migrated to and been embraced by policy wonks on the left. When Democrat think tanks say their party should support accountability and school choice, while rebuffing the teachers’ unions, you can bet that something has fundamentally changed in the political scene. In 2008, these issues, which had been the exclusive property of the conservative wing of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, had somehow managed to captivate education thinkers in the Democratic Party as well. (p. 22)

As I will explore below, Duncan’s discourse and the subsequent policies of the Obama administration do signal a change for education, but that change is ironically that this administration has continued the political and cultural ignoring of critical perspectives of educational reform, has moved away from progressive commitments to public schools, and has embraced neoliberal language and approaches to education and school reform (Gir-

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oux, 2010a). These changes for Democratic leadership related to education have all occurred within a larger popular discourse framing Obama as a socialist, a charge contrasting with his corporatist education appointments and policies. “Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been around the schoolyards and gyms in Chicago, has seen players who could have made more of themselves, in basketball and in life,” began Vecsey (2010), reporting on a Duncan talk that addressed college basketball players’ graduation rates. Vecsey continued, noting that Duncan challenged colleges to increase the graduation rates of those basketball players. Soon after this talk, Duncan raised the challenge again, but in the heat of March Madness, noting that many in the field of 65 would not be there if his standard of 40 percent graduation rates were enforced (Brady, 2010). Two aspects of these events are important here. First, when a president names a Secretary of Education, that person becomes the face, voice, and authority on education in the United States; thus, what the Secretary of Education says and how those comments are framed matter in the broader public discourse in direct and indirect ways. Next, the commentary coming from the Secretary of Education speaks to neoliberal norms and assumptions that are rarely challenged, again related to assumptions about accountability, graduation rates, and the value of education in the marketplace. Duncan’s call for a 40 percent graduation rate of college basketball players reinforces the American myth that education matters more than athletics—a cultural narrative that is more word than reality since the real world proves daily that what matters is far more complicated than the myth. Further, when we acknowledge data such as “graduation rates,” we must ask how that data are calculated. Whether or not we are discussing high school or college basketball player graduation rates, we must recognize that different formulas create different results, and messages. (For college basketball players, as one example of a flaw in a formula, a player who transfers from one school to another counts against the school left and not for the school joined even if that player graduates.) Beyond the problem with political discourse triggering uncritical assumptions about statistics, a larger failure of political and popular discourse is the recurring endorsement of accountability. Vecsey (2010) wrote about Duncan’s January 2010 talk, “Wielding some sharp verbal elbows, Duncan turned around and demanded that colleges do a better job of keeping and educating their players. Or else.” In other words, the Secretary of Education, as a real reformer, suggested sharp penalties for colleges not complying, even though the Department of Education has no authority for his standard, even though not a single person questioned holding the colleges responsible for the actions of adult students. As with high school graduation, I have always wondered why we as a culture are so quick to assume that

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an institution has a direct and singular ability or right to force people to behave in ways we deem appropriate (such as attending school and graduating within the norms established by that school). When high school students who drop out or college basketball players who leave college for the NBA are making informed choices, the focus of accountability on the schools is misguided and invalid. But the current accountability dynamic that is distorted also hides the reality that our public schools often fail students through corporatist practices that in fact do drive students from the exact schools that could benefit their lives. Ironically, as I examine below, bureaucratic school reform driven by neoliberal assumptions about teaching and learning is in fact masking what is broken in our system while perpetuating conditions that create schools hostile to the students most in need of public education. Obama and Duncan, then, are speaking for and reinforcing mechanistic practices that are the exact deforming myths (Freire, 2005) that education should empower people to change. “America’s Economic Salvation”: The Rhetoric of Education Unchanged Now, let’s consider the discourse and the proposed changes coming from Secretary Duncan and the Department of Education, focusing on a Duncan speech from September 24, 2009, and A Blueprint for Reform, released by the U.S. Department of Education in March 2010. Duncan’s September 24 speech is key because it was the first in his campaign for reform and based on his self-described “Listening and Learning” tour; the Blueprint becomes valuable as a guide for the policies that will follow the rhetoric. Early in his September talk, Duncan (2009) claims about his “Listening and Learning” tour that: I heard their voices—their expectations, hopes and dreams for themselves and their kids. They were candid about their fears and frustrations. They did not always understand why some schools struggle while others thrive. They understood profoundly that great teaching and school leadership is the key to a great education for their kids.

Duncan immediately speaks to hope, linking his education policy to Obama’s campaign, but more important, I believe, is the subtle suggestion that people don’t “understand why some schools struggle while others thrive,” and that most if not all of student success is tied to teachers and administrators (and not socioeconomic forces beyond the schools). Here is a central aspect of the failure of political discourse related to schools: We in fact do know why some schools thrive and others struggle, and we have

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known for decades—the most powerful connection to academic success is the status of any child’s home (Adamson, et al., 2002; Barton, 2007; Barton & Coley, 2009; Basch, 2010; Berliner, 2009; Hirsch, 2007; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2007; Thomas, 2009, 2010b; Wenglinsky, 2007). We also know that the failure occurring inside schools tends to mirror the social stratification of the broader society, thus reinforcing the social inequities of the culture instead of confronting those inequities, even in choice and charter settings (Burris, Welner, & Bezoza, 2009; Miron, Urschel, Mathis, & Tornquist, 2010; Peske & Haycock, 2006). The most corrosive aspect of neoliberal assumptions as they manifest themselves in educational policy and practices is that they reinforce a culture of blaming people living in poverty for their poverty and the children of poverty for their academic failures. Next, Duncan (2009) follows with utopian expectations, now placed within the context that we are somehow unaware of why some schools succeed and others don’t: “Everyone everywhere shares a common belief that education is America’s economic salvation.” Once again, as has been the refrain for decades, school is framed as the sole avenue for the economic success of the country, although the evidence on this connection is lacking (Bracey, 2004), and Duncan continues by also characterizing schools as “the one true path out of poverty—the great equalizer that overcomes differences in background, culture and privilege. It’s the only way to secure our common future in a competitive global economy.” “Salvation,” “one true path,” “only way”—Duncan’s words place a tremendous burden on schools without acknowledging the larger body of evidence that social forces trump school and teacher quality in the lives of children as well as their educational achievement. When Duncan (2009) turns to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the planned revisions to NCLB (which itself is a revision of ESEA), he acknowledges the problems with NCLB and federal influence on educational practices, but he also applauds NCLB “for exposing achievement gaps, and for requiring that we measure our efforts to improve education by looking at outcomes, rather than inputs.” Again, the discourse is compelling in the popular debate about schools, but flawed, as Duncan continues to shine all of the light on outcomes of the schools, thus keeping in the shadows the powerful social forces that we know are more significant than what happens in schools or on students’ answer sheets. It seems, according to Duncan (2009), that NCLB has succeeded in extending accountability (which he deems a positive impact) and has failed only because we have yet to implement better tests, and we continue to ask too little of students. And at the heart of this, we have the most significant failure of the discourse of the Obama administration: We persist in committing to accountability paradigms that are demonstrably more harmful to education than helpful (Amerin & Berliner, 2002; Kincheloe & Steinberg,

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2006; Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Gresson, 1997; Ravitch, 2010; Thomas, 2004, 2009). Duncan’s blame is misguided, accountability tools are flawed, and the entire process is couched in a competition and mechanistic paradigm that erases all the humanity and nuance from teaching and learning. The accountability paradigm is designed for the rugged individual to succeed, regardless of the veracity of that myth or the consequences of crowning a winner at the expense of a larger group of losers. Once again, Duncan (2009) joins the refrain that stretches back to the Committee of Ten in the 1890s: calling for raising the bar further so students are prepared for college or careers. Duncan offers statistics interspersed with soaring rhetoric as he begins to suggest how the Obama administration plans to take action and render change. A particularly disturbing element of the speech is when Duncan turns to the work and words of Martin Luther King Jr. Here, Duncan is a powerful orator, triggering the cultural mythology surrounding King, notably the call for social justice for marginalized populations in the United States. Like King, Duncan catalogues a series of “still waiting” points paralleling the need for educational change with King’s message about racial change in the 1960s United States. But this speech proves to be a contradiction of discourse and substance as Duncan (2009) reignites the crisis mentality surrounding schools and builds to conflicting points such as these: Let us build a law that demands real accountability tied to growth and gain both in the individual classroom and in the entire school—rather than utopian goals—a law that encourages educators to work with children at every level, the gifted and the struggling—and not just the tiny percent near the middle who can be lifted over the mediocre bar of proficiency with minimal effort. That’s not education. That’s game playing tied to bad tests with the wrong goals.

His crisis discourse is cloaked in utopian expectations for schools (despite his stated rejecting of “utopian goals”) and tied to resisting a culture of testing while also calling for better tests, stronger accountability, and higher standards. Lost in the discourse of politics, Duncan (2009) identifies educational reform as “the civil rights issue of our generation,” although the talk is absent any acknowledgement of the power of social inequities on the performance of schools and students, although the talk is absent any acknowledgement of the historical failure of the exact actions Duncan endorses throughout the speech. In fact, if urgency should be associated with anything in education, it should be our need to address that our schools often reproduce and increase the inequities of children’s lives outside of school. Now, from this speech, let’s turn to the Blueprint (U.S. Department of Education, 2010) to see how the discourse becomes policy.

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Blueprint for Change?: Status Quo in Sheep’s Clothing The themes and language of Obama’s opening message to the Blueprint (U.S. Department of Education, 2010) echo Duncan’s speech—the need for world-class schools that produce college-/career-ready students and that support the U.S. market economy. And while Obama’s comments acknowledge students’ home and communities, the implication is that schools, with better and higher standards, can change the society that is failing those people living in poverty. The Blueprint offers five priorities to guide “a reenvisioned federal role in education”: • “Every student should graduate from high school ready for college and a career, regardless of their income, race, ethnic or language background, or disability status” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). The first priority focuses on college and career readiness, disregarding that such a narrow standard fails to question if this is even possible (the utopian expectation of “every”) or appropriate. Echoing Duncan (2009), this priority again wants to have it both ways: rejecting the culture of testing while also calling for better tests. Further, the call for “every” student to graduate perpetuates a utopian expectation that can never be achieved, that can create only failure by comparison. • The second priority focuses on teacher and leadership development, including an acknowledgement that high-poverty schools need greater equity in teacher assignments, a position well supported by research (Peske & Haycock, 2006). But once again, this plan fails to address the abundance of evidence that shows social forces are more important to student achievement than the quality of the teachers or the schools (see Hirsch, 2007). • A continued faith in accountability paradigms is included in the third priority, adding, “But in the lowest-performing schools that have not made progress over time, we will ask for dramatic change” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). The use of “dramatic” reinforces the crisis language embedded in our discourse about schools, and this priority completely disregards that pressure, rewards, and punishment (Kohn, 1996) are inappropriate and failed strategies for addressing needs in high-poverty settings (Fryer, 2010). • Race to the Top, a competition-based program, and school choice are embraced in the fourth priority. As I will explore more fully below, the plans for change in education under Obama always fail to change our myopic commitment to competition and choice as cultural myths that have little evidence to support their practice

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in education or educational reform (Pontari & Rasmussen, 2009; Thomas, 2010a). • The fifth priority explains, “Tackling persistent achievement gaps requires public agencies, community organizations, and families to share responsibility for improving outcomes for students” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Here, the Department of Education establishes a commitment to broad innovation, suggesting that education needs the partnership of schools, families, and communities. While I believe this priority comes closer than some to what we need from politicians, it still suggests that school can achieve alone what is likely needed at a societal level first. In other words, the entire Blueprint implies that schools alone can achieve utopian expectations while also experiencing a decades-long crisis of failure as if schools and students exist separately from powerful societal realities. Crisis discourse and utopian expectations for schools, then, are a historical reality of public and political discourse and policy related to our schools. Obama and Duncan have not changed that dynamic but have accelerated both the discourse and the practices (Rothstein, 2010). As noted above, the change that Obama/Duncan have achieved is changing the Democratic commitment to progressivism to a neoliberal view of schools. Next, I examine the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) as a model of public and political discourse as it overlaps with federal policy to maintain a failed status quo while disregarding the need to make significant societal change first, before any educational change can achieve the results we hope for. As the Obama and Duncan commitment to charter schools reveals, the neoliberal norms that drive their policy and the public’s embracing of those policies, in fact, directly preclude the possibility of change that would disrupt the corporatist norms driving “no excuses” schools, such as the HCZ. Harlem Children’s Zone: Masking Failed Assumptions “And soon after he entered office,” writes Ravitch (2010), “President Obama heartened charter school advocates by urging state legislatures to remove the caps on charter schools” (p. 145). But progressives should not have been surprised, because during his campaign, Obama endorsed accountability on his Web site: “We need to stop paying lip service to public education, and start holding communities, administrators, teachers, parents and students accountable.”1 Then, in the third debate with McCain, October 15, 2008, Obama championed his support for charters and competition:

62   P. L. THOMAS Senator McCain and I actually agree on charter schools. I doubled the number of charter schools in Illinois despite some reservations from teachers unions. I think it’s important to foster competition inside the public schools. Where we disagree is on the idea that we can somehow give out vouchers as a way of securing the problems in our education system.2

Obama’s administration, through his discourse and actions, established an environment that allowed a renewed interest in charter schools specifically and school choice indirectly. The Obama/Duncan administration has placed the Department of Education firmly within “the Gates-Broad agenda,” explains Ravitch (2010): “The Broad Foundation pursues strategies that would deprofessionalize education, uses bonuses to motivate (or ‘incentivize’) teachers and students, and seeks to replace neighborhood schools with a competitive marketplace of choices” (p. 217). As Ravitch explores, Obama and Duncan have committed to charter schools—notably “no excuses” schools such as KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program)—and merit pay for teachers; further, initial policy such as Race to the Top reinforces America’s cultural commitments to neoliberal ideology as reflected in Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee (former Chancellor of DC public schools), who both incorporate the discourse and practices of business to reform schooling. Like Duncan, Gates and Rhee are a perpetuation of a high-standards, high-accountability, and market-based paradigm that matches America’s assumptions about the rugged individual and the idealized power of choice and competition. That dynamic is reflected in the HCZ experiment: “We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap,” proclaimed David Brooks (2009) in an op-ed for the New York Times.3 Brooks titled the piece “The Harlem Miracle,” about the Promise Academy of the HCZ. Brooks concluded that Dobbie and Fryer’s (2009) claim that the charter school had closed the achievement gap between blacks and whites proved the reformers right and the educational establishment wrong. According to Brooks, Obama/ Duncan’s abandoning progressive ideals and embracing neoliberal practices were supported by the accomplishments of the HCZ and its focus on a “no excuses” approach to education. Duncan as a real reformer was fitting well into the proof presented in the HCZ success; and this all confirmed the larger cultural myths supporting Brooks’ arguments. Throughout 2009, and uncritically, HCZ was championed by NPR, Edutopia, 60 Minutes, Time, and the Washington Post—where Shulman (2009) added, “Now the Obama administration seeks to replicate [President and CEO Geoffrey] Canada’s model in 20 cities in a program called Promise Neighborhoods and has set aside $10 million in the 2010 budget for planning. President Obama has frequently singled out the Harlem Children’s Zone, and first lady Michelle Obama recently called Canada ‘one of my heroes.’”

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The HCZ experiment includes a charter school that offers both social and educational support for students and parents, designed to lift the families out of poverty by addressing the entire zone of each child’s life. Paul Tough (2008) has chronicled the ambitious program in Whatever It Takes, although the book explores the HCZ with more complexity than any of the media identified above. The public discourse (Brooks, 2009; Shulman, 2009) and policy (U.S. Department of Education, 2010) that support the HCZ offer important lessons that have more to do with how we distort research than how we can reform schools. Repeating patterns exposed by Molnar (2001) and Yettick (2009) concerning the failure of mainstream media to report on educational research, the media and political reactions to the “Harlem Miracle” prove again that many have misrepresented what data from the Promise Academy reveal—mainly that there was no miracle. This parallels the claims of the Texas Miracle under then-governor Bush—a claim also later discredited (Klein, et al., 2000) but underreported. The focus on schools as the sole avenue to social reform, instead of acknowledging that schools are trapped in societal inequities that overwhelm both students and the schools they attend, is contrasted by this call from Freire (1998): “If education cannot do everything, there is something fundamental that it can do. In other words, if education is not the key to social transformation, neither is it simply meant to reproduce the dominant ideology” (p. 110). And this is what is not being said or practiced in the discourse and policies of the Obama administration. To hold up the HCZ as a success over the achievement gap both as evidence that schools can achieve utopian expectations and that schools can transform society is ultimately no change at all in how we have characterized schools. But it is a manufactured endorsement of a cultural myth related to the rugged individual and neoliberal assumptions. Aaron Pallas (2009b), responding directly to Brooks and later to coverage of the HCZ on CNN (Pallas, 2009a), noted that Dobbie and Fryer (2009) base their claims of closing the achievement gap on 1 test result of 10 at two grade levels (selective use of data did not end with A Nation at Risk). Further, Pallas (2009b) explains that advocates gloss over that those students did not close the gap on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills the same year. In short, making claims that HCZ research provides “a remedy for the achievement gap” overstates for the wider public what the data support. Proclaiming “miracle” exposes our flawed utopian expectations (more normalizing the exceptional), not a remedy for closing the achievement gap. For HCZ to show us how to reform public schools, we must know how HCZ schools compare with and differ from public schools in order to identify what causes any success. Then we must resist allowing the media and politicians to drive through distortion what we say, believe, and implement

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concerning our schools. One difference between HCZ schools and public schools is HCZ schools include virtually no ELL or special education students (Ravitch, 2009), although the public schools must serve those populations. Another difference is that although Brooks (2009) discounted the value of low student-teacher ratios, the HCZ schools have, according to the 60 Minutes report, one adult for every six children, again unlike public schools addressing high-poverty populations (Schorn, 2006). Further, HCZ schools address the social conditions of children living in poverty along with reforming schools. But advocates discount the impact of the social support and champion the most disturbing and least challenged aspect of the Harlem experiment—“no excuses schools”—Brooks (2009) explains, adding, “The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.” The claim of “no excuses schools” masks the rise of “new paternalism” schools, which embrace oppressive practices in pursuit of raising scores, increasing graduation rates, and improving college attendance (all neoliberal assumptions about education in a free society) while seeking to discredit progressive educational ideologies (Landsberg, 2009; Whitman, 2008). Ravitch (2009) has questioned HCZ’s commitment “to impose middleclass values on poor and minority children.” Ravitch argues, “But I don’t think that our schools need to be boot camps to teach courtesy, civility, respect for others, self-discipline, and other virtues necessary for democratic life.” “New paternalism” schools implement the worst aspects of racism and classism, notably that the problems we face are inherently in the children themselves; again, not that the outcomes associated with children reflect social inequities but flaws in the students themselves. If we persist in conforming all children to the system, we are ignoring the possible (and likely) flaws in society, standardized testing, and bureaucratic schooling (Giroux, 2005; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2007; Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Gresson, 1997; Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Hinchey, 1999; McLaren, 2007; McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005; Thomas & Kincheloe, 2006). When the media and politicians speak with authority in ways that confirm our stereotypes and prejudices, those corrupted views are perpetuated, absolving those with the best of intentions of any wrongdoing. We, then, are left with some disturbing lessons hidden by misrepresenting what HCZ charter schools reveal. First, we must distinguish media and political advocacy from evidence, especially when we are faced with claims of “miracles.” Brooks (2009) states the Promise Academy alone closed the achievement gap, but Dobbie and Fryer (2009) admit, “We cannot, however, disentangle whether communities coupled with high-quality schools drive our results, or whether the high-quality schools alone are enough to do the trick” (p. 4). Next, we must

Educational Hope Ignored Under Obama    65

seek the full picture, even when faced with the complexity of data and statistical claims of relevance. As well, we must make accurate comparisons with public schools when considering educational experiments. HCZ schools have conditions and populations unlike high-poverty public schools. What has worked for individual HCZ students may not work in public school reform (when we disregard the ends-justifies-the-means approach of “no excuses” schools). Many of the successful elements in the HCZ experiment, in fact, have been supported by research for decades, but rarely implemented in public schools. When Obama and Duncan endorse HCZ and other charter schools or choice initiatives, and when that discourse is coupled with programs such as Race to the Top, a program based on faith in competition and not evidence, we are left with the status quo in terms of how we view schools and school reform. The change we need, the change we hope for, should instead confront the assumptions that have driven political discourse and policies for decades. A Call for Change: New Discourse, New Action The Obama administration and the work of Secretary Duncan, as of 2010, have revealed a rhetorical and political pattern that is unchanged from what education has suffered for over a century: a perpetuation of cultural norms similar to the educational discourse and policies of presidents from Reagan through George W. Bush. In fact, Obama and Duncan represent an ironic change for Democrats claiming to be progressive—a change from progressive to neoliberal commitments. Freire (2005) recognizes the corrupting power of such norms: As we put into practice an education that critically provokes the learner’s consciousness, we are necessarily working against myths that deform us. As we confront such myths, we also face the dominant power because those myths are nothing but the expression of this power, of its ideology. (p. 75)

Framing our schools with crisis discourse and utopian expectations places educational discourse and policy within the “myths that deform us.” The change we need from Obama/Duncan and all political leaders is to create social policy and then educational policy that expose deforming myths and lead to action overcoming those myths. Below, then, I outline what changes we might consider instead of the words and policies coming from the Obama/Duncan White House/Department of Education at the beginning of the administration. Both the discourse and the policies could approach change and hope if the following were taken into consideration seriously:

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• Acknowledge that our schools are a reflection of our society. Schools are stratified as our society is; and the source of that stratification is often embedded in dynamics inherent in our culture that are beyond the power of individuals, especially children, to change. As noted above by Freire (1998), to acknowledge that schools alone are not capable of social reform is not resigning ourselves to failure, but a call to addressing the large social inequities so that we can then turn to the schools and ask for more. Educational reform must be couched inside larger societal reform. • The educational reform we embrace when corrupting social forces are addressed should also insure that schools do not continue to perpetuate stratification, such as tracking, and must provide equitable course and teacher assignments for all students (Peske & Haycock, 2006). Schools, further, need to be reformed away from mechanistic assumptions and toward student-centered environments that support students’ empowerment (Thomas & Kincheloe, 2006). • Educational practices should reject deficit perspectives (Payne, 2009) and “no excuses” schools (Whitman, 2008) for generative practices that recognize individual differences and abilities (Bomer, 2009; Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2008; Dudley-Marling, 2007; Dudley-Marling & Lucas, 2009; Dworin & Bomer, 2008; Gorski, 2006a, 2006b, 2008; Ng & Rury, 2006; Sato & Lensmire, 2009; Thomas, 2009, 2010b). The deficit perspective is a subset of the larger faith in the rugged individual. If a person would simply pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps, all would be well, says that cultural narrative. The deficit perspective works from an assumption that the rugged individual ideal exists and all we need to do is identify how any student fails that norm and provide that student with what is lacking. • We should reject framing the purpose of schools narrowly—for college and career readiness, for example—and reject promoting schools as the sole key to economic success (since the research doesn’t support the claim). A truly higher standard for schools is seeing education as an avenue to individual empowerment and democratic growth for the society. Jobs and other more narrow targets can and will be achieved if the higher goals are embraced. • We should clarify the complexity of the teaching-learning dynamic, notably rejecting the assumption that a sole and direct causational relationship exists between a single teacher and single student. Teaching and teachers matter, but not in direct and simple ways identified by traditional approaches to teacher evaluation and accountability. A shift in how we view, discuss, and value teachers is needed, as Giroux (2010b) argues:

Educational Hope Ignored Under Obama    67 Teachers are more crucial in the struggle for democracy than security guards and the criminal justice system. Students deserve more than being trained to be ignorant and willing accomplices of the corporation and the empire. Teachers represent a valued resource and are one of the few groups left that can educate students in ways that enable them to resist the collective insanity that now threatens this country. We need to take them seriously by giving them the dignity, labor conditions, salaries, freedom, time and support they deserve. This may be the most important challenge Americans face as we move into the 21st century. *  *  *

“The future of knowledge is at stake in this new cultural landscape,” explains Kincheloe (Thomas & Kincheloe, 2006), adding, Few times in human history has there existed greater need for forms of knowledge work and thinking that expose the dominant ideologies and discourses that shape the information accessed by many individuals. The charge of critical multiculturalists and postformalists at this historical juncture is to develop forms of knowledge work, research, and thinking that take these sobering dynamics into account. This is the idea behind my articulation of the bricolage (See J. Kincheloe & K. Berry, 2004). Attempting to make use of a variety of philosophical, methodological, cultural, political, epistemological, and psychological discourses, the bricolage can be employed by critical multiculturalists and postformalists to produce compelling knowledges that seek to challenge the neo-colonial representations about others at home and abroad. The bricolage can produce ways of thinking that move us to new vantage points from which we view ourselves and the world. (p. 149)

This call for change is not being heard, blocked by the din of the crisis discourse and utopian expectations that deform our children, our schools, and our society. The great failure being masked is that bureaucratic calls for school reform are perpetuating the labeling and marginalizing of teachers and students whose conditions in mechanistic schools parallel the inequities that the political elite are willingly ignoring both in their discourse and in their policies. Notes 1. See http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/index.php 2. See http://www.ontheissues.org/2008_Pres_3.htm 3. The mainstream and so-called “new” media share with political leaders neoliberal assumptions that speak to and reinforce those assumptions among the

68   P. L. THOMAS public. Jay Matthews, for example, as a journalist dedicated to education issues, remains within the same norms that inform the Obama administration (personified by Duncan as a noneducator bringing business standards to education) and corporate approaches to school reform embraced and perpetuated by Bill Gates (see Ravitch, 2010).

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Educational Hope Ignored Under Obama    69 Burris, C. C., Welner, K. G., & Bezoza, J.W. (2009). Universal access to a quality education: Research and recommendations for the elimination of curricular stratification. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ universal-access Chapman, S. (2010, April 15). Education reform gets a failing grade. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ctoped-0415-chapman-20100415,0,7825146.column Dobbie, W., & Fryer, R. G., Jr. (2009). Are high-quality schools enough to close the achievement gap? Evidence from a bold social experiment in Harlem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Retrieved from http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/ fryer/files/hcz%204.15.2009.pdf Dudley-Marling, C. (2007). Return of the deficit. Journal of Educational Controversy, 2(1). Retrieved from http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/ v002n001/a004.shtml Dudley-Marling, C., & Lucas, K. (2009, May). Pathologizing the language and culture of poor children. Language Arts, 86(5), 362–370. Duncan, A. (2009, September 24). Reauthorization of ESEA: Why we can’t wait. U. S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/ reauthorization-esea-why-we-cant-wait Dworin, J. E., & Bomer, R. (2008). What we all (supposedly) know about the poor: A critical discourse analysis of Ruby Payne’s “framework.” English Education, 40(2), 101–121. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage (P. Clarke, Trans.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare to teach (D. Macedo, D. Koike, & A. Oliveira, Trans.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Fryer, R. G., Jr. (2010, April). Financial incentives and student achievement: Evidence from randomized trials. Working Paper 15898. NBER Working Paper Series. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w15898 Gardner, H. (1996). Leading minds: An anatomy of leadership. New York: Basic Books. Get adjusted. (1947, December 15). Time. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,934231,00.html Giroux, H. A. (2005). Schooling and the struggle for public life: Democracy’s promise and education’s challenge (updated ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Giroux, H. A. (2010a, March 24). On pop clarity: Public intellectuals and the crisis of language. truthout. Retrieved from http://www.truthout.org/on-pop-clarity-public-intellectuals-and-crisis-language57950 Giroux, H. A. (2010b, April 14). In defense of public school teachers in a time of crisis. truthout. Retrieved from http://www.truthout.org/in-defense-publicschool-teachers-a-time-crisis58567 Gorski, P. (2006a, February 9). The classist underpinnings of Ruby Payne’s framework. Teachers College Record. Gorski, P. (2006b, July 19). Responding to Payne’s response. Teachers College Record. Gorski, P. (2008, April). The myth of the “culture of poverty.” Educational Leadership, 65(7), 32–36.

70   P. L. THOMAS Graham, S., & Hebert, M. A. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education. Hacker, H. K. (2009, August 9). Many Dallas-Fort Worth graduates struggle in college. The Dallas Morning News. Hirsch, D. (2007, September). Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. York, North Yorkshire, UK. Retrieved from http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/2123.asp Jacoby, S. (2004). Freethinkers: A history of American secularism. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Kincheloe, J., & Berry, K. (2004). Rigor and complexity in educational research: Conceptualizing the bricolage. London: Open University Press. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (2006). What you don’t know about schools. New York: Palgrave. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (2007). Cutting class: Socioeconomic status and education. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R., & Gresson, A. D., III (1997). Measured lies: The bell curve examined. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kincheloe, J., Steinberg, S., & Hinchey, P. (1999). The postformal reader: Cognition and education. New York: Falmer Press. Klein, S. P., Hamilton, L. S., McCaffrey, D. F., & Stecher, B. M. (2000) What do test scores in Texas tell us? Issue Paper, Rand Education. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. Retrieved from http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/ IP202/index.html Kohn, A. (1996). Beyond discipline: From compliance to community. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Landsberg, M. (2009, May 31). Spitting in the eye of mainstream education. Los Angeles Times online. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/news/education/ la-me-charter31-2009may31,0,6482403.story Leonhardt, D. (2010, March 23). In health care bill, Obama attacks wealth inequality. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/ business/24leonhardt. html?hp McLaren, P. (2007). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (5th ed.). New York: Pearson. McLaren, P. M., & Farahmandpur, R. (2005). Teaching against global capitalism and the new imperialism: A critical pedagogy. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Miron, G., Urschel, J. L., Mathis, W, J., & Tornquist, E. (2010). Schools without diversity: Education management organizations, charter schools and the demographic stratification of the American school system. National Educaton Policy Center. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ schools-without-diversity Molnar, A. (2001, April 11). The media and educational research: What we know vs. what the public hears. Milwaukee, WI: Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation. Retrieved from http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/ cerai-01-14.htm

Educational Hope Ignored Under Obama    71 National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983, April). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education. Washington DC: United States Department of Education. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html Ng, J. C., & Rury, J. L. (2006, July 18). Poverty and education: A critical analysis of the Ruby Payne phenomenon. Teachers College Record. Pallas, A. (2009a, December 7). Just how gullible is Anderson Cooper? New York: Gotham Schools. Retrieved from http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/07/justhow-gullible-is-anderson-cooper/ Pallas, A. (2009b, May 8). Just how gullible is David Brooks? New York: Gotham Schools. Retrieved from http://gothamschools.org/2009/05/08/just-howgullible-is-david-brooks/ Payne, R. (2009, May 17). Using the lens of economic class to help teachers understand and teach students from poverty: A response. Teachers College Record. Peske, H. G., & Haycock, K. (2006, June). Teaching inequality: How poor and minority students are shortchanged on teacher quality. Washington DC: The Education Trust, Inc. Retrieved from http://www.edtrust.org/dc/publication/teachinginequality-how-poor-and-minority-students-are-shortchanged-on-teacherqualit Pontari, B. A., & Rasmussen, P. R. (2009). Competition reconsidered: A perspective from psychology. In W. B. Worthen, A. S. Henderson, P. R. Rasmussen, & T. L. Benson (Eds.), Competition: A multidisciplinary analysis (pp. 47–59). Boston: Sense Publishers. Ravitch, D. (2009, May 12). What the “Harlem Miracle” really teaches. Bridging Differences blog. Education Week. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2009/05/what_the_harlem_miracle_really.html Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books. Rothstein, R. (2010, March 27). A blueprint that needs more work. Policy memorandum #162. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.epi.org/page/-/pdf/pm162.pdf Sato, M., & Lensmire, T. J. (2009, January). Poverty and Payne: Supporting teachers to work with children of poverty. Phi Delta Kappan, 9(5), 365–370. Schmidt, R., & Thomas, P. L. (2009). 21st century literacy: If we are scripted, are we literate? Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. Schorn, D. (2006, May 14). The Harlem Children’s Zone: How one man’s vision to revitalize Harlem starts with children. 60 Minutes. Retrieved from http://www. cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/11/60minutes/main1611936.shtml Shulman, R. (2009, August 2). Harlem program singled out as model. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/ article/2009/08/01/AR2009080102297.html Swanson, C. B. (2008, April 1). Cities in crisis: A special analytic report on high school graduation. Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. Thomas, P. L. (2004). Numbers games: Measuring and mandating American education. New York: Peter Lang USA.

72   P. L. THOMAS Thomas, P. L. (2009). Shifting from deficit to generative practices: Addressing impoverished and all students. Teaching Children of Poverty, 1(1). Retrieved from http://journals. sfu.ca/tcop/index.php/tcop/article/view/8/1 Thomas, P. L. (2010a). Parental choice?: A critical reconsideration of choice and the debate about choice. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. Thomas, P. L. (2010b, July). The Payne of addressing race and poverty in public education: Utopian accountability and deficit assumptions of middle class America. Souls, 12(3), 262–283. Thomas, P. L., & Kincheloe, J. L. (2006). Reading, writing, and thinking: The postformal basics. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Tough, P. (2008). Whatever it takes: Geoffrey Canada’s quest to change Harlem and America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. U.S. Department of Education. (2010, March). ESEA reauthorization: A blueprint for reform. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/ Vecsey, G. (2010, January 14). Arne Duncan challenges the N.C.A.A. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/sports/ ncaabasketball/15vecsey .html Wenglinsky, H. (2007, October). Are private high schools better academically than public high schools? The Center for Education Policy. Retrieved from http:// www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=Wenglinsky%5FReport%5F PrivateSchool%5F101007%2Epdf Whitman, D. (2008, Fall). An appeal to authority. Education Next, 8(4). Retrieved from http://educationnext.org/an-appeal-to-authority/ Yettick, H. (2009, July 27). The research that reaches the public: Who produces the educational research mentioned in the news media? National Educaton Policy Center. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ research-that-reaches

Chapter 4

Competing Definitions of Hope in Obama’s Education Marketplace Media Representations of School Reform, Equality, and Social Justice Rebecca A. Goldstein, Sheila Macrine, Nataly Z. Chesky, and Alexandra Perry

Introduction The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States signaled for Maxine Greene a “slow fuse of possibility” (2009, p. 397). It was a moment in history when many people saw hope—hope for equity and social justice, hope for the end of the war in Iraq, hope for a living wage, hope to enrich and enliven public education. Barack Hussein Obama, the United States’ first African American president, built a campaign on this message of hope and on a message of change. Many anticipated that the Obama administration would reverse or curb the damaging neoliberal practices The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 73–93 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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of the Bush Administration, including viewing education solely as an economic imperative, one that reflects market values, global competition, and American exceptionalism (Giroux, 2009; Giroux & Saltman, 2009; Kruger, 2010). The administration has instead further entrenched those ideologies and practices within the educational policy and reform landscape, with support from the news media. It is against this backdrop that we critically examine President Obama’s stance on public school reform and how the news media has reported on those reforms. Using press coverage of Obama’s selection of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and the continuing attacks on teachers and their unions, we illustrate how mainstream media news outlets (television, cable, newspapers, etc.), with the exception of a few, have supported the underlying neoliberal principles of merit pay, charter schools, radically diminishing the power of teachers’ unions, and increasing accountability for teachers through tying student test scores to individual teachers as commonsense school reform. We argue that the news media has failed in its mission to act as a “fourth estate,” because instead of analyzing and critiquing the Obama administration’s positions on education, it has created narratives regarding school reform that resonate both with the public and with the neoliberal agenda to radically alter how young people in the United States are educated (Altheide, 2002; Lakoff, 2004). As a result, neoliberal school reforms are presented as a form of common sense about schooling, teaching, and learning. Education in the Media The U.S. public has long been told that the nation is in the midst of an education crisis, one that can be traced as far back as the race for space and Sputnik. The general message in the press was that the Russians triumphed because they had better schools, and the media perpetuated the story into the present (Bracey, 2008, 2009). The news media has often played a role in shaping public perception to support particular positions on how to redress various issues and solve the education crisis (Gerstl-Pepin, 2006; Ingersoll, 2003). The common narrative goes something like this: The schools aren’t teaching, teachers are incompetent, and the nation is no longer competitive on the global stage. Powerful businessmen like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family use funds from their philanthropic foundations to wield an incredible influence over the media and schools, which has shaped education in the United States, by speaking at different education summits, donating large sums of money to individual schools and districts, and by vocally advocating in the news media for reform measures like merit pay and charter schools (Kovacs, 2005; Kovacs & Christie, 2008; Saltman, 2009). Even television news documentary programs like 20/20 and John

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Stossel’s report, Stupid in America, present carefully crafted “exposés” about students, teachers, families, and schools to uncover who is at fault for the failure of public education (Anderson, 2007; Gabbard & Atkinson, 2007; see also Brimelow, 2003). More and more, think tanks, particularly those with conservative and/or neoliberal interests, are quoted in the news, with little or no reference to who they are and whose interests they serve (Dolny, 1998; Haas, 2007). Thus, while people may access their personal experiences regarding public education that support their views and draw upon them for conclusions, the mainstream news media reinforces some conclusions more so than others, regardless of their accuracy (Bracey, 2009; Shaker & Heilman, 2004; Stack, 2006; Wallace, 1997). The result is that certain reforms gain more traction in the public consciousness than others. One cannot escape the political battles over and the urgency to resolve these issues because they are ubiquitous in the mass media—in the daily papers, on morning radio and television talk shows, on the evening news and commentary—and are widespread throughout Internet sources and blogs. Elements in the media imply that the American public should be afraid of and for public education, through engaging in political spectacle: The modern political spectacle—perpetuated through various media forms (e.g., round-the-clock cable television; paper and electronic magazines; the Internet; wireless connectivity; two-way Net/Webcams, online courses, etc.)— exercises control by isolating and fragmenting, denying history, distorting reality, alienating, and monopolizing communication (one-way, to its advantage). (Vinson & Ross, 2003, p. 49)

The media, in particular the news media, look for stories that sell. Media corporations are businesses, and therefore they focus on issues and stories that will attract readers, viewers, and revenue streams (Levin, 2004). Stories sell a particular narrative about an issue, and one way to ensure that those stories have staying power is to ensure that they appeal to people’s fears (Altheide, 2002). In this way, media reporting can have serious implications on the policy decision-making process (Anderson, 2007). Still, the American public consumes media messages, both consciously and unconsciously. While the American public has access to a wider range of news, opinion, and information because of the Internet, they continue to turn to newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post (in print and online) for their news information (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010). However, it is important to note that news coverage of educational issues is minimal at best and often not covered by journalists knowledgeable about educational issues (Pelikan, 2005; Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010; West, Whitehurst, & Dionne, 2009). Further, how the media shapes these debates is important because it creates what Bourdieu called “a reality effect”: “The simple report, the very fact

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of reporting, of putting on record as a reporter, always implies a social construction of reality that can mobilize (or demobilize) individuals or groups” (1999, p. 21). The media, quite literally, permeates and is permeated with Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” even as it surrounds people, helping reinforce the hegemonic culture (1971). In the case of education, certain reforms are viewed as more natural and logical than others. Shrinking Media and the Consolidation of Neoliberal Interests Just what any given media outlet presents to its consuming public, however, takes place against a larger backdrop of competing interests, some of which are very influential and shape the debate through access to information (Anderson, 2007; Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Saltman, 2007b; Scheufele, 1999). Those who own the media have significant influence over what is reported, how, and when (McChesney, 2004). In recent years, the number of individuals and companies who control the mass media has dwindled, with newspapers and other media venues being brought under the control of fewer and fewer companies, the result being a powerful elite control of the market share in a given community and nationwide (Bagdikian, 2004; Callaghan & Schnell, 2001; McChesney, 2004). Bagdikian (2004) commented that the Telecommunications Act of 1994, which was supposed to open up different media markets and outlets (for instance, New York City television, radio, cable, and print news) to competition, instead resulted in media consolidation, so much so that as of 2003, only five corporations controlled most media outlets in the United States. In 1983, there were 50. Now, more than ever, corporate control of the news narrows the range of voices and perspectives regarding different issues, and many perspectives reflected are those of the social and economic elite (Berger, 2005; Callaghan & Schnell, 2001; Gramsci, 1971; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Richardson, 2007). It is not simply that media consolidation has benefitted the elite. Powerful political interests in the United States have supported the rise of neoliberalism and have employed the media to reinforce neoliberalism as the defining reality in which people live and work (Harvey, 2005). The Bush administration, President Obama’s predecessor, disregarded repeatedly the debates and dialogues surrounding many of the political, economic, and educational conditions that resulted from deregulation and privatization (Giroux & Saltman, 2009). Neoliberal practices and policies “assault all things public, sabotage the basic contradiction between democratic values and market fundamentalism, it also weakens any viable notion of political agency by offering no language capable of connecting private considerations to public issues” (Giroux, 2002, para. 1). Therefore, couching

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all aspects of daily life within the language of the market—commercialism, privatization, and deregulation—diminishes citizen participation to little more than being a consumer. Given the totalizing narrative of neoliberalism and the narrowing of the news media, it is no wonder that neoliberal interests and solutions, particularly in regard to reforming public education, have become commonsense and perceived as politically neutral (Gramsci, 1971). That public education is commodified—that is, one’s individual output has a particular value assigned by the market—is not a revelation. What is significant about the impact of neoliberalism is the conjunction of increased accountability, standards, and efficiency for and on the part of students, teachers, and schools, coupled with more oversight at the state and federal levels, to ensure that each individual is doing her or his part (Apple, 2005). Teachers and schools are responsible for student learning and are held responsible when students fail to learn. Students, in turn, are responsible for their own learning and will be rewarded for successful learning, down the road, with employment that will enable them to take part in the marketplace (Giroux, 2009; Goldstein & Beutel, 2008; Ong, 2006). Economic efficiency is paramount, and teachers and students can’t be trusted to carry out the teaching and learning process without stopgaps like standardized tests to ensure that investors (public or private) are getting their money’s worth. On the surface, such statements appear to make sense. This is, after all, the myth of meritocracy, which many Americans believe is one of the foundations of their collective psyche (McNamee & Miller, 2004). However, common sense can be manipulated. If one fails to compete in the market according to the rules of neoliberalism, one simply chose not to work hard enough to be successful. What neoliberal advocates eliminate through their practices and policies are the government-supported safety nets that many members of the public need. Those same advocates ensure that the federal government stays out of their way by lobbying for and achieving more deregulation (as discussed above regarding the media) so that the government stays out of their way, except for when they need to be saved from their own plans and excess. And as far as the news media goes, it has dutifully reported on outcomes. The result? The media’s complicity supports a commonsense narrative steeped in neoliberal principles that further degrades the potential of democracy itself. It victimizes the poor and working class by blaming them for their own struggles even as the elite create and control the conditions under which such struggles occur. Neoliberalism, its supporters, and the media have quite literally changed how we think about, talk about, and engage in daily life at the local and civic levels (Bolter & Grusin, 2000; Giroux, 2009; Harvey, 2005; Kellner, 2002).

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Obama’s Choice: Arne Duncan as Anything but “Middle of the Road” Duncan’s neoliberal credentials have long been known among advocacy groups and scholars who observed him as head of the Chicago public schools. While in Chicago, Duncan worked closely with Mayor Daley and the Commercial Club of Chicago to realize the implementation of the Renaissance 2010 Plan, what Saltman (2007a, 2007c) considered a form of disaster capitalism. Renaissance 2010 sought to continue the gross underfunding of American public education, which has created the crisis state in which too many schools in Chicago and nationwide find themselves. Duncan militarized schools, particularly those that were underperforming, and installed police, security, metal detectors, and cameras (Giroux, 2010; Giroux & Saltman, 2009). Schools were closed, turned into private charter schools, and teachers were pressed with additional accountability measures to perform (Lipman & Hursh, 2007). Just as President Bush and his Secretary of Education Rod Paige brought the Texas Miracle to Washington, Obama and Duncan brought Renaissance 2010—in the form of Race to the Top—with more accountability, more testing, merit pay, and charter schools. Teachers and teachers’ unions found themselves under siege more than ever, by Democrats nonetheless, and traditional news media outlets helped to crystallize the battle as a struggle between school “reformers” and the teachers and teachers’ unions, and the latter were to blame for the failure of public education to improve. The debates over who would become the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration are illustrative of the ongoing debate between those who represented powerful business interests and those who voted for the president-elect. Commenting on the significance of this appointment, Giroux noted, Obama is caught in a tug-of-war between corporate interests and democratic values, accentuated by the ongoing state of perpetual uncertainty in the economy and the crisis of deteriorating public and higher education. What the Obama administration must understand is that the crisis in education is not only an economic problem that requires funds to rebuild old and new schools but also a political and ethical crisis about the very nature of citizenship and democracy. (2009, p. 262)

To assist in the transition in the Department of Education, presidentelect Obama chose Linda Darling-Hammond as the head of his policy working-group (Office of the President-Elect, n.d.). Pundits on both sides of the aisle commented on the choice, and she was immediately put in the running for the position of Secretary of Education. As it did with many individuals who were being considered for different positions, the New York

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Times ran a profile on Darling-Hammond, which focused on her long-standing work as a university professor who was an advocate for better teacher preparation and a vocal opponent of No Child Left Behind and the Bush administration’s education policies and practices. The piece also noted, as it did with others, that she had “baggage”: She signed a manifesto [in 2008] calling for greatly increased federal spending on poor schools and students, which put her at odds with signers of a competing one that said the nation’s priority should be to squeeze teachers unions and administrators harder to raise minority achievement. She is a longtime critic of Teach for America because many of its corps members abandon the classroom just when they are learning their jobs, but she has recently acknowledged that the program recruited new talent into teaching. (Dillon, 2008, para. 5)

This manifesto, actually a position statement by the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (BBE, 2008), was also signed by Obama’s eventual choice, Arne Duncan. The group called for continued education reform efforts surrounding small class sizes, meeting the needs of disadvantaged students and English-language learners, better teacher preparation, and improved professional development for teachers and school leaders. It also called for increasing investment in early childhood initiatives so all students come to school ready to learn, increasing attention and investment in health care initiatives, and paying more attention to students’ in- and out-of-school activities. While the Broader, Bolder Approach position aligned with many aspects of Obama’s education plan (Education Week, 2009), those who were associated with the BBE were connected to members of the status quo and pitted against an alternative group, the Education Equality Project (www. educationequalityproject.org). Among its positions were placing effective teachers in the classrooms and getting rid of ineffective ones, empowering parents, strengthening accountability measures, calling for more personal responsibility, and insisting that: Our elected officials confront and address head-on crucial issues that created this crisis: teachers’ contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them. (Education Equality Project, n.d., para. 9)

Thus, while the Broader, Bolder Approach viewed teachers’ unions as allies, the Education Quality Project saw them as obstacles to be reformed. Almost immediately after Darling-Hammond’s appointment to Obama’s policy working-group, different newspapers began laying out the issues sur-

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rounding the appointment of an education secretary in the front sections, while expressing their choices on the editorial pages. On December 5, 2008, the Washington Post ran an editorial titled, “A Job for a Reformer: Will Barack Obama Opt for Boldness OR The Status Quo in Choosing an Education Secretary?” After commenting on Darling-Hammond’s critique of No Child Left Behind and opposition to Teach For America, the editorial staff of the Washington Post cautioned the president-elect about his choice: It would be a mistake to retreat from the accountability that No Child Left Behind has brought in improving learning and narrowing the achievement gap for minority students. And the next secretary should encourage the kind of innovation and entrepreneurship typified by Teach for America’s success in attracting top college graduates to inner-city schools. (para. 3)

Here, it was already evident that Obama should choose a “real reformer,” someone who supported many of the same educational goals of No Child Left Behind, including the testing and accountability measures most supported by market-based reformers. In doing so, the editorial informed their readership not only that neoliberal policies were good for school children, but also that anyone who opposed them was part of the “status quo” that held back American education and obstructed the nation’s competitive edge. The New York Times carried a similar refrain the same day. David Brooks (2008), in pondering whom Obama might choose, commented on his own concerns regarding whether Obama would choose a “real reformer” who supported neoliberal reforms that aligned public education more with business models and interests. Brooks pegged those against reform as members of the establishment, those who were not interested in change and were afraid of losing their influence over public education. Brooks dismissed concerns about the financial, educational, and emotional impact of No Child Left Behind, because in his mind, it worked. Teachers were being held accountable. Students were being tested, and the public knew what and whether they were learning. Families had the choice to move their children to other schools. For Brooks, like many with neoliberal interests, Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education was a crucial bellwether in the battle over America’s public schools. Brooks commented on the fact that Obama had been successful up to that point in being able to avoid revealing too much to the press about which side of the debate he was on. He now had to make a decision that would either surge reform efforts forward or stall them: The stakes are huge. For the first time in decades, there is real momentum for reform. It’s not only Rhee and Klein—the celebrities—but also superintendents in cities across America who are getting better teachers into the classrooms and producing measurable results. There is an unprecedented

Competing Definitions of Hope in Obama’s Education Marketplace    81 political coalition building, among liberals as well as conservatives, for radical reform. (Brooks, 2008, para. 11)

That these two pieces reverberate so much with one another is telling about the curtailed perspectives available to the public. Two major newspapers with millions of readers ran stories about Obama’s choice for Secretary and framed his decision in terms of selecting between those who wanted to hold public education back and those who would boldly continue to reform schools employing neoliberal practices. For Brooks, there was a new generation of reformers who were willing, in Obama’s own words, “to move beyond the old arguments of left and right and take meaningful, practical steps to build an education system worthy of our children and our future” (Obama, 2008a, para. 15). Less than 2 weeks later, Obama announced Arne Duncan as his pick for Secretary of Education. Newspapers around the country, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and USA Today all hailed Duncan as a wise choice. Duncan was already positioned as a firm supporter of charter schools, school choice, privatization, the elimination of teacher tenure, performance pay, and business-style models of accountability (Dillon, 2009; Glod, 2008). The Chicago Tribune commented on Duncan’s ability to bring in talented people with very different views together (Malone & Sadovi, 2008). The Boston Herald noted that Duncan had: an excellent track record as an innovator and a supporter of charter schools who isn’t afraid to take on the teachers unions . . . [He] headed the nation’s third largest school system for the past seven years, during which time its students have shown slow but steady progress on statewide tests in each of those years. He’s not anti-teacher, he’s just pro-kid. “He’s not beholden to any one ideology, and he’s worked tirelessly to improve teacher quality,” Obama said of his Cabinet pick yesterday. (Ed gets innovator, 2008, para. 3–5)

With this decision, Obama revealed his vision for and position on public education in the United States. As Au (2009) noted, the battle for equitable education reform was not merely a battle against the Right and its push to privatize, incentivize, and remake public education as a business enterprise. It also represented a struggle over the very candidate people hoped would transform the United States into a more equitable and just society. Unfortunately, Obama’s desire to move beyond “tired education debates” (Dillon, 2008, para. 7) was less about the debates than about who he saw obstructing reform—liberals, “because they represent the status quo in education, side against reform, do not ask teachers to change their practices, do not believe in accountability, and are mainly interested in asking for more money” (Au, 2009, p. 314).

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Since his appointment as Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan has steadfastly enacted President Obama’s plan to transform No Child Left Behind into Race to the Top. Duncan revealed a vision for teacher education that challenged schools of education and called for new ways to quickly and efficiently recruit a new generation of teachers that would be innovative (Darling-Hammond, 2009). Those new teachers would contribute to the continuing transformation of public education by striving to push student learning, be held accountable and rewarded for success through merit pay systems, and work in innovative new learning settings like charter schools (Hursh & Lipman, 2008; U.S. Department of Education, 2009b). Instead of moving the nation back toward more equitable education free of market controls, Duncan has worked unabashedly to further entrench neoliberal policies, and actively strives to merge business and education together (Giroux, 2010). The Never-Ending Narrative: Attacks on Teachers and Teachers’ Unions Blaming teachers and schools for failing to fix problems for which they were and are ill-equipped has long been a refrain among the critics of public education, especially among conservatives, neoliberals, and those who support the corporatization of American society and schools (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). The Obama administration and Arne Duncan’s policies are a continuance of this long progression of debates over public education in which neoliberal interests have capitalized on framing the debate surrounding teachers, schools, and society (Cross, 2004; Giroux & McLaren, 1989; Hursh, 2000, 2008). The news media has continued to frame neoliberal school reform, from Ronald Reagan’s moral call for standards, privatization, and pressure on teachers to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, as a means to address the problems in schools and, presumably, society. What is significant about this historical moment, however, is that more and more a review of the news media reveals a frightening consensus: teachers and teachers’ unions are the problem (Hart, 2010). The news media’s reporting regarding school reform and teachers’ unions is converging, thus presenting a general consensus that neoliberal school reforms work, without adequately examining the quality of their reporting or whether those reform efforts have provided the greater access to quality education they promised (Anderson, 2007; Goldstein, 2010; Hursh & Lipman, 2008; Saltman, 2007b, 2010). For years, the attacks have been frequent and brutal. A New Yorker (Brill, 2009) exposé is a prime example of attacks on teachers and union contracts. Brill claimed that the due process procedures outlined in the New York City United Federation of Teachers contract took too long, were too

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expensive, and made it virtually impossible to fire teachers, and went so far as to ask, “Should a thousand bad teachers stay put so that one innocent teacher is protected?” (para. 29). What is striking about this question is the presumption that it is so important to reform due process to be able to get rid of bad teachers, that the occasional innocent teacher being wrongly found culpable, dismissed, and left with a destroyed professional reputation is acceptable collateral damage in the fight to transform American public education. Brill (2009) identified due process and the contract as one of a host of problems plaguing New York City schools, and that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Chancellor of Schools, Joel Klein, were school reformers willing to challenge teachers and the unions to bring about real change to the schools. One of the other targets, naturally, should be tenure, another system of protections put in place to protect teachers from the political vagaries of public schools (Weiner, 2005, 2007). However, neoliberal reformers like Bloomberg and Klein—as well as Paul Vallas, Michele Rhee, and Arne Duncan—saw tenure as an obsolete model no longer necessary for the new market-oriented schools (Goldstein, 2010; Saltman, 2007c; Weiner, 2007). Brill (2009) commented, “In Klein’s view, tenure is ‘ridiculous.’ . . . You cannot run a school system that way,” he says. “The three principles that govern our system are lockstep compensation, seniority, and tenure. All three are not right for our children” (para. 10). As the above examples illustrate, neoliberal attacks on teachers have capitalized on an important valence issue that crosses both sides of the political aisle: the welfare of children. How welfare is designed, of course, has little to do with what those concerned with issues of access, equity, and democratic possibility envision when they discuss these same issues. Instead, newspaper columnists and neoliberal supporters have focused on improving the welfare of children by calling for the elimination of teacher unions and getting rid of bad teachers. Thus, articles like the Wall Street Journal’s “How Teachers Unions Lost the Media” illustrate the fact that, more and more, the news media support neoliberal school reformers, harshly criticize teachers and their unions, and are open to more extreme measures to fix American schools (Whitmire & Rotherman, 2009). The Newsweek piece, “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” noted, “It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out” (Thomas & Wingert, 2010, p. 3, para. 1). Clearly, extraordinary measures are needed to supplant the power of teachers, unions, and their supporters, regardless of the tragedies that provide the opportunities. The New York Times Magazine also ran a piece, also by Brill that discussed the future of teachers’ unions and public school market-based reforms

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(Brill, 2010). The cover of the magazine included a photo of a whiteboard with the question, “Are Teacher’s Unions the Enemy of Reform?” and the subtitle, “How Obama’s Race to the Top Could Revolutionize Public Education.” The actual title of the piece was, in fact, “The Teacher’s Unions’ Last Stand.” The story presented a brief overview of the history of teacher unionism; the place of the teachers’ unions as a democratic power base that employed its powerful lobbying base to obstruct school reforms like charter schools, vouchers, more accountability, and merit pay; and how President Obama challenged the power of those unions by introducing those same reforms as important considerations in the Race to the Top funding competitions. And, while the article focused on states’ struggles to qualify for Race to the Top funding, the overall tone toward the teachers’ unions was less than positive. The article documented that Obama’s presidency also heralded a crucial shift in the education reform debates, noting “there is now a president who, when it comes to school reform, really does seem to be a new kind of Democrat” (Brill, 2010, para. 5). As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Washington Post also referred to Obama as a different type of Democrat than his predecessors (High-scoring school reforms, 2010). This identification, coupled with a growing group of school reformers interested in market reforms having more of a presence—on the political stage, in charter school networks, in policy writing groups—has culminated in an unprecedented convergence among the neoliberal interests and democratic politics to engage in frontal challenge to the teachers’ unions: they argue that a country that spends more per pupil than any other but whose student performance ranks in the bottom third among developed nations isn’t failing its children for lack of resources but for lack of trained, motivated, accountable talent at the front of the class. (High-scoring school reforms, 2010, para. 5)

In other words, it comes down to efficiency and economics. The only reason the wealthiest country in the world could perform as it does is because of the teachers. And teachers had to get on board with the changes or be lost in the rush. The Obama administration’s education reforms are particularly vexing to teachers and unions, especially tying teachers to merit pay, students’ test scores, and charter schools, because of the long-standing history of Democrats and teachers’ unions standing together on education issues. Two years into the Obama administration, the New York Times reported on the teacher frustrations as part of an article on the national combined conventions of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Dennis Van Roekel, president of the NEA was quoted as saying, “Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union,

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anti-student environment I have ever experienced” (Dillon, 2010, para. 4). Teachers were unhappy that they were taking all the blame, and the article focused a good deal of its content on how the administration was trying to better relations with teachers and their unions. At the same time, however, the article also commented that teachers and the unions were going to have to shift, and that the teacher’s unions’ complaints would not win out in the long run, noting that “the angry rhetoric from union leaders now was less important than the long-term changes the administration has begun to coax from them” (Dillon, 2010, para. 18). In other words, no matter what the unions say, no matter what evidence they provide, no matter how much the unions challenge these market reforms, change is inevitable. Perhaps the most shocking story in the news media concerned mass firing at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island after negotiations broke down between the district superintendant and negotiators for the teachers over additional work responsibilities and compensation (Jordan, 2010a). Central Falls High School, a low-performing urban high school, had been identified as a school that qualified for Title One Improvement Funding from the Department of Education. The funding and accompanying mandate to institute dramatic reforms in the nation’s lowest-performing schools, according to Duncan, would provide the “opportunity to put unprecedented resources toward reforms that would increase graduation rates, reduce dropout rates, and improve teacher quality for all students, and particularly for children who most need good teaching in order to catch up” (U.S. Department of Education, 2009a, para. 1). Further, such reform efforts were necessary to achieve equitable schooling for all children in the United States: If we are to put an end to stubborn cycles of poverty and social failure, and put our country on track for long-term economic prosperity, we must address the needs of children who have long been ignored and marginalized in chronically low-achieving schools. (U.S. Department of Education, 2009a, para. 1)

Rhode Island State Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist, in response to the new federal mandate, identified Central Falls High School as one of the six lowest performing schools in the state, with a 48 percent graduation rate and very low test scores (Jordan, 2010b). Superintendent of Central Falls Schools Frances Gallo entered into negotiations with teachers to enact the Transformation Model, which focused on teacher and leader effectiveness, lengthened schools days and instructional time, and more operating flexibility (U.S. Department of Education, 2009a). When negotiations broke down over financial compensation, Gallo moved onto her second choice reform model—the Turnaround Model—and announced the firing of everyone at the school.

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What was once a dispute among the administration and teachers at a small urban high school became national news, and not just because of the decision and the shock and outrage of teachers and unions, both locally and nationally. Both Arne Duncan and President Obama supported the decision (Jordan, 2010b; Montopoli, 2010; Thomas & Wingert, 2010; Tucker, 2010). Duncan “applauded” school officials for “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids” (Jordan, 2010b; Montopoli, 2010). Jennifer B. Jordan, in reporting on the mass firing, further quoted Duncan on the decision: “This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education,” Education Secretary Duncan said, “and when schools continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action” (2010b, para. 12). That action was to enact neoliberal school reforms, and teachers and unions who opposed those reforms failed to live up to their obligation to educate, and therefore deserved the consequences. Clearly, the school district was in crisis. It served one of the poorest communities in the state of Rhode Island, and the students who attended Central Falls High School were, for the most part, poor, English-language learners, and transient, and the test scores and graduation rates mirrored that reality. However, Obama ignored this context and focused solely upon the fact that the administration and the teachers union could not agree upon salary compensation for additional work hours (longer school days and before- and after-school tutoring), job responsibilities (tutoring, additional planning time, and eating lunch with students), and additional oversight (e.g., teacher evaluations). Teachers were asking to be compensated for the work they were to do. However, compensation was unimportant when it came to reforming the neediest schools. All that mattered was putting the school reforms in place for the kids. Conclusions: Rupturing the “Resistance is Futile” Narrative That the Obama administration is taking part in the attacks on teachers and teacher’s unions indicates a break with and betrayal of one of the Democrats staunchest supporters: organized labor and teachers and teachers’ unions in particular. If Obama, Duncan, and neoliberal reformers are able to further weaken organized labor, end tenure, and institute merit pay for teachers, and the media continues to benignly support it as the latest story in the struggle over school reform, public school teachers, en masse, could become the newest members of a very economically fragile club: professional itinerant workers. Other members of this club include small-scale consultants, adjunct faculty at universities, temp agency workers, or consultants who live contract to contract. They are the middle class that

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the Obama administration claims it wants to protect from the errors of the Bush administration. And yet, Obama and Duncan’s support of schoolwide firings and other market-reform initiatives makes such decisions legitimate and appropriate in the quest to reform public education. Transforming teaching into a permanent state of itinerancy also strips teachers of any voice they have left in regard to the curriculum, what they teach to whom and how, and their working conditions. It is, at its core, antidemocratic, antiworker, and inhumane. How would teachers then engage in teaching students to become citizens? The Obama administration’s school reform plan resonates with neoliberal’s extreme distaste of labor unions and state and federal workers, and reflects their admiration for freemarket practices in which it is every person for him- or herself. Given the fact that most major news outlets have carried stories about “problems with the unions,” it should be no surprise that so many people support the latest attacks on teachers en masse. Neoliberals have been able to capitalize on this fact to achieve their own ends: truly free-market schools uninhibited by workers’ rights. It is significant that the first two years of Obama’s administration has shown us that Obama sides with the “reformers”—those who advocate neoliberal reforms—and not with the “status quo”—teachers, their unions, colleges and universities, and other public workers. It is truly disturbing that the news media has gone unchallenged in how they frame school reform, teachers, and unions. The news media is failing to educate the public regarding issues related to educating the nation’s children. Instead of laying out the issues and engaging in any substantial analysis, they have relied on too many press releases and think-tank reports that neatly package the story for them (Anderson, 2007; Goldstein, 2010; Haas, 2007). And they are rarely held accountable for what they report. A deeper issue with which we must contend is the extent to which neoliberalism has permeated the thinking of Democrats and some others on the Left. While it has taken three decades for neoliberalism to establish such a foothold and has influenced both Democrats and Republicans (Harvey, 2005), that the Obama administration has continued to support neoliberal practices is disheartening for many who voted for him. Clearly, Democrats are thinking about school reform, as are those on the Right. Those who have stood traditionally with issues related to achieving a more equitable and just society, especially organized labor, have found themselves out in the cold, by the very administration so many of them voted into office. Neoliberal school reformers have gained amazing control of the narrative, and the media has helped to bring this about by reinforcing a new hegemonic narrative with its long-standing attacks against teachers, teacher’s unions, and organized labor in general (Gerstl-Pepin, 2002, 2007; McLaren & Fischman, 1998; Wallace, 1997). However, while the Obama administration

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and the media imply that school reform will occur with or without teachers and their advocates’ support, it does not mean that radical educators who envision a more just, equitable, and democratic schooling for all the nation’s children should give up hope. There are a number of signs that new media, including bloggers and news aggregate groups like Media Matters, the Hechinger Report, Fair and Accuracy in Reporting, Truthout, the Huffington Post, Think Progress, and others are becoming more aggressive in challenging the complicit support of neoliberal narratives in the mainstream news media. These groups, part of a growing movement that the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism is calling citizen journalism, are “expanding rapidly at the local level” and “brimming with innovation,” and while they are not yet in the position to replace traditional news media, they are already supplementing them and adding to the debate regarding how to reform public education (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010, para. 11). What remains clear, however, is that citizen journalism cannot, on its own, stem the tide of neoliberalism. Mainstream, traditional news media are continuing to present neoliberal reforms, whether regarding fixing the economic crisis, addressing social security and pension shortages, or public education, as if they are part of the natural course of progress for the nation (Bracey, 2009; Gabbard & Atkinson, 2007). Organized labor, benefits, pensions, and common school models of public education are relics of the past and must yield to the new market innovations. The 2008 presidential election signaled that a majority of voting Americans wanted something different from the neoliberal policies of prior administrations. Unfortunately, to date, President Obama has failed to redress some of Bush’s most antidemocratic and antipublic policies, particularly in education. Current dissatisfaction with Democrats and Republicans could lead to a more pronounced political shift at the state and federal levels. The question remains, however, to whose benefit? And what role will the news media play in framing the narrative? References Altheide, D. (2002). Creating fear: News and the constuction of crisis. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Anderson, G. L. (2007). Media’s impact on educational policies and practices: Political spectacle and social control. Peabody Journal of Education, 82(1), 103–120. Apple, M. W. (2005). Audit cultures, commodification, and class and race strategies in education. Policy Futures in Education, 3(4), 379–399. Au, W. (2009). Obama, where art thou? Hoping for change in U.S. education policy. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 309–320. Bagdikian, B. (2004). The new media monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press.

Competing Definitions of Hope in Obama’s Education Marketplace    89 Berger, A. (2005). Media analysis techniques (3rd. ed.). London: Sage. Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis: Myths, frauds, and the attack on America’s public schools. New York: Basic Books. Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. (1999). On television. New York: New Press. Bracey, G. W. (2008, April 22). The media machine marches on. Huffington Post, 22. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com Bracey, G. W. (2009). Education hell. Rhetoric vs reality: Transforming the fire consuming America’s schools. Alexandria, VA: Educational Research Service. Brill, S. (2009, August, 31). The rubber room: The battle over New York City’s worst teachers. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com Brill, S. (2010, May 17). The teachers’ unions’ last stand. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23Race-t.html Brimelow, P. (2003). The worm in the apple: How the teacher unions are destroying American education. New York: Harper Collins. Broader, bolder approach to education (2008). Expert task force charges school reform alone will fail in closing achievement gap. Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Retrieved from http://www.boldapproach.org Brooks, D. (2008, December 5). Who will he choose? The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com Callaghan, K., & Schnell, F. (2001). Assessing the democratic debate: How the news media frame elite policy discourse. Political Communication, 18(2), 183–213. Cochran-Smith, M., & Fries, M. K. (2001). Sticks, stones, and ideology: The discourse of reform in teacher education. Educational Researcher, 30(8), 3–15. Cross, C. T. (2004). Political education: National policy comes of age. New York: Teachers College Press. Darling-Hammond, L. (2009). President Obama and education: The possibility for democratic improvements in teaching and learning. The Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 210–223. Dillon, S. (2008, December 2). The new team: Linda Darling-Hammond. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com Dillon, S. (2009, November 11). After criticism, the administration is praised for final rules on education grants. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com Dillon, S. (2010, July 4). Teachers’ union shuns aides at convention. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com Dolny, M. (1998). What’s in a label? Right-wing think tanks are often quoted, rarely labeled. Fair and accuracy in reporting. Retrieved from http://www.fair.org Ed gets innovator. (2008, December 17). The Boston Herald. [Editorial]. Retrieved from www.Bostonherald.com Education Equality Project. (n.d.) Statement of principles. Retrieved from http:// www.educationequalityproject.org Education Week. (2009). The Obama education plan: An Education Week guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

90   R. A. GOLDSTEIN et al. Gabbard, D., & Atkinson, T. (2007). Stossel in America: A case study of the neoliberal/neoconservative assault on public schools and teachers. Teacher Education Quarterly, 34(2), 85–109. Gerstl-Pepin, C. I. (2002). Media (mis)representations of education in the 2000 presidential election. Education Policy, 16(1), 37–55. Gerstl-Pepin, C. I. (2006). The paradox of poverty narratives: Educators struggling with No Child Left Behind. Educational Policy, 20(1), 143–162. DOI: 10.1177/0895904805285 285. Gerstl-Pepin, C. I. (2007). Introduction to the special issue on the media, democracy, and politics of education. Peabody Journal of Education, 8(1), 1–9. Giroux, H. A. (2002). The corporate war against higher education. Workplace, 5(1). Retrieved from: http://louisville.edu/journal/workplace/issue5p1/5p1. html Giroux, H. A. (2009). Obama’s dilemma: Postpartisan politics and the crisis of American education. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 250–266. Giroux, H. A. (2010, June 10). Chartering disaster: Why Duncan’s corporate-based schools can’t deliver an education that matters. Truthout. Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org Giroux, H. A., & McLaren, P. (1989). Schooling, cultural politics, and the struggle for democracy. In H. A. Giroux & P. McLaren (Eds.), Critical pedagogy, the state, and cultural struggle (pp. xi–xxxv). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Giroux, H. A., & Saltman, K. (2009). Obama’s betrayal of public education? Arne Duncan and the corporate model of schooling. Cultural studiesCritical methodologies, 9(6), 772–779. Glod, M. (2008, December 17). Education pick is called “down-to-earth” leader: Nominee is praised as collegial reformer. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com Goldstein, R. A. (2010). Imaging the frame: Media representations of teachers, their unions, NCLB, and education reform. Educational Policy, XX(X), 1–34. Retrieved from doi:10.1177/0895904810361720 Goldstein, R. A., & Beutel, A. (2008). The best democracy money can buy: NCLB in Bush’s neo-liberal marketplace (a.k.a., Revisioning history: The discourses of equality, justice and democracy surrounding NCLB). Journal of Education Controversy, 3(1). Retrieved from http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/ eJournal/v003n001/a015.shtml Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Greene, M. (2009). Coda: The slow fuse of change. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 396–398. Haas, E. (2007). False equivalency: Think tank references on education in the news media. Peabody Journal of Education, 82(1), 63–102. Hart, P. (2010). First, bash the teachers: Media finds a scapegoat for educational failure. Fair and Accuracy in Reporting. Retrieved from http://www.fair.org/ index.php?page=4144 Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Competing Definitions of Hope in Obama’s Education Marketplace    91 Herman, E., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books. High-scoring school reforms. (2010, May, 26). The Washington Post [Editorial]. Retrieved www.washingtonpost.com Hursh, D. (2000). Neoliberalism and the control of teachers, students and learning: The rise of standards, standardization, and accountability. Cultural Logic, 4(1). Retrieved from http://clogic.eserver.org/4-1/hursh.html Hursh, D. (2008). High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching and learning: The real crisis in education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hursh, D., & Lipman, P. (2008). Chapter 8: Renaissance 2010: The reassertion of ruling-class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago. In D. Hursh (Ed.), High-stakes testing and the decline of teaching and learning: The real crisis in education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Ingersoll, R. M. (2003). Who controls teachers’ work? Power and accountability in America’s schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jordan, J. (2010a, February 13). Central Falls to fire every high school teacher. The Providence Journal. Retrieved from http://www.projo.com/education/content/central_fallsteachers. 1_02-13-10_A8HEI7Q_v61.3a65218.html Jordan, J. (2010b, February 24). Every Central Falls teacher fired, labor outraged. The Providence Journal. Retrieved from http://www.projo.com/news/content/ central_falls _trustees_ vote_02-24-10_EOHI83C_v59.3c21342.html Kellner, D. (2002) New media and new literacies: Reconstructing education for the new millennium. In L. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), The handbook of new media (pp. 90–104). London: Sage. Kovacs, P. (2005). Bill Gates and the corporatization of American “public” schools. Common Dreams. Retrieved from http://www.commondreams.org Kovacs, P. E., & Christie, H. K. (2008). The Gates foundation and the future of U.S. public education: A call for scholars to counter misinformation campaigns. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 6(2), 1–20. Kruger, M. (2010). Teachers’ jobs saved by H.R. 1586, the Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act: State-by-state. EdLabor Journal. House Committee on Education and Labor. Retrieved from http://edlabor.house.gov/blog/2010/08/ teachers-jobs-saved-by-hr-1586.shtml Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate— The essential guide for progressives. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green. Levin, B. (2004). Media-government relations in education. Journal of Education Policy, 19(3), 271–283. Lipman, P., & Hursh, D. (2007). Renaissance 2010: The reassertion of ruling class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago. Policy Futures in Education, 5(2), 160–178. DOI:10.2304/pfie.2007.5.2.160 Malone, T., & Sadovi, C. (2008, December, 17). City schools chief takes national stage: Arne Duncan to tackle “No Child” policy as Obama’s education secretary. The Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com McChesney, R. (2004). The problem of the media: U.S. communication politics in the 21st century. New York: Monthly Review Press. McLaren, P., & Fischman, G. (1998). Reclaiming hope: Teacher education and social justice in the age of globalization. Teacher Education Quarterly, 25(4), 125–133.

92   R. A. GOLDSTEIN et al. McNamee, S. J., & Miller, R. K., Jr. (2004). The meritocracy myth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.  Montopoli, B. (2010, February 24). Obama official applauds Rhode Island teacher firings. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com Obama, B. H. (2008, September 9). Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: A 21st century education. Speech delivered in Dayton, OH. Retrieved from http://www.barackobama.com/2008/09/09/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_111.php Office of the president-elect. (n.d). Policy working groups. Retrieved from http:// change.gov/learn/policy_working_groups Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pelikan, J. (2005). General introduction: The public schools as an institution of American constitutional democracy. In S. Fuhrman & M. Lazerson (Eds.), The public schools (pp. xiii–xvii). New York: Oxford University Press. Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. (2010). The state of the news media 2010: An annual report on American journalism. Retrieved from http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/ Richardson, J. E. (2007). Analyzing newspapers: An approach from critical discourse analysis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Saltman, K. J. (2007a). Capitalizing on disaster: Taking and breaking public schools. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Saltman, K. J. (2007b). Gambling with the future of public education: Risk, discipline, and the moralizing of educational politics in corporate media. Policy Futures in Education, 5(1), 37–49. DOI:10.2304/pfie.2007.5.1.37 Saltman, K. J. (2007c). Schooling in disaster capitalism: How the political right is using disaster to privatize public schooling. Teacher Education Quarterly, 34(2), 131–156. Saltman, K. J. (2009). The rise of venture philanthropy and the ongoing neoliberal assault on public education: The case of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Workplace, 16, 53–72. Saltman, K. J. (2010). The gift of education: Public education and venture philanthropy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scheufele, D. (1999). Framing as a theory of medial effects. Journal of Communication, 49 (1), 103–122. Shaker, P., & Heilman, E. E. (2004). The new common sense of education: Advocacy research versus acacemic authority. Teachers College Record, 106(7), 1444–1470. Stack, M. (2006). Testing, testing, read all about it: Canadian press coverage of the PISA results. Canadian Journal of Education, 29(1), 49–69. Thomas, E., & Wingert, P. (2010, March 6). Why we must fire bad teachers. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/05/why-we-mustfire-bad-teachers.html Tucker, E. (2010, September 4). Fired, rehired teachers back at troubled RI school. The Boston Globe. Available: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12 Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Competing Definitions of Hope in Obama’s Education Marketplace    93 U.S. Department of Education. (2009a, August 26). Obama administration announces historic opportunity to turn around the nation’s lowest-achieving public schools. [Press release]. Available http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/obama-administration-announces-historic-opportunity-turn-around-nations-lowestac U.S. Department of Education. (2009b, October 22). U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says colleges of education must improve for reforms to succeed. [Press release]. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2009/10/10222009a .html Vinson, K., & Ross, W. (2003). Image and education: Teaching in the face of the new disciplinarity. New York: Peter Lang. Wallace, M. (1997). Guided by an unseen hand: The mass media and education policy. In K. Watson & C. Mogdil (Eds.), Power and responsibility in education: Debate and diversity (pp. 147–155). London: Continuum. Weiner, L. (2005). Neoliberalism, teacher unionism, and the future of public education. New Politics, 10. Retrieved from http://www .wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue38/Weiner38.htm Weiner, L. (2007). A lethal threat to U.S. teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(4), 274–286. DOI: 10.1177/0022487107305603. Available http://jte. sagepub.com/content/58/4/274 West, D. M., Whitehurst, G.J., & Dionne, E. J (2009). Invisible: 1.4 percent coverage for education is not enough. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Retrieved from http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/1202_education_news_west. aspx Whitmire, R., & Rotherman, A. J. (2009, October 1). How teachers unions lost the media. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com

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Section II The Perils of Neoliberal Schooling: Critiquing Corporatized Forms of Schooling and a Sober Assessment of Where Obama is Taking Us

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Chapter 5

Charting a New Course for Public Education Through Charter Schools Where is Obama Taking Us? Mary Christianakis and Richard Mora

Introduction In February of 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. The Recovery Act allocated $787 billion to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and reinvest in education, among other sectors. Obama’s educational goals in the Recovery Act focused primarily on increasing monetary grants for low-income undergraduate students and cutting taxes for higher education. Five months later, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion competitive incentive program designed to jumpstart educational reform in state and local public school districts by funding states that “create[d] the conditions for education innovation and reform,” including the expansion of charter schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2009, p. 2). The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 97–119 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Presently, there are over 4,700 charter schools in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, with most in low-income urban communities, serving over 1.2 million students (CREDO, 2009; NCES, 2010), with tens of thousands more students on waiting lists (U.S. Department of Education, 2008). A wide array of institutions, some public and some not, run charter schools: social service agencies, universities, philanthropic organizations, religious schools (that remove religious symbols), previously tuition-charging privates, for-profit firms, parents, community members, and educators. These diverse constituencies underscore the broad appeal of charter schools. In this chapter, we analyze Obama’s education policies as they relate to charter schools. First, we show how his policies continue previous neoconservative and neoliberal educational initiatives that marketize schooling. We then discuss Arne Duncan’s role in charter schools, both in his previous capacity as CEO of Chicago Public Schools and in his capacity as Secretary of Education. Using evidence from empirical studies, we argue that the data supporting charter schools are underwhelming. Despite Obama’s invested hope, charter schools have not given children greater access to quality education, nor have they closed the “achievement gap.” While the durable consequences of Obama’s charter policies remain unknown, international perspectives, as well as the past and present research, foreshadow the fate of American public schooling during and beyond Obama’s tenure as president. Market approaches have left, and will continue to leave, special-needs students and English-language learners with fewer choices than their peers enjoy. Thus, we speculate on the future of public education in capitalized school markets and argue that charter schools are an intermediate step in the larger neoliberal and conservative agenda to privatize schools and funnel tax dollars into the market. Neoliberalism and School Choice For decades now, neoliberal economics has been reshaping democratic agendas by invoking market discourses (e.g., choice) to describe both the problem and utility of public schools (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2001). Neoliberal discourses continually seek to commodify schooling by depicting it as an economic drain linked to an unsustainable and uncontrollable welfare state (Burchell, 1996) threatening competition and productivity. In fact, in neoliberal societies, “there is nothing distinctive or special about education or health; they are services and products like any other, to be traded in the marketplace” (Peters, 1999, p. 2). Such market-oriented thinking, which collapses the distinction between public and private interests and marketizes public life, has won charter

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schools support across the political spectrum. Neoliberals and conservatives alike favor charter schools for operating semiautonomously from state educational mandates by entering into accountability contracts in exchange for academic and curricular freedom—arrangements that traditional public schools do not enjoy. Like Chubb and Moe (1990), who co-authored Politics, Markets and America’s Schools, an influential book in the school choice movement, many neoliberal and conservative proponents of charter schools contend that public education is overly bureaucratized and politicized, making schools unsalvageable in their traditional form. Neoliberals maintain that curricular independence holds the promise of closing the racialized achievement and graduation gaps. For conservatives, a main selling point of charter schools is that they are not required to employ unionized teachers. The convergence of neoliberal and conservative ideologies on the issue of charter schools has undoubtedly created a sociopolitical climate in which traditional public schools are assailed as a failing public good, and charter schools are trumpeted as entrepreneurial innovations. Charter schools have garnered the support of private foundations with large sums of money at their disposal, including some of the most wellknown partisan and bipartisan organizations: the Annenberg Foundation, the Ely and Edith Broad Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the WK Kellogg Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Moneys from foundations have funded both start-up and operating costs of individual charter schools and nonprofit organizations dedicated to the nationwide expansion of charter schools. Using venture capitalist models, some foundations call for charters to be managed like financial portfolios. The Gates Foundation, for one, supports a portfolio management system to “ensure a supply of quality school options that reflects a community’s needs, interests, and assets . . . and [to ensure] that every student has access to high-quality schools that prepare them for further learning, work, and citizenship” (Gates Foundation, 2005, p. 3). The central role of these venture philanthropists, or “philanthrocapitalists” (Ravitch 2010 p. 199), is startling. They are involved in one of the most sweeping educational reforms and yet cannot be held accountable by voters. Additionally, charter schools benefit from the work of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), the leading national nonprofit organization supporting the expansion of charter schools. In 2010, the NAPCS, whose board members have ties to public school districts, philanthropic foundations, and charter school operators, released a report that provided proponents of the charter school movements with a comparative assessment to be used as states established or modified charter laws to improve their chances in the Race to the Top competition. The report also

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gauged each state “with respect to its commitment to the full range of values in the public charter school movement: quality and accountability, funding equity, facilities support, autonomy, and growth and choice” (NAPCS, 2010, p. 3). As part of its campaign to promote charter schools, the NAPCS also holds an awards dinner during the National Charter Schools Week (the first week of May) called Champions for Charters, at which they honor public officials for supporting charter school legislation. Additionally, by sponsoring the Alliance of Public Charter School Attorneys (APCSA), an organization that was established in 2008 to provide lawyers with charter school-related information and networking opportunities, the NAPCS has access to a cadre of lawyers to advance the charter school agenda on the legal front. For most of their nearly 20-year history, charter schools have enjoyed access to federal funds through various grant programs and legislative acts. In 1994, at end of Clinton’s first term in office, the Department of Education (DOE) began funding charter school conferences, state programs, and charter school research through the Public Charter Schools Program (PCSP). The PCSP was subsequently amended by the Charter School Expansion Act of 1998 and by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The PCSP “provides support for the planning, program design, and initial implementation of charter schools” with the intended purpose of providing parents and students “choices among public schools and giv[ing] more students the opportunity to learn to challenging standards ” (U.S. Department of Education, 2004, p. 2). Additionally, in 2001, the DOE established the Credit Enhancement for Charter School Facilities Program, which provides competitive grants for entities seeking funds to enhance their credit in order to secure loans for the acquisition, construction, renovation, and/or operation of charter school facilities (Temkin, Hong, Davis, & Bavin, 2008, p. xi). The school choice movement gained a foothold within public education during the Bush presidency. Along with doling out annual federal funds for charter schools, the Bush administration encouraged school choice programs as a solution for underperforming school systems. After hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, the White House provided New Orleans with $1.9 billion in school aid, of which $500 million dollars went to school vouchers and $24 million to charter schools (Saltman, 2007). The marketization of public education in New Orleans led to both a drastic expansion of charter schools, which now account for over 50 percent of the city’s public schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2008), and to two thirds of New Orleans children attending either private or charter schools (Henderson, 2010). Additionally, during Bush’s presidency, the charter school movement was aligned with privatization through the growth of Education Management Organizations (EMOs) (Molnar & Garcia, 2007).

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Following Bush’s lead, Obama allocated $4.35 billion to the Race to the Top grant competition as an economic incentive to entice states into adopting the administration’s reform goals, which include the expansion of charter schools as well as high-stakes testing and test-score-driven accountability. During both Race to the Top competition rounds in 2010, state applications “receive[d] points based on the extent to which their laws do not prohibit or effectively inhibit increase of the number of high-performing charter schools” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 24). Higher points were awarded to states that had no caps or caps greater than 10 percent of their total number of public schools, medium points for caps between 5 percent and 10 percent, and low points if charter schools were capped at 5 percent or lower. Early on, the Obama White House made it clear that states with restrictions or caps on the total number of charter schools would be at a competitive disadvantage for federal funds. In a press interview, Duncan explained that states with stringent caps on charter schools “would not be helping their chances” (Quaid, 2009). Similarly, Obama remarked, “Right now, there are many caps on how many charter schools are allowed in some states, no matter how well they’re preparing our students. That isn’t good for our children, our economy, or our country” (White House Office of the Press Secretary, 2009, para. 30). Over the two rounds of the Race to the Top, 41 states and the District of Columbia submitted applications, with only 11 states and DC receiving funds. Not surprisingly, all the states that received federal funds had heeded the administration’s warnings and eliminated or raised their caps. For example, Delaware, which receive received $100 million, did not have any state caps on charter schools; Tennessee, which had raised their previously low charter school caps a few months after the Race to the Top competition was announced, received $500 million; and New York, whose legislature voted to raise the cap on charter schools from 200 to 460, of which no more than 214 are to be in New York City, received $700 million in federal funds. In the end, the Race to the Top is the most far-reaching presidential policy on behalf of charter schools enacted by any White House administration, given that nearly all of the states that applied, both winners and losers, relaxed restrictions on charter schools. Arne Duncan and the Market-Based Reform of Chicago Public Schools Obama’s choice of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education over progressive educator Linda Darling-Hammond (2010) made clear that the 44th president intended to advance free-market models of school choice. As CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan had welcomed Renaissance 2010, a plan

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to shutdown underperforming city schools and open new, autonomous schools (as possible charters) by 2010: “I like the competition and choice this will provide. I want Chicago to be a Mecca where entrepreneurship can flourish” (Ayers & Klonsky, 2006, p. 462). Under Duncan’s leadership, Chicago experienced an increase in both public and private charter schools and militarized public schools, as well as an increase in the frequency of high-stakes test taking (Au, 2009). The much-heralded Renaissance 2010, which Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley launched in 2004, was developed and proposed in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago (CCC), a group of leaders from corporate, financial, philanthropic, and civic sectors. The Civic Committee of the CCC (2009) has maintained that parental choice and market competition among schools would result in increased academic achievement in Chicago public schools. Similarly, a report funded by the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF), a private entity providing many Renaissance schools with financial support and accountability, states that new schools can “help create a portfolio of schools designed to make the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) more diversified, responsive, and effective” (Young et al., 2009, p. v). The educational reform efforts Duncan spearheaded in Chicago, much like the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, called for a return to back-tobasics curricula that emphasizes the testing of basic skills and the rewarding of teachers for high test scores through performance pay. During Duncan’s tenure as CEO, 44 traditional schools failed to meet the academic standards and were shutdown (Gwynne & de la Torre, 2009). Their students were given the choice to attend other traditional schools or participate in the lottery admission process of one of the new schools. Charter schools opened under Renaissance 2010 were approved by the Chicago Board of Education, but follow protocols and procedures that differ from those of regular public schools. To maintain their charters, schools must make adequate progress toward performance goals and must maintain fiscal standards by passing annual audits. Chicago charter schools must also hold open enrollment and must use a lottery system if they are oversubscribed (Lake & Rainey, 2005). Some charter schools have also elected to have family volunteer requirements as a condition of enrollment; other schools have other requirements, like military interest (Brown, Gutstein, & Lipman, 2009). Additionally, in order to operate, charter schools need only 50 percent of their teachers to be certified (Brown et al., 2009). Chicago charter school teachers do not participate in the public school’s collective bargaining agreement and typically earn less, just as the business interests backing Renaissance 2010 intended. According to Ayers and Klonsky (2006), in 2005, “Eden Martin, head of the powerful business lobby, the Civic Committee, wrote to Arne Duncan . . . : ‘The school unions will not

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like creation of a significant number of new schools that operate outside the union agreement, but operating outside the agreement is a key element of this strategy’” (p. 462). Consequently, the closing or turning around of schools has resulted in experienced teachers losing their jobs, not being rehired, and being replaced at the new schools by younger, cheaper, and less-experienced teachers (Brown et al., 2009). According to Duncan, closing underperforming schools was necessary in order to serve students. He wrote, “Closing and reopening schools is both educationally sound and morally warranted. We are hired to fight for kids—not for bureaucrats, reform groups, teachers, principals, or local schools councils. We close schools when kids are getting hurt” (Duncan, 2006, p. 458). Renaissance 2010, which was part of a larger economic plan to stimulate business in Chicago, has destabilized working-class and low-income communities (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Children experienced school closings as a crisis of displacement as students transferred to other schools, which led to instability and correlated to an increase in youth violence (Brown et al., 2009). Thousands of residents, including many in public housing, were displaced as middle-class families were lured back to the city with offers of privatized choice through a lottery-based charter system (Brown, et al., 2009). Critics of Renaissance 2010 charge that charter schools in Chicago are both the outgrowth of, and stimulus for, urban gentrification (Brown et al., 2009; Lipman, 2009). During Duncan’s tenure, low-income communities also had to contend with an increase of military charter schools, specifically the five military academies that made the JROTC program in Chicago the largest in the country (Brown et al., 2009). JROTC operates primarily in less-affluent urban school districts whose populations are deemed at-risk. In Chicago, all the cadet programs are in predominantly black and Latina/o middle schools, and four of the five military high schools are in black communities (Brown et al., 2009). These military schools, which Duncan lauded for their discipline and leadership (Tareen, 2007), train and socialize children as young as 15-years-old for possible careers in the military. Such militarization of schools is in line with neoliberal and conservative policies that both impoverish poor African American children and target them for military participation through what Berlowtiz (2000) calls “economic conscription and coercion.” Thus, the presence of military schools in poor communities perpetuates racialized labor markets. It seems that under Renaissance 2010, participatory democracy was a casualty of the school-closing procedures. Many parents who were not invited to participate in the school-closing process found decision making to be cloistered, secretive, and undemocratic. One Chicago parent, Freddrenna Lyle, felt so disenfranchised that she cosponsored a resolution with her city

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council to put a moratorium on school closings. Lyle argued, “before we pull the plug on a school, we want to know that every last thing has been tried. This was a fight this time. I don’t think they want to do this every single time. It’s destructive” (Spielman & Rossi, 2010). Bob Peterson, a Milwaukee public school teacher and a founding editor of Rethinking Schooling, points out that Duncan alienated many parents by closing down schools without following consistent hearing procedures, only to open up “boutique” charter schools (Democracy Now, 2009a). Also ignored in the school-closing discussions were the publicly and democratically elected representatives of the Local Schools Councils (LSC). The willful disenfranchisement of parents in Chicago by the CPS stands in sharp contrast to Duncan’s claim that the “CPS has advanced school reform’s earliest goals of ‘more local control’ by offering more autonomy to high-performing, rapidly improving schools” (Duncan, 2006, p. 458). Charter schools in Chicago handed public moneys to more private corporate sponsors than ever before. Lipman (2009) finds that of the first 57 charter schools in Chicago, 42 are corporate, 3 are teacher initiated, 9 are community centered, and 3 are university based. Boards who govern these charter schools have little accountability to the state, communities, or parents (Ford, 2005). Two years after Renaissance 2010 was initiated, Ayers and Klonsky (2006), two renowned educational scholars and developers of the small-schools movement, cautioned that the existing educational research did not justify the purported outcomes of having Educational Management Organizations (EMOs), or profit-oriented companies, run new Renaissance charter schools. Writing in The Phi Delta Kappan, Ayers and Klonsky assert the following: There is no evidence or educational research whatsoever to show that privately run charters can produce better results, but, never mind, the bandwagon is rolling, and the district—with its $4.6-billion budget—is climbing aboard. This is fact-free, faith-based reform at its worst. In this way, Ren 10 represents a Wal-Mart strategy for school change, where stores are easily replicable, employees interchangeable, and the work force turns over rapidly and continually. Nearly all of the new Renaissance 2010 schools are being run by first-year principals with staffs of new teachers. This is one of the business economies pushed by the EMOs. (p. 463)

The funding of EMOs that resulted under the restructuring Ayers and Klonsky describe is especially telling considering that Renaissance 2010 provides no additional funds for traditional CPS schools or support for CPS teachers (Lipman & Hursh, 2007). While corporate heads, foundation leaders, and politicians hailed Duncan as a no-nonsense, free-marketing reformer, the congratulatory praise

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was premature, if not unwarranted. Overall, Chicago students’ achievement in the new schools was not significantly different from matched comparison students in regular schools (Booker, Gill, Zimmer, & Sass, 2009; Young et al., 2009). Converting district-administered schools into charters has yielded uneven and inconclusive results (Gill, Zimmer, Christman, & Blanc, 2007). What is more, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, found that Duncan’s closure of low-performing schools reshuffled 8 out of every 10 students into similarly low-performing schools, and that when math scores were compared with other urban school districts, charter students were not among the highest performers (Gwynne & de la Torre, 2009). In addition, research shows that charter schools in Chicago attracted and served higher achieving students. In a 2006–2008 study that compared traditional Chicago Public schools with Renaissance 2010 schools, the latter had a smaller proportion of bilingual students attending (24% versus 36%). A similar pattern emerged with special-needs students, with 11 percent at Renaissance 2010 schools compared to the 15 percent in traditional public schools. Furthermore, when controlled for grade level, the students attending traditional public schools were older—a demographic that is statistically more likely to perform lower and to drop out—than those attending Renaissance 2010 schools (Young et al., 2009). A RAND study (funded by the Gates foundation, which also funded part of Renaissance 2010) found that Chicago charter schools attracted and served students who performed at statistically significant higher achievement levels prior to entering charter schools than their counterparts enrolled in traditional schools. When the data is disaggregated by race, black students who transferred to charter schools had significantly higher scores on standardized tests than the aggregate (Booker et al., 2009). It is also worth noting that by its very design, Renaissance 2010 gives the impression of far greater improvement than is actually the case. As Saltman (2007) explains, “By closing and reopening schools, Renaissance 2010 allows the newly privatized schools to circumvent NCLB AYP progress requirements, thus making the list of Chicago’s ‘need improvement’ schools shorter. This allows the city to claim improvement by simply redefining terms” (p. 135). All this evidence challenges Duncan’s claim that “for students trapped in chronically struggling schools, stronger accountability measures in cutting-edge new schools under Renaissance 2010 hold out the most promise” (Duncan, 2006, p. 458). When Duncan became Secretary of Education, he left no doubt that he would continue to support market-driven educational reforms and the ongoing increase of charter schools. One of Duncan’s first moves as Secretary of Education was to appoint individuals with ties to the NewSchools Venture Fund, whose mission is to support educational innovation by fund-

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ing “educational entrepreneurs.” The Fund raises money for both nonprofit and for-profit educational enterprises, and is both a fierce advocate of charter schools and a sharp critic of unionized labor and professional teacher education. Duncan hired James H. Shelton III, a former officer for the Gates Foundation and former partner of the NewSchools Venture Fund, to manage the $650 million “Invest in What Works and Innovation Fund” (Ravitch, 2010). He also appointed NewSchools Venture Fund’s Joanne S. Weiss to manage the Race to the Top initiative. These appointments signaled Duncan’s commitment to corporate-style management of public education. Charter School Myths: Innovation, Achievement, and Equity In public comments, Duncan has referred to charter schools as “laboratories of innovation” that would produce better classroom practices from which traditional schools can benefit (Diamond, 2009, para. 5). However, even as he was announcing the first round of Race to the Top award winners, there already was plenty of mounting evidence—aside from the data on new Renaissance 2010 schools—that charter schools, as a whole, were not living up to their billing as innovators or as better options than traditional public schools. Research suggests classroom strategies at charter schools are not innovative, but rather are much the same as those developed and used at traditional public schools (Lubienski, 2003). In fact, the few innovations observed at charter schools were organizational, particularly self-marketing. Comprehensive studies examining the effects of marketstyle competition in the educational systems of over 20 countries also found that choice results in administrative innovation, not in innovation within classrooms (Lubienski, 2006, 2009). Even more telling, the multinational data indicates that educational innovation results from “public-sector policies” and not from competition among schools (Lubienski, 2009). Existing research on charter schools and student performance shows that students attending charter schools are not faring any better than peers at traditional schools. In 2002, the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research (NCCPPR), a nonpartisan, nonprofit group, reported that charters did not perform better on standardized tests than traditional public schools (Vaden, 2002). In a 2007 follow-up report, the NCCPPR (Manuel, 2007) found that charter schools continued to perform no better than traditional public schools and, as a result, concluded that “choice” was not a good enough reason to authorize expanding public charter schools. Similarly, a RAND study of Philadelphia’s public schools found that between 1997 and 2007, children in charter schools did not outperform their tradi-

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tional school counterparts and that competition from charter schools did not improve traditional public schools, as is often argued by proponents of school choice (Zimmer, Blanc, Gill, & Christman, 2008). Even more telling, the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data shows that when compared with charter school students, traditional public school students in fourth grade scored higher in both reading and mathematics, and that eighth grade traditional public school students scored higher in mathematics and the same in reading (Robelen, 2008). Also, a 2009 Stanford University study of 2,403 charter schools in fifteen states found that 37 percent of the charters had learning gains that were significantly below traditional public schools, 46 percent showed no difference, and only 17 percent showed significantly better gains (CREDO, 2009). An extensive analysis by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA indicates that charter schools isolate students by class and race (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010). While nearly one in four charter schools do not provide data on low-income students, the available data shows that charter schools with high minority student enrollments have high rates of low-income students. Additionally, the study finds that charter schools are more racially segregated than traditional schools. Black students attending charter schools face far greater segregation than do students from other racial groups. Latino charter students experience less segregation than black students, but are also underenrolled in some Western states where they account for the majority of public school students. Additionally, the report finds that: In the West, where traditional public schools are the most racially diverse, and in some areas of the South, white students are over-enrolled in charter schools. In some cases, white segregation is higher in charter schools despite the fact that overall charter schools enroll fewer white students. These trends suggest that charter schools are contributing to white flight in the country’s two most racially diverse regions. (Frankenberg et al., 2010, p. 82)

These findings support previous data showing that parents might choose charter schools in order to change or improve the socioeconomic status of their children’s peer groups, reduce their children’s exposure to nonnative English speakers in the classroom (Koedel, Betts, Rice, & Zau, 2009), and to send their children to schools with their same racial demographics (Loveless & Field, 2009). Studies suggest that unlike traditional schools that provide universal education, many charter schools underserve students with special needs and students who are English-language learners (ELLs). Studies of charter schools in New York after 2000 show that they enroll fewer ELLs and fewer special-needs students than the traditional schools they replaced (Advocates for Children, 2002; Pallas & Jennings, 2009). Betts, Rice, Zau, Tang, and Koedel (2006) found that ELLs in San Diego charter schools had

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less access to charter schools because of language barriers in the dissemination and translation of registration materials. Furthermore, they found that parents’ education level correlated with choice, in effect advantaging better-educated and wealthier parents. In a study of Washington DC charter schools, Buckley and Schneider (2007) document that ELLs were proportionately underrepresented in 28 of the 37 charters and special-education students in 24 of the 37 charters. Boston’s charters also enroll a smaller percentage of both special-education students and ELLs. For example, while ELLs composed one fifth of the public school enrollment, they composed only 4 percent of charter enrollment, and over one third of the Boston charters did not have a single ELL (Ravitch, 2010). Consequently, the relative academic success of many Boston public charter schools (Kane, et al., 2009) might be due to their unrepresentative student populations. Unfortunately, large-scale examinations of ELL enrollments in charter schools throughout the country are difficult because many charter schools do not provide the federal government with data, resulting in “major gaps in federal data sources” (Frankenberg et al., 2010, p. 5). The lack of data on ELL students is so extensive that the available “Federal data on charter schools in California, arguably the country’s most significant gateway for immigrants, describe just seven ELL students attending its state charter programs” (Frankenberg et al., 2010, p. 5, emphasis in original). Data from a California study suggests that those charters that serve ELLs do not provide the number of qualified and specialized teachers to be able to serve ELL needs (Fuller, Gawlik, Gonzales, Park, & Gibbons, 2003). By not providing qualified teachers, charter schools are in violation of Lau v. Nichols (Supreme Court of the United States, 1974), which guarantees equal access to the core curriculum. The fact that charter schools do such a poor job of providing data on ELL students and of hiring qualified and specialized teachers raises the question: just how committed are they to serving ELL students? School choice is resulting in the exclusion of students with special needs, undoing decades of progress toward mainstreaming (Howe & Welner, 2002). Some charter schools are “counseling out” children with disabilities (Estes, 2006; Fierros & Blomberg, 2005; Grant, 2005; Howe & Welner, 2002; Rhim & McLaughlin, 2007). In a recent survey, 3 percent of charter schools admitted telling parents of children with disabilities they could not admit their children and 44 percent of the schools owned up to informing parents that their children would be better served at another school (Rhim & McLaughlin, 2007). In Texas, charter schools have the legal right to exclude children with behavioral problems, including those who suffer from emotional disorders (Estes, 2006). Recent news stories indicate that black parents in New Orleans and Detroit are concerned that local charter schools are discriminating against students with special needs by excluding them (Guerra & Hulett, 2010; Reckdahl, 2010).

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Some special-needs children in charter schools are not getting their learning needs met. Many charters employ inexperienced and uncredentialed teachers, who “are less likely to be knowledgeable about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE), and Free and Appropriate Education (FAE) requirements of the law” (Grant, 2005, p. 71). These teachers are more likely to teach racial minority students and more likely to refer them for special-education services (Cartledge, 2005). What is more, a study of 502 charter schools in California found that not only did charter schools have fewer students with special needs than regular public schools, but also that black students were overrepresented in classes for the severely learning disabled and the emotionally disturbed (Fierros & Blomberg, 2005). Additionally, the study found that ethnically diverse students who receive special-education services at charter schools are more likely to be segregated than their white peers are. As a result of such documented evidence, special-education scholars argue that charters be given only to applicants who can demonstrate how students with special needs will be provided with necessary accommodations (Davis, 2005; Obiakor, Beachum, & Harris, 2005). Scaling up good schools, as market-oriented neoliberals and conservatives would have us do, is likely to prove difficult, if not impossible. Charter schools operate by relying on parents’ “help labor” (Christianakis, n.d.) to keep their costs down and are highly dependent on the financial support of philanthropists (Education Sector, 2009). It has been documented, for example, that a predominantly middle-class charter school in Atlanta saved money by having parents contribute 15–40 hours of labor peer week (Hankins, 2005). Additionally, according to a study financed by the NewSchools Venture Fund, $500 million in private donations were needed over the course of a decade for networks of nonprofit operators to open approximately 350 charter schools (Education Sector, 2009). The dependence on private donations, as well as federal funds, raises serious questions about the feasibility and sustainability of charter school expansion in the long term. Given such data, leading educators and educational scholars question the expansion of charter schools. Bob Peterson, a teacher and founding editor of Rethinking Schools, asserts “we’re setting up a two-tier system, where there is the most difficult-to-educate kids, a higher percentage of special needs, English language learners, kids who are counseled out of charter schools and voucher schools because of discipline problems—they end up in the public schools, while there’s a self-selected group in the charter schools” (Democracy Now, 2009a). Deborah Meier, who began the small-schools movement decades ago, concludes that even though some charter schools are quality schools, the only significant change in public education is that nearly all charter schools are “just alternative private sys-

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tems within the public sector” (Democracy Now, 2009b, para. 20). Lastly, Ravitch (2010), a prominent educational historian and once an influential supporter of school choice, concedes that business-driven educational policies, which called for structural changes such as choice, charters, merit pay, and accountability, are unlikely to result in meaningful reform and efficiency. The Future Consequences of Capitalized School Markets Undaunted by mounting evidence that “choice” does not correlate with increased academic achievement in math and reading (Betts et al., 2006) and spurred by Obama’s incentives, charter school supporters have continued their attempts to sway public opinion in favor of school choice. They contend that with charter schools come opportunities for parents to exercise greater control over their children’s schooling options. For example, in an op-ed column published in the New York Times, Charles Murray (2010), a staunchly conservative academic, characterized school choice as a means by which poor parents can provide their children an education that rivals that of private school students, including the children of many liberals who oppose school choice. School choice advocates, however, make little mention of the fact that those with greater economic and political power are positioned to exploit educational markets (e.g., see Ball, 1998; Bartlett, Frederick, Bulbrandsen, & Murillo, 2008; Scoppio, 2002; Whitty & Edwards, 1998) for their gain or that markets can be manipulated. As Saltman (2007, p. 141), makes clear: Privatizers aim to treat the use of public resources as “shopping” by “consumers,” thereby naturalizing the public sector as a market—as a natural, politically-neutral entity ruled by the laws of supply and demand rather than as a matter of public priority, political deliberation, and competing values and visions. . . . [M]arkets themselves are hardly neutral and natural but are, on the contrary, hierarchical, human-made political configurations unequally distributing power and control over material resources and cultural value.

That markets include participants with unequal social, cultural, and political capital is evident in the dismantling and privatization of public schools in New Orleans and in Chicago. After hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration introduced vouchers into New Orleans by way of school aid even though New Orleans had not previously had a voucher program and even though representatives in the Louisiana state legislature had recently defeated a bill calling for K–12 vouchers for private and religious schools (Saltman, 2007). Similarly, as detailed above, civic and political leaders in

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Chicago paid little mind to low-income parents affected by the closing of local public schools and ignored the parents’ duly-elected representatives on Local Schools Councils (LSCs). School choice arguments, like neoliberal practices, position individuals as free to participate in increased global competition, but neglect to disclose the transfer of the risk of failure from the state to the individual (Saul, 2005). When charter schools are closed due to their low test scores or financial malfeasance, students and parents are left to contend with the fallout by turning to the available school options, which in low-income communities might be limited to other schools in danger of being closed. Consequently, in the not-too-distant future, we might come to find that in entire communities children’s educational experiences are defined not by a good innovative education, but by their enrollment in a series of struggling charter or traditional schools. Adding insult to injury, in neoliberal educational markets, these children and their families will be solely responsible for their poor “consumer” choices. Blurring the Line Between Private and Public Interests In addition to substituting choice for equality, the continued expansion of charter schools is also leading educational entrepreneurs to explore new ways to profit from both the marketization and the privatization of education. In this way, education is reduced to “a subsector of the economy” (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2001, p. 136). Consider, for example, what Ayers and Klonsky (2006) write about a key entrepreneur in the Renaissance 2010 reform: Chris Whittle, former publisher of Esquire and founder of the Edison Schools—one of the companies brought in to manage CPS schools—found that it can be just as profitable to manage public space as to own it. The way Whittle sees it, “If profits cannot be made in education, then here is a partial list of things that should be removed from schools immediately: textbooks, computers, desks, milk, pencils, paper, and all athletic supplies and uniforms. And let’s not forget to tear all school buildings down.” (p. 463)

Seeking to also exploit schooling for profit, other entrepreneurs have moved beyond the limitations of brick-and-mortar schools to the Internet, where for-profit companies opened virtual (or cyber) charter schools. Both Edison Schools and K12 Inc., the most prominent outfit in the cyber charter school industry, have troubling histories that raise serious concerns about privatizing a public good. Edison Schools, which became a publicly traded company in 1999, began having financial difficulties

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in 2001 after “its track record emerged—years in the red, unremarkable academics, accounting irregularities that led to an SEC investigation, and trouble retaining teachers” (Goldstein, 2008, para. 3). Edison became a private corporation again 2 years later after former-Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, along with two other state Republicans and fellow proponents of school choice, authorized the use Florida Retirement System (FRS) funds (which includes the savings of retired public school teachers) to purchase the struggling corporation (Bracey, 2004). With the highly criticized deal signed, Whittle’s salary as head of Edison nearly doubled as it went from $345,000 to $600,000 (Bracey, 2004). K12 Inc. was established in 1999 by William J. Bennett, the Secretary of Education under Reagan, who resigned from the company following a controversial comment he made on his radio show: “it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime . . . you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” In 2006, a Government Accountability Office investigation found that the Department of Education did not follow its own policies when it awarded millions of dollars in grants to K12 Inc. (prior to Bennett’s resignation) and to other companies with close ties to the Bush administration. With the continued privatization of public education, there will likely be additional reported cases of corruption involving educational firms connected to individuals who avail themselves of the revolving door between governmental agencies and the private educational sector for personal gain. It is also the case that some public servants shaping the educational agenda maintain ties that, if nothing else, give the impression of possible conflicts of interest. For instance, Ted Mitchell, the CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund and board member of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), also simultaneously serves as president of the California State Board of Education, California’s governing and policymaking body. In his capacity as a politically appointed, public policymaker, Mitchell was well-positioned to (intentionally or unintentionally) advocate for legislation that could prove beneficial for both the NAPCS and the NewSchools Venture Fund. While private and public interests will likely always intertwine in a neoliberal democracy, the encroachment on public goods by private and special interests takes us farther away from participatory democracy. The surrendering of public schools to market pressures and to the privileged within those markets benefits those who have access to power within both sectors. Conclusion Duncan has correctly stated on numerous occasions that “education is the civil rights issue of our generation.” While education has always been at the

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center of struggles for civil rights, there is a befuddling disconnect between Duncan’s words and his deeds. If Duncan and the Obama administration truly believe that education is a civil rights concern, why are they subjecting it to market pressures? Stated differently, when has the corporate world been out front on civil rights issues? Obama’s educational policy is undoubtedly going to result in the greatest increase of charter schools to date. The increase marks the convergence of politics, money, and neoliberal market rationalism in support of school choice, a fact that Duncan and other advocates know all too well. In an address at the 2009 National Alliance for Public Charter School Conference, Duncan stated, “We may never have an opportunity like this again—this president, this Congress, $100 billion, and a broad and growing consensus around the importance of education. So this is our time and this is our moment. This is our chance to transform the one thing in society with the power to transform lives. The path to success has never been clearer” (Duncan, 2009, p. 6). With all that has been discussed in this chapter, it bears asking: Whose time? Whose moment? Whose success? While educational researchers squabble over achievement gains on standardized tests, over which students are included in the accounting, or whether schools have comparable student populations, the real issue is that we are entrusting public education moneys to a wide array of entities that have demonstrated more innovation in their own marketing within the educational market than in the teaching of our children. Eduardo Galeano (2000) reminds us that capitalist discourse “wear[s] the stage name ‘market economy’” (p. 40) to disguise offenses carried out in the public arena. To highlight the emerging marketing language in public schooling, we borrow Galeano’s analogical style, which reveals how euphemisms mask and normalize neoliberal lexicons. • Shutting down schools without community input bares the name “Renaissance.” • Displacing students is called “restructuring.” • Turning away students is the luck of the draw in a “lottery.” • School choice is dressed up as “civil rights.” • Requiring parents to donate time and labor in order to stay within lean budgets falls under “parent involvement.” • Retitling Superintendents as portfolio-managing CEOs is called “reform.” • Funneling public money into “for-profit” schools is called “innovation.” • Revolving doors and potential conflicts of interest between businesses, philanthropies, schools, nonprofits, and government officials is termed “collaboration.”

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• Teacher bashing goes under the name “merit pay,” “added value,” and “accountability.” • Learning a foreign language is a must for “global competition,” yet children who are English-language learners are “low performers.” • Rejecting special-needs children is called “counseling out.” • Federal coercion goes under the competitive title “Race to the Top.” • Children are so-called investments—subject to elastic market pressures. • The rich who are coopting public services are praised as philanthropists who “give generously.” • And ill-prepared, inexperienced teachers are heralded as fresh, bright, altruistic “recent college graduates.” Out with the old, in with the new . . . it is “the American way.” Obama’s educational policy supporting charter schools furthers neoliberal and neoconservative agendas to undermine the welfare state, and hands over the public sector to market capitalism. Under a market economy, charter school expansion will likely increase social inequalities by encouraging the shift from education as a public good to education as an investment. The expansion of charter schools through competitive market practices introduces capitalist Darwinism, which leaves urban minority youth, special-needs students, and English-language learners at “a competitive disadvantage.” While the Obama administration presents a deregulated, free market-driven education as “hope,” research indicates that this hope is based on blind faith in the sort of neoliberal audacity that nearly toppled the financial market. References Advocates for Children. (2002). Pushing out at-risk students: An analysis of high school discharge figures—a joint report by AFC and the Public Advocate. Retrieved from http://www.advocatesforchildren.org/pubs/pushout-11-20-02.html Au, W. (2009). Obama, where art thou? Hoping for change in U.S. Educational Policy. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 309–320. Ayers, W., & Klonsky, M. (2006). Private management of Chicago schools is a long way from Mecca. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(6), 461–463. Ball, S. (1998). Big policies/small worlds: An introduction to international perspectives in educational policy. Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130. Bartlett, L., Frederick, M., Bulbrandsen, T., & Murillo, E. (2002). The marketization of education: Public schools for private ends. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 33(1), 1–25. Berlowitz, M. (2000). Racism and conscription the JROTC. Peace Review, 12(3), 393–398.

Charting a New Course for Public Education Through Charter Schools    115 Betts, J., Rice L., Zau, A., Tang, Y., & Koedel, C. (2006). Does school choice work? Effects on student integration and achievement. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California. Booker, K., Gill, B., Zimmer, R., & Sass, T. (2009). Achievement and attainment in Chicago charter schools. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. Bracey, G. W. (2004, October). The 14th Bracey Report on the condition of public education. Phi Delta Kappan, 149–167. Brenner, N., & Theodore, N. (2002). Cities and the geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism.” Antipode, 34(3), 349–379. Brown, J., Gutstein, E. R., & Lipman, P. (2009). Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story: Myth or reality? Rethinking Schools Online, 23(3). Retrieved from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_03/arne233.shtml Bulkley, K., & Fisler, J. (2003). A decade of charter schools: From theory to practice. Educational Policy, 17(3), 317–342. Burchell, G. (1996). Liberal government and the techniques of the self. In A. Barry, T. Osbourne, & N. Rose (Eds.), Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neoliberalism, and rationalities of government (pp. 19–37). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cartledge, G. (2005). Restrictiveness and race in special education: The failure to prevent or return. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 3(1), 27–32. Chubb, J., & Moe, T. (1990). Politics, markets, & America’s schools. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Christianakis, M. (n.d.). Parents as help labor: Inner-city teachers’ narratives of parent involvement. Teacher Education Quarterly. Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. (2009). Still left behind: Student learning in Chicago’s public schools. The Commercial Club of Chicago. Retrieved from http://www.civiccommittee.org/initiatives/education/index.html Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). (2009). Multiple choice: Charter school performance in 16 states. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The flat world and education: How America’s commitment to equity will deter our future. New York: Teachers College Press. Davis, C. (2005). Restrictiveness and race in special education: Access to a special education infrastructure. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 3(1), 57–63. Democracy Now!: The War and Peace Report. (2009a, June 23). Education secretary Arne Duncan pushes to aggressively expand charter schools while admitting problems. Retrieved from http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/23/education_secretary_arne_ duncan_pushes_to Democracy Now!: The War and Peace Report. (2009b, May 21). Teaching pioneer Deborah Meier on Obama’s education policy and the future of charter schools. Retrieved from http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/21/schools Diamond, L. (2009, March 15). Cash-strapped charter schools struggle. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved from http://www.ajc.com/hotjobs/content/ printedition/2009/03/ 15/charterschools03153dot.html Duncan, A. (2006). Chicago’s Renaissance 2010: Building on school reform in the age of accountability. The Phi Delta Kappan, 87(6), 457–458.

116    M. CHRISTIANAKIS and R. MORA Education Sector. (2009, November) Growing Pains: Scaling up the nation’s best charter schools. EducationSector Report. Retrieved from http://www.educationsector.org/usr_doc/ Growing_Pains.pdf Estes, M. B. (2006). Charter schools: Do they work for troubled students? Preventing School Failure, 51(1), 55–61. Fierros, E. G., & Blomberg, N. A. (2005). Restrictiveness and race in special education placements in for-profit and non-profit charter schools in California. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 3(1), 1–16. Ford, B. (2005). The significance of charter schools and the privatization of standards: Holding the wolf by the ears. Policy Futures in Education, 3(1), 16–29. Frankenberg, E., Siegel-Hawley, G., & Wang, J. (2010). Choice without equity: Charter school segregation and the need for civil rights standards. Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. Retrieved from www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu Fuller, B., Gawlik, M., Gonzales, E., Park, S., & Gibbons, G. (2003) Charter schools and inequality: National disparities in funding, teacher quality, and student support. Working Paper Series 03-2. Policy Analysis for California Education. Berkeley, CA. Galeano, E. (2000). Upside down: A primer for the looking glass world (M. F. Picador, Trans.). New York: Henry Holt. Gates Foundation. (2005). High performing school districts: Challenge, support, alignment, and choice. Seattle, WA: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gill, B., Zimmer, R., Christman, J., & Blanc, S. (2007). State takeover, school restructuring, private management, and student achievement in Philadelphia. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Goldstein, D. (2008, August 5). Business schools. The American Prospect. Retrieved from www.prospect.org//cs/articles;jsessionid=aIx0OLvmcvHgvyH5uK?artic le=business_schools Grant, P. A. (2005). Restrictiveness and race in special education: Educating all learners. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 3(1), 70–74. Guerra, J., & Hulett, S. (2010, May 20). Two cities: Are charters opting out of special ed? Michigan Radio. Retrieved from http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/ michigan/news.newsmain/article/7/0/1652221/Education/Two.Cities.Are. Charters.Opting.Out.of.Special.Ed Gwynne, J., & de la Torre, M., (2009). When schools close: Effects on displaced students in Chicago public schools. Consortium on Chicago School Research. Retrieved from http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/publications/CCSRSchoolClosingsFinal.pdf Hankins, K. (2005). Practising citizenship in new spaces: Rights and realities of charter school activism. Space and Polity, 9(1), 41–60. Henderson, M. B. (2010). In the wake of the storm: How vouchers came to the big easy. Education Next, 10(2). Retrieved from http://educationnext.org/in-thewake-of-the-storm// Howe, K., & Welner, K. (2002). School choice and the pressure to perform: Déjà vu for children with disabilities. Journal of Remedial and Special Education, 23(4), 212–221.

Charting a New Course for Public Education Through Charter Schools    117 Kane, T., Abdulkadiroglu, A., Angrist, J., Cohodes, S., Dynarski, S., Fullerton, J. et al. (2009). Informing the debate: Comparing Boston’s charter, pilot, and traditional schools. Boston: Boston Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.gse.harvard. edu/%7Epfpie/pdf/InformingTheDebate_Final.pdf Koedel, C., Betts, J., Rice, L., & Zau, A. (2009). The integrating and segregating effects of school choice. Peabody Journal of Education, 84(2), 110–129. KPCC. (2010, June 10). Valley charter school operators charged with embezzling $200K. Retrieved from http://www.scpr.org/news/2010/06/10/valley-charter-schooloperators-charged-embezzling/ Lake, R., & Rainey, L. (2005, June). Chasing the blues away: Charter schools scale up in Chicago. Washington, DC: Progressive Policy Institute, 2005. Retrieved from http://www.ppionline.org/documents/chicagocharter_0601.pdf) Lipman, P. (2009). Making sense of Renaissance 2010 school policy in Chicago: Race, class, and the cultural politics of neoliberal urban restructuring. Great Cities Institute Publication Number: GCP-09-02 Lipman, P., & Hursh, D. (2007). Renaissance 2010: The reassertion of ruling-class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago. Policy Futures in Education, 5(2). Loveless, T., & Field, K. (2009). Perspectives on charter schools. In M. Berends, M. Springer, D. Ballou, & H. J. Walberg (Eds.), Handbook of research on school choice (pp. 111–112). New York: Routledge. Lubienski, C. (2003). Innovation in education markets: Theory and evidence on the impact of competition and choice in charter schools. American Educational Research Journal, 40(2), 395–443. Lubienski, C. (2006). School diversification in second-best education markets international evidence and conflicting theories. Educational Policy, 20(2), 323–344. Lubienski, C. (2009). Do quasi-markets foster innovation in education? A comparative perspective. Education working paper, 25. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Manuel, J. (2007). Charter schools revisited: A decade after authorization, how goes the North Carolina experience? Raleigh: North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research. McLaren, P., & Farahmandpur, R. (2001). Teaching against globalization and the new imperialism: Toward a revolutionary pedagogy. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 136–150. Molnar, A., & Garcia, E. R. (2007). The expanding role of privatization in education: Implications for teacher education and development. Teacher Education Quarterly, 34(2), 11–24. Murray, C. (2010, May 4). Why charter schools fail the test. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/opinion/05murray.html National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. (2010, January). How state charter laws rank against the new model public charter school law. National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Retrieved from http://www.publiccharters.org/files/ publications/DB-ModelLaw_Report_01-12-10.pdf National Center for Educational Statistics. (2010, September). Table 100. Number of traditional and public charter elementary and secondary schools and percentages of students, teachers, and schools, by selected characteristics: 2007–2008. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_100.asp

118    M. CHRISTIANAKIS and R. MORA National Center for Educational Statistics. (n.d.). Table A-32-1. Number and percentage distribution of charter schools and students by selected characteristics: Selected school years 1999–2000 through 2007–08. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2010/section4/table-cht-1.asp Obiakor, F., Beachum, F., & Harris, M. (2005). Restrictiveness and race in special education: Practicalizing the laws. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal, 3(1), 52–55. Pallas, A., & Jennings, J. (2009). New York City’s progress reports. In L. Haimson & A. Kjellberg (Eds.), New York City schools under Bloomberg and Klein: What parents, teachers, and policymakers need to know. New York: Lulu. Peters, M. (1999). Neoliberalism. The encyclopedia of philosophy of education. Available online at: http://www.vusst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/neoliberalism.html Quaid, L. (2009, May 29). Duncan: States could lose out on stimulus cash. AP Online. Retrieved from http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1A1-D98FJOV00.html Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books. Reckdahl, K. (2010, June 5). Parents, advocates fear that New Orleans charter schools have rejected students with disabilities. The Times-Picayune. Retrieved from http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2010/06/parents_advocates_ fear_that_ne.html Rhim, L. M., & McLaughlin, M. J. (2007) Students with disabilities in charter schools: What we now know. Focus on Exceptional Children, 39(5), 1–13 Robelen, E. W. (2008). NAEP gap continuing for charters: Sector’s scores lag in three out of four main categories. Education Week, 27(38), 1–14. Saltman, K. J. (2007). Schooling in disaster capitalism: How the political right is using disaster to privatize public schooling. Teacher Education Quarterly, 34(2), 131–156. Saul. J. R. (2005). The collapse of globalism and the reinvention of the world. Camberwell, Victoria, Australia: Viking Penguin Books. Scoppio, G. (2002). Common trends of standardization, accountability, devolution and choice in the educational policies of England, U.K., California, U.S.A., and Ontario, Canada. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 2(2), 130–141. Spielman, F., & Rossi, R. (2010). CPS announces new school closing policy: CEO plans to give more notice of shutdowns. Sun Times. Retrieved from http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/2216554,cps-school-closing-policy-041029.article Supreme Court of the United States. (1974). Lau v. Nichols. (414 U.S. 563, No. 176520). Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=504676 8322576386473&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr Temkin, K., Hong, G., Davis, L., & Bavin, W. (2008). Implementation of the Credit Enhancement for Charter School Facilities Program. U. S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development Policy and Program Studies Service Implementation. Tareen, S. (2007, November 2). Chicago leads in public military schools. Associated Press. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-022738760309_x.htm

Charting a New Course for Public Education Through Charter Schools    119 U.S. Department of Education. (2004). Charter  schools program, title v, part b, nonregulatory guidance. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/guid/ cspguidance03.doc U.S. Department of Education. (2008). A commitment to quality: National charter school policy forum report, Washington, DC. U.S. Department of Education. (2009, November). Race to the Top Executive Summary. Washington, D.C. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/executive-summary.pdf U.S. Department of Education. (2010). Race to the Top program guidance and frequently asked questions. Washington, DC: Department of Education. Vaden, T. (2002, August 11). Its too soon to expand charter schools in North Carolina. The Chapel Hill News, p. A5. White House Office of the Press Secretary. (2009, March 10). Remarks by the president to the Hispanic chamber of commerce on a complete and competitive American education. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_ office/Remarks-of-the-President-to-the-United-States-Hispanic-Chamber-ofCommerce/ Whitty, G., & Edwards, T. (1998). School choice policies in England and the United States: An exploration of their origins and significance. Comparative Education, 34(2), 211–228. Young, V. M., Humphrey, D. C., Wang, H., Bosetti, K. R., Cassidy, L., Wechsler, M. E., Rivera, E., Murray, S., Shanzenbach, D. W. (2009). Renaissance schools fundsupported schools: early outcomes, challenges, and opportunities. Paper presented at the meeting of School Choice and School Improvement: Research in State, District and Community, Vanderbilt University. Zimmer, R., Blanc, S., Gill, B. P., & Christman, J. B. (2008). Evaluating the performance of Philadelphia’s charter schools. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Education.

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Chapter 6

Manufactured Consent Latino/a Themed Charter Schools, in Whose Interests? Theresa Montaño and Lynne Aoki

Introduction The inspiration for this chapter came from a former student’s critique of public education’s failure to provide Chicano/a1 students a Chicano-centered curriculum. He praised schools like Academia Semillas Del Pueblo (California), and Calli Olin and Toltecalli High School Academies (both in Arizona) as “examples of culturally responsive schools,” and argued that charter schools were the only alternative to the “monolinguistic curriculum” offered by public schools (Arenas, 2009). This Chicano student was not alone in concluding that charter schools were the only educational milieu conducive to the “promotion of a positive self image for Chicanos and Mexicanos.” The sudden increase of Latino-themed charter schools2 is evidence that charter school operatives have convinced some in the Chicana/o community that the attainment of a quality culturally and linguistically responsive education can only happen in charter schools. The idea that “many of our children are not graduating or getting the attention that they require The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 121–145 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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at traditional public schools” and that “community-based public charter schools” can provide the “extended curricula and innovative training programs that create the kind of familial environment in which students feel motivated to learn and succeed” is further reflected in a statement issued by Janet Murguia (2004) of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). What are the Motives for Establishing Charters in the Latino/a Community? Researchers (Darling-Hammond & Montgomery, 2008; Ravitch, 2010; Wells, 2002) have argued that charter schools were established to (a) aid in the deliberate and systematic dismantling of public education in favor of a market-based, corporate-controlled and -owned system of schooling and (b) free educators from the constraints of a highly managed bureaucracy that has failed to educate poor and minority children. It can be argued that Latino/a themed or Latino/a focused charter schools were established according to the second criteria stipulated above. A quick look at the Web pages and mission statements of a selective group of Latino themed charter schools (unocharterschools.org, dignidad.org, greendot.org, callolin.org) reveals that many of these schools are designed to improve the academic achievement of a neglected and underserved student population. The majority of the students at the schools listed above are Latino/a. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that charter schools have failed to improve the education of the Latina/o-Chicano/a student. A recent study by the Civil Rights Project (CRP) claims that charter schools have a higher level of segregation and that they fail to enroll and serve English Learners (EL). Ravitch (2010, p. 141) maintains that charter schools often “enroll the most motivated students in poor communities,” and these students are likely to increase the achievement data collected by state and federal Departments of Education (DOE). Ravitch (2010) alleges that when minority students abandon traditional public schools in poor communities for charter schools, a process of “creaming” occurs. This creaming of a select segment of the student population leaves the public school in the same community susceptible to federal labeling as an “underperforming” school. These findings are a few of the reasons that we are concerned with the effect that charter schools are having on traditional public education. However, as activists in the Latino/a community, the exodus of Latino/a students and parents who are leaving public schools in favor of charter schools also troubles us. In this chapter, we argue that perhaps while well intentioned, the move by Latino/a civil rights organizations to establish or affiliate with charter schools surreptitiously supports neoliberal interests to privatize schools.

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Our analysis begins with a brief history of the charter school movement and the growth of that movement. Secondly, we question the motives of the Obama-Duncan administration and expose how their policies, initiatives, and funding promote the rapid proliferation of charter schools. We also critique those within the Latino community, especially the National Council of La Raza for their failure to improve our schools and their complicity and involvement in removing the “public” from public education. Finally, we add the voices of a selected group of public and charter school practitioners to our critical inquiry. This group had varied backgrounds with respect to charter schools. One had teaching experience only in a charter school setting. Two taught in both charter and traditional public schools and one of these two enrolled her son in a charter school. One taught only in public schools. The final person came from a community activist and union background, and her teaching experience has been in publicly funded, community-based preschools. All had work and/or activist affiliation with the authors. For example, Ana and Theresa belong to the same union. Charter School History While teaching educational administration courses at the University of Massachusetts in the 1960s, Ray Budde conceptualized charter schools as a means of restructuring school districts (Kolderie, 2005). Until the 1980s, his concepts received little notice. However, in 1988 after the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983) and A Nation Prepared (1986), Budde published his earlier work to wider distribution. That same year, Al Shanker, then American Federation of Teachers president, embraced the concept with a proposal that teachers start and run new schools, labeled charter schools. Soon thereafter, Minnesota, which had a history of support for alternative educational programs, passed the first charter school law in 1991 and opened the nation’s first two charter schools the following year. Minnesota’s charter school legislation promoted school choice, the creation of new schools with relative autonomy from the authority of school districts, and schools with a degree of freedom from state laws and regulations that governed school districts. They were student-centered and results-oriented (Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, 2010). The number of charter schools expanded from the two Minnesota schools in 1992 to 1,297 schools throughout the nation in 1999 and 5,043 in 2009, serving over 1.5 million students in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. From its earliest beginnings to the present, the charter school concept has evolved. Looking at charter school governance models, for example, today, Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) “run close to 30 percent of all charter schools throughout the United States”

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(Center for Public Education, 2010). Some 16 percent are for-profit and 14 are nonprofit EMOs. California opened its doors in 1993 to 98 charter schools, serving 60,481 students, of whom 37.2 percent were Hispanic/Latino. By 1998, California had 89,387 students enrolled in 166 charter schools, 36 percent of which were Hispanic/Latino. In 2008–2009, 746 California charter schools served 285,617 students, and 41.1 percent were Hispanic/Latino. In 2009–2010, the number of California charter schools grew nearly 20 percent to 809 schools serving 341,000 students. With Latino/a students representing almost 50 percent of 6,252,031 California public school students, an increasing number of those students are entering charter schools (Ed-Data, 1993 to 2010). Today, California has one of the nation’s highest charter school enrollments, serving one in six charter school students nationwide. Since 2005, NCLR has supported 50 new charter school affiliates and 50 alternative schools across the United States with capacity-building, training and technical assistance, and supplemental funding. NCLR is the largest Latino/a civil rights organization in the nation and the largest civil rights organization working with charter schools. The United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) in the Chicago area is another organization that supports Latino/a themed charter schools. The Chicago Tribune has referred to UNO, an Alinsky-type community-based organization, as the organization “poised to become the largest direct-service charter school management firm in Illinois.” (Mihalopoulos & Ahmed, 2009). Beginning in 1998 with one charter school, UNO now operates eight charter schools in Chicago and has also capitalized on the tragedy of hurricane Katrina by opening its first charter school outside of the Chicago area in New Orleans. Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles established the Amino Leadership Academy with Latino/a students in mind. Presently, Green Dot, arguably NOT a Latino/a-themed charter organization, operates 19 schools in the Los Angeles area and is among the first charter organizations to be unionized. According to Villarreal O’Rourke (2008), minority themed charter schools are expected to grow. A U.S. Supreme Court decision indirectly aids those who are interested in narrowing the educational opportunity gap (commonly referred to a closing the achievement gap) in establishing “minorityfocused” charter schools. Private, for-profit companies have accelerated their funding of charter schools. For instance, JP Morgan Chase’s $325 million initiative supports the growth of high-performing U.S. charter schools. Furthermore, the Broad, Gates, Walton Family, and Lumina foundations have also increased funding for charter schools. Additionally, while corporate, for-profit foundations may not directly fund Latino/a-themed charter schools, they generously fund community-based organizations like the National Council of La Raza

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(NCLR) and school districts that are predominately Latino/a. For example, in Los Angeles, in which 73 percent of the students are Latino/a (Ed-Data, 2010), there are 161 charter schools serving approximately 58,000 students and “nearly all of them are funded by private corporations issued through foundation grants” (Posnick-Goodwin, 2010, p. 1). With the present set of proposed changes in local, state, and federal policies, this demographic shift toward charters will continue. But, in whose interest is it to increase Latino/a student enrollment in charter schools? How do Obama, Duncan, and neoliberal rhetoric contribute to the privatization of public education through the establishment of charter schools? Debatably, the Obama election was an opportunity to dismantle 8 years of failed policy. Many of his supporters believed that the newly elected administration would support innovation, excellence, and equity in education. It was, for many, considered an opportunity to counter the Bush policies, such as his attempt to promote charters instead of vouchers. When failing to secure congressional support for vouchers, Bush used “public appearances to promote charter schools as the solution to public school problems” (Hursh, 2008, p. 31). Obama supporters hoped that his election would help overturn Bush policies intent on destroying public education. However, the policies emanating from the Obama administration have not turned back the Bush administration’s attacks on public education. Yet many in the educational community are hesitant to label the educational policies of Obama and Duncan’s as neoliberal. Recently, the NAACP and five other civil rights organizations issued a balanced yet scathing critique of the Obama and Duncan education program, Race to the Top (RTTT). The $4.35 billion RTTT fund favors charter schools, competition, and punitive measures. The reports states: “If education is a civil right, children in ‘winning’ states should not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn in a high-quality environment.” A living example of conflict within is NCLR’s failure to actively engage in a criticism of RTTT or No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and of the Latino community to hold them accountable. We would argue that unless critical educational activists interrogate and challenge the rhetoric of “social justice” appropriated by Secretary Duncan, we are complicit in the administration’s regressive educational agenda. Our silence allows a market-driven educational system to destroy what is left of public education. The first sign of a problem with Obama’s perspective on public education was the appointment of Arne Duncan. After the announcement, Gerald Bracey (2009) characterized the losers as the “educators in schools and universities” and the winners as those “who managed to label the opposition candidate, Linda Darling-Hammond, as an instrument of the ‘status quo’ and a tool of the teachers’ union.” Duncan was a successful businessman, not an educator. His appointment was a sign that Obama’s views on public

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education were corporatist and procharter. Obama’s appointee, Arne Duncan, was infatuated with charter schools. Arne Duncan’s policies in Chicago were a “model of school closings and education privatization” (Brown, Gutstein, & Lipman, 2009, p. 1). An ally of corporate interest, Duncan put schools on probation, forced external partners upon them, and closed or “turned around” schools, often handing them over to private contractors. In 2009, Duncan called charter schools “one of the most profound changes in American education. [They] bring new options to underserved communities and introduce competition and innovation into the system.” (Department of Education, 2009, p. 2). Additionally, his support of charters has been monetarily beneficial for charter schools, since the Obama administration has tripled to a proposed $490 million federal funding provided to charter schools. Neoliberalism, Obama, Duncan, and the Charter School Movement in Latino/a Communities David Harvey (2005) defined neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.” (p. 5). Linking neoliberalism to teacher education, Christine Sleeter (2008) argued that neoliberal political policies generally emphasize opportunity and competition moderated by protections against discrimination and market excesses. These policies have changed the emphasis on education for the public good to education as a commodity. She argues that the purpose of teacher education shifts from “preparation partially for citizenship, to preparation for work” (p. 1948). Weiner (2007) suggests that neoliberal reforms in education such as privatization, movement away from centralized authority, accountability based solely on standardized tests, and weakening of teacher unions have implications for teacher preparation programs and for practicing classroom teachers. Since 2008, California teacher candidates, for example, have been required to pass assessments of their teaching performance, which Sleeter (2008) describes as moving “away from defining teacher quality in terms of professional knowledge and toward defining it in terms of testable content knowledge” (p. 1953). Plus, budget cuts in California not only require teachers to take tests but also pay for those while simultaneously paying higher tuition fees and purchasing

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materials for student teaching. In the meantime, for-profit charter universities compete with public ones by offering students attractive financial aid packages for accelerated teacher-preparation programs, and the Obama administration increases funding for Teach for America, reflecting the neoliberal ideology of free-market competition. The danger of neoliberal policy is that it uses the rhetoric of the civil rights community to advance its notion of educational reform. For instance, in a speech delivered to the National Education Association (2008), Duncan called education “the civil rights issue of the generation.” However, his policies, past and present, point to the preservation of an educational system that only exacerbates the inequality gap between middle- and working-class students. Arne Duncan has and will continue to publically endorse charter schools, in spite of the lack of consistent evidence that they have improved the quality of education. Through his actions, Duncan guarantees “the corporate liberalism of Bill Clinton and the conservative ‘populism’ of Ronald Reagan” (Karp, 2010, p. 53). In the Blueprint for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Secretary Duncan advances the concept of “turnaround schools.” This policy, if implemented, would facilitate the takeover of public schools by charter school operatives. He silences charter school opponents by arguing that charter schools are not “private,” claiming that charter schools are public because they are publically funded. However, a growing number of charter schools are managed by private, for-profit organizations, and many are recipients of millions of dollars donated by private, for-profit entrepreneurs. Turnaround schools will do little to improve the situation of troubled schools. In exchange for federal funding, the Blueprint will require teacher evaluation to be connected to test scores, infringing on teacher’s collective bargaining rights, and encouraging school districts to turn over public schools to charter school operatives. The Obama-Duncan administration has also made it easier for neoliberals and corporate interests to worm their way into Latino/a and Chicano/a communities. Across the country, school districts with a high percentage of Latino/a-Chicano/a children have introduced a new agenda for reforming schools. This agenda promoted by some Latino/aChicano/a elected officials promotes the proposals of the Obama administration, including the conversion of public schools into charter schools. In California, for example, they have rammed through a series of dubious and complex changes that will have a potentially devastating effect on the educational landscape for several years—and Latino children and youth are caught in the crossfire.

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The Dialectic of Charter Schools in Latino/a-Chicano/a Communities: Privatization or Innovation? In July 2009, the Harvard Educational Review published a special issue on the Obama presidency. Charles Payne and Tim Knowles (2009), from the University of Chicago, used the occasion to expound the virtues of charter schools. Payne and Knowles surmised that charter schools offer alternative schooling options for communities historically ignored, such as the creation of partnership opportunities for improving student academic outcomes and greater flexibility in curriculum development for teachers. In this study, Latino-themed charter schools were characterized as innovative schools, as defined by Payne and Knowles. In this study of Latino-themed charter schools, the description of the curriculum provided by the activists themselves suggests that teachers do have greater flexibility to offer their Latino/a students a more culturally and linguistically responsive instructional program. Moreover, UNO and NCLR have improved the relationship among the civil rights organizations, charter schools, foundations of wealthy entrepreneurs, and private corporations. However, Payne and Knowles fail to acknowledge that charters only impact the education of a select group of students. In this case, Latino-based charter schools have a detrimental effect on the quality of education for the vast majority of minority students, 97 percent of whom do not attend charter schools, including diversion of resources from traditional public schools to charter schools. Educational innovation benefits only the few students in charter schools and not the vast majority enrolled in traditional public schools. Taking Back the Discourse: Confronting the Reality of Inequity in Education In response to the view that public schools have failed, Berliner and Biddle (1995) suggest charter school reform was propagated to manufacture the public’s consent for the privatization of public schools. This manufactured consent is reflected in what UNO, NCLR, and the Green Dot Animo Leadership Academies are doing to promote charter schools. However, this critique of the charter school movement is not an indictment of Latino/aChicano/a civil rights organizations. We recognize that Chicana/o-Latina/o students “remain the most undereducated major population group in the country” (Gándara & Contreras, 2009, p. 18) and that Latino/a-themed charter schools were designed, in part, to improve the education of the Chicano/a students. Edexcellencia (2007) reports that 37 percent of the Latino/a-Chicano/a student population will drop out of high school in

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the United States. The California Department of Education reveals that Latino/a students remain underrepresented in public colleges and universities. Nationally, only 35 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Latino/as will enroll in college compared with 46 percent of whites (Fry, 2002). Moreover, only 11 percent of Chicana/o college students enrolling in 4-year colleges will ever graduate. To make matters worse, the electorate has initiated a number of educational projects that are unfriendly to Latinos/as, such as English-only instruction, measuring student achievement on the basis of scores on English standardized exams, unequal distribution of qualified teachers, and more. These policies have exacerbated the conditions of public schools in the Latino/a community and deteriorated the quality of the instructional program. The desire to remedy the situation is what drives Latino civil rights organizations to set up charter schools. However, there is no neutrality in the struggle against privatization and corporatization of public education. The establishment of charters objectively aids and abets privatization of public education. The rapid increase in the number of charter schools will not advance the interests of the Chicana/o student, but instead will destroy any hope for quality public education for all Latino/a students. What is worse is that corporations and private interests are capitalizing on the Chicana/o communities’ discontent with public education. Neoliberals and corporate interests have successfully portrayed public education as a failing and unaccountable bureaucracy and wormed their way into Latino/ a-themed charter schools and charter schools in the Latino/a-Chicano/a community. As such, they have used the inequity in the Latino/a community to manufacture consent and take over barrio schools. Fear as a Catalyst for Manufacturing Consent in the Barrio However, the cause of school failure experienced by Latino/a children rests squarely in the hands of those who determine educational and social policy and provides rationale for those in our community who wish to replace public schools with private charters. The social and political reality in the United States is that class and race directly impact the amount of educational progress a Latino/a student attains. A Latino/a parent’s level of educational attainment directly influences the education of her/his children, the child’s level of education influences his/her opportunity for gainful employment, and employment influences economic stability. Lipman (2004) posits racial and class inequalities as an “ensemble of social relations that are shaped by global, national, and local political-economic structures and ideological forces” (p. 5). We could not agree more. We maintain that the right wing, neoconservative, and neoliberal forces in the United States

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are focused on privatization not only in the United States, but also globally. In the Latino/a community, these forces are using monetary incentives in the form of philanthropic gifts to Latino/a civil rights organizations and Latino/a-themed charter schools. And parents are taking the bait. A recurrent theme in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (2007) is the role that fear and disaster play in the advancement of neoliberal ideology and the corporate stranglehold on society. The authors of this article maintain that the corporate elite in the United States have succeeded in presenting the American public with a negative perspective of public education and have used the mass media to promote this biased portrayal of public schools. The attacks on public education are not emanating only from the right, but the liberal media has recently added its voice to the onslaught of antiunion, antiteacher rhetoric. Recently, the film Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim offers charter schools as the sole solution to the problems in public schools. The Los Angeles Times publicly humiliated public school teachers by “naming names.” Teachers who failed to raise student test scores according to what the Times called a Value Added Model of Assessment were listed in the newspaper as “ineffective teachers” (Los Angeles Times, 2010). To that end, corporations, elected officials, and educational pundits have capitalized on the generally poor quality of education received by Latino/aChicano/a children to convert public schools into charter schools and to establish new charters in Latino/a communities rather than fund and support reform within traditional public schools that would benefit all students. Many in the Latino/a community, including progressive and liberal Chicano/a elected officials, have supported the practice of replacing public schools with charter schools. Recently, the Chicano mayor of Los Angeles called on the public to embrace the concept of accountability and competition and argued for mayoral control of the school district. Unsuccessful in his attempt to grab control, the mayor supported school board members who initiated the dismantling of the school district via a suspect plan to reform the troubled school district. A Chicana school board member fomented community unrest and division as she placed 250 public schools, including 50 new multimillion-dollar new schools up for bid in a plan she called “public school choice.” A Chicana state senator running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction authored legislation that ushered in questionable tenets of the Duncan Race to the Top reform plan, including provisions for conversion of public schools into charter schools. We argue that these practices are a part of a broader agenda to deregulate and privatize public schools. Neoliberals play upon the righteous indignation in the community. To that end, politicians, including Latino/a-Chicano/a elected leaders play upon the honest sentiments of those who want to organize for improvements in education, develop a culturally and linguistically responsive cur-

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riculum, and institute real innovation in public education. Using the media, neoliberals attempt to manufacture consent in the Latino/a community against the public neighborhood schools by implementing a propaganda model. The anti-public-education propaganda model effectively implements the fourth filter described by Herman and Chomsky (1988) as “flak” to describe our teachers as ineffective, our schools as failing, and to otherwise discredit public education. The review of the literature exposes the role that Latino civil rights organizations play in increasing charters in the Latino community. Studies have argued that charter schools teachers, in general, move to charters for more freedom and flexibility, increased decision making, dedicated staff, and a better learning atmosphere (Berliner, 1996 as cited in Bomotti, Ginsberg, & Cobb, 1999). Our inquiry moves us from the literature into the community. Our inquiry examines the perceptions of a select group of charter and traditional public school educators. Specifically, do teacher practitioners and activists understand the impact of charter schools on the Chicano/a community? Do our research participants view charter schools as an opportunity for innovation, freedom from public school constraints, or the piece-bypiece dismantling of public education? The practitioners are a convenient sample of five teacher and/or community activists. Our practitioners work in predominately Latino/a, racially isolated, and segregated schools; this is true of both the charter schools and public schools in their environment. Their diverse and varied backgrounds would provide a broad perspective on charter schools in the Latino/a community. To protect the anonymity of the interviewees, we have changed their names. Ana is a young charter schoolteacher. She has never taught in a public school. The charter school in which she works draws from the Latino/a community surrounding the school and is run by a nonprofit educational management organization (EMO). The school’s mission is to encourage Latinos to become leaders and to ensure their entry into college. In 2010, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $335 million in U.S. charter schools and $60 million in five charter networks in Southern California. The funds were to aid schools with personnel issues. Charter schools focus on performance rather than qualifications in the areas of tenure, evaluation, and compensation. Ana’s school is a recipient of a portion of these funds. The teachers at Ana’s site are unionized, and she is the union representative. Alejandra is a clinical professor in teacher education. Earlier in her career, she was both a charter school teacher/administrator and a traditional public school teacher. The charter school in which she was involved was a community-based school started by parents in an affluent area of Southern California and enrolled over 80 percent Latino students in a dual-language immersion setting.

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Carina taught in both charter and traditional public schools. Currently, her son attends a charter school. Carina’s charter school teaching experience took place in a Latino/a focused charter school enrolling over 90 percent Latino students. The K–6 charter school was a community-based school funded primarily with public funds. Carina’s son attends a K–5 charter school that is 1 of 12 run by a nonprofit charter school management organization. Both schools are a part of NCLR’s School Network, and the later receives additional funding from the Gates Foundation, part of which is contingent upon implementation of the teacher effectiveness program cited above. Melissa is a traditional public school teacher who has taught only in that setting. She is a leader and an activist in the teachers’ union. Her school enrolls 99 percent Latino children, and although her district provides a wide variety of programs to students who are English learners, including bilingual education, her school does not. Melissa’s union represents teachers in both charter and traditional public schools. Lastly, Patricia is a community activist and advocate for Latino/a students. She has a strong union background and is a supporter of change within the traditional public school system. All five are active within the same educational community; all have an affinity for the Latino/a community. The five practitioners discussed their views on the question of charter versus traditional public schools along the following dimensions: academic performance, culturally and linguistically responsive education, resources, and flexibility. We also asked questions regarding the ability of charters to provide quality education to Latina/o students. Other areas focused on respondents’ hopes and fears regarding the future of public education, the effects of charter schools on traditional public schools, and charter school funding issues. We sought an understanding of the issues facing public education and the impact that charter schools were having on the Latino/a community. Pensamientos y Voz: The Opinions of Practitioners on Charter Schools All five practitioners expressed concern about the growing trend toward charter schools. The mass exodus of students and parents from public schools alarmed one activist; she called it the “grand experiment.” The activist also argued that charter school laws have “failed to hold charter schools accountable in the same way public schools are” (Romero, personal communication, March 2, 2010). Acknowledging the recent comments by Secretary Duncan about “charter school accountability,” Romero hypothesized that the proposed accountability measures will force even innovative

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charter schools to follow a standardized curriculum and implement standardized tests as measures of student achievement. Academic Performance Our practitioners favored charter schools when discussing student academic achievement, even though most showed little desire to generalize results beyond their own settings. Their responses were nuanced: “Charter schools might do better if everything is in place. There is the ideal and the reality. People talk about charters as if the ideal exists, when in fact that is not the case.” Underlying their observations was a deep regret that traditional public schools were, in their opinions, serving Latino/a students less well than desired. About traditional public schools, Ana stated, “The state that we’re in is awful and disheartening. It makes me sick to my stomach. When you go to worst, the only place that you can go is up. It’s exciting that it [the charter school movement] is forcing educators, politicians, and others [to think about] what are we doing wrong in traditional public schools, how can we fix it. If they can do it, that’s good. I just want kids to be educated” (Zamora, personal communication, July 24, 2010). Melissa, the traditional public school teacher, opined that children with special needs (e.g., English learner, disabilities, or giftedness) would be better served academically in traditional public schools because public schools have more resources in the form of qualified providers, programs, facilities, and structures to address the needs of diverse populations. Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Education To a person, practitioners reflected that they were unaware of any formal schoolwide policies, programs, or approaches to incorporate culturally responsive education in their charter or traditional public school settings. Alejandra believed that the children in her classroom received a culturally responsive education. However, she stated that it depended on the teacher, not the school. In her school, no specific approaches addressed this. Melissa stated that, “In my heart of hearts, I believe that the traditional public school would be far more responsive to the students, given the district and the politics surrounding the school being served” (Brown, personal communication, June 24, 2010). Patricia felt that some charter schools do provide a culturally responsive education and that it has a positive influence on the lives of their students. She is most familiar with two charter schools in her area that provide culturally and linguistically relevant curriculum to their 90 percent Latino student bodies. In all three of the charter school

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settings represented by our practitioners, the schools functioned like, or were smaller learning communities, settings in which personal contact, caring, and knowledge of individual students, having more than passing acquaintance with each parent, and holding a commonality of goals for student success fit well in being culturally responsive to communities that valued a more personal and collectivist mindset. Regarding linguistic responsiveness, two schools provided all children with either Spanish as a second language or Spanish language arts. One, a dual-immersion school, also provided content instruction in Spanish. Melissa and Patricia, both public school practitioners, had no specific comments related to linguistic responsiveness in their settings. Likewise, Ana’s charter school provides only English instruction in part because of the number of English learners. Within California public schools, 5 percent of English learners receive instruction in their primary language and another 20.7 percent receive support, but not instruction in their primary language (California Department of Education, 2010). No similar statewide data are available for charter schools. Educating Latino/a Students Our five practitioners have strong and divergent opinions about the education of Latino/a students in traditional public schools. Two indicated that generally, Latino/a students do not receive a “good” education in the TPS system. Three felt that the TPS setting could or does provide quality educational experiences to Latino/a students. Ana believes that the public school system in which she teaches provides an “awful” education to most students, including Latinos/as, that “it’s not working.” Teachers, resources, and accountability are all factors that contribute to her perception of an inferior education. She pointed to teacher tenure as it is now implemented without teacher accountability as a contributor, indicating that tenure could work, but not as it is now implemented. Carina concurs. California school districts implement a system that is often called tenure, but is not. California law does not refer to tenure for classroom teachers. Tenure is a practice reserved for university and college professors. K–12 teachers have dismissal procedures that guarantee due process rights to teachers facing dismissal. According to Posnick-Goodwin (2010), “tenure has become a popular term used as a scapegoat for the real problems, which are ineffective evaluation of instruction, poor administrative practices, and inadequate investment by the public schools” (para. 1). The current economic environment, which includes cutbacks in staffing, creates tension between younger and senior teachers because teacher layoffs are based primarily on seniority. Unlike the neoliberal myth that unions protect “bad” teachers, any teacher is sub-

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ject to dismissal regardless of seniority and is protected from arbitrary firing by due process rights. Carina believes that Latino students are suffering the most in the TPS setting. She cited policies related to teacher tenure (“teachers who ‘don’t belong’ remain” and “good teachers are being laid off”; Lopez, personal communication, May 24, 2010), district mandates that do not promote good teaching, general school atmosphere that isn’t conducive to learning, and a parent-unfriendly system as factors mitigating against the TPS setting for Latino/a and other students. At her child’s charter school, she saw the beneficial effects of a small school in which each staff member (teachers, administrators, administrative staff, janitorial, etc.) knew and appeared to care about each child and family. She does not see that level of caring in her TPS setting. Alejandra, with a background in both charter and TPS settings, believes that public schools are better equipped to educate Latino/a students and the majority of students with different needs. She believes that if TPSs had the same resources as charter schools, TPSs would “hands down, no issue, absolutely” (Heredia, personal communication, June 24, 2010) educate Latino students better, but that the resource disparity prevents this. Melissa believes that “traditional public schools are the only way to educate Latino students. . . . I work in a district where the teachers are primarily Latino and many of us have returned to this district as adults because we believe in it and know what to do to help lift up our children and give them the education that they both need and deserve.” Patricia believes that TPSs can educate Latino/a students and that teachers really care. She has concerns that the system doesn’t embrace caring teachers and is too busy changing programs rather than looking at small successes and building on those. The Future of Traditional Public Education All five practitioners see a changed or disappearing traditional public school system. Ana believes that traditional public schools in their current form will not survive; that something must be done; that schools must embrace the communities in which they are situated and meet that community’s needs (physical and mental health, nutrition, access to health care and other services, etc.); that teachers, students, and community members must get to know each other and work together. Alejandra believes that traditional public schools “will continue to be under siege,” that any change will have to be teacher driven and focused on educating children rather than preparing them for tests. Carina stated that the TPS setting creates a less-than-ideal teaching and learning environment. She believes that there is a big need to education children in the TPS setting, but that “they have a ways to go.” Melissa states, “I am afraid for the future of traditional public schools. They are the scapegoat for everything ‘bad’ in this

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country . . . I believe that the schools can pull through, but not without some significant damage to them.” Patricia also despairs, “If we as a community, we as trade unions, do not do something to save public education, we will lose it to privatization, who only wants to make a buck.” Effect of Equal Inputs and Environment We asked practitioners to speculate on whether TPSs would be able to achieve similar academic results if the TPS educators were given the same flexibility, resources, and funding as charter schools. Three of the five believe that the TPS system could rise to the challenge, but are skeptical that TPSs would implement the major changes required to optimize equalized resources. Alejandra believes that TPSs would perform much better than charter schools given the same inputs, in large part because of their stability, i.e., they are established, have policies and procedures in place, stable staff and teaching force. Melissa, a traditional schoolteacher agrees that TPSs would be able to achieve good results with equal flexibility and resources. “Absolutely! . . . I believe that if things were not so tied to the model we have been using over the last several years, and that there was latitude as to how the moneys could be spent, we would see a whole other level of achievement for our students.” This model was characterized as top-down, mandated, inflexible, and continuously changing with no teacher input and little research base. Patricia stated, “I think they would supersede what charter schools are doing. I think we need to raise an educational revolution . . . We are too busy talking about hope, and that implies being nice.” Ana, a charter school teacher and union representative, was unsure whether this was possible, whether districts would be willing to give schools flexibility to do what schools thought was in the best interest of the children. While she believes that it is possible for TPSs to be great schools, she indicated that if TPSs continue to do the same thing, they would continue to fail Latino/a and African American students. Carina does not believe that the present TPS system in which she works would perform as well or better with equal funding and resources. She states, “Funding doesn’t lower the quality of instruction. It does make it more challenging.” She believes that the policies and programs in her TPS setting are detrimental to the education of children and stifle high-quality teaching that is responsive to each child. Charter Schools’ Influence on Traditional Public Schools “Charter schools were initially conceived as laboratories for reform, meant to instill choice and competition in the public school system” (Ed-

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Source, n.d.). If they are laboratories of reform, instances of success should be shared with traditional public schools to ensure that all students benefit from the efforts. The federal government, through its Charter School Program (CSP), provides competitive funds to charter schools, a portion of which may be used to assist other schools in adopting or adapting the charter school program or certain aspects of the program. States also set aside funds for dissemination. A 2005 study of CSP dissemination efforts found limited direct dissemination between charter schools and non–charter public schools (Steiner, Way, & Hassel, 2006). Consistent with earlier small studies (Wells, 2002), none of the five interviewed practitioners could point to formal or informal interaction between the charter and traditional public schools; that any influence charter schools might have on nearby TPS system was reactive rather than proactive, more an artifact of promotion, publicity, public perception, and the migration of students toward charter schools. Ana knows of no collaboration between charter schools and TPSs; “not something to celebrate.” She is an advocate of smaller learning communities and of teacher “alternative” pay. Ana believes that as students migrate to charter schools, “TPSs will see that they need to improve because money is going and funding is going” and that TPSs will have to change to compete. She believes that competition will challenge “everyone to get better. If that’s the wake-up call they need, then, awesome.” Alejandra worked in a charter school that was closely affiliated with the district. Through board meeting presentations, the board members were educated in “what Latino kids needed and what they were striving for” and how their needs might effectively be addressed differently. Alejandra believed that educating school boards regarding the different needs of Latino children could lead to beneficial effects in the TPS setting. Carina saw the main influence in decreased enrollment in the TPS setting attributable in part to charter schools. She experiences the hostility of TPS teachers toward charter schools, yet feels that charters and TPSs could work together for mutual benefit. Carina believes that there is much that TPSs can learn from charters. Similar to Ana, she points to the smaller school, personal attention, positive emphasis on achievement, and the effects that environment has on the entire school community as practices worthy of transfer to the TPS setting. She knows of no formal or informal interaction between her local TPS district and the charter at which her son attends. Melissa believes that comparisons are difficult. “Unless their numbers grow larger or they truly show that they are ‘the way’ to provide the best education for Latino students,” she is not sure that charter schools can influence the system of traditional public schools. Yet she believes that the department and state board of education “will continue to provide more positive opportunities for charter schools in California, and they will truly become a visible reality in Latino neighborhoods.” She views “the ultimate/

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overall impact of charter schools as negative because they have served as a draining source of the TPSs funding.” She believes that the department and board of education want TPSs to fail and that “many of the decisions are made in favor of charter schools and against anything good in TPSs.” Patricia worries about the public impression of TPSs versus charters: “I think parents think it is the great white hope.” She believes that the TPS system is burdened by state and national restrictions that stifle innovation and create an “oppressive situation” within the TPS system, while simultaneously allowing innovation in charter schools. Patricia hopes that the charter school movement “pushes teachers and trade unionists to fight for parity and equity. Why do charters get to be innovative, get waivers? It doesn’t sound right. It has to happen within the next two years or we will see the death of public education. No, it has to happen yesterday. With the budget cut, we are losing the fight.” Traditional Public Schooling and Latino/a Students Of our interviewees, most believe that the TPS system must improve and that charter schools might open the door for such improvement, although not necessarily as a direct consequence of collaboration. Ana believes that TPSs are less well-equipped to address the needs of Latino/a students. Because her charter school is a smaller learning community, she believes that it functions in a more culturally appropriate way for the 80 percent Latino/a community it serves. She believes that her charter “can do a much better job of bringing parents into the school and educational process.” Alejandra’s major concern for Latino/a students in the TPS system was whether they “were getting enough history, socially historical location for themselves.” At her charter school, she was able to prepare both Latino/a and other students and equip them to question at an age-appropriate level. She feels that an important part of their education is to understand standardized testing as separate from who they were or what they knew. Particularly, Latino/a students needed “protection as people . . . protecting their spirits so that they are not getting colonized over and over if they fail these tests.” In her charter school position, she was able to address these two concerns, but the practice was not institutionalized. Carina has concerns about Latino/a students in the TPS in which she is employed. Her chief worries are for English learners, who are labeled with negative consequences, who she believes are shut out of gifted programs because of language barriers, for whom “the rigor, the quality, the level of critical thinking is lost somehow.” Her experience with the charter school attended by her child is that children are not labeled, are included in gifted

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programs, and receive rigorous, quality education. She states, “I don’t see myself putting my child in public schools.” Melissa, as stated previously, believes that her TPS setting is responsive to the needs of Latino students, and that parents are satisfied with their children’s education. It’s very easy to blame traditional public schools for all the social ills, but someone has got to step up and say that it’s not the schools . . . It’s all the other bullshit that gets in the way. These kids are not white . . . They are not the majority culture in this country, and there is no amount of education that we can give them that will make them such. The education system needs to acknowledge that and allow for the differences that make us Americans . . . We don’t all speak the same, even if we have the same education . . . We understand things differently, even with the same education. Our cultures make us who we are . . . and what the hell is wrong with that? Not a damn thing! But when you take a standardized test, it creates an even larger divide of achievers and underachievers, smart and dumb, haves and have nots, and it’s all being orchestrated by the majority culture.

Patricia believes that the education that Latino/a students receive in traditional public schools varies according to the part of the city in which they attend school. “It matters how teachers are respected and treated with dignity at their worksite, and they in turn work with our students in the same way. I don’t think it is equal.” Charter School Funding We asked practitioners to express their thoughts regarding charter school funding, particularly by foundations and/or private companies. Ana had no concerns about outside funding and its potential influence at the charter school. “We live in a capitalistic system. . . . Money always comes with some [strings].” She believes that charter schools should review funding sources on a case-by-case basis. Her charter school group will receive a large amount of foundation funding if the schools implement a particular initiative supported by the foundation. She has positive feelings about this change. Alejandra and others have mixed feelings, and most questioned funders’ motives. In her opinion, charter schools “re-create the system of class oppression.” They are reserved for those “whose parents persist, are informed, and can navigate the educational system.” Moreover, Alejandra points out that “the funders determine the curriculum and standards, what and how it is taught.” Finally, Alejandra suggests that charter schools promote “the dominant business ideology that dichotomizes those who can and cannot.” Carina guesses that corporate funding has the purpose of tax

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write-offs. However, if the foundations or corporations “have an agenda,” that would be problematic. Melissa thinks “that these schools [funded by private companies or foundations] should be private schools and not charter schools.” She questions “whether or not they know what they are doing” and resents “that they take money from the traditional public school funding in order to experiment with our children.” Patricia wants to know the end results and wonders what corporations and foundations are “trying to get out of it,” perhaps the destabilization of teacher unions. Conclusion: Reciprocity of Responsibility: Toward Innovation, Democracy, and Equity in Public Education As we engage in this inquiry, the U.S. Department of Education has issued its Blueprint for the Reauthorization of ESEA. We maintain that the document holds promise in some areas of educational reform such as parent and community outreach and multiple versus single measures of student achievement. But without question, it also reflects a neoliberal agenda by calling for an increase in the number of charter schools, paying teachers based on students’ scores on standardized tests, and the adoption of a dubious set of national standards and more tests, among others. It is within this context that we walk away from this reflective inquiry with more questions than when we began this analysis of Latino/a themed charter schools and the Latino civil rights organizations that finance or support them. We strongly maintain our position that the push toward charter schools is a blatant attempt to destroy public education and that it does little to eradicate the educational inequities facing Latino/a students. Our conversations with teachers and community substantiate our position by noting the schism between charter and traditional public schools that hampers exchange of ideas that might improve education in both settings for all Latino/a students; the lack of flexibility that hampers teaching and innovation in traditional public schools; the ambivalence about the TPS system’s ability to change; that not all charter schools provide an education for Latino/a students that is superior to public schools; and the sheep-like acceptance of the charter school idea as the solution to the woes of public schooling with little or no critique. But the questions that remain are how do we work together to ensure that all Latino/a students benefit from improvements in education, no matter where they happen? The “we” includes parents, teachers, students, community members, Latino civil rights organizations, and others. The education of Latino/a students is in crisis, and we must take action to improve education for Latino/a and all students no matter where they receive their education, not creating a system that leaves most behind.

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The majority of our practitioners saw benefit in the charter school movement, yet understood that charter schools were not the answer. But questions remain regarding the generalizability of voice of this relatively small group. Some posed questions were not fully answered, culturally responsive curriculum, for example. Still others remained unasked. We did not ask activists about their thoughts on the role of Latino/a civil rights organizations in the proliferation of charter schools. As we engaged in conversation with this group, we realized that we disengaged from dialogue, exchange of ideas, critique of opinion, and correction of misconceptions. These were one-sided conversations—we as the listeners, they as they speakers. In our focus on receptivity to practitioners’ voices, we failed to enlighten or educate, or to have an open dialogue, and that is the work yet to be done, not only in interactions with practitioners, but also with Latino civil rights organizations, the Obama and Duncan administration, other supporters of charter schools, and with those in the traditional public school system. Our work is together with the common goal of improved education of all Latino/a students. It has been said that charter schools have become a “cause célèbre for philanthropists, hedge fund managers, movie stars, rock stars, and politicians” (von Zastrow, 2010); that the media’s tendency to focus on the very best charter schools has presented a distorted picture of charter schools. These high-achieving, high-profile charter schools have come to represent all charter schools. On the other hand, the very worst traditional public schools have come to represent all public schools, even though research points to a range of achievement across both types, including failed charters and highly successful traditional public schools. Despite some successes (and failures) in both settings, we will continue to undereducate the majority of Latino/a students until we come to solutions that are in the best interests of the students as opposed to the agendized interests of corporations and foundations and that reach the majority if not all Latino/a students. For example, through the 1970s, the federal government funded traditional public schools specifically to develop innovative solutions to identified education problems and, if successful, to disseminate the programs to other schools through the National Diffusion Network and other means. The network was funded by the Department of Education for over 20 years as a vehicle to identify, transfer, and implement successful educational systems, programs, and practices. This model worked to develop and identify successful practices and deliberately spread those successes throughout the public school system to benefit all children. It is a model that works and that might have applicability to current educational dilemmas and can work to improve public schools, not dismantle them. Although federal charter school funding includes dissemination, studies have shown

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very little activity in this area and a dearth of documentation of the efficacy or nature of such efforts. Now we must stand together in community, own the inequity, challenge assumptions, and call for genuine reform from within with no blaming, no defensiveness. Parents, students, civil rights organizations, and both traditional public and charter school teachers have their hearts in the right place with the same desires for high quality, highly effective culturally and linguistically responsive education for all Latino/a students. With that goal in mind, we can see alternatives more clearly, review and reflect critically, engage in important dialogues and discussions, and ensure that the best interests of the students, not those of corporations and foundations, are at the forefront. We remain, however, critical of the move by the Obama administration that, under the guise of school improvement and accountability, has offered our schools to corporations whose only objective is to produce a succession of submissive, docile, compliant workers. A case in point is Obama policies, currently written into Race to the Top (RTTT), that will reshape public schooling into a more competitive, corporatized, and grossly unequal educational system, not improve the quality of education for Latino/a students. By their actions, the Obama and Duncan administration, Latino civil rights organizations, corporations, and foundations situate themselves in favor of or in tacit agreement with the proliferation of charter schools over traditional public schools. We believe that progressive educators tend not to be critical of Democratic administrations or of community organizations. We hesitate to critique those in our own communities, such as NCLR or UNO. With polarization becoming the norm in public debate, we worry whether honest and open dialogue is possible, whether schisms might form having confronted “one of our own.” We consider the potential effects of naming the inequities and giving voice to the dark side of corporate and foundation funding of charter schools to civil rights groups like NCLR, to teachers employed by charter schools, to parents with children enrolled in charter schools, or calling out the Obama/Duncan administration on their charter school policies. In parallel, brutal and honest debate regarding the state of education in traditional public schools is a must. We believe that good people can move beyond their own self-interests for the benefit of the entire community—not my child, but our children; not my school, but the schooling of all Latino/a children; not my pocketbook, but our society. We tend not to criticize those on our side of the fence, although the lack of constructive criticism is a disservice to the very constituency that matters the most—children—and criticize we must for Latino/a students everywhere. Our conversations with a diverse group of practitioners have shown us the impor-

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tance of engaging in constructive dialogue and informed discussion that goes beyond the academic discourse. We have inferred from our research and conversations that there is a divide between perception and reality, research findings about charter schools versus practitioner beliefs, that the media has largely presented a biased case in favor of charter schools that permeates perception. Activists tell us that flexibility and commonality of purpose; smaller, more personal learning communities; and consistency of program does work for teachers, students, parents, and others. These are solutions that can be implemented anywhere. There is a general belief that change within the traditional public school system must have its origins in teachers—that teachers must resist system requirements that are detrimental to the education of Latino students—and must embrace and implement those that promote learning and student empowerment. All believe that major changes must occur within the traditional public school system. Ironically, most “innovations” identified as successful in charter schools are research-based and can, should, and have been used successfully in traditional public schools (e.g., smaller learning communities). Finally, we acknowledge criticisms of the public school system for its general failure to educate Latino/a students; yet have faith that the public education system can improve. Even though many schools are failing to adequately educate Latino/a students, charter schools are not a panacea and are likely detrimental to the educational experience of the vast majority of Latino/a students who are enrolled in traditional public schools. Our reflections and our conversations with a select group of practitioners shed some light on the Obama-Duncan administration policies and funding of charter schools, and have affirmed our thoughts. Our concentrated efforts should continue to be critical of the Obama-Duncan policies and of “those in our own backyard” who have failed to provide a balanced critique of charter schools and of traditional public schools and to propose changes within the traditional public school system. We cannot stand by because an organization is a Latino/a civil rights organization or an administration has general alignment with our values. It is in the best interests of Latino/a students to advocate, to critique and explore, to be brave and forthright in our efforts to move beyond academic discourse to action; action in which all constituents are represented at the table and in which all engage in meaningful dialogue, including critique, for the benefit of Latino/a youth. This is our advocacy, to bring together natural allies in the fight for educational equity in open and honest interchange aimed at restructuring and reforming the educational system, not just in charter schools, but overall.

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Notes 1. We use Chicano/a in a sociopolitical context to denote an individual of Mexican descent who is an activist in improving the social position of all Chicanos/ as and who advocates for the reclamation of his/her heritage and group-defined ethnic identity. We use Latino/a to encompass an ethnic group with origins in Latin American that is inclusive of Chicano/a. 2. For the purposes of this study, we define Latino-themed charter schools as charter schools with a Latino focus on curriculum, instruction, and community.

References Arenas, T. (2009). Unpublished senior thesis. Northridge, CA: California State University Northridge. Berliner, D., & Biddle, B. (1995) The manufactured crisis. New York: Harper Collins. Bomotti, S., Ginsberg, R., & Cobb B. (1999) Teachers in charter and traditional schools. Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/557 Bracey, G. (2009, 4 January). The hatchet job on Linda Darling-Hammond. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/ the-hatchet-job-on-linda_b_155104.html Brown, J., Gutstein, E., & Lipman, P. (2009, Spring). Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story: Myth or reality? Rethinking Schools Online, 23(3), 1–10. Retrieved from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_03/arne233.shtml California Department of Education, DataQuest. (March 2010). 2009–2010 English learners, instructional settings and services. Retrieved from http://dq.cde. ca.gov/dataquest/ElP2_State.asp?RptYear=2009-10&RptType=ELPart2_1a Center for Public Education. (2010). Charter schools: Finding out the facts: At a glance. Retrieved from http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/site/apps/nlnet/ content3.aspx?c=lvIXIiN0JwE&b=5868097&ct=8089273¬oc=1 Darling-Hammond, L., & Montgomery, K. (2008). Keeping the promise: The role of policy in reform. In L. Dingerson, B. Miner, B. Peterson, & S. Walters (Eds.), Keeping the promise: The debate over charter schools. Milwaukee (pp. 91–110). Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools. Duncan, A. (2009, July 2). Remarks of the U. S. Secretary of Education to the National Education Association, San Diego, CA. (unpublished text). EdSource, Issues & Research. (Undated). Charter school history and policy. Retrieved from http://www.edsource.org/iss_charter_policy.html Felch, J., Song, J., & Smith, D. (14 August, 2010) Grading the teachers: Who is teaching LA’s kids. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/ la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,2695044.story Fry, R. (2002). Latinos in higher education: Many enroll, too few graduate. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. Gandara, P., & Contreras, F. (2009). The Latino education crisis: The consequences of failed social policies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Manufactured Consent    145 Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books. Karp, S. (2010). School reform we can’t believe in. Rethinking Schools. Retrieved from rethinkingschools.org Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Picador. Kolderie, T. (2005, June). Budde and the origins of the “charter concept.” St. Paul, MN. Education/Evolving: A joint venture of the Center for Policy Studies and Hamline University. Lipman, P. (2004). High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. London, UK: RoutledgeFalmer Minnesota Legislative Reference Library. (2010). Resources on Minnesota issues: Charter schools. Retrieved from http://www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/issues/charter.asp National Council of La Raza. (2004, September). Janet Murguia acknowledges the role played by NCLR-affiliated charter schools in educating Hispanic children in Texas. News Release. Retrieved from http://www.nclr.org/content/news/ detail/27074/?print=1 National Council of La Raza. (2009). Charter school development initiative. Retrieved from http://www.nclr.org/section//charter_school/ Payne, C., & Knowles, T. (2009, Spring). Promise and peril: Charter schools, urban school reform, and the Obama administration. Harvard Educational Review, 79(2), 1–11. Posnick-Goodwin, S. (2010, Fall). The blame game. The California Educator, 15(2). Retrieved: http://www.cta.org/Professional-Development/Publications/Educator-October-10/The-blame-game-Waiting-for-Superman.aspx Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books. Santiago, D. (2007). What works for Latino students in higher education. Retrieved from http://www.edexcelencia.org/research/2007-examples-excelencia-compendium Sleeter, C. (2008). Equity, democracy, and neoliberal assaults on teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 58(4), 1947–1957. Steiner, L., Way, A., & Hassel, B. (2006) Assessment of charter schools program dissemination funding. Retrieved from http://www.wested.org/cs/we/view/rs/845 Villarreal O’Rourke, A. (2008). Picking up the pieces after pics: Evaluation current effort to narrow the education gap. Harvard Latino Law Review, 11, 263–278. Von Zastrow, C. (2010, May 3). Can traditional public schools share the limelight with charters? Learning First Alliance. Washington, DC. Retrieved August 6, 2010, from http://www.learningfirst.org/can-traditional-public-schools-share-limelight-charters Weiher, G. R., & Tedin, K. (2002). Does choice lead to racially stratified schools? Charter schools and household preferences. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 21(1), 79–92. Weiner, L. (2007). A lethal threat to U.S. teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(4), 274–286. Wells, A. S. (2002). Where charter school policy fails: The problems of accountability and equity. New York: Teachers College Press.

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Chapter 7

Whose Schools are These Anyway—American Dream or Nightmare? Countering the Corporate Takeover of Schools in California Roberta Ahlquist

The only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization to the point at which a substantial fraction of all educational service is rendered to individuals by private enterprises. Nothing else will destroy or even greatly weaken the power of the educational establishment—a necessary pre-condition for radical improvement in our educational system. . . . [In addition,] as in every other area in which there has been extensive privatization, the privatization of schooling would produce a new, highly active and profitable industry. —Milton Friedman, 1995

Introduction In this chapter, I address the impact of the neoliberal agenda on U.S. schools and, more specifically, on schools in California. First, I address the The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 147–167 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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impact of the Bush/Obama educational agenda in global terms. Second, I look at the impact of this Bush/Obama neoliberal agenda in California, including, hyperaccountability, or high-stakes standardized testing, charter schools, gross public service budget cutbacks and tuition increases, as examples of privatization of “the public good.” Third, I examine the contradictions between the public perception that President Obama is a leading proponent of quality public schooling, and the reality that the administration’s educational policies reflect neoliberal, hegemonic policies. Fourth, I highlight the effects of these policies on the lives of students and teachers, in terms of the future of democratic public schooling. Finally, I respond to the question: What can be done to counter this hegemonic agenda? To begin, I frame the historical context and theoretical framework in which the neoliberal agenda is being acted out. The Bush/Obama Neoliberal Agenda and the Decline of the U.S. Empire Since World War II, there has been a consolidation of corporate power worldwide, and a global shift in how government monies are disbursed to support the corporate neoliberal agenda. Representatives of the most powerful capitalist countries, in terms of Gross Domestic Product, met in June 2010 in two rounds in Toronto, Canada. They are the most “developed” countries in the world: the G8 (Italy, Russia, the UK, Japan, Germany, Canada, France, and the United States), and now the G20 (the next-leading economies), including countries such as China, Indonesia, and Brazil. The international corporate elite chose these 20 leaders, with the United States playing a key role. These countries have agreed to follow the U.S. neoliberal austerity program to “structurally adjust” their economies by cutting their national deficits on the backs of the poor, the working and middle classes, seniors, new immigrants, and the unemployed. Briefly, the neoliberal agenda, grounded in profit at any cost to the people, includes these basic tenets: (a) the “rule of the market”—international trade and investment unfettered from any regulations; (b) government deregulation, gutting health and safety or environmental protections that would diminish profit; (c) privatization of state-owned companies and services such as police and fire protection, schools, hospitals, utilities, and refuse collection that are sold to private sector investors; (d) elimination of the idea of “the public good” and “community” and replacement with the concept of “individual responsibility.” This last tenet is an aspect of deficit ideology, called “blaming the victim”; (e) cutting public expenditures for social services and reducing the social service safety net for poor people, again an example of the deficit ideology, “ just pull yourself up by those bootstraps” (Harvey, 2005).

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Democratic schooling has been a touted centerpiece of this country’s policies since Horace Mann’s call for access to schooling for all white children in the 1820s. At that time, it was clear that one way to socialize these children into the dominant corporate culture was through a common school experience. President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as legislation establishing Title 1, Head Start, and Housing and Urban Development programs; and federal funding for schools was provided by the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. But most of these programs were abandoned or weakened by subsequent administrations before they made significant change (Berlak, 2010; Zinn, 1980). Minor changes, however, do not threaten in any significant way the power of the elite or the unequal hegemonic structure of capitalism. Since Nixon’s 1968 election, the neoconservatives have designed and controlled the neoliberal agenda. Today the “American Dream” is dying, even for those few for whom it was a reality. The myth of meritocracy exposes nightmares rather than hopes. It has been framed as “a dream deferred” (Hughes, 1951). In reality, this dream is a cruel mystification and a lie. Meanwhile, this educational “reform” mandate is a “grand-theft” corporate takeover of the entire public school system, from preschool to higher education. Schools are quickly becoming authoritarian and militaristic. Uniforms, rigid discipline, behavior control, and increased surveillance are only a few of the ways this is happening (Saltman & Gabbard, 2003). Why? The wars continue because imperialism requires militarism to maintain global domination. A year ago, General McChrystal was put in charge of the “war” in Afghanistan to devise a “winning” strategy. One and a half years later, his strategy isn’t winning. General McChrystal’s replacement, General Petraeus, continues the occupation, which is ultimately linked to a neoliberal corporate capitalist agenda. The corporate press attempts to argue that this brings us closer to winning a corrupt foreign occupation. In addition to allocating $700 billion to maintain the military establishment, Obama seeks $33 billion in supplemental monies for these occupations/wars. Meanwhile, we desperately need funding to keep schools public and equal. But the money is going elsewhere. Militarism reigns. During the 1970s, leaders of some of the biggest corporations and other business interests developed an agenda to undermine teachers and students: to test and control the curriculum of public schools and to fundamentally change the nature of public schooling to serve the market economy. For example, 300 CEOs of major corporations, including members of the Fortune 500 and the Business Round Table, had decided by l989 that because public schools weren’t serving business or market interests, major change was needed. Using their corporate wealth and influence, they lobbied legislators, served on state and local foundations, funded think tanks,

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and propagandized school boards. This current standardized, homogenized, market- and data-driven accountability movement is the result. The impact on students, especially students on the “downside of power,” is devastating (Emery & Ohanian, 2004). The neoliberal corporate agenda is an undemocratic, top-down power grab, a dispossession and disempowerment of working-class students. It is creating divisions between teachers, parents, and administrators. It is “subtractive schooling” at its worst (Valenzuela, 1999). Anyone not part of the regimen of the Eurocentric, scripted, basics curriculum will be penalized. Those who speak another language or are from a nonwhite cultural/ethnic background will have these rich histories and cultures “subtracted” from their school experience. Neoconservative U.S. economist Milton Friedman convinced Chile to privatize schools in the 1970s. In the 1990s, Friedman’s proposal for U.S. education was as follows: To get a majority of the public to support a general and substantial voucher, we must structure the proposal so that it (1) is simple and straightforward so as to be comprehensible to the voter, and (2) guarantees that the proposal will not add to the tax burden in any way but will rather reduce net government spending on education. A group of us in California has produced a tentative proposition that meets these conditions. The prospects for getting sufficient backing to have a real chance of passing such a proposition in 1996 are bright. (Cato Institute, 1995)

This “free market” agenda, driven by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT), is nothing new, and heading solidly in Friedman’s direction, without the use of vouchers. Vouchers were promoted as a way to enable middle-class parents disgruntled with public schools to send their children to private schools with federal stipends. Corporate interests have realized that charter schools can accomplish the same goals as vouchers without causing as much resistance. The success of this agenda has much to do with the fact that the language of power is duplicitous. For example, there is no doubt that teachers, students, and administrators need to be held accountable. But while the language of power tells us that standardized tests are an essential and reliable measure of students’ academic success, and even though they are heralded as a means of insuring equity for all students, standardized test scores actually provide no reliable evidence of teacher quality or accountability on the part of teachers or students (Krashen, 2010). From a social justice perspective, this reactionary movement led to a national as well as a global crisis. We face the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression of the l930s. States are suffering massive education cuts, and public employees are confronting layoffs, furloughs, and salary cuts. Senior pensions are threatened as discussion of cuts to social se-

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curity loom on the horizon; yet the biggest banks have been bailed out with taxpayer monies, while Congress approved more funding for wars abroad at the taxpayer’s expense. We live in a capitalist system that is full of absurd contradictions, one that is far more brutal and unequal than many others in Europe (McChesney & Foster, 2010; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). For example, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, and Norway have been much kinder in their approach to schooling and health care; several of these countries also have the lowest income inequality in the world (Gamerman, 2008; Wilkinson, & Pickett, 2010). Reproduction theory, explained by Bowles and Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), has been borne out in practice. Capitalism, based on profit regardless of peoples’ needs, reproduces itself through all of its institutions, especially schooling. Schools reproduce an unequal, classist, and racist system, with curriculum and practices that reinforce the capitalist system. Occasionally, there are policies that soften the blows of this harsh system, but only very occasionally, as in Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks about quality education as “the civil rights issue of the century,” while at the same time he promotes regressive educational policies including merit pay, the proliferation of charter schools; the elimination of due process; a monolingual, Anglocentric, scripted curriculum; an overemphasis on standardized testing and assessment; and a dubious focus on “teacher educator accountability” and “teacher performance” (Duncan, 2009; see also Berlak, this volume). The attack on teacher education is vitriolic. Credential programs are grossly underfunded, while state universities claim that teacher preparation is a high priority. Other academic disciplines are being scrutinized, while some have already been cut, especially those that don’t provide clear “market” returns, i.e., philosophy, social science, fine arts, classics, and ethnic studies, to name a few. This crude measure of academic value, referred to as deliverology, is a failed program developed by Sir Michael Barber (UK), which posits that in education, if you cannot “deliver” or produce a profit for material goods or services for the corporate world, your program/department will be eliminated. Charles Reed, chancellor of the 23 campuses of the California State University System, has adopted this ideology and has introduced the Early Start Program (ESP). This program mandates that if entering freshmen do not have the requisite math and reading scores to qualify for admission to college, they must pay for and take remediation coursework before entrance into a university. Thus, more than one half of incoming freshmen to the CSU system will be required to pay for such remedial preparation. This is discriminatory. It targets identified groups and punishes them financially. The California Faculty Association (higher education union) is supporting English department faculty across the system who have signed a resolution

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opposing the Early Start Program. Meanwhile, all CSU campuses must have an Early Start Program plan by mid-November of 2010. There is widespread popular lore that President Obama is the great hope for social justice. He is supposedly a proponent of quality public school education for all. Yet Obama and his administration now call upon educators to embrace the values of the market economy, including “scientific” data-driven research and praxis, while they argue for greater transparency in educational funding. They appeal for educational reform based on research into so-called best practices (a superficial attempt to infer substantive research) and for collaboration among teacher’s unions, business interests, and politicians in the development of a national standards-based educational agenda. This is a major piece of the neoliberal, high-stakes, and hyperaccountability movement (Ahlquist, Gorski, & Montano, 2011). The subtext of this linguistically deceptive reform mandated by the Department of Education in Race To The Top is a one-time bribe; a stimulus package to fund the proliferation of charter schools with corporate managers who have little or no educational background. Funding of Race To The Top programs comes with strings attached, such as requirements to implement merit (performance) pay. Merit pay is a drastic shift from the equitable ways in which teachers have traditionally been paid. Traditionally, they are paid with yearly salary steps for college coursework and professional development workshops, with years of service, satisfactory evaluations, and seniority as the major basis for pay increases. The assumption is that merit pay reflects that teachers are doing more to increase tests scores. Yet there is no evidence that merit pay increases student achievement (Sawchuk, 2010). There are equally profound implications for replacing a fairly equitable, teacher-monitored evaluation system with a corporatized, competitive system based on dubious criteria. This is being done with the help of the “language of power,” the presidential voice, under the illusion of higher quality, more democracy, more choice, and more flexibility in the schools (Duncan, 2009). In reality, many charter schools are rigidly basic 3-Rs, militaristic, more authoritarian, and more unequal. The Gates Foundation, Edison, Eli Broad, and owners of the Knowledge is Power (KIPP) schools, and many Teach for America teachers, contribute to the dismantling of school equality, due process, democracy, and increased militarism (Lack, 2011). Academic freedom is being eliminated; working conditions for teachers and students are more harsh, competitive, and intense, with many teachers working 70 hours a week or more. What happens with Obama’s RTTT? Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the Washington DC, system fired 241 teachers in 2010 (5% of the district’s total) and she fired 345 from 2007–2009. A New York Times article (Lewin, 2010) carries no explanation of why these teachers were fired, nor does it offer any analysis of the complex situation, including the pressures these

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teachers faced to teach to the tests. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called Rhee’s evaluation system a destructive cycle of hire, fire, repeat. Evaluation should include a component of student learning, of course, but there also has to be teacher development and support. It can’t just be a “gotcha” system. Yet students in half of all DC public schools performed worse in the 2010 assessments than they did in 2009. Test scores have gone up, but there is much confusion as to why. It looks like different groups of students are being tested (Dingerson, 2010). Seniority rights are also on the chopping block. Here is the bribe, the pay-off: 20 percent pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 and $30,000 for teachers who meet certain standards, including rising test scores (Lewin, 2010). How many teachers rated in the top category of “highly effective”? Only 16 percent were so rated, but what does that mean? We get no explanation of any of the details. Nor do teachers, parents, or principals have any input, any voice in the assessment process. This is RTTT. High turnover rates are the goal. It’s cheaper and easier to control teachers when you can hire and fire at will. Teachers are pitted against fellow teachers who work in poor, underresourced schools, and if anyone gets those scores higher, they’ll be given performance pay, like good hedge fund bankers in the corporate world. It means a more unequal and more competitive, commodified school system, stratified along racial and class lines, with the erosion of tenure and academic freedom, lack of due process, an antiunion perspective, the adoption of a dubious set of national standards, and more, not less testing (Apple, 2010; Emery & Ohanian, 2003; Dingerson, 2010). .

The Impact of the Bush/Obama Neoliberal Agenda in California This standards movement has promoted a simplistic, basics curriculum. To add insult to injury, in order to increase test scores, many California urban high school students are being required to take three periods of English and two periods of math. This leaves students little opportunity to learn about music and art, science and history, not even physical education. The rationale for this action is to better prepare them to pass standardized tests, including the California High School Exit Exam. Rather than not be contributing to higher test scores, some students are so bored that they drop out of high school. The school budget in California is funded primarily by property taxes. The drop in housing sales and an increase in foreclosures have added to the school funding crisis. In 1978, Proposition 13 mandated that the state cannot raise property taxes for schools by more than 1 percent per year,

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unless a house is reassessed upon being sold. So, in addition to the Wall Street and banking fraud, the mortgage housing crisis, and increasing unemployment, the entire state is in a profound budget crisis that will take years, if ever, to resolve. Programs that serve ordinary people, such as public education, social service welfare, public housing, and health care have been decimated. California, with a population close to 37 million, is the most ethnically diverse and wealthiest state in the nation. Some 26.8 percent of California students are foreign born, and 42.3 percent speak a language other than English at home (www.census.org). Children of color comprise 54 percent of students and are now a majority in California’s schools. California high school completion rates are at 80.2 percent, yet below the national average of 85 percent. Nationwide, one third of public schools have failed to meet the standardized testing standards set forth in No Child Left Behind (Anderson, 2010). Why? In part it is because teachers are all being asked to do more with much less by way of support and resources. Over the past 2 years, California’s school budgets have been cut by $17 billion. Over 30,000 teachers were given pink slips or layoff notices (www. CTA.org, 2010). A large percentage of these teachers will not be hired back. At the same time that class sizes have been increased and resources cut, the testing mania continues. What do veteran teachers face? First they face increased demands for higher test scores; increased class size; more standards; rigid monocultural, basics curriculum; fewer resources; and students who fail to see any relevance to the “drill and skill” testing regimen. Many teachers cite the basing of student assessment on testing as unreliable and regressive, because it is dumbing-down students’ understanding of the world. Testing now drives student learning and the curriculum in general. So where do students learn how to question, to understand their place in the world, to challenge authority, to create new ideas, to explore deeper levels of thinking? Not in the classroom, unless the teacher is willing to risk that her students will learn deeper, that they will be able to manage the high-stakes standards, audits, and tests. The governor and legislature of California continue to allow massive education and social service cuts, as public employees confront job loss and/or minimum wage futures; and the unemployment rolls climb. As the public schools become starved for funds, the number of charter schools continues to grow and divert what funding there is to meet their needs. In this way, public schools are being corporatized and privatized. In response to Race To The Top, state governments took no time at all to institute requirements for top-down national “common standards” and provisions to create more charter schools as they raced to beat short timelines to apply for stimulus monies. The implications of resegregated charter schools for children of color, working-class and poor students, and linguistically diverse learners are profound.

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If the RTTT stimulus package that supports school privatization is successful, Bush’s No Child Left Behind reform package will roll forward, and urban public schools will serve as dumping grounds for low-achieving, unmotivated, low-skilled students. If they get their way, the corporate “powers that be,” using Obama’s “shock doctrine” reform policies, will reshape public schooling into a more competitive, segregated, stratified, corporatized, unequal, and privatized educational system (see Lea, this volume). Duncan says, “When schools continue to struggle, we have a collective obligation to take action” (2009). Yet these reforms are not designed to create the change the president campaigned for; rather they are part of the neoconservative agenda that serves to demonize teachers and their unions, punish students, and reward testing and textbook companies. It proposes “marketized solutions” to destroy anything PUBLIC in public education in favor of charter schools, and it creates a highly stratified, controlled, segregated, and privatized educational system. The results are devastating to anyone concerned with social justice, equality, and democracy. California passed Proposition 209 in the late 1980s, which did away with affirmative action. This contributed to an anti-immigrant environment combined with an English-only mandate, even though a majority of our K–12 students speak a first language other than English. What is the message to students? Where do they learn about ways to counter racism, classism, and other forms of oppression? What role does the state play in these educational goals? There is a clear disconnect between students’ authentic experiences and their school experiences. With a conservative agenda and less funding and resources for public schools, there has been an overt, apolitical de-skilling (Giroux, 2004) and “basics” approach to teaching and learning. De-skilling is going on as teachers serve as glorified test preparers and givers, and students as compliant test takers. Math, reading, and science have the most status. Basic knowledge needed for the U.S. imperial agenda is about a 9th grade reading and math level for the majority. Where are the arts? Music and art have been nearly eliminated from most school curricula. Yet some academics argue that these are the most important subjects to teach (Robinson, 2006). There will still be a small percentage who will learn how to think critically, analyze, question, create, and run things, but for the majority, these skills are too dangerous (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Giroux, 1991; McLaren, 2005). In summary, schools in California are increasingly segregated on racial and class lines (Kozol, 2004). In Oakland, 18 percent of schools are now charter schools, with top-down control and private consultants. In 2010, teachers were refused a salary increase, even though they are the lowest paid district in Alameda County. Where do students learn about ways to counter racism, classism, and unethical behaviors? Where do they learn about the value of creativity? (Robinson, 2006).

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Impacts of Neoliberal Policies on the Lives of Students and Teachers How can teachers teach deeply for critical problem-posing and culturally relevant education when we are forcing them to compete with each other to teach to high-stakes standardized tests? This narrowed focus destroys opportunities for poor students by increasing their drop-out rates, their class sizes, and reduces the number of teachers to serve them. Thousands of pre-K–12 teachers were laid off in 2010 alone. Meanwhile, as my studentteachers engage students in their classrooms, they face culture clash, poverty, depression, racism, and far too much hopelessness. To add insult to injury, California is still recovering from the shocks of the back-to-basics movement in the 1970s. Phonics, and “drill and kill” curriculum prevailed as a backlash to the gains of the civil rights movement. Obama’s agenda is not new, but the data-driven stakes are much higher today than in the past. This hegemonic power grab is reshaping the future of teaching and public education in every state in the country. Legislators compete for federal dollars, teacher unions take stands against these regressive measures, yet without new monies from depleted state budgets, districts react and apply for grants to fund their schools. The corporate media has promoted this agenda by badmouthing teachers, urban schools, poor kids, and teacher unions. Under existing capitalism, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult and indeed in more cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions. (Albert Einstein, 1949)

If we take a look at nearly any popular mainstream magazines and newspapers, we see how negatively teachers and unions are portrayed. The corporate media has fanned the flames of their formulated “crisis” as well as mystifying the citizenry about the state of public schooling (Klein, 2007). This forces teachers to be test givers and kids to be test takers in this datadriven system. Teachers working with immigrants, low-income students, and students of color are at a more serious disadvantage: they are scapegoats if students don’t score well, and many of these poor students are being pushed out of schools in an effort to streamline schooling to serve the interests of the marketplace. Some states, when faced with “common” national standards argue that their own state standards are high, more than adequate, that they cover the most significant content. Thus, California, among other states, said no to the imposition of national standards. Maryland, as well as California, was among such states. Yet when this occurred, immediately the Washington Post editorial page wrote a very negative article

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shaming this decision and arguing that Maryland should buy into these common standards (Anderson, 2010). Secretary of Education Duncan promotes these regressive policies, including a dubious focus on “teacher educator accountability” and “teacher performance” (Duncan, 2009, see also Berlak, this volume). The attack on teacher education is vitriolic. Credential programs are grossly underfunded, while state universities claim that teacher preparation is a high priority. Inevitably, other academic disciplines are being scrutinized, while some have already been cut, especially those that don’t provide clear market returns (i.e., philosophy, social science, classics, and ethnic studies, to name a few) (www.CFA.org, 2009). President Obama is no great hope for promoting social justice in education, nor is he a proponent of quality public schooling for all. Although his education czar, Arne Duncan, calls public schooling “the civil rights agenda for the millennium,” so far, it appears that this “civil rights agenda” is a cruel twist on the state of civil rights in the United States. Most of what was gained from the end of World War II to the present has been undermined by ongoing hegemonic policies and practices of both the conservative and liberal wings of the plutocracy, which support corporate capitalism. (Apple, 2010; Klein, 2007; Willinski, 1998).

Contradictions of the Obama Educational Reform Agenda The question is, how do social justice educators expose the disconnect between the promise of the administration to honor its stated goal: that “education is the civil rights issue of this generation” and the regressive, neoconservative legislative and educational reforms it promotes (Duncan, 2009)? Teachers need to develop a critical analysis of the Bush/Obama market-economy educational policies advanced by Secretary of Education Duncan, and social justice educators need to collaborate with parents, administrators, and activists to negotiate alternative spaces for organizing and equitable reform. Here are some excerpts from Secretary of Education Duncan’s (2009) speech about the education reform agenda: Education is the civil rights issue of this generation . . . When schools continue to struggle, we have a collective obligation to take action . . . Education is a daily fight for social justice.

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As he unveiled his education agenda before the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on April 6, 2009, Obama told students that these were the conditions: Better standards and assessment, increasing the number of charter schools, establishing merit pay for teachers, adopting “world-class national standards” and placing a greater emphasis on early childhood and higher education.

He concluded his speech by promising students of Village Academy Charter High School in California that the administration would not rest until: Your parents can keep their jobs and your families can keep their homes, and you can focus on what you should be focusing on—your own education.

In response to criticism about the competitive nature of RTTT objectives, he told the National Urban League (Anderson, 2010) that “minority students have the most to gain from overhauling the nation’s schools.” The response from the Urban League was a clear call for equity: “(they) want the administration to seek more equitable funding for schools.” It sounds like the American dream. Work hard. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Score high on the tests. You too can buy your dream home! You can get that dream job! But it’s the illusion of the American dream. In reality it’s a nightmare. Obama is serving the corporate mandates of those who got him elected. Using Klein’s (2007) shock doctrine “formulated crisis” in U.S. public education, it’s clear that his agenda is in the direction of “redefining education for corporate good rather than the public good” (Saltman & Gabbard, 2003). Today, the American dream is dying, even for those for whom it was a reality. The myth of meritocracy exposes nightmares. It has been framed as “a dream deferred” (Hughes, 1951). In reality, this dream is a cruel mystification and a lie. To think that students and parents will be able to “keep their jobs and their homes” (from Obama’s words), when for many, they have already been lost. What Can be Done to Counter this Agenda? We need to hear from more teachers regarding responses and solutions to the crisis of schooling. They know their students. They are most aware of their students’ needs and abilities. The vast majority of teachers work very hard, stay late, take additional assignments on for no extra remuneration, buy materials out of their own pockets, and are vastly undervalued and underappreciated. Some teachers are beginning to speak out. The California

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Teachers Association and the California Faculty Association are beginning to take more progressive stands. Here’s the voice of one teacher, making comparisons between what teachers and hedge fund managers make. This blog sums up the dilemma teachers, students, administrators, and parents face: Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 teachers? That money could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers . . . with benefits. The wealthy will have placed an estimated $2 trillion into hedge funds by the end of this year, while schools experience cutbacks everywhere. “That’s about $6,500 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.” To add insult to injury, they pay only a 15 percent tax rate on their “earnings,” while an experienced teacher will be paying 28 percent plus. Meanwhile, our generous foundations are lock-step in support of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s agenda—it’s all the fault of the teachers’ unions, recalcitrant and/or stupid teachers, and their “low expectations.” Most teachers work hard, are very committed to teaching their students and if affirmed go way beyond. . . . In contrast, I’d argue: schools are too big (and too important) to fail. They should be our first priority—before Iraq, before worrying about the morale of the Big Bankers, before spending money to bribe states to pay teachers according to their students’ test scores, before giving more tests, looking for the one best curriculum, closing the bottom 10 percent, and replacing them with semi-private schools, etc. As I used to remind folks, there will always be a last car on a train (where most fatal accidents occur), and exactly 10 percent in the bottom 10 percent. The bottom will always be schools with kids whose families are overwhelmingly in the bottom 10 percent when it comes to the resources they can offer their children. Schools cannot be the only leveler. (teacherken, April 10, 2010)

Schools are one of the few remaining institutions where we might have any hope of some form of equality. This is worth fighting for, and we have to do this, if we have any interest in democracy, dialogue, and acting on our world in the interests of making it a better and more joyful place to live. Given the cutbacks in funding and the pressure to raise test scores, teachers have become increasingly demoralized and frustrated. Many have lost their passion for teaching, as their academic freedom, creativity, culturally relevant pedagogy, and critical inquiry skills are devalued and constrained, to serve a scripted, one-size-fits-all curriculum. Thus, while the riches that potential teachers have to offer are being diminished, their students, who are more ethnically and linguistically diverse than ever, need their talents and devotion as never before. Charter schools have become an additional way in which public schools are being corporatized and privatized. The implications of resegregated charter schools for children of color, working-class and poor students, and linguistically diverse learners are profound. Duncan says, “When schools

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continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action.” This is “shock doctrine” language used to frighten teachers into compliance to the neoliberal agenda. To sum up, schools are increasingly segregated on racial and class lines (Kozol, 1992). Affirmative action has been outlawed. There is a scripted, one-size-fits-all curriculum in many schools, with monitors checking to see if teachers are teaching “on the same page, on the same day,” with the same tests. There is pressure for talking heads’ “drill and skill” teaching and testing, which interferes with opportunities to teach a range of cultural histories and multiple perspectives, critical thinking skills, inquiry, and social justice curriculum. Where do students learn about ways to counter racism, classism, and unethical behaviors? Where do they learn about the value of creativity? (Robinson, 2006). There is increasing surveillance in schools, including the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE), video cameras, metal detectors, and the use of body searches; schools feel more like places of incarceration rather than education. Gates and Broad Are Major Neoliberal Players We don’t hear much about these corporate players who have set this program in motion. We know that Gates has been involved in funding major educational change in the direction of the corporate agenda, but the press he gets is very positive, and even uplifting, as though his ideas will revolutionize schools with a broad liberal arts and science and math emphasis. If we look deeper, it’s the hegemonic neoliberal agenda. We also hear about Eli Broad, who has mixed reviews in the dominant press, but in general, he is portrayed as a philanthropist with constructive change on his agenda. Read carefully here. This is how Broad, one of the major funders of these changes, and now training leaders to implement his goals, is described in Wikipedia (2011): The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation’s education work is focused on dramatically improving urban K–12 public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition. The Broad Foundation has four national flagship initiatives: The Broad Superintendents Academy is a 10-month executive management program to train working CEOs and other top executives from business, nonprofit, military, government and education backgrounds to lead urban school systems.

Whose Schools are These Anyway—American Dream or Nightmare?    161 The $2 million Broad Prize for Urban Education is the nation’s largest education award given annually to urban school districts that have made the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement. The Broad Residency in Urban Education is a two-year management development program that trains recent graduate students, primarily with business and law degrees, who have several years of work experience and places them immediately into managerial positions in the central operations of urban school districts. The Broad Institute for School Boards is a national training and support program for urban school district governance teams of school board members and superintendents. The latest offering of The Broad Institute is Reform Governance in Action, a training program for reform-minded school boardsuperintendent teams to establish efficient and effective policies and processes that will improve board operations, strengthen management oversight and directly improve learning opportunities for students. In May 2007, the Broad Foundation donated $10 million dollars to the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, a high-performing public charter management organization in Los Angeles. On April 25, 2007, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation joined forces with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledging a joint $60 million to create Strong American Schools, a nonprofit project responsible for running Ed in 08, an information and initiative campaign aimed at encouraging 2008 presidential contenders to include education in their campaign policies.

Broad heavily funds the Center for Reform of School Systems (CRSS). Teachers will need to decide for themselves as to whether he is serving the needs of the majority of our students. Most argue NO. Read about what some teachers think of Broad’s ideas and programs. See Sharon Higgins’ blogs to understand the depth of his intrusion into public schools. What Can be Done to Counter this Hegemonic Agenda? Democracy? For whom? This educational “reform” mandate is a grand takeover of the entire public school system. We need another civil rights movement to counter this regression. We—parents, teachers, committed administrators, community activists—need to take back our schools. This draconian shift away from 5 decades of struggle for more representation of teachers of color, more linguistically sensitive teaching, and a culturally relevant curriculum, represents a “formulated crisis” in U.S. public education. The crisis is moving steadily in the direction of redefining education for corporate good rather than the public good (Saltman & Gabbard, 2003) This political agenda requires “marketized solutions,” which will destroy

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public education in favor of privatized education (Klein, 2007). Any major school reform that is driven by test scores must be viewed critically. Moreover, the antipathy that many people around the world show toward Americans, due to U.S. foreign policy, will continue unless Americans are more engaged with others. Education is the key to critically understanding and challenging war, inequities, and injustice, and building a more robust, dynamic, and meaningful democracy. It’s fairly clear that this is not Obama’s agenda. What we do not need is more standardized tests, more punishments, more oppressive regulations, more surveillance, more top-down control, more monocultural textbooks, more militarism, and more hegemony. What we do need is a pedagogy of resistance to these corporate mandates. We need more democracy; more equality; more of the public; more engagement; more problem-posing and critical thinking; more ethics; more histories; more creativity, music, art, and physical activities; and more equal opportunity in our schools. As this plague of neoconservatism rolls across the country, there are many creative, progressive, and subversive antidotes. Individually, in classrooms, teachers are doing what they know is best for their students. National Education Association (NEA) President Van Roekel, at the NEA Representative Assembly (RA) in July 2010, lamented: “Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced” (Lewin, 2010). At the Representative Assembly (National Education Association annual meeting), teachers approved a vote of “no confidence” for Race to the Top guidelines, and took a position against the use of competitive grants as a basis for the reauthorization of ESEA (EducationWeek, 7/4/10, “Teacher Beat”, blog). Union leadership is organizing against the testing mania. In a second round of bidding in Los Angeles, charter schools, private and other corporations, as well as independent groups, including unions and teachers, bid for the 17 lowest performing campuses to prevent their state takeover. Superintendent Ramon Cortines, who had been supporting privatization, threatened the district with resigning from the L.A. Unified School District. What will this mean for the students and teachers? Only time will tell (Blume, 2010). Many Los Angeles charter schools are being redefined in ways that serve the corporate world at the expense of kids (see Montaño, this volume). Few charter schools are social justice oriented, student centered, or teaching students from a critical pedagogy perspective. One of my former students is now principal of one of the few charter schools in Southern California that is framed within a critical pedagogy paradigm. The majority of students are working-class students of color. Here

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is his commentary about why critical pedagogy has been so useful and so necessary for his students: Many of these students have never been provided a framework to understand their collective experience. Thus, many of them begin to blame themselves and their lack of “aptitude” for school to explain their past failure in education. [This is a good example of how “cultural deficit theory” works: blame the victim (author’s insert)] But what we are beginning to see in our early stages of our reform efforts is that students are beginning to ask poignant questions about the institutional culture of schools. Additionally, they are questioning the quality of the previous schools they attended. Therefore, through constant dialogue with their teachers about these structural conditions, they understand that it is the institution of schools that has refused to change and meet their needs as learners. This change will only occur when we no longer decide to tinker with education as we have over the years, but radically change the way we conceptualize the purpose of school. (Gordon, 2010)

The challenge is to encourage teachers and prospective teachers to become involved in critiquing these efforts for radical change, as well as relevant dialogue, reflection, and action toward real transformative change in the interests of the public good. We need to encourage teachers and prospective teachers to remain involved in “informal sites of learning.” Informal sites of learning are the communities from which students, teacher’s unions, community organizations, and other support groups come. These sites provide spaces for dialogue and critique. Teacher-educators need to support social justice policies and legislation in their teacher credential programs (such as countering assessments like Teaching Performance Assessments), as well as support their student teachers who want to challenge the conservative pressures of scripted curriculum and pseudoscientific, data-driven measures of assessment. Teachers, parents, students, and the local community should decide functions of schooling. They need a strong voice in these matters. Public schooling requires the ongoing engagement of the local community. There is a major crisis today in education, and the players at the bottom (teachers, students, parents, local communities, union activists) need to take back the control and the power that has been stolen from them by the corporate class. Many people are challenging this outdated corporate-driven system. This system is a hierarchy of math, science, and reading at the top, and music, physical education, and art at the bottom. See the short blog by Sir Ken Robinson, who advocates turning the academic pyramid upside down to offer daily art and music, dance and theater, more creativity, and more affective education for all. His view of the future is stated below:

164   R. AHLQUIST I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right. (Robinson, 2006)

First, there are no quick fixes. But there are some things we should consider. Teachers can take back the assessment of their students if we work together to support their resistance. We need authentic assessments and multiple measures that assess relevant content that guide students toward better understanding and navigating to survive and thrive in the world. We need to educate parents and students about why these corporate policies are not in the best interests of the majority of our society. We all need to become engaged in ongoing community sessions to develop viable solutions that include teachers and parents, in contrast to framing teachers and parents as the problem. We must hear more voices of teachers about what they want, need, and know about their students; what works, what doesn’t; and how to better engage them in the process of critical, meaningful social justice learning. In the meantime, we (not the people at the top) need to be engaged in reshaping the educational agenda. We should not assume we will continue with NCLB. Nor should we assume that the ESEA will be spun with the full involvement of teachers, union activists, parents, and interested community members. Meanwhile, the California Teachers Association is saying NO to merit pay and teacher evaluation based on test scores (www.CTA.org, 2010). Teachers are saying that they want a union that will fight on their behalf— aggressively. Without the engagement of a majority of teachers and support from parents, these changes will not take place. Step-by-step, we will address some of the changes we want to see. We need authentic assessments, not fill-in-the-blank standardized tests, but tests that are used to help us better reach and teach all of our students (Gamerman, 2008). Teacher training programs teach that kids learn in different ways, yet once the teachers get into a school setting, they are asked to forget this fact and teach as though one size fits all. Smaller classrooms are key. In Finland, teachers have autonomy; they are well paid, affirmed, and respected. They define the curriculum, with input from others. Tests are not used punitively but as a means to see how well their students are learning. These teachers work hard, and the results show even in standardized

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tests (PISA), which are the highest in the world (Quinn, 2010). We can learn from other places how to support our teachers and better tap into our students’ needs and abilities. We need to affirm our teachers and validate what they do, and support their efforts to work under extremely adverse conditions. We need to find ways to strengthen connections with parents and the larger community so that everyone is kept informed about student progress, teacher ideas, and strategies to support children who need extra help. We need more counselors to assist poor students to choose classes that won’t lock them out of access to the college track. We need to recruit and retain more culturally and linguistically responsive teachers. We need to support the Dream Act and work for a fair and equitable immigration solution. We need to keep the “public” in public education! This is a long-term struggle, and we need to pace our activism so that we do not burn out. Talk to colleagues and parents on a regular basis. What can YOU do? Start in your own site, school, and local community. Get to know your students, parents, co-workers, and staff and engage them in an exchange of ideas over the current crisis. Discuss their stories and their concerns. Write op-ed pieces or stories for local papers to inform the community of major needs. Build alliances with folks who share a social justice vision. Help build an analysis of the problems and viable solutions. Make contacts with other progressive groups through alternative media, online blogs, Web sites, coalitions, and organizations that are working toward similar goals. Small steps by many dedicated people can provide us with creative change. A disgruntled parent in San Leandro, California, has finished a film, Race to Nowhere (2009), which, among other things, advocates that parents and teachers work together to start taking more control over public schools and the curriculum. It’s a good counter to the antiteacher, antiunion film, Waiting for Superman. In order to counter the antiteacher, antiunion corporate agenda, we need to strengthen coalitions and build alliances across differences, between and among teachers and parents, sympathetic administrators, and community activists. For the long haul, it is in all of our interests, and the interests of the planet, to work to educate about the failure of capitalism to even attempt to solve our problems: social, economic, political, educational, health related, housing, etc. We need a major transformation to work to radically change the system. It is absurd: brutal, corrupting, sick, and lethal (McChesney & Foster, 2010). Only then will we have a chance at a future for the next generations. We need to work toward greater equality in a world that is increasingly unequal. Working to make such a social justice transformation will bring us closer to being more humane citizens of the world.

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References Ahlquist, R., Gorski, P., & Montano, T. (Eds.). (2011). Assault on kids: How hyperaccontabilty, corporatization, deficit ideology and Ruby Payne are destroying public schools. New York: Peter Lang. Apple, M. (2010, June 16). Globalization & Education presentation at World Congress for Comparative Education, Istanbul, Turkey. Anderson, N. (2010, July 28). States setting pace on school change: Obama agenda stalled in Congress. The Washington Post. Berlak, H. (2010, February 16). Prelude to ‘Race to the Top’: A Short history. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/new/education/k 12/articles/2009/04/07/ boston_students struggle with english only rule/ Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Californa Faculty Association website: www.cfa.org California Teachers Association website: www.cta.org Cato Institute Education. (1995). Bulletin. Dingerson, L. (2010). Proving grounds: School “rheeform” in Washington, D.C. Rethinking Schools Online. Duncan, A. speeches, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, March 2009, July 2010. Einstein, A. (1949, May). “Why Capitalism?”, Monthly Review. Eli Broad. (2011, January). Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Broad Emery, K., & Ohanian, S. (2004). Why is corporate America bashing our public school? Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Friedman, M. (1995). Public schools: Make them private. The Washington Post. In CATO Bulletin. Retrieved from www.cato.org/pubs/brief/bp-023.html Gamerman, E. (2008, February 29). What makes Finnish kids so smart? Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html Giroux, H. (1991). Postmodernism, feminism, and cultural politics: Redrawing educatioal boundaries. Albany: State University of New York Press. Giroux, H. (2004). The terror of neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy. Boulder CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gordon, J. (2010). Critical pedagogy as a tool for school reform: The use of critical pedagogy as a high school principal. Unpublished paper. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hughes, L. (1951). Harlem. Montage of a dream deferred. In A. Rampersad (Ed.), The collected poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Books. Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism: New York: Picador Kozol, J. (1992). Savage inequalities: Chidren in America’s schools. New York: Harper Perennial. Krashen, S. (2010, September 6). Education in Washington: Standardized testing and teacher accountability. Seattle Times. Retrieved from http://seattletimes. nwsource.com/html/northwestvoices /2012800877_educationinwashingtonstandardizedtestingandteacheraccountability.html Lack, B. (2011). Anti-democratic militaristic  education: An overview and critical analysis of KIPP schools. In R. Ahlquist, P. Gorski, & T. Montano (Eds.), As-

Whose Schools are These Anyway—American Dream or Nightmare?    167 sault on kids: How hyper-accountability, corporatization, deficit ideologies and Ruby Payne are destroying public Schools. New York: Peter Lang.   Leopold, L. www.bluevirginia.us/.../why-are-25-hedge-fund-managers-worth-658000teachers. Lewin, T. (2010). School chief dismisses 241 Teachers in Washington. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/education/24teachers.html McChesney, R. (2008). The political economy of media. New York: Monthly Review Press. McChesney, R., & Foster B. J. (2010). Capitalism, the absurd system: A view from the United States. Monthly Review, 60(2). McLaren, P. (2005). Capitalists & conquerors: A critical pedagogy against empire. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Quinn, T. (2010). Wise, wiser teacher: What I learned in Finnish schools. Rethinking Schools, 24(4). Rethinking Schools Online. Robinson, K. (2006, June 27). www.TED. Com Monterey California Online video. Saltman, K. J., & Gabbard, D. A. (Eds.). (2003). Education as enforcement: The militarization and corporatization of schools. New York: Routledge. Sawchuk, S. (2010, September 21). Merit pay found to have little effect on achievement. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/ articles/2010/09/21/05pay_ep.h30.html?tkn=MVXF8D%2B99TBX%2F44% 2FI9Ze4vJClQEynUq71SCS&intc=es Spring, J. (1998). Education and the rise of the global economy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Taubman, P. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards and acountability in education. New York: Routledge. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.–Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2010). Why greater equality makes societies stronger: The spirit level. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Wingfield, A. H., & Feagin, J. (2009). Yes we can? White racial framing and the 2008 presidential campaign. New York: Routledge. Willinsky, J. (1998). Learning to divide the world: Education at empire’s end. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zinn, H. (1980). A people’s history of the U.S. From 1492 to the present. New York: Harper Collins.

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Chapter 8

Obama, Escucha! Estamos en la Lucha! Challenging Neoliberalism in Los Angeles Schools Theresa Montaño

Introduction The year 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of the August 29th Chicano Moratorium held in 1970 against the war in Vietnam. The antiwar demonstration mobilized between 25,000 and 30,000 people on a blistering hot day in East Los Angeles, California. The National Chicano Moratorium had successfully organized the largest minority-led demonstration against the war in Vietnam in the United States. The march down Whittier Boulevard ended in Laguna Park, where thousands listened to music, watched folkloricos1 perform, and listened to political speakers. The rally ended when the police attacked demonstrators, sending hundreds into the streets of East Los Angeles. In the aftermath of the violence, more than 100 protesters were arrested and 4 were killed. The fallen were Gustav Montag, Lyn Ward, José Diaz, and award-winning Chicano journalist, Ruben Salazar.2 The demThe Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 169–185 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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onstration inspired generations of Chicana/os3 to dedicate their lives to the struggle for social justice. In 1970, there were 2 million Chicano/a students in the United States. The Chicano/a student population of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) was 30 percent. The majority of Chicano/as lived in East Los Angeles, California. Chicano/as were concentrated in the states of Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Over 50 percent of Chicano/as lived in California. The educational landscape for Chicano/as was horrible. For example, for every 10 Chicano/as entering first grade, only 4 graduated from high school, and 3 out of 5 high school graduates read below grade level in English. In 1974, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (US CCR) described the education of Chicano/as as “a systematic failure of the educational process,” one that not only “ignores the educational needs of Chicanos students, but also suppresses their culture and stifled their hopes and ambitions” (p. 67). A Chicano/a student in the 1970s was racially and linguistically isolated, tracked into ability groups, punished for speaking Spanish in school and “treated less favorably than Anglo pupils” (p. 2). From 1968 to 1970, the Chicano/a community not only protested the war in Vietnam, but students walked out of high schools and, with parental and community support, sought to democratize public school students. Chicano/a movement activists formulated educational demands calling for the institutionalization of a bilingual-bicultural education, smaller class size, courses of special interest to Chicano/a students, and textbooks that reflected the Chicano/a experience. Chicano/a community activists also demanded the hiring of teacher candidates who were Chicano/a and insisted that teachers take a foreign language and ethnic studies courses and demonstrate an understanding of Chicano/as before teaching in predominately Chicano/a schools community. The Chicano/a educational agenda also called for an end to long-term ability grouping based on high-stakes tests and an end to the racial isolation. As a direct result of a social movement that was prominority, prowoman, antiwar and anti–corporate interests, certain demands for educational justice were met. Many of us who were a part of that struggle would not hold our current positions in education or politics if it were not for that movement. We must remember that the Chicano/a student movement emphasized people over profits. It directly and objectively challenged corporate interests and privatization. Community demands for local control were aimed at decentralizing and eliminating bureaucracy. It was a move to make public education more public, subjugating it to greater control by the community. As Chicana/o activists, we realized then that the solutions to the poor quality of education we were receiving would come from a progressive, culturally and linguistically based agenda. It is important to note that while the social and educational changes that resulted from the movimiento4

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were significant, many were manifested as mostly programmatic, short-term changes. Most of the projects were severely underfunded, and forces deeply embedded in dominant cultural and political systems would move rapidly to dismantle programs. Many Chicano/a movement activists entered universities during this time and majored in Chicano/a studies, determined to return to the community as classroom teachers (Ortega, 2007). The idea of teaching for peace and social justice was a part of a larger social movement that called for an end to an unjust war abroad, as well as social, economic, and educational justice here at home. It was a time when students, parents, and community members realized that teaching was a political act (Darder, 1991; Freire, 1973); a political act aimed at fundamentally changing education by radically restructuring an educational system. Whether the community was marching in the streets of East Los Angeles or walking out of high school campuses, the community cry was “we need an education, not war!” or Raza, si! Guerra no! Today, as Chicano/as, we face xenophobic and racist legislation aimed at “outlawing” Chicanos/as. In 2010, Arizona legalized the racial profiling of Chicano/as, banned Raza Studies in high schools, and prohibited “teachers with accents” from teaching English courses (Johnson, 2010; Rodriguez, 2010). The question of what happened to the movement, its leaders, and its activists, is the subject of great debate. Teresa Cordoba (as cited in Rodriguez, 1996), a university professor, scholar and activist summarizes it this way: “many of the past activists—many of whom were students—are today part of the environmental justice movement, work with youth, in health or legal clinics or teach in schools, and many are also now senior scholars.” (Chicano and Chicana movement section, para. 14). And, while many activists remain active in the struggle for social justice, a few, as is evident in the role the mayor of Los Angeles played in the recent struggle for public school choice, choose to side with those intent on destroying L.A. schools. Using the Obama presidency and the reign of Arne Duncan as the political backdrop, this chapter will examine nefarious educational policies in Los Angeles, California, specifically, LAUSD’s policy of “public school choice.” On August 25, 2009, under the guise of improving the quality of public schools, that is, to “enhance the educational opportunities provided to students attending District schools” (Los Angeles City Board of Education, 2009), the Los Angeles school board invited “internal and external stakeholders” to participate in an “open process congruent with the ideas present in No Child Left Behind” to submit plans for taking over public schools (p. 1). In other words, the school board invited charter school operatives, nonprofit organizations, and special interest groups to bid for control of 250 public schools, including 50 new multimillion dollar schools built with public funds. Instead of engaging in a constructive path toward improving schools that were overcrowded and crumbling, classrooms absent essential

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technology, or identifying effective models of instruction, the school board elected to implement a policy closely aligned with ideas promoted by the Obama administration: specifically the idea of reconstituting or “turning around underperforming” schools and handing them over to privately run, mostly nonunion charter schools. The Los Angeles educational agenda is supported by the powerful procorporate, Wall Street, Democrats, and many nonprofit organizations. This chapter will argue that “public school choice” in Los Angeles reflects the present neoliberal efforts of President Obama and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. The ideological agenda exposed by Duncan and Obama has influenced former Chicano movement activists, now elected officials, to give away public schools, undermine collective bargaining agreements, and dismantle the second largest school district in the nation. This chapter reflects upon and critiques the present battle to save public schools in Los Angeles. Central to the battle to save L.A. schools is the solidarity among a diverse group of activists who challenged the neoliberal agenda, held “colorblind” elected officials accountable, and played a significant role preventing the wholesale giveaway of public schools. Finally, a challenge will be issued to progressive educators to join in a constructive discourse about what is right for Chicano/a-Latino/a students, by engaging them in a process to collectively define an educational agenda for such students. It is an agenda based on a critical praxis that is educationally sound, academically rigorous, and culturally responsive, and one that is “not about the economic interests of competitive societies but that values each child as a perishable piece of life itself” (Kozol, 2005, p. 95). The Obama Education Agenda and the Latino/aChicano/a Community On March 10, 2009, before the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama unveiled his pillars of educational reform, including “better standards and assessment,” increasing the number of charter schools, establishing merit pay for teachers, adopting “world-class national standards,” and placing a greater emphasis on early childhood and higher education. Obama also pledged to the students at Village Academy Charter High School that he would not “rest until your parents can keep their jobs and your families can keep their homes, and you can focus on what you should be focusing on—your own education (Obama, 2009).” Some may argue that Obama’s educational pillars are exemplars of a broken promise; a promise made to teachers who endorsed his candidacy for presiden. But a quick review of a speech delivered to the National Education Association in 2008 will reveal that the president was open about his support of charter schools, merit pay, and test-driven accountability. According to Wayne Au (2009), Obama’s

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views on education were and are “centrists at best” and represent an “overall trajectory of educational conservativism in the United States” (p. 315). In other words, Obama did not break his promise on educational reform, because when it comes to education, Obama’s conservative positions objectively support the corporatization of public education. Ravitch described the reform efforts as “NCLB on steroids” (as citied in Myslinski, 2010). Obama sidelined his promise for a fair and comprehensive immigration policy by insinuating that in Congress, “there may not be an appetite” (Wilogren, 2010) for immigration reform. The failure to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill is a disappointment to the Latino/a community, who overwhelmingly supported the Obama presidency. Obama won the Latino vote 2 to 1, and Latinos were credited with victories in the three battleground states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada (Preston, 2008). When compared with the Latino vote in 2004, when 54 percent of Latinos voted for John Kerry, the number of Latinos voting for Obama climbed 13 percent. The Latino vote for Obama was due to his promise to end the war, develop a comprehensive immigration policy, initiate health care reform, and his views on public education (Gaynor, 2008; López, 2008; Martin, 2009; Moreno, 2008; NALEO, 2008; NALEO, 2010; Preston, 2008, William C. Velasquez Institute, 2008). According to the Nation magazine, had the Latino vote mandate which called for “policy changes in healthcare, educational opportunity and new ‘green jobs” been implemented by Obama the lives of many would have dramatically improved. Moreover, the implementation of the new policies could have secured “vote advantages in key electoral states for years to come” (Cobble & Velasquez, 2008). However, at present, states suffer massive education budget cuts and public employees confront furloughs, layoffs, and salary cuts, the Obama presidency has yet to deliver on his promise to Latino/s (Berman & Cusack, 2010). One Chicana activist expressed her feelings on the topic of 2008 elections by saying, “we felt good working to elect an African American who promised us education and immigration reform, but we got only health care. He should have come in and cleaned up, made real changes and instead he tries to be a centrist. We are a community under siege and he has done nothing for us!” (P. Recinos, personal communication, May 2, 2010). From Duncan to Villaraigosa: The Neoliberal Agenda in L.A. Schools In unveiling the Obama administration’s Blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA) before the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the House Education and Labor Committee, Duncan said that “education is one issue that can rise above ide-

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ology or politics” (Duncan, 2010, para. 1). This comment is misleading and false. There is no neutrality to education reform, a fact Arne Duncan demonstrated in his zealousness to reform education in Chicago. Lipman and Hursh (2007) said of Chicago’s neoliberal plan to reform schools, Renaissance 2010, that it was an attempt to “transform public education by introducing markets into education, shifting control from elected school councils and toward the unelected Commercial Club, and substantially reduced the power of teachers’ and other school employees’ unions” (p. 164). The Renaissance plan introduced by Chicago Mayor Daley was implemented by Arne Duncan (Brown, Gutstein, & Lipman, 2010). Lipman (2004), who has written extensively on the topic, purports that the struggle to save Chicago public schools was over who would control educational policy and practice, who defines the social agenda, and which alternatives would be considered viable. This contest for control of the educational agenda connects cultural struggles, contests over meaning, conflicting ideological and political perspectives, and discourses over social inequity. She further described the role of racial inequality as locations where “racialized school policies” led to greater social control of schools, “demonization of Latino/a and Black students” and portrayals of their teachers as “bad teachers.” In Los Angeles, a city where Latino/as hold many of the top political offices, Latino/a and Chicano/a students represent a greater percentage of the student population than in Chicago. However, the city’s educational reform efforts are remarkably similar to Chicago’s, especially the move to privatize schools. In Los Angeles, however, Latino/a and Chicano/as make up 48 percent of the population and 73 percent of the student population in LAUSD (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010; Ed-Data, 2010). The city’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is a former Chicano/a movement activist and trade unionist, and is the first Latino/a mayor since 1872. It is rumored that Mayor Villaraigosa supported the public school choice issue when his dream of controlling the school district, supported by the Secretary of Education, was defeated in the courts. And, like Chicago, Los Angeles communities have a history of “rising up.” Just 42 years ago in Los Angeles, 10,000 students and community members walked out of high schools across the city demanding a reduction in class sizes, more Chicano/a teachers and counselors, greater community control of schools, bilingual education, and Chicano/a Studies. Today, L.A. public education and the rights and interests of Chicano/a students are under attack like never before. The Demographic Imperative: Chicano/a-Latino/a Education The Chicano/a and Latino/a student population in this nation has grown (Pew Hispanic Center, 2008), and it is moving beyond the southwestern Unit-

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ed States. Today, Chicano/a and Latino/a students remain predominately Mexican-American and Mexican (63.9%), but the Latino/a-Chicano/a student population of the United States also includes Puerto Ricans (9.1%), Cubans (3.5%) and, in Los Angeles, a large percentage of Central Americans (4%), mostly Gualtemaltecos and Salvadoreños. Latino/a students comprise 41 percent of the student population in 10 of largest schools districts across the United States. Chicano/a-Latino/as students represent 30 percent to 50 percent of the student population in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas, and the Latino/a-Chicano/a student population is growing in Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Utah. The increase in the number of Latinos in the United States represents serious consequences for the future of the United States. We risk serious economic consequences as a nation, if we fail to educate our large and growing Latina/o-Chicano/a student population. And, according to UCLA (Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, 2010), in 2002, only 54 percent of Chicano/a-Latino/as students graduated from high school, and only 7 out of 100 enrolled in a four-year university. The social and political reality in this country is that class and race directly impact the amount of educational progress any student might attain. For the Latino/as and Chicano/a, it works something like this: The level of educational achievement attained by Latino parents directly influences the prospect of educational success for their children, the level of education received by the Latino/a children influences the opportunities for gainful employment opportunities, and employment influences economic stability. The result of this continued inequity is that Latino children grow up in crowded and/or substandard housing, have no medical insurance, and often live in unsafe communities. Even under these difficult conditions, Latino parents in the United States continue to believe that access to a quality education can guarantee their offspring the economic stability of which many could only dream. Many pursue this dream for their children while laboring under the worst working conditions, earning relatively low wages, with little or no opportunity for advancement. Paulo Freire (1973) once said that education was by its very nature a social, historical, and political construct and argued that teachers must be “fully cognizant of its political nature.” It is impossible to summarize the Chicana/o-Latino/a educational experience without a brief review of the impact the sociopolitical context has had on the attainment of an equitable education for Latino/a-Chicano/a students. As we suffer the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, our government has bailed out banks, corporations, and executive management. Hard times are threatening our California educational system and our children’s future. California public education was once celebrated around the world, but the ominous truth is that public education is already in deep trouble. This heavy burden

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threatens California’s future. Our schools are suffering from an unequal distribution of resources and misguided policies. And school districts like Los Angeles and Chicago form alliances with for-profit agencies and corporations whose only objective is to produce a succession of submissive and docile workers. Moreover, in cities like Los Angeles, those most affected by bad policies and practices are Chicano/as and Latino/as, who represent the majority of residents and students in the city of Los Angeles. Neoliberalism: The Obama Educational Agenda and in L.A. Schools Martinez and Garcia (2000) posit that neoliberalism’s intent is to replace public services with private enterprise. Neoliberals undermine public political participation and push to turnover public services, including schools, to privateers and wealthy corporations. Neoliberals work at eliminating concepts like the “public good,” reduce wages of unionized workers, and “deny protection to children, youth, women and the planet itself.” (p. 2). The freefall with respect to funding for public education, now ranking 47th in state spending, is an example of the state’s intent to reduce the funding for public services (Klein, 2009). The alliance, formed between the mayor, the school board, and Los Angeles’ corporate elite to design the idea of “public school choice,” is another example of how neoliberal economic policies have influenced educational policies. Hursh (2001) asserts “government and quasi governments seek to govern without specifying exactly what must be done, but by presenting requirements or standards as rationale” (p. 7). In the case of Los Angeles, elected officials use the rhetoric of social justice, closing the achievement gap and accountability to give away schools, create positivist educational measures, and bust unions. Neoliberals are notorious for changing the discourse on public education and for “buying off” elected officials. Politicians like Yolie Flores Aguilar are hired by the Gates foundation (Orlov, 2010), the mayor receives sizable donations from the Los Angeles business community, and the community’s schools are restructured to accommodate neoliberal interests. In 2009, California schools faced the worst funding crisis in years: $12 billion in cuts, class size increases, and the elimination of arts and music programs. More than 17,000 nurses, teachers, school librarians, and counselors lost their jobs in 2009 (Sanchez, 2010). When the Los Angeles School Board found itself faced with restrictive federal policies that labeled schools underperforming, and the promise of federal dollars under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RTTT), it voted 6-1 to draft and pass the Public School Choice Initiative. On August 25, 2009, almost 39 years after the Chicano Moratorium and 3 days after Governor Schwarzenegger proposed $2.4 billion

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more in cuts to K–12 education, Yolie Flores Aguilar, a Chicana school board member, decided to pass a proposal that would turn over one third of the school district to private operators, including charter school management groups and nonprofit organizations. The proposal was endorsed by L.A.’s Chicano mayor, who after failing to win a major power struggle to control L.A. schools was victorious in securing the election of Ms. Flores to the school board. In spite of the resistance by the United Teachers Los Angeles (2009), who referred to the proposal as “the Wal-Mart Zone of Choice” plan, the Los Angeles School Board, arguing that it must ensure “all students a high quality public education,” offered up more than 250 public schools and 50 new multimillion dollar schools built with public funds to special interest groups, charters, and private operators. The initiative was supported by charter school organizations like Green Dot, the Alliance for College Ready Schools, and parent groups like the Parent Revolution, a procharter school-parent organization. However, there were also many parents organizing against charter schools. According to Ms. Inouye (A. Inouye, personal communication, October 4, 2010), union activist and speech therapist: Even before the PSC initiative I remember the beginning of August in 2009. There was a meeting at a Catholic services building regarding Green Dot with Mayor Villaraigosa presenting. I went there with about 5 Garfield parents who also came saying they were against charter schools. I gave them the Stanford study, which  they were grateful for. None of us could get into the meeting because the Green Dot folks said we had to have reservations. We stood outside, talked with the media, and tried to listen to what was being said inside. Apparently there were parent meetings at Garfield, and these parents already had a strong position opposing the charters.

If not for pressure from the union, parents, and community activists, it is very likely that the PCS initiative could have resulted in a wholesale giveaway of schools. The final resolution allowed “school planning teams, local communities, pilot school operators, labor partners, charters and others who are interested in collaborating with the District” (Los Angeles City Board of Education, 2009) to develop operational and instructional plans. In response to those who argued that the District’s intent was aimed at privatization. In drafting the resolution, the District citing “the ideas present in No Child Left Behind” invited “internal and external stakeholders to submit plans to operate new schools” (Los Angeles City Board of Education, 2009, p.3). In response to an objection by the teachers union, the School Board and the Superintendent, eventually restricted submissions to non-profit, public organizations and established a workgroup to develop a set of guidelines and a process for submitting and evaluating proposals. The workgroup was composed of representatives of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Executive Secretary of Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO, the California Charter

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School Association, a designee of LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines, and their respective attorneys. The guidelines for the submission of proposals were eventually developed. The final guidelines would require those submitting proposals to establish provisions for admitting and retaining all neighborhood students and for personalizing the student learning environment. The guidelines also called for the development of student achievement plans that would prioritize instruction for the “academically challenged”, such as English-language learners and special-needs students. The School Board also directed the Superintendent to engage all bargaining units in LAUSD in a long-term discussion on future reform efforts. The proposed reform effort would include the “development of new in-District performance initiatives” (Los Angeles City Board of Education, 2009, p. 2), including a plan for revising the evaluation process of teachers. Submitted proposals would then be reviewed by a team of trained readers who would evaluate them against a template provided by the District. This group of evaluators would then recommend proposals to the Superintendent, who would, in turn, give his final recommendations to the Board. The rollout of the Public School Choice initiative (PSC) included outreach and education to the community, including a process for conducting an advisory vote in the communities surrounding the affected schools. However, the School Board would make the final determination and decide whether the school would remain a LAUSD governed school or be turned over to charter school operatives. United Teachers Los Angeles’ response to the PSC initiative was swift. In a memo issued the very next day to its members and the press UTLA, an “advocate for urgent, authentic, bottom-up school reform,” (United Teachers Los Angeles, 2009, p. 2) called on teachers to work with other members of the school to develop school reform plans that would empower all stakeholders. In the same memo, UTLA also issued demands for a strong oversight plan, adherence to collective bargaining agreements, and insisted the Superintendent be in charge of the process, as opposed to a “foundation hired hack” (United Teachers Los Angeles, 2009, p. 2). In a desperate attempt to save schools from the hands of charter school operatives, Los Angeles teachers began to write proposals (Knopp & Sun, 2010). UTLA and its affiliates, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers immediately began working with teachers and local school districts to design school plans such as the Esteban Torres Social Justice Academy and others. Saving the Public School: Resistance, Collaboration, and Action The move by the union to aggressively develop plans for school restructuring was a “stopgap” measure that shifted school control into the hands of

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public school teachers and their allies, and away from the private schools or charter management corporations. UTLA also asked their members to attend community meetings. Teachers, union staff, and community members engaged parents in conversations about the underlying reasons for the school reform plans and the importance of keeping the “public in public education.” At one point in the process, the District attempted to change the voting procedures so that parents would have to travel miles to cast their vote. The District’s plans were thwarted by an outcry from community activists and teachers, including the teacher’s union, which proclaimed that “in the interest of fairness, democracy and participation” the vote should take place at the affected school site (Duffy, 2010, p. 1). Chicano/a teachers and community activists like Carlos Montes, a Chicano movement activist and former political prisoner, coalesced with teachers to secure a democratic vote. The community meetings were chaotic. Many parents felt pressured by charter school advocates to vote for the charter school plan. According to Patricia Recinos, a parent and community activist, children as young as 5 were voting. Recinos described how she “had to go up to a couple of parents and ask them not to tell their children how to vote. Charter school operators were busing in parents and telling them how to vote and wanted to walk into the voting site to watch how they voted.” In the end, three quarters of the plans designed by public school parents, teachers, and administrators overwhelming won the community votes and the bidding process and became official pilot schools (United Teachers Los Angeles, 2010a, United Teachers Los Angeles, 2010b). But the attempt to give away public schools in Los Angeles was far from over. On May 24, 2010, LAUSD opened up eight more schools to the internal bidding process). This time the School Board indicated that outside charter management companies could not apply (Blume, 2010). The outside operators responded by suing the District. The struggle to keep schools in Los Angeles away from outside interests reflects the final passage of an article written by Stan Karp (2010), “until pressure from below forces a change in direction, the folks at the top will keep leading us over a cliff” (p. 53). What’s Next for the City of the Angels? California education was once celebrated around the world, but the ominous truth is that public education is in trouble. The response by the president and the Secretary of Education to the educational crisis has been to promote regressive neoliberal educational policies, including merit pay, charter schools, and discredited forms of “teacher/educator accountability” (Duncan, 2009). The Obama/Duncan policies represent a “formulated crisis” in U.S. public education, promoting education for the corporate

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good rather than the public good. Obama’s pillars of educational reform are part of a neoconservative political agenda of “marketized solutions,” dismantling public education and further privatizing education. On the other hand, the thirst for social justice that was a part of the fight for educational justice in the 1970s is returning to the streets of East Los Angeles, only this time, community activists and teachers are reacting to the neoliberal policies enacted by procharter, proprivatization forces. Chicano/a activists are, as they should be, in the forefront of the current movement. The term “Chicano/a” is more than an ethnic label; it is a political stance. Berta-Avila (2004) defined Chicana/o or Xicana/o as those who reflect a sociopolitical ideology and belief system that requires one to consciously resist hegemony and be grounded in critical pedagogy, a pedagogy of thought and action. The teachers and community activists at Esteban Torres High School are part of the collective resistance against those forces who pretend to work in our interests, but who in practice do not. In other words, this diverse group of teachers and activists are taking a critical stance. The establishment of the Esteban Torres Pilot School was a significant victory for L.A.’s teachers and parents. According to Ms. Inouye, teacher and community activist, teachers “are doing things they have never done before and are working really hard.” The principal of the performing arts school told Ms. Inouye that teaching at the new school is a dream come true, “she wanted to humanize schooling and is excited by the opportunity to do so” (A. Inouye, personal communication, October 4, 2010). The teachers at Social Justice Leadership Academy (one of the five pilot schools at the Esteban Torres High School site) are physically exhausted, “but so very happy.” The teachers report that that joy has been transferred to the students. Students come into class laughing, singing, and a sense community is developing.  According to Ms. Inouye, “the teachers feel that they will be developing little revolutionaries.” The struggle to defend public education will require Chicano/a movement activists, parents, and teachers to work together. This was the ideological stance that Chicano/a movement activists took in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is the stance we must take today. Accepting the label “Chicano/a” carries a personal responsibility to critically analyze the societal context in which Chicano/as or Latino/as live, to name the injustice imposed upon a marginalized community and to expose and reveal the history that lies behind the American façade, namely: The ravages of its [our] imperial expansionist genocide of the Native Americans; of the crushing of the lives of workers by the callous machinery of capitalists excessive; of wholesale subjugation of women, gay, lesbians; and, most especially and centrally the deeply anti-democratic and dehumanizing hypocrisies of white supremacy. (West, 2004, p. 13)

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Chicano/a movement activists must also assume a key role in exposing how neoliberalism destroys the public and social services in our communities, often the very services that Chicano activists worked so hard to build. The coalition of parents, Chicano/a community activists, and union members who successfully established the Esteban Torres Academies have proven the job of preparing tomorrow’s Latino students is everyone’s responsibility; however, the fight to protect public education is not limited to establishing one pilot school. The struggle for educational equity will require educational rights activist to continue fighting for the real and authentic accountability of public officials and schools. Teachers and community activists must establish genuine and equal parent-teacher-student partnerships, inform students and parents of their rights and responsibilities, institutionalize the dreams of the past and insert them into the plans of the future, and above all work hard to keep the public in public education! The Community Service Organization (CSO), under the leadership of Carlos Montes, is doing just that. In an effort to prevent the turnover of yet another public school to a charter organization, CSO called upon parents and community to build “a community movement to promote a free and equal public education for all in ELA!” CSO said no to “charter schools that are part of the attack of privatization on public education, public services and public workers” (CSOsite.org). As a Chicano/a educational activist, I have every confidence that the coalition of parents, teachers, and community activists in Los Angeles will work hard to provide Chicano/a-Latino/a students with the tools to become productive and active members of society. After all, the ultimate beneficiary of an educated community is the entire society. The fight for public education will also call for activists to expose the evils of neoliberalism and in doing so, we must challenged the conscious or unconscious roles that Chicano/a elected officials and some educational leaders play in promoting neoliberal policies. As a Chicana, I understand the need to seek political power. The attainment of power can translate into the ability to do more good for an oppressed community. But sometimes power leads to decision making that is based on whether or not you will personally lose individual power. So instead of making a decision based on what is just, instead of advancing a cause that is just, the focus becomes one of advancing a position of personal power. This type of decision making often calls for compromises that can lead to hopelessness. Many of us would not be where we are today if those who were active during the Chicano Moratorium had become hopeless. The idea that we need to compromise our beliefs to advance our personal positions will only lead to decisions that are harmful to the overall good, such as the case of the Los Angeles School Board attempting a massive school giveaway under the guise of public school choice. Along the path toward justice, we will always need to

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check ourselves—to make sure that our decisions are not advancing “just us,” but are promoting justice. Notes 1. Mexican folkloric or traditional dances. 2. An award winning Chicano journalist, Ruben Salazar was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Mexico City and Vietnam. After serving as a Times reporter, he worked at Spanish language station KMEX and continued to write a weekly column for the Times, documenting the Chicano/a experience. There are scholarships, schools, and parks named for him. In 2008, he was one of five U.S. journalists to be honored with a U.S. postage stamp. 3. The terms Latino/a and Chicano/a will be used interchangeably throughout this chapter. We use Chicano/a in a sociopolitical context to denote an individual of Mexican descent who is an activist in improving the social position of all Chicanos/as and who advocates for reclamation of his/her heritage and group-defined ethnic identity. We use Latino/a to encompass an ethnic group with origins in Latin American that is inclusive of Chicano/a. 4. The word movimiento is a Spanish term that refers to the Chicano/a social and political movement.

References Au, W. (2009). Obama, where art thou? Hoping for change in U.S. educational policy. Harvard Education Review, 79(2), 309–320. Berman, R., & Cusack, B. (2010, April 20). Dem to Obama: Push immigration or lose Latino voters at the pools. The Hill. Retrieved from http://thehill.com/ homenews/house/93183-dem-to-obama-push-immigration-or-ill-tell-latinovoters-to-stay-home Berta-Avila, M. I. (2004). Critical Xicana/Xicano educators: Is it enough to be a person of color? 
The High School Journal, 87(4), 66–79. Blume, H. (2010, May 24). Bidders can vie for eight schools, including L.A. high; Charter school law suit. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://latmesblogs. latimes.com/lanow/2010/05/bidders-can-vie-for-control-of-eight-schoolsincluding=la-high.html Brown, J., Gutstein, E., & Lipman, P. (2010). Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story: Myth or reality. Rethinking Schools Online. Retrieved from http://www. rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path=archive/23_03/arne233.shtml Cobble, S., & Velazquez, J. (2008). Obama’s Latino vote mandate. The Nation. Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com/article/obamas-latino-vote-mandate Commission on Civil Rights. (1974). Toward quality education for Mexican-Americans: Report VI: Mexican American education study. Washington DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Obama, Escucha! Estamos en la Lucha!     183 Darder, A. (1991). Culture and power in the classroom: A critical foundation for bicultural education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Duffy, A. J. (2010, January 13). Disenfrachising parents in the public school choice process. [Letter to L.A. School Board] Retrieved from http://www.utla.net/system/ files/UTLA_letter_2010_01_13.pdf Duncan, A. (2009, July 2). Remarks of the U.S. Secretary of Education to the National Education Association. San Diego, CA. Unpublished text. Duncan, A. (2010, March) Secretary Arne Duncan’s testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee on the Obama Administration Blueprint for Reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov.prin/news/speeches/2010/03/03172010/html Ed-Data. (2010). Students by ethnicity: Los Angeles Unified School District. 2008–2009. Retrieved from http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us/Navigation/fsTwoPanel.asp?b ottom=%2Fprofile%2Easp%3Flevel%3D06%26reportNumber%3D16 Freire, P. (1973). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gaynor, T. (2008, November 5). Latinos turn out in force for Obama: Exit poll. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4A49WO20081105 Hursh, D. (2001, October). Neo-liberalism and the control of teachers, students and learning: The rise of standards, standardization and accountability. Cultural logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice. Retrieved from http://clogic.eserver.org/4-1/hursh.html Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. (2010). California education report. Los Angeles: UCLA IDEA. Retrieved from http://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/ educational-opportunity-report/files-and-documents/Ed%20Op%20in%20 Hard%20Times.pdf Johnson, S. (2010, May 27). Arizona doesn’t care about blacks or anyone else in schools. New York Community Media Alliance. Retrieved from http://www.indypressny.org/nycma/voices/426/news/news/ Karp, S. (2010). School reform we can’t believe in. Rethinking schools, 24(3), 48–53. Knopp, S., & Sun, R. (2010, February 11). LA teachers take on charters. Socialist Worker. Retrieved from: http://socialistworker.org/print/2010/02/11/lateachers-take-on-charters Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York: Crown. Lipman, P. (2004). High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. New York: Routledge. Lipman, P., & Hursh, D. (2007). Renaissance 2010: The reassertion of ruling-class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago. Policy Futures in Education, 5(2), 160–178. Los Angeles City Board of Education. (2009, August 25). Public school choice: A new way in LAUSD. Los Angeles City Board of Education. Lopez, M. L. (2008, November 5). How Hispanics voted in the 2008 election. Retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1024/exit-poll-analysis-hispanics Martin, J. (2009, May 4). Inside Barack’s Hispanic strategy. Retrieved from http://www. politico.com/news/stories/0509/22510.html

184   T. MONTAÑO Martinez, E., & Garcia, A. (2000). What is neoliberalism? A brief definition for activists. Retrieved from http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/ neoliberalDefined.html Myslinski, M. M. (2010, March). Diane Ravitch speaks at Urban Issues conference. Retrieved from http://www.cta.org/Professional Development/Publications/ Educator-March-10/Education-scholar-Diane-Ravitch.aspx Moreno, I. (2008, November 10). In key states, Latino vote fueled Obama’s victory. The Free Library. Retrieved from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/In key states, Latino vote fueled Obama’s victory-a01611709815 National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO). (2008). 2008 Latino vote survey in key battleground states. Retrieved from http://www.naleo.org/ downloads/2008NALEO_Latino_Voter_Survey.pdf National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO). (2010). Latino vote a new force in shaping the election 2008 political map. Retrieved from http://www.naleo.org/pr11-07-08.html Obama, B. (2009, March). President Obama’s remarks to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.2009/01/10/us/politics/10text-obama.html Orlov, R. (2010, October 7). L.A. mayor praises work of Yolie Flores Aguilar. Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_15246107 Ortega, C. F. (2007). Introduction-Chicano studies as a discipline. In D. J. BixlerMárquez, C. F. Ortega, & R. Solorzano Torres (Eds.), Chicana/o studies survey and analysis (3rd ed., pp. vii–xv). Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Pew Hispanic Center. (2008, October 23). Latinos count for half of U.S. population growth since 2000. Retrieved from: http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report. php?ReportID=96 Preston, J. (2008, November 6). In big shift, Latino vote was heavily for Obama. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/ us/politics/07latino.html Preston, J. (2010, May 28). A potential Obama ally becomes an outspoken foe on immigration. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes. com/2010/05/29/us/politics/29gutierrez.html Prevatt, C. (2009, August 16). The shock doctrine hits public education. The liberal OC. Retrieved from http://www.theliberaloc.com/2009/08/16/the-shockdoctrine-hits-public-education/ Rodriquez, R. (1996). A resurgence of the Chicano/Chicana movement. Retrieved from http://www.jsri.msu.edu/RandS/research/ops/oc07.html#anchor735698 Rodriquez, R. (2010, May 3). Roberto Rodriguez: Anatomy of apartheid II. Retrieved from http://censored-news.blogspot.com/2010/05/roberto-rodriguez-anatomy-of-arizona.html Sanchez, D. (2010, March 4). Speech delivered at rally. Long Beach, CA. United Teachers Los Angeles. (2009). Public School Choice Resolution Q & A. Retrieved from: http://www.utla.net/node/2494 U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). State and county quickfacts. Retrieved from http: http:// quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0644000.html

Obama, Escucha! Estamos en la Lucha!     185 West, C. (2004) Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism. New York: Penguin. Wilgroren, D. (2010, April 29). Obama: “There may not be an appetite” to tackle immigration reform this year. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/29/ AR2010042901003_pf.html William C. Velasquez Institute. (2008, November). 2008 WCVI exit poll results. Retrieved from http://www.wcvi.org/latino_voter_research/polls/national/ 2008/2008exitpoll.html

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Chapter 9

Standardized Teacher Performance Assessment Obama/Duncan’s Quick Fix for What They Think it is That Ails Us Ann Berlak

Introduction The United States is in crisis: the economy in shambles, the safety net shredded, economic inequality greater than at any time since the years preceding the Great Depression, and it is unclear to what extent the destruction of the environment can be undone. These are real crises. At the same time, we are beset by manufactured crises that have become public obsessions. Among them, and of particular concern for those who believe there is still hope for democracy and public schooling, is the pervasive and obsessive fear, conveyed and magnified by corporate-dominated media, that the United States is losing its premiere place in the global economy. The opinion leaders of the corporatocracy have constructed as commonsense the beliefs that this loss of position can be attributed to failing public schools and that higher “standards” and more “accountability” will save us. The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 187–209 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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By now, we are all too familiar with the disasters wrought by K–12 standardized testing. In this chapter, I will explore the Obama/Duncan plan to impose a high-stakes regime of standards and accountability upon teachercredentialing programs. The mechanism Obama/Duncan plan to use for this purpose is a particular assessment instrument called PACT—Performance Assessment of California Teachers. PACT has been widely used as a high-stakes exit exam for credential candidates in California for the past few years and will soon be going national (Sawchuk, 2010). I will argue that PACT is an invalid and unreliable assessment instrument that, like K–12 high-stakes tests, promotes corporate and other neoliberal interests, not the interests of a viable and vibrant democracy. My argument is based upon personal observation and informal interviews with teacher-education faculty at five California State Universities. In an October 22, 2009, speech to teacher educators at Teachers College, Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, declared that the supreme purpose of public schooling is to keep America competitive. Punctuating his speech with military and corporate metaphors, Duncan identified failing schools as the source of the decline of our standing in the world order. But behind failing schools is, he told his audience, another culprit. The institutions that prepare teachers “are doing a mediocre job.” Duncan proclaimed that revolutionary change in—not evolutionary tinkering with—teacher education was necessary to solve the problems facing U.S. society and U.S. schools. Toward the end of his speech, he declared that a standardized performance-based exit exam that would measure both prospective teachers’ competence to teach and the quality of the credential programs that get them “classroom-ready” was key to bringing about this change. Teacher credential programs whose candidates score well on the exam would be rewarded, while programs whose students do not would be subject to punitive sanctions. Part of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top funds would provide resources and incentives to construct and promote these assessments. As furor raged one year later over assessing teacher quality in terms of students’ test scores (Economic Policy Institute, 2010), Education Week announced that 19 states are piloting PACT, and that it was likely to become a common prelicensing measure for new teachers across the United States (Sawchuk, 2010). Duncan’s plan to reform teacher education via an additional tier of highstakes testing for the ultimate purpose of promoting U.S. competitiveness is a recent manifestation of the transformation of public education that has proceeded under the twin banners of “standards” and “accountability” to profoundly affect all aspects of schooling over recent decades. It is both a permutation and an intensification of what has been labeled audit culture. In audit culture, professional judgment and wisdom are replaced by measurable and supposedly neutral, a-political quantifiable “scientific” processes for establishing objective truths (Taubman, 2010, pp. 86–89). The audit practices, and the beliefs and discourses that accompany them, have

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been culled from the world of business for the purpose of surveillance and control in order to serve the interests of the corporatocracy. Though the auditing practices promise objectivity and predictability, they, in fact, promote the tenets of neoliberalism, replacing the social values of democracy, equity, “the public good,” and “community” with competition, “individual responsibility,” and upward individual economic mobility (the promise of cashing in knowledge for jobs). Audit culture takes for granted the need for corporate, top-down management, a position advocated and supported by virtually every major corporate think tank and exemplar of venture philanthropy (Saltman, 2009) or philanthro-capitalism (Hinchey & Cadiero-Kaplan, 2005) including the Heritage Foundation; the Business Roundtable; and the Broad, Gates, and Walton Family foundations. The audit practices of the Obama/Duncan era are variations and extensions of processes characteristic of previous administrations, but under Obama/Duncan they are advancing at remarkable speed, metastasizing at federal, state, and local levels (Taubman, 2010, p. 12). Though many policymakers, teachers, and teacher educators now see that K–12 standardized testing is a failed policy, it is not widely recognized that all forms of standardized testing, including standardized high-stakes performance assessments like PACT, and the audit culture they sustain contribute significantly to the crises they purport to mitigate. It is, therefore, not surprising that state and national politicians and policymakers at all levels endorse expensive, time-consuming teacher performance assessments of no proven value in further pursuit of improving K–12 schools at a time when virtually every social program across the country is being slashed, and school districts are passing out pink slips and raising class size; nor is it surprising that the impending consequences of state and national exit exams for credential candidates remain below the radar of most teacher educators. Near the end of his Teachers College speech, Duncan named PACT as the particular high-stakes exit exam he had in mind for assessing teachingcredential programs and credential candidates. Few listening to Duncan’s speech had heard of PACT, though it had already been used for several years as an exit exam by many teacher-credential programs in California. I have written the following account of how PACT, a manifestation of the audit culture, played out in several credential programs in the hope that other teacher-education programs might learn from and not replicate our experience. The Missing Link in the Neoliberal Agenda for Schooling In 1998, the California Legislature passed a law requiring teacher-credential candidates to pass a state-approved exam in order to receive a credential. The legislation, an unfunded mandate, snuck in under the radar as part

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of an omnibus education bill; neither the implications of this assessment nor the issue of funding it were debated or even raised. Many credential programs in California, including one at the state university where I teach in the elementary education program, chose PACT, devised by selected members of the education faculties at Stanford University, Mills, most of the Universities of California, and two State Universities over CalTPA, an assessment system designed by the state in consultation with the Educational Testing Service. Evidently, our College of Education chose PACT because it purported to be an assessment of performance—qualitative, not quantitative—and to assess “authentic” teaching performance (Pecheone & Chung, 2006, pp. 22–23) using evidence from actual teaching practice (p. 23). Pecheone and Chung, major participants in the creation of PACT and, along with Linda Darling-Hammond, its major researchers, claimed that PACT could provide the crucial link in the chain of evidence connecting the classroom performance of credential candidates at the end of their credential programs to the “achievement” of the pupils of these candidates in their first year of teaching. They also believed that PACT could be used to assess the quality of credential programs in terms of their effects on learning outcomes specified and valued by state authorities (Pecheone & Chung, 2006, p. 23; see also Darling-Hammond, 2006a). Like all the other states, California already had a complex and comprehensive state-approved accountability system for teacher education including an elaborate set of state-mandated entrance and exit assessments, including the C-BEST (a test of basic literacy—reading, writing, and mathematics), C-SET (a standardized test of content knowledge), RICA (a test of knowledge about teaching reading), student teaching supervision, and GPA requirements. Our programs were also assessed by an increasingly prescriptive NCATE (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education), a national accrediting body that imposes an entirely separate assessment system. PACT added another layer to these systems of assessment. It is well known that each additional test throws up yet another hurdle that disproportionately affects people of color and those for whom English is not their first language. How PACT Works PACT assesses two types of performance: the Teaching Event (TE) and embedded signature assignments. The signature assignments are course assignments that faculty members are required to implement and score according to PACT-designated and state-approved criteria. (This is a clear intrusion into institutions’ and faculty members’ prerogative to set their

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own criteria for assessing students’ coursework.) I will focus on the TE, a 15-minute videotaped lesson taught by candidates during their final semester of student teaching accompanied by a portfolio of approximately 50 pages of teaching plans, teaching artifacts, student work samples, written reflections, and commentaries related to the TE. The guidelines and the more than 50 prompts specifying the elements of the portfolio are laid out in detail in a student handbook. Students enter the TE data (including the video) into a computer program. The specifications for the Teaching Event are available online (pacttpa.org); readers should access them to appreciate what completing the TE involves. To say that preparing the Teaching Event consumes an inordinate amount of time and psychic energy is a serious understatement. Scorers, trained by official state-approved PACT trainers in two day-long sessions and then “calibrated” annually to assure scorer consistency, assess the TE video and accompanying documentation using a series of standardized rubrics. Faculty members are not considered qualified to do PACT assessments unless they have been approved by PACT-certified trainers. After the rubric scores for the signature assignments and the TEs are submitted, a computer program transforms them into numbers that purport to represent the effectiveness of individual credential candidates, and these are forwarded to the state. Thus, in the end, this is a quantitative, not a qualitative, assessment. If the submitted numbers are at or above the cut score, the candidates will have fulfilled the PACT criteria for earning a credential. The scorers are anonymous and must not personally know the candidates they are scoring. Though all scorers have backgrounds in teaching, those assessing multiple subject candidates do not necessarily have particular expertise in areas they will be assessing (e.g., second-language acquisition or teaching mathematics). Since remuneration is a central motive for engaging in the tedious, highly regulated scoring task, and those scorers who are paid are paid per head, there is an incentive to score as rapidly as possible. A faculty member at one California state university wrote: Our faculty do not want to be involved in scoring the PACT teaching events, as it is very time consuming and tedious. We may be moving to a process that is almost exclusively scored by persons who know little about and who do not teach in our program. This is very troubling. I see institutions “farming out” the assessment of PACT to regional centers to cut costs and to score the huge numbers of events that will need to be scored. In short, PACT seems to violate everything we know about designing assessment. What kind of assessment have we created that faculty who teach in the program do not want to score?

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Is PACT a Valid and Reliable (Scientific) Way to Identify Quality Credential Programs and Quality Teaching? Pecheone and Chung, major authors and researchers of PACT, express expectations for the role PACT will play in establishing the chain of evidence between credential candidates’ classroom behaviors and students’ achievement as follows: [A] longitudinal study of the predictive validity of the PACT assessment is currently being planned. Credentialed teachers who have completed the PACT will be followed into their 1st years of teaching to examine . . . the relationship . . . of their scores on the PACT assessment with their students’ achievement gains. If it can be shown that performance (on PACT) . . . significantly correlates with student learning, . . . then PACT would have a compelling evidence base to support [its] . . . use to credential prospective teachers. (Pecheone & Chung, 2006, p. 33)

Is PACT a useful evidence-based “scientific” instrument for assessing credential programs and assessing and predicting teacher effectiveness, one that should be added to the audit society arsenal? Are candidates’ aggregated mean scores on PACT a useful, reliable, and valid basis for conducting internal and external reviews of programs, course development, and accreditation as Pecheone and Chung (2006, p. 25) claim? Is PACT a Valid Measure? An assessment instrument is valid to the extent that it accurately and fairly assesses the concept, idea, performance activity, or belief it claims to assess. In the case of PACT, this means that PACT scores assigned to candidates by trained raters represent the degree of the candidate’s future effectiveness as a teacher. The online PACT brochure proclaims, “A candidate who passes this assessment has shown he or she is a better prepared teacher who can help (K–12) students succeed.” What do the PACT authors mean by “succeed” and by “better prepared? ” Better prepared than whom and for what? In order to decide if PACT scores are valid representations of effective teaching, we first need a common idea of what effective teaching is. According to Linda Darling-Hammond, a lead researcher and proponent of PACT, such agreement is not problematic. She writes, “The question (of what teachers should know and be able to do) is easier to address than it once was because . . . [there are] now performance-based standards developed during the past decade . . . for beginning teacher licensing that have been adapted

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or adopted in more than thirty states and reflect a consensual, researchgrounded view” (Darling-Hammond, 2006b, p. 123). Thus, PACT purports to put an end to the cacophony of voices about the definition of good teaching and to provide the various stakeholders with a common tool for making rational cost-effective decisions and holding credential programs and prospective teachers accountable. The claim that there is a consensual view of effective teaching is questionable at best—defining quality always involves value judgments. Conceptions of effective teachers are inseparable from, and as highly politicized as, conceptions of a good society, and disagreements about the qualities of a good teacher, like disagreements over what makes a good society, do and should abound. What notion of good teaching is implicit in the PACT? In his Teacher College address Duncan proposed to “reward states that publicly report and link student achievement data to the institutions and programs where teachers and principals were credentialed,” and advocates “longitudinal data systems that enable states to track and compare the impact of new teachers from (various) teacher preparation programs on student achievement over a period of years” (Duncan, 2009). Since the quantity of K–12 student achievement data and the longitudinal data systems Duncan refers to are inconceivable apart from students’ standardized test scores, and programs and institutions are to be rewarded in terms of such “achievement,” apparently the notion of good teaching implicit in PACT is teaching that produces impact on students, measured in terms of scores on standardized tests. It goes without saying that there is a vast and well-respected literature that challenges the identification of standardized test scores with knowledge or learning (see the report of the Economic Policy Institute, 2010). The assumption that PACT scores will correlate with degrees of student achievement suggests that these scores serve a signaling as well as a screening function. A test’s screening function is intended to prevent incompetent teachers from entering the workforce. This is the “high stakes” aspect. The signaling function assesses whether a teacher’s score on the test offers a valid prediction of student learning (Goldhaber & Hansen, 2010, p. 220). The rubrics or criteria used to assign PACT scores are supposed to capture elements of teaching that are believed to have been identified through scientific research as behaviors that enable students to reach state standards as measured by standardized tests—primarily aspects of explicit, systematic, direct instruction, as exemplified below in Figure 9.1. These include such criteria as to what extent teachers’ objectives are multidimensional and complex, and also have a central focus. The rubrics do not assess teachers’ perseverance, readiness or abilities to think on their feet, establish trusting relationsips (Nieto, 2005), hear and respond to feedback, learn from experience, or promote student self-confidence and critical thinking. Note

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also that empathy, enthusiasm, fairness, respect, commitment, and other so-called dispositions have no place in PACT’s conception of the effective teacher. Though ways of responding to language differences is central to PACT, teachers’ responses to race and racism, and social class and classism (and of course gender and sexism) are not assessed. Nor does PACT take into account opportunity to learn standards that identify factors beyond teachers’ control, which affect their abilities to teach what is measured by standardized tests. In sum, PACT buffers the auditors from considering important aspects of the complexity of teaching. Fundamental to PACT is the belief that PACT is a valid, scientific instrument that produces verifiable, objective and generalizable truths that are not affected by researchers’ preconceptions, beliefs, hopes, and biases, nor by the social and political context in which the research occurs. Taking PACT scores seriously also requires three additional beliefs about science widely held in Western societies: that research is most dependable if it produces quantifiable evidence, that research findings can be applied to practice, and that processes like teaching can be best assessed by looking at (assessing) their discrete observable elements (each element ideally represented in terms of a numerical score). This is the notion that the whole can be understood as the sum of its parts. Teacher educators and educational policy writers and researchers recycle and reproduce the illusion that PACT and other elements of the audit culture reveal unbiased objective truths by seamlessly stitching terms like evidence-based, data-driven, best practices, outcomes-based, value-added, and scientific rigor into the language and logic of educational discourse (Cochran-Smith, 2005, p. 4). The use of the term achievement as shorthand for standardized test scores is a familiar example of how this process of mystification occurs. Though such concepts of scientific truth and objectivity have long been challenged by the understanding that we inevitably perceive “evidence” through lenses shaped by what we have learned to see and value, and by awareness that scientific measurements do not yield precise, quantifiable readings of human relationships and institutions, the trappings of “scientific research”—the cut scores, calibrations, and rubrics—remain invested with meaning that sustains what Stephen Colbert terms “truthiness,” the triumph of gut-level ideology over facts. Though during his campaign, Obama was adept at identifying the Bush administration’s failure to use research responsibly, apparently he believes that educational research, including research on teacher evaluation, has produced dependable knowledge of “what works” (Weiner, 2009). Supporters of PACT seem unaware that measurement of a teacher’s success in promoting learning is so fraught with psychometric problems and the limits of causal models so great (given the preponderance of interaction effects), that no current assessment system can do the job (Berliner, 2005, p, 30). Nowhere in the research and

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commentary supporting PACT is there a hint that the traditional conceptions of social scientific research are contested. Consider how the form of bias hidden in the requirement that credential candidates demonstrate their evaluation skills by evaluating student learning during the 1-week period of the TE can skew the concept of effective teaching. Evaluating candidates’ assessment skills within this time frame in effect requires candidates to assess relatively simple and molecular objectives that can be taught and assessed within a week; in the time frame provided by the TE, it is not possible to ascertain how well the candidate assesses more complex and long-term goals, such as the development of mutual respect between Asian and Latino students, or the growth of a student’s sense of agency. A different source of bias regarding effective teaching is implicit in the requirement to list the content standards that are the target of student learning in the TE (“List the complete text of the relevant parts of each standard”—TPE 1). Nowhere are candidates asked to critically evaluate the standards themselves. Since there is no mention of racism, poverty, sexism, or income inequalities in the state content standards, nor any alternative to the view that U.S. foreign policy might be motivated by reasons other than humanitarianism, PACT is corralling teacher educators, PACT assessors, and credential candidates into a singular and narrow conception of good teaching and the good society to which a critical understanding of social and political inequalities and the political arrangements that sustain them are peripheral (Sleeter, 2003). Perhaps this can be illuminated by imagining what criteria for assessing teacher effectiveness would be chosen by an alliance of teachers and poor parents whose primary and overriding goal is to reduce race and class inequalities in schools and society. Pecheone and Chung (2006) acknowledge that as a group, candidates teaching in the suburbs get higher PACT scores than those who teach in “inner cities.” In doing so, they acknowledge that candidates’ scores are affected by the social context in which they teach, not only by the individual’s or program’s qualities. One of the sources of this bias may be that the PACT definition of a good teacher marginalizes qualities that are essential for successfully teaching children who, for example, are homeless or arrive at school hungry. The PACT conception of an effective teacher may be “color blind” or “class blind” in a way that actually weights assessments in favor of suburban teachers. Does PACT Measure Authentic Performance? PACT supporters claim that PACT’s value is that it assesses teaching performance rather than teacher knowledge about teaching. Performance as-

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sessments are intended to enable assessors to make valid judgments about what credential candidates can do in situations that matter. There are a number of reasons to question the validity of making inferences about candidates’ performance skills from observing a 15-minute video of the TE. Many credential candidates themselves argue that the video-recorded Teaching Event does not represent their real teaching (“Not to mention,” a teacher educator writes, “that the quality of the videos is often poor, unless we spend hours training students video skills.”). Several candidates reported that during the TE, they were preoccupied with keeping in mind all the rubrics the assessor would be bringing to bear on the 15-minute performance, and whether the camera was picking up their students’ voices. In addition, some credential candidates might be highly anxious about being videotaped, particularly since they know the tape will be assessed by a stranger, to whose questions and concerns they will be unable to respond. It is, therefore, not surprising that many students elect to plan lessons that simply reveal their mastery of the rubrics but do not demonstrate their capacity to teach more complex concepts and ideas or skills, or handle student-to-student interaction or dialogue The TE is not a “normal” lesson for the children, either. Those who are videoed must have written permission from their parents, and in at least one case, normal seating arrangements were changed to make sure students who had not been given permission were at the periphery. The children might have been prompted to be on their best behavior or promised rewards for behaving well. The lesson might take place when the most difficult to manage children are out of the room. One credential candidate reported that he was encouraged to teach his PACT lesson for practice the day before the videotaping. Two documents on the PACT Web site—the Bias Review Handout and the Teaching Event Authenticity Form documenting that the candidate is the sole author of the teacher commentaries and that appropriate citations have been made for all materials used in the Teaching Event—suggest that, as is the case in K–12 testing, Campbell’s law might be operating. Campbell’s law states: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor” (Nichols & Berliner, 2007, p. 26–27). Because of PACT timeline logistics, students usually complete lesson plans for the TE weeks before they teach it, thus discouraging contingent and learner-centered instruction. One student told me: I spent about 15 hours writing about the lesson I was going to videotape, citing resources, spouting theory, explaining my best practices, and then the first stormy day of the year threw everything off track. It started hailing, the kids

Standardized Teacher Performance Assessment    197 ran to the windows as branches came crashing down and garbage whipped the windows. I had never planned so hard for a lesson in all my life, and I had never had one go that badly. It went badly because no matter how much you plan, a lot of teaching happens in the moment. A huge part of teaching, especially for beginning teachers, is finding that feeling in your gut that says “step in now!” or “sudden change of plans!”

Though Pecheone and Chung claim that PACT encourages and captures a unified and integrated learning sequence, it is expected that “the focus of the PACT assessments (be) . . . on candidates’ application of subject-specific pedagogical knowledge that research finds to be associated with successful teaching” (Pecheone & Chung, 2006, p. 23). This appears to mean that each lesson must “apply theory to practice.” PACT candidates must cite the “best practices” that validate their lesson plans as part of their TE. However, even in medicine (arguably a “harder” science than education), after 2 years, more than a quarter of evidence-based conclusions are contradicted by new data, and nearly half of the best practices are overturned at 5 years; some of the guidelines in the LEARN Act, which stipulates that scientifically valid research must be used by people receiving education funds from the government, were overturned even before the Act was written (Ohanian, 2009). Yet it is incumbent upon credential candidates to anticipate which research the anonymous assessors will count as scientific. It is no news that practitioners do not normally alter specific lessons on the basis of research findings, and that there has long been a vigorous debate about the relation of theory to teaching practice. The Use of Rubrics and the Reliability of PACT Assessments The purpose of the 2-day training of PACT assessors is to standardize assessors’ ratings of candidates, to assure that the ratings are unbiased, objective, and reliable. Assessors are expected to use rubrics—sets of standardized criteria—to achieve reliability. Each rubric formulates one of a set of checklists that, taken together, represent what the authors of the rubrics assume is the essential “knowledge base” of teaching. Does the use of rubrics increase PACT’s reliability? Let us look at just one of the eleven rubrics for assessing the knowledge base of elementary literacy. The concept knowledge base is divided into four domains: planning, teaching, assessing, and reflection. Each of these four domains is assessed on a minimum of two rubrics. Figure 9.1 is an example of one of the rubrics for planning. To achieve test-scoring consistency or reliability, PACT assessors are trained (calibrated) to make similar if not identical inferences from their

Both learning tasks and the set of assessment tasks focus on multiple dimensions of history/social science learning through clear connections among facts, concepts, interpretations, and judgments about a topic in history or social science. A progression of learning tasks and assessments guides students to build deep understandings of the central focus of the learning segment.

Learning tasks or the set of assessment tasks focus on multiple dimensions of history/social science learning through clear connections among facts, concepts, interpretations, and judgments about a topic in history or social science. A progression of learning tasks and assessments is planned to build understanding of the central focus of the learning segment.

The standards, learning objectives, learning tasks, and assessments have an overall focus that is primarily one-dimensional (e.g., learning facts or a singular interpretation of a topic in history/social science). The focus provides students an opportunity to use facts and concepts to make interpretations or judgments about a topic in history or social science.

The standards, learning objectives, learning tasks, and assessments either have no central focus or a onedimensional focus (e.g., solely on facts or planning activities that do not engage students in the use of analytic reasoning skills).

Figure 9.1  Planning establishing a balanced instructional focus

Level 4

Level 3

Level 2

Level 1

EH1: How do the plans structure student learning of developmentally appropriate analytic reasoning skills in history or social science? (TPEs 1, 4, 9)

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observations as the basis for assigning scores on each of the rubrics. When calculating a single score on the rubric “Establishing a balanced instructional focus,” each rater must make inferences about at least three separate skills: the ability to “focus on multiple dimensions of history/social science learning,” to “make clear connections between concepts,” and to plan a “progression” of the concepts. Notice that each scorer must individually decide how heavily to weigh each of these skills. Given the complexity of rating just this single rubric, it is no surprise that the reliability (inter-rater agreement) is in fact much lower than the 91 percent Pecheone and Chung claim (2006, p. 30). In order to get 91 percent agreement, Pecheone and Chung had to say that agreement exists when assigned scores are the same or within PLUS OR MINUS 1 point. On a 4-point scale, a 1 point difference is in fact quite significant. If you have only 4 possible scores you must have an exact match in order for there to be meaningful agreement. If you take out the PLUS OR MINUS 1, then the inter-rater agreement falls to 56 percent, which is not much better than flipping a coin. Pecheone and Chung’s research indicates a strong level of agreement between scorers’ assessments of the TE and holistic judgments by faculty and supervisors, and claim that this data confirms the validity of the TE scoring (2006, p. 31). They do not, however, address the question of what value the TE scoring process adds (see Oyler, 2010). There is no evidence that this time-consuming, unwieldy, unreliable, and invalid assessment process is superior to the clinical supervision and evaluation of candidates that was in place before the advent of PACT. Though most candidates pass PACT, there seems to be a small percentage who fail and are, therefore, unable to be credentialed even though they are deemed qualified by their student teaching supervisors, course instructors, and cooperating teachers. Though the use of rubrics takes for granted that the rater-assigned numbers for each rubric can be used to compute a valid as well as reliable measure of how good or effective the teaching is, in fact, the score only identifies the candidates’ degree of compliance with the criteria in the rubric, criteria that have been established by particular human beings who, like the rest of us, have preferences for and biases about the qualities of effective teaching. Many critics of using rubrics to assess writing and other forms of creative or artistic expression share the view that high scores based upon assessments using rubrics do not mean that the product or process is necessarily good (See Kohn, 2006; Mabry, 1999). They argue that rubric assessments cannot take into consideration the fact that the whole may be more than the sum of its parts. Nor can assessors acknowledge teaching attributes and actions they might deem as valuable but have been “calibrated” to ignore. Almost all of the attributes assessed by the rubrics—e.g., planning a progression of learning tasks, establishing a balanced instructional focus—are important components of good teaching. However, if we know anything for

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certain about the effects of standardized testing, it’s that what’s not tested is unlikely to be taught. So what is not assessed by PACT? PACT does not assess most of the qualities that Duncan himself in his Teacher’s College speech lists as attributes of great teachers—teachers who “can literally change the course of a student’s life . . . light a lifelong curiosity, (promote) a desire to participate in a democracy, instill a thirst for knowledge, reduce inequality and fight daily for social justice” (Duncan, 2009). Hierarchy and Power: Pact’s Effect on Teaching Candidates and Upon Teacher Education If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals—rats and monkeys, for example—that are forced into subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming “depressed” in humanlike ways.  Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains.  And—what is especially relevant here—they avoid fighting even in self-defense. (Ehrenreich, 2001, pp. 210–211)

The 1998 law requiring state-approved exit exams for credential candidates signified a definitive and substantial transfer of audit power over teacher education from university-based teacher educators (already held accountable by the state through a number of assessment mechanisms) to the state and federal governments and their agents. Though not immediately apparent, the effects of diminished autonomy, authority, and power upon teacher education programs and teacher educators and their students resembled in a number of ways the effects of subordination Barbara Ehrenreich described in the quotation above. California originally delegated the power to construct the assessments to ETS (Educational Testing Service), the world’s largest private producer of educational tests. However, the state declared that any accredited institution could construct its own Teacher Performance Assessment, based, of course, on the California Teacher Performance Expectations and meeting the state’s standards for reliability and validity. Though on the face of it the opportunity for each credential program to write its own TPA appears quite egalitarian, the results were exceedingly hierarchical. Because it takes considerable time and money to construct an instrument that would be approved by the state, only foundation-supported and well-connected universities—Stanford and the Universities or UCs—had the resources to di-

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rect, construct, and field-test their own Teacher Performance Assessments. Pecheone and Chung state this clearly: “The cost of developing PACT could not have been accomplished without . . . financial support from the University of California Office of the President and corporate funded foundations,” and thank the Morgan Family Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation in their first published article touting PACT’s validity (2006, p. 33). CSU Dominguez Hills, which as a state university had fewer resources than the UCs, attempted to write its own Teacher Performance Assessment in pursuit of “an elegant and rich assessment system,” but after 3 years decided to join PACT “in order to ameliorate the costs associated with an independently designed system” (Russell, 2006). Those who constructed the rubrics and trained the calibrators operationalized the definition of good teaching implicit in the Teacher Performance Standards PACT was intended to assess. The important task of creating the rubrics was undertaken by selected faculty and doctoral students, primarily from the high-status UCs and prestigious private universities, and their appointees who shared foundation-funders’ views of scientific research and of the qualities of effective teachers. If the views of those in leadership and those who did the work of constructing and defending the overall approach and the details of PACT had diverged too much from those of their funders or had failed to understand science and scientific research the way the funders did, they would not have been given the opportunity to create and research PACT in the first place, or would soon have been replaced. Linda Darling-Hammond was PACT’s primary contact in the Carnegie Foundation and originally PACT’s principle investigator (in his Teacher College speech, Duncan calls her “PACT’s pioneer”). As recipient of foundation funds, she and her colleagues were entitled, as she put it, “to play a special role in developing (educational) leaders who have sophisticated knowledge of teaching and are prepared not only to practice effectively in the classroom but also to take into account the bigger picture of schools and schooling (Darling-Hammond, 2006b, p. 122). How the Encroaching Audit Culture Affected Credential Candidates Because PACT is an unfunded mandate, credentialing institutions must pay for the video equipment and the costs of administering and scoring the assessments. (In the Teachers College speech, Duncan actually claimed that America’s taxpayers already “generously support” teacher preparation programs, but this is certainly not true of ours and many other institutions across the U.S.) Money that could have been spent on supervision (and on stipends to cooperating teachers) instead was spent administering PACT

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and paying scorers. Since students receive no feedback from PACT assessments unless they do not pass (and very little useful feedback at that), the time and money spent on PACT decreases candidates’ opportunities to engage in the reflective dialogue with experienced practitioners about their teaching, which is central to learning to teach. An informal survey revealed that most of the students in elementary credential programs at our university and at least four other California State Universities found PACT a serious and significant distraction from their coursework and student teaching, creating unnecessary anxiety and exhaustion as they tried to satisfy the requirements of what they perceived as repetitive, bureaucratized tasks. The first half of student teaching in the final semester came to focus on preparing for the Teaching Event, to the consternation of many student teaching supervisors, master teachers, and the candidates themselves. Some students were absent from student teaching in order to complete the PACT documentation. One student told me, “I wasn’t really able to take student teaching seriously until I’d completed the Teaching Event.” A systematic interview study of responses of credential candidates at the University of California-Davis (Okhremtchouck, et. al., 2009) revealed that the vast majority of them had overwhelmingly negative feelings about PACT, citing excessive writing demands, the stress of assembling portfolios at the same time as student teaching, and the toll it took on their health and personal relationships. The students found PACT minimally helpful regarding classroom management and instructional strategies. Most of the credential candidates’ responses to PACT cited on the official PACT Web site are positive. When evaluating the significance of such self-reports, it is important to know students’ points of comparison. Perhaps the students might have preferred the credential programs offered prior to the introduction of PACT, of which they had no knowledge. An analogy would be to factory workers who worked in teams to build entire automobiles, until the option to work in teams disappeared with the introduction of the assembly line. It took just two generations for workers to lose memory of the experience of building an automobile together, and come to accept the assembly line as “the way it is” (Braverman, 1998). Like the assemblyline workers, some prospective teachers may be content with PACT because they have had no opportunity to experience or envision an alternative. PACT normalized the idea that the teacher’s role is to execute the goals and objectives of others. Many students engaged in what has been called “bureaucratic ventriloquism: an inauthentic response so markedly detached from the individual’s own beliefs, that the utterances themselves appear to be projected from elsewhere (Rennert-Ariev, 2008, p. 111). As one talented candidate expressed it, “The teaching for PACT wasn’t coming from me.” A core curricular message of PACT was that authentic intellectual engage-

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ment is less important than superficial demonstrations of compliance with external forms of accountability. This was conveyed both by the detailed and specified requirements of the TE and through the hidden curriculum of hierarchy that was evident in the faculty’s inability to teach a curriculum they believed in. A student who graduated in December 2009, wrote: I tried not to let myself question PACT’s usefulness while going through it because it would just make me angry and no matter what, I would still have to do it. It was easier to just put the question of PACT’s usefulness out of my mind and write, and write, and write, all of what would have been 50 hardcopy pages had I printed it out. . . . To me PACT was just another hoop I had to jump through in order to get my teaching credential. Viewed in the most positive light: jumping through hoops is a useful life skill, especially if I plan on working for the state for the next 35 years.

When this student read an early draft of this chapter, which included the above reference to assembly-line workers, she responded, “I guess I was one of those assembly-line workers two generations down the line.” It was difficult to encourage students to consider working to counteract oppressive structures in their schools and districts when they saw how powerless faculty were to affect systemic change in ours. Effects of the Encroaching Audit Culture on Teacher Education and Teacher Educators Like the frog in slowly heating water that offers no resistance and eventually is boiled, it was not until our department had been subjected to PACT for several years that our faculty began to recognize the effect it was having on our program and morale. It had begun subtly, with jury-rigged or “tweaked” syllabi to reference the standards and Teacher Performance Expectations (see Taubman, 2010). Soon the curriculum began to change. In our department, preparing students for the TE gradually became the focus of student teaching seminars that had formerly been devoted to examining the interface of theory and practice. Lisa, who graduated in December, reported: We sacrificed 90 percent of our third semester practicum class working on PACT, when we could have been discussing how to handle situations we were facing in student teaching. We sacrificed a lot to prove to the legislators in California, and everyone they answer to, that we were ready to teach. And of course PACT didn’t prove that at all.

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Faculty members were more stressed and were working harder than ever before, not out of internal motivation, but because of the requirements PACT thrust upon us. In the atmosphere of blame and fear conjured by the media, politicians, and big business, some faculty decided to retire early. Others were worn down to the point where we simply complied. We got nothing in return for our collaboration. The curriculum changes we made to accommodate PACT had no justification beyond adapting to the exigencies of PACT. PACT added no useful information for improving our programs, but instead diverted time and resources from commitments to preparing teachers to educate the “whole” student, promote democratic citizenship, critical thinking, and courageous action and reduce the opportunity gap. Those who wrote the rubrics and trained the assessors became the primary interpreters of the mandate. This was as demoralizing and disempowering to many faculty members as standardized testing has been to K–12 teachers. One professor at a state university in Southern California who is recognized as a national and international expert in second-language acquisition found hard-to-take the notion that after 2 days of training, a calibrated scorer’s judgments about candidates’ competency to teach English-language learners was considered more valid than hers. She told me she resented being calibrated, with her 30 years of teaching and research in this discipline, to rate candidates on a questionable rubric alongside scorers who may have no knowledge or experience teaching English-language learners. In her view, PACT is a death knell for the long-standing respect for faculty and for their academic scholarship and expertise. Technical and logistical issues about PACT came to dominate our faculty meetings and substantive discussions, such as how we as a faculty should respond to the increasing focus on high-stakes testing in the schools, virtually disappeared. One author of PACT was quoted on the official PACT Web site as follows: “[PACT provides a great] opportunity to talk with other faculty about expectations for candidates and what we value. A real treat to engage with faculty over substance.” Perhaps prior to PACT, there had been few-tono substantive discussions in this woman’s department. But before PACT, our faculty had had discussions about substantive issues on a regular basis. Preparing students to score well on these preestablished PACT rubrics left little time for teacher educators to focus on qualities other than those central to PACT. Our teacher education program began, almost imperceptibly at first, to align the curriculum with the PACT rubrics, teaching to the test. My hunch is that the writers and creators of PACT who constructed the rubrics and trained the assessors engaged in discussions and debates as they constructed PACT, and these experiences contributed to some of the positive effects they claim PACT had upon themselves and their stu-

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dents. However, the experience of the creators of any system is bound to be quite different from that of the system users who, in this case, found themselves at the bottom of the pecking order, implementing a prefabricated, already “packaged,” assessment system, which defined good teaching for them through the construction of rubrics and the trainings and calibrations. There is no better way to destroy morale and to promote mindless implementation than to impose conformity and obedience to dictates from above. It is claimed that the new audit reforms are now owned and sustained by the profession (Sandy, 2007, p. 18). However, this is only true if one defines “the profession” very narrowly, excluding the many teacher educators and credential candidates who do not have access to foundation funds and therefore have no input or buy-in into PACT. Faculty went along with the reforms for several reasons. There were some—in my experience, a very few—who believed that PACT was a valid way to assess teaching and program effectiveness; these were educators who had come to accept unquestioningly a view of science that ultimately maintains hierarchies of power. There were other teacher educators who, though they might have believed that PACT did not identify effective teaching and that it militated against preparing teachers effectively, gradually became accustomed to being at the bottom of the academic heap and increasingly unwilling to challenge authority. Only a few of us expressed opposition publicly—and only until it became clear that the state was not going to allow institutions that did not conform to grant credentials. Conclusion: PACT as Fraud and Spectacle PACT, the newest component of the audit explosion, may be seen as a recoding of ongoing and serious social and economic crises—for example, increasing poverty, resegregation, and the widening opportunity gap—into issues of standards and accountability. It may also be understood as a political spectacle, “pure theatre with no other purpose than to look like something positive is happening, whereas it is not” (Berliner, 2005; Berliner & Biddle, 1997). It is a diversion from addressing the real crises that are presently confronting us by scaring ordinary citizens as well as teacher educators into thinking that what ails us as a society is that millions of unqualified teachers, having been miseducated by U.S. teacher educators, are teaching U.S. children. The war on teachers and teacher educators is replacing the war on drugs. PACT is justified as a useful weapon in that war. The quality of teacher education programs certainly varies, and most teacher educators are well aware of the need for continuing improvement. However, it is hard to make the case that in general U.S. teachers are not al-

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ready qualified: white U.S. students perform better than those of the highest performing nations in the world and all U.S. students, combined, placed about third in the world statistically; even America’s minority public school students scored above the international average (Berliner, 2005, p. 205). It is true that America’s poor and minority students do not do well in national and international assessments, and have the highest drop-out rates from U.S. schools. This is a crisis and it is a crisis of epic proportions. It is, however, essential to recognize that this crisis is in no way addressed by PACT. It is not addressed by PACT, first, because a large part of the responsibility for the academic success of poor and black and brown students is attributable to the inequality, poverty, and racism that affect the lives of these children and their parents in ways that are beyond the power of teachers to change directly and significantly. It is essential to recognize that this crisis occurs in a nation that is the second-most unequal of all the industrialized countries on Earth, and that this inequality is directly and indirectly a significant factor in the generation of every single one of our social ills (Wilkerson & Pickett, 2009). Further, we all know that poor children are often taught by the least qualified of U.S. teachers, often in facilities that are unfit. Thus, the schools’ failures to teach poor children and black and brown children adequately are only in part attributable to the quality of teachers and teacher educators. PACT is unlikely to address the so-called achievement gap: aspects of teachers’ performance that do affect the school success of poor children and black and brown children of all social classes, such as curricular decisions that engage children whose backgrounds do not match the dominant culture, are not central to PACT. In fact, by diverting attention from the essentials, PACT will undoubtedly contribute to widening, not reducing, the opportunity gap. Evidently, Duncan’s ideal is that all certification programs in the nation conclude with a PACT-like assessment. Wherever this happens, faculty and students are likely to experience the same withering effects many teacher educators in California and their students have already experienced. There are certainly more productive ways to improve schools and decrease inequality than more auditing with its attending compliance costs, and the proliferation of elaborate and expensive bureaucratic systems created to manage the audits. Each of us could suggest policies that would be likely to improve schools, narrow the opportunity gap, and address issues of inequality and democratic citizenship more productively than adding an additional audit mechanism, including raising teachers’ salaries, subsidizing teachers’ education during the years required to learn to teach, giving teachers more planning time, lowering class size, allocating funds to increase the proportion of teachers of color, and insuring that the most experienced and well-

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educated teachers are not disproportionately teaching economically privileged children. Because these audits will not improve the test scores of poor and black and brown children, either in the short or long term, the massive campaign to hold teacher educators and teachers accountable will be used to focus blame on the educational failures of these children, their teachers, teacher educators, and public education at all levels. Waiting for Superman and the celebration of the film by major networks and foundations harmonize with the PACT assumption that those with money and power are, ultimately, the ones who can save U.S. society by shaping teachers and controlling schools, and that teacher education and public schools having failed us, the only viable alternative is privatization. If Duncan/Obama has its way, there will soon be no “old timers” who can remember when teachers and teacher educators were respected as competent professionals whose role was to promote curricula and pedagogies that are relevant to time and place, and to contribute to the construction of an active citizenry and a more just and joyful world. Perhaps as the consequences of the “accountability movement” in teacher education become even more onerous, active resistance among teacher educators will grow. They cannot, however, go it alone. They need the help of K–12 teachers and university teachers across the disciplines, and popular support as well. References Berliner, D. (2004). If the underlying premise for No Child Left Behind is false, how can that act solve our problems. In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, & R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools (pp. 167–184). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books. Berliner, D. (2005). The near impossibility of testing for teacher quality. Journal of Teacher Education, 56(3), 205–213. Berliner, D., & Biddle, B. (1997). The manufactured crisis. New York: Basic Books. Braverman, H. (1998). Labor and monopoly capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Cochran-Smith, M. (2005) 2005 Presidential address: The new teacher education for better or for worse. Educational Researcher, 34(7), 3–18. Darling-Hammond, L. (2006a). Securing the right to learn: Policy and practice for powerful teaching and learning. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 13–24. Darling-Hammond, L. (2006b). Assessing teacher education: The usefulness of multiple measures for assessing program outcomes. Journal of Teacher Education, 57(2), 120–138. Duncan, A. (2009). Arne Duncan full transcript. Teacher’s College, Columbia University—Policy address on teacher preparation—Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education. http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=7195

208    A. BERLAK Economic policy institute (2010) Problems with the use of student scores to evaluate teachers. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp278 Ehrenreich, B. (2001) Nickeled and dimed. On not getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Goldhaber. D., & Hansen, M. (2010). Race, gender and teacher testing: How informative a tool is teacher licensure testing? American Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 218–251. Hinchey, P. H., & Cadiero-Kaplan, K. (2005). The future of teacher education and teaching: Another piece of the privatization puzzle Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 3(2). Retrieved from http://www.jceps.com/?pageID=artic le&articleID=48> Kohn, A. (2006). The trouble with rubrics. English Journal, 95(4), 12–14. Mabry, L. (1999). Writing to the rubric. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(9), 673–679. Nichols, S., & Berliner, D. (2007). Collateral damage—How high stakes testing corrupts American schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nieto, S. (2005). Schools for a new majority: The role of teacher educators in hard times. The New Educator, 1(1), 27–43. Ohanian, Susan. (2009, Nov. 30) Evidence-based practices, best practices, and other lies. http://www.susanohanian.org/show_commentaries.php?id=734. Okhremtchouk, I., Seiki, S., Gilliland, B., Ateh, C., Wallace, M., & Kato, A. (2009). Voices of pre-service teachers: Perspectives on the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT). Issues in Teacher Education, 18(1), 29–62. Oyler, C. (2010). Value added? Letters to the editor. Rethinking Schools Online. Retrireved from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/25_01/25_01_letters. shtml Pecheone, R. L., & Chung, R. R. (2006). Evidence in teacher education. The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT). Journal of Teacher Education, 57(1), 22–36. Rennert-Ariev, P. (2008). The hidden curriculum of performance-based teacher education Teachers College Record, 110(1), 105–138. Russell, S. (2006). Reforming urban teacher education: SB 2042 implementation five years later. Issues in Teacher Education, 15(1), 27–51. Saltman, K. (2009). The rise of venture philanthropy and the ongoing neoliberal assault of public education: The case of the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation. Workplace, 16, 53–72. Sandy, M. (2006). Timing is everything: Building state policy on teacher credentialing in an era of multiple, competing and rapid educational reforms. Issues in Teacher Education, 15(1), 7–19. Sawchuk, S. (2010, September 1). State group piloting teacher prelicensing exam. Education Week, 30(2), 1. Sleeter, C. (2003). Reform and control: An analysis of SB 2042. Teacher Education Quarterly, 30(1), 19–31. Taubman, P. (2010) Teaching by numbers. New York: Routledge

Standardized Teacher Performance Assessment    209 Weiner, K. (2009, July 30). Obama’s dalliance with truthiness. Teachers College Record. Retreived from http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=15731 Wilkerson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. London: Penguin.

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Chapter 10

The Political Economy of Educational Restructuring On the Origin of Performance Pay and Obama’s “Blueprint” for Education Mark Garrison

Introduction Education “reform”1 is unfolding at an unprecedented rate, with intense energy generated by some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful champions of “change,” what some observers have called the “billionaire boys club” (Ravitch, 2010). Thus, a cabal of CEOs, corporate-interest front groups, venture philanthropists, and hedge fund managers heavily influence education reform (Emery & Ohanian, 2004; Hass, 2009; Saltman, 2010). Major media outlets uncritically chronicle educational developments not considered possible 10 years ago: the elimination of tenure and establishment of a standardized test-based performance pay scheme for teachers are two noteworthy examples (e.g., Tammen, 2010). In a short

The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 211–224 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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time, performance pay has gone from a fantasy of neoliberal ideologues to policy reality for teachers in several states; it is now promoted in Obama’s Blueprint for education reform as the way forward for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). As the history of performance pay outlined in this chapter suggests, this move is likely to further degrade the teaching profession and lower the level of education. But the Obama administration is not only moving forward with performance pay schemes in public education via the bribery-like enticements that constitute the Race to the Top (RTTT) fund, but for all public employees (e.g., Davidson, 2009). Importantly, the plan now excludes those working in “national security” (e.g., Corrin, 2009). Not only within education circles, but Obama has, in his recent speeches, articulated a strategy in Afghanistan predicated on the notion of “performance” as a basis for assuring the “accountability” of “allies” (e.g., Obama, 2009). Thus, the notion of performance has become a central ideology informing and justifying broad changes in local, national, and international governing arrangements within a context of official claims that there is simply not enough money in the public treasury to support public education as in the past. The connection between demands for the radical restructuring of public education in general and performance pay in particular and the demand of the wealthy elite to cut spending on public education provides an important starting point for the careful interrogation of the origins of performance pay from a historical, economic, and political vantage point (see Glass, 2008). To this end, this chapter asks: What are the origins of current performance pay schemes and what does this analysis suggest for effective opposition to current education “reform” efforts? The Importance of Origin for Critical Policy Analysis Too often, those proposing the reforms set the terms of debate, with the public and educational researchers directed to narrowly focus on what “works”—with the reformers also setting the standards for determining both the meaning of and criteria for success. In the case being examined here, effective teaching is increasingly defined via student test scores, and so, we are to examine whether test scores rise or fall with any given particular performance pay scheme. Like rats in a maze, we are told we have to chase the data-cheese in order to find the way out. But what if we stop to analyze the origin of the maze that holds us captive? What if we take seriously and analyze the significance of those pushing reform who deem all evidence contrary to their cause as “irrelevant” (Braun, 2010).

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This suggests going beyond the evidence that suggests performance pay, and the larger reform agenda of which it is a part, will do little to improve the quality of education and much to erode it (e.g., Baker et al., 2010; Ravitch, 2010). Rather, the analysis should seek an understanding of the impetus or conditions that make possible the establishment of performance pay; that is, to seek its origin. Origin refers, first and foremost, to the conditions that give rise to a thing or phenomenon. That origin can be taken to refer simply to the first time something happened constitutes a simplification. . . . [O]rigin refers to uncovering the impetus, condition or initiation of a thing or phenomenon, and these references need not be only to one place in time. The connection to “beginning” or “first appearance” becomes relevant with the assumption of this approach: the essence of a thing or phenomenon is revealed when that thing or phenomenon first appears, and subsequently during each stage of its development—things and phenomena reveal themselves in space and time (Garrison, 2009, p. 42). Guided by recent work on the political origins of standardized testing (Garrison, 2009), this chapter examines the origin and effect of performance pay schemes imposed on English and Irish school teachers in the latter part of the 19th century and applies that understanding to deepen the developing critique of Obama’s education agenda. This “payment-byresults” scheme is the first modern, large-scale use of examinations as a basis for teacher compensation. Establishing the reasons for its adoption should prove useful in developing a broader and deeper analysis of present neoliberal trends in schools across the globe. This approach challenges us to go beyond the narrative offered by reformers as explanation for their own actions. Given the lack of evidence linking performance or merit pay to increased organizational performance (Gratz, 2009; Martins, 2010; Perry, Engders, & Jun, 2009; Zhang, 2002), it seems reasonable to assume that more is at issue than a desire to “raise student achievement” and close “achievement gaps.” Put another way, if the problem being addressed by advocates of performance pay is not student achievement, what problem(s) are the architects of performance pay trying to solve? History and Definitions “The concept of using incentives as well as coercion to induce and influence performance reaches back into our earliest recorded history” (Peach & Wren, 1992, p. 5). Practices that resemble what we today understand as performance pay are found in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 18th century BC), the “sixth and greatest king of the first dynasty of Babylon” (p. 7) (present-day Iraq). The Code specified how “traveling merchants could act

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as agents of principals located in the cities [where a] strong performance incentive existed as no profit accrued until the agent returned double the principal’s investment” (p. 7). It should be noted that such an approach to motivate and control the actions of individuals assumes a great distance between the controlling authority and those individuals who are the object of that control. In that sense, a key point of origin for performance pay schemes might be the reality of some physical or social distance, as exists, for example, with state and federal agencies on the one hand, and individual actions of teachers in the classroom on the other hand (what organizational sociologists sometimes delineate as the problem of “cybernetic control”). Also according to Peach and Wren, examples of the use of piece rates are found in 604 BC, also in Babylon. Weavers of cloth were paid “in food, the quantity granted depending upon the spinner or weavers’ output” (p. 7). Again, note the “management system” does not require the direct observation or even concern for the process of production. These practices were, according to these authors, never organized into a system and relative to other mechanisms for determining pay, quite rare. The emergence beyond this “intuitive” era took place only during the 19th century, a concomitant to the emergence of industrial capitalism, the relevance of which appears obvious and not in need of elaboration. But the meaning of performance pay is more complex and rich than one might expect. We would assume that an employee gives work or accomplishment to the employer for money, which if indeed this were the simple case, the notion of performance pay would be redundant. Yet in the present political economy, employees are often paid on the basis of some measure of time spent at a place of work (Peach & Wren, 1992). The employer is provided temporary control over the use of the abilities of the employee. This is key as teachers are being asked to work longer hours, while simultaneously forgoing seniority, the protections of due process, and so on. As performance pay suggests a rejection of time as a basis for remuneration, it requires a measure of the output of work; for such a pay system to work, this standard must be fairly obvious and acceptable to all involved (as is generally the case with sales). Note that this is actually quite distinct from merit pay, which involves some subjective judgment of a supervisor. Merit pay may be awarded for a “job well done” as judged by a supervisor, but such designations are not necessarily attached to some “measurable” output. Performance, however, is rendered as something more objective, such as the number of shoes sold by a salesman in a week. And importantly, despite their public support for it, most businesses do not adopt performance (as opposed to merit) pay, except in situations where performance is clear, as in piece-rate contexts (which appear to be more exploitive). Most businesses that claim to use performance pay in fact use a combination of subjective and objective measures, relying heavily on supervisors’ ratings for

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bonuses (see Gratz, 2009). Current proposals recommend that at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on test scores (and hence a decision to retain or fire the teacher), indicating a move to a performance pay structure, since the judgment of direct supervisors is diminished compared with previous practice. Origin of Payment-by-Results “Payment-by-results,” as it was called, constituted a more than 30-year experiment within the United Kindom (England and Ireland) following the Revised Code of 1862 (ending in the mid 1890s in England and 1920s in Ireland, with the political split of Ireland in 1922). And while earlier plans for performance pay in elementary education were attempted (Burton, 1979; Rapple, 1994, p. 3), the Revised Code stands as the most significant and extensive application of performance pay for teachers up to the present time (see Coltham, 1972; Dent, 1963; Madaus, Ryan, Kellighan, & Airasian, 1987; Rapple, 1994; for similar efforts in Australia see Griffiths, 1987). While changing over the period of operation, the program nonetheless maintained the following characteristics: allocation of funds based on attendance and attainment of students, as determined by Her Majesty’s Inspectors, with some provisions to provide monetary rewards directly to students. While teachers were not compensated on the basis of what we today would understand as the results of standardized tests or “growth models,” inspectors were to follow a very scripted examination protocol, which, relative to that historical moment, should be considered “standardized,” with the results of these examinations determining the majority of teacher pay. In 1862, the Committee of Council on Education “set out very specific instructions to the inspectors concerning the administration of the annual examination. Inspectors were advised that the test in the three Rs ‘of individual children according to a certain standard must always be, to a considerable extent, mechanical’” (Rapple, 1994, p. 6). The Committee instructed examiners regarding how students were to be called for examination, including the manner in which students are to either stand or sit. Student knowledge of school subjects was to be examined in a specified order. The Committee also established rules for how students were to be questioned and how their answers were to be assessed (pp. 6–7). The Revised Code of 1862 (and all revisions to it prior to eliminating payment-by-results) should be understood as an outgrowth of the increasing intervention of the British state into elementary education for the poor and working class. Rapple (1994) explains, “The first money granted by the government to elementary education was in 1833, all schools and teachers’ salaries having hitherto been provided by voluntary, generally religious, or-

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ganizations” (p. 2). He notes, however, that this funding was not meant to supersede voluntary activity, “and was given to two religious societies for disposal” (p. 2). Previous religious efforts alone proved insufficient to provide schools for the growing number of poor children. Precisely at this time concern about the education of the lower classes emerged, “their education was seen by some as an urgent humanitarian mission, and by others as a necessary undertaking if threats of revolution and moral decay were to be averted” (Coltham, 1972, p. 16). Quickly following this initial government effort, the Queen set up a Committee of the Privy Council for Education under the secretaryship of Dr. James Kay (afterwards Sir James Kay Shuttleworth) to supervise the limited governmental control over the education of the people, especially the application of Parliamentary money voted for educational purposes. The following year saw the establishment of the position of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools (H.M.I.), holders of which were charged with the inspection of those schools eligible to receive grants. (Rapple, 1994, p. 2)

Coltham (1972) notes, however, that at this point, the authority of the inspectors was limited, as the religious societies feared government interference. Some refused funds in order to avoid government inspection (p. 17). But the government involvement in education continued, albeit slowly, with funding for school buildings, training of teachers, and the “capitation grant” or funds used to encourage attendance. Grants for books and equipment also appeared. Again, it is important to emphasize that these efforts were, in the words of the Newcastle Commission of 1861, geared toward, “the education of the children of vagrants and to that of other children who cannot properly be allowed to associate with the families of respectable parents” (Rapple, 1994, p. 2; see also Coltham, 1972). “With all these expenses the amount of the grant voted each year necessarily grew,” Rapple explains, “until by 1859 it had risen to 723,115 pounds, not perhaps an inconsequential amount, but one which pales into some insignificance when set beside the nearly 78,000,000 pounds spent on the recent Crimean War” (p. 3). Nonetheless, the growth in expense on education meant, “the tentative period of state involvement was over” (p. 3). And while the government was now committed to extending education, “it was a sine qua non that it be ‘cheap’ and especially so since the run on the coffers due to the Crimean War” (p. 3). Lowe, the chief architect of payment-by-results, admitted that it was driven by concerns to maintain a “balanced budget.” Speaking before Parliament, he emphasized that “[I cannot] promise that this system will be an economical one, and I cannot promise that it will be an efficient one, but I can promise that it will be one or the other. If it is not cheap, it will be efficient; if it is not efficient, it shall be cheap” (Madaus, Russell, & Higgins,

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2009, p. 136). An analysis of Annual Reports of the Intermediate Education Board of Ireland during its 19th-century payment-by-results system indicates that exam standards and rewards were systematically manipulated. As the percentage of students passing the exam increased, expenditures on performance rewards to teachers grew. When the pass rate became too high, and thus too costly, the tests were made more difficult and the standards for passing were increased in order to reduce pass rates. This manipulation of pass rates assured there was no significant upward or downward trend in the percentage of students passing during the results era. (Madaus et al., 2009, p. 121; see also Madaus et al., 1987)

In other words, payment-by-results was a means by which to contain educational costs under the guise of accountability. The educational outcomes of this scheme were predicable, with critics even prior to its implementation foreshadowing present criticism of high-stakes testing and the so-called accountability movement. Historical accounts reveal that payment-by-results, wherever it was practiced, led to a scripted, low-level pedagogy, an over reliance on memorization—a curriculum narrowed to examined subjects and a decline in the quality of the teaching force. Cheating, system gaming, and abuse of students in an effort to secure their “performance” are documented outcomes of this system. After his retirement, one inspector referred to the experiment as “an ingenious instrument for arresting the mental growth of the child, deadening all his higher faculties” (Coltham, 1972, p. 24). There is no doubt that the system did not allow children to be viewed by teachers as fully human. Critical educators of the time referred to “three-fourths of our schools” as “grant factories” and a child as “a grant-earning unit.” If a monetary reward is to be attached to an individual’s attainments, then it is difficult for him to be thought of as anything other than “a grant-earning unit.” (Coltham, 1972, p. 24)

Far from “being for the kids,” as present rhetoric would have it, this approach led government inspectors and teachers to oppose the system as antiyouth, antiteacher, antieducation, and generally degrading to human dignity (Coltham, 1972; Dent, 1963; Griffiths, 1987; Madaus et al., 1987; Rapple, 1994).3 Yet concern here rests not mainly with documenting the atrocities associated with the scheme (which are chronicled in detail by those cited above), but rather with the conditions that give rise to what appears, in light of this history, as irrational and obviously not the way to organize education. To review, the origin of this scheme was in efforts by elites to reduce or control expenditures on an expanding government-administered edu-

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cation system. Importantly, from the vantage of the present, the financial concern for economism was massive expenditures on the Crimean War; a war, like present wars continuously waged by the United States against the popular will, considered to be a failure. Further, this accountability scheme, emerging in the context of humanitarian concerns and fear of social revolution by political elites, served to increase the supervisory authority of the national government over educational affairs, taking control away from religious authorities. Thus, central authorities overseen by Parliament gained control over the school curriculum by virtue of stipulating what curriculum would be tested and thus what results would yield payment to educators. In this sense, payment-by-results emerged as a part of a political effort to wrest the provision of education away from religious authorities and economic concerns to ensure that this provision for the poor and working class never went beyond, to use the British phrase, “their station.” Significantly, this scheme was born in a political context that did not emphasize or espouse education as the key means to opportunity, as U.S. mythology would have it. It emerged within the context of a society that held more to an open acceptance and reproduction of the class system, with the straightforward idea that schools should aim to prepare students for their station in life, something determined in large measure by their social origins. That is to say, payment-by-results originated within the context of a class-conscious system of education. It originated during a time where a national system of public education, with compulsory attendance, public oversight, public control, and public finance did not yet fully exist. Finally, it appears in history as a transitional process, from limited to overarching government involvement in what was once a local, voluntary, and religious function. Performance Pay and Obama’s Blueprint Glass’s (2008) contention that leading reform proposals to improve education—charters, vouchers, and other school choice mechanisms—are, in reality, proposals to cheapen education for the poor and working class and privatize it for the largely white middle class. Yet one of the few reforms to escape Glass’s microscope is that of performance pay. Nonetheless, his contention aligns with the historical record of pay for performance in England and Ireland, and provides an important context for analyzing the Obama administration’s Blueprint for education. It must be noted from the outset that tying teacher pay to student performance on examinations allows authorities to tightly regulate and quickly adjust expenditures on teaching to meet any number of specific aims, without the hassle of previous arrangements that demanded a stability of funding, collective bargaining, due process, etc. That is to say, while unions might agree to build perfor-

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mance pay into their contracts during collective bargaining, once evaluation, and ultimately pay, is determined by student test scores (irrespective of the technical merits of the model used), financial outlays for schools can be regulated by manipulation of academic standards—as took place in the Irish case studied by Madaus et al. (1987)—without teacher consent. But the issues are broader, and the aim of reducing expenditures over the long term must be connected to other political changes evident in the Obama administration’s reform initiatives. Thus, it is important to remember that the payment-by-results system reviewed above has its origins in the transference of control over education from religious to state authorities, the desire of elites to control the aspirations and socialization of the poor and working class, in addition to their desire to limit public expenditure on education as resources are swallowed up by the exegencies of British empire building. Those circumstances are, in broad terms, similar to the present state of affairs: a fixation on “balancing budgets,” with attending claims that there are only dwindling public funds available for social programs like education (e.g., Hanushek, 2010), all while the U.S. military and internal policing expenditures grow to levels never known before in human history (e.g., Shalal-Esa, 2010). That is to say, to achieve the aims associated with performance pay, broad governance changes are required, and therefore an analysis of the Blueprint should focus on the political significance of what is outlined in that proposal. A key political feature of the Blueprint is a narrative that consistently emasculates existing distinction between local, district, and state governance structures by establishing executive federal links to each entity through the use of federally mandated data on students to evaluate teachers and competitive grants. For example: Race to the Top has provided incentives for excellence by encouraging state and local leaders to work together on ambitious reforms, make tough choices, and develop comprehensive plans that change policies and practices to improve outcomes for students. We will continue Race to the Top’s incentives for systemic reforms at the state level and expand the program to school districts that are willing to take on bold, comprehensive reforms. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 6) We will call on states, districts and schools to aim for the ambitious goal of all students graduating or on track to graduate from high school ready for college and a career by 2020. Performance targets, based on whole-school and subgroup achievement and growth, and graduation rates, will guide improvement toward that ambitious goal, and those that are meeting all of their performance targets will be recognized and rewarded. States, districts and schools will look not just at absolute performance and proficiency, but at individual student growth and school progress over time, and the additional

220    M. GARRISON data described above, to guide local improvement and support strategies for schools. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, pp. 9–10)

Interestingly enough, the notion of education funded by grants, as opposed to guaranteed funding streams that are required for sustained support for quality public institutions, mirrors the British system under payment-by-results. It is also important to highlight that the notion of grants for education is premised on the idea of “deserving poor” and “charity” and moves the system farther away from the standard of education as a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Another important feature of the Blueprint is the manner in which state and local control over education finance is emasculated by federal plans to mandate “equity” measures in terms of funding and resource allocation. To give every student a fair chance to succeed, and give principals and teachers the resources to support student success, we will call on school districts and states to take steps to ensure equity by such means as moving toward comparability in resources between high- and low-poverty schools. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 5)

While this strategically appeals to the long-standing critique of the U.S. funding system as inherently unequal, it nonetheless also suggests a power structure capable of capping expenditures on education, a structure that might enable a more efficient redirection of those resources to private entities. It also serves to further eliminate institutional forms where the public might block a particular proposal, law, or policy, such as elected officials at the local and state level. While these officials have in general not acted to resolve inequality of school funding and resources, emasculating their role does nonetheless remove a layer of political representation and constitutes a de facto rewriting of federal and state rights and responsibilities as outlined in the U.S. Constitution (Ravitch, 2010). By calling for federal control over teacher/administrator education by using testing data to set standards for “effective” and “highly effective” teachers and administrators (replacing the notion of highly qualified under current law), this again constitutes what Ravitch (2010) correctly describes as a dramatic increase in federal control over what is given as a State right in U.S. Constitution. Thus, by supporting changes in governance, such as the elimination of school boards through charterization and mayoral control, the Obama administration appears to be seeking the complete elimination of the modern notion of accountability as rooted in democratic (public) processes (i.e., accountability rooted in public office and universal franchise) and instead replaces it with the medieval practice of humiliation and punishment with the innovation of using pseudoscientific “data” and “standards” to determine performance. Control of this data is assumed by the unelected federal exec-

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utives, such as the Secretary of Education. Of course, these practices are not all detailed in the Blueprint, but their content is evident in its inspiration, the so-called Race to the Top initiative funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In it we find an emphasis on the use of student test data as a basis for the evaluation of teachers, tests that have never been able to provide real measurements of anything (see Garrison, 2009). A specific feature of Race to the Top is its Assessment Program: a competitive grant for development assessment and data systems. Part of this effort is the creation of a federal database of student-level data, while other features create new governance structures among states, and compel state legislatures to change their laws to suit the federal competition guidelines (see Garrison, 2010). Finally, irrespective of one’s view of unions or existing school boards, it must be understood that the attack on unions and elected school boards that is part and parcel of the Blueprint is part of a broad effort to eliminate public control over education, to cheapen education, and divert public resources to private hands. That it is being accomplished with the bribery of Race to the Top should be enough for the democratic minded to oppose it, whether they favor unions or defend school boards as viable institutions. Without an effective smear campaign against teachers unions, this radical transformation of education cannot take place. This is why Obama’s Blueprint singles out teachers for heightened attack, as the unions stand as a major institutional force capable of blocking this “reform” while also constituting the major source of public expenditure on education, i.e., reducing expenditures on education ultimately requires a more temporary, unorganized, poorly trained teaching force (see Miner, 2010). While some of the most draconian implementations of performance pay have been defeated, as was the case with SB6 in Florida (Gabriel & Cave, 2010), it is clear that in the main, such policies are moving forward, with the help of some of the major teacher’s unions. Conclusion The origin of performance pay schemes in education is found in the efforts of the ruling elite to control public educational expenditures as they built a class-conscious and more centralized system of “public” education within a political context that espoused, when compared with rhetoric in the United States, relatively fixed notions of class. Importantly, from the vantage of the present, the financial concern driving this economism was massive expenditures on the Crimean War and the imperialist aspirations of the British more generally. Politically, the origin of pay-for-performance rests with the concerns of the ruling elite to contain the aspirations and independent thought of the then-burgeoning working class.

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What emerges as most significant from this broad and quick survey of the past and present is the significant shift in reliance on the myth of opportunity in the United States as a central frame for education policy and law. While the notion of equal opportunity is given lip service in the Blueprint, it is obvious that the underlying ideology guiding this proposal assumes a very narrow economic role for education quite different from broader goals that justified public education in early times. Despite the Obama campaign’s theme of hope, the content of the education being planned for future youth portends a future of drudgery; a college experience that appears to be limited to the vocational mission of community colleges; and a narrow privatized, fend-for-oneself outlook that rejects the very notion of social responsibility and collective well-being underpinning the historic and as yet unfulfilled demand for free public education for all that serves the public good and prepares every student for full participation in all aspects of social life. Notes 1. The term “reform” is placed in scare quotes not simply to reveal my opposition to these efforts, but more importantly, to indicate that they are in fact not “reforms” but rather, as I have argued elsewhere (Garrison, 2009), de forms; that is, they are conscious efforts to wreck the existing public education system. Put simply, they should not be considered reforms because they have not nor will they serve to improve the quality of education because they take as their starting point a rejection of what is known about the theory and practice of education. Current reform efforts—whether under the banner of choice, accountability, or closing the achievement gap—are best characterized as both anticonscious (against thinking and careful analysis) and antisocial (they reject outright the broadly social nature of education and its complex relationship to other social institutions and reduce its purpose to the most narrow aim of job training and social control). 2. Podgursky and Springer (2007) offer an American Enterprise Institute-supported effort to render empirical support for performance pay that is nonetheless unconvincing: “While the literature is not sufficiently robust to prescribe how systems should be designed . . . it is sufficiently positive to suggest that further experiments and pilot programs by districts and states are very much in order” (p. 943). Of course, AEI and their fellow travelers, along with the Obama administration, have gone well beyond “pilot” programs that can be carefully assessed, as full-scale performance pay is built into federal policy and RTTT competition and the administration’s Blueprint for Education Reform. 3. These outcomes foreshadow in important ways abuses documented in the test-driven Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and similar models of education praised by venture philanthropists and government officials (see Horn, 2009).

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References Baker, E. L., Barton, P. E., Darling-Hammond, L., Haertel, E., Ladd, H. F., Linn, R. L., et al. (2010, August 29). Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from http:// epi.3cdn.net/724cd9a1eb91c40ff0_hwm6iij90.pdf Braun, B. (2010, May). Education commissioner Schundler dismisses U.S. test ranking N.J. at the top in reading, math. Star-Ledger. Retrieved from http://blog. nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2010/05/us_education_tests_ranks_nj_at.html Burton, E. F. (1979). Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s education bill of 1799: A missing chapter in the history of Irish education. The Irish Journal of Education, 13(1), 24–33. Coltham, J. B. (1972). Educational accountability: An English experiment and its outcomes. School Review, 81(1), 15–34. Corrin, A. (2009, October 28). Obama signs bill that kills DOD pay-for-performance system. Federal Computer Week. Retrieved from http://fcw.com/articles/2009/10/28/obama-defense-authorization-and-nsps.aspx Davidson, J. (2009, June 23). Performance pay for federal employees still a matter of debate. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062202978.html Dent, H. C. (1963). The centenary of payment-by-results. British Journal of Educational Studies, 11(2), 185–188. Emery, K., & Ohanian, S. (2004). Why is corporate America bashing our public schools? Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Gabriel, T., & Cave, D. (2010). Florida governor splits with G.O.P. on teacher pay. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/ us/16teachers.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=senate%20bill%206%20florida%20 teachers%20test&st=cse Garrison, M. (2009). A measure of failure: The political origins of standardized testing. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Garrison, M. (2010, May 11). Race to the Top assessment program: Part II – the political significance of assessment governance. Retrieved from http://www.markgarrison. net/archives/827 Glass, G. V. (2008). Fertilizers, pills, and magnetic strips: The fate of public education in America. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers. Gratz, D. B. (2009). The peril and promise of performance pay: Making education compensation work. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Griffiths, R. (1987). A tale of 804.573 horses: Arithmetic teaching in Victoria, 1860– 1914. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 18(2), 191–207. Hanushek, E. A. (2010). Cry wolf! This budget crunch is for real. Education Week, 29, 32. Hass, N. (2009, December 4). Scholarly investments. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/fashion/06charter.html Horn, J. (2009, March 5). The KULT of KIPP: An essay review. Education Review, 12(3). Retrieved from http://edrev.asu.edu/essays/v12n3index.html

224    M. GARRISON Madaus, G. F., Russell, M. K., & Higgins, J. (2009). The paradoxes of high stakes testing: How they affect students, their parents, teachers, principals, schools, and society. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers. Madaus, G. F., Ryan, J. P., Kellighan, T., & Airasian, P. W. (1987). Payment-by-results: An analysis of a nineteenth century performance-contracting programme. The Irish Journal of Education, 21(2), 80–91. Martins, P. S. (2010). Individual teacher incentives, student achievement and grade inflation. Retrieved from http://cee.lse.ac.uk/cee%20dps/ceedp112.pdf Miner, B. (2010). Looking past the spin: Teach for America. Rethinking Schools, 24(3). Retrieved from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/restrict.asp?path= archive/24_03/24_03_TFA.shtml Obama, B. (2009, December 1). Remarks by the president in address to the nation on the way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forwardafghanistan-and-pakistan Peach, E. B., & Wren, D. A. (1992). Pay for performance: From antiquity to the 1950s. In T. C. Mawhinney (Ed.), Pay for performance: History, controversy, and evidence (pp. 5–22). New York: Haworth Press. Perry, J. L., Engbers, T. A., & Jun, S. U. (2009). Back to the future: Performancerelated pay, empirical research, and the perils of persistence. Public Administration Review, 69(1), 39–51. Podgursky, M. J., & Springer, M. G. (2007). Teacher performance pay: A review. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 26(4), 909–949. Rapple, B. A. (1994). Payment-by-results: An example of assessment in elementary education from nineteenth century Britain [Electronic version]. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 2(1), 1–21. Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/ article/view/664 Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books. Saltman, K. J. (2010). The gift of education: Public education and venture philanthropy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shalal-Esa, A. (2010, February 1). Obama seeks record $708 billion in 2011 defense budget. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6103C520100202 Tammen, K. (2010, March 24). Florida senate passes SB 6 in a 21-17 vote. News Herald. Retrieved from http://www.newsherald.com/articles/florida-82509passes-senate.html U.S. Department of Education. (2010, March). A Blueprint for reform: The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Retrieved from http://www2. ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/Blueprint/index.html Zhang, X. (2002). Exploring the impact and process of merit pay for public school teachers. Unpublished dissertation, The American University.

Section III Envisioning New Schools and a New Social World: Stories of Resistence, Hope, and Transformation

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Chapter 11

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda Connecting Reason to Power and Power to Resistance Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross

Introduction The sky is, of course, falling. We are lambs among wolves. The core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded social and economic inequality challenged by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance. This can now be summed up as life and death, an issue that most North Americans avoided during more than 8 years of war because, while the United States supports one of the largest militaries in the world, its personnel amount to less than 1 percent of the population. The very real conflict also sets up a challenge often ignored: how can people become whole, that is, live reasonably meaningful intelligible lives in connection with others in the midst of a social collapse that can quickly become barbarizing? If we are to face the crises of our day, we must do what Nemesis author Chalmers Johnson (2007) claims most Americans cannot do: connect cause The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 227–248 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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and effect—the whole with the parts, past-present-future—as Johnson rightly believes history is eradicated in America. The task means connecting war with imperialism, economic collapse with capitalism, and the imperial project to designs on schools, what people know and how they come to know it. It means connecting solutions to the social relations oppressing us. We must recognize that fights in health care are necessarily fights in education; that the battles about immigration are also battles about wages, hours, and benefits. It means recognizing what is afoot: class war, an international war of the rich on the poor: the social relations of capitalism. The economic restructuring through massive job losses in almost every sector (2.6 million between December 2008 and March 2009 according to Goodman & Healy, 2009) going on now will result in either a horrific defeat for the North American and world working class, or be marked as an awakening when people recognized the many boots on their throats. Last, making connections means transformation, overcoming the system of capital. Without that guiding North Star, any social movement is directionless, re-creating injustice in slightly new ways. Making Connections: The Elections of 2008 and 2010 Let us step back briefly and examine the elections. The recent elections of 2008 and 2010 should be studied not only as how voters chose, from the executive committee of the rich, the government, who would most charmingly oppress the majority of the people, but it should also be studied as how an element of capitalist democracy, the spectacle of the election, has speeded the emergence of fascism as a mass popular force (Moore, 1957; Singer, 2002). That is, • the corporate state, the rule of the rich, near-complete merger of corporations and government; • the continuation of the suspension of civil liberties (as with renditions); • the attacks on whatever free press there is; • the rise of racism and segregation (in every way, but especially the immigration policies); • the promotion of the fear of sexuality as a question of pleasure (key to creating the inner slave) and the sharpened commodification of women (Sarah Palin to pole dancers); • the governmental/corporate attacks on working peoples’ wages and benefits (bailouts to merit pay to wage and benefit concessions);

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• intensification of imperialist war (sharpening the war in Afghanistan sharpens war on Pakistan, which provokes war on Russia, etc., and the United States is NOT going to leave Iraq’s oil); • the promotion of nationalism (all class unity) by, among others, the union bosses; • teaching people the lie that someone else should interpret reality and act for us, when no one is going to save us but us; • trivializing what is supposed to be the popular will to vile gossip, thus building cynicism—especially the idea that we cannot grasp and change the world, but also debasing whatever might have been left of a national moral sense; • increased mysticism (is it better to vote for a real religious fanatic or people who fake being religious fanatics?); and • incessant attacks on radicals. That is a litany of the acceleration of fascism. Al Szymanski (1978) outlined the functions of the capitalist state’s democracy 3 decades ago. This is a reminder to 1. Guarantee the accumulation of capital and profit maximization and make it legitimate. 2. Preserve, form, and temper, capitalist class rule.    3. Raise money to fund the state. 4. Guarantee and regulate the labor force. 5. Facilitate commerce. 6. Ensure buying power in the economy. 7. Directly and indirectly subsidize private corporations. 8. State sanction of self-regulation of corporations. 9. Advance the overseas interests of corporations. Democracy does not dominate capital. Democracy submits, and atomizes voters into individuals huddled in ballot booths asking capital’s favorite question: What about Me? Let us continue to make connections, this time foreign and domestic policy. Making Connections: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Collapsed Economy What is U.S. foreign policy? It is largely unchanged post-Bush. It is war for empire, regional control, and in particular, oil. That is why the United States is in Afghanistan (it is not Al-Qaeda, which is more out of business

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than not, and it is not the Taliban, whose potential pipelines were hugged by the United States years ago, though worries about nuclear Pakistan destabilized by a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are real enough). Empire is why the United States is in Iraq, and is not going to leave in 2011. The permanent bases, six by our count, say so and so does every military expert working in the Obama administration. The wars’ cost, depending on your analyst, about $2 trillion, though we must acknowledge the military budget, is bathed by secrecy. Failed wars have a lot to do, but not entirely to do, with the economic collapse that continues to spiral while Obama, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, tries to contain it. The containment, so far, adds up to about $9.7 trillion, though that too is a secret, as are the recipients, in the midst of proclamations about transparency. Bloomberg is one of the few news groups willing to sue for the information—now in court. The TARPs etc. are sheer robbery achieved by the use of power that goes to the nature of U.S. society itself. When we hear “the economy” and “our government,” we should think “their economy, their government.” Where the bailout money has gone is a secret. Where it is going to go is a secret. Which banks the FDIC is visiting is even a secret. The bailout is not trickling down. Why should banks lend to people who are already in debt at a rate more than their annual incomes—about 50 percent of Americans? The total debt of the U.S. government, including unfunded entitlement obligations such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., adds up to more than $175,000 per citizen, more than $53 trillion, and that is before the bailouts began (Foster, 2009; Grandfather Economics Report Series, 2010). To nearly all economists, before the bust, that was a secret. Societies whose veins run with secrecy, that run on rumors and fanciful hopes, verge on tyranny. But it is no secret that the stimulus is already stimulating sharp battles between state, county, and city governments over who gets what and who holds the reins—most assuredly not those who do the work. The stimulus package that passed Congress may be full of pork, true, but one key aspect is being missed. It represents a conflict inside the U.S. ruling classes, who use the government as their executive committee and armed weapon, now with Obama as the Chair. This battle can be oversimplified as a struggle between old-line capital, as with the Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations, and newer capital, like the Bush/Cheney crowd, as well as a struggle between finance capital, investment banks, and more immediately, productive capital, like the “Big 3” automakers (we can already see the financier winners and auto losers in that). Nevertheless, it is a fight with each player acting, not out of high aims for the patriotic good, but the narrowest forms of opportunism, what Lady Astor called, “running off higgledy-piggledy,” after the nearest dollar. Before the TARP, Treasury Secretary Paulsen asked J. P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon to chip in to save the

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U.S. banking system. Dimon responded “I’d do anything for you and this country, but not if it’s going to jeopardize J. P. Morgan” (Sorkin, 2009). The many heads of finance never separated from the many bodies of productive capital, but the heads of finance who served as generals of the moneyed class believed they did, until the bodies of overproduction, corruption, and waste pulled them back. The United States is in a desperate situation. The military was fought to a standstill in Iraq. The best the United States can hope for is a draw in Afghanistan. Stephen Biddle (2009) of the Council on Foreign Relations (members are sprinkled all over the Obama regime) testified to that before Congress. The Obama line tracks behind Biddle’s writing. Biddle is quite clear: The United States is going to be in Iraq a long time, and probably longer in Afghanistan, at a cost of perhaps 50 to 100 dead a month. The United States is a declining world power ideologically, morally, politically, economically, and militarily. The government stands exposed as opposing the common good—as with the massive opposition to the first bailout before the Obama/McCain election—it cannot meet the elementary needs of the people, from housing to jobs to health care to old age assistance. U.S. elites are aware of their own weaknesses, so are their potential enemies. We saw Russia attack Georgia, a U.S. ally, and the United States did nothing. Russia challenged Europe and shut down pipelines. The United States and Europe only whined. In Europe, national political and economic rulers retreat to the comfort and protection of their home militaries as the notion of a united continent evaporates in a wash of economic realities and old hatreds. But the contradictory nature of capital popped up when General Motors demanded a bailout from Europe, after decades of “Buy Americanism” from both GM management and the United Auto Workers. The collapsed economy and failing wars turn up in domestic policy where, we note with humor, Obama has participated in and now led, perhaps the most massive transfer of wealth in history, gone on a breathtaking spending spree, yet he promises to balance the budget. Making Connections: The Economic Meltdown Sparks Global Unrest, Prompts Plans to Use Military Power to Curb Civil Unrest As global capitalism implodes, there has been a marked uptick in social upheaval worldwide. Now establishment analysts are expressing their concerns about “class conflict” and “civil war” in the United States.

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The financial crisis has sparked unrest globally and particularly across Europe, with demonstrations, strikes, and protests in 16 European countries (FACTBOX, 2009). Here are a just a few examples: • Tens of thousands of workers marched in Lisbon, Portugal, on March 13, 2009 against the policies of the socialist government, which unions say are increasing unemployment and favoring the rich at a time of crisis; • Hundreds of workers at Bulgaria’s Kremikovtzi steel mill protested on March 9, 2009 over planned lay-offs and unpaid salaries, demanding the socialist-led government find a buyer for the insolvent plant; thousands of police officers marched in Sofia on Sunday(QA: Please state date.) to demand a 50 percent wage rise and better working conditions; • In Greece, the fatal police shooting of a 15-year-old in December 2008 sparked the country’s worst riots in decades, fueled by anger at economic hardships and youth unemployment. Anarchists and left-wing guerrilla groups followed up with a wave of attacks against banks and police; Greek unions, representing about 2.5 million workers, also staged repeated protests against the government, saying its measures to tackle the global crisis only burden the poor; • In February 2009, over 100,000 people marched against cutbacks in Ireland (Crimmins, 2009). High unemployment rates have led to protests in Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria, and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France (Saltmarsh & Jolly, 2009; Schwartz, 2009). A half-million Mexican truckers shut down the country’s highways to protest high fuel prices (Truckers protest fuel prices, 2009). In December 2009, Russian riot police busted up protests in Vladivostok against new taxes intended to “help prop up Russia’s domestic car industry and prevent people buying cheaper, imported products.” The BBC reported that the protests were fueled by the severe impact of the global economic crisis on Russia. According to Newsweek, “the Russian Interior Ministry set up a special command center in Moscow, packed with surveillance equipment designed to deal with street unrest. The Duma, on Kremlin instructions, added seven new articles to the criminal code including a law that makes ‘participating in mass disorders’ such as the one in Vladivostok a crime against the state” (Matthews & Nemtsova, 2009). In December 2008 and January 2009, more than 800,000 Russians lost their jobs, making the total number of unemployed more than 6 million or 8.1 percent. Gennady Gudkov, former KGB colonel and current chair of the Duma’s security commit-

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tee, said, “We are expecting mass unemployment and mass riots. There will be not enough police to stop people’s protests by force” (Younge, 2009). There a have been massive general strikes in the French territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion (Fidler, 2009). The general strike in Guadeloupe prompted the French government to fly in riot police (Guadeloupe is a French “overseas department” in the Caribbean). And while the general strike lasted 6 weeks—it ended on March 4 with an agreement among the strike collective, the employers federation, and local and French governments, which granted 20 of the strikers primary demands and set out negotiations on a long list of remaining issues—strikes and protests continue, involving tens of thousands of workers (Martinique demonstrators, 2009). Just as the general strike ended in Guadeloupe (Guadeloupe strike ends, 2009), social unrest over economic conditions spread to Réunion, a French “overseas department” in the Indian Ocean (French unrest spreads, 2009). There is a pattern developing worldwide. U.S. elites are starting to worry about what might happen if the American workers take action as a result of their frustrations with massive economic inequalities. United States Prepares for Class War Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (2009) discusses the breakdown of taboos as the world’s economy continues to disintegrate. He notes, for example, that “nationalization” of banks and industry is now being seriously discussed by establishment analysts such as Alan Greenspan, Senator Lindsay Graham, and economist Alan Blinder. But Wallerstein’s most dramatic example of the breakdown of taboos is the open discussion of the possibility of class war breaking out in the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski, apostle of anticommunist ideology and President Carter’s National Security Advisor, appeared on a morning television talk show on February 17, 2009 and was asked to discuss his previous mention of the possibility of class conflict in the United States in the wake of the worldwide economic collapse.1 Brzezinski was straightforward about the belief that class war in America is real possibility:

Joe Scarborough: You also talked about the possibility of class conflict. Zbigniew Brzezinski: I was worrying about it because we’re going to have millions and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be

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having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time there is public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America . . . what’s going to happen in this society when these people are without jobs, when their families hurt, when they lose their homes, and so forth?   We have the government trying to repair: repair the banking system, to bail the housing out. But what about the rich guys? Where is it? [What are they] doing? Brzezinski went on to compare the current economic meltdown with the “Panic of 1907”: It sort of struck me, that in 1907, when we had a massive banking crisis, when banks were beginning to collapse, there were going to be riots in the streets. Some financiers, led by J. P. Morgan, got together. He locked them in his library at one point. He wouldn’t let them out . . . until they all kicked in and gave some money to stabilize the banks: there was no Federal Reserve at the time. Where is the moneyed class today? Why aren’t they doing something: the people who made billions, millions. I’m sort of thinking of Paulson, of Rubin [former treasury secretaries]. Why don’t they get together, and why don’t they organize a National Solidarity Fund in which they call on all of those who made these extraordinary amounts of money to kick some back in to [a] National Solidarity Fund? If we don’t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there’ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots!

Wallerstein (2009) points out that “almost simultaneously” LEAP/Europe, a European agency that issues monthly confidential bulletins for its clients—politicians, public servants, businessmen, and investors—devoted its February (2009) issue to global geopolitical dislocation, discussing the possibility of civil war in Europe, in the United States, and Japan; and foreseeing a “generalized stampede” that will lead to clashes, semi–civil wars (GEAB, 2009). Wallerstein (2009) quotes the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin as saying: “If your country or region is a zone in which there is a massive availability of guns, the best thing you can do . . . is to leave the region, if that’s possible.

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Wallerstein emphasizes that “these analyses are not coming from left intellectuals or radical social movements. . . . Verbal taboos are broken only when such people are truly fearful. The point of breaking the taboos is to try to bring about major rapid action—the equivalent of J. P. Morgan locking the financiers in his home in 1907” (Wallerstein, 2009). U.S. elites are obviously fearful enough to start planning for military responses to potential social upheaval as a result of the collapsing economy. The U.S. War College’s Strategic Studies Institute posited a number of “strategic surprises” that the country should be prepared for, including potential for disruption and violence caused by the economy’s failure. The report “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development” says “widespread civil violence inside the U.S. would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security” (Freier, 2008). For the first time ever, U.S. military units are staged and are training inside the country to address civil unrest rising from inequality. The Army Times has reported on the U.S. Northern Command’s deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Combat Brigade Team on U.S. soil for “civil unrest” and “crowd control” duties. The 5,000-member force was one of the first units deployed in Baghdad (Cavallaro, 2008; Rothschild, 2008). The Education Agenda as a War Agenda These factors will all appear in schools where money plays a very significant, but not the primary, role. The primary role of capitalist schooling is social control, winning the children of the poor and working classes to be loyal, obedient, dutiful, and useful, to ruling classes under a variety of lies: We are all in this together; this is a multicultural society, democracy trumps inequality, we all can be president, etc. Kids learn the ethics of slaves, perhaps an important reason why there is so little outcry from the rank and file of the military, engaged in war crimes worldwide, but well educated. We said, months before the 2008 election, that Obama will continue the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush education agenda that came into being after the ruling classes nearly lost control of the schools and universities during and after they lost the Vietnam war—ran away. That agenda can be summarized by: • The regimentation of curricula (phonics, abstract math, the eradication of history and academic freedom); • Racist and anti–working class high-stakes examination; • The deepening militarization of schooling (JROTC, ROTC, CIA, NSA, ICE, HS, etc. all over campuses).

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We added that, in some instances, Obama’s cadre would turn to privatization and in others they will not, depending mostly on the interaction of profitability and social control. One remarkable example of the merger of the corporate and the government is Bob Bobb’s arrival in Detroit to oversee the Detroit Public School’s finances (while a dysfunctional school board is allowed to pretend it controls whatever is left). Mr Bobb is on the DPS payroll at about $250,000. His salary is to be supplemented by the right-wing Broad Foundation, where he was trained, at nearly $100,000. Bobb turned three Detroit high schools over to WalMart; not privatized, but corporatized. Arne Duncan, Obama’s Education Secretary, is following precisely that path, rushing along with Race to the Top (RTTT) plans for merit pay rooted in test results; the abolition of some teacher job protection; a nationally regulated curriculum; more militarization in poor areas and national service to siphon off middle-class discontent; privatized charters like those favored by the Broad Foundation; and the takeover of some urban school system, like Detroit, by Broad-trained and funded Mr. Bobb. Leaders of teacher unions, the National Education Association (largest union in the United States by far) and the American Federation of Teachers assist the Obama project at every turn; AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union would “embrace the goals and aspirations outlined” by Obama in his speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (Phillip, 2009). Obama’s education plan is based on the same rhetoric (fear mongering) and reasoning that produced the educationally disastrous NCLB. Indeed, Diane Ravitch, right-wing education policy analyst at New York University and Assistant Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration opined, that Obama has given President George W. Bush a third term in education policy and that Arne Duncan is the male version of Margaret Spellings [Education Secretary in Bush’s second term]. Maybe he really is Margaret Spellings without the glasses and wearing very high heels. We all know that Secretary Spellings greeted Duncan’s appointment with glee. She wrote him an open letter in which she praised him as “a fellow reformer” who supports NCLB and anticipated that he would continue the work of the Bush administration. (Ravitch, 2009)

Like his predecessors, Obama misrepresents public education performance as a scare tactic and to open the door for the privatization. The late Gerald Bracey cataloged recent errors in Obama’s claims about public schools (Bracey, 2009). Here are a few examples: • Obama claims that graduation rates have fallen from 77 percent to 67 percent, but the U.S. Department of Education says the best method for estimating it puts it at 74.5 percent nationally.

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• Obama said drop-out rates have tripled over the past 30 years. But how does a 10 percent decline in graduation rate equal a 300 percent increase in drop-out rate? • Obama claims, “Just a third of our 13- and 14-year-olds can read as well as they should.” Bracey calls this claim “outright garbage” (Bracey, 2007). • Obama “raved about South Korean schools but neglected to say that thousands of South Korean families sell their children—yes, sell—to American families so their kids can (a) learn English and (b) avoid the horrible rigidity of Korean schools. And while the United States trails Korea on average test scores, it has a higher proportion of students scoring at the highest level on the Program of International Student Achievement (PISA). Moreover, it has the highest number of high scorers (67,000) of any country. No one else even comes close. • Obama “praises charters for creativity and innovation. But study after study of charters has come away saying they were surprised at how much the charter schools look like regular public schools. And charter schools don’t score as well on tests as regular public schools. You can’t bash the public schools on test scores then praise the charters which have lower scores” (Bracey, 2009). Obama’s education stimulus package continues the regimentation of curriculum and test-driven approach to education by bribing states and school districts to apply for $5 billion in grants largely aimed at boosting student test scores; these grants, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, the Race to the Top Fund. Obama, Duncan, and the rest do this because that is what they must do in the social context they are in, and because they have chosen sides in what is the class war, the international war of the rich on the poor, which the rich recognize and the poor, at least in the United States, do not—yet. Again, this is the core issue of our time: the interaction of rising inequality and mass, class-conscious, resistance. That is why the education budget is a war budget. Those who reject this fact not only mislead others—as did hundreds of liberal pundits who fashioned the hysteria that continues around Obama—but they also set up poor and working people for the emergence of fascism, the corporate state that emerges around us now. Example: demands to nationalize banks; the corporate state fully come forth. This includes, for example, columnist Robert Scheer, who called the Obama near-bank nationalization, “fascist,” then turned about and concluded that Obama is okay (Scheer, 2008). Or education big-wig Linda Darling-Hammond, who waived pom poms for Obama, then wandered off from the Obama education department, disillusioned, but never issued a

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self-criticism about what she did, or a warning about what scared her off (Bracey, 2009). Those who feel betrayed by Obama, like Scheer and Darling-Hammond, actually betrayed thousands of people themselves by marching them into the teeth of his charming grin. And those who knew their operation was a scam, like the education union bureaucrats, willfully set up their members for defeat. In many nations, schools are the centripetal organizing point of life. The contradiction of inequality and resistance already appears in education worldwide. Those who are hit first and worst, that is, those who were born with the least inheritance or who have lesser powers, are likely to fight back first—though not necessarily with strategic or even tactical wisdom: New York University building takeovers, the March 4th student actions of 2010, graduate assistant resistance, Detroit school job actions. But there is little organized class-conscious resistance. The antiwar movement wasted the potential demonstrated when millions of people hit the streets against the Iraq invasion. Most antiwar activity in the past 2 years was aimed at electing a demagogue, Obama, who was more open and honest than many of his liberal and left backers in proclaiming he had every intention of sustaining and expanding the empire’s wars. The antiwar movement has failed not only to mobilize action but, more importantly, it failed to take up the pedagogical and practical tasks at hand: teaching people how to develop strategy and tactics inside specific communities rooted in rational answers about why things are as they are, and then, just what it is that needs to be done. In education, pivotal to social mastery, the leaders of the two unions, the NEA and the AFT, with a combined membership of nearly 4,500,000, poured millions of dollars and thousand of volunteer hours into the Obama election, diverting member attention from their real source of power: their ability to control or at least influence their work places, the curriculum, the assessments, the military invasion, privatization, and the very reality of whether school should be opened or closed. Then the education union leaders worked behind the scenes to snare workers in a union of the wreckage of the AFL-CIO and the Change To Win Coalition, the splinter group that firmly believes in corporate-state unionism—the unity of business, labor, and government in the national interest. Leaders of both teacher’s unions are already engaged in offering extensive concessions, allowing layoffs, encouraging school workers to hit out at other working people as with the California Teachers Association demands that the state raise the regressive sales tax. Given the child abuse that is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the RaTT, closed schools buttressed by freedom schooling in the midst of social strife are superior to most everyday schooling (Gibson & Ross,

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2007). To reach that point, education organizers will have to fight their way through a phalanx of union bosses. Professional organizations in the field of education have been no better. The National Council for Social Studies, claiming to be the core group concerned with teaching for democratic citizenship in the United States, has had rare presentations from Rouge Forum members, only opposing the wars and predicting financial calamity. Absent that, the NCSS said nothing but to support imperialist war that sends the children of the poor, on all sides, to fight and kill children of the poor from other nations, all acting on behalf of the rich in their homelands, that is, capitalist democracy. During his campaign, Obama supported linking teacher pay based upon their students’ test scores. He made good on his promise with RaTT money (Stout, 2009). But teacher pay for student test scores is already an established practice in U.S. schools. Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, used test-based performance pay while he was C.E.O. of Chicago Public Schools, and New York City Schools embarked on a project to evaluate teachers based on test scores. Washington DC schools chief, Michelle Rhee, bargained an agreement with the AFT that teacher evaluations will be tied to students’ scores on standardized tests. The Detroit Federation of Teachers mirrored that. Paying teachers for student performance is not new. History shows that most of the gains from such programs are destructive illusions that narrow the curriculum and encourage teachers and administrators to cheat—as we have seen with the so-called Texas Miracle under the duo of Governor George W. Bush and his first Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, who presided over Houston schools when test scores there were enormously inflated (eduwonkette, 2008; Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008). Welford Wilms and Richard Chapleau of UCLA have examined pay-forresults schemes implemented in England, Canada, and the United States in the last 2 centuries and conclude: “Few results that are forced on the schools (especially destructive ones like pay-for-results) will ever penetrate the classroom and positively change the teaching and learning processes” (Wilms & Chapleau, 1999). Yet the Obama stimulus plan includes a continuing bribe to school workers. And the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund is providing $200 million for teacher and principal compensation linked to student test scores. How long will educators continue to exchange reasonably good pay, benefits, and some security for staying mum about the nature of imperialist warfare, for implementing racist high-stakes exams that not only intimidate and make dishonest everyone in a classroom, but that also segregate children wrongly by class and race under a fictitious veneer of science, hiding privilege behind a veneer of accomplishment? The tests, in turn, are being used to segregate teachers, as merit pay linked to test scores expands under

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the Obama administration, proving out the many steps of alienation: no control of the process and product of work, becoming less human to self and others, becoming an instrument of your own servitude; losing. The stimulus package provides an immediate $44 billion in temporary money for schools and comes with instructions from Duncan that schools should “spend funds quickly” in ways that increase test scores, and keep the receipts. While there is still a veil of secrecy around even the real education money, it appears that much of it is dedicated to school buildings, technology, etc. Much of the money will go to developers; unionist construction workers will battle with their nonunion counterparts for what is left—another example of the ability of capital’s relations to sort, divide, and rule. State financial crises are as real as the federal crisis. It is unclear as to whether the stimulus will be sufficient to offset cuts to programs and personnel in recent years, much less cuts to state education budgets in the coming year. For those who continue to have jobs, that state, city, and federal taxes will wipe out any income boost now promised. California’s sun shines on the best example; even with the bailout, the state will remain $2 billion in the red. Ruling classes have experience with suppressing rebellion. They know uprisings are often initiated by disgruntled, angry, educated, members of the middle or upper middle classes, who are cut off from opportunities during hard times. Keeping those people inside the evanescence of limited privilege is important. It is an ethic that pops the bubble, says, “No,” and leads to action. The ethics that drove the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement were wiped away by decades of mendacious pluralist postmodernism (religion with an angry cloak, which discarded the labor theory of value, the key role of exploited labor and made peace with the capitalist state), years of consumerism (70 percent of the U.S. economy until the bottom fell out), by the absence of examples from turncoat leaders in the trade unions and professional ranks; by the elimination of history in classrooms as Johnson forewarned; the upshot being that inside a nation teetering on the brink of the collapse of its ruling classes, the resistance must resurrect its memory of what it is to be in a truly moral fight—right against wrong, equality against inequality, justice against tyranny. Here are four resistance ethics worth restoring to life: • We are responsible for our own histories, if not our birthrights. • Solidarity and equality; an injury to one only goes before an injury to all. • It is wrong to exploit other people. • Justice demands organization and action where it counts. It’s right to rebel.

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Connecting Reason to Passion, Passion to Ethics, Ethics to Organization, and Organization to Action We wrote in Counterpunch, “We do not need to be lambs among wolves. There is a real fight ahead” (Gibson & Ross, 2008). We suggested a financial collapse could speed the rise of fascism, arriving in respectable garb. We make no Cassandra claims about our ability to predict the future—nor anyone’s desire to believe us. We came to the conclusion that economic collapse and imperialist war was inevitable years ago. In the 90s, meeting with middle school teachers, we said, “You are looking at the troops in the next oil war.” We foresaw the wars, but not September 11, 2001 (Chalmers Johnson came close). We did that by using dialectical and historical materialism, Marxist political economy, as an investigatory tool. We especially appreciated work by John Bellamy Foster, whose incisive work outlined the looming disaster. Foster summed up his view in response to a question that may make it easy to grasp: No I am not equating stagnation, stagflation, and overproduction, though they overlap. Stagnation, i.e., slow growth, rising unemployment/underemployment, high excess capacity, etc. reemerged in the 1970s. Initially, there was a period of stagflation (stagnation plus inflation). The inflationary part was brought under control but not the underlying stagnation, which continued. Under monopoly capital (or monopoly-finance capital) actual overproduction is not the dominant tendency since the demand shortfalls shows up in overcapacity rather than overproduction. Corporations cut back on output pretty quickly and lower their capacity utilization (fully competitive capitalism didn’t work this way). You could say, though, that it is a case of implicit overproduction, so there is no real contradiction. Of course a build up of productive capacity, which is increasingly underutilized, fits just as well with Marx’s statement, “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.” (Foster, 2009)

Foster’s repeated insistence that there are no sustainable solutions within the capitalist system that will serve what is the common good is courageous. Robert P. Brenner, interviewed in the Asia Pacific Journal, said, What mainly accounts for it is a deep, and lasting, decline of the rate of return on capital Investment since the end of the 1960s. The failure of the rate of profit to recover is all the more remarkable, in view of the huge drop-off in the growth of real wages over the period. The main cause, though not the only cause, of the decline in the rate of profit has been a persistent tendency to overcapacity in global manufacturing industries. What happened was that, one-after-another, new manufacturing power entered the world market—Germany and Japan, the Northeast Asian NICs (Newly Industrial-

242   R. GIBSON and E. W. ROSS izing Countries), the Southeast Asian Tigers, and, finally, the Chinese Leviathan. These later-developing economies produced the same goods that were already being produced by the earlier developers, only cheaper. The result was too much supply compared to demand in one industry after another, and this forced down prices and, in that way, profits. The corporations that experienced the squeeze on their profits did not, moreover, meekly leave their industries. They tried to hold their place by falling back on their capacity for innovation, speeding up investment in new technologies. But, of course, this only made overcapacity worse. Due to the fall in their rate of return, capitalists were getting smaller surpluses from their investments. They, therefore, had no choice but to slow down the growth of plants and equipment and employment. At the same time, in order to restore profitability, they held down employees’ compensation, while governments reduced the growth of social expenditures. But the consequence of all these cutbacks in spending has been a long-term problem of aggregate demand. The persistent weakness of aggregate demand has been the immediate source of the economy’s longterm weakness. (Brenner, 2009)

Brenner concluded: The bottom line is that, like Roosevelt, Obama can be expected to take decisive action in defense of working people only if he is pushed by way of organized direct action from below. The Roosevelt administration passed the main progressive legislation of the New Deal, including the Wagner Act and Social Security, only after it was pressured to do so by a great wave of mass strikes. We can expect the same from Obama . . . where they should be active is in trying to revive the organizations of working people. Without the recreation of working class power, little progress will be possible, and the only way to re-create that power is by way of mobilization for direct action. Only through working people taking action, collectively and en masse, will they be able to create the organization and amass the power necessary to provide the social basis, so to speak, for a transformation of their own consciousness, for political radicalization. (Brenner, 2009)

Marx went to the heart of the issue: shortage of effective demand. For Marx, there was never any doubt about the root cause of capitalist economic crises. “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit (Marx, 1967, p. 484). However, Professor Foster’s profound analysis of the source of crisis offers no radical project on how to get from here, capital in ruins, to there, the transcendence of capital; no strategy and tactics about how people might take on the system of capital, even as a beginning, and transform it. Brenner believes the world’s ruling classes hope to use the U.S. military might as an international police officer, preventing wider wars. We differ.

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We believe interimperialist rivalry will sharpen, especially over oil, but over regional control, water, markets, cheap labor, the usual suspects of imperialism. U.S. social, military, and moral weaknesses only exacerbate the tensions and make conflict more likely. Given the mantra, true as it is, that World War II alone solved the depression, armed conflict could be tempting to some who have never witnessed it. War means work and profits, setting up popular national unity, even if fleeting. At the same time, we are troubled by wild-card players who could set off unpredictable warfare: Al-Qaeda, Israel, Pakistan, etc. Our estimate is wider war over time. We offer an expansion on the foundation that Foster, Brenner, and others are fashioning. We return to Marx’s combat with political economists of old who treated the system of capital as a collection of gods with minds and lives of their own. Today, we see mainstream economists, really apologists, suggesting that The Market does this, The Market does that, when it is people at work, and other people dominating work. And some Marxist economists (Foster and Brenner exempted) focus in much the same way, tracing the movement of finance capital—its volatile expansions and busts—in great detail, without examining what is key about capital: social relations; people in their struggle with nature to produce and reproduce life and its means, to seek rational knowledge in order to survive; and for freedom. Simultaneously, we see much of what most people think of as the left dodging the failure of socialism—capitalism with a party claiming benevolence in the lead—the betrayals of the world’s “communist” parties and trade unions, the real dilemma of the imperial payout to the empire’s working classes and especially their mis-leaders; meaning that without a sharp historical critique of the past, any future struggle is undermined. We are also struck by this paradox: much of the left shies away from the use of the term capitalism. We see two mistaken motives. Some of the left seem to believe that people can only learn in baby-step fashion and cannot be told of the frights of the world economic system—when the term is now in daily use on TV talk shows. Others on the left, whose tactics we surely understand, operate in what they seem to think are secret wings of parties; the upshot being that the ruling classes and their police are fully aware of how these groups do analysis, while the people they hope to influence do not. We are aware of the dangers of the emergence of fascism—the remaining Patriot Act, etc.—and we are not so foolish to write what would be necessary should fascism arrive full blown, but in this period, we urge openness and the related risks. If it is true that the crux of the matter is inequality at hyperspeed contradicted by the chance of mass organized class-conscious resistance, and

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if it is equally true that the ruling classes have little left but their mostly conspicuous lies and sheer force, then it follows that while those who stand for equality and freedom have a formidable, ruthless enemy; we also have a chance, yet again, to supercede capital—for freedom and equality—if we do more than construct reason, but connect reason to passion, passion to ethics, ethics to organization, and organization to action. As above, it is possible that struggle will emanate from schools where, presumably, ideas still have a role. We wrote in Counterpunch that schools are the integrative organizing points of North American life—centers of power struggles for knowledge, capital, labor, and freedom (Gibson & Ross, 2008). That is our strategic view. Tactically, there are key choke points in schools, opposition to imperialist regulated curricula, rejecting high-stakes exams with boycotts, fighting salary cuts, tuition hikes, etc., and fighting the campus military invasion, as the military and the struggle for what is true are incompatible. We have already witnessed one of the larger school worker locals in the United States, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, pick up the test boycott tactic, in admittedly limited ways, but a boycott nonetheless. In San Diego, a coalition of parents, students, and teachers has had remarkable success in limiting enrollment in high school ROTC programs, through, above all else, sheer perseverance, leafleting regularly at the schools. The March 4, 2010, movement, which openly connected school, capitalism, imperialism and war, was heartening. Since 2008, we participated in some of the largest teach-ins in the United States—the Rouge Forum Conference in Louisville and the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice teach-ins. Combined, those totaled less than 500 participants; good in substance, far short in form. Nevertheless, the March 4th movement included many of our members—and ideas. Around the world, students and school workers in Greece and France started what became general strikes. In the United States, the education workforce has been more malleable. The key terms that might describe the majority of the professorate and K–12 U.S. educators would be racism, ignorance, cowardice, and opportunism. The schools, which were always capital’s schools, became, more than ever, missions for capitalism and educators its missionaries. What changes that? Social conditions may change. Layoffs, wage cuts, pension elimination, escalating class size; all add up. We worry they will add up piecemeal, leading to what we have already seen: education workers continuing with the bad habits of everyday schooling and, at the same time, pointing at others (the media specialists, the counselors, support staff like bus drivers or food workers, etc.) to be cut loose first—or the working class taxed more to pay for the miseducation of its children.

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We expect union leaders, who reject the reason most people believe they join unions, that is, contradictory interests of workers and employers, to lead a series of concessions—in the national interest (meaning their own opportunist interest). Concessions will be sold as “the best that can be done in hard times.” For example, the NEA is partnering with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers to implement reforms outlined a “Tough Choices for Tough Times,” a report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (Gewertz, 2009). Tough-Tough was authored by such educational experts as the director of the militarized Lockheed-Martin, and university presidents whose incomes are frequently dependant on grants from the military, earmarked for “research.” Tough-Tough calls for national curriculum standards as a means of recapturing the witless patriotism necessary to get people to work, and eagerly fight and die, for what is abundantly easy to see are the interests of their own rulers. Concession bargaining is in full swing. The union leadership, and the very structure of unions—dividing people as much or more than uniting them—will serve as yet another layer of enemies to be combated. The union bosses amount to a benign loyal opposition who seek to save the rules of the system for their own narrow desires. They reify the division of labor at the heart of capitalist society. No concessions. None. Not one step back in. Free K–university education. Free health care for everyone. Tax the rich. Tax inherited, landed, and corporate wealth. A 30-hour week with no cut in pay. No foreclosures. Bailout back mortgages with payments right to the buyers. Free K–university education. Or else. One strike after the next. Mutinies in the military. We believe people will fight back. They will have to fight back to live. Will sense be made of resistance? Will protestors demand a shorter work week with no cut in pay, the end of foreclosures and evictions, free health care for all, an end to education for domination, or will people, in the midst of a confusing social collapse, demand more troops on the streets as we see in the border cities of Mexico, strangling in the grips of drug gangs? First resistance, as with March 4th movement, might come from students who have had contact with a few thinking teachers. As hope (a vital function of school, real or false) evaporates, students might rise. They will need considerable support, and the notion that their struggle is a workers’ struggle as well. France 1968 is evidence enough. If the happier possibility of a mass resistance is to break out, we hope it combines the true passion of the ethics and call for equality and freedom we outlined with the analytical tools of political economy and the study of things and people as they change: dialectical materialism. People can become

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whole, joyous, and free within a resistance movement that is making sense of the crux of current conditions and that seeks to change the world. Everything is at hand for a full rearrangement of the social relations of daily life. Let us get to the real task connecting Reason to Power, to Ethics, to Passion, to Organization and Action. Note 1. See the video of interview of Bzezinski on the MSNBC television program “Morning Joe” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu8Nd7xuix4

References Biddle, S. (2009, February 12). Testimony before the committee on Armed Services, United States House of Representatives, First Session, 111th Congress. Retrieved from http:// armedservices.house.gov/pdfs/FC021209/Biddle_Testimony021209.pdf Bracey, G. (2007, May 3). A test everyone will fall. The Washington Post, p. A25. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202004.html Bracey, G. (2009, January 4). The hatchet job on Linda Darling-Hammond. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/the-hatchet-job-on-linda_b_155104.html Bracey, G. (2009, March 10). Obama blows it, part II. Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/on-education-obamablows_b_173666.html Brenner, R. P. (2009, February 7). Overproduction not financial collapse is the heart of the crisis: The US, East Asia, and the World. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Retrieved from http://www.japanfocus.org/_Robert_Brenner__S_J_JeongOverproduction_not_Financial_Collapse_is_the_Heart_of_the_Crisis__the_ US__East_Asia__and_the_World/ Cavallaro, G. (2008, September 30). Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1. Army Times. Retrieved from http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_ homeland_090708w/ Crimmins, C. (2009, February 29). Tens of thousands march against cutbacks in Ireland. ABC News. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/International/ wireStory?id=6928909 eduwonkette (2008, June 5). A Texas tall tale remembered, and demolished, one more time. Education Week. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/eduwonkette/2008/06/ a_texas_tall_tale_remembered_a_1.html FACTBOX. (2009, June 18). Financial crisis sparks unrest in Europe. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLI45108920090618 Fidler, R. (2009, March 13). Guadeloupe: General strike scores victory, spreads to other colonies. Green Left Online. Retrieved from http://www.greenleft.org. au/2009/787/40502

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda    247 Foster, J. B. (2009). A failed system—The world crisis of capitalist globalisation and its impact on China. Links. Retrieved from http://links.org.au/node/931 French unrest spreads to Reunion. (2009, March 5). BBC News. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7926953.stm Freier, N. (2008, November). Known unknowns: Unconventional strategic shocks. Defense Strategy Development, 32. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. Gewertz, C. (2009, March 10). NEA, business groups back “tough choices” reforms. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/ articles/2009/03/10/25nea.h28.html?tkn=QSBFnpGMU6Tfz%2B90MDHbx 3VHgcuRaEAiouMd Gibson, R., & Ross, E. W. (2007, February 2). No Child Left Behind and the Imperial Project: Cutting the schools-to-war pipeline. CounterPunch. Retrieved from http://www.counterpunch.org/gibson02022007.html Gibson, R., & Ross, E. W. (2008, March 1–15). The role of schools and of “No Child Left Behind” in a rotting imperial system: How educators should resist, CounterPunch, 15(5), 1, 4–6. GEAB No. 32-Contents. (2009, February 16). Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin. Retrieved from http://www.leap2020.eu/GEAB-N-32-Contents_a2806.html Goodman, P., & Healy, J. (2009, March 7). Job losses hint at vast remaking of U.S. economy.  The New York Times, p. A1. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes. com/2009/03/07/business/economy/07jobs.html?hp Guadeloupe strike ends after deal. (March 5, 2009). BBC News. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7925553.stm Grandfather Economics Report Series. (2010, April). America’s total debt report. Retrieved from http://mhodges701.home.comcast.net/~mhodges701/debtnat.htm Heilig, J. V., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Accountability Texas-style: The progress and learning of urban minority students in a high-stakes testing context. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 30(2), 75–110. Johnson, C. (2007). Nemesis: The last days of the American republic. New York: Metropolitan Books. Matthews, O., & Nemtsova, A. (2009, February 23). Fear comes to the Russian heartland. Newsweek. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/id/184763/output/print Martinique demonstrators celebrate end of strike. (2009, March 29). Associated Press. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jmweJ8SzMduOZH3iKJMPyKFo2Y5wD96U25J81 Marx, K. (1967). Capital (Vol. 3). New York: International Publishers. Moore, S. W. (1957). Critique of capitalist democracy. New York: Paine-Whiteman. Philip, E. (2009. March 10). Obama, taking on unions, backs teacher merit pay. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ ALeqM5iT—F725ypsNTaNrulnuCGd8vt0QD96RAIQ00 Ravitch, D. (2009, February 24). Is Arne Duncan really Margaret Spellings in drag? Education Week. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from http://blogs.edweek. org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2009/02/is_arne_duncan_really_margaret.html

248   R. GIBSON and E. W. ROSS Rothschild, M. (2008, November 12). What is NorthCom up to? The Progressive. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from http://www.progressive.org/mag/ wx111208.html Saltmarsh, M., & Jolly, D. (2009, March 19). Workers protest across France. The New York Times, p. A8. Retrieved http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/world/ europe/20france.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y Scheer, R. (2008, September 25). Economic fascism coming to America. Alternet. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from http://www.alternet.org/columnists/ story/100199/economic_fascism_coming_to_america/ Schwartz, N. D. (2009, February 14). Job losses pose a threat to stability worldwide. The New York Times, p. A1. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/ business/15global.html?_r=1 Singer, D. (2002). Prelude to revolution. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Sorkin, A. R. (2009). Too big to fail. New York: Viking. Stout, D. (2009, March 10). Obama outlines plan for education overhaul. The New York Times, p. A14. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/ us/politics/11web-educ.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y Szymanski, A. (1978). The capitalist state and the politics of class. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop. Truckers protest fuel prices in Mexico City. (2009, February 24). CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/02/24/mexico.protest/ Wallerstein, I. (2009, March 15). Civil war in the United States? (Commentary No. 253). Global Agence. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=1937 Wilms, W., & Chapleau, R. (1999, November 3). The illusion of paying teachers for student performance. Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/login.html?source=http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1999/ 11/03/10wilms.h19.html&destination=http://www.edweek.org/ew/ articles/1999/11/03/10wilms.h19.html&levelId=2100 Younge, G. (2009, February 27). Precarious populism. Agence Global. Retrieved from http://www.agenceglobal.com/article.asp?id=1918

Chapter 12

Connecting Communities and Schools Accountability in the Post-NCLB Era Tina Wagle and Paul Theobald

Introduction The post-NCLB era has begun. While no one is quite sure what shape it will take, and to what degree vestiges of testalotry will linger within it, it is certain that substantive changes are ahead under the current Obama administration. In this chapter, we build a case for (a) a much wider accounting of how to measure the performance of America’s schools, one that includes an analysis of improvement in the political and economic life of the nation; and (b) a specific reform initiative that directly targets that kind of improvement in the day-to-day work of schools. After many years in professional education, we have come to the conclusion that we cannot look—we no longer have the luxury of looking—for solutions to exclusively educational problems, or, for that matter, exclusively economic problems (which are ubiquitous at this moment), or exclusively political problems. We premise the arguments within this chapter on our firm belief that reform in any of these realms in the context of the 21st The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 249–263 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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century means concerted action across the spectrum of modern institutions that defend the status quo. We offer suggestions on how to change the status quo, in effect attempting to increase people’s investment in our collective future. While President Obama shares this goal, he has so far acted as if the nation’s educational enterprise is unrelated to its political and economic agendas. In this chapter, we will lay out our basis for believing that these three distinctively human realms—politics, economics, and education—are deeply intertwined, necessitating the kind of shift in how schools ought to demonstrate accountability in the 21st century. Why Obama Called for Change There are some who are not entirely discontent with the status quo, but given the fact that our economy is teetering on a precipice, and pension savings are in a free fall, most Americans will admit that there are serious problems to address. But let us also consider the problems that are currently NOT in the headlines. Over the past 30 years, as New Deal policies were dismantled and the nation’s wealth moved upward to the top strata of income earners, the physical infrastructure of this country has been seriously neglected, proving once again that Adam Smith’s (1759) “invisible hand” is no more accurate than it is scientific. In fact, MIT economist Herman Daly quipped that Smith got the wrong appendage. When people are free to pursue their own interests without the burden of engaging in common pursuits, it is not an invisible hand that appears, but an invisible foot that kicks the common good to pieces. We saw that invisible foot take down a Minneapolis bridge during rush hour in 2007. It has been kicking away at our water transport system, leading many experts to worry about the spread of diseases we normally associate with third-world countries: cholera, dysentery, and the like. The food supply is increasingly tainted and suspect, as we have allowed industrial methods of production to usurp what we at one time called farming. In the last few years, we have had poisoned tomatoes, peppers, spinach, onions, and peanut butter work their way into grocery stores across the country, to say nothing about increasing concerns connected to confinement-based production practices in the meat industry. If anyone thought that off-shore oil drilling was a safe way to tap fossil fuel energy, they clearly know better now as a result of the British Petroleum gulf disaster. Additionally, as mysterious diseases baffle physicians and antibiotic-resistant bacteria spreads, the shame of being the only modern democracy to deny health care to millions of its citizens has become an increasingly heavy burden. While we ceaselessly debate the pros and cons of abortion, thousands of living, breathing, working Americans needlessly die each year for want of a colonoscopy or mammogram for which they cannot pay. America’s infant mortality rate is twice as high as it is in Sweden or the Netherlands,

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or even Singapore. The death rate by hand gun in this country soars many thousands of times higher annually than any other nation on Earth. Amazingly, we consider the above issues minor problems in comparison with some of the broader concerns we are currently facing. The embrace and orchestration of what has come to be called “globalization,” for example, has exacerbated the demise of the middle ranks of income earners everywhere. CEOs openly chastise workers who refuse to take pay cuts, telling them they are now in a global labor market, meaning they are now competing with workers throughout the third world. The divide between the rich and the poor in the United States today makes the worst excesses of the Feudal Era seem modest. The top 2 percent of Americans possess more wealth than they could ever spend in a lifetime and yet, by the time loopholes are fully utilized, they are taxed at a much lower rate than middle-class wage-earners. Warren Buffet has publicly announced that he will give $1 million to any CEO who can demonstrate that he or she is in a higher tax bracket than his or her secretary. He has had no takers. Of course, the print and broadcast media in this country are owned and controlled by members of this elite 2 percent. As President Obama bravely proposed a small tax increase on the wealthy, the media has resisted revealing how much federal revenue would be generated as a result of this modest increase, let alone what would be generated by returning to pre–Ronald Reagan rates. This represents the status of neoliberalism in this country, which McLaren (2007, p. 27) describes as: a corporate domination of society that supports state enforcement of the unregulated market, [which] engages in the oppression of nonmarket forces and antimarket policies, guts free public services, eliminates social subsidies . . . establishes the market as the patron of educational reform and permits private interests to control most of social life in the pursuit of profits for the few (i.e., through lowering taxes on the wealthy, scrapping environmental regulations, and dismantling public education and social welfare programs).

A setting such as a neoliberal society makes democratic community engagement difficult because it is predicated on an egocentric model. Citizens, at least those with economic and political power, have their own agendas, which are often influenced by corporate domination and saturation. Thus, to propose an agenda where these same groups and individuals may need to engage in more altruistic and democratic practices may be a challenging task. But let us not lose our optimism. Church and State: Corporation and State On another note, one of the political precepts we revere in this country is the separation of church and state. There are many good reasons why

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this policy makes sense, but we have largely forgotten the most important motive of those 17th-century philosophers who first called for this reform. In the days before newspapers, radios, and television, news of the world was delivered at the pulpit. In the established churches of feudal Europe, kings could dictate what would be discussed in Sunday sermons. As well, they censored the publication of any pamphlets or books that might bring new ideas to the people. Separating church and state was a way to end such censorship. Perhaps the best example of this came in England in the 1640s—Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, head of the Church of England, and Charles the First, head of the state of England, were both executed. In that void, radical political philosophy flourished. Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, and James Harrington, and probably many others whose work has been lost to history, all created blueprints for a nonfeudal England and dedicated them to Oliver Cromwell (Theobald, 2009, pp. 20–24.) To create the same space, the same kind of intellectual freedom in the 21st century, we are going to need to effect the separation of corporation and state. Again, there are many reasons why such a policy makes sense, but none more important than breaking the monopoly over what information is shared with the people, the monopoly over what people therefore think about and discuss. As theorists of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2007; Kincheloe, 2008; McLaren & Leonard, 1993) surmise, education is political. We have seen that this institution is capable of producing transformation as well as reproducing itself. We argue, in the post-NCLB era, that more positive transformation is needed. We contextualize the NCLB and current post-NCLB eras as ones of continued reproduction of society because of their problematic testalotry demands, which continue to marginalize underprivileged and underrepresented groups while supporting the sustained status of the upper echelon. Supporters laud the fact that NCLB instituted accountability measures, but when examined more closely, the inequities of such measures are clearly visible, especially when considering these aforementioned groups. NCLB testing, for example, does not account for absenteeism nor does it take English-language learners into account sufficiently for them to have a fair level of testing. There are also economic inequities in the form of inadequate funding, particularly for the most high-needs schools. Citizens need to think critically about education and its connection to politics and economics as they can no longer be thought of in silos. We continue to wait to see how the Obama administration will reconcile these problematic efforts in the hopes of furthering a democratic agenda, but the early signs are not promising. Testing continues to be seen as synonymous with reform, and vast discrepancies in per-pupil funding remain securely entrenched.

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New Century Issues High on the list of critical concerns is what the United States should think about the world’s energy resources. One consistent 2008 campaign sound byte held that if we would just let the oil companies drill off-shore (“drill baby drill”), we would have plenty of oil for the future. Not only was this claim false, it was demonstrably beneficial to the financial interests of the oil companies. Like it or not, a globalized system of production and distribution is totally dependent on the remaining deposits of the Paleolithic sunlight we call fossil fuels. On the fact that we will run out of gas and oil, there is no disagreement; it is a biophysical inevitability. The only disagreement is over when this will happen. Lest you think this is hyperbole, we point to a recent study that demonstrates that if the per capita fossil fuel consumption rates of India and China were elevated to match current U.S. consumption rates, these two nations alone would need an additional planet Earth by 2030 (Villano, 2008). Some insightful scholars believe that our recent policy of distributing the nation’s wealth upward, our recent policy related to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and possibly even an imminent war with Iran, are all merely manifestations of the recognition among the power elite that we will run out, and as we do, dwindling stores will become increasingly expensive. If this fact does not suffice to at least open one’s mind to the possibility that the status quo might be problematic, there are further concerns connected to the dependence of the global economy on our shrinking stores of fossil fuels. An obvious one is that it immediately raises equity concerns. If the United States, approximately 5 percent of the world’s people, continues to utilize close to 50 percent of the world’s remaining fossil fuels, it is nearly certain that we will generate increasing levels of international antipathy, a circumstance that could possibly result in open warfare or the covert warfare we call terrorism. On top of this, a global economy is a gas-guzzling economy. We can produce Mattell toys in China because the low labor cost, even when added to the higher distribution cost, allows Mattell to maximize its profits. That ratio will become increasingly problematic as the distribution costs rise. But we must consider the following complication: it is not clear at this point if our embrace of this gas-guzzling economy might be heating the Earth’s atmosphere to the point where production versus distribution cost ratios will become the least of our concerns. Even the casual observer is aware of the fact that we have entered an era of superstorms. Tornadoes in January were virtually unheard of before the last 5 or 6 years, and hurricanes have increased in intensity. Biologists tell us that at least 75 percent of all migrating species have significantly altered their migration patterns. Additionally, many nonmigrating species, the polar bear most spectacularly, are experi-

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encing tremendous hardships related to weather changes. The potential for large-scale disruption is huge, as coastal flooding, in a nation where a vast majority of the population lives along the coast, is increasingly seen as a likely future scenario. These concerns underscore the dangers of the status quo. It is not sustainable. It is why Barack Obama campaigned on the promise to produce change. The truth is, however, that the status quo will change, inevitably, either through deliberate, thoughtful, planning, or through panic-driven exigency. And the record of human history in times of extreme duress is not a good one. It is then that people are most likely to forego democratic traditions and embrace the tyrant who best feigns benevolence or who most persuasively identifies a scapegoat. Thoughtful planning and critical thinking seem like better options. “Critical, political literacy can become an indispensible tool for citizens outside of elite-circles to counter hegemonic oppression” (Carr & Porfilio, 2010, p. 2). This planning has to go across the board. We believe that it does little good to work at political reform without simultaneously working on economic and educational reform. Even if small gains might be made, we simply no longer have time for piecemeal approaches. Political Thought for the 21st Century We are convinced that in order to restore and reinvigorate democracy, we must execute a final and definitive separation of corporation and state. Corporate campaign giving, for example, has been defended by our Supreme Court as an act of free speech, a pretty dubious ruling to say the least, but a ruling that puts our elected representatives directly at the service of corporate agendas. Let us illustrate how this plays out in practice. Most Americans are unaware of the fact that Congress passed legislation permitting the use of gas in meat packages such that red meat will stay red longer and not turn brown as quickly. Here’s an instance where Congress passed a law directly benefitting corporate agribusinesses by condoning the intentional deception of American citizens. An episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show (1996) offers us another example of corporate power. Winfrey had a former Montana cattleman as a guest, an individual who relayed all of the dirty secrets related to beef production in this country, including the fact that only 1 percent of all cattle butchered is tested for mad cow disease, prompting Winfrey to claim that she would never again eat a hamburger. The beef industry immediately took her and her guest to court—and lost. Undaunted, agribusinesses thereafter successfully lobbied in 21 states to pass what have come to be called “food disparagement laws,” making it illegal to say bad things about America’s food production and distribution system.

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Given the enormous power of corporations to create and execute a selfinterested political agenda, the 21st century is likely to experience ever more far-reaching proposals for political reform. Today, in 2011, there are ideas of considerable substance out there, ideas worthy of consideration and debate. For instance, there is a growing number of Americans calling for a constitutional convention to redo America’s political system, getting rid of anachronisms like the electoral college, lifetime terms on an unelected Supreme Court, and vast representation discrepancies in the U.S. Senate (Levinson, 2006). There is even considerable sentiment contending that the system is beyond fixing and that secession is the only viable option. In fact, 13 percent of Vermonters today support this option. Though that percentage may seem small, keep in mind that historians estimate that in 1776, only 25 percent of colonials were in favor of seceding from England. Of course, corporate media will not report on such things lest the popularity of these ideas grow. These movements are interesting and provocative. Clearly, the secession of a state might catalyze public sentiment to get behind a constitutional convention. A problem with these movements is that any potential success seems considerably far off, and there might not be time to wait. A better solution is to act on our growing understanding of the intimate connection between the well-being of democracy and the well-being of human community. Robert Putnam (2002) made this connection explicit in his longitudinal study of the political life of Italy titled Making Democracy Work. He then turned to another impactful scholarly project, chronicling the demise of community in America and the concurrent and simultaneous withering of American democracy. Far from an aggregation of self-interested individuals, a democracy is composed of communities that have similar and differing interests from other communities. The vitality of democracy is therefore contingent upon the degree to which citizens play an active role in the life of their communities, an active role premised on sound argument, an evidential base, active listening, and genuine effort at compromise—or what John Goodlad (1994) refered to as the “democratic arts.” But on every front, across all demographic classifications including socioeconomic status, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, et cetera, Americans have become increasingly less engaged in the life of their communities. Not just a little less, dramatically less. Putnam (2000) fastidiously documented this trend in his award-winning book Bowling Alone. The significance of the title is that while more Americans are bowling now than ever before, far fewer Americans are bowling in community leagues. We are doing less of everything together, meaning the welfare or well-being of the place that is shared with neighbors is increasingly left to distant authorities who lack intimate knowledge of local circumstances and who are in any case obligated to carry out the corporate

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agenda of those who put them office. In short, the lack of civic engagement translates directly into the demise of democracy. As communities have diminished, the political life of millions has been reduced to coming out to vote once every 2 years, and nearly half of those eligible to do so do not even bother. This is a fundamental political problem facing the United States in the 21st century. In order to rebuild democracy, in order to rebuild a government of, for, and by the people to replace the current one of, for, and by the corporations, we need to rebuild a sense of community by stimulating civic participation. Economic Thought in the 21st Century Let us turn to the topic of economics. The obvious question in this realm is what kind of production and distribution is least likely to further heat our atmosphere, least likely to create vast discrepancies between the poor and rich, least likely to collapse as fossil fuels disappear, least likely to trigger international antipathy, and most likely to regenerate a sense of community and reinvigorate democracy in the process? The answer is to move all the way from global production and distribution to local production and distribution. Jane Jacobs made this argument back in 1985 in her impressive book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. The title is actually a bit deceptive, for Jacobs claims that economies are best built around cities, that is, a local economy includes a city and its hinterland, the rural regions that surround it. Now this may sound like a tall order, a more difficult proposition even than successfully getting 37 states to call for a constitutional convention, but in actuality, people have more ability to affect economic change than political change. We vote once every 2 years or so; we produce and consume nearly every day. Recognizing this, Wendell Berry has devoted his life to living and consuming in a way that makes no man hostage to his comfort. We can all choose to consume in such a way. John Ruskin (1987) identified it back in the 19th century when he admonished his countrymen to “in all buying, consider, first, what condition of existence you cause the producers of what you buy” (p. 227). The best way to know what condition of existence you cause the producers of what you buy is to buy as local as possible. To maximize what is available locally, communities must adopt an economic strategy called “import substitution,” a process Jacobs (1985) describes at considerable length. Communities need to take stock of what is imported that could just as easily be produced locally, and then come together to find ways to make that local production happen. This is the wellspring of economic vitality. And when corporate giants attempt to undersell local operations, commu-

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nity allegiance can forestall such attempts. As well, communities can create policies that make it difficult for corporate giants to compete against local production. Having identified what we take to be the fundamental political reform required for life in the 21st century—the reinvigoration of citizen engagement necessary to effect the separation of corporation and state—and the fundamental economic reform required for life in the 21st century—ethical consumption and the promotion of local production and distribution via import substitution—we turn next to the educational arena and the kind of post-NCLB reform that will work across all three of the major spheres animating the human condition. Educational Thought for the 21st Century Before turning our attention to the educational arena, we would like to provide a quick historical review. One of the Enlightenment spokespersons trying to help Europe chart out a path to a nonfeudal world was a Frenchman by the name of Charles de Secondat Montesquieu. Montesquieu is actually America’s unsung philosophical hero—for he was the intellectual source of one of our dearest political doctrines, one that is on par with the separation of church and state: the separation of power via checks and balances. Our constitutional authors, Madison and Hamilton in particular, saw great wisdom in this idea, even though they rejected most of the rest of what Montesquieu had to say regarding the establishment of republics. For instance, Montesquieu claimed that they needed to be kept small and that they needed to cultivate frugality and virtue among the population; hardly useful prescriptions for the commercialist republic Hamilton and Madison envisioned. Further, Montesquieu (1914) believed that if a republic was to succeed at all, it required a system of schools capable of delivering what he called “the full power of education.” Hamilton and Madison were silent on the question of education—which is one reason it took another 50 years after the constitution was ratified to institute systems of free schools. In fact, in the large corpus of Hamilton’s writings, the only mention of youth has to do with the use that can be made of them, “at a tender age,” in the nation’s growing factories. Despite the undemocratic measures deliberately woven into our constitution, the infamous electoral college, the property qualifications for voting, the enormous representative-represented ratio, the nonelected positions on the Supreme Court, the infamous three fifths clause, etc.; despite all of that and in defense of Hamilton and Madison, they had little idea that what they created could become so conducive to politics dominated by party allegiances, and merely two political parties at that; or so conducive to an interlock between

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corporations and the apparatus of statehood. The shortcomings inherent in these developments have unfolded and intensified over time. It is now long past time that they were corrected. But how do we make this happen? It is our contention that a big part of the answer has to do with the educational endeavor. It seems that Montesquieu was correct; a successful republic does require a school system capable of delivering the “full power of education.” Standardizing what is taught to everyone everywhere and considering the effort accomplished or not on the basis of a test score is about as far away from what Montesquieu described as a republic can get. When you toss in the still-prevalent, lingering effects of social Darwinism, that an education ought to match an individual’s evolutionary endowment of intellect, and that it ought to further match the evident and probable occupational destiny of each child, you have an educational system that bears no resemblance to one designed to deliver the full power of education, one designed to create and maintain the vitality of a republic. That is what is needed in the post-NCLB era: public schools focused on delivering the full power of education. Westheimer and Kahne (2004) found in a study on democracy through community engagement that “social change is the product of collective effort” (p. 259). What must happen is something analogous to what must also happen in the political arena: catalyzing civic engagement of the sort that will effect the separation of corporation and state; and in the economic arena, ethical consumption flanked by local production and distribution via import substitution. Thus, it comes out something like this: curricular and instructional liberation for teachers monitored by, and negotiated with, a school’s surrounding public. For the sake of argument, we are going to ignore the current prescriptive policy milieu and pretend that school districts have once again been given considerable latitude to decide educational matters locally. The next step, then, would be to encourage school boards to recognize and act on the wisdom behind a return to local control. That wisdom, in our estimation, can be described this way: the academic progress of a child is a matter best decided at the level closest to the child; that is, at the level of the local school. We cannot and should not expect politicians at the state or national level to make pedagogical decisions that will benefit all children, because all children do not learn in the same way. Learning is almost completely dependent upon local context, cultural circumstances, as well as the personal ill- or well-being of each student on any given day. As well, learning is something highly dependent upon the quality of the relationship between student and teacher. Given this, we can lay out what a local school board might do to maximize the likelihood that all students will learn at a high level, that all students will receive the full power of education.

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To start, they need to turn the matter of learning over to the professionals who work in each school. The gift of curricular and instructional freedom often results in reinvigorated professional lives—teachers who utilize the local context to build relevance into student engagement with traditional school subjects. Liberated teachers will be far more likely to utilize their pedagogical imaginations to create lessons that will motivate students, stretch them, and maximize what they come to understand about school subjects and the utility of those subjects. The primary task of school administrators will be to figure out ways to emulate school systems in other nations, like Japan, where teacher-student contact hours are limited, say, to 4 hours per day, in order to increase teacher-to-teacher contact hours so that rich curricular and instructional discussions might take place. This kind of deep-level conversation would add immeasurably to the quality of student–teacher interaction (and is the very rationale for Theodore Sizer’s [2004] dictum “less is more”). Additionally, each school would be free to select curricular materials or make their own. Each teacher would be free to choose an instructional approach that seems to best match his or her strengths and the needs of the children in his or her charge. But what about accountability? Here is where the essence of the reform we are proposing interjects. Each school should convene a 10-member Board of Assessors chosen by lot for a 2-year term from the vicinity surrounding the school. Generally speaking, the selection process should be analogous to the one used to select jurors for legal trials, only in this instance, teachers would be charged with the task of selecting the board from those chosen by lot. A process could be created that would allow citizens to decline to serve on the Board of Assessors if there are good reasons to do so. Once established, this board would take over the curricular and instructional monitoring duties of the elected school board, leaving them free to deal with personnel, infrastructure, and budget issues. The responsibility of the Board would be to engage in discussions with teachers about their curricular and instructional choices, to decide how well these choices articulate across grades and subjects, and to become intimately involved in the assessment of student learning. Annually, the Board of Assessors should make a report to the State Department of Education relaying their level of satisfaction with the progress made at the school. In this way, the matter of accountability is given substance; a school’s community will be allowed to decide how well their school is doing, rather than a distant testing agency where the employees have never met the local students on whom they pass statistical judgments.

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Connecting Political, Economic, and Educational Reform We believe that political, economic, and educational thinking in this country are necessarily joined at the hip. Change strategies, therefore, need to take this circumstance into account. That is why we have argued that we need to catalyze civic engagement in the interest of effecting the separation of corporation and state. The Board of Assessors that we are proposing would bring roughly 1 million Americans into a crucial kind of civic engagement, thus contributing to positive growth in terms of rebuilding a sense of community in and around the school, and thus contributing to the promotion of democracy in America. With curricular and instructional freedom, teachers will be able to craft lessons that capitalize on the relevance of the local context, the local neighborhood, including how the neighborhood and the school’s neighbors have been treated by past and current policy decisions. In other words, schools can become an invaluable laboratory for policy surveillance, an invaluable agent in the promotion of import substitution and ethical consumption. Through learning in the traditional school subjects, students can do the research required for community members who wish to know the condition they create among the producers of what they buy. In this reform, we utilize the “project method” and elements of what has come to be called “place-based pedagogy” (Smith, 2002; Sobel, 2009). Some might argue that the majority of the nation’s teachers would be unfamiliar with these approaches. Although this seems unlikely to us, it is plausible that some would be. But we believe, nevertheless, that the act of curricular and instructional liberation itself will move teachers in this direction on their own devices, and that their development could be augmented with help from the nation’s schools and colleges of education. Higher education, generally, could play a major role, especially in terms of assisting local Boards of Assessors to do their jobs well. This would be a valuable sort of professorial service that could come from professors across a range of disciplines. We have a little experience with this stemming from Chicago’s experiment with Local School Councils, the elected members of which were required to participate in 18 hours of training initially provided by three Chicago-area higher education institutions, but later taken over by the Chicago school district itself. While there are many positive developments stemming from this 1988 reform effort, we believe that immersing the councils in personnel decisions has taken time, energy, and focus away from what the councils might otherwise more profitably do. Further, the fact that council members have been elected has meant that they have not been the kind of democratic catalyst they might have been if the selection process were by lot.

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A democratically selected Board of Assessors, whose focus is on curriculum and instruction, might very well orchestrate occasional public hearings, but the vast majority of the issues and concerns that generate antipathy and disruption at school board meetings would be left to the elected board. Part of what the training colleges and universities would offer to newly selected Assessor Board members would be how to communicate its role to the general public. Still, democracy is messy. Within this reform measure, there is potential for conflict between the nonelected Board of Assessors and the elected School Board, or between the assessors and teachers, or between the assessors and administrators. The American system of education has not prepared citizens well for the kind of “give and take” conversations that the assessors would need to embrace. Colleges can be a huge help by providing assistance toward that end. Most of the assistance from institutions of higher education would entail helping the Board members build a new vision for schools—helping them see the potential for connecting school work to the vitality of the community that the school serves, helping them understand the pivotal role of context, of relevance, to human learning. We have no intention of prescribing what a local school might do, but it is easy to envision a school that chooses to require a well-crafted piece of local legislation from each grade-level class, or a school that requires each grade-level class to adopt a neighborhood building for a complete restoration. Schools might identify a range of areas within which students must wield traditional school subjects in the interest of community betterment—aesthetics, health care, housing, historical preservation, oral history, community music and theater, local poetry, the identification of economic niches working catalytically toward import substitution, state and federal policy analysis, research related to the production of goods and services consumed locally, opinion surveys, cashflow surveys, environmental monitoring and testing, and so on. A school’s Board of Assessors would need to elicit from teachers how students will benefit academically from such projects and how what is learned will serve as a foundation for future learning. Additionally, they would need to serve as witnesses to student academic growth. Teachers who have both the time and the incentive to be creative and to work together can find an infinite number of ways to embed curriculum into local circumstances and local conditions, such that the traditional school subjects are taught within a context, the relevance of which would be abundantly evident, dramatically increasing the likelihood that school subjects will be well learned. The great shortcoming of what is now all the rage, standards-based education, is that it decontextualizes curriculum so that its use is unknown, or at best, assumed to exist somewhere far off in every student’s future. This is why John Dewey (1956) chastised American

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education, claiming it put children on a “waiting list” and kept them there until they were released by adulthood. The net effect of what we are currently doing in the name of education all across this country is very much like assigning the study of Spanish without the opportunity to use it; 5 years later, it is forgotten with ease. Any piece of the curriculum, devoid of an opportunity to wield it, suffers the same fate as unutilized Spanish instruction. The time-tested colloquialism is accurate: use it or lose it. The best intentions surrounding learning standards fly in the face of what we know about how humans learn. But even if this were not the case, there would still be ample reason to liberate teachers such that they might embed lessons within the context of the immediate community, ample reason if there is general agreement about the ends of education, general agreement that economic productivity does not solely define the human condition, that is, that one’s occupation is not the only means by which a life may be rendered rich or poor. A republic requires a school system that delivers “the full power of education.” Such a system, of necessity, will utilize the immediate community to balance economic and political enculturation, and to our great good fortune, reinvigorated communities mean a reinvigorated democracy. McLaren (2007) posits “the market as the patron of educational reform” (p. 27) in his neoliberal economic paradigm. We argue that the economic, political, social, ecological, and educational climates are all intertwined and must not be examined in silos. Let us hope Obama begins to initiate holistic reformation with regard to the aforementioned dynamics in mind that may truly lead to a changed, democratic society. References Carr, P. & Porfilio, B. (Eds.). (2010). The phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for education: Can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Dewey, J. (1956). The school and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friere, P. (2007). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Goodlad, J. (1994). The National Network for Education Renewal. Phi Delta Kappan, 74(2), 147–152. Jacobs, J. (1985). Cities and the wealth of nations. New York: Random House. Kincheloe, J. (2008). Critical pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang. Levinson, S. (2006). Our undemocratic constitution: Where the constitution goes wrong and how we the people can correct it. New York: Oxford University Press. McLaren, P. (2007). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy and the foundations of education. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. McLaren, P., & Leonard, P. (1993). Paulo Friere: A critical encounter. New York: Routledge.

Connecting Communities and Schools    263 Montesquieu, C. S. (1914). The spirit of the laws. London: G. Bell & Sons. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Putnam, R. (2002). Making democracy work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ruskin, J. (1987). Unto this last. New York: Penguin Books. Sizer, T. (2004). Horace’s compromise: The dilemma of American high school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Smith, A. (1759). The theory of moral sentiments. New York: Cosimo Classics. Smith, G. A. (2002). Place-based education: Learning to be where we are. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(8), 584–594. Sobel, D. (2009). Placed-based education: Connecting classroom and community. Retrieved from http://www.antiochne.edu/ed/il/pbexcerpt.pdf Theobald. P. (2009). Education now: How rethinking America’s past can change its future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Villano, D. (2008). A future of less. Miller-McClure. Retrieved from http://www.miller-mccune.com/business-economics/a-future-of-less-4338/# Westheimer, J., & Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 237–269. Winfrey, O. (1996). The Oprah Winfrey Show. Chicago: Harpo Productions, Inc. (April 16, 1996).

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Chapter 13

If There is Anyone Out There . . . Peter McLaren

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. —Barack Obama’s speech on election night 2008

Barack Obama is another stock character in the cyclical political theater embraced by the liberal class. Act I is the burst of enthusiasm for a Democratic candidate who, through clever branding and public relations, appears finally to stand up for the interests of citizens rather than corporations. Act II is the flurry of euphoria and excitement. Act III begins with befuddled confusion and gnawing disappointment, humiliating appeals to the elected official to correct “mistakes,” and pleading with the officeholder to return to his or her true self. Act IV is the thunder and lightning scene. Liberals strut across the stage in faux moral outrage, delivering empty threats of vengeance. And then there is Act V. This act is the most pathetic. It is as much farce as tragedy. Liberals—frightened back into submission by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party of the call to be practical—begin the drama all over again. We are now in Act IV, the one where the liberal class postures like the cowardly policemen in “The Pirates of Penzance.” Liberals promise battle. They talk of glory and honor. They vow not to abandon their core liberal values. The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 265–285 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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266   P. McLAREN They rouse themselves, like the terrified policemen who have no intention of fighting the pirates, with the bugle call of “Tarantara!” This scene is the most painful to watch. It is a window into how hollow, vacuous and powerless liberals and liberal institutions including labor, the liberal church, the press, the arts, universities and the Democratic Party have become. They fight for nothing. They stand for nothing. And at a moment when we desperately need citizens and institutions willing to stand up against corporate forces for the core liberal values, values that make a democracy possible, we get the ridiculous chatter and noise of the liberal class. —Chris Hedges (2011)

In the near-narcotic thrall of the 2008 presidential election, most of the discussion centered on the historical magnitude of the climate in which the election took place—during a (continuing) crisis of the world economy as the United States plunged into a crisis of capital the degree of which it hasn’t experienced since the Great Depression of 1929—and in the wake of the election of the first African American president. Yet many people were asking the following questions: Was the election the reaffirmation of American history? Was this historical moment the turning point we have all been waiting for since the patent disaster of the Bush-Cheney years—a lurch toward a new singular age of critical citizenship? Was the United States of America still the last best hope of humankind; the shining new multicultural city on a transnational hill? Did the new democratic electoral coalition of upscale whites and minority groups hint perhaps at another Great Society presidency as in the storied days of Lyndon Johnson? Was America really a place where all things are possible, where the power of democracy works in the best interests of American citizens? Will Obama remain obdurate before the congressional pressure of business as usual; stay steadfast when he is beleaguered by corporations and the military; and remain the zealous advocate for change around which he styled himself throughout the election campaign? Or was his talk about change just an affectation that he scrupulously and disingenuously applied to himself mainly for the purpose of winning votes? The bulk of these questions helped to shape the state of expectant anxiety and intense anticipation experienced by many as the Obama presidential team prepared to take office. However, the reality on the ground proved to be much more dismal than the hopes and dreams unleashed by Obama’s scintilating anticipatory rhetoric. It was an election campaign where image management played a more prominent role than in any other presidential election since Richard Nixon’s storied flop sweat and 5 o’clock shadow was blamed for his losing the famous presidential television debate with John F. Kennedy. The CNN Web site header read as follows: Calendar Offers Chance to Spend 2009 with Sarah Palin. On the cover was a shimmering photo of Sarah Palin holding

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the barrel and fore-end of a rifle with the stock swung cavalierly over her shoulder. Former Wasilla Deputy Mayor Judy Patrick’s 2009 wall calendar featuring photos of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and her family was the second most popular calendar on Amazon.com. Did you spend your New Year’s Eve in 2009 with Sarah Palin? The millions who did clearly wanted to dust off a 1950s version of the American Dream, as Palin had become their symbol of Yankee Doodle permanence through her cannily crafted intolerance of big cities, bureaucrats, and uppity minorities like Barack Obama and through her studied willingness to use racism, fear, ersatz patriotism, and lies to keep America on the “right” side of history. It could also be said, not irreverently, that Palin’s dipsy cast of countenance prefigured the arrival of the Tea Party’s zeitgeist lurking within the capitalist id, but shrouded in soccer mom epithets and ex beauty queen bravado. However, there were just as many patriotic Americans who preferred to paste up pictures of the Obama family on their refrigerator doors (even if the freezer was not as stocked with foodstuffs as in healthier economic times). Just as the Frank and April Wheeler characters in the film Revolutionary Road wanted to escape the white suburban American Dream, many voters wanted to escape with the Obamas—not by living as expatriates in Paris but by electing Barack Obama as a leader who would redefine America, not as a country of alienating work, immigrant bashing, imperialist wars, domestic spying, legal torture, and extraordinary rendition, but as a country that would reinvent itself on behalf of the poor and powerless, on the side of the world’s oppressed, and thereby give new meaning to what it meant to be a citizen of America. Whereas Frank and April lacked the self-critical reflection to break free from their ideological captivity and perspicuously refashion and reinvent their own political agency through a critical bildung (the struggle for self-mastery between the desire for individuation and selffulfillment and the demands of the social reality in which one is located), conditions on election night seemed ripe for a wholesale reversal of the ideological drift of the past 8 years for those who would only reach out and take up the challenge. However, each month that has passed since the election has seen the blush progressively fade from the rose. In fact, the rose has withered into powder in the entangled gloom of our worst fears. 2008 U.S. Election and My Preliminary Assessment The 2008 presidential election was little more than a rehearsal for a return of the same, a pretext for the restatement of business as usual in a different voice, whose message was more about rhetorical timbre and pitch than substantive policy initiatives—a rewriting of the old cocky exceptional-

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ism (the Leibnizian “we live in the best of all possible worlds”) in the new subjunctive language not simply of hope and possibility (what if?) but of resounding and reverberating hope and possibility (“what if” meets “we shall”), delivered in the Horatio Alger-joins-the-Orange-Revolution aerosol discourse of “yes we can!” and coffee-table mantra “when the going gets tough the tough get going!” This is because the hope of which Obama speaks is impossible to achieve under capitalism. Even if Obama has the best intentions, the rules of capital reproduction—the conditions necessary to keep capitalism afloat—constitute a constitutive barrier preventing Obama from exercising the kind of difference that will make a real difference (and that’s assuming that he seeks such change). Everything that could conceivably bring about the kind of social transformation that would dramatically change for the better the fabric of everyday life in America is unmasked as an impossible contradiction if we place it within the context of the stubborn persistence of capitalism as the only way to organize the globe for overcoming necessity. Of course, even the most resolutely political Americans won’t place it within such a totalizing context (isn’t the act of totalizing one of the bete noirs of the Marxists, according to some poststructuralist pundits?) but will focus solely or mainly on the subjective nature of the trauma or on the cultural aspects of the global crisis in which we are living rather than analyze the structural and systemic roots of the crisis that are deeply enmeshed in overproduction and accumulation through dispossession (via privatization, financialization, the management and manipulation of economic crises, and state redistribution of resources). Put simply, the reproduction of capital is necessary for the reproduction of wage laborers—the bread and butter of capitalist life. Unless we begin to look at organizing the struggle to overcome necessity outside the value form of labor in capitalist societies (such as in the case of a socialist alternative to capitalism), we will be locked in the prison house of endless exploitation and alienation with no alternative but to quaff gamely the arsenic-laced Kool-Aid. Sarah Palin tried to inject herself as the new face (literally and figuratively) of the Republican Party, employing abecedarian attempts at crafting her “knowing wink” for the titillated cameras that seem transfixed by her strangely antiquated beauty queen looks. Talk show hosts and journalists were bent on giving Palin a soft ride, ignoring her puckish pandering to the once separatist Alaskan Independence Party—she addressed their convention by video hookup in 2008—whose founder, Joe Vogler, is quoted as saying, “I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions” and whose current platform demands that public lands be open to private ownership. She charmed the public with her Great White North accent, and her Sachs Fifth Avenue wardrobe, as she continued purposefully to polarize the country between rural Americans and the Eastern elites, between people of color (including immigrants) and hard-working white males, and

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as she promoted to the pinnacle of American patriotism hockey moms and NASCAR dads and the hardscrabble decent folks who just couldn’t stomach the idea of a black man with his feet up in the Oval Office or a black woman adjusting the doilies in the Abraham Lincoln bedroom who wasn’t trussed in a maid’s uniform. Images of Barack Obama eating watermelon and fried chicken appeared on mock food stamps that were distributed in one Republican constituency, whereas Fox News liked to follow the name Barack Hussein Obama in its broadcasts with a mention of Osama Bin Laden, so as to create a damning association with its Pavlovian viewing public who, like clockwork, can be made to grind their populist teeth on demand when their hatred is stoked (and nobody knows how to stoke hatred of nonwhites better than Fox News). As racism became the torch of hope for the electoral victory of the Republican Party—an axial strategy that has driven its election propaganda since Richard Nixon popularized the “Southern Strategy”—millions of Americans apparently decided that the juggernaut of hate riding on a crest of Republican bile was too much for the American public, and a groundswell of support for Obama—largely made possible by the organizing skills of the antiwar movement and the popular left—was just enough to shift the momentum of support to Obama. To what extent the left can keep the pressure on the Obama presidency to focus on the unemployed at least as much as on the beleaguered industries and their corporate handlers remains to be seen. Moreover, even if it manages to keep the pressure on, it is unlikely that their voices will be heard as Obama has shifted considerably center-right since his election victory and seems bent on getting U.S. troops further bogged down in Afghanistan. Regular “America at War” features on media outlets are sure to remain stock features of American life as long as U.S. capital seeks to impose its will on foreign markets and the U.S. military continues its role as the alpha male for the transnational capitalist class. Clearly, the 2008 election had the appearance of disappearance, that somehow all the violence of the Bush administration would be vaporized once the Obamas settled into the White House. It was a classic mistake in general semantics of confusing the map with the territory. In this regard, the election could be likened to a media virus programming its own retransmission via a well-worn template that has no entrance for the critic, no exit for the cynic, and no substance whatsoever. Participant spectators trying to use their ballot for progressive political change found themselves sucked right back into a social universe of diminishing expectations and endless spectacle that kept them narcotically entrained in a strange loop of soundbyte aphorisms. It forced them to chase their tails inside what resembles a fetishized moebius strip, absent of any counterpoints or counternarratives, devoid, in other words, of contextual or relational thinking. Or following the hands of an Escher drawing where the sketch dissolves into the artist

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then dissolves back into the sketch, ad infinitum; illusion and reality appear in an endless dance with little chance of breaking out into a new moral, political, or economic logic through some form of metacommunication or metapraxis—after all, who is there to listen except the already insane? The unwitting victims, the popular majorities, have once again fallen prey to a contagion of manipulation, to an endless circularity of mutual determinations that spreads like a bacilli in a fetid swamp disguised as a golden pond that sports at its center a shining marble fountain spurting audacious hope like a geyser of yellow ink. Obama’s fountain of national renewal. Mainstream Media and the 2008 Election The mainstream media coverage of the election created a vortex of political indeterminacy, of radical contingency—a multitemporal and nonsynchronous dynamic, internal to the mechanisms of the election coverage as such—that encouraged antidialectic analyses of the issues facing the America public, causing its coverage to slip and slide and remain unfastened to any coherent historical narrative of social change, making contextual thinking impossible and blurring the distinction between illusion and reality, between the cadaver and the autopsy that follows. The historical and contextual rudderlessness of the media created a conceptual field in which real transformation could not be conceptualized. Such is the nature of the corporate media. The corporate media work as a closed autopoietic system that produces the conditions for a continuous mythmaking that bolsters the interests of the ruling elite. Consider this: The founding moment of the United States included genocide against the indigenous population and slavery, acts of violence that over time the dominant media apparatuses have retroactively transcoded and renarrated so that the original founding moment has become transformed into its opposite. Through a wistful backward glance, pilgrims and native peoples celebrated a shared humanity and thanksgiving. At least that’s the way we have been conditioned to think about it. The coordinates for reflecting on democracy in America have been repositioned so that it appears that only good can come of efforts to expand American interests into the far corners of the Earth. America’s enemies must therefore always already be the enemies of civilization. Countermyths and counternarratives must never gain legitimacy. Whenever they appear in mass market media scripts they are excised like warts. In effect, the dominant media work like the infrastructure of a domestic sewage treatment plant in which contaminants are removed from waste material. The objective is to produce a waste stream and sludge suitable for

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discharge or reuse back in the environment. In the media, information is treated as waste matter and includes the exclusion of information, the microfiltration of information, the marginalization and demonization of information, the naturalization of information, the transforming of information into propaganda, and the transcoding of information into its opposite, all of which have different stages of treatment (primary, secondary, and tertiary). All of this is done so that information can never lead to knowledge, to a praxis of knowing that includes acts of struggle and transformation. The media work like electronic microorganisms, neutralizing information that could be toxic to the well-being of the ruling elite, disinfecting it and then disposing or reusing the treated information so that it irrigates the overall system—a type of epicene groundwater recharge of information to keep the system of lies afloat like dregs in a bucket of rainwater. To a certain extent, Obama was able to complicate this system through Internet networks (interactive Web. 2.0 tools) that enabled him to move thousands of people to organize, which in the past would have required armies of paid organizers and volunteers. Here he could mount defenses against attacks against him in the mainstream media. He could also communicate with his constituents in a way that avoided the stultifying mediation of the corporate media. The election was a media spectacle that not only feverishly accelerated the political metabolism of the nation but also served as little more than an allegorical background for the battle for the soul of America. The media used our ballots to reproduce at the level of action the symbolic violence they export daily at the level of ideas. The goal was to get a neoliberal of the right or the left elected—somebody who would not challenge the presuppositions of the transnational capitalist class. In the interests of subverting the Bush regime, voting Democrats became vital organs of the body politic, subverting their own interests in the belief that their votes would matter, that they had the power to explode the limits or the self-contained subjectivity of our media-educated expectations and conditioned political agency. As John Sargis (2008) bluntly put it, The essence of American elections is to “vote” into office, from National to local governments those political, economic and militaristic operatives who will enhance the capitalist growth economy by enacting laws that minimize social controls over corporations in order to help them maximize their growth and economic efficiency and in the process acquiring good sums of money and the good life for themselves, while driving many others into financial ruin. In order for these values to permeate American life every voter has to believe they are participating in this great gimmick called elections: thus the economic and political elite gave “we the people” elections. However, the ballot gives us a silent death. In order to place in Congress those political hacks, who together with their opposite aisle counterparts create the best possible benefits to the military/industrial state, providing them with

272   P. McLAREN loopholes, tax havens, subsidies, and creative financing to increase profits but leave the American citizen poorer and without recourse from draconian bankruptcy laws, insurance discrimination, discrepancies in pay for women and minorities who make much less for equal work. In actuality there is only one capitalist Party with two wings, between which there are hardly any discernible differences. Congress’s real job is to pass laws that consolidate economic and political power in the hands of the elite whereas the aim of a real democracy can only be to institutionalize the equal distribution of economic and political power.

The media—the pusillanimous instruments of the cultural commonsense of the larger social order—are, after all, structural features of capitalist society and thus part of society’s social practices and as such must be linked to larger historical developments and viewed in the light of wider social forces and relations. Seen in this way, it becomes clear that the media support those institutions that undercut the collective needs, rights, and causes of workers and sully any fertile ground in which social struggles might take root that can challenge capital on behalf of labor and the global working class. In other words, the corporate media normalize the social division of labor and the ruthless exploitative practices needed to keep this division in place. Different blocs of capital must expand in order for capitalism to survive, and this means extracting the most profit possible. This essentially determines what gets produced, how, and by whom. It accounts for why one in six children worldwide are child laborers and why corn and sugar are now often produced in the so-called Third World, not to feed the hungry but to provide biofuels for advanced capitalist countries. This is why education and health care systems in the United States are in tatters. And why Obama failed to succeed with a public health care option. For centuries, the U.S. administration has had a bad habit of undertaking bellicose imperialist adventures via the interminable paradoxes of U.S. democracy (i.e., humanitarian intervention, torture to advance security, and other lies and equivocations that supposedly preserve our freedoms) and an even worse record of accounting for them afterward. Whenever his deteriorating health permits, the saturnine Cheney takes his ugly stagecraft and permasmirk to the talk show circuit and communicating an unbearable heaviness of being, illustrating the extent to which collective malice and a disingenuous spirit have made for such a toxic age of despair (to be fair, isn’t it mandatory for every president and vice president to enter into a Faustian pact with the devil?). Worried about his place in history, Cheney is desperately trying to place the patriot’s imprimatur on the torture of terrorism suspects and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The election of 2008 was not the usual fashion accessory election. Rather, it was the year of the great unraveling: a year of political reversals, of worldhistorical economic contradictions, of dramatic swings of the cultural pen-

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dulum, and of the terrifying clarity that comes with living in the underside of history. In the storied terrain of American politics, a lot has changed in the span of half a decade. Enough time has passed to have sepulchered the Bush administration in its timeless legacy of horror and shame. From the savage triumph of neoliberalism, the grandiose scaling of the commanding heights of authoritarian rule sans jackboots and goosestepping storm troopers, the mass worship of the presidential pouch salaciously strapped into a customized flight suit (can it compete with Obama’s pectorals that clearly rival those of Putin?), to the hideous scarecrow rictus of Bush salivating under the banner of “Mission Accomplished,” the world has witnessed a jarring reversal—the world-shattering crash of capitalist markets, the election of the first African American president (symbolically putting the final nail into the coffin of the old Jim Crow racism but not halting the new Jim Crow racism of mass incarceration of African-Americans), dismal retrospective evaluations of the Bush presidency with Bush himself earning the lowest approval rating of any president in U.S. history, an Iraqi journalist catapulted into global fame by hurling his shoes at the world’s most powerful potentate. Reaganism has, finally, been hoist with its own petard, and the prospect of the machinations of the ruling class remaining camouflaged from the popular majorities by carefully calculated lies and deception has clearly diminished. However, this is not because mainstream journalists have finally begun to disembed themselves from their ideological captivity and remove the tinfoil hats issued to them by the Pentagon. It is because of the existence of an overwhelming cynicism that the game is rigged from the outset. The smirking Bush is no longer the regular Joe with whom most Americans want to share a beer, comfortably basking in his aura of prideful certitude. Rather, he has become saddled with the legacy of the stubbornly self-righteous decider whose fiscal misrule (and not the decisions of a “shocked” and disbelieving Alan Greenspan, whose imagined bishopric of an unperturbed rich and powerful ruling class guided by the God-like hand of the market has now been thrown in history’s trash can along with the reputation of his erstwhile mentor, Ayn Rand) is now held to be responsible to a significant degree for their current misery (he inherited a $127 billion surplus when Bill Clinton left office and has left us a $9.5 trillion debt). One of the worst financial disasters in world history has occurred under the watch of the Bush regime, and the American people will not soon, if ever, forget, unless stubborn revisionist historians prevail down the winding and inglorious road of American political life, as they are wont to do. Lending institutions were not able to protect their shareholder’s and are now scrambling to keep themselves in business. We know that money was squandered in Iraq and given as a tax windfall to America’s richest individuals and corporations, and predictably, the American public blames the current reces-

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sion on bad business acumen when, in fact, the public should be taking a hard look at the structure of capitalism. The conservative recipe for economic well-being—tax cuts and low inflation through monetary policy controls and unfettered and unregulated markets—cannot succeed under global neoliberal capitalism. The overall savings rate of Americans (it’s been dropping since 1997) failed to increase with tax cuts. Supply-side economics pivots on a small number of Americans controlling a significantly large amount of the nation’s total income—1 percent of Americans that the Grand Old Party’s tax policies have favored— and this policy has clearly failed the poor. Deficit spending did grow the economy by 20 percent during Bush’s tenure, but between 2002 and 2006, it was the wealthiest 10 percent of households that saw more than 95 percent of the gains in income. Deregulation simply became a criminal enterprise of making more and more profits. However, the real question is whether the system of capitalism itself is criminal. Without answering this fundamental question, we focus on the salaries, benefits, and bonuses of the top executives who are getting taxpayer bailouts from Washington. We bristle at the executive largesse in terms of cash bonuses, stock options, and personal use of company jets (the average paid to each of the top executives of the 116 banks now receiving government financial aid was $2.6 million in salary bonuses and benefits)—the total amount would actually cover bailout costs for many of the banks (so far they have received $188 billion of our taxpayer dollars) that have accepted tax dollars to keep afloat. So while we fume about Wells Fargo of San Francisco, which took $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money with one hand and gave its top executives up to $20,000 each to pay personal financial planners with another, we would do well to focus more on our complacency with respect to capitalism as the only system under which democracy can flourish (and that’s quite an assumption given the state of democracy in this country). The richest 400 Americans own more than the bottom 150 million Americans combined; their combined net worth is $1.6 trillion. During the Bush years, the nation’s 15,000 richest families doubled their annual income, from $15 million to $30 million, and corporate profits shot up by 68 percent, whereas workers’ wages have been steadily shrinking (and the workers are not the ones who are being bailed out by the government). That scenario isn’t about to change radically with the election of Obama, who might possess Jeremiah’s aliveness to spiritual vision (don’t his hands look like lighted candles when he speaks?) but is unwilling to unmask and name the powers that be because, well, for one thing, he is that power. As long as he works within the optic of market reform, he will become yet another symbol for stripping the flesh from the dreams of the millions of the toilers of the world in the interest of increasing profits for the few.

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Predictably, the Republican spin machine, Fox News, tried to stave off a New Deal type of depression recovery program discussed by Obama by claiming that most historians agree that Roosevelt and the New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression. Of course, this revisionist reading of history even sounds silly to freshmen college students, but if it gets repeated often enough, it will be received by Fox TV’s hapless listeners as if it were regurgitated from the bowels of the gospel. We haven’t seen the worst of the economic crisis. The all-devouring jaws of capital consume us, even as we stably persist in freeing ourselves from the wrath of valve production. Although we might not see a return to the orphan trains of the 1920s, where hundreds of thousands of homeless and orphaned street urchins were taken to small towns and farms across the United States as part of a mass relocation movement of destitute children and unloaded at various train stations for inspection by couples who might want to adopt sturdy children to help them work the farms, we can be sure that it will be the children who will be suffering the most through the current recession. Even as the radical left poises itself to descend on the inner cities urging new lunch programs for schoolchildren and giving away free copies of Das Kapital, the prospect for substantive change remains slim. For many who live in the tattered periphery of the world economy, what Frantz Fanon called “les damnés,” the American flag no longer represents a symbol of freedom; its reterritorialization under Bush-era imperialist adventures, invasions, and war crimes both at home and abroad has caused it to reek with the death-like stink of American Exceptionalism when viewed by millions around the world. Obama wants to put the twinkle back into the stars and stripes, but whether he will be able to do this with his plans to increase the size of the military is doubtful. There is a fierce precedent in the United States of never apologizing for its atrocities and for the media disseminating uncritically prowar messages in what seems to be America’s endless military interventions into other countries. It was Vice-President George H. W. Bush who, in the aftermath of the downing of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf on July 3, 1988, made the following unforgettable statement: “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” This comment was pernicious enough, but Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, matched him in an interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes. Stahl commented that a half million children had died due to UN sanctions against Iraq and that that number exceeded the deaths of children in Hiroshima. Stahl asked, “you know, is the price worth it”? Albright responded, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

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Over a million innocent Iraqis have been murdered as a direct result of the invasion of Iraq and the UN sanctions (spearheaded by the United States) that preceded it, and Condoleeza Rice still had the bad-faith temerity to appear on the airwaves defending the war as she left office. Provoking an almost frontier nostalgia, Rice opined that the war on Iraq as worth the price and stubbornly maintained that she had no regrets about the decision to invade—in fact, she is “proud” of invading Iraq. It is here that she joins her predecessors in infamy. Racialized Practices in the Age of Obama And what about race? As people of color still lag well behind whites in almost every major social, economic, and political indicators, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2008) asked whether Obama will contest the new system of racial practices—what Bonilla-Silva calls “the new racism”—that is constructed by a new racial ideology called color-blind racism. In other words, is Obama a post– civil rights minority politician (i.e., an antiminority minority Republican or postracial Democrat) who is successful because he does not directly challenge the white power structure? Bonilla-Silva has argued that social movement politics and not electoral politics is the vehicle for achieving racial justice. Moreover, he noted that Obama’s policies on health care, immigration, jobs, racism, the war in Iraq, and the Palestinian question are not radical; that he has made a strategic move toward racelessness and that he has adopted a postracial persona and political stance. Obama doesn’t like to talk about racism (and when he does likes to remind people he is half-white) and, unlike black leaders unpopular with whites (such as Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, and Al Sharpton), even suggests that America is beyond race. Bonilla-Silva stated that Obama represents a “Magic Negro” figure: Obama also became, as black commentator David Ehrenstein has argued, “the Magic Negro”—a term from film studies that refers to black characters in “movies whose main purpose is to help whites deal with their issues.” In this case, voting for Obama allowed many whites to feel like they were cleansing their racial soul, repenting for their racial sins, and getting admission into racial heaven! Obama became whites’ exceptional black man—the model to follow if blacks want to achieve in Amerika!

For many nonwhites, particularly for blacks, Obama became a symbol of their possibilities. According to Bonilla-Silva (2008), He was indeed, as Obama said of himself, their Joshua—the leader they hoped would take them to the Promised Land of milk and honey. They read in between the lines (probably more than was/is there) and thought Obama

If There is Anyone Out There . . .    277 had a strong stance on race matters. For the old generation desperate to see change before they die (Jackson crying, John Lewis, etc.), and for many postReagan generation blacks (will.i.am from The Black Eyed Peas) and minorities who have seen very little racial progress during their life, Obama became the new Messiah following on the footsteps of leaders they did not see such as Martin and Malcolm.

However, as Bonilla-Silva remarked, Obama’s policies on race matters were not that much different from Hillary’s. He was the darling of the Democratic Leadership Council, his economic and health care programs are modest, he wants to expand the military by 90,000, intends to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, is a big supporter of free-market capitalism, and his policies on Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Palestine were no better than Hillary’s. However, many Obama voters believed (and many continue to believe) that “these are tactical positions Obama needed in order to get elected” and that many of his positions are temporary, and Obama will take more progressive positions the longer he remains in office. Obama’s supposedly a “stealth candidate”—a revolutionary in disguise about to surprise the world by eventually announcing a far shift to the left (perhaps in defense of the worldwide working class who own nothing but their ability to work ), that will have both liberals and conservatives quaking in their boots. The fear that Bonilla-Silva (2008) raises—that “the voices of those who contend that race fractures America profoundly may be silenced” in Obamerica—are real, and so is the fear that Obamerica may bring us closer to the racial structure of many Latin American countries: We may become like Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Belize, or Puerto Rico—nation states that claim to be comprised of “one people” but where various racial strata receive social goods in accordance to their proximity to “Whiteness.” And like in Latin American countries, Obama’s nationalist stance (“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America”) will help close the space to even talk about race. Hence, in Orwellian fashion, we may proclaim “We are all Americans!” but in Obamerica, some will still be “more American than others.”

Although clearly, racial justice has been retreating to its lowest point since the Kerner Commission Report announced 40 years ago that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one White—separate and unequal,” the election of Obama is unlikely to signal a permanent reversal of this trend. Has he not made speeches that excoriated black youth for a lack of “personal responsibility?” Has he not avoided uncovering or even mentioning the real structures of white supremacy? In doing so, has he not set the stage for the continuing demonization and incarceration of youth of color?

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Early in his presidency, Obama stated that he will not pursue prosecutions for high-level lawbreakers in the Bush administration, and he said nothing about Israel’s massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza (where half the population are children). That he would truckle to pro-Israel groups is telling. No words about the Palestinian casualties after Gaza came under sustained attack from supersonic aircraft, Merkava tanks, and thousands of troops. No comments about the 40 women and children who were torn to pieces outside a school. No word about whole families torn asunder in their beds by Israel bombs that, as of this writing, have killed almost 200 civilians out of 600 fatalities. Obama Forgetting U.S. Atrocities: Perpetuating Militarism and Neoliberalism It appears that Obama has forgotten the 17,500 dead—almost all civilians, most of them children and women—in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees at a UN base, more than half of them children; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were forced from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 and then cut to pieces by rockets and machine gun fire from an Israeli Apache helicopter. Yes, he seems to have forgotten not only these events but the interests of humanity. Could it be that Obama has also forgotten the U.S.-sponsored wars and military coups over the past 150 years? Has he forgotten the success of the United States in subordinating the economies of entire nations to the interests of U.S. capital? Could he also have forgotten the superexploitation of the wretched of the earth, who are trying to enter U.S. borders to help support their families only to be demonized and thrust back into oblivion? It’s clear, however, that he has not forgotten to appoint three recently retired four-star military officers to serve in his cabinet, including Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence (a military man who worked with Indonesia’s infamous military while it was slaughtering the East Timorese, personally informing General Wiranto of the Indonesian Army of full U.S. approval until international protests forced the Clinton administration to withdraw its military and diplomatic support). He’s already shocked Latin Americans in his shameful support of the Honduran coup. The historical magnitude of the Obama presidency could exceed the expectations of those on the left who are most likely to be his most virulent critics. He has already become the first African American president of the United States of America. His photo will be emblazoned on historical wall calendars. I can only hope he has the audacity to want to be more.

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So far, many on the left believe he will become entrapped in another narrative of corporate rule, stimulating with blandishments and rhetoric the continuance of the prevailing system. Some sentiments voiced by Bill Blum (2009) are opposite: You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials. Because the revolution will not be televised. There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news The revolution will not be right back after a message. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised. These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as 60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution.” Fast forward to 2009 . . . Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:



WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution? GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution. Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial

280   P. McLAREN (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Given the intensity of attacks on Obama by racist white politicians and media pundits, it’s natural to want to defend him. But the left cannot afford to soften its stance. So far, Blum’s commentary seems on the mark. Many of us are hoping we can write something very different at the end of the Obama years. But who are we kidding? Our society is imprisoned by capital’s value form. Despite tacking to the center-right on most domestic and foreign issues—including his egregious handling of an unprecedented economic crisis by bailing out the banks and pandering to the financial sector to the detriment of working people—he has unchained a racist fury across the U.S. mediascape on the part of right-wing pundits who have accused him of being “demonstrably a racist,” of pandering to people of color, of being a race-baiter, of being the “most racial president,” of having appointed a “racist administration,” of using a “black accent” when he addresses groups of African Americans, of preying on “white guilt” and using “racial anxiety” to get himself elected, of “defending racism,” and of supporting civil rights groups that are nothing more than “race-baiting poverty pimps.” Other reactionary white pundits have argued that they are fed up with refraining from criticizing the president because he is of “mixed-race.” First Lady Michele Obama was accused by right-wingers of not attending the funeral of Senator Robert Byrd because she has “authentic slave blood,” whereas Obama does not possess such blood. Some media pundits have argued that private businesses “ought to get to discriminate” and “it should be their right to be racist.” These are not isolated comments from fringe Internet wingnuts, but rather from popular white radio and television personalities who not only echo pre– Civil Rights Era racism but have spawned a new species of racism that suggests that anyone belonging to ethnic minority groups can be labeled racist if they happen to draw attention to the problems within their own communities and either overtly or indirectly implicate white Americans. While African American and Latino/a politicians are decried by white people as participating in reverse discrimination for being in favor of the health and well-being of their own ethnic constituencies, these very same white people, blinded by the hegemony of the Anglosphere (the only thing fish in water can’t seem to recognize is the water because it is all around them), fail to see how the entire legal system and educational system in the United States is structurally advantageous to white people. Merely to point out this structural inequality constitutes, in the eyes of many blindly venomous whites, an act of racism. Any discussions in the public square that are not dominated by a consensus of white men or women are considered by the white elite to be racist or characterized as acts of unspeakable intent.

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White Racialized Identity Perpetuates the Status Quo Steve Martinot (2010) provides an important explanation for why the white working class has preferred the social cohesion of white identity over the struggle for economic equality. According to Martinot, this attitude can be traced to the country’s colonial origins and the persistence of slavery until the Civil War. Martinot borrows Oliver Cox’s distinction between a social class and a political class. A social class is aware of itself conceptually, constitutes part of an established system, is conditioned to accept more or less the stability of its social contract with the ruling class, and reflects the social order of which it is a part, without necessarily generating a consciousness of having a common goal or interest, such as the class of wage earners. A political class does not constitute an organically integrated component of society, but constitutes a group actively and protagonistically struggling for power and change and guided by a common vision. A political class need not be limited to members from a single social class. The United States grew out of a colonial society founded on the genocidal massacre of its indigenous population and preserving slavery as its fundamental economic form. What was unique about this colonial society was that it possessed a corporate structure, requiring a stratified organization whose template was sacrosanct and whose members were expected to behave as a social class (social class here refers to a more or less stable contract with the ruling class and an organic integration into the dominant society). Allegiance to the corporate organization took priority over social class unity (such as the struggle for a better wage). After Bacon’s Rebellion, English bond-laborers were made into a “control stratum,” whose task as white people was to police the African slaves. This broke the solidarity between the English bond laborers and the African slaves that had been a part of Bacon’s Rebellion, and precipitated gratuitous violence on the part of the English bond laborers against the slaves. Such violence was rewarded by the colonial elite. White identity was therefore tied to the location of whites as part of a “control stratum” established by the colonial corporate entity of the state, a stratum that resulted in making social cohesion and unification part of white racialized identity. A dual class consciousness or dual identity among working-class whites can be seen historically in the conflicting way that they maintain their identity as members of a social class of laborers and as members of a political class that operated as a control stratum of the corporate/colonial plantocracy in policing African slaves. Racist violence on the part of whites, for instance, through the rejection of black workers in white-dominated unions, damaged their power as a social class but enhanced their cultural power as members of white society within the larger corporate/colonial plantocracy. When faced with a choice of class struggle or social cohesion as whites, white workers

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refused to abandon their historical role as a control stratum and attempted to define a class difference between themselves and black workers by taking advantage of the fact that white workers had direct access to capital through their wage labor, while black workers were forced to rely on the white control stratum for work. This enabled the consolidation and unification of white workers as a political class. Racialized violence marked the entrance of working-class whites into a political class in which their primary allegiance was to white society rather than to working-class solidarity. As a political class, their primary function was to establish social cohesion through a dominant white consensus. Their consciousness as a social class was not overtly racist, but their existence as a political class was grounded in white supremacy and membership in the white socius. This could account, at least in some significant way, for the reason white racism has historically been so successful as a divide-and-rule tactic against working-class organizations. Martinot concedes that there have been some noted historical exceptions when white people have supported the antiracist and prodemocracy struggle—the slavery era, the Jim Crow era, and the present era. But in each of these eras, when white people stood in opposition to the antidemocracy of white exclusionism— embodied in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954—they were defeated by forms of white populism that emerged from the white socius as various manifestations of control stratum activity. The abolitionists, for instance, were attacked as communists or anarchists or socialists, and white supremacist culture took control of the country. The same attitude today is reflected in the ratcheting-up of the racialization of the country, which we have witnessed in the attack on ethnic studies, the rollback of civil rights victories, the repeal of affirmative action standards, racial profiling, and the expansion of the prison industrial complex used to warehouse “unruly” people of color. The official ideology of color blindness now makes it a cultural offense to speak out about racial prejudice against any specific group; except that now, some aggrieved whites are often wearing the mantel of the oppressed and using the Tea Party and Republican platforms to air their grievances in the court of mainstream public opinion (fostered by the corporate media, especially Fox News). Liberals are now derided as demonic socialists indistinguishable from Nazis, and new public programs sponsored by the federal government are seen as part of a communist takeover of the country. The response of the left has been little more than pitching oppositional prefigurations of an authentic alternative to corporatism yet in a way that reinitiates the compromises of the dominant system and its consumer market. When President Bush commented on Kayne West’s statement—that Bush did not care about black people—as the nadir of his presidency, it was

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a very telling confession. Melissa Harris-Perry (2010) notes that Bush’s comments echoes the historical anxiety around race that occurred as a result of the fight to end American Reconstruction (1866–1877). She reminds us that the era of Reconstruction was a time when “black men ran for and held office, black families gained a toe hold as property owners, black and white laborers experimented with cooperative organizations and former Confederates were expected to accept that black people were full citizens.” Shortly after Reconstruction, however, America’s political parties “chose backroom bargaining and partisan power-sharing over American ideals.” Harris-Perry is worth quoting at length: Together they cut a deal that allowed Rutherford B. Hayes to ascend to the American presidency in exchange for an immediate end to Reconstruction. The parties were hastened and supported in this choice by the vocal and angry organizing of white Americans in the North and South. The visible evidence of black citizenship embodied in black male office-holders, black voters and black property ownership disgusted, angered and terrified white Americans who felt their grip on power slipping away under the policies of a strong, empowered, national government. They argued for states’ rights, organized into klans, created racist cultural images, spread rumors of black criminality and decried economic competition by new laborers. These white Americans called themselves patriots and pressured both parties to abandon strong central government by ending Reconstruction. With this 1877 compromise America plunged in the nadir. The decades of the nadir are marked by unthinkable racial terror, the destruction of black civil and political rights, the erosion of black economic capacity, the imposition of segregation, and the violent assertion of white supremacy as a governing norm. This is America’s most shameful chapter. Her nadir. Her low point.

According to Harris-Perry, Bush’s handling of Katrina evoked this brutal and blood-stained history of the United States, a history that provoked both Kayne’s comment and Bush’s outrage at being called a racist. However, media pundits who belong to today’s reactionary right and who have transmogrified into rabid supporters of the Tea Party show little concern for racism or for being compared with white supremacists. Harris-Perry (2010) remarks that she finds the 2010 midterms “comfortably familiar to the era of Redemption that followed Reconstruction.” She writes: Current calls for small government and states rights during the administration of a black president sound suspiciously like nineteenth-century efforts to weaken the state so that racial terror could be enacted with impudence against the black men who were then governing. After the aggressively antiimmigrant and more subterranean anti-black sentiments of the healthcare debate and the midterm election, I have wondered if we lost our ability to be

284   P. McLAREN shamed by open displays of cultural bigotry and political action motivated by white anxiety.

As Chris Hedges remarks in one of the quotations that opens this chapter, Obama has shown himself to be “another stock character in the cyclical political theater embraced by the liberal class.” He has been eloquent and urbane, to be sure, and is preferablt to anthing the Republicans have to offer. But will this latter fact frighten the American people back into cloying submission to begin the vulpine drama all over again? Isn’t it time to write a new play? One of liberation and socialism, and authored by the people? Who dares to consider this? Note 1. This chapter is essentially an expansion of Peter McLaren (2009), Rehearsing Disaster’s Rehearsal: The Election and Its Aftermath in Obamerica. Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, 9(6), 803–815. My discussion of Steve Martinot’s essay has been taken from Revenge of the Confederacy: Or How White Supremacy Reconstitutes Itself as Democracy. Preface to African American Freedom Fighters: The Struggle for Black History Month, by Abul Pitrie (Cognella, in press) and Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Against the Resurgence of Confederate Ideology. Preface for Against the Matrix of Oppressions: Toward a Democratic School System and an Equitable Society. Edited by Pierre Orelus. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

References Blum, B. (2009, September 2). The anti-empire report. Retrieved from http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer73.html Bonilla-Silva, E. (2008, November 7). Lecture delivered at the Association of Humanist Sociologists’ Meeting in Boston. Harris-Perry, M. (2010, November 9). Bush’s nadir. The Nation. Retrieved from http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/3912bushs-nadir Hedges, C. (2011). Where liberals go to feel good. Truthdig. January 24. Retrieved from http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_liberals_go_to_feel_good_ 20010124/ Martinot, S. (2010). The duality of class systems in US capitalism. Unpublished manuscript. McLaren, P. (in press). Revolutionary critical pedagogy against the resurgence of confederate ideology. In O. Orelus (Ed.), Against the matrix of oppressions: Toward a democratic school system and an equitable society. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

If There is Anyone Out There . . .    285 Sargis, J. (2008). U.S. elections: Everything must change so that it remains the same. International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, 4(4). Retrieved August 31, 2009, from http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol4/vol4_no4_sargis_us_ elections.htm

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Afterword

Working the Contradictions The Obama Administration’s Educational Policy and Democracy to Come Dennis Carlson

One of the more interesting aspects of the current debate over the future of public education in the United States is that progressives and those on the political left have generally defended public schools, albeit with qualifications: teachers are underpaid and not treated like professionals, the curriculum is too monocultural, and “high-stakes” testing is doing nothing but exacerbating the problem of the socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps. Democratic progressives have staked their hope on reform of the current system so that it is able to live up to its historic promise of being the “great equalizer” in American public life. The alternative, from this perspective, is to give up on the idea of a public education and give in to the forces of privatization, charter schools, and teacher union-busing—all of which would create a system of schooling likely to increase achievement gaps. As the chapters in this book suggest, this argument in support of fully funded The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 287–297 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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public schools and against privatization, is at this point a false choice in the sense that it is a choice we no longer have. The “public” school arena has been, and will continue to be, reorganized by a neoliberal discourse that is hegemonic in the “public” and the “private,” and that brings the logic of the new global capitalism into the heart of the state and directly into “public” educational policy and practice. The borders that once protected the state, if only tenuously from the “private” economy “outside,” were always a fiction of sorts, but one that at least worked for a while and allowed some democratic progressive gains to be made through the state. The room for such gains is now much more restricted as we begin to awaken to a truth we had forgotten: the inside and the outside of the state are not really separable by any rigid and fixed border, and that means that the state is under great pressure to serve the interests of hegemonic power blocs in society— and certainly this includes the interests of the lords of the economy and Wall Street. This means that public schools will be organized in ways that sort and select people for the inequalities of the new globalizing labor force. This is a “truth” that in the 1970s was associated with a structural neo-Marxism that understood public schools as part of what Louis Althusser (1970) called the “ideological state apparatus.” They had some autonomy from direct control by economic forces, but their overall role was to establish ideological conditions for the maintenance of advanced capitalism through the promotion of individual competition, sorting, a hidden curriculum of docility and authority, and so on. In a more deterministic, functional way, Samual Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1977) argued that the social and technical relations of work in the classroom “correspond” to the social and technical relations of work young people are being prepared for in the economy. Thus, working-class kids learned discipline and submission to work authority and the routine of alienated labor. All of this line of important neo-Marxist scholarship has been the subject of much-deserved criticism for its overly deterministic and class-reductionistic tendencies. But with all its limitations and even faults, it began to flesh out the broad outlines of what we are facing in efforts to democratize public education. Of course, it leads to cynicism and despair if we stop with a reproduction theory of schooling, for it does not provide a mechanism for intervening to stop this reproductive process short of a socialist revolution. But we can intervene in the current system to push it toward its limits, to push it to address fundamental issues of equity and social justice, of adequacy of funding, and so on. And we can fight the system on its own playing field, carving out a space of opposition and radical democratic education within a “privatized” or public charter school system. In some important ways, I want to argue, neoliberal school reforms, including the charter school movement, could be used to open up “free” space for oppositional discourses and movements to emerge, linked to vari-

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ous progressive social movements and networks of schools. If public charter schools could be freed up to control their own curriculum and pedagogy, within broad standards established by the state, then progressives might be much better off organizing oppositional movements of charter schools linked to a revived union movement, black and Latino/a as well as LGBTQ rights groups, and other community groups organized and mobilized around social justice and civil rights. Under these conditions, neoliberal restructuring would create the conditions for the emergence of its own opposition. Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony plays a central role in this regard, and it provides a needed corrective to the overly deterministic structural and functional Marxism of the 1970s. Gramsci used the term hegemony to refer to both cultural leadership by one power bloc in society, and to the ideological “commonsense” that supports and sustains such leadership, that is, the conventional wisdom and commonsense beliefs that legitimate and support the dominant group’s reform interests, presented as the interests of the “public” or the “nation.” Neoliberalism in education may thus be approached and studied as a hegemonic discourse and movement that has its origins among economic and financial elites, both inside and outside the state, but that is “packaged” in such a way that it also appeals to a broad range of Americans, concerned, for example, about improving the quality of public education and returning discipline and order to urban schools and communities. Neoliberal reformism has been organized around a lexicon of terms and themes whose meanings are interrelated and interdependent, including “the free market,” “preparing American youth for the new, global labor market,” “holding teachers accountable,” “competition,” “the bottom line,” “the consumer,” “productivity,” and so on. All of this language is presented as if it is apolitical, merely a rational response to the “iron law” of the market. This means that neoliberalism takes on the aura of inevitability and necessitarianism (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 29–44). We are asked to accept that we inhabit a social and cultural world produced and guided by self-evident, law-like principles, in the face of which resistance is futile and alternatives are “unrealistic.” Indeed, resistance might be futile, so long as the hegemonic machines and structures of neoliberalism establish the “bottom line” in a privatized system of public education and how that bottom line gets assessed or measured. Here is where I think the work of Felix Guattari (1983, 1996) is particularly important. He has argued that in the age of neoliberalism, the “semiotic machines” of transnational capitalism—those procedures and policies that organize the production of meaning and the flow of communication in the production process—have been “reterritorialized” to various public spheres, including public education. Once these semiotic machines are established in state institutions, transnational capitalism does not need

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to exercise direct and authoritarian control over public institutions. These machines establish a “semiotic pilotage” of state agencies, insuring that they operate in the interests of capital (Guattari, 1983, p. 235). It even becomes crucial to capitalism’s survival that it arranges “marginal freedom” for state agencies, a freedom that helps promote the notion that they are independent servants of the public interest. What are the semiotic machines of school reform, and more particularly urban school reform, in the age of neoliberalism? I think it is useful to think about three interrelated types of urban school machines in a neoliberal age: basic skills machines, quantification of quality machines, and disciplinary machines (see Carlson, 2003, 2005a, 2008). A basic skills machine is a machine that transforms the curriculum into a sequential series of literacy, math, and science skills to be “mastered” by students, with achievement assessed through high-stakes testing. Basic skills machines include curriculum texts that “target” predetermined skills, performance-based lesson and unit plan formats, remedial instructional packages and programs, and sophisticated management-information systems to oversee the student progress through the curriculum. The rationale for basic skills machines is that they presumably teach skills relevant to the “functional literacy needs” of high school graduates in the new entrée level, service industry workforce. While vocational education machines once prepared urban youth for the industrial labor force, basic skills machines prepare them for service and information processing jobs. By the 1980s, the service industry had become the fastest growing sector of the economy as “blue collar” manual labor jobs began to rapidly disappear and the job market for college-educated workers had begun to stagnate. Since then, these trends have continued. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, employment growth continues to be concentrated in the service-providing sector of the economy, which is projected to grow more than twice as fast as the overall economy between 2005 and 2015. At the same time, manufacturing employment is expected to decline by a further 5 percent, much less than the 16 percent decline that occurred over the previous decade, but only because America largely has been deindustrialized at this point (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005). The “skill needs” of the new service industry workers in a global economy are different than those of the “old” industrial working class, and political and economic leaders have been concerned that high school graduates are not sufficiently skilled in the new basics. Neoliberal reforms are thus about realigning the curriculum with the educational needs of workers in a new era. This was the theme of the influential report by President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk (1983). That report argued that “business and military leaders . . . are required to spend millions of dollars on costly remedial education and training programs in such basic skills as reading, writing, spelling, and computation”

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(National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 9). This has continued to be a guiding narrative in neoliberal reform. The report of the National Adult Literacy Survey released in 1999 concluded that only about 40 percent of those in the labor force had literacy levels that were inadequate for their jobs, and that service industry workers were most in need of remediation. According to the report, “these findings paint a bleak outlook for the future of the U.S. labor market” (Sum, 1999, p. 1). Basic skills machines “work” technically by stripping everything from the curriculum aside from a set of economically functional “basic skills” and imposing topdown control over teachers and students’ work. They “work” ideologically by being presented as a necessary response to make America more economically competitive. By alienating teachers and students from the process and product of their labor, they also are riddled with contradictions and generate a whole array of resistances. I call a second set of neoliberal machines “quantification of quality machines.” Roland Barthes noted that in contemporary theater, much as in good education I would say, participants are engaged in producing a certain “aesthetic reality,” the quality of which reveals itself through interpretive and even intuitive responses (Barthes, 1957, pp. 153–154). Nevertheless, the “business” of theater, again like the “business” of education, seeks to establish a whole circuit of computable indicators of quality. Barthes observes that in the case of the theater, these include ticket sales, a tabulation of the number of times the audience applauds or laughs, exit interviews in which members of the audience rate the performance, and other mechanisms for quantifying quality. In the case of education, the quantification of quality occurs, most notably, through the examination. To even make a “legitimate” statement about whether or not the nation’s schools are making progress in raising standards, you must accept standardized test scores as stand-ins for student achievement and knowledge. You must also take for granted an objectification of knowledge and a treatment of knowledge as a commodity that can be packaged and transferred to the student, with the teacher as a skills-transfer supervisor. Yet a third type of neoliberal machine is the disciplinary machine. Neoliberalism as a broad cultural discourse and movement is centrally concerned with the “problem” of disciplining, policing, and keeping under surveillance the new American working class and underclass of chronically unemployed (because the new economy “necessitates” higher levels of unemployment and poverty). In education, this translates into concern for the disciplining and policing student bodies, particularly poor black and Latino/a bodies. Disciplinary machines take on many forms, and primary among these in urban schools are high-stakes testing machines. Standardized testing is not only a basic skills curriculum machine and a quantification of quality machine. It is also and at the same time a disciplinary

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machine. According to Michel Foucault, the examination is the primary educational ritual of disciplinary power, “a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish,” all at the same time. Through the examination, a “visibility” is established over individuals “through which one differentiates and judges them” (1995, p. 184). But disciplinary machines also come in the form of policing technologies and apparatuses like detention, zero-tolerance policies, and unannounced locker searches. The erosion of the public sphere, the decline in job opportunities for urban youth, and the decline of the infrastructure in poor, urban neighborhoods have all been accompanied by a heightened policing of “aliens,” whether they are aliens from within the inner city or across the border with Mexico. As a result, public schools have been pushed to develop ever tighter working relationships with the juvenile court system and the police. Yet this vastly expanded policing apparatus, with the latest surveillance and riot-control technologies, still finds itself unable to deal effectively with the hegemonic image of urban youth “gone wild.” Once more, repressive policies that police populations and regulate border crossings invite their own counterpractices of freedom, which reveal the limits and contradictions of neoliberal reform. So long as these neoliberal “machines” establish the discursive limits of what is possible, even “thinkable” in urban schools, then it will matter little whether we have public or private schools, neighborhood schools, or charter schools. They will be organized by variations of these three semiotic machines, all of which serve to construct and reproduce class and race inequalities. This is one of the hard realities progressives and those on the left in the United States must face, I think. So long as these neoliberal machines of schooling are supported by both major political parties in the United States, there really is very limited and constricted space for democratic progressive work in urban schools. But that should not mean there is no space for an oppositional, democratic progressive response to the catastrophe of public education. One of the points Marx made about capitalism in the mid-19th century in Europe was that it established the conditions for the organization of its own opposition. Capitalism created the working class, and that class was already, by the mid-19th century, gaining access to modern technologies and communication media and engaged in its own self-organization and self-production as a “class for itself,” with a countervision of progress and freedom that would push capitalism to its limits, and in the process transform it into socialism. The latter was always understood to be produced within and through working the contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism makes socialism (a name for its transforming potential) possible, and neither can be understood as separable from its Other since both are constituted out of a dialectic. The meaning of both evolves and shifts upon a stage that largely has been prestructured by capital to make

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sure its interests are served. But this attempt to prestructure what goes on is itself a response to resistance by those actors who are being oppressed and exploited in the drama. So it is that neoliberalism is the name we give to the new stage upon which the master-slave struggle is being played out. In this sense, neoliberalism is the name for a social and cultural context of battle, for a new phase of capitalist development, instead of merely the name for the ideology of global or transnational capitalism (Hardt & Negri, 2000). In the face of a restructuring of the playing field that severely disadvantages a democratic progressive opposition, we have to ask: How do we most effectively challenge the construction and maintenance of class and race privilege through the new machines of neoliberal schooling? What kind of responses would push neoliberalism in education to its limits and work its contradictions? Ironically, I think one possible response is to work within neoliberal reform models to make them more responsive to “consumer citizens.” The machines of neoliberal schooling are designed to insure that parents and young people do not really exercise significant choice in education. They may choose between different “brands” of charter schools, but when all charter schools have to teach a basic skills curriculum tied to highstakes testing, then the difference between school “brands” is minimized. One of the driving contradictions of neoliberal reform discourse in education is that it violates the neoliberal principle of the consumer’s right to a “free marketplace of ideas.” This contradiction potentially opens up space for pushing the system to more adequately address “consumer rights” in meaningful choice over what is taught and to whom it is taught. If courts or state legislatures can be convinced that “consumer citizens” have a right to curriculum choice as well as school choice, then it might be possible to mobilize a democratic progressive network of public charters. Of course, fighting for consumer rights is a very limited, liberal agenda in itself; and to even think of the citizen primarily as a consuming subject—in this case, the consumer of public services—cedes semiotic ground to neoliberalism. At the same time, this strategic move is “intelligible” and thus defensible within the logic of neoliberalism, and it could result in networks and movements of nonprofit charter schools and community activist groups. Charter schools are already being used in cities throughout the United States, particularly by black and Latina/o social activists and community movements, to counter the continued mideducation and lowering of expectations that is still unfortunately the norm in most “regular” inner-city public schools. With all of their constraints, some charter schools are making a profound difference in the lives of marginalized youth and demonstrating that there is another way of educating youth marginalized by class, race, and ethnicity. These schools could serve as models for a new, democratic progressive system of networked charter schools taking back public education. But as I said, this possibility cannot be realized so long as the reproductive ma-

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chines of urban schooling prevent meaningful alternatives to the way things are. This suggests the need to focus on court and legislative activism at various levels of governance to make “educational choice” real by allowing for significant differences in curriculum, pedagogy, and the organization of the learning process. This would, at the same time, allow social conservatives to open their own networks of nonprofit charter schools, and progressives would need to become more savvy in “selling” and “marketing” their version of a good education. But at least there would be space to compete and to potentially develop a power bloc of democratic progressive charter schools linked in various ways to union movements and movements for social justice and equity. Finally, I believe that the role of teachers and teacher unions is essential in developing a democratic progressive educational praxis in a neoliberal age. The charter school movement in its hegemonic forms is a union-busting movement, designed to create the conditions for a postunion era in public education. This is a project supported by powerful economic and political elites, and it is being sold to the American people through media campaigns, like the one organized around release of the movie Waiting for Superman (2010). That documentary was distributed in major cinema outlets nationwide and received almost uniformly positive press, both nationally and locally. Its central theme is that teacher unions are blocking efforts to make the public schools more responsive to the needs of inner-city youth and that they are protecting incompetent and burned-out teachers. Urban youth are positioned as waiting for someone to save them. The superman in waiting is the dynamic, hard-driven, charismatic charter school leader, who puts kids’ needs first and insists that all teachers do the same, or else they are out. The documentary presents a well-worn narrative most in the audience are probably already well-prepared to affirm. Blame gets displaced from the economic and social conditions that generate inequalities and put on the backs of teachers and their self-serving unions. The same system that blames teachers for the “problem” of the achievement gap and its persistence, also actively participates in subordinating and silencing teachers, and reorganizing their work so that they have less room to resist new hegemonic machines. Among all the non-sense promoted in Waiting for Superman, it also contains enough good sense to appeal to many Americans. Otherwise, its narrative would not “work” in the ways that it does to mobilize broad political support for charter schools. Even its criticism of teacher unionism has a grain of truth in it that should not be ignored, for teacher unionism in its current form serves neither teachers nor students well. Teacher unionism in its current form was the result of a certain negotiated settlement over the wage-labor exchange. Its problems have to do with ceding control of the “production” process in education to “management,” and its narrow, instrumental

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approach to teacher interests. As the state has effectively regulated teacher unions so that they are no real threat to neoliberal reforms (banning teacher strikes, for example, and prohibiting negotiations about the curriculum and teacher evaluation), this model of teacher unionism is no longer able to serve as a countervailing force in the schools. In the era of teacher union militancy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unionism seemed to be such a countervailing force. But if it ever was, it is no more. Teachers do need, and will continue to need, a union to negotiate the wage-labor contract, and a system of democratic progressive charter schools would need to be unionized and actively prounion rather than antiunion. At the same time, a genuinely progressive alliance or network of charter schools would need to reappropriate other models of unionism, more consistent perhaps with the model of trade unionism in the United States. In the early 20th century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was the most powerful trade union movement, organizing highly skilled workers across various trades. In these unions, workers were mentored into the trade through apprenticeship, and the union had control of the knowledge base of the trade and the evaluation of workers. Such trade unions provide historic images and narratives of worker control that might be reworked and revived through the charter schools. Within the current system, they remain unthinkable (see Carlson, 2005b). This all means that a new, democratic and socially reconstructive teacher unionism is need, one that is overtly political and engaged in the praxis of mobilizing a counter-hegemonic movement to take back the state and the schools as part of a democratic socialist revolution, based on a new commonsense. Anything short of this is not transformative and will not effectively counter the forces that keep teachers in their place. All of this complicates a progressive response to neoliberalism and, more particularly, the Obama administration’s support for both profit and nonprofit charter schools in urban districts serving a high proportion of poor youth of color. The Obama administration can be criticized for its support of the hegemonic “machines” of urban schooling. At the same time, I have argued that a public (nonprofit) charter school system could provide a counter-space for the development of democratic progressive networks of schools linked to grassroots movements for community empowerment, social justice, and citizen rights. Together, such networks could work the system and engage in mobilizing support for a more culturally relevant and student-centered curriculum and pedagogy, organized around different educational machines like cooperative learning, exhibitions and performances, and service learning and community engagement. Existing public schools in urban neighborhoods need to be pushed to their limits, to make local and state leadership take seriously the pledge to “leave no child behind.” This might be the legitimating rhetoric that hides an oppressive practice of school reform, but it has some legal status and thus can and has

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been made the basis of suits brought against states, for example, by arguing that high-stakes testing actually is leaving many young people behind. Progressives can argue that to genuinely overcome achievement gaps and leave no child behind, we will have to do much more than come up with better standardized tests, or more effective methods of weeding out incompetent teachers. We will need to challenge the materials structures, and the relations of power, that produce achievement gaps and insure that millions of young people get left behind. These structures and relations, in turn, are not fully separable from the structures and relations of the new economic and social order and cannot be addressed separately. The work of progressive public intellectuals and educators, in this time of great flux and uncertainty, is to keep alive the promise of what democracy could be. That promise, projected onto a new cultural landscape, continues to be about helping empower and give voice to those who have been marginalized by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other markers of difference and “otherness” so that they can develop their full potentials and become active participants in the making of a democratic culture. Progressivism is a visionary project in that it imagines that we cannot talk about democracy as realized, only as what Derrida called a “democracy to come,” what we are striving toward. In this sense, democracy is a promise we make to a future whose name is socialism. But as Derrida observed, “the event of the promise takes place here, now in the singularity of a here-now . . . The here and now represents that this is not just a question of utopia” (Derrida, 2002, p. 180). The progressive project is thus one of praxis rather than merely critical analysis or the construction of utopian futures. Praxis implies the unity of thinking and doing, speaking and acting, and theory and practice, within the realm of the present and the situation at hand. But praxis pushes the present to the limits of what is possible and thus keeps alive the promise of what democratic education could be—as the authors in this book do. References Althusser, L. (1970), Ideology and ideological state apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays (1971), translated by Ben Brewster, 121–176. Roland Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Acts of resistance: Against the tyranny of the market, trans. Richard Nice. New York: The New Press. Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1977). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic public life. New York: Basic Books. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2004-14 Employment Projections. http://ww.bls.gov/ emp.

Working the Contradictions    297 Carlson, D. (2008). Neoliberalism and urban school reform: A Cincinnati case study. In B. Portfilio & C. Malott (Eds.), The destructive path of neoliberalism: An international examination of urban education (pp. 81–102). New York: Sense Publishers. Carlson, D. (2005a). Hope without illusion: Telling the story of democratic educational renewal. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 18(1), 21–45. Carlson, D. L. (2005b). Things to come: Teachers’ work and urban school reform. In L. Johnson, M. Finn, & R. Lewis (Eds.), Urban education with an attitude (pp. 21–32). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Carlson, D. (2003). Leaving children behind: Urban education, class politics, and the machines of transnational capitalism. Workplace. Available from http:// www.workplace-gsc.com/ Davis, M. (1990). City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. London: Verso. Derrida, J. (2002) Negotiations: Interventions and interviews, 1971–2001. With Elizabeth Rottenberg. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Smith. New York: International Publishers. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage. Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular revolution: Psychiatry and politics, trans. Rosemary Steed. New York: Penguin Books. Guattari, F. (1996). The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko. Cambridge, Mass: WileyBlackwell. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Sum, A. (1999). Literacy in the labor force: Results from the National Adult Literacy Survey. Education Statistics Quarterly, 1(4).

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Biographies

Roberta Ahlquist has taught Multicultural Foundations of Education, Educational Sociology, Educational Philosophy, and Critical Issues in Education at San Jose State University in California for over 30 years. Her research includes critical race theory, critical multicultural education, indigenous education, and postcolonial studies. As a Fulbright Scholar in 2006 in Finland, she taught “Teaching for Worlds of Difference” at Turku University. She’s a long-time union and peace activist with the California Teachers Association and California Faculty Association. Lynne Aoki has served the educational community for 30 years as an independent educational consultant. She specializes in planning and evaluating programs for English learners. Currently, she is Secretary and Executive Board member for Californians Together, a statewide coalition of parents, teachers, education advocates, and civil rights groups committed to securing equal access to quality education for all children, particularly those from underserved communities. The California Association for Bilingual Education and the Orange County Human Relations Commission have presented their advocacy awards to Lynne in recognition of her activism on behalf of English learners and immigrant students. Ann Berlak teaches in the Department of Elementary Education at San Francisco State University. Her current research interest is in raising awareness of the consequences of state-mandated Teacher Performance Assessments in teacher education upon classroom teachers, teacher educators, and credential students, who envision schools as sites of social justice and equity. The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education, pages 299–304 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Dennis Carlson is a professor of Curriculum and Cultural Studies in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and is a former director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies. He is the author of Teachers and Crisis: Urban School Reform and Teachers’ Work Culture; Making Progress: Education and Culture in New Times; and Leaving Safe Harbors: Toward a New Progressivism in American Education and Public Life. He also is the co-editor of numerous books on the cultural studies of education, including Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy with Michael Apple, Educational Yearnings with Thomas Oldenski, and Promises to Keep with Greg Dimitriadis. Paul R. Carr is an associate professor of sociology and interdisciplinary studies at Lakehead University (Orillia). His research focuses on democracy, critical pedagogy, media literacy, and peace studies. He has 5 edited books, including the award-winning The Great White North? Exploring Whiteness, Privilege and Identity in Education (Sense Publishers), and some 50 published articles and book chapters. He has a recently published single-author book entitled Does Your Vote Count? Critical Pedagogy and Democracy (Peter Lang). His Web site is: www.paulrcarr.net. Nataly Chesky is a doctoral student at Montclair State University in the EdD program in Pedagogy and Philosophy. She has taught middle school mathematics as well as logic and philosophy for younger children. Her general academic interests lie in exploring discources in philosophy of mathematicsin relation to educational theory and practice. Her future work will encompass working toward new perspectives concerning the relationship between abstraction and intuition in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Mary Christianakis is an assistant professor of education at Occidental College. Having received her PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture from UC Berkeley, she studies literacy development from a critical sociocultural perspective, primarily in urban and multilingual school contexts. Her work explores instructional practices related to the development of written language and, more broadly, how children negotiate academic membership within official school structures. Dr. Christianakis is also interested in literacy development in out-of-school settings, such as community and cultural centers. Her scholarly writing has focused on curriculum and instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse children. Rich Gibson, emeritus professor at San Diego State University, is a former auto worker, elementary and secondary school teacher, organizer, and bargaining specialist for several unions. He is the co-founder of the Rouge Forum, an organization of school workers, parents, and students seeking to transform education and society toward equity and the freedom to live

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creative, connected lives. His research, asking “What do people need to know, and how do they need to come to know it in order to live in solidarity?” serves that end. He is a co-editor of the journal Cultural Logic and the book Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Hampton Press). His Web site is www.richgibson.com. Mark Garrison is an associate professor of Educational Policy and Research, and director of Doctoral Programs at D’Youville College in Buffalo, New York. His research focuses on the political significance of educational reform efforts, including the political functions of testing, the rise of for-profit higher education, and the use of technology in schools. His book A Measure of Failure: The Political Origins of the Standardized Testing was published in 2009 (SUNY Press). Rebecca A. Goldstein is an associate professor of Curriculum and Teaching at Montclair State University. Her research interests include media framing of public education and education policy issues, urban teacher preparation, and teaching and learning in and for democratic societies. She is the editor of the book Useful Theory: Making Critical Education Practical (2007, Peter Lang). Her most recent article, “Imaging the Frame: Media Representations of Teachers, Their Unions, NCLB, and Education Reform” is forthcoming in the journal Educational Policy. She can be reached at [email protected]. David Hursh is an associate professor at the Warner School of Education, University of Rochester. His most recent book is High Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning: The Real Crisis in Education. In 1998, he helped start the Coalition for Common Sense in Education, a community group resisting reforms such as No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top. His curriculum efforts focus on environmental sustainability and social justice. In the summer of 2010, he traveled to Uganda where he developed and implemented lessons on energy systems. Virginia Lea is an associate professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. She earned her doctorate in Social and Cultural Education from the University of California at Berkeley. She sees her research, teaching, and social justice activism as a means of empowering students, peers, and community educators to gain a deeper understanding of the complex ways in which national and global hegemonic power perpetuates inequality through socioeconomic, political, legal, educational, cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, and ability discourses. She is the executive director of the Educultural Foundation, an educational organization that facilitates critical thinking about social and cultural issues through the arts.

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Peter McLaren is a professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of approxiamtely 50 books and mongraphs. Several hundred of his articles, chapters, interviews, reviews, commentaries, and columns have appeared in dozens of scholarly journals and professional magazines since the publication of his first book, Cries from the Corridor, in 1980. His work has been translated into 17 languages, and he lectures internationally. Sheila Macrine is associate professor in the Department of Education at the University of New Haven. Her research interests focus on connecting the cultural, institutional, and personal contexts of pedagogy, particularly as they relate to the social imagination, public intellectuals and progressive democratic education. She is the editor of several books, including Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hopes and Possibilities (2009, Palgrave Macmillan). Theresa Montaño is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State University Northridge. An active unionist, she joined the staff of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), where she worked as an area representative and professional development specialist for 9 years. Theresa’s research focuses on the schooling of Chicano/a-Latino/a students, critical pedagogy, teacher activism, and bilingual/ELL instruction. She is newly elected to the CTA Board of Directors, a role that she is familiar with, having previously served for 6 years as an NEA board director. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the California Faculty Association (CFA), serving as one of two representatives for the Council for Affirmative Action. Richard Mora is an assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College. Having received his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University, he investigates youth cultures, youth violence, gender, education, and urban poverty. He teaches courses in youth cultures, sociology of education, social inequality, and ethnographic research methods. Alexandra Perry is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Bergen Community College. Her work focuses on the relevance of epistemic questions to applied ethics as well as the epistemology of moral claims in history. In addition, she works in Philosophy of Education, particularly on issues concerning politics and policy. Brad J. Porfilio is an assistant professor of education at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois. He teaches courses on critical pedagogy, qualitative research, globalization and education, multicultural education, foundations of education, and curriculum theory in the Educational Leadership for Teaching and Learning Doctoral Program. He received his PhD in Sociol-

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ogy of Education in 2005 at the University at Buffalo. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and conference papers on the topics of urban education, youth culture, neoliberalism and schooling, transformative education, teacher education, gender and technology, and cultural studies. Paul Theobald currently serves as Interim Dean, School of Education, and the Woods-Beals Endowed Chair in Urban and Rural Education at Buffalo State College. He has published several books, including Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Community (1997, Westview Press), an intellectual history that weaves in philosophical themes in an attempt to build a new vision for educational ends; and Education Now: How Rethinking America’s Past Can Change its Future (2009, Paradigm Publishers), an attempt to reveal why efforts aimed at systemic change in the nation’s public schools have proved so futile in the past, and how we might use this knowledge to strike out on a different path. P. L. Thomas, associate professor of education (Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is currently a column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English) and series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Sense Publishers), in which he has a volume in press, entitled Challenging Genres: Comics and Graphic Novels. His recent books include Parental Choice?: A Critical Reconsideration of Choice and the Debate about Choice (2010, Information Age Publishing) and 21st century Literacy: If We are Scripted, are We Literate? (2009,Springer) co-authored with Renita Schmidt. E. Wayne Ross is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His recently edited books include Battleground Schools (Greenwood Press), Education Under the Security State (Teachers College Press), The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment (Teachers College Press), and Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Hampton Press). He is also co-author, with Kevin D. Vinson, of Image and Education: Teaching in the Face of the New Disciplinarity (Peter Lang). He is a former daycare and secondary school teacher, and a co-founder of the Rouge Forum. His Web site is: www.ewayneross.net. Christine E. Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Professional Studies at California State University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. She has published over 100 articles in edited books and journals. Her recent books include Unstandardizing Curriculum (Teachers College Press), Facing Accountability in Education (Teachers College Press), and Doing Multicultural Education for Achievement and Equity (with Carl

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Grant; Routledge). Awards for her work include the American Educational Research Association Social Justice Award, the California State University Monterey Bay President’s Medal, and the Central Washington University Distinguished Alum. Tina Wagle is an associate professor and chair of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at SUNY Empire State College. She has published on topics in foundations of education, including bilingual and urban education, and has taught many courses in the disciplines of Spanish and Education. Wagle is also actively engaged in the Western New York community, as she sees that as vital in helping to shape successful education practices and strategies. She was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service in 2008 in recognition of her efforts.