Post on 17-Feb-2023
NEO-LIBERALISM, EDUCATIONAL POLITICS AND HEGEMONIES OF SOCIAL LEARNING
Brian Ford
Theory chapter for Social Learning and Hegemony (aka, Respect for Teachers, Too: Classroom Politics)1
Bullet Points and then some paragraphs:
--Hegemony versus Social Learning
a. Broad Distinction
Social Learning is usually used to refer to changes within institutions
Hegemony is a broader term having to do with understandings that are cultural –
the pervasive common sense of a society the underpins every day actions
b. Theorists
Social Learning is articulated by, among others, Hugh Heclo and Peter Hall
Hegemony, in the sense of cultural hegemony, is most often associated with the work
of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the founder of the Italian Communist Party 1 What follows is the first stab at the theory chapter for Social Learning and Hegemony: Neoliberalism and Education Reform in the United States [or Framing Education Reform In The US In The Post-Vietnam Era.] It also, when talking about unions, includes elements of “The Strange Death of the New Professionalism: Redefined Self-Interest and the Development of Teachers’ Unions’ Positions on Educational Reform.” I have not always quite succeeded in separating those twoelements as of yet.
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who was imprisoned by Mussolini and died shortly after his release.
c. Major Points on Social Learning
Peter Hall, in depicting shifts from Keynesianism to Monetarism, defines ‘social learning’ as a “deliberate attempt to adjust goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience and new information.” (Peter Hall, 1993: 278.)
He disaggregates this concept into three central variables: the overarching goals in a field, techniques or policy instruments and the precise settings of these instruments.
These are, respectively, 3rd, 2nd and 1st order changes.
In my work, I add a fourth, to end up with four types of sociallearning: First, 1st order – the refinement of agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order -- the choice of methods to achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the selection of goals. Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals by reference
to principles, values, ideologies and visions of the future,utopian to dystopian.
In these terms, contemporary education reform is part of a third order change in social learning, but, as is usually the case, it is connected to fourth order change. It is hard to select new goals without changing the terms of justification.
4th order change is meant to be the link with concepts of Hegemony
3rd and 4th Order Change – from Social Learning to Hegemony
Hall's case is interesting because it did not begin within the state bureaucracy, the focus of many previous treatments of ‘social learning,’ but in public debates
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that were given a final imprimatur through a process of national electoral contestation.
Only then did the Thatcher government move to implement andconsolidate the paradigm they had previously adopted.
Two additions are made to this. In a diffuse institutional structure 3rd order change
can be achieved outside of state bureaucracies and without any direct national electoral contest.
Rather, as the examples of standards-based reform (which morphed into the Common Core) and charter schools show,3rd order change can be constituted by incremental means spread over many different institutions and many decades.
Thus, 3rd order change can be achieved over time by incremental means, but that is much more likely to happen if something else happens: 4th order change.
Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals by reference to principles, values, ideologies and visionsof the future, utopian to dystopian.
The discussion of 4th order change segues into discussions of hegemony.
The parallel development of investor led capitalism --basedon an exchange value paradigm-- and the decay of social welfare models --based on a labor value paradigm-- are the context in which this all unfolds.
That we have an integrated system of production, exchange, and accumulation which is subject to no state authority is taken for granted, even in education, shapes the debate and policy formation.
Please note that I hesitate to say that diffuse 3rd order change requires 4th order change, only that it usually is accompanied by 4th order change and is more likely to happen during periods of 4th order change. I also hesitate at time to call hegemony 4th order change,but at other times I do.
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--Major Points on Hegemony
The original Greek word, hegemonia, had, as its primary reference, the leadership of a confederacy of states by anotherstate. It is this notion that is used for the most part in International Relations theory, Robert Keohane being the leading example. While I have significant differences with Keohane, whose own work limits the use of the term 'hegemony' to state actors, we do accept similar periodizations. Keohane states that the mid-1960s marks the beginning of a post-hegemonic period, one in which no "one state is [both] powerfulenough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations, and willing to do so."2 But is the cause within thestate system or within the world financial system, which has been reconsolidated since the late 1960s.
Hegemony, as articulated by Gramsci, is a broader term having to do with understandings that are cultural –the pervasive common sense of a society.
My effort is to combine the two meanings, much in the way Robert Cox has done, but direct the analysis at domestic institutions, using education policy in the US as a heuristiccase study to illustrate the structuration effects of transnational institutionalization under conditions of globalization.
It is worth noting that by doing so we are using a Gramscian notion of the state that is much different than that used in Helco and Hall's work; for Helco and Hall the organizational state may have autonomy. Gramsci's notion of an extended state emanating from
2 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, Boston, 1977, p. 44; cited in Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, pp. 34 - 35. The latter work is premised on the proposition that by the late 1960's "U.S. dominance in the world political economy was challenged by the economic recovery and increasing unity of Europe and by the rapid economic growth of Japan." (p. 9)
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Civil and Political Society is meant to stress the organic unity of all three, not autonomy. That does notmean, however, that Gramsci did not believe state actorscould act with some degree of autonomy. While I might be accused of wanting things both ways, Gramsci's constant use of military metaphors points in the opposite direction.
Hegemony, in the Gramscian sense, claims that actors in civilsociety have a pervasive effect on norms and normal ways of thinking. There are certainly other types of hegemony besides those emanating from civil society, but this is the core. All hegemonies work in varying degrees on the formation of opinions, norms and normal ways of thought. Because, however, of the decisions that people must make in order to succeed (or merely survive), the economic core of civil society usually works to a greater degree than others to shape and maintain norms.
Civil society does not derive only from economic activity, but economic activity has a leading effect on ethics. This can be compared to political society, which has its leading effect through the exercise of collective will and with the state, which is more than the expression of political society. The state is also an institution with not only a considerable degree of autonomy, but also a great amount of inertia. These spheres all have their separate hegemonies.
We can speak a change in global hegemonic strategies that canbe traced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s; they are organically connected to increased transnational linkages, ideas of comparative advantage and advocacy of free trade.3
3 You might want to refer to Ariful Kabir, “Neoliberal Hegemony and theIdeological Transformation of Higher Education in Bangladesh,” Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, Vol 6, No 2 (2012). for further elucidation.
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Gramsci draws on Hegelian traditions and emphasizes that treating methodological divisions as organic ones is an all too common fallacy.
Gramsci says of Free Trade that it is based on just such a theoretical error; presenting the analytical “distinction between political society and civil society . . . as an organic one” when “in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same.” (1971: 160)
Gramsci was emphasizing that every civil society --including those that espouse laissez-faire liberalism-- has a political programme which is manifest in the state; he was by no means saying it doesn’t matter whether state or civil society provide services.
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SECTIONS
1) Social Learning in an Era of Transnationalism: Ideas, Coalitions and the Effect of Neo-Liberalism on Institutional Models
2) Overview
3) What is a social learning perspective?
4) Hegemonies of Social Learning
5) Framing Education By Class And Merit: Episodes of Social Learning and Conservative Ideas
6) Questions of trust
7) Actors under constraints
8) Social learning and paradigm change
9) Social Learning From A Political Economy Perspective
10) Educational Classes
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11) Social systems theory as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony
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Britain was the first country to modernize, under their traditional monarchical system, and they defeated us in several wars.But now they are very weak, pointed out Dr. Wang.Because they’ve taken up socialism.
- John Derbyshire, Calvin Coolidge in a Dream
* * *1) Social Learning in an Era of Transnationalism: Ideas, Coalitions and t he Effect of Neo-Liberalism on Institutional Models
Starting in media res, the political debate surrounding the
privatization of education has been a particularly vicious one. And
the middle is the mid- to late-90s, when the authors of one notable
pro-privatization book complained of “speculative, unprofessional
claims” directed against them by those “who get red in the face at
every mention of the word ‘markets.’”4 Similarly, Lynn Olson, a
4 The authors were Terry Moe, a Stanford Political Scientist,
and John E. Chubb, of the Edison Project. Claiming they “have no
interest in ideological wrangling,” they compare educational research
unfavorably to “a dispassionate world of science” and offer several
examples of “just how nasty and intolerant the ‘scholarly’ debate can
get.” (Chubb and Moe, in Rasell and Rothstein, 1993: 219-21) The
question of dispassionate approaches to science is touched upon
below.
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senior editor of Education Week stated, "there aren't any neutral people.
There's a feeling that everyone has a vested interest."5
This should not be surprising, for the stakes were remarkably
high. There were, and still are, roughly 60 million school children
in the United States and yearly expenditures are well over half a
trillion. While traditionally around 90% of students have attended
public schools, charter schools –publicly-funded, but privately-run
entities that first appeared at the close of the last century-- have
grown exponentially and seem to have gained a patina of, if not
excellence, then 'better overall.'
And we should focus on the stakes. For a long time private
enterprises, such as Public Strategies and Edison Schools, have
operated with public monies. For nearly two decades, leading public
figures have been saying the “fundamentals are all aligned for a great
number of people to make a whole lot of money in this sector.”6 Once,
while working in a public place with copies of two books on
privatization a 30-ish local MBA candidate approached me and asked me
5 Mitgang and Connell, 1999: 7.6 Said by then former Massachusetts Governor William Weld; Weld
finished his statement, “and do well by doing good.” (Walsh, 2000 in
Ed Week, 19 Jan 2000, p. 13)
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if I was planning to start a school. “It’s going to be lucrative,” he
said as his eyes widened, “very lucrative.”7
As has been the case in other sectors, private entities have
moved into the public sector and Capital is starting to run things
that used to be the province of the State. Labor and Land have also
been affected. Education, once supported by land grants in the US and
to this day depending on property taxes for significant revenues, is
being rethought and redirccted along different lines. Of course, the
State is the entity –the only entity-- that can to some degree control
and direct –or at least moderate-- run away Capitalism.
Labor would like to do so, but they are hardly in a position to
do so. Still, when one looks on the side of labor, the magnitude is
no less; one of the country’s largest unions is the National
Education Association (NEA) which has over two and a half million
members; the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) adds roughly
another million members.8 Teachers anticipated in the late 1990s that
7 Observation, 1020 Amsterdam Avenue, 23 Dec 1999. The two books
were Murphy, 1996; Flam, 199?. What is perhaps more interesting is
that he may well have been wrong. The search for a profitable
business model has been difficult. (Cite?)8 It is important to note that Teachers Unions are public sector
unions and this is one area in which unionization rates have not
stalled. “In 1998, government workers continued to have a much
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they would be directly affected by vouchers or any similar change and
some of those changes are occurring today. Roughly two-thirds of
educational costs are due to salaries and one of privatization’s
strongest arguments is that it cuts costs. That is, according to
Free Market arguments, it efficiently allocates resources, often
cutting costs by forcing providers to lower prices.9 So it is no
surprise that US teachers’ unions would modify their strategies so as
to deal with this threat.
higher unionization rate than their private sector counterparts, 37.5
percent versus 9.5 percent.” (NBLS, Press Release, 25 Jan 99) The
overall rate for the workforce was 13.9%, down from 14.1% in 1997 and
20.1% in 1983. Even though teachers cannot legally organize in six
states, over 80% of teachers belong to a union. (add cite) Over 3
million of the nation’s 16.2 million union members are NEA or AFT
members. Plans to merge the two unions have been common; the most
recent was defeated in 1998. [Update with new figures.]9 See Myron Lieberman (1993: 47-53), one of many commentators
on the Right who descry the unions as producer organizations with
anti-competitive policies. Chubb and Moe, (1990) however, emphasize
the autonomy that the market brings. Privitization, in the form of
vouchers, was suggested by Milton Friedman as long age as 1955; it has
been pursued most vigorously in the country most dedicated to
Friedman, Chile. (Carnoy and McEwan, 1999)
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And the threat was direct -- teachers unions, have been
identified by many on the Right as the problem. Those attacks, as
well as the response and non-response, help to outline the project
and the major concepts which will be employed.
These attacks, however, are considered at more length elswhere.10
What follows is an attempt to outline the major arguments and to give
a brief overview of education reform in the US since about 1978.
Privatization was, along with standards-based reform (now reborn as
the Common Core) and charter schools, one of three major reform
thrusts during the period that reached its adolescence in the 90's,
but two important points need to be made. First, along side all of
these was a technological component. Second, that that component had
wide-ranging effects: the pervasive use of standardized tests to
supposedly measure educational progress among students, teachers,
schools, school districts and the nation as a whole.
This change became a movement, one which had a growth spurt in
the early 1990s. Based on the premise that the US was losing to
other nations in the competition to successfully education the
nation's children, higher standards were supported by both President
Bushes, President Clinton and, most recently, President Obama. The
movement, as it matured, would eventually become so well
10 Indicate precisely which after finishing up. Dedication Chapters,
Amy Gutmann Chap
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placed/positioned as to appropriate the term 'Education Reform.'
Whether the claim that we were being 'out-educated' –the current
phrase used by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan --, was based on
fact, whether it might be a fabrication or whether it might hide
deeper defects of the society as a whole is a point that was largely
glossed over in public discourse.
False premise or not, this has had huge ancillary effects.
Curricula were altered, including cutting back on art, music,
physical education and other non-core subjects. Students were tested
constantly, losing days of instruction and periods of recess and free
play to test-taking and test prep. Teachers have begun to be
evaluated on 'the value' they have added in their teaching time, that
value being measured by these tests. Schools have been closed down
and entire faculties dismissed because they were thought lacking in
this regard. This is policy choice at the federal level, but it is
not merely that – it has been enacted as part of statues in state
after state after leverage has been applied by the US Department of
Education.
Thus, while the threat of privatization casts a long shadow and
is lurking in the background, it has not been the most important
movement in education. That would be standards-based reform linked to
high-stakes tests. As for privatization, while it has not inspired a
movement, the prospects of privatization have incentivized the
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sector. And then there are Charter schools, publicly-funded, but
privately run schools which are concentrated largely in poor urban
areas, the areas of greatest social pathology. It is important to
note that, overall, the discourse focuses on failures of public
schools in areas of concentrated poverty, that is, in areas where our
social failures are most evident.
For pro-privatization forces, we can think of testing and data-
collection as a weapon to attack the system. Testing is relied upon
as a means of gauging and accounting for school quality. From this
point of view, the need for the schools to be re-formed, in multiple
stages, over a long-period of time, is generally accepted and rarely
questioned. The idea that the forms of schooling are, in fact,
already really good enough, but what is required are greater
resources, especially in inner-city schools, is an alternative view
that has been much less discussed. It is with these discussions of
educational reform that we will be primarily concerned in the project
as a whole.
The question for the present moment, however, is, How did these
views become accepted? Part of the answer is that there has been a
relentless attack on the institutions of public education, including
the main organizational bodies that represent teachers, the NEA and
the AFT. While teachers’ unions in the US are one focus, this is not
a study of labor, but a study of educational discourse and the
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politics of schooling. The political dynamics include sharp attacks
on teachers’ unions, progressive pedagogical theories and, at the
most general level, the system of public schools. These attacks and
indictments, which speak of self-interested bureaucracies and public
monopolies, frame much of the discourse.
That public schools are falling short and suffer from inherent
flaws is a pervasive theme. It is also the result of a process of
disseminating a set of views that become the sum and substance of
much discourse. To describe this open-ended process, I will use the
terms hegemony and, in quotes, ‘social learning.’ The quotes are
there because a society may not always learn, but it does change
opinions.
The received wisdom of a particular age, since it informs
individuals, institutions and groups, has an effect on all learning.
Education is failing in the US. The US tends not to do well on
international rankings of education. There are always those who
express surprise or indignation, but it shouldn’t be surprising. The
US does not rank high in most social indicators, why should it rank
higher in education? The US ranks 10th to 20th in education and 28th
or 40th in infant mortality. Few express indignation about the latter
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figure.11 Since I’ve always been told that hegemony is pervasive, I
assume this understanding that public education needs to be reformed
because of low test scores, while infant mortality rates do not lead
to the same understanding about the public health system, is part of
hegemony.
In some ways the reasons for this are obvious -- upper and
middle class children don’t primarily depend on the public health
system. Everyone is against an outbreak of cholera, but short of
that poor children’s health is not a high priority. Neither, really,
is a poor child’s education. Thus this also points to class
interests as an active factor.
The connections between privatization and standards also suggest
this. On the national level in the US the spectre of international
11 According to the OECD; the rate of roughly 7 per 1000 is about
twice as high as the leading country, Japan. In international
rankings of education, there are a wide variety of figures one could
draw on; the rank of 10th or 20th is thought to be representative of
typical rankings, but they vary from exam to exam. The US is usually
in the middle, sometimes ahead of France, England, Austria and
Germany, usually behind Norway and New Zealand. For a more careful
examination of these statistics, see my Respect for Teachers, pp xxv – xxix
and pp 103-105; the latter looks at how these figures were presented
on Oprah.
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competition has been used to promote a set of promotions and exit
exams -- a.k.a., high stakes tests -- where were designed with the
goal of preparing students for college and eventual entry into the
workforce. These are tests on which upper class students tend to do
well, while those of lower socio-economic background do not. But
class is also invoked in another way. Beginning in the first of the
Reagan-Bush administrations, standards-based reform has run a
parallel course with calls for privatization. Here the major ideas
in play are ‘value-added,’ accountability, meritocracy and
efficiency, which are then used to describe the public education
system as failing.
Here we can question whether the system was truly failing or
whether significant parts of it were truly under-financed. While
standards-based reform may well call for additional funding,
privatization, especially in the form of vouchers, explicitly calls
into question whether the public system can work at all. Along with
many others, Henry Giroux has suggested that the language of the
public good has been largely replaced by the language of private
interests. A set of presumptions have become the accepted wisdom:
big government is about dependency, market relations constitute the
entirety, a winner takes most system is for the benefit of all and,
in neo-liberal philosophy, freedom is freedom to consume. Moreover,
public enterprises are doomed to fail. For Giroux, the emphasis on a
crisis in American education in this particular strand of
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argumentation has been successful in co-opting much of the left’s
rhetoric and using it against any notion of radical reform.12
This epistemic social reality has particular features, such as
the use of human capital theory, which tend to push not only
arguments but also the process of creating and refining institutions in one direction
rather than another. If the present period is characterized by a
neo-liberal synthesis in which efficiency is emphasized and notions
of value are reckoned in terms of marginal utility, then the
political actors engaging in discourse are likely to accept this as
common sense. In seeking to carve out a space for themselves in the
new civil society being created out of this business-oriented logic,
social actors may tend to accept rather than challenge this new
reality. Even those that are critical must realize that the popular
acceptance of certain presumptions is a reality which they must
confront.
If it is true that it is impossible to trace the influence of
ideas unconnected from the politics of a period, then political
12 Henry Giroux, 1988. Cited in William B. Stanley, 1992: 66.
Giroux was among many who saw the Standards Movement of the 1980s as
harbingers of what was to come. Stanley notes, however, that the
crisis metaphor was also present in the anti-progressive movement of
the 1950s and the social transformation literature of the 1930s. See
comments on Hirschmann below.
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discourse is a good place to look for the influence of ideas. Which
ideas are adopted is a political process. This is not to say that we
should focus on state actors and institutions, for at the stage of
adoption the nature of state institutions is perhaps least important;
besides, the state presupposes the concept of the political. More
than that, a regime is an attitudinal phenomenon in which behavior
follows from principles and norms and thus presupposes a particular
concept of the political. What are important are political actors
and social institutions embodying power relations, both formal and
informal, and the ideas, norms and principles which they reflect and
attempt to advance.
We can draw on Kathryn Sikkink’s work, where she distinguishes
between three stages of institutionalizing ideas: adoption,
implementation and consolidation. State-centered approaches provide
“the most insight into issues of implementation of economic policy,
and to a lesser degree, to the consolidation of the model.” She goes
on to emphasize, however, that it “is at the adoption stage where the
nature of state institutions was least important, and the impact of
international environment was most crucial.”13 It is arguably
somewhat less crucial --and certainly less speedy-- in educational
policy in the US, where the international environment is channeled
through a set of political institutions, the weight and nature of
which have huge impacts on policy articulation. Nonetheless, the
adoption of new ideas can transit national borders.
13 Sikkink, 1988, xvii.
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But they still need carriers withing national borders. Sikkink
writes that she started with ideas and ended up studying individuals
and institutions. This is also true of studies in education, but it
does not mean that ideas are unimportant, it just means that it is
easier follow those advancing ideas than the ideas themselves. There
are many trends, but we can mark two great turning points in policy
over the last half-century: Lyndon Johnson’s and Ronald Reagan’s
presidencies. These presidencies also represent, respectively, a
high point of welfare state policies and their attempted repudiation.
No one would claim this is an accident. Moreover, in each case,
education policy was a central component in a greater political
programme. In the case of Reagan, this political programme is still
unfolding.
As political processes they were also social learning processes.
This is a central point that admittedly leaps over a lot of
territory, most of which cannot be bridged here. Social learning’s
central intuition, however, is that in all political discourse, no
matter how based on interest, there is an appeal to something like
disinterested politics -- in Heclo’s formulation this approaches
“collective puzzlement on society’s behalf.”14 At least in the
current formulation, it does not deny that interest group politics
14 Hugh Heclo, 1974, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to
Income Maintenance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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are dominant. Rather it posits two things: first, that there are
predominant frameworks associated with any period and, second, that,
in some way, these direct interests to certain political outcomes. In
other words, the acceptable solutions to the puzzle –and, indeed, the
puzzle itself—change from period to period.
What I am suggesting is not only that the process of social
learning takes places within constraints posed by political economy,
but also, more precisely, that political economy has an effect on
epistemics – it limits what is considered a feasible policy.15 While
there certainly is an institutional effect on policy, the historical
branching process which limits options takes place within the realm
of acceptable political discourse and that the latter is determined
in greatest part by matters of political economy.
This may seem a bit vague, but it outlines the operating
assumptions: different periods can be characterized by different
political programmes which are, in turn, reflected in discursive
struggles and the way social actors articulate their interests.
This thought underlies not only theories of hegemony, but also a
whole range of related concepts such as ‘punctuated equilibrium’ and
‘critical juncture.’ However, ideas, even well-financed ideas, must,
in the end, be voiced by individuals. Thus one key is understanding
15 This is perhaps the main point of Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in
Capitalist America.
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the resources backing an individual's statements and the networks
with which they work.
Michelle Rhee, former Washington DC School Chancellor and
founder of the New Teachers Project and the Teaching Fellows program,
is one the chief supporters of more testing, firing teachers in large
numbers, bringing in non-educators to run the schools and closing
down failing schools that give children a 'crappy' education. She
entitled her recent book, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First. That gives
one an idea of how positions are advertised. And, indeed, this book
was an advertisement for Rhee's new organization, StudentsFirst, but it
was only 'radical' in the self-congratulatory way that acolytes of
Ayn Rand use the term. Saul Alinsky, who in this Rules for Radicals told
us that writings about revolution are few, would probably take as an
object lesson Rhee's use of the terms 'radical' and 'revolution' –
note how the quotes starts by pandering and then, before the catch
phrase at the end, repeats the argument that the US educational
system as a whole is failing.
America is the greatest country in the world. But that status
is at grave risk. The U.S. cannot and will not maintain that
leadership role -- from commerce to military might to moral
authority -- if we as a nation continue to allow our public
schools to decline. . . . So, what do we do about it? The answer
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is simple -- we need to completely restructure and redefine our
education system to put students first.16
This is a distilled version of a narrative that has been
propagated since the 1970s. Instead of radical reform, we have
mantras of accountability and efficiency as we follow the intertwined
paths of standards-based reform, privatization, anti-unionism, and,
more recently, charter schools and need for value-added measurements
of teacher performance. And she is part of a network. But we'll
return to that later. For the moment, notice the word 'completely' –
this is not an effort to improve the system, but to dismantle and
reassemble it.
These came to a head in the Bush administration’s No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) education act. While NCLB, a standards-based program,
is not the empirical subject, it is in some ways the logical
conclusion of this movement. NCLB accountability formulae label
many public schools as ‘failing’ -- something that almost cannot help
but to open up possibilities for private enterprises at some later
point. Moreover, this was in large part its intent. It is an
illustrative case of how business logic moves forward in advance of
the private interests that might benefit. In this case it is by use
16 Michelle Rhee, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First, 2013; excerpt
taken from Michelle Rhee copyrighted website,
http://www.edradical.com/, accessed 20 September, 2014.
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of an administrative apparatus that was justified by invoking the
national interest.
'Lynchpin,' however, may be a better word, since the movement
has moved on. The change in administration in Washington did not
change the policy, it changed the way the policy was used. There was
a new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who criticized NCLB, and
there was a 2011 executive order that was supposed to end it, but
there was no blanket cessation, instead, each state had to negotiate
its way out. Having tremendous leverage because NCLB, as originally
written, 100 percent of schools would have to reach NCLB performance
goals by 2014, the Obama administration embarked on the process of
giving states waivers from NCLB. There was a price, of course:
Duncan invited states to apply for waivers for the law's
toughest pieces -- like the AYP measurement system -- in
exchange for agreeing to adopt some of the administration's
favored education reforms. To get waivers, states would have to
create new student performance measurement systems and adopt new
evaluations for teachers and principals that take student
performance into account.17
17 Joy Resmovits, “Arne Duncan Puts No Child Left Behind Waivers In
Three States On 'High-Risk Status',” Huffington Post, 15 August 2013;
accessed September 2014 at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/15/arne-duncan-no-child-
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A lot of people did not expect this of the Democratic
administration elected in 2008, although that might have just because
they did not know of his support for charter schools, merit-based pay
and testing. Nor did they consider his ties to “the Commercial Club,
established in the 1800s to promote the interests of Chicago’s
corporate and business elite,”18 which was a “central force behind
Renaissance 2010 [a program which introduced] markets and competition
into education [and increased] state intervention as the Chicago
Public Schools administration intervene[d] in the daily activities of
educators by introducing corporate models of governance with
standardized testing linked to rewards and punishments.”19 Then there
left_n_3762041.html.18 Danny Weil, “Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model
Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse,”
Counterpunch, 24 August 2009; accessed May 2010 and September 2014
at http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/24/obama-and-duncan-s-
education-policy-like-bush-s-only-worse/. Weil goes on to call
Renaissance 2010 as :basically a land use plan for housing and
urban development aimed at increasing gentrification, with schools
playing a predominant role in maintaining and assuring a healthy
urban middle-class and attracting global visitors, tourists and
Wall Street financial interests.”19 Jitu Brown, Rico Gutstein and and Pauline Lipman, “Arne Duncan and
the Chicago Success Story: Myth or Reality?” Rethinking Schools, 29
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was also Arne Duncan's role – he was a non-educator from the business
sector who then became the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, who,
under Mayoral control, oversaw Renaissance 2010, “a corporate project
that was launched in 2004 to reform both the city and its public
schools with the intent of creating schools and geographical spaces
that would serve to attract the professionals believed to be needed
in a 21st century ‘global city’.”20
May 2009; accessed March 2010 at
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/05/29/arne-duncan-and-
chicago-success-story-myth-or-reality. They describe “the agenda
in which Duncan is complicit” as being shaped by
“Two powerful, interconnected forces drive education policy in the
city: 1) Mayor Daley, who was given official authority over CPS by
the Illinois State Legislature in 1995 and who appoints the CEO and
the Board of Education, and 2) powerful financial and corporate
interests, particularly the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club
of Chicago whose reports and direct intervention shape current
policy.”20 Danny Weil, “Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model
Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse,”
Counterpunch, 24 August 2009; accessed May 2010 and September 2014
at http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/24/obama-and-duncan-s-
education-policy-like-bush-s-only-worse/. Weil goes on to call
Renaissance 2010 as “basically a land use plan for housing and
urban development aimed at increasing gentrification, with schools
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Prior to his appointment, Mr. Duncan’s critical role in the
Renaissance 2010 was considered particularly suspect.21 Some early
skeptics, who must by now think they have been proven right, went so
far as to claim that then President-elect Obama has betrayed public
education by appointing “as his secretary of education someone who
actually embodies this utterly punitive, anti-intellectual,
corporatized and test-driven model of schooling .” This is “not only
because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and
penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the
slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts
of the corporation at best or the prison at worse.”22 Thus, instead
of charting a new direction, the Obama administration seems to be
playing a predominant role in maintaining and assuring a healthy
urban middle-class and attracting global visitors, tourists and
Wall Street financial interests.”21 David Hursh and Pauline Lipman, "Chapter 8: Renaissance 2010:
The Reassertion of Ruling-Class Power through Neoliberal Policies in
Chicago" in David Hursh, High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and
Learning, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Hursh’s arguments
are considered elsewhere. 22 Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman, “Obama's Betrayal of
Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling, “
t r u t h o u t website, 17 December 2008, accessed 29 April 2010 at
http://www.truthout.org/121708R?print.
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continuing a decades long attack on public schools that are thought
appropriate targets “not just because they are deemed ineffective but
because they are public.”23
We mentioned before that Michelle Rhee was part of a network.
She worked for Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein in New York; the
latter recommended her for the DC job. The New Teachers Project,
which predated Arne Duncan in saying the teacher evaluation system in
this country was broken, received money from the Gates Foundation.
Joel Klein took a job with Rupert Murdoch as head of their education
division; he sat right behind Rupert during Parlimentary hearings on
cell phone hacking. The Gates Foundation also supports the Measures
of Effective Teaching (MET) project. That Gates, Murdoch and
Bloomberg all see a great future for virtual education is not an
accident, nor is it an accident that they have all said similar
things about firing large numbers of teachers and having the top
quartile teachers remain, but teaching larger classes. You hear the
same things – often word for word – from these sources. You often
hear the same thing, again often word for word. from sources in the
Obama administration.24
23 David Labaree cited ibid., which in turn cites Alfie Kohn, "The
Real Threat to American Schools," Tikkun (March-April 2001), p. 25.24 For a more extensive treatment, see “Consider the Hero: Saving
Public Education by Attacking Teachers Unions,” Section H of my
Respect for Teachers, pp 95-142, from which much of the following is
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Since the beginning of the Obama administration we have seen a
push to expand charters, a continuation of the failing schools
policy, another push, this time for pay-for-performance measures, and
a redefinition of teacher quality, replacing qualified teachers with
effective ones. This is a dubious method for building up the
institutions of public education.
Not surprising because it goes back to NCLB and NCLB, by
creating a testing regime that focused on basic skills, managed to
subvert the content of the standards movement. With that the
standards movement which sought to achieve high levels of quality and
make students college ready was a thing of the past, but NCLB was
thoroughly a bi-partisan effort. Ted Kennedy sponsored the bill and
any thought that allowing Annual Yearly Progress and the failing
schools provisions was an oversight seems whimsical in the light of
the Obama and Duncan education program.
While it is true that Secretary Duncan is willing to waive
components of NCLB, they are only “for states that agree to pursue
reforms mandated by the administration.”25 Secretary Duncan touts this
taken.25 Joy Resmovits, “Arne Duncan: 'We've Been Very Complacent',”
Huffington Post, 23 September 2011; accessed September 2011 at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/23/arne-duncan-
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as encouraging innovation, but it is innovation defined in limited
terms; waivers will be granted, but under the condition that you
adopt the Obama/Duncan program. President Obama announced the
change “To help states, districts and schools that are ready to move
forward with education reform, our administration will provide
flexibility from the law in exchange for a real commitment to
undertake change. The purpose is not to give states and districts a
reprieve from accountability, but rather to unleash energy to improve
our schools at the local level.”26
States need to apply to receive a waiver and in the application
states will have to agree to take action to:
Transition to college- and career-ready expectations for
all students;
Develop systems of differentiated recognition,
accountability, and support;
Evaluate teacher and principal effectiveness and support
improvement; and
interview_n_975966.html26 “Obama Administration Sets High Bar for Flexibility from No
Child Left Behind in Order to Advance Equity and Support Reform,”
September 23, 2011, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary.
Retrieved from:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/23/obama-
administration-sets-high-bar-flexibility-no-child-left-behind-orde.
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Reduce duplication and unnecessary burden.27
Unions have no role in this process, at least they are not to
represent the interests of their members, but must adhere to the
student achievement only program –the one that contravenes all the
ordinary rules of how to build coalitions in support for social
policy-- that the Obama administration advances, “Collective
bargaining itself must be a tool not to protect adults, but to
protect student achievement,” Arne Duncan contends. “That's got to be
the purpose of all collective bargaining activity.” Even if once
accepts the premise, even if there is a reliable measure of teacher
quality based on student achievement, which at least Mr. Duncan
admits we don't have, you'd think he would rethink his position on
collective bargaining because one of his goals is to “get more great
teachers into the profession” and protecting teachers might be a way
to do it.
Instead he parrots the New Teacher Project: “We’ve been scared
27 U.S. Department of Education, September 23, 2011, ESEA
Flexibility. Retrieved from
http://www.ed.gov/esea/flexibility/documents/esea-flexibility.doc,
p.7.
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in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like
interchangeable widgets.”28 Then he parrots, among others, the MET
project, “Teacher evaluations are largely broken in this country.
We've had a system that doesn't reward excellence.” You'll note he
often uses the word 'excellence.' ”My job is to support, to shine a
spotlight, to replicate success, to talk about excellence, but also
to challenge the status quo.”
In the Resmovits interview he says, “Everyone is scared to say
that great teachers matter, and that's been a great impediment to 28 Quoted in Thomas Frieman, “Teaching for America,” New York Times,
November 20, 2010. For more on Arne Dunca's endorsement of the NTP
Widget effect report, see http://widgeteffect.org/news/, which
includes links to: “Grading Teachers” an Editorial in The Houston
Chronicle 8 July 2009, at
http://www.chron.com/opinion/editorials/article/Grading-teachers-
Stop-treating-teachers-like-1734195.php, and a “a major speech to
the National Education Association” during which “Arne Duncan said
policies created over the past century have produced an industrial
factory model of education that treats all teachers like
interchangeable widgets,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan Notes
"Widget Effect" in “Partners in Reform, Remarks to National
Education Association,” 02 July 2009; accessed July 2010 at
http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/partners-reform.
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reform. There's been this tendency to treat everyone the same. It
masks a tremendous richness and potential of nurturing amazing work
and not tolerating failure when it impacts children. Don't you think
that's vitally important to figure out how to get talent where you
need it most?” The problem with the Widget analogy, however, is that
individual talent is highlighted and teachers are compared on a
single dimension – the single metric of how they improve test scores.
Different capabilities in different teachers –their comparative
advantages, so to speak-- are ignored.
So too are school effects and umpteen other factors. These are
conveniently kicked down the road. As regards rating teachers, Duncan
answers, “I don't. And frankly no one does.” to Resmovits' queston,
“Do you have a prescription on how teachers should be rated?” Of
course there are a lot fo people with such prescriptions, all with
their hidden agendas and ideological baggage. While he says the
teacher evaluation system is broken, at the moment he allows that the
DOE will encourage teachers to be graded “On whatever system
[districts or states] have. You're right, they've got to have a
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thoughtful system. But let's have that conversation.”
Where would that conversation start? Arne Duncan says he's
driven by “anger . . . frustration and real dissatisfaction with the
status quo.”29 This was in response to the question, “You talk about
the status quo a lot, without describing who's keeping it that way.
Who are you targeting?” Obviously, he did not answer the question,
but 'the status quo' from other reformers has only rarely included
large educational conglomerates such as Pearson or venture
capitalists, despite the stunning dollar amounts involved. Pearson
recently signed a half a billion contract to provide testing services in
Texas30 As for venture capitalists, “In the venture capital world,
transactions in the K-12 education sector soared to a record $389
million last year, up from $13 million in 2005.”31 Instead of Pearson
29 End of Duncan quotes, all of which are from Resmovits,
“Complacent,” unless otherwise note. 30 Luke Quinton & Kate Mcgee, “What’s in Texas' $500 Million Testing Contract with Pearson?” KUT.ORG News, Austin, Texas, July 16, 2013; accessed October 2014 at http://kut.org/post/what-s-texas-500-million-testing-contract-pearson.
31 Stephanie Simon,”Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools,” Reuters, New York, 2 August 2012; accessed October
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and venture capitalists, the status quoe usually consists of the
'educational establishment' and teachers unions.
Duncan is more careful than that – he does not now finger point
in the same way, but says teachers, who “have been unfairly
demonized,” are hard-working and "desperately underpaid" and that “we
need to figure out how to double teacher salaries . . . Starting pay
should be in the $60,000s, and experienced teachers should have the
ability to make $130,000.”32 Whether that conversation will ever go
anywhere is, however, highly questionable; it seems as throw away
line, the epitome of a non-starter in a period when all level of
government –federal, state and local-- are facing huge budget gaps.
But Mr. Duncan wants to have "honest conversations that critically
challenge the status quo pretty hard," elevating and “reinventing the
profession" of teaching, not indulging in “kumbaya around the status
2014 at http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/usa-education-investment-idUSL2E8J15FR2012080232 Julie Mack, “ U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says teachers
are 'desperately underpaid' and salaries should be doubled,”
Kalamazoo Gazette, accessed September 09, 2011 at
http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2011/09/us_education_secre
tary_arne_du_1.html
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quo."33
The public statements on increasing teacher pay are new, at
least their prominence is. But they are of secondary importance
compared to connecting pay to performance on standardized tests. When
Race to the Top (RTTT) was announced, the Obama administration stated
specifically that it aimed “to reward states that use student
achievement as a 'predominant' part of teacher evaluations with the
extra stimulus funds — and pass over those that don’t.”34 This did
not mean that test scores were the only measure, but Joanne Weiss,
who administered the first round of applications, told states they
could lose out if test scores were not included in tenure decisions,
“it seems illogical and indefensible to assume that those aren’t part
of the solution at all.” Weiss wanted New York state, among others,
to change its laws so tests affected tenure; Daniel Weisberg, the
33 Ibid.34 Maura Walz, “Incenting Change; Obama official to New York: Change
your tenure law or else,” Gotham Schools, 9 July 2009 accessed Aug
2009 at http://gothamschools.org/2009/07/09/obama-official-to-new-
york-change-your-tenure-law-or-else/
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NTP's Vice President of Policy & General Counsel, a co-author of The
Widget Effect and, under Joel Klein, former Chief Executive of Labor
Policy and Implementation for the New York City Department of
Education, said this was a 'motivator' to change state law and make
'significant reform' to teacher.35 Under Andrew Cuomo, New York state
law was changed and a new evaluation system was instituted in the
2013-14 school year.
Still, we must go back to NCLB.
35 Weiss and Weisberg quoted in Maura Walz, op cit. The connections
between the NTP and Joel Klein's DOE are many. Current President
Tim Daly “helped launch TNTP’s flagship teacher pipeline program,
New York City Teaching Fellows.” Another co-author of The Widget
Effect, David Keeling, the NTP's Vice President of Communications and
wrote many of the ads for the Fellows program referred to in Part
1. The NTP also has a Vice President of Human Capital, Karolyn
Belcher, who started in Harlem one of the first three charter
schools in New York State, although this was before Mr. Klein was
Chancellor. And, of course, Mr. Klein recommended to Adrian Fenty
that founder Michelle Rhee be appointed head of DCPS. See “Our
Leadership,” the NTP website, accessed September 2011 at
http://tntp.org/about-us/our-leadership/
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By taking the elements put in place by standards-based reform,
the Bush administration wedded it to a privatization interest. This
‘interest,’ it must be kept in mind, is much broader than merely
those who would benefit directly, but includes those who would
benefit indirectly in having pro-privatization and anti-statist
agendas advanced. The later provides much more than a rooting
interest, but substantial material support as well, in terms of
propagating their views through think tanks, media and political
contributions. That the Obama administration continued is this
direction was particularly frustrating to many (including myself),
but perhaps most telling.
All in all, the issue of education reform presents an important
case study of how understandings of the public and private are
presently being reshaped in the US and of the important roles of
economic imperatives and common sense economistic presumptions in
that process.
While the movement for higher standards can claim antecedents
from Thomas Jefferson to Dwight Eisenhower, Michael Apple suggests
that contemporary support for national standards has come from four
groups in an uneasy coalition: neo-liberals committed to market
solutions, neo-conservatives seeking 'a return to' a common culture,
authoritarian populists favoring a return to religion and “particular
fractions of the professionally oriented middle class who are
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committed to the ideology and techniques of accountability,
measurement, and management.”36 Except when they invoke an
individualist and anti-statist ethos, I am not so sure of how
important the two middle groups are, but the combination onf neo-
liberals and those seeking answers through the advance of technology
is particularly potent and has shaped the discourse.
The discourse is also shaped by a particular strategy: attack.
The main idea of what follows is fairly simple -- that to advance
political programmes requires attacking social actors and social
36 Michael Apple, “Rhetorical Reforms: Markets, Standards and
Inequality, 30April 1999, pp 1-2; accessed October 2013. Apple, a
leading educator and activist at the University of Wisconsin, thinks
more can be said about the relationship between privatization and
standards. He suggests that the “seemingly contradictory discourse of
competition, markets and choice on the one hand and accountability,
performance objectives, standards, national testing, and national
curriculum . . . oddly reinforce each other and help cement
conservative educational positions into our daily lives in many
nations.” (1999: 2) Focusing on ‘holders of technical/administrative
knowledge’ who have autonomous interests and whose support signifies a
settlement or compromise with the dominant fractions of capital, Apple
asserts that capital’s strategic agenda is advanced only with the
cooperation of other groups “whose own needs are met as well.” (1986:
176)
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ideas that might pose effective opposition. It goes beyond that,
however, to suggest two things in addition. First, that by looking
at the attacks, we can get a fairly accurate picture of the political
programme being advanced. Second, that social actors in opposition
will in large part accept this programme except where it threatens
their very survival.
Of the attacks we shall say they are a means to advance a neo-
liberal programme based on micro-economic theories and business
practices which are thought to increase efficiency. This program
advocates a shift in responsibility for social welfare from the state
to the individual (and family) -- a shift from the public to the
private sphere. At the same time, proposed social norms are coherent
with the demands of productive enterprise and the pressures of
financial management. Furthermore, the increasingly transnational
organization of business and finance creates a situation in which
individual states cannot control cross-border flows.
This not an exhaustive list of contibuting cause, but the result
is a predominant mode of argumentation and a set of neo-liberal
presumptions which inform policy and set limits to acceptable
discourse. I have listed seven or eight main points, but the number
is nothing to quibble about:
comparative advantage must be a driving force of policy
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efficiency requires pruning away the state and, more
generally, levels of bureaucracy in private enterprise
the justification for individual remuneration is the
‘value-added’ by that individual
capital is fungible
accountability structures and the ineluctable market
modality of the incentive system provide for increases in
productivity
productivity increases also require constant
monitoring and measurement
altruism is dismissed by tautology
pragmatism is reduced to pragmatic self-interest
As these presumptions gain more general acceptance, the
articulation of the self-interest of the business and financial class
makes its way to being understood as a general, if not necessarily
universal, societal interest. In the broadest terms, this is a form of
hegemony that presents itself as a set of lessons in social learning,
something that will be discussed below.
The effects on education and schooling are profound. First, it
is assumed that the business model is appropriate to apply to
education. There is also, as the effort to make Chicago a global, 21st
century city indicates, an important transnational element.
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Since 1980 or so, economic production and class structure have
been increasingly articulated transnationally, resulting in a
qualitatively different formation of capital. One would expect to
see a corresponding change in public education. One can document
this by pointing to the examples of IMF and World Bank support for
education, but it is more wide-spread than that. Teachers’ unions,
which are also professional associations, end up using the same
language.
To ask the question of how to analyze developments in school
reform from this perspective, one would start with Schooling in Capitalist
America. Bowles and Gintis define a mechanism of class reproduction
by pointing to two correspondences: one between changing structures
of class and changes in public schooling, the other between what
business needs and what is taught in school. They support the first
claim by periodization; major school reform movements correspond to
struggles in capitalist relations.37
Today, human development is thought of in terms of capital
development and the individual learner is thought of as a discrete
investment. Competition is prized for its positive effects, while
the need for collaboration is downplayed. Another way to put this is
that of the two cultural pathways for human and cultural development,
37 See Bowles and Gintis, 1976: 234-5, and the political economy
section [?] below.
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the ‘independent pathway’ has dominated discourse while the
‘interdependent pathway’ has gotten much less attention.38 The
emphasis on capital development is then used to justify social
expenditures.
In the history of United States education reform, explicit
references to the national interest and international economic
competition were made in order to justify the beginnings of the
standards movement. Over all, many social actors in opposition have
in large part accepted this part of the programme. A telling example
is the political positioning of teachers’ unions in the US -- how
they have been attacked and how they have responded. As
representatives of public sector employees, they have opposed
privatization in almost every form, but accepted standard-based
reform and its calls for accountability and higher educational
quality. Beginning in the 1990s, various factions within both major
teachers’ unions publicly advocated a new approach to contract
negotiations. At the end of the 1990s this even led the largest
national teacher union to introduce a ‘New Unionism’ project. The
second-largest union, the AFT, embarked on efforts to turn teaching
into a Profession. This was spoken of as an attempt to adopt a
cooperative, rather than an adversarial approach, and included
38 See Patricia M. Greenfield, Heidi Keller, Andrew Fuligni and
Ashley Maynard, “Cultural Pathways through Universal Development,”
Annual Review of Psychology, 2003, 54: 461-90.
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schemes for site-based management, 'bare bones' contracts, merit-pay
and professional career ladders that crossed over into
administration. While it was hardly meant to completely overhaul the
industrial model of contract negotiations, it was both a reaction to
external criticisms and, at first, a decentralized and parallel set
of developments as local unions reacted to new demands and offered
positions the unions could live with.
Both unions began to move away from industrial unionism models
and attach importance to substantive educational concerns,39
highlighting the relationship between changing economic models and
collective strategies.40 The most influential explanation of this
39 Perry and Wildman, 1970; Jessup, 1978.40 [rewrite or delete]The material on teachers unions is slim and
hardly able to shed light on how global economic change has affected
their positioning. While Murphy (1990) has provided a fine history,
most accounts (e.g., Selden, 1985) are provided by participants, past,
present or future. Teachers Unions have most frequently been
analyzed in terms of labor negotiations, (Jessop, 1985: 3) but this
is a static view that hardly accounts for change. Union claims to be
stressing educational concerns, causing one to look in opposite
directions for the possible determinants of such a turn of events.
Interesting in this regard are the opposite trajectories of Berube
and Kerchner. Berube became an academic after he left the UFT in the
late 1960s in the aftermath of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
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strategic change is that it is generational, driven by changes in
belief,41 While that kicks the can of belief formation down the road,
it is nonetheless general enough to be applied comparatively;42
moreover, the generational argument breaks union strategic choice
down into phases and emphasizes periodization.
This, in turn, involves a learning curve; the industrial form of
representation is typical of bygone American corporate capitalism,
controversy. Kerchner, of the Claremont Graduate Center, has become
more and more involved with the NEA’s New Unionism push. Kerchner
was the guest speaker openning their March 1998 Higher Education
conference; not only did the NEA now have his co-authored guide to
revitalizing the union at number 2 on its professional best seller
list, but it also distributes a 50 page study guide to his 1997 book,
United Mind Workers, calling it the “most provocative educational reform
book of the 90s.”
Other works consulted include Urban (1997), Braun (1972), Eaton
(1975), Eberts and Stone (1983), Kirst (1984) and Taft. (1974)
Teachers Unions may be profitfully compared to new social movements
(e.g., Touraine, 1981; Kitschelt, in Zeitlin, 1985; Boggs, 1986; and
Olofsson, 1988). On changing union strategies, see Aronowitz (1983),
Moody (in Davis, 1987), Freeman and Medoff (1985).
41 Kerchner and Mitchell, 1988: 9.42 See Barber, 1992.
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albeit with a heavy emphasis on lobbying; traditional collective
bargaining did not generally attach importance to substantive
educational concerns.43 Teachers Unions, in this view, formerly were
considered “combatants rather than partners in the educational policy
process” but are now trying to recreate the joint operating
relationships unions enjoy in other countries.44 While a generational
account offers an overview of union strategic change, for the most
part it provides a descriptive framework for explanation rather than
an explanation itself.
Within strategic discourse at the national level, the adoption
of some of the tenets of this new approach eventually became
priorities in the 1990s. The administrations of Bill Chase of the
NEA began a 'New Unionism' program with the avowed aim of leaving
behind adverserial tactics and taking on the task of improving the
quality of education.45 Sandra Feldman, then President of the AFT,
spoke at length of the role teachers’ unions must take in insuring
‘true professionalism’ – a misguided attempt to my mind, in that a
profession needs to have a measure of control.46 Fundamental 43 Perry and Wildman, 1970; Jessup, 1978.44 Kerchner in Cooper, 1992
45 See, Kerchner, Koppich and Weeres, 1997. 46 I hope to make these points more clearly in an article still
in progress, “The Strange Death of the New Professionalism:
Redefined Self-Interest and The Development of Teachers’ Unions’
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characteristics of a profession include some sort of formal
professional association, a common cognitive base, institutionalized
training, licensing, work autonomy, colleague control and a code of
ethics.47 Teaching is not a profession for many reasons, but most
clearly because teachers do not control the operations of educational
enterprises.48
Positions on Educational Reform.”47 Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: a Sociological Analysis,
Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1978, p. 20848 According to Beatrice and Sidney Webb (New Statesman, 21 April
1917), a profession is founded upon specialized educational training.
They add that it is also a vocation – professionals supply objective
counsel and service to others. Their compensation, at least in most
cases, is agreed upon beforehand and there is no expectation of other
business gain – physicians regulated their own profession etc. Over
time, statutory regulation has increased, but professionals should
have the freedom to exercise professional judgement.
Overall, professions tend to be autonomous, which means they
have a high degree of control of their own affairs: "professionals
are autonomous insofar as they can make independent judgments about
their work.” (Michael D. Bayles, Professional Ethics. Belmont, California:
Wadsworth, 1981.) Teachers, who are often handed a curriculum which
they are told to teach, and are subject to scrutiny by
administrators, who of late have often not come up through the
teaching ranks, do not have that degree of control.
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But the bigger picture is beyond that. Kerchner admits to have
“missed something big . . . the tectonic plates of institutional
change were rumbling underneath public education.”49 The attacks
that frames the entire discourse are the attacks on models of state
enterprise, Keynesianism and the welfare state. In order to discuss
these attacks, I will employ the terms social learning and hegemony,
while also reviewing the political economy literature on education
and schooling.
Though it is not original with him, ‘social learning’ is a term
that I take from Peter Hall. Hall suggests three are different orders
of social learning. First, 1st order change or the refinement of
agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order -- the choice of methods to
achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the selection of goals.50 The
quotations are my own and they are meant to show the difficulties in
Cite other article on characteristics of a profession. Other
cites: Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: the Authority of Metaphor in the
History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1992, p.19.
49 Kerchner, Koppich and Weeres, 1997, p. 5.50 Peter Hall, 1993.
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referring to what is clearly a case of a change in conceptual models
as learning.
There are many cases in which epistemic models change -- we even
have a word for it when changes are least subject to prediction:
fashion. And just as changes in fashion tell us a great deal about a
period, so also do changes in epistemic models. That is not to say
this is ‘learning,’ nor is it to say everything is fashion.
Nonetheless, while there are technical advances, to be sure, in
fields ranging from art to city planning to drama we do not see any
thing approaching a linear progression of epistemic models. Indeed,
we don’t even have the vantage point to tell us what a linear
progression would be.
The overarching argument is that hegemony, when most successful,
is thought to present itself as a set of lessons in social learning.
Thus other social actors will follow these lessons and not challenge
the core of the leading political programme. That most social actors
will accept leading political programmes is not, however, a
transhistorical truth.
Let us compare the teachers with another ‘new unionism’:
The basic difference between the old and new unions in the clothing industry can be traced to the differences in their underlying philosophies. The older unions accepted the
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capitalist system of production as an inevitable evil under which workers are placed by natural law at the lowest rank of the economic order. . . . The new unions are dedicated to a Socialist philosophy and refuse to accept the myth of the divineorigin of capitalism, or to accept as a final decree of natural law the existing property relations.51
The quote comes from a book written before the enactment of the
Wagner Act and before the consolidation of corporatist interest-
intermediation structures. What is interesting to note is that the
critique of capitalism in the quote above is wholly absent from the
contemporary discourse of teachers’ unions. Instead, just as Chicago
presented itself as a global, 21st century city, the unions spent some
time presenting themselves as the professionals needed to create a
labor force able to compete in the global economy.
Part of the absence of any critique is due to the fact that
teachers, unlike textile workers, are not of ‘the lowest rank’ and
part of this is due to the effort to improve their rank within the
existing system. While the system the unions project is one with a
vibrant public sector, again, their first job, in terms of public
relations and building a collective will, is to deflect criticism.
51 Charles Elbert Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America: A
Study in Progressive Trades-Unionism, Ancon: New York, 1934, p 68.
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And this criticism, as other chapters show, is not mild.52
Attacks on teachers’ unions are vehement and often mean spirited.
They also place demands on teachers’ unions and place constraints on
their discursive production. In addition, when they are more than
mere words, but have legislative content that would curtail union
organizing and political action, they pose a threat which requires
the unions to mobilize resources to protect their legal and political
positions. Such a threat is posed by paycheck protection
initiatives, but specific cases of more general attacks on unions by
Republican Governors in states such as Wisconsin, New Jersey and Ohio
are noteworthy.
When one looks at the historical background –especially, attacks
on progressive pedagogy and the back-basics movement-- one should not
be surprised. The back-to-basics movement was a precursor of the
standards movement and we find many of the same arguments in earlier
and more revealing forms.
52 See, in particular, the 'Dedication' essay in this volume.
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2) Overview
The following analysis starts from the premise that the best way to understand the course of educational policy in US since the late 1970s is as reflective of a shift in hegemony. This shift in hegemony especially has its effects on labor and labor unions, specifically because the ability of labor to organize transnationally is severely limited in comparison to that of capital. When we talk about 'organized labor,' it is far less organized than 'organized capital.'
While on the surface they may seem to be a more formal organization than some business associations, unions organize individuals and collect dues from them; they are necessary institutions (or close to it) to create collective agency among workers. Organizations that draw on business --whether corporations or other for profit entities-- for political purposes may indeed be less formal and less necessary, but they are organizing businesses that have already been organized so that they might compete in the market place; they have revenues, they have a hierarchical structure, they can achieve great measures of collective agency without relying on formal institutional structures that connect business to business.53
Put that together with the WTO/GATT's stated commitment to free trade and the IMF/Money Center Bank enforcement of economic orthodoxy in
53 Przeworski Capitalism and Social Democracy?
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financial matters, and labor, with only the nearly forgotten ILO functioning effectively on a transnational level, is clearly outmatched.
They are outmatched in terms of effective agency. Amartya Sen defined agency as “the ability to identify objectives for change and act and bring about change.”54 Whether for the individual, collectives or institutions, agency is the ability to define ones goals and act upon them, even in the face of opposition. Such action can bring about a transformation from disempowerment to empowerment,55 but while different social actors may be able to definegoals, acting upon them in such a way as to bring about change depends in large degree on the resources available to the actors. While strategies of propogation are important, one must realize that those with greater resources tend to be much more effective in makingtheir point of view known and having their way of 'seeing' the socialworld – of understanding it, explaining it and changing it – acceptedas a pervasive common sense that shapes argument. Assumptions aboutthe nature of the social world and how it works and about the nature of people and how they act – for instance, that it makes sense to have an institutionalized transnational market system based on a desire for gain--, become the basis for defining goals that shape future society. Moreover, the acceptance of much of this as 'natural' (or at least 'normal') leads to certain issues not even
54 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, 199755 See, for instance, Naila Kabeer 1999:438
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being contested.
The roots of this are deep in the intertwined histories of Newtonian physics, Lockean Liberalism and the individualistic methodology that they share, supposedly, with micro-economic analysis.56 Locke'a mentor was Robert Boyle, the great Irish scientist (think of Boyle's law and the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas); he studied medicine; and he was also friends with Issac Newton, whose Prinipia Mathematica he greatly admired. His social contract or compact theory –that we exchange some of our 'natural' rights and freedoms inorder to become members of a society the common laws of which protectour life, liberty and property-- undergirds so much political agrument in the Anglo-American world that it really is impossible to calculate his influence. A central point of his theory: political society and political power are justified on the grounds that they make laws to protect and regulate property.
This much is generally understood about Locke, but Locke also was taken with money. In his pseudo-anthropological account of how surplus led to trade and trade changed from a barter system to a money-based system, he locates a turning point in world history.
56 We hope to explain the use of adjective 'supposedly' later, but
micro-economics does not look at individual human beings – rather it
looks at individual decision makers, which may be a human being, a
partnership, a corporation, etc.
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Money, since it is not a perishable item, maintains its value over time and therefore, once a society has money, there is in effect no
limit on the amount of property an individual, family or corporation may hold. Thus, the basic framework from which Lockean explanations emerge assumes that concentrations of wealth are a natural phenomena – natural in the sense that this is the way a society naturally develops. And, for Locke, property was sacrosanct – the reason that we form a social compact in the first place. He did not, however, venture far into the speculative world of what would happen because of these concentrations of property and money.
We'll say little more about Locke, except to say we do need to look at the concentrations of wealth and their effects. And we shouldalso speculate a little using the tools of micro-economics. During the 1990s, as NAFTA was put into effect and the GATT morphed into the WTO, I was looking at the roots of neo-liberalism. One root was conceptual and historical: how the mathematical form of economics with its emphasis on marginal utility models emerged in the mid-1800s during a period when the great powers were expanding and there was a relatively low level of conflict. During this period Jevons, Menger, Walras and Marshall, among others, developed something closely resembling modern micro-economics, explicitly modeling the disciplineon Newtonian mechanics.57 Along with macro-economics, the new approach supplanted political economy in both name in substance. Up until this time, the best seller in the field, running to a dozen or so editions, was John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, and 57 See Maurice Dobb, 1973.
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economics was considered as a part of politics and creating the wealthof a nation.. Afterwards, Economics became its own field, increasinglydivorced from considerations of politics and culture, ever so more based on mathematical approximations of social interactions.58
But let us consider for a second the model of Newtonian mechanics, gravitation in particular. Based on the mass of the objects in question, gravity has force in inverse proportion to the square of the distance at which it works. Conceptually, the desire for gain –specifically the desire for accumulating money and concentrating wealth-- is analogous to gravity. The greater the gainand the closer it is in time, the more it directs human action. I live in New York and in New York the financial center is like a big black hole which distorts the real-estate market. The greater the concentration of wealth, the greater the distortion. Yet when the Lockean paradigm is wedded to the micro-economic paradigm, this type of distortion is more often than not overlooked.
You'll note that I said 'closer in time.' Space is the much lessimportant variable since space can be bridged by technological means.But the further you put something off in time, the more its present
58 I followed this argument in a number of papers, including
“Transnational Hegemony and Liberal Ideology: A Gramscian Approach to
US Development Paradigms Under the Influence of the World Financial
System,” presented at the MUNS symposium, Social Forces and Post-Westphalian
Politics, York University, Toronto, 4 - 5 May 1995.
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value needs to be discounted. In an investment based paradigm, futurereturn is compared against other future returns – the future dictates the present, and the more certain and quicker the return, the more likely one is to invest. It remains to be seen what that means for social investment in education, the returns of which are long-term andwhich, especially in at-risk areas, are less certain. But there is also another element about time – it is infinitely divisible, thus making competition between decision makers increasingly about how can make an investment decision first. With the ability to transfer fundsaround the world in fractions of a nano-second, the reality of cyber-capital is that distance matters much less and the the speed of tradesis not something that is humanly possible, but timing is just about everything.59
Obviously that is an overstatement, but compare it to a paradigm based on labor and its value. In such a paradigm, time is indeed limited – every human being has only so much time on the planet, whether it be three score and ten or some other figure that may somehow be correlated to one's wealth – but time is valued in the present, as the one true possession of the individual.60
59 Compare to the Entropy Effect . . . 60 The idea that Adam Smith had a framework that, at least at times,
emphasizes the individual's time as the one, fundamental, scarce
factor of production, is entertained in my “How Would Adam Smith
Structure the World Exchange System? Transnational Civil Society
and the 2nd Half of Liberalism,” presented at the New York
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The political and social consequences of newer development paradigms, such as the emerging markets paradigm, are tied to the growth of financial markets around the globe. While state capitalism is a reality that limits the extent of neo-liberal thrusts, it has notled to a revival of the social welfare state or a statist paradigm, atleast not in terms of social welfare. That it might it the future cannot be ruled out --we tend to forget that the core elements of the social welfare state were first developed in Bismark's unified Germany–, but that is to be seen. Instead, and especially since 1989,market-based paradigms have developed out of the notion of macro-economic conditionality and have fast become the core of development strategy as it is articulated in and dominated by western capital markets.
This can be viewed as an change in strategy of the hegemonic economic powers: while the stability of financial markets is dependent on the global concert among economic powers, the financial market --not direct state to state aid-- acts as the immediate instrument of development by offering incentives (specifically market access) and sanctions (lack of capital flow). Thus the hegemony manifest in the paradigm stems not directly from states; rather, it is economic – a liberal hegemony of the integrated financial system. So
Political Science Association Conference, New York, 28 - 29 April,
1995.
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long as dropping out of the system is not a feasible option, it is an hegemony to which all states are subject to varying degrees, dependingon their resource base.
While others may argue that the same Liberal and Capitalist Hegemony has prevailed for two centuries or so, there have been variations of enormous import during this time. Whether this amountsto a new ‘hegemonic moment’ in the last 30 or 40 years is a matter ofsemantics. What we have seen is a shift in the direction, ideas and instruments of transnational, post-industrial captialism. For the last quarter century plus, activities in civil society --production, finance, information gathering, etc.-- as well as important aspects of family life,61 have become increasingly spread over many different nation-states, no single one of which can exert control over the entire process:
from circa 1968 onward,62 transnational corporations have developed into an integrated system of production, exchange,and accumulation which is subject to no state authority and has the power to subject to its 'laws' each and every memberof the interstate system.
Giovanni Arrighi, the author of the above, goes on to argue that61 See, for example, Robert Smith, Los Ausentes Siempre Presentes: The
Imagining, Making and Politics of a Transnational Community between New York City and
Ticuani, Puebla, Paper #27, ILAIS Papers on Latin America series, 1992.62 The periodization (ca. 1968) is chosen so as to coincide with the
emergence of Euromarkets.
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the emergence of a "Free Enterprise System --free, that is, from all previous vassalage to state power" is the ultimate limit of US hegemony and marks "the beginning of the withering away of the inter-state system as a primary locus of world power."63 While this may overstate the case, the relative influence of labor and capital has changed, to the greater favor of the latter. The post World- War II neo-corporatist settlement in which organized labor had virtual veto power over national policy directions is a thing of the past – just look at southern Europe or teachers' pensions in Illinois. While the power of labor was exaggerated in some accounts, no one today would seriously argue that the power of organized labor has kept pace with that of organized capital. If there is veto power now, it lies with the managers of financial capital.
Attacks on Keynesianism, welfare state policies and public enterprise were all important elements. The narrative that follows is meant to illustrate the effects on education. You might notice some unevenness, however. In first formulating the project, there was no thought to highlighting the unions, that only came later, as away of painting the broader picture and at that point they became thecenter piece; now they merely provide a set of examples. Still, whenthere is a focus on organizations representing educational professionals, I am more interested in what they were responding to than in the response itself.
John Bellamy Foster puts it this way, the “conservative movement 63 Giovanni Arrighi in Stephen Gill, ed. 1993: 182 - 183.
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for the reform of public education in the United States, and in much of the world, is based on the prevailing view that public education isin a state of emergency and in need of restructuring due to its own internal failures.” He then goes on “argue that the decay of public education is mainly a product of externally imposed contradictions that are inherent to schooling in capitalist society, heightened in our time by conditions of economic stagnation in the mature capitalisteconomies, and by the effects of the conservative reform movement itself.” 64
The theoretical framework within which the unions were placed, as participants in a discourse in which hegemony, presents itself as lessons in social learning. It is a bit unusual in parts, often asking the reader to draw her or his own conclusions, but it begins by looking at what one would mean by a social learning perspective. This is framed by a reference to hegemonies of social learning, the plural being chosen to illustrate that hegemony, or social leadership, does not have a single source.
The original Greek word, hegemonia, had, as its primary reference, the leadership of a confederacy of states by another
64 John Bellamy Foster. “Education and the Structural Crisis of
Capital The U.S. Case John Bellamy Foster,” Monthly Review, 1 July
2011; accessed October 2011 at
http://monthlyreview.org/2011/07/01/education-and-the-structural-
crisis-of-capital.
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state. It is this notion that is used for the most part in International Relations theory, Robert Keohane being the leading example. While I have significant differences with Keohane, whose ownwork limits the use of the term 'hegemony' to state actors, we do accept similar periodizations. Like Arrighi, Keohane states that themid-1960s marks the beginning of a post-hegemonic period, one in which no "one state is [both] powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations, and willing to do so."65 But is the cause within the state system or within the world financial system, which has been reconsolidated since the late 1960s?
Episodes of social learning offer examples of paradigm shifts ineconomic development, human development and political economy. Sincewe are concerned with the attacks on Keynesianism and the welfare state, we spend a lot of time looking at Margaret Thatcher’s justifications for such an approach. But justifications can also be gleaned from members of the British Labour Party, writing at the sametime, among them Michael Mann, who warned, “Though Keynes pretends torule within the nation-state, Adam Smith still rules without — and
65 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World
Politics in Transition, Boston, 1977, p. 44; cited in Keohane, After Hegemony:
Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, pp. 34 - 35. The latter
work is premised on the proposition that by the late 1960's "U.S.
dominance in the world political economy was challenged by the
economic recovery and increasing unity of Europe and by the rapid
economic growth of Japan." (p. 9)
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therefore, to a large degree, within as well.”66 Though Mann was urging the Party to embrace more modern forms of socialism, he himself recognized that that message did not necessarily get across.67
But, since we mentioned Boyle, we might note that he tells us the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressureand volume of a gas works only if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. So, too, might we think of Keynes, especially when it comes to the multiplier effect. For Keynes (who was drawing on Richard Khan's work), increases in government spending have greater effects on aggregate demand because they are multiplied. Those who receive money, especially unemployed or underemployed workers, spend most on consumption goods, saving only a small fraction. Thus businesses benefit form the extra spending – it allows them to hire more people and pay them, which in turn allows a further increase in consumer spending.
But this only works, at least to the degree Keynes contended, in
66 Michael Mann, “Nationalism and Internationalism: A Critique of
Economic and Defence Policies,” in J. Griffith, ed., Socialism in a Cold
Climate, London: Allen & Unwin, 1983, p. 187. 67 “Unfortunately, Tony Blair drew from this the opposite
political lesson for the Party than the one I had intended! He
embraced Adam Smith.” Michael Mann, “The Transnational Ruling Class
Formation Thesis,” Science & Society, Vol. 65, No. 4, Winter 2001–2002,
464–469.
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a closed system. If spending is on consumption of goods that are produced in other countries, then it is the economies of those countries which benefit from the multiplier. Thus, while the Keynesian multiplier might very well be effective on a global scale, during a period of globalization, many of the benefits move from the country which initiates the stimulus to other countries which supply consumer goods –clothes, televisions, i-pads, food, phones, etc.-- oftheir inputs –steel, cement, timber-- instead of staying in the home country. Overall, the more global the economy, the less likely the benefits of Keynesian economics will stay in one country and the lesslikely political coalitions supporting Keynesian style economics willsucceed.
Episodes of social learning also speak of how ideas play a crucial role in the construction of coalitions and identifies three coalitions that affect educational policy. Central to this are questions of trust and it is proposed that changes in modes of trust have affected choices in public policy. From here extend the discussion of Peter Hall’s work, which hopefully explains why Margaret Thatcher’s name comes up so often, as it does in examining some of the episodes of social learning that occur in the 1980s and have had long-lasting ramifications. As should be clear, social learning and paradigm change are treated from a political economy perspective and, as we more on later to considers class and the distribution of educational opportunity, we shall look at Gourevitch’s Politics in Hard Times.
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The social systems theory can be used as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony will likely not be considered in what follows, but it is a suggestion I feel compelled to make.
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3) What is a social learning perspective?
Once one forgets about Barbara Eden, the fight with a giant squid and a second, totally separate fight with a giant octopus (which happens to be electrically charged), there is a lot to be learned about social learning from the 1950s movie Voyage to the Bottom of
the Sea. The first thing is that social learning is often problem-oriented -- there is a problem-solving model and a process of decision making, much of which is based on technical criteria. The presence of a problem –financial, environmental, military, political,what have you-- seems to be a necessary ingredient, a motivating factor, the raw material with which one works and which informs the policy process. The second thing is that, while social learning is shaped primarily by the problem to be solved, both the model and the process of problem solving are contested. This also means, however,that there is a third thing, that there are episodes of social learning. This is closely connected to the second thing, so if one prefers we can call it thing 2-a – that there are episodes of contestation in which ideas, power and interests all interact. This is the most general framework from which the following proceeds.68
68 According to Connelly et al. (2000, 105), “A framework is a
system of ideas or conceptual structures that help us 'see' the
social world, understand it, explain it, and change it. A framework
guides our thinking, research, and action. It provides us with a
systematic way of examining social issues and providing
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Much, if not all of this is demonstrated in the film. Indeed,how this episode plays out is the substance of the movie. The contested nature of establishing policy, both from the power centers of a state and then throughout civil and military society, is centralto its narrative. The problem in the film is that the earth is heating up, something to do with the Van Allen Belt. One plan, advocated by one group of scientists and to be implemented by those who will be manning the hyper-advanced submarine Sea View, is to fire a nuclear missile along the Van Allen Belt and obliterate it. Another faction is led by a bearded scientist who announces in a hardto place accent, “I am diametrically opposed!” He believes that, if allowed to proceed of its own accord, the heating syndrome will reverse itself. Much of the tension in the plot is provided by this central conflict.
That it echoes current debates about global warming helps to make the point. There are those who deny there is a problem, those
recommendations for change. . . . A framework consists of basic
assumptions about the nature of the social world and how it works and
about the nature of people and how they act. For example, some people
assume that society is basically harmonious and that harmony results
from a set of shared values. Others assume that society is in
conflict and that conflict is rooted in class, race, and gender
struggles over power and access to and control over resources.”
[check original source]
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who attribute the problem to natural cycles which will reverse themselves, those who believe we need to have a radical change in consumption and emmission of green-house gases, those who believe that nothing short of a change in the economic system is needed and, finally, those who believe, a al Freakeconomics, that we need a new technology to counter the old technology – that we should pump sulpher into the sky or genetically engineer algae that will take more CO2 from the atmosphere.
Ideas play a foremost role -- they are the weapons of battled argument. Which theory is correct is central to the choice in front of them and affects the alliances which then form. But ideas do not hold the stage by themselves – power holders will influence the course of events and decision making, even when it comes to the most sophisticated and esoteric scientific processes. In other words, decision-making always has a political element, both in terms of serving coalitions and in terms of policy making process. The formeralways include and are usually centered on economic interests. They are probably clearer in the global warming example. Those who produce CO2 as a byproduct of economic activities don't want to pay the cost of lowering consumption through a BTU tax (which, if I may tip my hand, seems to make the most immediate sense) or increased regulation and control of emissions.
As for the process and the chain of command in politics, the Sea View is again helpful as indicated by the one participant who announces, “My answer will come directly from the president.”
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Presumably the president is not an expert on the Van Allen Belt, but he does have the authority to pick among those who are. Thus, while it need not always be so formal or so specific, economic interests, scientific study and political hierarchies all play a role in social learning.
But this is not all – Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea offers more. Much additional plot tension comes from the conflict between personaland public interest. Personalities and management techniques also differ, as shown by the different approaches of the officers. Furthermore (and by now we have long since stopped numbering things),some notion of something like punctuated equilibrium is also present -- what happens when our understanding of the natural world is turnedon its head? Then there is also the possibility of rebellion: “If you continue your lunatic project, you will never see it completed!” (Of course, this seems to beg the question, how will it be completed if he does not continue it?) And once one does remember Barbara Eden, who is secretary to the Admiral, engaged to the sub’s captain and encouraged (once her blouse has been soaked through) to take off her uniform jacket in several sweaty scenes, there is a lot to be said about women’s roles.
What one would not learn, however, is a basic intuition of social learning in the social science and public policy literature --the idea of institutional development and, presumably, advance. Thistype of institutional or policy learning is often thought to be synonymous with social learning. This, however, is a view I will
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reject for I believe it to be incompatible with any adequate theory of politics. Nonetheless, it does point to a category of phenomena -- efforts to develop an institutional response to what is, by and large and by consensus, considered to be a problem worthy of addressing. While far more true of a Heclo, and far less of a Peter Hall (which we’ll leave that for later discussion), in some ways thisis rooted in (or at least has strong affinities with) structural-functionalist understandings.
I mentioned that problems which had to be solved played a role in initiating political responses. That is to say both that communities construct institutions to serve certain functions and that acute problems are likely to produce efforts to reshape institutions so as to meet them. Admittedly or not, sometimes the social learning literature adopts an almost neo-Aristotlean view of the state as an entity above and beyond society meant to solve collective problems and provide for the common good. Or, since they may also be part of an international organization or of an academic institution, perhaps it would be better put say that the problem solvers are placed above society and are only sometimes placed withinthe state.69
69 Problems with defining what is (and is not) the ‘state’ often
cloud what are otherwise clear discussions. This is one of the
reasons for the extensive use of Gramsci. See the discussion of his
‘enlarged state’ below.
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As a heuristic device, this has many strengths. It gives us a starting point and focuses on an active process -- problem solving. But there is also a weakness in that ideas are thought of as instrumental -- the way to seek after or implement a solution to a problem, but not as having any intrinsic value.70 This seems a misapprehension of a reality in which actors validate their actions and justify their social role by reference to a set of ideas and ideals. This is even more the case when these are sets of ideals which cannot be verified.
All in all, social learning only occasionally rises to the level of critical thinking. As Robert Cox has noted, problem-solvingis not critical thinking. Problem solving “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly.” Critical theory "stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about” calls them into question institutions and social power relations that problem-solving takes for granted :by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing.”71
70 Cite paper from Apsa99 on ‘policy learning’71 Robert W. Cox, Approaches to World Order, 1996, pp 88-89. See, also,
John S. Moolakkattu, "Robert W. Cox and Critical Theory of
International Relations," International Studies, October 2009 vol. 46
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Critical theory has a normative element in that we distinguish between what we want the state to be –what we think it ought to be-- and what the real-existing state is. While what 'is' does not exhaust the realm of social learning, problem solving begins with what is and limits the 'ought' to how to fix it.
That is one issue. That this institution building is led by elites is another. The consensus by which problems are identified and addressed is a third -- or again one may label it 2-a. These elites might be aligned with, or may avail themselves of technocraticelements, but they might not. More commonly, they can pick among competing factions of those who claim the status of ‘expert.’ Most importantly, the identification of problems is only in rare instancesforced on elites by nature. Instead, the identification and recognition of social problems is a political and epistemic process that often as not is enmeshed in intense struggles among social actors.
This raises the question – a truly normative question and thus the motivating factor for those engaged in critical theory – as to who shares in a collective good and who suffers from a collective ill.
The idea of distributional justice is therefore a variable. Moreover as Raymond Williams argues, the acceptance of one version orno. 4 439-456.
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another by the majority is a central tenet of hegemony.72 This not only neatly folds in with key categories in Aristotle’s Politics, but also with the main premises of this analysis. First, that social learning occurs as frequently as not in discrete episodes. Second, while addressing more or less pressing problems, power, ideas and interests coalesce and interact in relatively novel patterns. Third,that the constellation of power influences not only the goals of social policy, but also both the way problems are perceived and the set of options which are considered plausible and within the realm ofthe common wisdom.
What follows methodologically from the first and second premisesis that each case must be examined on a case by case basis; from the third, however, we can argue that specific attention should be given
72 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 1977. Theories of
distributive justice are also central to economic policy. According
to Peter Hammond, choices of economic policy which focus on
consequences, such as cost-benefit tests, “necessarily require
distributional judgements. These should emerge from a social welfare
objective incorporating interpersonal comparisons.” See Hammond,
“Progress in the Theory of Social Choice and Distributive Justice,”
in S. Zandvakili (ed.) Research in Economic Inequality, Vol. 7: Inequality and
Taxation pp. 87-106; revised version of English original published in
Italian translation in L. Sacconi (ed.) La decisione: Razionalità collettiva e
strategie nell' amministrazione e nelle organizzazioni (Milano: Franco Angeli,
1986), ch. 3, pp. 89-106.
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to the influence of predominant paradigms which structure and are embedded in dominant political programmes. We might think of two constellations of power. One is an issue specific coalition, the other a more general coalition -- the hegemonic center of gravity, ifyou will.
Despite the gravity metaphor, this calls not for a mechanistic approach, but for some theory involving consciousness, self-consciousness, reflection, passive acceptance and active strategic choice. It also must take account of group formation, organizationaltasks and how something like a collective will is formed, maintained and then changes over time. Accordingly, reactions ranging from resistance to resignation are involved, but most importantly the passive aspects of social response should be problematized. In otherwords, one question should be why resistance did not develop.
Overall, we shall suggest that there has been a change in the apportioning of responsibility -- that responsibilities borne in the post-war period by the state as part of a comprehensive social settlement have devolved onto the individual and family.
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4) Hegemonies of Social Learning
At a certain age we cease to focus on other people. Instead we focus on what is immediately important to us as individuals. In addition, we oft times think of ourselves as parts of family units that we will help bring into being. We also focus on what is immediately important in terms of careers. Some also think of the money making possibilities of their investments.
If ‘social learning’ is to have any meaning, this process of coming to opinions as how best to achieve one’s goals in society has to be accounted for. But at the moment I want to remark on the lack of fellowship -- the lack of interest in others except as they enter into our future plan.
Business affects this -- we become more calculating if we adopt the ways of business. As the Vice-President of a major Swiss investment bank once told me, over time “you become more pragmatic.” When asked what he meant by that he responded, almost as if the answer to the questions was self-evident, “by that I mean pragmatic in your own self-interest.”73 One need not rely on that single quote,one need only look at business magazines and the advice they offer. The ideology of business is manifest in the advice people who want toget ahead would do well to take to heart.
That is what ‘hegemony’ is -- hegemony, in the Gramscian sense 73 Interview, May, 1998.
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that actors in civil society have a pervasive effect on norms and normal ways of thinking. There are certainly other types of hegemonybesides those emanating from civil society, but this is the core. Nonetheless, they often have expression in what might be termed political society. Mark Blythe provides a prescient and poignant example, recounting how his father spoke of a 'natural level of unemployment' and how Government spending to create jobs would only result in higher inflation and eventually come to nil.74 This narrative was about the futility of a Government jobs policy, but it was based on economic ideas that rejected Keynesian approaches.75 Allhegemonies work in varying degrees on the formation of opinions, norms and normal ways of thought. Because, however, of the decisions74 See Mark Blythe, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change
in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p vii. He,
however, often shared that story for years prior to the book's
publication.75 Albert Hirschman outlined three types of conservative thought,
referring to the ‘futility thesis,’ the ‘perversity thesis’ and the
‘jeopardy thesis.’ Mr. Blythe senior is employing the futility
thesis. A Jacobin thesis might be folded into the perversity
thesis, which Hirschman identifies with Burke: ” the social
outcome of the revolutionaries’ striving for the public good would
be evil, calamitous, and wholly contrary to the goals and hopes
they were professing.” Albert O. Hirschman, “Two Hundred Years of
Reactionary Rhetoric: The Case of the Perverse Effect,“ Tanner
Lectures on Human Values, Univ. of Michigan, 8 April 1988, p. 14.
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that people must make in order to succeed (or merely survive), the economic core of civil society usually works to a greater degree thanothers to shape and maintain norms.
Civil society does not derive only from economic activity, but economic activity has a leading effect on ethics. This can be compared to political society, which has its leading effect through the exercise of collective will and with the state, which is more than the expression of political society. The state is also an institution with not only a considerable degree of autonomy, but alsoa great amount of inertia. These spheres all have their separate hegemonies.
This does not mean that the state and political society do not influence ethics, or that civil society or the state have little influence on collective will. Nor would anyone suggest that civil society and political society have no influence on the state. Any such statement is ludicrous. The distinction, more so, is between the ways that ‘social learning’ is influenced.
We can think of three major ways. First, during the individual’s upbringing and ongoing lifespan. Second, as part of collective groups. Third, there is state action. It is in referenceto this third area that a technocratic concept of ‘social learning’ developed in political science. In an attempt to interpret the shiftfrom Keynesian to Monetarism, Peter Hall notably expanded the idea of‘social learning’ to the level of political society, suggesting that
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there are orders of paradigm change and that greater change involved a shift of political forces.76 Despite the fact that those who labor to construct deductive systems of economics have almost always thought of themselves –and wanted others to think of them-- as scientists and not philosophers,77 Hall implied that economic theory was to be treated as social and political philosophy. As a social philosophy, it would most likely achieve success by having its tenetsaccepted by actors in civil society.
In investigating educational policy the accepted wisdom embeddedin the pervasive ethics of civil society must be included. In the USall three spheres have their effects and we can think of three hegemonies of social learning, one involving institutions, the other collective decision making and the third ethics. All three stem frominterest in one way or another, but in much different ways. One is the formation of how we as individuals conceive of what we should do for our own sakes. Ethics, as opposed to morality, grows out of this. Morality is conceived, at least in Kant’s terms, with what is right regardless of consequences. Ethics has all to do with consequences -- what happens from your action.
Ethics is how a society is lead ahead -- one way at least,
76 Peter Hall, 1993.77 Paraphrase of Robert Solo, “Economics as Social Philosophy, Moral
Philosophy, and Technology,” in Solo, ed., Economics and the Public
Interest, Rutgers Univ. Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1955, p. 5.
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manifest in the way people justify their actions. This comes from self-interest, but not a single view of self-interest. It involves the stages of development as we become older. It also involves the collective efforts we make to shape events -- our active decisions asself-conscious (and sometimes apathetic) members of society seeking our own and our collective interests. And it involves the state -- the institutions we form in order to have both inertia and autonomy -- to carry out the tasks we set and to anticipate needs we, as occupied, self-interested individuals, do not have the time or expertise to anticipate and respond to.
All three are based on interest and there is no necessary correspondence between the edicts of civil society and the ethics of the social whole, but it usually is the predominant force. There arelimits beyond which civil society cannot survive. One danger is thatpolitical society and the state will go beyond those limits --not an impossibility, by any means, as political history shows. This is a fear of Jacobins to add to Hirschman’s three types of conservative thought.78 As conservative humorist --and one time self-described
78 Hirschman refers to the ‘futility thesis,’ the ‘perversity thesis’
and the ‘jeopardy thesis.’ A Jacobin thesis might be folded into
the perversity thesis, which Hirschman identifies with Burke: ”
the social outcome of the revolutionaries’ striving for the public
good would be evil, calamitous, and wholly contrary to the goals
and hopes they were professing.” Albert O. Hirschman, “Two Hundred
Years of Reactionary Rhetoric: The Case of the Perverse Effect,“
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communist--, P.J. O’Rourke explained, conservatives fear the government’s possession of guns.79 While he did not cite Weber, he paraphrased him closely regarding the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
But what he failed to do, as many who make reference to Weber fail to do, is to note that Weber referred to the state as a ‘human community.’80 The fear of state force may be a legitimate ground for the delegitimation of state authority. But to paraphrase Churchill, the mix of state authority and the regulation of civil society is theworst system ever created, except for all the others. In other words, state regulation is necessary to create a humane civil society. One advocate of this strain of thought is Jonathan Kozol:
I’ve never in my entire life seen any evidence that the competitive free market, unrestricted, without a strong counterpoise within the public sector, will ever dispense decentmedical care, sanitation, transportation, or education to the
Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Univ. of Michigan, 8 April 1988, p. 14.79 Radio interview on National Public Radio, June 2004.80 Weber claims that the state is any "human community that
successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical
force within a given territory . . . its administrative staff
successfully upholds a claim on the 'monopoly of the legitimate use
of physical force' (German: das Monopol legitimen physischen Zwanges) in
the enforcement of its order." I have relied on Wikipedia for the
quotes.
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people. It’s as simple as that.81
Accordingly (as I hope to show), among the sources for education
reform I will be investigating, we may include suburban flight, ingrained class patterns in residence and Margaret Thatcher. But within the field of international politics there is another category of hegemony, not based on the individual’s upbringing, struggles in political society or learning process of the technocratic state, but on leadership and interaction among states. In other words, Keohane's view of hegemony and Gramsci's are not mutually exclusive. Hegemony is a broad term – it involves transnational links, especially those created by transnational business, but also by migration patterns and intertwined security arrangements. In the present instance, in involves actions beyond the posted-boundaries ofthe sovereign state.
Instead of calling this international hegemony, we might refer to it as transnational hegemony or hegemony in the transnational sphere. In one chapter title I considered, I referred to the post-Vietnam era. This is meant to suggest a shift in the balance betweenstate-centered and society-centered forms of hegemony at the transnational level, but it is not to say that the US debacle in Vietnam was the cause; rather, the US loss in Vietnam is a symbol of 81 “The Market is Not The Answer: An Interview With Jonathon Kozol,”
Rethinking Schools, date uncertain; accessed June 2010 at
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/voucher_report/v_s
oskoz.shtml.
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the limits of state mobilization regimes and, more generally, of the ability of major powers to project power beyond their borders. But,although changes in strategic balance were immensely important, military loss was not the main cause; rather, changes in technology altered the balance between organized labor, organized capital and the state.
Technological advances enabled the formation and strengthening of an entity that we might call transnational civil society. Moreover, the failure in Vietnam and Afghanistan of the statist military-political model of hegemony offered by the US and the USSR left an opening for other models. Finally, with the Oil Crisis and the ensuing Debt Crisis this led to a politico-ethical model centeredon the economic interactions of civil society. The dual crises are particularly important in that financial concerns began to supercede security concerns. The latter, of course, did not go away and neither did the state’s role, but there was a shift of hegemony and ashift in hegemony's purpose. Instead of residing in a single hegemon, it is found in a non-unified juridical authority, residing in many and diverse sovereign states, which governs the transnationalnetworks which link them together. Instead of leading a confederacy of states, the institutions of hegemonic stability coordinated and regulated actions among competing national economies.
Wolfgang Reinicke has argued that the organizational logic of globalization has allowed private actors to escape state regulation and, consequently, limited the policy options of supposedly soverign
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states.82 Reinicke argues that transnational integration of the financial services industry has made single nation efforts at regulation futile in most instances; in order to confront problems brought about or intensified by globalization, states meet and agree to pool a measure of soverignty, either by signing inter-locking agreements or creating semi-autonomous entities such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). We may add that the financial services industry, especially bond-rating agencies such as Moody’s, affect alllevels of government.83 That the cost of financing state projects places effective limits of sovereign power is not new -- Louis XVI called the Estates General together for just such a reason. But it nonetheless has significant effects.
What these efforts have in common is that they are limited to measures on which one can gain consensus from the collected state actors. The effect is that only those things pass which both are recognized as 'public goods' and are not vetoed by one of the major players involved in the negotiations. This limits matters quite a bit; economic matters are primary, social welfare concerns are not.
82 Wolfgang Reinicke, Global Public Policy: Governing without Government?,
Brookings Institution Press, 1998.83 Tim Sinclair, "Bond-Rating Agencies and Coordination in the
Global Political Economy," in Private Authority and International Affairs, A.
Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler and Tony Porter, eds., Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1999.
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The WTO, along with the IMF and World Bank this serve as the skeletaltransnational functional equivalent of a ‘state’ -- a set of regulatory and coordinating bodies in which the concerns of the financial community come first. Obviously, there is no ‘monopoly’ onthe use of force, legitimate or otherwise, but in many ways this nonetheless resembles the Nightwatchman model of the state. The ‘human community’ served by development paradigms tied to the world financial system is, at best, a community of investors. it questionsthe effects on ethics and community structure that are entailed by efficiency dominated paradigms. The principal aim is to describe how that ethical and ideological content has been informed by the workingsof a civil society that is increasingly constituted transnationally.
What has this to do with education? According to Felix Rohatyn, the role of financing economic development in the less developed world "will, more and more, be taken over by the global capital markets. The cold-blooded selection process by world capital is invested will determine the economic progress of many developing countries."84 Of course, it is quite another thing to determine if a similarly cold-blooded selection process is also present in education, especially at the hegemonic center. Nonetheless, there isample evidence that human development must transverse the same terrain as economic development. While I do not wish to examine in depth how recent economic development and human development paradigmsresemble one another, they do share presuppositions. It is the predominance of the market over the state that is the point when 84 Felix Rohatyn, NYRB, 1994: 48.
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discussing epistemic hegemony.
The Competitive State is a term that Cerny has used to refer to
a state that “has to facilitate a regulative framework in which the
national economy can compete in the international market.”85 The
rule of comparative advantage comes first. The state plays
indispensable roles in attracting capital and facilitating
innovation, but within this framework its principal function is to
allow economic actors within the nation to compete with economic
actors in other nations.
Does the State of Competition lead to a sort of Educational
Taylorism? That remains to be proven, but there are many indications
that it is so. Whether state and civil society are one thing or two,
all of this has an effect on the national civil society. This goes
beyond the state meeting the competitive needs of corporations in
transnationally articulated markets. The rise of neo-liberal
economics is attached to instrumental rationality for individual and
society both. The public good is less debated and public debate is
considered a lesser good. The vision is of an instrumentally
85 Xavier Bonal, “Managing education legitimation crisis in neo-
liberal contexts: some semiperipheral evidence,”p 5; summarizing
P.G.Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State: the dynamic of
political globalization,” Government and Opposition, Vol. 32, #2, pp. 251-
271. Much of what follows draws on Bonal’s analysis.
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rational individual; political rationality emanates from the
financial sector, which has taken precedence over both production and
commerce.86 Globalization and the competition for capital that can
now much more easily cross national boundaries has led to enhanced
“economic competitivism and commodification in almost all spheres of
life.”87
The idea that there is no choice is directly connected to the
process of depoliticization which, in turn, is connected to the
constellation of forces at the global level. This can be viewed as
an change in strategy of the hegemonic economic powers: while the
stability of financial markets is dependent on the global concert
among economic powers, the financial market --not direct state to
state aid-- acts as the immediate instrument of development by
offering incentives (specifically market access) and sanctions (lack
of capital flow). Thus the hegemony manifest in the paradigm stems
not directly from states; rather, it is a liberal hegemony of the
integrated financial system. So long as dropping out of the system
86 On the last point, see Vilas, 1996 . . . cited in David Hursch,
“Neoliberalism and the Control of Teachers, Students and Learning: The
Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accountability,” Cultural Logic,
Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000.. 87 Xavier Bonal, “Managing education legitimation crisis in neo-
liberal contexts: some semiperipheral evidence,”p 7.
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is not a feasible option, it is an hegemony to which all states are
subject to varying degrees, depending on their resource base.
This may overstate things, but it is nonetheless true that a
system that derives its lessons in social learning from this
political rationality is going to head in certain directions.
'Economic Liberalism' as an ideology has developed in tandem with the
institution of a market economy since the end of the Napoleonic Wars
tended towards opportunities for business, huge industrial expansion,
exploitation of labor and disregard for the environment. In
contrast, the collapse of this system led to a much different system
in both the inter-war and Cold War periods. Unlike the 99 year
peace, the period from 1914 to 1989 had only a twenty year truce to
interrupt 75 years of war and preparation for war. State-led efforts
at mobilization and redistribution of economic product were, if not
the norm, at least a norm.
The idea of ‘preparation for war’ is especially important,
because if this is one of the goals of a political programme it
affects what is often a pragmatic choice of ideological apparatus.
In other words, leaders tend to focus on the problems they need to
solve problems and maintain power at the same time. By “leaders” I
mean not only individuals but also leading groups. Sociologically
these groups develop an organization to promote their views and
maintain leadership. They develop coalitions based on their
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arguments. If they are arguing that preparation for war is a
priority, they will choose an ideology that emphasizes the importance
of social cohesion and the idea of national unity as expressed
through a national community that will take care of its members.
Neo-liberalism, as it turns out, can be considered as a critique
of the failures of this system. The ideas of efficient
administration and accountability are key -- the delegitimation of
the previous system was focused on the idea of efficiency and greater
productivity. It rarely considers the question, however, of “to
whose benefit.” Instead the state is constrained -- thought of as an
emergency to apparatus, to deal with hurricanes, wars and to keep an
eye on the self-regulating markets. Neo-liberalism should, of
course, be situated in the dual sociological context from which it
developed: (a) the post-Cold War expansion of capitalistic modes of
production into the former command economies; and (b) the post-Debt
Crisis reconfiguration of economic and political relations between
the core Western countries and the dependent countries of the
periphery and semi-periphery. But the consequences are more
important --the result is a change in ethics.
It might be called ‘The Business Survival Ethic.’ The concept
of the 'natural' as found in these models discounts ethics. It not
only place individual survival above group survival, thus
misrepresenting biological process, it emphasizes production without
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addressing the sphere of reproduction.
Education is nonetheless being reshaped in accordance with it.
This is despite the fact that when examining how the biological
sciences are applied to human evolution, the group, not the
individual, is the unit of survival. And ethics, not investments,
are what binds the community together. 'Ethics' are necessary not
only to the functioning of society on a day to day basis, but also to
produce self-sufficient individuals capable of competing successfully
in the world. In relegating this to secondary status, ideologies of
economic liberalism seem determined in the same breath to misrepesent
Adam Smith and Darwin. Smith's was a complex vision in which The
Wealth of Nations was intended to be seen in the context of The Theory of
Moral Sentments. The Darwinian model of survival in the transnational
business jungle is similarly incomplete in that it does not account
for the role of ethics in so called 'evolutionary' processes. Ethics
has an effect on both selection in nature and in the socially
instituted market. While 'self-sufficiency' or efficiency is thought
to be the end product of the process, the models assume a supply of
self-sufficient units capable of competing successfully. We may
critique them in the same way that Rawls (1971) critiques the natural
rights theories with which they have affinities: they posit a
condition that the functioning of the system does not itself produce.
So, too, with its application to education. David Hursh points
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out that educational summits of the nation’s governors have been
twice hosted by IBM. The first was called by the Clinton
Admistration’s Marshall Smith so that schools might meet the ever
changing dynamics of international competition and the work place.
The second resulted in a call for every state to adopt standards
backed up by standardized tests, including “a system of ‘rewards and
consequences’ for teachers, students and schools.”88 At about the
same time the National Alliance for Business came out with a report:
Standards Mean Business.
Hursh argues that in the 1990s the state “intruded into the
lives of teachers and students to a degree unprecedented in history.”
He then follows this with the simple, unvarnished truth: “Teachers
are increasingly directed by district and school administrators to
focus on raising test scores rather than teaching for
understanding.”89 One would think that this is not a necessary
consequence of standards. It isn’t, but everything is on a short-
term basis. Get the scores up by next year -- not five years from
88 Miner, 1999/2000, p. 3, in Hursch, “Neolibealism and the
Control of Teachers, Students and Learning: The Rise of Standards,
Standardization, and Accontabity,” Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall
2000., p. 5.89 Hursch, “Neolibealism and the Control of Teachers, Students and
Learning: The Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accontabity,”
Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000., p. 6.
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now. Principals don’t have tenure, they have two year contracts and,
like baseball managers, get fired if they have bad results. They
used to have tenure and people would stay in a job for 20 years, have
time to develop a school and a faculty. Since it may result in
stagnation, this sort of institutional stability is thought outmoded.
The new method is based on an unforgiving corporate model --
reshuffle your staff, get them to give 110%, make them aware they are
in a precarious situation.
Deliver the numbers. That is what you are held accountable to
-- the numbers, not the welfare of the child. This is done from a
distance:
Governmental and quasi-governmental organizations seek to governwithout specifying exactly what must be done, but by presenting the requirements or standards as rational and non-controversial,and providing a limited range in which it must be implemented.. . . Education is no longer valued for its role in developing political, ethical and aesthetic citizens90
Though from a distance, it is also top-down. And a lot of
people would argue, as Dewey did and Kohn continues to do, that it is
self-defeating -- that if you turn schooling into drudgery, then
don’t expect good results. Teaching may not always be an art, but it
should be part entertainment. Expect better results from students
90 Hursch, “Neolibealism and the Control of Teachers, Students and
Learning: The Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accontabity,”
Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000., p. 6.
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who are engaged. But the emphasis on producing numbers in the short
term with possible dismemberment as a result (for the school),
produces a different approach geared towards passing those tests.
Again, this isn’t the only approach administrators could use, but
they are faced with a second problem -- in poorer schools in the
cities, there is a retention problem and new teachers have to be
trained to function within a master plan. Since the plan is to pass
a test, teachers are often constrained as to what to teach. They
need to cover a curriculum, so they are supposed to cover Greece in
three days, Rome in two. Since new teachers are constantly coming,
back-to-basics seems to make sense.
Again, it is not the only possibility, but there seems to be a
tendency for teachers to become “deskilled as they implement
curriculum developed by others.” 91 It is almost as if those who take
an interest in education reform in the business community see the
world as divided between those who have the dedication, drive and
talent of a Wall Street security trader and those who need to
directed. They are directed according to the logic of ‘best
practices’ as if developed in competitive business. McNeil’s work on
the Houston reform was generally limited to magnet schools, but it is
instructive nonetheless. She points to the widening difference
91 Hursch, “Neolibealism and the Control of Teachers, Students and
Learning: The Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accontabity,”
Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000., p. 6.
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between the quality of education for the poor and the more privileged
as because of standardization:
phony curricula, reluctantly presented by teachers in class to conform to the forms of knowledge their students would encounteron centralized tests. . . . the role of students as contributors to classroom discourse, as thinkers, as people who brought their personal stories and life experiences into the classroom, was silenced or severely circumscribed.92
Again, it is not the only possibility, but it seems like the
more likely result when you connect it the fact that poor and rich
kids in the same year of high school may be four years apart in
average reading level, but still take the same test. Moreover,
according to Pauline Lipman, “those at the lowest rungs of the system
-- teachers and students -- [are held] responsible for the systematic
failures of public schools.” Basing her analysis on the policies of
public schools in Chicago, she sees the adoption of “a simple
straightforward solution: teachers and principals are to be
monitored, governed, and regulated by standards, scripted
instruction, mandated curricula, standardized tests, and outside
agencies contracted by the school board to oversee failing schools.”93
Lipmann seeks to connect the accountability discourses to “a
92 McNeill, 2000, p 4.93 Pauline Lipman, “Education Accountability and Repression of
Democracy Post 9/11,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Vol. 2, #1,
March 2004.
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shift in U.S. political culture that legitimates the suppression of
critical thought and action,” as well as the “restriction of
democratic participation.” 94 While there are many who would argue
that this is what schools were doing long before accountability
became a watchword, there has been a change. I referred to it as a
4th order change -- the justification of goals by reference to
principles, values, ideologies and visions of the future. In 4th
order change the most important shifts may not have been in
educational policy per se, but in the over arching changes in ideology
associated with economic models of free competition and fiscal
discipline. This is not a democratically oriented discourse, it is
based on the freedom to compete and follow one’s self-interest.
It is also based on the idea that it is neither the input of
resources nor the motivation of the actors, but the outcomes of the
market that selects out merit. The individual, no longer having the
guarantee of jobs or livelihood, had to energetically pursue his or
her self-interest. In Houston, Chicago and New York, this same logic
is applied to the process of reform and the student’s fate is this
mock up of the market depends on the results on high stakes tests.
Students who have greater degrees of appropriate ‘private education’
at home, but concurrent with and previous to entry into school, have
94 Pauline Lipman, “Education Accountability and Repression of
Democracy Post 9/11,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Vol. 2, #1,
March 2004.
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as much of an advantage as those with greater financial backing in
the market. According to McNeil, the result of gearing teaching and
curriculum to passing these tests is clearest in schools serving low-
income students of color:
standardized reforms drastically hurt the best teachers, forcingthem to teach watered down content because it was computer gradeable. The standardization brought about by the state policies forced them to teach artificially simplified curricula that had been designed by bureaucrats seeking expedient (easily implemented, noncontroversial) curricular formats.95
Again, this type of educational Taylorism need not be the case
and there are many reformers, some who served as ‘bureaucrats,’ who
strove to keep standards-based reform from devolving into
standardization. This was precisely because, as Lipman said, it
“degrades the work of the best teachers, it is little help to the
weakest teachers, because it does not increase their knowledge,
skill, or commitment to richer teaching and learning.”96 She connects
this to what Roger Dale calls ‘conservative modernization’ --
“simultaneously freeing individuals for economic purposes while
controlling them for social purposes.” 97 Lower income students are
95 McNeill, 2000, p ?.96 Pauline Lipman, “Bush’s Education Plan, Globalization, and the
Politics of Race,” Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000.97 Pauline Lipman, “Bush’s Education Plan, Globalization, and the
Politics of Race,” Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000; quoting Dale as
cited by Apple, 1996.
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not barred from the higher ranks, but they are for the most part
expected to use their basic skills to become part of a post-
industrial working class, involved in clerical work, data processing
and other service industry jobs.
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5) Framing Education By Class And Merit: Episodes of Social Learning and Conservative Ideas
While not totally dominant, economic approaches seem to predominate discourse and discussions of reform in education. Begin with the thought that education is failing. That thought is sourced somewhat in declining test scores in the US during the 1970s and 1980s -- a decline that occurred during the last stages of an enormous expansion of the school system and that has not continued. It is also sourced in fears of international competition.
This has had two variants. Eisenhower, shortly after Sputnik descried the weaknesses of US education, advocating a back-to-basics approach. That approach was revived in the 1970s and became standards-based reform. Only the enemy was different -- this time itwas Japan and the competition was economic. The claim that education was failing was now sourced in business and steeped in the logic of economic competition. Two solutions were offered -- one, improving the quality of public education by new techniques, was statist in design but, in funding, minimalist. The other privatization, would take money from the public system. Both emphasized monitoring the outcomes of schooling and both seemingly assumed that present inputs were adequate, at least in the aggregate. Only techniques and management schemes needed to be changed.
But beyond that, each had its own perspective on the child. Among others, DeYoung argues that educational discourse has been
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increasingly dominated by business concerns which conceptualize children as potential workers and economic development resources.98 This may be true on the statist side, but less so on the privatization side, where the child (or the parent) is also considered a consumer. Schooling is big business, after all -- two trillion world-wide. Schumpeter said, “No bourgeoisie ever disliked war profits.” One would assume no bourgeoisie ever disliked the spoils of school reform, either.
Motivations may vary, but three perspectives, the child as
rights-bearer, the child as development resource and the child as
consumer (vis-à-vis his parents), tend to crowd out other perspectives
-- the child as future democratic citizen, the child as human being.
While contended, this facilitates the consolidation of an ideological
shift that is particularly important.
Three theorists – Aaron Wildavsky on political culture, Gosta
Esping-Andersen on welfare-state models and Joel Spring on education
–all present tripartite models of political positioning. Aaron
Wildavsky speaks of three cultures in the United States: competitive
individualism, hierarchy and egalitarian collectivism.99 This closely
resembles in all but terminology Esping-Andersen’s regime types: the
liberal, the conservative (or corporate) and the social-democratic
98 DeYoung, 1989: 105, 3.99 In King, 1990. See Cipollina (NYPSA, 1999) correlates these to
three core values: Liberty, Order and Equality.
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(or social citizenship) state; these can be distinguished according
to the degree to which commodification is allowed to determine
distribution.100 Somewhat similarly Spring states, “[e]ducational
goals are directly related to political beliefs” and outlines three
positions: those in favor of a ‘negative state,’ those in favor of
a ‘positive state,’ and those who emphasize political struggle.101
In investigating educational reform in the US, the ‘negative
state’ position (which has as its positive content reliance on
individual initiative) forced others on to the defensive in the
1980s. In the 1990s, we see a severely limited neo-progressive
response. So limited one might want to remove the adjective
‘progressive,’ it focuses on preserving the least controversial of
corporatist institutions by somehow justifying them in terms
acceptable to neo-liberals. The liberal, ‘negative state’ program
disavows active state efforts to create cohesive national societies.
It instead proposes to create a climate of competitive individualism
from which a nearly limitless material bounty will result.102 Social
100 Esping-Andersen’s 1990, 1993, 1999; see, also, Korpi, 1978,
1983.101 Spring 1989: 30-32.102 The equation of ‘liberal’ with the negative state position,
and of ‘conservative’ with the positive may seem strange to American
political ears, but it reflects the neo-liberal appropriation of the
term. Here ‘liberalism’ is limited to ‘economic liberalism’ and
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citizenship is eclipsed, competition is advanced as a barely
questioned good, individual striving for advancement allows for a
hierarchy that rolls over egalitarian collectivism, the individual is
conceived in relation to the machinery of material progress.
Hegemony is presented as social learning.
Overall, this helps us to understand how conservative positions
become embedded in educational policy and institutions. In implying
so far that wealth and power are able to shape the system to meet
their own interests, a definition of ‘conservative’ has been relied
upon which should now be made explicit. A most direct definition can
be found in Ed Gibson’s work on conservative parties and electoral
movements. Here he defines conservative as those “that draw their core
constituencies from the upper strata of society.”103 The connection between
‘enlightenment’ or ‘political liberalism’ is seen as secondary. The
natural growth of political liberalism into social democracy (see
T.H. Marshall, 1950) is seen as something to be avoided -- a
pathology or a cancer. Conservative and paternalistic programs that
use the state for redistribution as a means of decreasing social
tensions are considered atavisms. Indeed, the use of tension and
pressure is central to the model.103 Edward L. Gibson, “Conservative Electoral Movements and
Democratic Politics: Core Constituencies, Coalition Building,
and the Latin Amercian Electoral Right,” in Chalmers, Campello
de Souza and Boron, 1992, p. 15. Gibson’s footnote on this was
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conservative and upper strata is central to what follows. Here
conservative political programs would have as a chief goal preserving
a social order in which the present upper strata continue to do well.
Even in the hard, hard sciences, Kuhn tells us, paradigm change is
episodic. While other elements of Kuhn’s account may not be as true
for either social science or ‘social learning,’ this one certainly
is. It is important to keep this in mind when the question becomes,
What is the source of these changes? By almost all accounts,
paradigm change in science is a less contested process than ‘social
learning.’ That is not to say it is uncontested, but in Kuhn’s
account there is a struggle to solve problems, while in ‘social
learning’ there seems to be just one struggle after another. This
more general struggle includes not only struggles to solve problems,
but struggles over material goods, institutional structure, political
power and ideology.104
cut off during the editorial process, but he attributes this
view to others. [Contact Gibson] 104 This refers to another very long argument. See “The Four
Causes of Hegemony: Struggles Over Material Goods,
Institutional Structure, Political Power And Ideology or
Antinomical Constructs and Synthetic Narratives of Social
Learning Processes and Narratives of Social Process: Drawing on
Kant and Aristotle Regarding Opposition, Cause and Ontology,”
Chapter 3 of my Social Learning And Hegemony: Framing Education Reform in
the US, in process.
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Perhaps these are all present in the sciences, but there is at least a difference of degree. Recalling Poincare’s aphorism, John Hall argues that within the social sciences concepts are subject to contestation far more frequently than in natural science; in the later case there are more often arguments over data. Policy struggles, one would expect, are even more contested; basically, in politics you can’t reduce any activity to ‘learning.’
Perhaps these are all present in the sciences, but there is at
least a difference of degree. Recalling Poincare’s aphorism, John
Hall argues that within the social sciences concepts are subject to
contestation far more frequently than in natural science; in the
later case there are more often arguments over data.105 Policy
struggles, one would expect, are even more contested; basically, in
politics you can’t reduce any activity to ‘learning.’
Deliberate, orderly steps are not an accurate portrayal . . . ofhow policy process actually works. Policy making is, instead, acompletely interactive process without beginning or end. (Lindbloom and Woodhouse, 199x: 92)
The problem with the analogy with learning is that a society does not‘learn.’ That is the reason I put quotes (which I will forthwith remove) around the phrase social learning. When describing an ongoing, open ended, interactive process, the emphasis on learning cannot be at the level of society as a whole, but must focus on actors. Even the functionaries that govern do not learn
105 In Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 31.
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collectively, but as individuals and within institutions and groups. Since a society doesn’t learn, the analogy with learning is not only unhelpful, but misleading. Nor was it quite right to say this is ‘a process of disseminating a set of views that become the sum and substance of discourse.’ There is truth to that, but we must also talk about what things are absorbed into the culture and how they skew interpretation.
In looking back at a journal entry, we have an example or two:
4 May, 2004 – I was teaching two classes. I had the opportunity to teach some graduate courses this past fall. Almost like a superhero I had an alter ego -- the Bipolar Pedagogue, teaching Special Ed during the day and International Relations Theory and the Political Economy of Latin America at night.
The commute to New Jersey was tiring, but I was amazed by how little work I really had to do. I spent no time motivating students. All Ihad to do was tell them to do something and they did things. I guessthat is what a lot of critics of education think it entails. Most ofmy time with my present group is, however, spent motivating. I teachin a big high school in the Bronx -- not particularly dangerous, not particularly prestigious. I spend a lot of time talking to students in hallways, making small jokes, giving them things to read and otherways treating them as interesting human beings.
Too often I think our students feel the effect of a testing regime that gives rewards based on performance and feel as if unconditioned regard is a thing they have lost. They find it in their peers and I try to create a situation in which they can be peers in learning. I talk about the testing regime because I’ve seen its negative effects and I feel as if my kids are the victim of a huge machine.
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I tried to make this point to my graduate students, but most of them seem to have absorbed this cultural change. Here there is a problem. That there has been a shift in hegemony from public to private is not a difficult point to assert, but it may be impossible to prove.
Nonetheless, you can always quote someone. This grand process of social institutionalization is perhaps nowhere more evident than in theories of economic development. As regards my students' judgmentof how plausible all of this is, I offered into evidence the introductory paragraph from the book which was at one time perhaps the most widely used in development courses in the US, The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment:
During the more than thirty years since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, "development" has captured the attention of economists and statesmen alike. Of course international inequalities are not new, but three factors account for this recent emphasis: (1) the realization that the worldwide spread of markets has not automatically brought the benefits promised by 19th century economic theory; (2) the emergence of socialism as a viable development alternative; and (3) the pressure for economic development exerted by the newly independent countries of Latin America,106 Asia, and Africa with the resulting challenge to existing economic relations. (Wilber and Jameson in Wilber, 1984: 4)
The paragraph comes from a piece originally published in 1975. A
contemporary reader must be struck by the 3 numbered factors, esp. #
2; contemporary notions see 'socialism' not as a viable alternative,
but as the chief impediment to economic advance. Most pertinent,
however, is # 1, for much of contemporary development theory relies 106 As a one-time Latin Americanist, I must hasten to correct this;
most countries in the region declared political independence before
1830.
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on the belief that the worldwide spread of capital markets and the
general expansion of the market economy will bring such great
benefits that there is no need to anticipate any shortfalls. This is
benign neglect of global capital markets and the cold-blooded
selection process by which world capital is invested.
Behind this is a view of personhood which increasingly informs
arguments and discourse is that of the individual as calculator. It
does so from two sides. Internally, market-oriented paradigms depict
the inner workings of the psyche as a series of calculations. This
is clearly the case in micro-economics and choice theory; even when
the practioner keeps in mind this is a radical simplification, it is
used in argument to justify policy. Moreover, externally, human
capital theory measures the human being as one would any other
investment.
This all seems clearer in Britain than in the US, where this
provides another justification for Third Way politics and other
centrist positions with neo-liberal cores. As “modernized social
democracy,” the Third Way believes “that human capital is more
critical today to economic success than financial or physical capital
so education and skills are vitally important for our future.”107
107 This was attributed to Tony Blair in an article on the Third
Way that I read while in Cambodia. I don’t have the original source.
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That the need for education is to be concluded only after
assuming the need for economic success is very telling and reflects
shifting conceptions of what the state should and can do. What is
the source of this change? What purposes does it serve? As the
emphasis on ‘human capital’ would suggest, it also has to do with the
shape of civil society, which is more and more patterned on an
economic model. Of course, that is exactly the type of contention
that is difficult to make a proven point, but I don’t mind being
contentious and it is, after all, the idea, and this informs much of
what I write. Nearly all of it
But there is another part to considering ideas and the outer
frames of discourse. In so doing, we must think of their
transmission form individual to individual. Again, England provides
a clear example. Close your eyes and think of the influence of
Friedrich von Hayek on Margaret Thatcher. It means a lot when the
future Prime Minister writes ‘yes’ in the margins:
. . . during a visit to the Conservative Party’s research department in the mid-seventies, [Thatcher] slammed a copy of [Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty] on the table and declared, “This is what we believe.”108
She was also taken with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. (1944)
I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at this time. It was only in the mid-1970s,
108 John Cassidy, “Annals of Money: The Price Prophet” in The
New Yorker, 7 Feb. 2000, pp. 44-51, p. 50.
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when Hayek’s works were right at the top of the reading list given me by Keith Joseph, that I really came to grips with the ideas he put forward. . . . Hayek saw that Nazism --national socialism-- had its roots in nineteenth century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning further into other sectors.109
Here the ideas of an economist influenced and led to the
electoral success of a politician. Moreover, a political programme
became it owns ‘ism.’ This is more than Heilbroner quoting Keynes on
the voices of madmen -- it is a part of social learning that every
academic understands. We want our ideas to be adopted and
implemented by those in power. Moreover, if one accepts there is a
basic ideological similarity between the Thatcher and Reagan
governments, then this of more than passing relevance.
Policy shifts initiated by the Reagan administration play as
large a role in this story as anything else. Indeed, the most
important shifts may not have been in educational policy per se, but
in the over arching changes in ideology associated with economic 109 Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, Harper-Collins, New York,
1995: 50-51. When she first read it in 1945, Thatcher had heavily
underlined the following passage in her personal copy of Serfdom:
the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the
socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of
those tendencies. (see Chris Ogden, Maggie, Simon and Schuster, New
York, 1990: 155.)
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models of free competition and fiscal discipline. They have
attempted to create a new channel for the mainstream. In this, Maggie
Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan were not that far apart. Whether she
influenced, inspired, encouraged, gave succor to, assisted or merely
had an affinity with them, it is just a short jump from Mrs. Thatcher
to the policies of the Reagan administrations:
Nor did Hayek mince his words about the monopolistic tendencies of the planned society which professional groups and trade unions would inevitably seek to exploit. Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group -- and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. (Thatcher, 1995: 51)
Here we have an example of how an idea enables the creation of a
coalition. It identifies an enemy and those whose interests are
served by advancing this argument tend to join the coalition. In
this case it is one the three major coalitions that have supported
the Anglo-American political programme: the anti-distributional
coalition. The other two, which overlap, respectively, to greater
and lesser degrees, are the pro-privatization and pro-standards
movements. These three, sometimes cross-cutting, but more often
reinforcing, issue cleavages shape the terrain of educational
discourse.
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And much of this starts with both Thatcher and Reagan policies
which threatened to change the social division of labor by changing
the normal distribution of the social product. That they both
specifically targeted organized labor and the public education system
is of course pertinent, but this must be seen in the context of
building a coalition for a more general political programme. The key
stated belief of this programme: the virtue of the private sector
over against the public sector.
This is a change of significant magnitude and perhaps goes
beyond the 3rd order change of which Hall speaks. Is there such a
thing as a fourth order change?
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6) Questions of trust
Peter Hall mentions three orders of change, but one should
consider a fourth. Fourth order change might be the justification of
goals by reference to principles, values, ideologies and visions of
the future. At the bottom of all this would nonetheless be class and
class interests and that should be the starting point. I realize
this is an assertion rather than a provable hypothesis, but let me
clarify something about ‘class.’ It is a difficult term and here I
mean three things, one having to do with the productive, the second
with the reproductive, the third with the political sphere. First,
we speak of the class of people who are organizing business and
productive enterprise; they place demands on the educational system.
Second, there is the class of people who are relatively affluent,
whose affluence is reflected in residential patterns and a skewed
distribution of educational opportunity. Thus, in addition to
looking at activity, including class activity, one must also look at
how the interests of more affluent classes are reflected in the
institutions of education. This is the bedrock/shifting sand spoken
of above. Finally, there is a political class, or rather a set of
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competing and inter-acting political coalitions which generally have
a significant class basis. So, in addition to the sources and the
institutions, one must look to ideas which seek to direct social
activity.
And we should look to trust, which Bernard Barber treats as a
complex notion in which expectations of future performance vie with
beliefs in good intentions. In The Logic and Limits of Trust, Barber speaks
of how business espouses and want others to embrace ‘The Indirect
Road.’ He describes it as follows:
Social control over service to the public welfare is assigned not to public expectations of direct fiduciary obligations and their fulfillment, but to the indirect competitive mechanisms of the market. That is, the profit incentive, operating through the market, will ensure indirectly that businesses effectively serve the public good. 110
Barber states that this market ideology, like the ideologies of other
groups, developed to great extent in response to social criticism.
He points out five “patterned responses to persuade the public that
110 Bernard Barber, The Logic and Limits of Trust, Rutgers University Press,
1983. Because of their number, references to Barber are given in
parentheses in the text.
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their behavior in the market does serve the public welfare . . . that
they are, in short, to be trusted for both their competence and their
service to society.” (p. 106) The market ideology, in which business
justifies its autonomy by stressing its efficiency, is first among
these.
The argument goes something like this. The profit motive is
essential in producing the material cornucopia that all sectors of
society desire and technically competent performance makes
profitability possible. Government regulation and national planning
are hindrances -- they are unable to adapt, to innovate, to
demonstrate their competence. Thus the negative side of this
emphasizes the incompetence of government -- more so even than the
role of unions, which were the main vexation of business prior to
World War II. As Silk and Vogel, writing in the mid-70s, tell us,
economic troubles are attributed to “a crypto-socialism or excessive
government interference that is undermining the effective working of
a free enterprise system.”111 111 Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics & Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in
American Business, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976, p 25.
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Publishing in 1983, Barber duly noted that business ranks “near
the bottom of the list in confidence surveys.” (p. 101) But since
the late 70s there has been a concerted effort to place
individualistic ideologies at the forefront of politics and policy
reform. That this movement has had considerable political successes
is indisputable and it is often noted that this neo-liberal thrust
has changed the political landscape. The preferred form of
management accountability is based as much on business as it is on
child development.
This is significant because market ideologies, unlike all
others, ignore both questions of how one expects the moral social
order to persist and, more specifically, expectations of fiduciary
responsibility to those who not in a direct contractual relationship.
Barber distinguishes between organic ideologies, in which a community
interest was predominate, and ideologies such as laissez-faire, which
proposed that “if every individual looked after his own interests,
then the community or public interest --‘the greatest good of the
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greatest number’--would be indirectly but automatically and surely
achieved.” Obviously, laissez-faire is not new, but it has been renewed,
at least in theory and rhetoric, if not always in practice.
But practice has changed. Outsourcing across national
boundaries, while something that only infrequently affects the public
education directly, has proved a model of ‘efficiency’ when that term
is defined as increasing productivity or adding to a stock’s value.
What has remained constant, however, is a development model that has
seen ‘comparative advantage’ as a solution, while the problem of
absorbing social costs so as to gain that advantage often goes
unaddressed.
This is both a shift in how trust is conceived socially and also
a shift in the apportioning of social responsibility. The norm of
trust in business -- that we trust in the consequences, that these
might produce a general good even in the presence of selfish
intentions -- has greater scope and has gained more general credence.
We need not consult the intentions of actors, because even self-
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interested actors will, in a market framework, work towards the
general good. This is not a new argument, but since the 1970s the
lack of credible counter-arguments is palpable – or worse, taken for
granted.
It is also a shift in the apportioning of responsibility. From
this perspective, the state as a human community is reduced to a
community of economic actors, investors chief among them.
Responsibility for the individual resides with the individual and his
or her family. At the extreme, in this more perfect union state
responsibility is limited to protecting property rights and providing
for public order. The general welfare will be provided by the
aggregation of self-interested actions.
Returning to our ongoing example of teachers unions, this is, of
course, a different justifying narrative than the unions must
produce. Nonetheless, the unions’ narrative must somehow cohere with it. Yes,
it may attack it in its particulars, but it cannot easily contradict
its principles. This is one limit on political possibilities.
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According to Charles Anderson, “the deliberation of public policy
takes place within a realm of discourse . . . policies are made
within some system of ideas and standards which is comprehensible and
plausible to the actors involved.”112 Another limit is that the
unions must further contend with one of the most common thoughts,
that while what is good for business is generally for the general
good, the interests of unions are somehow thought of as ‘special.’
Thus, to understand the multiple effects on education requires
that we look at trust. According to Barber, trust has both a general
and specific meaning. The “comprehensive definition of trust [is] as
expectation of the persistence of the moral social order.” (p. 14)
This can be broken down into two specific expectations: technically
competent role performance and fiduciary obligation and
responsibility. The market ideology is unique, however, in that
“public trust in business is supposed to be limited entirely to
112 add to bib
Anderson, Charles. 1978. “The Logic of Public Problems:
Evaluation in Comparative Policy Research,” in Ashford, Douglas,
ed. Comparing Public Policies. Beverly Hills: Sage.
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technically competent performance.” (p. 101)
This is a process in which a “radical doctrine of individualism”
develops within the context of “a system of exchange not only vastly
expanded but also structurally changed and newly institutionalized in
the modern world.” (p. 103) Polanyi described this as a reversal --
instead of economics being embedded in social and community
relations, economic relations are primary and society and community
are transformed by them. If there is a community to which business
has obligations here, it is a community of investors. But there is
some sort of community.
According to the market ideology, self-interest is the driving
force, but whether explicitly noted or not, by itself self-interest
is insufficient. If businessmen only honored agreements when they
did not conflict with self-interest, then there would only be
scattered expectations of having the agreements honored. So it is
not quite that fiduciary responsibility is done away with, but it is
limited to a complex idea of self-interest as embodied in a set of
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business ethics and enforced by statute.
These turns of thought require looking not only at partisan
politics, but at the distribution of the social product among
classes. If society is here thought of as a community of investors
-- those that invest their time, their talents and their alienable
resources in productive enterprises -- then it follows that returns
from these investments are thought to constitute a just distribution of the social product.
We can see the roots of this in Locke's emphasis on property and his
obsession with money as a way to accumulate limitless wealth.
Recalling Esping-Andersen, commodification is allowed to determine
distribution. If this is the hegemonic expectation, then trust
exists but is limited.
The ramifications may be most clear in the debate over
privatization. In what is perhaps a challenge to Schmitt, Norberto
Bobbio has been called the divide between public and private ‘the
great dichotomy.’ By this he means that the public/private
distinction divides the world into two spheres which are mutually
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exclusive and jointly exhaustive; furthermore, it subsumes other
distinctions and makes them secondary. But, as Bobbio notes, that is
at the conceptual level and this analytical distinction does not
necessarily serve to increase understanding. Indeed, it may distort:
the practical level of public policy that line is blurred and the
question arises, ‘What is a public school?’
In America 2000, produced under the auspices of the Bush Dept. of
Education in 1991, the word ‘public’ is used seven times in 35 pages;
as Joseph Kahne has observed, those seven references all came within
discussions of school choice proposals that called into question the
existence of public schools. Recommendations were for a significant
institutional transformation of the system. Included was, of course,
a battle over language. America 2000 argued that the definition of
public schools should be broadened to “include all schools that serve
the public and are accountable to public authority, regardless of who
runs them.” Charter schools had barely gotten off the drawing board
at this point (there were only 4 nation-wide in 1992)113
113 Find cite
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The role of the public schooling system in democratic polities
is both complicated and significant, but one thing is clear: for the
last quarter-century the most prominent objections to the present
system have been, in different ways, rooted in economics. Not all,
of course, but economic arguments are behind at least two of the
three potential directions for institutional reform. On the one
hand, arguments for privatization pose one of the most powerful
challenges to extant paradigms for the provision of public education.
On the other, the public system has been subject to internal
reorganizations that have been justified by the needs of the private
sector and the expressed desire to remain competitive
internationally. These range from experimentation with school
management paradigms to a national movement that is premised on the
belief that the use of standardized tests can lead to improved
academic standards. These are but two of a set of arguments with
economistic presumptions. These presumptions not only color the
discourse, but lead it off in directions perhaps far removed from our
shared understandings of what is necessary for a democracy to
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function.
Also limited are the functions of trust. According to Barber,
one function of trust is to articulate a set of shared values and
serve as “an integrative mechanism that creates and sustains
solidarity in social relationships and systems.” Within such social
systems, trust “is not a zero-sum matter but is the creator of
enhanced benefits for all parties.” In other words, it is a public
good. But if the expectation is that one gets returns based on
investment of resources, then the good it does is distributed
according to the holdings of these resources. Membership in a
community does not by itself bring benefits. Value is added as one
produces.
Of course, children don’t produce.
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7) Actors under constraints
The narrative of this work as a whole concerns actors working under enormous constraints in one field and works to outline those constraints, their sources and their consequences. One of the chiefconstraints is the need to act in accordance with economic policy programs. While neither necessary nor sufficient, transnational linkages are an important contributing factor. In writing about social learning in an era of transnationalism, the purpose is to showthe skewing of education theory in order to remain in accordance witha particular form of political economy. The argument it makes is that the presumptions of hegemony are, on the one hand, stem from a transnational hegemony and, on the other, manifest themselves in a neo-liberal ideology. It is the gravity of the hegemonic center that shapes the discursive field.
What follows is an discussion of Peter Hall’s work, the purposeof which is two-fold: to sort out the most important potential policy changes; second, to compare the process of change in two quitedifferent, albeit related, cases -- economic policy in the UK and educational policy in the US. If we accept Hall’s treatment, there was a ‘3rd order change' in economic thinking in the UK; not only levels and instruments of policy, but the overall goals changed. This did not begin within the state bureaucracy, the focus of many previous treatments of ‘social learning,’ but in public debates that were given a final imprimatur through a process of national electoral
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contestation. Only then did the Thatcher government move to implement and consolidate the paradigm they had previously adopted.
Similar contestation does not come at the end, but somewhere in the middle of the story of US educational reform. But while finalityis made more difficult to achieve because of a diffuse institutional structure, paradigms in the provision of public education are, nonetheless, still being contested, with privatization especially casting a long shadow. Whether all this amounts to, in the Kuhnian terminology of Peter Hall, a 3rd order change, is left a somewhat openquestion: certainly some proposed changes were of that magnitude, but they met significant resistance and have not been implemented. It also leaves open whether standards-based reform has, by incremental means, constituted a 3rd order change.
How does one situate all of this in a larger historical context? Engaging in the comparison with Hall is, after all, partially becauseof the implication of Hall’s case. If, as Hall contends and no one denies, there was a change from Keynesianism to Monetarism in the UK,it did not come unaccompanied.114 It involved a political programme
114 In the US, where the Reagan administration availed itself of
deficit spending, one might have a different interpretation. With
spending, as with military action, Reagan's rhetoric did not reveal
what he would do. Not only did he spend a large amount of money
and create deficits, much of this was devoted to military programs
that were never used. For his sometimes bellicose demeaner, Reagan
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and a change of standards in judging what is acceptable policy. Fromthis perspective, a change in macro-economic policy was perhaps the leading edge, but only part of a greater whole.
Accordingly, the major question to seek out and investigate is: What are the parallel changes in discourse within which contests overeducational policy proceed and how do they affect the possibilities of implementing and embedding a change within the institutional structure of education? This is a question of which we can say both that it admits of no definitive answer and that it betrays a quite limited perspective if one does not ask it. And, definitive answer or no, there is a lot of evidence.
It is further argued that this constitutes an effective form of hegemony. While it is an even more comprehensive term, ‘hegemony’ here refers to the process by which elite-led coalitions elaborate a vision of social order: which functions are to be served and how theconcrete organizations that serve these functions are going to be
deployed military force only rarely, such as in Grenada. While I
have always been a steadfast opponent of the Reagan
administration's Central American policies –they were the reason I
started studying Political Science-- there were never any American
combat troops on the ground. While Thatcher was able to inspire
true believers, Reagan could not only do that, but he could act
pragmatically in the short term, not easily falling into the traps
that have tempted other presidednts.
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run. It is from this perspective that this chapter is being written. It is a synthetic narrative on the possibilities, successes and missed opportunities of social learning.
Transitions to economic liberalization are a way to order both the national economy and transnational relations; according to Simmons and Elkins, these transitions tend to form clusters, both regionally and over time and this is partly due to policy diffusion.115 Their version of social learning is relevant, but limited. First, it is limited to a single issue area, economics; second, it is conceptually limited, focusing on exchange of information and network and communicative linkages that could contribute to learning. While accepting the importance of networks and clusters, the version of social learning advanced here goes beyond policy diffusion within networks; it emphasizes the widespreadeffects of liberalism that spill across issue areas and goes beyond the idea of information to the gestalt that structures thinking and opinion formation.
115 Beth Simmons and Zachary Elkins, “The Globalization of
Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political
Economy,” Workshop Paper for Internationalization of Regulatory Reform: The
Interaction of Policy Learning and Policy Emulation in Diffusion Processes, Univ. of
Calif. at Berkeley, 24-25 April, 2003.
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8) Social learning and paradigm change
Social learning manifests itself in societies as a whole. Thereis not way around this. Instead of functionaries within the formal institutional governing structure of a state, a more wide-ranging group is included. But even if one limits oneself to a community of thinkers within the state, the problem is to identify the cause of paradigm
change. What is its source? There are multiple answers, but one somehow must take account not only of communities of thinkers, but also those who are somehow organized to be a (more or less) effectivesocial actor. And we must look at this not only at the national, butalso at the global level. As regards transnational structuration116--116 Theories of structuration are found in both Giddens and
Bourdieu. In each, social change is thought to be an ongoing process
of interaction, thought to be a matter of, in varying degrees,
reciprocal causation. Just as one would not, in looking at two
children playing tag, attach the label independent variable to one
child's motion over the other, one cannot give predominance to one
agent's strategy over the other. Both involve multiple levels of
anticipation. See, for example, Giddens, 1984: 180-1, where he
states, "Structural constraint is not expressed in terms of the
implacable causal forms which structural sociologists have in mind
when they emphasize so strongly the association of 'structure' with
'constraint.' Structural constraints do not operate independently of
the motives and reasons that agents have for what they do. They
cannot be compared with the effect of, say, an earthquake which
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the context in which the rest unfolds--, the leading characteristic of the contemporary era is the importance of finance and investment capital. In sum, there has been a shift in hegemony not so much fromone state to another as from state organizations to a transnational system of organization emanating from the ensemble of institutions which comprise private enterprise.
This is a simple argument that is very difficult to confirm, butit would change things. Once accomplished, this changes the framework of analysis:
ideas that specify how [to perceive] problems, which goals may be attained through policy and what sorts of techniques can be used to reach these goals . . . interlock to form a relatively coherent whole that might be described as a policy paradigm. Like a gestalt, it structures the very way in which policy-makers see the world and their role within it.117
Implicit is a typology of social learning. In comparison with
destroys a town and its inhabitants . . . . The structural
properties of social systems do not act, or 'act on', anyone like
forces of nature."
Interestingly enough, Gramsci anticipated this language in a
critique of reformers. “Life for [reformers] is like an
avalanche . . . [they think] I as an individual do not have the
strength to stop it.” (Gramsci cited in Cammett, 1967: 46) 117 Peter Hall, “From Keynesianism to Monetarism,” in Structuring Politics,
1993: 91-2.
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Kuhn’s model – what we can call the ‘hard science’ model, there are other types, including, presumably, models more appropriate for social science, policy science and policy struggle. Hall gives us a model with two stages, so to speak -- there is electoral contestationand afterwards there is the implementation of the new paradigm by thevictorious side.
Although it should be pointed out that Mrs. Thatcher won her first election with considerably less than 50% of the vote, the conceptual revolution is nonetheless by the ballot box. She attempted to introduce a new political programme, one which was basedon a different model of the economy.
Overall, the conceptual framework I draw on to analyze this is equal parts political economy and social learning. It goes beyond that, however, when it suggests the following, presumably non-false, equation:
hegemony = social learning + political economyMoreover, it suggests that there are two competing modes of hegemony,the assimilationist and integrationist.
Closely parallel to the distinction David Soskice has made between Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) and Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs),118 I will instead concentrate on the quality of hegemony, assimilationist vs. integrative, as a way to characterize 118 Soskice, 1993.
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the period. Ideological and organizational changes in global capitalism followed the stagflation of the 1970s. Constraints on governmental policy options manifested themselves in two basic responses: a dual labor market policy in the US and neocorporatism inmost of Western Europe. These two responses were representative of structural differences between LMEs and CMEs. In the liberal model, macro-economic stimulation and reliance on state expenditures are eschewed. Moreover, they reject collective solutions and instead demand that government remove obstacles to cutting costs, including labor costs, so they may compete successfully on those grounds. 119
The shift from Keynesianism to monetarism brought with it not only a new set of assumptions, i.e. there is a ‘natural rate of unemployment,’ but also a new set of constituents. “Like most kinds of policy, a macro-economic strategy tends to favor the material interests of some social groups to the disadvantage of others.”120 Education is also like most kinds of policy, and it is significant that second on her agenda was the privatization of education.121
The individuals in Thatcher’s government were keenly aware of
119 See Soskice, 1993; Saxonhouse and Srinivasan, 1999; Kitschelt,
1999; Scrapf, 1991; Goldthorpe, 1984 and King and Wood, in
Kitschelt, 1999. This is a truncated version of the discussion at
the end of chapter one.120 Peter Hall, Structuring Politics, 92, 94.121 Walford, 1990; Hall 1993.
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their counterparts in other national societies. Historical examples show this can result in strange policy outcomes. Bismark’s social welfare provisions have already been mentioned. That the Weimar constitution (Article 163) stated that every German must “exercise his mental and physical powers in a manner required by the welfare ofall” and, further, that for those who had “no suitable opportunity for work . . . livelihood will be provided” is another surprise. Butthey followed the Soviets in being only the second to declare “the meeting of citizens’ basic needs was a goal of the state.”122
This was another time and the Weimar constitution found its shape both in response to domestic pressure and international configurations. Transnational links and international competition affect both political coalitions and generally accepted ideologies. And there are long-term effects. Adhering to much of the neo-liberalagenda, Anglo-american capitalism, as it was formed under Thatcher and Reagan, has continued into Triangulation and Third Way politics -- that is, there is an underlying acceptance of micro-economic presumptions. Moreover, there is an explicit rejection of the integrationist model. Mrs. Thatcher herself read Hayek and rejected social planning:
Hayek saw that Nazism --national socialism-- had its roots in nineteenth century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning
122 Peukert, Weimar, p. 132.
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further into other sectors.123
Thatcher saw the rise of Fascism and Nazism not as a reaction against the socialist movements of 1920s or caused, at least in Germany, by the trauma of its defeat in and treatment after the GreatWar, but as the predictable outcome of using the state to reshape society. She rejected the integrationist approach and instead adopted an assimilationist approach in which incentives and the market model were predominant.
In this instance ideas did not develop within the technocratic state apparatus, but through the political process. This is, in fact, the challenge that Hall gives the social learning literature. In Hall’s case, the episode of 3rd degree paradigm change in macro-economic policy had its origins in a successful political campaign (Thatcher’s) and ensuing efforts to introduce a new political programme. Part of the plan is to change the way people think. According to Hall (1986, 1993), the British case should be conceptualized in Kuhnian terms as a 3rd Order Shift of policy paradigms in which monetarist understandings of political economy supplanted Keynesian ones. Such a change does not stand alone -- it goes hand-in-hand with a recommodification of the accepted status of individuals vis-à-vis the market. It also attacks the very core idea ofthe welfare state: that there are inviolable social rights based on
123 Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, Harper-Collins, New York,
1995: 50-51. See Chapter 2.
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citizenship, not performance.124
In the last type of policy change, new paradigms must be seen inthe context of a wider set of ideological commitments. These commitments don’t grow up in space, but unify groups that will benefit if the proposed policies are implemented. This is what I mean by ‘political programme’ and I use the term below to begin to develop a model centered on social actors engaged in political and policy struggles. This is not a quiet discussion of opposing viewpoints, it is contention. But it is limited contention. Some viewpoints are never stated. Every such actor must articulate their self-interest, not only externally, but also internally in order to maintain the support of, in the case of a union, their membership. Here the limitations placed on actors become implicit
On the other hand, it is not only a struggle for the survival ofthe organization, or a struggle to maximize the utility of its members, it is a struggle to change the direction of society as a whole. For all of Mrs. Thatcher’s railing against ‘social planning,’her programme was social planning par excellance. Privatization is at the center; as Hector Schamis has argued, privatization is "a global process of inducement through which some countries emulate others;" moreover, it can constitute “the core of a true process of political engineering.”125 'Privatization' here means more than merely the
124 Marshall, 1950.125 Schamis, 1992: 58; 1994: 5)
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selling off of state-owned enterprises; it entails the reconceptualization of the model of state regulation of society alonglaissez-faire lines.
This requires assembling a coalition. Coalitions form around interests, but interests have to be articulated, eventually in a programmatic way. That is, social actors do not look for abstract interests, rather they choose among various options presented to them. And the coalition must extend beyond those who benefit from privatization while at the same time still drawing on the core arguments for privatization.
Accordingly, the narrative focus is on privatization –including charters-- and standards. It is in the connection between two that much of the story lies. While they have different constituencies, one cannot tell a coherent history of either without reference to theother. The movement for higher standards also reflects this conceptualization of political and social change in economic terms; the internalization of the values imbued in the process of advancing from grade to grade based on competitive standardized tests (which function as exit exams) are coherent with an internalized common sense.
As Robert Arnove has argued, “the belief that there is a causal relationship between the ‘excellence’ of a school system, as measured
by national standardized examinations, and the economic success of a country in global competition . . . revived the interest in the relationship
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between education systems and national productivity.”126 Combined with a push for privatization, this belief was encouraged by a campaign and has been highly successful in shaping educational reformdebates ever since. Like privatization, is has been seen as part of a wider set of ideological commitments, including: expansion of market mechanisms and contraction of governmental reponsiblities; theacceptance of intense competition and economic security as a norm; increased cultural discipline and an implicit Social Darwinist logic.127
Neither appears ex nihilo, rather both appear at a time when globalhegemonic strategies were undergoing redefinition. Calls for greaterlabor flexibility changed the opportunity structure for all workers, whether educated or not, skilled or unskilled, first world or third.128 Thus both privatization and standards are attempts to form crucial links in the movement to a redefined model of capitalist relations, one that is, in keeping with long-term Anglo-american models, based on an economistic and assimilationist logic. This logicis an essential element in the ongoing maintenance and repeated reconstructions of a Transnational Civil Society that are perhaps themost salient landmarks in the process of recent history. And, if indeed this model is the model for the foreseeable future, as
126 Arnove and Torres, 1999: 4; emphasis added.127 On social darwinism, see Apple, 1999, and John Powers, 128 Womack, et al., 1990.
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suggested by numerous authors,129 then the ramifications are immense.
Apple argues that what we have seen in this debate is "the reconstruction of common-sense," which has "redefined the terrain of debate of all things educational" in terms of economic style competition.130 As argued above, this can be seen from the inception ofthe standards movement in the early 1980s. More than that, the measurements involved in the standards movement form the method of accountability that allows public schools to be branded failing or successful.
Overall, there is a messy and non-parsimonious assemblage of factors to be accounted for. In addition to conventional political and governmental topics, such as bureaucrats, interest groups and elections, Lindblom and Woodhouse emphasize
the deeper forces structuring and often distorting governmental behavior: business influence, inequality and impaired capacities for probing social problems.
Then one must account for multiple forces involved, always keeping in mind that business influence must be considered. Thus, in129 For an overview, see Jeff Faux, "Is the American Economic Model
the Answer?," The American Prospect no. 19, Fall 1994. He considers
whether “the ‘American model’ -- deregulation, weak unions, and a
minimalist welfare state -- offers an exemplary competitiveness
strategy for surviving in the global economy.”130 Apple, 1999.
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depicting the historical process of education reform in the US I havechosen an explanatory model that tends to be richer than it is rigorous. That is, however, only if we define rigor according to mathematical models and the ability to measure things. I get nervousat times, because in looking at the flow of ideas one is hard pressedto measure. Yes, you can code words and do content analysis based oncounting when they appear and how often one social actor uses which term. But that does not tell us how the underlying assumptions have changed over time or what their significance is. It may be impossible to conduct a systematic inquiry into ideological change asexpressed in discourse that is not only ‘rigorous’ according to the standards of empirical research, but also is meaningful in an investigative and heuristic sense.
Unlike the others, third order change is thought to be the
result of a disjunctive process and brings along with it “radical
changes in the overarching terms of policy discourse.” (1993: 279)
Invoking Kuhn’s language, Hall depicts this as competition between
(not within) policy paradigms. Leaving aside for the moment whether
or not there is always at least an implicit competition between
paradigms,131 we can note that, according to Kuhn, when two paradigms
compete it is because each contains its own account of how the world
operates. Those who follow different paradigms dispute each other’s
data and will not admit to any binding technical procedure to resolve
131 note Yale - based critic of kuhn. Compare to Bricolage?
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their differences.
This suggests three things. First, that paradigm change is
as much a sociological and political process as anything else;
experts have controversial views and the outcome of a dispute depends
upon who has positional advantages within the broader institutional
framework. Second, paradigm shifts go hand-in-hand with a shift in
the locus of authority -- indeed, the central question becomes
‘who[se account] is authoritative?’ Third, these coterminous shifts
are likely to be proceeded by policy failures which undermine the
intellectual coherence of the original position and thence its
authority.132
Paradigm contention therefore leads us to the attempt to
locate authority. Relations of authority are, by definition,
political. Accordingly, 3rd order change is, in its broadest
outlines, a political process which involves the mobilization of
social groups with interests which are affected by the policy change.
But one needs to differentiate between Hall’s case and the case
at hand. Combined with the push for privatization, a campaign
based on the belief that there is a causal relationship between
132 A fourth implication -- that policy failures are often due to
structural conditions over which there is no control -- is also worth
mentioning.
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students’ results on national standardized examinations, and the
economic success of a country in global competition, began in the
1980s. It has been highly successful in shaping educational reform
debates ever since. Teachers unions’ strategies and discourse
developed amid an anti-statist current that, as a worldwide
phenomenon, has advocated market solutions and cast aspersions on the
instrumentality of public institutions.133 Somehow, within the
context of changing political programmes, we can find self-interest
in the reciprocal relation between structuration and strategic
choice. This approach is shaped by four basic questions about the
overall strategic turn. These might be called the four C's --
causes, content, coalitions and consequences. First, why have
teachers unions begun to redefine their self-interest? Second, what
did this redefinition consist of? Third, how this shaped and been
shaped by their links to larger political coalitions? Fourth, what
are the significant consequences?
The question for the present study is whether the changes in
educational policy constitute a third order change. The answer to
this question is yes, no, seemingly not and maybe. Yes, major
policies promised by conservatives in the early 1980s, such as
133 do Souza, 1992.
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privatization in the form of tuition tax credits or educational
vouchers, would have, if implemented, had constituted such a change.
But, no, they have not as yet been implemented. Instead we have what
may be only a series of what seem to be 1st and 2nd order changes:
increased federal spending, new administrative techniques and forms
of school management (including charters) and, finally, standards-
based reform. But then again, one of these, particularly the last,
might be something more than that –a way to alter the public
education system from the inside- and may suggest that 3rd order
change can be achieved over time by incremental means.
There are three overlapping coalitions that have been the
underlying sources of educational policy, all with their locus of
authority in civil society. First there is the anti-
distributionalist/anti-statist coalition mentioned above. Second,
while it does not necessarily include the same technocratic elements,
there is the flip side of this which draws on much the same
constituency: the pro-privatization coalition. Besides some
significant differences around the edges, there is also a different
type of vehemence that powers the pro-privatization forces; while
they may be ideological, they are to the greatest extent interest-
based. Third, there is the coalition for standard-based reform with
its meritocratic ideological core.
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The prospect of privatization cannot be ignored in this story --
and it seems to fit what might be called a ‘dual paradigm’ model.134
While still nascent in the 1990s and still contested today,
privatization offers a new paradigm concerning the public provision
of education, one in which each school, public, private, religious or
otherwise, “would operate with equal access to public resources and
largely independent of public controls, in a free market for
educational services.” (Carnoy, 1993: 164) Two of the ramifications
of such a shift are of great magnitude. First, public education in
the US has not traditionally been thought of merely as a way of
delivering a commodity. More than a method of political
socialization, public education has been a “vehicle for deliberation
and debate.” (Henig, 1996: 11) US political culture has long
accepted as an article of faith that “unless all its citizens are
educated” the “existence of a republic . . . is an admitted
impossibility.”135 Second, this mechanism of choice poses the danger
of a multi-tiered education system in which public schools become, as
they already are in many urban areas, schools of last resort.
(Noguerra, 1994: 237)
As Hall’s account of 3rd order change would lead one to expect, 134 I have in mind Tilly’s dual soverignty article. [cite]135 Eaton, 1874: 6. John Eaton was Commissioner of Education in the
Grant Administration.
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there is no ‘common sense’ on the issue and the amount of controversy
generated is truly remarkable. George Will calls those against
vouchers ‘reactionaries’ who oppose fairness. Unions call charter
school supporters privateers. Dirk C. van Raemdonck tells us
"Students in the ailing, monopolistic U.S. public school system could
benefit from a more open educational marketplace.”136 As later
chapters document, these are among the more civil comments in the
debate. On each side there is a mobilized base, one that views any
attack on vouchers to be an attack on fairness and justice, another
that sees the implementation of vouchers as an attack on democracy
and equality.
Yet privatization was not implemented on a grand-scale and can
be considered only a potential 3rd order change. Polarization on the
issue worked against implementation. To paraphrase Hall, this is a
contest that has not as yet ended, for the supporters of neither
paradigm have secured positions of authority from which they have
been able to rearrange the organization and standard operating
procedures of the process and thus institutionalize the new paradigm.
Of course, Mrs. Thatcher was polarizing as well, but the institutions
were different. The diffuse structure of institutional authority
136 Dirk C. van Raemdonck, “European observations on U.S. public
education,” Mackinac Center, 2000.
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over education in the US contrasts with the UK model. In the US
education has traditionally been a local affair. While their
governance has been the subject of much derision,137 the principle of
local control is strong enough that in 1973 the US Supreme Court went
so far as to rule that “states didn’t have to provide public
education.”138
Different issues cut differently and standards-based reform was
less controversial. Arguing against higher standards was like arguing
against motherhood. But there was still controversy and motives were
still impugned. Look at two respected academic-policy accounts of the
most important publishing event in education of the time, the
publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. Evoking Jonathan Edwards, Finn
137 Mark Twain’s comment is, as always, incise: “First God created
idiots. That was for practice. Then he created school boards.”
Quoted in Claudia Johnson, Stifled Laughter: One Woman’s Story about Fighting
Censorship. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum, 1994, p 28.138 (quoted in Lieberman, 1993 -- cite case) This is implicitly
recognized in Brown: “the opportunity of an education . . . where the
state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available
to all on equal terms.” (Brown v. Board, e.a.) On the other hand, all
states admitted after the Civil War were required to include a
provision on education in their constitution.
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and Rebarber139 refer to the report in a section called ‘The Great
Awakening,’ calling it ‘stirring’ and commenting that it gave
coherence and a well-articulated rationale for an as yet unnamed
‘excellence movement.’ (1991: 175-6) Contrast this with Tyack and
Cuban, who call Risk an “ideological smokescreen” that “reduced
schooling to a means of economic competitiveness, both personal and
national . . . and obscured rather than clarified the most pressing
problems,” especially those of poverty and inequity. (1995: 34)
The emphasis on professionalism and cooperative unionism in the late1990s was in part a response to that; moreover, it provides a window on the systematic interrelation of economics and the educational system in one case, one case that happens to be at the hegemonic center of contemporary capitalism. Such analysis requires a comprehensive approach. First, one must address the class-positionof teachers, specifically the position of teachers vis-à-vis workers in the labor market who are perceived to have less skill. Second, majoreducational issues, especially the prospect of the privatization of public schools and movement for standards can hardly be ignored. Third, the changing structure of political coalitions is crucial, especially the seemingly “one-sided compromise with corporate conservatism.” Finally, and perhaps most nebulously, there has been a change in ideational trends, or what one might call the meta-narrative of social change, one which is best captured in the 139 Vanderbilt Professor and former Asst. Sec. of Education Chester
Finn is a leading personage in these debates.
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changing relation between ideology and utopian vision.140
In responding to direct attacks, the unions faced two strong tendencies, the anti-union arguments and the anti-state tendencies which are the subject of the previous chapter. The content of their change was to come up with a set of defenses regarding school quality
140 See Ricoeur, 1976. That it is at least plausible that we have gone
through a turning point in World History was the subject of much
writing at the end of the Cold War. The so-called ‘End of History’
thesis focuses on the end of Cold War as a turning point. (Fukuyama,
1992; Adler, 1993; Burns, 1994; Bertram and Chitty, 1994; Williams,
1997) Other writers focus on how social institutionalization has
begun to take on a new form in which transnational flows of commerce
and finance cross state boundaries with such rapidity that state
policy is severely constrained. (Tilly, 1995; Sassen, 1996)
There is much debate in development theory on how this has affected
global governance in the form of IMF discipline; (Polak, 1991) if
not in accordance with established orthodoxies, the country in
question is subject to severe penalities, which signifies a shift in
sovereignty from states to other political entities. Whether
Giovanni Arrighi is right that the emergence of a "Free Enterprise
System --free, that is, from all previous vassalage to state power"
is the ultimate limit of US hegemony and marks "the beginning of the
withering away of the inter-state system as a primary locus of world
power." (Arrighi in Gill, 1993: 182 - 183.) For instance, Jagdish
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initiatives. Moreover, they formed a defensive coalition. The consequences have been to limit their repertoire.
While these ‘four C’s’ may seem to cast the net too wide, none of these four by itself is sufficient for a comprehensive analysis; nonetheless, all are at least desirable.141 And union leaders need to consider them. Understanding the opportunity structure for different stake holders is a prerequisite for studying strategy. Comprehensive,’ however, may be too big a word, and perhaps ‘heuristic’ would be a better choice and the present study is conceived as a heuristic case study. According to Eckstein (1965: 104-8), heuristic case studies concern themselves with potentially
Bhagwati has refered to the "Wall St. - Treasury Complex," to
somehow try to come to grips with the situation. By making an
analogy with Eisenhower's "military - industrial complex," Bhagwati
has succintly, if implicitly, pointed to the different hegemonic
strategies employed by the leaders of a military alliance and of a
trade alliance. (Bhagwati, 1998) Perhaps most striking in this
respect is the reported endorsement of the 'end of history' thesis
by a former member of Ayn Rand's collective, Alan Greenspan;
apparently by this he meant something 1ike the end of the business
cycle. (Cite)141 The argument for is necessary, desirable or sufficient for a
comprehensive analysis is not something which leads to definitive
resolutions. My argument in the theory section below derives from
Aristotle.
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generalizable relations between aspects of overall concrete configurations. It is an exploratory method in which there is an assumed interaction between the inquiry and theory building. Heuristic case studies are especially appropriate in cases in which there are no established theories or in which established theories are insufficient.
The “aspects” one might focus on are attacks and strategies in response, assuming that strategies emanate from a self-reflective process. Actors develop them in response to the perceived strategiesof specific social actors, but they also take shape within ‘a structural context’ or ‘opportunity structure’ which is the sum totalof the strategic choice of all social actors. The change in strategies should not be separated from the conditions that spawned them. The four questions above suggest that to locate the strategy one must take into account economic conditions, the content of educational debates, partisan politics and changes in notions of the social contract. These are analytically separable variables, but theyare organically connected.
This could more properly be referred to as a change in global hegemonic strategies and the principle theoretical inspiration is Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). All are aspects of a change that can betraced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s; they are organically connected to increased transnational linkages, ideas of comparative advantage and advocacy of free trade. Gramsci draws on Hegelian traditions and emphasizes that treating methodological divisions as
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organic ones is an all too common fallacy. Gramsci says of Free Trade that it is based on just such a theoretical error; presenting the analytical “distintion between political society and civil society . . . as an organic one” when “in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same.” (1971: 160)
Gramsci was emphasizing that every civil society has a politicalprogramme, including those that espouse laissez-faire liberalism; he was by no means saying it doesn’t matter whether state or civil society provide services.
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9) Social Learning From A Political Economy Perspective
There are many surveys of educational policy in the US, but those which emphasize how basic economic conditions have shaped policy fall within the camp of political economy. I claim allegianceto this camp to the extent that I believe that political economy explanations cannot be ignored and, in most cases, sketch the broad limits of acceptable policy. However, to the extent that political economy explanations would preclude or ignore (the latter much more likely) political, technological and intellectual forces, I must demur. These are forces equal in historical significance to those involving economic interests and their consolidation into classes.
Political economy debates on US education see changes in policy and education reform as shaped primarily by capitalist dominated workrelations. Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) is simultaneously the most influential and criticized work; using a functionalist analytical framework, it periodizes US schooling policies so as to correlate to the economic imperatives that the particular variant of capitalism called for at that moment. As Liston(1988: 48) argues, “the radical debate was framed and formed as a reaction” to their reproduction theses, most importantly, that major school reform movements correspond to changes in capitalist relations. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976: 234-5) Criticisms of their analysis, friendly or otherwise, have tended to highlight its allegedreductionist character and how it downplays important causal
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linkages, including working class agency, specific struggles over curricular changes, democratic political dynamics and the dynamic of acceptance/resistance. 142 Indeed, in order to escape the charge of determinism, the original authors felt obliged to provide a self-critique in which everything, even name order, was turned on its head; their new conceptual framework treated society “as an ensemble
142 See, respectively, Katznelson and Meier (1985), Shor (1983),
(Carnoy and Levin, 1985) and, for the last, many others, including
Giroux (1983), Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) and Apple (1979, 1987,
1999). The literature on Bowles-Gintis is large enough to form its
own sub-field. Bailey (1995) reformulates the correspondence
principle to analyze the 1988 Education Reform Act, reformulating
the principles so as to include resistance (see Giroux, 1981); he
sees this reform as a change in the legitimating process of
reproduction, not in reproduction itself. Rikowski (1997) refers
to the debilitating problematics of the thesis, calling for a fresh
start by focusing analysis on labor power. Cole (1988) recounts
how Bowles and Gintis moved from “revolutionary socialism to post-
liberal democracy; see, also, Cole (1983) for a more specific
critique. Apple (1988) places Bowles and Gintis as the foundation
for further analysis. . Livingstone (1995) recounts 4 different
emphases stemming among those sympathetic: class formation
(Katznelson and Meir, 1985), hegemony theory (Apple, 1987),
captialist reproduction requirements (Ginsburg, 1991) and the
contradictions between these requirements and democracy. (Ascher,
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of structurally articulated sites of social practice.” (Gintis and Bowles, 1981: 55)
Despite all the critiques, the original thesis contains an intuition regarding correspondence that, while neither fine nor original,143 has nonetheless been robustly accurate in predicting subsequent changes in educational policy. In the early 1980s the discourse on and initiatives for educational reform changed markedly in the US as business concerns came to have greater influence.144 A convenient benchmark is the Reagan administration’s publication of A
Nation at Risk;145afterwards, ‘excellence’ took center stage and, with the
et al., 1996) Of course, none of these arguments precludes the
others, but they all show different aspects of a complex reality.143 Katznelson and Meier, for instance, say much the same by drawing
on the work of Frank Tracy Carlton. (1965)144 This seems to be a consensus opinion. See, among others, Berube
(1991), Aronwitz and Giroux (1991) and Boyd and Kerchner, (1988).
Nevertheless, one should go back at least the late 1970s to
understand the source of this influence. UAW President Douglas
Fraser said the following in 1978: “The leaders of industry,
commerce and finance in the US have broken and discarded the
fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period
of growth and progress. . . . leaders of the business community,
with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war.”
(Brecher and Costello, 1998: 16)]
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significant exception of court challenges, 146 ‘equity’ became a secondary concern.147 Starting from this point, there are three main paths along which policy has advanced: privatization of one sort or another;148 charter schools;149 and a national standards movement whichaims to improve the quality of the public schools by the extensive
145 There also seems to be consensus on this issue. As Thomas Sobel,
Commissioner of Education in New York from 1987 – 95, said, “I
suppose I’ll start with A Nation at Risk just like everyone else.”
(Interview, 15 Apr 98) It has been described as a “fire-and-
brimstone sermon about education” in which “damnation” is defined
as “economic decline.” (Tyack and Cuban, 1995: 1) It was not,
however, the only high profile commission during the 80s; see
Korenz (1988).146 See, for example, the New Jersey case as recounted in Firestone,
Goertz and Natriello, 1997: 21-26.147 Tyack and Cuban (34) go on to call Risk an “ideological
smokescreen” that “reduced schooling to a means of economic
competitiveness, both personal and national . . . and obscured
rather than clarified the most pressing problems,” esp. those of
poverty and inequity. Iannaccone (in Boyd and Kerchner, 1998)
examines excellence in terms of realignment issues. While
seemingly simplistic, the division between the two goals of
'equity' and 'excellence' not only helps to outline educational
reform debates, but also gives insight into the coalitions which
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use of exit exams.150
This occurred at the same time as major ideological and organizational changes in global capitalism; these followed the stagflation of the 1970s, placing constraints on governmental policy options. Edward Berman has documented a parallel similarity in the
support them. (Stambler, 1998: 85)148 See, for example, Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools,
which presents a market-based system of school choice as a pathway
to excellence because it would shift “responsibility to parents
[and] their choices would have consequences” for the quality of
education. (1990: 564) They are also explicitly against democratic
control of schools. (1990, Ch. 2)149 Charter Schools are schools which receive public monies but have a
separate charter which allows them a degree of independence from
local educational authorities. (Nathan, 1996) As of April 1999,
34 states have passed charter legislation (Kemerer, 1999: 8) and
over 1200 schools operate nation-wide, up from only 4 in 1992 (CER,
1999).150 This seems to represent a direct response to 60s and 70s radical
critiques of American education such as Illich (1971), in which the
‘melting into one’ of learning and the assignment of social roles
was descried. While standards involve changes in curriculum, their
main characteristic is that they tie advancement through and
graduation from school to formal testing.
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method and ideology of educational reform (1999: 257-9) and, overall,it is no accident that the changing strategies for education have been coterminous and intertwined with the period of globalization. This would seem to make a prima facie case for the relevance of a reproduction thesis that sees turning points in educational history which “correspond to particularly intense periods of struggle around the expansion of capitalist production relations.” (B&G, 1976: 234-5)
The presence of a correspondence is not surprising, however, forthe initial functionalist assumption is hardly debated -- somehow theeducational system performs functions that reproduce (and perhaps transform) society. This is hardly a radical notion -- a Parsons or aDahl would not argue against it. The pertinent question, as many have pointed out, is not that there is a connection, but how. Bowlesand Ginits (157) emphasize a "self-conscious capitalist class” as theprime moving factor. Through police power and control over production and investment, they have been able to define “a feasible educational model” as reasonable and necessary in light of economic realities. (238) As a starting point this is fine, but it is by no means clear that the “capitalist economic imperative [to] produce competent, willing workers” (Brosio, 1994: 1) is sufficient to bring about a social outcome in which the model of schooling goes barely contested.
Brosio himself emphasizes the ‘democratic imperative’ as the other defining characteristic of a Janus-faced public school system. As indicated above, other writers have highlighted particular actors
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or issues of democratic contestation. But a question arises as to whether democratic contestation is becoming a less important influence on educational policy. John Hall speaks of how transnational production works to “’hollow out’ many of the traditional powers of the state.” (1994: 207; see, also, Banuri and Schor, 1992 and Epstein and Gintis, 1992) Theorists in comparative education ask similarly whether “globalization mean[s] that the nation-state has lost its power to control social formation and therefore to create conditions for socialization, citizenship, and the promotion of a democratic environment?” (Morrow and Torres, 1999:109)
In many ways this is the most significant question, one that is often ignored because of “the once-interrupted interchange between scholars of the State and the School.” (Wirt and Kirst, 1975: 1) That is, politics and education are studied not only in different departments, but often in different schools. For political science, the school system is often reduced to its function of political socialization. (Guttmann, 1987: 13-17) For those in education, the political realm is more often than not treated as exogenous, a tradition stemming from the success of progressive era reforms which substituted centralized scientific management of schools for control by ward bosses. (Tozer, et al., 1998: 97) But the school itself is potentially a means of social control; a century ago the American Sociologist Edward Ross thought of it as an inexpensive form of police, saying that as “the state shook itself loose from the church,
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it reached out for the school” to instill internal values.151
Considering the task, there is understandably some ambivalence about the schools having this role. This role of religion in establishing norms is immense:
Myth and ritual together provide a means whereby means whereby men can exhibit to themselves the forms of their collective life. If we ask the key question of a society, What is holy to whom, we shall lay bare the different norms that inform social life. . . . It is a thought . . . applicable to modern American religion if we consider the way in which American Religion acquired its hegemony by its key role in the work of imposing the norms of American homogeneity upon immigrant variety, and how, in filling this role, it transformed its own content.152
While it is suggested that private economic interests led both the anti-statist and pro-privatization coalitions, there is a conservative argument against state power that has more force in the first. The uneasiness of allowing this task to the schools creates an official agnosticism on values, but that also leaves open a space.According to Michael Apple, the Right has taken advantage of that space and accomplished “a successful translation of an economic doctrine into the language of experience, moral imperative, and common sense.” (1988tc: 172)
‘Standards,’ though they have met with significant resistance of151 (cited in Spring, 1989)
152 MacIntyre, 1966, p110.
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late,153 are the chief example of this. They are responses to the educational reform movements employing the hegemonic logic of late 20th century political economy regimes – weakening public control and relying on market mechanisms. Originally motivated by a desire to emulate the Japanese, if not thoughtfully implemented it may well lead the US away from some of its greatest strengths – a democratic ethos and the creativity of its individual citizens.
On the one hand, ‘standards’ calls for students to follow instructions; there is little or no room for the negotiation of authority which I have found to be the most challenging and valuable aspect of teaching. On the other, ramifications go beyond education,for education is a crucial battle ground: schooling is the one government provided ‘social service’ of which the vast majority of UScitizens take advantage and the values imbued in the process of advancing from grade to grade are internalized as a common sense. This involves a recommidofication of the status of individuals vis-à-vis
the market, attacking the very core idea of the welfare state: inviolable social rights based on citizenship, not performance. (Marshall, 1950) Rooted in micro-economic understandings of choice, (e.g., M. & R. Friedman, 1980) and deeply embedded notions of self-reliance, it embraces a concept of hyper-functionalism for the individual, upon whom are mounted more and more varying responsibilities. Some, such as arranging retirement plans, might
153 Add footnote with cites; include Fairtest, NYT 3 Dec and 8 Dec 99.
Expand in Chapter 6.
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also pave the way to privatization, but the central task is to make sure he or she can adjust to the ever-changing economy:
The global knowledge economy is transforming the demands of the labor market throughout the world. It is also placing new demands on citizens, who need more skills and knowledge to be able to function in their day-to-day lives.154
From this perspective, students should be taught to think of themselves as commodities to be marketed. This is what a pragmatic, self-interested person does.
Overall, the movement to raise educational standards stands out for it seems to represent the same convergence at the center postulated by theorists trying to explain changes in welfare regimes.By focusing on the nexus between ‘standards’ we pick up on Clintonianreferences to ‘responsible’ individuals. But I also wish to follow up on an observation made by Apple (1986: 176), that capital’s strategic agenda is advanced only with the cooperation of other groups “whose own needs are met as well.” Apple focused on ‘holders of technical/administrative knowledge’ who have autonomous interests and whose support signifies a settlement or compromise with the dominant fractions of capital. Teachers unions, who become pivotal actors in later chapters, have followed a similar logic. It, as seems to be the case, their New Professionalism is an attempt to
154 World Bank Report, “Lifelong Learning in the Global Knowledge
Economy: Challenges for Developing Countries,” IBRD, Washington,
2003, p xvii.
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enter an inner and protected circle, then this logic is built on the fragmentation of the working class that has been a leading aspect of the contemporary period. It seems plausible enough that this is a reaction to changes in global hegemonic strategies that call for greater labor flexibility and have thus changed the opportunity structure. They are also responses of a piece with the so-called ‘New Economy Unionism’ that stresses qualifications of workers and more amiable labor management relations (NEIS, 29 July, 99) and the ‘new industrial relations’ rhetoric stressing the need of employers for “high skills . . . because of fundamental changes in their competitive environment.” (Steeck, 1994: 251)
To the extent that I shall add something theoretically novel, itcomes first from seeing much of this as an ongoing, simultaneous and intertwined social learning processes among, between and within different groups corporate groups in society. These groups range from unions and technocrats to political parties and diverse issue networks in civil society. That each of them has its own learning constraints and trajectory is heavily influenced by my readings of Gramsci and self-proclaimed Gramscian approaches.155 Much of this is implicit above – the idea of a ‘self-conscious capitalist class’ leads to an interpretation of the formation of coalitions and the changes in strategy.
155
add stuff from message #1 in columbia inbox
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On another side, teachers unions provide a highly revealing study. For instance, changes in teacher union strategy are motivatedby a changing global economy in which different models of capitalism vie for hegemony. Moreover, the postitioning of teachers unions represents and solidifies a significant change in political coalitionformation. But this is only part of the analysis and instead of speaking of ‘ideological,’ ‘cultural,’ ‘social’ hegemonies, I will be referring to hegemony as a heuristic device to trace influence within a system. The influence is that of economistic hegemonic strategies on generally accepted notions of education.
Reforms based on testing fit this bill. Even before No Child Left Behind, such tests were used in the majority of the states. While this method of monitoring performance is cost-efficient, it also appears to act as an impediment to graduation for minority students. (Natriello and Pallas, 1998) The logic is that the exams will cut off a lot of students from what is an important signaling device and, presumably, make the majority work harder and accomplish more as economic actors.
How do the consolidation of classes and social learning interact? This is the distribution of educational opportunity or opportunity structure. What we see when comparing the cases of the US and the UK is that realms of discourse while the institutions differed. In the US, while discourse hints of transnational civil society along neo-liberal lines, institutions are less centralized and more diffuse.
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The diffuse and changing institutional structure of education is
part of this story. While localities have traditionally run
education, states have taken greater and greater roles. In the late
70’s state expenditures surpassed local expenditures for the first
time.156 Since the late 1970s there has also been a cabinet level
Dept. of Education and the federal role has grown; by using what a
development economist would call conditionality, the federal
government has been able to leverage its contribution of less than 8%
and, especially in the 90s, push forward standards-based reform.
Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the use of leverage
expanded to link standards-based reform to a testing regime that
would then be used to measure students, teachers, schools and
districts. Failure on those tests led to the expansion of charter
schools.
I’ll leave it for someone else to write the full institutional
story. The important point here is that we can differentiate this
case from Hall’s. The non-unified institutional structure makes it
very difficult for a vanguard, conservative or otherwise, to capture
156 footnote on institutional structure. See Spring, Kirst and Wirt,
etc. add chart based on NBES data.
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all the reins of governance simultaneously. Even at the Federal
level, unlike the UK, the US has separate electoral bases for the
executive and legislative; this is perhaps part of the reason that,
unlike Thatcher, Reagan did not even pretend that he might someday
balance the budget.157
Thus the parallel between Hall’s depiction of the process by
which 3rd order change was achieved in the UK and changes in US
educational policy is limited. Two key elements are there in
combination: the mobilization of a conservative electoral coalition
around accusations of poor levels of performance in the sector. But
in Hall’s case the election led rather quickly to the implementation
of a new policy paradigm; Mrs. Thatcher made it a priority, promoting
monetarist-minded officials and shifting the locus of decision making
from the Treasury to the Bank of England and the Prime Minister.
(Hall, 1993: 287)
With US educational policy under Reagan, on the other hand, we
see the rather paradoxical attempt to promote reform while at the
same time pledging to do away with the Department of Education. As
157 Actually, he might have pretended, but no one took him seriously.
See Washinton Monthly. article Feb 2003.
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Terrel Bell, Reagan’s first Sec. of Education has said, the latter
goal would lead to “the destruction of the indispensable power base
that . . . was necessary for my survival in office.”158
The Reagan strategy was consistent with his overall thrust: to
cut federal education spending while using “his office as a bully
pulpit to spur the states to educational reform.”159 But threatening
to dismantle the institutional apparatus and instead using the
channel of public communication is far different from stocking the
existing committees of government with those of your persuasion.
Thus conservative educational reform depends on something more than
conservative electoral fortunes. To the ‘it depends’ category one
may add the response, ‘it depends on the degree to which the
institutional framework governing education comprises one unified
system.’ In the UK, the Thatcher victory was near the end of the
process; in the US, the Reagan victory was the beginning of an
arduous process that is still going on. For the Reagan-Bush
administrations this meant that to advance education reform rhetoric 158 Spring, 1989, 6. Secondary sources provide contradictory
information of Bell’s attitude towards dismantling the Department.
Spring says he was opposed from the beginning. Berube (1988: 99)
says “Bell fully recommended such a move.”159 Berube, 1991: 5.
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was crucial. Much of their strategy was to use the presidency as a
rhetorical presidency to advocate reform on the level of the 50 states
and to further alternate ways of approaching the question of how the
state should provide for public education.160
Thus, part of the strategy was to engage in a long term battle
to somehow change public attitudes. For the last thirty years this
has led to a substantial series of texts, among them: pro-
privatization tracts (esp. emanating from right wing think tanks);
anti-union posturing and research from politicians and academics; and
an ‘excellence discourse.’
This leads to perhaps the most interesting question: how do
organized interests respond to attempted 3rd order change in policy
paradigms? The answer is as best they can. To take our major
example, as a counter-strategy, the unions advocated excellence on
their own terms. But these were terms within another’s discourse.
Terms of discourse tell us a great deal about the relation
between interests and ideological position. The realm of discourse
is connected to set of ideas which make sense to a general audience;
if you can control these terms, then you limit most of the possible 160 See Caesar in Landry, 1985. Caesar, James W. “The Rhetorical
Presidency Revisited,” in Modern Presidents and the Presidency, Marc
Landry, ed. Lexington, MA: Lexington books, 1985.
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outcomes. If 'competitive excellence' is the goal, instead of, for
example, 'a binding model of citizenship,' then you are more likely
to embrace an economistic vision of education.
The underlying assumptions of how our social interactions
operate has great reach. Hall extends social learning to political
society. What I am suggesting here is that, at least for education
in the US, one must extend it to civil society as well. Both the
coalitional structure and the values used to set goals are highly
political and change over time. Based primarily on class as regards
financing, based on race, region, religion, education, ideology and a
slew of other factors when it comes to issues as various as sex
education, the length of the school day, safety, choice of library
books, etc., coalition structures also vary according to issue.
But that does not detract from the discussion of hegemony, civil
society and transnational influence. The first will look at types of
social learning, the second at economic development theory and how it
has changed during a period in which transnational linkages have
increased and state autonomy has decreased. One effect of this type
of social learning is that we have ended up, in education, on a
search for a the single metric. And once the single metric has been
established, the discourse orbits around it.
So let us take Hall’s three orders of change and add a fourth,
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to end up with four types of social learning. First, 1st order the
refinement of agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order -- the choice of
methods to achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the selection of goals.
Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals by reference to
principles, values, ideologies and visions of the future.
The first two fall with the technocratic world, although we should note that technocrats are not without political affiliation orpolitical goals. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a leap. Both third and fourth order social learning are, by their nature, collective, political and philosophical -- they chart out a collective strategy based upon public argumentation. Of course, as might be the case with children, putting ideas into categories can bedangerous, but it does tell us how we might distinguish between episodes of social learning. Questions that come to the fore include, How does accepted practice in a field change at each level? What forces lead to this acceptance? What degree of acceptance do they have? Are there alternative views that have a wide degree of acceptance?
In the other chapters I will seek to tie this together with the notion of hegemony, but here I want to look at the effects of this particular episode in social learning. The sometimes parallel, sometimes intertwining tracks of privatization (discussed, but not implemented to nearly the level advocates propose) and standards based reform (less discussed, but, for good or ill approaching full
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implementation) have had huge effects in one of the largest social experiments of our time.
There has been some mention of Chicago, but let's talk about NewYork. Former Chancellor Joel Klein’s model for the overhaul of the NYC education system, initiated by self-made, mega-wealthy Mayor Bloomberg,161 is based on business models, corporate and otherwise. Many would argue -- and I would not disagree -- that the Mayor is genuinely public spirited, but it is a spirit of a particular type. The building of institutions according to the ‘best practices’ method, which Bloomberg has adopted, is business-language and the choice of best practices follows business method. The administrativedesign and goals that Klein --the second consecutive lawyer to hold the post of Chancellor-- has initiated draw both on business models and reflect business complaints about workforce rigidity.
What's more, it was no accident that Mr. Klein has a background in anti-trust -- business-based conservatives often refer to the public schools as public monopolies, with all that implies.
161 With a net worth of roughly 4.9 billion, he was among the 100
richest people in the world -- #85 on Crain’s List in 2004. He is
now, according to Forbes, the 13th richest person in the world, with
34.1 billion. (Forbes, “The World's Billionaires,” accessed at
http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall, 5 October
2014.) That his weath increased seven-fold while he was Mayor is
worthy of note.
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The reform also provides some lessons in social learning -- the
process by which collective decisions as to what comprises the
general welfare are adopted, implemented and consolidated.162 The
political economist, Peter Hall, in depicting shifts from
Keynesianism to Monetarism, defines ‘social learning’ as a
“deliberate attempt to adjust goals or techniques of policy in
response to past experience and new information.”163 He then
disaggregates this concept into three central variables: the
overarching goals in a field, techniques or policy instruments and
the precise settings of these instruments. These are, respectively,
3rd, 2nd and 1st order changes. To these three orders of change we may
add a fourth, to end up with four types of social learning. First,
1st order the refinement of agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order --
the choice of methods to achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the
selection of goals. Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals
by reference to principles, values, ideologies and visions of the
future.
It seems the last -- 4th order change -- is the order of the day
at the New York City Department of Education. This is not a question
of ‘phonics’ versus ‘whole language’ approaches, but rather of how an
enterprise is to be run:
162 See Sikkink, 1988.163 Peter Hall, 1993: 278.
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community school districts are out . . . replaced with ten “learning regions,” each with a superintendent answerable directly to the chancellor’s office. Dismantling the musty old Board of Education bureaucracy piece by piece, Bloomberg and Klein have recruited a cadre of corporate-sector whiz kids, who will now run school divisions such as transportation, food services, school construction, and maintenance.164
The NYC reform is based on a certain set of presumptions as to
what is the best practice, most of them undergirded by the accepted
common wisdom in business and legal circles. In critiquing the
public school system, efficiency is the criteria by which it is to be
evaluated. But it is one thing to apply this to running school
construction and another to apply it to classroom teaching. Still,
the transfer is made and there is an economizing logic to this -- the
real business of schools is to increase performance. There is also a
quasi-missionary logic -- students have to be prepared to survive in
a dog-eat-dog world. That is the bottom line and it is spoken of in
just so many words by those who are charged with changing the system.
Pegagogues have their place in this scheme, but not in designing
it. This is reflected at least symbolically in the head of the
Leadership Academy being, as Arne Duncan was in Chicago, a CEO and
not a president or a dean. It is a break with the academic world,
164 Sol Stern, “Bloomberg and Klein Rush In,” City Journal, Spring
2003. By the way, the 10 learning regions were eventually phased out
in favor of educational networks that saw the schools as clients.
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which is brought in at a lower level and used to justify the best
practices at the school level and in the classroom. The Leadership
Academy, originally located in the Tweed Courthouse, is a school to
train new principals and promote leadership among existing
prinicpals. It was in many ways the lynchpin of Mayor Bloomberg’s
effort. Based on corporate management concepts and supported by the
Wallace Foundation, it has an academic dean, but is headed by C.E.O.,
Robert E. Knowling, Jr., who had this to say when asked whether he
had succeeded in reaching his goals with the Leadership Academy:
I know that at the end of the day there’s only one metric that counts. That is, did we move student achievement? And when I say move, not incrementally move, but did we substantially improve over a period of time, student achievement.165
That this single metric has weight as the common currency of
educational discourse pushes asides many other functions of the
schooling system: providing for socialization and public health,
instilling democratic values, aiding a child’s emotional and social
as well as cognitive development and somehow creating a better
society.166
165 Interview with Robert E Knowling, Jr., 5 Nov. 2003, conducted
by Rafael Pi Roman, “A Year of Change: Leadership in the Principal’s
Office,” New York Voices, Channel 13, New York, January 2004.166 There is a vast literature on this. See, among others, the
work of Larry Cuban, Jeff Henig, Dorothy Shipps, Henry Giroux and
Michael Apple. For the different social agendas which shape
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Putting it another way, John Taylor Gato, author of the
Underground History of American Education, and also a former NYC teacher,
argues that this moves away from the three traditional purposes of
education -- teaching people to be moral, teaching them to be good
citizens and helping them towards self-realization. 167
The emphasis on academic achievement reveals the fourth order
change spoken of above. Within this framework, school is thought of
as a business in which profit and loss are measured by the metric of
student achievement. Principals are thought of as managers at the
educational policy, see Herbert Kliebard, 1986. 167 John Taylor Gato, “Against School: How Public Education
Cripples our Kids, and Why,” Atlantic Monthly, Sept 2003, p. 35. Gato
claims that there really is no problem with public education except
that schools are designed to promote boredom, perpetuate childhood
and make sure no one ever grows up. With a thesis so provocative, it
is appropriate that he quotes H.L. Mencken (in The American Mercury,
April 1924):
[the aim of public education is not] to fill the young of the
species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . .
Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim . . . is simply
to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level,
to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent
and originality.
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school level and they are thought of as responsible for outcomes. If
they don’t produce, if they do not control and direct their students
in the way they been told, they’ll be replaced -- something Mayor
Bloomberg was quite specific about in reminding principals about
their responsibility to control school violence:
“The principals will get the help they need to turn the schools around,” he said. “But it they don’t succeed in making their schools safe, they will be asked to look for work elsewhere. Principals are the managers and have the authority and the responsibility to produce the results we are as a society expect.”168
So one best practice is to train a lot of managers to make sure you
have competent people.
19 This is, of course, rather reasonable and I would add, as
someone who has had the opportunity to work under quite a few, that
improving the quality of principals very well be the most efficient
way to improve a school. Bad principals are, after all, a disaster.
But combined with the elimination of principal tenure, the
measurement of competence according to quantitative measures and
payment based on performance, it has the overall effect of making
principals seek short-term solutions. They don’t know if they will
be there in the long-term. And this is bad for institution building
and should make us question the importation of business methods to
168 Bryan Virasami, “Dispruptive students will soon face hard new
lessons in school discipline under a far-reaching plan announced by
Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” New York Newsday, 23 Dec 2003.
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the most long term of projects -- education and, eventually, cultural
and social development.
20
This came out in one interview with a principal who, as part of
his ongoing training, goes to Leadership Academy functions. The
principal pointed out that at the beginning “they took us out to the
Ramada at JFK and it must have cost $300,000 -- this is during the
summer, when they have empty schools all over the City.” 169 When
asked, s/he said s/he could serve as a buffer for the teachers, many
of whom had been recruited among former colleagues, but that was
because their numbers were better than average. The principal agreed
that the emphasis on instruction eliminated the social work
components of education, but made a more general point:
I don’t doubt their good intentions, but there are canards aboutgood intentions . . . Most people who criticize it say the paradigm of business is wrong for education, but within that paradigm they’ve picked the wrong one. If you’re not with the team, you’re against it -- ‘my way or the highway.’
I thought the thing about democracy was that smart people could disagree.170
169 Interview with Principal, 16 March 04. The cost estimate is,
at best a ballpark figure. I have not tried to verify it.170 Interview with Principal, 16 March 04. On the ‘team’ metaphor,
a relevant statement came from the Department of Education’s chief
instructional officer as she handed in her resignation:
Despite stepping down, Lam maintained she had acted
appropriately in attempting to find her husband a job. She said in
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The principal indicated that they ran people like rats in a cage
-- kept everyone at The Learning Academy running around like people
on The Apprentice. I admit I prompted that comparison, but it was
agreed to wholeheartedly. Considering for a moment, the principal
finally said, “They’re morons -- they don’t get it.” Rather they
rely on, as Alfie Kohn calls it, competition’s most common defense:
“the assumption that success (or productiveness or goal attainment)
means competition. Given this assumption, the assertion that no one
would get anything done without competition doesn’t require proof; it
is self-evident.” 171
This is historically connected to the idea of ‘enterprise
culture’ which emerged in the UK under Margaret Thatcher and which
has had great influence in the US. This was a deliberate attempt to
a statement Monday that Klein knew about her efforts and that she
had been "given a green light to proceed." "Recognizing that I am a
team member, not the team leader, though, this evening I have with
sadness given my resignation to Chancellor Klein," the statement
said. Klein asked for her resignation after a report by Richard
Condon, the special commissioner of investigation for the New York
City schools, found that Lam had helped wrangle a supervisory job
in the Bronx for her husband, Peter Plattes. (www.wnbc.com, “Deputy
Schools Chancellor Diana Lam Announces Resignation,” posted and
updated March 9, 2004.)171 Kohn, 1992, p. 45.
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break down the Keynesian welfare and begin an era of “cultural
restructuring and engineering based upon the neo-liberal model of the
entrepreneurial self - a shift characterised as a moving from a
‘culture of dependency’ to one of ‘self-reliance.'”172 What Michael
Peters has called the ‘responsibilising of the self’ is evident as
the focus of responsibility for education shifts to individuals who
are selected out as an elite.173
172 Michael Peters, “Education, Enterprise Culture and the
Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective,” Journal of Educational
Enquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001, p58.173 Ibid. For Peters, the state writes “itself out of its traditional
responsibilities concerning the welfare state through twin
strategies of a greater individualisation of society and the
responsibilisation of individuals and families. Both are often
simultaneously achieved through a greater contractualisation of
society, and particularly by contracting-out state services. . . .
A genealogy of the entrepreneurial self reveals that it is the
relationship, promoted by neo-liberalism, that one establishes to oneself
through forms of personal investment (for example, user charges,
student loans) and insurance that becomes the central ethical
component of a new individualised and privatised consumer welfare
economy. In this novel form of governance, responsibilised
individuals are called upon to apply certain management, economic,
and actuarial techniques to themselves as subjects of a newly
privatised welfare regime. ” This argument is made in somewhat
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It is this idea that informs the discourse and the search for
the single metric. The problem with the elitist aspect is that if a
teacher does not succeed it is because he or she does not have “the
characteristics [that] differentiate our most successful teachers.”
The solution (sometimes labeled 'The Solution') is not to support
institutions, but to create a mechanism to recruit those with
“leadership characteristics—perseverance in the face of challenges,
the ability to influence and motivate others, organizational ability,
problem-solving ability.”174 And if you cannot do that, you're
deselected. As the founder of Teacher for America says,
the most successful teachers in low-income communities
operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of
where their students will be performing at the end of the year
different terms in Part 1 of this project, by focusing on the
connections between the concepts of dedication, leadership and
entrepreneurship and how they then lead to a call for the
individual to be hyper-functional. The development of new
conceptions of merit, as influenced by Ms. Thatcher and Mr. Hayek,
are treated in the other essays of Part 2. 174 Wendy Kopp, “Wendy Kopp Interview: Eight questions for Wendy
Kopp,” The Economist website, Apr 3rd 2010; accesse May 2011 at
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/04/wendy_kop
p
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that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students
in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision,
maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through
purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly
on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do
whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face..175
There is an authority that is put forth by the ‘best practices’
rhetoric -- that some how it is the product of neutral, quasi-
scientific process. It is not. It is a practical business method
that has value -- but it denies that there are disputes about value.
That, indeed, is the whole crux of the argument of why there can’t
really be social learning, or, as Brian Fay once put it, a policy
science.176 But once we enter into the pragmatic world, what is
‘best’ is always disputed. The consensus opinion on what is best is
a political decision.
The business approach -- of competitive struggles to grant
individuals rewards based on the value they add is something that is
seemingly at odds with the idea not of only of democracy, but of the
way most people would like to see their children cared for. More
important, the aim of instruction loses sight of the most important
175 Eight questions for Wendy Kopp176 Footnote Brian Fay’s ’75 book. It might be worth adding a
synposis of his argument.
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fact:
They need to eat, they need to sleep, they need a stable environment. It these prerequisites aren’t met, then forget about it -- they won’t be able to learn.177
And since the concentration of failing schools is highly
correlated to the concentration of high poverty students and
situations more likely to produce social pathologies, you would think
this would get more attention, but one would know but little of this
from listening to policy talk on education.178 That talk is directed
to groups in which those prerequisites are assumed. The state does
not have to step where the family will provide.
Ignoring poverty with the mantras of 'no excuses' or 'whatever
it takes' is often invoked.179 As a rhetorical strategy, we can call 177 Conversation with former Bronx High School teacher, 23 March
04. 178 There are exceptions, such as the Harlem Children's Zone and the
Obama administration's 20 Promise Neighborhoods program is set up
so a neighborhood receives a full network of services from the
craddle to college and beyond. But it is more a pilot program than
anything else, and seems to be treated as a second tier of reform.
Moreover, both HCZ and the Promise program insist that public-
private partnerships, with the private money often coming from
hedge funds, are to be preferred. See 179 See, for example, Michelle Rhee, Poverty Must be Tackled But Never
Used as an Excuse, Huffington Post, 5 September 2012; accessed
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this 'ignore it with platitudes.' This is one absence that marks the
truncated nature of debates on education. Frequently lamented or not,
most debates on education do not consider what happens when the
family does not provide. While standards-based reform and measures
of privatization are the two major types of change that have been
proposed, both draw on an underlying assumption. For a quarter-
century, the main discourse on education in the United States starts
with the question of, ‘Why has it failed?’
Failure is then defined in a particular way. Why has a system
which, nearly every weekday, is responsible for the care of one-sixth
of an increasingly diverse population, not produced an increase in
standardized test scores? This is part of a third order change in
social learning, but, as is usually the case, it is connected to
fourth order change. It is hard to select new goals without changing
the terms of justification.
October 2012 at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-rhee/poverty-must-be-
tackled-b_b_1857423.html.
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9a) Failure as a Springboard
How has this notion of failure played out? As Robert Slavin notes, we have been in “an uninterrupted state of reform . . . sincethe publication of A Nation at Risk “ under the first Reagan-Bush Administration. Risk, like other influential documents before it, linked the nation’s temporary failures in international competition to the systematic failures of the school system. The first such flurry of attacks on the school system came half a century ago, afterthe launch of Sputnik showed the Russians’ burgeoning technological superiority. Similarly, Risk was based on the premise that the Japanese were soon to surpass us economically. That the dire economic straits of the early 80s had been preceded by the rise of Euro-dollar markets, the abandoning of the Gold Standard, the loss ofthe Vietnam War, the Oil Crisis, the Debt Crisis and whatever else you might add to the list did not save the schools from criticism.
Slavin goes on to note that ”Throughout that time, the main
focus of reform has been on school governance and accountability.” 180
Other things were out of focus, however. For instance, no where in
Risk is class-size or its effects on the quality of teaching
mentioned. [wrong ftnt]181 Rather, the first step was of the second
180 Slavin, “Success for All: Policy Consequences of Replicable
Schoolwide Reform,” Ch. 13 of Handbook of Educational Policy , Academic
Press, 1999, p. 325.
181 Walter Karp, “Why Johnny Can’t Think: The Politics of Bad
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order -- to set up a monitoring system and By the 1990s, almost all states had adopted standards, tests and systems of accountability designed to recognize schools whose students are doing well and to punish those whose students are doing poorly.182
This was the easy part, because it could be justified by drawing
on principles common to different forms of liberalism -- not only
neo-liberalism with its economistic bias, but rights-based liberalism
as well. Slavin then goes on to talk about privatization, and this
is where most speculation focused at the time, but here there is a
clear divide -- there are some liberal principles which justify
privatization and others which scream against it. Certainly, even if
the issue of vouchers has met electoral defeats and court challenges,
privatization has made great strides at the margins. 183 But equally
Schooling, Harper’s Magazine, 1985.
182 Slavin, “Success for All: Policy Consequences of Replicable
Schoolwide Reform,” Ch. 13 of Handbook of Educational Policy , Academic
Press, 1999, p. 325.
183 Contracting out for food services and maintenance are examples,
along with the use of privately developed educational products.
Some aspects of privatization are clearly linked to standards-
based reform. In general, like entrance exams, the use of exit
exams also has an important privatization component. See
"Reading, writing and enrichment: Private money is going to U.S.
public schools," The Economist, v. 350 no8102 (Jan. 16 '99) p. 55-6.
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important -- and much more so if privatization is stalled in some
regards -- is the change of management techniques within the public
sphere. And this is heavily influenced by ‘business learning’ --
the commonly accepted set of notions within the realm of private
enterprise.
But we have left out two parts of the story. First, what
happened when it became apparent that the US had not fallen behind
the Russians technologically and that the still efficient Japanese
seemed to be running in place economically? Actually, the schools
got some credit. Not the nation-wide system of K-12 education, of
course, but higher education got some props. It was also subject to
some cuts, initiated by state legislators and private administrators.
And it still ran fairly well. So maybe you make the public schools
more like higher education and also make them more efficient at the
same time.
A tacit argument for vouchers is part of this, although not the
The article cites International Data Corporation estimates that
private enterprise's share of education expenditures will increase
from 13 to 25 percent over the next 20 years; they anticipate this
will be achieved by concentrating on supplementary services, such
as testing, coaching, training and pre-school education. The
article’s title, by the way, is interesting, as the flow of money
is for the most part in the other direction.
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most important part. In an article very sympathetic to the idea of
vouchers, Edwin West said, “A final version of the voucher can be
seen operating in post-secondary education. . . . [when] governments
provide grants to universities and colleges in strict proportion to
enrollment we have another case where ‘funds follow the student.’
This situation . . . is the essence of the voucher principle.”184
The private-public mix model of higher education in the US
influences these debates. The complaints of university professors
about the ability of their students to write expository essays, to
have some idea of when the Civil War had been fought, to locate Japan
on a map and to solve for ‘x’ in algebraic equations were used
effectively by proponents of the ‘excellence movement.’ True, the
excellence movement was more effective in pushing standards, but
standards and vouchers often have the same objectives.
What is the second part of the story? It isn’t considered by
the majority of people -- it is assumed.
They need to eat, they need to sleep, they need a stable environment. It these prerequisites aren’t met, then forget
184 Edwin G. West, “Education Vouchers in Practice and Principle:
A World Survey,” February 1996, p 4. This was a summary paper on
a fuller report that was downloaded from the website World Bank’s
International Finance Corporation.
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about it -- they won’t be able to learn.185
It seems the willful disregard of cultural deficits and social
pathologies makes it easier to support vouchers. Prerequisites for
educational success are not considered. Thus, making the argument
for vouchers based on principle, rather than interest, is possible.
West lists four principles behind vouchers which “explain
the[ir] attempted objectives.” First is consumer choice, second
personal advancement, third the promotion of competition and fourth
wider access to private schools. All of them assume the
prerequisites above. These are similarly assumed in contemporary
versions of meritocracy -- that is a competition among those well
cared for. In the same five paragraph section, West (though he does
not refer to it as such) also includes a fifth principle “a
significant private school advantage in terms both of student
achievement and unit costs.”186 If not a one-to-one correspondence,
there is a significant overlap with the principles behind standards-
based reform, especially when those reforms include ‘failing schools’
provisions.
185 Conversation with former Bronx High School teacher, 23 March
04. 186 West, 1996, p. 3. He does not refer to this as a ‘principle.’
Whether this is as significant as Mr. Knowling being a CEO is a
matter of interpretation.
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10) Educational Classes
There is no easy one-to-one correspondence between class position and educational opportunities in the US, but there are broadclass divisions that, depending on the interpretation, may either provide for some social mobility or accurately approximate a caste system. What they do, no matter how you might describe them, is to provide different classes with different opportunities. At one end of the scale are a trinity of educational opportunities that serve the elite, somehow defined: highly touted private schools, exclusivesuburban schools and magnet schools within otherwise challenged public systems. According to the language that developed into standards-based reform we are turning this into the upper reaches of a meritocracy.
According to the analysis of social class there is something else going on. The question of class compromise now has a different content than that specified by Przeworski.187 Wages have deliberately
187 Adam Przeworski, “Problems in the Study of Transition to
Democracy,” p. 62. (1986?).
neither the aggregate of interests of individual capitalist
(persons and firms) nor the interests of organized wage-earners
can be violated beyond specific limits . . . profits cannot fall
so low as to threaten reproduction of captial, and wages cannot
fall so low as to make profits appear as a particularistic
interest of capital.
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been pushed lower through a series of outsourcing and downsizing initiatives. Except where corruption is concerned, the ‘particularistic interests’ of capital are nearly sacrosanct in much mainstream political discourse. The idea of introducing new
government programs that are overtly redistributive is hardly countenanced and older redistributive programs are pared down or subject to privatization. The question of distribution of the socialproduct is left to the market as if the market were a naturally occurring eco-system or a miracle.
Indeed, there is a strong trend that accepts the use of the term‘miracle’ without much qualification. Writers such as John Gray (drawing on Hayek and Miser) and Milton Friedman seem to imply that Adam Smith (and others) stumbled upon the philosopher’s stone. The key to a happy and prosperous society is allowing information to flowand greed to motivate. These are the predominant views of late 20th
and early 21st century discourse -- the air we breathe. Radical views are measured by the degree they deviate from this norm.
‘The genius of capitalism’ is a common phrase and when it comes to learning, genius has its place. But the attribution of genius is subjective and limited in time, place and scope. There are periods of social learning, as there are periods of learning in every other human endeavor. In each a trinity of power, ideas and interests mustbe accounted for. Falling within each period are numerous episodes in different issue areas, and in each area coalitions are shaped differently. Nonetheless, there is a core. There are solid
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coalitions that mark each period and limit the possibilities of political discourse in all fields.
While there are questions about how to use the term ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ the analogy with evolution may be useful.188 It is limited, of course, because the conditions that change are the resultof human-made rather than natural processes, but the idea of a environment in which some policy options thrive and others fall by the way side is intriguing. As Peter Gourevitch argues, policy requires politics -- of ideas there are many, but only one is adoptedand political support is a sine qua non. Economics prescribes, but power decides.
In Politics in Hard Times Gourevitch makes a broad distinction betweenprosperous times and hard times. In the former social systems appearstable, there is a regularity of the economy that allows for rules tobe modeled and followed. It is, in essence a question of technical efficiency -- how to perfect or optimize a system already in place. In the latter, instability shatters illusion189 and patterns unravel. This is much the same distinction that Hall makes in distinguishing between 3rd order change and either 1st or 2nd order change. Models
188 Rose book on evolution.189 This can be difficult. Example from the Simpsons. Nelson Munce,
the school bully, has made a deal to get back his prized picture of
himself with Snow White, he is told, “She’s an actress.” He
responds, “Shut up! Some of us prefer illusion to despair.”
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come into conflict. The question in not one of technical efficiency,but political agility -- which policy’s “adherents have the power to translate their opinion into the force of law.”190 and patterns unravel.
Gourevitch locates the moment of punctuation in the mid- to late1970s and early 1980s. The conjoined high rates of inflation and unemployment led to the unraveling of the great post-World War II historic compromise. This was a form of bounded capitalism191 that resulted from “the traumas of the depression . . . and World War II.”192 that resulted from “the traumas of the depression . . . and World War II.” This was a period in which a truce prevailed among social antagonists in the form of government regulations and intervention that had as its goals the creation and maintenance of a mixed economy and class compromise.
For Gourevitch, the content of bounded capitalism included six major elements. First, private capitalism was required to operate within a system of rules that provided social, political and economicstability. Second, the state operated so as to ensure not just the opportunities and rights, but the welfare of its citizens. Third, industrial relations were institutionalized. Fourth, there was
190 PG, Hard Times, P. 17. 191 I believe this is meant to directly parallel to the notion of
bounded rationality in Herbert Simon. 192 PG, p. 18. Bring this up again when talking about Winston.
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management of the demand side of the economy in order to maintain full employment. Fifth and sixth, in an uneasy embrace, lie imperatives for both economic regulation and free trade.
This historic compact was historically attacked in the 70s and 80s. The center did not hold, the compromise came undone. The inefficiency of government critique was both pervasive and bipartisan; it is to be remembered that the first president to emphasize deregulation was James Earl (a.k.a., ‘Jimmy’) Carter. Moreover, it was nearly global. Gourevitch’s study is a broad comparative one, spanning five countries and three international crises. He states that all three involved three elements: a major downturn in investment and business cycles, a change in the geographical distribution of production and significant growth of newproducts and productive processes.
The present study is more intensive. In seeking explanations regarding transnational linkages, it looks at the effects of international crises on one sector in one country, one that at first glance is somewhat insolated from international crises, the educationsector. It becomes even more limited when it focuses on union responses and attempts to direct or influence educational policy in the wake of one of these crises. The point of this section, however,is that the wake is highly significant. There are, in fact, multiplepathways by which transnational cause becomes educational effect. The doctrines of the 60s, according to Gourevitch, lost prominence; and while he means economic doctrines, we can add educational ones,
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as well. In both cases the connection of economic crisis, policy debate and political experimentation led to new policy outcomes. In each, doubt as to the viability of policy led to controversy and thento conflict from which new policies emerged.
Flowchart A gives a loose interpretation of Gourevitch’s account. It is what he refers to as the Political Sociology of Political Economy, and in it he tries to trace how economic crises influence political decision making.
insert Flowchart A ‘political sociology of political economy’ [filename: 004-pt1-ch1flowchartA]
Gourevitch begins with possible causes, including mismanagement,outside shocks and exhaustion of the model. Of the first, economies are often mismanaged because of political expediency, something whichwould come as not surprise to anyone who has read Peron’s correspondence. As evidence we can offer Juan Peron's 1953 letter toCarlos Ibanez, then President of Chile:
My Dear Friend:
Give to the people, especially to the workers, all this is possible. When it seems that you are already giving them doo much, give them more. You will see the results. Everyone willtry to scare you with the specter of an economic class. But all of this is a lie. There is nothing more elastic than theeconomy, which everyone fears so much because no one understands it.193
193 Albert O. Hirshman, “The Search for Economic Determinants,” in
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The history of Latin American political economy provides illustrations of the other points as well. Outside shocks, especially the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, led to huge balance of payments difficulties. These, in turn, resulted in the Debt Crisis and a new transnational financial order. This new order, in which money center banks, with the assistance of the IMF, produced its own orthodoxy -- a set of conditions that sovereign countries needed to meet in order to maintain financing.194
As for exhaustion of the model, we can posit at least two causes. First is the technological. The most well known treatment of this is the work of Guillermo O’Donnell and countless others who followed on Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism. One of the chief causes for regime change in the Southern Cone was, according to O’Donnell, the slow pace of economic progress due to ‘bottlenecks.’ These were the result of the exhaustion of the easy phase of import substitutionindustrialization, which was not capital intensive. The perceived necessity of bringing down consumption in order to increase investment in heavy industry was the rationale behind instituting repressive regimes.The logic of compromise exhausted, the pure force of the state was relied on in order to ensure order.
David Collier, (Ed.). 1979. The New Authoritarianism in Latin America.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 65.194 Polak,1991. Find article and add quote.
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In the North, however, this was not so much a result of technological or economic development imperatives, as the result of achange in strategy by leading groups. In the Post- World War II period, the chief ‘comparative advantage’ in economic growth was the social peace of class compromise. The following quote is one of scores that represents this view:
Those countries that had managed to institutionalize industrial conflict and set up barriers to inflation enjoyed the fruits of their organizational endeavors in terms of industrial peace and rapid growth.195
This view treats class systems and interest intermediation arrangements as objects which may be judged in terms of comparative economic efficiency. But beginning in the late 1960s, there was a sea change in how these objects were judged. While technology had its role, the Oil Crisis, the ensuing debt and the change in transnational finance were key here; they concentrated the control ofresources in a more and more tightly integrated financial network. This changed the political dynamic and shifted coalition patterns. Here ‘new ideas’ were able to take hold because they served the interests of power holders -- power holders whose positions had been buttressed by the Oil and Debt Crises. With the concentration of capital and integration of financial networks, the strategic dynamic changed. People in newly reinforced positions of power could figure
195 Stephen Bornstein, “States and Unions: From Postwar Settlement to
Contemporary Europe,” in Bornstein, et al., eds., The State in Capitalist
Europe, 1984, p. 51.
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out how to pick apart institutions.
Thus the exhaustion of a model can be political as well as technological. While technological change may be its basis, political actors develop new strategies as technology opens new possibilities. The various factors that led to outcomes are all in the shadow of this. Class and coalition struggles were reshaped. There was a new criteria for ‘better’ ideas -- ‘better’ being definedin a pragmatic way that any business person would find common sensical. Partisan concerns were not so much muted as transmuted andnew centrist positions became the order of the day for the left. Institutional inertia, while still a real force, especially in education, was challenged. The concentration of resources is, of course, perhaps the leading factor.
But let us return to Gourevitch’s argument. The importance of power in shaping policy has three faces even when one focuses on political leaders. They are politicians with ambitions, but they arealso individuals with preferences and abilities, as well as the holders of institutional posts which have their own demands and ability to shape action. What Gourevitch says about political leaders and policies is particularly relevant:
political leaders have to get into those institutional positionsand hold to them. . . . [moreover,] policies, to take effect, require compliance or even enthusiasm from countless individualswho work or invest or buy. . . . When politicians make choices, therefore, their choices are constrained by the need to mobilize or retain support. (p. 20, e.a.)
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The examples he gives are common places of our understanding of electoral politics: the marriage of iron and rye, the New Deal, etc.In each case a coalition formed and a study of policy choice requiresa political sociology of historical coalitions. Gourevitch’s questions involve describing and understanding these coalitions: whowas in them? How were they put together? By political figures? Didclass interests or the interests of self-motivated political figures converge with the public interest? Were other combinations possible?How tight a formation did they form?
My interest is to somehow gain insight on how this affects social learning. Indeed, I may be calling for a pluralistic conception of social learning.196 At the transnational level, it is the joining of elites. Instead of ‘iron’ and ‘rye’ we have financialcapital that looks to heighten returns -- in Robert Wade’s terms, ‘Wall Street,’ the ‘Treasury Department’ and the ‘IMF.’197 At the
196 At least in the case of electoral democracies. This, of course,
is not out of keeping with theories of paradigm change in which
power has a hand, even in the most technical and arcane
disciplines. (See Kuhn, etc. cite)197 We could also add the City of London, as does Robert Wade, “The
Asian Crisis and the Wall Street - Treasury - IMF Complex,”
presented at Columbia University, 24 Feb 1999. [This draft
actually not for citation -- contact Wade.] Wade expanded on
Bhagwati’s Wall Street - Treasury Complex. Wade emphasizes how
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transnational level, it is the joining of elites. Instead of ‘iron’ and ‘rye’ we have financial capital that looks to heighten returns --in Robert Wade’s terms, ‘Wall Street,’ the ‘Treasury Department’ and the ‘IMF.’ But at the national level, one has to map out patterns ofsupport that are rooted in building electoral coalitions, including the money and other resources that help to run successful campaigns. And this is not an easy task. For Gourevitch, economic conditions directly affect policy disputes only rarely. While economics is a factor, we must look to four other factors -- factors that mediate orinfluence, rather than create change.
Thus, after economic conditions, Gourevitch next speaks of the organization of the state -- the system of rules and institutions which govern the policy making process. For instance, the distinction between first by the board systems (as in the US and UK) and systems of proportional representation has a huge effect on the number of parties that actually have influence. Similarly, the difference between Presidential and Parliamentary systems affects thecalculations of power holders. [add Skatch cite]
international agreements on standards, such as Basle Accord on
Capital Adequacy Standards, hide “the power of the US to
restructure other economies in line with its own interests.” Wade
indicated that Bhagwati took issue with adding the IMF. We may
also take issue with identifying ‘Wall Street - Treasury Department
interests’ with ‘US interests.’
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Next198 is the perhaps inappropriately named ‘mechanisms of representation,’ by which he means not the formal electoral process, but groups which gather in order to represent their interests and contend for power, such as interest groups and political parties. These are, he suggests, the effective agents of power.
He then mentions ideology, which –as it is embedded in discourse-- is the central concern here. Finally he adds a differenttype of variable: placement in the international system. Dispensing with any review of the other crises he investigates, we should look to how these four variables affected the breakdown of thehistoric compromise realized in the Post-War Welfare State and Keynesian demand stimulus.
Material conditions did change. The success of the model led toproblems in the late 1960s. The economies of Japan and Germany revived, increasing international competition. So did the spread of industrial capacity to developing countries, something that was trulyto come to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s. In these decades the underlying process whereby organized economic actors were learning touse human resources transnationally led to significant deindustrialization in the US and UK and a decrease in blue collar jobs and wages. New products and processes helped to make this
198 This is not the order that Gourevitch provides. They have been
altered so as to better coincide with the Aristotlean framework
regarding types of causation.
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possible -- outsourcing of white collar intellectual tasks, such as computer programming and telemarketing, only became viable with the development of inexpensive telecommunciations links. Thus, it is interesting to note, material conditions changed as a result of this learning process.While technological change altered the social learning process, this is not a uni-directional process.
How did this affect the coalitions? Again there is a learning process – or at least a shift in opinions. The policy mix that had existed for several decades needed to be changed because of market considerations. That is, at least, how business saw it:
all business groups have accepted the interpretation that their international problems are caused by labor costs, labor behavior, and the regulatory instruments that labor has supported. (p 30)
Labor, on the other hand, became defensive, seeking to maintain existing positions in wages, social services and jobs. They did not have a positive program to modernize and rationalize the economy, butbusiness did: lower taxes, lower social charges, less regulation. Inaddition, because of transnational production linkages, business accepted a reduced “link between domestic producers and domestic labor.” (p. 30, e.a.)
Each of these actors had to strike a balance in their position taking between managing the economy as a whole and asserting the
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particularities of its own situation.199 The predominant view, however, came to be based on the neo-classical paradigm. While Keynes has managed to sneak back into things here and there, one is much more likely to see references to Friedman in popular discourse.200 The predominant view, however, came to be based on the neo-classical paradigm. While Keynes has managed to sneak back into
199 As always, John Cleese was on top of the matter:
You will also have noticed that it isn’t just the way that
people try to get things out of you that is irritating. [It is
also] the way they try to disguise their rather obvious motives.
The rich don’t say ‘We want more money.’
They say, ‘this increased taxation is reducing personal
incentive.’
The trade unions don’t say, ‘We want more money.’
They say, ‘this governmental interference with wage
negotiations abrogates one of the fundamental principles of the
trade union movement.’
-- John Cleese, How to Irritate People
200 See the discussion of Evans on generations of policy. Also, while
discourse avoided mention of Keynes, the Reagan administration’s
economic policies -- like those of the current administration --
increased spending on defense and reduced taxes, resulting in
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things here and there, one is much more likely to see references to Friedman in popular discourse.
But what about education? The unions tell us something -- they are guided by the need to respond to this pattern. Attacks on unionsand governmental organizations -- as a wedge to start the push for privatization -- have inspired fierce resistance. But the issues that cohere with meritocracy and standards-based reform have not produced such a response. It is worth noting that unlike many unions, teachers unions are not only defensive, they have a positive program involving accountability and standards-based reform.
And that, after all, is what hegemony is about -- consequences, both intended and unintended, especially those that come from pervasive opinions. These opinions support programs that direct or the support the direction of social activity. The intention of the action counts to a degree, as does the anticipation of its effects. It is anticipated to have certain consequences, perhaps with the general population and elites anticipating things to come in much different ways. But it is the connection which is the key to group social learning -- it involves an active process of hegemony, seekingout those who will follow your leadership and accept your direction. The political programme that forms the core, as in core and periphery, of any hegemonic constellation of groups, has far reaching
deficit spending at a time of low or negative growth. This
certainly can be seen as a type of demand stimilus.
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consequences. Elements of the core economic programme emanate out, sort of like waves in a pond, affecting in multiple ways the other programs and policies in society.
Institutions, while they don’t merely reflect the power of those with the ability to mobilize the greatest resources, are never constructed without the cooperation of a significant number of those actors.201 It goes without saying -- far too often. It is a tautology that in order to build institutions you need the cooperation of those who control and have the ability to mobilize resources. In order to build a consensus some sort of (at least) tacit agreement is necessary. Small numbers of those who can controland/or mobilize resources can veto political programmes.
Perhaps one example is found in the existence of the World TradeOrganization in the absence of anything approaching a world government. Trade can be agreed upon because of the assimilationist pull of economic growth, increased government spending cannot.202
201 I believe I may be echoing a talk by Robert Kaufmann of Rutgers.202 Keynes at one point said that the multiplier effect of
government spending would never reach its highest level of 5 (based
on a marginal propensity to consume of 0.8). Because of ‘leakages’
in the economy, including both taxes and imports, an multiplier of 2
or 3 might be more likely. In a closed system, however, where there
were no imports and where reckoning with deficits could be delayed,
the multiplier would be greater.
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Those forces controlling economic resources can be pulled in to tradeagreements while those forces with political stakes will be likely toveto moves that will curtail their power. The former forces will have greater say and tend to supercede the interests --even the democratically arrived at interests-- of the general population. These are interests arrived at in a realm where power and the abilityto control resources are nearly the same thing.
Certain things you cannot do under such a balkanized system, however, and taking care of education may be one of them. Global dynamics may work against it. Of course, there are two arguments forthis, one that investment in education will yield long term returns and national policy should encourage this. The other argument is that short term concerns will argue against national expenditures on education. But what is likely to happen is that education will become less and less a national concern and more and more a private one.
This has parallels to the arguments against Keynesianism. For Keynes, confronted with an industrial plant not used to capacity, inefficient use was better than no use.203 There is an underlying
203 Keynes, of course, went beyond this: "If the Treasury were to
fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in
disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with
town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried
principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to
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assumption that the government must eventually deal with social welfare and that if some level of subsistence is guaranteed, people might as well be reasonably active.204 There is an underlying assumption that the government must eventually deal with social welfare and that if some level of subsistence is guaranteed, people might as well be reasonably active. It is necessary to induce some
do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the
note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and,
with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community,
and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater
than it actually is." The General Theory of Employment, Interest
and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 129. He did go on to say,
“It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like;
but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of
this, the above would be better than nothing.” The point however,
is that during periods of economic contraction stimulus is
necessary; that it be useful would be better, but the point is to
create stimulus.204 Full employment policies were the norm in most OECD countries
after World War II. In the US the Employment Act of 1946 and the
Humphrey-Hawkins Act were the chief pieces of legislation. In the
UK, under Clement Attlee, the Labour government enacted much of the
Beveridge Plan, which had significant Conservative support. This
resulted in the development of an extensive welfare state, reform
in education and the nationalization of key industries. It also
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sort of movement.
The conservative revival that cast aspersions on Keynes came strongly with the stagflation of the 1970s. The ‘Phillips curve’ shifted. A.W. Phillips noted in the late 1950s that there was an inverse relationship between unemployment and wage levels. High unemployment was linked to low wages and visa versa. Moreover, therewas a similar relationship between unemployment and general inflationlevels. But not in the 1970s. Richard Nixon’s statement that ‘we are all Keynesians now’ gave way to Jimmy Carter’s ‘misery index’ -- the adding of unemployment and inflation figures together to form oneindicator. If an inverse relationship held, this number should not vary much. In running against Gerald Ford, Carter pointed out that they had both grown during the Nixon-Ford administrations. They alsogrew during his administration, something Ronald Reagan was more thanwilling to point out, asking the American people if they were better off than they were four years ago.
While a simple answer might have been that, among other factors,the Oil Crisis had disrupted normal economic growth, instead there was a change of paradigms from Keynesianism to Monetarism, as discussed in the next section.205 But we must realize that for the Keynesian paradigm to work, it is necessary that institutions develop
led to an increase in the power of unions, something which was
curtailed in the US by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. (Gourevitch,
pp. 175-77)
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over time. This is not a mechanism, but organic growth upon a mechanism. Institutions are built and people work within them. They expand uponthem sometimes, but opportunities must be recognized by power holdersand they must devote resources to fully exploit them. This is true of both enterprises that must find their own revenue stream (the private sector) and those that depend on a revenue stream decided upon through collective decision making as manifest in state action (the public sector).
Individuals must also produce their own revenue streams -- or their families must. This is a thought Mrs. Thatcher made resoundingly when she said there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. It is the fulcrum of the Thatcherite revolution. While someone might want to ask at what age does the individual acquire this responsibility, it is effective in limiting calls on society’s responsibility.
The logic of public discourse in such a situation is that there becomes a time when the average individual says, “I’m not going to fight against that aspect of the system.” That logic includes both how determined a person is and how beaten down -- both consent and coercion play a role. The logic of ascent is tied up with a plethoraof factors -- the opportunities available, social discrimination, coercion, etc. In a paradigm based on bargaining relationships -- which all micro-based paradigms are -- it is based on factors which 205 Or at least the language of paradigms. Much of the meat of
monetarism was left out as Reagan continued to run deficits.
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are present but not always apparent in price series or their equivalents. This is to repeat an old argument, that there are always hidden factors in bargaining relationships and turn it into a question -- what is hidden?
The simple answer is power and control over resources. These result in the adoption of political programmes. With that let us return to Gourevitch. Flowchart B uses the first flowchart as its basis and tries to overlay educational policy on his lattice. The idea is that educational policy is not a thing-in-itself, but is somehow dependent on its relevance to economic policy debates.
[Insert chart b ‘political sociology of political economy of education’ -- filename: 004-pt1-ch1flowchartb]
Adapting Gourevitch (and following Aristotle) analysis is based
on multiple layers of causation. I look at four levels of causation:so-called direct effects (material cause), effects on (or through) institutions (formal cause), effects on individuals, social agents, coalitions and groups (efficient cause) and effects on ideology and policy (final cause).206
This is both a specific and a general problem, because educationcoalitions and electoral coalitions are different things. While neither is generally class-based, so much as regionally and race based, class plays a major role. That is often a role based not on 206 This is to be worked out if this becomes a full-length book.
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class per se, however, as the specific circumstances of that class member. Think of different members of the upper class as an example;the upper middle class parent who buys a home in Gross Point or SandsPoint does not want to subsidize parents who send their kids to eliteprivate schools, yet they are similar in many other ways. On the other hand, some in the lower classes are in favor of vouchers, especially those who seek a specific cultural or religious content for their child's education. (While it may be overplayed at time, oneducation much of what is debated is the product of cultural coalitions – some Christian conservatives advocate ‘breaking the spirit of the willful child.’207) And there are interest-based coalitions -- protectionist factions for employment regimes. 208 And there are interest-based coalitions -- protectionist factions for employment regimes.
Nonetheless, my general argument is that they are class-based, but with odd tweaks. Some of these tweaks are indicated below in a discussion from the Shields and Brooks commentary on the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour in the wake of Supreme Court Decision upholding the
207 This may be heard frequently on Christian radio (a.k.a., ‘listen
sponsored family radio’) WFME 94.7 FM in Newark and New York. Some
excerpts from February 18, 2004: “Faith subdues the kingdom of
Satan. . . . Never be fooled by a cultural move to subdue God. . .
. You don’t act on what you feel, you act on ‘thus sayeth the
Lord.’”208 Cite shipps, guttmann.
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constituionality of some voucher programs (June 28, 2002)
MARK SHIELDS: But the two parties are totally conflicted.Their constituencies are at odds. The Democrats-- I worked with three African American secretaries, single moms, all of whom were Protestants, all of whom had their children inWashington, DC in the Catholic schools. They scrimped, theysaved work overtime to keep their kids in the Catholic schools.
* * * DAVID BROOKS: That's exactly right. You go into a suburb, I don't care if it's Republican or Democratic, I paid $50,000 to get into the school district extra on my house cost. You're telling me the inner city kids are going to come here? They're against it [voucher programs]. The Teachers Unions and hence the Democrat Party are against it. You've got the Republican rank and file and theDemocratic establishment; that's a pretty strong coalition.But I do think you will see in inner city failing schools, like Milwaukee, like Cleveland, like Florida now, you'll see that all around the country.
In these quotes you can see some of the tensions. Parents are willing to pay to put their kids in ‘better schools.’ Parents also pay to keep their kids away from problem kids, who are eventually theresponsibility of the public schools. The public schools cannot and should not avoid this responsibility, but it makes it harder for a school to function well. So we see tensions. Local school district versus local school district, rich versus poor, city versus suburb. The funding system for schools, which relies heavily on property taxes is certainly class-based, but the resulting political positionsof parents are not intuitively obvious. Indeed, the costs of
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schooling (in direct outlays, housing costs, taxes and opportunity costs) are great enough so that we see classes split among the parents and non-parents. A business executive who has no children may, in terms of his ideology and interests, be disposed towards privatization and vouchers. The same man, now a parent who has made the move to a ‘good’ suburban district, may fear that vouchers or, more accurately, public school choice programs209 will result in an undesirable change in his child’s school's student body.
Intuitively obvious or not, it is something most people understand. It also informs their actions. They realize that peopledo move out to the suburbs to provide a safer environment and better schools for their kids. It has, since the 1950s at least, become a part of the folk understanding of what it means to be a parent in America. City schools are bad, to be avoided, something to which no well thinking parents would condemn their children.
So unlike housing, health and welfare, where more predictable positions in favor of corporatization and privatization are evident, education is somewhat more resistant. The strength of teachers
209 See Peter Cookson’s Introduction to School Choice (Yale, 1995), where
he recounts his experience as a headmaster at an elite private
school. He asked one of the parents why, when there was a very
good public school in the area, he chose to spend the money on a
private school which, frankly, had poorer facilities. The answer
he recieved was that he was there because of 'the other parents.'
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unions and their importance for the Democratic Party are one reason. The decentralized and fragmented nature of the system is another, as is its inertia. After all, creating a market is not the task, for a market of sort already exists for those with sufficient resources andthey do not want to have their existing options taken away.
I am not, however, about to argue that all politics is local. Certainly that is true, but politics is never merely local. Local debates occur within overarching frameworks which are created by forces far greater than any individual. Individuals do have their effects, especially when they are aggregated many times over, but political they become an effective reality as part of coalitions thatcohere by reference not just to transitory interests, but to ideological principles and question of identity.
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11) Social systems theory as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony
David Laitin has used social systems theory as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony. Rejecting any sort of mutual or automatic adjustment among sub-systems, he proposes that a hegemonic single sub-system provides a dominant symbolic framework. The idea of epistemic hegemony can make a distinction between peripheral and core arguments in any society. The exchange system isthe source of the core arguments of neo-liberal hegemony -- free trade, free markets and minimal state regulation. These values ‘travel’ toward the educational system via many pathways. Parallel paths include the limitation of state finance and education thought of as an investment with future monetary returns.
Possible institutional accommodations between neo-liberalism andmeritocracy are close to the center or this back and forth movement. Meritocratic practices, such as civil service exams, have traditionally been associated with the state. But for the last half-century a robust system of supposedly meritocratic exams has emanatedfrom the private sector and reshaped both private and public institutions of higher education. More than that, it has changed thecriteria for social advancement and, consequently, the common sense that people learn when they are making life choices. After World WarII, the US university system was remodeled according to a meritocratic logic. Elite institutions, while still serving
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privileged families, increasingly drew their prestige from their selectivity as measured, in good part, by the scores of their students on standardized tests. 210 And so it is not insignificant that it was the nation-wide decline in SAT scores that, as much as anything else, led to the 1980s renewed emphasis on academic excellence in secondary schools.
This is only part of the history of the testing regime. Aaron Pallas has suggested all of this is linked to a project of increased rationality. In neo- Skinneresque [Tayloresque?] fashion, it is assumed that high stakes testing, in which promotion and graduation are dependent on passing standardized tests, motivates students to achieve.211 Teachers and administrators are likewise motivated. As an example of how neo-liberal methods have entered this sphere, statistics and tests are thought to provide ‘value added assessment’ in which the teacher’s contribution to learning can be isolated from
210 Nicholas Lemann, 1999, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American
Meritocracy, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.211 Union publications provide numerous examples of this. A 2002
edition of New York Teacher, the magazine of the New York State Union of
Teachers, includes two letters on the subject of new tests. Both
claim that they are insufficiently challenging. One teacher attacked a
“’feel good’ philosophy of [unsound] assessment that does not support
standards-based ideals.” Another paired “a serious lowering of
motivation and standards.” (Letters, “Doesn’t add up,” and “An
easier ‘environment,’” 27 March 2002, pp. 8 - 9.)
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other causal factors.212
What I would like to suggest is not merely that the issue of meritocracy looms large in all of this, but the existence of a project to ‘increase rationality’ in a particular way. For the last quarter century we have been witnessing an ongoing project to mesh meritocracy and neo-liberalism -- to make them compatible. After all, one cannot assume that meritocracy goes hand-in hand with neo-liberalism. Certainly, if one reads earlier works, the institutionalinfrastructure of meritocracy requires not a minimalist state, but huge state expenditures on education. A neo-liberal meritocracy may be an oxymoron, the reality either leaving behind those who come fromimpoverished educational backgrounds or requiring a huge institutional apparatus engaged in a project of social engineering.
But the logic of merit-based social advancement is at the core the appeal. Especially prominent are efforts to reshape educational institutions in accordance with a meritocratic ethos. How this narrows the field of accepted educational models will be explored elsewhere. Here I wish to look at attempts to make meritocracy coherent with efforts to embed neo-liberal values. A common conceptual foundation can be found in the concept of comparative advantage.
Comparative advantage is perhaps the key concept in attempting to extrapolate a macro-economic policy from the principles of micro-212 Pallas, Lecture at Teachers’ College, New York, Dec., 2001.
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economics. Connected as it is to selection by the market, it also has a strong family resemblance to Jefferson’s “pure selection” of those who compose the “natural aristoi” – the natural aristocracy of talent and ability.213 And it is not only that the conceptual similarities between the two resonate through policy debates on education, but the major reform movement of the 80s and 90s --standards-based reform-- was causally linked to achieving comparativeadvantage for the US in international economic competition.
The link between meritocracy and neo-liberalism, is not, however, unproblematic. The union of economic liberalism and meritocracy is an uneasy one. The history of meritocratic institutions is closely tied to state enterprise and regulation and the implementation of standards requires much more than a Minimalist state. Then there are the problems of ‘meritocracy’ itself.
The late Michael Young, who coined the term in his 1958 book, meant the term ironically. Commenting less than a year before his death, he felt compelled to note that his book was a satire, that theterm was meant as pejorative and to lament the widespread use of the term in the United States and in the speeches of Tony Blair:
In the new social environment, the rich and powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves . . . The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them areencouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits,they can feel they deserve whatever they get. They can be insufferably smug . . . So assured have the elite become that
213 Letter to John Adams, 28 Oct 1813.
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there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves.214
Young’s point was that a meritocratic ethos can be used to justify increasingly inequality and a sense of privilege. For instance, children who lack access to the best schools routinely do poorly on exams; they remain close to the bottom and their inferior position isjustified by their low scores on standardized tests.215 More importantly, a meritocracy does not need to be universal. Not only can you set up a meritocracy among an elite group, but, in fact, a universal meritocracy --in which no child lacks access to high quality education-- goes against a universal reality: the privileged seek advantages for their children. This is a very practical link – a part of praxis – the comparative advantages parents seek for their own offspring. When it comes to educating other people’s children,216
it is only natural for parents to protect their own. Social conscience and filial duty are at odds.
This sociological truth underlies the political dynamics of building and reforming education institutions -- public education
214 Michael Young, “Down with Meritocracy,” Guardian (UK), 29
June 2001.215 Much of this paraphrased from Margalit Fox’s obituary of
Young, “Coined, Mocked Meritocracy,” NYTimes, 25 Jan 2002. It
could also be taken from any number of the education scholars
cited in throughout.216 There are numerous books that use this phrase in their title.
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requires the support of parents, but parents do not want to enable those who will compete with their children. Even if the standards movement is a serious attempt to reform the system -- which it certainly is for some--, the political will unlikely to be there to give ‘poor children’ the same opportunities as the well-to-do.
Given all this, we should expect at least some resistance to standards-based reform.217 The question is, where do we expect it andwhere do we find it? On privatization, the unions are resolute, their opposition invariable. On standards we find another outcome --there was resistance, but the unions have not been its source. Some education scholars and advocates have been extremely critical, there have been parents groups who oppose them and recently one highly respected administrator has suggested that he will risk a jail term rather than fully implement New York state’s standards program.218 The unions, however, have more often been enthusiastic supporters. Atthe same time, they have stressed that more resources are needed to make the reform work, and that as presently funded this is not a
217 Locating resistance is one of the keys to successfully
operating a paradigm based on hegemony. Parents, rather than
teachers organized by unions, seem to provide a great deal when
'opting out' of testing. Teacher resistance seems to be more
localized, as in the case of Garfield HS in Seattle, which is treated
in other chapters.218 Add cites, examples: Peter Sacks, Alfie Kohn, Supt. of White
Plains.
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sufficiently serious effort. [revise --]
The positions the unions have taken are telling. Despite the dangers involved,219 despite the misgivings of many teachers about theeffects of teaching to the test,220 despite the misgivings of many teachers about the effects of teaching to the test, despite the seeming trade off between ‘equity’ in the favor of ‘excellence,’ despite the narrowing of educational philosophies, the national unions sought to find a niche for themselves as the professionals needed to run this reformed system. They thought they were positioning their members to move from the diminishing ranks of industrial wage earners and enter into a more stratified professionalrank, as certified by academic degrees and qualifying exams. Not only did National Board Certification begin as a union project, but calling for more stringent licensing requirements is an issue that Shanker spearheaded.
As regards standards, the positions the unions have taken endorse the concept. A recent United Federation of Teachers (UFT) television ad speaks of teachers providing the needed expertise to
219 For example, some local Wisconsin union officials have argued
that by encouraging labor/management cooperation and by calling on
unions to take responsibility for the quality of its members, the NEA
was playing into the hands of those who wish to destroy public
education. The Scott Walker episode.220 Add teachers’ comments on standards
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get students passed demanding new tests; the other issues they speak of: “teach them the basics, keep them safe, prepare them for a more complex world.”221 They are linked to the meritocratic part of the process, and that means accepting parts of the neo-liberal programme.They must consider merit pay, value-added models and other proposed methods of achieving efficiency, at least as pilot projects. And they must also accept the main point of this meritocratic program -- that the chief failing of the public schools is that they have not allowed the most capable children to advance.
All in all, they have not only followed their interests but rearticulated them in a way so as to coherent with mainstream political formulations. And, while their influence is indisputable, this rearticulation of interests is not merely a response to materialinterests, partisan politics or generational change, but to changes in hegemonic strategies on a global scale. Most important in this regard is a public/private distinction -- not that between public andprivate interests, but between public and private enterprises. While these are obviously connected, it is a significant difference. Arguments that public enterprises are corrupt or inefficient and thusserve as feeding troughs for special interests conclude that privatization, as well as deregulation, are in the public interest.
Private provision is arguably more efficient, but it puts more
221 UFT television ad; add ran in the NY area during January 2002.
[check web-site]
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pressure on workers. One need only consider the example of health insurance and how it, at least prior to the Affordable Care Act, madepeople hold on to their jobs. This amounts to an assimilationist model, something that will be addressed in time. For the present, wemust realize that this is the part of the neo-liberal programme the unions are dead set against. And it is this set of decisions, opposition and resistance versus compromise and accommodation, that Ihope to trace. At the same time, one must account for the way the discourse is and why the discourse is the way it is.
One thought is that discourse analysis reveals a form of social learning: meritocracy as an unheralded form of social transformation. This approach allows for an inquiry based on the fundamental concept of ‘hegemony,’ as well as its associated terms, political programme, historic bloc, contradictory consciousness and ‘spontaneous consent.’ These terms all come from Gramsci and it is my belief that his conceptualization provides a paradigm that is far better than mechanistic paradigms able to explain ideological and strategic change. As such, it is also meant to provide an alternative to game theoretic analytic narratives; instead, it is a synthetic narrative of social actors coming to grips with changing circumstances and developing new strategies. The explanatory conceptualization is based on hegemony.222
222 It might also be referred to as heuristic case study and I
believe the use of hegemony is well suited to explaining a series of
events. If you think parsimony is always a virtue, you might limit
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As the original point of departure, it depicted the learning process of two unions in the same field as they align themselves on an issue by issue basis. That seemed a good idea at the time, for inso doing, it would depict not social learning, but social actors learning in the context of ongoing social struggles. However, that did not seem sufficient once one had to explain the continuities between NCLBand the Obama administration, thus a wider net has been cast, one that looks at the advent of TFA, the way parents choose schools and how teachers are portrayed on TV and in films.
But there was also another reason -- the pragmatics of strategic choice does not reduce itself easily to either analysis based on self-interest or moral critique. In terms of interest, there are so many ways of conceiving of interest that no single string of calculations can predict -- as I’ve mentioned, individual, corporate group and general interests have to be calculated and somehow integrated and balanced. There is no easy prediction without also understanding who has the power to make decisions and mobilize resources, so this type of calculation is always limited in explaining political outcomes.223 Morality -- the groundwork of
yourself to game theoretics only. But the world is complex and you
end up adhocking all the time.223 This does not mean it is not sometimes very effective, and
those cases are the basis of the greatest successes of the North -
Thomas approach. This may be addressed elsewhere and the Bates, et
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grievance -- involves a different complication. Strategic decision makers have to take into account what Weber said in Politics as a Vocation;a political leader, when considering how to justify positions, cannotabide merely by personal conscience. In this case the appearance of hypocrisy may be the result of not wanting to alienate allies. Not only can one not ignore opportunities, one must seize them -- for a leader, to be described as an opportunist is often as not a compliment.
To consider all of this as part of a process of social learning,
we can state that politics plays the dominant role in institutional
change, with the stipulation that economics has perhaps the dominant
role in politics. That is not to say that administrative and
pedagogical expertise have no weight in political rationalizations --
far from it. Nevertheless the influence of economics as channeled
through political processes provides much of the impetus behind
educational change. You can’t prove that, but it can become the
inspiration/point of departure for a historical narrative -- an
analytical narrative that attempts to weigh factors against one
another in what is, by necessity, a qualitative rather than
quantitative [factor?] analysis.
al.-- volume Analytic Narratives is taken up.
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