DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION AND MARKETS:

Segmentation, Privatization and Commodification

Brian Ford

New York City Department of Education

brianford58@yahoo.com; bpford1@gmail.com

Presented at the Institution of Education and Research

University of Dhaka

Dhaka, Bangladesh

26 August 2014

Please note this is a draft.

It may be cited, but please identify it as 'the Dhaka draft version.'

Now, surely nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital andthe servility of labor.

-- Horace Mann, Fifth Annual Report to the Board of Education of Massachusetts, 1842

INTRODUCTION:

The promise of egalitarian democracy is based on the promise of

public education – that it function to educate the vast majority of

citizens so that they may aspire and succeed. At least that is one

of the major theories in support of universal and compulsory

education in the US. The argument is that, without a public

education system that works, in effect, to redistribute economic

opportunity to the next generation, democracy under a free market

system is much more likely to result in a stratified society with

limited social mobility.

Some people don't have a problem with that. Thirty five years

ago Michael Katz pointed out that inequality works our really well for

members of the elite and made two observations that are still

relevant. First, the nation’s public education systems have

consistently been a mix of inconsistent elements; they are:

“universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and

class-biased.” Much to the point, he also suggests that the question

we should first ask is not what we should have in education, but why

don’t we have something much better: “I expect . . . that any

serious effort to equip poor children as effective competitors for the

well-to-do will meet enormous, and probably successful resistance.”1

Katz thus identifies one dynamic the affects policy formation in

the US – the desire, particularly of the upper middle classes, to

protect their children from the competition of those who have merit

and would benefit from high quality public education. However, what

he points to was more relevant at the time he wrote than it is now;

comparing the 1970s to the current time, there was then less

globalization, fewer immigrants arriving in the US and we can say,

very generally, that workers, wages, career professions and their

accompanying salaries were all more insulated from global competition

than they are today. Indeed, wages and salaries have been at best

stagnant for the last 40 years, while the growth in the US economy has

been concentrated in the upper strata of investors and financiers.

In most developed countries, and especially English-speaking

ones, inequality has risen; among the more developed OECD countries,

it is highest in the United States. According to Timothy Noah, "Among

the industrial democracies where income inequality is increasing, it's

1 Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in

America [1971, expanded edition 1975], p xviii, p. 152.

much worse in the United States than it is almost anywhere else. Among

34 nations recently surveyed by the OECD, the United States got beat

only by Turkey, Mexico, and Chile. That's as measured by the Gini

coefficient, and including taxes and government transfer payments."2

Nonetheless, the dynamic that Katz pointed to – of parents

working to find better schools for their children and get a leg up on

the competition is still in play. The very rich sent their children

to elite private schools that prepare them for elite universities; the

upper middle classes retreat to enclave suburbs where expenditures on

schools are 2 to 3 times what they are in inner cities and where the

vast majority of the student body comes from homes with higher incomes

and higher levels of education; concerned parents who do not have the

resources to move to these suburban district attempt to find the

'better' schools in their own districts, whether they are magnet

public schools or the better charter schools; finally, the children of

those parents with the fewest resources and who are least 2 Timothy Noah, “Can Domestic Policy Affect Income Distribution?” The

New Republic, 13 March, 2012. There is an extensive literture on this. See, among many others, Colin Gordon, “Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality,” at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/index; and Thomas Piketty, "The Explosion of US Inequality after 1980,"in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 294–96.

knowledgeable end up in schools with other children who have similar

parents.

All in all, the United States ends up grouping their students

according to the success and concern of their parents. Those who have

parents who have the highest levels of education and income –two

figures which are highly correlated-- tend to go to schools where the

majority of students have a greater share of what we might is often

called cultural capital. This stratification of the K-12 education

system has numerous effects and is reflected in test scores. Indeed,

one reason the US does not do as well on international tests is

because of schools in areas of concentrated poverty. With a child

poverty rate of close to 28% – 7 times that of Finland, for instance –

the US has a lot of baggage. Yet, as we shall see below, the claim

that the US does not do well on international tests is manufactured

and not borne out by the evidence.

This dynamic of stratification points to another: business

strategies which aim to segment the market. What private business

strategies do -- and what many charters also try to do -- is segment

the market. The involves dividing a broad target market into subsets

of consumers who have common needs and priorities, and then designing

and implementing strategies to target them. There are many aspects to

this. Traditionally the big money maker was selling textbooks. Now,

however, education corporations such as Pearson and Wireless

Generation have moved beyond this to providing curricula, data

systems, virtual education products and teaching training.

Governmental offices for curriculum development at the state and

district level have been eliminated since outsourcing is thought to be

more efficient. More importantly, in the name of raising standards,

every state in the US is now required to gives sets of standardized

tests, most of them produced by private entities. Finally, there are

new forms of financing an regulating (or not regulating schools). Let

us start then with charter schools, move on to the claims made about

US performance on international tests and finish by taking a

philosophical approach to the problems of education in a democratic

and capitalist society.

In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, what follows

is broken into five sections. The first, which recounts Amy

Gutmann's Democratic Education and uses her work to examine business

models in education. The second is an examination of testing and its

effects on creativity. The fhird is a brief account of Charter

Schools. The fourth looks at attacks on the Public Education system

in the US. The fifth looks at the numerical basis for these claims.

Finally there is a conclusion that looks to three very different, but

extremely important American writers on quality, education and social

justice, Robert Pirsig, John Dewey and John Adams.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION WHEN DEMOCRACY AND CAPIALISM ARE AT ODDS?

Amy Gutmann, who became President of the University of

Pennsylvania in 2004, can lay claim to being a practical educator.

Nonetheless, she began her career as a theorist, a political

philosopher, writing on democracy and education. Her work encouraged

autonomy for educational professionals and it is instructive to

examine the values in her work and how much influence they have had.

Political theories of education, according to Gutmann, fall

into three broad categories based on the source of authority: those

that give authority over education to the state, those that give it

to the family and those that give it to education professionals.

Saying that none of them by itself coheres with a liberal democracy,

Gutmann rejects all three models: the family state, in which

children are educated for the good of the state and the sake of

social harmony; the state of families, where parents are entrusted to

make choices for and pursue the best interests of their children; and

the state of individuals, which relies on educational professionals

and expert knowledge to create institutions which maximize the future

choice of children, “without prejudicing children towards any

controversial conception of the good life.”3 In the end, she

argues, none of the three models work in a liberal democracy

precisely because they are based solely on a single source of

authority.

Of course, whenever one says there are three kinds of anything

(perhaps even more so then when you say there are only two kinds), it

is a simplification and often a conscious over-simplification done

for the sake of argument. In this case, for instance, one might

consider human communities other than the state as being sources of

authority, one might question the definition of family and one might

wonder if, as an alternative to education professionals, we might

consider giving authority to those who are deemed somehow to have a

'calling' for educating the young. It is unlikely that Guttmann, 3 Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education, Princeton University Press, 1987, discussion pp 22-44, quote p. 34.

whose Democratic Education has been praised as the most important book on

the role of education in a democracy since Dewey,4 is unaware of

this. Rather, she is not willing to embrace any of viewpoints, but

offers a model which incorporates the other three. Gutmann calls for

a “democratic state of education [which] attempts to balance the

power of the state, parents, and educational experts and officials.”5

A sophisticated thinker, she emphasizes that the education of

the young is shaped not just by governments, but by Democracy more

broadly conceived. She also does not miss out on the fact that the

young grow older over time and then have their chance to shape

Democracy. Accordingly, she makes her three-fold division in order

to begin a discussion that will encompass theories which ask who

should have the authority to shape the education of citizens in a

democracy.

Gutmann's is often the first book on the syllabus for courses on

Democracy and Education. She is a more lucid writer than John Dewey

and covers, chapter by chapter, section by section, a set of 4 Mark Yudof, “Review of Democratic Education,” Ethics Vol. 99, No. 2, 1989.5 Democratic Education., p 42.

controversies for public education that make it almost an ideal book

for a college course. Students may engage on issues ranging from

creationism to sex education, parental authority to sexism, religious

education to public finance, television and technology to book

banning, illiteracy to adult education. With all this, it is

interesting to note that business and markets, so much the woof and

warp of debates on education reform, are words that do not appear in

her three-fold division, among her chapter titles or the titles of

the sub-sections.

It is particularly striking because the most forceful calls for

education reform of the current day look not to the state, not to the

family, not to 'future' individuals, nor, by any means, to

educational professionals acting on their behalf, to be the main

actor. Rather they seek to authorize a fourth group to shape the

future of public education in the US: the business community and

those who feel they have a calling to use business methods to improve

and reform the school system. What I will suggest in what follows,

half as a conceit, half as a description, that contemporary efforts

at reforming education in the US –on which there is much bipartisan

consensus-- seem determined to be systematic in their rejection of

Gutmann's conclusions.

There is little call for balance between the state, the family

and education professionals. Instead, schools and school systems, the

argument goes, should be allowed to be run by non-professionals, at

first as an experiment, later as a norm. (Yes, there are

professionals, but they often come from fields other than education.)

Families should be able to choose among competing schools which

reflect their values – they are the customers for whom the schools

must compete. As for the state, one cannot say its role is reduced,

but its role is changed. Instead of running things directly, it is

to set up the rules by which different educational entities can

compete, to insist that student performance be measured, to gather

data and then determine who has succeeded and who has failed. With

the exception of establishing standards for learning, the state does

not provide content. Students are not citizens, they are clients.6 6 As a senior vice-president of the AFT, Bella Rosenberg, once wrote in a personal communication, “One of the keys, I think is tracing the shift in the use of the word ‘citizen’ to ‘consumer’ or client.”The e-mail Bella Rosenberg continued, “The pervasiveness of market metaphors is quite striking. Ed. was one of the last holdovers; no more. And underlying the ‘choice’ argument is this: the shift from collective to individual responsibility. Basically, vouchers say go choose (not that we’ll give you enough money to make REAL choices) and if you happen to choose wrong, tough.” (May 1999) See also, Andrew Rossi’s new documentary, “Ivory Tower.”

This overstates the case by a bit, but still, why is there such

a distance between Gutmann and contemporary education reform? One

reason is that her book was first published in 1987. In the timeline

of education reform this is during the launch of the standards

movement, roughly mid-way between the publication of the A Nation at Risk

and the 1989 National Educational Summit at Charlottesville,

Virginia, where President Bush and nearly all 50 Governors (Bill

Clinton among them) convened to set education goals for the nation.

This may surprise people today who are accustomed to see education

summits on NBC, CNBC and MSNBC,7 but the goals adopted at the meeting

eventually transformed themselves into America 2000 in the Bush

administration and were passed as Goals 2000 during the Clinton

Administration. Even if it is true that the so-called excellence

movement was driven by a business-inspired coalition,8 at that moment

the need to “discover a curriculum appropriate for developing the

7 NBC broadcast its first annual Education Nation summit in September 2010. From Brian Jones' description (see the Introduction) emphasizes 'the theme' of employing privatization to fix the schools.

8 See Thomas Toch, In The Name of Excellence: The struggle to reform the nation's schools, why it's failing, and what should be done, Oxford University Press, New York, 1991.

right skills and values for citizens of a deliberative democracy”9

seemingly had more widespread support.

Still, that certainly was a long time ago. Larry Cuban recounts

how things changed the quarter-century since. Claims were made, for

example, by a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education who said that

“faltering academic achievement between 1967 and 1980 sliced billions

of dollars from the U.S. Gross national product.” Rhetorical

questions were asked, for instance, by the chairman of IBM, who said,

education “is a major economic issue . . . If our students can’t

compete today, how will our companies compete tomorrow?”

Nonprofessionals were brought in to run major school systems, and

they started talking about “the bottom line. Business has profit and

loss. The school system has students and [need to] get through these

exams and go on to successful careers. That’s what this system is

about.”10 9 Matthew Pamental, “What is it Like to be a Deliberative Democrat?” in Steven Tozer, ed., Philosophy of Education 1998, Philosophy of Education Society, Urbana, Illinois, 1998, p 229; accessed September 2012 at http://ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/pes/article/view/2110/805.

10 Larry Cuban “Making Public Schools Business-Like . . . Again,”PS: Political Science & Politics, April 2004, pp 237-9. Though reported by Cuban, these are direct quotes from, respectively. Chester Finn, thenserving in the elder Bush's administration, John Akers, then chairmanof IBM and Harold Levy, then Chancellor of the New York City Public

While Cuban goes on to systematically question those statements,

to counter those assumptions (and also to suggest they are often

based on uncertain math),11 anyone reading about education reform

today would think that business and markets would at least merit a

full chapter treatment, if not half the book – even a book primarily

concerned with civic education.

But Gutmann was writing before – before Chubb and Moe, before No

Child Left Behind, before Joel Klein, before Rupert Murdoch hired Joel

Klein, before Teach for America, before charter schools, before the

advent of the pervasive theory that, if not the family, then the

state and educational professionals themselves might in fact be the

source of multiple problems that could be solved by applying common

sense – the common sense of what works in business.

Gutmann was writing before the common sense of what works in

business became the predominant way of justifying educational reform.

Schools.

11 Uncertain math is the focus of my, Respect For Teachers or The Rhetoric Gap and How Research on Schools is Laying the Ground for New Business Models in Education, Rowman and Littlefield, 2012.

With that spread of business sense as common sense, there is a dual

abdication of social responsibility, the first part of which is

treating kids like adults, the second of which places inordinate

responsibility for 'closing the achievement gap' on individual

teachers and also places inordinate blame for the failures of public

education on educators' shoulders when they are more accurately

linked to long standing social pathologies and an unjust distribution

of educational opportunity. Those who were most influenced by

Gutmann's work had different and, to some eyes, what might seem

quaint priorities:

I examine the role of public education in response to these social challenges. Based on Amy Gutmann’s democratic education theory, I maintain that the foremost role of public education is to foster basic democratic principles (such as equal opportunity and liberty)12

How then does one somehow come to grips with the question of

markets and their effect on education and, in particular, democratic

education, in both theory and practice?

12 Sigal Ben-Porath, "Radicalizing Democratic Education: Unity andDissent in Wartime," in ed. Kal Alston, Philosophy of Education 2003, Philosophy of Education Societym Urbana, Illinois, 2004, p. 245; accessed October 2012 at http://ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/pes/article/view/1741/458.

This part of the essay hardly has room for an exhaustive or

comprehensive account, but it can be rather suggestive, the first

suggestion being that international competition has justified the

adoption of business practices in schools which may actually be

hurting us in international economic competition. Foremost among

these is the adoption of a top down management style which assumes

breaking apart and reconstituting the school –so-called 'creative

destruction' or disruptive innovation- is a desirable goal. This

draws on the principle of autonomy, but it is not autonomy for

teachers and only sometimes for principals, but is mostly for the

managers of principals.

Over the last thirty years a narrative has developed that has

become the common sense of education reform. The prevailing argument

is that we can succeed in global competition, but only if we first

succeed in fixing our failing system of education. This requires

the acceptance of two competing and somewhat contradictory claims.

On the one hand, global competition is conceived in terms of free

trade and is assumed to be something that we should support. As Jeff

Faux argues, in order to support Free Trade agreements from the North

American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to The Trans-Pacific

Partnership (TPP) one claim that constantly repeats is that “American

workers are naturally superior to other workers and would therefore

'win' in any fair competition.”13

While this has roots in the Reagan administration, the use of

such rhetoric is truly bipartisan. From President Obama: "Our

workers are the most productive on Earth, and if the playing field is

level, I promise you: America will always win.”14  On the other hand

there is another claim that we can not compete; we are told that

America is being 'out educated' – that other countries have superior

educational systems and that we are being left behind. How we ever

produced the American workers who are 'naturally superior' and who

continue to be 'the most productive in the world' when we have this

out-dated education system is left a mystery.

The connection between education reform and free trade is

crucial. As Faux points out, the claim about American workers being

13 Jeff Faux, “The Myth of the Level Playing Field,” The American Prospect, 13 March 2012; accessed October 2012 at http://prospect.org/article/myth-level-playing-field.

14 Barack Obama, State of the Union Message, 24 January 2012; from Faux, “The Myth of the Level Playing Field.”

superior is “problematic at best and at worst, a pander to our

national delusion of exceptionalism.” In major part, the delusion is

that free trade results in large numbers of highly paid jobs that a

highly educated populace will be able to take advantage of. However,

“for many governments in less developed countries and investors in

developed countries, exploiting labor is the point—cheap workers

represent these nations’ comparative advantage.”15

Within the teaching profession, however, exploiting labor has to

be accomplished by other means. There are direct methods – in the

2nd Presidential debate of 2012, Mitt Romney suggested we 'staple

green cards' to the diplomas of “People from around the world with

accredited degrees in science and math” and have skills we need.16

This would not only help information technology companies and the

like, but would also make it easier for school districts to import

science and math teachers, as well as ESL teachers, foreign language 15 Both quotes in this paragraph, Faux, “The Myth of the Level PlayingField.”

16    Mitt Romney, proposal during his 2nd debate with Barack Obama, Hemstead, NY, 16 October 2012. This is the full quote from mynotes: "I think we should give visas to people --green cards, rather-- to people who graduate with skills that we need. People from around the world with accredited degrees in science & math get agreen card stapled to their diploma."

teachers, etc. Most states will both honor overseas degrees and

provide temporary teaching credentials, if needed.

Then there are indirect methods. Here we can look at another

article by Faux; adding his voice to many others, he talks about the

media ignoring facts and data while “the war on public education”

continues "for the sake of the children." He recounts the “familiar

media narrative [in which] the central problem with American K-12

education is low-quality teachers protected by their unions.”

Privatization is the solution, especially “the privately run but

publicly financed charter school,” which because they are not

regulated to the same degree, are mostly nonunion and are in

competition with one another, will provide a better model.17

In the narrative, adopting this model is one long needed step.

The next most pressing is paying teachers based on their performance

--for which you may read the ability of their students to get better

scores on standardized tests. Ignoring the fact that this is exactly

17 Jeff Faux, “Education Profiteering; Wall Street's Next Big Thing?,” Huffington Post Blog, 29 September 2012; accessed October 2012 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-faux/education-wall-street_b_1919727.html.

the opposite of what the best education systems in the world do, it

is claimed that both steps are imperative if we are not to fall by

the wayside in international economic competition.

The global competition theme is, by itself, not new; that our

system of education must be reformed because of global competition

has been a constant for over half a century.18

But what does that mean for democratic education?

Both John Dewey and Amy Gutmann begin from the axiom that tax-

supported public schools should primarily serve democratic ends.

However, as a practical matter, creating a system of public education

means dealing with the economic ends of powerful agents in society.

Gutmann's use of the family, the state and a cadre of educational

professionals is therefore useful as a heuristic device to sort out

the attacks on public education among the family, state and

professional sources of authority.

It follows, then, that there are different types of attacks. In 18 See , for instance, Jonathan Plucker, "Look Out,

the Russians Japanese Irish British Indians and Chinese are coming!" Guest post at Rick Hess's 'Straight Up'  Blog, Education Week, April 2, 2012; accessed June 2012 at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2012/04/why_is_the_us_prioritizing_minimum_competency.html

non-technical language we can think of 'friendly' attacks, such as

school choice, in which the authority of parents to choose for their

children is used as a pretext for dismantling and/or restructuring

systems of public education. But school choice is then undermined by

the standardization of education in what might be deemed 'positive'

attacks – attacks which claim the system is lagging and needs higher

standards. The common core is the latest example and I am not so

much against it as I am its linkage to high stakes tests. These

narrow curriculum and reduce the effort to shape citizens to the

desire to create hyper-functional economic individuals who can

survive in even the worst economic maelstrom. As such, it is paired

with a negative state position which seeks to reduce if not eliminate

state enterprise, except in so much as it might be outsourced to

private enterprise. Finally, there are 'attack' attacks – on unions,

on tenure, on professional qualifications.

Taken together, a think this is a good, if not exactly rigorous,

way of describing what has been happening since, more or less, 1978.

Let's then return to the suggestion that, at least as a conceit,

contemporary advocates of this brand of education reform are nearly

systematic in their rejection of Gutmann's conclusions. Where to

locate autonomy is one example, for it is closely aligned with the

question of who one invests with authority. But there are others,

ranging from encouraging critical thinking to maintaining a principle

of non-exclusion to disallowing repression of arguments.

In all of these contemporary education reform finds itself at

odds with Gutmann. Her assertion that “[c]hildren must learn not

just to behave in accordance with authority, but to think critically

about authority if they are to live up to the democratic ideal of

sharing political sovereignty as citizens,” is often cited as a

indication of a bias, while her argument that “all educable children

[need to] learn enough to participate effectively in the democratic

process,” gets even worse treatment, for it is hardly considered in

main stream discussions of the goals of public education.19

Certainly no one seems to take the stance of an H. L. Menken,

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to

think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing

superstitions and taboos.”20 Or, if they do, they want to avoid the 19 Both quotes from Gutmann, Democratic Education, pp 51, 170.

20 The quote continues, “Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and

danger.

The bias argument, however, is neither unsophisticated nor

without merit. It raises serious questions as to the viability of

Gutmann's project – or any project based on tolerance, understanding

and rational deliberation. While one can assert that we should hold

such values, one is hard pressed to say why they should trump other

values. Arguments that she is biased in favor of a “value-neutral

liberalism” that is “precisely the sort of comprehensive worldview”

which Gutmann herself has “claimed to circumvent by refusing to pass

judgment on different ways of life” and that she employs a “value-

laden conception of autonomy” in contending that schools emphasize

the transmission of “those civic values—tolerance, mutual respect,

and egalitarianism—necessary for continued deliberation” are

particularly worthy of note.21

intolerable.” H. L. Menken, Prejudices: Third Series, A.A. Knopf, New York, 1922.

21 See Rita Koganzon, “Educating for Liberty? The Shortcomings ofContemporary Civic Education Theories,” American Enterprise Institute Program on American Citizenship, Policy Brief 2, August 2012; accessed October 2012at http://www.aei.org/files/2012/08/03/-educating-for-liberty-the-shortcomings-of-contemporary-civic-education-theories_16425781063.pdf; and Stephen G. Gilles , “On Educating Children: A Parentalist Manifesto,” University of Chicago Law Review, 63: 937, Summer, 1996; accessed Oct 2012 at http://www.politicalscience.uncc.edu/godwink/PPOL8687/WK2%20Jan%2018%20Diversity

Nonetheless, the lack of attention to her underlying goals may

be more telling. Speaking more generally, Cuban puts it more

strongly: “Even more damning are the questions that have been omitted

from the current economic and political agendas shaped by business-

inspired reformers,” and then lists three unanswered questions.22

%20and%20Community/Gilles%20On%20educating%20children.pdf. Koganzon is particularly interested in two court cases, the

first (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 US 205, 1972) involving Amish parents who wanted to remove children from the school at the age of 14, the second (Mozert v. Hawkins County Public Schools,827 F. 2d 1058, 6th Cir. 1987) involving Christian fundamentalist parents who may very well have had “a legitimate grievance in complaining that a school curriculum of neutral exposure belittled their religious values by treating them as subjective preferences, in essence espousing a worldview that eschews all comprehensive world views.” (Koganzon, citing Nomi Stolzenberg, “‘He Drew a Circle That Shut Me Out’: Assimilation, Indoctrination, and the Paradox of Liberal Education,” Harvard Law Review, 106:627–29, 1993.) This is hardly a insubstantial argument, and Koganzon asks a question to which there is no ready answer and thus suggests the difficulty, if not impossibility, of realizing Gutman's project: “ to what extent should intolerance be tolerated and how can a commitment to pluralism and a unified civic culture be reconciled?”

In contrast, Gilles' 'Paternalistic Manifesto' purports to offera 'new paradigm' under which “both the direct speech of parents to their children--and their indirect speech through teachers and schools as their agents--should be categorized as parental educative speech that is entitled to the same high-level protection against content- or viewpoint-based state action that political and religiousspeech already receive.”

22 Larry Cuban “Making Public Schools Business-Like . . . Again,” p 239. Cuban lists three questions that remain “unasked by business-inspired reform [and] go unanswered today.” First, do “schools

Among the omitted we can include Gutmann's major principles, those of

non-discrimination and non-repression.

Gutmann's principles of non-discrimination and non-exclusion are

sometimes given lip service, but the ways they are used --to buoy

'high performing charter schools' or programs to revamp teacher

evaluation-- are hardly consistent with providing high quality

education for everyone or improving the quality of teaching. (I

realize this is an argument that still needs to be made, but it is

not a difficult one to make.) Non-discrimination states all educable

children must be educated, not, as often is the case with charters,

that some children will be selected out to go to better schools. The

related principle of non-exclusion means that no one may be excluded

from being educated so as to have the tools for participating in our

democracy. But the tools pay for performance systems would develop

are likely to be much narrower than that. In most current debates

geared toward preparing workers also build literate, active, and morally sensitive citizens who carry out their civic duties?” Second, if it is possible at all, how “can schools develop independently thinking citizens who earn their living in corporate workplaces?” Third, when “unemployment increases, and graduates have little money to secure higher education or find a job matched to their skills, will public schools, now an arm of the economy, get blamed—as they have in the past—for creating the mismatch?” The first two overlap considerably with the discussion below.

non-discrimination and non-exclusion are not imperatives, but

platitudes.

As for non-repression, this is sometimes treated as liberal

nonsense. The principle of non-repression calls for open debate; it

does not allow for curtailing rational deliberations on or competing

conceptions of 'the good life' of 'the good society.' Although the

question of what to do with groups that do not show tolerance and

respect may be problematic, tolerance and respect for the viewpoints

of others is the point, perhaps quite literally the starting point of

a liberal society: no one group or alliance of groups can enforce its

view of what is good in life. This principle seems to get the

shabbiest treatment, for it seems to be shunted aside, the assumption

being that everything will take care of itself over time. A

competitive market-based system will do this, somehow.

Thus, either through operational definitions of equal

opportunity –that opportunity for a few of the deserving poor in high

performing charter schools will suffice-- or the unwillingness to

recognize that there is a problem –lack of tolerance for opposing

views-- we see that current debates skirt around the problems of

democratic education Gutmann raises. Those debates are goal-

oriented, the main goal being economic success for the individual,

the nation and, one might guess, a few well-connected companies.

This is, of course, at most a conceit, so one can find exceptions,

but the idea that Gutmann has been consistently contradicted and

ignored gains in credibility when we consider her first priority,

which is not to resolve “the problems plaguing our educational

institutions,” but to establish a set of methods “that are compatible

with a commitment to democratic values.”23  

We can finish with autonomy, which Gutmann would grant to

teachers so that they may “exercise intellectual independence in

their classrooms,” which is a necessary precondition if one wishes to

“teach students to be intellectually independent.”24 This, however,

is simply not very often the case when reforms espouse business

models. There are indirect affects that promote not autonomy in the

classroom, but a top-down model in which intellectual freedom is

curtailed.

23 Gutmann, Democratic Education, p 11.

24 Gutmann, Democratic Education, p. 80.

Here assumptions are heavily influenced by Chubb and Moe, who in

the early 1990s made a seminal call for principal autonomy. Their

Politics, Markets and America’s Schools 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.25 They were (and

presumably still are) also explicitly against democratic control of

schools and advocate, above all, giving managers autonomy.26

Ironically, a robust anti-demcratic movement has grown up in the

quarter-century since Democratic Education was published. But here there

is is also an interesting contradiction, one which, considering this

happened after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, is even more richly

ironic. While in many ways granting autonomy is proposed as an

alternative to a command economy model –which old public school

systems supposedly resemble--, in promoting autonomy for managers as

opposed to teachers, something is lost which both the free market and

25 John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe , Politics, Markets and America’s Schools, TheBrookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1990, p 564.

26 If so, Chubb and Moe may have turned out a seminal work in sociallearning. See Brian Ford, Social Learning and Hegemony: Education Reform In The US In The Post-Vietnam Era, in process.

democratic institutions value: the knowledge, expertise and judgment

of the individual.

John Gray, in discussing Miser and Hayek, claims that the

problem with planned economies is that they do not take advantage of

the information possessed by individuals. In other words, a plan

thinks of the individuals implementing it as mere executors of the

plan. However, this underestimates them -- they can adjust for

specific conditions which the planner could never anticipate.27 In

sum, they can use their knowledge and information, which otherwise is

underutilized or lost completely. In terms of investment, this

knowledge does not provide any return.

All of this came after Gutmann wrote, but if there is a

deficiency in her work, it stems from underestimating both the power

of the business-side argument and the difficulties of creating a

system which (a) incorporates all three models on which she

elaborates in her thought experiments and (b) is not overrun by

private interests in the form of business-oriented ideologies of

27 John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and culture at the close of the modern age,New York: Routledge, 1995, pp 66-76

change. Of course, hers was foremost a normative work telling us to

what we should aspire and thus, perhaps, make its eventual appearance

–or at least the appearance of some better system-- more likely.

Nonetheless, whatever benefits might result in terms of civic virtue

and future choice, the practical difficulties are so enormous that

they threaten to rend her argument moot.

The greatest of these practical difficulties is encapsulated in

the following argument: we are not merely part of a democratic state

or a system of representative democracy, but a democratic, and

decidedly capitalist state. While representation and democracy may

provide the form of the state, capitalism is the source of the

greater part of its content; while there are exceptions, the function

of the school is shaped to great degree by the perceived needs of

capital. This is especially true of the demands business has for

labor. When this perspective dominates, schooling is seen in terms

of refining the labor supply and children are conceptualized not as

future citizens, but as potential workers.28

28 See Alan J. DeYoung, Economics and American Education: An Historical and Critical Overview of the Impact of Economic Theories on Schooling in the U.S., Longman, New York. 1989.

An extreme version of this argument is found in Socialist and

Marxist perspectives; these view schools as having as their primary

role the production of wage-labor for capitalistic exploitation. But

you don't have to be a Marxist to believe that reform is a facade

hiding other motives – you just might think that people are greedy.

Or you might accept a mixed view which sees the state as an arena in

which pitched battles are waged (without end or definitive

resolution) between those forces seeking truly democratic reforms and

pushing for greater egalitarianism along and those engaging in the

democratic process so that they might annex the resources of the

state for reasons of private capital accumulation.29 In the first

view, the state and education authorities are little more than

functionaries doing the bidding of economic actors. But even in the

latter view, the presence of political forces which draw their

strength from the market system creates huge challenges to

establishing a system in which there is a balance between the goals

of educating for the sake of the community, respecting parent's

wishes and giving students, as they become adults, great latitude in

choosing their own version of the good life.

29 See, for example, Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State, Stanford University Press, 1985.

It also creates a challenge for Democracy itself. One of

Gutmann's reviewers claimed the book's central theme was “how to

produce true republican citizens -- citizens who possess both the

ability and the motivation to participate in their deliberative

political communities,” the dual paradox being that the “democratic

context . . . imposes limits on how educational decisions are made”

and that, in the reciprocal relationship between education and

democracy, educational decisions made in previous generations

determine to large degree how decisions are made and who makes

decisions in a democratic polity.30

To a great extent I depend on Herbert Kliebard to make

sense of this. He arguded that there are four major social

30 Suzanna Sherry, “Book Review: Republican Citizenship in a Democratic Society,” Texas Law Review, Vol. 50: 1229, May, 1988; assessed July 2012 at https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app? action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=66+Tex.+L.+Rev.+1229&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=48e2092e5d983905dd2f613fdf2cfd02,

See, also, Sanford Levinson, “What Should Citizens (as Participants in a Republican Form of Government) Know About the Constitution?”, William & Mary Law Review Vol 50:1239, 2009; accessed August 2012 at http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/ wmlr/vol50/iss4/6.

agendas in education, each linked with a coalition of

interest and ideational groups; since the 1980s, the

'humanist,' the 'social reconstructionist,' and the child

'developmentalist' philosophies have seemed to fall by the

wayside, leaving ascendant a 'social efficiency' group, the

approach of which is preparing children for adult roles.

While Kliebard was looking at a 'social efficiency

educator' who wanted to apply the standard techniques of

industry and make of schooling a business,31 the newer

advocates of efficiency glean lessons from a post-

industrial age.

How much of an overstatement would it be, however –great or

slight--, to say that the normative content is no longer democratic,

but almost single-mindedly economic? This can be expressed as

follows: America is failing its youth because a poor education

system is denying them the opportunity to be economically

competitive. One should not underestimate the power of this

31 Ibid, p. 28.

argument. Its influence stems from a widespread dissatisfaction with

America's schools which, whether deserved or not, became common

knowledge and resulted in wave after wave of reform movements for

educational change.

In the US system, there is a synergetic relationship between

private wealth and those involved in what has become a perpetual

cycle of seeking election and reelection, with the former financing

the latter. This seems inevitable, but only because our system of

indirect representation –a first by the post system is which those

who fail to win a plurality have little or no voice-- is combined

with a broad interpretation of the first amendment that falls

somewhere between Jefferson --“Our liberty depends on freedom of the

press, and that cannot be limited without being lost”-- and maybe

H.L. Menken – “If you want freedom of the press, then go out and buy

one.”32

32 First quote, Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. James Currie (28 January 1786), from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Vol. 18, Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, Washington, DC, 1903, p ii. Menkenwas famous for saying, “There is no underestimating the intelligence of the American public;” this quote, however may come from elsewhere,with William Randolph Hearst also a candidate. It is similar to “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” whichhas also been attributed to Menken, but comes form A. J. Liebling, "Do you belong in journalism?", The New Yorker, 14 May 1960. As for

The corrosive effects of money on politics are well attested to

and many have questioned freedom of the press. While former

journalists, as well as people who worked with newspapers and are

aware of how newsrooms work. may be abused have provided quips –one

can think of Menken or Mark Twain--, overarching denunciations

usually come from the far Left and the far Right.33 Lenin, pointing

to the issue of money and the press, may have said this most clearly,

Hearst, his character is better captured by the statement, “You can crush a man with journalism.”

33 Churchill was reported to have said, “As to freedom of the press, why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?” (Piers Brendon, Winston Churchill: A Biography, Harper & Row, New York,1984, p. 105.) It seems, however, that this was originally said by Lenin, to whom the same quote is attributed by, of all people, Menken. Lenin prefaced it by first saying, “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.” (Lenin, Speech in Moscow, 1920, collected in H. L. Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources Selected, New York, A. A. Knopf, 1942.)

[The quotations in the last two notes were culled from and/or verified on James's Liberty file collection index (http://jim.com/), Wikiquote and The Quote Investigator website, where they are 'Dedicated to Tracing Quotations.' The last, accessed August 2012 at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/03/02/lenin-free-press/, was most helpful because of its insightful research on Menken, Liebling, Churchill and Lenin]

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the

press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe,

buy and fake 'public opinion' for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

This is a fact. No one will ever be able to refute it.”34

The specific argument at hand, however, is that the need for

money to run election campaigns has resulted in the alienation of our

form of political representation. While indirect representation in a

democracy need not result in an alienated form of politics, nor in

oligarchy or plutocracy,35 the combination of indirect representation

34 Lenin's quote begins, “We do not believe in 'absolutes.' We laugh at 'pure democracy.' The 'freedom of the press' slogan became a great world slogan at the close of the Middle Ages and remained so up to the nineteenth century. Why? Because it expressed the ideas of the progressive bourgeoisie, i.e., its struggle against kings and priests, feudal lords and landowners. No country in the world has done as much to liberate the masses from the influence of priests andlandowners as [Soviet Russia] has done, and is doing. We have been performing this function of 'freedom of the press' better than anyone else in the world. (Vladimir Lenin, “A Letter To G. Myasnikov,” Lenin's Collected Works,1st English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 32, pp. 504–505; accessed September2012 at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm)

35 See Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy, University of Chicago Press, 2006. Drawing from Rousseau, Kant and Paine, among others, she attempt a “democratic rediscovery of representation,” comparing it favorably with 'direct democracy.' According to Urbaniti, for citizens the later is “much less representative of their ideas than their indirect presence in a representative democracy.” (p 113)

with a two party system and nearly limitless flows of campaign

dollars has consequences. While it may be the case that “democratic

self-government is not direct but indirect by virtue of being

discursive,”36 the discourse is largely shaped by those who have

financial resources.37

In the United States this seems to have created a situation in

which the indirect presence of citizens in a representative democracy

is muted, filtered and redirected. We see this manifest in an

education system obsessed with measurement, willing to make decisions

based on measures that are sketchy and unreliable and then embark on

reforms that are untested. Influenced, if not financed by "'data-

driven' investors [who] are not so much interested in students'

scores, as in the opportunities to cut costs by using online 36 Lisa Disch,  “Review of Urbinati's Representative

Democracy." in Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History, vol. 11, 2007,  p. 233.

37 Systems in which there is proportional representation would tend to be much different, for the party has a different role. Since itneed not form a plurality in order to have a share in power, a party is more likely to be viable by representing a set of views orregional concerns. For an more extended version along these lines, including an excursion into the Whig period (1836 to 1852) in US history, see Brian Ford, “Democratic Education and Markets or Did we learn anything from the Chicago Teachers' Strike?” in process, but proceeding very slowly.

technology” and make a bundle,38 the slogan seems to be 'Measure

first, ask questions later.'

In New York, one key reform was the creation of the Leadership

Academy. Roughly modeled on an MBA program, the Leadership Academy,

originally and symbolically located in the Tweed Courthouse directly

behind City Hall, was designed to train new principals and promote

leadership among existing principals. It was in many ways the

lynchpin of Mayor Bloomberg’s and Mr Klein’s reform efforts – a

program that would produce managers and principals who agreed with

them on the importance of data and testing. Based on corporate

management concepts and supported by the Wallace Foundation, it has

an academic dean, but is headed by C.E.O. The first was 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.39

38 Jeff Faux, “Education Profiteering; Wall Street's Next Big Thing?,” Huffington Post Blog, 29 September 2012; accessed October 2012 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-faux/education-wall-street_b_1919727.html. Faux says the goal is not to improve the quality of teaching, but to require fewer qualified teachers.

39 Interview with Robert E Knowling, Jr., 5 Nov. 2003, conducted

This is not the only example. A dozen years ago, when then

President Clinton asked that processes to remove teachers who aren't

competent be developed, it went hand-in-glove with a proposal to deny

federal funds to districts hiring unqualified teachers.40 For the Obama

administration, on the other hand, it goes hand-in-glove with a shift

in criteria from qualified teachers to effective teachers.

This, in turn requires methods of measurement and one can

reasonably ask which respects teachers more and which is more likely

to create a well-functioning school system. But –keeping in mind

that, while there is no generally credible measure of effectiveness,41

policy makers have nonetheless been pushing testing and defining

by Rafael Pi Roman, “A Year of Change: Leadership in the Principal’s Office,” New York Voices, Channel 13, New York, January 2004.40 Rothstein, 1999.41 This will be admitted, at least in part, even by many who believe “abolishing what is known as the single salary schedule, the nearlyuniversal practice in public education of paying teachers not on the basis of performance, but strictly on the basis of the college credits they’ve amassed and the years they’ve taught,” is the firstnecessary step to improving the system, “The vast majority of public schools don’t have a credible system of measuring the quality of teachers’ work.” Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman, “Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education,” Education Sector, Washington, D.C., 2008, p 2; accessed April 2011 at http://www.educationsector.org/usr_doc/RushToJudgment_ES_Jan08.pdf.

achievement as if there were-- let us digress for now and consider

what are the consequences for teaching and learning.

MEASUREMENT, TESTING AND CREATIVITY

The desire for measurement –and especially its linkage to

teacher evaluation- has four major drawbacks. First are the

questions of measurement, its accuracy, fairness and effects.

Second, this approach may well contribute to an ongoing process in

which the curriculum has been limited and, apparently, creativity has

been curtailed. Third there is the problem of how do we separate

the individual teacher’s effects from that of the school and the

social environment. Finally, there is the question of the social

consequences of basing pay solely on measured performance, both on

the efficacy of the school and the structure of our civil society.

Let us focus on the second for a moment.

Despite the frequent pairing of 'creativity and achievement,'42 42 For instance, look at then candidate Obama’s rhetoric in the 2008 election:

preparing our children to compete in the global economy is one of the most urgent challenges we face. We need to stop paying lip service to public education, and start holding communities, administrators, teachers, parents and students accountable. We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that American children lead

one drawback of emphasizing achievement may be a lack of creativity.

The question of measurement is incredibly important -- if teachers

are tied so closely to standardized tests then they will teach to

those tests. Recent research indicates creativity in US youth has

gone down over the last 20 years, just the period that standardized

testing became the driving force of reform. In other words, creativity

may be curtailed by the very data-driven policies that equate achievement with the constant

measurement of student performance on standardized tests.

The paradoxical outcome of 30 years of test-driven school reform

is that it may have made the US less competitive in terms of

international education. One aspect this is the reported drop in

creativity. According to Kyung-Hee Kim, presently at William and

Mary and formerly a high school and middle school English teacher in

her native Korea, IQ scores in the US continue to rise, but

creativity, as measured by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking,

the world once again in creativity and achievement.Opening statement on education, Organizing for America website,

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/index.php, accessed 3 Jan09. The Organizing for America website is the successor to the web-site for the Obama campaign. Notice that despite the later desire for undoing NCLB’s accountability regime, nearly everyone is held accountable. Or is it everyone? What are the consequences of a focused deflection on to “communities, administrators, teachers, parents and students”?

have been in decline since 1990. The irony is that, while it is

fostered by US culture, “creativity is not emphasized by the U.S.

educational system.” Her overall framework, which began with

examining Confucianism in the Korean context, suggests that “culture

is more influential than creative strategies and skills for fostering

creativity in individuals.”43

This does not discount the influence of schools; as I suggest

elsewhere, the emphasis on testing indicates a significant change in

US culture. Since the 1990s we have had a test-driven, data

gathering model. Again there is a long history, but while the most

respected theorists on education say ‘Play, play, play’ to promote

child development, currently we test, test, test. Tests of English

Language (not literature) and Math predominate, something that was

consolidated under NCLB. Some schools eliminated recess in order to

add test preparation sessions. Tests, which are used before we have

established they are accurate, determine the fate of schools,

principals and teachers, as well as students; this determination not

only depends on these evaluation schemes in development, but precede

diagnosis.43 Cite her W&M website . . .

Her research on creativity (Kim. K. H.. The creativity crisis.) is under review.

Do constant testing pressure and teaching to the test curtail

creativity? Some early skeptics, who must by now think they have

been proven right, have gone so far as to claim that President 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 [Secretary of Education] 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.”44 Thus, instead of charting a new direction,

this continues a decades long attack on public schools that are

thought appropriate targets “not just because they are deemed

ineffective but because they are public.”45

One result: affect has been ignored or downplayed, while basic

cognitive skills have been stressed. That that stress may produce

44 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.45 David Labaree cited ibid., which in turn cites Alfie Kohn, "The Real Threat to American Schools," Tikkun (March-April 2001), p. 25.

stress is highly likely. Like all organizations, schools are

affectively laden environments; the main difference is that this is

true to an even higher degree than most other places.

Kim's work explored Torrance’s concern that IQ tests miss the

majority of creative students. She states “that about 80% of top

20% are missed if gifted students are identified solely by IQ;”

moreover, “there is a relationship between behavior problems and

creativity.”46 Thus the environments that produce better results on

cognitive tests – those that are more straightforward and linear –,

may not do as well in promoting creativity.

Theresa Amabile's work, while focused on the work place, comes

to similar conclusions: “creativity is undermined unintentionally

every day in work environments that were established—for entirely

good reasons—to maximize business imperatives such as coordination,

productivity, and control.”47

Managers not only tend to fear creativity “in any unit that

46 Kim, “Scholarhsip,” at her W&M web-stie; accessed May 2011 at http://kkim.wmwikis.net/Scholarship.

47 Theresa Amabile, "How to Kill Creativity," Harvard Business Review, 76, no. 5, September-October 1998, p 76.

involves systematic processes or legal regulations,” but “also hold a

rather narrow view of the creative process.” in which creativity

refers merely to the way people think, but misses two other essential

ingredients: expertise and motivation.48 While I have added the emphasis

to fear, the emphasis on motivation and expertise are original. They

are presented, along with creative thinking skills which promote

flexibility and originality, the three components or creativity.

It is striking that her findings that external rewards, such as

we find in pay-for-performance schemes, and her highlighting the

importance of knowledge in its technical, procedural, and

intellectual forms, run counter to the 'effective teacher' model as

envisaged by the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching

Project, the Duncan DOE and the Gates funded, Michelle Rhee founded,

Bloomberg and Klein supported New Teacher Project. Rather, her

emphasis is on intrinsic motivation and affect as influenced by the

work environment. In a latter co-authored paper, it is stated that

“positive affect relates positively to creativity in organizations”

often with a time-lag in which positive affect is the “antecedent of

creative thought, with incubation periods of up to two days.”49 With 48 Ibid, pp. 77-78, 49 Teresa M. Amabile, Sigal G. Barsade, Jennifer S. Mueller, Barry M. Staw,

children and schools, where the creative 'product' is, one hopes, an

engaged, imaginative person, the time-lag might be much, much longer.

What a constant refrain of 'prepare for the test' does to this is

unclear and all of this work is subject to more scrutiny that I will

provide here. But there are clear dangers to living and dying by the

test.

Drops in creativity seem to be one. A Newsweek cover story in

2010 listed the usual suspects: television, that damn kid's music,

video games, etc. But TV had already been around for 40 years by

1990. Popular teen-oriented music was about as old. The latter

development of video games makes them a better fit, but they've been

around since the 70s, two decades before creativity scores started to

go down. No, the closest chronological correlation is with the

increase in standardized testing.

The creativity measures developed by E. Paul Torrance in the

1950s have not gotten as much attention as the NAEP,, PISA, TIMSS or

the good old SAT, but they may be more important. This is the case

"Affect and creativity at work," Administrative Science Quarterly, 2005, vol. 50, pp. 367–403; accessed October 2011 at http://www-management.wharton.upenn.edu/mueller/docs/50302-amabile.pdf.

not only from a humanist or child developmentalist perspective, but

even from a social efficiency or economistic perspective looking for

efficiency and how 'socially optimum outcomes' are produced by the

aggregation of individual choices guided by self-interest.

In addition to giving tests, Torrance and colleagues tracked the

adult accomplishment and real, rather than standardized test,

achievements of people who took them in their youth. There was a

wide variety – patents, books, businesses, published papers, gallery

exhibits, professional attainments and host of others. Doing well

under Torrance's testing conditions correlated with these wide-

ranging creative accomplishments in life. Certainly, analysis based

on the torrance data might be found to be subject to criticisms

similar to other forms of measurement – and I can definitely be

accused of presenting a 'research shows' style argument. But it is a

different argument and it tells a different story that need

attention. Jonathan Plucket of Indiana University used the data to

come to the conclusion that the correlation of Torrance's index of

creativity to lifetime creative accomplishment was over 3 times as

strong as that for IQ tests.50

50 Paragraph summarizes Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, “The Creativity Crisis In America,” Newsweek, July 10, 2010;

These test have not entered into the discourse, however.

Indeed, creativity is hardly mentioned in a debate where

'performance' and 'achievement' dominate and where the latter terms

are defined operationally by the results of standardized tests.

Standardized curriculum and standards for curriculum dominate

practices that are geared to meeting Annual Yearly Progress (AYP),

Recess and free play are constrained, rote memorization and test

preparation are up. Creativity scores have gone down and the

emphasis on testing seems to be the leading suspect.51

Other market emulations have also had their effects, so let us

look at charter schools next.

CHARTER SCHOOLS – A BRIEF ACCOUNT

One of the most visible examples of market emulation in

education has been the advent of the charter school. Charters have

too complex and contested a history to fully recount here – among

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html. Plucker's work is on 'talent' rather than creativity, but he considers the former a term that encompasses the latter.

51 See, Respect for Teachers, Section H, “Consider the Hero: Saving Public Education by Attacking Teachers Unions,” pp, 95 to 141, esp. pp. 121 to 141.

other things they were once championed by Al Shanker, the most

important union leader in American education –, but certain things

are clear, such as their growth. Charters have expanded enormously

in the last two decades, from 4 in 1992 to at least a 2000 times that

many today. What they amount to is another matter.

Charter schools are public schools in that they are publicly-

funded and are set up by state law. Nonetheless, since each school

has a special charter granted to a lay board of directors. The

result is a hybrid form, part public, part private, but less

regulated than traditional public schools and more likely to be a

point of entry for private enterprise.

The first charter law was passed in 1991 in Minnesota, “a

provision that would permit licensed teachers to create innovative

schools, essentially on contract to a public school board.”52 That is

the old model, however; while it still sometimes happens that a group

of teachers comes together to form a charter school, the new norm

involves outside organizations and charters are possible points of

entry for profit-making organizations. Ultimately authority resides 52 Peter Cookson, School Choice, p. 46. Mr Cookson, incidentally, says Mr Shanker introduced the idea.

in the lay boards, but they often contract with educational

management organizations (EMOs) to run the school.

EMOs, such as EdisonLearning (formerly the Edison Project, which

planned to ride the voucher wave), Imagine Schools (formerly

Chancellor Beacon Academies, which almost uniquely develops its own

curriculum) and Mosaica Education (which has schools from Atlanta to

New Delhi to Abu Dhabi), are for-profit enterprises which are paid a

management fee, either a fixed percentage of revenues (usually 12 to

15%) or the surplus of revenues over costs. They usually emphasize

integrating technology into the classroom both to serve pedagogical

purposes and to lower costs. They have enthusiastic supporters who

believed in their principles from the start:

EMOs represent an innovative management tool that school

administrators can use to raise student achievement. . . .

Unlike public schools, if EMOs fail to perform adequately, they

can be fired. EMOs must satisfy their customers to survive.53

53 Guilbert C. Hentschke, Scot Oschman, and Lisa Snell, “Education Management Organizations: Growing a For-profit Education Industry with Choice, Competition, and Innovation,” Policy Brief 21, Reason Public Policy Institute, no date, but circa 2003, p 11; accessed Feb 2011 at http://reason.org/files/86f373eefe12bf11ff614e1305ff3362.pdf.

Not only that, “EMOs promise improved test scores, longer school

days and years, cleaner schools, a back-to-basics curriculum, an

emphasis on technology, and a larger role for parents in their

children's education than is typically the case in public schools.”54

On the other hand, there are those who are less enthusiastic and

track their progress each year.55 Finally, “Each EMO seeks to create

a distinctive "brand" to distinguish itself from other EMOs and

highlight the values of its "unique" model to school districts and

charter schools,”56 and some have suggested we could be witnessing

“[n]ew systems of public schools, overseen by a private organization

and operating under a common 'brand.'”57

54 Ibid., p. 6, with a sliding use of 'promise' as they are directly citing Edison Schools, Fourth Annual Report on School Performance, www.edisonschools.com/design/d23.html, October 1, 2001.

55 Alex Molnar, Gary Miron, Jessica Urschel, Profiles of For-Profit Education Management Organizations Twelfth Annual Report – 2009-2010, National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado at Boulder, December 2010; accessed February 2011 at http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/EMO-FP-09-10.pdf. 56 Hentschke, et al., op cit., p 6.57 Steven F. Wilson, ‘Realizing the Promise of Brand-name Schools’, in Diane Ravitch (Ed.) Brookings Papers on Education Policy: 2005 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005). Charter management organizations (CMOs), such as Aspire Public Schools, are the non-profit equivalent, but they are far fewer in number and narrower in scope.

During the 1990s state after state passed charter laws and most

states have laws authorizing charters. The enabling legislation varies

greatly, but charters do not have to hire certified teachers in most

cases.58 In recent years, most states have raised or removed caps on

the numbers of charters. Publicly funded but privately controlled,

they include both for- and not-for-profit models. Charter schools are

less regulated and do not in most cases have to abide by union

contracts; many proponents see them as the form for a new public

education model -- a key instrument in an expanded conception of

public education based on public-private partnerships in which schools

will compete with one another for students. For this very reason

charters are thought by opponents to be a wedge that might split and

shatter support for public education.

58 As for NCLB, it requires teachers to have a bachelor’s degree, demonstrated content knowledge in their subject area and full statecertification. Charter school teachers must do the same, except they do not usually need state certification, although publicationsmake it read as if they do. “All charter school teachers who teachcore academic subjects, like other public school teachers, must hold a bachelor’s degree and demonstrate competency in the core academic areas in which they teach. They also must have full state certification, unless the state charter school laws specify that such certification is not required for charter school teachers.” USDOE, No Child Left Behind: A Toolkit for Teachers, 2004, pp 9, 24; accessed August 2011at http://www2.ed.gov/teachers/nclbguide/nclb-teachers-toolkit.pdf.

While they are a clear example of market segmentation, charters

are not the big money maker. They are, rather, schools which are more

likely to purchase corporate products and less likely to hire

certified teachers. They are also more likely to have a higher turn

over of teachers . According to data from the New York State

Department of Education, charter schools in New York City lose far

more teachers every year than traditional public schools; of the 70

schools for which there was data, 28 (40%) lost at least 40% of their

teachers with five years or less experience and “10 lost more than

half of their veteran faculty in the 2011-12 academic year; 24 schools

saw more than 40 percent of experienced teachers exit.”59

There are a variety of reasons for this high 'churn rate.'

First, they hire younger teachers, usually at lower salaries, who

often find that teaching is not a good fit for them. Second, they

often demand the teachers be 'at will employees' who may be fired at a

moment's, or at most, a month's notice. Third, they often represent

themselves as something they are not, leading the teachers they hire 59 Helen Zelon, “Striking Teacher Churn in Charter Schools:The high rates of teacher attrition raise questions about whether even the most successful charter schools can maintain quality amid the churn,” Alternet web-site, August 22, 2014; accessed 24 August 2014 athttp://www.alternet.org/education/striking-teacher-churn-charter-schools

to leave. Fourth, administrators often put pressure on veteran

teachers, who have higher salaries, to leave. Finally, they are often

part of networks in which promotion usually means leaving the school

and going somewhere else.

It is clear that market emulation is the model. Not only is it

the case that a high churn rate is a fact of life in most market

models, but, in addition, charter schools are “released from

compliance with many local and state regulations ... [o]n the

assumption that over-regulation of traditional schools has stultified

educational innovation and responsiveness.” Moreover, they “are

expected to improve the educational system by providing competition

for regular public schools [and a] model for public schools to

emulate.”60 Primarily those are public schools in less affluent

areas, however.

60 Henry M. Levin, A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Educational Vouchers, Occasional Paper No. 5, National Center for the Study of Privatization inEducation, Teachers College, Columbia

University, 2001, later published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24(3) (2002), pp. 159-174;

citing Joe Nathan, Charter Schools: creating hope and opportunity for Americaneducation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), and Chester Finn, Bruno V. Manno & Gregg Vanourek, Charter Schools in Action: renewing public education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Charters are mostly found in low-income areas. Private entities

and individuals (including many hedge fund managers) have provided

significant monies to model programs, such as the Harlem Children’s

Zone and KIPP.61 Most charters have the option of removing

'difficult students' difficult being defined variously, in terms of

behavior or, at times, low test scores. They are considered by

advocates of vouchers a 'second best' choice.

Other things are less clear and become points of contention.

Critics claim they are entities “promoted by the same constellation

of forces that back high-stakes testing;”62 however, while there is

significant overlap, there are also differences, especially when

61 They are, however, quite different models: “What distinguishesCanada's vision, and makes it genuinely radical, is precisely what differentiates it from KIPP: Canada is determined to serve not merelypoor, underprivileged students but all of Harlem's most disadvantaged—the children not only of impoverished-but-earnest strivers but of disaffected gang-bangers, dysfunctional drug addicts, and the like. .. . Canada likens KIPP's mission to a kind of reverse quarantine: Take the best kids, who already enjoy distinct advantages because of their home environment, isolate them and thus protect them from the contagion of dysfunction that surrounds them in the ghetto.” (Sara Mosle, “How Children Stop Failing: It takes a village to raise a school,” Review of Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes, Slate, Sept. 2, 2008; accessed February 2010 at http://www.slate.com/id/2198864/)62 All quotes in this paragraph are from a pseudonymous article by'An Assessor,' “Testing, Privatization, and the Future of Public Schooling,” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Volume 63, Issue 03 (July-August, 2011)

there is local support. Another claim is that “they under enroll

English language learners and students with disabilities;” again,

this may be true in the majority of cases, but not all and is a

contested point. Outside monies enable prominent charters “to

provide more for their students than do under-resourced, nearby

public schools,” but charters do not generally spend more per pupil.

At the other end of the spectrum, critics warn of “the McDonald’s of

the charter world, corporate entities such as White Hat in Ohio . . .

chains of charters offering test-prep malnourishment while the owner

pockets the big bucks.” This, of course, is also disputed.

Controversies abound on preformance, “several major research

studies, including one by the federal government, found that charters

on average perform less well than public schools on standardized

tests.”

The last conclusion was based on US DOE studies.63 Other studies

found the opposite, but most found that, just like regular public

schools, some are good and some are bad: 63 CREDO, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States(2009), available at http://credo.stanford.edu.pdf. U.S. Department of Education, The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts (2010), available at http://toped.svefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/charter-mathematica-study0610.pdf.

What emerges is a simple fact: charter schools are not all created equal. But the not-so-simple truth about charters is that compared with traditional schools, they are both more likely to outperform and more likely to underperform their predicted outcomes.64

One explanation may be that charter schools are “sufficiently

heterogeneous that many charter schools choose the hardest to educate

while others attract (and perhaps use strategies to retain) only the

best students?”65

Again, we see segmentation at work. Charters become the

intermediary consumer, grouping together students who are similar and 64 Carol Lloyd, op cit.; Carol Lloyd is the executive editor of Great Schools. The report she is referring to is Portrait of the Movement, The California Charter School Association's First Annual Report on Charter School Performance and Accountability, accessed at http://www.calcharters.org/advocacy/accountability/portraitofthemovement/It may say something that a charter school association comes up with a mixed picture, but most of their conclusions (such as “'classroom-based' charter schools outperform non-classroom based . . . virtual academies and home school charters” and those associated with successful CMOs have done better) seem reasonable. Furthermore, the report at least implies that this is a diagnostic step and charters will be able to outperform traditional schools n the future. Note that the results were released “with endorsementsfrom Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and reformer Michelle Rhee.” No other major education figures were mentioned in Lloyd's piece.

65 Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider, “Are Charter School Students Harder to Educate? Evidence from Washington, D.C.,” National Centerfor the Study of Privatization in Education, Research conducted with support from the Political Science Program at the National Science Foundation, grant number SES-0314656, accessed at http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP96.pdf

then buying educational services and products from private entities.

They also work against the organization of labor by hiring unqualified

teachers and not providing long-term job security. Let us now look at

the chief justification for instituting such changes, that the US

system of public education is failing.

ATTACKS ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

Attacks on public schools in the US are failing and are have led

us to fall behind in international competition go back at least to the

1950s. This has two variants. Shortly after Sputnik, President

Eisenhower descried the weaknesses of US education, advocating a back-

to-basics approach so that the nation might more successfully

compete with the Soviet Union. In 1959, he Dwight wrote an open

letter to Life magazine decrying the practices of progressive education.

Without rhetorical flourish, Eisenhower attacked Dewey-esque

educational programs as soft and misguided:

educators, parents and students alike must be continuously stirred up by the defects in our educational system. They must be induced to abandon the educational path that, rather blindly,they have been following as a result of John Dewey’s teachings.

[We need a] return to fundamentals . . . stress[ing] English, history, mathematics, the simple rudiments of one or more of the sciences, and at least one language.66

66 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Private Letters of the President,”

It is somewhat ironic that Eisenhower took such a prominent role, as

he believed that the Federal Government should only have a temporary

role in education, in order to promote state funding.67

Still, it was Eisenhower’s intention or not, I believe that, when

taken together, these all cohere with what came to be the core of a

political programme based on modified neo-liberal theories of the

state. While the 1950s was a relatively statist period, decades

later, minimalist theories of the state would have a profound impact

on education. The content of the state program -- back-to-basics and

competitive exams -- was retained, but it was taken up by the private

sector and attacks on the state and state funding became more furious.

This is especially true of programs initiated by the international

organizations that have served as the instruments of transnational

hegemony. But these are only the most obvious examples and on the

national level we have a much more nuanced process in which the

engineering of consent is far more subtle. It is nonetheless clearly

business marked.

Life, March 16, 1959, p. 114. Quoted in Berube, 1995: 39.67 Clowse,1981: 153.

The back-to-basics approach was revived in the 1970s --

eventually becoming what is now known as standards-based reform and

the common core-- only the enemy was different. This time it was

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.

Each has its own perspective on the child. Among others,

DeYoung68 argues that educational discourse has been increasingly

dominated by business concerns which conceptualize children as

potential workers and economic development resources. 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,

68 DeYoung, 1989: 105, 3.

“No bourgeoisie ever disliked war profits.” Well, no bourgeoisie ever

disliked the spoils of school reform.

In other work, I make use of Gramsci and Kant to make sense of a

set of neo-liberal presumptions that have fashioned much of

educational discourse and argue that the neo-liberal conception of

justice has been reduced by constant reference to necessity. This is

a predominant mode of argumentation in conservative arguments.69 The

set of neo-liberal presumptions – their articles of faith, so to

speak – is thought to have six main points, although the number is

nothing to quibble about:

comparative advantage must be a driving force of policy

efficiency requires pruning away the state

the justification for individual remuneration is the

‘value-added’ by that individual

the nature of capital is fungible

the ineluctable modality of the incentive system

pragmatism is reduced to pragmatic self-interest

This articulation of the self-interest of the business class

makes its way to being understood as a general, if not necessarily 69 It follows what Albert Hirshman called the futility thesis – that the use of government in the end always makes things worse. [Cite to be added.]

universal, societal interest. In the history of United States education

reform, this was done by making explicit reference to the national

interest in order to justify the beginnings of the standards

movement. Here it is also pointed out that it is assumed that the

business model is appropriate to apply to education, something that

one can document at the transnational level quite easily by pointing

to the examples of IMF and World Bank support for education. Human

development is thought of in terms of capital development. The

psychology is squeezed out of it.

There are currents of hegemony which, as we will see, pattern the

terrain of struggle. Transnational elements are highly important and

here and help to outline the rest of the project. But in terms of

domestic politics we have a series of events, beginning in the late

1970s, which attack public education as having failed the nation.

Most prominent was the publication in 1983 of, A Nation at Risk, which

famously held, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose

on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we

might well have viewed it as an act of war.”70 It called for more

70 The first paragraph is included in full below:Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is

rigor and higher standards, but significantly did not call for

privatization, something that President Reagan had campaigned on in

1980. was followed by and a series of other reports advocated this

approach.71

How has this notion of failure played out? As Robert Slavin

notes, we have been in “an uninterrupted state of reform . . . since

the publication of A Nation at Risk “ under the first Reagan-Bush

Administration. Risk, like other influential documents before it,

concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that whilewe can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges havehistorically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

71 Terrel Bell, Reagan’s first Sec. of Education began the rather paradoxical attempt to promote reform while at the same time pledgingto do away with the Department of Education. Bell said the latter goal would lead to “the destruction of the indispensable power base that . . . was necessary for my survival in office.” (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.” But it is interesting to think that he mayhave placed a poison pill in the administration’s efforts not only todismantle government machinery, but to privatize through tuition tax-credits. Creating standards for schools did create a barrier to entry, albeit one that charter shcools have seemed to .

linked the nation’s temporary failures in international competition to

the systematic failures of the school system. But is was different in

that economics was the rationale. Tyack and Cuban called 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.72

As noted, the first such flurry of attacks on the school system

came half a century ago, after the launch of Sputnik showed the

Russians’ burgeoning technological superiority; there is another round

going on now, with the Chinese portrayed as the great opponent.

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 of the Vietnam War, the Oil

Crisis, the Debt Crisis and whatever else you might add to the list

did not save the schools from criticism.

Transnational linkages are a crucial contextual factor – a sine qua

72 Tyack and Cuban, 1995, p. 34.

non – because linkages across state bounders strengthen economic

liberalism. Neoliberal economic institutions both reinstate a version

of the public/private distinction that is antithetical to the

provision of most social goods by the state and advocate a shift in

responsibility from the collective to individuals; at the same time

corporations are invested with the rights of individuals.73

Transnational linkages undercut collective bargaining power; the

integration of the financial sector in particular has allowed powerful

private actors to avoid state regulation (or at least pick among the

states) and thus limited the policy options of supposedly sovereign

states.74 Overall, the paradigm of choice at the core of privatization

and other market-based reforms largely removes the power of collective

decision-making.75

On the national level in the US the spectre of international

competition has been used to promote a set of promotions and exit

exams -- a.k.a., high stakes tests -- which were designed with the

goal of preparing students for entry into the workforce. Beginning in

73 Liston, 1988: 5.74 Wolfgang Reincke, Global Public Policy: Governing without Government?, Brookings Institution Press, 1998.

75 See, Elmore and Fuller, 1996; Smith and Meier, 1995 and Amy Wells, 1993.

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,’ meritocracy and efficiency,

which are then used to describe the public education system as

failing.

Slavin goes on to note that ”Throughout that time, the main

focus of reform has been on school governance and accountability.” 76

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.77 Rather, the first step was of the second 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.78

Attacks on the public education system also became a mainstay of

Republican politics. Early in the George W. Bush administration, 76 Slavin, “Success for All: Policy Consequences of Replicable Schoolwide Reform,” Ch. 13 of Handbook of Educational Policy, Academic Press, 1999, p. 325.77 Walter Karp, “Why Johnny Can’t Think: The Politics of Bad Schooling, Harper’s Magazine, 1985.78 Slavin, “Success for All: Policy Consequences of Replicable Schoolwide Reform,” Ch. 13 of Handbook of Educational Policy, Academic Press, 1999, p. 325.

Secretarya of Education Rod Paige referred to the National

Educatonal Association the nation's largest teacher union, as a

‘terrorist organization.’ It was just the latest of a series of

efforts to place the blame for public education’s failures squarely on

the shoulders of Teachers Unions. Addressing the Republican National

Convention in 1996, nominee for President Bob Dole said:

I say this not to the teachers, but to their unions: If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying. To the teachers unions I say, when I am president, I will disregard your political power, for the sake of the children, the schools, and the nation. I plan to enrich your vocabulary with those words youfear -- school choice, competition, and opportunity scholarships -- so that you will join the rest of us in accountability, while others compete with you for the commendable privilege of giving our children a real education.

Why Republicans have done this is fairly clear. Politically,

they dovetail with attacks on Keynesianism and the welfare state and,

presumably, help them win elections.79 Economically, many of their

constituents are likely to make quite a bit of money. Indeed, the

stakes are remarkably high – there are roughly 50 million school

children in the United States and yearly expenditures are approaching

79 See Respect for Teachers, Section H, “Consider the Hero: Saving Public Education by Attacking Teachers Unions,” pp, 95 to 141, esp. pp. 95to 110.

a half trillion. While almost 90% of students attend public schools,

private enterprises such as Public Strategies and Edison Schools

operate with public monies; the “fundamentals are all aligned for a

great number of people to make a whole lot of money in this sector,”

according to former Massachusetts Governor William Weld.80 Once,

while working in a public place with copies of two books on

privatization a 30-ish local MBA candidate approached me and asked if

I was planning to start a school. “It’s going to be lucrative,” he

said as his eyes widened, “very lucrative.”81

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 sevenreferences 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 80 Weld finished his statement, “and do well by doing good.” (Walsh, 2000 in Ed Week, 19 Jan 2000, p. 13)81 Observation, Amsterdam Avenue, 23 Dec 1999. The two books were Murphy, 1996; Flam, 199?.

runs them.”

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.’82 By this he means that the public/private

distinction divides the world into two spheres which are mutually

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?’

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

82 Norberto Bobbio, “Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society,” translated by Carroll Mortera, in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, Verso: London, New York, 1988. See, also,Norberto Bobbio. 1989. Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of StatePower. Translated by Peter Kennealy. Polity: Cambridge.

potential directions for institutional reform.83 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 function.

THE NUMBERS CLAIM

So how is all of this justified?

83 Charter schools should be considered as a major potential institutional transformation. They are not addressed at any length for 3 reasons. First, they do not appear on the scene until the early 1990s. Second, the unions’ positions on charters varies from state to state, according to the specifics of state legislation. Third, school level research tends to indicate that the charter modelmay not be feasible -- that each school must recreate administrative tasks that had formerly been done at the district level, including maintaining compliance with federal reporting requirements.

One of the most interesting aspects of educational discourse in

the US is the use of numbers, especially international comparisons.

Instead of effective communication about issues, what we often see is

the selection of framing devices that changes the way issues are

supported. The US usually ranks between 15th and 25th in student

achievement. While we rank 37th or so in infant mortality, this

figure is rarely used to criticize our private-public mix in the

health sector. Education is another matter. Finland, often ranked

first, and Singapore, always in the top five, are used to point out

that we must have a failed system of education in the US.

A market-based ideological predisposition evidences itself in

two ways. First, the discourse largely ignores differences between

countries regarding social conditions, culture and the place

secondary school has regarding social advancement. If Finland's

child poverty rate is 4% and the US rate is 28%, this is just thought

to be an excuse, of no relevance. If the performance of Korean or

Chinese students in secondary school largely determines their future

social position, but US students can bide their time until college,

this is not brought up. It may very well be the case that, once we

consider such variables we might very well predict the US would land

in 17th place overall – or 25th or 31st, for that matter.

Most strikingly, the remedies for public education are not based

on the success stories of Finland or Singapore or Korea, but on

market models. Market-oriented ideology has influenced multiple

changes in educational theory, from how to produce a good teaching

force to asserting that school systems improve not because of

collaboration, but because of competition. Elsewhere I have

described this as a shifting of social responsibility on the

individual; the atomistic individualism that drives economistic

exchange models is a key factor. Individuals will rise in the

market-place so we need not follow Finland's model.

Obviously it would be difficult to follow Finland's model in terms of

social equity. Finland does well and represents one of the least

unequal countries in terms of Programme for International Student

Assessment (PISA) results in 2006:

In Finland less than 5% of the overall performance variation among OECD countries lay between schools . . . Finland also showed the highest overall performance in science suggests that Finnish parents can rely on high and consistent performance

standards across schools in the entire education system.84

As Richard Kahlenberg states, there is over 40 years of research –

going back to the Coleman Report in 1966-- that points to Socio-

Economic Status (SES) of the student's family as the biggest

predictor of achievement. The SES of the school is the second

biggest predictor.85 We can think of this in terms not only of

poverty, but of peer groups and peer achievement.

And we can think in terms of educational development. In Finland,

teachers need a Master’s Degree and extensive academic training.

They treat teachers as professional and selection is rigorous.

Teachers who need improvement are given additional training. This is

an institution building model, not a market emulation model. Instead

of following the institution building model, we will recruit more

talented teachers through alternative certification programs such as

Teach for America and The New Teacher Project. Aided by new data

streams, we’ll move from a model of a qualified teacher to a model of

an ‘effective teacher.’ There is an implicit elitism in that it is

84 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). 85 Richard D. Kahlenberg, “How to Build Quality Schools Citywide: Balancing Choice and Neighborhood Schools,” The Century Foundation,May 12, 2011.

assumed that native intelligence and Ivy level credentials will count

for more than comprehensive educational training. This is not to say

all is well in teacher training, but the effort here is not to change

how teachers are trained, but to skip lightly around the training.

Closely tied to this is a critique of education in the US : we

are obsessed with promoting self esteem instead of ensuring rigor and

promoting high standards. This is not new – Chester Finn talked

about it in the 1990s and Admiral Rickover’s Education and Freedom made

similar arguments over 50 years ago. They are both part of a long

tradition which were calls for 'common sense solutions' and attacks

progressive and humanist educational philosophies, especially those

that were associated with John Dewey and Albert Maslow.

The cultural message is that we coddle our children. It is as if

different cultural norms could be instituted to solve the endemic

problems of poverty and that anyone who spoke differently was making

excuses for failure.86

Much of the evidence to support this is from international test 86 See my Respect for Teachers, pp xxvii-xxxi, for a more extensive discussion of the cultural argument.

results that seem to show, in the words of US Secretary of Education

Arne Duncan, that other countries are out competing us. However,

this is simply not true. The claim that the US lags behind its

economic rivals, as some say, #23 and #25 out of 30 in Reading and

Math respectively, is based on selective reporting. Michelle Rhee,

former head of the District of Columbia Public Schools and a

prominent supporter of corporate education reform, is one of many who

speaks about this repeatedly,. Her claim is, I assume, based on the

PISA 2006 results for 15 year olds;87 the US ranked 21st out of 30 on

Science on the same test, but these results are not representative.

Most international test results put the US in the middle or

higher. The 8th Grade, TIMSS (2007) in Math, ranked the US 9th of 48

overall and 7th out of the 15 countries with advanced economies. In

Civics, Poland, Finland and Cyprus were 1, 2 and 3, and the U.S. did

fairly well, ranking 6th overall and 5th out of 17 developed

democracies (OECD countries). As for Reading, the 2009 PISA on

87 The Math ranking matches up, but reading performance data for the United States were excluded the PISA database because of an errorin printing the test booklets that directed students to the wrong passages for certain questions. See “Frequently Asked Questions: OECD PISA (2006); accessed June 2011 http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_32252351_32235731_38262901_1_1_1_1,00.html

Reading Literacy results say 6 OECD countries had higher average

scores than the United States, 13 lower and 14 had scores not

measurably different from the U.S. Average.

Basically, the US is in the big bulge in the middle. The

Average Scores and Rankings, for the 8th Grade Progress in

International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in 2006rank the US as 18

out of 45 (10th out of 20 OECD countries), ahead of France, England,

Austria, New Zealand and Norway, among others; the 17 ahead of the US

include 4 Canadian provinces, so if Canada was listed once, the US

would be 14th.88 Just like the scores, explanations vary as to US

Rankings. Steve Krashen says this is about what we should expect

once we factor in poverty levels; Michelle Rhee (and Arne Duncan)

blames a failing system with an accent on failing teachers; others

point to weak curriculum.

I would offer a test-driven model of instruction as a additional

contributing factor, but also would wonder out loud why we are

expected to outperform other countries. There are enough factors

88 National Center for Education Statistics, accessed September 2011 via http://utaheducationfacts.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=119&Itemid=69

that indicate otherwise, including socio-economic disparities, which

are highly correlated with racial disparities: “On the combined

reading literacy scale, White (non-Hispanic) and Asian (non-Hispanic)

students had higher average scores (525 and 541, respectively) than

the overall OECD and U.S. average scores,” and are comparable with

the first 5 countries, Korea (539), Finland (536), Canada (524) New

Zealand (521) and Japan (520); “Black (non-Hispanic) and Hispanic

students had lower average scores (441 and 466, respectively).” which

compare to the bottom 2 among the OECD, Chile (449) and Mexico (425).

In the US, it is as if global divisions between North and South are

found in microcasm.

An even clearer indicator of SES and its effects are the

breakdowns by schools based on the percentage of students eligible

for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL); this is a good substitute for

income by school, as it is a proxy measure for the concentration of

low-income students within a school. In 2006-07, 20.3 million

students (41.20%) were FRPL eligible, a figure that went up about

2008. Again looking at the Reading component of PISA 2009, the

Average Score in the U.S. was 500, but this varied widely by school;

on average schools with less than 10 percent FRPL eligible students

scored 551, 10 to 24.9 percent 527, 25 to 49.9 percent 502, 50 to

74.9 percent 471, 75 percent or more 446.89 So, once sorted in these

social categories, what do these scores most likely indicate? That

we are coddling the young by giving children a false sense of

security or that questions of poverty loom large, but largely

unaddressed? That our system of education is failing or that it is

highly stratified?

As Iris Rotberg points out, citing the 2009 PISA report,

“findings for member-countries in the Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development show that, on average, close to 60 percent of

the difference in reading performance between schools is accounted for by

the socioeconomic status of the students attending the schools. In

the United States, socioeconomic status accounts for close to 80 percent of

the difference.”90

89 See H.L. Fleischman, P.J. Hopstock, M.P. Pelczar and B.E. Shelley,“Highlights From PISA 2009: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy in an International Context,” (NCES 2011-004). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010; accessed September 2011 at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004.pdf

90

Iris C. Rotberg, “International Test Scores, Irrelevant Policies: Misleading Rhetoric Overlooks Poverty’s Impact,” Education Week Commentary, September 12, 2011, emphasis added; accessed

CONCLUSION: ROBERT PIRSIG, JOHN DEWEY AND JOHN ADAMS, QUALITY, DEFINING EFFICIENCY AND THE BENEFITS OF LIBERAL EDUCATION OF

A definition of a measurable 'quality' rooted in standardized

test scores as a way to differentiate among teachers does seem narrow

in the extreme. While an argument could be made that this is a

minimum requirement, it is likely to become an operational definition

with a great deal of weight. While it speaks of teacher quality, it

is basically a quantitative measure and one might speculate on how

someone who takes on the concept of quality might respond.

September 2011 at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/14/03rotberg_ep.h31.html.

SES is also reflected in racial disparities (I doubt it is the other way around); in the 2006 PISA, “on the combined science literacy scale in the United States, Black (non-Hispanic) students (409) and Hispanic students (439) scored lower, on average, than White (non-Hispanic) students (523).” For comparison's sake, South Korea ranked 7th among OECD countries with an average of 522; Finland was first with 563, Mexico dead last with 410. See Rodger W. Bybee (Chair Science Forum and Science Expert Group, PISA 2006 Science) PISA’S 2006 Measurement of Scientific Literacy: An Insider’s Perspective for the U.S.,Washington, DC, June 2, 2009; accessed April2010 at ahttps://edsurveys.rti.org/PISA/documents/BybeeNCES_PISA_Research_Conference_Paper_Final__psg.pdf; and Baldi, S., Jin, Y., Skemer, M., Green, P.J., and Herget, D. (2007). Highlights From PISA 2006: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Science and Mathematics Literacy in an International Context (NCES 2008–016). National Centerfor Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC; accessed May 2011 at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008016.pdf.

One such writer and thinker was Robert Pirsig. When he became

preoccupied with the notion that any series of events can generate an

unlimited number of scientific hypotheses, Pirsig began a long

examination of 'quality,' 'value' and 'morals' while still an

undergraduate science student. 'Preoccupied' may be too weak a word,

as he was eventually expelled from the university, but, as recounted

in his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this led to a focus to

'quality' (an overarching term meant to subsume both values and

morals) as 'the knife-edge of experience,' a term he takes from

Plato.91 'Quality' is something that encompasses both the subjective

and objective -- a characteristic of perceptual experience that

precedes and is part of any explanation, including an explanation of

quality.

For Pirsig, who wrote books that combined elements of novels,

memoirs and essays, the lesson was that even those who ruminate on

quality can miss the point. At the end of Zen, the framing event of 91 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values , William Morrow & Company, New York, 1974. Pirsig's autobiographical philosophical expositions continued Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, Bantam Books, New York, 1991, where he discusses The Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) and attempts to develop it as a theory of reality.

which is a cross country motorcycle trip with his son, the narrator

chastises the boy for standing up on the pegs, saying it is

dangerous. The son responds that want to see something – for the

entire trip he has been looking at the middle of his father's back.

The theorists of quality had no idea how limited was his son's

experience.

Clearly, the definitions of teacher quality we are discussing

are neither so expansive nor so rooted in individual experience;

instead, the focus in on the effects of teachers on the performance

of their students on standardized tests. Interestingly enough,

however, this runs into the same problem that Pirsig found as an

undergraduate, that only a few hypotheses get attention –sometimes

only one-- out of a seemingly limitless number that could explain

these outcomes. The factor that we attend to is labeled 'teacher

quality,' but this is a tautological definition as 'quality' is

defined in terms of the tests – those who get their students to do

better on the tests are considered to be of higher quality.

And that brings us to Dewey, We remember that Dewey was

Eisenhower’s target, but Dewey himself was highly critical of

standard curriculum. In the 1940s and 1950s, “while Dewey was being

feted by young and old alike, American culture was rapidly building

an educational system which in many respects was the very antithesis

of what he was talking about.”92 Nonetheless, by treating

‘progressivism’ as a whole, these attacks served to group together an

enemy.

Whether ‘American culture’ can be a social actor is of course a

question, but blocs of conservative social actors can certainly exert

a force on culture as it develops and alter the direction of its

development. Other social actors as well, but with conservative

social actors you expect to see a force exerted in the direction of

norms in accordance with the system’s functions and which serve to

maintain the status quo.

Thus the choice of Dewey, as an enemy is revealing. Consider

first how he would define ‘efficiency’ -- in a way totally at odds

92 Clarence J. Karier, “Elite Views on American Education,” in Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, Eds., Education and Social Structure in the Twentieth Century, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967, p. 151.

with contemporary usage:

Whether called culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual -- and he would not be an individual if there were not something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed, distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material commodities. For how can there bea society really worth serving unless it is constituted of individuals of significant personal qualities?93

Dewey said, “If we eliminate the social factor from the child we

are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual

factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless

mass.” Was the child good bad? Was this a variable or could it be

inert and malleable, a tableau raza?

Many administrative progressives based their model of reform on

the ‘lifeless mass’ of industrial production. This was tempered by

the needs of public health and order in an increasingly urban

society. Instead of invoking the organic relation of the

psychological and sociological sides of education as a process, they

concentrated on the economic and social consequences of instruction.

93 John Dewey, 1916, Chapter 10

Like the pegadogues, the administrative idea of education was “often

active[ly] hostile toward the traditional curriculum,” 94 but unlike

the pedagogues, they did not concern themselves about whether one way

delivery systems of authoritarian education were good for a

democratic society. Nor did they worry that if education relied on

‘a pressure from without' that it would become reduced to the same.

It this resulted only in “certain external results, but [could] not

truly be called educative,” 95 they would accept those results.

It was not, as Dewey would have it, that education “must begin

with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests

and habits.” Nor were the child’s powers interpreted by “carry[ing]

them back into a social past [and] project[ing] them into the

future.” The “child’s instinctive babblings” were not taken

seriously as “the promise and potency of future social intercourse.”

96 With the exception of a few enclaves, the state of civilization in

his time, supported by new found power of the industrial order, did

not proceed in that direction. 94 Ibid. 95 Dewey, Pedagogic Creed, from The School Journal, Vol. LIV, No. 3, 16 Jan 1897, p. 77.96 Dewey, Pedagogic Creed, pp. 77-8.

Not only has Dewey’s image of the school as a garden hardly been

prescient, but his belief that “Life is a self-renewing process

through action upon the environment,”97 has not guided pedagogical

practice. Rather, as standardized tests became the backbone of

education in the US (first in the selective process of admittance to

colleges and universities, later in sets of state mandated tests for

K-12 students which rated students, teachers and schools according to

value-added criteria), behaviorist psychologies pushed forward.

While theories of ‘constructionism’ drawing on Dewey’s work were

(and still are) taught in education schools, their influence was

limited. Instead, the learning theory of Thorndike, perhaps the

original stimulus and response framework of behavioral psychology,

has had by far the greater impact. Called ‘connectionism,’ it

posited a forerunner of the black box theory: explanations of

learning need not refer to unobservable internal states. In addition,

field observations of external states and teaching practices was

similarly unnecessary:

97 John Dewey, 1916, Chapter 1.

Thorndike, the pioneering educational psychologist at Teachers College, actually told his students not to waste time going to schools except to administer some test or experimental device. It was much more important, he told them, to advance their competence in statistics. Avoid schools, he said, and "spend arduous years in devising, testing, and standardizing units of measurement" so we will be able to gauge teaching, learning, andeducational progress.98

Dewey’s views on democracy and education would also place him at

odds with contemporary discourse. He believed not only that

democracy required universal education, but also that education

should be geared toward the developing child, considered in all of

the aspects of his or her development.

This did not stand. Instead, education seemed to follow Edward

L. Thorndike, who published some fifty books, including dictionaries,

textbooks and teacher manuals at the beginning of this century and

“not only influenced what was taught and how it was taught; he also

supplied the criteria for evaluating and standardizing the process.”

99

98 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, “A New Imperative: Mobilizing Change in American Education,” Remarks at Dean's Weekend, November 1-2, 2002, in HGSE, 18 Nov. 02.99 Clarence J. Karier, “Elite Views on American Education,” in Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, Eds., Education and Social Structure in the Twentieth Century, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967, p. 151.

Ellen Lagemann has argued that to understand 20th century

education in the US, one needs to understand that Thorndike won and

Dewey lost.100 One should do away with the notion that Dewey is the

prime influence. Rather behaviorist psychologies have been advanced

by proponents of standardized testings.

While Dewey is associated with progressive education, author

after author has distinguished between two varieties of progressive

thought and practice as applied to education. Pedagogical

progressivism was associated with Dewey and became the dominant

language and guiding ideology of many schools of education. 101 But it

was not the dominant practice in the public schools.

100 Lagemann eventually became Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She was quoted, among other places, in Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, New York: Basic, 1991, p. 196. Alfie Kohn points out that “Exactly the same contrast between Dewey and Thorndike -- and the same conclusion -- is offered by Sylvia Farnham-Diggory,. Schooling,. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 28.” (See Kohn, “Forward...Into the Past,” Rethinking Schools, Fall 1999, Vol. 14, No. 1.) In addition, Kliebard (1986) remarks frequently on the marginality of Dewey’s role.101 David F. Labaree, “Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education: An American Romance,” Lecture delivered at International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Sao Paulo, Brazil, July 18, 2003.Citing Cremin, 1961, p 328.

I believe Adams, who loved poetry and literature even though he

was a lawyer, would share similar thoughts. Adams was political

theorist who was the most strident among the founders in his support

for education.

Adams was also the 2nd President of the United States, but his 4

years was by his own admission undistinguished and he was the only

one of the first 5 presidents not elected to a second term. (His

son, John Quincy, was the second.) More important to American

history was his life previous to his election in 1796.

In the 2nd Continental Congress he was the chief mover pushing

for independence. He is generally given credit for nomiating George

Washington to lead the Continental Army. He contributed to the

writing of the Dclaration of Independence and wrote extensively on

politics, political theory and forms of governance.. He served as

one of our first diplomats and he was enormously successful. Among

other things, he arranged loans from the Dutch during the Revolution

that kept the Continental Army afloat. And he was a realist as well

as a theorist. Though it did not exist in his youth, Adams seemed to

anticipate the current state of Congress when he feared that member

of a legislature "will obtain influence by noise, not sense."102

Education, however, might have been closest to his heart. He

drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest written

constitution still in use today. Moreover, his support for education

was not limited to a privileged elite, but was tied to conceptions of

the the mutual interdependence and the destiny shared by all members

of a society:

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lowerclass of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

This line of thought was codified in the Constitution of the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the

102 Citations for Adams to be added.

university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schoolsin the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures,and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

And with that I will close this essay, returning to the original

thought --that the promise of egalitarian democracy is based on

the promise of public education and its function to educate the

vast majority of citizens so that they may aspire and succeed--

and allowing the reader to glean whatever lessons from it that

might serve the current moment.