NEO-LIBERALISM, EDUCATIONAL POLITICS AND HEGEMONIES OF SOCIAL LEARNING [Ford social Learning and...

NEO-LIBERALISM, EDUCATIONAL POLITICS AND HEGEMONIES OF SOCIAL LEARNING

Brian Ford

Theory chapter for Social Learning and Hegemony (aka, Respect for Teachers, Too: Classroom Politics)1

Bullet Points and then some paragraphs:

--Hegemony versus Social Learning

a. Broad Distinction

Social Learning is usually used to refer to changes within institutions

Hegemony is a broader term having to do with understandings that are cultural –

the pervasive common sense of a society the underpins every day actions

b. Theorists

Social Learning is articulated by, among others, Hugh Heclo and Peter Hall

Hegemony, in the sense of cultural hegemony, is most often associated with the work

of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the founder of the Italian Communist Party 1 What follows is the first stab at the theory chapter for Social Learning and Hegemony: Neoliberalism and Education Reform in the United States [or Framing Education Reform In The US In The Post-Vietnam Era.] It also, when talking about unions, includes elements of “The Strange Death of the New Professionalism: Redefined Self-Interest and the Development of Teachers’ Unions’ Positions on Educational Reform.” I have not always quite succeeded in separating those twoelements as of yet.

Ford// “Neo-Liberalism, Educational Politics and Hegemonies Of Social Learning” 18 October 2014 Draft of Theory Chapter for Social Learning and Hegemony //

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who was imprisoned by Mussolini and died shortly after his release.

c. Major Points on Social Learning

Peter Hall, in depicting shifts from Keynesianism to Monetarism, defines ‘social learning’ as a “deliberate attempt to adjust goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience and new information.” (Peter Hall, 1993: 278.)

He disaggregates this concept into three central variables: the overarching goals in a field, techniques or policy instruments and the precise settings of these instruments.

These are, respectively, 3rd, 2nd and 1st order changes.

In my work, I add a fourth, to end up with four types of sociallearning: First, 1st order – the refinement of agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order -- the choice of methods to achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the selection of goals. Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals by reference

to principles, values, ideologies and visions of the future,utopian to dystopian.

In these terms, contemporary education reform is part of a third order change in social learning, but, as is usually the case, it is connected to fourth order change. It is hard to select new goals without changing the terms of justification.

4th order change is meant to be the link with concepts of Hegemony

3rd and 4th Order Change – from Social Learning to Hegemony

Hall's case is interesting because it did not begin within the state bureaucracy, the focus of many previous treatments of ‘social learning,’ but in public debates


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that were given a final imprimatur through a process of national electoral contestation.

Only then did the Thatcher government move to implement andconsolidate the paradigm they had previously adopted.

Two additions are made to this. In a diffuse institutional structure 3rd order change

can be achieved outside of state bureaucracies and without any direct national electoral contest.

Rather, as the examples of standards-based reform (which morphed into the Common Core) and charter schools show,3rd order change can be constituted by incremental means spread over many different institutions and many decades.

Thus, 3rd order change can be achieved over time by incremental means, but that is much more likely to happen if something else happens: 4th order change.

Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals by reference to principles, values, ideologies and visionsof the future, utopian to dystopian.

The discussion of 4th order change segues into discussions of hegemony.

The parallel development of investor led capitalism --basedon an exchange value paradigm-- and the decay of social welfare models --based on a labor value paradigm-- are the context in which this all unfolds.

That we have an integrated system of production, exchange, and accumulation which is subject to no state authority is taken for granted, even in education, shapes the debate and policy formation.

Please note that I hesitate to say that diffuse 3rd order change requires 4th order change, only that it usually is accompanied by 4th order change and is more likely to happen during periods of 4th order change. I also hesitate at time to call hegemony 4th order change,but at other times I do.


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--Major Points on Hegemony

The original Greek word, hegemonia, had, as its primary reference, the leadership of a confederacy of states by anotherstate. It is this notion that is used for the most part in International Relations theory, Robert Keohane being the leading example. While I have significant differences with Keohane, whose own work limits the use of the term 'hegemony' to state actors, we do accept similar periodizations. Keohane states that the mid-1960s marks the beginning of a post-hegemonic period, one in which no "one state is [both] powerfulenough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations, and willing to do so."2 But is the cause within thestate system or within the world financial system, which has been reconsolidated since the late 1960s.

Hegemony, as articulated by Gramsci, is a broader term having to do with understandings that are cultural –the pervasive common sense of a society.

My effort is to combine the two meanings, much in the way Robert Cox has done, but direct the analysis at domestic institutions, using education policy in the US as a heuristiccase study to illustrate the structuration effects of transnational institutionalization under conditions of globalization.

It is worth noting that by doing so we are using a Gramscian notion of the state that is much different than that used in Helco and Hall's work; for Helco and Hall the organizational state may have autonomy. Gramsci's notion of an extended state emanating from

2 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, Boston, 1977, p. 44; cited in Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, pp. 34 - 35. The latter work is premised on the proposition that by the late 1960's "U.S. dominance in the world political economy was challenged by the economic recovery and increasing unity of Europe and by the rapid economic growth of Japan." (p. 9)


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Civil and Political Society is meant to stress the organic unity of all three, not autonomy. That does notmean, however, that Gramsci did not believe state actorscould act with some degree of autonomy. While I might be accused of wanting things both ways, Gramsci's constant use of military metaphors points in the opposite direction.

Hegemony, in the Gramscian sense, claims that actors in civilsociety have a pervasive effect on norms and normal ways of thinking. There are certainly other types of hegemony besides those emanating from civil society, but this is the core. All hegemonies work in varying degrees on the formation of opinions, norms and normal ways of thought. Because, however, of the decisions that people must make in order to succeed (or merely survive), the economic core of civil society usually works to a greater degree than others to shape and maintain norms.

Civil society does not derive only from economic activity, but economic activity has a leading effect on ethics. This can be compared to political society, which has its leading effect through the exercise of collective will and with the state, which is more than the expression of political society. The state is also an institution with not only a considerable degree of autonomy, but also a great amount of inertia. These spheres all have their separate hegemonies.

We can speak a change in global hegemonic strategies that canbe traced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s; they are organically connected to increased transnational linkages, ideas of comparative advantage and advocacy of free trade.3

3 You might want to refer to Ariful Kabir, “Neoliberal Hegemony and theIdeological Transformation of Higher Education in Bangladesh,” Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, Vol 6, No 2 (2012). for further elucidation.


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Gramsci draws on Hegelian traditions and emphasizes that treating methodological divisions as organic ones is an all too common fallacy.

Gramsci says of Free Trade that it is based on just such a theoretical error; presenting the analytical “distinction between political society and civil society . . . as an organic one” when “in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same.” (1971: 160)

Gramsci was emphasizing that every civil society --including those that espouse laissez-faire liberalism-- has a political programme which is manifest in the state; he was by no means saying it doesn’t matter whether state or civil society provide services.


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SECTIONS

1) Social Learning in an Era of Transnationalism: Ideas, Coalitions and the Effect of Neo-Liberalism on Institutional Models

2) Overview

3) What is a social learning perspective?

4) Hegemonies of Social Learning

5) Framing Education By Class And Merit: Episodes of Social Learning and Conservative Ideas

6) Questions of trust

7) Actors under constraints

8) Social learning and paradigm change

9) Social Learning From A Political Economy Perspective

10) Educational Classes


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11) Social systems theory as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony


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Britain was the first country to modernize, under their traditional monarchical system, and they defeated us in several wars.But now they are very weak, pointed out Dr. Wang.Because they’ve taken up socialism.

- John Derbyshire, Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

* * *1) Social Learning in an Era of Transnationalism: Ideas, Coalitions and t he Effect of Neo-Liberalism on Institutional Models

Starting in media res, the political debate surrounding the

privatization of education has been a particularly vicious one. And

the middle is the mid- to late-90s, when the authors of one notable

pro-privatization book complained of “speculative, unprofessional

claims” directed against them by those “who get red in the face at

every mention of the word ‘markets.’”4 Similarly, Lynn Olson, a

4 The authors were Terry Moe, a Stanford Political Scientist,

and John E. Chubb, of the Edison Project. Claiming they “have no

interest in ideological wrangling,” they compare educational research

unfavorably to “a dispassionate world of science” and offer several

examples of “just how nasty and intolerant the ‘scholarly’ debate can

get.” (Chubb and Moe, in Rasell and Rothstein, 1993: 219-21) The

question of dispassionate approaches to science is touched upon

below.

Ford// “Neo-Liberalism, Educational Politics and Hegemonies Of Social Learning” 18 October 2014 Draft of Theory Chapter for Social Learning and Hegemony // Page

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senior editor of Education Week stated, "there aren't any neutral people.

There's a feeling that everyone has a vested interest."5

This should not be surprising, for the stakes were remarkably

high. There were, and still are, roughly 60 million school children

in the United States and yearly expenditures are well over half a

trillion. While traditionally around 90% of students have attended

public schools, charter schools –publicly-funded, but privately-run

entities that first appeared at the close of the last century-- have

grown exponentially and seem to have gained a patina of, if not

excellence, then 'better overall.'

And we should focus on the stakes. For a long time private

enterprises, such as Public Strategies and Edison Schools, have

operated with public monies. For nearly two decades, leading public

figures have been saying the “fundamentals are all aligned for a great

number of people to make a whole lot of money in this sector.”6 Once,

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

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

5 Mitgang and Connell, 1999: 7.6 Said by then former Massachusetts Governor William Weld; Weld

finished his statement, “and do well by doing good.” (Walsh, 2000 in

Ed Week, 19 Jan 2000, p. 13)


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

said as his eyes widened, “very lucrative.”7

As has been the case in other sectors, private entities have

moved into the public sector and Capital is starting to run things

that used to be the province of the State. Labor and Land have also

been affected. Education, once supported by land grants in the US and

to this day depending on property taxes for significant revenues, is

being rethought and redirccted along different lines. Of course, the

State is the entity –the only entity-- that can to some degree control

and direct –or at least moderate-- run away Capitalism.

Labor would like to do so, but they are hardly in a position to

do so. Still, when one looks on the side of labor, the magnitude is

no less; one of the country’s largest unions is the National

Education Association (NEA) which has over two and a half million

members; the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) adds roughly

another million members.8 Teachers anticipated in the late 1990s that

7 Observation, 1020 Amsterdam Avenue, 23 Dec 1999. The two books

were Murphy, 1996; Flam, 199?. What is perhaps more interesting is

that he may well have been wrong. The search for a profitable

business model has been difficult. (Cite?)8 It is important to note that Teachers Unions are public sector

unions and this is one area in which unionization rates have not

stalled. “In 1998, government workers continued to have a much


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they would be directly affected by vouchers or any similar change and

some of those changes are occurring today. Roughly two-thirds of

educational costs are due to salaries and one of privatization’s

strongest arguments is that it cuts costs. That is, according to

Free Market arguments, it efficiently allocates resources, often

cutting costs by forcing providers to lower prices.9 So it is no

surprise that US teachers’ unions would modify their strategies so as

to deal with this threat.

higher unionization rate than their private sector counterparts, 37.5

percent versus 9.5 percent.” (NBLS, Press Release, 25 Jan 99) The

overall rate for the workforce was 13.9%, down from 14.1% in 1997 and

20.1% in 1983. Even though teachers cannot legally organize in six

states, over 80% of teachers belong to a union. (add cite) Over 3

million of the nation’s 16.2 million union members are NEA or AFT

members. Plans to merge the two unions have been common; the most

recent was defeated in 1998. [Update with new figures.]9 See Myron Lieberman (1993: 47-53), one of many commentators

on the Right who descry the unions as producer organizations with

anti-competitive policies. Chubb and Moe, (1990) however, emphasize

the autonomy that the market brings. Privitization, in the form of

vouchers, was suggested by Milton Friedman as long age as 1955; it has

been pursued most vigorously in the country most dedicated to

Friedman, Chile. (Carnoy and McEwan, 1999)


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And the threat was direct -- teachers unions, have been

identified by many on the Right as the problem. Those attacks, as

well as the response and non-response, help to outline the project

and the major concepts which will be employed.

These attacks, however, are considered at more length elswhere.10

What follows is an attempt to outline the major arguments and to give

a brief overview of education reform in the US since about 1978.

Privatization was, along with standards-based reform (now reborn as

the Common Core) and charter schools, one of three major reform

thrusts during the period that reached its adolescence in the 90's,

but two important points need to be made. First, along side all of

these was a technological component. Second, that that component had

wide-ranging effects: the pervasive use of standardized tests to

supposedly measure educational progress among students, teachers,

schools, school districts and the nation as a whole.

This change became a movement, one which had a growth spurt in

the early 1990s. Based on the premise that the US was losing to

other nations in the competition to successfully education the

nation's children, higher standards were supported by both President

Bushes, President Clinton and, most recently, President Obama. The

movement, as it matured, would eventually become so well

10 Indicate precisely which after finishing up. Dedication Chapters,

Amy Gutmann Chap


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placed/positioned as to appropriate the term 'Education Reform.'

Whether the claim that we were being 'out-educated' –the current

phrase used by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan --, was based on

fact, whether it might be a fabrication or whether it might hide

deeper defects of the society as a whole is a point that was largely

glossed over in public discourse.

False premise or not, this has had huge ancillary effects.

Curricula were altered, including cutting back on art, music,

physical education and other non-core subjects. Students were tested

constantly, losing days of instruction and periods of recess and free

play to test-taking and test prep. Teachers have begun to be

evaluated on 'the value' they have added in their teaching time, that

value being measured by these tests. Schools have been closed down

and entire faculties dismissed because they were thought lacking in

this regard. This is policy choice at the federal level, but it is

not merely that – it has been enacted as part of statues in state

after state after leverage has been applied by the US Department of

Education.

Thus, while the threat of privatization casts a long shadow and

is lurking in the background, it has not been the most important

movement in education. That would be standards-based reform linked to

high-stakes tests. As for privatization, while it has not inspired a

movement, the prospects of privatization have incentivized the


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sector. And then there are Charter schools, publicly-funded, but

privately run schools which are concentrated largely in poor urban

areas, the areas of greatest social pathology. It is important to

note that, overall, the discourse focuses on failures of public

schools in areas of concentrated poverty, that is, in areas where our

social failures are most evident.

For pro-privatization forces, we can think of testing and data-

collection as a weapon to attack the system. Testing is relied upon

as a means of gauging and accounting for school quality. From this

point of view, the need for the schools to be re-formed, in multiple

stages, over a long-period of time, is generally accepted and rarely

questioned. The idea that the forms of schooling are, in fact,

already really good enough, but what is required are greater

resources, especially in inner-city schools, is an alternative view

that has been much less discussed. It is with these discussions of

educational reform that we will be primarily concerned in the project

as a whole.

The question for the present moment, however, is, How did these

views become accepted? Part of the answer is that there has been a

relentless attack on the institutions of public education, including

the main organizational bodies that represent teachers, the NEA and

the AFT. While teachers’ unions in the US are one focus, this is not

a study of labor, but a study of educational discourse and the


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politics of schooling. The political dynamics include sharp attacks

on teachers’ unions, progressive pedagogical theories and, at the

most general level, the system of public schools. These attacks and

indictments, which speak of self-interested bureaucracies and public

monopolies, frame much of the discourse.

That public schools are falling short and suffer from inherent

flaws is a pervasive theme. It is also the result of a process of

disseminating a set of views that become the sum and substance of

much discourse. To describe this open-ended process, I will use the

terms hegemony and, in quotes, ‘social learning.’ The quotes are

there because a society may not always learn, but it does change

opinions.

The received wisdom of a particular age, since it informs

individuals, institutions and groups, has an effect on all learning.

Education is failing in the US. The US tends not to do well on

international rankings of education. There are always those who

express surprise or indignation, but it shouldn’t be surprising. The

US does not rank high in most social indicators, why should it rank

higher in education? The US ranks 10th to 20th in education and 28th

or 40th in infant mortality. Few express indignation about the latter


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figure.11 Since I’ve always been told that hegemony is pervasive, I

assume this understanding that public education needs to be reformed

because of low test scores, while infant mortality rates do not lead

to the same understanding about the public health system, is part of

hegemony.

In some ways the reasons for this are obvious -- upper and

middle class children don’t primarily depend on the public health

system. Everyone is against an outbreak of cholera, but short of

that poor children’s health is not a high priority. Neither, really,

is a poor child’s education. Thus this also points to class

interests as an active factor.

The connections between privatization and standards also suggest

this. On the national level in the US the spectre of international

11 According to the OECD; the rate of roughly 7 per 1000 is about

twice as high as the leading country, Japan. In international

rankings of education, there are a wide variety of figures one could

draw on; the rank of 10th or 20th is thought to be representative of

typical rankings, but they vary from exam to exam. The US is usually

in the middle, sometimes ahead of France, England, Austria and

Germany, usually behind Norway and New Zealand. For a more careful

examination of these statistics, see my Respect for Teachers, pp xxv – xxix

and pp 103-105; the latter looks at how these figures were presented

on Oprah.


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

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

goal of preparing students for college and eventual entry into the

workforce. These are tests on which upper class students tend to do

well, while those of lower socio-economic background do not. But

class is also invoked in another way. Beginning in the first of the

Reagan-Bush administrations, standards-based reform has run a

parallel course with calls for privatization. Here the major ideas

in play are ‘value-added,’ accountability, meritocracy and

efficiency, which are then used to describe the public education

system as failing.

Here we can question whether the system was truly failing or

whether significant parts of it were truly under-financed. While

standards-based reform may well call for additional funding,

privatization, especially in the form of vouchers, explicitly calls

into question whether the public system can work at all. Along with

many others, Henry Giroux has suggested that the language of the

public good has been largely replaced by the language of private

interests. A set of presumptions have become the accepted wisdom:

big government is about dependency, market relations constitute the

entirety, a winner takes most system is for the benefit of all and,

in neo-liberal philosophy, freedom is freedom to consume. Moreover,

public enterprises are doomed to fail. For Giroux, the emphasis on a

crisis in American education in this particular strand of


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argumentation has been successful in co-opting much of the left’s

rhetoric and using it against any notion of radical reform.12

This epistemic social reality has particular features, such as

the use of human capital theory, which tend to push not only

arguments but also the process of creating and refining institutions in one direction

rather than another. If the present period is characterized by a

neo-liberal synthesis in which efficiency is emphasized and notions

of value are reckoned in terms of marginal utility, then the

political actors engaging in discourse are likely to accept this as

common sense. In seeking to carve out a space for themselves in the

new civil society being created out of this business-oriented logic,

social actors may tend to accept rather than challenge this new

reality. Even those that are critical must realize that the popular

acceptance of certain presumptions is a reality which they must

confront.

If it is true that it is impossible to trace the influence of

ideas unconnected from the politics of a period, then political

12 Henry Giroux, 1988. Cited in William B. Stanley, 1992: 66.

Giroux was among many who saw the Standards Movement of the 1980s as

harbingers of what was to come. Stanley notes, however, that the

crisis metaphor was also present in the anti-progressive movement of

the 1950s and the social transformation literature of the 1930s. See

comments on Hirschmann below.


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discourse is a good place to look for the influence of ideas. Which

ideas are adopted is a political process. This is not to say that we

should focus on state actors and institutions, for at the stage of

adoption the nature of state institutions is perhaps least important;

besides, the state presupposes the concept of the political. More

than that, a regime is an attitudinal phenomenon in which behavior

follows from principles and norms and thus presupposes a particular

concept of the political. What are important are political actors

and social institutions embodying power relations, both formal and

informal, and the ideas, norms and principles which they reflect and

attempt to advance.

We can draw on Kathryn Sikkink’s work, where she distinguishes

between three stages of institutionalizing ideas: adoption,

implementation and consolidation. State-centered approaches provide

“the most insight into issues of implementation of economic policy,

and to a lesser degree, to the consolidation of the model.” She goes

on to emphasize, however, that it “is at the adoption stage where the

nature of state institutions was least important, and the impact of

international environment was most crucial.”13 It is arguably

somewhat less crucial --and certainly less speedy-- in educational

policy in the US, where the international environment is channeled

through a set of political institutions, the weight and nature of

which have huge impacts on policy articulation. Nonetheless, the

adoption of new ideas can transit national borders.

13 Sikkink, 1988, xvii.


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But they still need carriers withing national borders. Sikkink

writes that she started with ideas and ended up studying individuals

and institutions. This is also true of studies in education, but it

does not mean that ideas are unimportant, it just means that it is

easier follow those advancing ideas than the ideas themselves. There

are many trends, but we can mark two great turning points in policy

over the last half-century: Lyndon Johnson’s and Ronald Reagan’s

presidencies. These presidencies also represent, respectively, a

high point of welfare state policies and their attempted repudiation.

No one would claim this is an accident. Moreover, in each case,

education policy was a central component in a greater political

programme. In the case of Reagan, this political programme is still

unfolding.

As political processes they were also social learning processes.

This is a central point that admittedly leaps over a lot of

territory, most of which cannot be bridged here. Social learning’s

central intuition, however, is that in all political discourse, no

matter how based on interest, there is an appeal to something like

disinterested politics -- in Heclo’s formulation this approaches

“collective puzzlement on society’s behalf.”14 At least in the

current formulation, it does not deny that interest group politics

14 Hugh Heclo, 1974, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to

Income Maintenance. New Haven: Yale University Press.


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are dominant. Rather it posits two things: first, that there are

predominant frameworks associated with any period and, second, that,

in some way, these direct interests to certain political outcomes. In

other words, the acceptable solutions to the puzzle –and, indeed, the

puzzle itself—change from period to period.

What I am suggesting is not only that the process of social

learning takes places within constraints posed by political economy,

but also, more precisely, that political economy has an effect on

epistemics – it limits what is considered a feasible policy.15 While

there certainly is an institutional effect on policy, the historical

branching process which limits options takes place within the realm

of acceptable political discourse and that the latter is determined

in greatest part by matters of political economy.

This may seem a bit vague, but it outlines the operating

assumptions: different periods can be characterized by different

political programmes which are, in turn, reflected in discursive

struggles and the way social actors articulate their interests.

This thought underlies not only theories of hegemony, but also a

whole range of related concepts such as ‘punctuated equilibrium’ and

‘critical juncture.’ However, ideas, even well-financed ideas, must,

in the end, be voiced by individuals. Thus one key is understanding

15 This is perhaps the main point of Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in

Capitalist America.


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the resources backing an individual's statements and the networks

with which they work.

Michelle Rhee, former Washington DC School Chancellor and

founder of the New Teachers Project and the Teaching Fellows program,

is one the chief supporters of more testing, firing teachers in large

numbers, bringing in non-educators to run the schools and closing

down failing schools that give children a 'crappy' education. She

entitled her recent book, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First. That gives

one an idea of how positions are advertised. And, indeed, this book

was an advertisement for Rhee's new organization, StudentsFirst, but it

was only 'radical' in the self-congratulatory way that acolytes of

Ayn Rand use the term. Saul Alinsky, who in this Rules for Radicals told

us that writings about revolution are few, would probably take as an

object lesson Rhee's use of the terms 'radical' and 'revolution' –

note how the quotes starts by pandering and then, before the catch

phrase at the end, repeats the argument that the US educational

system as a whole is failing.

America is the greatest country in the world. But that status

is at grave risk. The U.S. cannot and will not maintain that

leadership role -- from commerce to military might to moral

authority -- if we as a nation continue to allow our public

schools to decline. . . . So, what do we do about it? The answer


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is simple -- we need to completely restructure and redefine our

education system to put students first.16

This is a distilled version of a narrative that has been

propagated since the 1970s. Instead of radical reform, we have

mantras of accountability and efficiency as we follow the intertwined

paths of standards-based reform, privatization, anti-unionism, and,

more recently, charter schools and need for value-added measurements

of teacher performance. And she is part of a network. But we'll

return to that later. For the moment, notice the word 'completely' –

this is not an effort to improve the system, but to dismantle and

reassemble it.

These came to a head in the Bush administration’s No Child Left

Behind (NCLB) education act. While NCLB, a standards-based program,

is not the empirical subject, it is in some ways the logical

conclusion of this movement. NCLB accountability formulae label

many public schools as ‘failing’ -- something that almost cannot help

but to open up possibilities for private enterprises at some later

point. Moreover, this was in large part its intent. It is an

illustrative case of how business logic moves forward in advance of

the private interests that might benefit. In this case it is by use

16 Michelle Rhee, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First, 2013; excerpt

taken from Michelle Rhee copyrighted website,

http://www.edradical.com/, accessed 20 September, 2014.


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http://www.edradical.com/

of an administrative apparatus that was justified by invoking the

national interest.

'Lynchpin,' however, may be a better word, since the movement

has moved on. The change in administration in Washington did not

change the policy, it changed the way the policy was used. There was

a new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who criticized NCLB, and

there was a 2011 executive order that was supposed to end it, but

there was no blanket cessation, instead, each state had to negotiate

its way out. Having tremendous leverage because NCLB, as originally

written, 100 percent of schools would have to reach NCLB performance

goals by 2014, the Obama administration embarked on the process of

giving states waivers from NCLB. There was a price, of course:

Duncan invited states to apply for waivers for the law's

toughest pieces -- like the AYP measurement system -- in

exchange for agreeing to adopt some of the administration's

favored education reforms. To get waivers, states would have to

create new student performance measurement systems and adopt new

evaluations for teachers and principals that take student

performance into account.17

17 Joy Resmovits, “Arne Duncan Puts No Child Left Behind Waivers In

Three States On 'High-Risk Status',” Huffington Post, 15 August 2013;

accessed September 2014 at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/15/arne-duncan-no-child-


26 of 222

A lot of people did not expect this of the Democratic

administration elected in 2008, although that might have just because

they did not know of his support for charter schools, merit-based pay

and testing. Nor did they consider his ties to “the Commercial Club,

established in the 1800s to promote the interests of Chicago’s

corporate and business elite,”18 which was a “central force behind

Renaissance 2010 [a program which introduced] markets and competition

into education [and increased] state intervention as the Chicago

Public Schools administration intervene[d] in the daily activities of

educators by introducing corporate models of governance with

standardized testing linked to rewards and punishments.”19 Then there

left_n_3762041.html.18 Danny Weil, “Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model

Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse,”

Counterpunch, 24 August 2009; accessed May 2010 and September 2014

at http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/24/obama-and-duncan-s-

education-policy-like-bush-s-only-worse/. Weil goes on to call

Renaissance 2010 as :basically a land use plan for housing and

urban development aimed at increasing gentrification, with schools

playing a predominant role in maintaining and assuring a healthy

urban middle-class and attracting global visitors, tourists and

Wall Street financial interests.”19 Jitu Brown, Rico Gutstein and and Pauline Lipman, “Arne Duncan and

the Chicago Success Story: Myth or Reality?” Rethinking Schools, 29


27 of 222

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/24/obama-and-duncan-s-education-policy-like-bush-s-only-worse/


was also Arne Duncan's role – he was a non-educator from the business

sector who then became the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, who,

under Mayoral control, oversaw Renaissance 2010, “a corporate project

that was launched in 2004 to reform both the city and its public

schools with the intent of creating schools and geographical spaces

that would serve to attract the professionals believed to be needed

in a 21st century ‘global city’.”20

May 2009; accessed March 2010 at

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/05/29/arne-duncan-and-

chicago-success-story-myth-or-reality. They describe “the agenda

in which Duncan is complicit” as being shaped by

“Two powerful, interconnected forces drive education policy in the

city: 1) Mayor Daley, who was given official authority over CPS by

the Illinois State Legislature in 1995 and who appoints the CEO and

the Board of Education, and 2) powerful financial and corporate

interests, particularly the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club

of Chicago whose reports and direct intervention shape current

policy.”20 Danny Weil, “Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model

Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse,”

Counterpunch, 24 August 2009; accessed May 2010 and September 2014

at http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/24/obama-and-duncan-s-

education-policy-like-bush-s-only-worse/. Weil goes on to call

Renaissance 2010 as “basically a land use plan for housing and

urban development aimed at increasing gentrification, with schools


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http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/05/29/arne-duncan-and-chicago-success-story-myth-or-reality

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/05/29/arne-duncan-and-chicago-success-story-myth-or-reality

Prior to his appointment, Mr. Duncan’s critical role in the

Renaissance 2010 was considered particularly suspect.21 Some early

skeptics, who must by now think they have been proven right, went so

far as to claim that then President-elect Obama has betrayed public

education by appointing “as his secretary of education someone who

actually embodies this utterly punitive, anti-intellectual,

corporatized and test-driven model of schooling .” This is “not only

because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and

penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the

slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts

of the corporation at best or the prison at worse.”22 Thus, instead

of charting a new direction, the Obama administration seems to be

playing a predominant role in maintaining and assuring a healthy

urban middle-class and attracting global visitors, tourists and

Wall Street financial interests.”21 David Hursh and Pauline Lipman, "Chapter 8: Renaissance 2010:

The Reassertion of Ruling-Class Power through Neoliberal Policies in

Chicago" in David Hursh, High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and

Learning, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Hursh’s arguments

are considered elsewhere. 22 Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman, “Obama's Betrayal of

Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling, “

t r u t h o u t website, 17 December 2008, accessed 29 April 2010 at

http://www.truthout.org/121708R?print.


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continuing a decades long attack on public schools that are thought

appropriate targets “not just because they are deemed ineffective but

because they are public.”23

We mentioned before that Michelle Rhee was part of a network.

She worked for Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein in New York; the

latter recommended her for the DC job. The New Teachers Project,

which predated Arne Duncan in saying the teacher evaluation system in

this country was broken, received money from the Gates Foundation.

Joel Klein took a job with Rupert Murdoch as head of their education

division; he sat right behind Rupert during Parlimentary hearings on

cell phone hacking. The Gates Foundation also supports the Measures

of Effective Teaching (MET) project. That Gates, Murdoch and

Bloomberg all see a great future for virtual education is not an

accident, nor is it an accident that they have all said similar

things about firing large numbers of teachers and having the top

quartile teachers remain, but teaching larger classes. You hear the

same things – often word for word – from these sources. You often

hear the same thing, again often word for word. from sources in the

Obama administration.24

23 David Labaree cited ibid., which in turn cites Alfie Kohn, "The

Real Threat to American Schools," Tikkun (March-April 2001), p. 25.24 For a more extensive treatment, see “Consider the Hero: Saving

Public Education by Attacking Teachers Unions,” Section H of my

Respect for Teachers, pp 95-142, from which much of the following is


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Since the beginning of the Obama administration we have seen a

push to expand charters, a continuation of the failing schools

policy, another push, this time for pay-for-performance measures, and

a redefinition of teacher quality, replacing qualified teachers with

effective ones. This is a dubious method for building up the

institutions of public education.

Not surprising because it goes back to NCLB and NCLB, by

creating a testing regime that focused on basic skills, managed to

subvert the content of the standards movement. With that the

standards movement which sought to achieve high levels of quality and

make students college ready was a thing of the past, but NCLB was

thoroughly a bi-partisan effort. Ted Kennedy sponsored the bill and

any thought that allowing Annual Yearly Progress and the failing

schools provisions was an oversight seems whimsical in the light of

the Obama and Duncan education program.

While it is true that Secretary Duncan is willing to waive

components of NCLB, they are only “for states that agree to pursue

reforms mandated by the administration.”25 Secretary Duncan touts this

taken.25 Joy Resmovits, “Arne Duncan: 'We've Been Very Complacent',”

Huffington Post, 23 September 2011; accessed September 2011 at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/23/arne-duncan-


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as encouraging innovation, but it is innovation defined in limited

terms; waivers will be granted, but under the condition that you

adopt the Obama/Duncan program. President Obama announced the

change “To help states, districts and schools that are ready to move

forward with education reform, our administration will provide

flexibility from the law in exchange for a real commitment to

undertake change. The purpose is not to give states and districts a

reprieve from accountability, but rather to unleash energy to improve

our schools at the local level.”26

States need to apply to receive a waiver and in the application

states will have to agree to take action to:

Transition to college- and career-ready expectations for

all students;

Develop systems of differentiated recognition,

accountability, and support;

Evaluate teacher and principal effectiveness and support

improvement; and

interview_n_975966.html26 “Obama Administration Sets High Bar for Flexibility from No

Child Left Behind in Order to Advance Equity and Support Reform,”

September 23, 2011, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary.

Retrieved from:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/23/obama-

administration-sets-high-bar-flexibility-no-child-left-behind-orde.


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Reduce duplication and unnecessary burden.27

Unions have no role in this process, at least they are not to

represent the interests of their members, but must adhere to the

student achievement only program –the one that contravenes all the

ordinary rules of how to build coalitions in support for social

policy-- that the Obama administration advances, “Collective

bargaining itself must be a tool not to protect adults, but to

protect student achievement,” Arne Duncan contends. “That's got to be

the purpose of all collective bargaining activity.” Even if once

accepts the premise, even if there is a reliable measure of teacher

quality based on student achievement, which at least Mr. Duncan

admits we don't have, you'd think he would rethink his position on

collective bargaining because one of his goals is to “get more great

teachers into the profession” and protecting teachers might be a way

to do it.

Instead he parrots the New Teacher Project: “We’ve been scared

27 U.S. Department of Education, September 23, 2011, ESEA

Flexibility. Retrieved from

http://www.ed.gov/esea/flexibility/documents/esea-flexibility.doc,

p.7.


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in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like

interchangeable widgets.”28 Then he parrots, among others, the MET

project, “Teacher evaluations are largely broken in this country.

We've had a system that doesn't reward excellence.” You'll note he

often uses the word 'excellence.' ”My job is to support, to shine a

spotlight, to replicate success, to talk about excellence, but also

to challenge the status quo.”

In the Resmovits interview he says, “Everyone is scared to say

that great teachers matter, and that's been a great impediment to 28 Quoted in Thomas Frieman, “Teaching for America,” New York Times,

November 20, 2010. For more on Arne Dunca's endorsement of the NTP

Widget effect report, see http://widgeteffect.org/news/, which

includes links to: “Grading Teachers” an Editorial in The Houston

Chronicle 8 July 2009, at

http://www.chron.com/opinion/editorials/article/Grading-teachers-

Stop-treating-teachers-like-1734195.php, and a “a major speech to

the National Education Association” during which “Arne Duncan said

policies created over the past century have produced an industrial

factory model of education that treats all teachers like

interchangeable widgets,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan Notes

"Widget Effect" in “Partners in Reform, Remarks to National

Education Association,” 02 July 2009; accessed July 2010 at

http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/partners-reform.


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reform. There's been this tendency to treat everyone the same. It

masks a tremendous richness and potential of nurturing amazing work

and not tolerating failure when it impacts children. Don't you think

that's vitally important to figure out how to get talent where you

need it most?” The problem with the Widget analogy, however, is that

individual talent is highlighted and teachers are compared on a

single dimension – the single metric of how they improve test scores.

Different capabilities in different teachers –their comparative

advantages, so to speak-- are ignored.

So too are school effects and umpteen other factors. These are

conveniently kicked down the road. As regards rating teachers, Duncan

answers, “I don't. And frankly no one does.” to Resmovits' queston,

“Do you have a prescription on how teachers should be rated?” Of

course there are a lot fo people with such prescriptions, all with

their hidden agendas and ideological baggage. While he says the

teacher evaluation system is broken, at the moment he allows that the

DOE will encourage teachers to be graded “On whatever system

[districts or states] have. You're right, they've got to have a


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thoughtful system. But let's have that conversation.”

Where would that conversation start? Arne Duncan says he's

driven by “anger . . . frustration and real dissatisfaction with the

status quo.”29 This was in response to the question, “You talk about

the status quo a lot, without describing who's keeping it that way.

Who are you targeting?” Obviously, he did not answer the question,

but 'the status quo' from other reformers has only rarely included

large educational conglomerates such as Pearson or venture

capitalists, despite the stunning dollar amounts involved. Pearson

recently signed a half a billion contract to provide testing services in

Texas30 As for venture capitalists, “In the venture capital world,

transactions in the K-12 education sector soared to a record $389

million last year, up from $13 million in 2005.”31 Instead of Pearson

29 End of Duncan quotes, all of which are from Resmovits,

“Complacent,” unless otherwise note. 30 Luke Quinton & Kate Mcgee, “What’s in Texas' $500 Million Testing Contract with Pearson?” KUT.ORG News, Austin, Texas, July 16, 2013; accessed October 2014 at http://kut.org/post/what-s-texas-500-million-testing-contract-pearson.

31 Stephanie Simon,”Private firms eyeing profits from U.S. public schools,” Reuters, New York, 2 August 2012; accessed October


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and venture capitalists, the status quoe usually consists of the

'educational establishment' and teachers unions.

Duncan is more careful than that – he does not now finger point

in the same way, but says teachers, who “have been unfairly

demonized,” are hard-working and "desperately underpaid" and that “we

need to figure out how to double teacher salaries . . . Starting pay

should be in the $60,000s, and experienced teachers should have the

ability to make $130,000.”32 Whether that conversation will ever go

anywhere is, however, highly questionable; it seems as throw away

line, the epitome of a non-starter in a period when all level of

government –federal, state and local-- are facing huge budget gaps.

But Mr. Duncan wants to have "honest conversations that critically

challenge the status quo pretty hard," elevating and “reinventing the

profession" of teaching, not indulging in “kumbaya around the status

2014 at http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/usa-education-investment-idUSL2E8J15FR2012080232 Julie Mack, “ U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says teachers

are 'desperately underpaid' and salaries should be doubled,”

Kalamazoo Gazette, accessed September 09, 2011 at

http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2011/09/us_education_secre

tary_arne_du_1.html


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quo."33

The public statements on increasing teacher pay are new, at

least their prominence is. But they are of secondary importance

compared to connecting pay to performance on standardized tests. When

Race to the Top (RTTT) was announced, the Obama administration stated

specifically that it aimed “to reward states that use student

achievement as a 'predominant' part of teacher evaluations with the

extra stimulus funds — and pass over those that don’t.”34 This did

not mean that test scores were the only measure, but Joanne Weiss,

who administered the first round of applications, told states they

could lose out if test scores were not included in tenure decisions,

“it seems illogical and indefensible to assume that those aren’t part

of the solution at all.” Weiss wanted New York state, among others,

to change its laws so tests affected tenure; Daniel Weisberg, the

33 Ibid.34 Maura Walz, “Incenting Change; Obama official to New York: Change

your tenure law or else,” Gotham Schools, 9 July 2009 accessed Aug

2009 at http://gothamschools.org/2009/07/09/obama-official-to-new-

york-change-your-tenure-law-or-else/


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http://gothamschools.org/2009/07/09/obama-official-to-new-york-change-your-tenure-law-or-else/

http://gothamschools.org/2009/07/09/obama-official-to-new-york-change-your-tenure-law-or-else/

NTP's Vice President of Policy & General Counsel, a co-author of The

Widget Effect and, under Joel Klein, former Chief Executive of Labor

Policy and Implementation for the New York City Department of

Education, said this was a 'motivator' to change state law and make

'significant reform' to teacher.35 Under Andrew Cuomo, New York state

law was changed and a new evaluation system was instituted in the

2013-14 school year.

Still, we must go back to NCLB.

35 Weiss and Weisberg quoted in Maura Walz, op cit. The connections

between the NTP and Joel Klein's DOE are many. Current President

Tim Daly “helped launch TNTP’s flagship teacher pipeline program,

New York City Teaching Fellows.” Another co-author of The Widget

Effect, David Keeling, the NTP's Vice President of Communications and

wrote many of the ads for the Fellows program referred to in Part

1. The NTP also has a Vice President of Human Capital, Karolyn

Belcher, who started in Harlem one of the first three charter

schools in New York State, although this was before Mr. Klein was

Chancellor. And, of course, Mr. Klein recommended to Adrian Fenty

that founder Michelle Rhee be appointed head of DCPS. See “Our

Leadership,” the NTP website, accessed September 2011 at

http://tntp.org/about-us/our-leadership/


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By taking the elements put in place by standards-based reform,

the Bush administration wedded it to a privatization interest. This

‘interest,’ it must be kept in mind, is much broader than merely

those who would benefit directly, but includes those who would

benefit indirectly in having pro-privatization and anti-statist

agendas advanced. The later provides much more than a rooting

interest, but substantial material support as well, in terms of

propagating their views through think tanks, media and political

contributions. That the Obama administration continued is this

direction was particularly frustrating to many (including myself),

but perhaps most telling.

All in all, the issue of education reform presents an important

case study of how understandings of the public and private are

presently being reshaped in the US and of the important roles of

economic imperatives and common sense economistic presumptions in

that process.

While the movement for higher standards can claim antecedents

from Thomas Jefferson to Dwight Eisenhower, Michael Apple suggests

that contemporary support for national standards has come from four

groups in an uneasy coalition: neo-liberals committed to market

solutions, neo-conservatives seeking 'a return to' a common culture,

authoritarian populists favoring a return to religion and “particular

fractions of the professionally oriented middle class who are


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committed to the ideology and techniques of accountability,

measurement, and management.”36 Except when they invoke an

individualist and anti-statist ethos, I am not so sure of how

important the two middle groups are, but the combination onf neo-

liberals and those seeking answers through the advance of technology

is particularly potent and has shaped the discourse.

The discourse is also shaped by a particular strategy: attack.

The main idea of what follows is fairly simple -- that to advance

political programmes requires attacking social actors and social

36 Michael Apple, “Rhetorical Reforms: Markets, Standards and

Inequality, 30April 1999, pp 1-2; accessed October 2013. Apple, a

leading educator and activist at the University of Wisconsin, thinks

more can be said about the relationship between privatization and

standards. He suggests that the “seemingly contradictory discourse of

competition, markets and choice on the one hand and accountability,

performance objectives, standards, national testing, and national

curriculum . . . oddly reinforce each other and help cement

conservative educational positions into our daily lives in many

nations.” (1999: 2) Focusing on ‘holders of technical/administrative

knowledge’ who have autonomous interests and whose support signifies a

settlement or compromise with the dominant fractions of capital, Apple

asserts that capital’s strategic agenda is advanced only with the

cooperation of other groups “whose own needs are met as well.” (1986:

176)


41 of 222

ideas that might pose effective opposition. It goes beyond that,

however, to suggest two things in addition. First, that by looking

at the attacks, we can get a fairly accurate picture of the political

programme being advanced. Second, that social actors in opposition

will in large part accept this programme except where it threatens

their very survival.

Of the attacks we shall say they are a means to advance a neo-

liberal programme based on micro-economic theories and business

practices which are thought to increase efficiency. This program

advocates a shift in responsibility for social welfare from the state

to the individual (and family) -- a shift from the public to the

private sphere. At the same time, proposed social norms are coherent

with the demands of productive enterprise and the pressures of

financial management. Furthermore, the increasingly transnational

organization of business and finance creates a situation in which

individual states cannot control cross-border flows.

This not an exhaustive list of contibuting cause, but the result

is a predominant mode of argumentation and a set of neo-liberal

presumptions which inform policy and set limits to acceptable

discourse. I have listed seven or eight main points, but the number

is nothing to quibble about:

comparative advantage must be a driving force of policy


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efficiency requires pruning away the state and, more

generally, levels of bureaucracy in private enterprise

the justification for individual remuneration is the

‘value-added’ by that individual

capital is fungible

accountability structures and the ineluctable market

modality of the incentive system provide for increases in

productivity

productivity increases also require constant

monitoring and measurement

altruism is dismissed by tautology

pragmatism is reduced to pragmatic self-interest

As these presumptions gain more general acceptance, the

articulation of the self-interest of the business and financial class

makes its way to being understood as a general, if not necessarily

universal, societal interest. In the broadest terms, this is a form of

hegemony that presents itself as a set of lessons in social learning,

something that will be discussed below.

The effects on education and schooling are profound. First, it

is assumed that the business model is appropriate to apply to

education. There is also, as the effort to make Chicago a global, 21st

century city indicates, an important transnational element.


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Since 1980 or so, economic production and class structure have

been increasingly articulated transnationally, resulting in a

qualitatively different formation of capital. One would expect to

see a corresponding change in public education. One can document

this by pointing to the examples of IMF and World Bank support for

education, but it is more wide-spread than that. Teachers’ unions,

which are also professional associations, end up using the same

language.

To ask the question of how to analyze developments in school

reform from this perspective, one would start with Schooling in Capitalist

America. Bowles and Gintis define a mechanism of class reproduction

by pointing to two correspondences: one between changing structures

of class and changes in public schooling, the other between what

business needs and what is taught in school. They support the first

claim by periodization; major school reform movements correspond to

struggles in capitalist relations.37

Today, human development is thought of in terms of capital

development and the individual learner is thought of as a discrete

investment. Competition is prized for its positive effects, while

the need for collaboration is downplayed. Another way to put this is

that of the two cultural pathways for human and cultural development,

37 See Bowles and Gintis, 1976: 234-5, and the political economy

section [?] below.


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the ‘independent pathway’ has dominated discourse while the

‘interdependent pathway’ has gotten much less attention.38 The

emphasis on capital development is then used to justify social

expenditures.

In the history of United States education reform, explicit

references to the national interest and international economic

competition were made in order to justify the beginnings of the

standards movement. Over all, many social actors in opposition have

in large part accepted this part of the programme. A telling example

is the political positioning of teachers’ unions in the US -- how

they have been attacked and how they have responded. As

representatives of public sector employees, they have opposed

privatization in almost every form, but accepted standard-based

reform and its calls for accountability and higher educational

quality. Beginning in the 1990s, various factions within both major

teachers’ unions publicly advocated a new approach to contract

negotiations. At the end of the 1990s this even led the largest

national teacher union to introduce a ‘New Unionism’ project. The

second-largest union, the AFT, embarked on efforts to turn teaching

into a Profession. This was spoken of as an attempt to adopt a

cooperative, rather than an adversarial approach, and included

38 See Patricia M. Greenfield, Heidi Keller, Andrew Fuligni and

Ashley Maynard, “Cultural Pathways through Universal Development,”

Annual Review of Psychology, 2003, 54: 461-90.


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schemes for site-based management, 'bare bones' contracts, merit-pay

and professional career ladders that crossed over into

administration. While it was hardly meant to completely overhaul the

industrial model of contract negotiations, it was both a reaction to

external criticisms and, at first, a decentralized and parallel set

of developments as local unions reacted to new demands and offered

positions the unions could live with.

Both unions began to move away from industrial unionism models

and attach importance to substantive educational concerns,39

highlighting the relationship between changing economic models and

collective strategies.40 The most influential explanation of this

39 Perry and Wildman, 1970; Jessup, 1978.40 [rewrite or delete]The material on teachers unions is slim and

hardly able to shed light on how global economic change has affected

their positioning. While Murphy (1990) has provided a fine history,

most accounts (e.g., Selden, 1985) are provided by participants, past,

present or future. Teachers Unions have most frequently been

analyzed in terms of labor negotiations, (Jessop, 1985: 3) but this

is a static view that hardly accounts for change. Union claims to be

stressing educational concerns, causing one to look in opposite

directions for the possible determinants of such a turn of events.

Interesting in this regard are the opposite trajectories of Berube

and Kerchner. Berube became an academic after he left the UFT in the

late 1960s in the aftermath of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville


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strategic change is that it is generational, driven by changes in

belief,41 While that kicks the can of belief formation down the road,

it is nonetheless general enough to be applied comparatively;42

moreover, the generational argument breaks union strategic choice

down into phases and emphasizes periodization.

This, in turn, involves a learning curve; the industrial form of

representation is typical of bygone American corporate capitalism,

controversy. Kerchner, of the Claremont Graduate Center, has become

more and more involved with the NEA’s New Unionism push. Kerchner

was the guest speaker openning their March 1998 Higher Education

conference; not only did the NEA now have his co-authored guide to

revitalizing the union at number 2 on its professional best seller

list, but it also distributes a 50 page study guide to his 1997 book,

United Mind Workers, calling it the “most provocative educational reform

book of the 90s.”

Other works consulted include Urban (1997), Braun (1972), Eaton

(1975), Eberts and Stone (1983), Kirst (1984) and Taft. (1974)

Teachers Unions may be profitfully compared to new social movements

(e.g., Touraine, 1981; Kitschelt, in Zeitlin, 1985; Boggs, 1986; and

Olofsson, 1988). On changing union strategies, see Aronowitz (1983),

Moody (in Davis, 1987), Freeman and Medoff (1985).

41 Kerchner and Mitchell, 1988: 9.42 See Barber, 1992.


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albeit with a heavy emphasis on lobbying; traditional collective

bargaining did not generally attach importance to substantive

educational concerns.43 Teachers Unions, in this view, formerly were

considered “combatants rather than partners in the educational policy

process” but are now trying to recreate the joint operating

relationships unions enjoy in other countries.44 While a generational

account offers an overview of union strategic change, for the most

part it provides a descriptive framework for explanation rather than

an explanation itself.

Within strategic discourse at the national level, the adoption

of some of the tenets of this new approach eventually became

priorities in the 1990s. The administrations of Bill Chase of the

NEA began a 'New Unionism' program with the avowed aim of leaving

behind adverserial tactics and taking on the task of improving the

quality of education.45 Sandra Feldman, then President of the AFT,

spoke at length of the role teachers’ unions must take in insuring

‘true professionalism’ – a misguided attempt to my mind, in that a

profession needs to have a measure of control.46 Fundamental 43 Perry and Wildman, 1970; Jessup, 1978.44 Kerchner in Cooper, 1992

45 See, Kerchner, Koppich and Weeres, 1997. 46 I hope to make these points more clearly in an article still

in progress, “The Strange Death of the New Professionalism:

Redefined Self-Interest and The Development of Teachers’ Unions’


48 of 222

characteristics of a profession include some sort of formal

professional association, a common cognitive base, institutionalized

training, licensing, work autonomy, colleague control and a code of

ethics.47 Teaching is not a profession for many reasons, but most

clearly because teachers do not control the operations of educational

enterprises.48

Positions on Educational Reform.”47 Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: a Sociological Analysis,

Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1978, p. 20848 According to Beatrice and Sidney Webb (New Statesman, 21 April

1917), a profession is founded upon specialized educational training.

They add that it is also a vocation – professionals supply objective

counsel and service to others. Their compensation, at least in most

cases, is agreed upon beforehand and there is no expectation of other

business gain – physicians regulated their own profession etc. Over

time, statutory regulation has increased, but professionals should

have the freedom to exercise professional judgement.

Overall, professions tend to be autonomous, which means they

have a high degree of control of their own affairs: "professionals

are autonomous insofar as they can make independent judgments about

their work.” (Michael D. Bayles, Professional Ethics. Belmont, California:

Wadsworth, 1981.) Teachers, who are often handed a curriculum which

they are told to teach, and are subject to scrutiny by

administrators, who of late have often not come up through the

teaching ranks, do not have that degree of control.


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But the bigger picture is beyond that. Kerchner admits to have

“missed something big . . . the tectonic plates of institutional

change were rumbling underneath public education.”49 The attacks

that frames the entire discourse are the attacks on models of state

enterprise, Keynesianism and the welfare state. In order to discuss

these attacks, I will employ the terms social learning and hegemony,

while also reviewing the political economy literature on education

and schooling.

Though it is not original with him, ‘social learning’ is a term

that I take from Peter Hall. Hall suggests three are different orders

of social learning. First, 1st order change or the refinement of

agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order -- the choice of methods to

achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the selection of goals.50 The

quotations are my own and they are meant to show the difficulties in

Cite other article on characteristics of a profession. Other

cites: Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: the Authority of Metaphor in the

History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1992, p.19.

49 Kerchner, Koppich and Weeres, 1997, p. 5.50 Peter Hall, 1993.


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referring to what is clearly a case of a change in conceptual models

as learning.

There are many cases in which epistemic models change -- we even

have a word for it when changes are least subject to prediction:

fashion. And just as changes in fashion tell us a great deal about a

period, so also do changes in epistemic models. That is not to say

this is ‘learning,’ nor is it to say everything is fashion.

Nonetheless, while there are technical advances, to be sure, in

fields ranging from art to city planning to drama we do not see any

thing approaching a linear progression of epistemic models. Indeed,

we don’t even have the vantage point to tell us what a linear

progression would be.

The overarching argument is that hegemony, when most successful,

is thought to present itself as a set of lessons in social learning.

Thus other social actors will follow these lessons and not challenge

the core of the leading political programme. That most social actors

will accept leading political programmes is not, however, a

transhistorical truth.

Let us compare the teachers with another ‘new unionism’:

The basic difference between the old and new unions in the clothing industry can be traced to the differences in their underlying philosophies. The older unions accepted the


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capitalist system of production as an inevitable evil under which workers are placed by natural law at the lowest rank of the economic order. . . . The new unions are dedicated to a Socialist philosophy and refuse to accept the myth of the divineorigin of capitalism, or to accept as a final decree of natural law the existing property relations.51

The quote comes from a book written before the enactment of the

Wagner Act and before the consolidation of corporatist interest-

intermediation structures. What is interesting to note is that the

critique of capitalism in the quote above is wholly absent from the

contemporary discourse of teachers’ unions. Instead, just as Chicago

presented itself as a global, 21st century city, the unions spent some

time presenting themselves as the professionals needed to create a

labor force able to compete in the global economy.

Part of the absence of any critique is due to the fact that

teachers, unlike textile workers, are not of ‘the lowest rank’ and

part of this is due to the effort to improve their rank within the

existing system. While the system the unions project is one with a

vibrant public sector, again, their first job, in terms of public

relations and building a collective will, is to deflect criticism.

51 Charles Elbert Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America: A

Study in Progressive Trades-Unionism, Ancon: New York, 1934, p 68.


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And this criticism, as other chapters show, is not mild.52

Attacks on teachers’ unions are vehement and often mean spirited.

They also place demands on teachers’ unions and place constraints on

their discursive production. In addition, when they are more than

mere words, but have legislative content that would curtail union

organizing and political action, they pose a threat which requires

the unions to mobilize resources to protect their legal and political

positions. Such a threat is posed by paycheck protection

initiatives, but specific cases of more general attacks on unions by

Republican Governors in states such as Wisconsin, New Jersey and Ohio

are noteworthy.

When one looks at the historical background –especially, attacks

on progressive pedagogy and the back-basics movement-- one should not

be surprised. The back-to-basics movement was a precursor of the

standards movement and we find many of the same arguments in earlier

and more revealing forms.

52 See, in particular, the 'Dedication' essay in this volume.


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2) Overview

The following analysis starts from the premise that the best way to understand the course of educational policy in US since the late 1970s is as reflective of a shift in hegemony. This shift in hegemony especially has its effects on labor and labor unions, specifically because the ability of labor to organize transnationally is severely limited in comparison to that of capital. When we talk about 'organized labor,' it is far less organized than 'organized capital.'

While on the surface they may seem to be a more formal organization than some business associations, unions organize individuals and collect dues from them; they are necessary institutions (or close to it) to create collective agency among workers. Organizations that draw on business --whether corporations or other for profit entities-- for political purposes may indeed be less formal and less necessary, but they are organizing businesses that have already been organized so that they might compete in the market place; they have revenues, they have a hierarchical structure, they can achieve great measures of collective agency without relying on formal institutional structures that connect business to business.53

Put that together with the WTO/GATT's stated commitment to free trade and the IMF/Money Center Bank enforcement of economic orthodoxy in

53 Przeworski Capitalism and Social Democracy?


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financial matters, and labor, with only the nearly forgotten ILO functioning effectively on a transnational level, is clearly outmatched.

They are outmatched in terms of effective agency. Amartya Sen defined agency as “the ability to identify objectives for change and act and bring about change.”54 Whether for the individual, collectives or institutions, agency is the ability to define ones goals and act upon them, even in the face of opposition. Such action can bring about a transformation from disempowerment to empowerment,55 but while different social actors may be able to definegoals, acting upon them in such a way as to bring about change depends in large degree on the resources available to the actors. While strategies of propogation are important, one must realize that those with greater resources tend to be much more effective in makingtheir point of view known and having their way of 'seeing' the socialworld – of understanding it, explaining it and changing it – acceptedas a pervasive common sense that shapes argument. Assumptions aboutthe nature of the social world and how it works and about the nature of people and how they act – for instance, that it makes sense to have an institutionalized transnational market system based on a desire for gain--, become the basis for defining goals that shape future society. Moreover, the acceptance of much of this as 'natural' (or at least 'normal') leads to certain issues not even

54 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, 199755 See, for instance, Naila Kabeer 1999:438


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being contested.

The roots of this are deep in the intertwined histories of Newtonian physics, Lockean Liberalism and the individualistic methodology that they share, supposedly, with micro-economic analysis.56 Locke'a mentor was Robert Boyle, the great Irish scientist (think of Boyle's law and the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas); he studied medicine; and he was also friends with Issac Newton, whose Prinipia Mathematica he greatly admired. His social contract or compact theory –that we exchange some of our 'natural' rights and freedoms inorder to become members of a society the common laws of which protectour life, liberty and property-- undergirds so much political agrument in the Anglo-American world that it really is impossible to calculate his influence. A central point of his theory: political society and political power are justified on the grounds that they make laws to protect and regulate property.

This much is generally understood about Locke, but Locke also was taken with money. In his pseudo-anthropological account of how surplus led to trade and trade changed from a barter system to a money-based system, he locates a turning point in world history.

56 We hope to explain the use of adjective 'supposedly' later, but

micro-economics does not look at individual human beings – rather it

looks at individual decision makers, which may be a human being, a

partnership, a corporation, etc.


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Money, since it is not a perishable item, maintains its value over time and therefore, once a society has money, there is in effect no

limit on the amount of property an individual, family or corporation may hold. Thus, the basic framework from which Lockean explanations emerge assumes that concentrations of wealth are a natural phenomena – natural in the sense that this is the way a society naturally develops. And, for Locke, property was sacrosanct – the reason that we form a social compact in the first place. He did not, however, venture far into the speculative world of what would happen because of these concentrations of property and money.

We'll say little more about Locke, except to say we do need to look at the concentrations of wealth and their effects. And we shouldalso speculate a little using the tools of micro-economics. During the 1990s, as NAFTA was put into effect and the GATT morphed into the WTO, I was looking at the roots of neo-liberalism. One root was conceptual and historical: how the mathematical form of economics with its emphasis on marginal utility models emerged in the mid-1800s during a period when the great powers were expanding and there was a relatively low level of conflict. During this period Jevons, Menger, Walras and Marshall, among others, developed something closely resembling modern micro-economics, explicitly modeling the disciplineon Newtonian mechanics.57 Along with macro-economics, the new approach supplanted political economy in both name in substance. Up until this time, the best seller in the field, running to a dozen or so editions, was John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, and 57 See Maurice Dobb, 1973.


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economics was considered as a part of politics and creating the wealthof a nation.. Afterwards, Economics became its own field, increasinglydivorced from considerations of politics and culture, ever so more based on mathematical approximations of social interactions.58

But let us consider for a second the model of Newtonian mechanics, gravitation in particular. Based on the mass of the objects in question, gravity has force in inverse proportion to the square of the distance at which it works. Conceptually, the desire for gain –specifically the desire for accumulating money and concentrating wealth-- is analogous to gravity. The greater the gainand the closer it is in time, the more it directs human action. I live in New York and in New York the financial center is like a big black hole which distorts the real-estate market. The greater the concentration of wealth, the greater the distortion. Yet when the Lockean paradigm is wedded to the micro-economic paradigm, this type of distortion is more often than not overlooked.

You'll note that I said 'closer in time.' Space is the much lessimportant variable since space can be bridged by technological means.But the further you put something off in time, the more its present

58 I followed this argument in a number of papers, including

“Transnational Hegemony and Liberal Ideology: A Gramscian Approach to

US Development Paradigms Under the Influence of the World Financial

System,” presented at the MUNS symposium, Social Forces and Post-Westphalian

Politics, York University, Toronto, 4 - 5 May 1995.


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value needs to be discounted. In an investment based paradigm, futurereturn is compared against other future returns – the future dictates the present, and the more certain and quicker the return, the more likely one is to invest. It remains to be seen what that means for social investment in education, the returns of which are long-term andwhich, especially in at-risk areas, are less certain. But there is also another element about time – it is infinitely divisible, thus making competition between decision makers increasingly about how can make an investment decision first. With the ability to transfer fundsaround the world in fractions of a nano-second, the reality of cyber-capital is that distance matters much less and the the speed of tradesis not something that is humanly possible, but timing is just about everything.59

Obviously that is an overstatement, but compare it to a paradigm based on labor and its value. In such a paradigm, time is indeed limited – every human being has only so much time on the planet, whether it be three score and ten or some other figure that may somehow be correlated to one's wealth – but time is valued in the present, as the one true possession of the individual.60

59 Compare to the Entropy Effect . . . 60 The idea that Adam Smith had a framework that, at least at times,

emphasizes the individual's time as the one, fundamental, scarce

factor of production, is entertained in my “How Would Adam Smith

Structure the World Exchange System? Transnational Civil Society

and the 2nd Half of Liberalism,” presented at the New York


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The political and social consequences of newer development paradigms, such as the emerging markets paradigm, are tied to the growth of financial markets around the globe. While state capitalism is a reality that limits the extent of neo-liberal thrusts, it has notled to a revival of the social welfare state or a statist paradigm, atleast not in terms of social welfare. That it might it the future cannot be ruled out --we tend to forget that the core elements of the social welfare state were first developed in Bismark's unified Germany–, but that is to be seen. Instead, and especially since 1989,market-based paradigms have developed out of the notion of macro-economic conditionality and have fast become the core of development strategy as it is articulated in and dominated by western capital markets.

This can be viewed as an change in strategy of the hegemonic economic powers: while the stability of financial markets is dependent on the global concert among economic powers, the financial market --not direct state to state aid-- acts as the immediate instrument of development by offering incentives (specifically market access) and sanctions (lack of capital flow). Thus the hegemony manifest in the paradigm stems not directly from states; rather, it is economic – a liberal hegemony of the integrated financial system. So

Political Science Association Conference, New York, 28 - 29 April,

1995.


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long as dropping out of the system is not a feasible option, it is an hegemony to which all states are subject to varying degrees, dependingon their resource base.

While others may argue that the same Liberal and Capitalist Hegemony has prevailed for two centuries or so, there have been variations of enormous import during this time. Whether this amountsto a new ‘hegemonic moment’ in the last 30 or 40 years is a matter ofsemantics. What we have seen is a shift in the direction, ideas and instruments of transnational, post-industrial captialism. For the last quarter century plus, activities in civil society --production, finance, information gathering, etc.-- as well as important aspects of family life,61 have become increasingly spread over many different nation-states, no single one of which can exert control over the entire process:

from circa 1968 onward,62 transnational corporations have developed into an integrated system of production, exchange,and accumulation which is subject to no state authority and has the power to subject to its 'laws' each and every memberof the interstate system.

Giovanni Arrighi, the author of the above, goes on to argue that61 See, for example, Robert Smith, Los Ausentes Siempre Presentes: The

Imagining, Making and Politics of a Transnational Community between New York City and

Ticuani, Puebla, Paper #27, ILAIS Papers on Latin America series, 1992.62 The periodization (ca. 1968) is chosen so as to coincide with the

emergence of Euromarkets.


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the emergence of a "Free Enterprise System --free, that is, from all previous vassalage to state power" is the ultimate limit of US hegemony and marks "the beginning of the withering away of the inter-state system as a primary locus of world power."63 While this may overstate the case, the relative influence of labor and capital has changed, to the greater favor of the latter. The post World- War II neo-corporatist settlement in which organized labor had virtual veto power over national policy directions is a thing of the past – just look at southern Europe or teachers' pensions in Illinois. While the power of labor was exaggerated in some accounts, no one today would seriously argue that the power of organized labor has kept pace with that of organized capital. If there is veto power now, it lies with the managers of financial capital.

Attacks on Keynesianism, welfare state policies and public enterprise were all important elements. The narrative that follows is meant to illustrate the effects on education. You might notice some unevenness, however. In first formulating the project, there was no thought to highlighting the unions, that only came later, as away of painting the broader picture and at that point they became thecenter piece; now they merely provide a set of examples. Still, whenthere is a focus on organizations representing educational professionals, I am more interested in what they were responding to than in the response itself.

John Bellamy Foster puts it this way, the “conservative movement 63 Giovanni Arrighi in Stephen Gill, ed. 1993: 182 - 183.


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for the reform of public education in the United States, and in much of the world, is based on the prevailing view that public education isin a state of emergency and in need of restructuring due to its own internal failures.” He then goes on “argue that the decay of public education is mainly a product of externally imposed contradictions that are inherent to schooling in capitalist society, heightened in our time by conditions of economic stagnation in the mature capitalisteconomies, and by the effects of the conservative reform movement itself.” 64

The theoretical framework within which the unions were placed, as participants in a discourse in which hegemony, presents itself as lessons in social learning. It is a bit unusual in parts, often asking the reader to draw her or his own conclusions, but it begins by looking at what one would mean by a social learning perspective. This is framed by a reference to hegemonies of social learning, the plural being chosen to illustrate that hegemony, or social leadership, does not have a single source.

The original Greek word, hegemonia, had, as its primary reference, the leadership of a confederacy of states by another

64 John Bellamy Foster. “Education and the Structural Crisis of

Capital The U.S. Case John Bellamy Foster,” Monthly Review, 1 July

2011; accessed October 2011 at

http://monthlyreview.org/2011/07/01/education-and-the-structural-

crisis-of-capital.


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state. It is this notion that is used for the most part in International Relations theory, Robert Keohane being the leading example. While I have significant differences with Keohane, whose ownwork limits the use of the term 'hegemony' to state actors, we do accept similar periodizations. Like Arrighi, Keohane states that themid-1960s marks the beginning of a post-hegemonic period, one in which no "one state is [both] powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations, and willing to do so."65 But is the cause within the state system or within the world financial system, which has been reconsolidated since the late 1960s?

Episodes of social learning offer examples of paradigm shifts ineconomic development, human development and political economy. Sincewe are concerned with the attacks on Keynesianism and the welfare state, we spend a lot of time looking at Margaret Thatcher’s justifications for such an approach. But justifications can also be gleaned from members of the British Labour Party, writing at the sametime, among them Michael Mann, who warned, “Though Keynes pretends torule within the nation-state, Adam Smith still rules without — and

65 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World

Politics in Transition, Boston, 1977, p. 44; cited in Keohane, After Hegemony:

Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, pp. 34 - 35. The latter

work is premised on the proposition that by the late 1960's "U.S.

dominance in the world political economy was challenged by the

economic recovery and increasing unity of Europe and by the rapid

economic growth of Japan." (p. 9)


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therefore, to a large degree, within as well.”66 Though Mann was urging the Party to embrace more modern forms of socialism, he himself recognized that that message did not necessarily get across.67

But, since we mentioned Boyle, we might note that he tells us the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressureand volume of a gas works only if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. So, too, might we think of Keynes, especially when it comes to the multiplier effect. For Keynes (who was drawing on Richard Khan's work), increases in government spending have greater effects on aggregate demand because they are multiplied. Those who receive money, especially unemployed or underemployed workers, spend most on consumption goods, saving only a small fraction. Thus businesses benefit form the extra spending – it allows them to hire more people and pay them, which in turn allows a further increase in consumer spending.

But this only works, at least to the degree Keynes contended, in

66 Michael Mann, “Nationalism and Internationalism: A Critique of

Economic and Defence Policies,” in J. Griffith, ed., Socialism in a Cold

Climate, London: Allen & Unwin, 1983, p. 187. 67 “Unfortunately, Tony Blair drew from this the opposite

political lesson for the Party than the one I had intended! He

embraced Adam Smith.” Michael Mann, “The Transnational Ruling Class

Formation Thesis,” Science & Society, Vol. 65, No. 4, Winter 2001–2002,

464–469.


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a closed system. If spending is on consumption of goods that are produced in other countries, then it is the economies of those countries which benefit from the multiplier. Thus, while the Keynesian multiplier might very well be effective on a global scale, during a period of globalization, many of the benefits move from the country which initiates the stimulus to other countries which supply consumer goods –clothes, televisions, i-pads, food, phones, etc.-- oftheir inputs –steel, cement, timber-- instead of staying in the home country. Overall, the more global the economy, the less likely the benefits of Keynesian economics will stay in one country and the lesslikely political coalitions supporting Keynesian style economics willsucceed.

Episodes of social learning also speak of how ideas play a crucial role in the construction of coalitions and identifies three coalitions that affect educational policy. Central to this are questions of trust and it is proposed that changes in modes of trust have affected choices in public policy. From here extend the discussion of Peter Hall’s work, which hopefully explains why Margaret Thatcher’s name comes up so often, as it does in examining some of the episodes of social learning that occur in the 1980s and have had long-lasting ramifications. As should be clear, social learning and paradigm change are treated from a political economy perspective and, as we more on later to considers class and the distribution of educational opportunity, we shall look at Gourevitch’s Politics in Hard Times.


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The social systems theory can be used as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony will likely not be considered in what follows, but it is a suggestion I feel compelled to make.


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3) What is a social learning perspective?

Once one forgets about Barbara Eden, the fight with a giant squid and a second, totally separate fight with a giant octopus (which happens to be electrically charged), there is a lot to be learned about social learning from the 1950s movie Voyage to the Bottom of

the Sea. The first thing is that social learning is often problem-oriented -- there is a problem-solving model and a process of decision making, much of which is based on technical criteria. The presence of a problem –financial, environmental, military, political,what have you-- seems to be a necessary ingredient, a motivating factor, the raw material with which one works and which informs the policy process. The second thing is that, while social learning is shaped primarily by the problem to be solved, both the model and the process of problem solving are contested. This also means, however,that there is a third thing, that there are episodes of social learning. This is closely connected to the second thing, so if one prefers we can call it thing 2-a – that there are episodes of contestation in which ideas, power and interests all interact. This is the most general framework from which the following proceeds.68

68 According to Connelly et al. (2000, 105), “A framework is a

system of ideas or conceptual structures that help us 'see' the

social world, understand it, explain it, and change it. A framework

guides our thinking, research, and action. It provides us with a

systematic way of examining social issues and providing


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Much, if not all of this is demonstrated in the film. Indeed,how this episode plays out is the substance of the movie. The contested nature of establishing policy, both from the power centers of a state and then throughout civil and military society, is centralto its narrative. The problem in the film is that the earth is heating up, something to do with the Van Allen Belt. One plan, advocated by one group of scientists and to be implemented by those who will be manning the hyper-advanced submarine Sea View, is to fire a nuclear missile along the Van Allen Belt and obliterate it. Another faction is led by a bearded scientist who announces in a hardto place accent, “I am diametrically opposed!” He believes that, if allowed to proceed of its own accord, the heating syndrome will reverse itself. Much of the tension in the plot is provided by this central conflict.

That it echoes current debates about global warming helps to make the point. There are those who deny there is a problem, those

recommendations for change. . . . A framework consists of basic

assumptions about the nature of the social world and how it works and

about the nature of people and how they act. For example, some people

assume that society is basically harmonious and that harmony results

from a set of shared values. Others assume that society is in

conflict and that conflict is rooted in class, race, and gender

struggles over power and access to and control over resources.”

[check original source]


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who attribute the problem to natural cycles which will reverse themselves, those who believe we need to have a radical change in consumption and emmission of green-house gases, those who believe that nothing short of a change in the economic system is needed and, finally, those who believe, a al Freakeconomics, that we need a new technology to counter the old technology – that we should pump sulpher into the sky or genetically engineer algae that will take more CO2 from the atmosphere.

Ideas play a foremost role -- they are the weapons of battled argument. Which theory is correct is central to the choice in front of them and affects the alliances which then form. But ideas do not hold the stage by themselves – power holders will influence the course of events and decision making, even when it comes to the most sophisticated and esoteric scientific processes. In other words, decision-making always has a political element, both in terms of serving coalitions and in terms of policy making process. The formeralways include and are usually centered on economic interests. They are probably clearer in the global warming example. Those who produce CO2 as a byproduct of economic activities don't want to pay the cost of lowering consumption through a BTU tax (which, if I may tip my hand, seems to make the most immediate sense) or increased regulation and control of emissions.

As for the process and the chain of command in politics, the Sea View is again helpful as indicated by the one participant who announces, “My answer will come directly from the president.”


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Presumably the president is not an expert on the Van Allen Belt, but he does have the authority to pick among those who are. Thus, while it need not always be so formal or so specific, economic interests, scientific study and political hierarchies all play a role in social learning.

But this is not all – Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea offers more. Much additional plot tension comes from the conflict between personaland public interest. Personalities and management techniques also differ, as shown by the different approaches of the officers. Furthermore (and by now we have long since stopped numbering things),some notion of something like punctuated equilibrium is also present -- what happens when our understanding of the natural world is turnedon its head? Then there is also the possibility of rebellion: “If you continue your lunatic project, you will never see it completed!” (Of course, this seems to beg the question, how will it be completed if he does not continue it?) And once one does remember Barbara Eden, who is secretary to the Admiral, engaged to the sub’s captain and encouraged (once her blouse has been soaked through) to take off her uniform jacket in several sweaty scenes, there is a lot to be said about women’s roles.

What one would not learn, however, is a basic intuition of social learning in the social science and public policy literature --the idea of institutional development and, presumably, advance. Thistype of institutional or policy learning is often thought to be synonymous with social learning. This, however, is a view I will


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reject for I believe it to be incompatible with any adequate theory of politics. Nonetheless, it does point to a category of phenomena -- efforts to develop an institutional response to what is, by and large and by consensus, considered to be a problem worthy of addressing. While far more true of a Heclo, and far less of a Peter Hall (which we’ll leave that for later discussion), in some ways thisis rooted in (or at least has strong affinities with) structural-functionalist understandings.

I mentioned that problems which had to be solved played a role in initiating political responses. That is to say both that communities construct institutions to serve certain functions and that acute problems are likely to produce efforts to reshape institutions so as to meet them. Admittedly or not, sometimes the social learning literature adopts an almost neo-Aristotlean view of the state as an entity above and beyond society meant to solve collective problems and provide for the common good. Or, since they may also be part of an international organization or of an academic institution, perhaps it would be better put say that the problem solvers are placed above society and are only sometimes placed withinthe state.69

69 Problems with defining what is (and is not) the ‘state’ often

cloud what are otherwise clear discussions. This is one of the

reasons for the extensive use of Gramsci. See the discussion of his

‘enlarged state’ below.


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As a heuristic device, this has many strengths. It gives us a starting point and focuses on an active process -- problem solving. But there is also a weakness in that ideas are thought of as instrumental -- the way to seek after or implement a solution to a problem, but not as having any intrinsic value.70 This seems a misapprehension of a reality in which actors validate their actions and justify their social role by reference to a set of ideas and ideals. This is even more the case when these are sets of ideals which cannot be verified.

All in all, social learning only occasionally rises to the level of critical thinking. As Robert Cox has noted, problem-solvingis not critical thinking. Problem solving “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly.” Critical theory "stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about” calls them into question institutions and social power relations that problem-solving takes for granted :by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing.”71

70 Cite paper from Apsa99 on ‘policy learning’71 Robert W. Cox, Approaches to World Order, 1996, pp 88-89. See, also,

John S. Moolakkattu, "Robert W. Cox and Critical Theory of

International Relations," International Studies, October 2009 vol. 46


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Critical theory has a normative element in that we distinguish between what we want the state to be –what we think it ought to be-- and what the real-existing state is. While what 'is' does not exhaust the realm of social learning, problem solving begins with what is and limits the 'ought' to how to fix it.

That is one issue. That this institution building is led by elites is another. The consensus by which problems are identified and addressed is a third -- or again one may label it 2-a. These elites might be aligned with, or may avail themselves of technocraticelements, but they might not. More commonly, they can pick among competing factions of those who claim the status of ‘expert.’ Most importantly, the identification of problems is only in rare instancesforced on elites by nature. Instead, the identification and recognition of social problems is a political and epistemic process that often as not is enmeshed in intense struggles among social actors.

This raises the question – a truly normative question and thus the motivating factor for those engaged in critical theory – as to who shares in a collective good and who suffers from a collective ill.

The idea of distributional justice is therefore a variable. Moreover as Raymond Williams argues, the acceptance of one version orno. 4 439-456.


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another by the majority is a central tenet of hegemony.72 This not only neatly folds in with key categories in Aristotle’s Politics, but also with the main premises of this analysis. First, that social learning occurs as frequently as not in discrete episodes. Second, while addressing more or less pressing problems, power, ideas and interests coalesce and interact in relatively novel patterns. Third,that the constellation of power influences not only the goals of social policy, but also both the way problems are perceived and the set of options which are considered plausible and within the realm ofthe common wisdom.

What follows methodologically from the first and second premisesis that each case must be examined on a case by case basis; from the third, however, we can argue that specific attention should be given

72 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 1977. Theories of

distributive justice are also central to economic policy. According

to Peter Hammond, choices of economic policy which focus on

consequences, such as cost-benefit tests, “necessarily require

distributional judgements. These should emerge from a social welfare

objective incorporating interpersonal comparisons.” See Hammond,

“Progress in the Theory of Social Choice and Distributive Justice,”

in S. Zandvakili (ed.) Research in Economic Inequality, Vol. 7: Inequality and

Taxation pp. 87-106; revised version of English original published in

Italian translation in L. Sacconi (ed.) La decisione: Razionalità collettiva e

strategie nell' amministrazione e nelle organizzazioni (Milano: Franco Angeli,

1986), ch. 3, pp. 89-106.


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to the influence of predominant paradigms which structure and are embedded in dominant political programmes. We might think of two constellations of power. One is an issue specific coalition, the other a more general coalition -- the hegemonic center of gravity, ifyou will.

Despite the gravity metaphor, this calls not for a mechanistic approach, but for some theory involving consciousness, self-consciousness, reflection, passive acceptance and active strategic choice. It also must take account of group formation, organizationaltasks and how something like a collective will is formed, maintained and then changes over time. Accordingly, reactions ranging from resistance to resignation are involved, but most importantly the passive aspects of social response should be problematized. In otherwords, one question should be why resistance did not develop.

Overall, we shall suggest that there has been a change in the apportioning of responsibility -- that responsibilities borne in the post-war period by the state as part of a comprehensive social settlement have devolved onto the individual and family.


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4) Hegemonies of Social Learning

At a certain age we cease to focus on other people. Instead we focus on what is immediately important to us as individuals. In addition, we oft times think of ourselves as parts of family units that we will help bring into being. We also focus on what is immediately important in terms of careers. Some also think of the money making possibilities of their investments.

If ‘social learning’ is to have any meaning, this process of coming to opinions as how best to achieve one’s goals in society has to be accounted for. But at the moment I want to remark on the lack of fellowship -- the lack of interest in others except as they enter into our future plan.

Business affects this -- we become more calculating if we adopt the ways of business. As the Vice-President of a major Swiss investment bank once told me, over time “you become more pragmatic.” When asked what he meant by that he responded, almost as if the answer to the questions was self-evident, “by that I mean pragmatic in your own self-interest.”73 One need not rely on that single quote,one need only look at business magazines and the advice they offer. The ideology of business is manifest in the advice people who want toget ahead would do well to take to heart.

That is what ‘hegemony’ is -- hegemony, in the Gramscian sense 73 Interview, May, 1998.


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that actors in civil society have a pervasive effect on norms and normal ways of thinking. There are certainly other types of hegemonybesides those emanating from civil society, but this is the core. Nonetheless, they often have expression in what might be termed political society. Mark Blythe provides a prescient and poignant example, recounting how his father spoke of a 'natural level of unemployment' and how Government spending to create jobs would only result in higher inflation and eventually come to nil.74 This narrative was about the futility of a Government jobs policy, but it was based on economic ideas that rejected Keynesian approaches.75 Allhegemonies work in varying degrees on the formation of opinions, norms and normal ways of thought. Because, however, of the decisions74 See Mark Blythe, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change

in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p vii. He,

however, often shared that story for years prior to the book's

publication.75 Albert Hirschman outlined three types of conservative thought,

referring to the ‘futility thesis,’ the ‘perversity thesis’ and the

‘jeopardy thesis.’ Mr. Blythe senior is employing the futility

thesis. A Jacobin thesis might be folded into the perversity

thesis, which Hirschman identifies with Burke: ” the social

outcome of the revolutionaries’ striving for the public good would

be evil, calamitous, and wholly contrary to the goals and hopes

they were professing.” Albert O. Hirschman, “Two Hundred Years of

Reactionary Rhetoric: The Case of the Perverse Effect,“ Tanner

Lectures on Human Values, Univ. of Michigan, 8 April 1988, p. 14.


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that people must make in order to succeed (or merely survive), the economic core of civil society usually works to a greater degree thanothers to shape and maintain norms.

Civil society does not derive only from economic activity, but economic activity has a leading effect on ethics. This can be compared to political society, which has its leading effect through the exercise of collective will and with the state, which is more than the expression of political society. The state is also an institution with not only a considerable degree of autonomy, but alsoa great amount of inertia. These spheres all have their separate hegemonies.

This does not mean that the state and political society do not influence ethics, or that civil society or the state have little influence on collective will. Nor would anyone suggest that civil society and political society have no influence on the state. Any such statement is ludicrous. The distinction, more so, is between the ways that ‘social learning’ is influenced.

We can think of three major ways. First, during the individual’s upbringing and ongoing lifespan. Second, as part of collective groups. Third, there is state action. It is in referenceto this third area that a technocratic concept of ‘social learning’ developed in political science. In an attempt to interpret the shiftfrom Keynesian to Monetarism, Peter Hall notably expanded the idea of‘social learning’ to the level of political society, suggesting that


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there are orders of paradigm change and that greater change involved a shift of political forces.76 Despite the fact that those who labor to construct deductive systems of economics have almost always thought of themselves –and wanted others to think of them-- as scientists and not philosophers,77 Hall implied that economic theory was to be treated as social and political philosophy. As a social philosophy, it would most likely achieve success by having its tenetsaccepted by actors in civil society.

In investigating educational policy the accepted wisdom embeddedin the pervasive ethics of civil society must be included. In the USall three spheres have their effects and we can think of three hegemonies of social learning, one involving institutions, the other collective decision making and the third ethics. All three stem frominterest in one way or another, but in much different ways. One is the formation of how we as individuals conceive of what we should do for our own sakes. Ethics, as opposed to morality, grows out of this. Morality is conceived, at least in Kant’s terms, with what is right regardless of consequences. Ethics has all to do with consequences -- what happens from your action.

Ethics is how a society is lead ahead -- one way at least,

76 Peter Hall, 1993.77 Paraphrase of Robert Solo, “Economics as Social Philosophy, Moral

Philosophy, and Technology,” in Solo, ed., Economics and the Public

Interest, Rutgers Univ. Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1955, p. 5.


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manifest in the way people justify their actions. This comes from self-interest, but not a single view of self-interest. It involves the stages of development as we become older. It also involves the collective efforts we make to shape events -- our active decisions asself-conscious (and sometimes apathetic) members of society seeking our own and our collective interests. And it involves the state -- the institutions we form in order to have both inertia and autonomy -- to carry out the tasks we set and to anticipate needs we, as occupied, self-interested individuals, do not have the time or expertise to anticipate and respond to.

All three are based on interest and there is no necessary correspondence between the edicts of civil society and the ethics of the social whole, but it usually is the predominant force. There arelimits beyond which civil society cannot survive. One danger is thatpolitical society and the state will go beyond those limits --not an impossibility, by any means, as political history shows. This is a fear of Jacobins to add to Hirschman’s three types of conservative thought.78 As conservative humorist --and one time self-described

78 Hirschman refers to the ‘futility thesis,’ the ‘perversity thesis’

and the ‘jeopardy thesis.’ A Jacobin thesis might be folded into

the perversity thesis, which Hirschman identifies with Burke: ”

the social outcome of the revolutionaries’ striving for the public

good would be evil, calamitous, and wholly contrary to the goals

and hopes they were professing.” Albert O. Hirschman, “Two Hundred

Years of Reactionary Rhetoric: The Case of the Perverse Effect,“


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communist--, P.J. O’Rourke explained, conservatives fear the government’s possession of guns.79 While he did not cite Weber, he paraphrased him closely regarding the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

But what he failed to do, as many who make reference to Weber fail to do, is to note that Weber referred to the state as a ‘human community.’80 The fear of state force may be a legitimate ground for the delegitimation of state authority. But to paraphrase Churchill, the mix of state authority and the regulation of civil society is theworst system ever created, except for all the others. In other words, state regulation is necessary to create a humane civil society. One advocate of this strain of thought is Jonathan Kozol:

I’ve never in my entire life seen any evidence that the competitive free market, unrestricted, without a strong counterpoise within the public sector, will ever dispense decentmedical care, sanitation, transportation, or education to the

Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Univ. of Michigan, 8 April 1988, p. 14.79 Radio interview on National Public Radio, June 2004.80 Weber claims that the state is any "human community that

successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical

force within a given territory . . . its administrative staff

successfully upholds a claim on the 'monopoly of the legitimate use

of physical force' (German: das Monopol legitimen physischen Zwanges) in

the enforcement of its order." I have relied on Wikipedia for the

quotes.


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people. It’s as simple as that.81

Accordingly (as I hope to show), among the sources for education

reform I will be investigating, we may include suburban flight, ingrained class patterns in residence and Margaret Thatcher. But within the field of international politics there is another category of hegemony, not based on the individual’s upbringing, struggles in political society or learning process of the technocratic state, but on leadership and interaction among states. In other words, Keohane's view of hegemony and Gramsci's are not mutually exclusive. Hegemony is a broad term – it involves transnational links, especially those created by transnational business, but also by migration patterns and intertwined security arrangements. In the present instance, in involves actions beyond the posted-boundaries ofthe sovereign state.

Instead of calling this international hegemony, we might refer to it as transnational hegemony or hegemony in the transnational sphere. In one chapter title I considered, I referred to the post-Vietnam era. This is meant to suggest a shift in the balance betweenstate-centered and society-centered forms of hegemony at the transnational level, but it is not to say that the US debacle in Vietnam was the cause; rather, the US loss in Vietnam is a symbol of 81 “The Market is Not The Answer: An Interview With Jonathon Kozol,”

Rethinking Schools, date uncertain; accessed June 2010 at

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/voucher_report/v_s

oskoz.shtml.


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the limits of state mobilization regimes and, more generally, of the ability of major powers to project power beyond their borders. But,although changes in strategic balance were immensely important, military loss was not the main cause; rather, changes in technology altered the balance between organized labor, organized capital and the state.

Technological advances enabled the formation and strengthening of an entity that we might call transnational civil society. Moreover, the failure in Vietnam and Afghanistan of the statist military-political model of hegemony offered by the US and the USSR left an opening for other models. Finally, with the Oil Crisis and the ensuing Debt Crisis this led to a politico-ethical model centeredon the economic interactions of civil society. The dual crises are particularly important in that financial concerns began to supercede security concerns. The latter, of course, did not go away and neither did the state’s role, but there was a shift of hegemony and ashift in hegemony's purpose. Instead of residing in a single hegemon, it is found in a non-unified juridical authority, residing in many and diverse sovereign states, which governs the transnationalnetworks which link them together. Instead of leading a confederacy of states, the institutions of hegemonic stability coordinated and regulated actions among competing national economies.

Wolfgang Reinicke has argued that the organizational logic of globalization has allowed private actors to escape state regulation and, consequently, limited the policy options of supposedly soverign


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states.82 Reinicke argues that transnational integration of the financial services industry has made single nation efforts at regulation futile in most instances; in order to confront problems brought about or intensified by globalization, states meet and agree to pool a measure of soverignty, either by signing inter-locking agreements or creating semi-autonomous entities such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). We may add that the financial services industry, especially bond-rating agencies such as Moody’s, affect alllevels of government.83 That the cost of financing state projects places effective limits of sovereign power is not new -- Louis XVI called the Estates General together for just such a reason. But it nonetheless has significant effects.

What these efforts have in common is that they are limited to measures on which one can gain consensus from the collected state actors. The effect is that only those things pass which both are recognized as 'public goods' and are not vetoed by one of the major players involved in the negotiations. This limits matters quite a bit; economic matters are primary, social welfare concerns are not.

82 Wolfgang Reinicke, Global Public Policy: Governing without Government?,

Brookings Institution Press, 1998.83 Tim Sinclair, "Bond-Rating Agencies and Coordination in the

Global Political Economy," in Private Authority and International Affairs, A.

Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler and Tony Porter, eds., Albany, NY:

State University of New York Press, 1999.


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The WTO, along with the IMF and World Bank this serve as the skeletaltransnational functional equivalent of a ‘state’ -- a set of regulatory and coordinating bodies in which the concerns of the financial community come first. Obviously, there is no ‘monopoly’ onthe use of force, legitimate or otherwise, but in many ways this nonetheless resembles the Nightwatchman model of the state. The ‘human community’ served by development paradigms tied to the world financial system is, at best, a community of investors. it questionsthe effects on ethics and community structure that are entailed by efficiency dominated paradigms. The principal aim is to describe how that ethical and ideological content has been informed by the workingsof a civil society that is increasingly constituted transnationally.

What has this to do with education? According to Felix Rohatyn, the role of financing economic development in the less developed world "will, more and more, be taken over by the global capital markets. The cold-blooded selection process by world capital is invested will determine the economic progress of many developing countries."84 Of course, it is quite another thing to determine if a similarly cold-blooded selection process is also present in education, especially at the hegemonic center. Nonetheless, there isample evidence that human development must transverse the same terrain as economic development. While I do not wish to examine in depth how recent economic development and human development paradigmsresemble one another, they do share presuppositions. It is the predominance of the market over the state that is the point when 84 Felix Rohatyn, NYRB, 1994: 48.


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discussing epistemic hegemony.

The Competitive State is a term that Cerny has used to refer to

a state that “has to facilitate a regulative framework in which the

national economy can compete in the international market.”85 The

rule of comparative advantage comes first. The state plays

indispensable roles in attracting capital and facilitating

innovation, but within this framework its principal function is to

allow economic actors within the nation to compete with economic

actors in other nations.

Does the State of Competition lead to a sort of Educational

Taylorism? That remains to be proven, but there are many indications

that it is so. Whether state and civil society are one thing or two,

all of this has an effect on the national civil society. This goes

beyond the state meeting the competitive needs of corporations in

transnationally articulated markets. The rise of neo-liberal

economics is attached to instrumental rationality for individual and

society both. The public good is less debated and public debate is

considered a lesser good. The vision is of an instrumentally

85 Xavier Bonal, “Managing education legitimation crisis in neo-

liberal contexts: some semiperipheral evidence,”p 5; summarizing

P.G.Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State: the dynamic of

political globalization,” Government and Opposition, Vol. 32, #2, pp. 251-

271. Much of what follows draws on Bonal’s analysis.


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rational individual; political rationality emanates from the

financial sector, which has taken precedence over both production and

commerce.86 Globalization and the competition for capital that can

now much more easily cross national boundaries has led to enhanced

“economic competitivism and commodification in almost all spheres of

life.”87

The idea that there is no choice is directly connected to the

process of depoliticization which, in turn, is connected to the

constellation of forces at the global level. This can be viewed as

an change in strategy of the hegemonic economic powers: while the

stability of financial markets is dependent on the global concert

among economic powers, the financial market --not direct state to

state aid-- acts as the immediate instrument of development by

offering incentives (specifically market access) and sanctions (lack

of capital flow). Thus the hegemony manifest in the paradigm stems

not directly from states; rather, it is a liberal hegemony of the

integrated financial system. So long as dropping out of the system

86 On the last point, see Vilas, 1996 . . . cited in David Hursch,

“Neoliberalism and the Control of Teachers, Students and Learning: The

Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accountability,” Cultural Logic,

Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000.. 87 Xavier Bonal, “Managing education legitimation crisis in neo-

liberal contexts: some semiperipheral evidence,”p 7.


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is not a feasible option, it is an hegemony to which all states are

subject to varying degrees, depending on their resource base.

This may overstate things, but it is nonetheless true that a

system that derives its lessons in social learning from this

political rationality is going to head in certain directions.

'Economic Liberalism' as an ideology has developed in tandem with the

institution of a market economy since the end of the Napoleonic Wars

tended towards opportunities for business, huge industrial expansion,

exploitation of labor and disregard for the environment. In

contrast, the collapse of this system led to a much different system

in both the inter-war and Cold War periods. Unlike the 99 year

peace, the period from 1914 to 1989 had only a twenty year truce to

interrupt 75 years of war and preparation for war. State-led efforts

at mobilization and redistribution of economic product were, if not

the norm, at least a norm.

The idea of ‘preparation for war’ is especially important,

because if this is one of the goals of a political programme it

affects what is often a pragmatic choice of ideological apparatus.

In other words, leaders tend to focus on the problems they need to

solve problems and maintain power at the same time. By “leaders” I

mean not only individuals but also leading groups. Sociologically

these groups develop an organization to promote their views and

maintain leadership. They develop coalitions based on their


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arguments. If they are arguing that preparation for war is a

priority, they will choose an ideology that emphasizes the importance

of social cohesion and the idea of national unity as expressed

through a national community that will take care of its members.

Neo-liberalism, as it turns out, can be considered as a critique

of the failures of this system. The ideas of efficient

administration and accountability are key -- the delegitimation of

the previous system was focused on the idea of efficiency and greater

productivity. It rarely considers the question, however, of “to

whose benefit.” Instead the state is constrained -- thought of as an

emergency to apparatus, to deal with hurricanes, wars and to keep an

eye on the self-regulating markets. Neo-liberalism should, of

course, be situated in the dual sociological context from which it

developed: (a) the post-Cold War expansion of capitalistic modes of

production into the former command economies; and (b) the post-Debt

Crisis reconfiguration of economic and political relations between

the core Western countries and the dependent countries of the

periphery and semi-periphery. But the consequences are more

important --the result is a change in ethics.

It might be called ‘The Business Survival Ethic.’ The concept

of the 'natural' as found in these models discounts ethics. It not

only place individual survival above group survival, thus

misrepresenting biological process, it emphasizes production without


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addressing the sphere of reproduction.

Education is nonetheless being reshaped in accordance with it.

This is despite the fact that when examining how the biological

sciences are applied to human evolution, the group, not the

individual, is the unit of survival. And ethics, not investments,

are what binds the community together. 'Ethics' are necessary not

only to the functioning of society on a day to day basis, but also to

produce self-sufficient individuals capable of competing successfully

in the world. In relegating this to secondary status, ideologies of

economic liberalism seem determined in the same breath to misrepesent

Adam Smith and Darwin. Smith's was a complex vision in which The

Wealth of Nations was intended to be seen in the context of The Theory of

Moral Sentments. The Darwinian model of survival in the transnational

business jungle is similarly incomplete in that it does not account

for the role of ethics in so called 'evolutionary' processes. Ethics

has an effect on both selection in nature and in the socially

instituted market. While 'self-sufficiency' or efficiency is thought

to be the end product of the process, the models assume a supply of

self-sufficient units capable of competing successfully. We may

critique them in the same way that Rawls (1971) critiques the natural

rights theories with which they have affinities: they posit a

condition that the functioning of the system does not itself produce.

So, too, with its application to education. David Hursh points


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out that educational summits of the nation’s governors have been

twice hosted by IBM. The first was called by the Clinton

Admistration’s Marshall Smith so that schools might meet the ever

changing dynamics of international competition and the work place.

The second resulted in a call for every state to adopt standards

backed up by standardized tests, including “a system of ‘rewards and

consequences’ for teachers, students and schools.”88 At about the

same time the National Alliance for Business came out with a report:

Standards Mean Business.

Hursh argues that in the 1990s the state “intruded into the

lives of teachers and students to a degree unprecedented in history.”

He then follows this with the simple, unvarnished truth: “Teachers

are increasingly directed by district and school administrators to

focus on raising test scores rather than teaching for

understanding.”89 One would think that this is not a necessary

consequence of standards. It isn’t, but everything is on a short-

term basis. Get the scores up by next year -- not five years from

88 Miner, 1999/2000, p. 3, in Hursch, “Neolibealism and the

Control of Teachers, Students and Learning: The Rise of Standards,

Standardization, and Accontabity,” Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall

2000., p. 5.89 Hursch, “Neolibealism and the Control of Teachers, Students and

Learning: The Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accontabity,”

Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000., p. 6.


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now. Principals don’t have tenure, they have two year contracts and,

like baseball managers, get fired if they have bad results. They

used to have tenure and people would stay in a job for 20 years, have

time to develop a school and a faculty. Since it may result in

stagnation, this sort of institutional stability is thought outmoded.

The new method is based on an unforgiving corporate model --

reshuffle your staff, get them to give 110%, make them aware they are

in a precarious situation.

Deliver the numbers. That is what you are held accountable to

-- the numbers, not the welfare of the child. This is done from a

distance:

Governmental and quasi-governmental organizations seek to governwithout specifying exactly what must be done, but by presenting the requirements or standards as rational and non-controversial,and providing a limited range in which it must be implemented.. . . Education is no longer valued for its role in developing political, ethical and aesthetic citizens90

Though from a distance, it is also top-down. And a lot of

people would argue, as Dewey did and Kohn continues to do, that it is

self-defeating -- that if you turn schooling into drudgery, then

don’t expect good results. Teaching may not always be an art, but it

should be part entertainment. Expect better results from students

90 Hursch, “Neolibealism and the Control of Teachers, Students and




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who are engaged. But the emphasis on producing numbers in the short

term with possible dismemberment as a result (for the school),

produces a different approach geared towards passing those tests.

Again, this isn’t the only approach administrators could use, but

they are faced with a second problem -- in poorer schools in the

cities, there is a retention problem and new teachers have to be

trained to function within a master plan. Since the plan is to pass

a test, teachers are often constrained as to what to teach. They

need to cover a curriculum, so they are supposed to cover Greece in

three days, Rome in two. Since new teachers are constantly coming,

back-to-basics seems to make sense.

Again, it is not the only possibility, but there seems to be a

tendency for teachers to become “deskilled as they implement

curriculum developed by others.” 91 It is almost as if those who take

an interest in education reform in the business community see the

world as divided between those who have the dedication, drive and

talent of a Wall Street security trader and those who need to

directed. They are directed according to the logic of ‘best

practices’ as if developed in competitive business. McNeil’s work on

the Houston reform was generally limited to magnet schools, but it is

instructive nonetheless. She points to the widening difference

91 Hursch, “Neolibealism and the Control of Teachers, Students and




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between the quality of education for the poor and the more privileged

as because of standardization:

phony curricula, reluctantly presented by teachers in class to conform to the forms of knowledge their students would encounteron centralized tests. . . . the role of students as contributors to classroom discourse, as thinkers, as people who brought their personal stories and life experiences into the classroom, was silenced or severely circumscribed.92

Again, it is not the only possibility, but it seems like the

more likely result when you connect it the fact that poor and rich

kids in the same year of high school may be four years apart in

average reading level, but still take the same test. Moreover,

according to Pauline Lipman, “those at the lowest rungs of the system

-- teachers and students -- [are held] responsible for the systematic

failures of public schools.” Basing her analysis on the policies of

public schools in Chicago, she sees the adoption of “a simple

straightforward solution: teachers and principals are to be

monitored, governed, and regulated by standards, scripted

instruction, mandated curricula, standardized tests, and outside

agencies contracted by the school board to oversee failing schools.”93

Lipmann seeks to connect the accountability discourses to “a

92 McNeill, 2000, p 4.93 Pauline Lipman, “Education Accountability and Repression of

Democracy Post 9/11,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Vol. 2, #1,

March 2004.


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shift in U.S. political culture that legitimates the suppression of

critical thought and action,” as well as the “restriction of

democratic participation.” 94 While there are many who would argue

that this is what schools were doing long before accountability

became a watchword, there has been a change. I referred to it as a

4th order change -- the justification of goals by reference to

principles, values, ideologies and visions of the future. In 4th

order change the most important shifts may not have been in

educational policy per se, but in the over arching changes in ideology

associated with economic models of free competition and fiscal

discipline. This is not a democratically oriented discourse, it is

based on the freedom to compete and follow one’s self-interest.

It is also based on the idea that it is neither the input of

resources nor the motivation of the actors, but the outcomes of the

market that selects out merit. The individual, no longer having the

guarantee of jobs or livelihood, had to energetically pursue his or

her self-interest. In Houston, Chicago and New York, this same logic

is applied to the process of reform and the student’s fate is this

mock up of the market depends on the results on high stakes tests.

Students who have greater degrees of appropriate ‘private education’

at home, but concurrent with and previous to entry into school, have

94 Pauline Lipman, “Education Accountability and Repression of

Democracy Post 9/11,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Vol. 2, #1,

March 2004.


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as much of an advantage as those with greater financial backing in

the market. According to McNeil, the result of gearing teaching and

curriculum to passing these tests is clearest in schools serving low-

income students of color:

standardized reforms drastically hurt the best teachers, forcingthem to teach watered down content because it was computer gradeable. The standardization brought about by the state policies forced them to teach artificially simplified curricula that had been designed by bureaucrats seeking expedient (easily implemented, noncontroversial) curricular formats.95

Again, this type of educational Taylorism need not be the case

and there are many reformers, some who served as ‘bureaucrats,’ who

strove to keep standards-based reform from devolving into

standardization. This was precisely because, as Lipman said, it

“degrades the work of the best teachers, it is little help to the

weakest teachers, because it does not increase their knowledge,

skill, or commitment to richer teaching and learning.”96 She connects

this to what Roger Dale calls ‘conservative modernization’ --

“simultaneously freeing individuals for economic purposes while

controlling them for social purposes.” 97 Lower income students are

95 McNeill, 2000, p ?.96 Pauline Lipman, “Bush’s Education Plan, Globalization, and the

Politics of Race,” Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000.97 Pauline Lipman, “Bush’s Education Plan, Globalization, and the

Politics of Race,” Cultural Logic, Vol. 4, #1, Fall 2000; quoting Dale as

cited by Apple, 1996.


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not barred from the higher ranks, but they are for the most part

expected to use their basic skills to become part of a post-

industrial working class, involved in clerical work, data processing

and other service industry jobs.


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5) Framing Education By Class And Merit: Episodes of Social Learning and Conservative Ideas

While not totally dominant, economic approaches seem to predominate discourse and discussions of reform in education. Begin with the thought that education is failing. That thought is sourced somewhat in declining test scores in the US during the 1970s and 1980s -- a decline that occurred during the last stages of an enormous expansion of the school system and that has not continued. It is also sourced in fears of international competition.

This has had two variants. Eisenhower, shortly after Sputnik descried the weaknesses of US education, advocating a back-to-basics approach. That approach was revived in the 1970s and became standards-based reform. Only the enemy was different -- this time itwas Japan and the competition was economic. The claim that education was failing was now sourced in business and steeped in the logic of economic competition. Two solutions were offered -- one, improving the quality of public education by new techniques, was statist in design but, in funding, minimalist. The other privatization, would take money from the public system. Both emphasized monitoring the outcomes of schooling and both seemingly assumed that present inputs were adequate, at least in the aggregate. Only techniques and management schemes needed to be changed.

But beyond that, each had its own perspective on the child. Among others, DeYoung argues that educational discourse has been


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increasingly dominated by business concerns which conceptualize children as potential workers and economic development resources.98 This may be true on the statist side, but less so on the privatization side, where the child (or the parent) is also considered a consumer. Schooling is big business, after all -- two trillion world-wide. Schumpeter said, “No bourgeoisie ever disliked war profits.” One would assume no bourgeoisie ever disliked the spoils of school reform, either.

Motivations may vary, but three perspectives, the child as

rights-bearer, the child as development resource and the child as

consumer (vis-à-vis his parents), tend to crowd out other perspectives

-- the child as future democratic citizen, the child as human being.

While contended, this facilitates the consolidation of an ideological

shift that is particularly important.

Three theorists – Aaron Wildavsky on political culture, Gosta

Esping-Andersen on welfare-state models and Joel Spring on education

–all present tripartite models of political positioning. Aaron

Wildavsky speaks of three cultures in the United States: competitive

individualism, hierarchy and egalitarian collectivism.99 This closely

resembles in all but terminology Esping-Andersen’s regime types: the

liberal, the conservative (or corporate) and the social-democratic

98 DeYoung, 1989: 105, 3.99 In King, 1990. See Cipollina (NYPSA, 1999) correlates these to

three core values: Liberty, Order and Equality.


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(or social citizenship) state; these can be distinguished according

to the degree to which commodification is allowed to determine

distribution.100 Somewhat similarly Spring states, “[e]ducational

goals are directly related to political beliefs” and outlines three

positions: those in favor of a ‘negative state,’ those in favor of

a ‘positive state,’ and those who emphasize political struggle.101

In investigating educational reform in the US, the ‘negative

state’ position (which has as its positive content reliance on

individual initiative) forced others on to the defensive in the

1980s. In the 1990s, we see a severely limited neo-progressive

response. So limited one might want to remove the adjective

‘progressive,’ it focuses on preserving the least controversial of

corporatist institutions by somehow justifying them in terms

acceptable to neo-liberals. The liberal, ‘negative state’ program

disavows active state efforts to create cohesive national societies.

It instead proposes to create a climate of competitive individualism

from which a nearly limitless material bounty will result.102 Social

100 Esping-Andersen’s 1990, 1993, 1999; see, also, Korpi, 1978,

1983.101 Spring 1989: 30-32.102 The equation of ‘liberal’ with the negative state position,

and of ‘conservative’ with the positive may seem strange to American

political ears, but it reflects the neo-liberal appropriation of the

term. Here ‘liberalism’ is limited to ‘economic liberalism’ and


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citizenship is eclipsed, competition is advanced as a barely

questioned good, individual striving for advancement allows for a

hierarchy that rolls over egalitarian collectivism, the individual is

conceived in relation to the machinery of material progress.

Hegemony is presented as social learning.

Overall, this helps us to understand how conservative positions

become embedded in educational policy and institutions. In implying

so far that wealth and power are able to shape the system to meet

their own interests, a definition of ‘conservative’ has been relied

upon which should now be made explicit. A most direct definition can

be found in Ed Gibson’s work on conservative parties and electoral

movements. Here he defines conservative as those “that draw their core

constituencies from the upper strata of society.”103 The connection between

‘enlightenment’ or ‘political liberalism’ is seen as secondary. The

natural growth of political liberalism into social democracy (see

T.H. Marshall, 1950) is seen as something to be avoided -- a

pathology or a cancer. Conservative and paternalistic programs that

use the state for redistribution as a means of decreasing social

tensions are considered atavisms. Indeed, the use of tension and

pressure is central to the model.103 Edward L. Gibson, “Conservative Electoral Movements and

Democratic Politics: Core Constituencies, Coalition Building,

and the Latin Amercian Electoral Right,” in Chalmers, Campello

de Souza and Boron, 1992, p. 15. Gibson’s footnote on this was


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conservative and upper strata is central to what follows. Here

conservative political programs would have as a chief goal preserving

a social order in which the present upper strata continue to do well.

Even in the hard, hard sciences, Kuhn tells us, paradigm change is

episodic. While other elements of Kuhn’s account may not be as true

for either social science or ‘social learning,’ this one certainly

is. It is important to keep this in mind when the question becomes,

What is the source of these changes? By almost all accounts,

paradigm change in science is a less contested process than ‘social

learning.’ That is not to say it is uncontested, but in Kuhn’s

account there is a struggle to solve problems, while in ‘social

learning’ there seems to be just one struggle after another. This

more general struggle includes not only struggles to solve problems,

but struggles over material goods, institutional structure, political

power and ideology.104

cut off during the editorial process, but he attributes this

view to others. [Contact Gibson] 104 This refers to another very long argument. See “The Four

Causes of Hegemony: Struggles Over Material Goods,

Institutional Structure, Political Power And Ideology or

Antinomical Constructs and Synthetic Narratives of Social

Learning Processes and Narratives of Social Process: Drawing on

Kant and Aristotle Regarding Opposition, Cause and Ontology,”

Chapter 3 of my Social Learning And Hegemony: Framing Education Reform in

the US, in process.


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Perhaps these are all present in the sciences, but there is at least a difference of degree. Recalling Poincare’s aphorism, John Hall argues that within the social sciences concepts are subject to contestation far more frequently than in natural science; in the later case there are more often arguments over data. Policy struggles, one would expect, are even more contested; basically, in politics you can’t reduce any activity to ‘learning.’

Perhaps these are all present in the sciences, but there is at

least a difference of degree. Recalling Poincare’s aphorism, John

Hall argues that within the social sciences concepts are subject to

contestation far more frequently than in natural science; in the

later case there are more often arguments over data.105 Policy

struggles, one would expect, are even more contested; basically, in

politics you can’t reduce any activity to ‘learning.’

Deliberate, orderly steps are not an accurate portrayal . . . ofhow policy process actually works. Policy making is, instead, acompletely interactive process without beginning or end. (Lindbloom and Woodhouse, 199x: 92)

The problem with the analogy with learning is that a society does not‘learn.’ That is the reason I put quotes (which I will forthwith remove) around the phrase social learning. When describing an ongoing, open ended, interactive process, the emphasis on learning cannot be at the level of society as a whole, but must focus on actors. Even the functionaries that govern do not learn

105 In Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 31.


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collectively, but as individuals and within institutions and groups. Since a society doesn’t learn, the analogy with learning is not only unhelpful, but misleading. Nor was it quite right to say this is ‘a process of disseminating a set of views that become the sum and substance of discourse.’ There is truth to that, but we must also talk about what things are absorbed into the culture and how they skew interpretation.

In looking back at a journal entry, we have an example or two:

4 May, 2004 – I was teaching two classes. I had the opportunity to teach some graduate courses this past fall. Almost like a superhero I had an alter ego -- the Bipolar Pedagogue, teaching Special Ed during the day and International Relations Theory and the Political Economy of Latin America at night.

The commute to New Jersey was tiring, but I was amazed by how little work I really had to do. I spent no time motivating students. All Ihad to do was tell them to do something and they did things. I guessthat is what a lot of critics of education think it entails. Most ofmy time with my present group is, however, spent motivating. I teachin a big high school in the Bronx -- not particularly dangerous, not particularly prestigious. I spend a lot of time talking to students in hallways, making small jokes, giving them things to read and otherways treating them as interesting human beings.

Too often I think our students feel the effect of a testing regime that gives rewards based on performance and feel as if unconditioned regard is a thing they have lost. They find it in their peers and I try to create a situation in which they can be peers in learning. I talk about the testing regime because I’ve seen its negative effects and I feel as if my kids are the victim of a huge machine.


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I tried to make this point to my graduate students, but most of them seem to have absorbed this cultural change. Here there is a problem. That there has been a shift in hegemony from public to private is not a difficult point to assert, but it may be impossible to prove.

Nonetheless, you can always quote someone. This grand process of social institutionalization is perhaps nowhere more evident than in theories of economic development. As regards my students' judgmentof how plausible all of this is, I offered into evidence the introductory paragraph from the book which was at one time perhaps the most widely used in development courses in the US, The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment:

During the more than thirty years since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, "development" has captured the attention of economists and statesmen alike. Of course international inequalities are not new, but three factors account for this recent emphasis: (1) the realization that the worldwide spread of markets has not automatically brought the benefits promised by 19th century economic theory; (2) the emergence of socialism as a viable development alternative; and (3) the pressure for economic development exerted by the newly independent countries of Latin America,106 Asia, and Africa with the resulting challenge to existing economic relations. (Wilber and Jameson in Wilber, 1984: 4)

The paragraph comes from a piece originally published in 1975. A

contemporary reader must be struck by the 3 numbered factors, esp. #

2; contemporary notions see 'socialism' not as a viable alternative,

but as the chief impediment to economic advance. Most pertinent,

however, is # 1, for much of contemporary development theory relies 106 As a one-time Latin Americanist, I must hasten to correct this;

most countries in the region declared political independence before

1830.


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on the belief that the worldwide spread of capital markets and the

general expansion of the market economy will bring such great

benefits that there is no need to anticipate any shortfalls. This is

benign neglect of global capital markets and the cold-blooded

selection process by which world capital is invested.

Behind this is a view of personhood which increasingly informs

arguments and discourse is that of the individual as calculator. It

does so from two sides. Internally, market-oriented paradigms depict

the inner workings of the psyche as a series of calculations. This

is clearly the case in micro-economics and choice theory; even when

the practioner keeps in mind this is a radical simplification, it is

used in argument to justify policy. Moreover, externally, human

capital theory measures the human being as one would any other

investment.

This all seems clearer in Britain than in the US, where this

provides another justification for Third Way politics and other

centrist positions with neo-liberal cores. As “modernized social

democracy,” the Third Way believes “that human capital is more

critical today to economic success than financial or physical capital

so education and skills are vitally important for our future.”107

107 This was attributed to Tony Blair in an article on the Third

Way that I read while in Cambodia. I don’t have the original source.


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That the need for education is to be concluded only after

assuming the need for economic success is very telling and reflects

shifting conceptions of what the state should and can do. What is

the source of this change? What purposes does it serve? As the

emphasis on ‘human capital’ would suggest, it also has to do with the

shape of civil society, which is more and more patterned on an

economic model. Of course, that is exactly the type of contention

that is difficult to make a proven point, but I don’t mind being

contentious and it is, after all, the idea, and this informs much of

what I write. Nearly all of it

But there is another part to considering ideas and the outer

frames of discourse. In so doing, we must think of their

transmission form individual to individual. Again, England provides

a clear example. Close your eyes and think of the influence of

Friedrich von Hayek on Margaret Thatcher. It means a lot when the

future Prime Minister writes ‘yes’ in the margins:

. . . during a visit to the Conservative Party’s research department in the mid-seventies, [Thatcher] slammed a copy of [Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty] on the table and declared, “This is what we believe.”108

She was also taken with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. (1944)

I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at this time. It was only in the mid-1970s,

108 John Cassidy, “Annals of Money: The Price Prophet” in The

New Yorker, 7 Feb. 2000, pp. 44-51, p. 50.


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when Hayek’s works were right at the top of the reading list given me by Keith Joseph, that I really came to grips with the ideas he put forward. . . . Hayek saw that Nazism --national socialism-- had its roots in nineteenth century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning further into other sectors.109

Here the ideas of an economist influenced and led to the

electoral success of a politician. Moreover, a political programme

became it owns ‘ism.’ This is more than Heilbroner quoting Keynes on

the voices of madmen -- it is a part of social learning that every

academic understands. We want our ideas to be adopted and

implemented by those in power. Moreover, if one accepts there is a

basic ideological similarity between the Thatcher and Reagan

governments, then this of more than passing relevance.

Policy shifts initiated by the Reagan administration play as

large a role in this story as anything else. Indeed, the most

important shifts may not have been in educational policy per se, but

in the over arching changes in ideology associated with economic 109 Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, Harper-Collins, New York,

1995: 50-51. When she first read it in 1945, Thatcher had heavily

underlined the following passage in her personal copy of Serfdom:

the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the

socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of

those tendencies. (see Chris Ogden, Maggie, Simon and Schuster, New

York, 1990: 155.)


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models of free competition and fiscal discipline. They have

attempted to create a new channel for the mainstream. In this, Maggie

Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan were not that far apart. Whether she

influenced, inspired, encouraged, gave succor to, assisted or merely

had an affinity with them, it is just a short jump from Mrs. Thatcher

to the policies of the Reagan administrations:

Nor did Hayek mince his words about the monopolistic tendencies of the planned society which professional groups and trade unions would inevitably seek to exploit. Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group -- and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. (Thatcher, 1995: 51)

Here we have an example of how an idea enables the creation of a

coalition. It identifies an enemy and those whose interests are

served by advancing this argument tend to join the coalition. In

this case it is one the three major coalitions that have supported

the Anglo-American political programme: the anti-distributional

coalition. The other two, which overlap, respectively, to greater

and lesser degrees, are the pro-privatization and pro-standards

movements. These three, sometimes cross-cutting, but more often

reinforcing, issue cleavages shape the terrain of educational

discourse.


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And much of this starts with both Thatcher and Reagan policies

which threatened to change the social division of labor by changing

the normal distribution of the social product. That they both

specifically targeted organized labor and the public education system

is of course pertinent, but this must be seen in the context of

building a coalition for a more general political programme. The key

stated belief of this programme: the virtue of the private sector

over against the public sector.

This is a change of significant magnitude and perhaps goes

beyond the 3rd order change of which Hall speaks. Is there such a

thing as a fourth order change?


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6) Questions of trust

Peter Hall mentions three orders of change, but one should

consider a fourth. Fourth order change might be the justification of

goals by reference to principles, values, ideologies and visions of

the future. At the bottom of all this would nonetheless be class and

class interests and that should be the starting point. I realize

this is an assertion rather than a provable hypothesis, but let me

clarify something about ‘class.’ It is a difficult term and here I

mean three things, one having to do with the productive, the second

with the reproductive, the third with the political sphere. First,

we speak of the class of people who are organizing business and

productive enterprise; they place demands on the educational system.

Second, there is the class of people who are relatively affluent,

whose affluence is reflected in residential patterns and a skewed

distribution of educational opportunity. Thus, in addition to

looking at activity, including class activity, one must also look at

how the interests of more affluent classes are reflected in the

institutions of education. This is the bedrock/shifting sand spoken

of above. Finally, there is a political class, or rather a set of


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competing and inter-acting political coalitions which generally have

a significant class basis. So, in addition to the sources and the

institutions, one must look to ideas which seek to direct social

activity.

And we should look to trust, which Bernard Barber treats as a

complex notion in which expectations of future performance vie with

beliefs in good intentions. In The Logic and Limits of Trust, Barber speaks

of how business espouses and want others to embrace ‘The Indirect

Road.’ He describes it as follows:

Social control over service to the public welfare is assigned not to public expectations of direct fiduciary obligations and their fulfillment, but to the indirect competitive mechanisms of the market. That is, the profit incentive, operating through the market, will ensure indirectly that businesses effectively serve the public good. 110

Barber states that this market ideology, like the ideologies of other

groups, developed to great extent in response to social criticism.

He points out five “patterned responses to persuade the public that

110 Bernard Barber, The Logic and Limits of Trust, Rutgers University Press,

1983. Because of their number, references to Barber are given in

parentheses in the text.


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their behavior in the market does serve the public welfare . . . that

they are, in short, to be trusted for both their competence and their

service to society.” (p. 106) The market ideology, in which business

justifies its autonomy by stressing its efficiency, is first among

these.

The argument goes something like this. The profit motive is

essential in producing the material cornucopia that all sectors of

society desire and technically competent performance makes

profitability possible. Government regulation and national planning

are hindrances -- they are unable to adapt, to innovate, to

demonstrate their competence. Thus the negative side of this

emphasizes the incompetence of government -- more so even than the

role of unions, which were the main vexation of business prior to

World War II. As Silk and Vogel, writing in the mid-70s, tell us,

economic troubles are attributed to “a crypto-socialism or excessive

government interference that is undermining the effective working of

a free enterprise system.”111 111 Leonard Silk and David Vogel, Ethics & Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in

American Business, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976, p 25.


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Publishing in 1983, Barber duly noted that business ranks “near

the bottom of the list in confidence surveys.” (p. 101) But since

the late 70s there has been a concerted effort to place

individualistic ideologies at the forefront of politics and policy

reform. That this movement has had considerable political successes

is indisputable and it is often noted that this neo-liberal thrust

has changed the political landscape. The preferred form of

management accountability is based as much on business as it is on

child development.

This is significant because market ideologies, unlike all

others, ignore both questions of how one expects the moral social

order to persist and, more specifically, expectations of fiduciary

responsibility to those who not in a direct contractual relationship.

Barber distinguishes between organic ideologies, in which a community

interest was predominate, and ideologies such as laissez-faire, which

proposed that “if every individual looked after his own interests,

then the community or public interest --‘the greatest good of the


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greatest number’--would be indirectly but automatically and surely

achieved.” Obviously, laissez-faire is not new, but it has been renewed,

at least in theory and rhetoric, if not always in practice.

But practice has changed. Outsourcing across national

boundaries, while something that only infrequently affects the public

education directly, has proved a model of ‘efficiency’ when that term

is defined as increasing productivity or adding to a stock’s value.

What has remained constant, however, is a development model that has

seen ‘comparative advantage’ as a solution, while the problem of

absorbing social costs so as to gain that advantage often goes

unaddressed.

This is both a shift in how trust is conceived socially and also

a shift in the apportioning of social responsibility. The norm of

trust in business -- that we trust in the consequences, that these

might produce a general good even in the presence of selfish

intentions -- has greater scope and has gained more general credence.

We need not consult the intentions of actors, because even self-


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interested actors will, in a market framework, work towards the

general good. This is not a new argument, but since the 1970s the

lack of credible counter-arguments is palpable – or worse, taken for

granted.

It is also a shift in the apportioning of responsibility. From

this perspective, the state as a human community is reduced to a

community of economic actors, investors chief among them.

Responsibility for the individual resides with the individual and his

or her family. At the extreme, in this more perfect union state

responsibility is limited to protecting property rights and providing

for public order. The general welfare will be provided by the

aggregation of self-interested actions.

Returning to our ongoing example of teachers unions, this is, of

course, a different justifying narrative than the unions must

produce. Nonetheless, the unions’ narrative must somehow cohere with it. Yes,

it may attack it in its particulars, but it cannot easily contradict

its principles. This is one limit on political possibilities.


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According to Charles Anderson, “the deliberation of public policy

takes place within a realm of discourse . . . policies are made

within some system of ideas and standards which is comprehensible and

plausible to the actors involved.”112 Another limit is that the

unions must further contend with one of the most common thoughts,

that while what is good for business is generally for the general

good, the interests of unions are somehow thought of as ‘special.’

Thus, to understand the multiple effects on education requires

that we look at trust. According to Barber, trust has both a general

and specific meaning. The “comprehensive definition of trust [is] as

expectation of the persistence of the moral social order.” (p. 14)

This can be broken down into two specific expectations: technically

competent role performance and fiduciary obligation and

responsibility. The market ideology is unique, however, in that

“public trust in business is supposed to be limited entirely to

112 add to bib

Anderson, Charles. 1978. “The Logic of Public Problems:

Evaluation in Comparative Policy Research,” in Ashford, Douglas,

ed. Comparing Public Policies. Beverly Hills: Sage.


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technically competent performance.” (p. 101)

This is a process in which a “radical doctrine of individualism”

develops within the context of “a system of exchange not only vastly

expanded but also structurally changed and newly institutionalized in

the modern world.” (p. 103) Polanyi described this as a reversal --

instead of economics being embedded in social and community

relations, economic relations are primary and society and community

are transformed by them. If there is a community to which business

has obligations here, it is a community of investors. But there is

some sort of community.

According to the market ideology, self-interest is the driving

force, but whether explicitly noted or not, by itself self-interest

is insufficient. If businessmen only honored agreements when they

did not conflict with self-interest, then there would only be

scattered expectations of having the agreements honored. So it is

not quite that fiduciary responsibility is done away with, but it is

limited to a complex idea of self-interest as embodied in a set of


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business ethics and enforced by statute.

These turns of thought require looking not only at partisan

politics, but at the distribution of the social product among

classes. If society is here thought of as a community of investors

-- those that invest their time, their talents and their alienable

resources in productive enterprises -- then it follows that returns

from these investments are thought to constitute a just distribution of the social product.

We can see the roots of this in Locke's emphasis on property and his

obsession with money as a way to accumulate limitless wealth.

Recalling Esping-Andersen, commodification is allowed to determine

distribution. If this is the hegemonic expectation, then trust

exists but is limited.

The ramifications may be most clear in the debate over

privatization. In what is perhaps a challenge to Schmitt, Norberto

Bobbio has been called the divide between public and private ‘the

great dichotomy.’ By this he means that the public/private

distinction divides the world into two spheres which are mutually


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exclusive and jointly exhaustive; furthermore, it subsumes other

distinctions and makes them secondary. But, as Bobbio notes, that is

at the conceptual level and this analytical distinction does not

necessarily serve to increase understanding. Indeed, it may distort:

the practical level of public policy that line is blurred and the

question arises, ‘What is a public school?’

In America 2000, produced under the auspices of the Bush Dept. of

Education in 1991, the word ‘public’ is used seven times in 35 pages;

as Joseph Kahne has observed, those seven references all came within

discussions of school choice proposals that called into question the

existence of public schools. Recommendations were for a significant

institutional transformation of the system. Included was, of course,

a battle over language. America 2000 argued that the definition of

public schools should be broadened to “include all schools that serve

the public and are accountable to public authority, regardless of who

runs them.” Charter schools had barely gotten off the drawing board

at this point (there were only 4 nation-wide in 1992)113

113 Find cite


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The role of the public schooling system in democratic polities

is both complicated and significant, but one thing is clear: for the

last quarter-century the most prominent objections to the present

system have been, in different ways, rooted in economics. Not all,

of course, but economic arguments are behind at least two of the

three potential directions for institutional reform. On the one

hand, arguments for privatization pose one of the most powerful

challenges to extant paradigms for the provision of public education.

On the other, the public system has been subject to internal

reorganizations that have been justified by the needs of the private

sector and the expressed desire to remain competitive

internationally. These range from experimentation with school

management paradigms to a national movement that is premised on the

belief that the use of standardized tests can lead to improved

academic standards. These are but two of a set of arguments with

economistic presumptions. These presumptions not only color the

discourse, but lead it off in directions perhaps far removed from our

shared understandings of what is necessary for a democracy to


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function.

Also limited are the functions of trust. According to Barber,

one function of trust is to articulate a set of shared values and

serve as “an integrative mechanism that creates and sustains

solidarity in social relationships and systems.” Within such social

systems, trust “is not a zero-sum matter but is the creator of

enhanced benefits for all parties.” In other words, it is a public

good. But if the expectation is that one gets returns based on

investment of resources, then the good it does is distributed

according to the holdings of these resources. Membership in a

community does not by itself bring benefits. Value is added as one

produces.

Of course, children don’t produce.


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7) Actors under constraints

The narrative of this work as a whole concerns actors working under enormous constraints in one field and works to outline those constraints, their sources and their consequences. One of the chiefconstraints is the need to act in accordance with economic policy programs. While neither necessary nor sufficient, transnational linkages are an important contributing factor. In writing about social learning in an era of transnationalism, the purpose is to showthe skewing of education theory in order to remain in accordance witha particular form of political economy. The argument it makes is that the presumptions of hegemony are, on the one hand, stem from a transnational hegemony and, on the other, manifest themselves in a neo-liberal ideology. It is the gravity of the hegemonic center that shapes the discursive field.

What follows is an discussion of Peter Hall’s work, the purposeof which is two-fold: to sort out the most important potential policy changes; second, to compare the process of change in two quitedifferent, albeit related, cases -- economic policy in the UK and educational policy in the US. If we accept Hall’s treatment, there was a ‘3rd order change' in economic thinking in the UK; not only levels and instruments of policy, but the overall goals changed. This did not begin within the state bureaucracy, the focus of many previous treatments of ‘social learning,’ but in public debates that were given a final imprimatur through a process of national electoral


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contestation. Only then did the Thatcher government move to implement and consolidate the paradigm they had previously adopted.

Similar contestation does not come at the end, but somewhere in the middle of the story of US educational reform. But while finalityis made more difficult to achieve because of a diffuse institutional structure, paradigms in the provision of public education are, nonetheless, still being contested, with privatization especially casting a long shadow. Whether all this amounts to, in the Kuhnian terminology of Peter Hall, a 3rd order change, is left a somewhat openquestion: certainly some proposed changes were of that magnitude, but they met significant resistance and have not been implemented. It also leaves open whether standards-based reform has, by incremental means, constituted a 3rd order change.

How does one situate all of this in a larger historical context? Engaging in the comparison with Hall is, after all, partially becauseof the implication of Hall’s case. If, as Hall contends and no one denies, there was a change from Keynesianism to Monetarism in the UK,it did not come unaccompanied.114 It involved a political programme

114 In the US, where the Reagan administration availed itself of

deficit spending, one might have a different interpretation. With

spending, as with military action, Reagan's rhetoric did not reveal

what he would do. Not only did he spend a large amount of money

and create deficits, much of this was devoted to military programs

that were never used. For his sometimes bellicose demeaner, Reagan


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and a change of standards in judging what is acceptable policy. Fromthis perspective, a change in macro-economic policy was perhaps the leading edge, but only part of a greater whole.

Accordingly, the major question to seek out and investigate is: What are the parallel changes in discourse within which contests overeducational policy proceed and how do they affect the possibilities of implementing and embedding a change within the institutional structure of education? This is a question of which we can say both that it admits of no definitive answer and that it betrays a quite limited perspective if one does not ask it. And, definitive answer or no, there is a lot of evidence.

It is further argued that this constitutes an effective form of hegemony. While it is an even more comprehensive term, ‘hegemony’ here refers to the process by which elite-led coalitions elaborate a vision of social order: which functions are to be served and how theconcrete organizations that serve these functions are going to be

deployed military force only rarely, such as in Grenada. While I

have always been a steadfast opponent of the Reagan

administration's Central American policies –they were the reason I

started studying Political Science-- there were never any American

combat troops on the ground. While Thatcher was able to inspire

true believers, Reagan could not only do that, but he could act

pragmatically in the short term, not easily falling into the traps

that have tempted other presidednts.


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run. It is from this perspective that this chapter is being written. It is a synthetic narrative on the possibilities, successes and missed opportunities of social learning.

Transitions to economic liberalization are a way to order both the national economy and transnational relations; according to Simmons and Elkins, these transitions tend to form clusters, both regionally and over time and this is partly due to policy diffusion.115 Their version of social learning is relevant, but limited. First, it is limited to a single issue area, economics; second, it is conceptually limited, focusing on exchange of information and network and communicative linkages that could contribute to learning. While accepting the importance of networks and clusters, the version of social learning advanced here goes beyond policy diffusion within networks; it emphasizes the widespreadeffects of liberalism that spill across issue areas and goes beyond the idea of information to the gestalt that structures thinking and opinion formation.

115 Beth Simmons and Zachary Elkins, “The Globalization of

Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political

Economy,” Workshop Paper for Internationalization of Regulatory Reform: The

Interaction of Policy Learning and Policy Emulation in Diffusion Processes, Univ. of

Calif. at Berkeley, 24-25 April, 2003.


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8) Social learning and paradigm change

Social learning manifests itself in societies as a whole. Thereis not way around this. Instead of functionaries within the formal institutional governing structure of a state, a more wide-ranging group is included. But even if one limits oneself to a community of thinkers within the state, the problem is to identify the cause of paradigm

change. What is its source? There are multiple answers, but one somehow must take account not only of communities of thinkers, but also those who are somehow organized to be a (more or less) effectivesocial actor. And we must look at this not only at the national, butalso at the global level. As regards transnational structuration116--116 Theories of structuration are found in both Giddens and

Bourdieu. In each, social change is thought to be an ongoing process

of interaction, thought to be a matter of, in varying degrees,

reciprocal causation. Just as one would not, in looking at two

children playing tag, attach the label independent variable to one

child's motion over the other, one cannot give predominance to one

agent's strategy over the other. Both involve multiple levels of

anticipation. See, for example, Giddens, 1984: 180-1, where he

states, "Structural constraint is not expressed in terms of the

implacable causal forms which structural sociologists have in mind

when they emphasize so strongly the association of 'structure' with

'constraint.' Structural constraints do not operate independently of

the motives and reasons that agents have for what they do. They

cannot be compared with the effect of, say, an earthquake which


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the context in which the rest unfolds--, the leading characteristic of the contemporary era is the importance of finance and investment capital. In sum, there has been a shift in hegemony not so much fromone state to another as from state organizations to a transnational system of organization emanating from the ensemble of institutions which comprise private enterprise.

This is a simple argument that is very difficult to confirm, butit would change things. Once accomplished, this changes the framework of analysis:

ideas that specify how [to perceive] problems, which goals may be attained through policy and what sorts of techniques can be used to reach these goals . . . interlock to form a relatively coherent whole that might be described as a policy paradigm. Like a gestalt, it structures the very way in which policy-makers see the world and their role within it.117

Implicit is a typology of social learning. In comparison with

destroys a town and its inhabitants . . . . The structural

properties of social systems do not act, or 'act on', anyone like

forces of nature."

Interestingly enough, Gramsci anticipated this language in a

critique of reformers. “Life for [reformers] is like an

avalanche . . . [they think] I as an individual do not have the

strength to stop it.” (Gramsci cited in Cammett, 1967: 46) 117 Peter Hall, “From Keynesianism to Monetarism,” in Structuring Politics,

1993: 91-2.


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Kuhn’s model – what we can call the ‘hard science’ model, there are other types, including, presumably, models more appropriate for social science, policy science and policy struggle. Hall gives us a model with two stages, so to speak -- there is electoral contestationand afterwards there is the implementation of the new paradigm by thevictorious side.

Although it should be pointed out that Mrs. Thatcher won her first election with considerably less than 50% of the vote, the conceptual revolution is nonetheless by the ballot box. She attempted to introduce a new political programme, one which was basedon a different model of the economy.

Overall, the conceptual framework I draw on to analyze this is equal parts political economy and social learning. It goes beyond that, however, when it suggests the following, presumably non-false, equation:

hegemony = social learning + political economyMoreover, it suggests that there are two competing modes of hegemony,the assimilationist and integrationist.

Closely parallel to the distinction David Soskice has made between Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) and Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs),118 I will instead concentrate on the quality of hegemony, assimilationist vs. integrative, as a way to characterize 118 Soskice, 1993.


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the period. Ideological and organizational changes in global capitalism followed the stagflation of the 1970s. Constraints on governmental policy options manifested themselves in two basic responses: a dual labor market policy in the US and neocorporatism inmost of Western Europe. These two responses were representative of structural differences between LMEs and CMEs. In the liberal model, macro-economic stimulation and reliance on state expenditures are eschewed. Moreover, they reject collective solutions and instead demand that government remove obstacles to cutting costs, including labor costs, so they may compete successfully on those grounds. 119

The shift from Keynesianism to monetarism brought with it not only a new set of assumptions, i.e. there is a ‘natural rate of unemployment,’ but also a new set of constituents. “Like most kinds of policy, a macro-economic strategy tends to favor the material interests of some social groups to the disadvantage of others.”120 Education is also like most kinds of policy, and it is significant that second on her agenda was the privatization of education.121

The individuals in Thatcher’s government were keenly aware of

119 See Soskice, 1993; Saxonhouse and Srinivasan, 1999; Kitschelt,

1999; Scrapf, 1991; Goldthorpe, 1984 and King and Wood, in

Kitschelt, 1999. This is a truncated version of the discussion at

the end of chapter one.120 Peter Hall, Structuring Politics, 92, 94.121 Walford, 1990; Hall 1993.


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their counterparts in other national societies. Historical examples show this can result in strange policy outcomes. Bismark’s social welfare provisions have already been mentioned. That the Weimar constitution (Article 163) stated that every German must “exercise his mental and physical powers in a manner required by the welfare ofall” and, further, that for those who had “no suitable opportunity for work . . . livelihood will be provided” is another surprise. Butthey followed the Soviets in being only the second to declare “the meeting of citizens’ basic needs was a goal of the state.”122

This was another time and the Weimar constitution found its shape both in response to domestic pressure and international configurations. Transnational links and international competition affect both political coalitions and generally accepted ideologies. And there are long-term effects. Adhering to much of the neo-liberalagenda, Anglo-american capitalism, as it was formed under Thatcher and Reagan, has continued into Triangulation and Third Way politics -- that is, there is an underlying acceptance of micro-economic presumptions. Moreover, there is an explicit rejection of the integrationist model. Mrs. Thatcher herself read Hayek and rejected social planning:

Hayek saw that Nazism --national socialism-- had its roots in nineteenth century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning

122 Peukert, Weimar, p. 132.


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further into other sectors.123

Thatcher saw the rise of Fascism and Nazism not as a reaction against the socialist movements of 1920s or caused, at least in Germany, by the trauma of its defeat in and treatment after the GreatWar, but as the predictable outcome of using the state to reshape society. She rejected the integrationist approach and instead adopted an assimilationist approach in which incentives and the market model were predominant.

In this instance ideas did not develop within the technocratic state apparatus, but through the political process. This is, in fact, the challenge that Hall gives the social learning literature. In Hall’s case, the episode of 3rd degree paradigm change in macro-economic policy had its origins in a successful political campaign (Thatcher’s) and ensuing efforts to introduce a new political programme. Part of the plan is to change the way people think. According to Hall (1986, 1993), the British case should be conceptualized in Kuhnian terms as a 3rd Order Shift of policy paradigms in which monetarist understandings of political economy supplanted Keynesian ones. Such a change does not stand alone -- it goes hand-in-hand with a recommodification of the accepted status of individuals vis-à-vis the market. It also attacks the very core idea ofthe welfare state: that there are inviolable social rights based on

123 Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, Harper-Collins, New York,

1995: 50-51. See Chapter 2.


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citizenship, not performance.124

In the last type of policy change, new paradigms must be seen inthe context of a wider set of ideological commitments. These commitments don’t grow up in space, but unify groups that will benefit if the proposed policies are implemented. This is what I mean by ‘political programme’ and I use the term below to begin to develop a model centered on social actors engaged in political and policy struggles. This is not a quiet discussion of opposing viewpoints, it is contention. But it is limited contention. Some viewpoints are never stated. Every such actor must articulate their self-interest, not only externally, but also internally in order to maintain the support of, in the case of a union, their membership. Here the limitations placed on actors become implicit

On the other hand, it is not only a struggle for the survival ofthe organization, or a struggle to maximize the utility of its members, it is a struggle to change the direction of society as a whole. For all of Mrs. Thatcher’s railing against ‘social planning,’her programme was social planning par excellance. Privatization is at the center; as Hector Schamis has argued, privatization is "a global process of inducement through which some countries emulate others;" moreover, it can constitute “the core of a true process of political engineering.”125 'Privatization' here means more than merely the

124 Marshall, 1950.125 Schamis, 1992: 58; 1994: 5)


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selling off of state-owned enterprises; it entails the reconceptualization of the model of state regulation of society alonglaissez-faire lines.

This requires assembling a coalition. Coalitions form around interests, but interests have to be articulated, eventually in a programmatic way. That is, social actors do not look for abstract interests, rather they choose among various options presented to them. And the coalition must extend beyond those who benefit from privatization while at the same time still drawing on the core arguments for privatization.

Accordingly, the narrative focus is on privatization –including charters-- and standards. It is in the connection between two that much of the story lies. While they have different constituencies, one cannot tell a coherent history of either without reference to theother. The movement for higher standards also reflects this conceptualization of political and social change in economic terms; the internalization of the values imbued in the process of advancing from grade to grade based on competitive standardized tests (which function as exit exams) are coherent with an internalized common sense.

As Robert Arnove has argued, “the belief that there is a causal relationship between the ‘excellence’ of a school system, as measured

by national standardized examinations, and the economic success of a country in global competition . . . revived the interest in the relationship


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between education systems and national productivity.”126 Combined with a push for privatization, this belief was encouraged by a campaign and has been highly successful in shaping educational reformdebates ever since. Like privatization, is has been seen as part of a wider set of ideological commitments, including: expansion of market mechanisms and contraction of governmental reponsiblities; theacceptance of intense competition and economic security as a norm; increased cultural discipline and an implicit Social Darwinist logic.127

Neither appears ex nihilo, rather both appear at a time when globalhegemonic strategies were undergoing redefinition. Calls for greaterlabor flexibility changed the opportunity structure for all workers, whether educated or not, skilled or unskilled, first world or third.128 Thus both privatization and standards are attempts to form crucial links in the movement to a redefined model of capitalist relations, one that is, in keeping with long-term Anglo-american models, based on an economistic and assimilationist logic. This logicis an essential element in the ongoing maintenance and repeated reconstructions of a Transnational Civil Society that are perhaps themost salient landmarks in the process of recent history. And, if indeed this model is the model for the foreseeable future, as

126 Arnove and Torres, 1999: 4; emphasis added.127 On social darwinism, see Apple, 1999, and John Powers, 128 Womack, et al., 1990.


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suggested by numerous authors,129 then the ramifications are immense.

Apple argues that what we have seen in this debate is "the reconstruction of common-sense," which has "redefined the terrain of debate of all things educational" in terms of economic style competition.130 As argued above, this can be seen from the inception ofthe standards movement in the early 1980s. More than that, the measurements involved in the standards movement form the method of accountability that allows public schools to be branded failing or successful.

Overall, there is a messy and non-parsimonious assemblage of factors to be accounted for. In addition to conventional political and governmental topics, such as bureaucrats, interest groups and elections, Lindblom and Woodhouse emphasize

the deeper forces structuring and often distorting governmental behavior: business influence, inequality and impaired capacities for probing social problems.

Then one must account for multiple forces involved, always keeping in mind that business influence must be considered. Thus, in129 For an overview, see Jeff Faux, "Is the American Economic Model

the Answer?," The American Prospect no. 19, Fall 1994. He considers

whether “the ‘American model’ -- deregulation, weak unions, and a

minimalist welfare state -- offers an exemplary competitiveness

strategy for surviving in the global economy.”130 Apple, 1999.


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depicting the historical process of education reform in the US I havechosen an explanatory model that tends to be richer than it is rigorous. That is, however, only if we define rigor according to mathematical models and the ability to measure things. I get nervousat times, because in looking at the flow of ideas one is hard pressedto measure. Yes, you can code words and do content analysis based oncounting when they appear and how often one social actor uses which term. But that does not tell us how the underlying assumptions have changed over time or what their significance is. It may be impossible to conduct a systematic inquiry into ideological change asexpressed in discourse that is not only ‘rigorous’ according to the standards of empirical research, but also is meaningful in an investigative and heuristic sense.

Unlike the others, third order change is thought to be the

result of a disjunctive process and brings along with it “radical

changes in the overarching terms of policy discourse.” (1993: 279)

Invoking Kuhn’s language, Hall depicts this as competition between

(not within) policy paradigms. Leaving aside for the moment whether

or not there is always at least an implicit competition between

paradigms,131 we can note that, according to Kuhn, when two paradigms

compete it is because each contains its own account of how the world

operates. Those who follow different paradigms dispute each other’s

data and will not admit to any binding technical procedure to resolve

131 note Yale - based critic of kuhn. Compare to Bricolage?


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their differences.

This suggests three things. First, that paradigm change is

as much a sociological and political process as anything else;

experts have controversial views and the outcome of a dispute depends

upon who has positional advantages within the broader institutional

framework. Second, paradigm shifts go hand-in-hand with a shift in

the locus of authority -- indeed, the central question becomes

‘who[se account] is authoritative?’ Third, these coterminous shifts

are likely to be proceeded by policy failures which undermine the

intellectual coherence of the original position and thence its

authority.132

Paradigm contention therefore leads us to the attempt to

locate authority. Relations of authority are, by definition,

political. Accordingly, 3rd order change is, in its broadest

outlines, a political process which involves the mobilization of

social groups with interests which are affected by the policy change.

But one needs to differentiate between Hall’s case and the case

at hand. Combined with the push for privatization, a campaign

based on the belief that there is a causal relationship between

132 A fourth implication -- that policy failures are often due to

structural conditions over which there is no control -- is also worth

mentioning.


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students’ results on national standardized examinations, and the

economic success of a country in global competition, began in the

1980s. It has been highly successful in shaping educational reform

debates ever since. Teachers unions’ strategies and discourse

developed amid an anti-statist current that, as a worldwide

phenomenon, has advocated market solutions and cast aspersions on the

instrumentality of public institutions.133 Somehow, within the

context of changing political programmes, we can find self-interest

in the reciprocal relation between structuration and strategic

choice. This approach is shaped by four basic questions about the

overall strategic turn. These might be called the four C's --

causes, content, coalitions and consequences. First, why have

teachers unions begun to redefine their self-interest? Second, what

did this redefinition consist of? Third, how this shaped and been

shaped by their links to larger political coalitions? Fourth, what

are the significant consequences?

The question for the present study is whether the changes in

educational policy constitute a third order change. The answer to

this question is yes, no, seemingly not and maybe. Yes, major

policies promised by conservatives in the early 1980s, such as

133 do Souza, 1992.


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privatization in the form of tuition tax credits or educational

vouchers, would have, if implemented, had constituted such a change.

But, no, they have not as yet been implemented. Instead we have what

may be only a series of what seem to be 1st and 2nd order changes:

increased federal spending, new administrative techniques and forms

of school management (including charters) and, finally, standards-

based reform. But then again, one of these, particularly the last,

might be something more than that –a way to alter the public

education system from the inside- and may suggest that 3rd order

change can be achieved over time by incremental means.

There are three overlapping coalitions that have been the

underlying sources of educational policy, all with their locus of

authority in civil society. First there is the anti-

distributionalist/anti-statist coalition mentioned above. Second,

while it does not necessarily include the same technocratic elements,

there is the flip side of this which draws on much the same

constituency: the pro-privatization coalition. Besides some

significant differences around the edges, there is also a different

type of vehemence that powers the pro-privatization forces; while

they may be ideological, they are to the greatest extent interest-

based. Third, there is the coalition for standard-based reform with

its meritocratic ideological core.


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The prospect of privatization cannot be ignored in this story --

and it seems to fit what might be called a ‘dual paradigm’ model.134

While still nascent in the 1990s and still contested today,

privatization offers a new paradigm concerning the public provision

of education, one in which each school, public, private, religious or

otherwise, “would operate with equal access to public resources and

largely independent of public controls, in a free market for

educational services.” (Carnoy, 1993: 164) Two of the ramifications

of such a shift are of great magnitude. First, public education in

the US has not traditionally been thought of merely as a way of

delivering a commodity. More than a method of political

socialization, public education has been a “vehicle for deliberation

and debate.” (Henig, 1996: 11) US political culture has long

accepted as an article of faith that “unless all its citizens are

educated” the “existence of a republic . . . is an admitted

impossibility.”135 Second, this mechanism of choice poses the danger

of a multi-tiered education system in which public schools become, as

they already are in many urban areas, schools of last resort.

(Noguerra, 1994: 237)

As Hall’s account of 3rd order change would lead one to expect, 134 I have in mind Tilly’s dual soverignty article. [cite]135 Eaton, 1874: 6. John Eaton was Commissioner of Education in the

Grant Administration.


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there is no ‘common sense’ on the issue and the amount of controversy

generated is truly remarkable. George Will calls those against

vouchers ‘reactionaries’ who oppose fairness. Unions call charter

school supporters privateers. Dirk C. van Raemdonck tells us

"Students in the ailing, monopolistic U.S. public school system could

benefit from a more open educational marketplace.”136 As later

chapters document, these are among the more civil comments in the

debate. On each side there is a mobilized base, one that views any

attack on vouchers to be an attack on fairness and justice, another

that sees the implementation of vouchers as an attack on democracy

and equality.

Yet privatization was not implemented on a grand-scale and can

be considered only a potential 3rd order change. Polarization on the

issue worked against implementation. To paraphrase Hall, this is a

contest that has not as yet ended, for the supporters of neither

paradigm have secured positions of authority from which they have

been able to rearrange the organization and standard operating

procedures of the process and thus institutionalize the new paradigm.

Of course, Mrs. Thatcher was polarizing as well, but the institutions

were different. The diffuse structure of institutional authority

136 Dirk C. van Raemdonck, “European observations on U.S. public

education,” Mackinac Center, 2000.


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over education in the US contrasts with the UK model. In the US

education has traditionally been a local affair. While their

governance has been the subject of much derision,137 the principle of

local control is strong enough that in 1973 the US Supreme Court went

so far as to rule that “states didn’t have to provide public

education.”138

Different issues cut differently and standards-based reform was

less controversial. Arguing against higher standards was like arguing

against motherhood. But there was still controversy and motives were

still impugned. Look at two respected academic-policy accounts of the

most important publishing event in education of the time, the

publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. Evoking Jonathan Edwards, Finn

137 Mark Twain’s comment is, as always, incise: “First God created

idiots. That was for practice. Then he created school boards.”

Quoted in Claudia Johnson, Stifled Laughter: One Woman’s Story about Fighting

Censorship. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum, 1994, p 28.138 (quoted in Lieberman, 1993 -- cite case) This is implicitly

recognized in Brown: “the opportunity of an education . . . where the

state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available

to all on equal terms.” (Brown v. Board, e.a.) On the other hand, all

states admitted after the Civil War were required to include a

provision on education in their constitution.


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and Rebarber139 refer to the report in a section called ‘The Great

Awakening,’ calling it ‘stirring’ and commenting that it gave

coherence and a well-articulated rationale for an as yet unnamed

‘excellence movement.’ (1991: 175-6) Contrast this with Tyack and

Cuban, who call Risk an “ideological smokescreen” that “reduced

schooling to a means of economic competitiveness, both personal and

national . . . and obscured rather than clarified the most pressing

problems,” especially those of poverty and inequity. (1995: 34)

The emphasis on professionalism and cooperative unionism in the late1990s was in part a response to that; moreover, it provides a window on the systematic interrelation of economics and the educational system in one case, one case that happens to be at the hegemonic center of contemporary capitalism. Such analysis requires a comprehensive approach. First, one must address the class-positionof teachers, specifically the position of teachers vis-à-vis workers in the labor market who are perceived to have less skill. Second, majoreducational issues, especially the prospect of the privatization of public schools and movement for standards can hardly be ignored. Third, the changing structure of political coalitions is crucial, especially the seemingly “one-sided compromise with corporate conservatism.” Finally, and perhaps most nebulously, there has been a change in ideational trends, or what one might call the meta-narrative of social change, one which is best captured in the 139 Vanderbilt Professor and former Asst. Sec. of Education Chester

Finn is a leading personage in these debates.


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changing relation between ideology and utopian vision.140

In responding to direct attacks, the unions faced two strong tendencies, the anti-union arguments and the anti-state tendencies which are the subject of the previous chapter. The content of their change was to come up with a set of defenses regarding school quality

140 See Ricoeur, 1976. That it is at least plausible that we have gone

through a turning point in World History was the subject of much

writing at the end of the Cold War. The so-called ‘End of History’

thesis focuses on the end of Cold War as a turning point. (Fukuyama,

1992; Adler, 1993; Burns, 1994; Bertram and Chitty, 1994; Williams,

1997) Other writers focus on how social institutionalization has

begun to take on a new form in which transnational flows of commerce

and finance cross state boundaries with such rapidity that state

policy is severely constrained. (Tilly, 1995; Sassen, 1996)

There is much debate in development theory on how this has affected

global governance in the form of IMF discipline; (Polak, 1991) if

not in accordance with established orthodoxies, the country in

question is subject to severe penalities, which signifies a shift in

sovereignty from states to other political entities. Whether

Giovanni Arrighi is right that the emergence of a "Free Enterprise

System --free, that is, from all previous vassalage to state power"

is the ultimate limit of US hegemony and marks "the beginning of the

withering away of the inter-state system as a primary locus of world

power." (Arrighi in Gill, 1993: 182 - 183.) For instance, Jagdish


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initiatives. Moreover, they formed a defensive coalition. The consequences have been to limit their repertoire.

While these ‘four C’s’ may seem to cast the net too wide, none of these four by itself is sufficient for a comprehensive analysis; nonetheless, all are at least desirable.141 And union leaders need to consider them. Understanding the opportunity structure for different stake holders is a prerequisite for studying strategy. Comprehensive,’ however, may be too big a word, and perhaps ‘heuristic’ would be a better choice and the present study is conceived as a heuristic case study. According to Eckstein (1965: 104-8), heuristic case studies concern themselves with potentially

Bhagwati has refered to the "Wall St. - Treasury Complex," to

somehow try to come to grips with the situation. By making an

analogy with Eisenhower's "military - industrial complex," Bhagwati

has succintly, if implicitly, pointed to the different hegemonic

strategies employed by the leaders of a military alliance and of a

trade alliance. (Bhagwati, 1998) Perhaps most striking in this

respect is the reported endorsement of the 'end of history' thesis

by a former member of Ayn Rand's collective, Alan Greenspan;

apparently by this he meant something 1ike the end of the business

cycle. (Cite)141 The argument for is necessary, desirable or sufficient for a

comprehensive analysis is not something which leads to definitive

resolutions. My argument in the theory section below derives from

Aristotle.


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generalizable relations between aspects of overall concrete configurations. It is an exploratory method in which there is an assumed interaction between the inquiry and theory building. Heuristic case studies are especially appropriate in cases in which there are no established theories or in which established theories are insufficient.

The “aspects” one might focus on are attacks and strategies in response, assuming that strategies emanate from a self-reflective process. Actors develop them in response to the perceived strategiesof specific social actors, but they also take shape within ‘a structural context’ or ‘opportunity structure’ which is the sum totalof the strategic choice of all social actors. The change in strategies should not be separated from the conditions that spawned them. The four questions above suggest that to locate the strategy one must take into account economic conditions, the content of educational debates, partisan politics and changes in notions of the social contract. These are analytically separable variables, but theyare organically connected.

This could more properly be referred to as a change in global hegemonic strategies and the principle theoretical inspiration is Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). All are aspects of a change that can betraced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s; they are organically connected to increased transnational linkages, ideas of comparative advantage and advocacy of free trade. Gramsci draws on Hegelian traditions and emphasizes that treating methodological divisions as


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organic ones is an all too common fallacy. Gramsci says of Free Trade that it is based on just such a theoretical error; presenting the analytical “distintion between political society and civil society . . . as an organic one” when “in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same.” (1971: 160)

Gramsci was emphasizing that every civil society has a politicalprogramme, including those that espouse laissez-faire liberalism; he was by no means saying it doesn’t matter whether state or civil society provide services.


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9) Social Learning From A Political Economy Perspective

There are many surveys of educational policy in the US, but those which emphasize how basic economic conditions have shaped policy fall within the camp of political economy. I claim allegianceto this camp to the extent that I believe that political economy explanations cannot be ignored and, in most cases, sketch the broad limits of acceptable policy. However, to the extent that political economy explanations would preclude or ignore (the latter much more likely) political, technological and intellectual forces, I must demur. These are forces equal in historical significance to those involving economic interests and their consolidation into classes.

Political economy debates on US education see changes in policy and education reform as shaped primarily by capitalist dominated workrelations. Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) is simultaneously the most influential and criticized work; using a functionalist analytical framework, it periodizes US schooling policies so as to correlate to the economic imperatives that the particular variant of capitalism called for at that moment. As Liston(1988: 48) argues, “the radical debate was framed and formed as a reaction” to their reproduction theses, most importantly, that major school reform movements correspond to changes in capitalist relations. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976: 234-5) Criticisms of their analysis, friendly or otherwise, have tended to highlight its allegedreductionist character and how it downplays important causal


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linkages, including working class agency, specific struggles over curricular changes, democratic political dynamics and the dynamic of acceptance/resistance. 142 Indeed, in order to escape the charge of determinism, the original authors felt obliged to provide a self-critique in which everything, even name order, was turned on its head; their new conceptual framework treated society “as an ensemble

142 See, respectively, Katznelson and Meier (1985), Shor (1983),

(Carnoy and Levin, 1985) and, for the last, many others, including

Giroux (1983), Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) and Apple (1979, 1987,

1999). The literature on Bowles-Gintis is large enough to form its

own sub-field. Bailey (1995) reformulates the correspondence

principle to analyze the 1988 Education Reform Act, reformulating

the principles so as to include resistance (see Giroux, 1981); he

sees this reform as a change in the legitimating process of

reproduction, not in reproduction itself. Rikowski (1997) refers

to the debilitating problematics of the thesis, calling for a fresh

start by focusing analysis on labor power. Cole (1988) recounts

how Bowles and Gintis moved from “revolutionary socialism to post-

liberal democracy; see, also, Cole (1983) for a more specific

critique. Apple (1988) places Bowles and Gintis as the foundation

for further analysis. . Livingstone (1995) recounts 4 different

emphases stemming among those sympathetic: class formation

(Katznelson and Meir, 1985), hegemony theory (Apple, 1987),

captialist reproduction requirements (Ginsburg, 1991) and the

contradictions between these requirements and democracy. (Ascher,


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of structurally articulated sites of social practice.” (Gintis and Bowles, 1981: 55)

Despite all the critiques, the original thesis contains an intuition regarding correspondence that, while neither fine nor original,143 has nonetheless been robustly accurate in predicting subsequent changes in educational policy. In the early 1980s the discourse on and initiatives for educational reform changed markedly in the US as business concerns came to have greater influence.144 A convenient benchmark is the Reagan administration’s publication of A

Nation at Risk;145afterwards, ‘excellence’ took center stage and, with the

et al., 1996) Of course, none of these arguments precludes the

others, but they all show different aspects of a complex reality.143 Katznelson and Meier, for instance, say much the same by drawing

on the work of Frank Tracy Carlton. (1965)144 This seems to be a consensus opinion. See, among others, Berube

(1991), Aronwitz and Giroux (1991) and Boyd and Kerchner, (1988).

Nevertheless, one should go back at least the late 1970s to

understand the source of this influence. UAW President Douglas

Fraser said the following in 1978: “The leaders of industry,

commerce and finance in the US have broken and discarded the

fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period

of growth and progress. . . . leaders of the business community,

with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war.”

(Brecher and Costello, 1998: 16)]


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significant exception of court challenges, 146 ‘equity’ became a secondary concern.147 Starting from this point, there are three main paths along which policy has advanced: privatization of one sort or another;148 charter schools;149 and a national standards movement whichaims to improve the quality of the public schools by the extensive

145 There also seems to be consensus on this issue. As Thomas Sobel,

Commissioner of Education in New York from 1987 – 95, said, “I

suppose I’ll start with A Nation at Risk just like everyone else.”

(Interview, 15 Apr 98) It has been described as a “fire-and-

brimstone sermon about education” in which “damnation” is defined

as “economic decline.” (Tyack and Cuban, 1995: 1) It was not,

however, the only high profile commission during the 80s; see

Korenz (1988).146 See, for example, the New Jersey case as recounted in Firestone,

Goertz and Natriello, 1997: 21-26.147 Tyack and Cuban (34) go on to call Risk an “ideological

smokescreen” that “reduced schooling to a means of economic

competitiveness, both personal and national . . . and obscured

rather than clarified the most pressing problems,” esp. those of

poverty and inequity. Iannaccone (in Boyd and Kerchner, 1998)

examines excellence in terms of realignment issues. While

seemingly simplistic, the division between the two goals of

'equity' and 'excellence' not only helps to outline educational

reform debates, but also gives insight into the coalitions which


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use of exit exams.150

This occurred at the same time as major ideological and organizational changes in global capitalism; these followed the stagflation of the 1970s, placing constraints on governmental policy options. Edward Berman has documented a parallel similarity in the

support them. (Stambler, 1998: 85)148 See, for example, Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools,

which presents a market-based system of school choice as a pathway

to excellence because it would shift “responsibility to parents

[and] their choices would have consequences” for the quality of

education. (1990: 564) They are also explicitly against democratic

control of schools. (1990, Ch. 2)149 Charter Schools are schools which receive public monies but have a

separate charter which allows them a degree of independence from

local educational authorities. (Nathan, 1996) As of April 1999,

34 states have passed charter legislation (Kemerer, 1999: 8) and

over 1200 schools operate nation-wide, up from only 4 in 1992 (CER,

1999).150 This seems to represent a direct response to 60s and 70s radical

critiques of American education such as Illich (1971), in which the

‘melting into one’ of learning and the assignment of social roles

was descried. While standards involve changes in curriculum, their

main characteristic is that they tie advancement through and

graduation from school to formal testing.


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method and ideology of educational reform (1999: 257-9) and, overall,it is no accident that the changing strategies for education have been coterminous and intertwined with the period of globalization. This would seem to make a prima facie case for the relevance of a reproduction thesis that sees turning points in educational history which “correspond to particularly intense periods of struggle around the expansion of capitalist production relations.” (B&G, 1976: 234-5)

The presence of a correspondence is not surprising, however, forthe initial functionalist assumption is hardly debated -- somehow theeducational system performs functions that reproduce (and perhaps transform) society. This is hardly a radical notion -- a Parsons or aDahl would not argue against it. The pertinent question, as many have pointed out, is not that there is a connection, but how. Bowlesand Ginits (157) emphasize a "self-conscious capitalist class” as theprime moving factor. Through police power and control over production and investment, they have been able to define “a feasible educational model” as reasonable and necessary in light of economic realities. (238) As a starting point this is fine, but it is by no means clear that the “capitalist economic imperative [to] produce competent, willing workers” (Brosio, 1994: 1) is sufficient to bring about a social outcome in which the model of schooling goes barely contested.

Brosio himself emphasizes the ‘democratic imperative’ as the other defining characteristic of a Janus-faced public school system. As indicated above, other writers have highlighted particular actors


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or issues of democratic contestation. But a question arises as to whether democratic contestation is becoming a less important influence on educational policy. John Hall speaks of how transnational production works to “’hollow out’ many of the traditional powers of the state.” (1994: 207; see, also, Banuri and Schor, 1992 and Epstein and Gintis, 1992) Theorists in comparative education ask similarly whether “globalization mean[s] that the nation-state has lost its power to control social formation and therefore to create conditions for socialization, citizenship, and the promotion of a democratic environment?” (Morrow and Torres, 1999:109)

In many ways this is the most significant question, one that is often ignored because of “the once-interrupted interchange between scholars of the State and the School.” (Wirt and Kirst, 1975: 1) That is, politics and education are studied not only in different departments, but often in different schools. For political science, the school system is often reduced to its function of political socialization. (Guttmann, 1987: 13-17) For those in education, the political realm is more often than not treated as exogenous, a tradition stemming from the success of progressive era reforms which substituted centralized scientific management of schools for control by ward bosses. (Tozer, et al., 1998: 97) But the school itself is potentially a means of social control; a century ago the American Sociologist Edward Ross thought of it as an inexpensive form of police, saying that as “the state shook itself loose from the church,


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it reached out for the school” to instill internal values.151

Considering the task, there is understandably some ambivalence about the schools having this role. This role of religion in establishing norms is immense:

Myth and ritual together provide a means whereby means whereby men can exhibit to themselves the forms of their collective life. If we ask the key question of a society, What is holy to whom, we shall lay bare the different norms that inform social life. . . . It is a thought . . . applicable to modern American religion if we consider the way in which American Religion acquired its hegemony by its key role in the work of imposing the norms of American homogeneity upon immigrant variety, and how, in filling this role, it transformed its own content.152

While it is suggested that private economic interests led both the anti-statist and pro-privatization coalitions, there is a conservative argument against state power that has more force in the first. The uneasiness of allowing this task to the schools creates an official agnosticism on values, but that also leaves open a space.According to Michael Apple, the Right has taken advantage of that space and accomplished “a successful translation of an economic doctrine into the language of experience, moral imperative, and common sense.” (1988tc: 172)

‘Standards,’ though they have met with significant resistance of151 (cited in Spring, 1989)

152 MacIntyre, 1966, p110.


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late,153 are the chief example of this. They are responses to the educational reform movements employing the hegemonic logic of late 20th century political economy regimes – weakening public control and relying on market mechanisms. Originally motivated by a desire to emulate the Japanese, if not thoughtfully implemented it may well lead the US away from some of its greatest strengths – a democratic ethos and the creativity of its individual citizens.

On the one hand, ‘standards’ calls for students to follow instructions; there is little or no room for the negotiation of authority which I have found to be the most challenging and valuable aspect of teaching. On the other, ramifications go beyond education,for education is a crucial battle ground: schooling is the one government provided ‘social service’ of which the vast majority of UScitizens take advantage and the values imbued in the process of advancing from grade to grade are internalized as a common sense. This involves a recommidofication of the status of individuals vis-à-vis

the market, attacking the very core idea of the welfare state: inviolable social rights based on citizenship, not performance. (Marshall, 1950) Rooted in micro-economic understandings of choice, (e.g., M. & R. Friedman, 1980) and deeply embedded notions of self-reliance, it embraces a concept of hyper-functionalism for the individual, upon whom are mounted more and more varying responsibilities. Some, such as arranging retirement plans, might

153 Add footnote with cites; include Fairtest, NYT 3 Dec and 8 Dec 99.

Expand in Chapter 6.


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also pave the way to privatization, but the central task is to make sure he or she can adjust to the ever-changing economy:

The global knowledge economy is transforming the demands of the labor market throughout the world. It is also placing new demands on citizens, who need more skills and knowledge to be able to function in their day-to-day lives.154

From this perspective, students should be taught to think of themselves as commodities to be marketed. This is what a pragmatic, self-interested person does.

Overall, the movement to raise educational standards stands out for it seems to represent the same convergence at the center postulated by theorists trying to explain changes in welfare regimes.By focusing on the nexus between ‘standards’ we pick up on Clintonianreferences to ‘responsible’ individuals. But I also wish to follow up on an observation made by Apple (1986: 176), that capital’s strategic agenda is advanced only with the cooperation of other groups “whose own needs are met as well.” Apple focused on ‘holders of technical/administrative knowledge’ who have autonomous interests and whose support signifies a settlement or compromise with the dominant fractions of capital. Teachers unions, who become pivotal actors in later chapters, have followed a similar logic. It, as seems to be the case, their New Professionalism is an attempt to

154 World Bank Report, “Lifelong Learning in the Global Knowledge

Economy: Challenges for Developing Countries,” IBRD, Washington,

2003, p xvii.


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enter an inner and protected circle, then this logic is built on the fragmentation of the working class that has been a leading aspect of the contemporary period. It seems plausible enough that this is a reaction to changes in global hegemonic strategies that call for greater labor flexibility and have thus changed the opportunity structure. They are also responses of a piece with the so-called ‘New Economy Unionism’ that stresses qualifications of workers and more amiable labor management relations (NEIS, 29 July, 99) and the ‘new industrial relations’ rhetoric stressing the need of employers for “high skills . . . because of fundamental changes in their competitive environment.” (Steeck, 1994: 251)

To the extent that I shall add something theoretically novel, itcomes first from seeing much of this as an ongoing, simultaneous and intertwined social learning processes among, between and within different groups corporate groups in society. These groups range from unions and technocrats to political parties and diverse issue networks in civil society. That each of them has its own learning constraints and trajectory is heavily influenced by my readings of Gramsci and self-proclaimed Gramscian approaches.155 Much of this is implicit above – the idea of a ‘self-conscious capitalist class’ leads to an interpretation of the formation of coalitions and the changes in strategy.

155

add stuff from message #1 in columbia inbox


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On another side, teachers unions provide a highly revealing study. For instance, changes in teacher union strategy are motivatedby a changing global economy in which different models of capitalism vie for hegemony. Moreover, the postitioning of teachers unions represents and solidifies a significant change in political coalitionformation. But this is only part of the analysis and instead of speaking of ‘ideological,’ ‘cultural,’ ‘social’ hegemonies, I will be referring to hegemony as a heuristic device to trace influence within a system. The influence is that of economistic hegemonic strategies on generally accepted notions of education.

Reforms based on testing fit this bill. Even before No Child Left Behind, such tests were used in the majority of the states. While this method of monitoring performance is cost-efficient, it also appears to act as an impediment to graduation for minority students. (Natriello and Pallas, 1998) The logic is that the exams will cut off a lot of students from what is an important signaling device and, presumably, make the majority work harder and accomplish more as economic actors.

How do the consolidation of classes and social learning interact? This is the distribution of educational opportunity or opportunity structure. What we see when comparing the cases of the US and the UK is that realms of discourse while the institutions differed. In the US, while discourse hints of transnational civil society along neo-liberal lines, institutions are less centralized and more diffuse.


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The diffuse and changing institutional structure of education is

part of this story. While localities have traditionally run

education, states have taken greater and greater roles. In the late

70’s state expenditures surpassed local expenditures for the first

time.156 Since the late 1970s there has also been a cabinet level

Dept. of Education and the federal role has grown; by using what a

development economist would call conditionality, the federal

government has been able to leverage its contribution of less than 8%

and, especially in the 90s, push forward standards-based reform.

Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the use of leverage

expanded to link standards-based reform to a testing regime that

would then be used to measure students, teachers, schools and

districts. Failure on those tests led to the expansion of charter

schools.

I’ll leave it for someone else to write the full institutional

story. The important point here is that we can differentiate this

case from Hall’s. The non-unified institutional structure makes it

very difficult for a vanguard, conservative or otherwise, to capture

156 footnote on institutional structure. See Spring, Kirst and Wirt,

etc. add chart based on NBES data.


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all the reins of governance simultaneously. Even at the Federal

level, unlike the UK, the US has separate electoral bases for the

executive and legislative; this is perhaps part of the reason that,

unlike Thatcher, Reagan did not even pretend that he might someday

balance the budget.157

Thus the parallel between Hall’s depiction of the process by

which 3rd order change was achieved in the UK and changes in US

educational policy is limited. Two key elements are there in

combination: the mobilization of a conservative electoral coalition

around accusations of poor levels of performance in the sector. But

in Hall’s case the election led rather quickly to the implementation

of a new policy paradigm; Mrs. Thatcher made it a priority, promoting

monetarist-minded officials and shifting the locus of decision making

from the Treasury to the Bank of England and the Prime Minister.

(Hall, 1993: 287)

With US educational policy under Reagan, on the other hand, we

see the rather paradoxical attempt to promote reform while at the

same time pledging to do away with the Department of Education. As

157 Actually, he might have pretended, but no one took him seriously.

See Washinton Monthly. article Feb 2003.


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Terrel Bell, Reagan’s first Sec. of Education has said, the latter

goal would lead to “the destruction of the indispensable power base

that . . . was necessary for my survival in office.”158

The Reagan strategy was consistent with his overall thrust: to

cut federal education spending while using “his office as a bully

pulpit to spur the states to educational reform.”159 But threatening

to dismantle the institutional apparatus and instead using the

channel of public communication is far different from stocking the

existing committees of government with those of your persuasion.

Thus conservative educational reform depends on something more than

conservative electoral fortunes. To the ‘it depends’ category one

may add the response, ‘it depends on the degree to which the

institutional framework governing education comprises one unified

system.’ In the UK, the Thatcher victory was near the end of the

process; in the US, the Reagan victory was the beginning of an

arduous process that is still going on. For the Reagan-Bush

administrations this meant that to advance education reform rhetoric 158 Spring, 1989, 6. Secondary sources provide contradictory

information of Bell’s attitude towards dismantling the Department.

Spring says he was opposed from the beginning. Berube (1988: 99)

says “Bell fully recommended such a move.”159 Berube, 1991: 5.


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was crucial. Much of their strategy was to use the presidency as a

rhetorical presidency to advocate reform on the level of the 50 states

and to further alternate ways of approaching the question of how the

state should provide for public education.160

Thus, part of the strategy was to engage in a long term battle

to somehow change public attitudes. For the last thirty years this

has led to a substantial series of texts, among them: pro-

privatization tracts (esp. emanating from right wing think tanks);

anti-union posturing and research from politicians and academics; and

an ‘excellence discourse.’

This leads to perhaps the most interesting question: how do

organized interests respond to attempted 3rd order change in policy

paradigms? The answer is as best they can. To take our major

example, as a counter-strategy, the unions advocated excellence on

their own terms. But these were terms within another’s discourse.

Terms of discourse tell us a great deal about the relation

between interests and ideological position. The realm of discourse

is connected to set of ideas which make sense to a general audience;

if you can control these terms, then you limit most of the possible 160 See Caesar in Landry, 1985. Caesar, James W. “The Rhetorical

Presidency Revisited,” in Modern Presidents and the Presidency, Marc

Landry, ed. Lexington, MA: Lexington books, 1985.


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outcomes. If 'competitive excellence' is the goal, instead of, for

example, 'a binding model of citizenship,' then you are more likely

to embrace an economistic vision of education.

The underlying assumptions of how our social interactions

operate has great reach. Hall extends social learning to political

society. What I am suggesting here is that, at least for education

in the US, one must extend it to civil society as well. Both the

coalitional structure and the values used to set goals are highly

political and change over time. Based primarily on class as regards

financing, based on race, region, religion, education, ideology and a

slew of other factors when it comes to issues as various as sex

education, the length of the school day, safety, choice of library

books, etc., coalition structures also vary according to issue.

But that does not detract from the discussion of hegemony, civil

society and transnational influence. The first will look at types of

social learning, the second at economic development theory and how it

has changed during a period in which transnational linkages have

increased and state autonomy has decreased. One effect of this type

of social learning is that we have ended up, in education, on a

search for a the single metric. And once the single metric has been

established, the discourse orbits around it.

So let us take Hall’s three orders of change and add a fourth,


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to end up with four types of social learning. First, 1st order the

refinement of agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order -- the choice of

methods to achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the selection of goals.

Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals by reference to

principles, values, ideologies and visions of the future.

The first two fall with the technocratic world, although we should note that technocrats are not without political affiliation orpolitical goals. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a leap. Both third and fourth order social learning are, by their nature, collective, political and philosophical -- they chart out a collective strategy based upon public argumentation. Of course, as might be the case with children, putting ideas into categories can bedangerous, but it does tell us how we might distinguish between episodes of social learning. Questions that come to the fore include, How does accepted practice in a field change at each level? What forces lead to this acceptance? What degree of acceptance do they have? Are there alternative views that have a wide degree of acceptance?

In the other chapters I will seek to tie this together with the notion of hegemony, but here I want to look at the effects of this particular episode in social learning. The sometimes parallel, sometimes intertwining tracks of privatization (discussed, but not implemented to nearly the level advocates propose) and standards based reform (less discussed, but, for good or ill approaching full


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implementation) have had huge effects in one of the largest social experiments of our time.

There has been some mention of Chicago, but let's talk about NewYork. Former Chancellor Joel Klein’s model for the overhaul of the NYC education system, initiated by self-made, mega-wealthy Mayor Bloomberg,161 is based on business models, corporate and otherwise. Many would argue -- and I would not disagree -- that the Mayor is genuinely public spirited, but it is a spirit of a particular type. The building of institutions according to the ‘best practices’ method, which Bloomberg has adopted, is business-language and the choice of best practices follows business method. The administrativedesign and goals that Klein --the second consecutive lawyer to hold the post of Chancellor-- has initiated draw both on business models and reflect business complaints about workforce rigidity.

What's more, it was no accident that Mr. Klein has a background in anti-trust -- business-based conservatives often refer to the public schools as public monopolies, with all that implies.

161 With a net worth of roughly 4.9 billion, he was among the 100

richest people in the world -- #85 on Crain’s List in 2004. He is

now, according to Forbes, the 13th richest person in the world, with

34.1 billion. (Forbes, “The World's Billionaires,” accessed at

http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall, 5 October

2014.) That his weath increased seven-fold while he was Mayor is

worthy of note.


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http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall

The reform also provides some lessons in social learning -- the

process by which collective decisions as to what comprises the

general welfare are adopted, implemented and consolidated.162 The

political economist, Peter Hall, in depicting shifts from

Keynesianism to Monetarism, defines ‘social learning’ as a

“deliberate attempt to adjust goals or techniques of policy in

response to past experience and new information.”163 He then

disaggregates this concept into three central variables: the

overarching goals in a field, techniques or policy instruments and

the precise settings of these instruments. These are, respectively,

3rd, 2nd and 1st order changes. To these three orders of change we may

add a fourth, to end up with four types of social learning. First,

1st order the refinement of agreed upon methods. Second, 2nd order --

the choice of methods to achieve goals. Third, 3rd order -- the

selection of goals. Fourth, 4th order -- the justification of goals

by reference to principles, values, ideologies and visions of the

future.

It seems the last -- 4th order change -- is the order of the day

at the New York City Department of Education. This is not a question

of ‘phonics’ versus ‘whole language’ approaches, but rather of how an

enterprise is to be run:

162 See Sikkink, 1988.163 Peter Hall, 1993: 278.


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community school districts are out . . . replaced with ten “learning regions,” each with a superintendent answerable directly to the chancellor’s office. Dismantling the musty old Board of Education bureaucracy piece by piece, Bloomberg and Klein have recruited a cadre of corporate-sector whiz kids, who will now run school divisions such as transportation, food services, school construction, and maintenance.164

The NYC reform is based on a certain set of presumptions as to

what is the best practice, most of them undergirded by the accepted

common wisdom in business and legal circles. In critiquing the

public school system, efficiency is the criteria by which it is to be

evaluated. But it is one thing to apply this to running school

construction and another to apply it to classroom teaching. Still,

the transfer is made and there is an economizing logic to this -- the

real business of schools is to increase performance. There is also a

quasi-missionary logic -- students have to be prepared to survive in

a dog-eat-dog world. That is the bottom line and it is spoken of in

just so many words by those who are charged with changing the system.

Pegagogues have their place in this scheme, but not in designing

it. This is reflected at least symbolically in the head of the

Leadership Academy being, as Arne Duncan was in Chicago, a CEO and

not a president or a dean. It is a break with the academic world,

164 Sol Stern, “Bloomberg and Klein Rush In,” City Journal, Spring

2003. By the way, the 10 learning regions were eventually phased out

in favor of educational networks that saw the schools as clients.


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which is brought in at a lower level and used to justify the best

practices at the school level and in the classroom. The Leadership

Academy, originally located in the Tweed Courthouse, is a school to

train new principals and promote leadership among existing

prinicpals. It was in many ways the lynchpin of Mayor Bloomberg’s

effort. Based on corporate management concepts and supported by the

Wallace Foundation, it has an academic dean, but is headed by C.E.O.,

Robert E. Knowling, Jr., who had this to say when asked whether he

had succeeded in reaching his goals with the Leadership Academy:

I know that at the end of the day there’s only one metric that counts. That is, did we move student achievement? And when I say move, not incrementally move, but did we substantially improve over a period of time, student achievement.165

That this single metric has weight as the common currency of

educational discourse pushes asides many other functions of the

schooling system: providing for socialization and public health,

instilling democratic values, aiding a child’s emotional and social

as well as cognitive development and somehow creating a better

society.166

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

by Rafael Pi Roman, “A Year of Change: Leadership in the Principal’s

Office,” New York Voices, Channel 13, New York, January 2004.166 There is a vast literature on this. See, among others, the

work of Larry Cuban, Jeff Henig, Dorothy Shipps, Henry Giroux and

Michael Apple. For the different social agendas which shape


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Putting it another way, John Taylor Gato, author of the

Underground History of American Education, and also a former NYC teacher,

argues that this moves away from the three traditional purposes of

education -- teaching people to be moral, teaching them to be good

citizens and helping them towards self-realization. 167

The emphasis on academic achievement reveals the fourth order

change spoken of above. Within this framework, school is thought of

as a business in which profit and loss are measured by the metric of

student achievement. Principals are thought of as managers at the

educational policy, see Herbert Kliebard, 1986. 167 John Taylor Gato, “Against School: How Public Education

Cripples our Kids, and Why,” Atlantic Monthly, Sept 2003, p. 35. Gato

claims that there really is no problem with public education except

that schools are designed to promote boredom, perpetuate childhood

and make sure no one ever grows up. With a thesis so provocative, it

is appropriate that he quotes H.L. Mencken (in The American Mercury,

April 1924):

[the aim of public education is not] to fill the young of the

species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . .

Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim . . . is simply

to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level,

to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent

and originality.


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school level and they are thought of as responsible for outcomes. If

they don’t produce, if they do not control and direct their students

in the way they been told, they’ll be replaced -- something Mayor

Bloomberg was quite specific about in reminding principals about

their responsibility to control school violence:

“The principals will get the help they need to turn the schools around,” he said. “But it they don’t succeed in making their schools safe, they will be asked to look for work elsewhere. Principals are the managers and have the authority and the responsibility to produce the results we are as a society expect.”168

So one best practice is to train a lot of managers to make sure you

have competent people.

19 This is, of course, rather reasonable and I would add, as

someone who has had the opportunity to work under quite a few, that

improving the quality of principals very well be the most efficient

way to improve a school. Bad principals are, after all, a disaster.

But combined with the elimination of principal tenure, the

measurement of competence according to quantitative measures and

payment based on performance, it has the overall effect of making

principals seek short-term solutions. They don’t know if they will

be there in the long-term. And this is bad for institution building

and should make us question the importation of business methods to

168 Bryan Virasami, “Dispruptive students will soon face hard new

lessons in school discipline under a far-reaching plan announced by

Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” New York Newsday, 23 Dec 2003.


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the most long term of projects -- education and, eventually, cultural

and social development.

20

This came out in one interview with a principal who, as part of

his ongoing training, goes to Leadership Academy functions. The

principal pointed out that at the beginning “they took us out to the

Ramada at JFK and it must have cost $300,000 -- this is during the

summer, when they have empty schools all over the City.” 169 When

asked, s/he said s/he could serve as a buffer for the teachers, many

of whom had been recruited among former colleagues, but that was

because their numbers were better than average. The principal agreed

that the emphasis on instruction eliminated the social work

components of education, but made a more general point:

I don’t doubt their good intentions, but there are canards aboutgood intentions . . . Most people who criticize it say the paradigm of business is wrong for education, but within that paradigm they’ve picked the wrong one. If you’re not with the team, you’re against it -- ‘my way or the highway.’

I thought the thing about democracy was that smart people could disagree.170

169 Interview with Principal, 16 March 04. The cost estimate is,

at best a ballpark figure. I have not tried to verify it.170 Interview with Principal, 16 March 04. On the ‘team’ metaphor,

a relevant statement came from the Department of Education’s chief

instructional officer as she handed in her resignation:

Despite stepping down, Lam maintained she had acted

appropriately in attempting to find her husband a job. She said in


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The principal indicated that they ran people like rats in a cage

-- kept everyone at The Learning Academy running around like people

on The Apprentice. I admit I prompted that comparison, but it was

agreed to wholeheartedly. Considering for a moment, the principal

finally said, “They’re morons -- they don’t get it.” Rather they

rely on, as Alfie Kohn calls it, competition’s most common defense:

“the assumption that success (or productiveness or goal attainment)

means competition. Given this assumption, the assertion that no one

would get anything done without competition doesn’t require proof; it

is self-evident.” 171

This is historically connected to the idea of ‘enterprise

culture’ which emerged in the UK under Margaret Thatcher and which

has had great influence in the US. This was a deliberate attempt to

a statement Monday that Klein knew about her efforts and that she

had been "given a green light to proceed." "Recognizing that I am a

team member, not the team leader, though, this evening I have with

sadness given my resignation to Chancellor Klein," the statement

said. Klein asked for her resignation after a report by Richard

Condon, the special commissioner of investigation for the New York

City schools, found that Lam had helped wrangle a supervisory job

in the Bronx for her husband, Peter Plattes. (www.wnbc.com, “Deputy

Schools Chancellor Diana Lam Announces Resignation,” posted and

updated March 9, 2004.)171 Kohn, 1992, p. 45.


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javascript:popUp('http://cf.wnbc.com/ny/sh/toafriend/index.cfm?page=http://www.wnbc.com/tiny/2907293/detail.html','width=450,height=225');

break down the Keynesian welfare and begin an era of “cultural

restructuring and engineering based upon the neo-liberal model of the

entrepreneurial self - a shift characterised as a moving from a

‘culture of dependency’ to one of ‘self-reliance.'”172 What Michael

Peters has called the ‘responsibilising of the self’ is evident as

the focus of responsibility for education shifts to individuals who

are selected out as an elite.173

172 Michael Peters, “Education, Enterprise Culture and the

Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective,” Journal of Educational

Enquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001, p58.173 Ibid. For Peters, the state writes “itself out of its traditional

responsibilities concerning the welfare state through twin

strategies of a greater individualisation of society and the

responsibilisation of individuals and families. Both are often

simultaneously achieved through a greater contractualisation of

society, and particularly by contracting-out state services. . . .

A genealogy of the entrepreneurial self reveals that it is the

relationship, promoted by neo-liberalism, that one establishes to oneself

through forms of personal investment (for example, user charges,

student loans) and insurance that becomes the central ethical

component of a new individualised and privatised consumer welfare

economy. In this novel form of governance, responsibilised

individuals are called upon to apply certain management, economic,

and actuarial techniques to themselves as subjects of a newly

privatised welfare regime. ” This argument is made in somewhat


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It is this idea that informs the discourse and the search for

the single metric. The problem with the elitist aspect is that if a

teacher does not succeed it is because he or she does not have “the

characteristics [that] differentiate our most successful teachers.”

The solution (sometimes labeled 'The Solution') is not to support

institutions, but to create a mechanism to recruit those with

“leadership characteristics—perseverance in the face of challenges,

the ability to influence and motivate others, organizational ability,

problem-solving ability.”174 And if you cannot do that, you're

deselected. As the founder of Teacher for America says,

the most successful teachers in low-income communities

operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of

where their students will be performing at the end of the year

different terms in Part 1 of this project, by focusing on the

connections between the concepts of dedication, leadership and

entrepreneurship and how they then lead to a call for the

individual to be hyper-functional. The development of new

conceptions of merit, as influenced by Ms. Thatcher and Mr. Hayek,

are treated in the other essays of Part 2. 174 Wendy Kopp, “Wendy Kopp Interview: Eight questions for Wendy

Kopp,” The Economist website, Apr 3rd 2010; accesse May 2011 at

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/04/wendy_kop

p


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that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students

in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision,

maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through

purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly

on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do

whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face..175

There is an authority that is put forth by the ‘best practices’

rhetoric -- that some how it is the product of neutral, quasi-

scientific process. It is not. It is a practical business method

that has value -- but it denies that there are disputes about value.

That, indeed, is the whole crux of the argument of why there can’t

really be social learning, or, as Brian Fay once put it, a policy

science.176 But once we enter into the pragmatic world, what is

‘best’ is always disputed. The consensus opinion on what is best is

a political decision.

The business approach -- of competitive struggles to grant

individuals rewards based on the value they add is something that is

seemingly at odds with the idea not of only of democracy, but of the

way most people would like to see their children cared for. More

important, the aim of instruction loses sight of the most important

175 Eight questions for Wendy Kopp176 Footnote Brian Fay’s ’75 book. It might be worth adding a

synposis of his argument.


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fact:

They need to eat, they need to sleep, they need a stable environment. It these prerequisites aren’t met, then forget about it -- they won’t be able to learn.177

And since the concentration of failing schools is highly

correlated to the concentration of high poverty students and

situations more likely to produce social pathologies, you would think

this would get more attention, but one would know but little of this

from listening to policy talk on education.178 That talk is directed

to groups in which those prerequisites are assumed. The state does

not have to step where the family will provide.

Ignoring poverty with the mantras of 'no excuses' or 'whatever

it takes' is often invoked.179 As a rhetorical strategy, we can call 177 Conversation with former Bronx High School teacher, 23 March

04. 178 There are exceptions, such as the Harlem Children's Zone and the

Obama administration's 20 Promise Neighborhoods program is set up

so a neighborhood receives a full network of services from the

craddle to college and beyond. But it is more a pilot program than

anything else, and seems to be treated as a second tier of reform.

Moreover, both HCZ and the Promise program insist that public-

private partnerships, with the private money often coming from

hedge funds, are to be preferred. See 179 See, for example, Michelle Rhee, Poverty Must be Tackled But Never

Used as an Excuse, Huffington Post, 5 September 2012; accessed


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this 'ignore it with platitudes.' This is one absence that marks the

truncated nature of debates on education. Frequently lamented or not,

most debates on education do not consider what happens when the

family does not provide. While standards-based reform and measures

of privatization are the two major types of change that have been

proposed, both draw on an underlying assumption. For a quarter-

century, the main discourse on education in the United States starts

with the question of, ‘Why has it failed?’

Failure is then defined in a particular way. Why has a system

which, nearly every weekday, is responsible for the care of one-sixth

of an increasingly diverse population, not produced an increase in

standardized test scores? This is part of a third order change in

social learning, but, as is usually the case, it is connected to

fourth order change. It is hard to select new goals without changing

the terms of justification.

October 2012 at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-rhee/poverty-must-be-

tackled-b_b_1857423.html.


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9a) Failure as a Springboard

How has this notion of failure played out? As Robert Slavin notes, we have been in “an uninterrupted state of reform . . . sincethe publication of A Nation at Risk “ under the first Reagan-Bush Administration. Risk, like other influential documents before it, linked the nation’s temporary failures in international competition to the systematic failures of the school system. The first such flurry of attacks on the school system came half a century ago, afterthe launch of Sputnik showed the Russians’ burgeoning technological superiority. Similarly, Risk was based on the premise that the Japanese were soon to surpass us economically. That the dire economic straits of the early 80s had been preceded by the rise of Euro-dollar markets, the abandoning of the Gold Standard, the loss ofthe Vietnam War, the Oil Crisis, the Debt Crisis and whatever else you might add to the list did not save the schools from criticism.

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

focus of reform has been on school governance and accountability.” 180

Other things were out of focus, however. For instance, no where in

Risk is class-size or its effects on the quality of teaching

mentioned. [wrong ftnt]181 Rather, the first step was of the second

180 Slavin, “Success for All: Policy Consequences of Replicable

Schoolwide Reform,” Ch. 13 of Handbook of Educational Policy , Academic

Press, 1999, p. 325.

181 Walter Karp, “Why Johnny Can’t Think: The Politics of Bad


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order -- to set up a monitoring system and By the 1990s, almost all states had adopted standards, tests and systems of accountability designed to recognize schools whose students are doing well and to punish those whose students are doing poorly.182

This was the easy part, because it could be justified by drawing

on principles common to different forms of liberalism -- not only

neo-liberalism with its economistic bias, but rights-based liberalism

as well. Slavin then goes on to talk about privatization, and this

is where most speculation focused at the time, but here there is a

clear divide -- there are some liberal principles which justify

privatization and others which scream against it. Certainly, even if

the issue of vouchers has met electoral defeats and court challenges,

privatization has made great strides at the margins. 183 But equally

Schooling, Harper’s Magazine, 1985.

182 Slavin, “Success for All: Policy Consequences of Replicable

Schoolwide Reform,” Ch. 13 of Handbook of Educational Policy , Academic

Press, 1999, p. 325.

183 Contracting out for food services and maintenance are examples,

along with the use of privately developed educational products.

Some aspects of privatization are clearly linked to standards-

based reform. In general, like entrance exams, the use of exit

exams also has an important privatization component. See

"Reading, writing and enrichment: Private money is going to U.S.

public schools," The Economist, v. 350 no8102 (Jan. 16 '99) p. 55-6.


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important -- and much more so if privatization is stalled in some

regards -- is the change of management techniques within the public

sphere. And this is heavily influenced by ‘business learning’ --

the commonly accepted set of notions within the realm of private

enterprise.

But we have left out two parts of the story. First, what

happened when it became apparent that the US had not fallen behind

the Russians technologically and that the still efficient Japanese

seemed to be running in place economically? Actually, the schools

got some credit. Not the nation-wide system of K-12 education, of

course, but higher education got some props. It was also subject to

some cuts, initiated by state legislators and private administrators.

And it still ran fairly well. So maybe you make the public schools

more like higher education and also make them more efficient at the

same time.

A tacit argument for vouchers is part of this, although not the

The article cites International Data Corporation estimates that

private enterprise's share of education expenditures will increase

from 13 to 25 percent over the next 20 years; they anticipate this

will be achieved by concentrating on supplementary services, such

as testing, coaching, training and pre-school education. The

article’s title, by the way, is interesting, as the flow of money

is for the most part in the other direction.


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most important part. In an article very sympathetic to the idea of

vouchers, Edwin West said, “A final version of the voucher can be

seen operating in post-secondary education. . . . [when] governments

provide grants to universities and colleges in strict proportion to

enrollment we have another case where ‘funds follow the student.’

This situation . . . is the essence of the voucher principle.”184

The private-public mix model of higher education in the US

influences these debates. The complaints of university professors

about the ability of their students to write expository essays, to

have some idea of when the Civil War had been fought, to locate Japan

on a map and to solve for ‘x’ in algebraic equations were used

effectively by proponents of the ‘excellence movement.’ True, the

excellence movement was more effective in pushing standards, but

standards and vouchers often have the same objectives.

What is the second part of the story? It isn’t considered by

the majority of people -- it is assumed.

They need to eat, they need to sleep, they need a stable environment. It these prerequisites aren’t met, then forget

184 Edwin G. West, “Education Vouchers in Practice and Principle:

A World Survey,” February 1996, p 4. This was a summary paper on

a fuller report that was downloaded from the website World Bank’s

International Finance Corporation.


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about it -- they won’t be able to learn.185

It seems the willful disregard of cultural deficits and social

pathologies makes it easier to support vouchers. Prerequisites for

educational success are not considered. Thus, making the argument

for vouchers based on principle, rather than interest, is possible.

West lists four principles behind vouchers which “explain

the[ir] attempted objectives.” First is consumer choice, second

personal advancement, third the promotion of competition and fourth

wider access to private schools. All of them assume the

prerequisites above. These are similarly assumed in contemporary

versions of meritocracy -- that is a competition among those well

cared for. In the same five paragraph section, West (though he does

not refer to it as such) also includes a fifth principle “a

significant private school advantage in terms both of student

achievement and unit costs.”186 If not a one-to-one correspondence,

there is a significant overlap with the principles behind standards-

based reform, especially when those reforms include ‘failing schools’

provisions.

185 Conversation with former Bronx High School teacher, 23 March

04. 186 West, 1996, p. 3. He does not refer to this as a ‘principle.’

Whether this is as significant as Mr. Knowling being a CEO is a

matter of interpretation.


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10) Educational Classes

There is no easy one-to-one correspondence between class position and educational opportunities in the US, but there are broadclass divisions that, depending on the interpretation, may either provide for some social mobility or accurately approximate a caste system. What they do, no matter how you might describe them, is to provide different classes with different opportunities. At one end of the scale are a trinity of educational opportunities that serve the elite, somehow defined: highly touted private schools, exclusivesuburban schools and magnet schools within otherwise challenged public systems. According to the language that developed into standards-based reform we are turning this into the upper reaches of a meritocracy.

According to the analysis of social class there is something else going on. The question of class compromise now has a different content than that specified by Przeworski.187 Wages have deliberately

187 Adam Przeworski, “Problems in the Study of Transition to

Democracy,” p. 62. (1986?).

neither the aggregate of interests of individual capitalist

(persons and firms) nor the interests of organized wage-earners

can be violated beyond specific limits . . . profits cannot fall

so low as to threaten reproduction of captial, and wages cannot

fall so low as to make profits appear as a particularistic

interest of capital.


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been pushed lower through a series of outsourcing and downsizing initiatives. Except where corruption is concerned, the ‘particularistic interests’ of capital are nearly sacrosanct in much mainstream political discourse. The idea of introducing new

government programs that are overtly redistributive is hardly countenanced and older redistributive programs are pared down or subject to privatization. The question of distribution of the socialproduct is left to the market as if the market were a naturally occurring eco-system or a miracle.

Indeed, there is a strong trend that accepts the use of the term‘miracle’ without much qualification. Writers such as John Gray (drawing on Hayek and Miser) and Milton Friedman seem to imply that Adam Smith (and others) stumbled upon the philosopher’s stone. The key to a happy and prosperous society is allowing information to flowand greed to motivate. These are the predominant views of late 20th

and early 21st century discourse -- the air we breathe. Radical views are measured by the degree they deviate from this norm.

‘The genius of capitalism’ is a common phrase and when it comes to learning, genius has its place. But the attribution of genius is subjective and limited in time, place and scope. There are periods of social learning, as there are periods of learning in every other human endeavor. In each a trinity of power, ideas and interests mustbe accounted for. Falling within each period are numerous episodes in different issue areas, and in each area coalitions are shaped differently. Nonetheless, there is a core. There are solid


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coalitions that mark each period and limit the possibilities of political discourse in all fields.

While there are questions about how to use the term ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ the analogy with evolution may be useful.188 It is limited, of course, because the conditions that change are the resultof human-made rather than natural processes, but the idea of a environment in which some policy options thrive and others fall by the way side is intriguing. As Peter Gourevitch argues, policy requires politics -- of ideas there are many, but only one is adoptedand political support is a sine qua non. Economics prescribes, but power decides.

In Politics in Hard Times Gourevitch makes a broad distinction betweenprosperous times and hard times. In the former social systems appearstable, there is a regularity of the economy that allows for rules tobe modeled and followed. It is, in essence a question of technical efficiency -- how to perfect or optimize a system already in place. In the latter, instability shatters illusion189 and patterns unravel. This is much the same distinction that Hall makes in distinguishing between 3rd order change and either 1st or 2nd order change. Models

188 Rose book on evolution.189 This can be difficult. Example from the Simpsons. Nelson Munce,

the school bully, has made a deal to get back his prized picture of

himself with Snow White, he is told, “She’s an actress.” He

responds, “Shut up! Some of us prefer illusion to despair.”


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come into conflict. The question in not one of technical efficiency,but political agility -- which policy’s “adherents have the power to translate their opinion into the force of law.”190 and patterns unravel.

Gourevitch locates the moment of punctuation in the mid- to late1970s and early 1980s. The conjoined high rates of inflation and unemployment led to the unraveling of the great post-World War II historic compromise. This was a form of bounded capitalism191 that resulted from “the traumas of the depression . . . and World War II.”192 that resulted from “the traumas of the depression . . . and World War II.” This was a period in which a truce prevailed among social antagonists in the form of government regulations and intervention that had as its goals the creation and maintenance of a mixed economy and class compromise.

For Gourevitch, the content of bounded capitalism included six major elements. First, private capitalism was required to operate within a system of rules that provided social, political and economicstability. Second, the state operated so as to ensure not just the opportunities and rights, but the welfare of its citizens. Third, industrial relations were institutionalized. Fourth, there was

190 PG, Hard Times, P. 17. 191 I believe this is meant to directly parallel to the notion of

bounded rationality in Herbert Simon. 192 PG, p. 18. Bring this up again when talking about Winston.


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management of the demand side of the economy in order to maintain full employment. Fifth and sixth, in an uneasy embrace, lie imperatives for both economic regulation and free trade.

This historic compact was historically attacked in the 70s and 80s. The center did not hold, the compromise came undone. The inefficiency of government critique was both pervasive and bipartisan; it is to be remembered that the first president to emphasize deregulation was James Earl (a.k.a., ‘Jimmy’) Carter. Moreover, it was nearly global. Gourevitch’s study is a broad comparative one, spanning five countries and three international crises. He states that all three involved three elements: a major downturn in investment and business cycles, a change in the geographical distribution of production and significant growth of newproducts and productive processes.

The present study is more intensive. In seeking explanations regarding transnational linkages, it looks at the effects of international crises on one sector in one country, one that at first glance is somewhat insolated from international crises, the educationsector. It becomes even more limited when it focuses on union responses and attempts to direct or influence educational policy in the wake of one of these crises. The point of this section, however,is that the wake is highly significant. There are, in fact, multiplepathways by which transnational cause becomes educational effect. The doctrines of the 60s, according to Gourevitch, lost prominence; and while he means economic doctrines, we can add educational ones,


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as well. In both cases the connection of economic crisis, policy debate and political experimentation led to new policy outcomes. In each, doubt as to the viability of policy led to controversy and thento conflict from which new policies emerged.

Flowchart A gives a loose interpretation of Gourevitch’s account. It is what he refers to as the Political Sociology of Political Economy, and in it he tries to trace how economic crises influence political decision making.

insert Flowchart A ‘political sociology of political economy’ [filename: 004-pt1-ch1flowchartA]

Gourevitch begins with possible causes, including mismanagement,outside shocks and exhaustion of the model. Of the first, economies are often mismanaged because of political expediency, something whichwould come as not surprise to anyone who has read Peron’s correspondence. As evidence we can offer Juan Peron's 1953 letter toCarlos Ibanez, then President of Chile:

My Dear Friend:

Give to the people, especially to the workers, all this is possible. When it seems that you are already giving them doo much, give them more. You will see the results. Everyone willtry to scare you with the specter of an economic class. But all of this is a lie. There is nothing more elastic than theeconomy, which everyone fears so much because no one understands it.193

193 Albert O. Hirshman, “The Search for Economic Determinants,” in


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The history of Latin American political economy provides illustrations of the other points as well. Outside shocks, especially the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, led to huge balance of payments difficulties. These, in turn, resulted in the Debt Crisis and a new transnational financial order. This new order, in which money center banks, with the assistance of the IMF, produced its own orthodoxy -- a set of conditions that sovereign countries needed to meet in order to maintain financing.194

As for exhaustion of the model, we can posit at least two causes. First is the technological. The most well known treatment of this is the work of Guillermo O’Donnell and countless others who followed on Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism. One of the chief causes for regime change in the Southern Cone was, according to O’Donnell, the slow pace of economic progress due to ‘bottlenecks.’ These were the result of the exhaustion of the easy phase of import substitutionindustrialization, which was not capital intensive. The perceived necessity of bringing down consumption in order to increase investment in heavy industry was the rationale behind instituting repressive regimes.The logic of compromise exhausted, the pure force of the state was relied on in order to ensure order.

David Collier, (Ed.). 1979. The New Authoritarianism in Latin America.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 65.194 Polak,1991. Find article and add quote.


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In the North, however, this was not so much a result of technological or economic development imperatives, as the result of achange in strategy by leading groups. In the Post- World War II period, the chief ‘comparative advantage’ in economic growth was the social peace of class compromise. The following quote is one of scores that represents this view:

Those countries that had managed to institutionalize industrial conflict and set up barriers to inflation enjoyed the fruits of their organizational endeavors in terms of industrial peace and rapid growth.195

This view treats class systems and interest intermediation arrangements as objects which may be judged in terms of comparative economic efficiency. But beginning in the late 1960s, there was a sea change in how these objects were judged. While technology had its role, the Oil Crisis, the ensuing debt and the change in transnational finance were key here; they concentrated the control ofresources in a more and more tightly integrated financial network. This changed the political dynamic and shifted coalition patterns. Here ‘new ideas’ were able to take hold because they served the interests of power holders -- power holders whose positions had been buttressed by the Oil and Debt Crises. With the concentration of capital and integration of financial networks, the strategic dynamic changed. People in newly reinforced positions of power could figure

195 Stephen Bornstein, “States and Unions: From Postwar Settlement to

Contemporary Europe,” in Bornstein, et al., eds., The State in Capitalist

Europe, 1984, p. 51.


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out how to pick apart institutions.

Thus the exhaustion of a model can be political as well as technological. While technological change may be its basis, political actors develop new strategies as technology opens new possibilities. The various factors that led to outcomes are all in the shadow of this. Class and coalition struggles were reshaped. There was a new criteria for ‘better’ ideas -- ‘better’ being definedin a pragmatic way that any business person would find common sensical. Partisan concerns were not so much muted as transmuted andnew centrist positions became the order of the day for the left. Institutional inertia, while still a real force, especially in education, was challenged. The concentration of resources is, of course, perhaps the leading factor.

But let us return to Gourevitch’s argument. The importance of power in shaping policy has three faces even when one focuses on political leaders. They are politicians with ambitions, but they arealso individuals with preferences and abilities, as well as the holders of institutional posts which have their own demands and ability to shape action. What Gourevitch says about political leaders and policies is particularly relevant:

political leaders have to get into those institutional positionsand hold to them. . . . [moreover,] policies, to take effect, require compliance or even enthusiasm from countless individualswho work or invest or buy. . . . When politicians make choices, therefore, their choices are constrained by the need to mobilize or retain support. (p. 20, e.a.)


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The examples he gives are common places of our understanding of electoral politics: the marriage of iron and rye, the New Deal, etc.In each case a coalition formed and a study of policy choice requiresa political sociology of historical coalitions. Gourevitch’s questions involve describing and understanding these coalitions: whowas in them? How were they put together? By political figures? Didclass interests or the interests of self-motivated political figures converge with the public interest? Were other combinations possible?How tight a formation did they form?

My interest is to somehow gain insight on how this affects social learning. Indeed, I may be calling for a pluralistic conception of social learning.196 At the transnational level, it is the joining of elites. Instead of ‘iron’ and ‘rye’ we have financialcapital that looks to heighten returns -- in Robert Wade’s terms, ‘Wall Street,’ the ‘Treasury Department’ and the ‘IMF.’197 At the

196 At least in the case of electoral democracies. This, of course,

is not out of keeping with theories of paradigm change in which

power has a hand, even in the most technical and arcane

disciplines. (See Kuhn, etc. cite)197 We could also add the City of London, as does Robert Wade, “The

Asian Crisis and the Wall Street - Treasury - IMF Complex,”

presented at Columbia University, 24 Feb 1999. [This draft

actually not for citation -- contact Wade.] Wade expanded on

Bhagwati’s Wall Street - Treasury Complex. Wade emphasizes how


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transnational level, it is the joining of elites. Instead of ‘iron’ and ‘rye’ we have financial capital that looks to heighten returns --in Robert Wade’s terms, ‘Wall Street,’ the ‘Treasury Department’ and the ‘IMF.’ But at the national level, one has to map out patterns ofsupport that are rooted in building electoral coalitions, including the money and other resources that help to run successful campaigns. And this is not an easy task. For Gourevitch, economic conditions directly affect policy disputes only rarely. While economics is a factor, we must look to four other factors -- factors that mediate orinfluence, rather than create change.

Thus, after economic conditions, Gourevitch next speaks of the organization of the state -- the system of rules and institutions which govern the policy making process. For instance, the distinction between first by the board systems (as in the US and UK) and systems of proportional representation has a huge effect on the number of parties that actually have influence. Similarly, the difference between Presidential and Parliamentary systems affects thecalculations of power holders. [add Skatch cite]

international agreements on standards, such as Basle Accord on

Capital Adequacy Standards, hide “the power of the US to

restructure other economies in line with its own interests.” Wade

indicated that Bhagwati took issue with adding the IMF. We may

also take issue with identifying ‘Wall Street - Treasury Department

interests’ with ‘US interests.’


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Next198 is the perhaps inappropriately named ‘mechanisms of representation,’ by which he means not the formal electoral process, but groups which gather in order to represent their interests and contend for power, such as interest groups and political parties. These are, he suggests, the effective agents of power.

He then mentions ideology, which –as it is embedded in discourse-- is the central concern here. Finally he adds a differenttype of variable: placement in the international system. Dispensing with any review of the other crises he investigates, we should look to how these four variables affected the breakdown of thehistoric compromise realized in the Post-War Welfare State and Keynesian demand stimulus.

Material conditions did change. The success of the model led toproblems in the late 1960s. The economies of Japan and Germany revived, increasing international competition. So did the spread of industrial capacity to developing countries, something that was trulyto come to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s. In these decades the underlying process whereby organized economic actors were learning touse human resources transnationally led to significant deindustrialization in the US and UK and a decrease in blue collar jobs and wages. New products and processes helped to make this

198 This is not the order that Gourevitch provides. They have been

altered so as to better coincide with the Aristotlean framework

regarding types of causation.


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possible -- outsourcing of white collar intellectual tasks, such as computer programming and telemarketing, only became viable with the development of inexpensive telecommunciations links. Thus, it is interesting to note, material conditions changed as a result of this learning process.While technological change altered the social learning process, this is not a uni-directional process.

How did this affect the coalitions? Again there is a learning process – or at least a shift in opinions. The policy mix that had existed for several decades needed to be changed because of market considerations. That is, at least, how business saw it:

all business groups have accepted the interpretation that their international problems are caused by labor costs, labor behavior, and the regulatory instruments that labor has supported. (p 30)

Labor, on the other hand, became defensive, seeking to maintain existing positions in wages, social services and jobs. They did not have a positive program to modernize and rationalize the economy, butbusiness did: lower taxes, lower social charges, less regulation. Inaddition, because of transnational production linkages, business accepted a reduced “link between domestic producers and domestic labor.” (p. 30, e.a.)

Each of these actors had to strike a balance in their position taking between managing the economy as a whole and asserting the


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particularities of its own situation.199 The predominant view, however, came to be based on the neo-classical paradigm. While Keynes has managed to sneak back into things here and there, one is much more likely to see references to Friedman in popular discourse.200 The predominant view, however, came to be based on the neo-classical paradigm. While Keynes has managed to sneak back into

199 As always, John Cleese was on top of the matter:

You will also have noticed that it isn’t just the way that

people try to get things out of you that is irritating. [It is

also] the way they try to disguise their rather obvious motives.

The rich don’t say ‘We want more money.’

They say, ‘this increased taxation is reducing personal

incentive.’

The trade unions don’t say, ‘We want more money.’

They say, ‘this governmental interference with wage

negotiations abrogates one of the fundamental principles of the

trade union movement.’

-- John Cleese, How to Irritate People

200 See the discussion of Evans on generations of policy. Also, while

discourse avoided mention of Keynes, the Reagan administration’s

economic policies -- like those of the current administration --

increased spending on defense and reduced taxes, resulting in


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things here and there, one is much more likely to see references to Friedman in popular discourse.

But what about education? The unions tell us something -- they are guided by the need to respond to this pattern. Attacks on unionsand governmental organizations -- as a wedge to start the push for privatization -- have inspired fierce resistance. But the issues that cohere with meritocracy and standards-based reform have not produced such a response. It is worth noting that unlike many unions, teachers unions are not only defensive, they have a positive program involving accountability and standards-based reform.

And that, after all, is what hegemony is about -- consequences, both intended and unintended, especially those that come from pervasive opinions. These opinions support programs that direct or the support the direction of social activity. The intention of the action counts to a degree, as does the anticipation of its effects. It is anticipated to have certain consequences, perhaps with the general population and elites anticipating things to come in much different ways. But it is the connection which is the key to group social learning -- it involves an active process of hegemony, seekingout those who will follow your leadership and accept your direction. The political programme that forms the core, as in core and periphery, of any hegemonic constellation of groups, has far reaching

deficit spending at a time of low or negative growth. This

certainly can be seen as a type of demand stimilus.


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consequences. Elements of the core economic programme emanate out, sort of like waves in a pond, affecting in multiple ways the other programs and policies in society.

Institutions, while they don’t merely reflect the power of those with the ability to mobilize the greatest resources, are never constructed without the cooperation of a significant number of those actors.201 It goes without saying -- far too often. It is a tautology that in order to build institutions you need the cooperation of those who control and have the ability to mobilize resources. In order to build a consensus some sort of (at least) tacit agreement is necessary. Small numbers of those who can controland/or mobilize resources can veto political programmes.

Perhaps one example is found in the existence of the World TradeOrganization in the absence of anything approaching a world government. Trade can be agreed upon because of the assimilationist pull of economic growth, increased government spending cannot.202

201 I believe I may be echoing a talk by Robert Kaufmann of Rutgers.202 Keynes at one point said that the multiplier effect of

government spending would never reach its highest level of 5 (based

on a marginal propensity to consume of 0.8). Because of ‘leakages’

in the economy, including both taxes and imports, an multiplier of 2

or 3 might be more likely. In a closed system, however, where there

were no imports and where reckoning with deficits could be delayed,

the multiplier would be greater.


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Those forces controlling economic resources can be pulled in to tradeagreements while those forces with political stakes will be likely toveto moves that will curtail their power. The former forces will have greater say and tend to supercede the interests --even the democratically arrived at interests-- of the general population. These are interests arrived at in a realm where power and the abilityto control resources are nearly the same thing.

Certain things you cannot do under such a balkanized system, however, and taking care of education may be one of them. Global dynamics may work against it. Of course, there are two arguments forthis, one that investment in education will yield long term returns and national policy should encourage this. The other argument is that short term concerns will argue against national expenditures on education. But what is likely to happen is that education will become less and less a national concern and more and more a private one.

This has parallels to the arguments against Keynesianism. For Keynes, confronted with an industrial plant not used to capacity, inefficient use was better than no use.203 There is an underlying

203 Keynes, of course, went beyond this: "If the Treasury were to

fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in

disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with

town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried

principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to


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assumption that the government must eventually deal with social welfare and that if some level of subsistence is guaranteed, people might as well be reasonably active.204 There is an underlying assumption that the government must eventually deal with social welfare and that if some level of subsistence is guaranteed, people might as well be reasonably active. It is necessary to induce some

do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the

note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and,

with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community,

and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater

than it actually is." The General Theory of Employment, Interest

and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 129. He did go on to say,

“It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like;

but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of

this, the above would be better than nothing.” The point however,

is that during periods of economic contraction stimulus is

necessary; that it be useful would be better, but the point is to

create stimulus.204 Full employment policies were the norm in most OECD countries

after World War II. In the US the Employment Act of 1946 and the

Humphrey-Hawkins Act were the chief pieces of legislation. In the

UK, under Clement Attlee, the Labour government enacted much of the

Beveridge Plan, which had significant Conservative support. This

resulted in the development of an extensive welfare state, reform

in education and the nationalization of key industries. It also


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sort of movement.

The conservative revival that cast aspersions on Keynes came strongly with the stagflation of the 1970s. The ‘Phillips curve’ shifted. A.W. Phillips noted in the late 1950s that there was an inverse relationship between unemployment and wage levels. High unemployment was linked to low wages and visa versa. Moreover, therewas a similar relationship between unemployment and general inflationlevels. But not in the 1970s. Richard Nixon’s statement that ‘we are all Keynesians now’ gave way to Jimmy Carter’s ‘misery index’ -- the adding of unemployment and inflation figures together to form oneindicator. If an inverse relationship held, this number should not vary much. In running against Gerald Ford, Carter pointed out that they had both grown during the Nixon-Ford administrations. They alsogrew during his administration, something Ronald Reagan was more thanwilling to point out, asking the American people if they were better off than they were four years ago.

While a simple answer might have been that, among other factors,the Oil Crisis had disrupted normal economic growth, instead there was a change of paradigms from Keynesianism to Monetarism, as discussed in the next section.205 But we must realize that for the Keynesian paradigm to work, it is necessary that institutions develop

led to an increase in the power of unions, something which was

curtailed in the US by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. (Gourevitch,

pp. 175-77)


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over time. This is not a mechanism, but organic growth upon a mechanism. Institutions are built and people work within them. They expand uponthem sometimes, but opportunities must be recognized by power holdersand they must devote resources to fully exploit them. This is true of both enterprises that must find their own revenue stream (the private sector) and those that depend on a revenue stream decided upon through collective decision making as manifest in state action (the public sector).

Individuals must also produce their own revenue streams -- or their families must. This is a thought Mrs. Thatcher made resoundingly when she said there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. It is the fulcrum of the Thatcherite revolution. While someone might want to ask at what age does the individual acquire this responsibility, it is effective in limiting calls on society’s responsibility.

The logic of public discourse in such a situation is that there becomes a time when the average individual says, “I’m not going to fight against that aspect of the system.” That logic includes both how determined a person is and how beaten down -- both consent and coercion play a role. The logic of ascent is tied up with a plethoraof factors -- the opportunities available, social discrimination, coercion, etc. In a paradigm based on bargaining relationships -- which all micro-based paradigms are -- it is based on factors which 205 Or at least the language of paradigms. Much of the meat of

monetarism was left out as Reagan continued to run deficits.


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are present but not always apparent in price series or their equivalents. This is to repeat an old argument, that there are always hidden factors in bargaining relationships and turn it into a question -- what is hidden?

The simple answer is power and control over resources. These result in the adoption of political programmes. With that let us return to Gourevitch. Flowchart B uses the first flowchart as its basis and tries to overlay educational policy on his lattice. The idea is that educational policy is not a thing-in-itself, but is somehow dependent on its relevance to economic policy debates.

[Insert chart b ‘political sociology of political economy of education’ -- filename: 004-pt1-ch1flowchartb]

Adapting Gourevitch (and following Aristotle) analysis is based

on multiple layers of causation. I look at four levels of causation:so-called direct effects (material cause), effects on (or through) institutions (formal cause), effects on individuals, social agents, coalitions and groups (efficient cause) and effects on ideology and policy (final cause).206

This is both a specific and a general problem, because educationcoalitions and electoral coalitions are different things. While neither is generally class-based, so much as regionally and race based, class plays a major role. That is often a role based not on 206 This is to be worked out if this becomes a full-length book.


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class per se, however, as the specific circumstances of that class member. Think of different members of the upper class as an example;the upper middle class parent who buys a home in Gross Point or SandsPoint does not want to subsidize parents who send their kids to eliteprivate schools, yet they are similar in many other ways. On the other hand, some in the lower classes are in favor of vouchers, especially those who seek a specific cultural or religious content for their child's education. (While it may be overplayed at time, oneducation much of what is debated is the product of cultural coalitions – some Christian conservatives advocate ‘breaking the spirit of the willful child.’207) And there are interest-based coalitions -- protectionist factions for employment regimes. 208 And there are interest-based coalitions -- protectionist factions for employment regimes.

Nonetheless, my general argument is that they are class-based, but with odd tweaks. Some of these tweaks are indicated below in a discussion from the Shields and Brooks commentary on the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour in the wake of Supreme Court Decision upholding the

207 This may be heard frequently on Christian radio (a.k.a., ‘listen

sponsored family radio’) WFME 94.7 FM in Newark and New York. Some

excerpts from February 18, 2004: “Faith subdues the kingdom of

Satan. . . . Never be fooled by a cultural move to subdue God. . .

. You don’t act on what you feel, you act on ‘thus sayeth the

Lord.’”208 Cite shipps, guttmann.


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constituionality of some voucher programs (June 28, 2002)

MARK SHIELDS: But the two parties are totally conflicted.Their constituencies are at odds. The Democrats-- I worked with three African American secretaries, single moms, all of whom were Protestants, all of whom had their children inWashington, DC in the Catholic schools. They scrimped, theysaved work overtime to keep their kids in the Catholic schools.

* * * DAVID BROOKS: That's exactly right. You go into a suburb, I don't care if it's Republican or Democratic, I paid $50,000 to get into the school district extra on my house cost. You're telling me the inner city kids are going to come here? They're against it [voucher programs]. The Teachers Unions and hence the Democrat Party are against it. You've got the Republican rank and file and theDemocratic establishment; that's a pretty strong coalition.But I do think you will see in inner city failing schools, like Milwaukee, like Cleveland, like Florida now, you'll see that all around the country.

In these quotes you can see some of the tensions. Parents are willing to pay to put their kids in ‘better schools.’ Parents also pay to keep their kids away from problem kids, who are eventually theresponsibility of the public schools. The public schools cannot and should not avoid this responsibility, but it makes it harder for a school to function well. So we see tensions. Local school district versus local school district, rich versus poor, city versus suburb. The funding system for schools, which relies heavily on property taxes is certainly class-based, but the resulting political positionsof parents are not intuitively obvious. Indeed, the costs of


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schooling (in direct outlays, housing costs, taxes and opportunity costs) are great enough so that we see classes split among the parents and non-parents. A business executive who has no children may, in terms of his ideology and interests, be disposed towards privatization and vouchers. The same man, now a parent who has made the move to a ‘good’ suburban district, may fear that vouchers or, more accurately, public school choice programs209 will result in an undesirable change in his child’s school's student body.

Intuitively obvious or not, it is something most people understand. It also informs their actions. They realize that peopledo move out to the suburbs to provide a safer environment and better schools for their kids. It has, since the 1950s at least, become a part of the folk understanding of what it means to be a parent in America. City schools are bad, to be avoided, something to which no well thinking parents would condemn their children.

So unlike housing, health and welfare, where more predictable positions in favor of corporatization and privatization are evident, education is somewhat more resistant. The strength of teachers

209 See Peter Cookson’s Introduction to School Choice (Yale, 1995), where

he recounts his experience as a headmaster at an elite private

school. He asked one of the parents why, when there was a very

good public school in the area, he chose to spend the money on a

private school which, frankly, had poorer facilities. The answer

he recieved was that he was there because of 'the other parents.'


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unions and their importance for the Democratic Party are one reason. The decentralized and fragmented nature of the system is another, as is its inertia. After all, creating a market is not the task, for a market of sort already exists for those with sufficient resources andthey do not want to have their existing options taken away.

I am not, however, about to argue that all politics is local. Certainly that is true, but politics is never merely local. Local debates occur within overarching frameworks which are created by forces far greater than any individual. Individuals do have their effects, especially when they are aggregated many times over, but political they become an effective reality as part of coalitions thatcohere by reference not just to transitory interests, but to ideological principles and question of identity.


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11) Social systems theory as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony

David Laitin has used social systems theory as a point of departure for a theory of cultural hegemony. Rejecting any sort of mutual or automatic adjustment among sub-systems, he proposes that a hegemonic single sub-system provides a dominant symbolic framework. The idea of epistemic hegemony can make a distinction between peripheral and core arguments in any society. The exchange system isthe source of the core arguments of neo-liberal hegemony -- free trade, free markets and minimal state regulation. These values ‘travel’ toward the educational system via many pathways. Parallel paths include the limitation of state finance and education thought of as an investment with future monetary returns.

Possible institutional accommodations between neo-liberalism andmeritocracy are close to the center or this back and forth movement. Meritocratic practices, such as civil service exams, have traditionally been associated with the state. But for the last half-century a robust system of supposedly meritocratic exams has emanatedfrom the private sector and reshaped both private and public institutions of higher education. More than that, it has changed thecriteria for social advancement and, consequently, the common sense that people learn when they are making life choices. After World WarII, the US university system was remodeled according to a meritocratic logic. Elite institutions, while still serving


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privileged families, increasingly drew their prestige from their selectivity as measured, in good part, by the scores of their students on standardized tests. 210 And so it is not insignificant that it was the nation-wide decline in SAT scores that, as much as anything else, led to the 1980s renewed emphasis on academic excellence in secondary schools.

This is only part of the history of the testing regime. Aaron Pallas has suggested all of this is linked to a project of increased rationality. In neo- Skinneresque [Tayloresque?] fashion, it is assumed that high stakes testing, in which promotion and graduation are dependent on passing standardized tests, motivates students to achieve.211 Teachers and administrators are likewise motivated. As an example of how neo-liberal methods have entered this sphere, statistics and tests are thought to provide ‘value added assessment’ in which the teacher’s contribution to learning can be isolated from

210 Nicholas Lemann, 1999, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American

Meritocracy, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.211 Union publications provide numerous examples of this. A 2002

edition of New York Teacher, the magazine of the New York State Union of

Teachers, includes two letters on the subject of new tests. Both

claim that they are insufficiently challenging. One teacher attacked a

“’feel good’ philosophy of [unsound] assessment that does not support

standards-based ideals.” Another paired “a serious lowering of

motivation and standards.” (Letters, “Doesn’t add up,” and “An

easier ‘environment,’” 27 March 2002, pp. 8 - 9.)


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other causal factors.212

What I would like to suggest is not merely that the issue of meritocracy looms large in all of this, but the existence of a project to ‘increase rationality’ in a particular way. For the last quarter century we have been witnessing an ongoing project to mesh meritocracy and neo-liberalism -- to make them compatible. After all, one cannot assume that meritocracy goes hand-in hand with neo-liberalism. Certainly, if one reads earlier works, the institutionalinfrastructure of meritocracy requires not a minimalist state, but huge state expenditures on education. A neo-liberal meritocracy may be an oxymoron, the reality either leaving behind those who come fromimpoverished educational backgrounds or requiring a huge institutional apparatus engaged in a project of social engineering.

But the logic of merit-based social advancement is at the core the appeal. Especially prominent are efforts to reshape educational institutions in accordance with a meritocratic ethos. How this narrows the field of accepted educational models will be explored elsewhere. Here I wish to look at attempts to make meritocracy coherent with efforts to embed neo-liberal values. A common conceptual foundation can be found in the concept of comparative advantage.

Comparative advantage is perhaps the key concept in attempting to extrapolate a macro-economic policy from the principles of micro-212 Pallas, Lecture at Teachers’ College, New York, Dec., 2001.


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economics. Connected as it is to selection by the market, it also has a strong family resemblance to Jefferson’s “pure selection” of those who compose the “natural aristoi” – the natural aristocracy of talent and ability.213 And it is not only that the conceptual similarities between the two resonate through policy debates on education, but the major reform movement of the 80s and 90s --standards-based reform-- was causally linked to achieving comparativeadvantage for the US in international economic competition.

The link between meritocracy and neo-liberalism, is not, however, unproblematic. The union of economic liberalism and meritocracy is an uneasy one. The history of meritocratic institutions is closely tied to state enterprise and regulation and the implementation of standards requires much more than a Minimalist state. Then there are the problems of ‘meritocracy’ itself.

The late Michael Young, who coined the term in his 1958 book, meant the term ironically. Commenting less than a year before his death, he felt compelled to note that his book was a satire, that theterm was meant as pejorative and to lament the widespread use of the term in the United States and in the speeches of Tony Blair:

In the new social environment, the rich and powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves . . . The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them areencouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits,they can feel they deserve whatever they get. They can be insufferably smug . . . So assured have the elite become that

213 Letter to John Adams, 28 Oct 1813.


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there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves.214

Young’s point was that a meritocratic ethos can be used to justify increasingly inequality and a sense of privilege. For instance, children who lack access to the best schools routinely do poorly on exams; they remain close to the bottom and their inferior position isjustified by their low scores on standardized tests.215 More importantly, a meritocracy does not need to be universal. Not only can you set up a meritocracy among an elite group, but, in fact, a universal meritocracy --in which no child lacks access to high quality education-- goes against a universal reality: the privileged seek advantages for their children. This is a very practical link – a part of praxis – the comparative advantages parents seek for their own offspring. When it comes to educating other people’s children,216

it is only natural for parents to protect their own. Social conscience and filial duty are at odds.

This sociological truth underlies the political dynamics of building and reforming education institutions -- public education

214 Michael Young, “Down with Meritocracy,” Guardian (UK), 29

June 2001.215 Much of this paraphrased from Margalit Fox’s obituary of

Young, “Coined, Mocked Meritocracy,” NYTimes, 25 Jan 2002. It

could also be taken from any number of the education scholars

cited in throughout.216 There are numerous books that use this phrase in their title.


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requires the support of parents, but parents do not want to enable those who will compete with their children. Even if the standards movement is a serious attempt to reform the system -- which it certainly is for some--, the political will unlikely to be there to give ‘poor children’ the same opportunities as the well-to-do.

Given all this, we should expect at least some resistance to standards-based reform.217 The question is, where do we expect it andwhere do we find it? On privatization, the unions are resolute, their opposition invariable. On standards we find another outcome --there was resistance, but the unions have not been its source. Some education scholars and advocates have been extremely critical, there have been parents groups who oppose them and recently one highly respected administrator has suggested that he will risk a jail term rather than fully implement New York state’s standards program.218 The unions, however, have more often been enthusiastic supporters. Atthe same time, they have stressed that more resources are needed to make the reform work, and that as presently funded this is not a

217 Locating resistance is one of the keys to successfully

operating a paradigm based on hegemony. Parents, rather than

teachers organized by unions, seem to provide a great deal when

'opting out' of testing. Teacher resistance seems to be more

localized, as in the case of Garfield HS in Seattle, which is treated

in other chapters.218 Add cites, examples: Peter Sacks, Alfie Kohn, Supt. of White

Plains.


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sufficiently serious effort. [revise --]

The positions the unions have taken are telling. Despite the dangers involved,219 despite the misgivings of many teachers about theeffects of teaching to the test,220 despite the misgivings of many teachers about the effects of teaching to the test, despite the seeming trade off between ‘equity’ in the favor of ‘excellence,’ despite the narrowing of educational philosophies, the national unions sought to find a niche for themselves as the professionals needed to run this reformed system. They thought they were positioning their members to move from the diminishing ranks of industrial wage earners and enter into a more stratified professionalrank, as certified by academic degrees and qualifying exams. Not only did National Board Certification begin as a union project, but calling for more stringent licensing requirements is an issue that Shanker spearheaded.

As regards standards, the positions the unions have taken endorse the concept. A recent United Federation of Teachers (UFT) television ad speaks of teachers providing the needed expertise to

219 For example, some local Wisconsin union officials have argued

that by encouraging labor/management cooperation and by calling on

unions to take responsibility for the quality of its members, the NEA

was playing into the hands of those who wish to destroy public

education. The Scott Walker episode.220 Add teachers’ comments on standards


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get students passed demanding new tests; the other issues they speak of: “teach them the basics, keep them safe, prepare them for a more complex world.”221 They are linked to the meritocratic part of the process, and that means accepting parts of the neo-liberal programme.They must consider merit pay, value-added models and other proposed methods of achieving efficiency, at least as pilot projects. And they must also accept the main point of this meritocratic program -- that the chief failing of the public schools is that they have not allowed the most capable children to advance.

All in all, they have not only followed their interests but rearticulated them in a way so as to coherent with mainstream political formulations. And, while their influence is indisputable, this rearticulation of interests is not merely a response to materialinterests, partisan politics or generational change, but to changes in hegemonic strategies on a global scale. Most important in this regard is a public/private distinction -- not that between public andprivate interests, but between public and private enterprises. While these are obviously connected, it is a significant difference. Arguments that public enterprises are corrupt or inefficient and thusserve as feeding troughs for special interests conclude that privatization, as well as deregulation, are in the public interest.

Private provision is arguably more efficient, but it puts more

221 UFT television ad; add ran in the NY area during January 2002.

[check web-site]


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pressure on workers. One need only consider the example of health insurance and how it, at least prior to the Affordable Care Act, madepeople hold on to their jobs. This amounts to an assimilationist model, something that will be addressed in time. For the present, wemust realize that this is the part of the neo-liberal programme the unions are dead set against. And it is this set of decisions, opposition and resistance versus compromise and accommodation, that Ihope to trace. At the same time, one must account for the way the discourse is and why the discourse is the way it is.

One thought is that discourse analysis reveals a form of social learning: meritocracy as an unheralded form of social transformation. This approach allows for an inquiry based on the fundamental concept of ‘hegemony,’ as well as its associated terms, political programme, historic bloc, contradictory consciousness and ‘spontaneous consent.’ These terms all come from Gramsci and it is my belief that his conceptualization provides a paradigm that is far better than mechanistic paradigms able to explain ideological and strategic change. As such, it is also meant to provide an alternative to game theoretic analytic narratives; instead, it is a synthetic narrative of social actors coming to grips with changing circumstances and developing new strategies. The explanatory conceptualization is based on hegemony.222

222 It might also be referred to as heuristic case study and I

believe the use of hegemony is well suited to explaining a series of

events. If you think parsimony is always a virtue, you might limit


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As the original point of departure, it depicted the learning process of two unions in the same field as they align themselves on an issue by issue basis. That seemed a good idea at the time, for inso doing, it would depict not social learning, but social actors learning in the context of ongoing social struggles. However, that did not seem sufficient once one had to explain the continuities between NCLBand the Obama administration, thus a wider net has been cast, one that looks at the advent of TFA, the way parents choose schools and how teachers are portrayed on TV and in films.

But there was also another reason -- the pragmatics of strategic choice does not reduce itself easily to either analysis based on self-interest or moral critique. In terms of interest, there are so many ways of conceiving of interest that no single string of calculations can predict -- as I’ve mentioned, individual, corporate group and general interests have to be calculated and somehow integrated and balanced. There is no easy prediction without also understanding who has the power to make decisions and mobilize resources, so this type of calculation is always limited in explaining political outcomes.223 Morality -- the groundwork of

yourself to game theoretics only. But the world is complex and you

end up adhocking all the time.223 This does not mean it is not sometimes very effective, and

those cases are the basis of the greatest successes of the North -

Thomas approach. This may be addressed elsewhere and the Bates, et


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grievance -- involves a different complication. Strategic decision makers have to take into account what Weber said in Politics as a Vocation;a political leader, when considering how to justify positions, cannotabide merely by personal conscience. In this case the appearance of hypocrisy may be the result of not wanting to alienate allies. Not only can one not ignore opportunities, one must seize them -- for a leader, to be described as an opportunist is often as not a compliment.

To consider all of this as part of a process of social learning,

we can state that politics plays the dominant role in institutional

change, with the stipulation that economics has perhaps the dominant

role in politics. That is not to say that administrative and

pedagogical expertise have no weight in political rationalizations --

far from it. Nevertheless the influence of economics as channeled

through political processes provides much of the impetus behind

educational change. You can’t prove that, but it can become the

inspiration/point of departure for a historical narrative -- an

analytical narrative that attempts to weigh factors against one

another in what is, by necessity, a qualitative rather than

quantitative [factor?] analysis.

al.-- volume Analytic Narratives is taken up.


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