[RSCT] TruthOut 12/17/08: Obama's betrayal of public education? Arne Duncan and the corporate model of schooling

Wed Dec 17 22:13:20 CST 2008

Obama's betrayal of public education? Arne Duncan and the corporate model of schooling

by Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman
Truthout  Wednesday 17
 December 2008

    Since the 1980s, but particularly
under the Bush administration, certain elements of the religious right,
corporate culture and Republican right wing have argued that free public
education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from
a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to
transform schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to
the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the
marketplace. As the educational historian David Labaree rightly argues, public
schools have been under attack in the last decade "not just because they
are deemed ineffective but because they are public."[1]
Right-wing efforts to disinvest in public schools as critical sites of teaching
and learning and govern them according to corporate interests is obvious in the
emphasis on standardized testing, the use of top-down curricular mandates, the
influx of advertising in schools, the use of profit motives to
"encourage" student performance, the attack on teacher unions and
modes of pedagogy that stress rote learning and memorization. For the Bush
administration, testing has become the ultimate accountability measure, belying
the complex mechanisms of teaching and learning. The hidden curriculum is that
testing be used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by reducing them to mere
technicians, that students be similarly reduced to customers in the marketplace
rather than as engaged, critical learners and that always underfunded public
schools fail so that they can eventually be privatized. 

But there is an even
darker side to the reforms initiated under the Bush administration and now used
in a number of school systems throughout the country. As the logic of the
market and "the crime complex"[2] frame
the field of social relations in schools, students are subjected to three
particularly offensive policies, defended by school authorities and politicians
under the rubric of school safety. First, students are increasingly subjected
to zero-tolerance policies that are used primarily to punish, repress and
exclude them. 

Second, they are increasingly absorbed into a "crime
complex" in which security staff, using harsh disciplinary practices, now
displace the normative functions teachers once provided both in and outside of
the classroom.[3] Third, more and more schools are breaking down
the space between education and juvenile delinquency, substituting penal
pedagogies for critical learning and replacing a school culture that fosters a
discourse of possibility with a culture of fear and social control. Consequently,
many youth of color in urban school systems, because of harsh zero-tolerance
polices, are not just being suspended or expelled from school. They are being
ushered into the dark precincts of juvenile detention centers, adult courts and
prison. Surely, the dismantling of this corporatized and militarized model of
schooling should be a top priority under the Obama administration.
Unfortunately, Obama has appointed as his secretary of education someone who
actually embodies this utterly punitive, anti-intellectual, corporatized and
test-driven model of schooling. 

    Barack Obama's selection of Arne Duncan for
secretary of education does not bode well either for the political direction of
his administration nor for the future of public education. Obama's call for
change falls flat with this appointment, 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. The
first casualty in this scenario is a language of social and political
responsibility capable of defending those vital institutions that expand the
rights, public goods and services central to a meaningful democracy. This is
especially true with respect to the issue of public schooling and the ensuing
debate over the purpose of education, the role of teachers as critical
intellectuals, the politics of the curriculum and the centrality of pedagogy as
a moral and political practice. 

    Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, presided
over the implementation and expansion of an agenda that militarized and
corporatized the third largest school system in the nation, one that is about
90 percent poor and nonwhite. Under Duncan, Chicago took the lead in creating
public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draconian student
expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a growing
police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools and fired
entire school staffs. A recent report, "Education on Lockdown,"
claimed that partly under Duncan 's
leadership "Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become infamous for its harsh
zero tolerance policies. Although there is no verified positive impact on
safety, these policies have resulted in tens of thousands of student
suspensions and an exorbitant number of expulsions."[4] Duncan 's
neoliberal ideology is on full display in the various connections he has
established with the ruling political and business elite in Chicago .[5] He led the Renaissance 2010 plan, which was created for Mayor Daley
by the Commercial Club of Chicago - an organization representing the largest
businesses in the city. The purpose of Renaissance 2010 was to increase the
number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of
accountability - a code word for legitimating more charter schools and high
stakes testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago 's
2010 plan targets 15 percent of the city district's alleged underachieving
schools in order to dismantle them and open 100 new experimental schools in
areas slated for gentrification. Most of the new experimental schools have
eliminated the teacher union. The Commercial Club hired corporate consulting
firm A.T. Kearney to write Ren2010, which called for the closing of 100 public
schools and the reopening of privatized charter schools, contract schools (more
charters to circumvent state limits) and "performance" schools. Kearney 's
web site is unapologetic about its business-oriented notion of leadership, one
that John Dewey thought should be avoided at all costs. It states, "Drawing
on our program-management skills and our knowledge of best practices used
across industries, we provided a private-sector perspective on how to address
many of the complex issues that challenge other large urban education
transformations. "[6]

     Duncan 's
advocacy of the Renaissance 2010 plan alone should have immediately
disqualified him for the Obama appointment. At the heart of this plan is a
privatization scheme for creating a "market" in public education by
urging public schools to compete against each other for scarce resources and by
introducing "choice" initiatives so that parents and students will
think of themselves as private consumers of educational services.[7] As a
result of his support of the plan, Duncan 
came under attack by community organizations, parents, education scholars and
students. These diverse critics have denounced it as a scheme less designed to
improve the quality of schooling than as a plan for privatization, union
busting and the dismantling of democratically- elected local school councils.
They also describe it as part of neighborhood gentrification schemes involving
the privatization of public housing projects through mixed finance
developments.[8] (Tony Rezko, an Obama and Blagojevich campaign
supporter, made a fortune from these developments along with many corporate
investors.) Some of the dimensions of public school privatization involve
Renaissance schools being run by subcontracted for-profit companies - a shift
in school governance from teachers and elected community councils to appointed
administrators coming disproportionately from the ranks of business. It also
establishes corporate control over the selection and model of new schools,
giving the business elite and their foundations increasing influence over
educational policy. No wonder that Duncan 
had the support of David Brooks, the conservative op-ed writer for The New York
Times. 

    One particularly egregious example of Duncan 's
vision of education can be seen in the conference he organized with the
Renaissance Schools Fund. In May 2008, the Renaissance Schools Fund, the
financial wing of the Renaissance 2010 plan operating under the auspices of the
Commercial Club, held a symposium, "Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The
New Market in Public Education," at the exclusive private club atop the
Aon Center. The event was held largely by and for the business sector, school
privatization advocates, and others already involved in Renaissance 2010, such
as corporate foundations and conservative think tanks. Significantly, no
education scholars were invited to participate in the proceedings, although it was
heavily attended by fellows from the pro-privatization Fordham Foundation and
featured speakers from various school choice organizations and the leadership
of corporations. Speakers clearly assumed the audience shared their views. 

    Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of
Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a
"movement for social justice." He invoked corporate investment terms
to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence
on the other 500 schools in Chicago .
Redefining schools as stock investments he said, "I am not a manager of
600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve
the portfolio." He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that
having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a
prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace
public education. "We're trying to blur the lines between the public and
the private," he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform
is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of
both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers'
Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform. He also
insisted that the CTU opposes charter schools (and, hence, change itself),
despite the fact that the CTU runs ten such schools under Renaissance 2010.
Despite the representation in the popular press of Duncan as conciliatory to
the unions, his statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep
hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters
created under Ren2010 are deunionized) . Thus, in Duncan 's
attempts to close and transform low-performing schools, he not only reinvents
them as entrepreneurial schools, but, in many cases, frees "them from
union contracts and some state regulations. "[9] Duncan 
effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of the Nobel
  Street charter schools, who openly called for the
closing and reopening of every school in the district precisely to get rid of
the unions. What became clear is that Duncan views Renaissance 2010 as a
national blueprint for educational reform, but what is at stake in this vision
is the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the discredited and
tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives love to embrace. 

    In spite of the corporate rhetoric of
accountability, efficiency and excellence, there is to date no evidence that
the radical reforms under Duncan 's
tenure as the "CEO" of Chicago Public Schools have created any
significant improvement. In part, this is because the Chicago 
 Public Schools and the Renaissance
Schools Fund report data in obscurantist ways to make traditional comparisons
difficult if not impossible.[10] And, in
part, examples of educational claims to school improvement are being made about
schools embedded in communities that suffered dislocation and removal through
coordinated housing privatization and gentrification policies. For example, the
city has decimated public housing in coveted real estate enclaves,
dispossessing thousands of residents of their communities. Once the poor are
removed, the urban cleansing provides an opportunity for Duncan 
to open a number of Renaissance Schools, catering to those socio-economically
empowered families whose children would surely improve the city's overall test
scores. What are alleged to be school improvements under Ren2010, rest on an
increase in the city's overall test scores and other performance measures that
parodies the financial shell game corporations used to inflate profit margins -
and prospects for future catastrophes are as inevitable. In the end, all Duncan 
leaves us with is a Renaissance 2010 model of education that is celebrated as a
business designed "to save kids" from a failed public system. In
fact, it condemns public schooling, administrators, teachers and students to a
now outmoded and discredited economic model of reform that can only imagine
education as a business, teachers as entrepreneurs and students as customers.[11]

    It is difficult to understand how Barack Obama can
reconcile his vision of change with Duncan's history of supporting a corporate
vision for school reform and a penchant for extreme zero-tolerance polices -
both of which are much closer to the retrograde policies hatched in
conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institution,
Fordham Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, than to the values of the
many millions who voted for the democratic change he promised. As is well
known, these think tanks share an agenda not for strengthening public
schooling, but for dismantling it and replacing it with a private market in
consumable educational services. At the heart of Duncan 's
vision of school reform is a corporatized model of education that cancels out
the democratic impulses and practices of civil society by either devaluing or
absorbing them within the logic of the market or the prison. No longer a space
for relating schools to the obligations of public life, social responsibility
to the demands of critical and engaged citizenship, schools in this dystopian
vision legitimate an all-encompassing horizon for producing market identities,
values and those privatizing and penal pedagogies that both inflate the
importance of individualized competition and punish those who do not fit into
its logic of pedagogical Darwinism.[12] 

    In spite of what Duncan 
argues, the greatest threat to our children does not come from lowered
standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes or the lack of rigid
testing measures that offer the aura of accountability. On the contrary, it
comes from a society that refuses to view children as a social investment,
consigns 13 million children to live in poverty, reduces critical learning to
massive testing programs, promotes policies that eliminate most crucial health
and public services and defines rugged individualism through the degrading
celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports and the spectacles of violence
that permeate corporate controlled media industries. Students are not at risk
because of the absence of market incentives in the schools. Young people are
under siege in American schools because, in the absence of funding, equal
opportunity and real accountability, far too many of them have increasingly
become institutional breeding grounds for racism, right-wing paramilitary
cultures, social intolerance and sexism.[13] We live
in a society in which a culture of testing, punishment and intolerance has
replaced a culture of social responsibility and compassion. Within such a
climate of harsh discipline and disdain for critical teaching and learning, it
is easier to subject young people to a culture of faux accountability or put
them in jail rather than to provide the education, services and care they need
to face problems of a complex and demanding society.[14] What
Duncan and other neoliberal economic advocates refuse to address is what it
would mean for a viable educational policy to provide reasonable support
services for all students and viable alternatives for the troubled ones. The
notion that children should be viewed as a crucial social resource - one that
represents, for any healthy society, important ethical and political
considerations about the quality of public life, the allocation of social
provisions and the role of the state as a guardian of public interests -
appears to be lost in a society that refuses to invest in its youth as part of
a broader commitment to a fully realized democracy. As the social order becomes
more privatized and militarized, we increasingly face the problem of losing a
generation of young people to a system of increasing intolerance, repression
and moral indifference. It is difficult to understand why Obama would appoint
as secretary of education someone who believes in a market-driven model that
has not only failed young people, but given the current financial crisis has
been thoroughly discredited. Unless Duncan 
is willing to reinvent himself, the national agenda he will develop for
education embodies and exacerbates these problems and, as such, it will leave a
lot more kids behind than it helps. 

    -------- 

    [1] Cited
in Alfie Kohn, "The Real Threat to American Schools," Tikkun
(March-April 2001), p. 25. For an interesting commentary on Obama and his
possible pick to head the education department and the struggle over school
reform, see Alfie Kohn, "Beware School 'Reformers', " The Nation
(December 29, 2008). Online: www.thenation. com/doc/20081229 /kohn/print. 

    [2] This
term comes form: David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social
Order in Contemporary Society ( Chicago :
 University of Chicago
  Press , 2002). 

    [3] For a
brilliant analysis of the "governing through crime" complex, see
Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed
American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, ( New
  York , NY : Oxford University
Press, 2007). 

    [4]
Advancement Project in partnership with Padres and Jovenes Unidos, Southwest
Youth Collaborative, Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse
Track, ( New York : Children
& Family Justice Center of Northwestern University School of Law, March 24, 2005 ), p.31. On the broader
issue of the effect of racialized zero tolerance policies on public education,
see Christopher G. Robbins, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the
Militarization of Schooling ( Albany :
SUNY Press, 2008). See also, Henry A. Giroux, The Abandoned
Generation ( New York :
Palgrave, 2004). 

    [5] 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). 

    [6] See: www.atkearney. com

    [7] Creating a New Market of Public Education: The Renaissance Schools Fund
2008 Progress Report, The Renaissance Schools Fund www.rsfchicago. org

    [8]
Kenneth J. Saltman, "Chapter 3: Renaissance 2010 and No Child Left Behind
Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking 
 Public Schools " ( Boulder :
Paradigm Publishers, 2007). 

    [9] Sarah
Karp and Joyn Myers, " Duncan 's
Track Record," Catalyst Chicago 
(December 15, 2008 ).
Online: www.catalyst- chicago.org/ news/index. php?item= 2514&cat=5&tr=y&auid=4336549

    [10] (See
Chicago Public Schools Office of New Schools 2006/2007 Charter 
 School Performance Report Executive
Summary) 

    [11] See
Dorothy Shipps, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 
1880-2000, (Lawrence : University 
 of Kansas Press, 2006). 

    [12] See,
for example, Summary Report, " America 's
Cradle to Prison Pipeline," Children's Defense Fund. Online at: www.childrensdefens e.org/site/ DocServer/ CPP_report_ 2007_summary. pdf?docID= 6001;
also see, Elora Mukherjee, Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing
of New York City Schools, (New York :
American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties, March 2008), pp.
1-36. 

    [13] Donna
Gaines, "How Schools Teach Our Kids to Hate," Newsday (Sunday, April
25, 1999), p. B5. 

    [14] As has
been widely, reported, the prison industry has become big business with many
states spending more on prison construction than on university construction.
Jennifer Warren, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, ( Washington ,
 DC : The PEW 
 Center on the States, 2007). Online
at: www.pewcenteronthes tates.org/ news_room_ detail.aspx? id=35912

    Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair
in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster
 University in Canada.
His most recent books include: Take Back Higher Education
(co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), The University in Chains:
Confronting the Military-Industrial -Academic Complex, (2007), and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of
Greed, (2008). His newest book, Youth in a Suspect Society:
Democracy or Disposability? , will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in
2009. 

    Kenneth Saltman is associate professor in the
department of Educational Policy Studies and Research at DePaul
 University in Chicago.
He is the author, most recently, of Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking
 Public Schools,
(Paradigm Publishers 2007), and editor of Schooling and the Politics of
Disaster (Routledge 2007). 
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