to
“reclaim the conversation” challenges leading liberal educators to
repudiate their involvement in what’s being called “corporate school
reform.” We finally see liberal activists opposing the bipartisan
education project that has subjected school and teachers to “free
market” policies. Liberals are starting to contest privatization,
testing, and attacks on teacher unions, rather than accepting neoliberal
assumptions and policies taken wholesale from right-wing think tanks
and functions.
, we’ve seen an acceleration of critique in traditionally liberal media about school reform — from
. There’s even been a whiff of
on the common core curriculum. Why did liberals urge teachers unions to
on contractual issues that protect kids and miss what the unions should have been doing, like
To
be fair, liberals have not been alone in their confusion about policies
cloaked in the rhetoric used by the civil rights movement about
equalizing educational opportunity. The pace of change in education has
been breathtaking, schools and teachers battered by the speed and force
of mandates. The most profound changes in education were made more
enticing with the carrot of increased funding. Cash-strapped school
districts and states couldn’t turn down extra money they received as a
quid pro quo for adopting the stranglehold of testing and privatization
required by “No Child Left Behind” and, more recently, “Race to the
Top.” Still, for way too long, liberals assumed that
schools could be “fixed” without tackling social and economic inequality
Liberals couldn’t see this big picture, partly because as Bhaskar Sunkara
writes,
“American liberalism is ineffective and analytically inadequate.” But
why? One reason is that they want to be non-ideological and practical,
and without principles to guide them, they are pulled in the political
direction exerting the most influence.
David Steiner,
currently Hunter College Dean and a former Commissioner of Education in
New York State and Director of Arts at the country’s largest teachers
union, the National Education Association, illustrates how liberals
persuade themselves to support neoliberal policies. It’s essential, he
argues, “to be non-aligned [ideologically]” and look at “policy
recommendations, policy as executed based on its merits and not on
whether it’s the darling child of the left or the right…”
When
power relations are skewed, however, the “merits” are generally found in
the right-hand column if one’s principles don’t configure the analysis.
Steiner argues that teacher education should take up important
questions like how often to make eye-contact with students and omit
issues that are irrelevant for teaching, like schooling’s role in a
democracy.
Teaching about social justice is objectionable to Steiner because it challenges the status quo.
Confusion about whether they even have an ideology has allowed U.S. liberals
to evade confronting
the choice between “profits and people,” the contradiction embedded in
capitalism at the heart of “free market” reforms. Liberals accepted
making public schools compete with charters. They permitted
outsourcing test creation and grading, teachers’
evaluation , professional development, as well as
hiring to
transnational corporations that are virtually unregulated. Many
liberals persuaded themselves that corporations could make profits in
the previously non-profit sector of education without hurting kids. But
when is there ever enough money left over in school for profit? When do
you
not need the money for children?
Take liberal
confusion over charter schools. Advocating charter schools to boost
academic outcomes for poor, minority kids presumes that we can provide
equal educational opportunity and simultaneously maintain a
status quo of
segregated housing and schooling. If you are unwilling to wage the
unpopular fight for residential and school integration and equalized
(and adequate) school funding, charter schools can seem a “good enough”
compromise. The controversy over charter schools is symptomatic of
liberalism’s unwillingness to face racism’s embeddedness in almost every
aspect of education. The claim of leaving “no child behind” had a
powerful resonance in part because educational inequality persisted in
the twenty-first century. To deny that reality, as do many liberals who
have awakened to the dangers of “corporate school reform” (led by feisty
born-again liberal Diane Ravitch), is to assume that schooling of
white, middle-class parents and children was not previously that much
different from what poor and working class children of color
experienced. It was — and is.
The impact of the education
counter-revolution, which has all but destroyed the gains in education
made by progressive social movements in the Sixties and Seventies, has
been most harmful to the children reforms were purportedly designed to
help: poor children of color and children with special needs. Cornell
West is on-target when he names the
“shameful silence” of
progressives on Obama and school reform, though he gives the Black
Caucus too much of a pass when he excuses their “protective disposition”
for a black president viciously attacked by the Right.
When white
liberals advocate for schools to which they would never send their own
children, as Ian Frazier does in his puff piece on a Harlem charter
school (skewered so well by blogger
“EduShyster”),
what’s causing their inconsistency? Racism yes, and also more than a
whisper of elitism, which can’t be disentangled from social class.
Many
liberals assume they will be unable to win others to their way of
thinking. In contrast to the Right, liberals lack confidence in the
power of their ideas so they rely on electing politicians, Democrats and
sometimes Republicans, who will carry out their ideals, perhaps in
stealth. Because of their ideological confusion, liberals can’t imagine
alternative social and political arrangements, so when their political
friends betray them, they tend to either deny the reality or excuse it
as inevitable and look for the new shining hope.
In regard to
school reform, most liberals have accepted the “left-wing of the
possible” (Michael Harrington’s seductive phrase). But this strategy led
them to err about what may be the major moral and political issue of
the day.
Harrington refused to repudiate the War in Vietnam with enough
vigor when he should have. Liberals supported reforms that have almost
destroyed public education. Like Harrington, they failed see options
other than those created by the powerful. In contrast, Daniel Singer,
who wrote for the Nation,
began his analysis with reference to what is needed. In “Whose
Millennium: Theirs or ours?” he argues for policies not on the horizon,
noting that freedoms are unattainable “only if present political and
social arrangements are considered normative and immutable.”
We have so much evidence that
school reforms being
carried out by Democrats and Republicans aim to benefit the rich and
powerful, that we can no longer excuse liberals who don’t “get’ what’s
happening. School closings
devastate communities and are often driven by developers who want to gentrify neighborhoods (the critical fact lost in a
confused story in the Atlantic website about the real estate “mess” created by not having enough developers who will take over the closed schools). While
standardized testing scandals are being exposed, Atlanta schools teachers and administrators, mostly black, are being
indicted and jailed, Michelle Rhee,
also implicated in a test scandal, is criticized mainly because she has more Republicans than Democrats
donating to her front group “Students First.”
At
this point, the notion that liberals who don’t “get” the big picture
have good intentions is itself a form of denial. The best way to educate
liberals is to stand up for principles of social justice and equality,
as the recently
re-elected reformers who
lead the Chicago Teachers Union are doing. We need to fight smart and
hard for what we believe in and let the liberals follow — or not.
Read more at Jacobinmag.com
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