Christopher A. Lizotte of the University of Washington and Dan Cohen published an interesting research paper about how market-driven policies have been promoted and sold. The paper was published in 2014-2015, and the trends described here have become more powerful, promoted by some of the wealthiest people in the nation. The title of the paper is “Teaching the Market: Fostering Consent to Education Markets in the United States.”
Abstract. Marked-based reforms in education have garnered the support of politicians, philanthropists, and academics, reworking the nature of public education in the United States. In this paper we explore the methods used to produce consent for market-based reforms of primary and secondary (K-12) schooling in the United States, focusing on two case studies to interrogate how this consent is generated as well as how these reforms are resisted in place. In doing so we illustrate how market-making in public services is a contested terrain and the importance of understanding the nature of their roll-out at the local level.
Here is a brief excerpt:
We understand this shift toward marketization in education and its recent acceleration as being situated within the broad neoliberal shift towards privatization and deregulation of formerly public goods that has taken place over the past thirty years. As in other sectors that have been subject to this treatment, this process has occurred not simply through the retreat of the state but through the deliberate repurposing of the state to reshape its institutions in the image of a market (Peck and Tickell, 2002); indeed, many of the reforms that have taken place within education are the result of explicit state policies to create market pressures within education (Lubienski, 2005): These policies include (to name a few): the imposition of standardized testing as a method through which schools can be ‘judged’ by the market, the threat of school closures for ‘failing’ schools, and the use of selective grants to reward schools and districts conforming most closely to principles of deregulation and privatization. Crucially, however, these marketization processes require careful priming in order to generate public consent for market-based reforms. In particular, the marketization of education is powerfully promoted through the notion of school ‘choice’. Presented as an apolitical and socially neutral mechanism for allowing parents to maximize their children’s educational opportunities, choice is endowed with a moral authority that obscures the power inherent in who can exercise the power to choose and the available range of choices. This choice, it is argued, finds its natural expression in the expansion of markets as a supposedly level playing field where the best-performing options rise to the top and those that fail are eventually discarded. Indeed, as Rose (1999) claims, choice, defined as the individual maximization of opportunities, has become the litmus test by which good membership in the polity is defined. In this light, the term, like those used to describe other market-making projects in public services, hides assumptions about what kinds of choice can be legitimately exercised and under what circumstances. The power to ‘choose’ as it is understood under contemporary capitalism is a highly individualized capacity that seeks to maximize one’s return on investment. Other alternative possibilities tend to fade out of view in the language of most market-based school reformers.
I think the whole idea of market-driven education is bizarre. The cornerstone of the “markets” is competition and competition requires winners and losers; good companies drive our bad companies, strong companies outcompete weak companies, but is this what we want for our children, winners and losers?
The whole point of public education was to instill a sense of “we are all in this together” politically and so to support our democracy, thereby. Those trying to support “competition-based education” are deliberately trying to undermine our democracy and need top be fought at that level. They need to be addressed as being anti-American, anarchists, etc.
now adamantly selling the theory that America stands for untethered capitalism, not democracy: and so many people buying in
Yes, as citizens of a community, to keep democracy intact, we need to sit around a table solving problems with a shared set of values instilled, having learned them in public education.
Market based education teaches values approved by Bill Gates or whomever floats a variety of attractive but disparate values to those who seek to fashion our government in their own image of totalitarian capitalism, beginning, of course, with our children.
Charters schools and any other attempt to privatize that public education that brought droves of volunteers to defend democracy all over the world in a variety of wars since our inception, are an insult to those thousand of souls resting at Arlington National Cemetery.
As much as a threat to democracy the values propagated by those who sought to destroy it in the past have been, those who seek to privatize our protective, public education are, in my opinion , an even bigger threat.
The article discusses various attempts to turn public education into a commodity. It also discusses how local communities have resisted the marketization of public education. Privatization is generally the result a manufactured “crisis” that is imposed by complicit politicians, some of whom profit from the privatization of education. Absent from the discussion is an analysis of results.
Privatization offers no big gains in education unless students are hand picked. There is little discussion of the impact on public school budgets and services in school districts that have experienced widespread privatization. There is no analysis of all the disruption and chaos caused by monetization of education. Now that privatized systems have existed for over twenty years, we have seen public schools cutting essential services in order to transfer funds to private companies that offer education on the cheap in order to preserve profit for the parent company. The needs of many take a back seat to the wants of a few. Waste, fraud, embezzling, enhanced segregation, loss of federal protections are not part of the discussion in the article. Privatization is more about generating profit and less about addressing student needs.
Market-based education is oxymoronic. And moronic. The excerpt was heavily laden with pseudo-academic jargon that detracted from its intention.
It’s a really barren ideology and I think that’s why it doesn’t create any real enthusiasm or committment in the public so has to be sold over and over and over.
They took this noble idea – universal public education- and reduced it to a product. The original idea was much bigger and richer than the technocratic replacement. Really difficult to pull off well, admittedly, but much bigger and richer than giving everyone a voucher and telling them to go find a cluster of “individualized” education providers to contract with.
I think ed reformers will find there’s no enduring public will to financially support it- privatized K-12 education will be politically vulnerable because it doesn’t ask anything of anyone other than funding the voucher. It’s in no sense a community or public project.
All of ed reform is going to end up as vouchers. That is inexorably and inevitably where this ends up. The ed reform ideology is inconsistent with public systems. They’re halfway there already. Ten years ago a ” backpack of cash to purchase edu-services” was considered too far Right for ed reform- now it’s the majority and mainstream.
K-12 education is the last universal public system in the US. Did any of these “reformers” consider what they’re throwing away when they privatize it? Why are they so insanely and arrogantly confident that privatized systems will be better and more equitable? What other privatized system in the US makes them believe that?
It’s a shame that there’s no real discussion of any of this outside of a small group of public education supporters. I think the public will deeply, deeply regret throwing the universal public system in the trash. They understand that once it’s gone they’ll never get it back, right? All they’ll be doing is lobbying for vouchers- the Massachusets voucher will be bigger than the Mississippi voucher but that will be the extent of public input and investment into “public education”. Barren. No one will be attending any rallies to increase the voucher amount from 5500 to 5600. The whole “public” part will be gone.
30 years after this “movement” announced they would be taking over and running public education they are just now asking what public schools are for:
“Now and into the indefinite future, what will we understand public schools are for? In the absence of clear learning goals or accountability, why should parents be required to send kids to school and childless taxpayers forced to pay for them? It’s still true that America needs young adults to be ready for higher education and training in professions, and to become part of a thoughtful electorate. But the institutions created to seek those goals have, in many places, lost their focus. Consensus about the goals of public education has eroded, and our growing polarization and civic distrust will make it hard to restore.”
“The institutions created to seek those goals”. That would be “the institutions” these people chopped up, privatized and threw in the trash because they were all genuis “innovators” who should be permitted to radically reform a public system and turn it into a private one.
Reap the whirlwind. They’ve created a collection of consumers instead of citizens and they’re wondering why there’s no consensus. What is it the public is supposed to rally around? A voucher? A payment system? “Educational delivery systems” (as one ed reform university department describes schools)?. The technocrats are wondering why they don’t inspire anyone. Because it’s just a market and our only role is as consumers?
Ed reform is about as inspiring as choosing a cell phone plan. Of course there’s no “community”. Markets weren’t designed to produce communities. They’re designed to deliver products.
Well put. If you destroy the purpose of school, then ask what the purpose of school might be, that makes you a ________.
I have been wondering a lot about what competition in the marketplace does for us in the area of larger economics of late. Unbridled competition, a child of the colonial era, produced a fascinating array of things like chattel slavery and genocide directed at those who stood in the way of those who would compete. Something else came of that era, however. The Enlightenment, fueled by the competition that produced a new wealthy class in Europe, suggested the idea of government by the consent of the governed, and science as a way to consider reality. Whether a direct result of competition or as a by product of the economic stirrings of the era, we would surely not be in favor of the result of abandoning these principles. So is competition good or bad? I say yes, both.
To date, no system has worked well that ignores the nature of humanity. The ideas of Montesquieu recognize the nature of man as a pack animal. He sought to create an ideal of government that took this into account. Adam Smith sought to describe how people relate to each other as economic inhabitants of the earth. He studied their natural tendencies. We need to unite the good things of each good idea.
Manufacturing consent sounds like something Bill Cosby used to do.
“The power to ‘choose’ as it is understood under contemporary capitalism is a highly individualized capacity that seeks to maximize one’s return on investment.”
It is ironic and revealing that in public services where competition has been promoted as a remedy toward reform, i.e. education, health care, or prisons, anti-competitive practices have been put in place through contract procurement that, in fact, have kept those responsible for services, such as principals, teachers, doctors, or nurses, from pursuing opportunities to actually improve.