On One Elsewords: Public Schools Have Been Made to Answer for Capitalism’s Crimes
Hi friends, this week we are highlighting Nora De La Cour’s insightful review of From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State by Daniel S. Moak for Jacobin Magazine:
Anyone who has applied to teach at a public school in the past twenty years has probably felt the need to pack their resume with statements like “used rigorous instruction to build essential college- and career-readiness skills,” or “empowered students to compete in today’s global economy.”
Under neoliberal education reform, the notion that public schooling’s primary aim should be to make individual students more attractive to their future employers has attained the status of common sense. But human capital theory wasn’t always the dominant way of understanding of education’s purpose. Indeed, the concept of schooling to boost employability only became ubiquitous by eclipsing earlier philosophies that elevated the collective, democracy-supporting role of public education.
To understand how, in the education-reform era, the federal government began forcing states to attack teachers and schools in the name of “accountability,” it makes sense to begin the story in 2002. When George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law, high-stakes standardized testing became mandatory for all public school students, with penalties for schools that failed to adequately progress toward the literally impossible goal of 100 percent proficiency.
Or, taking a wider view, we might trace the federal assault on schools and the teaching profession back to A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report commissioned by Reagan’s education secretary Terrel Bell, which warned that “a rising tide” of educational mediocrity threatened US commercial primacy. The Reagan Revolution, many have argued, saw the rise of a broad coalition of religious conservatives, neocons, neoliberals, and corporate interests committed for various reasons to dismantling egalitarian Great Society education policy.
In From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State, Daniel S. Moak makes a fascinating intervention into the above accounts, arguing that punitive accountability reforms like NCLB or Obama’s Race to the Top initiative are in fact ideologically continuous with Great Society education policy and rhetoric, which positioned schooling as the answer to racial and economic inequality.
Moak chronicles how, between the 1930s and the 1950s, the view that education could fix problems like unemployment and poverty by better equipping students for the existing economy vied with claims that the existing economy had caused these problems in the first place. The former theory ultimately triumphed in Washington, and the faith in schools’ magical power to eradicate inequality was codified in Lyndon Johnson’s signature education law — paving the way for the punishing accountability programs that have hammered students, teachers, and schools in this century.
Check out the rest of Nora’s review at Jacobin.