Clinton

The Flipping of Education Policy: When Big Government Became a Good Thing and Local Control Became Bad

Deborah Duncan Owens Common Core State Standards, conservatism, corporate education reform, free market education policies, local school districts , , , ,

Several years ago my husband, Thomas Fiala, and I presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) conference regarding education policy.  President Obama had recently been elected and No Child Left Behind was choking the life out of public education. The steady drumbeat of free market privatization was clearly echoing across the nation.  Race to the Top was starting to boil across the country and its scalding corrosive steam was beginning to be felt.  Our paper explored the convergence of education policy discussions across the decades and we presented it at a political science conference because it was as much about the intrusion of economic policy and conservative ideology in the education arena as it was education policy.  The MPSA conference was an excellent venue for vetting our ideas.  Instead of preaching to the choir, we were talking with scholars from other disciplines who could challenge us and help us in our quest to understand how we ended up in this place and time with the federal government driving education policy — something that has been traditionally considered a local issue or, at best, in the hands of state governments to decide.

One of our discussants at MPSA posed an interesting question, asking, “How do you explain the fact that conservatives have always been opposed to centralized federal government and yet it was a Republican president who brought us the most far-reaching federal education policies in U.S. history?  How do you explain that?”  “Aaaah,”  We responded.  “That is the question that drives our research.”  Far from being definitive, our paper had opened up a number of questions that were not easy to answer.  And so we continued to delve into our research.

By 2014, the Common Core State Standards had become a lightning rod in the U.S. and was driving an angry groundswell of dissenters on both the political right and left.  While many conservatives were angry about the federal overreach in promoting a set of national education standards that were suspect by their very nature, many liberals were crying foul over the continued assault on public education and teachers, and an onslaught of standardized tests. And both sides were questioning the profit motive that was driving corporate influence in education policy.

The time was right to write The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy.  In this book I try to answer the question posed at the Midwest Political Science Association conference several years earlier.  While the key to understanding current education policy is acknowledging the powerful influence of conservative voices that have never missed an opportunity to criticize the very notion of public education since at least 1931 when Albert Jay Nock wrote The Theory of Education in the United States, to understand how these ideas became the wellspring of current education policy requires an examination of public policy in general. Conservative thinkers such as Nock and those who followed him, most notably free market economist Milton Friedman, were provided a national stage when President Reagan was elected.  And while Reagan’s first order of business in the education policy arena was intended to be the abolition of the federal Department of Education, the publication of the erroneous, misleading, and factually wrong report A Nation at Risk created a heady atmosphere among Reagan supporters that their conservative ideas could finally form the basis of national education policy in the years to come.  While ANAR did not immediately yield the fruit of their most cherished idea — vouchers and school choice — it did provide a platform for promoting the privatization of public education.  And the inflammatory report did provide the impetus for dismantling our nation’s public school system by creating a crisis mentality and promoting the zeitgeist that all our public schools are failing.  This zeitgeist has gone largely unchallenged, and when it was challenged in the early 90s with the Sandia Report, the administration of George H.W. Bush had the report buried so that it would never be publicly reported to the American citizens.

When a Democrat was elected as president, our nation had an opportunity to reclaim our nation’s public school system and celebrate the achievement of a nation that had for so long envisioned public schools as an arena for hope and equity.  Acknowledging that schools serve and reflect communities and that there was still so much work to be done to overcome structural problems like poverty, income disparity, racism, and unequal funding for public schools that interfere with a child’s educational attainment, we could have embarked on an era of genuine reform — both socially and educationally.  Instead, we placed our faith in Bill Clinton and understanding his public and education policies is essential if one is to understand the origins of the Common Core.  He opened the gate, through his allegiance to the free market and his adoption of third way politics, to corporate leaders who took a place at the head of the table in education policies.  And corporate leaders seized the opportunity with gusto.  As a result, Bill Clinton became the architect of what would become No Child Left Behind, which would be skillfully named by George W. Bush to reflect the trademarked motto (“Leave no Child Behind”) of Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund.

Corporate leaders have been setting the agenda in education for several decades now.  They do not act in a conspiratorial way.  They were invited to the policy table and they have not left.  No one blinked an eye when they openly declared that they envisioned the education arena as a way to make huge profits.  They organized summits and conferences to plot their strategy.  Corporate leaders and think tank executives move freely between governmental appointments and private enterprise to expand their influence.  They act boldly and brush off any criticism about their actions because they can afford to do so.

A growing number of scholars have begun to acknowledge that governmental decision making in the U.S. has been corrupted by this third way of governance.  Mike Lofgren calls it the Deep State, explaining the phenomenon on the Bill Moyers show.  In deciphering the policies that have culminated in RTTT and CCSS, I think I now understand how we got here.  The question now remains — how do we get out of here?  How do we reclaim our public schools?   A first step, I believe, is reclaiming local control over public schools.  This we cannot surrender.  A growing number of education critics are arguing that local school governance is the problem.  We are seeing a growing trend in which entire school districts are being turned over to private management firms and the power of local school boards is being assaulted.  It is only at the local level, with democratically elected school boards, that we can complete the work of reclaiming public schools and address problems inherent with faulty standards, curricula, high stakes testing, teacher evaluation, data mining, and the other toxic policies emanating  from centralized authorities who long ago relinquished their responsibilities to corporations intent on using education policies as a way to make a buck on the backs of our children.  School boards have the power to drive the money lenders from the temple.  Of course, they must seize their power by collectively demanding that our elected officials restructure school funding so that school districts do not have to bow to the altar of state and federal officials to ensure that their children receive equitable funding for their public schools.

For Poor Children, “It is the Economy, Stupid”

Deborah Duncan Owens children and poverty, education reform , ,

As I concluded the research for my upcoming book, The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy, I was left with the conviction that untangling and dismantling corporate free market education reform policies requires a citizen mass willing and able to speak truth to power.  Topping my list of recommendations for reclaiming our public schools in the U.S. is the following:

“When politicians or pundits begin a discussion with an assertion that the entire American public school system is a failure it is a clear indication that … they would rather target public schools for reform than engage in a meaningful discussion about how to eliminate poverty and larger social issues that are at the root of low academic achievement in some communities in America” (p. 210).

You see, for children, education reform should and must begin with efforts to eliminate poverty.  Those of us who have taught in high-poverty schools and worked with children who are the victims of our nation’s allegiance to free market economic policies know all too well that simply reforming schools and blaming teachers for low achievement doesn’t target what is really at the heart of low achievement.  A number of years ago, as I was interviewing an excellent veteran reading teacher in the Mississippi Delta, she made a poignant statement that I will never forget.  She was talking about her efforts to provide reading interventions in a school that served children living in extreme poverty.  She felt defeated and frustrated and, on this day, she was sad.  She said, “I’m trying to teach these children to read, and they’re trying to survive.”

Brett Dickerson, too, understands how high poverty rates impact students and teachers.  In August, he wrote “… schools with high poverty rates tend to wear down the best teachers and burn them out from the relentless pressures of poverty-related issues in their students.”

In my years in Mississippi working in high poverty schools I was keenly aware of how vulnerable and isolated children are when they live in impoverished communities — both urban and rural.  They are, indeed, trying to survive.  They are highly motivated to learn, but sometimes life just gets in the way.  It’s hard to concentrate when you don’t know if you’ll have anything to eat at home or you don’t know where you’ll be staying that night.  It’s hard to concentrate when your neighborhood is not a place where you can safely play.  So many of the children I taught talked about violence they’d witnessed first-hand and they were too knowledgeable about the drug culture that surrounded them every day.  On two separate occasions I saw children pick up freshly sharpened pencils and use them to pretend they were injecting themselves with drugs in the crooks of their little arms.  It broke my heart. These were very young children.  And they didn’t ask for the opportunity to be so worldly wise.

James Carville, President Clinton’s campaign manager is attributed with developing the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  It was a successful strategy and helped Clinton get elected.  However, four years later Clinton enacted his welfare reform strategy, prompting Clinton appointee Peter Edelman to publicly resign his position and write a scathing critique for The Atlantic entitled “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done.”  The nation should have listened when Edelman stated, “I am afraid … that along the way we will do some serious injury to American children, who should not have had to suffer from our national backlash.”  But the nation didn’t listen.  And children have suffered.  Peter Edelman’s wife, Marian Wright Edelman, is the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.  The Edelmans met in 1967 when Peter accompanied Senator Robert Kennedy to the Mississippi Delta and witnessed first-hand the devastating poverty in the region.  Marion Wright, then working for the NAACP, accompanied Kennedy and her future husband, Peter Edelman, as they toured impoverished communities and homes.

Marian Wright Edelman has been a stalwart voice for poor children in the United States.  The Children’s Defense Fund ceaselessly advocates for children, publishing annual reports on the state of childhood poverty in our country.

Because, of course, for children, “it is the economy, stupid.”  And for Black children, the situation is dire.  In September, 2014, the CDF provided the following analysis of childhood poverty in the U.S.:

“Poverty data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on September 16, 2014 reveal that child poverty dropped significantly for the first time since 2000, from 21.8 percent in 2012 to 19.9 percent in 2013. While child poverty decreased for Hispanic, White and Asian children, Black children saw no decrease and continue to have the highest child poverty rate. Despite some decreases child poverty among all children remains at shamefully high levels. Nearly one in five children – 14.7 million – were poor in 2013, and children remain the poorest age group in the country. Although 1.5 million fewer children were poor in 2013, there were still 1.3 million more poor children than in 2007 before the recession began.”

No amount of education reform initiatives, grit studies, or no-excuse charter schools can overcome the unwieldy noose of poverty that strengthens its grip every day on the lives of poor and vulnerable children.  Peter Edelman began his article for The Atlantic with the statement, “I hate welfare.”  I do, too.  Most of all, I hate the need for welfare and I hate the fact that it is the children who suffer the most.  For one of the wealthiest nations in the world to have nearly 20% of its children living in poverty is a national disgrace.

I am sad, too, that our politicians and education policy makers continually point to teachers and schools as the institution that has the power to overcome childhood poverty.  We cannot.