Failure of Corporate School Reform by Saltman Kenneth J.;

Author:Saltman, Kenneth J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4185938
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The New Market Positivism in the New

Two-Tiered Educational System

As David Hursh, Sandra Mathison, and Mark Garrison42 among others powerfully emphasize, we must understand the emphasis on standardized testing as both utterly central to historical struggles over public education and central to the current neoliberal school reforms. What is afoot in the current privatization initiatives is an attempt to do nothing short of transform public education into a private market, essentially ending public education.

The transformation of public education into a private market is being done by what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” David Harvey describes as “accumulation by dispossession,” and in education I have termed “capitalizing on disaster” or “smash and grab privatization,” in which declarations of disaster, failure, and crisis are used to implement long-standing privatization initiatives that could not be otherwise enacted. This broader privatization trend is particularly evident in the rapidly expanding charter movement (which is a frontal assault on teachers’ unions, teacher work, and teaching as a critical and intellectual endeavor, and the spear tip of the privatization movement), the continuing voucher movement, Race to the Top, and the organized efforts of the venture philanthropies43 neoliberal think tanks, associations, and political organizations as well as back-to-back secretaries of the U.S. Department of Education attended by their staff of bureaucrats with a corporate view of school reform.

These organizations and individuals are rapidly succeeding in smashing teachers’ unions and overrunning local school boards in order to put in place privatized school networks, as in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, this great neoliberal experiment in privatization, in which a school district was remade with privatized charter networks, is currently being expanded statewide in Louisiana. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana Board of Education superintendent Paul Pastorek, and Recovery School District CEO Paul Vallas seek to ratchet up school failure scores to declare more and more public schools as “failed” and subject to closure and replacement by privatized schools. The privatizers have a profound antipathy for teacher education and academically grounded certification, local school boards, and community governance and seem to favor anti-intellectual practicalism, teacher de-skilling, and radical experimentation with unproven market-based reforms.

What the teachers’ unions, education scholars, teachers, and everyone concerned about strengthening public education have to grasp is that as long as the framing of educational quality remains trapped within the current frame of allegedly neutral and allegedly objective quantifiable “student achievement,” public education stands to be dismantled.

The kind of schooling pushed by the privatization advocates aims to transform a current dual system of public schooling into another dual system of public schooling. In the current dual system, elite public schools in rich, predominantly white communities prepare managers, leaders, and professionals for the top of the economy and the state while the underfunded public schools in poor, working-class, and predominantly nonwhite communities prepare the docile, disciplined workforce for the bad jobs at the bottom of the economy or for exclusion from the economy altogether. Despite the ceaseless neoliberal and liberal rhetoric of crisis and failure, the public schools—as Freire,

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