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Race, Poverty & the Environment | Vol. 19 No. 1 — 2012

The “reform” rhetoric is enormously seductive toparents and low-income communities whose childrenattend poorly funded, poorly functioning schools. In pre-dominantly Hispanic and African American neighbor-hoods, schools are often incapable of providing childrenwith more than the rudiments of literacy because theycannot afford to recruit and retain sufficient numbers ofteachers. Schools that serve large concentrations of recentimmigrants are usually so underfunded and overwhelmedby the number of students that they are compelled to usebathrooms and closets as classrooms.

Education “reforms” like NCLB and Race to the Top,however, presume that if children do not succeed atschool, the responsibility rests solely with the school.Such an approach destroys the structure and organizationof a publicly-funded and presumably publicly-controlledsystem of education begun more than a century ago. Infact, NCLB closely resembles the blueprint developed inultra right-wing think tanks for replacing locally con-trolled, state-funded school systems with a collection ofprivatized services governed by the market. What NCLBchiefly adds to the original “free market” framework isstandardized curricula and testing and the ChristianRight’s “faith-based” interventions.

Applying the Skewed Logic of Free Markets to SchoolsThe free market underpinning to education pretends

that schools can compensate for the array of savage eco-nomic and social problems created or abetted by govern-

ment policies. Under such flawed reasoning, publicfunding for low-cost housing is reduced or eliminatedbecause the “market” is best at regulating housing costsand availability. However, when markets fail, resulting insoaring rates of homelessness, schools are told that it isnot an acceptable excuse for a child’s poor performance. Ifthere is sufficient political furor over the schools’ inabilityto cope with this crisis, the government creates a discretetoken allocation for educational services for the homeless.But the allocation often is too small relative to the enor-mity of the problem to be meaningful. Just tracking thewhereabouts of children who move from one shelter toanother, let alone providing them with appropriate serv-ices, is beyond the capacity of most urban schoolsystems, which would have to interact with numerousbureaucratic, under-resourced and dysfunctional agenciesin the process.

A program to advance educational opportunity has tobe undertaken as part of a larger project to end inequality,including de facto school segregation. To argue thatschools have a limited capacity to ameliorate economicand social inequality is not to diminish the moral orpolitical importance of the struggle to improve education.Any progressive movement deserving of the name willdemand that public schools provide all students with aneducation that will allow them to be well-rounded, pro-ductive citizens, capable of competing for well-payingjobs. Improving schools for the poor and working classcan make a difference in the lives of some children and

By Lois Weiner

Privatizing Public Education: The Neoliberal Model

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed with bipartisan support during the Bush presidency and despite many attempts torepeal it, it’s still the law of the land. Its rhetorical promise, like the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” program, isthat the federal government will hold public schools accountable for their failure to educate poor and working class His-panic and African American students. But the purported aim of increasing educational opportunity masks the real intent ofthese so-called education reformers to create a privatized system of public education that has a narrow, vocational curricu-lum enforced through standardized tests.  

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Next Generation

for that reason alone, progressive school reform deservesour attention. Improving schools for all children is of crit-ical political significance because it demands that Ameri-can democracy make good on its pledge of equality.However, we also need to be cognizant of the limitationsof school reform as a policy vehicle for making societymore equitable. As the authors1 of Choosing Equality: TheCase for Democratic Schooling note, education can chal-lenge the tyranny of the labor market—but cannot elimi-nate it. As neoliberal policies tighten their grip on govern-ments and capitalism’s assault on the living conditions ofworking people intensifies, schooling becomes an everweakening lever for improving the economic well-beingof individuals even as it remains a critical arena for politi-cal struggle.

Any agenda for progressive social change, whichincludes improving education, must address what histori-an David Hogan calls “the silent compulsion of economicrelations,” i.e. the nexus of racial segregation in schoolsand housing and the funding of schools with local prop-erty taxes. Segregation in housing has become the pretextfor abandoning the challenge of racially integratingschools, which in turn has seriously weakened the forcesthat can challenge funding inequities. Some AfricanAmerican activists and researchers advocate dropping thedemand for integrating schools, arguing that AfricanAmerican children would be better served in segregatedschools staffed by African American teachers. Althoughthe despair that underlies such thinking is understand-able,2 the reality is that racially segregated schools andschool systems are more isolated politically and, thus,more vulnerable in funding battles with state legislatures.The urgency for making schools better is undeniable, butso is the necessity for mounting a political and legal chal-lenge to de facto school segregation and the use of localproperty taxes to fund schools.

NCLB and Capital’s Global Agenda for EducationThe endurance of NCLB is a dismal indication of the

level of disorientation about education’s role in a democ-racy and the contradiction of privatizing this essentialcivic function.

Underlying the bipartisan endorsement of “schoolreform” is a shared ideological support for a neoliberalglobal capitalist economy and neoliberal view of educa-tion. In both industrialized and developing nations,neoliberal reforms are promoted as rationalizing andequalizing delivery of social services. Even the World

Bank demands curricular and structural changes in educa-tion when it provides loans as outlined in its draft “WorldDevelopment Report 2004: Making Services Work forPoor People,” which describes education’s purpose solelyin terms of preparing workers for jobs in a globaleconomy where capitalism can move jobs wherever itwishes—that is, to countries where profits trump workingconditions and salaries. The draft was later modified innegotiations with governments and non-governmentalorganizations, but the original is a declaration of war,especially on public education and independent teachersunions.

Public education remains the largest piece of publicexpenditure, highly unionized and not yet privatized. Thedraft report identifies unions, especially teachers unions,as one of the greatest threats to global prosperity, arguingthat they have “captured governments,” holding poorpeople hostage to demands for more pay and suggeststhat teachers should be fired wholesale when they strikeor resist demands for reduced pay. The report also callsfor privatizing services, greatly reducing public funding,devolving control of schools to neighborhoods, andincreasing user fees. The World Bank has implementedmany elements of the draft report by making loans andaid contingent upon “restructuring,” which is to say,destroying public funding and control of educationalsystems. The results, writes University of Buenos AiresProfessor Adriana Puiggros, have been devastating to liter-acy rates and the Bank’s promise of equality.3

A key element of the program is limiting access tohigher education through the imposition of higher tuitionand reduced government support to institutions and indi-vidual students. Meanwhile, lower education is chargedonly with preparing students for jobs requiring basicskills, which the multinationals aim to move from onecountry to another. Schools that train workers for jobsrequiring limited literacy is all we can realistically expectfor poor people in poor countries, says the report, andthey do not require well-educated or skilled teachers.Teachers with significant education are a liability becausethey are costly to employ and the largest expense of anyschool system, the report argues, whereas minimally edu-cated workers require only teachers who are themselvesminimally educated.

Most of NCLB’s elements for reorganizing educationin the U.S. are straight out of the World Bank draftreport: Charter schools and vouchers to be used in privateschools fragment oversight and control; testing require-

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ments and increasingly punitive measures for low scorespressure schools to limit what is taught so that the testsbecome the curriculum; privatization of school services,such as tutoring and professional development for teach-ers tied to raising test scores, undercuts union influenceand membership.

Teachers Unions Fight Neoliberal DownscalingThe Bush administration was quite open about the

explicit linkage between a deskilled teaching force and anarrow curriculum as evidenced by the statements ofGrover Whitehurst, an undersecretary in the Departmentof Education agency responsible for education research.Public investment in research about teacher education isunnecessary, he maintained, because the government isrequired to provide only a basic education that willprepare students for entry-level jobs; therefore, govern-ment funds are better spent creating materials for teach-ing basic skills that teachers with little or no expertisecan use. This is precisely the strategy promoted in thedraft report, which lauds programs that briefly train 15year old peasant girls, who then teach literacy skills inrural areas.

One way to limit access is to charge fees to attendschool at all levels. We see the former strategy in underde-veloped countries, where families must often pay forschooling that was once available for free. In fact, a WorldBank condition for loans explicitly prohibited free educa-tion until a movement by liberals in the U.S. Congress,informed and inspired by global justice activists, chal-lenged it.

Access to learning is also limited by curriculum. LarryKuehn, research director of the British Columbia TeachersFederation, has traced this trend to the Reagan adminis-tration, circa 1987, when the U.S. began promoting thedevelopment of “education indicators” to guide curriculaand testing at the Organization for Economic Coopera-

tion and Development (OECD). The OECD consists ofthe 29 most industrialized countries and some rapidlyindustrializing ones, such as Korea and Mexico. In theearly discussions, the OECD planned the development ofuniform curricula with “culture-free” materials appropri-ate for the new “information economy.” Kuehn’s workilluminates not only the anti-intellectual and anti-human-istic assumptions of these curricula, but also how existingexpectations about what students should learn had to be“downscaled.”

Teachers in the Global North have avoided the full forceof neoliberalism’s assault on education for decades. It isonly in the past few years that they have started to realizethat their profession and the ideals that brought them intoclassrooms may be destroyed. Many are frightened, butthey are also angry. Growing numbers realize that teachersand their unions have to reach out to communities andparents, forming mutually respectful alliances. And nowdiscussions about the global context now seem relevant.4

The universal experience of privatization, increasingtuition, enormous student debt, and ever less support forpublic education has awakened the unions. Yet, missingstill in the work of teacher unions, their leaders andranks, is an understanding that to defend public educa-tion in this country, teachers and their unions must helpdevelop an international response to neoliberalism—onethat puts justice and equity at the forefront of the union’sprogram for education and develops alliances acrossnational borders. n

Endnotes1. Ann Bastian, Norm Fruchter, Marilyn Gittell, Kenneth Haskins, and Colin Greer, foreword

by James P. Comer. Temple University Press. 1986.2. African American and Hispanic youth are frequently tracked into classes that offer low-

level materials and poor instruction rather than college preparatory work, even in wellfunded school districts.

3. <indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/cambridge/2004/02/286118.html>4. Lois Weiner, “Teacher Unionism Reborn.” New Politics, Winter 2012, Vol:XIII-4,

<newpol.org/node/579>

Lois Weiner, Ed.D. is a professor of elementary and secondary education at New Jersey City University. She is the author of Social Justice and Teach-

ers Unions: Reversing the Assault on our Schools (Haymarket Press), forthcoming October 2012. This article is adapted from one previously pub-

lished by New Politics (newpol.org/node/285).For more information on resistance of teachers to neoliberal reforms, go to teachersolidarity.com.

n

Photo:

Elementaryschools stu-dents in theBayviewHuntersPoint in SanFrancisco.

©2011 JarrelPhillips

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