Abstract
Since the 1980s, but particularly under the Bush administration, certain elements of the religious right, the corporate culture, and the Republican right wing have argued that free public education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to transform schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the marketplace. As the educational historian David Labaree rightly argues, public schools have been under attack in the last decade “not just because they are deemed ineffective but because they are public.”1 Right-wing efforts to disinvest in public schools as critical sites of teaching and learning and govern them according to corporate interests is obvious in the emphasis on standardized testing, the use of top-down curricular mandates, the influx of advertising in schools, the use of profit motives to “encourage” student performance, the attack on teacher unions and modes of pedagogy that stress rote learning and memorization. For the Bush administration, testing has become the ultimate accountability measure, belying the complex mechanisms of teaching and learning. The hidden curriculum is : that testing be used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by reducing them to mere technicians; that students be similarly reduced to customers in the marketplace rather than as engaged, critical learners and that always underfunded public schools fail so that they can eventually be privatized.
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Notes
This term comes from David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
For a brilliant analysis of the “governing through crime” complex, see Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Advancement Project in partnership with Padres and Jovenes Unidos, Southwest Youth Collaborative, Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track, New York: Children & Family Justice Center of Northwestern University School of Law, March 24, 2005, p. 31.
Christopher G. Robbins, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling, Albany: SUNY Press, 2008.
See also, Henry A. Giroux, The Abandoned Generation, New York: Palgrave, 2004.
David Hursh and Pauline Lipman, “Chapter 8: Renaissance 2010: The Reassertion of Ruling-Class Power through Neoliberal Policies in Chicago” in David Hursh, High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Kenneth J. Saltman, Chapter 3: Renaissance 2010 and No Child Left Behind Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools” (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
See Dorothy Shipps, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880–2000, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006.
See, for example, Summary Report, “America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline,” Children’s Defense Fund. Available online at www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/CPP_report_2007_summary.pdf?docID=6001; also see, Elora Mukherjee, “Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools,” New York: American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties, March 2008, pp. 1–36.
As has been widely, reported, the prison industry has become big business with many states spending more on prison construction than on university construction. Jennifer Warren, “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008,” (Washington, DC: The PEW Center on the States, 2007).
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© 2010 Kenneth J. Saltman
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Giroux, H.A., Saltman, K.J. (2010). Coda: Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling. In: The Gift of Education. Education, Politics, and Public Life. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105768_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105768_9
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