(Neo)Liberalism,popular media,and the political struggle for the future of US public education

Abstract

The idea that the US public school system is ‘broken’ and needs reform has become commonplace over the past three decades. The article argues that the quest to transform public education revolves around powerful intersecting forces: ideational activism by education entrepreneurs, financial backing from billionaire philanthropists and hedge fund managers, bipartisan political endorsement, a compliant press and receptive culture industries. The aim of these combined forces, in which media play a central role and liberal tropes of freedom, choice and equality of opportunity are prevalent, is to build ideological consensus around private and market alternatives to public education.

Keywords

Class education ideology media neoliberalism

A 2008 New York Times Magazine headline asked, ‘How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?’ (Tough, 2008). This question could be posed because it was common sense that the American public (state) school system was ‘broken’ (Krueger, 1998: 29), thanks to repeated assertions by politicians, pundits and philanthropists that had been widely disseminated by the media. I was thus not surprised when, having mentioned my research on media and the debate over public schools, three colleagues from my university regaled me with claims that American public education is in crisis and needs reform. Citing the plight of poor children of colour in urban schools and the threat of the United States falling behind global competitors because of its failing school system, they echoed the indictment of public education in the documentary Waiting for Superman (2010), which they had found convincing.

I was struck by the paradox of my colleagues’ bleak view of public education, given that we work at a state research institution, are products of public schools and received our degrees from public universities. And I pondered the irony that they consider themselves political liberals committed to state-supported education as a human right and the basis of a viable democracy. But even after admitting their children had received good educations from public schools in our well-heeled university town and surrounding suburbs, they clung to their sense that the state-funded education system is in serious trouble. Where, I wondered, did my co-workers acquire an understanding of the problem with public education so tied to solutions that promote the privatization of the American school system.

In an analysis of Teach for America (TFA), a ‘prototypical liberal education reform organization’ that sends college graduates to teach for 2 years in low-income schools, Andrew Hartman (2011) notes the ‘ironies of contemporary education reform’ (p. 51). In the name of ‘delivering justice’ to underprivileged children, he argues, TFA and its allies have ‘advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers’ that fuel attacks on teachers’ unions and been the vanguard in ‘forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education – and the role of public school teachers – in a deeply unequal society’. That consensus includes the themes cited by my colleagues: US public education is a failure, especially for disadvantaged children in urban schools; the derelict school system has dire consequences for US economic and political power relative to Asia and Europe,¹ and the fairest and most rational solution to this problem is the privatization of public education. My colleagues’ acceptance of this diagnosis of public education’s malaise and the putatively necessary remedies attests to the success of the education reform agenda, which has tapped into tenets of liberal ideology, including choice, competition, merit, self-reliance, equality of opportunity, the individual versus a leviathan state, the fluidity of social hierarchies and the permeability of structural constraints.

Although the trope of broken schools is bipartisan and ubiquitous – Republican George W Bush and Democrat Barack Obama both proclaimed themselves education reform presidents with similar rhetoric promoting comparable policies – it is worth recalling its history. The attack on public education in the United States has roots in A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), a study commissioned by Ronald Reagan, who hoped to use it to shrink or eliminate the federal Department of Education. Although the report said nothing about school choice, market competition or privatization, its declaration that public education was fostering ‘a rising tide of mediocrity’ (p. 9) planted the idea that American schools were failing and launched a wave of reform efforts during a time of dramatic cuts in government funding of education. In the 1990s, school districts adopted outcome-based education based on standards that could be quantitatively measured. George H W Bush in 1989 backed the creation of national curriculum standards for public education that the Bill Clinton administration enacted in 1994. Clinton was an ardent supporter of publicly funded, privately run charter schools and counted the proliferation of state laws permitting them as a signal accomplishment of his presidency (Clinton Presidency: Expanding Education Opportunity, n.d.). A standards-driven approach to education was codified with George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, passed in 2001 with overwhelming Republican and Democratic support, which used results from annual tests on standardized curriculum to rank and discipline schools and teachers. By 2009, a fixation on standards and testing, preference for market solutions, and scepticism towards government had achieved such consensus that Obama’s Race to the Top (RTT) initiative incorporated all three principles.

Over three decades, the idea that the American public school system is broken was transformed from a question, to a hypothesis, to an article of faith. Once considered an essential individual right and foundation of a functioning democracy, public education in the United States is being transformed.² Contemporary education reform is premised on market-based values – accountability, choice, competition and entrepreneurialism – and market-driven strategies, including deregulation, privatization, data-based decision making, high-stakes test-based evaluation for students, teachers and schools, and weakening of teacher tenure and seniority rights (Cersonsky, 2013; Karp, 2012; Miner, 2013; Ravitch, 2010; Saltman, 2007). Directed primarily at low-performing urban schools with a majority of low-income African American and Latino children, education reform exhibits a neoliberal faith in privatization in the form of charter schools (publicly funded, privately managed schools with more freedom to hire/fire teachers and accept/reject/eject students, comparable to UK academies and free schools); school vouchers (state subsidies in the form of tax credits that parents apply to the cost of private and religious schools); and for-profit and non-profit education management organizations (EMOs) and charter school management organizations (CMOs).

In a critique of Waiting for Superman, Diane Ravitch (2010), who as George W. Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Education was a proponent of testing and choice and is now a vocal critic, characterized the struggle over public education thus:

There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector. (p. 24)

This article examines that clash of ideas as an ideological struggle over the future of public education in American society. It seeks to understand why public education came to be seen as a problem at a particular historical moment, how the problem has been defined, and how that definition has determined what counts as appropriate solutions. Equally important are questions of who possesses the power and resources to disseminate their judgments about public education and turn them into policy and practice, and who is subjected to those decisions, for what political ends and with what social implications. Situating the campaign to reform US public education within the rise of neoliberal restructuring and the transformation of US urban policy in conformance with neoliberal political values, the article argues that the campaign to reform public education, in which media play a powerful role, can be understood as ideological class practices implicated in the upward redistribution of wealth and power that is the hallmark of neoliberalization.

Neoliberalization and the making of new urban policy

The neoliberal political project gained force during the 1970s’ structural crisis of the global economy, with its declining rate of profit, diminished economic growth, and combined inflation and unemployment that marked the end of the post-World War II boom and undermined confidence in the dominant Keynesian economic model. The elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States commenced a transformation of the two nations’ economies through deindustrialization, growth of the service sector and a shift of investment from goods to finance, and of the role of the state in the economy by means of tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and reduced spending on public infrastructure and social programmes. As this dual economic makeover was exported to the periphery it was christened globalization. What David Kotz (2003) terms ‘neoliberal restructuring’ (p. 15) and Jamie Peck (2010) designates ‘neoliberalization’ (p. 7) is an interlocking political, economic and ideological project to establish a new set of rules for governing the functioning of capitalism. Peck characterizes neoliberalization as ‘an open-ended and contradictory process’ (Peck, 2010) aimed at ‘the capture and reuse of the state, in the interests of shaping a pro-corporate, freer-trading “market order”’ (pp. 7, 9). For Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (2005), neoliberalization’s fundamental objective is the creation of a ‘new social order’ (p. 9) to restore the ‘power and income of the upper fractions of the ruling classes’. Because that involves channelling wealth and power upward and economic insecurity downward, the success of the new order has depended on the ability to ‘establish a new social compromise in an environment of rising inequality’ by ‘associating a broader social strata to the growing prosperity of the few, really or fictitiously’ (Duménil and Lévy, 2002: 45).

Tracing the history of neoliberalism as an intellectual and political project, Peck considers the role of think tanks as an instrument to bring social policy into correspondence with free-market values. He proposes that the success of neoliberal policies has depended on think tanks’ ability to achieve a ‘major ideational and ideological realignment’ (Peck, 2010: 137) of public thinking about the proper role of the state and its relationship to the economy. As Peck (2010) argues, contrary to its ‘trademark antistatist rhetoric, neoliberalism was always concerned – at its philosophical, political, and practical core – with the challenge of seizing and retasking the state’ (p. 4). The Manhattan Institute, established in New York City in the late 1970s, was a prominent force in laying the groundwork for the neoliberalization of education policy. Treating New York as a laboratory, the institute forged its reputation by focusing on urban issues – welfare reform, law and order, race relations and education policy – with an eye towards ‘reframing the debate around America’s cities, their alleged pathologies, and their putative salvation’ (Peck, 2010: 137). In so doing, the institute and successor think tanks crafted a ‘meta-strategy’ to ‘name and narrate’ (Peck, 2010) the ‘urban problem’ (p. 140) using ideas and language that simultaneously expressed and ‘put to work an increasingly pervasive political rationality’ (p. 138). The success of this neoliberal reframing of US urban policy can be seen in the three-decade shift from welfare to workfare programmes, from policies concerned with the social causes of crime to punitive law-and-order policing, from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society expansion of the social safety net to an emphasis on individual charity and private philanthropy, and in the accelerating push towards privatization and consumer choice in fundamental social goods, including education and health.

This is the context in which the link was forged between the rhetoric of choice and the rhetoric of failing schools. Buoyed by and working in tandem with the mandates of the NCLB Act and the RTT initiative, education reform has become synonymous with a ‘corporate-backed, market-driven, testing-oriented movement in urban education’ (Cersonsky, 2013). Since the 1990s, as educational privatization became the default solution to the challenges facing America’s urban schools, the quest to transform public education has revolved around a set of powerful intersecting forces: ideational activism by education entrepreneurs, financial backing from billionaire philanthropists and hedge fund managers, bipartisan political endorsement supported by lobbyists and think tanks and the assistance of a compliant press and receptive culture industries. Together, the activities of these individuals and institutions constitute a meta-strategy to erode confidence in public education and build ideological consensus around private and market solutions. A crucial part of that process, in which media are thoroughly implicated, has involved deploying the liberal tropes of freedom, choice and equality of opportunity in the quest to name and narrate what’s wrong with public education and what should be done to fix it.

Naming and narrating the problem

A researcher surveying the electronic landscape of the education reform issue cannot help noticing the prevalence of a particular genre of images: photogenic African American and Latino children in spotless school uniforms intently focused on their lessons and teachers or engaged in a lively group exercise, thereby embodying the benefits of their escape from failing public schools. Such images show up not only in the websites, reports and press releases of education reform organizations, but in mainstream media coverage – an indication of the important function these children play in education reform’s broken schools narrative. In that romantic narrative, the children are victims, the villains are public school teachers, especially teachers unions, who put their own interests in job security above students’ need for a quality education, and the heroes are the reformers and their benefactors seeking to rescue children from the flawed public education system.

Prominent heroes include education reform entrepreneurs Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of TFA; Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Success Academy Charter School network in New York City; Geoffrey Canada, founder of New York’s Harlem Children’s Zone charter school; Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington DC schools and founder of StudentsFirst lobbying organization; and Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, founders of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school network and charter management organization. Chief among the movement’s benefactors are billionaire philanthropist organizations – Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Walton (Walmart) Family Foundation – which together have poured some US$4.4 billion into various school reform projects in the last decade (Beamish, 2011). Another major source of money is wealthy individuals from the financial sector – hedge fund managers and venture capitalists who serve on the boards of charter schools and for-profit and non-profit EMOs. Hedge fund managers have been particularly prominent in New York City, according to Barbara Miner (2010), where ‘charters are overwhelmingly controlled by hedge fund directors and finance capitalists who sit on the boards of directors that are legally responsible for running a charter and establishing its financial, educational and personnel policies’ (p. 5). One such New York hedge funder, Whitney Tilson, took his passion for education reform a step further in 2005 by founding Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political action committee that strives to drive a wedge between Democrats and the nation’s two major teachers’ unions while raising Wall Street money for Democratic candidates who support the goals of corporate education reform (Hirsch, 2010; Karp, 2012; Miner, 2010; Tultican, 2012). The political and media fields have also produced education reform heroes, including former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and his former school chancellor Joel Klein, now the CEO of News Corporation’s educational technology subsidiary, the current US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his boss Barack Obama, media mogul Oprah Winfrey and filmmaker Davis Guggenheim.

In keeping with their heroic personae, education reformers routinely couch their goals in language drawn from the US civil rights movement (Weiner, 2013). Upon being nominated Secretary of Education, Duncan said education ‘is the civil rights issue of our generation and the one sure path to a more equal, fair and just society’ (Obama, 2008). TFA’s website proclaims that ‘in our country today, the education you receive depends on where you live, what your parents earn, and the color of your skin’ and vows to correct this ‘serious injustice’ (Teach for America 2015); KIPP’s website touts its track record ‘in helping students from educationally underserved communities develop the knowledge, skills, character and habits needed to succeed in college and the competitive world beyond (‘About KIPP’ 2014); the Broad Foundation declares its aim ‘to ensure that every student in an urban public school has the opportunity to succeed’ (Broad Foundation Education, 2013); the website of DFER proclaims a commitment to ‘fighting on behalf … of low-income children of color … trapped in persistently failing schools’ (‘Statement of Principles’ 2013).

Such civil rights talk is not new; as Janelle Scott (2012) notes, ‘for at least two decades, conservatives have argued that school choice was the last unachieved civil right’ (p. 72). Its prevalence in education reform discourse draws sustenance from widely acknowledged disparities in academic performance (measured by standardized test scores, course selection, dropout rates, college attendance) between low-income and middle- to upper income students and, because African American and Latino students are over-represented in the lower economic rungs, between them and their White counterparts. Aimed specifically at closing this racialized ‘achievement gap’, the very title of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act evokes the spirit of the civil rights era (Bush, 2002). Because education reformers consider the poor performance of public schools and teachers to be the cause of the achievement gap, their solution is to relocate children to new private educational settings where they can succeed. Hence, the recurrence across education reform’s discursive terrain of variations on the phrase ‘poverty does not determine destiny’ (TFA, 2011).

The rhetorical power of this phrase stems from the fact that over the past three decades, racial segregation of housing and schools in the United States has dramatically worsened. In 2012, 80% of Latino students and 74% of Black students were in schools where the majority of students were not White, and the average Black or Latino child attended schools where nearly two-thirds of the students were low-income. Racial segregation and concentration are particularly severe in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, including Chicago, New York, Detroit, Boston, St Louis and Pittsburgh, where education reformers have poured much of their energy and resources (Orfield et al., 2012: 7–9). The racial wealth and income gap in the United States is equally stark and accelerating; in 2009, the median wealth of White families was US$113,149 compared to US$6325 for Latino families and US$5677 for African American families (Shapiro et al., 2013: 1). The combined effects of racial and class segregation have marked consequences for school quality. US public schools get money from local, state and federal governments, with latter contributing the least. State funding comes from income and sales taxes and local money comes from property taxes. The extent to which a given state relies on property taxes to fund public education greatly affects the amount of inequity between schools. For example, students from wealthy families who live in property-tax rich suburbs and have parents who can contribute money for special purposes attend well-funded public schools (like those of my colleagues’ children), whereas urban and rural children from less-affluent communities face very different educational circumstances: in addition to having lower levels of parental participation and financial contribution, schools where poverty is concentrated have ‘high rates of teacher and staff turnover, outdated and unchallenging curricula, limited extracurricular offerings, low achievement and poor graduation rates’ (Orfield et al., 2012: 39).

While education reform discourse relies on civil rights language like equality, fairness and freedom, the private charter schools created to rescue disadvantaged children from public education bear little resemblance to the elite private schools and colleges attended by education reform entrepreneurs, their wealthy patrons, their political allies, and their respective offspring (Winerip, 2011). Scott (2013), a scholar whose work focuses on the politics of education, points out that ‘the schools generated from this [elite] leadership tend to emphasize a highly regulated approach to instruction, with longer school days and years, and rigid norms around student behavior and discipline’ (p. 10). In Success Academy classrooms, two New York Times reporters note, ‘children sit in blue and orange uniforms, usually with their hands folded, their feet flat on the floor, listening to teachers – most just out of college – barking out orders, sometimes in startling tones’ (Baker and Hernandez, 2014). Describing a typical KIPP school day that begins with math drills at 7 a.m., education historian Andrew Hartman (2011) observes that

in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. The assumption behind such reforms is that inner-city children can succeed only through regimentation. (p. 55)

Such critical assessments of the kind of schooling being delivered by education reformers to poor and minority children are relatively rare, however, especially in mainstream media.

A look at a subset of education reform institutional actors and their political and media connections illustrates their complex, mutually beneficial relations. Since its origin in the 1989 thesis of Princeton University undergraduate Wendy Kopp, TFA has been cast as a defender of educational equality and incubator of educational leaders. In its expansion from 500 college graduates placed in classrooms in 1990, to 11,000 placements in 2013, TFA has seen alumni become charter school founders, heads and staff of educational management and charter management organizations, leaders in education-reform friendly foundations, school board members, school superintendents and elected state officials. TFA’s website states its goal to have 250 of members in elected office, 300 in policy or advocacy leadership roles and 1000 ‘in “active” pipelines for public leadership’ (Cersonsky, 2012). Scott (2008) considers TFA a ‘pipeline’ (p. 163) to the private education management sector: former TFA corps members teach in KIPP schools, work for other CMOs and EMOs and hold leadership positions at the Broad Foundation. As one study notes, TFA is the most common work experience among founders and upper managers of ‘nationally prominent entrepreneurial educational organizations’ (Higgins et al., 2011).

Among the education entrepreneurs who were TFA recruits are Michelle Rhee and KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and David Levin. DFER’s Whitney Tilson was among TFA’s founders and is a board member of KIPP Academy Charter School. All of the big foundations behind education reform – Gates, Broad and Walton – supply substantial money to TFA, with Broad its most generous patron (Blume, 2011). KIPP’s board of directors includes Wendy Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth – a founding member of TFA, former president of Edison Schools, one of the largest for-profit educational management organizations in the United States, and board member of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems (Scott, 2008) – as well as Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix.

Media and/for Education Reform

Hastings’ service on KIPP’s board reflects the prominent presence of top executives from media and communication technology industries across the landscape of corporate media reform. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has given money to TFA, KIPP and DFER’s advocacy wing, Education Reform Now (Fang, 2013). Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave US$100 million to reform efforts in Newark, New Jersey schools. eBay founder Jeff Skoll launched Participant Media in 2004 with the goal of creating entertainment vehicles (film, television) that ignite social action campaigns; among those vehicles is Waiting for Superman (2010). Philip Anschutz, conservative owner of the Weekly Standard, the Washington Examiner and the entertainment conglomerate AFG, produced the pro-charter, anti-teachers union movie Won’t Back Down (2012), which was distributed by News Corporation’s Twentieth Century Fox, and he partnered with Participant Media to produce Waiting for Superman. News Corporation CEO and owner of an online education software and testing company Rupert Murdoch used his Wall Street Journal as a platform to praise the power of communications technology to transform American schools (Murdoch, 2011). Overshadowing all of these figures is Bill Gates, the world’s richest man worth US$76 billion, whose US$36 billion (Goodell, 2014) foundation is the world’s largest private grant making organization, and whose involvement in education reform extends in myriad directions. In Miner’s (2010) view (p. 3), the prominence of these ‘analog conservatives and digital billionaires’ in education reform rests on their mutual ‘embrace of market-based reforms, entrepreneurial initiatives, deregulation and data-driven/test-based accountability as the pillars of educational change’.

Given that reformers and their organizations represent themselves as champions of educational equality for underprivileged children, education reform has received significant friendly coverage from mainstream media. TFA, with its Peace Corps and civil rights era associations, has been embraced by standard bearers of liberal journalism, including Newsweek, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Washington Post and The Charlie Rose Show. As Hartman (2011) notes, ‘From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education’ (p. 51). Geoffrey Canada has been featured across national media, including 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Nightline, Charlie Rose, The Oprah Winfrey Show, USA Today, New York Times and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, whose host introduced him as a ‘passionate advocate’ for children (‘Geoffrey Canada’ 2014; ‘Geoffrey Canada talks’ 2011; Tough, 2004). Such language is common in media representations of education reform figures: A Time magazine cover posed Michelle Rhee in a classroom clutching a broom to sweep out old educational practices and labelled her a ‘revolutionary force’ (Ripley, 2008: 36). In an episode promoting StudentsFirst, Oprah Winfrey declared Rhee a ‘warrior woman’ (Oprah calls Michelle Rhee, 2010). A New York Times reporter dubbed Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz an ‘education crusader’ (Gootman, 2008). Canada, Rhee, KIPP’s Feinberg and Levin, Joel Klein and Bill Gates were stars of Waiting for Superman, while another pro-education reform documentary, The Lottery (Ashman-Kipervaser et al., 2010), showcased Moskowitz.

While all education reformers seek favourable media treatment, the Gates Foundation surpasses all in the scope of its efforts to shape public perceptions. Gates has supplied money to education reform advocacy groups (New Teacher Project, Teach Plus, StudentsFirst), to think tanks that produce studies and interpret education issues for journalists (American Enterprise Institute, Thomas B. Fordham Institute), and to a philanthropic advisory firm ‘to mount and support public education and advisory campaigns’ (Dillon, 2011: A1). The foundation has also funded or formed partnerships with media organizations to promote education reform. Besides giving US$1.4 million to the Education Writers Association to provide training and resources for journalists (Ruark, 2013), the Gates Foundation in 2009 joined forces with Viacom, the world’s fourth largest media conglomerate, to weave education storylines into current and future TV programmes (Arango and Stelter, 2009: C1). The following year, partnered with the Broad Foundation, Gates funded ‘NBC News Education Nation’ featuring public events and programmes on education reform and gave US$2 million (Barkan, 2011) to Participant Media for a ‘social action campaign’ (p. 58) to support the message of Waiting for Superman (Strauss, 2010). As an education analyst noted, the Gates Foundation ‘has influence everywhere in absolutely every branch of education, whether you’re talking about the federal, state or local levels of government, schools, the press, politicians or think tanks’ (Anderson, 2010: A1).

News media are predisposed towards philanthropic foundations, particularly when their stated aim is helping children. When those same foundations are a major source of education research funding, reporters may also find it difficult to find expert counter perspectives. Once the range of expert opinion on an issue has been established, reports tend to reproduce the viewpoints of official and expert sources on which journalistic routines rely. As those sources and perspectives have coalesced around corporate education reform’s narrative of broken schools, it has become the dominant frame within media coverage. Thus, a study of a year’s worth of articles on education reform from newspapers in a dozen cities across the United States found themes consistent with the positions of corporate education reform: a consensus that ‘America’s educational system is broken’ (Manuel, 2009: 54); an ‘overwhelmingly negative assessment of teachers, their preparation and the unions that represent them’ (p. 29); ‘negative constructions of government’ and positive references to ‘entrepreneurship, financial incentives, and private sector ingenuity’ (p. 39).

Although support by billionaire benefactors plays an important role in promoting corporate education reform’s agenda, the key to building consensus around the broken schools narrative has been bipartisan political support for neoliberal education policies, which strongly influences mainstream media representations. In 2008, the editors of a volume examining charter schools and corporate education reform, expressed hope that Obama’s election meant the United States was on ‘the cusp of a new political dialogue’ that might loosen the ‘conservative stranglehold on political debate’ and create ‘opportunities for progressives to regain the initiative’ in addressing public education (Dingerson et al., 2008: xii). However, at the very moment they were heralding Obama as a possible saviour of public education, he was preparing to carry on the three-decade assault on public schooling and become corporate education reform’s greatest champion. This returns us to the contradictions at the intersection of liberalism and education reform. It is precisely because the project to neoliberalize public education has had bipartisan support – and especially because it has the support of the Democratic Party, which had historically been identified as a friend to organized labour, including teachers – that the discourse of broken schools has been able to achieve the status of common sense.

W Lance Bennett et al. (2007) argue that whether an issue becomes ‘news’ (p. 49) and how it is covered is determined by the ‘core principle of the mainstream [US] press system’, through which ‘mainstream news generally stays within the sphere of official consensus and conflict displayed in the public statements of key government officials who manage the policy areas and decision-making processes that make the news’. In covering a given policy area, journalists attend to the ‘perceived power of the factions that are lined up for or against the dominant options’ (Bennett et al., 2007). News stories thus track with the political parameters established by official sources. As the authors note, ‘the prominence of various perspectives in the news doesn’t have so much to do with whether they’re supported by available facts, but whether they have powerful champions, and whether they go unchallenged, or survive challenges, by other powerful players’ (Bennett et al., 2007: 50). Corporate education reform certainly has powerful champions in the ‘managers of choice’ (Scott, 2008: 149) located in the big foundations, hedge funds, TFA, charter schools, education and charter management organizations, DFER and think tanks. But their efficacy has been immeasurably enhanced by a quarter century of bipartisan political support culminating in the ascendance of their most avid supporter in Barack Obama.

In the run up to the 2008 presidential elections, major figures in the education reform movement recognized the importance of maintaining bipartisan support. In 2007, Eli Broad and Bill Gates launched their US$60 million ‘Ed in ’08’ initiative to pressure presidential candidates to make education reform a campaign priority (Herszenhorn, 2007). All of the candidates fell in line and Obama’s platform included support for charter schools and merit pay for teachers (Knopp, 2008). In August 2008, DFER sponsored a pre-convention seminar titled ‘Ed Challenge for Change’ attended by a ‘coalition of foundations [including Gates and Broad], nonprofits, and businesses supporting the charter school movement’ that featured denunciations of teachers’ unions and calls for Obama to select Arne Duncan, a corporate education reformer as CEO of Chicago’s public schools, as his Secretary of Education (Goldstein, 2008; Tultican, 2012). When Obama appointed Duncan, DFER took credit, as did the Broad Foundation, whose annual report said the appointment

marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments – charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time, and national standards – the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted. (Broad Foundations, 2009–2010: 5)

Obama’s connections to the education reform movement are extensive. The Gates Foundation not only supplied top aides to Duncan, but its ‘projects align so closely with President Obama’s agenda that critics say it resembles an arm of the government’ (Anderson, 2010: A1). Barkan (2011) notes that Duncan quickly integrated the Department of Education into the ‘network of revolving-door job placement that includes the staffs of Gates, Broad, and all the thinks tanks, advocacy groups, school management organizations, training programmes, and school districts that they fund’ (p. 55). Obama’s relationship with DFER predates his presidency. In 2005, as an Illinois senator he attended the founding meeting of the organization ‘sponsored by a group of financial and charter school entrepreneurs’ (Karp, 2012). At TFA’s twentieth anniversary summit, Obama delivered a video message congratulating TFA for its ‘continued belief in the potential of America’s children’ and Duncan gave the keynote address (Neale, 2011). Waiting for Superman’s director Davis Guggenheim directed a 10-minute biography of Obama shown at the Democratic National Convention, a 30-minute infomercial for Obama’s 2008 campaign and a 17-minute film for the 2012 campaign. Shortly after the release of Waiting for Superman, Obama played host in the Oval Office to Davis and the film’s five students and their families; extensively covered by the media, the event provided ‘a huge boost for the charter school movement’ (Perone, 2010). With this degree of official consensus on the issue of education reform, mainstream media have little incentive to stray from the parameters set by major power factions. Only when there is strong disagreement within the realm of official politics is the mainstream press moved to present alternative perspectives in a serious and extended way.

Following the money

Commenting on the key institutional actors driving the education reform agenda, Barbara Miner (2010) observes, ‘Take away the Gates, Walton and Broad Foundations, Teach for America alumni, DFER, and a few essential hedge fund and investment managers, and the pro-corporate charter movement would shrink significantly’ (p. 8). But if their numbers are small, their combined economic resources, interdependent relationships, connections to bipartisan political support and access to media have given this circle of institutions/agents outsized influence in shaping the diagnosis of and cure for the problem of public education, with significant potential rewards beyond the satisfaction of rescuing children. In a Washington Post opinion piece, the dean of Howard University’s School of Education challenged the idea that TFA, EMOs and billionaire foundations were guided simply by a commitment to civil rights and educational equality. In her view,

Urban school reform is not about schools or reform. It is about land development. … about exporting the urban poor, reclaiming inner city land, and using schools to recalculate urban land value. This kind of school reform is not about children, it’s about the business elite gaining access to the nearly $600 billion that supports the nation’s public schools. It’s about money. (Qtd in Strauss, 2013)

The figure she cites is the annual expenditure on American kindergarten to twelfth grade (K-12) education, which is viewed in certain quarters as the ‘next big “undercapitalized” sector of the economy’, similar to health care in the 1990s (Fang, 2011). Jonathan Kozol recounts being shown a document written by securities analysts describing the benefits of opening up public education to private enterprise. Kozol writes: ‘From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada”’ (Kozol, 2007: 8). Rupert Murdoch has clearly signalled his interest in the big enchilada. Announcing News Corporation’s entry into the for-profit education business with the acquisition of an education subsidiary specializing in testing and assessment technology, he described K-12 education as ‘a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting to be transformed’ (Fang, 2011).

Economic opportunities to be gained from school privatization are plentiful:

Direct government funding. State money allocated to students follows them to charter schools.

Reduced labour costs. Most charter schools are non-union with greater flexibility to hire and fire, when compared to public school teachers, who are the largest single group of US public sector employees comprising a third of unionized public sector workers (Hirsch et al., 2012: 1).

Return on investments. In response to foundations and think tanks pushing the idea of using market mechanisms to generate wealth and jobs in poor communities, which have been crippled by the combination of deindustrialization and defunding of government programmes, US Congress in 2000 passed a bill offering incentives to invest in low-income communities. The resulting New Markets Tax Credit programme provides a 39% tax credit on investments paid out over 7 years. Taking advantage of this programme, hedge funds and banks investing in charter schools get the 39% credit, interest on the original investment, and possibly additional tax credits linked to job creation or historic preservation. Charter school investors can potentially double their money in 7 years (Gonzalez, 2010; Rawls, 2013).

Increased property values. Many of the urban public schools deemed failing and forced to close are in gentrifying neighbourhoods, making new charter school investments even more attractive (Miner, 2010; Saltman, 2007: 137–143; Strauss, 2013).

Creating markets for products. High-stakes testing spawned a multi-billion dollar industry to produce and score tests. By 2005, schools were generating US$2.5 billion a year for the testing industry (Kozol, 2007: 9). The online learning industry is undergoing dramatic expansion as it lobbies school districts to require online courses and create for-profit virtual schools (Fang, 2011).

Recognizing the value of the public education sector, Hess (2005: 6) notes that because it is almost entirely funded by public taxes, the aspirations of billionaire foundations to remake public schooling will ‘stand or fall on their ability to shape public institutions or redirect public expenditures’. Mathieu Hilgers (2013) argues that the successful implementation of neoliberal restructuring depends on cultivating internalized ‘categories of perception that shape how agents problematize their experience, reinterpret their past and project themselves into the future’ (p. 82). The extent to which the narrative of broken schools has become common sense suggests that the forces of corporate education reform have so far been winning the clash of ideas over public education’s future. Their ability to cultivate categories of perception can be seen in my colleagues’ embrace of Waiting for Superman, just as universally mandated high-stakes testing and the 300% increase in the number of charter school students in the last decade (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2014) attest to their success at shaping institutions and redirecting public funds.

At TFA’s twentieth anniversary celebration, Michelle Rhee, on stage with Joel Klein, Geoffrey Canada and Dave Levin before an audience of 11,000, compared the early 1990s when charter schools were emerging to the education reform movement today: ‘The difference’, she said, ‘is that now we’ve hit the mainstream with Waiting for Superman and NBC’s Education Nation’ (TFA, 2011). While Rhee may be overestimating the correspondence between popular media and popular opinion, as key resources and sites for the selection, orchestration and distribution of social knowledge, media are central to the process in which struggles for hegemony, or perceived legitimate leadership, are waged. This is the heart of what Stuart Hall (1977: 340) has termed media’s ‘ideological work’.

The forces of corporate education reform have become mainstream in the context of the massive upward redistribution of wealth that is the foundation of neoliberal restructuring, of the destruction of the urban industrial manufacturing base and reduction of public sector jobs and their replacement by a low-wage service economy, of the dramatic increase in racial and class segregation and resulting poverty among inner city children and resource-starved urban public schools, and of the erosion of meaningful philosophical and policy differences between the Democratic and Republican parties, which over the past three decades have converged around the notion that government is the cause and the market is the solution to nearly every societal problem (Peck, 2008). This larger context is largely missing from the broken schools narrative that spans public policy, political speeches, foundation reports and grants and charter organization press releases, and, because these are now also the dominant sources of information about the problem with public education, missing also in the stories produced by corporate media. The romantic narrative of education reform asks, in the name of fairness, equality and freedom, that we support policies of wealthy benefactors who promise to save disadvantaged children from their otherwise certain dead-end futures by extricating them from their public schools and inadequate unionized teachers. The question it does not raise is how the forces of education reform movement may themselves be implicated in producing the conditions of unfairness and inequality that have limited those children’s future in the first place, and what they now stand to gain from the privatization of public education.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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