Abstract
Finally, a book about education policy worth reading.
The closing passage in Education Policy Perils: Tackling the Tough Issues (coedited by Tienken & Mullen, 2016) sums up the best part of this book for me: “The time for debate is over” (Tienken, p. 180). Indeed, so much of the “debate” regarding “curricular standardization, high stakes testing, and the corporatization of education” (Tienken & Mullen, 2016, p. 1) is, in reality, a battle between solid research versus manufactured, high-gloss, profit-driven narratives. Because of this, it is refreshing (no, make that empowering) to find a text about education policy that, as the editors write in their introduction, “pierce(s) the veil on some of the most popular and controversial issues in education policy making” (Tienken & Mullen, p. 1). And, this is a book that delivers on that promise.
Most laypersons (other than edu-policy wonks like myself) have little interest in understanding the dubious terrain of policy language. No wonder, this serious subject involves such heady topics as global economics, legislative slights-of-hand, and opaque statistics. This includes everyone but wonks: that is, parents, local business owners (not to be confused with corporate billionaires), teachers, and tax-paying community members. What much of humanity is interested in are the effects that policy writ large has on their own respective corner of the world. For the parent, schools are valued by how successful or happy their children are on a daily basis at school (and how prepared they will be for their respective futures). For local business owners, it is whether the next generation will be equipped with the requisite skills to get the right kind of jobs and perform well. For taxpayers in general, concern relates to how much tax goes toward public education and how much bang they are getting for their educational buck.
Each of these interests appears easy to address, that is until you begin asking deeper questions such as, “Do all parents want the same kind of educational experience for their child, given how different each child’s experiences and needs will be?” Or, “Are the skills valued by global corporate elite really more important than educating the whole child?” and “Just because this is what Microsoft (for example) wants, is that what we want for an educated polity in a democratic society?” Also, questions regarding school success, when so much of what is measured can be directly correlated with family/community income, are equally murky. To begin with, there is little consensus as to what makes a “good” or “high achieving” school.
Coeditors Tienken and Mullen weave together a series of seven chapters which provide answers to these questions and more, using language that is not only accessible to policy makers but also to the real stakeholders most affected by policy: us—the people—parents, teachers, and community members. The complexity of such questions and the competing needs and interests within our diverse society are precisely reasons why Education Policy Perils is such a necessary book today and moving forward in the discussions about policy. These are perilous times for public education.
The various contributing authors deftly sift through the mire of selling points and lobbying sound-bites about “school choice.” It is refreshing to listen to academics with real expertise who rely on the facts rather than entertaining the folly that “maybe there is a good side” to corporate ownership of public education (for any of us except the corporations). Paid-for researchers and lobbyists lead us to believe that the language in policy around “choice” and “free market” are matters of opinion, not unlike which flavor of ice cream tastes better: chocolate or vanilla. Imagine! Recently appointed Secretary of Education Betsy Devos compared shopping for schools with the way one might shop for Uber (http://www.businessinsider.com/betsy-devos-compares-school-choice-uber-2017-3), a statement that (according to the article), “ignores the fact that one is a private good, while the other is a public good.” Such a foolhardy and negligent response reminds me eerily of Marie Antionette’s proclamation, “Let them eat cake.” Devos’s statement is steeped in the corporate and global free-market Kool Aid in which we (parents, students, teachers, and citizens) are merely consumers in a market economy.
Policy “reform” narratives (i.e., propaganda) are fabricated, distracting from the real problems we face as a society: widening gaps between rich and poor, increased racial/ethnic violence, zero tolerance policing, unemployment, divisive politics, and disaffected marginalized groups. Education Policy Perils’ chapters redirect the conversation squarely on the facts, evading the distractive narratives that hold zero weight but 100% profit. Author Sjoberg quite clearly summarizes the state of education on a global scale: “Competition, privatization, and market-orientation are threatening the value that used to be the cornerstone of public education in many countries. School leaders should take a stance in this battle over priorities . . .” (p. 130).
Discussions around the perils of current policy decisions are much like debates about climate change, while the results of policy manifest as a civil rights issue. Neoliberal education policy, like climate change, is everywhere and nowhere at once. Likewise, the effects that Pearson has on the global market for curriculum development as illustrated by editor/author Mullen manifest far more like CO2 in the atmosphere: everywhere and nowhere. But, the effects of high-stakes testing and school choice result in social inequities and injustices that can be felt by millions of disenfranchised students (as in Rodriguez’s chapter “Leading in a Socially Just Manner”). Similarly, authors Marder, Tramaglini, and Tienken in their respective chapters examine how private interests and a free-market ideology toward schooling have exacerbated existing social, economic, and racial inequalities. In Chapter 1, Lubienski and Myers use supporting research devoid of “rhetoric” to point out how school choice continues to fail in its promise to deliver a better system than traditional public education. Just as in the climate “debates” (a term I find to be loaded because it assumes that there really are two legitimate sides when there are not), we have the “debates” about school choice policy. We could argue that in the realm of climate issues, there’s the CEOs of major coal and oil industries and their paid-for spokespersons, and then there’s the rest of us. In education policy, there are those paid lobbyists for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and corporate CEOs—and then there’s the rest of us.
It is difficult for laypersons to “see” corporate takeover of public education in any truly direct fashion (because it is disguise by hijacked language and glitzy marketing). So, we rely on experts, like those authors in this book, to reveal what otherwise might remain inviable to the naked public eye. Half the battle is in clarifying what the origins of the problems with education are and who is responsible. While there are, and the authors agree, many historic failures within the traditional model of public education, this text makes a compelling case for why the solutions to these educational conundrums do not rest with marketization and privatization. Explaining the origins of neoliberalism to someone standing next to you at the bus stop would be like scientists trying to explain how CO2 interacts with the atmosphere while at the checkout line at a store. How do we get noneducation folks to listen to something that is quite complicated and, well, boring?
Once readers have become aware of the realities of the impending dangers of the neoliberal agenda that will dismantle public education, a daunting task that this book does supremely well, I still want to know more about the question “Now what?” I would have liked to hear more about “what to do” about the issues that are so clearly outlined here. If the first half of the battle is getting people’s attention, the second half of the battle is mobilizing a collective sense of public agency to do something about it. I wanted to hear more like the passage quoting Ball (2012) in Mullen’s chapter on “corporate networks” that states, “We need to defend a ‘thickly democratic public sphere’ and pave the way for ‘a radical egalitarian politics of redistribution, recognition, and representation [p. xxii]” (p. 46).
Perhaps the authors in Perils chose to leave some of this for the readers to answer for themselves. Any proscriptive solution (like those developed for the reformers themselves) is doomed to fail, because meaningful action will more likely be local and context-specific. I am thinking of the chapter by Rodriguez where she writes, “Making the content of preparation programs relevant to the demographic context in which leaders will serve is necessary . . . to support successful change” (p. 63). If, as as authors Tramaglini and Tienken argue in Chapter 4, the problem is standardization, then the solution cannot be so as well.
Even though Perils leaves me wanting to know more about what we can do to reclaim our democracy and the future of public education, at least readers will have access to the information all of us should have to decide how to respond in an informed fashion. That, in itself, is a huge contribution, given we increasingly reside in a historical moment of “fake news” and fact-denial. In other words, the book’s authors do not pretend to be neutral or unbiased by catering to an “alternative” view, one which really does not exist in the research, only in the rhetoric. We have arrived at a perilous place in which “corporatization and marketization of public schools,” as author Mullen writes, “has become the new normal” (p. 47).
I would recommend this book to any leader in K-12 schools (in any country under the yoke of a free-market education agenda). More than this, I would urge that we all give a copy of it to our neighbors and anyone near us, such as at a bus stop or grocery store. Education Policy Perils reclaims a factual and engaging narrative, making necessary, compelling, and accessible illustrations of what is happening in education policy, and what is at stake for our children and our democracy if we do not respond. When collectively we become passionately engaged with informed discourses around education policy, we can transform policy perils into policy promises.