Educating the Right Way

Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136284168
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book Apple explores the 'conservative restoration' - the rightward turn of a broad-based coalition that is making successful inroads in determining American and international educational policy. It takes a pragmatic look at what critical educators can do to build alternative coalitions and policies that are more democratic. Apple urges this group to extricate itself from its reliance on the language of possibility in order to employ pragmatic analyses that address the material realities of social power.

CHAPTER 1

Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality

Introduction

Open season on education continues. The media, candidates for public office, conservative pundits, corporate leaders, nearly everyone it seems, has an opinion on what’s wrong with schools. I have mixed emotions about all this attention. On the one hand, what could be wrong with placing issues of what education does and should do front and center? As someone deeply involved in thinking about and acting upon schools, it’s rather pleasing to see that conversations about teaching, curricula, evaluation, funding, and so much more are not seen as the logical equivalent of conversations about the weather. The fact that these discussions often are heated is also something to be welcomed. After all, what our children are to know and the values this should embody is serious business.

On the other hand, all of this attention creates some disquietude. One word in the last sentence of the previous paragraph explains one reason for this—business. For all too many of the pundits, politicians, corporate leaders, and others, education is a business and should be treated no differently than any other business. The fact that this position is now becoming increasingly widespread is evidence of some worrisome tendencies. Of the many voices now talking about education, only the most powerful tend to be heard. Although there is no one unitary position that organizes those with political, economic, and cultural power, the central tendencies around which they are found tend to be more conservative than not.

What are these voices saying? Over the past decades, conservative groups in particular have been pressing for public funding for private and religious schools. Voucher plans have been at the forefront of this movement. In the eyes of voucher proponents, only by forcing schools onto a competitive market will there be any improvement. These pressures are complemented by other kinds of attacks, such as the following argument. “Facts” are missing in the curriculum. Traditional content and methods have been jettisoned as our schools move toward trendy (and overly multicultural) subjects that ignore the knowledge that made us such a great nation. Raise standards. Get more tests in schools, based on “real” knowledge. Raise the stakes for teachers and students who fail them. This will guarantee that our schools return to time-honored content and more traditional methods. If tests are not enough, mandate and legislate traditional methods and content at a state level.

Vouchers are in the air—and in the courts. High stakes testing is also in the air—and in news reports that document the damaging bureaucratic and technical problems that have occurred when such tests were instituted all too quickly in a number of cities and states. Other evidence for some of the latter pressures on traditional content and methods is not hard to find either. In several states, hotly contested bills have been introduced, and in some instances passed, that mandate the use of phonics in literacy instruction. Indeed, the federal government has now put its imprimatur—and its funding—behind such “scientific” models of literacy instruction, and labeled other approaches as basically not worthy of our attention. The stereotype that what are called “whole-language” methods—that is, methods that are grounded in the lived experience of students’ actual language and literacy use—have totally replaced phonics is widespread. There is actually little evidence that this is the case, since most teachers seem to use a “bricolage” of multiple approaches depending on the needs that have to be met.ch ¹ However, this has not interrupted the agenda of those who are deeply committed to the politics of conservative restoration in education. The same groups sponsoring legislative mandates of this type also often stand behind the attacks on the teaching of evolution and the supposed loss of God’s guiding word in schools.

All these movements are swirling around simultaneously. Every time one begins to understand one set of pressures, another one enters from a different direction. Each has “the” answer, if only we would become true believers and follow them. Each and every one of these pressures is situated within larger dynamics. I want to stop the swirl for a little while in order to make sense of them both in education and in their relation to larger ideological and economic forces in societies like our own. Because these pressures and forces are complicated, let me begin this sense-making process in a straightforward way—with a story about a child, a teacher, and a school in a particular community.

Joseph’s Story

Joseph sobbed at my desk. He was a tough kid, a hard case, someone who often made life difficult for his teachers. He was all of nine years old and here he was sobbing, holding on to me in public. He had been in my fourth-grade class all year, a classroom situated in a decaying building in an East Coast city that was among the most impoverished in the nation. At times I wondered, seriously, whether I would make it through that year. There were many Josephs in that classroom, and I was constantly drained by the demands, the bureaucratic rules, the daily lessons that bounced off the kids’ armor. Yet somehow that year was satisfying, compelling, and important, even though the prescribed curriculum and the textbooks that were meant to teach it were often beside the point. They were boring to the kids and boring to me.

I should have realized the first day what it would be like when I opened that city’s “Getting Started” suggested lessons for the first few days and it began with the suggestion that “as a new teacher” I should circle the students’ desks and have them introduce each other and tell something about themselves. It’s not that I was against this activity; it’s just that I didn’t have enough unbroken desks (or even chairs) for all the students. A number of the kids had nowhere to sit. This was my first lesson—but certainly not my last—in understanding that the curriculum and those who planned it lived in an unreal world, a world fundamentally disconnected from my life with those children in that inner-city classroom.

But here’s Joseph. He’s still crying. I’ve worked extremely hard with him all year long. We’ve eaten lunch together; we’ve read stories; we’ve gotten to know each other. There are times when he drives me to despair and other times when I find him to be among the most sensitive children in my class. I just can’t give up on this kid. He’s just received his report card and it says that he is to repeat fourth grade. The school system has a policy that states that failure in any two subjects (including the “behavior” side of the report card) requires that the student be left back. Joseph was failing “gym” and arithmetic. Even though he had shown improvement, he had trouble staying awake during arithmetic, had done poorly on the mandatory citywide tests, and hated gym. One of his parents worked a late shift and Joseph would often stay up, hoping to spend some time with her. And the things that students were asked to do in gym were, to him, “lame.”

The thing is, he had made real progress during the year. But I was instructed to keep him back. I knew that things would be worse next year. There would still not be enough desks. The poverty in that community would still be horrible, and health care and sufficient funding for job training and other services would be diminished. I knew that the available jobs in this former mill town paid deplorable wages and that even with both of his parents working for pay, Joseph’s family income was simply insufficient. I also knew that, given all that I already had to do each day in that classroom and each night at home in preparation for the next day, it would be nearly impossible for me to work any harder than I had already done with Joseph. And there were another five children in that class whom I was supposed to leave back.

So Joseph sobbed. Both he and I understood what this meant. There would be no additional help for me—or for children such as Joseph—next year. The promises would remain simply rhetorical. Words would be thrown at the problems. Teachers and parents and children would be blamed. But the school system would look like it believed in and enforced higher standards. The structuring of economic and political power in that community and that state would again go on as “business as usual.”

The next year Joseph basically stopped trying. The last time I heard anything about him was that he was in prison.

This story is not apocryphal. Although the incident took place a while ago, the conditions in that community and that school are much worse today. And the intense pressure that teachers, administrators, and local communities are under is equally worse. It reminds me of why I mistrust our incessant focus on standards, increased testing, marketization and vouchers, and other kinds of educational “reforms” that may sound good in the abstract but often work in exactly the opposite way when they reach the classroom level. It is exactly this sensibility of the contradictions between proposals for reform and the realities and complexities of education on the ground that provides the impetus for this book.

We face what in the next chapter I call conservative modernization. This is a powerful, yet odd, combination of forces that is in play in education, a combination that many educators, community activists, critical researchers, and others believe poses substantial threats to the vitality of our nation, our schools, our teachers, and our children. As I noted, we are told to “free” our schools by placing them into the competitive market, restore “our” traditional common culture and stress discipline and character, return God to our classrooms as a guide to all our conduct inside and outside the school, and tighten central control through more rigorous and tough-minded standards and tests. This is all supposed to be done at the same time. It also is all supposed to guarantee an education that benefits everyone. Well, maybe not.

Education is too often thought of as simply the delivery of neutral knowledge to students. In this discourse, the fundamental role of schooling is to fill students with the knowledge that is necessary to compete in today’s rapidly changing world. To this is often added an additional caveat: Do it as cost-effectively and as efficiently as possible. The ultimate arbiter of whether we have been successful at this is students’ mean gains on achievement tests. A neutral curriculum is linked to a neutral system of accountability, which in turn is linked to a system of school finance. Supposedly, when it works well, these linkages guarantee rewards for merit. “Good” students will learn “good” knowledge and will get “good” jobs.

This construction of good schooling, good management, and good results suffers from more than a few defects. Its foundational claims about neutral knowledge are simply wrong. If we have learned anything from the intense and continuing conflicts over what and whose knowledge should be declared “official” that have raged throughout the history of the curriculum in so many nations, it should have been one lesson. There is an intricate set of connections between knowledge and power.² Questions of whose knowledge, who chooses, how this is justified—these are constitutive issues, not “add-ons” that have the status of afterthoughts. This construction of good education not only marginalizes the politics of knowledge but also offers little agency to students, teachers, and community members. In some ways, it represents what Stephen Ball has characterized as “the curriculum of the dead.”³

Furthermore, it is unfortunate but true that most of our existing models of education tend to ratify or at least not actively interrupt many of the inequalities that so deeply characterize this society. Much of this has to do with the relations between schooling and the economy, with gender, class, and race divisions in the larger society, with the intricate politics of popular culture, and with the ways we finance and support (or don’t) education.⁴ The connections between schooling and good jobs are weakened even more when we closely examine what the paid labor market actually looks like. Rosy statistics of stock market gains and wealth creation obscure the fact that in the real existing economy, all too many jobs require low levels of skills and low levels of formal education. A decided mismatch exists between the promises of schooling and actual job creation in our supposedly glorious free market economy, a mismatch that is distinctly related to the exacerbation of race, gender, and class divisions in this society.⁵

Of course, there are those who see a much different connection between the market and education, one that is much more positive. For them, markets may offer hope for children, but even more so for the entrepreneurs who invest in marketized schooling. In their minds, the $700 billion education sector in the United States is ripe for transformation. It is seen as the “next health care”—that is, as a sphere that can be mined for huge profits. The goal is to transform large portions of publicly controlled nonprofit educational institutions into a “consolidated, professionally managed, money-making set of businesses that include all levels of education.”⁶ Even though comparatively little money is being made now, for-profit companies are establishing law schools; creating or managing elementary, middle, and secondary schools; and engaging in education on factory floors and in businesses. Billions of dollars from corporations, investment funds, and even your pension funds (if you are lucky enough to have one) are pouring into for-profit educational ventures. In essence, in the words of Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, capital has said, “You guys are in trouble and we’re going to eat your lunch.”⁷ The motives of the private companies involved are clear. At the same time as they will eliminate the waste that putatively always comes from public schooling, they will turn education into “an efficiently run and profitable machine—using investors’ money instead of tax dollars.”⁸ I wonder what Joseph would say as he sits in his perhaps soon-to-be for-profit prison, having come from a city whose economic base was destroyed as owners and investors closed the factories there and moved them to nonunionized areas so that they wouldn’t have to pay a livable wage, or for decent schooling, health care, or pensions.

Conservative Agendas

From my comments so far, you may have guessed that this book is situated in a specific place on the political/educational spectrum. Although there may occasionally be problems with the traditional categories of “left” and “right” in sorting through the complexities of politics on the ground in all of our nations, I consciously and without apology position myself on the left. In my mind, the United States remains a vast experiment, one in which both right and left argue about what it is an experiment in. The debate over this is vital and undoubtedly will continue. Indeed, it is part of the political lifeblood of the nation. However, like Richard Rorty, I also believe that it is the left that keeps it going.

For the Right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed: it thinks the country is basically in good shape, and may well have been in better shape in the past. It sees the Left’s struggle for social justice as mere trouble making, as utopian foolishness. [Yet] the Left, by definition is the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains unachieved.⁹

Rorty is insightful about the role of progressive criticism in keeping this nation moving. After all, almost all of the social programs that many of us now take as “natural”—social security, for example—came about because of progressive mobilizations against the denial of basic human rights. However, Rorty is on less secure grounds when he claims that “the Right never thinks anything much needs to be changed,” for a good deal of the right is very much involved in radical transformations. Over the past two to three decades, the right has mounted a concerted attack on what many of ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments to the First Edition
• 1. Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality
• 2. Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge?
• 3. Producing Inequalities: Conservative Modernization in Policy and Practice
• 4. Who “No Child Left Behind” Leaves Behind: The Class and Race Realities of Audit Cultures
• 5. Endangered Christianity
• 6. God, Morality, and Markets
• 7. Away with All Teachers: The Cultural Politics of Home Schooling
• 8. Doing the Work of Home Schooling: Gender, Technology, and Curriculum
• 9. Righting Wrongs and Interrupting the Right
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index