Education in the Age of Biocapitalism

Optimizing Educational Life for a Flat World

C. Pierce

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137027832
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Biocapitalism, an economic model built on making new commodities from existing forms of life, has fundamentally changed how we understand the boundaries between nature/culture and human/nonhuman. This is the first book to examine its implications for education and how human capital understandings of education are co-evolving with biocapitalism.

PART I

Origins of Educational Biocapital

CHAPTER 1

Learning to be Homo economicus on the Plantation: A Brief History of Human Capital Metrics

On the basis of this theoretical and historical analysis we can thus pick out the principles of a policy of growth which will no longer be simply indexed to the problem of the material investment of physical capital, on the one hand, and of the number of workers [on the other], but a policy of growth focused precisely on one of the things that the West can modify most easily, and that is the form of investment in human capital. And in fact we are seeing the economic policies of all the developed countries, but also their social policies, as well as their cultural and educational policies, being oriented in these terms.

—Michel Foucault, 1979

Over the summer of 2011, teachers in the Ogden school district just north of Salt Lake City awoke to find a new, non-negotiated contract agreement in the mail. The District Superintendent’s Office informed teachers that they would need to sign a new contract agreement that included a merit pay protocol attached to a value-added performance metric, or they would no longer have a job in the fall. The story unfolding in Ogden is becoming a frequently told one across the United States. The growth of performance measurement tools such as value-added metrics and other mathematical and statistical evaluation models that claim to isolate teachers’ positive and negative effects on students’ classroom achievement, has gained considerable traction through the competitive structures built into reform policies such as Race to the Top where states are rewarded for adopting accountability measures focused on increasing teacher and school performance ratings. The value-added movement, which I examine in detail in chapter 2, turns out to be just another iteration in a long line of accountability discourses and practices that have promised to “fix” endemic problems in US public schools through the application of new “revolutionary” scientific models of learning assessment. Complex historical problems of educational equity such as the growing achievement gap between white students and students of color, one of the primary aims of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, are best solved through the development and application of newfangled techniques capable of more accurately measuring teacher and student performance.

Recent phase II funding distribution for Race to the Top reflects such a belief in new scientific measurement breakthroughs and indicates how equitable and quality education is going to be achieved under the Obama administration’s reform policy that puts a shiny new wrapping on an old and broken approach. Looking at Race to the Top winners, it is abundantly clear that if states want financial support in a time of drastic educational cutbacks, they must adopt a whole host of accountability reforms including value-added measures of performance and an expansion of the charter school system. Despite the fact that federal funds for education make up only a portion of school budgets, they are nonetheless one of the most important public assurances in an economic climate where state budgets (such as Michigan’s) are collapsing. Not unlike the neocolonial practices employed by the World Bank and IMF that force compliance with neoliberal developmental strategies in the developing world, states either will adopt market-based accountability measures or be starved financially while the most underserved students will continue to absorb the brunt of educational disinvestment. For example, almost all the state winners of Race to the Top funding included the following provisions in their strategic reform plan: an expansion of the charter school system, a strong emphasis on STEM curriculum and programs, and the institutionalization of value-added accountability measures that focuses on teacher performance in relation to student achievement (United States Department of Education 2012).¹ Across the country from Utah, Florida, Ohio, California, Washington DC, Tennessee, Michigan, Hawaii, Texas, Wisconsin, New York, Colorado, to Georgia, performance-based assessment models such as value-added techniques are quickly becoming one of the primary ways schools will either enter the race or be disqualified at the starting line.

Yet, in its rapid ascension to being the chief strategy for the Department of Education’s signature reform plan under Obama and Arne Duncan, there has been almost no discussion on or analysis of the origins of value-added metrics beyond the controversy of whether or not teacher performance ratings are an appropriate measure of student performance and academic achievement. Where, in other words, did such an influential measurement device for determining educational quality come from? In surveying the public debate swirling around value-added applications to school contexts, it is clear that this question has been entirely lost or conveniently disguised in the decidedly neoliberal context that currently shapes the educational reform debate in the United States. It also seems next to impossible to find a competing model that either of the two dominant political parties promotes—demonstrating another interesting feature of the value-added framework: neoliberal strategies for educational restructuring (such as its predecessors Nation at Risk and NCLB) operates from a one-dimensional politics that treats educational life as a calculable and regulatory field of economic control and extractive value.²

One of the most troubling aspects emerging from the neoliberal restructuring of education over the past 30 years in the United States is the way in which reform movements based on educational measurement techniques such as the value-added framework claim to have isolated the true measure of learning into what teachers can either add or subtract from their pupils. However, the design and application of such assessment models are not a new breakthrough in educational assessment research, but rather part of a larger political project that seeks to reduce complex sociocultural settings such as schools into an economic grid of value assessment and optimization. From such a context, understandings of educational environments and best practices of teaching are organized and controlled through a rationality infused with free-market strategies and a fundamentalist view of students as self-interested economic actors situated in a highly competitive “flat” world. The primary goal of this chapter is to expose the roots of the free-market fantasy advanced through value-added proponents by situating its development within the larger genealogical arc of the Chicago School of Economics free-market laboratory, in particular, their construct of human capital theory in one of their landmark studies Time on the Cross (TC). Starting out as a fringe economic theory focused on discovering where and how economic value is produced in different historical and social settings, human capital theory has achieved nearly universal acceptance as the practical and ethical framework in which to view and judge educational health in the United States. The human capital project embedded in neoliberal understandings of education, such as the one I examine in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s TC, is also the birthplace of contemporary assessment tools such as value-added metrics and, as such, I argue we must understand the historical development of human capital theory as part of the broader mission of neoliberal policies and governing practices in order to better see what is at stake in accepting measurement technologies of human value as predictors of a healthy and successful educational life.

It is particularly important to critically evaluate the history of human capital theory in our current historical moment given that in the past few years, the public has been flooded with wildly popular and influential books that wholeheartedly promote human capital frameworks. Books such as Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz’s (2010) The Race between Technology and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond’s (2010) The Flat World and Education, and New York Times editorialist (and part-time educational policy expert) Thomas Friedman’s seemingly ubiquitous “flat-world” analyses are all prominent parts of the human capital constellation in educational research and popular media.³ Each of these authors and many more like them that populate the educational reform industry have helped normalize human capital narratives and understandings of education so much so that it has become the language everyone must speak when offering their solutions for educational reform. Such a consensus is representative of the degree to which human capital theory has become the naturalized way to talk about and frame problems such as educational inequity, economic growth and stagnation, and the role US schools play in national security challenges in the twenty-first century that have become inextricably linked to the unrealizable dream of unbounded global capitalist growth.

Given the complete collapse of economic imperatives into national educational goals, represented in books and policy reccomendations such as these and countless others, it is now more important than ever to go back and examine how such a one-dimensional cultural logic of education has been established and helped set the stage for governmental strategies aimed at the total economization of educational life. In this chapter and the next, I look at two periods in the development of human capital theory in order to shed light on the role it has played in merging economic and educational value into an indistinguishable unity. The story of human capital theory, as I discuss in this chapter, began as a distinct project that evolved out of the radical free-market womb of the Chicago School of Economics. As such, human capital theory needs to be understood within the larger context of neoliberal thought and practice in order to see how it has become integral to the success of the neoliberal restructuring of education. To do so, it will be helpful to begin with the man by which all life is measured.

Situating Human Capital Theory within the Neoliberal Project: From Homo sapiens to Homo economicus

Neoliberalism, as a school of economic thought and policy development, started in the United States with a small and dedicated group of economists and policy makers at the University of Chicago during the period immediately following World War II. Their mission as an intellectual community was to establish research and social policy approaches infused with the belief that a utopian capitalist state could be achieved through a radical free-market restructuring of the growing welfare state of the New Deal era. As Naomi Klein (2007) puts it, Milton Friedman and other Chicago School disciples believed in a view of pure capitalism that held “just as ecosystems self-regulate, keeping themselves in balance, the market, left to its own devices, would create just the right number of products at precisely the right prices, produced by workers at just the right wages to buy those products—an Eden of plentiful employment, boundless creativity and zero inflation” (50). The neoliberal theorists’ dream of a pure capitalist state was built through the radicalization of the ideas of classic political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Locke, Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill (Foucault 2008, Hardt and Negri 2000, Harvey 2005, Giroux 2008, Peters 2009). In one sense, neoliberalism then can be seen as aggressively retooling classical liberal economic concepts and notions of the market and state to match their goal of attaining a capitalist Garden of Eden. The primary target of the Chicago School’s “new” liberalism was the state’s control and administrative power over social welfare programs (including schools), international development policies, and regulatory mechanisms of commerce that hindered unfettered corporate expansion (Harvey 2005). Or, as Michel Foucault put it in his 1978 lectures on the development of neoliberalism in the United States, the overarching target for the Chicago School and the powerful supporters of its views consisted of “three elements—Keynsian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs—together formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop” (Foucault 2008, 217).

Within the historical development of neoliberalism as an intellectual movement seeking to remove the regulatory and legal parameters of the Welfare state that encumbered privatized growth in society, human capital theory played an instrumental role. Specifically, human capital theory serves as an important conceptual bridge that opens up more spaces to privatization such as human beings’ productive life and public goods such as schools. Yet in order for more public and governmental entities and people to be transformed through the processes of privatization, market responsiveness, and value maximization, neoliberal theorists recognized that a theory and set of practices needed to be invented in order to establish the basis for human subjectivity through their developing economic science. All of human life for neoliberal theorists, in other words, needed to be evaluated in terms of human capital accumulation and investment. Put differently, if the structural dimension of neoliberalism focused on the restructuring of state institutions and legal apparatuses through free-market governing strategies and policies, a concomitant theory of the subject was also required in order to understand Adam and Eve in their true light as entrepreneurial apple farmers. However, for the ontological condition of humanity to be transformed into what Foucault, referring to Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham’s moral theory of the liberal individual, called Homo economicus, or, the self-interested, rational economic subject, human capital theorists such as Theodore Schultz, Robert Fogel, Jacob Mincer, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and other Chicago School economists had to overcome two important problematics. Standing in the way of their vision of a free and open society guided by unbridled capitalism was the question of how to ontologically establish human nature and social environments seemingly inseparable from free-market rationalities of the pure capitalist state.⁴

The first problem Chicago School theorists confronted while trying to conjure the neoliberal subject into existence was the issue of living and dead labor. That is, neoliberal theorists had to grapple with the question of how corporations, governments, and individuals in capitalist nations and the developing world could be recalibrated through a revised notion of labor that understood people as continual self-investment machines, or atomized sites of productive potential or diminishing returns within a free-market social context. In this sense, human capital theorists needed to come up with a new language and interpretive tools with which to erase the inherent contradiction of labor within industrial capitalist conditions of production where extractable value from the wage–labor process defined the worker–owner relation as well as state institutions that legally sanctioned them. Stated in Marx’s language, human capital theorists needed to ask how the problem of alienation (one’s productive forces set against oneself through the commodity form of wage labor) could be recast into a question of personal investment and entrepreneurial acumen—in effect shifting the question of class antagonism to the realm of individual responsibility and rational decision-making ability based on one’s capacity to conduct his/her life effectively through sound economic thinking and behaviour in society. Indeed, moving the exploitative nature of work in the capitalist system of production into a framework of personal responsibility tied to market rationalities is one of the most important contributions human capital theorists have made to the neoliberal project. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1975) put it in their classic Marxist critique of human capital theory, the “degree of success [of human capital theory] is secured at a considerable price: ‘labor’ disappears as a fundamental explanatory category and is absorbed into a concept of capital in no way enriched to handle labor’s special character. One gets the uneasy feeling that the operation was successful, but the patient vanished!” (74).

Second, and related to the first problematic, human capital theorists also needed to invent sophisticated analytical metrics in order to be able to measure how investments in human capital such as education had positive or negative effects on the economic value of individuals and populations in society. Human capital theory, in other words, required a new science of human economic value that could produce evidence to support the view that free-market economics and human ontology were indeed a Darwinian coupling. Through advanced statistical and mathematical analyses that focused on measuring inputs such as skill acquisition, education and training, dietary habits, ability to move to new labor markets, and mating choice, a truer picture of humans as income stream incubators could be offered and established as the foundation of social life and thus social policy formation. The filtering of people through human capital valuation metrics, put differently, made individuals and groups understandable as economic input actors on a stage where human nature seemed to have only evolved from an accountant’s imagination.

One of the best examples illustrating how human capital theory attempts to make human ontology and free-market rationality into genetic partners is the Chicago School’s value measurement technology cliometrics. Cliometrics is a statistical and mathematical model that was designed by human capital theorists to measure the ability of individuals and populations to respond and adjust to market cues embedded in capitalist social environments. Commenting on Robert Fogel’s part in the revolution cliometrics caused within the broader field of economics, Claudia Goldin (1995) states, “The new economic history, or cliometrics, formalized economic history in a manner similar to the injection of mathematical models and statistics into the rest of economics” (193). As we will see in this chapter, humans living in social settings structured through capitalist relations, for human capital theorists, naturally develop an ethical orientation geared toward continual self-investment practices in areas such as skill acquisition, housing, education, mating choices, genetic endowment, health inputs (i.e., diet or access to good health care), and other types of human capital that help optimize a person’s life-value in capitalist societies. Again the sleight of hand here embedded within human capital theory, and especially apparent in measurement tools such as cliometrics, is the substitution of internal crises that are a product of the social organization of labor under capitalist conditions with a problem of deficiency or impurity in the individual or population, namely, their value as investible units and productive assets in a globally competitive economic environment. Cliometrics was one such tool developed by neoliberal theorists and, as such, is a highly useful subject of analysis in that it was designed to perform precisely what was needed most: the translation of individuals and populations into measuraeable market beings. The transformation of all human life to fit the genome of Homo economicus also required the development of an educational dimension that has yet to be studied.

Neoliberal theorists in the United States have had a deep interest in education since the post-World War II period, and it is no surprise that the radical restructuring of the public education system has been one of the primary areas of their collective research.⁵ Yet what is it exactly that makes education so important to the neoliberal project? One way to answer this question, and what my analysis in this chapter of an early human capital study attempts to do, is examine how neoliberal theorists construct a model of education out of their application of performance metrics to socioeconomic settings. Education, set within human capital frameworks such as Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s case study TC, is turned into a productive space where the individual and population are treated as investable and entrepreneurial sites inextricably connected to economic growth and market competition. Human capital models of education thus are subject to and even call for governing techniques that can ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Biopolitics and Education: A Return to the Question of Life and School
• Part I   Origins of Educational Biocapital
• Part II   Promissory Future(s): Learning the Science of Life
• Part III   Biological Citizenship in a Flat World: Governmentalities of Optimization and Their Alternatives
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index