CFP: Education Reform: Past, Present, and Future

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies
Special Issue on Education Reform: Past, Present, and Future
Edited by Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University) and Jeff Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)

Fundamental questions have roiled the American educational system in recent years. Critics suggest that public education is failing its students and the nation, pinning the blame on teachers' unions, curriculum, and educational bureaucracy, among other culprits. Skeptics, on the other hand, note that critiques of today's educational system are motivated by get-rich-quick privatization schemes or simply find educational reform to be the latest cause de jour. Teachers themselves often feel that their professionalism, their care for children as well as test scores, and their collective bargaining rights vis-a-vis administrators are threatened by possible reforms.

As the journal of record for the Illinois Council for the Social Studies, The Councilor will publish a special issue on the topic of educational reform. We seek academic articles and shorter reflective essays on topics related to educational reform in its current guise, but also its past iterations and possible future trajectories. Possible topics may include:

• Teachers’ firsthand experiences with new testing and accountability regimes
• Lessons from previous reform movements that might inform the current situation
• Discussion of how Illinois teachers and schools have responded to the challenges of education reform

For consideration, please submit an abstract of approximately 200 words to the editors by October 15, 2012. The editors will review all submissions and then invite authors to submit full articles to the journal in early 2013. Abstracts should be emailed to Andrew Hartman (ahartma@ilstu.edu) and Jeff Manuel (jemanue@siue.edu).

The Councilor is the peer-reviewed journal of the Illinois Council for the Social Studies. Since 1939, The Councilor has published articles that incorporate pedagogical innovation and practice into all disciplines of the social studies. The Councilor also provides a forum for scholars to publish articles that explore the ways in which they integrate research into the classroom.

Farm to Market: Can the Stanford Humanities PhD "Remain Relevant"?

Earlier this week, my Twitter feed lit up with news from the Farm -- tweeted and retweeted links (most to this Inside Higher Ed story) and lots of chatter about a proposal put forward by a group of senior faculty at Stanford to make significant changes to the structure and funding of humanities PhDs there.

You can download the four-page proposal here.  It is a provoking and thought-provoking document, and I would like to invite our readers to help me think through its implications.  Overall, I find its rationale problematic, but I would be glad to hear other views.  Indeed, I would be glad to know there is some other way.

The proposed changes outlined in the document include -- among other things -- requiring grad students to select an academic or non-academic career goal early in their studies, offering alternatives to the dissertation where appropriate to meet those goals, and drastically reducing the total time to degree to (ideally) five years.  "Currently," the report notes, "Stanford culture encourages students to take longer than five years with the help of prestigious dissertation fellowship competitions.  We believe that financial support should be structured as an incentive to finish earlier, not later."  The plan proposes to speed the time to degree by fully funding students during summers; it will also require departments to set benchmarks that students must achieve in order to remain in the PhD program. 

The reference to "Stanford culture" is telling. Those two words no doubt evoke a whole host of associations for the immediate audience to whom this document is addressed:  professional identities, personal relationships, institutional structures and social norms, disciplinary traditions and academic expectations, genealogies of teaching and learning, all inflected and instantiated in particular ways unique to this university.  Invoking "Stanford culture" here suggests that the issue at hand is first of all a matter of local concern.  And of course that suggestion is correct:  these are, at bottom, proposals for an intra-institutional policy change.  Change the institution's policies, change the institutional culture.

However, Stanford is part of the larger culture of academe.  And within that larger culture, Stanford is a heavy hitter.  Flagship university, marquee institution, cachet school -- call it what you will, Stanford is one of a select group of institutions whose internal business -- even when that business is undertaken with the view/hope of keeping things "in house"-- often receives extensive attention and can be enormously influential in defining or redefining the idea of what a university is or should be, both within academic culture and beyond it.  Moreover, this particular proposal seems to be part of an effort to broadly influence academic culture.  The Inside Higher Ed news story frames the proposal as a follow-up to Russell Berman's 2011 admonition to the MLA membership to "reform" doctoral programs by providing alternatives to the dissertation, teaching transferrable skills, and reducing the time to degree.

The shorter time to degree does not strike me as a terrible idea.  It might sound draconian to Stanford students, but it sounds familiar -- and possible -- to me. I'm pursuing my degree at a public university that caps my funding at five years and requires that I carry a full course load and teach or TA every semester in order to receive funding.  Relatively few classes at Stanford are taught by graduate students, and I presume that would not change under this proposal.  So shortening the time to degree, without requiring additional teaching duties of the humanities PhD students, might save some money -- though presumably it would only speed up the rate at which the university turns out PhDs for which there are no jobs.  If educational reform is about anything these days, it's about "efficiency." But, as Leonard Cassuto has suggested, perhaps it's better to figure out your (lack of) options sooner rather than later.

So table the question of time to degree; my biggest initial objection to the Stanford plan is the proposal for an alternate dissertation.

In the twitterverse (my handle is @LDBurnett -- follow at your own risk!), I expressed some of my concerns and reservations: 

Might Stanford reforms foster a two-tier system, problematizing [the] value of [a] PhD in either market?

Here I was referring specifically to the measure calling for PhD students to choose between academic and non-academic professional aims and shape their degree plan accordingly.  Presumably, the dissertation would continue to be the chief "capstone" for those pursuing a traditional academic career.  I wondered, would this path come to be perceived as the "real" PhD within academe and beyond it?  Or, as the university graduates more students whose doctoral work does not involve the writing of a dissertation -- a "more easily attainable" degree, as Rob Townsend put it -- will that contribute to the oversupply of PhDs while diluting the (perceived?) rigor of the degree within academe? 

My long-standing concern about standards and requirements for the PhD makes the conversation I had with Rosemary Feal about the Stanford proposal especially ironic.  She invoked the fact that people complained of a decline in standards when Latin ceased to be a requirement for a university degree to imply, I think, that those who view the Stanford plan with reservations are simply being reactionary.  This was my response:

Interesting question, Rosemary. Brings up the issue of foreign language req[uirements]: "learn it before you apply"

Or will the foreign language requirement be dropped for "non academic" plans?  Sigh.

It's not an idle question.  Barely a month has passed since Feal gave an approving nod to my post defending the foreign language requirement for PhDs, a requirement many would like to abandon.  One reason people give for abandoning the foreign language requirement echoes some of the reasoning behind the changes envisioned in the Stanford proposal: graduates need a different skill set for the current employment market.  Feal's response to such arguments, linked above, did not take up the instrumentalist discourse of vocational training and lay out the case for foreign language study as a crucial job skill.  Instead, she made explicit what the MLA statement on the issue assumes: a "utilitarian function should not be the primary factor in determining whether PhDs in English would do well to invest time in second-language proficiency." This is an argument for intrinsic value, not market value.

However, if the entire idea of a PhD in English is recast in primarily utilitarian terms, the question of a foreign language requirement becomes moot.  Or extinct.

Indeed, more than the specifics of the plan, the utilitarian rationale of the Stanford proposal bothers me the most.  I grumbled:

Why not just admit fewer PhDs?  Why fund PhDs for [the] private sector? Stanford PhD as Voc Ed for Silicon Valley? 

Yeah, I got a little snarky at the end there.  But the snark is a signpost for a sombre lament.  University education at the undergraduate level has, by and large, become nothing more, nothing other, than a way of training workers to meet the labor needs of corporate capital.  Whatever higher education used to be -- or whatever we think education used to be, or ought to be, or against all odds somehow sometimes once managed to be -- it is now primarily a certification for and acculturation to wage labor in the professional-managerial class.

That certification role has long been the domain of professional graduate programs and degrees.  But now, it seems, the humanities PhD will be subsumed into that project as well.  This might be a real gain for students looking for transferrable skills in an uncertain job market.  But it seems to be a real loss for the University -- not to Stanford perhaps, but to the modern American University with a capital "U," now entirely (as opposed to mostly?) subservient to the demands of corporate capital.  The hegemony of the market is complete.

So, as I said, I find the Stanford proposal problematic.  But that statement as it stands is unfair to the professors who wrote this report and advanced these suggestions. 

Look at the opening paragraph.  Look at the compound question this faculty work group met to consider:  "Can and should the humanities PhD remain centrally relevant -- at Stanford, in the academy, and in an increasingly global and cosmopolitan 21st century society?" 

Is Russell Berman, the recent past president of the Modern Language Association, really wondering if the training of literary scholars is still an appropriate task of the academy?  Is Caroline Winterer,  a preeminent intellectual and cultural historian of early America, really wondering if the Stanford history department should still train scholars for the professoriate?  I doubt that these committed humanists have begun to question the place of the humanities at the heart -- as the heart -- of the modern university.

I think these professors and their colleagues are responding to two main external pressures.

First, and most admirably, the six professors who prepared this report are expressing and addressing a genuine concern for the future of their students.  These profs see the realities of the academic job market.  Not all of their students will find placement in tenure-track jobs; some of them won't even find work as adjuncts.  This is a wrenching reality.  You spend years mentoring young people to take a place as fellow scholars in the academy, all the while concerned that there is no room for them.  Most professors must find this distressing, and I don't think there's a shred of insincerity in these scholars' expressions of concern for the future employment of their students.

However, it's not a new concern in academe.  In a paper presented at the 1977 Wingspread Conference on New Directions in Intellectual History, Henry F. May expressed a similar worry:  "It may be that the irreducible independence of the historian explains in part what I find a poignant phenomenon: that able people still throng to graduate study in history even though they know that there are few jobs."[1]  While it may be the case that students enter PhD programs today with a less realistic view of the academic job market than they did -- or that May assumed they did -- in 1977, it is clear that the phenomenon of humanities PhDs who can't find jobs is not a new crisis.  The authors of the Stanford proposal no doubt hope their suggested changes will address this long-standing problem.  Nevertheless, I think they are responding primarily to a more immediate pressure.

Even at one of the most elite, prestigious, well-endowed research universities in the world, scholars in the humanities have to contend for and defend the "relevance" of their profession.  The word "relevant" appears several times in the opening paragraphs of this document, but the idea to which it refers is not explicitly articulated or defined.   Relevant to whom?  Relevant in what context?  Relevant according to what criterion? 

Relevant according to the criterion of immediate financial cost.  This document is addressing the question, How can we justify the "massive investment of time, effort, and money" that it takes to train PhD students in the humanities?  And the document's answer is, in effect, "We can't."  As currently configured, the document implies, a humanities PhD at Stanford is not worth the cost.  The only way to "remain relevant" -- for in today's higher education landscape, relevance is translatable into a dollar figure, with no remainder -- is to cut costs.

It is difficult to say whether this document has been prepared in response to or in anticipation of a request from the University's administration or the Board of Trustees to address the bottom-line costs of a humanities PhD.  This proposal might very well be an attempt to "get out in front" on the issue before it is formally raised.  That's the approach Berman suggested:  "I call upon the profession to recognize the need to make our doctoral programs affordable and accessible. If we do not change them, we may lose them."

On Twitter, I raised the question, "Why are the humanists the ones wielding the ax?"  Now I see that the ax has already been laid to the root of the tree.  What these professors are trying to do, I think, is to deflect the blow as well as they can. But if the only way we humanists can manage to do that is to surrender to the logic of the market, master the language of austerity, and embrace the ethos of efficiency as our bedrock value, then I'm afraid we may have sold the farm and bought the ranch already.


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[1]Henry F. May, "Intellectual History and Religious History," in New Directions in American Intellectual History, edited by John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), 105.

Diane Ravitch Speaks

I'm excited. Tonight, Diane Ravitch speaks on my campus. She is to give a talk at Braden Auditorium, which seats just under 3,500 people. Based on the fact that ISU has one of the largest colleges of education in the nation, and that Ravitch has become the nation's staunchest supporter of teachers, my bet is the event is standing-room only. Given Ravitch's career trajectory, which Tim Lacy first called attention to at this blog over two years ago, this is remarkable.

I first got to know the work of Ravitch in graduate school. I took a class on the history of education reform with Donald Collins, who has been a mentor and friend ever since. Donald assigned authors with various perspectives, including some he disagreed with, namely, Ravitch, who was known at the time to be a fairly conservative historian and education reformer, appointed assistant secretary of education by George H.W. Bush. We read Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. In this book, her magnum opus, Ravitch argued that the progressive education movement took a wrong turn somewhere shortly after Dewey. It had dumbed down the national curriculum, lowered standards, made schooling too vocational, too adherent to this or that trend. Left Behind is carefully researched, which is no surprise given that Ravitch learned the craft of history from Lawrence Cremin, and I learned a lot by reading it. But at the time I thought it was crankily nostalgic for a classic liberal curriculum that was never as liberal as its proponents claimed. I also thought it was too hard on progressive education, though I was certainly critical of some elements of that movement in my book, Education and the Cold War, though from a different vantage point.

But now Ravitch is the most prominent voice against the so-called education reform movement. This is evident in her latest book, the excellent and bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which is not only an immaculately researched brief against the education reform movement, but also Ravitch's mea culpa. She apologizes for getting caught up in the zeitgeist that reigned supreme in policy-making circles: privatization, testing, "choice," charters, etc. Ravitch's resistance to the education reform movement is also evident in her being one of the most influential "tweeters" around (@DianeRavitch). Ravitch also now regularly writes essays against the education reform movement at The New York Review of Books. Her latest, which critically reviews Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp's recent book, aligns with my thinking on Teach for America, which I make clear in my Jacobin article, "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders." Again, this is remarkable. I'm excited for tonight.

The Ironies of Education Reform

In a post from about a month ago I sought to put the so-called education reform movement in a longer historical context. I introduced the post as follows:



I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the so-called education reform movement lately. Many of the movement’s highest-profile success stories have been (or should have been) discredited by recent cheating scandals. Although the cheating in Atlanta seems to have been the most systematic—the “Atlanta miracle” was built on the same house of cards as the “Texas miracle”—even movement darling Michelle Rhee (pictured here with former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty)

hasn’t escaped the brouhaha unscathed. At least one of the D.C. schools Rhee touted as exemplary gained blue-ribbon accolades thanks to impossibly lofty wrong-to-right erasure rates. Unsurprisingly, high-stakes testing, where student scores are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations—upon which rewards and punishments are issued—have led to a culture of cheating and corruption. We should expect much more of the same, since this is the model touted by Obama and his Secretary of Education, former Chicago Public Schools CEO (yes, CEO) Arne Duncan, in the form of the “Race to the Top” policy that allocates big money to those states most aggressive in implementing measures celebrated by educational reformers.



There’s much work to be done by educational historians on the so-called educational reform movement.



I've been giving more thought to the historical significance of the education reform movement since I posted this, mostly because I am writing a piece on Teach for America (TFA), where Rhee first made her mark in the world of education reform.



Rhee’s professional biography highlights the baffling place of TFA relative to the knotty history of American education reform. The last education leader as polarizing as Rhee was Albert Shanker, the longtime head of the New York City United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Shanker’s fractious legacy is evident in that he was both lampooned in the Woody Allen film Sleeper, as the man who blew up the world no less, and posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. The paradoxical connections between Rhee, the leading anti-teacher’s unionist, and Shanker, the most important teacher’s unionist in American history, do not end there, however. When Shanker infamously lead the UFT out on three separate teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, in what became known as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (which I blogged about here, in the context of thinking about communitarianism), Shanker was defending an educational order similar to that which TFA has attached itself to: a standardized system of accountability believed to be meritocratic. It goes without saying that these similarities are deeply ironic.



Some background history is warranted (I gave a synopsis of this at my post on communitarianism as well). In the late 1960s, black citizens in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political and financial support from the liberal elite, including from Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Power theorists such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. They sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers on the grounds that black teachers, unlike their white counterparts, would not presume black students genetically or culturally incapable of academic achievement.



Whether or not black teachers would better serve black students was less important to Shanker and the UFT than the fact that community control infringed upon a collectively bargained contract whereby teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests they took at several points along their career. This system, which Shanker and his union members believed was objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but often left black teachers behind. As part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several white teachers, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control. Prefiguring the TFA model, several of the white replacement teachers were inexperienced yet academically gifted Ivy Leaguers. This move, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker, who, thanks to union solidarity, decisively defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

As historian Jerald Podair convincingly shows, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis shattered the alliance between Jews and blacks that, for decades, had formed the bedrock of New York City’s cosmopolitanism.



But the crisis broke another bond, one mostly unnoticed despite its significance: that between teacher’s unions and educational reformers. Prior to the late 1960s, the concerns of teachers and students were rarely thought exclusive. It was understood that teachers and students held a mutual interest in acquiring more resources for schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville dismantled this affinity by revealing the cracks in the engine of American meritocracy.



Unwittingly, the TFA insurgency inserted itself into this complex history in incongruent ways. On the one hand, like the Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, TFA operates by a post-social Darwinist philosophy that all students are capable of academic achievement, no matter their racial and socio-economic background. And yet, on the other hand, much as Shanker and his teachers did in 1968, TFA bolsters a standardized testing regime that underpins American meritocracy—which, due to the long and tortuous history of race and class discrimination, disproportionately benefits whites at the expense of blacks and the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This discrepancy underscores the problems associated with the rationale for education reform: that it seeks to end educational inequality.

The Ironies of Education Reform

In a post from about a month ago I sought to put the so-called education reform movement in a longer historical context. I introduced the post as follows:



I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the so-called education reform movement lately. Many of the movement’s highest-profile success stories have been (or should have been) discredited by recent cheating scandals. Although the cheating in Atlanta seems to have been the most systematic—the “Atlanta miracle” was built on the same house of cards as the “Texas miracle”—even movement darling Michelle Rhee (pictured here with former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty)

hasn’t escaped the brouhaha unscathed. At least one of the D.C. schools Rhee touted as exemplary gained blue-ribbon accolades thanks to impossibly lofty wrong-to-right erasure rates. Unsurprisingly, high-stakes testing, where student scores are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations—upon which rewards and punishments are issued—have led to a culture of cheating and corruption. We should expect much more of the same, since this is the model touted by Obama and his Secretary of Education, former Chicago Public Schools CEO (yes, CEO) Arne Duncan, in the form of the “Race to the Top” policy that allocates big money to those states most aggressive in implementing measures celebrated by educational reformers.



There’s much work to be done by educational historians on the so-called educational reform movement.



I've been giving more thought to the historical significance of the education reform movement since I posted this, mostly because I am writing a piece on Teach for America (TFA), where Rhee first made her mark in the world of education reform.



Rhee’s professional biography highlights the baffling place of TFA relative to the knotty history of American education reform. The last education leader as polarizing as Rhee was Albert Shanker, the longtime head of the New York City United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Shanker’s fractious legacy is evident in that he was both lampooned in the Woody Allen film Sleeper, as the man who blew up the world no less, and posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. The paradoxical connections between Rhee, the leading anti-teacher’s unionist, and Shanker, the most important teacher’s unionist in American history, do not end there, however. When Shanker infamously lead the UFT out on three separate teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, in what became known as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (which I blogged about here, in the context of thinking about communitarianism), Shanker was defending an educational order similar to that which TFA has attached itself to: a standardized system of accountability believed to be meritocratic. It goes without saying that these similarities are deeply ironic.



Some background history is warranted (I gave a synopsis of this at my post on communitarianism as well). In the late 1960s, black citizens in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political and financial support from the liberal elite, including from Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Power theorists such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. They sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers on the grounds that black teachers, unlike their white counterparts, would not presume black students genetically or culturally incapable of academic achievement.



Whether or not black teachers would better serve black students was less important to Shanker and the UFT than the fact that community control infringed upon a collectively bargained contract whereby teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests they took at several points along their career. This system, which Shanker and his union members believed was objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but often left black teachers behind. As part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several white teachers, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control. Prefiguring the TFA model, several of the white replacement teachers were inexperienced yet academically gifted Ivy Leaguers. This move, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker, who, thanks to union solidarity, decisively defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

As historian Jerald Podair convincingly shows, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis shattered the alliance between Jews and blacks that, for decades, had formed the bedrock of New York City’s cosmopolitanism.



But the crisis broke another bond, one mostly unnoticed despite its significance: that between teacher’s unions and educational reformers. Prior to the late 1960s, the concerns of teachers and students were rarely thought exclusive. It was understood that teachers and students held a mutual interest in acquiring more resources for schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville dismantled this affinity by revealing the cracks in the engine of American meritocracy.



Unwittingly, the TFA insurgency inserted itself into this complex history in incongruent ways. On the one hand, like the Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, TFA operates by a post-social Darwinist philosophy that all students are capable of academic achievement, no matter their racial and socio-economic background. And yet, on the other hand, much as Shanker and his teachers did in 1968, TFA bolsters a standardized testing regime that underpins American meritocracy—which, due to the long and tortuous history of race and class discrimination, disproportionately benefits whites at the expense of blacks and the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This discrepancy underscores the problems associated with the rationale for education reform: that it seeks to end educational inequality.

What Good is Education to Society? The Thin Line Between Justice and Order

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the so-called education reform movement lately. Many of the movement’s highest-profile success stories have been (or should have been) discredited by recent cheating scandals. Although the cheating in Atlanta seems to have been the most systematic—the “Atlanta miracle” was built on the same house of cards as the “Texas miracle”—even movement darling Michelle Rhee hasn’t escaped the brouhaha unscathed. At least one of the D.C. schools Rhee touted as exemplary gained blue-ribbon accolades thanks to impossibly lofty wrong-to-right erasure rates. Unsurprisingly, high-stakes testing, where student scores are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations—upon which rewards and punishments are issued—have led to a culture of cheating and corruption. We should expect much more of the same, since this is the model touted by Obama and his Secretary of Education, former Chicago Public Schools CEO (yes, CEO) Arne Duncan, in the form of the “Race to the Top” policy that allocates big money to those states most aggressive in implementing measures celebrated by educational reformers.

There’s much work to be done by educational historians on the so-called educational reform movement. Although movement activists herald their ideas as fresh and bold, they don’t offer much new (aside from the enthusiasm with which they embrace market solutions to intransigent problems). For instance, like progressive educators since John Dewey, current educational reformers almost always sell their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, like the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century, current trendy reform mechanisms always end up serving the ends of order: whereas the progressive education movement’s most longstanding success story was its pedagogical program for “Americanization,” current reform success is calculated by how well students score on standardized tests and by college-entrance rates. In short, educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo.

Educational thinkers have long debated the role of education in society from one side or the other of the thin line between justice and order. In a compelling review of John Marsh’s Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality, Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry expresses the pessimistic, but frankly realistic view that schools are nothing more than engines of social reproduction. He pithily writes:

The hope is that every student has a teacher or two over a decade and a half that really makes them question and think, but either way, we silently acknowledge that they’ll spend the majority of their young vigor-filled lives quivering at the arbitrary mercy of petty kooks and jowly tyrants. Schools train students in what business professor Stefano Harney says every diploma really proves: “that the student can follow arbitrary authority, endure boredom, and compete against others.”

Such dour analysis has deep roots in Marxism. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Culture is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.” We might as well substitute “culture” with “education.” Thinking about education as merely reproducing the capitalist order has been common amongst neo-Marxists since conditioned by Louis Althusser’s famous 1969 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” (Much of my analysis of Althusser and his acolytes is drawn from the conclusion of my book, Education and the Cold War.) For Althusser, a state apparatus such as a public school system hailed, or, in Althusserian language, “interpellated” subjects to their predetermined tasks. Subjects in the educational apparatus were “always-already” called into being. There was no hope that people could rise above the ideological structure of a school. Justice was, at best, a façade, covering over the actual work being done by the schools: reproducing the dominant ideology and, as such, the status quo social order.

The leading neo-Marxist theorists of educational reproduction in the United States after the 1960s were Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Their book Schooling in Capitalist America was the most important empirical contribution to the genre. The Bowles and Gintis critique was rooted in their disillusionment with liberal reform in the United States, specifically with the failed assurance of social mobility—the promised by-product of public education. One of the basic thematic premises of Bowles and Gintis was that “the meritocratic orientation of the educational system promotes not its egalitarian function, but rather its integrative role.”

And yet, there have been a host of thinkers with leftist and Marxist orientations who have emphasized the liberating possibilities of education. Paulo Freire, author of the acclaimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has been canonized by colleges of education, is the most important signpost of such thinking. According to Freire, the great humanistic task of the oppressed was to liberate both themselves and their oppressors from dehumanization. But, paradoxically, humanization affirms itself in the face of dehumanization—this is the “pedagogy of the oppressed.” Henry Giroux, the most widely read North American of the Freire school of thought, took this one step further: he argued that educators should join the oppressed in the vanguard of liberation. Education could be a force for revolution.

Such thinking continues. From a political position similar to Malcolm Harris, yet with diametrically different premises about the possibilities of education, Julia Pointer Putnam argues in her recent Monthly Review essay—“Another Education is Happening”—that education can be put to work for a more just society if it deemphasizes individualistic, meritocratic achievement and instead accentuates the goals of community-building (reprising some of the arguments made by the community-control activists of the late 1960s). In building on the work of legendary Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, Pointer Putnam advocates:

a type of learning known as Place-Based Education (or Community-Based Education), where the local community and environment serve as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum. This approach diminishes the boundaries that have been built up between schools and the community. Place-Based Education emphasizes the ability of young people to learn by addressing the real-life problems around them.

If such pedagogical thinking sounds familiar, that’s because it is, at least, to those who have read John Dewey or any number of those schooled in Deweyan pedagogy. In fact, Pointer Putnam is explicit about grounding her theory of education in Deweyan thought. She even quotes Dewey to that effect: “The teaching-learning environments that would bring greatest growth are places where children and adults grow together, where the schools are not separate from the community.”

Dewey believed that education was the key to remolding society along more just lines. (Much of this section on Dewey is taken from Chapter 1 of my book Education and the Cold War.) Dewey’s theory of education was socially democratic. He believed education could and should remold society to be cooperative and just, even if at the expense of efficiency and order. In this regard, although he influenced progressive educators from both the order and justice sides of the movement, Dewey was firmly on the side of justice. Dewey’s theory of education was also one of agency rooted in the belief that, since human history was contingent, human subjectivity could irrevocably alter the course of the future. He conceptualized education as a motive force in overcoming the tyrannical impositions of the past. In short, Dewey was antipathetic to education as conformity. For Dewey, the relationship between individual agency and the surrounding environment was one of mutual adjustment, not a matter of one-sided accommodation of the individual to a static environment. “The environment must be plastic to the ends of the agent,” argued Dewey, because the “transformation of existing circumstances is moral duty rather than mere reproduction of them.”

In this, many have since criticized Dewey as too typically progressive or liberal in his naïve faith in reform—especially in his faith in the ameliorative potential of education. (Most of this form of criticism has come from Marxists, or from populists like Christopher Lasch. Of course, Dewey took it from all sides. The great counter-progressive historian Richard Hofstadter contended Dewey’s progressive educational theories were anti-intellectual for emphasizing practical concerns—in fact, Hofstadter dedicated a whole chapter to this critique in his celebrated Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And no one American thinker has ever had more abuse heaped upon him by conservatives than Dewey—Democracy and Education ranks fifth on a recent Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” not as harmful as The Communist Manifesto, but more so than Das Kapital!) But despite his relatively optimistic theory of education, Dewey was always sensitive to the misappropriation of his ideas. He was against education for social order. In fact, he reserved some of his most venomous intellectual barbs for those progressive educators who sacrificed justice at the altar of order and efficiency.

In 1914 Dewey wrote an article in the very first issue of The New Republic that was brutal in its assessment of fellow progressive educator David Snedden’s version of vocational education, which Dewey described as a practice that fashioned schools as “preliminary factories supported at public expense.” In Dewey’s eyes, vocational education had become a method for subsidizing capital at the expense of labor. Dewey’s article sparked an instructive exchange with Snedden, who was taken aback by Dewey’s attack, explaining that he had grown accustomed to such haranguing by educational “reactionaries,” but did not expect it from a fellow progressive. Snedden argued that his vocational education system would benefit everybody—management and workers alike. Everyone would reap the benefits of increased levels of production that would result from an educational system that trained students to succeed in their predetermined vocational niches. In response to Snedden’s reply, Dewey explained that their divergence was “not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.” For Dewey, vocational education had become “an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.”

And yet, despite Dewey’s explicit hesitations, nearly a century later, the history of American education suggests that order almost always wins out over justice, no matter authorial intentions—and no matter that Deweyans persist in sprouting up across the educational landscape. We might need to come to terms with the fact that education—or more precisely, schooling—is meant to serve the ends of the status quo, i.e., brutal inequality. And thus, if the educational reformers have been successful at anything, it’s in ensuring a more efficient machine for reproducing the status quo.

Of course, as an educator, some degree of optimism is warranted. Since most of you, gentle readers, are educators, what say you?

What Good is Education to Society? The Thin Line Between Justice and Order

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the so-called education reform movement lately. Many of the movement’s highest-profile success stories have been (or should have been) discredited by recent cheating scandals. Although the cheating in Atlanta seems to have been the most systematic—the “Atlanta miracle” was built on the same house of cards as the “Texas miracle”—even movement darling Michelle Rhee hasn’t escaped the brouhaha unscathed. At least one of the D.C. schools Rhee touted as exemplary gained blue-ribbon accolades thanks to impossibly lofty wrong-to-right erasure rates. Unsurprisingly, high-stakes testing, where student scores are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations—upon which rewards and punishments are issued—have led to a culture of cheating and corruption. We should expect much more of the same, since this is the model touted by Obama and his Secretary of Education, former Chicago Public Schools CEO (yes, CEO) Arne Duncan, in the form of the “Race to the Top” policy that allocates big money to those states most aggressive in implementing measures celebrated by educational reformers.

There’s much work to be done by educational historians on the so-called educational reform movement. Although movement activists herald their ideas as fresh and bold, they don’t offer much new (aside from the enthusiasm with which they embrace market solutions to intransigent problems). For instance, like progressive educators since John Dewey, current educational reformers almost always sell their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, like the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century, current trendy reform mechanisms always end up serving the ends of order: whereas the progressive education movement’s most longstanding success story was its pedagogical program for “Americanization,” current reform success is calculated by how well students score on standardized tests and by college-entrance rates. In short, educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo.

Educational thinkers have long debated the role of education in society from one side or the other of the thin line between justice and order. In a compelling review of John Marsh’s Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality, Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry expresses the pessimistic, but frankly realistic view that schools are nothing more than engines of social reproduction. He pithily writes:

The hope is that every student has a teacher or two over a decade and a half that really makes them question and think, but either way, we silently acknowledge that they’ll spend the majority of their young vigor-filled lives quivering at the arbitrary mercy of petty kooks and jowly tyrants. Schools train students in what business professor Stefano Harney says every diploma really proves: “that the student can follow arbitrary authority, endure boredom, and compete against others.”

Such dour analysis has deep roots in Marxism. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Culture is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.” We might as well substitute “culture” with “education.” Thinking about education as merely reproducing the capitalist order has been common amongst neo-Marxists since conditioned by Louis Althusser’s famous 1969 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” (Much of my analysis of Althusser and his acolytes is drawn from the conclusion of my book, Education and the Cold War.) For Althusser, a state apparatus such as a public school system hailed, or, in Althusserian language, “interpellated” subjects to their predetermined tasks. Subjects in the educational apparatus were “always-already” called into being. There was no hope that people could rise above the ideological structure of a school. Justice was, at best, a façade, covering over the actual work being done by the schools: reproducing the dominant ideology and, as such, the status quo social order.

The leading neo-Marxist theorists of educational reproduction in the United States after the 1960s were Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Their book Schooling in Capitalist America was the most important empirical contribution to the genre. The Bowles and Gintis critique was rooted in their disillusionment with liberal reform in the United States, specifically with the failed assurance of social mobility—the promised by-product of public education. One of the basic thematic premises of Bowles and Gintis was that “the meritocratic orientation of the educational system promotes not its egalitarian function, but rather its integrative role.”

And yet, there have been a host of thinkers with leftist and Marxist orientations who have emphasized the liberating possibilities of education. Paulo Freire, author of the acclaimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has been canonized by colleges of education, is the most important signpost of such thinking. According to Freire, the great humanistic task of the oppressed was to liberate both themselves and their oppressors from dehumanization. But, paradoxically, humanization affirms itself in the face of dehumanization—this is the “pedagogy of the oppressed.” Henry Giroux, the most widely read North American of the Freire school of thought, took this one step further: he argued that educators should join the oppressed in the vanguard of liberation. Education could be a force for revolution.

Such thinking continues. From a political position similar to Malcolm Harris, yet with diametrically different premises about the possibilities of education, Julia Pointer Putnam argues in her recent Monthly Review essay—“Another Education is Happening”—that education can be put to work for a more just society if it deemphasizes individualistic, meritocratic achievement and instead accentuates the goals of community-building (reprising some of the arguments made by the community-control activists of the late 1960s). In building on the work of legendary Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, Pointer Putnam advocates:

a type of learning known as Place-Based Education (or Community-Based Education), where the local community and environment serve as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum. This approach diminishes the boundaries that have been built up between schools and the community. Place-Based Education emphasizes the ability of young people to learn by addressing the real-life problems around them.

If such pedagogical thinking sounds familiar, that’s because it is, at least, to those who have read John Dewey or any number of those schooled in Deweyan pedagogy. In fact, Pointer Putnam is explicit about grounding her theory of education in Deweyan thought. She even quotes Dewey to that effect: “The teaching-learning environments that would bring greatest growth are places where children and adults grow together, where the schools are not separate from the community.”

Dewey believed that education was the key to remolding society along more just lines. (Much of this section on Dewey is taken from Chapter 1 of my book Education and the Cold War.) Dewey’s theory of education was socially democratic. He believed education could and should remold society to be cooperative and just, even if at the expense of efficiency and order. In this regard, although he influenced progressive educators from both the order and justice sides of the movement, Dewey was firmly on the side of justice. Dewey’s theory of education was also one of agency rooted in the belief that, since human history was contingent, human subjectivity could irrevocably alter the course of the future. He conceptualized education as a motive force in overcoming the tyrannical impositions of the past. In short, Dewey was antipathetic to education as conformity. For Dewey, the relationship between individual agency and the surrounding environment was one of mutual adjustment, not a matter of one-sided accommodation of the individual to a static environment. “The environment must be plastic to the ends of the agent,” argued Dewey, because the “transformation of existing circumstances is moral duty rather than mere reproduction of them.”

In this, many have since criticized Dewey as too typically progressive or liberal in his naïve faith in reform—especially in his faith in the ameliorative potential of education. (Most of this form of criticism has come from Marxists, or from populists like Christopher Lasch. Of course, Dewey took it from all sides. The great counter-progressive historian Richard Hofstadter contended Dewey’s progressive educational theories were anti-intellectual for emphasizing practical concerns—in fact, Hofstadter dedicated a whole chapter to this critique in his celebrated Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And no one American thinker has ever had more abuse heaped upon him by conservatives than Dewey—Democracy and Education ranks fifth on a recent Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” not as harmful as The Communist Manifesto, but more so than Das Kapital!) But despite his relatively optimistic theory of education, Dewey was always sensitive to the misappropriation of his ideas. He was against education for social order. In fact, he reserved some of his most venomous intellectual barbs for those progressive educators who sacrificed justice at the altar of order and efficiency.

In 1914 Dewey wrote an article in the very first issue of The New Republic that was brutal in its assessment of fellow progressive educator David Snedden’s version of vocational education, which Dewey described as a practice that fashioned schools as “preliminary factories supported at public expense.” In Dewey’s eyes, vocational education had become a method for subsidizing capital at the expense of labor. Dewey’s article sparked an instructive exchange with Snedden, who was taken aback by Dewey’s attack, explaining that he had grown accustomed to such haranguing by educational “reactionaries,” but did not expect it from a fellow progressive. Snedden argued that his vocational education system would benefit everybody—management and workers alike. Everyone would reap the benefits of increased levels of production that would result from an educational system that trained students to succeed in their predetermined vocational niches. In response to Snedden’s reply, Dewey explained that their divergence was “not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.” For Dewey, vocational education had become “an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.”

And yet, despite Dewey’s explicit hesitations, nearly a century later, the history of American education suggests that order almost always wins out over justice, no matter authorial intentions—and no matter that Deweyans persist in sprouting up across the educational landscape. We might need to come to terms with the fact that education—or more precisely, schooling—is meant to serve the ends of the status quo, i.e., brutal inequality. And thus, if the educational reformers have been successful at anything, it’s in ensuring a more efficient machine for reproducing the status quo.

Of course, as an educator, some degree of optimism is warranted. Since most of you, gentle readers, are educators, what say you?