For more than 100 years, K-12 education policy
has been driven by fears of foreign domination. Now that ideology is taking
over higher ed, and lining corporate coffers in the process.
In
the fall of 2006, a special commission appointed by the U. S. Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings issued its report on proposed changes for colleges
and universities in the United States. In language clearly intended to portray
the university in business terms, the authors summarized what they learned
during the hearings that led up to the drafting of the Spellings
Commission Report:
What we have learned
over the past year makes clear that American higher education has become what,
in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly
risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive. It is an enterprise
that has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and
institutions must be transformed to serve the changing educational needs of a
knowledge economy (p. ix).
The
question of if such a transformation of American higher education should
occur is obviously assumed in the report to be a settled issue—or at least it
is a question whose relative unimportance should not stand in the way of moving
forward on the how the university should serve the needs of the knowledge
economy. This unquestioned assumption by the Commission would seem to
signal a full reawakening of the technocratic educational agenda that began 100
years ago as an efficiency-based economic answer to a philosophical question
regarding the purpose of higher education, which had been focused for the past
800 years or so on the educational mission of creating good people and
citizens, rather than good servants of the knowledge economy.
Following
its industrial efficiency metaphor, the Spellings Commission Report goes on to
cast this ominous warning:
History
is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond
to—or even to notice—changes in the world around them, from railroads to steel
manufacturers. Without serious self-examination and reform, institutions of
higher education risk falling into the same trap, seeing their market share
substantially reduced and their services increasingly characterized by
obsolescence (p. ix).
In
their enthusiasm to make their business metaphor literal in its application to higher
education, the authors do not offer any evidence of the looming competitive
threat to the prominence of American universities, nor do they explain how it
is that students from around the world regularly opt for an American university
education if they can get one.
While
this kind of anxious rhetoric from policy elites has remained a standard line
of attack in the K-12 school reform discussion for the past 100 years, such
dire warnings are quite new to discussions of higher education reform—and quite
troubling to those who view the university’s mission in broader terms than the
corporate service model that the Spellings Commission advocated to counteract
the fear of “other countries...passing us.”
The
history of K-12 reform movements in the United States has been regularly
punctuated by similar alarmist rhetoric that goes back to the early 20th
century. The first generation of scientific management enthusiasts argued that
vocational high schools and industrial training schools for African Americans and
brown immigrants would offer security against the chief economic threat from
Germany, where educational system was based on the Prussian model for efficient
sorting of students for future life roles. Elite education reformers inspired
by Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management attacked the
liberal arts orientation of the school curriculum as outmoded, old-fashioned,
and out of touch with the times.
For
reformers and eugenics enthusiasts such as Franklin Bobbitt, Elwood Cubberley
and Edward Thorndike, economic prosperity demanded that waste be eliminated by
sorting individuals using primitive IQ and achievement tests and targeting
education based on the adult roles that students were qualified to occupy. As
Stanford University’s Cubberley phrased it, educators need to move past the
“the overly democratic notion that all individuals are of equal value.” By the
time the first IQ tests had been developed and deployed by the “scientific”
education reformers in the early 1920s, the differentiated vocational
curriculums seemed poised to deliver the efficiency that the American economic
engine required to cement America’s preeminent role as world leader. By the
time the efficiency zealots’ ideas were reaching the masses, however, the
Germans were in defeat, at the hands of the poorly educated English and
American rabble.
Fast-forward
to the 1950s, and we find a new generation of education reformers led by
Admiral Hyman Rickover and history professor Arthur Bestor. The '50s reformers
used new fears of foreign domination by the Soviets to steer K-12 schools
toward a rigorous curriculum focused on math and science. Sputnik came to
represent, for those who controlled the storyline in the media, another example
of a nation’s educational system asleep at the wheel while a foreign nation,
this time the Soviets, drove away with the prize of first place in the space
race. The grave security threats posed by the space advance were played up for
an American public already cringing in their fallout shelters, and it is not
coincidental that the first huge infusion of federal dollars to beef up science
and math teaching was named the National Defense Education Act [NDEA]. By the time the
U. S. had landed the first man on the moon just 11 years after Sputnik signaled
the apparent demise of American education, the superiority of Soviet schools
was long forgotten as the reformers had won the curriculum controls they
wanted.
Education
reformers twice more in the years following the space race would play the
foreign fear card. During the Reagan years, A Nation at Risk produced a
groundswell of anxiety, enough to turn schools back toward the basics and away
from the educational equity movement begun in the 1960s. It was President
Reagan’s reminder to the American people that perhaps the schools had been
charged with doing too much too fast that served to justify the turning away
from the educational equality agenda just in time to save the American people
from another foreign economic threat, this time the Japanese. For the '80s round
of antiquarian reforms, an added element of accountability based on test scores
was added to the back-to-basics game plan, thus assuring that those American
minorities recently integrated into white schools would be called upon to show
proof that they deserved the education that they had been denied since their
ancestors’ arrival to the American shores in chains.
The
rise of Japan, whose economic advances were construed as sure signs of
educational collapse in the U.S., was once more forgotten just 10 years later,
when the Japanese economic threat was eclipsed by an American economic boom
such as the world had not seen. And once again, none of the reformers
credited the quick economic turnaround to the American schools, which, of
course, would have made as much sense as blaming them for the economic demise
10 years earlier.
The
most recent wave of foreign fear exploited by education reformers seeks to move
schools further in the direction of an education agenda embraced by the
modern-day efficiency zealots, or what Benjamin Barber calls consumer
capitalists. To reinvigorate national economic advantage over China and India,
21st-century reformers once more go to the education solution, calling for more
science, technology, engineering, and math teaching with nationally adopted
curriculum and tests.
What
makes this round of foreign fear exploitation by education reformers unique is
that higher education is as much the target as K-12 schools, signaling the
coming of age of the K-20 technocratic agenda that is clearly visible beneath
the thin veneer of exaggerated nation baiting represented by another generation
of scare documents
like “Tougher Choices
for Tougher Times,” which was funded primarily by the Gates
Foundation.
[Or see "Rising Above the Gathering Storm."]Like its many predecessors, TCTT offers grave scenarios if its
educational recommendations are not heeded.
The
following paragraphs from Part 4 of our recently published book, The Mismeasure
of Education, pick up the story and move it to where we
are today. With Americans now spending approximately $700 billion per year on
education, “K-20” schooling has come to represent a potential river of
continuous revenue for corporate interests. It is of no small consequence to
the greatest university system in the world that all Americans become keenly
aware of what is at stake as corporatists move in to feed on higher education.
We
write:
"Echoing
the rationale used by reformers since the 1980s, the [Spellings]
Report contended that its proposed changes to higher education would
allow, in the end, the United States to gain “a heightened capacity to compete
in the global market place” (p. xiii). The Report supported closer linkages
between K-12 and higher education, and it called for the same accountability
measures in higher education that were being promoted for the next generation
of testing in K-12:
Student
achievement, which is inextricably connected to institutional success, must be
measured by institutions on a “value-added” basis that takes into account
students’ academic baseline when assessing their results. This information
should be made available to students, and reported publicly in aggregate form
to provide consumers and policymakers an accessible, understandable way to
measure the relative effectiveness of different colleges and universities (p.
4).
These
recommendations met with a cool response from most colleges and universities,
but by 2011 over 100 institutions of higher education, including the University
of Texas, were administering and reporting
student results on the College Learning Assessment (CLA). The CLA is
given to students as entering freshmen and at the end of their sophomore year
to measure the “value added” knowledge attainment after two years of college.
Efforts to expand the use of the CLA have been strongly supported by the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation, the latter of which was
formed in 2001 by the sale of the “nation’s largest private guarantor and
administrator of education loans” to SLM, Inc. (Sallie Mae), which was the
“owner and manager of student loans for 5.3 million borrowers (Lumina
Foundation, 2007, p. 3) [From the ground
up: An early history of the Lumina Foundation for education.
Indianapolis: Lumina Foundation].
Both
foundations have worked in concert since Lumina’s founding to push a variety of
“advocacy philanthropy” aimed to increase college attendance among minorities
and the poor and to advance 21st-century scientific management through
technological applications to higher education planning, implementation, and
delivery. In a study presented
in 2012 at the American Education Research Association, researchers
Cassie Hall and Scott Thomas found that,
There
has been a shift in the focus of foundations toward issues of completion, productivity,
metrics, and efficiency—foundations are focusing on broad policy issues,
including the ways in which higher education systems are arranged, their
funding structures, how they are held accountable, and how they manage their
data systems (p. 12).
Hall
and Thomas found Gates, Lumina, and other corporate foundations using
strategies “to insert themselves in the public policy process” in ways that
have paid great dividends in the corporate foundation exercise of power to
steer K-12 public education agendas at the federal and state levels. Hall
and Thomas interviewed policy experts who expressed a common concern and a deep
irony that the foundation accountabilists never seem to acknowledge:
The
most disturbing element … is that, in America, we elect officials to determine
the direction of the country, yet foundations are working to set the public
policy agenda. Foundation officials are not elected, foundations do not pay
taxes, and there are no accountability or transparency measures. It’s not
that they shouldn’t have a voice, but trying to direct government is another
thing…(p. 31).
By
seeding state government departments and university departments with lucrative
grants, foundations such as Lumina and Gates effectively buy cooperation among
public officials and knowledge workers who may, otherwise, question who stands
to benefit most by increased college efficiencies in data collection, analysis,
transfer, storage, and retrieval, or they may wonder about motives for programs
supported by a foundation created with funds from the student loan business to
increase access to college for students who must borrow heavily to attend.
This
kind of narrow instrumentalist approach extended to colleges and universities
bodes ill for the future of the economy, the nation, and the health of the
planet. For even if foundation motives and “advocacy philanthropy” were
entirely pure and without economic benefit for the companies that spawned the
foundations or the cottage industries sprung up to promote foundation goals,
there remains problems with this kind of social policy steering: 1) it weakens
democracy by perpetuating anti-democratic control of public institutions, 2) it
restricts the diversity of opinion and expertise that are required to solve the
interlinking and systemic problems that threaten economic sustainability, the
health of the ecosystems, and the continuation of civilization as we know it,
and 3) it narrows educational priorities to serve productivity needs that
constrict the growth of knowledge at a most importune time in human
history.
For
those who view the schools’ and the universities’ core mission as foundational
to creating and evolving knowledge and understanding to advance the autonomy
and improved living for all people and cultures, the fixation by unelected
plutocrats on a singular vision of what is fair for everyone except themselves
expresses a level of arrogance for which no parallel exists in the national
history. Public education policy steering by billionaires offers a real
and present danger to the purpose and functioning of democratic institutions,
as well as the likelihood for the kind of ethical dysfunction and reckless
self-aggrandizement that earned for Wall Street investment bankers a reputation
as casino
capitalists. Or when foundation sponsored research takes precedent
over independent scholarly research by the National Research Council, as in the
case of Gates-funded research prevailing as NRC warnings about value added
assessments were dismissed, there is the open invitation to grave policy errors
arising from tunnel vision and
knowledge advocacy posing as independent judgment.
These
possibilities loom at a unique juncture in planetary history from which the
future of most species will be determined by the choices, educational and
otherwise, that we humans make in the near term. Our political, scientific, and
cultural dilemmas will require many well-educated minds, spirits, and hands to
make a sustainable road into the future, and the direction and the conveyance
to get there should not be determined by opportunists with enough blind hubris
to convince themselves, if no one else, that the destination and the vehicles
have been pre-arranged by a few who stand to expand and concentrate their power
by those crucial choices."
