I have prepared a powerpoint presentation that helps to concretize neoliberalism and neoconservatism, as discussed by Lipman and Apple. You can click on the box inside a box icon to make the powerpoint full screened. (I first prepared this Powerpoint for this course in 2009, which is why it bears that date).
Neoliberalism & Neoconservatism
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On May 4, 2008 the New York Times published an article that detailed the dire situation for many US Americans needing healthcare in a climate of exponentially rising costs. Though 158 million do have some kind of health insurance, the portion of families’ household incomes going to healthcare has risen by 12% since 2001, making healthcare the largest annual expense for the average US family
Elsewhere, unanticipated crises such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse in August 2007, heavy rains in New York City that flooded and shut down the subway system, and the months long 2007 drought in Georgia spurred cries for the private take-over of roads, public transportation, and water management, not just in the crisis zones, but all over the country. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) scrambled to respond to the expanding needs of survivors, for-profit crisis management companies such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater, already fatted by profits on the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, moved quietly into place to seize the opportunity yielded by FEMA’s severe inadequacy.
In early 2008, New York State garnered proposals from Wall Street firms who want to take over the state lottery system. States like New Jersey, California are already seriously considering privatizing state lotteries (Hakim, 2008). Between 2001 and 2008, the New York City Housing Authority lost $611 million in Federal funding, as public housing units all over the country have been destroyed, or as developments have been privatized.
In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld began privatizing warfare by hiring Blackwater to do combat in Iraq, a move that unilaterally interrupted pre-existing international checks and balances (via international tribunals and less directly through things like trade embargos). Hiring a for-profit company to engage in combat undercuts any ethical or economic factors that might encourage reason and restraint. A company that makes its money on war without the consequences of paying for it will be sure to keep the war going.
This is a different way of thinking about the shrinking of public/free space. Bruce Western writes,
"Between 1970 and 2003, state and federal prisons grew sevenfold to house 1.4 million convicted felons serving at least one year behind bars, and typically much longer. Offenders held in county jails, awaiting trial or serving short sentences, added another 700,000 by 2003. In addition to the incarcerated populations, another 4.7 million people were under probation and parole supervision. The entire correctional population of the United States totaled nearly 7 million in 2003, around 6 percent of the adult male population" (Western, p. 6, 2003).
In the US, more than 1 in 100 adults are in jail or prison. More than 1 in 9 Black men aged 20-34 are in jail or prison (Pew Center on the States, 2008), a “profound social exclusion” (Western, 2006, p. 7). “No other group,” Western writes, “routinely contends with long terms of forced confinement and bears the stigma of official criminality in all subsequent spheres of social life…” (ibid, p. 7). In the past twenty years, state spending on prisons has grown by more than 127%, while state spending on higher education has only grown by 21% (Pew Center on the States, 2008). The expansion of prison spending and increase of percentage of the population impact what is public and who are the public in ways that we haven’t even begun to understand.
Like other parts of the public sphere, education is vulnerable to privatizing reform when perceived to be in crisis. In a recent book, When School Reform Goes Wrong (2007), Nel Noddings positions the No Child Left Behind Act within a reform effort ignited in 1983 by A Nation at Risk, an open letter to the American people written by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk, Noddings writes,
"(I)s alarmist; it uses words such as war, foreign power, and unilateral disarmament. Readers who might otherwise look for carefully presented evidence may be swept into premature agreement by language that induces fear. When policymakers warn that the United States will lose its competitive edge, that other nations are producing more engineers than the United States, and that our students lag dangerously behind those of other nations, audiences rarely ask for evidence to support the warnings. They are moved by emotion" (Noddings, p. 21, 2007).
Noddings casts NCLB as a prime example of Orwellian double-think (leave no child behind while all children are left behind) and writes that some critics claim that “the designers and advocates of NCLB intend to weaken the public schools and thus pave the way for privatization” (ibid, p. 23). It’s not difficult to be suspicious; NCLB has mandated that all students and all schools demonstrate “100% proficiency” by the year 2014. “Virtually no informed parent, teacher, administrator, researcher –or legislator- thinks this mandate can be met.” (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 5). As the deadline approaches, schools already struggling to make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) have back loaded the widest increments toward proficiency. For example, “Under Ohio’s AYP arrangement, the rate of progress required for the years from 2002-2009 is only one third of the annual rate that will be required from 2010 to 2014” (ibid, 2008, p. 6; Linn, 2003). Last year, New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein hired a subdivision of Edison, Inc., the same company rebuffed by the Philadelphia school system in 2002 and New York City school system in 2007, to provide federally mandated tutoring to schools not making AYP under NCLB. Edison, Inc. made $9.6 million from this arrangement in the 2005-06 school year.
Authors Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff refer to the ripple effects of NCLB’s 100% proficiency mandate as a “cascade of consequences” that grow more severe over five years of a school’s documented insufficient progress. Ultimately, in the fifth year of insufficient progress, schools are “identified for restructuring” and are “required to develop new governance structures, such as reopening as a charter school, replacing a majority of the staff, hiring a private management company to run the school, or being taken over by the state” (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 60). There are no data that support that the kinds of improvements built into the NCLB progress schedule can be made within set time frames, and no evidence that the sequence of steps required of unsatisfactory schools will put them back on track (Sunderman and Orfield, 2006; Rebell and Wolff, 2008). Further, though federal funding for schools has increased, the increase does not cover the increased testing and administrative costs of complying with NCLB. The backloading of progress requirements, the “rapid-fire cascade of consequences” (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 135), the inadequate funding, and the almost absurd goal of 100% proficiency all add up to a scenario destined for steep fall-out for public schools, as private firms and faith-based organizations are poised on the sidelines, waiting for their chance to make a play. By 2014, “almost all schools are likely to be on the “needs improvement’ list” (Rebell and Wolff, 2008, p. 5; Linn, 2003).
Public funding for basic human and civic needs is being repealed at every turn in a young person’s life. As firms position themselves to take over public transportation, public housing, and public schools, and as the healthcare system becomes available only to those who can pay for it in more pronounced ways, young people find themselves becoming more and more isolated from the lifelines that have defined the American way. Though we know that resources are unevenly distributed, and that much improvement is needed, school is the only place that some students will be able to get a healthful meal, see a counselor or nurse, be tested for a range of cognitive, learning, and physiological disabilities or impairments, have access to books, computers and the internet, and be free from the expectation to earn money. For fewer students, school will be the place where they learn English, get needed sexual health information and safe sex devices, and receive relevant career training and guidance.
Bruce Western (2005) argues that another institution has picked up the slack as other institutions have contracted: prisons. “(T)he penal system (has) assumed new responsibilities for public health, delivering treatment on a large scale for mental illness, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C”
Lawrence Cremin argued in 1989 that as non-school institutions have changed since World War II, schools have been expected to pick up the pieces. Further, as Cremin and Jean Anyon (2005) assert, the US has a “longstanding tendency of…try[ing] to solve certain social problems indirectly through education rather than directly through politics,” (Cremin, 1990, p. ix) or in Anyon’s work, through the direct change of social policy (Anyon, 2005)
Schools are expected to do so much because other public spaces have contracted. It is a profound irony that federal and state mandates focused upon accountability have feigned accountability while passing the buck: schools absorb the responsibility for meeting most social needs.
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