Twilight of Equality?

10/6/2014

            In the summer of 2011, I hopped on a plane and headed to Washington D.C. to attend an education rally and march aimed at protesting neoliberal attacks on public schools. The timing for the march was appropriate. It occurred in the wake of the massive Wisconsin protests over Governor Scott Walker’s attack on collective bargaining. Then, in my own backyard (Florida at the time), bills were beginning to roll out onto the floors of the state legislature that would eventually kill tenure for all newly hired teachers and effectively tie teacher pay to student test scores. There was an apparent trend emerging among many other states as well. Needless to say, I went to D.C. out of sheer frustration. I was overwhelmed by feelings of political powerlessness and a mass of questions that ultimately kept leading me back to one question: What the hell do I do about this?  I found solidarity there among 5,000 educators, parents, and students; I realized that I was not alone in my frustration, my anxiety, or my rage against the injustice I saw being forced upon the public schools and the people who learn and work inside them.

It took me a couple of months to gain my activist bearings about me after that march, but I have been wholly dedicated to education activism for over two and a half years now. It has been as invigorating as it has been frustrating. As a steering committee member for a national education organization, it is often hard to tell if me and my cohorts are actually ‘steering’ or shaping anything, for it often feels much more like we are riding on or being sucked away in the torrents of a social movement. That is, the challenges of defining, agreeing upon, and then channeling the energies in a productive manner is immense. And in the small amount of time I have been involved, I have seen people come and go and larger organizations break down into "narrow, single-issue lobbying, litigation, and fundraising organizations" and then disintegrate (p. 67). Given my experience with the organization, though, Lisa Duggan’s book The Twilight of Equality? is a particularly fascinating piece. In fact, I was nothing short of furious by the time I got to the fifth page in the introduction because of the way she describes the intent and the tactics of neoliberals and policies.

See, as a former educator I have watched the gradual standardization of my field since 2002, and it has resembled much of what de Russy was aiming at in her university reforms (p. 33). This has been a particularly painful and infuriating thing to endure not only because I have always felt inherently creative, but also because I also desire to see the same nurtured in children and students. The major mechanism for standardizing human beings in schools, and hence ‘teaching’ the creativity out of them, has been through the utilization of the high-stakes test. The high-stakes test is problematic for a plethora of reasons, of course. First, the tests are created by private, for-profit, testing corporations. In other words, the tests that determine a child’s fate in K-12 are created inside a corporate black hole: no public oversight exists, the public (parents and teachers included) are not allowed to see the test, and because they are considered ‘private,’ the corporation does not have to ensure their assessments meet scientific standards for validity and reliability. The second major problem is that legislation functions as a (public) mandate that requires state governments to purchase the tests from the for-profit corporations so they can engage in (private) assessment. Thus, billions of tax dollars are funneled out of taxpayers’ pockets each year, through their schooling institutions, and into the pockets of private, corporate profiteers.

Finally, although there are enough problems here to fill a dissertation, there is the problem that high-stakes tests are not at all dissimilar to IQ tests (p. 39). In fact, Florida’s newest state test is actually made by the same company that manufactured the IQ test in the 1900’s. High-stakes tests and their accompanying policies embrace the bankrupt notion that student growth is somehow quantifiable and thereby work to reinforce the market-based faith that “If something is not measureable, then it lacks value” (p. 34). The popularized discourse on testing, meanwhile, is been geared toward ‘rigor’, international competition in a ‘global economy’, ‘failing schools’, a ‘lazy’ teaching profession, and ‘personal accountability’ when it comes to teaching and learning. Notice the neoliberal focus is on the failure of students, teachers, and a public institution; it is not aimed at the issues of poverty, underfunding, and structural inequality that result from tax cuts and the insane expenditures that schools are now legally required to flush out of the institution and into private hands.

At its very core, neoliberal/privatized education policies and the resulting high-stakes testing industrial complex divert much needed attention and funds away from those students who most need public support. And by maintaining the idea that a test is somehow ‘objective’, neoliberals simultaneously divert attention away from (and money toward) the racist, classist, and culturally and linguistically biased mechanism of standardization.