After the Future

Commonplace Freedoms

What Gramsci calls 'common sense' . . . typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or 'others') can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word 'freedom' resonates so widely with the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes 'a button that elites can press to open the door in the masses' to justify almost anything. Thus could Bush retrospectively justify the Iraq war. Gramsci therefore concluded that political questions become 'insoluble' when 'disguised as cultural ones'. (David Harvey, BHoN, p. 39)

I've never read Gramsci, but I've been saying here for years that we need to separate out political issues from cultural issues. People who belong to different tribes frequently have a common enemy, and they figure out how to make alliances when facing a common threat. But that would require a level of 'good sense' that neither traditionalist nor cosmopolitan tribalists in American society seem capable of mustering. 

In the rhetorical tradition, the verbal tool used to evoke common sense is the commonplace. A common place is an idea or a value that one absorbs with one's mother's milk. It's assumed to be true the way we all assume that the truth in an adage like the "early bird gets the worm." Politics runs on commonplaces, and the rhetorical challenge is to develop narratives that resonate with American commonplaces.

In the post I put up the other day, I talk about how Neoliberalism's appeal lies in its use of commonplaces. I quote Harvey who says "The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as a  'central values of civilization'." These are the core values of the liberal tradition tracing back to the 1600s. But the real question is whose freedom, whose dignity? Harvey concludes his first chapter with this passage:

Thirty years of neoliberal freedoms have, after all, not only restored power to a narrowly defined capitalist class. They have also produced immense concentrations of corporate power in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing (for example Wal-Mart). The freedom of the market that Bush proclaims as the high point of human aspiration turns out to be nothing more than the convenient means to spread corporate monopoly power and Coca Cola everywhere without constraint. With disproportionate influence over the media and the political process this class (with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the lead) has both the incentive and the power to persuade us that we are all better off under a neoliberal regime of freedoms. For the elite, living comfortably in their gilded ghettos, the world must indeed seem a better place. As Polanyi might have put it, neoliberalism confers rights and freedoms on those 'whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing', leaving a pittance for the rest of us. How is it, then, that 'the rest of us' have so easily acquiesced in this state of affairs? (David Harvey, BHoN, p. 38)

How is it indeed? Well, part of the answer is that we have been skillfully manipulated by powerful factions who know their way around a commonplace. The appeal to American values that made sense in a country of 5 million people before the industrial revolution is being very effectively deployed to reinforce political and economic arrangements that favor these elites. And the opposition to these ideas has been very successfully framed as 'socialism', which is anathema to these ideals. The result is 

Commodifying the Un-commodifiable

From Michael Sandel's "What Isn't for Sale" in the April Atlantic:

This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.

The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?

As Sandel points out elsewhere in the article, one of the consequences of living in a market society is that there is a bias toward commodifying everything because we don't want to make judgments or develop a consensus about what is better and worse. 

In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is “How much?” Markets don’t wag fingers. They don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones. Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged.

This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.

I hate diffident non-judgmentalism. Tolerance, ok. We don't hate those with whom we disagree, but let's argue about what we believe and why. Let's stop being so wishy washy. Believe me the privatizers are clear about what they want, and they love it when the best of us lack all conviction.

P.S. This is the basic argument of David Graeber's book Debt that I've been excerpting quotes from in the last couple of weeks. I hope to have a post some time that goes into the book's argument. He has a new book out, a part of which was excerpted the other day in Salon. It's entitled The Democracy Project. 

Seductive Neoliberalism

For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted  and not open to question. The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as a  "central values of civilization''. In so doing they chose wisely, for these are indeed compelling and seductive ideals. These values, they held, were threatened not only by fascism, dictatorships, and communism, but  by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgments for those of individuals to choose. David Harvey--A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 5

The United States from its origins is a liberal society. A liberal society is one characterized by free markets with minimal state interference, a celebration of individual freedom and private property rights, and a democratically legitimated government that protects basic rights like freedom of speech and religion. In the Anglo-American world classic dominant political economic paradigm, but from it developed in the U.S. what might be called reform liberalism or progressive liberalism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Progressive liberalism, while embracing the basic values framework of classic liberalism, emerged as it became clear that classic liberalism led to the immiseration of the workers who labored within the large new industrial complexes that developed after the Civil War in the U.S. Classic liberalism created wealth, but it didn't distribute it well or fairly. 

Progressive liberalism sought to use the power of governments to restrain the more predatory practices of emerging large corporations and to mitigate the disruptive social and economic effects caused by a rapidly developing and innovative capitalist market economy. Progressive liberalism in the U.S. is similar in many respects to social emocracy in Europe in that both seek an economic middle road between markets and government controls, but both derive from different post-Enlightenment intellectual traditions. Progressive liberalism is an attempt to moderate the extremes of bare-knuckled laissez-faire capitalism; European social democracy comes out of the other branch of Enlightenment political economic thinking--revolutionary socialism, and sought to mitigate its violently disruptive agenda of bare-knuckled revolutionary socialism.

I think American progressive liberalism's roots in the classic liberal tradition make it peculiarly allergic to the more dirigiste forms of European social democracy. Calling Obama, or anybody with any influence on the American national scene who doesn't come from Vermont, a socialist is facetious. Socialism has never had much broad seductive power in the U.S. Progressive liberalism is more experimental and adaptive, rather than ideologically driven. Keynes gave it a theoretical framework, but FDR came before Keynes. 

In the US, laissez-faire liberalism dominated from the 1865 to 1932, and progressive liberalism dominated from 1933 to 1975. Laissez-faire Liberalism re-emerged during the shock decade of the 1970s during the Carter administration, was aggressively implemented during the Reagan administration, settled in during the Clinton administration, and It should have self-destructed during the Bush administration, but it didn't. Many people, me included, thought that the shock of the aughts--the U.S. government's reckless war-making and fiscal policies coupled with the financial markets disaster of 2008 would have forced adjustments in the direction of progressive liberalism, but the Obama administration has largely embraced neoliberalism as its basic policy framework.

Our politics in the US might be described now as mainly a factional dispute between right and left neoliberals. Neoliberalism is classic liberalism in a postindustrial key. It's an open question now whether the dominance of progressive liberalism from the thirties through the seventies was aberrational, and we've now returned to the historical norm. From where we stand now, it would appear so. But the ascendancy of neoliberalism doesn't explain what's going on in Washington now, and why the government is paralyzed and it's impossible to even get sensible gun control legislation enacted that 90% of the American population supports. Why isn't there more consensus in both parties if both are more or less agreed about neoliberal objectives?

I'd argue that the Democrats are, relatively speaking, serious neoliberals, while the Republicans are not. Democrats are serious about governing in accordance with Neoliberal principles.That means they embrace liberal social values while also embracing fiscally conservative agenda that seeks free trade, lower taxes and privatization of public institutions, cuts to entitlements, deregulation, weakening of collective bargaining rights, and a fetish regarding balanced budgets and reducing deficits. 

The Republicans, on the other hand, are not serious at all about governance; they seek to use government power as a crony system primarily to protect and promote the interests of the very wealthy. Both parties are cronyist, but it's far more extreme and blatant in the Republican party. The Republican agenda overlaps with the Neoliberal agenda, but it departs from it when it conflicts with its strategies to maintain its political power or to wrest it from the Democrats who, though neoliberal in its essence still have to deal with progressive liberals in its caucus.The acquisition and exercise of political power is the most important objective for Republicans. It's a game many of them are playing as an end in itself without regard for what's good for the country as a whole. Governance is not something they care about, believe in, or do very effectively. Rather than shaming the GOP for their governance failures, the media accept it as evidence for the Republican contention that Government cannot govern effectively. 

Both parties have bases, which party elites in each have to manage and appease from time to time, but neither base poses serious threats to elites in either party. Elites within the GOP have to deal with the cultural conservatives and religious right that compose their base, and elites within the Democratic party have to deal with a loose confederation of groups that are a mix of Progressive liberals on economic issues and cultural liberals who care more about identity politics than economic issues, and have little understanding of or care about the Neoliberal agenda.

This separation on cultural issues is exploited by economic elites to keep workers and the middle class divided in their separate cultural silos so they won't unite around economic issues. As a result, the cultural conservatives within the Republican Party are almost as powerless as the Progressive liberals are within the Democratic Party. Both factions get tossed crumbs, but neither is able to get its agenda taken seriously, except insofar as aspects of it overlap with the Neoliberal agenda. The culturally conservative GOP base gets opposition to sensible gun control as its crumb du jour; the progressive base gets support for abortion, gay marriage, as its crumbs du jour. I'm not saying some elites are insincere in their support or opposition to these cultural issues. I am saying that our preoccupation with them distracts us from dealing with deeper structural developments that have led to the emasculation of the progressive liberal economic agenda.

So while the Democratic Party power structure is dominated by neoliberals, it must embraces progressive liberals as part of its coalition as the GOP must embrace cultural conservatives. There are many neoliberals--Tom Friedman comes to mind--who are earnest utopians in their embrace of neoliberalism. And so an important place where  earnest neoliberals true believers  and their earnest counterparts in the Progressive faction differ is in a basic philosophical difference regarding globalization.

Neoliberals see it as something that lies outside of the power of national governments to control and so see the more realistic course as rolling with it rather than fighting it. They accept free market capitalism as on the whole a dynamic, if somewhat disruptive, positive force, and seek to mitigate its more disruptive effects by promoting improved education to prepare future workers for a dynamically changing work place and retraining programs  for adults to mitigate the effects of structural, chronic worker displacement. The fundamental presuppositions of neoliberalism are social darwinist: adapt or die. 

Progressive liberals accept that we are living in a rapidly integrating world system, but think that national governments can play a more proactive role in shaping national policy to benefit the interests of the broad public. This was essential goal of the Breton-Woods system==to find a Keynesian balance between desirable economic global integration and national sovereignty. Neoliberalism cares about the first but says there's little that can be done or should be done regarding the second. The neoliberals used the shocks of the seventies to discredit the Keynesian compromise, and have reverted us to the world system that existed before WWI. We're back in a kind of global economic wild west dominated by transnational economic warlords.

So we've seen this movie before. Yes, things are different now, but progressive liberals complain that neoliberal policies derive from political choices that benefit elite interests, and are not simply a necessary adjustment to the inevitable forces of globalization. But their critique has been unable to get any traction in the national corridors of power because while progressive liberal policy ideas resonate with a majority of Americans, they don't with elites in either party, and because wealthy elites are running things, nothing changes until that changes.  And that's not going to change until progressive liberals come up with a counter narrative that is more broadly seductive than the neoliberal one. It must provide "a conceptual apparatus . . . that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit." And organizes a people's movement around it. 

 

Don't Blame the Schools

From Salon this morning:

The United States ranked in the bottom four of a United Nations report on child well-being. Among 29 countries, America landed second from the bottom in child poverty and held a similarly dismal position when it came to “child life satisfaction.”

Keeping the U.S. company at the bottom of the report, which gauged material well-being, overall health, access to housing and education, were Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, three of the poorest countries in the survey.

UNICEF said in a statement on the survey that child poverty in countries like the U.S. “is not inevitable but is policy-susceptible” and that there isn’t necessarily a strong relationship between per capita GDP and overall child well-being, explaining: “The Czech Republic is ranked higher than Austria, Slovenia higher than Canada, and Portugal higher than the United States.”

The Netherlands ranked number one on the list, with Norway, Iceland, Finland and Sweden filling out the top five.

Whenever you hear somebody decrying the "achievement gap", and how America's schools are failing, send them the link to this article. The U.S. is near the top when it comes to per capita GDP, but the more important issue is how the wealth produced by GDP is distributed. There is something terribly wrong with us, and we are incapable of doing anything about it.  We have the wealth; we don't have the imagination or the will to distribute it fairly:

The Neoliberal World System

When the Keynesian settlement was finally put into effect, after World War II, it was offered only to a relatively small slice of the world's population. As time when on, more and more people wanted in on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the period from 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary movements, could be seen as demands for inclusion: demands for political equality that assumed equality was meaningless without some level of economic security. . . . At some point in the '70s, things reached a breaking point. It would appear that capitalism, as a system, simply cannot extend such a deal to everyone. Quite possibly it wouldn't even remain viable if all its workers were free wage laborers; certainly it will never be able to provide everyone in the world the sort of life lived by, say, a 1960s auto worker in Michigan or Turin. . . . The result might be termed a crisis of inclusion. By the late 1970s the existing order was clearly in a state of collapse, plagued simultaneously by financial chaos, food riots, oil shock, widespread doomsday prophecies of the end of growth and ecological crisis--al of which, it turned out, proved to be ways of putting the populace on notice that all deals were off.

The moment that we start framing the story this way, it's easy to see that the next thirty years, the period from roughly 1978 to 2009, follows nearly the same pattern. Except that the deal, the settlement, had changed. Certainly, when both Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK launched a systematic attack on the power of labor unions, as well as on the legacy of Keynes, it was a way of explicitly declaring that all previous deals were off. Everyone could now have political rights . . . but political rights were to become economically meaningless. (David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, p. 374-75)

Before 2003 when I first started writing this blog, religious and philosophical issues were the primary focus of my reading and thinking. I honestly didn't care that much about what was happening in the political and economic spheres. I saw any hope then for  real change as developing out of the cultural sphere, with the political and economic spheres reacting to it. I still believe that, but I have come to believe that the encroachment of the political and economic spheres in the cultural sphere is crowding out what I think of as spiritual possibility. The conditions for the possibility of spiritual initiatives are becoming increasingly sterile. Neoliberalism is the name for the toxic reigning world view in the political and economic spheres that is sterilizing spiritual possibility in this way.

Before 2003, I'd have described myself as a generic social democrat. I voted for Clinton in '92, but for Nader in '96 and 2000. It was then that I was beginning to wake up to this Neoliberal thing. But my assumption during the '80s and '90s was that the world created by Thatcher and Reagan was aberrational, that the pendulum would eventually swing back to some sensible approximation of the New Deal compromise between markets and governments. I no longer believe that. I don't think there's going to be a pendulum swing. I believe now things are fundamentally different. I think we're locked in. 

We're locked in because since the fall of the Soviet Union, Neoliberalism has become the dominant narrative around which this globalization is organized in the political and economic spheres, and there is no alternative political economic world view with a constituency powerful enough to push back against it. Some promising things have emerged in Latin America while the US has been preoccupied with its imperial follies in the Middle East, but will they be able to survive if and when the people who run things start paying more attention?

A lot of us, even if we accept that the trente glorieuses  were then and this is now, still think that a new deal has to be negotiated, we want negotiate that deal from a position where we have some leverage. But Neoliberalism isn't interested in negotiating, and its principals have worked hard and are still working to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary people to have any power or leverage in the negotiations. The unions have been eviscerated. We certainly no longer have any power in the political process because the Neoliberal world view is embraced with minor variations by political elites in both parties in the U.S., and it's the narrative that has become accepted without question by the people around the world who are running things. And it will continue to dominate elite thinking until a plausible alternative emerges.

But I fear that it will only emerge out of the rubble of Neoliberalism's self-destruction--a collapse that will not be easy or painless for any of us. The crisis of 2008 was a warning, but not one that the people running the world seem to have heeded. Why have they not heeded it?  Because Neoliberalism is a fundamentally myopic world view that justifies the status quo for those who are currently running things. And the people running things, like the Roman Senatorial class of old, are incapable of thinking long term or seeing the big picture. They are concerned only about themselves, and from where they stand, things look pretty good. And who is proposing a plausible alternative--if by 'plausible' one means 'continuing to benefit those who are running things'? 

More on all this theme as we move forward.

 

 

Quote of the Day: David Graeber

What the 1% are is, effectively, a ruling class, they represent the point where concentrated wealth can be turned into political power. National politics in the US has been reduced to battles between different factions of that 1%. This is not just a traditional Marxist bourgeoisie though—and this is where I think it dovetails with the argument in debt—it represents the effects of financialization whereby more and more, economic value is not extracted indirectly, through the wage, but directly, through rents and more generally by what they used to call “political-jural extraction,” which I think was Perry Anderson’s term for feudalism. I’m not saying we’re reverting to feudalism quite, but something else in some ways analogous.

Whenever a surplus is extracted directly rather than indirectly, ideology also changes, since it’s much harder to disguise what’s really going on. Hence the neoliberal obsession, noted in the book, in preemptive attacks on anything that even looks like it’s an alternative. They’re barely even trying to convince anyone capitalism is a good system any more; just arguing that no other system is conceivable. (Source)

I am preparing a post, or perhaps a series of posts, on Neoliberalism, and I will lean heavily on David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years and David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. The goal is to understand how we let Neoliberalism and its financialization of reality become "normal". How we have come to accept market mechanisms in the economic sphere as normative, but have come more and more to accept that we live in a market society, as well, in which so many social, non-familial transactions are about interest rather than about mutual aid and support of one another's flourishing.

I have spent a lot of time talking here about the ongoing destructive effect of Neoliberal ideas in public education, but while acute there, the negative effects are more pervasive and broadly dehumanizing.  Of course, lots of people resist the Neoliberal world view and find it repugnant, but they're not the people running things. And the ambitious do not rise in this political economy unless they embrace it as normative.

Neoliberals and those who accept the Neoliberal order tend to think of what has happened to the political economy, especially in the last thirty years since the toppling of Keynes, as a reversion to the natural order, or that it's the inevitable consequence of globalization, that we must let 'nature' take its course, that there's no fighting it, and that all other alternatives are either naive or harmful. 

Then, if I have the time and energy, I want to spend some time reflecting on the Hayek/Polanyi polarity. The goal is not to polemicize but to understand the underlying assumptions, the metaphysics, so to say, of each thinker's world view. And also to bring into the discussion other thinkers who explore either side of this polarity. 

Quote of the Day: William James

“I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of mans pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top. You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.”

William James, letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899. The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, vol. 2, p. 90.

Erase to the Top

Here are some posts I put up when this cheating scandal in Atlanta first broke in 2011. See here, here and here. 

The emphasis on test scores is all about the technocratic compulsion to measure one kid againsst another, one teacher against another, one school against another--to what end? Does anyone with good sense think that this demand that everhyone measure up to some bureuacrats's standard is somehow going to significantly improve learning? 

Assessments are part of learning. No one is questioning that. But anybody who knows anything about how learning happens understands that bubble tests give the most superficial kind of assessment. They have some superficial value, but they don't tell you the important things that other assessments and a teacher's just knowing his or her kids can tell you. 

This compulsion toward standardized testing is complex, but it abets the idea that most teachers are incomptent, and that we need some objective standard to assess teachers and to hold them accountable. But as I've argued before, if you want to improve educational outcomes, train teachers well, pay them a decent wage, and trust them to do their jobs. Everything follows from that. 

Pope Francis and the Church of the Poor

Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires’s 21-24 slum. Yet, as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, he denounced liberation theology, and insisted that the priests seeking to defend and mobilise the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their political activity.

He now maintains that he “would like a church that is poor and is for the poor.” But does this mean giving food to the poor, or does it mean also asking why they are poor? The dictatorships of Latin America waged a war against the poor, which continued in many places after those governments collapsed. Different factions of the Catholic Church took opposing sides in this war. Whatever the stated intentions of those who attacked and suppressed liberation theology, in practical terms they were the allies of tyrants, land-grabbers, debt slavers and death squads. For all his ostentatious humility, Pope Francis was on the wrong side. (George Monbiot, "Cardinal Sins")

Montbiot echoes the famous quote by Dom Heldar Camara, the bishop of Recife Brazil who became rather well known in the sixties and seventies: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Popes Benedict and Francis apparently don't think the 'why' question is one that the official church should bother itself about. As Montbiot's article reminds us, Benedict, during his pre-pope stint as the the head of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, was the heavy who shut down the efforts of so many priests and nuns who did care about that question.

They asked why, and understood why, and they risked and often gave their lives to do something about it by working to organize and empower poor people. But they were perceived as communist or as abetting a communist program when Cold War tensions were still high. But communism is an atheistic ideology, and it's a scandal for the church to be associated with anything so impious. As in Vichy France, better to work the fascists than the resistance, too many communists in the resistance, after all. 

Perhaps some day Benedict and Francis will be canonized because they understood how the church expects a saint to act. But in my view a saint is not a pious conformist; he or she is rather someone who is willing to risk everything in working for the regime of compassion and love to which Jesus and the gospels point. What have our current and former ecclesial CEOs risked in that way? Did they even have a clue when they met someone who did in fact live such risk? Or did they just see them as reds?

The Roman Catholic Church is animated more by the spirit of imperial Rome than it is by the spirit of the gospels, and that's why its spiritual authority is not taken seriously by anyone who has a clue about the latter. At least the new pope gets that the imperial thing and the red Gucci shoes are bad p.r., but we'll see if there's any substance to his humility. We'll see whether, in fact, his humility is just a mask for moral cowardice. I hope it isn't. But even if his is a true humility, will it have any impact in changing the imperial ethos that has dominated the Vatican since the 300s. Give me a shout if that starts to happen, but until then, who cares about what happens in that corrupt little city state. 

School Choice is Not a Solution

The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: See here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools.

Accountability? Read here about some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable. One of them opened in 2001. Over the past 11 years, it has collected $46.8 million but its students perform worse than those in the public schools. Some choice.

And anyone who looks at the NAEP reports on urban districts will see that after 22 years of vouchers, charters, and competition, Milwaukee is a poster child for the failure of vouchers, charters, and competition. The students in those schools all perform about the same level. No sector is better. The Milwaukee schools are ranked among the lowest performing of the urban districts tested by NAEP, ranking just above sad Detroit.

If choice was the answer, Milwaukee should be at the top of the nation’s urban districts. But it is near the bottom. Why? Because choice is not the answer. Addressing the causes of low test scores is the answer, and choice does not address the causes of low test scores: poverty and segregation (Diane Ravitch)

See also the CREDO report from Stanford on how most charters underperform public schools.

Anybody who has been paying attention to what's been going on in neoliberal education reform understands that the big push to promote charters and vouchers has little to do with improving poor kids' academic outcomes and much more to do with pushing a privatizing ideology that in the minds of its proponents is medicine for all that ails us. And as I pointed out the other day, standardization tools like the common core have less to do with raising standards and more to do with providing a justification for closing public schools and privatizing them. This can be done because so many people buy the propaganda that our schools are failing rather than understanding that our society is failing the kids who go to those schools, and that there is little the schools can do that can make a real difference.

Where you go to school doesn't matter so much as where you grow up. Schools of any kind--public, private, or charter--cannot offer broad scalable solutions until you deal with the underlying causes and constraints of child poverty. Sure, some schools perform better than others, but there are no formulas. Success has to do with particular people finding something that works in their particular community. I think that particular communities, in an interdependent relationship with the broader educational community, should be given latitude do develop their own solutions.

I'm all for innovation and creativity. But charters don't offer that any more than normal public schools do, because both are constrained by the need to teach to the test. And so too many of these charters are standardized testing mills, and they are delivering exactly the opposite of what these kids need. All kids need to be challenged, but the challenges are different for different kids, and standardization doesn't promote choice; it puts all kids, whether they are in public or charter schools, in a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. 

***

I'm not anti-market; it clearly has its uses, but there's a difference between having a market economy and a market society. In the latter everything becomes a commodity, and there are some things that cannot be commodified.

I'm planning to do a piece, or maybe a series of pieces, on the origins of neoliberalism, and I'm want to frame it as a philosophical debate between Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi. I'm clearly in the Polanyi camp, but I want to give a fair representation to the concerns of people who are persuaded by Hayek. There is a serious debate at the bottom of all this, and it's essentially a debate about human empowerment and the conditions that promote or undermine it.

The Common Core State Standards

I remember when I first heard about the movement to develop a national common core for K-12 public school curricula, I thought, "Why not?"  Why not set standards that will give a high school diploma some meaning? Why not set up a national curriculum that insures that every kid has a solid grounding in history, arts, math, and the sciences?  Since then I've learned a lot about what's really going on, and my opinion about it has reversed.

First of all it's way too top down, one-size-fits-all. Although there are some situations where centralization is desirable and necessary, this is not one of them. A centralized core is too easily coopted by powerful players, and the more you learn about the Common Core State Standards, the clearer it becomes that it is a child of neoliberal establishment elites foisting its ideas about reform on public education.

Reform for neoliberal education reformers is akin to what reform means for the IMF when it seeks to impose the bipartisan neoliberal program known as the Washington Consensus on countries that are in debt crisis. There is a 'Washington Consensus" concerning education as well. We see it in the neoliberal reforms promoted by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Neoliberal education reformers want you to believe that our public schools are in an analogous crisis--the educational equivalent of Argentina in the eighties or Greece now--so they need drastic intervention to reform the schools on neoliberal principles.  But as I said in a post earlier this month, our schools are not the problem, poverty is. And while schools have a role to play in any efforts our society makes to deliver children out of it, any strategy that believes that schools should carry the full burden of that effort is doomed to failure.

The Common Core is not going to solve this problem, not even a little. Here's Diane Ravitch on this subject:

The most reliable predictor of test scores is family income.

The Common Core will have no impact whatever in changing the scandalous proportion of children who live in poverty in this nation. Nearly a quarter of our children are living in poverty, as compared to far smaller proportions in other societies. If we were to make a dent on that number, bring it down to, say, 15%, that would have a bigger impact on test scores than Common Core. But that is just my guess.

The common wisdom, repeatedly predicted by state superintendents, is that test scores will drop by 30% or so when the Common Core standards are assessed because the tests are “harder.” This will feed the corporate reform narrative that “our schools are failing.” They will use the new stats to attack public education and demand more vouchers and more charters and more privatization. The entrepreneurs are eagerly awaiting the moment when the bad scores are announced, as it will give them new opportunities to sell their edu-schlock.

The fact that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was an original member of the board of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst–the corporate reformers’ attack machine against public education–is no comfort. The other members of her original board were Jason Zemba, who wrote the Common Core math standards, and a third person, who worked for Coleman’s Student Achievement Partners. In other words, Rhee’s board was the same as the Common Core leadership.

Do you see how this game is played? There are so many different tactics that are being deployed in the neoliberal education reform agenda, and any one of them--charter schools and vouchers, common core, teacher accountability, Teach for America--when taken in isolation seem innocuous enough, but taken together are designed to destroy a system that whatever its flaws should be community controlled, not corporate controlled. 

For more on this read how principal Carol Burris's opinion changed too. She even co-authored a book promoting the idea of the common core, but she says the well has been poisoned. See here and here. Interesting grafs: 

The best way that I can explain my trepidation is with the following analogy.

Hurricane Sandy hit the shores of New York and New Jersey at high tide when there was a full moon, a time when tides were 20% higher. It was a Category One hurricane of no great fury—its winds were “only” about 74 miles per hour.  However, Sandy became a super storm due to a Canadian cold front, which wrapped around the hurricane, making the storm larger and more ferocious.

Think of the Common Core standards as the high tide—the tide intended to lift all boats. Testing is the hurricane—a strong storm that blows through each year and affects our every action as educators.  Now add the cold front, the ever-increasing high stakes, wrapping around the tests. Those high stakes—school closings, grade level retentions, and the evaluation of teachers by student scores—have given the hurricane additional fury and strength.  High tide, which in and of itself is benign, now becomes a destructive force.

As a New Yorker who saw the tide of a nearby bay fill four feet of our home, I have new respect for what occurs when strong forces converge. 

Neoliberal reforms are the factors that make something that seems benign into something terribly destructive. 

Iraq Ten Years Later

Many decent people after Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, et al., believed that the international community had an obligation to intervene to protect the human rights of Tutsis, Bosniaks, and Kosovars. They were horrified to learn how the U.N. stood by and allowed the massacre in Rwanda, and supported the interventions in the Balkans later in the decade.

This same argument was proposed as a compelling reason for intervening in Iraq. I was astonished at how many people whose thinking and poltics I otherwise respected justified the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds, arguing that national sovreignty should be superseded when the rights of a naton's citizens were being egregiously abused. It should have been done in Rwanda, and it was good that it was done in the Balkans. Why was Iraq any different? Why was Bush doing anything differently than Clinton did?

Well, there were plenty of reasons that Iraq was different and why the Bush administraton's rationale for invasion never passed the smell test. And the first thing anybody with any nose at all smelled was the oil. The overwrought attempts to connect Saddam with al-Quaeda, the hysteria about WMD--none of it added up. And then when the influence of the neocon Project for the New American Century came into view, it all made sense. This was a geopolitical power grab and an exercise in state building engineered by second-rate, chicken-hawk technocrats. The hubris was fantastical, and the results predictable.

 

Wage Discipline

Why are wages are flat, unemployment high, and inflation stable despite the economic recovery? Because it benefits the so-called investor or rentier class:

But capitalists are always fighting a two-front war in democracies, against workers and against their representatives in the government, who might begin to change the social framework to give workers more bargaining power. Capitalism is predicated on the asymmetries of power, on capital’s ability to compel workers to sell their labor power. Capitalists must fight anything that threatens that imbalance, regardless of whether it leads to an aggregate increase of social wealth or even improves their individual profits. . . .

Not to be too functionalist about it, but it often seems like a good idea to work backward from the need for labor discipline to understand certain vagaries of economic policy; at the level of policy and not individual firms, class struggle and getting leverage over workers matters more than efficiency or profit or even growth. (Source)

In other words it's all about developing and maintaining a set of power arrangements that give the rentiers the upper hand in all conflicts with the majority, i.e., everybody who is not them--the 99%. 

I believe that the behavior or the 1% is more fear motivated than greed motivated. Ever wonder why wealthy elites see themselves as victims. It's not because they are; it's because they fear they will be. They see themselves as an embattled minority in which the majority hates them. They live, whether consciously or unconsciously, in a world in which they know what goes around comes around, and if people they have kept down get the chance, they will reciprocate. I think the same kind of psychology infects white people, especially in the Southwest, who are freaked out by Mexicans. They know the history, and they believe that If Mexicans eventually get the upper hand politically, they will treat white people exactly as the white people treated them. Same psychology governs the thinking of the Rick Santini types who speak for the 1%--if they give workers the upper hand, they will treat them as they treated the workers.  And people whose brains are soaked in adrenaline are simply not people you can talk sense to. That's not the whole story, but I'd argue that's a big part of it. 

There are two things that wealthy elites fear more than anything: First, because they are such a minuscule minority in a democracy, they fear that the majority will use the political process to expropriate their wealth through "confiscatory" taxes or other redistribution schemes. Second, they fear any kind of movement to organize ordinary people that will empower them politically or in labor negotiations, because they fear it gives them the means to realize their first fear. Even if such empowerment movements are sane and reasonable, even if they would lead to greater profits and broader wealth, they see in such movements the san culottes running amok in the streets of Paris.

Either wealthy elites don't realize that workers can be bought off, as they were during the post WWII period (workers as a group don't want power; they just want to live comfortably), or they look at their aggressive attempts to destroy unions and other empowerment movements as a long-range strategy. Push the workers deep into their end of the field with as lousy field position as possible, and make them fight for every inch when they finally organize to push back. Why buy them off now if we only have to do it in an emergency?  

So two political objectives follow from this: First, push hard and don't give an inch on taxes. It's not about greed; it's about power and doing what is required to maintain one's position at the top of the pyramid. The best offense is a good offense, because once things shift and the elites are on their heels, then it's over. Or so they fear. Second, do whatever it takes to keep the "mob" confused, divided, and feuding among themselves. Tell big lies. Work the patriotism angle. Use wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, and immigration, to keep cosmopolitan workers hating traditionalist workers. Use the 'no-i'm-not-you-are tactic' to keep the uniformed disoriented. Any time anyone defending the interests of the investor or rentier class accuses those who oppose them of class warfare (or racism, fascism, or corruption, or whatever), you can be sure they are describing their own program, and want to deflect the public's attention away from it. 

This confusion is promoted in various ways, for instance In the very effective way it has coopted populist resentments a la Glen Beck and the Tea Party. In other cases it's not unlike the way Southern oligarchs kept poor whites from ever seeing how they had more to gain in joining with poor blacks to organize economically and politically to break up the oligarchy that oppressed them both. It's in this sense that American politics have been southernized, but it's a strategy that is as old as there have been pyramidal social systems.

I heard someone say the other day that autocracy and oppression don't need to be explained: it's the historical norm. It's rather freedom and self rule that need to be explained. The iron rule of oligarchy is the norm once humans move out of hunter gatherer societies; everything else is the exception. 

People who have a pathological need for power do whatever is necessary in the game of thrones to get it, and normal people who just want to live modest, decent lives let them because they just don't care enough to fight them. The question we have to face is whether we are now in the process of reverting to the historical norm, and because we're living off the fumes of the exceptional period since WWII, we haven't realized it yet. But a part of me is still optimistic that we will figure this out, that we will learn how new information technologies have empowered us to organize push back. But as I've argued here frequently over the last several years, nothing happens until the cultural left and the cultural right understand that they have the same enemy. 

Being in the Grip of Compulsions We Don't Understand

I have been getting this feeling lately about the big historical sweep of things and of our individual seemingly insignificant part to play in it. It’s a feeling of how mostly things don’t change, and yet how they do, how greed and powerlust seem to be in the driver’s seat, and yet that they are not the whole story, how everything seems to point to an undesirable outcome, but that there is always enough to point to that gives one reason for hope.

I've come to believe that a sign of the people who are living well is that their lives are a kind of wandering in the wilderness, of being neither here nor there, of being satisfied with their daily manna allotment, which is just enough to keep them alive and moving. The great intoxications are not for such wanderers; for them it's always just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and of doing what is required of them on that day and in that place.

We’re at a point in history now where it seems that things will play out the way they will play out. There’s not a lot the wandering folk can do, except what is in front of them to do. The world is in the grip of people who are driven by compulsions they don’t understand, and their compulsions are the root cause of so much needless suffering--for themselves and others. I can rant all I want about the stupidity and selfishness of so much of it, but it’s always been this way. Anything else has been the exception.

The world has always been driven by a quest for the great intoxication. Is it really about money and power, or is it about the momentary states of intoxication that come with their acquisition. And enough is never enough because the intoxication is momentary, and life without it is so empty and drab, and so like addicts in desperate need of a fix, they are compelled to get more power and more wealth, not for there own sake, but as a means to an end, and there is never an end to it.

That's what motivates the great ones, and the rest of us settle for the little intoxications that likewise never satisfy, hedonic adaptation and all that, so we look for love in all the wrong places, play our little ego games at work or in relationships, and in general muck things up because we are in the grip of compulsions we do not understand. 

***

It's more complicated, of course, because the intoxication isn't the problem so much as the compulsive need for it. The problems do not lie so much in being in the state of intoxication itself, but rather in the way people behave when they are not in it. I recently watched The Hustler and The Color of Money--both great films about phenomenally talented pool players played by Paul Newman and Tom Cruise--and they're a study in what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow". When they're in it they believe they are invincible, and often they are. At one point in The Hustler, the Newman character, Fast Eddie says to his girlfriend:

Fast Eddie: . . .When I'm goin', I mean, when I'm REALLY goin' I feel like a... like a jockey must feel. He's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him... he's comin' into the stretch, the pressure's on 'im, and he KNOWS... just feels... when to let it go and how much. Cause he's got everything workin' for 'im: timing, touch. It's a great feeling, boy, it's a real great feeling when you're right and you KNOW you're right. It's like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue's part of me. You know, it's uh - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood, it's got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don't have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. I can play that game the way... NOBODY'S ever played it before.

Sarah: You're not a loser, Eddie, you're a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything. 

Was this the feeling that Homer’s Greek heroes had? Eddie's jockey-on-a-horse reference brings to mind the theme explored in Peter Shaffer's Equus.

Whatever the source or cause of experiences like these, they are like being possessed by a god because when in a flow state one operates on a level that transcends one’s ordinary level of talent. As with Homer's heroes, the difference between the good and the great is this capability to move into this other dimension when one is taken of hold of by the god. I’ve sniffed it now and then, enough to know what it must be like, but never in a way that led me to have any impact. And it's probably just as well. I'm sure I would have become an addict. 

Because if being in the flow is mostly a positive experience, the problem for people who experience its intensity lies in its becoming addictive. When they are not in it, the only important thing is that they get back into it. And sometimes when they are playing they're not in the flow, and they lose, but they think it's just a matter of time before they get back into it. I imagine something like this happens to gamblers who once had a lucky streak and continuously seek the elation it brought them losing untold sums in the quest, thinking they will win it back when their "luck" returns, i.e., when the god once again deigns to lift him above other mortals.

Both the Newman and Cruise characters, who have this experience of being in the flow, are rather guileless and uncalculating--at least in the beginning. The important thing is for them to be in that state, whatever name they give it; it's not really about the money--the money is important for the people around them, their stakeholders, and the stakeholders are continuously frustrated by their players because they have no interest in the hustle game. There is no payoff for these players in the hustle. Making money does not give them the intoxication that they crave; they want that feeling, to be in that intoxicating state of invincibility that comes with being in the flow.

And when they lose, no matter how badly, they think it's just a matter of time before they get back to it, and when they do, all will be well. And they will win back all they have lost. It's just a matter of having enough time and the money to stay in the game.

Isn't this what we are seeing on Wall Street. The big players there are intoxication addicts.They see themselves as invincible. If things have gone south, it's only temporary. Sooner or later they'll be back in the flow. Look--isn't the stock market at an all-time high? They are winners, and the rest of us should trust them, and rely on them as the Achaeans did Achilles. 

America's "Education Crisis"

 Linda Darling Hammond in a recent interview:

Well, there are a couple of things to know before we talk about the scores. First of all, the United States has more children living in poverty, by a long shot, than any other industrialized nation. Right now about one in four children are living in poverty. In most other industrialized nations we’re talking about well under 10 percent, because there’s so many more supports for housing, healthcare, employment, and so on.

With that very high poverty rate, our average scores on international tests look a little above the average in reading, about at the average in science and somewhat below the average in math, and a lot has been made out of that in the United States. But in fact, students in American schools where fewer than 10 percent of the students live in poverty actually are number one in the world in reading. Students in schools with up to 25 percent of kids living in poverty would rank number three in the world in reading, and even schools with as many as 50 percent of kids in poverty scored well above the averages in the OECD nations – which is mostly the European and some Asian nations. Our teachers are doing something very right in terms of educating kids to high levels in much more challenging circumstances than children face in other countries.

The place where we really see the negative affects are in the growing number of schools with concentrated poverty, where more than 75 percent of children are poor. And there -- the children in those schools score at levels that are near those of developing countries, with all the challenges that they face.

When I was running for school board in 2011, everybody was talking about the "achievement gap" and the pervasive narrative then was to blame teachers and schools for it, to bemoan the cataclysm besetting American public schools and how despite the money we spend our rankings are so low in international testing. And when I pointed out that poverty was to blame and not teachers and schools, I was told my attitude was rooted in "the soft bigotry of low expectations", that the real reason was that teachers looked at poor kids and didn't have the high expectations that they had for more affluent kids, that education was the way out of poverty, and that the solution was to have an excellent teacher in every classroom. A good propagandist knows how to take a partial truth that resonates with uncritically accepted popular assumptions and to make it the whole story.

I guess we've been told for so long now that education is the way out of poverty that a lot of Americans have bought this story as applicable for all children everywhere. I'm not going to deconstruct it here--it's too tedious and obvious. But it became a commonplace, and still is, that the schools are the problem, and newspaper editorialists across the nation for the last decade and more have ardently supported the "reformers"--the Michelle Rhees, Wendy Kopps, Arne Duncans, Joel Kleins, Bill Gateses, Eli Broads, etc. who have been behind this idea of closing failing schools and replacing them with charters, of blaming teachers and insisting on tying their evaluations to student progress, and of promoting high-stakes standardized testing as a way of improving academic standards.

None of these wants to look at the root cause, which is poverty. All of them are promoting ideas that are driving the good teachers out of teaching because they don't understand the intrinsic motivations that drive all good teachers. They don't understand how they are making things worse--or if they do, they don't care because they have other fish to fry.

And so the idea that our schools are failing is a commonplace, especially among the rich liberal democrats who fund the politicians who make education policy --the kind who hang out at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival. Some them are naively sincere. Others clearly are opportunists. As David Sirota pointed out the other day:

You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”

The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics. 

It's amazing to me how so many people don't want to look at the hard truth that poverty is at the heart of things, that the burden of solving all the problems associated with learning and poverty are too heavy for schools and their teachers to shoulder alone. It's amazing to me that the corporate reformers' technocratic cluelessness, their obsession with quantifying and measuring what cannot be measured is so influential. But it is, because like so much of what influences policy in our country right now, it's about money, who has it and who doesn't.

P.S. Good piece in the New Yorker about the teachers at Seattle's Garfield High School who are boycotting the use of the standardized MAP test. The MAP was also something I ran against back in 2011. Its use both subtantively and symbolically points to everything that is wrong with corporate reform ideas about closing achievement gaps.