I recently posted that the Democrats will be useless in supporting economic justice issues until being called a Neoliberal has the same stigma as being called a homophobe. Neoliberal ideology is just repackaged late 19th Century Social Darwinism, which is an ideological justification for social stratification that rewards winners and punishes losers, where the winners and their retainers compose the top economic quartile, and everybody else is a loser.
It's a system where the winners write the rules, and they write them in such a way to make sure that this pyramid stabilizes into a class system in which a small elite dominates, a somewhat larger retainer class benefits by enacting and enforcing the elite will, and social mobility is granted to a few prodigies who come from the loser classes. There is nothing unusual about this. It's the way most societies have stratified into class and caste systems throughout history. It's just that as recently as forty or fifty years ago, the idea would have been shocking to most Americans that America could become that kind of society.
While this winner-take-all mentality is blatantly extolled among Republicans, it is abetted by Democratic elite policymakers as well, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Obama administration's education policies. Even the name they give it--Race to the Top--is Social Darwinist.
While I realize that readers without kids in public schools see this as rather abstract and irrelevant to their concerns, it's a perfect example of the way the bipartisan elite opinion is captured by Neoliberal thinking, and if you are concerned as I am about saying No to Neoliberalism, then one place you can fight back is by learning about what's going on in your local public schools and supporting efforts of community activists there to push back against Neoliberal reform. It's one place where local efforts can make a difference in fighting a toxic national trend. We need to protect our local public schools from Neoliberal dismantlement.
If you would like to get some quick background on the issue, this interview this morning with Diane Ravitch is a good place to start, and my pieces here on Technocratic vs. Humanistic Public Education here and here is another--or just click on the education tag below.
I think that the hardest thing for concerned but uninformed people to deal with is the spin given by Neoliberal reformers who make their efforts appear to be all about helping to overcome the achievement gap, to introduce reforms that provide innovation and choice, that hold teachers accountable, and that raise standards. Who could be against these things? And what kind of monster is Bill DeBlasio that he wants to close down a few charters in NYC? DeBlasio understands what's going on, but people of good will are confused because fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo, a Neoliberal through and through, opposes him and stands with the pro-charter groups. Oh dear, Oh dear, the typical liberal Democrat doesn't know what to think. DeBlasio has just gone too far.
But they were ok when Bloomberg closed down dozens of neighborhood schools, because they were loser schools. Charters are for winners. That's right, and they kick out any kid who looks like he's going to be a loser, when being a loser is measured by poor performance on standardized tests. Neoliberals don't care about losers; they want to redirect all resources to support winners, and charters are their tool of choice in the K-12 educational sphere.
I daresay there are many advocates of Neoliberal education reform who sincerely believe their own propaganda. But charter schools, standardized testing, and teacher evaluations based on student performance are all tools being used to create a new system shaped on Neoliberal values, a system that is meant to privilege some and cast everyone else overboard. Ravitch does not use the term Neoliberal, but this is what's she's describing here:
And the move in Chicago, as well as elsewhere, to boycott standardized tests — where do you see that going?
The test that they’re boycotting — right now there’s just a couple different schools that are doing it — is a test that’s being phased out. So it doesn’t really have a lot of huge impact — and yet the Chicago public schools are reacting in a very punitive fashion.
In reading stories from the Chicago press, about how they keep sending out directives saying isolate the kids, tell the kids they have to sit and make an affirmative statement — it’s a hysterical response, about “oh my God, some child, somewhere, might not take a standardized test.” And you have to kind of step back and say, “When did Pearson and McGraw-Hill become the arbiters of privilege in American education?”
…It just goes on and on with the multibillion-dollar corporations determining who are the winners and who are the losers in American society. In effect, we have the standardized testing companies now as the arbiters of our meritocracy…
We’re doing to standardized testing what was done in “Brave New World.” And in “Brave New World,” the meritocracy was determined at conception. We use standardized tests as our means of sorting out kids, and saying “you’re at the top, and you’re at the bottom.” The problem with that is that suggests an end to social mobility. Because the one thing we know about standardized testing is that no matter what standardized test it is, those who have are at the top and those who have not are at the bottom…
There are a few kids who rise to the top despite all obstacles. And kids from really wealthy circumstances who fall to the bottom. But on the whole and consistently, the standardized test is a reflection of socioeconomic status. So in effect the standardized test then becomes a giving to those who have, and… certifying the have-nots as have-nots.
Neoliberals will protest that they are doing no such thing. But don't listen to what they say, watch what they do, and think for yourself. See how what's happening now leads to what Ravitch is talking about later.