Borderland

It’s an old story:

If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them – Naomi Klein (2005).

The at-risk “local population,” I’m most familiar with would be teachers, school administrators, and school board members who believe that the school reform movement is aimed at improving education. It isn’t. It’s about dismantling government and creating a more favorable business climate.

Paul Rosenberg makes the connection between disaster capitalism and current education policy, pointing out that cash-strapped state and local governments are willing to jump through reform hoops, such as lifting restrictions on charter schools and pegging teacher evaluations to student test scores to qualify for federal money. This, despite a glaring lack of evidence that proposed policy changes will actually do any good.

The more I see and hear of it, the less it sounds like good is what the reformers have in mind. Take Arne Duncan, for example. Our Secretary of Ed is regularly critical of some aspect of the education system. Last week, it was teacher preparation programs in schools of education. I’m not going to defend them, since my undergrad training program was pathetic. But Jim Horn is right; when Duncan attacks teacher training programs, and in the next breath praises simple certification mills that churn out Teach For America temps on 2-year urban adventures, what should we conclude about his commitment to quality? Horn suggests that, instead, Duncan should be going after business schools for the chaos they’ve visited on our economy. Indeed.

Duncan:

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, about promoting civic knowledge and participation, the classroom is the place to start. Children today in our neediest schools are more likely to have the least qualified teachers. And that is why great teaching is about more than education—it is a daily fight for social justice.

I don’t get it; this seems altogether backward. I say, “Education is about more than great teaching.” It’s also about informed policy implementation, professional development (which was his original point), and an economic climate favorable to families and child welfare. The opportunity, inequality, and civic knowledge he is so concerned about is mere rhetoric, coming from him, and it’s being dished out in a decidedly undemocratic manner. If he or any in the reformistocracy had a sincere interest in civil rights they’d be fighting to right a host of social wrongs on multiple fronts rather than leaning exclusively on teachers. The business class, though, is in its ascendancy, and it’s looking for new colonial conquests.

This realization was brought home for me the other day when I ran across a couple of essays by the agrarian writer, Wendell Berry. Berry has been writing for at least the last few decades about agricultural policy and the tension between agrarianism and industrialism. The news is not good. According to Berry, we had less than half the number of farmers in the United States in 2002, than we had in 1977. Realizing that the neoliberal reforms we see being promoted in education are already well-established in the food production network is not comforting, but it does bring the issues into sharper focus.

In The Idea of a Local Economy, Berry points out that, as concern for environmental degradation has been established as a policy issue, it has done so at the cost of being oversimplified. Much the same could be said about education:

We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of “raw materials,” and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.

And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as “environmental” problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.

Berry offers a critique of “free market” capitalism and points out, among other things, that:

The “law of competition” does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the “free market” will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.

As an alternative, Berry proposes that we develop the idea of local economies based on two principles, neighborhood and subsistence. This seems like as reasonable a proposal for school policy as it does for agriculture. Meet local demands with local solutions. Local capacity to solve problems must be conserved, and not delegated to distant others.