By Paul Horton.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of listening to the late Nobel Economics laureate Gary Becker speak at my school. Professor Becker won the Nobel Prize for his book Human Capital that argued that the marketplace provides consumers with “rational choices” that rational people will follow to become successful. In this way of thinking, markets rationalize “human capital” to enable smart economic actors to achieve more efficient outcomes.

Not surprisingly, Becker argued that the market would have corrected itself and that we would all be better off without the Keynesian stimulus of President Obama’s Recovery Act.

I really tuned in when Becker began to talk about the privatization of schools. He said that he “loved teaching and that a great teacher should be willing to teach sixty students in a class. If students thought that they could learn more from a given teacher, they should be able to choose that teacher and that teacher should be paid more.”

He went on to say that things should work the same way with schools; that all students should be able to choose their schools and that a public monopoly on schools and schooling prevented them from doing so. He supported starting as many charter schools as possible to end the public school monopoly and to introduce more “market efficiencies” into education.

Most of our students were really very eager to hear from “the granddad” of one of our juniors. They loved the idea that the market represented unlimited opportunity and many had read biographies of Silicon Valley billionaires and had dabbled, some very successfully, in coding and creating aps.

The idea of the market as a panacea that could solve all problems and create prosperity for more around the world is very popular within our community of Hyde Park, Illinois, the Obama Administration, and at the Milton Friedman Institute that has recently moved from across the street from the Progressive era inspired University of Chicago Laboratory Schools to the former McCormick Theological Seminary one block away.

Friedman, the Chicago School popularizer of the economic philosophy some call “neoliberalism” that pushes for the privatization of “socialized” government functions that allows free markets to operate more efficiently, like Becker, was no friend of public education.

Vouchers were proposed by Friedman to both overcome “neighborhood effects” and as a way of “denationalizing” education, or privatizing education. They were necessary to put parochial schools on the same footing with public schools and to give greater educational opportunity to the poor. Finally, Friedman believed mediocrity in teaching was encouraged by pay scales that paid teachers based on experience rather than on performance. To overcome this built-in tendency to fall into mediocrity, Friedman proposed that teachers should be paid only on their merits. If their current assessments reflected high effectiveness, they should be paid more. A third year teacher who is rated very effective, should be paid more than a top-of –the-pay-scale teacher who is less effective, according to Friedman. (Capitalism and Freedom, 89-96)

Friedman’s libertarian educational philosophy was considered right wing in the eyes of most Americans during the so-called “Golden Age” of increasing economic and productivity growth from 1948-1973. But as high inflation brought on by high levels of government spending and Middle Eastern oil embargoes settled into “stagflation” that coupled high unemployment with inflation, the economic ideas of the Chicago School of Friedman and Becker, among others, made their way into partial acceptance under the Carter administration and into a “full steam ahead” mode during the Reagan Presidency.

Indeed, many historians now see the year 1979 as a turning point all over the world with the almost simultaneous rise of Deng Xiaoping, Thatcher, and Reagan. All three leaders were convinced that economic liberalization that freed markets from state regulation and other macroeconomic interventions would lead to rapid economic growth and greater prosperity for all.

But, as Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers has argued, the honeymoon of Friedman’s ideas within congress and parliament was short lived. His idea that if a country could reduce its money supply and allow markets to grow unfettered—monetarism—did not seem to work when implemented by Carter (1979), Thatcher, and Reagan. “Between 1979 and 1983, as monetary authorities in both countries did their best to steer by money supply targets alone, rather than the usual, eclectic basket of economic indicators, the smooth deflationary landing that the leading monetarists had predicted turned into a classic business cycle collapse. Squeezed by record interest rates and unemployment levels higher than any time since the Great Depression, inflation finally tumbled.” (Rogers, The Age of Fracture, 54)

While the Chicago School’s impact on state monetary policy may have been reduced by the mid 80s, the dissemination of its ideas was winning a critical mass of intellectuals, legal scholars, and economists in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. The conservative Olin Foundation underwrote a great deal of training at law schools and paid for many influential named professorships and summer camps sponsored by a friend of Friedman, Henry Manne, and trained hundreds of lawyers, judges, and congressional aides in price theory and Chicago School ideas about microeconomics. Judge Richard Posner argued in his Economic Analysis of Law that the most equitable legal decisions were those that “maximized the most aggregate wealth.” Posner’s ideas—in Hyde Park he is known as “never thought a single word that did not get into print Posner”—have had an immense influence on legal and economic thought in the United States since the early 70s. (Rogers, The Age of Fracture, 58)

Many of those who perceived the growing influence of the Chicago law and economics schools in public discourse, according to Rodgers, also noticed that “the new market metaphors” being used by Chicago School influenced economists, lawyers, and journalists were detached from the contexts of “history and institutions and questions of power.” These new “metaphors of markets and society were a heuristic myth, of course, a model of ideal action.” But by 1992, they had begun to replace the standard Keynesian macroeconomics text of the previous forty-four years, Paul Samuelson’s 14^th edition of Economics. (Rogers, 76)

Friedman’s and Becker’s ideas about education took a bit longer to gain political traction, but the Neoliberal Thought Collective (NTC), as economist Philip Mirowski, the chair of the Notre Dame Economics Department, calls academic proponents of pure market ideology, has come to dominate public discussion about education issues.

Though the newly formed Carter administration’s Department of Education refused to grant federal money to parochial schools because it feared that vouchers would only further encourage rapid white flight from desegregating public schools, especially in the South, the nascent religious right began to organize around the issue of vouchers. Richard Viguerie famously energized the Moral Majority around such related wedge issues desegregation, vouchers for religious schools, and “family values.”

Not surprisingly, market ideas about education were embraced by a Reagan administration that rode the wave of the “Moral Majority” and “the southern strategy” pioneered by George Wallace and Richard Nixon to victory in 1980. Initially supporting a policy of education decentralization and local control, the Reagan Education Department shifted to supporting standardized testing following the publication of the 1983 Nation at Risk report that portrayed public education in the United States as rapidly deteriorating.

In fact, however, the 70s push to integrate schools had resulted in the highest gains to date achieved in closing the achievement gap between African American and Latinos and whites. But the Nation at Risk report focused on declining ACT and SAT test scores and the threat to economic development and national security that would result from a decline of American education. Corporate and Reagan administration leaders like William Bennett sought to use the Nation at Risk report to push a Sputnik like response in a national education program that emphasized national standardized curricula and tests, vouchers, and merit pay.

Clearly, the Reagan administration proposed Friedmanesque market solutions in legislation, but congress did not buy in. But Reagan’s second Secretary of Education, Bennett, created the model for Federal education policy that is pretty much followed today by the Obama administration: Federally supported standardized testing, support for charter schools, data driven teacher assessments, and merit pay. Under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act these ideas were institutionalized and supported famously by a coalition of liberals led by senator Edward Kennedy and Republican senators and governors who demanded an end to the “liberal racism” of low expectations.

President Obama has embraced all of these ideas and added his support with Secretary Duncan’s “Race to the Top” that also incentivizes state support for charter schools and state adoption of the Common Core Curriculum that attempts to build a foundation for linguistic and mathematical literacy. (Valerie Strauss, “Ronald Reagan’s Impact on Education Today,” Washington Post, 2-6-11) Obama, however, has stopped short of endorsing vouchers even though vouchers would accelerate the growth of charter schools.

As a result of these policies, support for the privatization of education through public-private partnerships in the form of charter schools has increased rapidly in the last 15 years according to the National Center for Education Statistics. To date, charter school legislation has been passed in 42 states and charter schools represent a total of 6.2 percent of schools nationally. Arizona and the District of Columbia have created the highest percentage of charter schools, and in Arizona 14 percent of all schools are charter schools. The greatest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools can be found in urban areas with the highest percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch. (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30)

Today, the ideas of the NTC in education dominate liberal and conservative media outlets alike. The publishers and editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company, and the Murdoch papers all stand strong for market solutions in education. NPR education reporting is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, one of the major supporters of charter schools, standardized testing, and teacher assessments based on test scores. Education reporters are fed a constant stream of studies, few of which are peer reviewed, coming from foundations and think tanks that push market solutions. The largest of these institutions are the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations. The Gates Foundation funds much of the research that is produced by the Harvard Education Department and the Walton Foundation funds most  education research produced by the University of Arkansas.

Critics of education privatization and standardized testing regimes are typically depicted as irresponsible curmudgeons at best and conspiracy theorists at worst. Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, and Education Secretary Duncan have consistently labeled opponents of their policies conspiracy theorists who are constantly “looking for black helicopters.”

But opponents of Secretary Duncan’s policies might stand on firmer ground than he or Chester Finn might think. While critics of school privatization are easily marginalized in the national discourse by selective reporting and consistent editorial barrages on the nation’s most widely read editorial pages, they might have the better arguments for the idea that a functioning democracy requires schools that are independent of top down corporate control.

This is why a myriad of important criticisms of neoliberal education thinking deserve more discussion and debate.

Most obviously, as Professor Rogers has noted, the models the NTC uses to legitimate their ideas about privatization too easily jettison historical, cultural, and institutional contexts in the name of increasing market efficiency and total wealth.

The origins of many of the Chicago School’s ideas can be found in Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s ideas were formulated as his response as an economist working for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce to high levels of post WWI inflation and the social welfare programs of “Red Vienna,” the city’s social democratic regime that instituted welfare, education programs, childcare, and built housing for the urban poor who had lived in ramshackle hovels for decades. Not surprisingly, Hayek argued that reducing government spending would release capital for private economic development that would create more jobs and prosperity in the long run.

Kari Polanyi Levitt, the daughter of Hayek’s Vienna contemporary, economist and social theorist Karl Polyani, puts Hayek in context:

In the setting of intellectual Vienna of the 1920s, the Austrian economist Fredrich von Hayek, his patron Ludwig von Mises, and their associates were the misfits—the remnants of old Imperial Vienna’s privileged urban elites, whose security had been shattered, whose savings had been decimated by wartime and postwar inflation and whose taxes were financing the pioneering housing programs of socialist Red Vienna. In their parlors and favorite coffee houses, they fed their fears of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They found more fertile soil for their ideas in the United States. It was not Hayek’s theoretical work which was important in the construction of the neoliberal paradigm, but rather his radical commitment to combat economic planning of any kind, including the New Deal.” (“The Power of Ideas: Keynes, Hayek, and Polanyi, http://www.karipolanyilevitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Kari-Polanyi-Levitt-intro-IJPE-FINAL.pdf)

The history of the rise of neoliberal influence on the academy and politics has become something of a cottage industry in recent years as Daniel Stedman Jones, David Harvey, Philip Mirowski, Naomi Klein, Kim Phillips-Fein, and more recently, Kevin Kruse, have written meticulously documented histories chronicling the corporate money pumped into supporting the ideas of Hayek and the Chicago School through the creation of the Mount Pelerin Society, funding professorships and awards, think tanks that could feed editorial boards and the press a steady stream of market ideology, and foundations that could use charitable founding to shape pro market policy outcomes. The target was originally the New Deal, but it continues to be any public spending beyond national security and fire and police protection.

This formidable Goliath of corporate influence has met with persistent and pesky criticism from a number of academicians and somewhat marginalized journalists.

An impressive variety of critics of NTC education reform ideas use the above historical, institutional, and cultural analyses to scrutinize the motives of investors in schools and other public-private partnerships.

At their broadest levels these criticisms focus on very powerful interests creating what political scientist and lawyer Bernard Harcourt has called “The Illusion of Free Markets.” Harcourt argues that those who do not go along with market reforms are penalized and the legal system increasingly devises punishments for those unwilling to make “rational choices.” (http://harpers.org/blog/2011/09/the-illusion-of-free-markets-six-questions-for-bernard-harcourt/)

Intellectual historian, social theorist, and Princeton professor Sheldon Wolin argues that democracy has been severely compromised in the last thirty-five years and that the acceptance of privatization only further erodes democracy in contrast to Milton Friedman’s argument that “free markets” serve to expand democracy:

By ceding substantive functions once celebrated as populist histories, it diminishes the political and its democratic content. The strategy followed by privatization’s advocates is, first, to discredit welfare functions as ‘socialism’ and then either sell those functions to a private bidder or to privatize a particular program. A traditional government function, such as education is in the process of being redefined, from a promise to make education accessible to all to an investment opportunity for venture capital. (Democracy Incorporated, 136)

Here in Chicago, for example, President Obama’s best friend, Martin Nesbitt, has started a venture capital firm called the Vistria Group that promises to create portfolios for investment in charter schools. Not surprisingly, he and many of the members of Chicago’s Commercial Club (known to locals as the “billionaire’s club), including Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and current Republican governor Bruce Rauner are very enthusiastic about charter school investment based only their experience in organizing and operating the Noble Charter chain. Another of Chicago’s wealthiest families, the Crowns, who own controlling interest in the Chicago Bulls and the Empire State Building, actively invest in charter school “portfolios.” (Google “Crown Foundation”).

In portfolio managed schools like the Noble Charter Schools, the emphasis in teaching and learning is on “practices and discourses of test preparation, including regular test practice, routinized and formulaic instruction, emphasis on discrete (tested) skills, substitution for test prep materials for regular texts, and differential attention to students based on their likelihood of passing high stakes tests,” according to sociologist Pauline Lipman in her book, The New Political Economy of Urban Education. (128)

 My teacher informants who decided that they could no longer teach at the Noble Charter schools confirm the above description and insist, “the stress is on rote learning to increase scores and not on what could be called deeper levels of learning. The Noble Charters are not looking for creative teachers, they are looking for teachers who will simply read from a script.”

Moreover, Lipman insists that the hallmark idea of “choice” has always been an illusion in American education markets. “In reality, there is a long history of school choice in the United States—for the privileged few. One of the most pervasive ‘choice tactics’ of the middle and upper classes is to buy homes in areas with the ‘best,’ most well resourced schools.” This situation has been compounded by the introduction of selective enrollment schools in urban areas, creating tiered system within the public schools. (137)

In many large cities where the schools have been placed under mayoral control, school boards are selected by mayors or are subservient to them. Although many parents and students push for access to charter schools, those who do not are forced to send their children to schools that are starved of resources by district policies that are hardly democratic.

In Chicago, for example, where 50 schools were closed, most parents felt that they were powerless to effect any change. Communities with a great deal of political clout like Hyde Park were able to save most of their schools. But many communities on the south and west sides of Chicago lost most of their schools, including my neighborhood of Woodlawn that lost four of five elementary schools.

Clearly, for those parents who opt into the charter system there is choice, but for those who do not, there is coercion and top down management. For most low-income parents, “choice” is very much both illusion and humiliating propaganda.

A Bronzeville (Chicago south side) parent who refused to send her daughter to a charter school told me, “we got overcrowded classrooms and inferior facilities for not going along with the program.”

In a recent paper, “Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination,” University of Miami Law Professor Osamudia R. James analyses the social and political pitfalls of inner city school choice:

given the role of choice and choice rhetoric as a foundation for American liberal thought, its dominance in public school reform is no surprise; nor is its presentation as the as the answer for poor, working class, and minority students novel. What has been insufficiently explored, however, is the particularly racialized constraints under which people of color exercise choice in the education   system. Encouraged by pundits and policymakers to demand choice, and ever mindful of cultural deficit models that will place blame squarely at their feet if they do not leave the public school system, minority students increasingly enroll in the programs. But as more options are demanded, school choice policies undermine the coalitions that could be formed to address the real obstacles to academic achievement, like segregation by race and class, food and housing insecurity, and inadequate school financing. Ultimately, choosing is not the liberation it is promoted as being. (p. 4)

The pressure to require choice that discourages meaningful political change is more often than not top down: reformers like Gates supply funds for astroturf organizing in favor of school choice and hedge fund managers fund “reform” front groups like Democrats for Education Reform and staff them with successful African American strivers who are true believers.

The prominence of education choice ideology is primarily the product of the demands made on politicians by the wealthy. A private equity manager told Chrystia Freedland, author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, about a heated exchange between a leading Democrat and a hedge fund manager: “Screw you,” he told the lawmaker. “Even if you change the legislation the government won’t get a single penny more from me in taxes. I’ll put my money in a foundation and spend it on good causes. My money isn’t going to be wasted in your deficit sinkhole.”

Foundations that funnel large sums of investment into promoting market “reforms” in education provide both a tax benefit to the wealthy and create emerging markets for investment in stocks that the wealthy are betting on.

Neoliberal education reform is thus pushed by the work of foundations that cater to the whims of millionaires and billionaires, and they are having their way. Many of the presidential appointees to Arne Duncan’s Department of Education were former employees of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, most prominently James Shelton III and Joanne Weiss. Large numbers of representatives from the Broad Foundation that trained Secretary Duncan as an administrator were present at meetings to determine how education policy could best benefit from the proposed American Recovery Act. Silicon Valley executives and Wall Street brokers who want a piece of the emerging privatized education market are gung-ho on heavy charter school and STEM programs for schools. And Pearson Education has done its best to corner every sector of the emerging education marketplace while managing to avoid having to write competitive impact statements when winking at a friendly Justice Department that has been told by Mr. Gates and Mr. Duncan that “scaling up” and standardizing will introduce more market efficiencies and will lead to the greater economic good, the Chicago Law and Economics mantra.

Nicole Ashcroft, editor of Jacobin and author of The New Prophets of Capital and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in his well-reviewed Losing Our Way are on to all of this.

Ashcroft gets what these foundations are doing:

Foundations are not only unaccountable and undemocratic—they often also implement programs and structures that are undemocratic. One of the central goals pushed by education reformers is to eliminate elected school boards—as did mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002—the only voice for parents and communities to speak up about school reform.

Moreover, Ashcroft believes that the wealth of these foundations does damage to democracy:

The restructuring of the economy over the past few decades, the slashing of income and capital gains taxes have given the super-elite more money than ever before. They are using this money to follow their dreams of changing the world. The American public is subsidizing their dreams, because every dollar these billionaires write off as philanthropic giving isn’t added to the public revenue….But the dreams of these foundations are not our dreams. We don’t have a say in shaping them. The foundations are unregulated and unaccountable. They set the agenda. There is no democratic process through which citizens get to decide what to do with the money. ( p 142-43)

After reviewing the impact of foundations on privatizing school reform, Herbert, now a Senior Fellow at the Demos think tank, concluded:

Those who are genuinely interested in improving the quality of all American youngsters are faced with two fundamental questions: First, how long can school systems continue to pursue market-based reforms that have failed year after demoralizing year to improve the education of the nation’s most disadvantaged children? And second, why should a small group of America’s richest individuals, families, and foundations be allowed to exercise such overwhelming—and often such toxic—influence over the ways in which public school students are taught? There is no reason why plutocratic school systems should be any more acceptable to a majority of Americans than plutocratic government in general. (pp. 227-8)

As Freedland warned after interviewing dozens of the new plutocrats, “As they become more powerful relative to everyone else, their ability to impose one [oligarchy] increases.”

The fact that what the billionaires want goes hard against the grain of the best available evidence is as difficult to explain as why so many reject the science of evolution or global warming.

The linchpin of the Education “reform” movement’s attempt to tie assessments of teacher effectiveness (Value Added Measures) to students test scores has been discredited by the most prestigious professional organization of statisticians, the American Statistical Association should not be used to judge individual teachers or programs, but only be used instead to evaluate the quality of larger systems. (http://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf)

The press is so full of non peer-reviewed studies and contorted data on education that some of the countries most respected educational statisticians are beginning to speak out. Gene Glass, Professor emeritus at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at the National Education Policy Center in Boulder, Colorado has recently expressed grave doubts about the use of “cooked data,” “

…test company lobbyists convince politicians that grading teachers and schools is as easy as grading cuts of meat. A huge publishing company from the United Kingdom has spent $8 million in the past decade lobbying Congress. Politicians believe that testing must be the cornerstone of any education policy.

The results of this cronyism between corporations and politicians have been chaotic. Parents see the stress placed on their children and report them sick on test day. Educators, under pressure they see as illegitimate, break the rules they see imposed on them by governments. Many teachers put their best judgment and best lessons aside and drill children on how to score high on multiple-choice tests. And too many of the best teachers exit the profession.

When measurement became the instrument of accountability, testing companies prospered and schools suffered. I have watched this happen for several years now. I have slowly withdrawn my intellectual commitment to the field of measurement.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/08/20/renowned-researcher-why-i-am-no-longer-comfortable-in-the-field-of-educational-measurement/)

Even the most credible studies look more like red flags than bellwethers for privatization schemes subsidized by the public taxpayer. Stanford’s Center for Research and Education Outcomes (CREDO), for example, found that charter school results are mixed at best. According to this study only 17 percent of charter schools outperformed their public school peers and 37 percent were doing worse. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/charter-school-performance-study_n_3493023.html)

Two of the leading academic critics of charter schools claim that public schools outperform charter schools if researchers are careful enough to factor in the numbers of students who leave charters for disciplinary or academic reasons. Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski, professors at the University of Illinois, use a large data set to conclude that public schools actually outperform charter schools when researchers control for students that charters sort out, who do not wind up in 8^th or 12^th grade statistics used by charter schools to measure their success. If researchers add back in the scores of those students who have left or kicked out of charter schools the numbers even out and even surpass charter school performance. (http://news.illinois.edu/news/13/1111private_schools_ChristopherLubienski_SarahLubienski.html)

In their path-breaking book, The Public School Advantage, the Lubienskis contest the positive impact of market driven reform on education policy:

the primary assumption of market theory—that differences between public and private/independent sectors are the crucial factors for school effectiveness—is essentially disproved by these data. Once we account for the SES (Socio-Economic Status) difference between the populations of students in the different sectors, it is clear that the variables that differ between sectors are not significant predictors of achievement.

They explain the current growth of support for market based education is without empirical foundation, “The continued popularity of marketist reforms inspired by market theory, despite the dearth of data supporting these policies by the emerging evidence challenging them, offers a classic example of policy makers elevating means over ends, an ideological strategy over actual evidence, and a policy goal over the actual purpose of the institution….The extended infatuation with vouchers for private schools, for instance, or the nationwide effort to expand charter schools, regardless of the thin empirical basis for these policies, speaks to the power of this belief to guide policy.” (The Public School Advantage, 130)

The Lubienskis argue that the three major assumptions of market theorists don’t work in reality: 1) Public schools are not failing, 2) most charter parents “choose schools” that do not outperform public schools because they do not have access to or have not consulted objective data and instead rely on misinformation and advertising and 3) the autonomy of the school does not lead to higher achievement because charters “too often do not use autonomy to employ innovative or cutting edge instruction, instead adhering to traditional instructional methods and an outdated, narrow mathematics curriculum.” (The Public School Advantage, 139-44)

Another recent study form UCLA based on broad evidence, “Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards,” found that “The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which are simply not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither.” “Charter schools, in many ways, have more extensive segregation than other public schools,” according to the study’s executive summary. (http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/choice-without-equity-2009-report)

Sheryll Cashin, professor of law at Georgetown, in her well-reviewed recent book, Place not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America agrees, and argues that Obama education policy has “failed.” She insists that public and charter schools do not overcome the neighborhood effects that Milton Friedman said they would. “I call it undertow. A child surrounded by poverty is not exposed to other kids with big dreams and a realistic understanding of how working hard in school will translate into success years later.” (31)

A more recent longitudinal peer reviewed study supports Cashin’s point. Sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth and the Transition to Adulthood, argues that resources in African American neighborhoods do not match resources available in blue collar white neighborhoods, especially when it comes to mentorship and networking that will match 14 and 15 year olds with job prospects. The authors of the Long Shadow Report argue that impoverished schools need more supports and that the country’s leaders need to restart a serious discussion about integration that goes beyond the selective enrollment and magnet school approaches. (http://releases.jhu.edu/2014/06/02/how-the-long-shadow-of-an-inner-city-childhood-affects-adult-success/)

The fact that our political leaders refuse to promote policies that would integrate schools beyond race and class lines, or as Ms. Cashin says by “place not race,” is the most profound indictment of the market approach to education.

This critique is echoed by Economist Ha-Joon Chang of the University of Cambridge who argues that the pure market approach of neoliberals is shortsighted because “they use rules of thumb (heuristics) to focus on a small number of possible moves, in order to reduce the number of scenarios that need to be analysed, even though the excluded moves may have brought better results.” (23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, 175)

Chang also has doubts about the idea that increasing test scores will lead to higher rates of productivity or more wealth for the United States, “Education is valuable, but the main value is not in raising productivity. It lies in its ability to help us develop our potentials and live a more fulfilling and independent life…the link between education and productivity is rather tenuous and complicated.” (189)

The current policy obsession with STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—Education that is aimed at increasing funding for these areas of learning will lead to productivity gains for the United States is also called into question by Sociology Professor Andrew Hacker in a recent review of several books on the topic in this summer’s New York Review of Books, “The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent.” (July 9)

Hacker’s review concludes that the demand for engineers is overblown and that there may not be enough jobs for current projected majors in STEM:

The fervor over Stem goes beyond promoting a quartet of academic subjects. Rather, it’s about the kind of nation and people we are to be. Already in play are efforts to instill metrics—and morality—of technology within ourselves as individuals and into the texture of society. Artists and poets may have to score high on tests of trinomial distributions if they want bachelors’ degrees. In viewing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as strategic weapons, we are constricting honored callings and narrowing national priorities, while the alleged needs for STEM workers are open to serious question, including whether the demand for them may be exaggerated or manipulated.

Hacker also points to another issue–morality. If neoliberal education reform is indeed a power-play by anti-democratic billionaires who know very little about empirical education research, and who are bent on using political power to bend data and perception like gravity bends light waves, where is the “progressive caucus” in congress on these issues? Where are investigative reporters who work for our country’s leading newspapers?

I suspect that the answer to this question has something to do with “heuristics,” that most Americans, most “progressive” politicians and investigative reporters are so taken by the idea that the marketplace best decides social and cultural questions that they take pro-market, non peer reviewed studies produced by corporate funded foundations as gospel truth.

Neoliberal “news speak” dominates our education discourse and what Gary Becker had to say to my students thus pretty much sounded like common sense to aspiring young entrepreneurs.

As a citizen and teacher, I tend to be more philosophical. My objections parallel Michael J. Sandel’s: markets crowd out ideas about morality and fairness. (What Money Can’t Buy, 110-130) Education markets do not focus on doing anything about the effects of poverty and segregation that are much more deeply rooted than education reformers would have us believe. They focus on eliminating “neighborhood effects,” but discard students who do not fit the “neighborhood” that they seek to create. Students who score too low on tests, students who speak another language at home, and students who refuse to comply with almost military disciplinary codes are simply sent back to neighborhood public schools. Charter schools are designed to serve “strivers.”

Like most teachers with much experience in different settings, I know that many students who do not score well on objective tests are often the hardest working and the most successful in the long run. I also know that learning is mysterious and can’t be reduced to algorithms. A struggling student, or a student with “discipline problems,” can find internal motivation at any time. Most teachers know that this can be unpredictable and that our mantra tends to be “one day at a time, every day is a new day for every student.” Good teachers don’t give up on anybody, and we think that giving up on students, as many charter school chains give up on students, is both immoral and unethical, especially when the intention is to sell a product.

After all, motivation is a tricky thing and “drill and kill” might be good for the marines, but it is probably not good for the majority of American students. As Daniel Pink wrote in his recent book on motivation, Drive,

The problem with making extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.

Pink is on to something important here. Education market “reformers” seem so hell bent on growing markets as if they were growing cells in a petri dish, that they are overlooking the preponderance of evidence that suggests that their approach is not working. They are so focused on the petri dish that they have lost sight of the fact that the “shortcuts” that they are creating are resulting in corruption, hucksterism, and turning a blind eye to better solutions like desegregation.

Indeed, a report released in 2014 by The Center for Popular Democracy and Education found that at least 100 million dollars in public money had been lost to fraud and corruption in the merging charter school sector and that “no agency, federal or state, has been given the resources to properly oversee” it. They also emphatically suggested that $100 million “is probably only the tip of the iceberg.”(http://www.thenation.com/article/despite-shocking-reports-fraud-charter-schools-lawmakers-miss-opportunity-increase-overs/)

Even more important, top down solutions will never work without input an buy-in from the bottom up; in this case students, teachers, and parents. Again Pink nails it in Drive, “Human beings have an innate drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

Yet the fallacies of market driven education reform go much deeper than motivation. When Hayek, Friedman, and Becker claim that markets and people are rational, they are simply wrong. If the 20^th century taught human beings anything, it was that human beings and their behavior tend not to be rational. Hayek’s Viennese contemporaries, Freud and Adler, found that human motivations are anything but rational, and another of his Austrian contemporaries, Adolph Hitler, proved the psychoanalysts tragically correct.

Duke Economist Dan Ariely has driven this reality home in several brilliant books, most notably in, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Ariely argues that rational market driven incentives will not work in the field of Education, and that

more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that the answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash ill take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make the most difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can’t take the path of market norms.

The biggest problem with the education privatizers is that they have no sense of limits. They have invested a great deal of capital in ideas that do not work as well as they had hoped. They do not want to think that they are throwing good money after negative results, so they are manipulating the levers of power and the national press to create the impression that their efforts still have potential.

The big question at this juncture somewhat desperately becomes, when will they simply accept their losses? As usual, philosopher and poet Wendell Berry offers us sage advice on the issue of education privatization or anything else:

The danger of the ideal of competition is that it neither proposes nor implies any limits. It proposes simply to lower costs at any cost, and to raise profits at any cost. It does not hesitate at the destruction of the life of a family or the life of a community. It pits neighbor against neighbor as readily as it pits buyer against seller. Every transaction is meant to involve a winner or a loser. And for this reason the human economy is pitted without limit against nature. For in the unlimited competition of neighbor and neighbor, buyer and seller, all available means must be used; none may be spared.” (What are People For?, 131)

Opting out of standardized testing for many thus is a very “rational choice” to combat the irrationality of the market “reform” of education in the United States. Opting out of irrational, profit-driven “education reform” is rather simply a measure of the persistence of sanity within a society that instinctively resists the slimy tentacles of plutocracy.

Paul Horton has taught for thirty years in virtually every kind of school. He began his teaching career in a recently integrated rural Texas middle school. He then taught for five years in a large urban high school in San Antonio’s West side where the majority of young people were ESL. He has been teaching at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the country’s most diverse independent school founded by John Dewey, for fourteen years.