Introduction: Schooling in a Time of Crisis and Austerity

Abstract

As we drift further into the second decade of the twenty-first century, public schooling in the United States has become a focal point of anxiety and a signpost of sobering challenges. In the dominant media and among the financial and political elite, a corporate consensus has emerged that has declared public schooling to be a failed experiment—an antiquated social institution incapable of meeting the demands and assorted crises of the global era.² The rhetoric of educational failure is most often invoked in relation to “urban education”—a not-so-subtle “race neutral” euphemism for public schools that serve primarily impoverished communities and mostly black and Latino youth. Dominant explanations for the perpetuation of “failure” in such schools—low test scores, dysfunctional environments, high dropout rates, and so on—have become increasingly predictable. Across a network of high-profile corporate reform advocates, right-wing think tanks, business groups, and corporate foundations the problem is said to be located in the inefficient and corrupt nature of the public sector itself and the supposed incompetence and greed of teachers and their unions. The future of the nation is said to depend on restructuring public school systems by subjecting them to commercial management and the private discipline of market forces. In order to save public education, it is argued, we must break-up the “public school monopoly” through the wholesale privatization of the educational commons.

Schools express the conflicts and limitations as well as the hopes of a divided and unequal society; and they continue to be both testing grounds and battlegrounds for building a more just and freer life for all.

—Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America¹