The Opt Out Revolt
Democracy and Education
In the United States today, the age of monopoly-finance capital and neoliberal politics, all aspects of social life are being financialized at breakneck speed, while the economy as a whole and employment remain lackluster. Financial flows of whatever kind are converted into “securitized” assets to be leveraged by Wall Street speculators. The data of private communications are mined. Health care is converted into a realm of super profits. Public water and electric facilities are sold to the highest bidder. The political system is turned into an open-air auction. Even pollution is treated as a market.
At the center of this juggernaut is elementary and secondary education, which receives over $550 billion in annual public spending, equal to the GDP of Belgium, ranked twenty-fifth worldwide in national income.1 The new copyrighted Common Core State Standards, and the accompanying standardized tests run by two multi-state consortia in conjunction with testing companies, are “high stakes” not merely for schools, teachers, and students, but also for the vested interests of capital. The latter seek by these means to: (1) form a labor force of cheerful robots; (2) eliminate critical thinking from schools; (3) generate immense profits for the education industry and information firms; (4) end teacher tenure, seize control of classrooms from professional educators, and break teachers’ unions; (5) privatize public education through charter schools and other means; (6) facilitate private profits and financial speculation through control of government education funding; (7) merge education for large sections of the poor and racial minorities with the military and penal systems; (8) decrease the role of democracy in education while increasing the corporate role; (9) create databases with detailed biometrics on almost everyone, to be exploited by corporations; and (10) manage the population in what is a potentially fractious society divided by race and class.
Such unstated systemic aims—even more than the stated goals of closing the achievement gap associated with racial and ethnic inequality, or increasing international competitiveness—serve to explain the vast restructuring of U.S. education pushed forward during the last decade and a half, from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top.
The entire educational reform movement, as it is called, has been spearheaded by a number of big “venture philanthropic” or “philanthrocapitalist” foundations, including the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and others, which have sought to promote the Common Core State Standards, high-stakes standardized tests, and charter schools. These foundations have poured billions into educational restructuring, with the cooperation of large corporations and the government at every level.2
However, what could be called the national command center of this corporate-based education reform movement is located in the quasi-governmental agencies of the Council of Chief State Officers (CCSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA), both consisting of governmental officials but functioning outside political jurisdictions as private, non-governmental organizations, unaccountable to the populace. The CCSO and the NGA have copyrighted the Common Core State Standards, which were paid for primarily by the Gates Foundation and designed in conjunction with educational services companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill—and without the significant involvement of teachers. As a result neither the federal government nor the states nor the teaching profession itself have control of the Common Core, which is nonetheless imposed on states and local school districts, forming the foundation of the entire system of high-stakes standardized testing.3 The performance of students on the high-stakes standardized tests is currently being used in thirty-five states to The Opt Out Revolt by John Bellamy Foster • Monthly Review:
