New Book Defines Neoliberalism, Challenges Elite Charade of Changing the World
Betsy DeVos, our current U.S. Secretary of Education, is easy to peg. She’s an education libertarian who has been known to declare, “Government really sucks.” She believes in the glory of private markets and has an added commitment to religious education and using government money to help parents pay for it.
But how do we accurately name and fully explain to ourselves the thinking of people like Arne Duncan and Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the people who call themselves Democrats for Education Reform? These Democrats want to divert public tax dollars away from the traditional public schools—which continue to serve over 50 million American children—to unregulated private contractors called charter schools. How did school privatization become bipartisan, with conservative Republicans like DeVos favoring vouchers and Democrats enthusiastically supporting charters? Turning so-called “failing” public schools over to Charter Management Organizations, if you will remember, was one of the “remedies” of the bipartisan, Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, and of Race to the Top, the project of Obama-era Democrats.
In his new book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas helps us out here. While much of the book focuses on current trends in the philanthropic sector, Giridharadas also defines the values that have become a new kind of conventional wisdom about public policy in our now alarmingly unequal society. Giridharadas provides the data depicting the incomes of the rest of us next to those in the top One Percent and the top .001 Percent. He describes the kind of inequality that separates the rich and the poor but leaves the rich with all the power when it comes to framing solutions to unequal healthcare, for example, or a public education system that has, following residential trends, become increasingly segregated by economics as well as race—schools with radically unequal funding that provide radically disparate access to opportunity. Giridharadas does not explore these social and economic challenges in themselves, nor does he suggest solutions. Instead he chooses to delineate all the ways powerful elites have assigned themselves responsibility for solving the problems—and to describe the injustice that follows when the Continue reading: New Book Defines Neoliberalism, Challenges Elite Charade of Changing the World | janresseger