Teachers in Los Angeles Confront Privatization—the Heart of Today’s Neoliberal Conventional Wisdom
Almost a decade ago, I was sitting in the audience at a national meeting when a prominent Democrat endorsed neoliberalism—the idea that the private sector can do better than the government. I might have expected this speaker to defend government services, but instead he expressed what sounded to me like the conventional wisdom as it might have been voiced at an Aspen Institute cocktail party of the so-called “theory class.” There was no reasoning, no sense that evidence was necessary. He merely assumed we all agreed: “We can’t support vouchers,” declared the speaker, “but charter schools are OK because they aren’t really a form of privatization.”
In their book, American Amnesia, the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe how such conventional wisdom can somehow become acceptable despite plenty of contradictory evidence. Writing about the emergence of a bipartisan neoliberal consensus beginning in the Reagan era and continuing today, they write: “These changes did not go unnoticed or occur without pushback. Yet those who sought to defend or resurrect the ideas under siege found themselves caught in what communications experts call a ‘spiral of silence.’ In such a spiral, opinions become dominant because of acquiescence as well as acceptance. Even if individuals do not agree with an idea, their sense that it is shared broadly makes them reluctant to voice dissent. In time, this anticipation can create self-fulfilling cycles—a ‘spiral’—in which conflicting ideas are pushed to the periphery. When alternative understandings are no longer voiced confidently, we collectively forget their power.” (American Amnesia, p. 198)
“Corporate school reform” is what we often call it—the idea that schools can be made more efficient by business school principles like accountability, determined through the data set of aggregate standardized test scores. Further, de-regulation will make schools more innovative and teachers will be motivated with financial incentives to work harder to raise scores. The other part of the theory is support for privatization. When they talk about privatization of CONTINUE READING: Teachers in Los Angeles Confront Privatization—the Heart of Today’s Neoliberal Conventional Wisdom | janresseger