Beyond the poverty of national security: toward a critical human security perspective in educational policy

Abstract

This article examines the intersecting logics of human capital and national security underpinning the corporate school reform movement in the United States. Taking a 2012 policy report by the Council on Foreign Relations as an entry point, it suggests that these logics are incoherent not only on their own narrow instrumental terms, but also more importantly in terms of progressive ideals of human and educational flourishing. The article proceeds to draw on discussions within the fields of international relations and critical security studies in order to think through what it might mean to reframe educational policy within the terms of human security rather than human capital and national security. It further explores both the possibilities and distinct limitations of extant human security discourses and policies in relation to global neoliberal governance and biopolitics. The article concludes by advocating for a critical human security framework in educational policy along three conceptual lines: (1) A Human beyond Human Capital; (2) Symbiotic Parallelism; and (3) Altersecurity. Ultimately, it suggests that human security for educational flourishing might offer insight into transcending the idea of security altogether.

Keywords:

• critical analysis
• equity/social justice

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Tara Silver, Jesse Bazzul, and Chris Arthur for reading and commenting on an earlier stage of this draft. He would also like to thank the blind reviewers from JEP for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. Concerns over national security and public education have a long and well-documented history in the United States. In the context of the cold war, the launch of the first orbital satellite Sputnik by the Soviet Union inspired Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration to pass the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. Concerned the US was losing the space and arms race, the NDEA provided investments in public education at all levels directed toward science education and technological research. While not without its own ideological baggage, the NDEA was embedded in a welfare ethos and Keynesian state that made explicit connections between public educational investment and collective security. It was during this period that concerns over how racial oppression and class inequalities tarnished the global image of the US in relation to the Soviet Union (particularly in the contested Third World), alongside pressure from labor and civil right movements, impelled federal policy interventions to address poverty and expand and improve public educational systems. Almost two decades later in the early 1980s, the cold war once again provided the backdrop for alarmist concerns over public schooling and the nation’s security. The Reagan era task force A Nation at Risk famously compared the state of US public education to a national emergency stating: ‘If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war’ (ANAR 1983). Like the NDEA, A Nation at Risk framed the improvement of math, literacy, and science education as a national security concern. However, with A Nation at Risk the policy referent began to change from a welfare-based orientation of public educational investment and collective security to an emergent neoliberal one oriented to reforming public educational systems in the interest of global competitiveness, entrepreneurialism, and human capital development. The Council on Foreign relations report (CRF 2012) that is taken up in this paper represents both an extension and an intensification of this neoliberal logic in educational policy and reform.

2. There is a healthy debate as to whether ‘corporate school reform’ is an adequate term to describe the current highly organized effort to apply neoliberal rationalities to educational policy. While I acknowledge that ‘corporate school reform’ collapses a variety of economic and political actors as well as ideological positions into one monolithic term, I think that it retains essential value as a critical and descriptive category to describe general tendencies within the consensus on privatization, accountability, and standardized testing that dominate the educational agenda of both Democratic and Republican parties in the United States and their corporate backers and allies.

3. See also the dissenting views at the end of the report by Carole Artigiani, Linda Darling-Hammond, Stephen M. Walt, Randi Weingarten, Ellen V. Futter, Jonah M. Edelman, and Shirley Ann Jackson.

4. See Henwood (2005) for a critical discussion of the many ironies and myths surrounding the new economy. On immaterial labor see Hardt and Negri (2001).

5. This is backed up by data that suggest that educational performance has steadily risen over the last three decades for all children in the United States (Reardon 2013). However, due to financial resources and huge investments in cultural capital, the progress made by upper middle- and elite-class youth has far exceeded gains made by middle-, lower middle-, and low-income youth.

6. The notion that class, race, and gender inequality and labor market patterns are set primarily external to schooling is corroborated by a long tradition of social science research in education. See in particular, The Coleman et al. report (1966), Bowles and Gintis (2011), Rothstein (2004), and Anyon (2005) who provides a useful survey of the empirical data on these issues. Also for a short piece on the reasons why education alone cannot solve these structural problems see Madrick’s (2013) Education is Not the Answer.

7. See Hellman and Kramer (2012) on the US military and security budget.

8. For a variety of research reports that show the shortcoming s of the corporate reform movement in the United States see the studies conducted by CREDO at Stanford University (http://credo.stanford.edu/), the National Center for Education Policy at the University of Colorado (http://nepc.colorado.edu/), and the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org). For broad overviews of the problems and blind spots associated with corporate reforms in relation to deepening inequality see from a liberal perspective Darling-Hammond (2010), Rothstein (2004), and Ravitch (2009) and from a critical perspective see Apple (2006), Saltman (2007, 2012), and Lipman (2004, 2011). For examinations of ongoing class and race inequalities in relation to educational markets in the United Kingdom see Ball (2003), Gillborn (2008), and Reay (2006).

9. The report does acknowledge that poverty and unequal funding impact school achievement. However, it argues that growing divisions in American society are primarily due to a ‘widening gap between the educated and the uneducated’ (CRF 2012, 12). In other words, growing levels of poverty and social inequality are said to emanate from public educational dysfunction rather than political economic conditions. Thus, the authors of the report argue for the privatization of education as opposed to directly addressing poverty and inequality through social policy. As Ravitch (2012) puts it, ‘while the task force points out the problems of concentrated poverty in segregated schools, exacerbated by unequal school funding, it offers no recommendations to reduce poverty, racial segregation, income gaps, or funding inequities.’

10. The corporate school reformers often use selective interpretation of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to suggest American youth are falling behind their peers in other nations. However, as Martin Carnoy of Stanford University and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute have pointed out (2013), social class and child poverty rates have a significant impact on the tests (and on how one interprets the results). For the 2009 PISA, for instance, US public schools with less than 10% poverty scored higher than any other nation in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), schools with 10–25% poverty trailed only Korea and Finland, while schools with a 75% poverty rate and above were second to last among the 34 OECD nations.

11. Adaptation has become the dominant frame under which global research and policy operates. This can be seen among other places in the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change. The logic is that nothing can be done to stop runaway climate change, so we must prepare to adapt for a future defined by inevitable ecological exhaustion and catastrophe.

12. From the standpoint of cultural politics, corporate school reformers like Michelle Rhee and their backers now openly avow social democratic language and morality in order to specifically disavow public schooling and social democratic policy. This is based on the insistence that the true cause of poverty and extreme inequality lies in public institutions and progressive policies themselves and that the remedy can thus be found in more extreme forms of deregulated capitalism and corporate empowerment.

13. For further analysis on the limits of human capital theory and neoliberalism in education see Bowles and Gintis (2011), Sidorkin (2007), Peters (2001), Bazzul (2012), Arthur (2012), De Lissovoy (2008), and Pierce’s (2013) Education in the Age of Biocapitalism that also takes the biopolitics of human capital education as central to its thesis.

14. On a guaranteed basic income see the analysis provided by Wright (2010).

15. This would include raising the US top marginal tax rate to at least the OECD average (a minor 12% increase to 38% which would be far below historical highs, and according to Madrick (2012), would generate an additional $18 trillion over ten years), enforcing the tax code on corporations and punishing rampant tax avoidance schemes, instituting a financial transaction tax on Wall Street and reinstating a firewall between banking and speculation, and dismantling and redirecting resources from the military and prison industrial complexes toward social as opposed to militaristic ends.

16. For more on the radical imagination in the age of finance capitalism and neoliberal austerity see the brilliant work of Max Haiven available at his website: http://maxhaiven.com/.