Neoliberalism and Corporate School Reform: “Failure” and “Creative Destruction”

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Notes

For the most thorough tracking of commercialism, see Alex Molnar's Schoolhouse Commercialism annual reports available at www.nepc.colorado.edu.

Turnaround consulting in schools has been based not on evidence of effectiveness or a cohesive program but rather on a metaphor of corporate turnaround consulting and a massive public subsidy for this market experiment. For excellent coverage of the appalling lack of public oversight see Sam Dillon (2010), as well as my discussion of Alvarez and Marsal's “turnaround consulting” that slashed millions in funding for public schools while netting millions in consulting fees in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina in Saltman (2007).

I take this up in Saltman (2010).

See the “work” of James Tooley, who is a scholar at the center of the World Bank educational privatization push (e.g., Tooley 2009).

The visions of the right-wing think tanks such as AEI, Hoover, and Heritage is made particularly clear by Andy Smarick (2010). Smarick suggested that public schools should be thought of as private businesses competing against one another and, most importantly, suggests that the “advantage” of charter schools is that they can be easily closed and replaced with other privatized solutions. Paul T. Hill of the Center for Reinventing Public Education regularly championed this aim in advocating “urban portfolio districts.”

Usually such pillage is described as introducing “private sector” efficiencies, which fits the classic definition of ideology as a camera obscura inverting reality as private sector involvement skims wealth out of the system. McKinsey, whose education sector is headed by globe-trotting neoliberal consultant Michael Barber, makes the agenda quite clear: “Drive productivity gains in the public and regulated sectors. Public and regulated sectors such as health care and education represent more than twenty percent of the US economy, but has persistently low productivity growth. McKinsey analysis has demonstrated that, if the US public sector could halve the estimated efficiency gap with similar private sector organizational functions, its productivity would be five to fifteen percent higher and would generate annual savings of $100 billion to $300 billion.” Available at http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/growth_and_renewal_in_the_us/index.asp.

As an economic doctrine, neoliberalism calls for the privatization of public goods and services, the deregulation of markets, foreign direct investment, and monetarism. Neoliberalism represents an ideology of market fundamentalism in which the inevitably bureaucratically encumbered state can do no good, and markets must be relied upon to do what the state has formerly done. Neoliberalism imagines the social world as privatized and suggests that economic rationality ought to be expanded to every last realm. In this view, the public sector disappears as the only legitimate collectivities can be markets while the individual is principally defined as an economic actor, that is, a worker or consumer. The state in this view ought to use its power to facilitate markets. Democracy becomes an administrative matter best left to markets rather than to public deliberation.