When trying to make sense of consequential events, we must always remember: proper and complete contextualization is always necessary. Within coverage pertaining to education reform and the modern attack on urban education, both spanning decades, what’s been lacking in both popular coverage and consumption is comprehensive contextualization. Perhaps the narrow conveyance on education matters exists due to a perceived attention deficit among the public, or that “getting into weeds” is not what is expected from reporters whose newsrooms are skeletal compared to past decades. Whatever the cause, it is clear to education practitioners and researchers alike that popular education discourses focus on education as if it exists apart from a broader political or societal ecology. Such a presentation of education matters divorced of proper contextualization guaruntees that consumers of the message cannot develop a comprehensive understanding of what’s being covered. My intention here is to use an interdisciplinary approach by incorporating economics, history and education research that helps the audience recognize that the attack on teacher unions and Black educators has everything to do with economics, racism, and politics – and very little, if anything, to do with education. And so we’ll start with framing the context by unpacking neoliberalism, the neoliberal hijacking of urban education, and the receptivity in messaging of the need for education reform…and with that, let’s get to it.
This series is entitled, Peep Game: Black Educators and the Modern Attack on Teacher Unions. For folks out there that may be lacking in their slang comprehension, to “peep game” means to recognize or understand what’s going on… OR it can mean, depending on how you say it, to recognize schemes or scheming behavior. In this instance, both meanings are appropriate. I’m asking folks to recognize what is, and what has been going AND I’m asking folks to recognize the scheming that is and has been taking place pursuant to the assault on urban school districts, urban teachers and the Black teachers within both.
Nothing that follows will make sense without at least a cursory understanding of neoliberalism, and the economic reality we’ve been trapped in for the last 43 years. Further, we cannot fully understand what’s happened in education over the past four decades unless we understand education through the lens of neoliberalism. You’ll find that as I explore further, that you’ll likely be able to make connections between what I’m describing, and what you see on your own where you are.
Neoliberalism is a process by which government, corporations, and the wealthy do each of the following in order to maximize profit and transfer more of it upward to the richest, and also consolidate political power among the powerful. Quite often, the richest and the most powerful are a conjoined population. (To be sure, entire volumes, books, and journal articles have been written by researchers from a wide variety of disciplines on neoliberalism, so consider this an extremely short CliffsNotes explanation of neoliberalism.) Nonetheless, under neoliberalism we seen an effort to:
- “Shrink the state” (and its ability to serve and prioritize the needs and expectations of citizens) by drastically cutting taxes of the wealthiest among us and corporations — taxes that pay for the functioning of government and government services… why? Because whatever service the government does not provide to the public through tax revenue, it becomes a product for corporate interests to sell and profit from
- Demonize “Big” Government and those that rely on government to serve the needs of the people, and also erode governmental regulations policing corporate operations. Everyone who receives social security, SSI, school lunches, welfare, affordable housing and Section 8, financial aid, medicaid, medicare, family leave aid, public sector workers, and everyone working desiring a living wage, according to neoliberals, are all “takers” who are relying on “big government”
- Rely on markets as the “neutral” deciders of what’s best for public and corporate life… Here, the reliance on markets commodifies and monetizes everything in public and private life…everything has a price…from things as small as extra leg-room on a plane and extra memory on your iPhone, to things as significant as assessing a price tag for organ transplants…if you can afford to have a heart transplant for instance, you therefore have purchased the ability to live…and those who cannot afford a heart transplant, simply, don’t get to… they do not get to live because they don’t have enough money to be able to do so. That’s private market orientation determining folks’ ability to live. Your life, in this case, has a price tag, a monetary valuation.
- Placing primacy of the Individual before the collective: destroying modes of collective action, cracking down on protests, collapsing labor movements, weakening worker power to prevent solidarity among the regulars; keeping folks separate and isolated make us easier to exploit both in society and at work
- Privatize Public Services and cast the public delivery of services as inherently costly and inefficient. This includes auctioning off highways and roads, privatizing school loans, even military services through the use of private contractors better known as mercenaries. Privatizing public services places the responsibilities that would be held by the government, under corporate administration and all the ugly realities that come along with it, namely the primary goal of profit maximization not service to public as service to the public, then, becomes a secondary responsibility.
Individually none of these points may seem like much of a big deal until you realize all of these are happening at the same time, and that the only winners in this shift from a dedication to public responsibility, to the private administration of public services along with deregulation and anti-taxation, are the wealthy who lead corporate interests and corporations themselves.
Remember, the underlying aim under neoliberalism is to maximize profit accumulation upward, consolidate political power, and reduce power and agency for everyone else.
Here’s a graphic that is essentially saying much what’s be discussed above but in more concise language: Neoliberalism is a form of capitalism in which the state deregulates the economy, destroys unions, decreases taxes on the rich and corporations, defunds public goods, while repressing the poor, particularly people of color…
What’s at the bottom of the infographic are all manifestations of neoliberalism: Favoring big business and the wealthy, removing labor protections… can you believe in twenty-one states the minimum wage is still $7.25 and hasn’t gone up since 2009!
Gutting social services, using the police and the prisons as a form of social control of the poor specifically, AND using the power of police to extract money from the poorest areas through excessive fines and court costs… also accessing the cheapest labor which is why several states today are rolling back child labor laws so they can have children legally work in mines, factories, McDonalds’ for long hours… even the widespread usage of prison labor where inmates are working for multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations – that is happening because corporations would rather have access to cheapest labor in the form of child and inmate labor, than paying adults a fair wage.
Look at this graph that starts in 1980…realize that Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and took office in 1981 and instituted neoliberalism in the form of “trickle down economics” or Reaganomics, coupled with sustained union-busting…
Look at the impact..look at how sharply the share of the nation’s income shifted from the bottom 50% to the upper 1%
This infographic here shows how much more money folks have at the top, and annual income inequality generally.
The top .01% earn about $28M a year
The top .1% to .01% earn about $3.2M a year
The bottom 90% of Americans earn about $31,000 year… the bottom 90%! 90% of people in this country earn, on average, about $31,000…
The graph on the right, is the distribution of wealth. The bottom represents what people would like it to be, and the one above represents what they THINK the distribution of wealth is…
What it actually is, is the top graph. Recognize how much wealth is consolidated in the top 20% and how little is the bottom 80%…
Where do you think Black folks fit in here in either of these graphs?
Where do you think the Black folks who live in areas where education reform took hold, are situated on these graphs?
Here, the rich guy has all the benefits of government and private economics to ensure that he is the beneficiary, where the most vulnerable see less and less help from the government in simply providing for the most basic services and needs…like food.
Allow me to pause for a moment to drive this point home: We have to be cognizant about our nation’s economic reality, and beneficiaries of the radical redistribution of wealth UPWARD, in order to understand where and how the modern attack on specifically urban teacher unions and urban education fits. There is a specific and deliberate connection which you’ll see as we push forward in Part II…
