Schooling and the Politics of Disaster

Schooling and the

Politics of Disaster

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Schooling and the

Politics of Disaster Edited by

Kenneth J. Saltman

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Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑95659‑5 (Softcover) 0‑415‑95660‑9 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑95659‑8 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑95660‑4 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Schooling and the politics of disaster / edited by Kenneth J. Saltman. p. cm. ISBN 978‑0‑415‑95659‑8 (hardback) ‑‑ ISBN 978‑0‑415‑95660‑4 (pbk.) 1. Education‑‑Social aspects. 2. Disaster relief‑‑Political aspects. 3. Government aid to education. 4. Privatization in education. 5. Hurricane Katrina, 2005. I. Saltman, Kenneth J., 1969‑ LC191.S2653 2007 379‑‑dc22

2006037859

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

Kenneth J. Saltman

Section I Theorizing the Politics of Disaster Chapter 1

Reading the Signs: A Philosophical Look at Disaster

25

Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon

Chapter 2

Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability: Floating Bodies and Expendable Populations

43

Henry A. Giroux

Chapter 3

Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail: The Racialization of Class Exploitation

71

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo

Chapter 4

Feasting on Disaster: Urban School Policy, Globalization, and the Politics of Disaster

87

Pauline Lipman interviewed by Kenneth J. Saltman

Section II Disaster and Educational Policy Chapter 5

Benign Neglect? : Drowning Yellow Buses, Racism, and Disinvestment in the City That Bush Forgot

103

Kristen L. Buras

Chapter 6

The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind: Standardization and Deracialization Breed Inequality

123

Enora R. Brown



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vi  •  Contents

Chapter 7

No Corporation Left Behind

141

Pepi Leistyna

Chapter 8

The Schools Are Failing: Think Tanks, Institutes, Foundations, and Educational Disaster

159

Philip Kovacs

Chapter 9

Disaster Politics and the Right-Wing Assault on Public Schooling and Public Space

177

A Dialogue between Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky

Chapter 10 The Patriotic Prejudice: 9/11 on Campus

189

David Gabbard

Section III Disaster and Global Implications Chapter 11 Beyond Cheap French Fries: Remembering the Social in Social Disaster

209

Michael W. Apple

Chapter 12 The Independent Women’s Forum: Teaching Women’s Rights in the “New Iraq”

219

Robin Truth Goodman

Chapter 13 U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World: The Deeper Implications of the Current Systemic Collapse of the Neoliberal Regime

233

Greg Tanaka

Chapter 14 The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after September 11

249

Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson

Chapter 15 The Potential Disaster of Education for Sustainable Development

269

Richard Kahn

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Contributors

281

Index

285

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the contributors to this book, but I do have to single out a few people for special attention. In particular, conversations with my friend and former colleague Pauline Lipman had a lot to do with the conceptualization of this book. I appreciated her willingness to include one of those conversations in this book. The presentations of Kristen Buras and David Gabbard as well as that by Pauline Lipman at AERA (American Educational Research Association) in 2005 were also central to the idea for this book, as were the conversations we had there. Conversations with Henry Giroux as he was working on his book Stormy Weather (Paradigm, 2006) and I was writing about the privatization of public schooling following Katrina for my book Capitalizing on Disaster (Paradigm, 2007) were integral to the idea for this book. I would also like to especially thank Routledge editor Catherine Bernard whose enthusiasm for the project and crucial suggestions for improvements were tremendously appreciated.

vii

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Introduction Kenneth J. Saltman

From the natural disasters of the Asian tsunami and the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast to the human-made disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan, Indonesia, the United States, and around the globe, disaster is shaping politics. Terror and security dominate political debates and frame issues, while the spectacle of disaster sells policy and commodities alike. Disaster saturates culture, imagination, and dreams as films sell nightmarish spectacles of a planet destroyed by such unlikely assailants as space aliens and asteroids and more likely ones like global warming and nuclear winter, while books of Christian apocalypse sell millions of copies. Cultural theorists, such as Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, have famously asked why it is possible to imagine total planetary catastrophe and yet it appears impossible to imagine an alternative to global capitalism. We might reframe this opposition to recognize, as have Naomi Klein, David Harvey, and others, that increasingly global capitalism is producing and taking advantage of disasters. Writing of the Asian tsunami of 2005 Naomi Klein describes, the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them.1 As I discuss briefly in this introduction, and in greater detail in my book Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Paradigm Publishers, 2007), following both the invasion of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, privatization advocates took advantage of disaster to implement charter schools, voucher schemes, and deregulation of education, while educational profiteers secured exclusive rebuilding contracts. Meanwhile in cities around the United States (like Chicago through Renaissance 2010), declaration of schools and communities as “disaster areas” is being used to justify dismantling public schooling and public housing and replacing it with public school privatization and gentrification. The historical failure to invest in the public has produced disastrous conditions. Now, rather than investing in public schools and other public spheres crucial to a more democratic society, the political right is pushing to privatize and commodify these outcomes. 

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  •  Kenneth J. Saltman While Iraq and New Orleans may seem like rare and isolated cases of privatization advocates capitalizing on disaster, the chapters in Schooling and the Politics of Disaster illustrate that these seemingly extreme examples typify a much larger and even dominant domestic trend in education. Indeed as some chapters contend, on a national level, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) sets schools up to be designated as “failed” so they can be closed and then reopened in a number of experimental forms including charter schools and for-profit schools. Under the current guidelines of NCLB, most public schools in the United States are headed for this outcome. On a local level such mass closures and experimental reopenings are already happening in major U.S. cities such as Chicago, Boston, and Portland, Oregon. This phenomenon involves much more than privatization, including matters of school funding, the culture of schooling, organizational models for school systems, educational leadership, the role of think tanks in policy and reform, and the relationship between educational politics and foreign policy. The chapters in Schooling and the Politics of Disaster address concrete and specific examples, including No Child Left Behind, the war on terror, Hurricane Katrina, the making of educational funding crises in the United States, the role of educational think tanks in planning for disaster response, and the Iraq War. As well, a number of chapters take a broader perspective on disaster including consideration of how schooling has been shaped by the disasters produced by globalization and the legacy of colonialism, and how media spectacles of disaster educate the public about pressing matters. Chapters range from the policy oriented to the philosophical, though all chapters focus on the politics of disaster and the way it is shaping education or functioning pedagogically. In what follows here, I focus on how the political right is using disaster to push a public school privatization agenda. Schooling in Disaster Capitalism: How the Political Right Is Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling 2 Around the world, disaster is providing the means for business to accumulate profit. From the Asian tsunami of 2005, which allowed corporations to seize coveted shoreline properties for resort development, to the multi-billiondollar, no-bid reconstruction contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan; from the privatization of public schooling following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast to the ways that No Child Left Behind sets up public schools to be dismantled and made into investment opportunities—a grotesque pattern is emerging in which business is capitalizing on disaster.3 Despite the fact that attempts to privatize and commercialize public schools proceed at a startling pace,4 privatization increasingly appears in a new form, which Klein calls disaster capitalism, and which David Harvey terms accumulation by dispossession. In education, the political right is capitalizing on disaster from Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 to the federal No Child Left Behind

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Introduction  •   Act, from education rebuilding in the Gulf Coast of the United States to education profiteering in Iraq. The new predatory form of educational privatization aims to dismantle and then commodify particular public schools. This conservative movement threatens the development of public schools as necessary places that foster engaged critical citizenship. At the same time it undermines the public and democratic purposes of public education, it amasses vast profits for the few, and even furthers U.S. foreign policy agendas. Educators committed to defending and strengthening public education as a crucial public sphere in a democratic society may be relieved by several recent failures of the educational privatization movement. By 2000, business publications were eyeing public education as the next big score, ripe for privatization and commodification, likening it to the medical and military industries and suggesting that it might yield $600 billion a year in possible takings.5 However, it has become apparent that only a few years later Educational Management Organizations (EMO), which seek to manage public schools for profit, have not overtaken public education (though EMOs are growing at an alarming rate; a fivefold increase in schools managed in six years). The biggest experiment in for-profit management of public schooling, the Edison Schools, continues as a symbol (according to the right-wing business press) of why running schools for profit on a vast scale is not profitable.6 The massive EMO Knowledge Universe, created by junk bond felon Michael Milken upon his release from prison from nearly one hundred counts of fraud and insider trading, is in the midst of going out of business.7 By the autumn of 2005, the school voucher movement, which the right has been fighting to implement for decades, had only succeeded in capturing the Washington, DC public schools (with the assistance of Congress), and that experiment is by all accounts looking bad. The charter school movement, which is fostering privatization by allowing for publicly funded schools managed by for-profit companies, and is being pushed by massive federal funding under No Child Left Behind, has also taken a hit in NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores, which in traditional terms of achievement suggest that charter school students do not score as high as those in the much maligned public schools. Even school commercialism has faced a sizable backlash from a public fed up and sickened by the shameless attempts of marketers to sell sugar-laden soft drinks and candy bars to U.S. schoolchildren who are suffering epidemic levels of type II diabetes and obesity. Although commercialism continues putting ads in textbooks and on playing fields, on buildings and buses, a growing number of cities, states, and provinces have put in place anticommercialism laws. Such laws limit the transformation of public space into yet more commercial space for corporations, which have succeeded in infiltrating nearly every bit of daily life with advertisements and narratives proselytizing the elements of corporate culture: celebrating consumerism,

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  •  Kenneth J. Saltman possessive individualism, social Darwinism, authoritarianism, and a corporate vision for the future of work, leisure, politics, and the environment. It would be difficult to assert that most public schools currently foster the best alternative to corporate culture, that is, democratic culture—what Dewey called creative democracy. Nurturing a democratic culture and a democratic ethos demands continual work, practice, and attention from educators.8 The present historical moment is seeing the radical erosion of democratic culture by not only the aforementioned onslaught of commercial culture, but also the state-led dismantling of civil liberties under the new dictates of the security state, the resurgence of jingoistic patriotism under the so-called War on Terror, and demands for adhesion to a militarized corporate globalization.9 If many public schools do not presently foster a democratic ethos necessary for developing habits of engaged public criticism and participation in citizens, the public nature of public schools makes them crucial sites and stakes of struggle for the expansion of democratic social relations. Privatizing public schools does not simply threaten to skim public tax money to provide rich investors with profit. Public schools differ from privately controlled schools in that they harbor a distinct potential for public deliberation and oversight, which privately owned and controlled educational institutions limit. Privately controlled institutions are captured by private interests. For example, freedom of speech is protected in the public space of a town common, but is privately regulated in a shopping mall. In a public school, learning and knowledge can be engaged in relation to pressing public problems in ways that can be limited within privatized schools. Consider. for example, the following threats to the public: the threats posed by expanded corporate control over biotechnology giants such as Monsanto, which can patent life, own and control the genetic makeup of all crops, and infect biodiverse crops with potentially devastating genetically modified Franken-food; the threats posed to the global environment by multinational corporations like McDonald’s, which participate in destroying the rainforests for cattle grazing land; the threats to public life as a national security state expands to enable the U.S. government to continue to strategically surround the world’s oil supplies with permanent military bases to benefit oil corporations, military corporations, and to continue to project a capitalist model of development that is most often, despite the rhetoric, thoroughly at odds with democracy, particularly in the states alleged to be U.S. allies, such as Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Uzbekistan. When a for-profit corporation runs schools, it passes on its ideological commitments to corporate globalization, which frame public problems in ways compatible with ever-expanding corporate profit despite the risks to people. Public problems like the weakening of the public sphere resulting from the corporate takeover of knowledge and schooling is not likely to be taught by corporations such as the Edison Schools. At stake in the struggle for public education is the value

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Introduction  •   of critical and public education as a foundation for an engaged citizenry and a substantive democracy. Capitalizing on Disaster in Education10 Despite the range of obvious failures of a number of public school privatization initiatives, privatization advocates have hardly given up. In fact, the privatizers have become far more strategic. The new educational privatization might be termed “back door privatization”11 or maybe smash and grab privatization. A number of privatization schemes are being initiated through a process involving the dismantling of public schools followed by the opening of for-profit, charter, and deregulated public schools. These enterprises typically despise teachers’ unions, are hostile to local democratic governance and oversight, and have an unquenchable thirst for “experiments,” especially with the private sector.12 These initiatives are informed by right-wing think tanks and business organizations. Four examples that typify backdoor privatization are: (1) No Child Left Behind, (2) Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 project, (3) educational rebuilding in Iraq, and (4) educational rebuilding in New Orleans. No Child Left Behind No Child Left Behind sets schools up for failure by making impossible demands for continual improvement. When schools have not met the criteria for adequate yearly progress (AYP), they are subject to punitive action by the federal government, including the potential loss of formerly guaranteed federal funding and requirements for tutoring provided by a vast array of for-profit special educational service providers. A number of authors have described how NCLB is a boon for the testing and tutoring companies while it does not provide financial resources for the test score increases it demands.13 (This is in addition to the cultural politics, knowledge of which these tests affirm and discredit.)14 Sending billions of dollars to support the charter school movement, NCLB pushes schools that do not meet AYP to restructure in ways that encourage privatization, discourage unions, and avoid local regulations on crucial matters. One study has found that by 2013 nearly all of the public schools in the Great Lakes region of the United States will be declared failures and therefore subject to such reforms.15 Clearly, NCLB is designed to accomplish the implementation of privatization and deregulation in ways that open action could not. A study of the Great Lakes region of the United States by educational policy researchers found that 85 to 95 percent of schools in that region would be declared as “failed” by the No Child Left Behind adequate yearly progress measures by 2014.16 The implications of this are national in scope. Under NCLB, “The entire country faces tremendous failure rates, even under a conservative estimate with several forgiving assumptions.”17 Under NCLB, in order for Illinois, for example, to get much-needed federal Title I funds, the school must

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  •  Kenneth J. Saltman demonstrate adequate yearly progress. Each year Illinois must get higher and higher standardized test scores in reading and math to make AYP. Illinois schools, and specifically Illinois schools already receiving the least funding and already serving the poorest students, are being threatened with: (1) losing federal funds; (2) having to use scarce resources for underregulated and often unproven supplemental educational services (SES, private tutoring) such as Newton, a spin-off company of the much criticized for-profit Edison Schools; or (3) being punished, reorganized, or closed and reopened as a choice school (these include for-profit or nonprofit charter schools that do not have the same level of public oversight and accountability, often do not have teachers unions, and often have to struggle for philanthropic grants to operate). Many defenders of public education view remediation options 2 and 3 under NCLB as being designed to undermine those public schools that have been underserved in the first place in order to justify privatization schemes.18 Public schools need help, investment, and public commitment. NCLB is setting public schools up for failure not only in Illinois, but nationally by raising test-oriented thresholds without raising investment and commitment. NCLB itself appears to be a system designed to result in the declaration of wide-scale failure of public schooling to justify privatization.19 Dedicated administrators, teachers, students, and schools are not receiving much-needed resources or public investment in public services and employment in the communities where they are situated; instead they are getting threats. The theoretically and empirically dubious underlying assumption of NCLB is that threats and pressure force teachers to teach what they ought to teach and force students to learn what they ought to learn. In terms of conventional measures of student achievement, Sharon Nichols, Gene Glass, and David Berliner found in their empirical study High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act, that “there is no convincing evidence that the pressure associated with high-stakes testing leads to any important benefits for students’ achievement … [the authors] call for a moratorium on policies that force the public education system to rely on high-stakes testing.”20 These authors find that high stakes testing regimes do not achieve what they are designed to achieve. However, to think beyond efficacy to the underlying assumptions about achievement it is necessary to raise theoretical concerns. Theoretically, at the very least, the enforcement-oriented assumptions of NCLB fail to consider the limitations of defining achievement through high-stakes tests, fail to question what knowledge and whose knowledge constitute legitimate or official curricula that students are expected to master, fail to interrogate the problematic assumptions of learning modeled on digestion or commodity acquisition (as opposed to dialogic, constructivist, or other approaches to learning); such compartmentalized versions of knowledge and learning fail to comprehend how they relate to the broader social

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Introduction  •   and political realities informing knowledge making, both in schools and in society generally. Renaissance 2010 In Chicago, Renaissance 2010, essentially written by the Commercial Club of Chicago, is being implemented by the Chicago Public Schools, a district with more than 85 percent of students who are poor and nonwhite. It will close one hundred public schools and then reopen them as for-profit and nonprofit charter schools, contract schools, magnet schools, all of which bypass important district regulations. The right-wing Heartland Institution hailed the plan, “Competition and (public private) Partnerships are Key to Chicago Renaissance Plan,” while the President of the Chicago Teachers’ Union described it as a plan to dismantle public education.21 These closings are targeting neighborhoods that are being gentrified and taken over by richer and whiter people who are buying up newly developed condos and townhomes. Critics of the plan view it as urban cleansing, which principally kicks out local residents.22 Like NCLB, Renaissance 2010 targets schools that have failed to meet Chicago accountability standards defined by high-stakes tests. By closing and reopening schools, Renaissance 2010 allows the newly privatized schools to circumvent NCLB adequate yearly progress requirements, which makes the list of Chicago’s “need improvement” schools shorter. This allows the city to claim improvement by simply redefining terms. NCLB and Renaissance 2010 share a number of features including not only a high-pressure model, but also reliance on standardized testing as the ultimate measure of learning, threats to teacher job security and teachers’ unions, and a push for experimentation with unproven models including privatization and charter schools, as well as a series of business assumptions and guiding language. For example, speaking of Renaissance 2010 Mayor Daley stated, “this model will generate competition and allow for innovation. It will bring in outside partners who want to get into the business of education.”23 Beyond its similarities to NCLB, Renaissance 2010 is being hailed as a national model in its own right across the political spectrum. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the most heavily endowed philanthropic organization in history, worth about $80 billion, with projects in health and education. Its focus on school reform is guided by the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute. Though it offers no substance, argument, or evidence for why Renaissance 2010 should be replicated, the economically unmatched Gates Foundation praises Renaissance 2010 as a roadmap for other cities to follow.24 As Pauline Lipman writes: If Chicago’s accountability has laid the groundwork for privatization, Renaissance 2010 may signal what we can expect nationally as school districts fail to meet NCLB benchmarks. In fact, failure to make “adequate

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  •  Kenneth J. Saltman yearly progress” on these benchmarks, and the threat of a state takeover, is a major theme running through the Commercial Club’s argument for school choice and charter schools. Business and political leaders seem to believe turning schools over to the market is a common sense solution to the problems in the schools.25 Both NCLB and Renaissance 2010 involve two stages of capitalizing on disaster. The first stage involves the historical underfunding and disinvestment in public schooling that has resulted in disastrous public school conditions. The public and private sectors have failed the communities where these schools are located. Although the corporate sector is usually represented in mass media and in much conservative and liberal educational policy literature as coming to the rescue of the incompetent public sector, as Dorothy Shipps points out in her book School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880–2000 (2006), the corporate sector in Chicago and around the nation has long been deeply involved in school reform, agenda setting, and planning in conjunction with other civic planning. As she asks, “if corporate power was instrumental in creating the urban public schools and has had a strong hand in their reform for more than a century, then why have those schools failed urban children so badly?”26 Creative Associates International, Incorporated In Iraq, Creative Associates International, Incorporated (CAII), a for-profit corporation, has made over $100 million from no-bid contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to rebuild schools, develop curriculum, develop teacher training, and procure educational supplies. The company has avoided using local contractors and has spent the majority of its funds on security, while the majority of schools continue to languish in squalor. Educational privatization typifies the way the U.S. invasion has been used to sell off Iraq. Privatization and the development of U.S.-style charter schools are central to the plan (conservative consultants from the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been employed), despite the fact that these are foreign to Iraq’s public education system, and members of right-wing think tanks have been engaged to enact what invasion and military destruction has made a lucrative opportunity financially and ideologically. Privatization of the Iraqi schools is part of a broader attempt to privatize and sell off the Iraqi nation, while for-profit educational contractor CAII appears as the spearhead of U.S. foreign policy to “promote democracy.”27 As I discuss at length elsewhere,28 the claims for democracy promotion in Iraq appear to have more to do with using this human-made disaster for promoting the interests of corporations and transnational capital, and nothing to do with expanding meaningful and participatory democracy.

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Introduction  •   Hurricane Katrina Likewise, following the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast, a for-profit educational contractor from Alaska (named Akima) won a no-bid contract to build temporary portable classrooms in the Gulf Coast region. But for-profit education’s big haul in the Big Easy came as a result of the U.S. Department of Education imposing the largest ever school voucher experiment for the region and nation. Right-wing think tanks had prepared papers advocating such an approach, describing public school privatization as a “silver lining” and a “golden opportunity.”29 Six months after Hurricane Katrina, the destroyed New Orleans public schools sit slime-coated in mold, debris, and human feces, partially flooded and littered with such detritus as a two-ton air conditioner that had been on the roof and the carcasses of dead dogs. All 124 New Orleans Public Schools were damaged in some way and only 20 have reopened with more than 10,000 students registered. There were 62,227 students enrolled in NOPS before the storm.30 The devastation nearly defies description. Katrina roared in, severely damaging about a quarter of the schools: Roofs caved in. Fierce winds blew out walls and hurled desks through windows. Floodwaters drowned about 300 buses. Computers, furniture and books were buried in mud. Dead dogs and rotting food littered hallways.31 Yet days after the disaster the Washington Times quoted long-standing advocate of school vouchers, Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice, on the issue. Bolick used the tragedy to propose wide-scale privatization of the New Orleans public schools in the form of a massive voucher scheme. He said, “If there could be a silver lining to this tragedy, it would be that children who previously had few prospects for a high-quality education, now would have expanded options. Even with the children scattered to the winds, that prospect can now be a reality—if the parents are given power over their children’s education funds.”32 Calling for the privatization of public schools, Bolick’s metaphor of the silver lining was repeated over and over in the popular press immediately after the storm. Karla Dial wrote in the Heartland News, “emergency vouchers could be the silver lining in the storm clouds that brought Hurricane Katrina to the Gulf Coast on August 29.”33 Reuters quoted Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard as saying, “We think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I call it the silver lining in the storm cloud.”34 Jack Kemp, a longtime proponent of business approaches to urban poverty and member of the Reagan administration, took poetic license but stayed with the precious metal theme. The People for the American Way reported, “with the effort to rebuild after Katrina just getting underway, the Right sees, in the

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10  •  Kenneth J. Saltman words of Jack Kemp, a ‘golden opportunity’ to use a portion of the billions of federal reconstruction funds to implement a voucher experiment that, until now, it has been unable to get through Congress.”35 The governor of Louisiana saw gold too. Before the storm the state legislature had rejected the governor’s attempt to seize control of the public schools from the city, but after Katrina, “legislation proposed by Governor Blanco in November allows the state to take over any New Orleans school that falls below the statewide average on test scores and place it into the state’s Recovery School District. Under this low standard, management of 102 of the 115 Orleans Parish schools operating before Katrina would be transferred to the state. The governor sees it as an effort to grasp what she called a ‘golden opportunity for rebirth.’36 Director Brian Riedlinger of the Algiers Charter Schools Association, which would control all but one of the reopened New Orleans schools six months after the tragedy, employed a creative variation on the theme, invoking the poetry of Coleridge and the discourse of hygiene, “I think the schools have been a real albatross. And so I think what we’re giving parents is the possibility of hope, a possibility of wiping the slate clean and starting over.”37 Long-standing advocates of public school privatization, Paul T. Hill and Jane Hannaway, carried the hygienic metaphor a step further writing, in their Urban Institute report “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans,” that “[e]ducation could be one of the bright spots in New Orleans’ recovery effort, which may even establish a new model for school districts nationally.”38 This “bright spot,” which according to Hill and Hannaway should be a national model, calls for refusing to rebuild the New Orleans public schools, firing the teachers and by extension dissolving the teachers union, eradicating the central administration, and inviting for-profit corporations with sordid histories (such as the Edison Schools39 and other organizations) to take over the running of schools.40 Sajan George is a director of Alvarez and Marsal, a Bush administration–connected business consulting firm that is making millions in its role subcontracting the rebuilding of schools. George, a “turnaround expert” contracted by the state, brought these metaphors together stating, “This is the silver lining in the dark cloud of Katrina. We would not have been able to start with an almost clean slate if Katrina had not happened. So it really does represent an incredible opportunity.”41 An incredible opportunity indeed. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans typifies the new form of educational privatization. The disaster has been used to enrich a tiny, predominantly white business and political elite, while achieving educational privatization goals that the right has been unable to achieve before: (1) implement the largest ever experiment in school vouchers, (2) allow for enormous profits in education rebuilding by contracting firms with political connections, and (3) allow the replacement of a system of universal public education with a charter school network designed to participate in the dispossession of poor and African

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Introduction  •  11 American residents from their communities. Documents such as those by the Urban Institute and Heritage Foundation discuss strategies to make the temporary voucher scheme permanent and even how to take advantage of future disasters. The Yankee Institute took a full-page color advertisement in Heartland’s School Reform News with a letter from Executive Director Lewis Andrews admonishing readers that when the real estate bubble bursts and public education “cost soars relative to home values” in rich communities, “savvy reformers will be prepared to make the case for school vouchers in all communities.”42 The ad begins with the expression, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” Implicit in Andrews’s statements is the fact that privatizers have already been taking advantage of the historical failure to fund education properly in poor and working-class communities. Before Katrina, per-pupil spending in New Orleans stood at about $5,000 ($4,986 in 1998). To put this in perspective, per-pupil spending in suburban public school districts in wealthy suburbs around the nation reaches as high as four times this amount despite the fact that they face far fewer obstacles. As the right clearly grasps, the question of privatization is inextricably linked to matters of public funding. Vouchers, charters, and EMOs cannot make headway with well-financed public schools in richer communities. Crises and emergencies benefit privatization advocates who can seize upon a situation with preformulated plans to commodify this public service. To put it differently, privatizers target those who have been denied adequate public investment in the first place. As the United Federation of Teachers Joe Derose insists, the policy emphasis in rebuilding should be on the chronic underfunding plaguing the New Orleans public schools rather than on the schemes to privatize them.43 As the preceding quotes from Bolick, Kinnan, and Andrews illustrate, the right is eager to take advantage of crisis to subvert democratic oversight concerning policy matters of great public importance. The political right is waging war on public education while doing all it can to force through privatization initiatives that are unpopular and difficult to win politically. Neoliberalism and the Uses of Disaster in Public Schooling Contemporary initiatives to privatize public schools through the use of disaster can only be understood in relation to the neoliberal ideology that presently dominates politics.44 As David Harvey elucidates, neoliberalism, also described as neoclassical economics or market fundamentalism, brings together economic, political, and cultural policy doctrine. Neoliberalism, which originated with Frederic Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the “Chicago boys” at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, expresses individual and social ideals through the markets. Within this view, individual and social values and aspirations can best be reached through unfettered markets. In its

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12  •  Kenneth J. Saltman ideal forms (as opposed to how it is practically implemented), neoliberalism demands privatization of public goods and services, removal of regulations on trade, loosening of capital and labor controls by the state, and permitting of foreign direct investment. Neoliberals believe that public control over public resources should be taken from the “necessarily bureaucratic” state and placed with the “necessarily efficient” private sector. The implosion of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall were used by neoliberals to declare that there could be no alternative to global capitalism. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously called this the TINA thesis—there is no alternative to the market. Within the logic of capitalist triumphalism, the only thing to do is to put into effect the dictates of the market and spread the market to places previously inaccessible. The past financial performance of neoliberalism, as Harvey explains, is not one of accomplishment but rather one of failure, having caused crises, instability, and unreconciled contradictions regarding state power.45 However, as he shows, neoliberalism is extremely accomplished at upwardly redistributing economic wealth and political power. Consequently, Harvey suggests understanding neoliberalism as a long-standing project of class warfare waged by the rich on everyone else. Neoliberalism has damaged welfare state protections and undermined the government’s authority to act in the public interest. As well, these policies have brought on wide-scale disaster around the globe, including a number of countries in Latin America and the Pacific Rim. Such disasters have compelled governments to reevaluate neoliberalism as it has been used by the so-called Washington consensus. In fact, recent elections throughout Latin America with victories by the left have largely been a reaction to the neoliberal Washington consensus, which imposes neoliberal globalization through institutional mechanisms such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. Initially seen as a wacky doctrine, neoliberalism was not brought into the mainstream of policy and government circles until the late 1970s and early 1980s in Thatcher’s United Kingdom and in Reagan’s United States. As Harvey details, Chile, under the brutal dictator Pinochet, was a crucial test field for the ideology, resulting in increased commercial investments in Chile alongside 30,000 citizen disappearances. The widening reception of neoliberalism had to do with the steady lobbying of right-wing think tanks and electoral victories, but also with the right conditions, including economic crises challenging the Keynesian model and Fordist modes of economic production and social formation in the late 1970s.46 Neoliberalism is distinctly hostile to democracy. As Harvey writes, Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only

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Introduction  •  13 possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. A strong preference exists for government by executive order and by judicial decision rather than democratic and parliamentary decision-making.47 Such opposition to democracy and preference for elite governance is ceaselessly expressed by such neoliberal education writers as those of the Koret Task Force of the Hoover Institution, such as John Chubb, Terry Moe, and Eric Hanuschek and company.48 For progressive and critical educators principally concerned with the possibilities for public schooling to expand a democratic ethos and engaged critical citizenry, neoliberalism’s antidemocratic tendencies appear as particularly bad. In education, neoliberalism has pervasively infiltrated education with radical implications, remaking practical judgment and forwarding the privatization and deregulation program. The steady rise of privatization and the shift to business language and logic can be understood through the extent to which neoliberal ideals have succeeded in taking over educational debates. Neoliberalism appears in the now commonsense framing of education through presumed ideals of upward individual economic mobility (the promise of cashing in knowledge for jobs) and the social ideals of global economic competition. In this view national survival hinges upon educational preparation for international economic supremacy. The preposterousness of this assumption comes as school kids, rather than corporate executives, are being blamed for the global economic race to the bottom. The TINA thesis, which has come to dominate politics throughout much of the world, has infected educational thought as omnipresent market terms such as accountability, choice, efficiency, competition, monopoly, and performance frame educational debates. Nebulous terms borrowed from the business world, such as achievement, excellence, and best practices, conceal ongoing struggles over competing values, visions, and ideological perspectives. (Achieve what? Excel at what? Best practices for whom? And says who?) The only questions left on reform agendas appear to be how to best enforce knowledge and curriculum conducive to individual upward mobility within the economy and national economic interest as it contributes to a corporately managed model of globalization as perceived from the perspective of business. This is a dominant and now commonplace view of education propagated by such influential writers as Thomas Friedman in his books and New York Times columns, and such influential grant givers as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This neoliberal view of education dangerously eradicates the role of democratic participation and the role of public schools in preparing democratic citizens with the intellectual and critical tools for meaningful and participatory self-governance. By reducing the politics of education to its economic

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14  •  Kenneth J. Saltman functions, neoliberal educational thinking has deeply authoritarian tendencies that are incompatible with democracy. Democracy is under siege by the tendency of market fundamentalism to collapse politics with economics, thereby translating all social problems into business concerns with the possibilities for continued profit making. Yet democracy is also under siege by a rising authoritarianism in the United States, which eviscerates civil liberties and attacks human rights domestically and internationally through the U.S. Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition (state-sanctioned kidnapping, torture, and murder), spying on the public, and other measures that treacherously expand executive power. Internationally, this appears as what Harvey has termed “the New Imperialism” and others have called militarized globalization, which includes the so-called War on Terror, the U.S. military presence in more than 140 countries, the encirclement of the world’s oil resources with the world’s most powerful military, and so forth. This is on top of a continued culture of militarism that educates citizens to identify with militarized solutions to social problems. In education, I have called this militarism “education as enforcement,” actions that aim to enforce global neoliberal imperatives through a number of educational means.49 David Harvey offers a compelling economic argument for the rise of repression and militarization, explaining the shift from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. Neoliberal policy was coming into dire crisis by the late 1990s as deregulation of capital was resulting in a threat to the United States as it lost the manufacturing base and increasingly lost its service sector and financial industry to Asia.50 For Harvey, the new militarism in foreign policy is partly about a desperate attempt to seize control of the world’s oil spigot, as lone superpower parity is endangered by the rise of a fast-growing Asia and a unified Europe with a strong currency. Threats to the U.S. economy are posed not only by the potential loss of control over the fuel for the U.S. economy and military, but also by the power conferred by the dollar remaining the world currency and the increasing indebtedness of the United States to China and Japan as they prop up the value of the dollar for the continued export of consumer goods. For Harvey, the structural problems behind global capitalism remain the financialization of the global economy and what Marx called “the crisis of overproduction,” driving down prices and wages while glutting the market and threatening profits. Capitalists and states representing capitalist interests respond to these crises through Harvey’s version of what Marx called primitive accumulation—“accumulation by dispossession.” Privatization is one of the most powerful tools of accumulation by dispossession, transforming publicly owned and controlled goods and services into private and restricted ones—the continuation of “enclosing the commons” begun in Tudor England. If neoliberalism came into crisis due to the excesses of capitalism (deregulation and liberalization yielding capital flight, deindustrialization, etc.), then the neoconservative response—emphasizing control

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Introduction  •  15 and order and reinvigorated overt state power—makes a lot of sense. As Harvey explains in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), central to the crisis of neoliberalism are the contradictions of its antipathy to the nation and reliance on the state. Neoconservatives have responded to the neoliberal crisis by using national power to push economic competition, to pillage productive forces for continued economic growth, and to control populations through repression as inequalities of wealth and income are radically exacerbated, resulting in the expansion of a dual society of mobile professionals on the one side and everyone else on the other.51 The surging culture of religious right-wing populism, irrational new age mysticism, and endless conspiracy theorizing appear as symptoms of a cultural climate in which neoliberal market fundamentalism has come into crisis as both economic doctrine and ideology. Within this climate, private for-profit knowledge-making institutions, including schools and media, are institutionally incapable of providing a language and criticism that would enable the rational interpretation necessary for political intervention. Irrationalism is the consequence. Not too distant history suggests that this can lead in systematically deadly directions.52 At present there is a crucial tension between two fundamental functions of public education for the capitalist state. The first involves reproducing the conditions of production—teaching skills and know-how in ways that are ideologically compatible with the social relations of capital accumulation. Public education remains an important and necessary tool for producing capital to create political and economic leaders, docile workers and marginalized citizens, or even for participating in sorting and sifting out those to be completely excluded from the economy and politics. The second function that appears to be relatively new and growing involves the capitalist possibilities of pillaging public education for profit, in the United States, Iraq, or elsewhere. Drawing on Harvey’s explanation of accumulation by dispossession, we see that in the United States the numerous strategies for privatizing public education—from voucher schemes, to for-profit charter schools, to forced for-profit remediation schemes, to dissolving public schools in poor communities and replacing them with a mix of private, charter, and experimental schools—all follow a pattern of destroying and commodifying schools where the students are redundant to reproduction processes, while maintaining public investment in the schools that have the largest role in turning out managers and leaders. Strategies of capitalist accumulation, dispossession, and reproduction, appear to be at odds. After all, if public schooling is being pillaged and sold off, then how can it reproduce the social order for capital? Yet privatization is targeting those most marginal to capitalist reproduction, thereby making the most economically excluded into commodities for corporations. Hence, EMOs target the poor, making economically marginalized people into opportunities for capital in the same way that for-profit prisons do. Reproduction and dispossession feed each other in several ways: in an ideological apparatus

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16  •  Kenneth J. Saltman such as education or media, privatization and decentralization exacerbate class inequality by weakening universal provision, weakening the public role of a service, putting in place reliance upon expensive equipment supplied from outside, and justifying further privatization and decentralization to remedy the deepened economic differentiation and hierarchization that has been introduced or worsened through privatization and decentralization. The obvious U.S. example is the failure of the state to properly fund public schools in poor communities, and then privatizing those schools to be run by corporations.53 Rather than addressing the funding inequalities and the intertwined dynamics at work in making poor schools or working to expand the democratic potential of public schools, the remedy is commodification. It is crucial to emphasize that what Klein terms “disaster capitalism” and Harvey terms “accumulation by dispossession” are not just an economic project but also a cultural project, and that these need to be understood together. What Henry Giroux has termed the “cultural pedagogy of neoliberalism”54 is typified not merely by the language of silver linings and golden opportunities, but by the turn to business language and models in thinking about the social world including public school reform and policy. Not only have public school debates been overrun by the aforementioned neoliberal language, but as we see in New Orleans, business turnaround specialists, such as Alvarez and Marsal, are brought in to dictate school rebuilding while residents are dispossessed of their communities through economic rationales. The state and Alvarez and Marsal invoked principles of supply and demand to justify not rebuilding the New Orleans public schools (residents do not return because the schools have not been rebuilt and then the planners declare that there is no demand for school rebuilding). The idealization of choice, markets, business, deregulation, and anti-unionism is propagated in a number of ways through the cultural pedagogy of neoliberalism. It is essential to remember what Pierre Bourdieu emphasized about neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics … owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked as such to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy [that of the United States] that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate

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Introduction  •  17 intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies.55 A number of educational forces in addition to schools are required to keep such premises appearing natural and hence unquestionable. Mass media is one of the most powerful pedagogical forces continuously educating the public in understanding the economy as natural and inevitable, whether through news programs that report stock prices like the weather; or through sports that align capitalist values of numerically quantifiable progress and growth with the possibilities of the human body; or through police shows (nearly half of U.S. TV content), which replace the primary role of the police (protecting private property) with the drama of seldom-committed spectacular murders; or the social Darwinist game shows that make contestants compete for scarce resources including money, cutthroat corporate jobs, trophy spouses, and cut-face plastic surgery to compete all the better; or through the advertising behind it all, which sells the fantasies that comprise a particular kind of radically individualized cynical consumer view of the self and the social world. Such media products function pedagogically to define what is possible to think and what is impossible to imagine for the future. Yet as powerful as mass media is as a pedagogical force, the traditions of critical pedagogy, critical theory, cultural studies, feminism, progressive education, and critical cultural production offer powerful tools to produce different kinds of visions—hopeful, democratic visions that articulate with growing democracy movements around the world. The neoliberal postulates that Bourdieu denaturalizes appear increasingly dubious at best as wealth and income are radically redistributed upward in the United States, while nation after nation in Latin America rejects the neoliberal Washington consensus in favor of a path that more generally coheres with the democratic ideals of the global justice movement.56 For teachers and other cultural workers, the most crucial matter at stake in debates over privatization and school reform is generally the possibilities for public schooling to expand a democratic ethos and foster democratic practices and social relations with regard to politics, culture, and the economy. What is being done for profit and ideology in New Orleans and Iraq, in Chicago and throughout the United States with NCLB does just the opposite by political dispossession, economic pillage, and symbolic cultural violence. It is incumbent upon educators to develop pedagogical and material strategies to expand democratic struggles so that the public take back schools, resources, and cultural power as part of a broader democratic alternative to the antidemocratic, neoliberal approaches that capitalize on disaster and imperil the public.

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18  •  Kenneth J. Saltman Organization of the Book The following chapters are organized into three sections. The first, “Theorizing the Politics of Disaster,” begins by providing a philosophical and historical look at the concept of disaster itself, and then offers biopolitical, ideological, and political economic critiques of the politics of disaster and its implications for education. The second section, “Disaster and Educational Policy,” investigates how the politics of disaster is central to such varied phenomena as teaching and learning, race, curriculum, No Child Left Behind, testing, textbook publishing, privatization, urban reform initiatives, higher education, and educational think tanks. All of these chapters consider the broader political, economic, and cultural contexts informing school policy as they are impacted by the politics of disaster. The third and final section, “Disaster and Global Implications,” expands this broad contextualization to consider the politics of disaster in a global sense, ranging from neoliberal globalization to the so-called War on Terror, to the Iraq war, the backlash against women and feminism, the politics of development aid, and ecological collapse. Ideally, this collection will begin discussion about how the politics of disaster is shaping education and will lend itself to critical pedagogical response. Notes





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1. Naomi Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Nation, May 2005, pp. 9-11. 2. This chapter draws on material developed in my forthcoming book, Capitalizing on Disaster: Breaking and Taking Public Schools (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). A version of this introduction appears in the forthcoming Teacher Education Quarterly special issue on business involvement in public schooling, which is guest edited by Bruce Jones. 3. Klein, May 2005. 4. For the most recent update on the state of educational privatization, see the research provided by the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, available at http://www.schoolcommercialism.org. 5. Economist, “Reading, Writing, and Enrichment: Private Money is Pouring into American Education—and Transforming It,” January 16, 1999, 55. I detail a number of business publications that were salivating over privatizing public schooling in “Junk King Education,” in Strange Love, Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market, ed. Robin Truth Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman, 39–65 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). In academic circles, Paul Hill was striving to make education an investment opportunity. Paul Thomas Hill, Lawrence C. Pierce, and James W. Guthrie, Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America’s Schools (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Hill appears at the forefront of calls for Katrina profiteering in 2005. 6. See, for example, William C. Symonds, “Edison: an ‘F’ in Finance,” Business Week, November 4, 2002, and Julia Boorstin, “Why Edison Doesn’t Work,” Fortune, December 9, 2002. For a detailed discussion of Edison’s financial problems and the media coverage of them, see Kenneth J. Saltman, The Edison Schools:

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Introduction  •  19













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Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005). 7. See “Junk King Education,” in Goodman and Saltman, eds., 2002. 8. See Richard J. Bernstein’s important discussion of the need for a democratic ethos based on Dewey’s notion of creative democracy in The Abuse of Evil (New York: Verso, 2005). 9. See William I. Robinson, The Critical Globalization Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003). 10. See Kenneth J. Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster for a chapter-length discussion of how Katrina, Iraq, Renaissance 2010, and NCLB exemplify the new form of educational privatization. 11. The editors of Rethinking Schools describe the federal voucher scheme after Hurricane Katrina as “back door privatization,” see “Katrina’s Lessons,” Rethinking Schools, fall 2005, 4–5. 12. David Hursh offers an important discussion of how neoliberal education policies destroy democratic public educational ideals in “Undermining Democratic Education in the USA: The Consequences of Global Capitalism and Neo-Liberal Policies for Education Policies at the Local, State, and Federal Levels,” Policy Futures in Education 2, nos. 3 and 4 (2004): 607–620. 13. For an excellent collection of criticisms of No Child Left Behind, see Deborah Meier and George Wood, eds., Many Children Left Behind (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2004). In relation to what Henry Giroux has called the “war on youth” being waged in the United States, see his important chapter on NCLB in Henry A. Giroux, Abandoned Generation (New York: Palgrave, 2003). See also the collection of writings on NCLB on the Rethinking Schools Online website at http:// www.rethinkingschools.org. 14. Schools reward professional and ruling-class knowledge and dispositions, and disaffirm and punish the knowledge and dispositions of working-class, poor, and culturally nondominant groups. See, for example, the works of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Passeron, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Stephen Ball, Sonia Nieto, Jean Anyon, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, to name just a few. 15. See Edward W. Wiley, William J. Mathis, and David R. Garcia, “The Impact of Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act on Schools in the Great Lakes Region,” Education Policy Studies Laboratory, Arizona State University, September 2005, http://edpolicylab.org (accessed 10/31/06). 16. Wiley, Mathis, and Garcia, p. 3 of “Executive Summary.” http://edpolicylab. org. 17. Wiley, Mathis, Garcia, p. 3 of “Executive Summary.” http://edpolicylab.org. 18. See, for example, the contributors in Deborah Meier and George Wood, eds., Many Children Left Behind. See also the writing of Stan Karp and Gerald Bracey on NCLB. A number of excellent resources on privatization and commercialism implications of NCLB can be found at the site of the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at http://www.schoolcommercialism.org. 19. Alfie Kohn, “NCLB and the Effort to Privatize Public Education,” in Meier and Wood, eds., Many Children Left Behind, 79–100.

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20  •  Kenneth J. Saltman 20. Sharon L. Nichols, Gene V. Glass, and Davic C. Berliner, “High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act,” Educational Policy Studies Laboratory, http://edpolicylab.org, p. 3 of “Executive Summary.” 21. For an important scholarly analysis, see Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education (New York: Routledge, 2004). 22. Activist groups include Parents United for Responsible Education, Teachers for Social Justice, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, and others. 23. Deb Moore, “A New Approach in Chicago,” School Planning and Management, July 2004, 8. 24. “Snapshot: Chicago Renaissance 2010. Possibilities: An Education Update,” p. 2, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Education/RelatedInfo/Possibilities/Possibilities2004 (accessed 10/31/06). 25. Pauline Lipman, “‘We’re Not Blind. Just Follow the Dollar Sign,’” Rethinking Schools Online, vol. 19, no. 4 (summer 2005), http://www.rethinkingschools.org (accessed 10/31/06). 26. Dorothy Shipps, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago 1880–2000 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), x. 27. Pratap Chaterjee, Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004). 28. Kenneth J. Saltman, “Creative Associates International, Inc.: Corporate Education and Democracy Promotion in Iraq,” Review of Education Pedagogy Cultural Studies 28 (2006): 25–65. 29. For example, Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice described privatization as the “silver lining” of the cloud that was Hurricane Katrina. His op-ed was then carried by or quoted in countless publications including the neocon National Review, publications of the Heartland Institute, the Washington Times, and USA Today, among others. The quote was picked up and repeated by others advocating the same approach. 30. April Capchino, “More than 100 N.O. Schools Still Closed,” New Orleans City Business, February 27, 2006. 31. Cohen, “New Orleans’ Troubled Schools Get Overhaul,” Associated Press, March 4, 2006, YahooNews, http://news.yahoo.com (accessed 10/31/06). 32. Clint Bolick, “Katrina’s Displaced Students,” Washington Times, September 15, 2005. 33. Karla Dial, “Emergency School Vouchers Likely for Katrina Victims,” Heartland Institute, School Reform News, November 2005, http://www.heartland.org (accessed 10/31/06). 34. Sharon Cohen, March 4, 2006. 35. People for the American Way, “Hurricane Katrina: A ‘Golden Opportunity’ for the Right-Wing to Undermine Public Education,” People for the American Way, November 14, 2005, http://www.pfaw.org (accessed 10/31/06). 36. Paul Hill and Jane Hannaway, “The Future of Public Education in New Orleans,” in After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity and Equity into the New New Orleans (The Urban Institute, January 2006). 37. Online NewsHour, “Rebuilding New Orleans Schools,” Public Broadcasting System, December 19, 2005, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education (accessed 10/31/06).

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Introduction  •  21









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38. Hill and Hannaway, January 2006. 39. Saltman, The Edison Schools, 2005. 40. Hill and Hannaway, January 2006. 41. Cohen, March 4, 2006. 42. Heartland Institute, School Reform News, November 2005, 9. 43. Cohen, March 4, 2006. 44. Henry Giroux’s The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2004) makes a crucial analysis of the cultural pedagogy of neoliberalism. For a discussion of neoliberal pedagogy in relation to school curriculum, film, and literary corporate cultural production, see Goodman and Saltman, eds., 2002. An excellent mapping and analysis of these conservatisms and others can be found in Michael Apple’s Educating the Right Way (New York: Routledge, 2001). 45. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 46. For an excellent succinct discussion of the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism with the rise of neoliberal globalization and the concomitant shifts in social organization as well as implications for cultural theory, see Nancy Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” Constellations 10, no. 2 (2003): 160–171. 47. Harvey, 2005, 66–67. 48. See, for example, Chubb and Moe’s neoliberal education bible Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990). See also the several Koret-edited collections, including A Primer on America’s Schools (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2001). 49. See Kenneth J. Saltman and David Gabbard, eds., Education as Enforcement: the Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge, 2003). 50. Harvey offers important tools for comprehending neoliberalism and neoconservatism in both A Brief History of Neoliberalism (see n. 45) and The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a discussion of Harvey’s recent work, the implications for public school privatization, and the theoretical limitations of this work, see Kenneth J. Saltman “Review of a Brief History of Neoliberalism,” Policy Futures in Education, 2007. 51. The expansion of the dual society as a result of neoliberal globalization has been importantly theorized by Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the Human Consequences (New York: Polity, 1998) and Fraser, 2003, 160–171. 52. See Theodore Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001). 53. See Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 54. Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004). 55. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 10–11. 56. A valuable source for literature on the global justice movement is ZNet available at http://www.zmag.org.

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I

Theorizing the Politics of Disaster

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1

 Reading the Signs

A Philosophical Look at Disaster Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon

In this chapter Jane Gordon and Lewis Gordon provide a historical and philosophical perspective on disaster. Their discussion provides crucial foundations for understanding the politics of disaster and includes concerns regarding how politics and education are presently being remade through the language of crisis and moralism. This chapter offers a short philosophical exploration of the concept of disaster and an outline of some of the impediments to learning from disasters in the modern age. The term disaster is astrological in origin. Through a Middle French transformation of the Italian term disastro, which means “ill starred” or “bad planet,” it in turn has origins in Latin (astrum) and ancient Greek (astron). The picture becomes one of an event from which a warning was issued from the heavens, or more precisely the planets and the stars. Paying close attention to one’s astrological charts offers no less than an attunement, it would seem, to the possibility of avoiding or at least preparing for bad events or ruin. How, we may ask, do the stars warn us of such events? The configurations of the stars are events in themselves, so with this in mind, we see an event whose signification is another event. In other words, the event appears as a sign, a sign deferred and differing, in the sense of being unequal to that which it signifies. But since the sign and its signification stand as a continuum of ill-fated events, its appearance is, from the outset, bad. The events that follow such signs tend to occlude the signs themselves. Those consequences, which we now know as disasters, are significant in their own right. They are bad things, terrible things, that we wish could have been avoided. And yet natural disasters are not naturally disastrous. The failure to read signs leads to such disasters. Were the signs read properly, perhaps—the tremor in the earth, ripples in the tide, change in the color of gases emanating from a mountain’s peak, sudden changes in the color of the sky, or wind from an approaching storm; or perhaps the animals running to high ground, insects fleeing en masse—natural phenomena such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, tornados, and hurricanes would occur without loss of life, 25

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26  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon or at least human life.1 The failure to take heed of warnings, to read signs properly, is catastrophic. From the ancient Greek word katastrephein (which literally means to turn downward or make a downward turn), the significance of such failure is also embodied in its consequence; in catastrophes we are pushed downward; in effect we fall.2 To be pushed downward is to face limited options, but in this instance options limited by our own response to crisis—a decision not to act in the face of necessity. A danger in all catastrophes is that they are also disasters, which means that they, too, may exist in a continuum of warnings. To be caught in their field is to face being swallowed up in the avalanche of ill-fated signs. One hopes that the spillage ends at a distance, and if one is lucky, without having been experienced through one’s senses, especially that of sight: not being seen, it cannot be read, and therefore cannot emerge as a sign. To look is to become involved. By covering one’s eyes, by looking elsewhere, locking one’s doors, perhaps one would be passed over and thus lose significance in such a perilous stream.3 The victim of a disaster is, thus, unavoidably marked.4 As a victim of a disaster, is she or he part of its continuum? Is such an ill-fated individual also a sign, a fallen star in whose situation the suffering of others has been placed, as in the case of the scapegoat, or is that person, by coming upon the scene, a divine warning? Much of this turns on whether the victim emerges as a survivor. There are several responses to these possibilities. The first is to take the notion of a divine warning seriously, and in so doing, take the victim of disaster to be a kind of monster. The etymology of the term monster makes this obvious. Derived from the Latin monstrum, which in turn is from the verb monere (to warn or to admonish), it was known as a warning from God or the gods. The connection with disaster should be quite obvious because stars and planets, as thought of over the ages, are in the heavens; they are, in other words, heavenly bodies. Their descent is thus always momentous. A warning suggests that there is something one could do to avoid disaster. By doing so, it stimulates a crisis (from the Greek krenein, which means “to choose”), it stimulates choices to be made. Because the results of making the wrong choices will be catastrophic, these kinds of divine warnings occasion not only anxiety, the struggle with choices one must make, but also fear. The initial sign, then, warns of the catastrophe, but the disaster produces victims who are a continuation of the initial sign; they, in effect, become signs, carrying (like victims of the plague), disaster wherever they go. They become, in other words, monsters.5 Monsters of disaster are special kinds of divine warning. They are harbingers of things we do not want to face, of catastrophes, and in coming to us, we fear that they will bring such events upon us. Consequently, many of us blame such victims. We (by which we mean simply “we fellow human beings”), transform them from effect into cause. They become both the signifier and the

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 Reading the Signs  •  27 signified; their ill fate must, in some way, be of their own doing; their failure, in other words, to have properly read the signs. Our success in reading such signs must, then, take the form of eschewing their messenger.6 That ability reinforces the view that it must have been an initial failure on the part of the victim of disaster that led to his or her being caught up in the web of disastrous significations—of becoming a warning. We are in effect declaring, “Yes, we can read the sign,” when we blame and abandon such victims. There are many historical and recent incidents to support such views. The demonization of the black victims of Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the most graphic in recent memory.7 It is, as well, an event that challenges our ordinary understanding of disaster because it revealed that not all victims can appear as such. Race, as is now well known, was distinguished by two kinds of people in that catastrophe—those who were innocent by virtue of being white and those who were already guilty by virtue of being black. The latter’s color served as a mark or stain, or in the language of this reading a sign that raised the bar of what is required properly to be victims. Timothy Chambers describes this double standard well in his appropriately titled article, “‘They’re Finding Food, but We’re Looting?’”8 The discourse on the event, at least from right wing through even the liberal media, portrayed white (and therefore innocent) victims of a circumstance that was a function of the black (and therefore illicit) presence, for they did not collapse into the signifier or continuum of the disaster. They became the “we” who faced the warning, exemplified by the chain of signs from storm to floods to an overflow of black presence calling for containment. By preserving their whiteness (that is, by not blackening them) the white populations along the Gulf Coast states struck by the hurricane became the limits of black spillage—the border of monstrous movement. Thus, the constant affirmation of their humanity by the media in the midst of the disaster also affirmed black inhumanity—the danger of an unbounded black population.9 The stories of illicit behavior, of rape and pillage, were themselves the continuum, the movement of signs that such populations were to be shunned. These representations constructed a projected black state of nature, one that was, in contrast to whites, who seemed innately to know and honor codes of private property, barbaric and brutal. Although it would at first seem that white humanity was affirmed when their actions were referred to with phrases such as “finding food,” we should bear in mind that their closeness to the circumstances also meant that they could be rooted for but not joined; some aspect of the nation’s integrity needed to be protected from the spillover of such disaster. The whole circumstance must not be their fault because what would follow from them, as the proper exemplars of the nation, would also be the nation’s culpability. As in all theodicy, where evil is explained as something from without, such responsibility must come from elsewhere, from the monstrous tide that continued past the borders of the ill-fated city rather than from a failure to develop an adequate political response.

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28  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon The people who went to the heart of the disaster were truly courageous souls. Stories await regarding the reach of the disastrous continuum, of the movement of signs that permeated the nation as the messengers of the event, those whose lives constituted its message, were absorbed across the nation as harbingers of disaster. The economy rippled, the moral conscience of the nation rippled, political reputations were endangered, and many more aspects of contemporary life were shaken. One might consider here the courageous work of Martin Delaney, the famed black physician, novelist, jurist, and social theorist who, faced with the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in 1854 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, unlike many whites with equivalent medical training who fled, remained and organized a team of male and female nurses and provided medical care for the city. Recall as well that Michel Foucault’s oft-cited discussion of the panoptican in Discipline and Punish begins with reflections on the situation of the plague. In his view, the image of the plague and the plague-struck town “stands for all forms of confusion and disorder.” It is within this state of nature that jurists imagine the “utopia of the perfectly governed city,” perfect disciplinary functions that separate unpredictable crowds into individuated, organized units.10 The reference to plague brings to the fore our theme of the signifying continuum, literally the contagion of the meaning of disaster. One need not look only at the events that followed Katrina to see how the ascription of divine warning occasions anxiety and fear. There have been societal disasters as well, the consequence of which has been a set of people who function as divine warnings. For example, the destruction of the public infrastructure for effective American schools took a form similar to the situations of individuals in New Orleans, which led to their resistance to the warnings to leave as the storm approached, and the realities they suffered during its onslaught and continue to suffer in its aftermath. What else are white schools, which seem to “find” the resources they need versus predominantly black schools, which have become synonymous with wasted resources and failure? What else are the responses, such as white flight or the very deliberate creation of school zones that isolate students of color and the poor, or charter schools with admissions procedures that predetermine who may apply, or the development of internal structures of separation (such as tracking programs for predominantly white college-bound students) to prevent an influx of black students tipping the low-percent ceiling in “good” American schools (often less than 5 but maximally 12 percent) imposed on them? The result of selfreflection from such black students is the previously mentioned collapse of effect into cause: Their failure to read the significance of their racialization, of their being black, delimits their ability to stray.11 The disaster of the public schools, they fail to see, is in and exemplified by them. A black public school is, in other words, a form of divine warning.12 There are brave individuals (as there were in Hurricane Katrina) who devote their lives to such a disaster, who

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 Reading the Signs  •  29 face being drawn into the continuum of signs that constitute its reach. These are people who are willing to risk being swept up in the tide of signification; they are willing to look at such signs instead of avoiding them, and by doing so, incur the wrath of those who have been forced to behold what they did not want to see. They are, in the end, dangerous people. It is not only black students in such schools who are treated as monsters in our society but also their teachers, whose efforts to stem the tide lead to their being swallowed up in it.13 Yet there are other portraits that can be made of victims of disaster and the hostility they may face as they reach out for the proverbial kindness of strangers. Instead of becoming a monster, Simone Weil argues that the individual who becomes a divine warning should properly be characterized as a category of affliction. She observes: Men have the same carnal nature as animals. If a hen is hurt, the others rush up and peck it. The phenomenon is as automatic as gravitation. Our senses attach to affliction all the contempt, all the revulsion, all the hatred which our reason attaches to crime.14 An afflicted person suffers a catastrophe; he or she is, in effect, struck down. Weil’s definition of affliction, in this regard, is worth a long quotation: Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain. If there is complete absence of physical pain there is no affliction for the soul, because thought can turn itself away in any direction. Thought flies from affliction as promptly and irresistibly as an animal flies from death… . There is no real affliction unless the event which has gripped and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction where there is not social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another… . The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction… . At the very best, he who is branded by affliction will only keep half his soul (Weil, 440–441). Weil saw much redemption in affliction. For her it is, in effect, the immensity of God in contact with the hubris of an expanding soul. God crushes us through contacting, touching, us, and in the emptying of the ego that follows the suffering and humiliation borne by such an encounter, one is left open to God. Here she captures the spirit, so to speak, of worship in theistic societies, where enthusiasm, literally letting God or the god in, is its guiding feature.15 Here we see Weil’s peculiar twist on theodicy. Instead of blaming the victim for his or her calamities, she affirms the goodness and justness of God by congratulating the afflicted. Disaster—that suffering forewarned from

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30  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon heaven—is, in this reading, a gift. Yet poetic and theologically rich though her portrait might be, Weil was wise enough to know that it would occasion very few volunteers. What is more, it simply reverses the logic of theodicy, in this instance valuing the unique insight and access of the despised. Portraying the victim of disaster as afflicted explains, to some extent, the courageous souls in a different light. For instead of a divine warning, such people regard the victim of disaster as a divine calling or cry that should ignite what is good and divine in us. But the paradox of such a portrait is that it works best if the suffering is not interpreted as affliction. Reaching out to a calling from God, pious though it may be, is not the same as risking the loss of everything in a circumstance that just happened to turn out to be a call from God. In other words, for the argument to work, the courageous soul must not know it. And because the reach of the sign of disaster could be continuous, it means as well that the victim of disaster must not know that it is a form of affliction. With stakes so high, is it any wonder that the response, especially among those wrapped in a theodicy in which good fortune is prized as evidence of their piety, is to look away from the afflicted, to regard such victims, in the end, as bad news?16 There is, however, at least a third possibility. Ellen K. Feder recently argued, in a discussion of physicians’ responses to intersex patients, that the patients often experience a form of shame from being incurable or being extraordinarily difficult to fix.17 The physician’s frustration at the patient for not being a good patient (here defined as one whose body facilitates being cured), leads to shame on the part of the patient. The patient suffers the shame of having done something wrong, namely, of disappointing the physician. Feder’s insight offers a different explanation of the anxiety and fear occasioned by victims of disaster. The sign echoed by the victim is our own impotence. Because we cannot erase the disaster, we become frustrated at those who failed to have read its signs: Why didn’t they leave? Why did they choose to live there? Why did they choose to live in trailer parks or makeshift shacks in areas known for natural disasters? Why, why, why? What was wrong with them? Such views erase the distinction between choice and option.18 One’s choices rarely transform the options available. They often can only affect how we relate to those options. To address options, one must go beyond oneself to the world that creates them. There are options from nature, such as our biological makeup and the chemical and physical components of our presocial environment. And then there are those that are a function of the human world and its concomitant social world. That world affects our options by endowing them with meanings that are broader than each individual; it also impacts the environment by transforming it into a chain of signification that we can call cultural. It is in this sense that options carry with them responsibility. A disaster can be read as a circumstance or circumstances in which, regardless of intentions, options are so limited that intense suffering and even ruin are the result.

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 Reading the Signs  •  31 The source of frustration and the desire to blame the victim of disaster is a consequence of a subterranean truth: “society, unlike biochemical processes, cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being.”19 Disasters, although they reveal our impotence, emphasize the need for our agency—for a political response. Much of the current obsession with disasters is symptomatic of the anxiety of the political right over the need for politics and political institutions. This manifests itself in many ways, including the search for privatized solutions to public problems or for faith-based aid agencies to replace the need for government services. One sees this as well with those on the political left, who continue to defend politics through being discursive, but actually fail to develop viable answers to the question of what is to be done. Many in these ranks also turn to valorize the work of local NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), their own counterparts to the privatized charity models advocated by conservatives. These agencies, from the standpoint of the left, are to stimulate the kind of active grassroots participation that might lead to a revived public and political life, and yet in the more immediate, signal a deep impotence. A clear indication of this is the rise of moralistic reasoning and moralizing in both instances. The left writes moralistic appeals against the failures of the right to respond to the disaster; the right simply blames the left for the social conditions that maintained an environment of susceptible people. The left responds that vulnerability to disaster is a function of social options. The right responds that there are limits to who should be responsible for other people’s social welfare, and on whose lives are most deserving of such responsibility. Moralizing simplifies and stabilizes a complex world in flux and allows us to put at a distance what might otherwise be too near. Moralizing turns on deand acontextual thinking in which people or circumstances alone are reductionistically blamed for what is always a complex mediation of both. Examples of this abound: an obsession with car seats and with fining parents who fail to use them, while not putting into place the conditions for their availability in all vehicles, such as cabs, school buses, city buses, trains, and ferries. A bewildering sense that our children are not safe finds seemingly quick solutions, and individuals (but not the state), who can be forced to pay. It is a similar situation with child abuse. There is a generalized sense that the society in which we live is sick, without a coherent understanding of the relationship between adults and children. Rather than a conversation about what developing coherence in this regard might involve, there is an obsession with the failure of government-related agencies to intervene in child abuse situations, some of which end in violent death. Yet there is an absence of support for the resources such agencies would need to function as actual havens for children. Our aim is not to diminish the significance of either car safety or intervention on behalf of children in dangerous situations. We are voicing concern about the ways in which these policies direct attention away from larger political questions of

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32  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon social responsibility by collapsing into an individuating and individualistic moralism. Social, cultural, and political problems give way to identifying easy culprits whom we can collectively scorn. This is not to say that there should be no accounting for individual responsibility. Ironically, however, there is a way of avoiding individual responsibility by overindividualizing it. Hannah Arendt reflected in the 1960s, in her essay “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” that the deep aversion in popular culture to judging and assigning responsibility to individuals, that the very logic on which courts rely to identify culpable individuals, was resisted deeply at the level of culture.20 Everyone seemed to say that faced with similarly horrific situations, all would be equally guilty. In lieu of this aversion to judgment she urged that we engage in reflection on what is involved in being a thinking person. What thinking people do is ask, What must I do or not do to live together with myself? Moralism disguises itself as someone willing to undertake the reflection required for judging, but in fact latches on instead to selfrighteous forms of making judgments, to a reflexive ascription of blame—an ongoing failure actually to consider the nature of responsibility. To be judgmental, which is not the same as judging, is to refuse fully to engage and read the signs before one, by making the accused individual a continuum of the sign.21 The failure turns on a desire to distance oneself from what is discomforting, to make it impossible that one might be responsible for such an abomination. This is what is so strange about this moment: in our aversion to addressing disasters as signs, and our mythopoetic understanding of them as falling stars or monsters as divine warnings, we actively create monsters and enemies and thereby maintain moments of hysteria, refusing actually to interpret and take responsibility for the kinds of responses that may be needed to alleviate human misery. Responding requires genuine thinking and acting, both of which refer to a set of principles to which one might appeal. Consider these reflections of Ortega Y Gasset: An idea is putting a truth in checkmate. Whoever wishes to have ideas must first prepare himself to desire truth and to accept the rules of the game imposed by it. It is no use speaking of ideas when there is no acceptance of authority to regulate them, a series of standards to which it is possible to appeal in discussion. These standards are the principles on which culture rests. I am not concerned with the form they take. What I affirm is that there is no culture where there are no standards to which our fellow-men can have recourse. There is no culture where there are no principles of legality to which to appeal. There is no culture where there is no acceptance of certain final intellectual positions to which the dispute may be referred… . When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism… .

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 Reading the Signs  •  33 The average man finds himself with “ideas” in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation. He has no conception even of the rare atmosphere in which ideas live. He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. Hence his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words… . To have an idea means believing one is in possession of the reasons for having it, and consequently means believing that there is such thing as reason, a world of intelligible truths. To have ideas, to form opinions, is identical with appealing to such an authority, submitting oneself to it, accepting its code and its decisions, and therefore believing that the highest form of intercommunion is the dialogue in which the reasons for our ideas are discussed.22 Gasset, for his part, was impressed by the principles of liberalism, which he argued represented “the loftiest endeavor towards common life.” It could be nothing short of a supreme form of generosity that majorities within it conceded rights to minorities, thereby “announc[ing] determination to share existence with an enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak” (76). He noted that this noble, “refined,” and “acrobatic” attitude was also “antinatural” and that it was not surprising that “this same humanity would soon appear anxious to get rid of it.” It required a “discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth” (ibid.). The contrast between this attitude and that of German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote in the same period, could not be more stark. The latter stressed the indispensability of enemies to political life, but charged advocates of liberalism with downplaying the difficulties of incorporating and coexisting with them to its detriment.23 Liberals, he claimed, proceeded as if all matters could be dealt with through negotiation. If this proved limited, then such questions were simply deferred. Not everything, Schmitt argued, could be reduced to the framework of economics and debate. There were, he insisted, differences that could not be mediated: could democracies coherently tolerate antidemocratic parties? What should be done with communities that aimed to subordinate the power of other collectivities? For Schmitt, the political emerged in moments when any group that could mobilize citizens around its designation of shared friends and enemies did so, sharpening a sense of the substance of its own political identity and what would be required to sustain it. The political therefore emerged in the identification of moments in which the rule of law and established political procedures could not apply.24 After a period in which most U.S. political and social theorists thought it appropriate to ignore Schmitt’s work (especially because of his involvement with the Nazi Party), many have recently been drawn to this work which shares many sympathies with postmodern writers who have framed the effort to create shared identities and hegemonic political programs as acts

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34  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon of domination. Within both are aversions to the mediation and active compromise, which are at the core of political life. In Schmitt this takes the form of a desire for a powerful dictatorial leader who will act (with our acclaim) as godlike, immune to the criticisms and procedural interventions of others. Schmitt emphasized that his work was not a call for ongoing war or militarization. Yet his stressing moments of exception in which someone emerges as sovereign by identifying collective friends and enemies emphasizes the political as the point at which group differences cannot be mediated diplomatically. To compromise, under such circumstances, is to jeopardize the substance of one’s group identity, which easily lends itself to a political climate in which we can spend massively on the political economy of war while we scorn the idea of investing in constructive politics or developing our infrastructure, because it has been claimed, as the attacks on social programs over the past two-anda-half decades aver, these mechanisms are broken.25 Schmitt’s point was to insist that for political membership to be coherent, there would necessarily be outsiders, that one always made reference to who would be substantively included by and through the infrastructure of political life. Our point here is not to attack Schmitt so much as an effort to interpret his appeal as a sign, to read the significance of such widespread attraction to a theoretical account of the impossibility of liberal democracies as we know them. In this portrait of liberal-to-left interventions on the one hand and conservative-to-right-wing ones on the other, we see an asymmetrical situation that is often posed as a symmetrical one in a logic of “both sides.” The reason they are not symmetrical is that they have entirely opposed aims. For the liberal-to-left approach, the project relies on discursive practices, the very essence of which requires opposition. The conservative-to-right-wing approach is primarily interested in order and rule. Such an objective can be gained at the expense of eliminating all opposition; because even one’s opponent must be provided a place in the former, there is an implicit egalitarian consequence. Because one’s opponent must be eliminated in the latter, the logical conclusion is, in a word, fascism. The consequences are seen today in the distinction between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Although the free market functions as the theology of both, neoliberals would prefer the preservation of civil liberties, whereas neoconservatives are willing to discard them, as we have seen in the War on Terror, which has included torture, unconstrained surveillance, and the erosion of a genuinely independent press. Disasters demand, as we have been arguing, community responses. A radically individualistic ethics and politics leave little room for such an option. And more, the need for social infrastructures that enable natural phenomena simply to be such, edifices that could assure that the consequences of an unexpected calamity are, in a word, contained, where the sign continuum is limited, is anathema in a world governed by rule over politics. Where rule is primary, containment does not focus on minimizing the impact of a calamity,

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 Reading the Signs  •  35 but on transforming its spillage into order. Thus, law enforcement and military intervention are supported—all of which are in fact government-supported activity—over things that could have avoided chaos in the first place such as good levees (New Orleans), accessible health care (the sign continuum of diseases that become pandemics), employment (poverty and crime), and appropriately supported education systems (illiteracy, poverty, and crime). The cynicism about the ability to affect the world positively through politics, to set the conditions suggested by disaster so as to forestall the negative impact of future disasters, is evident in the attack on all forms of noninstrumental teaching and learning, anything which instead of showing immediately measurable results might ask instead what is worth measuring.26 And yet even the most instrumental of education suggests a world in which one might engage, or more minimally to which one might adjust—one with a mundane social fabric that one might strengthen or refashion. A genuine education for emergency or for perpetual disaster would require the cultivation of practical reason, good judgment, and the ability to think and act where contingency is the rule. Even in such circumstances, questions of value cannot be avoided, even though a criticism of liberal education has been that it lacks a treatment of values. Such criticisms often conceal their real complaint, which is not about values but about which values. Much talk of public education is saturated with the language of crisis. The right has orchestrated this crisis through an assault on public places and the advancement of a set of narrow skills over and against the very notion of education as a preparation for civic life. Many on the left have, by moving away from fighting for state responsibility and waging a fight against hegemony and the articulating of standards, abrogated their role as defenders of public life and politics. Our education systems, with few exceptions, do not prepare us for disasters because we are interested in manufacturing and continuing, rather than reading or learning from such phenomena, the production of enemies. Remaining in crises, standing paralyzed in the face of disaster, cannot be the telos of education. The word education is derived, we should remember, from the Latin word educare, meaning “to lead out.” What more fitting a response could there be to what we have been calling the sign continuum of disaster than to learn how to go beyond it? There is no doubt that liberal democracies play down the unmediable faiths of their members and thereby, as Karl Marx diagnosed, enshrine the private life as the place in which men and women really live as opposed to a political sphere (in which we appear as citizens), which is, from the modern liberal standpoint, almost purely administrative and procedural and seems dead to our real hopes and dreams.27 It does, however, suggest that listening to political minorities may improve the vision of the majorities, that they may offer signs and a point of view from which we might learn. But that would mean

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36  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon that they would have appeared as people, as freed from the sign continuum of disaster. The American present is, however, distinguished by, among other things, a neurotic fear of reality. It is as though reality itself has become the sign continuum, that is, a disaster. It is no accident that some of the most spacious political conversation in contemporary U.S. life takes place on comedy shows. Humor requires, to be actually funny, a kernel of accuracy that is not possible when one is thinking or talking dogmatically. If aimed at the already converted, it evokes a moment of catharsis as a blow is struck against the often feared government officials and their policies. The laughter it evokes is also more ritualistic. Genuine humor forces us into proximity and distance with respect to our own positions and those of others, forcing us to reflect on the inconvenient truths and images of all positions. Humor, in this way, is uniquely pedagogical; it allows us safely to try on other roles and ideas that can open the way to genuine reflection and the rules of genuine thinking and persuasion that Gasset described. But humor also has its limitations. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon related the importance of humor whose cultivation was worth developing even by identifying his enemies and making a scene. Humor offered him a naive view on the discursive, where he sought simply the reaching of others through the force of truth and argumentation, but he had to change his tune, since even reason took flight from him (the sign continuum), which led to his descent into Negritude in his effort to subvert the catastrophe through its affirmation. That moment of solace was, however, struck by a divine warning, through Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, “Black Orpheus,” in which Negritude was shown to be a form of effort to escape reality, a looking away from reality.28 Fanon lamented: “Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep” (Fanon 1967, 140).29 After crying, Fanon was able to face reality, which was the theme of his next chapter, “Psychopathology and the Negro,” in which he argued that the modern world has no coherent notion of what it means to be a healthy black adult. The text is an exploration of the many efforts at responding to these problems without recourse to their social genesis. Our point about the need for social responses is, in other words, not a new one. We are not responsible for a rock suddenly falling out of the sky, but we are responsible for the social conditions by which that rock could be transformed into a disaster. And as our technology increases our ability to predict the movement of natural phenomena, it brings with it the responsibility for the kind of damage that can be unleashed by such things on the world of the living. The portraits we have offered here are different perspectives on a single phenomenon. In disasters, whose sibling is catastrophe, there is a striking down

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 Reading the Signs  •  37 of individuals in ways that suggest condemnation. Here we move to the realm of the damned, whose etymological roots point to the Latin damnum, which refers to loss or hurt, or as in the obvious cognate, damage. It is no accident that the fear and anxiety about recent disasters relate to their signification of an impending spillover of populations whose options are reduced daily in this age of neoliberal globalism of market forces and neoconservative demands for forceful world order. 30 We find ourselves now reflecting on what Frantz Fanon called the condemned or damned of the earth.31 Here we bear witness to people who live under limited options wrought by a calamity that historically fell upon them as if from out of the sky. The disaster of colonialism and racism has been the creation of disastrous subjects, people who are marked as the continued sign of ill fate and ruin. These people, whom W. E. B. Du Bois more than a century ago identified as “problem people,” are sites of damnation.32 This is not to say that there are not those among them who “rise.” It is that their ascent does not function in the same way as those in groups without the significations of disaster. In other groups, the project of rising becomes the rule instead of the exception. The logic of condemnation means that such achievement is more the exception than the rule. What this means, in effect, is that one cannot rise as a member of that group. Think about the adage “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” The conscience of society is such, however, that it offers little room for survivors of what should not have gone out of control. We have explored how such survivors stimulate fear and trembling. It is not only that they have survived, but they pose, as well, the challenge to others of surviving them. That is why, as Elias Canetti observed, survivors are often destroyed, especially by despots.33 The continuation of a survivor means, in effect, that others must die. Better him or her than the rest of us. In other words, we must become survivors. How, we may ask, do imperial societies articulate survival? It is through the affirmation of the value of one set of lives over others, a value that can only be confirmed through the unleashing of death. In the language we have been using throughout this chapter, that means pushing the sign continuum in another direction. In the death of every Iraqi, for instance, is the affirmation of the survival of every American; in the death of every black, there is an affirmation of white survival; in death on the African continent is the affirmation of life in the rest of the world. Fanon ended nearly all of his books with reflections on how important it is for communities to learn how to move on, to look over at a horizon across a star-filled sky at dawn’s door. The consequence of this is his often misunderstood notion of setting afoot a new humanity. We hope that our explorations have shown that taking flight from disaster is, in effect, an effort to avoid a situation the result of which is its continuation. To move on requires the affirming embrace of the human being within us through the affirmation of

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38  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon social reality itself, of the yes that is of if not a courageous soul, at least a sober one in the world of others. Notes















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1. There were indigenous people, such as the Moken of the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, and most certainly animals, who escaped the deadly tsunami in December 2004 through recognizing and taking heed of the signs that something very dangerous and unusual was rushing onto their shores. They took necessary precautions. These could not have forestalled the devastation to buildings on the coastline, but they did save lives. In many ways the decision to develop properties so close to the shoreline embodies a refusal to take heed of the concomitant responsibility of being vigilant in reading signs. 2. It is striking that the term catastrophe contains the word astro wedged within, so as to demarcate the ill fate of a falling star or planet. Things that fall from the heavens embody a form of suffering that cannot fully be understood by those who see it only from below. 3. This is not to ignore the significance of the other senses. A tremor, for example, is felt. 4. U.S. slavery branded the slaves, and those interned in Holocaust concentration camps were tattooed. After the formal end of slavery, racism made color the “mark” that substituted for branding. Here we see a move from the technological imposition of demarcation to the logic of the curse, of damnation. See our discussion of damnation below. 5. For a developed discussion of this conception of monsters, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Monsters: A Philosophical Portrait,” in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, edited by Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2007). 6. Think of how little we hear from survivors of 9/11, from individuals who were in the Trade Towers and who managed to escape. We hear, in documentaries and news coverage commemorating the event, much more from the loved ones of those who did not make it. See our concluding remarks on survivors. 7. There have been many forums and publications devoted to describing this event. For a concise and rich portrait of the demonization of the victims of that catastrophe, see Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006). 8. Timothy Chambers, “‘They’re Finding Food, but We’re Looting?’: A Two-Ethics Model for Racist Double Standards,” APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 6, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 5–7. 9. For discussion of the role of the media in the depiction of unfolding events, see Chambers, “They’re Finding Food,” and Giroux, Stormy Weather, 48–53. 10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 198–199. Foucault notes that the leper, who was the symbolic inhabitant of the space of exclusion, is incorporated into the model of the plague victim. The technique of excluding him also makes use of disciplinary partitioning and individualization to mark and brand the normal and abnormal.

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 Reading the Signs  •  39 11. Although the reality here is often that of black and brown schools, the nation’s anxiety about race creates a phenomenological field of blackness as antipodal to the ideal of whiteness. For many designated “brown” people, this often means finding a haven in Catholic schools and universities that lack a sufficiently large population through which to escape, or at least attempt to escape, the American racial continuum. We thus focus on black signification here since it is the primary sign of disaster in the country. In countries such as France and Germany, such a continuum is at the moment more brown in the national consciousness because there is not a sufficient concentration of blacks to occasion such fears as in the case of England, but reports of attacks on black students in those countries, as well as in such Asian countries as China and Japan, suggest that in the fear of brown is also a fear of a gravitational pull down into blackness. 12. Many students do read the signs. Consider for example the reflections of two teenaged girls interviewed by Jonathan Kozol about the ongoing project of segregating schools. One reflected, “It’s like we’re being hidden. It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think of it again.” Another student commented, “Think of it this way … If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel? I think they’d be relieved.” See Jonathan Kozol, Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005), 28–29. 13. Many such teachers, while incurring such wrath, work within the same semiotic structure when it comes to the question of their children. In other words, many teachers will work in schools to which they would never dream of sending their children. 14. Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” in The Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (Mt. Kisko, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1977), 443. 15 For a discussion of some contemporary implications of this concept, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Can Men Worship?” which is chapter 6 of Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 118–134. 16. See Max Weber, “The Protestant Work Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” and Other Writings, edited, translated, and introduced by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) for the classic discussion of modern rationalization of prosperity and misfortune. For a more recent reading, see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 291–343. 17. Ellen K. Feder, “Lessons from Nietzsche: Reframing the Moral Questions in the Medical Management of Intersex,” in Heretical Nietzsche Studies, edited by Janet Borgerson, Thomas Meyer, and Lewis R. Gordon, forthcoming. 18. For more discussion on this concept of options, see Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publisher, 2006), chapter 5, “Decadent Development,” and Gordon, Existentia Africana, chapter 4, “What Does It Mean To Be a Problem?”, 62–95. 19. These arguments are familiar in the debate over the social welfare state. They are brought to the fore in the rhetoric that followed Hurricane Katrina. See Giroux’s Stormy Weather for an outline of them.

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40  •  Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon 20. See Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005). 21. Judgment requires criteria through which there can be an understanding of the limits of rules. It is no accident that the word critic shares etymological roots with criteria, criticism, critique, and crisis—namely, the Greek word krenein (to choose), from which comes the word krites (judge). The realization that the criteria and evidence that set limits for and are required to make choices themselves must be considered and chosen. Being judgmental requires making a decision prior to having criteria; it involves treating some circumstances as a preconcluded law. 22. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W.W. Norton, 1932), 71–74. 23. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translated with an introduction by George Schwab, with a Foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 24. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab with a Foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 25. For a critique of the rejection of social welfare programs from a policy and legal studies point of view, see the work of Joel Handler, e.g., The Poverty of Welfare Reform (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995) and Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe: The Paradox of Inclusion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 26. It is now simply taken for granted that public education programs of the late 1960s through the 1970s were not working, but the actual data do not support such a conclusion. Investing in better public schools, especially in the inner cities, did lead to a rise in high school graduates and students entering colleges and those entering graduate schools. See, for example, Thomas K. Gilhool, “The Right to an Effective Education: From Brown to PL 94-142 and Beyond,” in Beyond Separate Education: Quality Education for All, ed. Dorothy Kerzner Lipsky and Alan Gartner (Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1989), 243–253. 27. See, for example, Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” from The Marx and Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Richard Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 26–52. 28. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 114–120, and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, edited by Peter Ungar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 291–330. 29. For discussion of this dimension of Fanon’s thought, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday,” The C.L.R. James Journal 11, no. 1 (summer 2005): 1–43, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “The Cry of the Self as a Call from the Other: The Paradoxical Loving Subjectivity of Frantz Fanon,” Listening: A Journal of Religion and Culture 36, no. 1 (winter 2001): 46–60. 30. These themes can be found in many works. See, for example, Giroux, Stormy Weather; Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization:

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 Reading the Signs  •  41 The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), and Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). See also, for discussion of the distinction between neoliberalism and neoconservatism, Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence. 31. Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, Préface de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: François Maspero éditeur, 1961). 32. We are referring to Du Bois’s reflections in The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg & Company, 1903). Many discussions abound. For our interpretation, see Lewis R. Gordon, “What Does It Mean to be a Problem?” in Existentia Africana, chapter 4. See also Reiland Rabaka, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Problem of the Twenty-First Century: An Essay on Africana Critical Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 33. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), 242.

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2

Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability

Floating Bodies and Expendable Populations1 Henry A. Giroux

Drawing on the work of Zygmunt Bauman (Wasted Lives) and the biopolitics of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri, Henry Giroux argues that Hurricane Katrina marks the advent of a new kind of politics in which entire populations are rendered disposable within the racial and class politics of neoliberalism. Giroux contends that the relationship between politics and pedagogy must be rethought in order to confront the biopolitical production of disposable lives and reimagine and enact democratic futures. In the long aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, citizens in the United States and globally are still struggling to draw the correct conclusions and learn the right lessons from that horrific catastrophe. Initially we were led to believe that Katrina was the result of a fateful combination of natural disaster and government incompetence. The perfect storm of bad luck provided one more example of the general inability of the Bush administration to actually govern, let alone protect its citizenry. Yet with some distance and sober reflection, such assessment seems a bit shortsighted, a little too localized. In truth, Katrina offers a number of relevant lessons not only for U.S. citizens, but for Canadians and citizens all over the world who must grapple with the global advance of what I call a politics of disposability. First, Katrina is symptomatic of a form of negative globalization that is as evident in Ottawa, Paris, and London as it is in Washington DC, New Orleans, or any other city throughout the world. As capital, goods, trade, and information flow all over the globe, material and symbolic resources are increasingly being invested in the free market, while the social state pays a terrible price. As safety nets and social services are being hollowed out and communities crumble and give way to individualized, one-man archipelagos, it is increasingly difficult to address collectivity, or act in concert to meet the basic needs of citizens or maintain the social investments needed to provide life-sustaining services. As nation-states fall under the sway of the principal philosophy of the times, which insists on the end of 43

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44  •  Henry A. Giroux the era of “big government” in favor of unencumbered individualism and the all-encompassing logic of the market, it is difficult to resurrect a language of social investment, protection, and accountability. Second, as Katrina made perfectly clear, the challenges of a global world, especially its growing ecological challenges, are collective and not simply private. This suggests that citizens in New Orleans as well as in Vancouver, Halifax, and Toronto—coastal and inland—must protect those principles of the social contract that offer collective solutions to foster and maintain both ecological sustainability and human survival. Canadians have done more to insure environmental protections than their neighbors to the south, there is much, much more that has to be done to curtail the threat of global warming and numerous ecological disasters. Third, as Hurricane Katrina vividly illustrated, the decline of the social state along with the rise of massive inequality increasingly bars whole populations from the rights and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citizens of the republic; these populations are increasingly rendered disposable, left to fend for themselves in the face of natural or man-made disasters. This last challenge is difficult, for here we must connect the painful dots between the crisis in the Gulf Coast and that other gulf crisis in the Middle East; we must connect the dots between images of U.S. soldiers standing next to tortured Iraqis forced to assume the additional indignity of a dog leash, to images of bloated bodies floating in toxic waters overwhelming New Orleans city streets after five long days of punctuated government indifference to the suffering of some of its citizen populations. If we continue to squander the world’s natural resources, prioritize free markets over free people, and beggar with financial debt populations already in need, is it not then likely that we will have to endure more “natural” catastrophes, more terrorist threats, along with media images that punctuate our own loss of humanity, whether of Canadian soldiers in Somalia or U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib? In earlier eras, imagery of racist brutality and war atrocities moved nations to act and to change domestic and foreign policy in the interests of global justice. These contemporary images moved all of us, but only it seems for a time. Why is that so? Emmett Till’s body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young fourteenyear-old African American boy for whistling at a white woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy’s mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A.A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the south side of Chicago, be left open for four long days. While mainstream news organizations ignored the horrifying image, Jet magazine published an unedited photo of Till’s face taken while he lay in his coffin. Shaila Dewan points out, “[m]utilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  45 its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy.” 2 Till had been castrated and shot in the head, his tongue had been cut out, and a blow from an ax had practically severed his nose from his face—all of this done to a teenage boy who came to bear the burden of the inheritance of slavery and the inhuman pathology that drives its racist Lacanian imaginary. The photo not only made visible the violent effects of the racial state, it also fueled massive public anger, especially among blacks, and helped to launch the Civil Rights Movement. From the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam, images of human suffering and violence provided the grounds for a charged political indignation and collective sense of moral outrage inflamed by the horrors of poverty, militarism, war, and racism, eventually mobilizing widespread opposition to these antidemocratic forces. Of course, the seeds of a vast conservative counterrevolution were already well underway as images of a previous era—“whites only” signs, segregated schools, segregated housing, and nonviolent resistance—gave way to a troubling iconography of cities aflame, mass rioting, and armed black youth who came to embody the very precepts of lawlessness, disorder, and criminality. Building on the reactionary rhetoric of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan took office in 1980 with a trickle-down theory that would transform corporate America and a corresponding visual economy. The twin images of the young black male gangsta and his counterpart, the welfare queen, became the primary vehicles for selling the American public on the need to dismantle the welfare state, ushering in an era of unprecedented deregulation, downsizing, privatization, and regressive taxation. The propaganda campaign was so successful that George H. W. Bush launched his 1988 presidential bid with the image of Willie Horton, an African American male convicted of rape and granted early release, and succeeded in trouncing his opponent with little public outcry over the overtly racist nature of the campaign. By the beginning of the 1990s, global media consolidation, coupled with the outbreak of a new war that encouraged hyperpatriotism and a rigid nationalism, resulted in a tightly controlled visual landscape—managed both by the Pentagon and by corporate-owned networks—that delivered a paucity of images representative of the widespread systemic violence.3 Selectively informed and cynically inclined, American civic life became more sanitized, controlled, and regulated. Hurricane Katrina may have reversed the self-imposed silence of the media and public numbness in the face of terrible suffering. Fifty years after the body of Emmett Till was plucked out of the mud-filled waters of the Tallahatchie River, another set of troubling visual representations has emerged that both shocked and shamed the nation. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, grotesque images of bloated corpses floating in the rotting waters that flooded the streets of New Orleans circulated throughout the mainstream media. What first appeared to be a natural catastrophe soon degenerated into a social

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46  •  Henry A. Giroux debacle.4 Days after Katrina had passed over the Gulf Coast, hundreds of thousands of poor people, mostly blacks, some Latinos, many elderly, and a few white people, packed into the New Orleans Superdome and the city’s convention center, stranded on rooftops, or isolated on patches of dry highway without food, water, or a place to wash, urinate, or find relief from the scorching sun. Weeks passed as the floodwater gradually receded and the military gained control of the city, and more images of dead bodies surfaced in the national and global media. Television cameras rolled as bodies emerged from the floodwaters while people stood by indifferently eating their lunch or occasionally snapping a photograph. Most of the bodies found “were 50 or older, people who tried to wait the hurricane out.” 5 Various media soon reported that over 154 bodies had been found in hospitals and nursing homes. The Boston Globe wrote, “the collapse of one of society’s most basic covenants—to care for the helpless—suggests that the elderly and critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans.” 6 Dead people, mostly poor African Americans, left uncollected in the streets, on porches, in hospitals, nursing homes, in electric wheelchairs, and in collapsed houses prompted some people to claim that America had become like a “Third World country,” while others argued that New Orleans resembled a “Third World Refugee Camp.” 7 There were now, irrefutably, two Gulf crises. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tried to do damage control by forbidding journalists to “accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims.” As a bureau spokeswoman told the Reuters News Agency, “We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media.” 8 But questions about responsibility and answerability would not go away. Even the dominant media for a short time rose to the occasion by posing tough questions about accountability to those in power in light of such egregious acts of incompetence and indifference. The images of dead bodies kept reappearing in New Orleans, refusing to go away. For many, the bodies of the poor, black, brown, elderly, and sick came to signify what the battered body of Emmett Till once unavoidably revealed, and America was forced to confront these disturbing images and the damning questions behind them. The Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the Emmett Till affair, revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see, but also had spent the better part of two decades demonizing. But like the incessant beating of Poe’s telltale heart, cadavers have a way of insinuating themselves into the consciousness, demanding answers to questions that are not often asked. The body of Emmett Till symbolized overt white supremacy and state terrorism organized against the threat that black men (apparently of all sizes and ages) posed against white women. But the black bodies of the dead and walking wounded in New Orleans in 2005 revealed a different image of the racial state, a different modality of state terrorism, marked less by an overt form of white racism than by a highly

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  47 mediated displacement of race as a central concept for understanding both Katrina and its place in the broader history of U.S. racism.9 That is, while Till’s body insisted upon a public recognition of the violence of white supremacy, the decaying black bodies floating in the waters of the Gulf Coast represented a return of race against the media and public insistence that this disaster was more about class than race, more about the shameful and growing presence of poverty, “the abject failure to provide aid to the most vulnerable.” 10 Till’s body allowed the racism that destroyed it to be made visible, to speak to the systemic character of American racial injustice. The bodies of the Katrina victims could not speak with the same directness to the state of American racist violence, but they did reveal and shatter the conservative fiction of living in a color-blind society. The bodies of the Katrina victims laid bare the racial and class fault lines that mark an increasingly damaged and withering democracy, and revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and are consigned to fend for themselves. At the same time, what happened in New Orleans also revealed some frightening signposts of those repressive features in American society and demanded that artists, public intellectuals, scholars, and other cultural workers take seriously what Angela Davis insists “are very clear signs of … impending fascist policies and practices.” These policies and practices not only construct an imaginary social environment for all of those populations rendered disposable, but also exemplify a site and space “where democracy has lost its claims.” 11 Invisible or Criminal: Options for the Poor and the Racialized in the National Security State Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the consequences of the long legacy of attacking big government and bleeding the social and public service sectors of the state became glaringly evident, as did the government’s “staggering indifference to human suffering.” 12 Hurricane Katrina made it abundantly clear that only the government had the power, resources, and authority to address complex undertakings, such as dealing with the totality of the economic, environmental, cultural, and social destruction that impacted the Gulf Coast. Given the Bush administration’s disdain for the legacy of the New Deal, important government agencies were viewed scornfully as oversized entitlement programs, stripped of their power, and served up as a dumping ground to provide lucrative administrative jobs for political hacks who were often unqualified to lead such agencies. Not only was FEMA downsized and placed under the Department of Homeland Security, but its role in disaster planning and preparation was subordinated to the all-inclusive goal of fighting terrorists. While it was virtually impossible to miss the total failure of the government response in the aftermath of Katrina, what many people saw as incompetence or failed national leadership was more than that. Something

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48  •  Henry A. Giroux more systemic and deep-rooted was revealed in the wake of Katrina—namely, that the state no longer provided a safety net for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless. Instead, it had been transformed into a punishing institution intent on dismantling the welfare state and treating the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, and disabled as dispensable populations to be managed, criminalized, and made to disappear into prisons, ghettos, and the black hole of despair. The Bush administration was not simply unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it denied that the federal government alone had the resources to address catastrophic events; it actually felt no responsibility for the lives of poor blacks and others marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirts of society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about engendering the financial rewards and privileges of only some members of society, while the welfare of those marginalized by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The coupling of the market state with the racial state under George W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle the welfare state, eliminate affirmative action, model urban public schools after prisons, create further barriers for immigrants, and incarcerate with impunity Arabs, Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyperneoliberalism is now organized around the best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or an impediment to market freedoms, free trade, consumerism, and the neoconservative dream of an American empire. This is what I call the new biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life’s tragedies, but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer exists in color-blind America. How else to explain the cruel jokes and insults either implied or made explicit by Bush and his ideological allies in the aftermath of such massive destruction and suffering? When it became obvious in the week following Katrina that thousands of the elderly, poor, and sick could not get out of New Orleans because they had no cars or money to take a taxi or any other form of transportation, or were sick and infirm, the then third-highest-ranking politician in Washington, Rick Santorum, stated in an interview, “people who did not heed evacuation warnings in the future may need to be penalized.” 13 For Santorum, those who were trapped in the flood because of poverty, sickness, and lack of transportation had become unwelcome reminders of the state of poverty and racism in the United States, and for that they should be punished. Their crime, it seems, was to be victims of a natural disaster that made a social and politically embarrassing disaster visible to the world. Commenting on facilities that had been set up for the poor in the Houston Astrodome in Texas, Bush’s mother and the wife of former President George H.W. Bush said in a National Public Radio interview, “So many of the people here, you know,

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  49 were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” 14 Other right-wing ideologues seeking to deflect criticism from the obscene incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration used a barely concealed racism to frame the events of Katrina. For example, Neil Boortz, a syndicated host on WFTL-AM in Florida stated that “a huge percentage” of those forced to leave New Orleans were “parasites, like ticks on a dog. They are coming to a community near you.” 15 On the September 13 broadcast of The Radio Factor, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly overtly indulged his own racism before millions of his viewers by claiming that poor black people in New Orleans were basically drug addicts who failed to evacuate the city because they would not have access to their fix.16 In one of the most blatant displays of racism underscoring the biopolitical “live free or die” agenda in Bush’s America, the dominant media increasingly framed the events that unfolded during and immediately after the hurricane by focusing on acts of crime, looting, rape, and murder, allegedly perpetrated by the black residents of New Orleans. In predictable fashion, politicians such as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an order allowing soldiers to shoot to kill looters in an effort to restore calm. Later inquiries revealed that almost none of these crimes took place. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek argued, “what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: ‘You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!’” 17 It must be noted that there is more at stake here than the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have the power to protect themselves from such stereotypes and others do not, and for those who do not—especially poor blacks—racist myths have a way of producing precise, if not deadly, material consequences. Given the public’s preoccupation with violence and safety, crime and terror merge in the all too familiar equation of black culture with the culture of criminality, and images of poor blacks are made indistinguishable from images of crime and violence. Criminalizing black behavior and relying on punitive measures to solve social problems do more than legitimate a biopolitics defined increasingly by the authority of an expanding national security state under George W. Bush. They also legitimize a state in which the police and military, often operating behind closed doors, take on public functions that are not subject to public scrutiny.18 This becomes particularly dangerous in a democracy when paramilitary or military organizations gain their legitimacy increasingly from an appeal to fear and terror, prompted largely by the presence of those racialized and classspecific groups considered both dangerous and disposable. Within a few days after Katrina struck, New Orleans was under martial law and occupied by nearly 65,000 U.S. military personnel. Cries of desperation and help were quickly redefined as the pleas of “refugees,” a designation that suggested an alien population lacking both citizenship and legal rights had inhabited the Gulf Coast. Images of thousands of desperate and poor

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50  •  Henry A. Giroux blacks gave way to pictures of combat-ready troops and soldiers with mounted bayonets canvassing houses in order to remove stranded civilians. Embedded journalists now traveled with soldiers on Humvees, armored carriers, and military helicopters in downtown USA. What had begun as a botched rescue operation by the federal government was transformed into a military operation. Given the government’s propensity to view those who are poor and black with contempt, it was not surprising that the transformation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from disaster area to war zone occurred without any audible dissent from either the general public or the dominant media. New Orleans increasingly came to look like a city in Iraq as scores of private soldiers appeared on the scene—either on contract with the Department of Homeland Security or hired by wealthy elites to protect their private estates and businesses. Much like Iraq, the Gulf Coast became another recipient of deregulated market capitalism as soon as the floodwaters began to recede. The fruits of privatization and an utter disregard for public values were all too visible as the private mercenaries and security companies hired to guard federal projects often indulged in acts of violence that clearly constituted vigilantism. Katrina lays bare what many people in the United States do not want to see: large numbers of poor black and brown people struggling to make ends meet, benefiting very little from a social system that makes it difficult to obtain health insurance, child care, social assistance, cars, savings, and minimumwage jobs if lucky, and instead offers to black and brown youth inadequate schools, poor public services, and no future, except a possible stint in the penitentiary. As Janet Pelz rightly insists, “These are the people the Republicans have been teaching us to disdain, if not hate, since President Reagan decried the moral laxness of the Welfare mom.” 19 While Pelz’s comments provide a crucial context for much of the death and devastation of Katrina, I think to more fully understand this calamity it is important to grasp how the confluence of race and poverty has become part of a new and more insidious set of forces based on a revised set of biopolitical commitments. This new biopolitical agenda has largely denied the sanctity of human life for those populations rendered at risk by global neoliberal economies and has instead embraced an emergent security state founded on cultural homogeneity. The Production and Regulation of Disposable Subjects Within the last few decades, theorists have analyzed matters of state sovereignty in the new world order to provide a range of insights into the relationship between power and politics, the political nature of social and cultural life, and the merging of life and politics as a new form of biopolitics. While the notion of biopolitics differs significantly among its most prominent theorists, including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,20 what these theorists share is an attempt to think through

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  51 the convergence of life and politics, locating matters of “life and death within our ways of thinking about and imagining politics.” 21 Within this discourse, politics is no longer understood exclusively through a disciplinary technology centered on the individual body—a body to be measured, surveilled, managed, and included in forecasts, surveys, and statistical projections. Instead, biopolitics points to new relations of power that are more capacious, concerned not only with the body as an object of disciplinary techniques that render it “both useful and docile,” but also with a body that needs to be “regularized,” subject to those immaterial means of production that produce ways of life that enlarge the targets of control and regulation.22 This shift in the workings of both sovereignty and power, in addition to the emergence of biopolitics are made clear by Foucault, for whom biopower replaces the power to dispense fear and death “with that of a power to foster life—or disallow it to the point of death… . [Biopower] is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism.” 23 As Foucault insists, the logic of biopower is dialectical, productive, and positive.24 Yet he also argues that biopolitics does not remove itself from “introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.” 25 Foucault believes that the death function in the economy of biopolitics is justified primarily through a form of racism in which biopower “is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power.” 26 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have both modified and extended Foucault’s notion of biopower, highlighting a mode of biopolitics in which immaterial labor such as ideas, knowledge, images, cooperation, affective relations, and forms of communication extend beyond the boundaries of the economic to produce not just material goods as “the means of social life, but social life itself. Immaterial production is biopolitical.” 27 In this instance, power is extended to the educational force of the culture and to the numerous technologies, mechanisms, and social practices through which it reproduces various forms of social life. What is crucial to grasp in this rather generalized notion of biopolitics is that power remains a productive force, provides the grounds for both resistance and domination, and registers culture, society, and politics as terrains of multiple and diverse struggles waged by numerous groups in a wide range of sites. For my purposes, the importance of both Foucault’s and Hardt and Negri’s work on biopolitics is that they move matters of culture, especially those aimed at “the production of information, communication, [and] social relations … to the center of politics itself.” 28 Within these approaches, power expands its reach as a political force beyond the traditional scope and boundaries of the state and the registers of officially sanctioned modes of domination. Biopolitics now touches all aspects of social life and is

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52  •  Henry A. Giroux the primary political and pedagogical force through which the creation and reproduction of new subjectivities takes place. While biopolitics in Foucault and Hardt and Negri addresses the relations between politics and death, biopolitics in their views is less concerned with the primacy of death than with the production of life, both as an individual and a social category. In Giorgio Agamben’s formulation, the new biopolitics is the deadly administration of what he calls “bare life,” and its ultimate incarnation is the Holocaust with its ominous specter of the concentration camp. In this formulation, the Nazi death camps become the primary exemplar of control, the new space of contemporary politics in which individuals are no longer viewed as citizens, but are now seen as inmates stripped of everything, including their right to live. The uniting of power and bare life, the reduction of the individual to homo sacer—the sacred man who under certain states of exception “may be killed and yet not sacrificed”—no longer represents the far end of political life.29 That is, in this updated version of the ancient category of homo sacer is the human who stands beyond the confines of both human and divine law—“a human who can be killed without fear of punishment.” 30 According to Agamben, as modern states increasingly suspend their democratic structures, laws, and principles, the very nature of governance changes as “the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence.” 31 The life unfit for life, unworthy of being lived, as the central category of homo sacer, is no longer marginal to sovereign power but is now central to its form of governance. State violence and totalitarian power, which in the past either were generally short-lived or existed on the fringe of politics and history, have now become the rule, rather than the exception, as life is more ruthlessly regulated and placed in the hands of military and state power. In the current historical moment, as Catherine Mills points out, “all subjects are at least potentially if not actually abandoned by the law and exposed to violence as a constitutive condition of political existence.” 32 Nicholas Mirzoeff has observed that all over the world there is a growing resentment of immigrants and refugees, matched by the emergence of detain-and-deport strategies and coupled with the rise of the camp as the key institution and social model of the new millennium. The “empire of camps,” according to Mirzoeff, has become the “exemplary institution of a system of global capitalism that supports the West in its high consumption, low-price consumer lifestyle.” 33 Zygmunt Bauman calls such camps “garrisons of extraterritoriality” and argues that they have become “the dumping grounds for the undisposed of and as yet unrecycled waste of the global frontier-land.” 34 The regime of the camp has increasingly become a key index of modernity and the new world order. The connections among disposability, violence, and death are now common under modernity in those countries where the order of power has become necropolitical. For example, Rosa Linda Fregoso analyzes femicide as a local

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  53 expression of global violence against women in the region of the U.S./Mexico border where over one thousand women have been either murdered or have disappeared, constituting what amounts to a “politics of gender extermination.” 35 The politics of disposability and necropolitics have not only generated widespread violence and ever expanding “garrisons of extraterritoriality,” but have also taken on a powerful new significance as a foundation for political sovereignty. Biopolitical commitments to “let die” by abandoning citizens appear increasingly credible in light of the growing authoritarianism in the United States under the Bush administration.36 Given the Bush administration’s use of illegal wiretaps, the holding of “detainees” illegally and indefinitely in prisons such as Guantanamo, the disappearance, kidnapping, and torture of alleged terrorists, and the ongoing suspension of civil liberties in the United States, Agamben’s theory of biopolitics rightly alerts us to the dangers of a government in which the state of emergency becomes the fundamental structure of control over populations. While Agamben’s claim that the concentration camp (as opposed to Foucault’s panopticon) is now the model for constitutional states captures the contrariness of biopolitical commitments, which have less to do with preserving life than with reproducing violence and death, its totalitarian logic is too narrow and fails in the end to recognize that the threat of violence, bare life, and death is not the only form of biopower in contemporary life. The dialectics of life and death, visibility and invisibility, and privilege and lack in social existence that now constitute the biopolitics of modernity have to be understood in terms of their complexities, specificities, and diverse social formations. For instance, the diverse ways in which the current articulation of biopower in the United States works to render some groups disposable and to privilege others within a permanent state of emergency need to be specified. Indeed, any viable rendering of contemporary biopolitics must address more exactly how biopower attempts not just to produce and control life in general, as Hardt and Negri insist, or to reduce all inhabitants of the increasing militarized state to the dystopian space of the “death camp,” as Agamben argues, but also to privilege some lives over others. The ongoing tragedy of pain and suffering wrought by the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina reveals a biopolitical agenda in which the logic of disposability and the politics of death are inscribed differently in the order of contemporary power—structured largely around wretched and broad-based racial and class inequalities. I want to further this position by arguing that neoliberalism, privatization, and militarism have become the dominant biopolitics of the mid-twentiethcentury social state, and that the coupling of a market fundamentalism and contemporary forms of subjugation of life with the power of capital accumulation, violence, and disposability, especially under the Bush administration, has produced a new and dangerous version of biopolitics.37 While the murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the intersection

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54  •  Henry A. Giroux of race and class inequalities on the one hand, and state violence on the other has long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different and more dangerous register. The new biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned violence but also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability. While the United States has never been free of repressive governments, there is a special viciousness that marks the current regime. War, violence, and an attack on human rights coupled with the attack on the social state and the militarization makes this government stand out for its antidemocratic policies. As William DiFazio points out, “the state has been so weakened over decades of privatization that it … increasingly fails to provide health care, housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive percentage of its population.” 38 While the social contract has been suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush administration it has been virtually abandoned. Under such circumstances, the state no longer feels obligated to take measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and death. The state no longer protects its own disadvantaged citizens—they are already seen as dead within a transnational economic and political framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics in which the categories of “citizen” and “democratic representation,” once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the government, either because of the persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labor. That is no longer true. This new form of biopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in which “vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead,” 39 largely invisible in the global media or, when disruptively present, defined as redundant, pathological, and dangerous. Within this wasteland of death and disposability, whole populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls “social homelessness.” 40 While the rich and middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of symbolic and material capital, the “free market” provides neither social protection and security nor hope to those who are poor, sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class. Given the increasingly perilous state of those who are poor and dispossessed in America, it is crucial to reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism and the security state’s politics of cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This task is made all the more urgent by the destruction, politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina. Planned Poverty and the Demise of Democracy In a May 25, 2001 interview, Grover Norquist, head of the right-wing group Americans for Tax Reform, told National Public Radio’s Mara Liasson: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  55 I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” 41 As a radical right-wing activist and practical strategist, Norquist has been enormously instrumental and successful in shaping tax policies designed to “starve the beast,” a metaphor for policies designed to drive up deficits by cutting taxes, especially for the rich, in order to paralyze government and dry up funds for many federal programs that offer protection for children, the elderly, and the poor. Norquist saw his efforts pay off when thousands of people, most of them poor and black, drowned in the basin of New Orleans and upward of 500,000 were displaced. Under such circumstances, a decades-long official policy of benign neglect became malign neglect, largely rationalized through a market fundamentalism in which the self-interested striving of individuals becomes the cornerstone of both freedom and democracy. This is a politics that wages war against any viable notion of the social state and democratic values. And as Lawrence Grossberg points out, “The free market in neoliberalism is fundamentally an argument against politics, or at least against a politics that attempts to govern society in social rather than economic terms.” 42 The neoliberal efforts to shrink big government and public services must be understood both in terms of those who bore the brunt of such efforts in New Orleans and in terms of the subsequent inability of the government to deal adequately with Hurricane Katrina. Reducing the federal government’s ability to respond to social problems is a decisive element of neoliberal policymaking, as was echoed in a Wall Street Journal editorial that argued without irony that taxes should be raised for low-income individuals and families, not to make more money available to the federal government for addressing their needs, but to rectify the possibility that they “might not be feeling a proper hatred for the government.” 43 If the poor can be used as pawns in this logic to further the political attack on big government, it seems reasonable to assume that those in the Bush administration would refrain from using big government as quickly as possible to save the very lives of such groups, as was evident in the aftermath of Katrina. The vilification of the social state and big government— really an attack on nonmilitary aspects of government—has translated into a steep decline of tax revenues, a massive increase in military spending, and the growing immiseration of poor Americans and people of color. Under the Bush administration, U.S. Census Bureau figures reveal that “since 1999, the income of the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars … [and in 2005] 1.1 million were added to the 36 million already on the poverty rolls.” 44 While the number of Americans living below the poverty line is comparable to the combined populations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas, the Bush administration chose to make, in the 2006 budget, $70 billion in new tax cuts for the rich, while slashing programs that benefit the least fortunate.45 Similarly, the projected $2.7 trillion budget for 2007 includes a $4.9 billion reduction in health funds for senior citizens (Medicare) and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a $17 million

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56  •  Henry A. Giroux cut in aid for child-support enforcement, cutbacks in funds for low-income people with disabilities, major reductions in child care and development block grants, major defunding of housing for low-income elderly, and an unprecedented rollback in student aid. In addition, the 2007 budget calls for another $70 billion dollars in tax cuts most beneficial to the rich and provides for a huge increase in military spending for the war in Iraq.46 While President Bush endlessly argues for the economic benefits of his tax cuts, he callously omits the fact that 13 million children are living in poverty in the United States, “4.5 million more than when Bush was first inaugurated.” 47 And New Orleans had the third highest rate of children living in poverty in the United States.48 The illiteracy rate in New Orleans before the flood struck was 40 percent; the embarrassingly ill-equipped public school system was one of the most underfunded in the nation. Nearly 19 percent of Louisiana residents lacked health insurance, putting the state near the bottom for the percentage of people with health insurance. Robert Scheer, a journalist and social critic, estimated that one-third of the 150,000 people living in dire poverty in Louisiana were elderly, left exposed to the flooding in areas most damaged by Katrina.49 It gets worse. In an ironic twist of fate, one day after Katrina hit New Orleans, the U.S. Census Bureau released two important reports on poverty indicating that “Mississippi (with a 21.6 percent poverty rate) and Louisiana (19.4 percent) are the nation’s poorest states, and that New Orleans (with a 23.2 percent poverty rate) is the 12th poorest city in the nation. [Moreover,] New Orleans is not only one of the nation’s poorest cities, but its poor people are among the most concentrated in poverty ghettos. Housing discrimination and the location of government-subsidized housing have contributed to the city’s economic and racial segregation.” 50 Under neoliberal capitalism, the attack on politically responsible government has been matched by an equally harsh attack on social provisions and safety nets for the poor. And in spite of the massive failures of market-driven neoliberal policies—extending from a soaring $420 billion budget deficit to the underfunding of schools, public health, community policing, and environmental protection programs—the reigning right-wing orthodoxy of the Bush administration continues to “give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values.” 51 The Bush administration’s ideological hostility toward the essential role that government should play in providing social services and crucial infrastructure was particularly devastating for New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Prior to 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America. The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001 that “[t]he New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all,” 52 and yet the Bush administration consistently denied requests for funds by the New Orleans Army Corps of Engineers. Ignoring repeated requests, the Bush

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  57 administration cut the Army Corps’ funding by more than a half-billion dollars in its 2002 budget, leaving unfinished the construction for the levees that eventually burst. And in spite of repeated warnings far in advance by experts that the existing levees could not withstand a Category 4 hurricane, the Bush administration in 2004 rejected the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project’s request for $100 million, offering instead a measly $16.5 million. Huge tax cuts for the rich and massive cuts in much-needed programs continued unabated in the Bush administration, all the while putting the lives of thousands of poor people in the Gulf Basin in jeopardy. As David Sirota has reported, this disastrous underfunding of the levee infrastructure, coupled with even more tax cuts for the rich and less revenue for the states, continued right up to the time that Hurricane Katrina struck, making it almost impossible for governments in the Gulf region either to protect their citizens from the impact of a major hurricane or to develop the resources necessary for an adequate emergency response plan in the event of a flood.53 President Bush did not address questions about the lack of proper funding for the levees. Instead, he played dumb and, in spite of overwhelming evidence that he was aware of the inadequacy of the embankments, came up with one of the most incredible sound bites of his career: “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” 54 In fact, Bush was briefed the day before Katrina hit and was emphatically warned by a number of disaster officials that the levees could be breached, though he later denied having been briefed.55 Much of the press viewed Bush’s remarks about the levees as indicative simply of his cluelessness and indifference to any information that did not conform to his own budgetbusting, anti–big government ideology. But such political and moral indifference is linked less to the narrow-mindedness and rigidity of Bush’s character than it is to a broader set of biopolitical commitments at work in a global system that increasingly dictates who lives and who dies in the context of a rabid neoliberalism and a morally bankrupt neoconservatism.56 But it is more than this still. The government’s failure to respond quickly to the black poor on the Gulf Coast relates to a deeper set of memories of racial injustice and violence, memories that suggest a link between an apartheid past and the present intensification of its utter disregard for populations now considered disposable. Militarism and Despair: Mutually Reinforcing Forces Biopower in its current shape has produced a new form of biopolitics marked by a cleansed visual and social landscape in which the poor, the elderly, the infirm, and criminalized populations all share a common fate of disappearing from public view. Rendered invisible in deindustrialized communities far removed from the suburbs, barred from the tourist-laden sections of major cities, locked into understaffed nursing homes, interned in bulging prisons built in remote farm communities, hidden in decaying schools in rundown neighborhoods that bear the look of third-world slums, populations of poor

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58  •  Henry A. Giroux black and brown citizens exist outside the view of most Americans. They have become the waste products of the American Dream, if not of modernity itself. These disposable populations serve as unwelcome reminders that the once vaunted social state no longer exists. An apt personification of the death of the social contract in the United States, these living dead, having fallen through the large rents in America’s social safety nets, reflect a governmental agenda bent on attacking the poor rather than attacking poverty. That America’s disposable populations are largely poor and black undermines the nation’s commitment to color-blind ideology. Race remains the “major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country.” 57 One of the worst storms in our history shamed us into seeing the plight of poor blacks and other minorities. In less than forty-eight hours, Katrina ruptured the pristine image of America as a largely white middle-class country modeled after a Disney theme park. Beneath neoliberalism’s corporate ethic and market-based fundamentalism, the idea of democracy is disappearing and, with it, the spaces in which democracy is produced and nurtured. Democratic values, identities, and social relations along with public spaces, the common good, and the obligations of civic responsibility are slowly being overtaken by a market-based notion of freedom and civic indifference in which it becomes more difficult to translate private woes into social issues and collective action, or to insist on a language of the public good. The upshot to the evisceration of all notions of sociality is a sense of total abandonment, resulting in fear, anxiety, and insecurity over one’s future. The presence of the racialized poor, their needs, and vulnerabilities—now visible—becomes unbearable. All solutions as a result now focus on shoring up a diminished sense of safety, carefully nurtured by a renewed faith in all things military. Militaristic values and military solutions are profoundly influencing every aspect of American life, ranging from foreign and domestic policy to the shaping of popular culture and the organization of public schools.58 Faith in democratic governance and cultural pluralism increasingly gives way to military-style uniformity, discipline, and authority coupled with a powerful nationalism and a stifling patriotic correctness, all of which undermine the force of a genuine democracy by claiming that the average citizen does not have the knowledge or authority to see, engage, resist, protest, or make dominant power accountable.59 Lost public spaces and public culture have been replaced with what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the modern anti-spectacle. According to Mirzoeff, “the modern anti-spectacle now dictates that there is nothing to see and that instead one must keep moving, keep circulating and keep consuming.” 60 Nonstop images, coupled with a manufactured culture of fear, strip citizens of their visual agency and potential to act as engaged social participants. The visual subject has been reduced to the lifelong consumer, perpetually looking

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  59 for new goods and promising discounts, all the while traveling in spaces that suggest that public space is largely white and middle class, free of both unproductive consumers and those individuals marked by the trappings of race, poverty, dependence, and disability. Under the logic of modernization, neoliberalism, and militarization, the category “waste” no longer includes simply material goods but also human beings, particularly those rendered redundant in the new global economy, that is, those who are no longer capable of making a living, who are unable to consume goods, and who depend upon others for their most basic needs.61 Defined primarily through the combined discourses of character, personal responsibility, and cultural homogeneity, entire populations expelled from the benefits of the marketplace are reified as products without any value, to be disposed of as “leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking.” 62 Even when young black and brown youth try to escape the biopolitics of disposability by joining the military, the seduction of economic security is quickly negated by the horror of senseless violence compounded daily in the streets, roads, and battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, and made concrete in the form of body bags, mangled bodies, and amputated limbs—rarely to be seen in the narrow ocular vision of the dominant media. With the social state in retreat and the rapacious dynamics of neoliberalism unchecked by government regulations, the public and private policies of investing in the public good are dismissed as bad business, just as the practices of protecting people from the dire misfortunes of poverty, sickness, or the random blows of fate are viewed as acts of bad faith. Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion. This is especially true for those racial groups and immigrant populations who have always been at risk economically and politically. Increasingly, such groups have become part of an evergrowing army of the impoverished and disenfranchised—removed from the prospect of a decent job, productive education, adequate health care, acceptable child care services, and satisfactory shelter. As the state is transformed into the primary agent of terror and corporate concerns displace democratic values, dominant power “is measured by the speed with which responsibilities can be escaped.” 63 With its pathological disdain for social values and public life, and its celebration of an unbridled individualism and acquisitiveness, the Bush administration does more than undermine the nature of social obligation and civic responsibility; it also sends a message to those populations who are poor and black—society does not want, care about, or need you.64 Katrina revealed, with startling and disturbing clarity, who these individuals are: African Americans who occupy the poorest sections of New Orleans, those ghettoized frontier zones created by racism coupled with economic inequality. Cut out of any long-term goals and a decent vision of the future, these are the

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60  •  Henry A. Giroux populations, as Zygmunt Bauman points out, who have been rendered redundant and disposable in the age of neoliberal global capitalism. Hope for the Future: Creating an Emancipatory Biopolitics Through Pedagogy Katrina reveals that we are living in dark times. The shadow of authoritarianism remains after the storm clouds and hurricane winds have passed, offering a glimpse of its wreckage and terror. The politics of disaster that affected Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi are about more than government incompetence, militarization, socioeconomic polarization, environmental disaster, and political scandal. Hurricane Katrina broke through the visual blackout of poverty and the pernicious ideology of color-blindness to reveal the government’s role in fostering the dire conditions of largely poor African Americans, who were bearing the hardships incurred by the full wrath of the indifference and violence at work in the racist, neoliberal state. Global neoliberalism and its victims now occupy a space shaped by authoritarian politics, the terrors inflicted by a militarized state, and a logic of disposability that removes them from government social provisions and the discourse and privileges of citizenship. One of the most obvious lessons of Katrina—that race and racism still matter in America—is fully operational through a biopolitics in which “sovereignty resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who may die.” 65 Those marginalized according to color and class, unable to contribute to the prevailing consumerist ethic, are vanishing into the sinkhole of poverty in desolate and abandoned enclaves of decaying cities, neighborhoods, and rural spaces, or in America’s ever-expanding prison empire. Under the Bush regime, a biopolitics driven by the waste machine of a brutal age in which insecurity, the collapse of the social state, and the separation of power from politics constitutes for the vast majority of citizens what Zygmunt Bauman defines as “liquid modernity,” 66 register a new and brutal racism as part of the emergence of a contemporary and savage authoritarianism. Any viable attempt to challenge the biopolitical project that now shapes American life and culture must do more than unearth the powerful antidemocratic forces that now govern American economics, politics, education, media, and culture; it must also deepen possibilities of individual and collective struggles by fighting for the rebuilding of civil society and the creation of a vast network of democratic public spheres, such as schools and the alternative media, in order to develop new models of individual and social agency that can expand and deepen the reality of democratic public life. This is a call for a diverse “radical party,” following Stanley Aronowitz’s exhortation, a party that prioritizes democracy as a global task, views hope as a precondition for political engagement, gives primacy to making the political more pedagogical, and understands the importance of the totality of the struggle as it informs and articulates within and across a wide range of sites and sectors of everyday

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  61 life—domestically and globally. Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of how race, class, power, and inequality in America contribute to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the poor, people of color, and working- and middle-class people. The fight for equality offers new challenges in the process of constructing a politics that directly addresses poverty, class domination, and a resurgent racism. Such a politics would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations of power as they affect diverse individuals and groups at the level of daily life. Such struggles would combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living, one that provides a decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the United States. Biopolitics is not just about the reduction of selected elements of the population to the necessities of bare life or worse; it is also potentially about enhancing life by linking hope and a new vision to the struggle for reclaiming the social, providing a language capable of translating individual issues into public considerations, and recognizing that, in the age of the new media, the terrain of culture is one of the most important pedagogical spheres through which to challenge the most basic precepts of the new authoritarianism. The waste machine of modernity, as Bauman points out, must be challenged within a new understanding of environmental justice, human rights, and democratic politics. Negative globalization, with its attachment to the mutually enforcing modalities of militarism and racial segregation, must be exposed and dismantled. And this demands new forms of resistance that are both more global and differentiated. But if these struggles are going to emerge, especially in the United States, then we need a politics and pedagogy of hope, one that takes seriously Hannah Arendt’s call to use the public realm to throw light on the “dark times” that threaten to extinguish the very idea of democracy. Against the tyranny of market fundamentalism, religious dogmatism, unchecked militarism, and ideological claims to certainty, an emancipatory biopolitics must enlist education as a crucial force in the struggle over democratic identities, spaces, and ideals. In order to challenge the biopolitics of disposability, we must recognize that abiding powerlessness atrophies the public imagination and leads to political paralysis. Consequently, its policies avidly attack critical education at all levels of cultural production in an all-out effort to undermine critical thought, imagination, and substantive agency. To significantly confront the force of a biopolitics in the service of the new authoritarianism, intellectuals, artists, and others in various cultural sites—from schools to higher education to the media—will have to rethink what it means to secure the conditions for critical education both within and outside of the schools. In the context of formal schooling, this means fighting against the corporatization, commercialism,

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62  •  Henry A. Giroux and privatization of public schools. Higher education has to be defended in the same terms. Against the biopolitics of racial exclusion, the university should be a principal site where dialogue, negotiation, mutual understanding, and respect provide the knowledge and experience for students to develop a shared space for affirming differences while simultaneously learning those shared values necessary for an inclusive democratic society. Similarly, both public and higher education must address with new courage the history of American slavery, the enduring legacy of racism in the United States, and its interface with both political nationalism and the enduring market and religious fundamentalisms at work in contemporary society. Similarly, racism must not be reduced to a private matter, a case of individual prejudice removed from the dictates of state violence and the broader realm of politics, and left to matters of “taste, preference, and ultimately, of consumer, or lifestyle choice.” 67 What must be instituted and fought for in higher education is a critical and antiracist pedagogy that unsettles, stirs up human consciousness, “breeds dissatisfaction with the level of both freedom and democracy achieved thus far,” and inextricably connects the fates of freedom, democracy, and critical education.68 Hannah Arendt once argued, “the public realm has lost the power of illumination,” and one result is that more and more people “have retreated from the world and their obligations within it.” 69 The public realm is not merely a space where the political, social, economic, and cultural interconnect; it is also the preeminent space of public pedagogy—that is, a space where subjectivities are shaped, public commitments are formed, and choices are made. As sites of cultural politics and public pedagogy, public spaces offer a unique opportunity for critically engaged citizens, young people, academics, teachers, and various intellectuals to engage in pedagogical struggles that provide the conditions for social empowerment. Such struggles can be waged through the new media, films, publications, radio interviews, and a range of other forms of cultural production. It is especially crucial, as Mark Poster has argued, that scholars, teachers, public intellectuals, artists, and cultural theorists take on the challenge of understanding how the new media technologies construct subjects differently with multiple forms of literacy that engage a range of intellectual capacities.70 This also means deploying new technologies of communication, such as the Internet, camcorder, and cell phone, in political and pedagogically strategic ways to build protracted struggles and reclaim the promise of a democracy that insists on racial, gender, and economic equality. The new technoculture is a powerful pedagogical tool that needs to be used, on the one hand, in the struggle against both dominant media and the hegemonic ideologies they produce, circulate, and legitimate, and, on the other hand, as a valuable tool in treating men and women as agents of change, mindful of the consequences of their actions, and utterly capable of pursuing truly egalitarian models of democracy.

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  63 The promise of a better world cannot be found in modes of authority that lack a vision of social justice, renounce the promise of democracy, and reject the dream of a better future, offering instead dreams of the pale assurance of protection from the nightmare of an all-embracing terrorism. Against this stripped-down legitimation of authority is the promise of public spheres that, in their diverse forms, sites, and content, offer pedagogical and political possibilities for strengthening the social bonds of democracy, new spaces within which to cultivate the capacities for critical modes of individual and social agency, and crucial opportunities to form alliances to collectively struggle for a biopolitics that expands the scope of vision, operations of democracy, and the range of democratic institutions—that is, a biopolitics that fights against the terrors of totalitarianism. Such spheres are about more than legal rights guaranteeing freedom of speech; they are also sites that demand a certain kind of citizen informed by particular forms of education, a citizen whose education provides the essential conditions for democratic public spheres to flourish. Cornelius Castoriadis, the great philosopher of democracy, argues that if public space is to be experienced not as a private affair, but as a vibrant sphere in which people learn how to participate in and shape public life, then it must be shaped through an education that provides the decisive traits of courage, responsibility, and shame, all of which connect the fate of each individual to the fate of others, the planet, and global democracy.71 In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the biopolitical calculus of massive power differentials and iniquitous market relations put the linked scourges of poverty and racism on full display. To confront the biopolitics of disposability, we need to recognize the dark times in which we live and offer up a vision of hope that creates the conditions for multiple collective and global struggles that refuse to use politics as an act of war and markets as the measure of democracy. Making human beings superfluous is the essence of totalitarianism, and democracy is the antidote in urgent need of being reclaimed. Katrina should keep the hope of such a struggle alive for quite some time because, for many of us, the images of those floating bodies serve as desperate reminders of what it means when justice, as the lifeblood of democracy, becomes cold and indifferent in the face of death. Equally important, we need a new language for recognizing how the media has become a central form of public pedagogy and a site of struggle. Recognizing the pedagogical and political importance of the media as a pedagogical site suggests the need for discourse that lifts the “truth” of images beyond the evidence of our senses. Theory must once again function as an act of defiance, a critical resource, against thought aimed merely at explication or, even worse, thinking that is merely the reproduction of what already exists. Hurricane Katrina revealed a media that is global, one that demands a politics confronting not only a culture industry that now spans the globe but also globally generated problems at their own level. The dominant media colonizes the public space with a discourse that collapses public issues into

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64  •  Henry A. Giroux private concerns. Offering only individual failure against a world beset with social problems, it privatizes politics just as it depoliticizes any viable notion of agency. Katrina made clear that there is a need to fill the gap between images of collective suffering and the social conditions that produce and mediate them. Connecting the struggle over the media to the need to link public pedagogy to the imperatives of a substantive global democracy represents a new public agenda waiting to be occupied by critical theory and those intellectuals, social movements, educators, youth, and others for whom responsibility is the first obligation of a democratic politics. The dreadful images of human suffering produced by Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s incompetence, and widely portrayed by the media, made visible the waning interest in the public good, the waning appetite for social reform, and the disappearance of the social state. But at the same time, such images served as reminders of the profound shift in the public sphere and the fragility of democracy when public problems are left to the whims of the market, the forces of deregulation, and the tasks of fragmented individuals. The dominant media, regardless of its contradictions, has become a principal impediment to democracy, and yet it is the media that bears the central responsibility for educating people and shaping public life. It is precisely in that contradiction that a new politics needs to be forged and struggled over. Notes



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1. Many of the ideas in this essay are drawn from my newest book, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2006). 2. Shaila Dewan, “How Photos Became an Icon of the Civil Rights Movement,” New York Times, August 28, 2005, http://www.wehaitians.com/how%20photo s%20became%20icon%20of%20civil%20rights%20movement.html (accessed January 7, 2006). 3. Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992). 4. It is worth noting how the media portrayals of the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina differ when viewed from the contrasting perspectives of a natural catastrophe and the ensuing man-made social debacle. Labeled as a natural disaster, Katrina initially seemed removed from the political realm and social criticism until it became clear in the aftermath of the tragedy that matters of race and class had to be addressed. The natural aspect of the disaster opened the door for media coverage of a domestic tragedy that could articulate dissent in a way that the state-manufactured war coverage could not. In other words, natural catastrophes are not supposed to be politicized in themselves; it was only in the aftermath that racial and class politics emerged, enabling the media and the public to criticize the negligence and incompetence of the government, and because the event occurred on domestic soil, the government had less control over the way the media constructed the event, particularly in invoking issues related to poverty, race, and inequality. I want to thank Grace Pollock for this insight.

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5. Dan Frosch, “Back from the Dead,” ALTWeeklies.com, September 28, 2005, 1– 3, http://www.altweeklies.com/gyrobase/AltWeeklies/Story?oid=oid%3A151104 (accessed April 26, 2006). 6. Cited in Derrick Jackson, “Healthcare Swept Away,” Boston Globe, September 21, 2005, http://www.boston.com. 7. Rosa Brooks, “Our Homegrown Third World,” Los Angeles Times, September 07, 2005, 1–2, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/ views05/0907-24.htm (accessed April 12, 2006). 8. Terry M. Neal, “Hiding Bodies Won’t Hide the Truth,” Washington Post, September 8, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed February 3, 2006). 9. For a brilliant analysis of the racial state, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001). 10. Eric Foner, “Bread, Roses, and the Flood,” Nation, October 3, 2005, 8. 11. Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 122, 124. 12. Bob Herbert, “A Failure Of Leadership,” New York Times, September 5, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05herbert.html?ex=128357280 0&en=a8bed4004ac0f93e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss (accessed February 26, 2006). 13. Sean D. Hamill, “Santorum Retreats on Evacuation Penalty Remarks,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 7, 2005, http://www.post-gazette.com/ pg/05250/566844.stm (accessed April 10, 2006). 14. Cited in editorial, “Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off,” New York Times, September 7, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/ 07barbara.html?ex=1140498000&en=61560581b40ea782&ei=5070 (accessed April 18, 2006). 15. Bob Norman, “Savage Station,” Miami New Times, September 22, 2005, http:// www.miaminewtimes.com/Issues/2005-09-022/news/metro4.html (accessed March 1, 2006). 16. The audio clip of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s comments broadcast September 13, 2005, on The Radio Factor can be found on the Media Matters for America website, http://mediamatters.org/items/200509150001. 17. Slavoj Zizek, “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape: Reality and Fantasy in New Orleans,” In These Times, October 20, 2005, http://www.inthesetimes.com/ site/main/article/2361/ (accessed March 9, 2006). 18. Eric Klinenberg, in an interview in In These Times, points out that “Beginning with the Crime Bill in 1994, all levels of government have delegated traditional social service responsibilities to paramilitary or military organizations—responsibilities that in many cases they are poorly suited to handle… . [Moreover] they are often designed to operate behind closed doors, and much of the work they do is classified and not subject to public scrutiny.” Jeff Bleifuss interview with Eric Klinenberg, “Disasters: Natural and Social,” In These Times, October 24, 2005, 22. 19. Janet Pelz, “The Poor Shamed Us into Seeing Them,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 19, 2005, 1–2, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print. cgi?file=/views05/0919-26.htm (accessed February 4, 2006).

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66  •  Henry A. Giroux 20. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002); Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2003). 21. Mitchell Dean, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004): 17. 22. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 249. 23. Mika Ojakangas, “Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault,” Foucault Studies 2 (May 2005): 6. 24. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 136. 25. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255. 26. Ibid., 258. 27. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 146. 28. Ibid., 334. 29. See, especially, Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 30. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (London: Polity Press, 2003), 133. 31. Malcolm Bull, “States Don’t Really Mind Their Citizens Dying (Provided They Don’t All Do It at Once): They Just Don’t Like Anyone Else to Kill Them,” London Review of Books, December 16, 2004, 3. 32. Catherine Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Biopolitics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004): 47. 33. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 145. 34. Bauman, Liquid Love, 136. 35. Rosa Linda Fregoso, “‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights,” Social Identities 12, no. 2 (March 2006): 109. 36. See, for instance, Henry A. Giroux, Against the New Authoritarianism (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2005). 37. There are a number of important works on the politics of neoliberalism. I have found the following particularly useful: Anatole Anton, Milton Fisk, and Nancy Holmstrom, eds., Not for Sale: In Defense of Public Goods (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (London: Polity, 1998); Ulrich Beck, Individualization (London: Sage, 2002); Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press, 1998); Pierre Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998, http://www.en.monde-diplomatique. fr/1998/12/08bourdieu; Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, trans. Loic Wacquant (New York: The New Press, 2003); Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000);

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Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press 2003); Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Doug Henwood, After the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2003); Colin Leys, Market Driven Politics (London: Verso, 2001); Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005); Alain Touraine, Beyond Neoliberalism (London: Polity Press, 2001). 38. William DiFazio, “Katrina and President George W. Bush Forever,” Situations 1, no. 2 (2006): 87. 39. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 40. 40. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (London: Polity Press, 2004), 13. 41. Cited in Thom Hartmann, “You Can’t Govern if You Don’t Believe in Government,” Common Dreams News Center, September 6, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0906-21.htm (accessed January 17, 2006). 42. Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005), 117. 43. Cited in Paul Krugman “Hey Lucky Duckies,” New York Times, December 3, 2002, 31. 44. Robert Scheer, “The Real Costs of a Culture of Greed,” AlterNet, September 06, 2005, 2, http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/25095 (accessed April 10, 2006). 45. Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney, Amanda Terkel, Payson Schwin, and Christy Harvey, “Budget: After Katrina, More of The Same,” Think Progress. Org, October 21, 2005, http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/apps/nl/ content2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=914257&ct=1520271 (accessed April 12, 2006). 46. Jonathan Weisman, “Budget Plan Assumes Too Much, Demands Too Little,” Washington Post, February 7, 2007, A10. See also, Ewen MacAskill, “Bush Slashes Aid to Poor to Boost Iraq War Chest,” February 6, 2007, http://commondreams. org/headlines07/0206-04.htm. 47. Robert Scheer, “Does Bush Finally See Poor People,” Common Dreams, September 20, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0920-28.htm (accessed April 12, 2006). 48. Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney, Amanda Terkel, Payson Schwin, and Christy Harvey, “Poverty: A Close Look at ‘The Other America,’” Think Progress.Org, September 19, 2005, http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/ apps/nl/content2.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=914257&ct=1428461 (accessed May 5, 2006). 49. Robert Scheer, “Rotten Fruit of the ‘Reagan Revolution,’” Robert Scheer.com, September 06, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0906-23.htm (accessed April 12, 2006). 50. Peter Dreier, “Katrina in Perspective: The Disaster Raises Key Questions About the Role of Government in American Society,” Dissent Magazine, Summer 2005, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/su05/dreier.htm (accessed October 22, 2006).

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68  •  Henry A. Giroux 51. William Greider, “Defining a New ‘New Deal,’” Nation, September 21, 2005, http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/25745 (accessed June 3, 2006). 52. Cited in Paul Krugman, “A Can’t-Do Government,” New York Times, September 2, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0902-22.htm (accessed January 30, 2006). 53. David Sirota, “Welcome to New Orleans,” In These Times (October 24, 2005), 21. 54. Frank Rich notes the revealing similarity between George W. Bush’s “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees” and Condoleezza Rice’s post– 9/11 claim “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people could take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.” See Frank Rich, “Fallujah Floods the Superdome,” New York Times, September 4, 2005, 10. 55. Spenser S. Husu and Linton Weeks, “Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina,” Washington Post, March 2, 2006, A01. 56. This is not an argument being made only by critics on the Left. Francis Fukuyama, one of the stars of the neoconservative movement, has recently jumped ship and argued in the New York Times that neoconservatism increasingly resembles Leninism and that, “as both a political symbol and body of thought, it has evolved into something he can no longer support.” Francis Fukuyama, “After Neoconservatism,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 19, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed February 19, 2006). 57. Paul Krugman, “Tragedy in Black and White,” New York Times, September 19, 2005, A27. 58. See, for example, David A. Gabbard and Kenneth Saltman, eds., Education as Enforcement (New York: Routledge, 2003); Randall R. Beger, “Expansion of Police Power in Public Schools and the Vanishing Rights of Students,” Social Justice 29, nos. 1–2 (2002): 119–130. 59. Richard H. Kohn, “Using the Military at Home: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Chicago Journal of International Law 94, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 165–192; Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 723–735. 60. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, 16. 61. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity, 2000); also Bauman, Liquid Love; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London: Polity, 2005). 62. Bauman, Wasted Lives, 27. 63. Zygmunt Bauman cited in Nicholas Fearn, “NS Profile: Zygmunt Bauman,” New Statesman, January 16, 2006), 30. 64. Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 68–69. 65. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11–12. 66. Bauman, Liquid Modernity. 67. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 146–147. 68. Bauman, Liquid Love, 14. 69. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 4.

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Hurricane Katrina and the Politics of Disposability  •  69 70. Mark Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 71. See, especially, Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81–123.

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3

Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail The Racialization of Class Exploitation

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo

In this chapter McLaren and Jaramillio contend that in the 1950s and 1960s Americans witnessed attacks on African Americans by lynch mobs, police dogs, and fire hoses; but the assault on African Americans during Hurricane Katrina was of a different sort. It was an attack on hope—hope that the United States had overcome its historical legacy of racism, hope that educated journalists had moved beyond portraying life in the United States with brutally overt or subtle racist stereotypes, hope that capitalist democracies had made necessary headway in ending poverty, hope that the government could muster whatever it took to care for its poor and dispossessed in a time of emergency. Katrina sounded the death knell of such hope—a hope born in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement of earlier, and seemingly much more unreal, times. Not only has the immoral geography of the country been illuminated for the world to see, but the very meaning and purpose of American capitalist democracy has been called into question. The Rising Tide of Belligerence The social historical panorama unfolding before us is in tumult, ranging from confused and paranoid to lethally vengeful. Great swaths of the planet are in political chaos and beset with unprecedented ecological disintegration. It is as if all of human decency has been sucked into a vortex of political imbroglio. The Bush oligarchy—poster children for torture and endless war—has become an agglomeration of dangerously co-habiting parasites, enforcers, tyrants, and calumniators—Captain Queegs with Blackberrys—operating out of a den of McCarthy-era redivivus. Here in the U.S. the aroma of corruption is as pungent as the flop sweat that graced the storied jowls of an oncamera Richard Nixon. Fear has become the big stick to wield in the service of patriotism, priming us with images and expectations of imminent attack, blurring the distinction between the imagined and the occurrent, desultory, and carefully orchestrated threats, and producing, through a sultry atmosphere of impending doom, political lassitude among the hapless multitude. 71

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72  •  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo Depoliticization has become the official hallmark of patriotism, presaging a quickening of fascism. Condi Rice with her team of kobolds circles the globe, reveling in her newfound role as “warrior princess” as she unsuccessfully assures her sepoys around the world that the United States government does not use torture and is protecting the interests of the free world. An air marshal guns down a fleeing mentally ill patient who claimed he had a bomb, and Fox News commentators salivate over how well Homeland Security is doing its job. It was not that long ago that Americans discovered that maintaining the free world comes at a large financial as well as ideological cost. Earlier in the year, it became alarmingly evident that the Bush administration paid conservative pundit Armstrong Williams $240,000 while serving as a media talking head to help persuade African Americans to back President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. More recently it has been made clear that purchasing journalistic mercenaries is not only a major part of a larger and well-fueled government scheme to blur the line between legitimate news reporting and political propaganda here in the United States (as part of what is known as Psychological Operation [PSYOP] within the homeland itself), it is also an integral part of the so-called democracy-building efforts in foreign countries such as Iraq. It was recently disclosed that the Pentagon hired propaganda-making firms to cultivate, in the Iraqi media, the false impression of grassroots support for the American occupation. Mr. Rumsfeld may have closed the Office of Strategic Influence, but he kept it functioning covertly by outsourcing work to contractors such as the Rendon Group and the Lincoln Group, which won additional multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts for media analysis and a media operations center in Baghdad, including “damage control planning.” Jacob Weisberg (2005) draws the distinction between propaganda (“a calculated and systematic effort to manage public opinion”) and spin (“lying and routine political dishonesty”). He notes, “when the Bush administration manufactures fake ‘news,’ suppresses real news, disguises the former as the latter, and challenges the legitimacy of the independent press, it corrodes trust in leaders, institutions, and, to the rest of the world, the United States as a whole.” On the European front, young people of African and Arab descent have recently given the bien nacidos of France the political megrims in their chosen response—the torch—to decades of criminal misrule, the ghettoization of immigrant youth and the imperialist practices of entitlement of the capitalist elite. Back home, capitalist exploitation and its loyal ally, racism, while unwanted guests at the banquet known as the American Dream, are still the primary reasons why the poor are excluded from eating at the same table and forced to scramble for whatever scraps are made available to them elsewhere. Whites are likely to forget why more folks of color do not join them at the table of good fortune unless a crisis of national proportion occurs; such a crisis has occurred and continues still.

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Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail  •  73 Katrina: Emblematic of America’s War with the Poor On Sunday, August 28, less than 48 hours before Katrina struck, residents of New Orleans were starting to get antsy. While they may not have been prepared for that devastating rara avis among Mother Nature’s storehouse of storms, they were even less prepared for the human callousness that would follow in its tremulous wake—especially those among the 112,000 people in New Orleans who were without any private form of transportation and had to bear the full brunt of the havoc wreaked by the Category 4 hurricane (at one stage a Category 5 just prior to making landfall). While they were angry at remarks made by David Brooks in the New York Times that “most of the ambitious and organized people abandoned the inner-city areas of New Orleans long ago” (Bacon 2005a, 14), implying that those who could not leave deserved their fate, they were hardly surprised. Coiled like a viper in the hurricane’s eye, the specter of capitalism unleashed its pent-up supply of hell upon its historically most vulnerable victims: impoverished African Americans (before Hurricane Katrina, the unemployment rate among Gulf residents was among the nation’s highest, with 18 to 30 percent of people in the region living under the poverty line—twice the national rate—and with blacks in New Orleans suffering a 35 percent poverty rate; Bacon 2005a). In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans witnessed attacks on African Americans by lynch mobs, police dogs, and fire hoses, but the assault on African Americans during Hurricane Katrina was of a different sort. It was an attack on hope—hope that the United States had overcome its historical legacy of racism, hope that educated journalists had moved beyond portraying life in the United States with brutally overt or subtle racist stereotypes, hope that capitalist democracies had made necessary headway in ending poverty, hope that the government could muster whatever it took to care for its poor and dispossessed in a time of emergency. Katrina sounded the death knell of such hope—a hope born in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement of earlier, and seemingly much more unreal, times. Not only has the immoral geography of the country been illuminated for the world to see, but the very meaning and purpose of American capitalist democracy has been called into question. Of course, there was no absence of media pundits (such as Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel and Jeff Jacoby and Kathy Young of the Boston Globe) eager to defend Condi’s condemnation of suggestions that the slow response to Katrina had anything to do with racism (Bacon 2005b, 13). Despite the protestations of Condi and the Bush gang, many of the most cherished American values have imploded in the sinkhole of global capitalism. More than just a series of untenable contradictions accumulated in successive moments of bureaucratic neglect, the political debacle known as Hurricane Katrina has become emblematic of white supremacist free-market democracy, prompting an international reassessment of the status of the American

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74  •  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo Dream. Much of this reassessment echoed The Human Development Report, an independent report commissioned by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Its 2005 edition (370 pages) written by Kevin Watkins, the former head of research at Oxfam, investigates inequalities in health provisions inside the United States as part of a survey of how inequality worldwide is retarding the eradication of poverty. We learn, for instance, that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the United States for the past five years, and is now the same as Malaysia. We learn that America’s black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday, and that wealth creation does not necessarily mean eradicating or even lessening poverty, because eradicating poverty means providing people with full access to health, education, and other social provisions. What we do not learn is that we have known about similar conditions for decades and longer, and we still seem incapable of overcoming them. It is much easier to blame and demonize the victims, and that is exactly what happened in the case of Hurricane Katrina. One stunning illustration of political naiveté and lack of even a rudimentary understanding of the relationship between race and class can be found in remarks by journalist Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel: Parker … expressed surprise that an African-American woman told her matter-of-factly that “Bush doesn’t care about people who look like me” because the woman was “an elegant professional woman clearly not of the Al Sharpton school of reactionary politics.” (quoted in Bacon 2005b, 13) The act of God that began like a susurrus of wind in the eerie darkness swelled into the piercing, piteous wail of a banshee, a blackened sky draped over the city of New Orleans like the funeral cowl of the unshriven dead. The gale force winds seemed to arch the stars across the horizon like a diadem of death. For many, all would soon be lost in the impending chaos. A moral panic ensued when the public was fed horror stories about what it was like to be trapped in the inferno of black anarchism, stories refracted in the cesspool of racism and fear that lies deep within the structural unconscious of a nation founded upon violence, slavery, and genocide: African American “wildings” gang-raping women and children, looting stores of liquor and drugs, shooting at ambulances, police patrols, and rescue helicopters, and throwing the city into a vortex of violence and anarchy—stories that were later confirmed as untrue. (We are not arguing that no looting took place, but we challenge the sentence recently handed down by a judge who condemned three convicted looters, who stole beer, liquor, and wine, to 15 years in prison.) Fox News correspondent Steve Harrington described New Orleans as the ‘‘Wild West,” while Fox News correspondent Phil Keating characterized a fire visible in some news footage as being set ‘‘perhaps for no apparent reason but just for the joy of arson’’ (quoted in Yassin 2005, 11). An article in USA Today was unembarrassingly headlined, ‘‘The Looters, They’re Like Cockroaches’’

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Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail  •  75 (Yassin 2005, 10). Fox News’s Viagra posse leader, Bill O’Reilly, revealed that it was not blood running through his veins, but the muck that lined the city’s drainpipes, when he repugnantly opined in the Florida Sun-Sentinel on September 10, 2005: [t]hat “the suffering” of “the poor in New Orleans” should be a lesson: “Connect the dots and wise up. Educate yourself, work hard and be honest… . If you don’t … the odds are that you will be desperately standing on a symbolic rooftop someday yourself. And trust me, help will not be quick in coming.” And in O’Reilly’s view, help should not necessarily be offered… . “The white American taxpayers are saying: ‘How much more do we have to give here?’” (quoted in Bacon 2005b, 13) For all the descriptions of New Orleans in military terms, like war zone, and theater of operations, where marauding hordes of looters supposedly overturned every act of human civility, it is interesting to note the Seattle Times’s report concluding that there was no more violence in New Orleans during the aftermath of Katrina than in any other typical week (Bacon 2005b, 14). Many stories of violence, such as snipers firing at rescue vehicles and police being attacked by mob violence, were later discredited (Bacon 2005b; Yassin 2005). The New Orleans Times-Picayune, on September 26, 2005, discovered an official count of only four violent deaths citywide for the entire flood period, which was typical of a city that anticipated approximately 400 homicides in 2005 (Yassin 2005, 9). According to Jaime Omar Yassin: As the Washington Post observed days after the hysteria began to die down (9/15/05), National Guard troops were surprised to encounter “virtually no violence” at the Convention Center made infamous by countless unsubstantiated media reports of raped babies and wanton murder. Likewise, on the streets, correspondents such as Nick Robertson (CNN Daybreak, 9/5/05) seemed almost disappointed that “I haven’t been asked to wear a bullet-proof vest” by authorities. While there had been some violence, and looting that could only have been motivated by profit, there were apparently no raping/murdering/looting gangs, nor was there any substantial devastation wrought by violence and looting. (Yassin 2005, 12) In contrast to many prevailing media reports at the time, it would have seemed that the only way to enter the urban hell to help the wayworn victims of Katrina without turning into stone would be to send in Snake Blisken with a rogue team of ex-convicts specially trained in urban warfare. As a result of the exaggerated media stories of violence, food was actually airlifted and dropped into New Orleans, since the city was deemed too infested with criminals for rescuers to enter safely. The New York Daily News retorted that because “anarchy, Mogadishu-style, is just around the corner if they’re not stopped,”

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76  •  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo officials “must do whatever it takes to curb the hardcore, armed, violent felons who are making it impossible to save the city,” and who are “a very different breed from desperate citizens who are trying to get food and water” (quoted in Bacon 2005b, 14). Of course, it is hard to tell which citizens were trying to get food and water when a white couple was described in media reports as “finding provisions,” while a black man was described as “looting” (although Jonah Goldberg admitted: “I don’t know what’s in the bag the black guy is tugging along behind him. Perhaps he really did loot the grocery store for more than mere essentials? The white couple found the bread and soda ‘from’ a local grocery store. Did they go in it?” [cited in Bacon 2005b, 14]. It is telling that the Daily News evoked the image of Mogadishu (Somalia), one that the American public associates with Blackhawk Down fame, a place where eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed in a rescue attempt, and where U.S. General Boykin claimed to have taken a photograph of a satanic presence over the city before he went on years later to proclaim George W. Bush as God’s choice for the presidency, and to announce triumphantly that the U.S. Army sent to occupy Iraq was a Christian army fighting the evil followers of Islam (see McLaren 2005). Right-wing journalist Jonah Goldberg, who recently replaced leftist columnist Robert Scheer in a conservative putsch at the Los Angeles Times, described the survivors of Katrina in the National Review Online blog as a different species and inhuman, as a mutant breed that had infested the Superdome—what Goldberg dubbed a “Mad Max/Thunderdome/Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show” (quoted in Bacon 2005b, 14). Goldberg advised those still trapped in the floodwaters of New Orleans to “hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents,” “find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless,” and “protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the Earth with a race of gilled supermen” (quoted in Bacon, 2005b, 14). Goldberg’s comments about a new species of supermen emerging from the urban swamplands of New Orleans echoes the dystopic nightmare of Hollywood’s Waterworld. Allan Breed’s report in the Cincinnati Post described “naked babies wail[ing] for food as men get drunk on stolen liquor” and a crowd “whose almost feral intensity” prevented a helicopter from delivering water to victims (quoted in Bacon 2005b, 14). It is not difficult to imagine radio personality Bill Bennett staying home all week, strangely transfixed by the televised images of the looting and chaos, shaking his head in self-righteous contempt, his obscene racist fantasies about bringing crime rates down by aborting the fetuses of New Orleans’ African American population, coursing like a riptide inside his pious brain soured by a frat boy’s impish self-hatred. We imagine that his heart began to palpitate with racial pride upon hearing Governor Blanco’s assurance to the white ruling class that they would be saved from savagery: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well trained, experienced, battle-tested and under my

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Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail  •  77 orders to restore order in the streets. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will’’ (quoted in Blum 2005). Even New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the city’s police force of 1,500 strong to abandon search-and-rescue missions in order to guard the city from the looters (Blum 2005). There is never any mistaking the priority given to property rights in capitalist societies. A Fox News reporter “boasted that the National Guard and other armed forces, arriving days after the humanitarian crisis had reached critical levels, were ‘highly proficient in the use of lethal force’” (quoted in Yassin 2005, 11). CNN’s Wolf Blitzer could hardly contain his excitement that the cavalry had finally arrived when he announced: “eight convoys and troops are on the ground at last in a place being described as a lawless, deadly war zone” (quoted in Yassin 2005, 12). This news also pleased conservative pundit Peggy Noonan who, writing in the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com, announced: “I hope the looters are shot” (quoted in Bacon 2005b, 14). Never one to be outdone when it comes to protecting the ruling class from barbarism, Tucker Carlson remarked, “Maybe [the National Guard] should have shot people but they didn’t” (quoted in Bacon 2005b, 14). Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post on September 6, 2005, wrote a piece called “Troops Back from Iraq Find Another War Zone,” which allowed the public to hear from the National Guard itself: “Just the smell and feel of a war zone in the city put the soldiers on edge.” The article, subtitled “In New Orleans, It’s like Baghdad on a Bad Day,” featured young Guard soldiers boasting, “If we’re out on the streets, we’ll fight back and shoot until we kill them”—though the worst first-hand example of the “violence and looting” that “‘shocked’ the Guard protagonists was the sight of ‘70-year old women in new Nike high-tops’” (quoted in Yassin 2005, 12). Watching images of African Americans on CNN through Bennett’s “dead seeing eyes” (to borrow a term used by Henry 2004, p. 201) confirmed not the common humanity of all those facing overwhelmingly perilous conditions, but only his own whiteness and his palpable and pure racial supremacy, signaling to him how horrifying it must be to be nonwhite. When, in an unscripted NBC benefit concert, rapper Kanye West exclaimed: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people, … [America was organized] to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible,” his remarks hit a nerve with people of color throughout the country, and they also underscored the truism that the poor hit the hardest are disproportionately African American. They also echoed the observation of philosopher Paget Henry (2004), that the condition of African Americans in the United States reflects a “persistent and long-term inability to recognize the humanity of people of African descent” among the “dead seeing eye of the Western

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78  •  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo master self” (2004, 200, 201). Henry argues that in Hegel’s view, the African does not qualify as a genuine other in the Western dialectic of the master/slave relationship. Hegel made it clear in his own phenomenology that the African is without self-consciousness and therefore does not qualify as being part of the second moment of duplication in the unity of the master self. The African was a slave located outside of history and was not able to confirm the humanity of the imperial master (Henry 2004). Despite repeated pleas from Governor Blanco for emergency relief—500 buses, 40,000 more troops, ice, water and food, base camps, staging areas, amphibious vehicles, the return of the Louisiana Army National Guard’s 256th Brigade Combat Team (then deployed to Iraq), mobile morgues, rescue teams, housing, airlift and communications systems—little materialized during the week that Katrina made landfall. The situation was so bad that Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA), having been pressured to spend time in public relations stunts with President Bush, wrote Blanco’s staff that Bush’s “entire effort on behalf of the federal government has been reflected in his and his people’s nonchalant attitude to the people of LA. You may give him this to read” (Warrick, Hsu, and Hull 2005). Those African Americans who had begged in vain to be rescued from floating rooftops, those who drowned in their attics, those who were abandoned and perished in hospitals and nursing homes, those whose bloated corpses floated down the waterlogged boulevards and which remain to this day unidentified—all of them bore witness to the reverse mirror image of the violence that was directed at their ancestors, but this time dressed up as “ineffective response” to an act of God. According to faith-based political theory it was not the place of those affected by the hurricane to question, much less attempt to interfere with, an act of God. A number of fundamentalist religious leaders took to the pulpit and declared Katrina an act of holy vengeance against “southern decadence.” According to Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans: “New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion—it’s free of all of those things now,” Shanks says. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there—and now we’re going to start over again.” (quoted in Brown and Martin 2005) Antiabortion activist Steve Lefemine likened the satellite map of Hurricane Katrina to “the image of an 8-week old fetus” and clamored, “God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion” (quoted in Cooperman 2005). Citing “Providence” and judgment against “national sin,” Lefemine and his kin washed their hands of the moral and social responsibility to assist our citizens in times of tragedy and rather utilized Katrina to

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Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail  •  79 advance their own fundamentalist ideology—a set of beliefs and practices that are increasingly becoming the norm in an evolving “Christian America.” We can imagine an old jazz musician sitting on the damp street corner, unaware of the impact that mold would have on his wheezing lungs in the weeks ahead, staring at a waterlogged saxophone case bobbing in a steamy sewer like a bloated corpse risen up from the river Styx. We imagine his relatives, some working in public-sector jobs, being denied a living wage when they are finally allowed to return to the city, and then being hit with massive layoffs if they are lucky enough to find a job in the casualized work zone of part-time positions (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as late as October 2005, 500,000 of the 800,000 people evacuated had yet to return home; see Bacon 2005a). Those who do manage to return to their eviscerated homes, and take a close look at the fine print of their hurricane damage insurance policies, will notice that the policies cover only wind damage, not water or flooding. So the policies that they paid into in good faith will be virtually useless for many. But for those fortunate enough to have escaped to Texas, well, we have words of consolation from former First Lady Barbara Bush. After visiting the Astrodome stadium in Houston, Texas, where thousands of evacuees from New Orleans and other affected areas were being housed, Barbara Bush chucked prior to exclaiming: “So many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them… . What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. Almost everyone I’ve talked to says: ‘We’re going to move to Houston’” (Parry 2005). This was subtle racism, to be sure, but journalist reports of black inner-city residents and white suburban residents offered a disturbing contrast: There was … a more subtle racism at work in much of the coverage of the actions taken by whites and African-Americans after the hurricane … the response of the poor black victims was consistently portrayed as at best selfish, and at worst antisocial and criminal. Commentators were much more generous in their assessment of non-blacks. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (9/1/05) and the Pittsburg Post-Gazette (9/13/05), for instance, portrayed residents and business owners from Matarie, Louisiana, a mostly white suburb of New Orleans, as grateful, enterprising and generous. (Bacon 2005b, 15) We’re not so sure, however, that the actions of the residents of the mostly white suburb of Gretna could be described as “grateful, enterprising and generous” as they forcibly turned away evacuees, sending them back by bus into the city, and firing warning shots in the air. This seems more like the surfacing of Jim Crow’s ugly head than the actions of Mayberry’s Aunt Bee. And the policy force was behaving anything like Andy Taylor and Barney Fife. Jacqueline Bacon (2005b) notes, “[why] is turning one’s neighbors away when they are

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80  •  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo in need—even physically threatening them—not deemed selfish, antisocial behavior?” (15). How many survivors of Katrina were mercifully oblivious to the possible connection between global warming and the intensity of the hurricane, the racial politics of why a preventative infrastructure was not in place, the blaming of the victims because they did not heed the warning to evacuate, the all out war by conservatives against the poor who they felt were kept poor by liberal programs in the first place, and the high-stakes politics swirling around them in the national arena unleashed by the federal system of “dual authority” established by the U.S. Constitution incorporating both national and state sovereignty? How, centuries later, this recycled quarrel over the division between state and national power would impact the politics of disaster relief was something few could have imagined. A major hurricane in New Orleans had been listed as one of the most likely major catastrophes to strike the United States, but what occurred when the hurricane struck was as shocking as the hurricane itself. Much of the equipment (high-water vehicles, refueling tankers, and generators) that would have been used to help New Orleans were already deployed in Iraq to help slaughter the Iraqi resistance to the occupation. Instead of being used to help the people of the United States during a time of crisis, these men, women, and machines were conscripted into the service of President Bush’s bloody war for oil, which has brought about a free-market “democracy”—a malediction that some Iraqi leaders have described as a worse situation than the rule of Saddam. Noam Chomsky noted, Bush funding cuts in 2004 compelled the Army Corps of Engineers to reduce flood-control work sharply, including badly needed strengthening of the levees that protected New Orleans. Bush’s 2005 budget called for another serious reduction—a specialty of Bush-administration timing, much like the proposed sharp cut in security for public transportation right before the London bombings in July 2005. (Chomsky 2005) Just six days after Katrina hit, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans (Community Labor United) stood resolute and emboldened, demanding that a committee of affected evacuees “actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans” (Klein 2005). Concerned that a pack of corporate hyenas would descend onto the area and use federal relief funds to “replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in gentrified New Orleans,” Community Labor United refused to have its citizens victimized twice, neither instance of which could be attributed to a sacrosanct act of God or the result of minor bureaucratic mismanagement. The citizens claimed rights to the land they once inhabited. As Naomi Klein (2005) observed:

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Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail  •  81 It’s a radical concept: the $10.5 billion released by [C]ongress and the $500 million raised by private charities doesn’t actually belong to the relief agencies or the government; it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as “underprivileged anyway” just got very rich. Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, reconstruction efforts in the devastated area have not actualized the hopes of the people, and we are witnessing, yet again, a return to profit over people in cases where the afflicted expect capitalism’s ardent supporters to at least powder their faces with a bit of humanity. Shortly after the dead calm, the Bush administration declared the region a Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone, an ominous designation at best, indicative of the very same policies put into effect immediately following the fall of Baghdad and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Measures to support the Republican agendas included “suspending rules that require payment of prevailing wages by federal contractors and providing displaced schoolchildren with vouchers—another underhanded blow at the public school system. They included lifting environmental restrictions, ‘waiving the estate tax for deaths in the storm-affected states’—a great boon for the population fleeing New Orleans slums—and in general making it clear once again that cynicism knows no bounds” (Chomsky 2005). The Davis Bacon Act’s protection for workers’ wages (a statute that hails as far back as 1931, and mandates payment of prevailing wages on federally funded construction projects), which the Bush gang had suspended, was reinstated only after the AFL-CIO and many community groups organized massive protests throughout the region and the threat of a congressional vote prompted Bush to back down. Similar protests from labor groups have emerged following the Department of Homeland Security’s easing of sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers, unleashing yet another fierce firestorm in the hurricane’s wake. As a result, the big fat cats of enterprise—Halliburton; Kellogg, Brown and Root; and Bechtel—have cashed in on cheap and oftentimes free immigrant labor. Untold numbers of immigrant laborers are being stiffed, going weeks without pay. Nonpayment of wages is a violation of federal law, but when it affects workers rendered invisible because of their immigration status, no one seems to pay much attention. The politics of barbarism wrought by a racialized nationalism and backlash against undocumented workers is most definitely affecting Latinos now doing reconstruction on the Gulf Coast, and they might also inflame existing racial divisions. According to David Bacon (2005a), the racial fault lines of immigration politics threaten to pit Latinos against Blacks, and migrant laborers against community residents hoping to return to their homes. Community organizations, labor and

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82  •  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo civil rights advocates can all find common ground in a reconstruction plan that puts the needs of people first. But flood-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana could also become a window into a different future, in which poor communities with little economic power fight each other over jobs. Anti-immigrant politicians and common citizens alike are quick to blame immigrant workers for exploiting reconstruction efforts in the washed-out region, for cheating the poor and unemployed residents of New Orleans and Biloxi from the much needed opportunity to work, and for changing the racial, cultural, and economic demographic landscape of the area. And yet while the United States eagerly accepted assistance in the form of military engineers, doctors, and nurses from a Mexican military convoy—the first Mexican military unit to operate on U.S. soil since 1846—dozens of displaced Mexican immigrants from Katrina’s wake seeking shelter in the safe confines of church shelters have been deported with nothing more to show for their extended stay in the land of freedom and economic success than the haggard and fetid water-soaked clothes on their backs. The steady flow of people-swapping taking place across states and the United States–Mexico border can be perplexing to some. As U.S. border control agents steadfastly hunt down displaced immigrants and shoo them out of the country, hundreds of others from bordering states and Mexico are making their way to the GO (Gulf Opportunity Zone) zone. Within this context, immigrant laborers are conceptualized as actively responding to environmental forces and maximizing their individual interests, a view that fails to recognize the state’s role in creating and re-creating the conditions for immigrant labor (Burawoy 1976). Proposed guest worker programs very likely will exploit immigrant labor and force wages down, and communities of color will be forced to compete with each other, sharpening existing race and class inequalities. In an attempt to rationalize the Bush Administration’s guest worker program and immigration policy, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove justified the Bush Administration’s guest worker program and immigration policy at a luncheon by saying, “I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.” I am sure that Mexican migrant workers don’t want their sons or daughters to have to pick tomatoes, either. Or make beds for Bush’s “have mores”, or cluster bomb “evil-doers” in Iraq and other places where the empire and its corporate elite decides to strike back at enemies of its financial and geopolitical strategic interests. American Enterprise Institute researchers Kathryn G. Newmark and Veronique de Rugy (2006) celebrate the entrepreneurial opportunities that Katrina has created for the capitalist overhaul of education. A $20.9 million grant from the federal No Child Left Behind charter school program, combined with assaults on the teachers union, can do wonders in bringing about the

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Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail  •  83 neoliberal wet dream of a private sector takeover of public education. When proposed tax-free zones for businesses and school vouchers for students take effect, conditions that further enable the exploitation of the poor will have intensified. Our understanding of Hurricane Katrina needs to be situated within the disciplinary practices of capital and its process of valorization through unsustainable capital-fueled growth and development, overproduction, resource depletion, and ecosystem destabilization and destruction within the capitalist marketplace. We cannot shift our focus away from capitalism’s devastating consequences for the ecosphere as well as the global division of labor and its racialized social relations. Depletion of nonrenewable resources, disruption of natural cycles, and waste and pollution are intrinsically connected to capitalist relations of production, which in turn have their differential impacts on populations in terms of race and gender. Capitalists accept collateral damage as part of the overall process, and whether it happens to be the deaths of thousands of human beings or ecodestructivity that leads to the elimination of large clusters of biospheres does not really seem to matter to the Masters of Capital—as long as this collateral damage has a minimal effect on the lives of the transnational capitalist class. The current ecological crisis and crisis of capitalism brought on by fossil-fuel shortage has led to resource wars, geopolitical conflicts and unilateral invasions, and the deliberate sacrifice of African American communities and other communities of color within the United States who are disproportionately cut loose in times of political, ecological, or so-called natural disasters. Continued assaults on the life-sustaining natural processes and resources all of us depend upon can be expected as long as capital’s law of value is not challenged. In the case of New Orleans, the wetlands, for example, were not effective in flood control because they had lost their protection and became casualties of the logic of capitalist accumulation. The wetlands, which provide a buffer against storm surge, are depleting at a rate of about 25 miles per year; since the 1930s Louisiana has lost nearly 2,000 square miles of wetlands, losing about the equivalent of a football field every 38 minutes. We need to extend Marx’s “relentless criticism of everything existing” not only to the failure of the Bush administration to respond to Hurricane Katrina but also to the capitalist system itself, of which the Bush administration is but one manifestation—albeit one of the most repugnant examples of a “rogue nation” in recent history. Whether the rebuilding of New Orleans will follow the classic capitalist pattern of increased wealth for the few and misery for the majority is still yet to be determined. One of the challenges of critical educators is to make the interconnectedness among capitalism, ecosystem destruction, and the racialization of the exploitation of human labor more transparent and less seemingly inevitable, and to find ways of bringing about a socialist alternative. In

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84  •  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo this regard, the tragedy of Katrina offers us an important pedagogical opportunity to initiate change not only in the case of New Orleans, but beyond the reach of our national borders. Note An extended version of this chapter appears in Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, 7(2): 1–17 (2007).

References ABC News. (2007). White House Red-Faced Over Rove Immigration Remark. February 2. Retrieved on February 11 from: http://blogs.abcnews.com/political­ radar/2007/02/white_house_red.html. Bacon, David. 2005a. Divided we fall. Truthout/Perspective, http://www.truthout.org/ docs_2005/printer_112305D.shtml (accessed December 10, 2005). Bacon, Jacqueline. 2005b. Saying what they’ve been thinking. Extra! December, 13–15. Blum, Bill. 2005. Some things you need to know before the world ends. The AntiEmpire Report, September 5, http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer25.htm (accessed December 10, 2005). Brown, Jody and Allie Martin. 2005. New Orleans residents: God’s mercy evident in Katrina’s wake. AgapePress, September 2, http://headlines.agapepress.org/ archive/9/22005b.asp (accessed December 14, 2005). Burawoy, Michael. 1976. The functions and reproduction of migrant labor: Comparative material from Southern Africa and the United States. American Journal of Sociology 81(5): 1050–1087. Chomsky, Noam. 2005. Wanted a leader for America. Khaleej Times, October 5, http:// www.chomsky.info/articles/20051005.htm (accessed December 10, 2005). Cooperman, Alan. 2005. Some say natural catastrophe was “divine judgment.” Houston Chronicle, http://www.chron.com/cs/csa/printstory.mpl/nation/3338642 (accessed December 14, 2005). Henry, Paget. 2004. Whiteness and Africana phenomenology. In What white looks like: African-American philosophers on the whiteness question, ed. George Yancy, 195–209. New York and London: Routledge. Klein, Naomi. 2005. Let the people rebuild New Orleans. The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050926/klein (accessed December 14, 2005). McLaren, Peter. 2005. Capitalists and conquerors. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Newmark, Kathryn and Veronique De Rugy. 2006. Hope after Katrina. Education Next, 6(4), pp. 12–21. Parry, Ryan. 2005. Bush: They were underprivileged, so this is working very well for them, Mirror.co.uk., September 7, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objecti d=15938967&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=so-many-of-the-peoplehere-were-underprivileged-anyway--so-this-is-working-very-well-for-them---name_page.html (accessed December 10, 2005). Warrick, Joby, Spencer S. Hsu, and Ann Hull. 2005. Blanco releases Katrina records: La. governor seeks to “set the record straight,”’ Washington Post Staff Writers, Sunday, December 4, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/12/03/AR2005120301480.html (accessed December 10, 2005).

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Katrina and the Banshee’s Wail  •  85 Watkins, Kevin. 2005. Human development report. http://hdr.undp.org/reports/ global/2005/ (accessed December 10, 2005). Weisberg, Jacob. 2005. Beyond spin: The propaganda presidency of George W. Bush, Slate, December 7, http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=2131768&nav/ tap1 (accessed December 10, 2005). Yassin, Jaime Omar. 2005. Demonizing the victims of Katrina. Extra! November/ December, 9–12.

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4

Feasting on Disaster

Urban School Policy, Globalization, and the Politics of Disaster Pauline Lipman interviewed by Kenneth J. Saltman

Kenneth: I’m excited about the opportunity to interview you on this topic, so I want to start by asking you what “the politics of disaster” means to you in the context of your work on urban school policy and globalization. Pauline: I’ve been studying the relationship between the neoliberal reconstruction of cities and urban education policy with a particular focus on disinvestment, reinvestment, and the racialized politics of place. I think that the notion of the politics of disaster is a very useful way to think about what’s actually happened and is happening to cities in the context of neoliberalism and the assault on people of color. It is also useful in terms of talking about school policy. So, although I haven’t actually used the language of “the politics of disaster” in my work, I think that much of what you’re trying to get at in this book relates to the work that I’ve been doing. So in terms of cities, I think that the political economy of disaster captures David Harvey’s formulation of the spatial fix—the creative destruction and reconstruction of the built environment as a means of solving the structural crises of capitalism. Capital disinvests in, devalues the built environment of cities, production facilities, housing, places of consumption, and then when it is sufficiently devalued to become a lucrative investment again, reinvests in it. This is a really powerful way to think about the politics of disaster being visited on urban areas. And, that’s a central piece of the context that I’ve been working on when thinking about what’s happening to cities in terms of gentrification, displacement, and containment of people of color. When we think about disaster in that sense, it’s of course not natural disaster, but it’s human-made disasters that are systematic and that are part of a system that produces disaster in the interest of profit. In the case of Chicago, this is dramatically reflected in the disinvestment in public housing to the 87

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88  •  Pauline Lipman interviewed by Kenneth J. Saltman point of being uninhabitable, and then the destruction of 19,000 units of public housing and the displacement of the thousands of people who lived there. But disinvestment, devaluing, and selective reinvestment is also exemplified by what has happened and is happening to schools in the city. In terms of schools and my work on urban school policy, I think that the politics of disaster is a very helpful framework for thinking about education policy despite the many struggles by parents, teachers, students, and community members for improvements in urban education. Definitely, there were some steps toward greater equity as a result of struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. But schools, like other social spheres, have been systematically disinvested in by the state. We have schools in Chicago, for example, that have been systematically disinvested in and are situated within communities that have experienced similar disinvestment. In fact these schools serve people whose every aspect of life (housing, community infrastructure, education, health care, social services, neighborhood environment) has been systematically disinvested in by the state and by capital. Having done this the state, in collaboration with capital, institutes neoliberal education accountability policies, which require everyone to meet the same standards and be tested by the same tests. Many schools are unable to meet these standards because of this historical disinvestment, which is a product of racial oppression and the drive for profit. This process opens them up, then, for reinvestment the same way that New Orleans is now ripe for reinvestment. Kenneth: Some might respond to you by saying that, “Well, what’s happening isn’t a conspiracy. There’s no conspiracy going on.” Is there a conspiracy going on? On some level, is there not a conspiracy going on? How is it that we need to understand that? Pauline: I think that’s a really good question, and it’s a question I get asked a lot when I talk about my recent work. I think it’s complex—it sounds like a conspiracy, yet conspiracy is too simple an explanation. I think in fact it is both/and. It’s not a conspiracy in the sense that this process is driven by the logic of capital and the logic of structural racism and oppression of people of color. It is in the interest of a system driven by capital accumulation to disinvest and reinvest. This is larger than the individual motivations or machinations of particular finance capitalists or real estate investors. We are talking about a systematic process of accumulating capital. It is a set of social relations and embedded ideologies and practices. On the other hand, gentrification and the displacement and containment of low-income, working-class people of color is also

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Feasting on Disaster  •  89 calculated, in the sense that neoliberalism is an explicit economic, social, political, and ideological project. There is a particular neoliberal agenda, and there are social actors who set out to implement its policies quite consciously. Moreover, the economic and social marginalization of people of color, particularly African Americans in Chicago, is embedded in and reproduced by economic and social policy in the city (zoning ordinances, economic development priorities, and school policy, for example). And the regulation and containment of communities of color is the product of a pervasive ideology of white supremacy. One that intersects with the spatial reconstruction of the city. So, although everyone involved is not participating in a conspiracy, there are explicit agendas. We have the Commercial Club of Chicago, for example, which is an explicit social actor. It’s a very conscious social actor. The Commercial Club is an organization of the CEOs of leading corporate and financial organizations, corporate law firms, corporate philanthropies, and public officials in the city. It has a long history and an aggressive recent history of playing an active and interventionist role in shaping public policy. The Commercial Club produces policy papers that actually promote the politics of feasting on disaster, even though they’re couched in the language of trying to help “minority” children and improving the economic climate of the city for everyone. And in the context of neoliberalism, their agenda of downtown development, bringing the middle class back to the city, providing public subsidies for developers, and dispersing low-income people of color becomes “the only alternative.” So I think we have people at all levels of the school system and city government who participate in this. There are those who have a conscious agenda, and there are those who are influenced by the hegemonic ideologies and policies of neoliberalism and racism, and there is the logic of capital and system of racial oppression. Kenneth: How do you understand the relationship between local trends, such as Renaissance 2010, and national trends, such as No Child Left Behind, as well as global trends? Pauline: Well, on a global scale this trend is apparent. To use David Harvey’s framework of accumulation by dispossession, clearly neoliberal policies are about turning everything over to the market and essentially dissolving a whole set of post–World War II social and economic relations. The result is the massive displacement of people, destruction of the environment, impoverishment and imisseration, and intensification of the oppression of women and children

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90  •  Pauline Lipman interviewed by Kenneth J. Saltman and indigenous peoples. So that’s a global politics of disaster in the interest of capital accumulation. NAFTA is a clear example. We can also think of the new imperialism led by the U.S. drive for global geopolitical domination and the intensified militarization of the world as part of the global politics of disaster. I think NCLB [No Child Left Behind] is a clear example of private interests reaping benefits from disinvestment in the public sphere, particularly in communities of color. The ground for the NCLB accountability system was laid by a history of failing to invest in the material and intellectual resources necessary for students to flourish in schools, as well as the failure to take advantage of the cultural, social, and intellectual resources possessed by communities of color in particular. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a retrenchment of the gains won through struggles in the 1960s and 1970s for cultural representation and more equitable redistribution of resources. The Reagan, Bush, Clinton years of retrenchment coupled with the overall economic and cultural assault on urban communities of color in particular, set up their schools for failure under NCLB. Now NCLB is appropriating the language of equity to institute an accountability system which opens the way to privatization of public education. It already has accomplished this in terms of for-profit supplemental education services and the national wave of charter school development. Kenneth: Which is in part about dismantling public schooling. Am I right? Pauline: Which is about dismantling public schooling. Renaissance 2010 in Chicago is a prime example. I should explain that Renaissance 2010 is an education plan that was proposed by the Commercial Club of Chicago in its June 2003 report titled Left Behind. The Commercial Club spent much of that report talking about Chicago’s test scores being essentially flat and that something needed to be done. Their proposal was to open one hundred new schools, mostly as charter schools. In that report the Commercial Club said it would prefer vouchers, but the political climate in the state is not right for vouchers so therefore, the report proposes expanding charter schools. The Commercial Club is really calling for the dismantling of public education in the city. In fact, the report argues that the problem with public education is that it is a monopoly that should be broken by opening up schools to the market. There are six hundred public schools in Chicago, some of them are very small, but one hundred schools would be one-sixth of the system privatized. A year later, in June 2004, Mayor Daley announced Renaissance 2010 at an event sponsored by the Commercial Club, and that plan

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Feasting on Disaster  •  91 essentially follows the blueprint of the Commercial Club, closing 60-70 schools and opening 100 new schools. The schools that are being closed are mostly located in African American low-income communities, except for a couple in racially and ethnically mixed low-income areas. All the areas are either sites of some of the most intense gentrification in the city or areas that are in the initial stages of gentrification. Closing schools and then reopening them later as new schools with no guarantee that the children who formerly attended them will be able to return has the effect of pushing families out of the neighborhood. Moreover, the new schools being created are, in some cases, such as public Montessori schools, designed to appeal to new middle-class residents. So the Renaissance 2010 plan is actually linked to the politics of disaster related to housing and urban development in the city. Schools are being closed on the grounds that they were failing. Well, why were they failing? So we go back to this whole process of disinvestment. And Renaissance 2010 will gobble up part of the public school system for the private sector. It has been announced by the mayor and the CEO of Chicago Public Schools that this is the first step in transforming the school system. Kenneth: Do you see a reverse suburbanization going on in urban centers and is that the same as gentrification? I think this is an idea in talking with you that is a very important and original idea that you’ve noticed. Could you speak to that? Pauline: There is, on a global scale, a spatial reconfiguration and reconstruction of metropolitan regions. That’s a product of the respatialization of the economy under neoliberalism as the regulatory power of the nation-state is weakened in relation to the economy. Of course, we know that the state is not weaker when it comes to regulating the working class and poor people and securing the interests of capital, as in the case of NAFTA. But the respatialization of the economy has led to cities and metropolitan regions competing directly in the global economy including marketing downtown areas for upscale living. Moreover, leading cities like Chicago, which is attempting to be a first tier global city, are, as Saskia Sassen describes them, central nodes in the global economy. The growth of very high-paying jobs associated with global city functions is a factor drawing the middle-class and upper-middle-class professionals to the city in this process of reverse suburbanization. Cities are thus supporting the production of upscale housing, leisure zones, elite public schools, and so on to attract high-paid professionals who manipulate and manage leading-edge sectors of the global economy. This is coupled with the key role of gentrification as a pivotal sector of

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the neoliberal economy in urban areas generally. So the combination of gentrification and the drive for some cities to become global cities is actually making those cities magnets for high-paid workers in a process you are referring to as reverse suburbanization. But it’s actually more complex than that because of course the other piece of it is that low-income people are being pushed out of the city, particularly low-income African Americans, who are largely seen by capital as peripheral to the new economy. Reverse suburbanization is accompanied by a change in the whole suburban area itself. So you have back-office corporate offices in edge cities, such as Elgin Illinois outside Chicago, where professionals are being recruited, including immigrants. But then you also have very low-income suburbs with high concentrations of poverty, and there are a lot of sweatshops in those areas as well. Land is cheaper there and so new manufacturing is also being built there. Some of these areas are also attracting immigrants, so there is now transnational migration of labor directly to suburban areas. Using the U.S. Census, demographer William Frey found that in 1990 19 percent of the population in suburban areas were what he calls minorities, and in 2000 it was 27 percent. In fact African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color are the fastest growing populations in suburban areas. So the reverse suburbanization is actually part of a larger reconfiguration of the metro region as a space of social and economic inequality. Much right-wing policy has involved declaring urban public schools as disasters and then seizing them away from local control. How have you seen state takeovers of schooling and has No Child Left Behind followed a more local model? How do you understand the dynamic in relation to the legacies of antifederalism and federalism that informed the struggles over racial desegregation? Is that a clear question? It is. It’s a really hard question. And um … Can I … let me interrupt you here for just one second to clarify and say when I’m talking of, when I’m asking you about the seizures of urban schools I mean by both mayors, as in the case of Chicago, and by states, as in the case of— Jersey City. Sure … or Pennsylvania or, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana, even though that attempt at state takeover failed right before Hurricane Katrina. So the question is about the seizures of urban school districts by mayoralties as well as state legislatures and governors. And what’s involved in this, this kind of declaration of disaster area and seizure of so-called failed urban schools?

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Feasting on Disaster  •  93 Pauline: I have to say that I don’t completely understand that. I think that what’s interesting is related to the second part of your question, that during the 1960s in the struggle over desegregation, African Americans, Latinos, progressives who were fighting for desegregation of the schools as a way to improve education for African Americans and Latinos and Asians called on the state and demanded that the national state intervene against the white supremacy of local states. Here the state was called on to intervene on the side of racial justice. So that was the sort of role that the federal government was playing and it’s interesting when we think about the state taking over now— Kenneth: You mean the federal state? Pauline: The federal state, yes. No Child Left Behind mandates that if schools don’t make mandated adequate yearly progress gains, the state in fact has to take over or reconstitute school districts. The state actually has to step in. The federal government is not doing it, but they’re devolving that to the states. And then you have a situation like Chicago where the mayor took over the schools with the backing of the Commerical Club. What I think is interesting about that is that in the present situation, as you just pointed out, in fact what these takeovers mean is takeover and hand over. They take over and then hand over to the corporate sector. So in the case of Chicago, although the Commercial Club was not directly involved in the mayoral takeover, in fact, intentionally or not, it laid the groundwork for privatization of the school system. That’s what No Child Left Behind does too. It mandates that states intervene and one of the things that it supports is charter schools. Kenneth: Are these takeovers by cities and states in part about dismantling or weakening or destroying teachers unions to further facilitate these kinds of privatization schemes? Pauline: I’m glad you raised that because we haven’t been talking about that point and it is certainly key. Again, taking Chicago as an example, if you look at the report by the Commercial Club that was the blueprint for Renaissance 2010, it attributes failure in Chicago Public Schools to the Chicago Teachers Union, which makes it difficult, in their view, to fire bad teachers. They also attribute school failure to the meddling of parents through local school councils, which make schools “inefficient.” The report goes on to say its critique should in no way be taken as a critique of the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, or its other leadership, or the mayor. In the Chicago example, it’s clear that dismantling teachers unions is part of the takeover agenda.

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94  •  Pauline Lipman interviewed by Kenneth J. Saltman Juan Gonzalez, co-host of Democracy Now, in reference to Hurricane Katrina used the phrase “feasting on disaster.” Schools are a very clear instance of failing to provide the resources, failing to support the resources in the community, creating the conditions for schools to be facing real challenges, and then reaping the benefits of that disaster which the state and corporate interests created. Dismantling unions is a clear example of capital reaping benefits from disaster. Kenneth: You’ve opposed both the corporate influence on educational policy and the militarization of schools. Can you elaborate on this relationship with regard to Chicago schools? Pauline: I think that they are related but they also have a logic of their own. In Chicago, beginning with the mayor’s takeover of the Chicago Public Schools [CPS] in 1995, one of the practices that was enacted, in addition to setting up a centralized accountability system, was the creation of highly selective public college preparatory magnet schools, most of them in gentrified or gentrifying areas. This was quite explicitly to attract professionals, particularly whites, back to the city. But during that time CPS also created two public military high schools, and since then there have been two other public military high schools. There are also fourteen public military middle schools. All these schools are joint ventures between the Chicago Public Schools and the military. They are all located in black or Latino communities, except for the Admiral Rickover Naval Academy at Senn High School, which is in an immigrant and African American neighborhood. I would argue that those schools prod us to think about the intersection of the corporate agenda and the militarization agenda. I think they are for producing labor discipline, regulating and disciplining youth of color, and developing military recruits. Those are schools that will prepare students with the dispositions that, from the standpoint of capital, are necessary for a disciplined lowwage labor force. And in fact the Commercial Club of Chicago, in all its reports on economic development over the past twenty years, has consistently talked about the need for public schools to prepare a disciplined workforce. But the schools also are quite explicitly about disciplining youth of color, and they provide a cadre of military recruits who have already gone through years of premilitary training in middle and high school. This is the militarization agenda. Kenneth: You’ve heard me ask the question before, but what you’re talking about now raises a question about a central structural tension between capital’s need to reproduce the labor force with the use of

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Feasting on Disaster  •  95 schooling, teaching skills and know-how in ways that are ideologically compatible with a capitalist economy. Yet it seems as if the politics of disaster is about pillaging public schooling to privatize it, to commodify it, to commercialize it. And in many ways that dismantles the very reproductive apparatuses that are necessary for capitalist reproduction, or at least historically have been necessary for capitalist reproduction. Can you speak about that tension, maybe with regard to what you see playing out in Chicago or elsewhere? Pauline: I think that is a real tension, and I think it’s a central contradiction of neoliberalism because neoliberals promote disinvestment in social reproduction and turn social reproduction functions, from health care to housing to schooling, over to capital. But then what happens when there is no national policy that helps direct and steer social reproduction in ways ideologically and materially beneficial to capital? That has been a role that the nation state has played historically, to support social reproduction and to plan it strategically. Under neoliberalism, schooling just becomes another commodity. So will what happens in schools in fact serve the larger legitimation, capital accumulation, and knowledge production functions of schooling that have been essential to the maintenance of capitalism? I think that’s one of the central contradictions of neoliberalism. In fact, it’s perhaps unresolvable and potentially a point of real weakness. This is a point that has been made by Susan Robertson and Roger Dale in the U.K. as well. It’s also the case that as the state withdraws more and more from the public arena, from areas of social reproduction such as health care, childcare, and education, and as neoliberalism creates more pain and suffering and disinvestment and impoverishment, the need for social control is greater. And so one aspect of the politics of disaster is that it not only pillages the public sector but also institutes very strict measures of social control and social discipline to contain the inevitable resistance. That’s what we saw in New Orleans with martial law on the streets. The military schools also serve this function. On one hand they may help produce a disciplined labor force, but the more central function is social control. The language of social control surrounding the military schools makes this explicit. In Chicago it is about taking “unruly and dangerous youth” and turning them into disciplined citizens through military discipline. But of course there’s a third aspect, which is that the U.S. is engaged in a project of world empire, and people are not joining the military. It’s very difficult to get people to join the military,

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particularly African Americans, and these schools are a pipeline into the military. In my book Capitalizing on Disaster I looked at some of the language that the right has used in talking about Hurricane Katrina, and it’s fascinating because they endlessly described Hurricane Katrina as a “silver lining” in the storm. This was a phrase that I found earliest with Clint Bollick of the Alliance for School Choice and then it got endlessly replicated on television news and newspapers. And they created a disaster metaphor and painted disaster as a happy outcome, and it was a happy outcome because it was enabling a long-standing, decades-long privatization agenda. But the language in this case is just the tip of the iceberg. What we’re getting at here is the question of language, and the intersection of neoliberal language (business language like choice, efficiency, monopoly, competition, that has been so celebrated in the literature by privatization advocates) with disaster language, like failure, discipline, opportunity. In the case of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the company Alvarez and Marsal were brought in to do contracting work and they were described as “turnaround specialists,” through entrepreneurial language. Can you speak about this intersection and this language? I think it’s a really interesting point. What I was thinking about when you were talking was how racialized all of this is, and how we haven’t discussed that much. In the U.S., race plays a very important role in the neoliberal agenda, in the agenda of the right, and the politics of disaster. That is the central point around which all of that language revolves. What has really failed that’s embedded in that language is the people—the people are the failures. When we talk about the “failure” of urban schools it’s really the people in those schools that are constructed as the failures. When we talk about the “failure” of urban neighborhoods, it’s the people who are constructed as the failures, and in fact the solutions that are proposed, like Hope VI redevelopment projects, are justified by that pathologizing discourse. Public/private partnerships. Public/private partnerships, creating mixed-income communities, that’s explicitly about having middle-class role models for lowincome people of color. So it’s clear that the assumption is that it’s the people who’ve failed. That is somehow why their housing has failed. That is somehow why they don’t have jobs. That is why their schools are failing. So I think it is the notion that “we” have done everything “we” could to solve these problems and nothing has

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worked. And that’s why it’s a silver lining because now “we” can start with a clean slate. They use that language of the “clean slate” repeatedly in the literature in the right-wing think tanks. So what does a clean slate really mean? It means wiping out all the social policies that were won through bitter struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, that provide some modicum of social investment in communities and in people. And it means in many cases wiping out the people, just clearing out the people, whether it’s neighborhoods, whether it’s a whole city as in the case of New Orleans, or whether it’s the new schools being set up in New Orleans and in Chicago under Renaissance 2010. The language of discipline is about disciplining, in fact, people of color. And so this is a profoundly authoritarian discourse that is about people who need to be controlled, managed, moved, changed, disciplined. So we need turnaround specialists who can come in and change the conditions of either the communities where they’ve lived or the schools they have attended. I think that the core of all of that language is that it refers to people of color, primarily African Americans. There is no one else who could be so vilified, about whom this language could revolve in this country. This is dangerously fascistic. I agree. What kinds of policies could counter what you’re talking about here today? What should people be doing to affect these kinds of policies? I think that’s what many people are struggling to figure out. To continue with Chicago as an example, there has been a persistent struggle against Renaissance 2010 since it was leaked to the public in July 2004. I have been involved in that struggle, and people are very clear that it’s not enough simply to oppose this policy. We have to figure out what the alternatives are. How do we challenge this agenda in a way that puts forward a vision of what we want? I think that we are struggling with that. This is a really important question because a central ideological thrust of neoliberalism is the TINA [there is no alternative to the market] thesis, the sense that there is no alternative, the discourse of inevitability that surrounds neoliberalism. The dominant discourse in Chicago has been that if you’re against Renaissance 2010, you’re against change. So how do we fight it then? I have a few thoughts based on what’s actually happening. One is that the concrete, transformative practices that people are struggling to realize in schools and other educational sites provide an alternative vision of education, an alternative vision of society. These alternatives are strategically important in this period, both

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98  •  Pauline Lipman interviewed by Kenneth J. Saltman locally and globally because of the ideological force of the discourse of inevitability. One aspect of the period that we’re living in is that the globalization of neoliberalism, the U.S. military drive for world domination, the globalization of the politics of disaster have also produced a global social movement that is very diverse and multifaceted, and that makes connections that people did not see before. So while there is globalization from above, there is also globalization from below, globalization of social movements, and globalization of alternative agendas. So concrete practices in local areas have the potential to ripple out beyond the local area, not to be replicated but to be learned from, because even though the specifics are different, the social and economic dynamics are fundamentally not so different between Porto Allegre and Barcelona and Taiwan and Philadelphia and Delhi, for example. So the development of concrete alternative agendas on a local level can have global implications. We see some of that in the U.S. in national groupings, like NYCORE, a group of radical teachers in New York city that has developed curriculum around the politics of disaster, around Hurricane Katrina, that’s being used nationally. We see it in Chicago in the very beginning stages of the formation of new social justice high schools that are attempts to rethink education in a way that is not just personally transformative but socially transformative. We see it in critical participatory action research projects that are being documented. So transformative alternatives can challenge the dominant policies, strategically. I think studying, documenting, analyzing these alternatives is an important task for educational researchers in order to develop a liberatory program in education and other social arenas. A second thing we can do is learn from the global south, because some of the most advanced examples are located there. Projects such as the Citizen Schools in Porto Allegre are models that people around the world are learning from. They can help redefine the relationship between schooling and the struggle for economic and political democracy. Third, I think that a key element is building new solidarities and new alliances. We could say, well that’s always been essential, but in this period we actually have a real opportunity to do that broadly because the neoliberal politics of disaster cuts across so many social sectors. Renaissance 2010 undermines teachers and school employee unions. It eliminates local school councils, which are democratically elected governance bodies made up primarily of parents and community members. It affects low-income and working-class communities by supporting gentrification. It displaces

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Feasting on Disaster  •  99 students and impacts teachers in the schools that are receiving displaced students. And so we have in Chicago a coalition, perhaps fragile, but a coalition nonetheless, that is made up of all those social forces who would not have necessarily been working together before. It’s definitely across race and across community boundaries out of necessity. Building these solidarities is a very key piece. Finally, in schools, as in other arenas, we need a transformative discourse that can contend with the dominant framing of educational problems and solutions. In Chicago Mayor Daley, the Commercial Club, and the CEO of Chicago Public Schools have a program that instantiates their neoliberal educational discourse. Now of course they also have a powerful lock on the media, and political power in the mayor’s office, but they have control of the discourse. NCLB and Chicago’s accountability policies have shaped the discourse around personal responsibility, failure of schools in communities of color, and the need for centralized authorities to make “tough” decisions and take dramatic action to “turn around” dysfunctional schools/communities. This is a profoundly authoritarian discourse justified by the construction of social disasters. The struggle over the discourse around education, over what we mean by education, what its purpose is, and how that might be enacted is one that we have not developed on the ground, and that’s really central to challenge existing policies. Kenneth: So it sounds like the cultural politics involved in this, in imagining an alternative future, is central. Pauline: I think it’s central, but I think the practical politics of forming alliances is also central, and they are interrelated. There are real tensions and differences that are grounded in the specific realities of teachers, students, parents, communities of color, school reformers, unions, and so on. These have to be struggled over in the process of working together, but practical politics and cultural politics are both very important. In the end, there is a need for a political program for democratic, equitable, liberatory public education that can be a basis for a more unified struggle against the politics of disaster and that is part of a larger social justice movement.

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II

Disaster and Educational Policy

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5

Benign Neglect?

Drowning Yellow Buses, Racism, and Disinvestment in the City That Bush Forgot Kristen L. Buras

This chapter charts the history and interrogates the ideology of benign neglect, which has profoundly shaped educational disinvestment and state inaction in post-Katrina New Orleans. The ideological underpinnings of neglect are examined in two earlier periods of reconstruction in the United States—post–Civil War Reconstruction and the reconstruction initiated by the Civil Rights Movement. Conditions in New Orleans are explored as part of this history, with attention paid to both state neglect of African American communities and struggles over schooling in light of recent destruction, dislocation, and rebuilding. Whether rooted in post–Civil War rejection of government support for newly freed blacks, antiwelfare discourses in the mid-twentieth century, or postKatrina demands for a city cleansed of low-income communities of color, the ideology of benign neglect fuels conceptions of black cultural deficiency on which neoconservatism depends and criticisms of the activist state on which neoliberalism relies. New Orleans, it is ultimately argued, has become an experimental ground for racist right-wing policies that extend a legacy of infrastructural disinvestment—one that is criminal rather than benign. Six months after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, I walked through the French Quarter in New Orleans, the city where I was born and raised. It was empty and eerily quiet, even on Bourbon Street. I was on my way to meet Kalamu ya Salaam, an African American educator, poet, and former director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. During our visit, he shared with me a series of haiku that he had recently penned: dead dogs hang from trees bloated barges sit on the wrong side of levees

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104  •  Kristen L. Buras dumb pigeons have flown now it’s people’s turn to perch roasting atop roofs a caravan of yellow buses drowns because the mayor can’t drive official death counts exclude so-called looters shot on sight of their skin dry folk uptown hold their noses, rejecting wet people’s funky stank things that go bump in the night: your boat against a dead baby’s body a son returns, finds four month old bones wearing his missing mother’s dress1 Entitled “you can’t survive on salt water,” the poem provokes (or should provoke) us to ask a number of pointed questions. Why were people, especially low-income African American residents without the means to evacuate, left to perch on rooftops and to die? Why were white uptown folk high and dry, while a barge burst and the Industrial Canal poured into the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, which is downtown on lower ground? Why were school buses allowed to drown, and how might their forsaken, lifesaving potential shed light on state failure to support the daily education and immediate evacuation of poor urban youth and their families? What does it mean when powerful groups and government representatives dismiss “wet people’s funky stank” and ignore the barges, bones, and brutality that characterize a barely disguised attack on the survival of large segments of the African American community and other communities of color in New Orleans?2 Rather than answering the above questions by emphasizing ignorance, bureaucracy, a lack of government intent, or even forces of nature as adequate explanations for such destruction, it is imperative to recognize the following: What happened in New Orleans has a history—one that has much to do with a distorted conception of racial benevolence, an antipathy to particular forms of state intervention for fear of the consequences for already downtrodden

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Benign Neglect? •  105 groups, and a deep and sometimes unarticulated desire to sustain structures of class and racial inequality. During the period of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, for instance, one question that preoccupied southern whites was “Will the free Negro work?” Underlying this question was the belief that only force could ensure the disciplined labor of an otherwise “lazy” population.3 White power over blacks, in other words, was not only good for whites. It was “good” for blacks, and thus federal withdrawal of support for Reconstruction, which enabled the Old South to rise again, was presumably “good.” Although clearly the years following the Civil War represent a period that is distinct in significant ways from the present, consider the words of Gary DeMar, president of a Christian Right organization, just weeks after Hurricane Katrina: [Government] subsidies have led to the immobility of the poor, the breakup of the family, and dependency on government programs… . The poorest of the poor of New Orleans have been forced to leave the place they’ve called home and taken to cities where they may have to begin a new life… . Blacks migrated from the South in the 1920s… . Adversity led millions … to parts unknown to make a better life for themselves and their families. It can happen again. The evacuees, local governments, and Washington politicians have a choice. They can reengineer the same failed welfare policies that trapped and warehoused the poor in New Orleans, or they can advance a strategy of personal, family, social, and moral development. This is as good a time as any to dismantle the welfare state.4 Here again there is a sense that only force could inspire low-income African American families in New Orleans to break the alleged cycle of dependency on state subsidies. In this case, as before, government failure to protect the rights of blacks is recast in benevolent terms. African Americans have been given the opportunity to “make a better life for themselves.” What is clear is that neglect and inaction have long been government policy, even before attacks in recent decades on the welfare state, civil rights measures, and affirmative action policies targeting dispossessed groups. Considering the grossly inhumane and fatal episode that unfolded in New Orleans day after day without help, it should be equally clear that state inaction is a highly racialized strategy of genocidal proportions; sometimes its effects are immediate and at other times gradual, but its effects are real and not infrequently calculated. In this chapter I briefly analyze the ideological underpinnings of such inaction during two earlier periods of reconstruction within the United States— post–Civil War Reconstruction and the reconstruction associated with the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. Conditions in New Orleans before and after Katrina are analyzed as part of this history, with

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106  •  Kristen L. Buras special attention paid to the acceleration of struggles over schooling in light of recent destruction, dislocation, and “rebuilding.” Additionally, I underscore the efforts of traditionally subordinated communities in New Orleans to challenge state disinvestment. It is ultimately argued that New Orleans has become an experimental ground zero for elitist and racist right-wing policies that extend this legacy of neglect and infrastructural disinvestment, especially in public realms most significant to oppressed communities. Such negligence, I conclude, is not benign but criminal. Benign Neglect: A History in Three Parts Understanding the disaster that occurred (and continues to occur) in New Orleans requires us to think historically. There is something to be gained by examining the contours of reconstruction across eras and holding in focus simultaneously, for example, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the War on Poverty, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In the shadow of the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau was created, in part to assist recently emancipated blacks in obtaining access to land, organizing schools, and negotiating contracts as “free” laborers. W. E. B. Du Bois (1935) writes in Black Reconstruction in America: [The] labors of Hercules faced the Freedmen’s Bureau: to make as rapidly as possible a general survey of conditions and needs in every state and locality; to relieve immediate hunger and distress; to appoint … upwards of 900 bureau officials; to put the laborers to work at regular wage; to transport laborers, teachers, and officials; to furnish land … ; to open schools … ; to establish hospitals and guard health … ; to answer continuous and persistent criticism, North and South, black and white; to find funds to pay for all of this.5 At root, the bureau was confronted with the monumental task of responding to the upheaval and dislocation that resulted from war as well as both the destruction of preexisting infrastructure and the historic lack of government-supported infrastructure for African American advancement. From a distance, Du Bois’s description of the bureau might be read as a mandate for FEMA—both in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and for the years ahead. In words that resonate powerfully with crises in post-Katrina New Orleans— pressing concerns resulting from sudden displacement and long-term concerns about homes, schools, and the local economy—Du Bois emphasized that the “conditions facing the bureau were chaotic.” He explains: In every state many thousands were found without employment, without homes, without means of subsistence, crowding into towns and about military posts, where they hoped to find protection and supplies.

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Benign Neglect? •  107 The sudden collapse of the rebellion … was like an earthquake. It shook and shattered the whole previously existing social system.6 Like the earthquake of the Civil War detailed by Du Bois, Katrina (and way-too-late government-chartered buses) scattered hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians across the nation under similarly chaotic conditions. With the levee breaches, floodwaters, and wind moreover, much of the public infrastructure of New Orleans was likewise shattered, especially in communities of color in lower-lying areas of the city. Du Bois critiques the lack of appropriations for the bureau and the ultimate veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill (which would have extended the life of the agency) by President Andrew Johnson in 1866. Not without significance, he underscored the ideology that guided Johnson’s decision: “It was never intended that freedmen should be fed, clothed, educated, and sheltered by the United States. The idea upon which slaves were assisted to freedom was that they become a self-sustaining population.” 7 Despite the fact that enslaved black laborers had sustained colonial empire and nation for centuries without benefit and now faced hostile forces with few resources, such sentiments were widely held. Many northern whites did not support the use of public funds for such purposes, especially for such a population. “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” read a gubernatorial broadside in 1866, was “an agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the White Man” and had “cost the taxpayers of the nation at least twenty-five million dollars.” 8 Moreover, most southern whites attacked the bureau because it constituted a barrier to reestablishing the structure of racial power that prevailed before the war. In the end, state intervention—at least of a certain kind—was seen as counterproductive for formerly enslaved blacks whose alleged idle nature was only encouraged by government appropriations for African American infrastructure. Such wasted money was better spent on white infrastructure and its restoration than on forty acres, a mule, and a school for African Americans. According to this view, the withdrawal of government support for blacks was understood as beneficial to whites and blacks alike. Indeed, such withdrawal is what eventually enabled the Old South to “redeem” itself.9 In post-Katrina New Orleans, ironically, government failure to support particular residents’ right to return and to invest in (re)building public infrastructure has allowed not the rise of the Old South, but the birth of a “new” New Orleans—wealthy, white, and racially cleansed.10 With weakening federal commitment to Reconstruction, the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the attacks on the recently acknowledged rights of African Americans only advanced. Much like enduring hurricane-force wind and water with little protection, newly freed blacks were subjected to these violent elements, which often destroyed churches and schools—the infrastructure of the black community. The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson,

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108  •  Kristen L. Buras which solidified the legal apparatus of segregation, would ultimately require another era of racial reconstruction.11 The foundations of the second era of reconstruction were laid in intervening decades as African Americans mounted daily resistance to segregation and struggled to establish self-help organizations, maintain black schools and colleges, and build movements focused on civil rights and pan-African identity and power.12 These efforts bolstered the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century—the beginning of which is often marked by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional in the realm of public schooling. Yet here, too, such victories were undermined by government neglect and the reconstitution of racial discourses against state intervention on behalf of black communities. Thus, for example, the declaration that schools desegregate “with all deliberate speed” enabled racial apartheid to persist in education.13 Meanwhile, protesters challenging segregation in other social arenas were brutally attacked by white mobs and police with dogs, hoses, clubs, and bombs. Engaged in a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, protesters were prohibited by violent state troopers from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an episode known as Bloody Sunday.14 While particular fractions of the white community criticized such incidents and supported liberal state reform around voting and other civil rights, some came to believe that a different bridge should not have been crossed—that is, the move from civil rights to Black Power. The call for more radical reconstruction, whether through multicultural curricula, community control, affirmative action, or state reparations, evoked a strong reaction. For neoconservatives—a portion of them former leftists—the War on Poverty and efforts to realize the Great Society had gone too far, with state support only contributing to a vicious “cycle of dependency,” the “pathologies” of a black underclass, and a host of “unanticipated consequences.” 15 Central here is Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report in 1965 entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” In that report, Moynihan explains: The Negro situation is commonly perceived by whites in terms of the visible manifestations of discrimination and poverty… . It is more difficult, however, for whites to perceive the effect that three centuries of exploitation have had on the fabric of Negro society itself… . But here is where the true injury has occurred: unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little… . The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.16 In a private memo written to President Richard Nixon in 1970—one that was leaked to the press—Moynihan urged a policy of “benign neglect” on issues

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Benign Neglect? •  109 of racial inequality.17 As historian Robin D. G. Kelley explains, “Much of the white middle class agreed. They believed that African Americans received too many government handouts. They were tired of ‘paying the bill,’ especially now that racism had allegedly been eliminated by the Civil Rights movement.” 18 We cannot separate this longer history of reconstruction and the ideological undercurrents of benign neglect from what was occurring in pre-Katrina New Orleans, what occurred in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, and what is still occurring in post-Katrina New Orleans (and many other cities). In the 1970s, George Clinton wrote the song “Chocolate City” for Parliament, which went: “We didn’t get our forty acres and a mule, but we did get you.” 19 The “you” was urban America, where a number of cities were not only centers of black struggle, but also hubs of black culture and political leadership. When Mayor Ray Nagin declared in January 2006 that New Orleans was previously and should again be a “chocolate city,” the reaction from many whites (and a fraction of the black middle class) was hostile.20 Michael Eric Dyson has poignantly questioned, “Is the offense that [Nagin] said it was a black city, or that it is black?” 21 Clearly part of the “offense” was the seemingly open-ended nature of Nagin’s suggestion, which might encourage the return of poor African Americans. At the same time that Nagin called for restoring such a city, he also suggested that God was “upset at black America” and that Martin Luther King, if alive today, would say that less attention should be paid to “racists” and more to the black community “fixing ourselves first.” 22 In this way, Nagin embraced dominant discourses on black pathology and personal responsibility. When all is said and (not) done, New Orleans may be the poster child for benign neglect—a city where government abandonment of low-income African Americans inspired communal repentance with the assent of God and Martin Luther King. Conservative television figure Bill O’Reilly asserted that poor blacks were responsible for their demise, proclaiming: The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina should be taught in every American school: If you don’t get educated, if you don’t develop a skill and force yourself to work hard, you’ll most likely be poor. And sooner or later you’ll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help. Chances are, that help will not be quick in coming.23 Time and time again, notions of cultural deficiency, poverty, force, neglect, and benevolence are wedded to one another. Hence the comment of former First Lady Barbara Bush while visiting the Houston Astrodome where Katrina evacuees congregated: “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working out very well for them.” 24 Or this comment on the “culture of poverty” from WSB-AM radio commentator Neal Boortz:

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110  •  Kristen L. Buras What we saw in New Orleans was, in some part, the poor demonstrating the very behavior that made them poor in the first place, and the behavior that keeps them poor. We saw a complete and utter lack of self sufficiency… . It was as if they had no sense of responsibility for their own safety.25 Or this assault on state welfare for the poor from Pat Buchanan: With Katrina, “the idea that good intentions and government programs can build a Great Society was exposed as a fraud. After trillions of tax dollars for welfare, food stamps, public housing, job training, and education have poured out since 1965, poverty remains pandemic.” 26 These statements and their ideological roots in the past constitute a history of benign neglect that must be rendered visible if we are to fully understand government inaction in relation to communities of color in New Orleans (and ultimately in other cities). Recall now the explanations of disaster in New Orleans that I earlier mentioned—ignorance, bureaucracy, lack of intent, and nature. Alongside these explanations, ponder the record of informed neglect that I have discussed and consider the following. In 1998, Al Naomi, senior project manager of the Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans district, reported that if Hurricane Georges had hit New Orleans: “Our levees would not have protected us.” 27 In 2001, journalist Mark Fischetti reported in Scientific American, a widely circulated magazine: New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen… . If a big slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water… . Scientists at LSU [Louisiana State University] who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers predict that more than 100,000 people could die.28 Despite such knowledge—indeed, this danger has been recognized for centuries and more modernized assessments have been circulating for decades— the federal government nonetheless decreased funding for flood protection in New Orleans.29 More to the point, federal, state, and local governments failed to allocate sufficient resources and were inadequately prepared to secure the homeland from a known threat. There is more—much more, in fact—although here I can only provide a glimpse into the unspeakable tragedy that was allowed to unfold. Left to die in the heat and floodwaters of New Orleans without food, water, medical attention, shelter, or a means of escape, black residents attempted to leave the city on foot by crossing the Mississippi River Bridge. In an episode akin to the incident forty years earlier on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Gretna Police (who serve communities on the opposite side of the Mississippi River) neglected to provide assistance and instead prohibited residents from crossing, it has

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Benign Neglect? •  111 been reported, by pointing and firing guns.30 Meanwhile, members of FEMA and the military were staged at Zephyr Stadium in Metairie, a suburb in Jefferson Parish, where ice, water, food, and other supplies had been delivered in Katrina’s aftermath.31 Notably, Mayor Nagin testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security in February 2006 that desperately needed supplies remained largely undistributed to the suffering masses in the city: I was so flabbergasted. I mean, we were in New Orleans, we were struggling… . And when I flew out to Zephyr Stadium to the Saints’ facility, I got off the helicopter, just started walking around and I was awestruck. We had been requesting portable lights for the Superdome because people were standing that night all over—to make a long story short, there were rolls of portable lights. We knew sanitary conditions were so poor, we wanted Port-O-Lets. They had Port-O-Lets all around the Saints’ facility. I stopped and talked to a gentleman who was a firefighter from California. I said, “Man, it’s great for you to be here. You just got here, right?” He said, “No, we drove all night, 36 hours. We’ve been sitting waiting around for the orders to go into the city to help.” Then we went into the facility because I hadn’t eaten. And it was like the Ritz Carlton… . They had water, they had ice, they had everything.32 In short, the federal government delayed—no, withheld—basic and lifesustaining supplies from citizens for whom every second was literally hell on earth. Such sitting and waiting cost lives and traumatized a generation that will never forget the eternity they spent in the streets of New Orleans amid hunger, thirst, devastation, and death, while their government maintained a makeshift Ritz Carlton in the suburbs. For those who would excuse this failure to act based on stories of looting and urban degeneration—stories that were skewed, inaccurate, and that criminalized entire communities of color— it appears a fair amount of suburban looting was actually occurring.33 Zephyr Stadium sought payment for damages (at least $800,000) from state insurance, FEMA, and private insurance officials for televisions and refrigerators stolen from box office suites, missing sports equipment, ransacked team offices, and “doors pried open with crowbars.” 34 To deflect criticism from the federal response, President George W. Bush and others in his administration initially denied immediate knowledge of the disaster unfolding in New Orleans and sought to evade testimony by claiming executive privilege.35 We now know with certainty from Congressional investigations that high-ranking officials were fully aware of the threat and the catastrophe. The day before Katrina made landfall, for example, Bush had a video teleconference from his Crawford, Texas ranch with emergency management officials, including Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, who warned Bush of impending disaster.36 Before Katrina reached New Orleans, moreover, the Department of Homeland Security had issued a

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112  •  Kristen L. Buras report “predicting that [the hurricane] could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded.” 37 FEMA official Marty Bahamonde witnessed conditions firsthand by helicopter on August 29—the day Katrina struck—and spoke directly to Michael Brown, the director of FEMA at the time, who notified the White House of the dire circumstances that same night.38 Yet three days later on August 31, the response from Brown’s press secretary to an email from Bahamonde, who indicated that thousands were without food and water and that “estimates are many will die within hours,” was the following: Mr. Brown needed more time to eat dinner in Baton Rouge, where “restaurants are getting busy.” 39 This kind of informed—even murderous—disengagement, whether prior to or after Katrina, filtered all the way down to the local level, where the city had finished developing only 10 percent of its evacuation plan and the New Orleans Police Department had “just three small boats and no food, water, or fuel to supply its emergency workers.” 40 Perhaps most significant, negligence has been ongoing. This cannot be explained by either the immediacy of overwhelming circumstances or unanticipated bureaucratic challenges. In his State of the Union Address in early February 2006, almost six months after Katrina, Bush dedicated only 51 seconds of an hour-long speech to New Orleans, which remained in a state of utter devastation.41 At that time—the same time during which I met with Salaam—only 33 percent of New Orleanians had managed to return (144,000 out of 463,000) and only 14 percent of the public schools had reopened (literally a handful, with only a few seats remaining open at times). Some 200,000 homes remained destroyed, with whole neighborhoods—entire regions— totally lifeless and unpopulated. Thirty million cubic yards of debris remained uncollected.42 Levees were weaker than before Katrina, with 169 of 350 miles of the system compromised, damaged, or destroyed.43 Only about 13 percent of the House of Representatives and 30 percent of the Senate had actually visited post-Katrina New Orleans by February, with later visits occurring due to the activism of Women of the Storm—a group that chartered a plane to Washington, DC to personally deliver invitations to members of Congress.44 In the end, Bush’s defense budget for 2007 alone called for $439 billion, while the funding for 90,000 square miles of Gulf Coast destruction tallied only $80 to $100 billion.45 A colleague, Donna Vukelich, and I interviewed Salaam in May 2006 for a community-funded radio station in Madison, Wisconsin, and asked him to respond to claims that the city had been rebuilt. President Bush had briefly visited New Orleans in January—a visit that brought him directly from the airport to a private meeting in the wealthy Garden District. Emerging from behind closed doors to make comment, Bush spoke of New Orleans indicating, “It’s a heck of a place to bring your family. It’s a great place to find some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun. And I’m glad you

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Benign Neglect? •  113 got your infrastructure back up on its feet.” 46 In response to Bush’s statement, Salaam stressed: [That] represents the view of the ruling class. And as far as the ruling class is concerned, New Orleans is fully functional. The areas of the city that did not flood, which were mainly those directly adjacent to the river, for the most part are controlled by people with money.47 Indeed, there are no plans to open or even rebuild traditional public housing in New Orleans. The public schools, which were almost wholly African American, have been downsized and deregulated. The Gulf Opportunity Zone presents few opportunities for former residents, especially the poor, while neoliberal and neoconservative policies and racialized neglect engineer a “clean slate” for wealthy white elites (and black conservative leaders aligned with them). This is not to romanticize the condition of public schooling and public housing in pre-Katrina New Orleans, but rather to underscore the lack of any plan whatsoever to either restore the crumbling infrastructure that existed or to involve displaced residents in the process of envisioning and building a more just New Orleans now.48 New Orleans is sometimes known as the “city that care forgot.” In the past, this referred to the easygoing and informal milieu that some believed the city represented. This attribution has acquired an entirely new meaning in postKatrina New Orleans. For many, it describes a government that has failed to care for the citizens on whose backs the city was historically, economically, and culturally built. It is most disturbing to hear conservative modernizers49 argue that such failure actually serves the interests of the very groups it would appear to harm, especially low-income African Americans. Whether embodied in postwar rhetoric that jettisoned Reconstruction, antiwelfare discourses that increasingly took shape as the Civil Rights Movement reconstructed civil society and the state, or post-Katrina demands that call for rebuilding a city cleansed of low-income communities of color, the ideology of benign neglect may partly explain—certainly not justify—particular forms of government inaction in the immediate aftermath of and period since Katrina. Perhaps most relevant, this legacy fuels conceptions of black cultural deficiency on which neoconservatism depends and criticisms of the social democratic state on which neoliberalism relies. Public disinvestment, as we have seen, is closely tied to cultural misrecognition and racial demonization for its legitimacy. With this history in mind, I turn briefly to the arena of schooling and highlight a few poignant examples of how benign neglect and disinvestment have shaped education in pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans.50

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114  •  Kristen L. Buras Schooling and Disinvestment in New Orleans When I returned to New Orleans nearly a half year after Katrina, I surveyed different areas of the city. Mardi Gras parades were rolling uptown along St. Charles Avenue, where “dry folk” live and go to school. Much of the Ninth Ward, which had one of the highest rates of black working-class homeownership in the nation, resembled a wasteland with houses washed from foundations and signs at school entryways deformed and rusted.51 Historically, whites in New Orleans have commanded higher ground along the natural levee produced by the Mississippi River, where elevations are as high as fifteen feet above sea level. The majority of blacks lived downtown and in the back swamps—low-lying areas where the government was lax in providing flood protection. In the 1950s, a special pump enabled outlying areas to be drained and suburban construction to proceed. With Brown v. Board of Education decided during this same period, working-class and middle-class whites fled to the suburbs to avoid school desegregation, thus depleting the tax base for urban schools where low-income African Americans remained.52 Long deprived of state resources—my involvement in youth programs a decade before Katrina revealed deplorable educational conditions—80 percent of New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) were further damaged or destroyed by the hurricane.53 The Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education assumed control of the NOPS in November 2005, with 107 of 128 schools placed in a state-run Recovery School District.54 Some 4,000 public school teachers were also placed on “disaster leave” without pay and then fired when the district terminated all but 61 of its 7,000 employees in January; during this same period, 90 percent of public library staff was fired.55 Only a handful of schools had reopened by January (approximately 17), spurring complaints and lawsuits regarding the inadequate number of seats in the schools and the refusal to enroll certain groups of students.56 As one youth explained in New Orleans: “I don’t go to school. My mama tried to put us in school and nobody would take us. We might go back to Dallas.” 57 As students and teachers were being dismissed, the federal government had already begun providing millions of dollars for the establishment of charter schools in the city. Along these lines, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission appointed by Nagin issued a report at the beginning of 2006 that advocated “world-class public education” in the form of an all-charter school district. Groups of charter schools, it suggested, should be coordinated by “network managers” and principals charged with oversight of budgets, hiring, and firing. Interestingly, the report called for more equitable funding of schools, but failed to specify the financial mechanisms and restructuring needed to accomplish this.58 Decentralization, we are told, serves the interests of all urban families. Yet teachers from Oakland Public School District

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Benign Neglect? •  115 in California, a district consulted by the commission, issued warnings from the grassroots: Our public schools were taken over [by the state] 2½ years ago… . In that time we have witnessed the use of charter schools as a wedge to destroy the institution of public education… . Randolph Ward [the stateappointed administrator] has already spoken in Louisiana to civic leaders about the wonders of privatization… . The number of public school students has fallen from 51,000 to 41,000 since Ward took over… . He has laid off clericals, teachers, and school safety officers. Under Ward, libraries have been eliminated in nearly all middle schools and several high schools… . [Many of the charter schools] screen their applications and often do not even follow state law.59 Whereas pre-Katrina New Orleans had 117 public schools serving 63,000 students, the school system is now only a shadow of itself with 53 schools—31 of them operating as charters under the control of some 13 different entities— and 24,000 students.60 On August 5, 2006, just two weeks before the start of the academic year, parents were invited to the New Orleans Arena where information was provided by schools planning to open in the city—many of them new charters with little information, although hopes and promises were readily available.61 Sorely needed financial resources were wasted as schools spent “thousands of dollars in newspaper and radio ads,” with one school expending $30,000 on its “outreach budget” to recruit students. The city paper urged, “Parents trying to maneuver the maze of public schools in post-Katrina New Orleans would do well to start with a new premise: Think of yourselves as consumers in a brand new marketplace.” 62 That marketplace, however, is not so new, as deregulation, privatization, and state disinvestment have led to increasing levels of segregation and inequality elsewhere—patterns surely to be repeated in a system that has been “shaken and shattered” (to use Du Bois’s words) by a catastrophic event.63 As one New Orleans student put it, “The worst part of it all is that the public officials—both elected and hired—who are supposed to be looking out for my education have failed me even worse than the ones who abandoned me in the Superdome.” 64 In reality, members of the African American community have been given very little choice in the unprecedented neoliberal education experiment occurring in New Orleans. Lower Ninth Ward residents and activists from the Common Ground Collective confronted police in an effort to enter and repair the Martin Luther King Elementary School for Science and Technology for the upcoming academic year, because the state did not intend to reopen its doors until 2008. King sat under 15 feet of water after the levee breached along the Industrial Canal.65 It is crucial that disaster not allow a history of educational struggle to be likewise submerged and forgotten.66 The school first

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116  •  Kristen L. Buras opened in 1995 after a decade of community activism. It boasted a faculty in which 90 percent of the teachers had more than 20 years of experience. It dramatically improved test scores, attendance, and dropout rates, but it “never sorted students or shied away from those who offered the greatest challenges.” 67 Despite frequent requests from the Orleans Parish School Board to become a magnet school, principal Doris Hicks instead opted to run a school for all children in the community. In post-Katrina New Orleans, “King’s staff is the only grassroots organization” that survived negotiation of the charter school process, as “every other group that has won a charter from the state since Katrina contracted with an outside school management company.” 68 On September 6, families were nonetheless holding protest signs that read “Open Our School” because the building promised by the state—the school is unable to open at its original Lower Ninth Ward campus—was not ready, although school was supposed to begin on August 17. Indeed, the Recovery School District announced that five schools would delay opening due to incomplete renovations, three schools would relocate miles away for at least several weeks, and five others would stagger attendance times.69 A month later, many students were still without teachers, books, buildings, and school buses.70 The “labors of Hercules” may again face the state, but neoliberal experimentation will do little to engender inclusive, well-resourced, visionary schools. Drowning buses are much more than a symbol of what King and other schools in New Orleans will endure as state disinvestment intensifies. Alvarez and Marshal, a private firm hired to “turn around” the New Orleans Public Schools before the storm, advertised a flooded New Orleans school bus on eBay for $9,000 in an attempt to “raise revenue for the … cash-starved district.” The ad read, “Exclusive limited offer. Own a piece of history.” 71 It is most tragic that opening the doors of any urban public school system should require the commodification of disaster and protests by schoolchildren and their parents. We are repetitively told that such communities do not need state resources—they need only self-discipline and the discipline of the market to improve the conditions of their lives. This is proclaimed in New Orleans as well as in Houston, a city where displaced black New Orleanians have been called “FEMA rats” by racist locals, and where school leaders now responsible for educating children of color from New Orleans “hope that the strict discipline policies, which require students to wear uniforms, walk in straight lines and complete homework every night, will help students cope.” 72 The director of the Terrorism and Disaster Center of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network warns that “coddling children [from New Orleans] who misbehave in class could make it more difficult for them to return to normality.” 73 As we have seen, the idea that coddling causes misbehavior and pathology has a history—one that continues in post-Katrina New Orleans and elsewhere to the detriment of traditionally marginalized communities.

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Benign Neglect? •  117 Negligence: Benign or Criminal? Such neglect is hardly benign—it is criminal. Katheryn Russell-Brown explains it this way: “‘Crime’ is generally defined as an act (or failure to act) that violates local, state, federal, or international law. Applying this definition to Katrina provides us with a fresh opportunity to reconsider how we ‘see’ crime and justice.” She goes on to outline a number of events that potentially constitute criminal acts, such as: Denial of access, by law enforcement officials, to hundreds of fleeing New Orleans residents who sought entry onto a public bridge (hate crime, false imprisonment) Delay in the search and rescue efforts for hurricane victims (negligence, wrongful death) Failure to construct an adequate levee system … in a city that, according to all indicators, would face a deadly hurricane (negligence, wrongful death) Inadequate federal strategy and funding for handling millions of displaced hurricane residents (negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent infliction of emotional distress) Adoption of a New Orleans rebuilding plan that allows for substantial rebuilding in most areas except the Lower Ninth Ward (negligence, unlawful taking)74 Russell-Brown is most insightful when she concludes: The effort to identify those liable for Katrina’s harms is more than just symbolic. Prosecutions targeting those responsible for the poor planning and execution of disaster relief would send a clear message that the wide-scale offenses committed against Katrina victims, mostly black and poor, did not escape notice… . The failure to recognize an offense because of the victim’s race and class is symptomatic of racial ajustice—a system that has selective vision when it comes to what constitutes crime and harm.75 In a similar vein, Adrien Katherine Wing reveals the ways in which state action and inaction in relation to Katrina violate binding international treaties, including the International Convention on the Elimination of Race Discrimination. She also demonstrates the relevance of an important but currently nonbinding document—the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement—and reveals myriad human rights violations perpetrated by the United States government.76

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118  •  Kristen L. Buras I have attempted both to chart the history and to interrogate the ideology of benign neglect, which has mightily and tragically influenced who has access to house and home, cultural respect and education, dignity and protection, life and limb. We must think in more complicated terms about the exercise of power, which often depends, ironically, on a refusal to act. There has not been adequate recognition of what I will call the shadow state—that is, all of the actions the state could have taken but did not take. Herein is the key to understanding disaster fully materialized and justice never actualized. Notes







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1. Kalamu ya Salaam, “You Can’t Survive on Salt Water: Seven Haiku for Old Orleans,” in The End of Forever: Post-Katrina Poetry from New Orleans, ed. K. Y. Salaam, R. Kemp, and K. Brown-Robinson (New Orleans, LA: Runagate Multimedia, in press). 2. In this chapter I focus on African Americans historically and in pre- and postKatrina New Orleans. See Kristen L. Buras, Reconstruction, Race, and Resistance in Post-Katrina New Orleans: Can a City School the Nation? (New York: Routledge, forthcoming), for a more comprehensive discussion of the ways in which an array of communities have been affected (e.g., Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans East, migrant laborers rebuilding the city). Also see Grace Kao, “Where are the Asian and Hispanic Victims of Katrina? A Metaphor for Invisible Minorities in Contemporary Racial Discourse,” Du Bois Review 3 (spring 2006): 223–231. 3. Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 58. 4. Gary DeMar, “Katrina’s Potential Silver Lining” (American Vision, 2005), http://www.american vision.org (accessed September 22, 2005). 5. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: The Free Press, 1935), 225. 6. Ibid., 224 (my italics). 7. Ibid., 276. 8. Foner and Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction, 81. 9. See Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. 10. Kristen L. Buras, “Katrina’s Early Landfall: Exclusionary Politics Behind the Restoration of New Orleans,” Z Magazine, December 2005, 26–31. 11. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); Foner and Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction; Albion W. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand: A Novel of the South during Reconstruction (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1879/1991). 12. Cynthia Stokes Brown, ed., Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement: Ready from Within (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996); Robin D. G. Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem”: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South, Journal of American History, 80 (1993): 75–112; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993); Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

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Benign Neglect? •  119 13. Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 14. Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991). 15. Kristen L. Buras, “Neoconservatism,” in Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: The Effects of School Reform in a Neoliberal/Neoconservative Age, ed. David Gabbard (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007); Kristen L. Buras, Rightist Multiculturalism: Core Lessons on Neoconservative School Reform (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). 16. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” in The Essential Neoconservative Reader, ed. Mark Gerson (New York: AddisonWesley Publishing, 1996), 30–36. 17. Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982). 18. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 5. 19. Ibid., 6. 20. Ray Nagin, “Transcript of Nagin’s Speech,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola. com (January 16, 2006); Nagin’s declaration was not without contradiction, especially considering the way in which his policies and his Bring New Orleans Back Commission undermine the interests of poor and working-class African Americans. See Buras, “Katrina’s Early Landfall.” 21. Michael Eric Dyson in Jonathan Tilove, “Author Paints Hurricane as Clarion Call on Poverty,” Times-Picayune, 2, http://www.nola.com (February 12, 2006). 22. Nagin, “Transcript.” 23. Bill O’Reilly in Ian McFeat, “Washing Away: A Trial Activity Asks Who’s Guilty for Katrina’s Horrors,” Rethinking Schools 20 (winter 2005): 63–66 (my italics). 24. Barbara Bush in J. Lessenberry, “America Discovers Its Underclass,” Metro Times-Detroit, http://www.metrotimes.com (September 14, 2005), 1 (my italics). 25. Neal Boortz in CNN, Katrina: State of Emergency (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005), 117. 26. Pat Buchanan in CNN, Katrina: State of Emergency, 117. 27. Al Naomi in Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places, 2003), 165. 28. Mark Fischetti in Lewis, New Orleans, 166. 29. B. Marshall, “Centuries of Missteps Sealed City’s Fate,” Times-Picayune, http:// www.nola.com (August 26, 2006); Burl Noggle, Working with History: The Historical Records Survey in Louisiana and the Nation, 1936–1942 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1988); D. Sirota, “Hurricanes Rain on Bush’s Tax Cut Parade,” http://www.inthesetimes.com (September 27, 2005). 30. M. Brown, “Grand Jury, Federal Authorities Look into Bridge Blockade,” TimesPicayune, http://www.nola.com (August 4, 2006); R. Nelson, “ACLU Seeks Probe of Bridge Incident,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (February 22, 2006). 31. E. Anderson, “Z’s Seek Pay for Damaged Stadium,” Times-Picayune, October 22, 2005, D-2.

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120  •  Kristen L. Buras 32. Suburban Emergency Management Project, “Testimony of Mayor Ray Nagin before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security,” http://www.semp.us/ biots/biot_326.html (February 1, 2006): 21–22. 33. Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado, “Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?” in After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina, ed. David Dante Troutt (New York: The New Press, 2006), 87–110. 34. Anderson, “Z’s Seek Pay.” 35. E. Lipton, “White House Knew of Levee’s Failure on Night of Storm,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com (February 10, 2006); B. Walsh, “Nagin Takes Heat on Capitol Hill,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (February 2, 2006). 36. CNN, Katrina; T. Lush, “For Forecasting Chief, No Joy in Being Right,” St. Petersburg Times, http://www.sptimes.com (August 30, 2005). 37. Lipton, “White House Knew,” 4–5. 38. Ibid. 39. Associated Press, “FEMA Official Says Boss Ignored Warnings,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com (October 20, 2005): 2. 40. Lipton, “White House Knew,” 2–3. In criticizing city government and its failure to mobilize resources, it is imperative to also keep in mind the financial crises endemic to urban centers across the nation and the role played by white flight, corporate tax breaks, and consistent state and federal cutbacks in social programs in generating these crises. 41. WWL-TV Editorial Board, “State of the Union Lacking for Katrina Victims,” http://www.wwltv.com (February 1, 2006). 42. S. S. Hsu, “Post-Katrina Promises Unfulfilled,” Washington Post, nttp://www. washingtonpost.com (January 28, 2006); K. Randall, “City Residents Denounce ‘Bring New Orleans Back’ Rebuilding Plan,” World Socialist website, http:// www.wsws.org (January 14, 2006); S. Ritea, “Public Schools Are Near Capacity,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (January 20, 2006); Washington Post, “Update: New Orleans,” http://www.washingtonpost.com (February 9, 2006). 43. B. Marshall, “Are We Safe?” in Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (March 25, 2006). 44. L. Williams, “Storming D.C.,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (January 26, 2006); B. Alpert, “House Bigwigs Coming to New Orleans,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (February 18, 2006). 45. L. C. Baldor, “Bush to Request $439.3B Defense Budget,” Associated Press, http:// apnews.myway.com (February 2, 2006); WWL-TV, “Where Has the $85 Billion in Congressional Money Gone?” http://www.wwltv.com (February 1, 2006). 46. Randall, “City Residents Denounce,” 2. 47. Kalamu ya Salaam on Access Hour: Post-Katrina New Orleans, co-hosts Kristen L. Buras and Donna Vukelich (Madison, WI, WORT, May 8, 2006). 48. Buras, “Katrina’s Early Landfall.” 49. Michael W. Apple, Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001); Michael W. Apple and Kristen L. Buras, eds., The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles (New York: Routledge, 2006). 50 For a more comprehensive discussion, see Buras, Reconstruction, Race, and Resistance.

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Benign Neglect? •  121 51. Common Ground, “New Orleans in Numbers: Pre- and Post-Hurricane Katrina Snapshot” (New Orleans, LA: Common Ground, 2006). 52. Lewis, New Orleans. 53. S. Ritea, “Nagin’s Schools Panel Issues Reforms,” Times Picayune, http://www. nola.com (January 18, 2006). 54. S. Ritea, “Orleans Plans Two Alternative Schools.” Times-Picayune, http://www. nola.com (August 9, 2006). 55. Amy Goodman, “All New Orleans Public Schools Teachers Fired, Millions in Federal Aid Channeled to Private Charter Schools,” http://www.democracynow.org (June 20, 2006); S. Saulny, “Students Return to Big Changes in New Orleans,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com (January 4, 2006); T. Tetlow, “Libraries Will Be a Haven Once Again,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola. com (April 5, 2006). 56. S. Ritea, “Public Schools Are Near Capacity,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola. com (January 20, 2006); S. Ritea, “Lawsuit Precedes News of School Openings,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (January 31, 2006). 57. Center for Community Change, “Dismantling a Community” (New Orleans, LA: Center for Community Change, 2006), 24. 58. Bring New Orleans Back Commission, “Rebuilding and Transforming: A Plan for World-Class Public Education in New Orleans” (New Orleans, LA: Bring New Orleans Back Commission, 2006). 59. Steven Miller and Jack Gerson, “Charter Schools: A Warning from Oakland,” Rebuilding Louisiana Coalition, http://www.rebuildinglouisianacoalition.org (February 1, 2006). 60. Center for Community Change, “Dismantling”; S. Ritea, “Schools Chief Hits Ground Running,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (September 11, 2006); S. Ritea, “Problems Plague N.O. School Recovery,” Times-Picayune, http://www. nola.com (October 9, 2006). 61. S. Ritea, “Schools to Help Confused Parents,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola. com (August 5, 2006). 62. S. Ritea, “Public Schools Compete for Kids,” Times Picayune, http://www.nola. com (August 12, 2006). 63. Kristen L. Buras and Michael W. Apple, “School Choice, Neoliberal Promises, and Unpromising Evidence,” Educational Policy 19 (2005): 550–564. 64. Maria Hernandez in Center for Community Change, “Dismantling,” 20. 65. J. Pope, “Volunteers Start Cleaning School in Lower 9th Ward,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (March 23, 2006). 66. For example, see Apple and Buras, eds., The Subaltern Speak. 67. S. Ritea, “The Dream Team,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (August 1, 2006): 3. 68. Ibid., 2. 69. S. Ritea, “Five Charter School Openings Delayed,” Times-Picayune, http://www. nola.com (September 6, 2006). 70. Ritea, “Problems Plague.” 71. S. Ritea, “No Flood of Cash Offers Yet for Waterlogged School Bus,” TimesPicayune, http://www.nola.com (March 29, 2006). 72. T. Lee, “Haven and Hell,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com (February 12, 2006): 4; J. Spencer and J. Radcliffe, “Katrina’s Aftermath: Learning to Cope with Stress,” Houston Chronicle, http://www.houstonchronicle.com (October 18, 2005): 2.

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122  •  Kristen L. Buras 73. Spencer and Radcliffe, “Katrina’s Aftermath,” 2. 74. Katheryn Russell-Brown, “While Visions of Deviance Danced in Their Heads,” in Troutt, ed., After the Storm, 114–115. 75. Ibid., 117–118. 76. Adrien Katherine Wing, “From Wrongs to Rights: Hurricane Katrina from a Global Perspective,” in Troutt, ed., After the Storm.

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6

The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind

Standardization and Deracialization Breed Inequality

Enora R. Brown

This chapter discusses the neoliberal policies of NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and anti-affirmative action and the national mantras that accompany them—standardization and deracialization. It considers their impact on the pedagogical practices and educative relationships within two schools—one public school on probation under NCLB in a working-class African American community and the other an independent, integrated school in an upscale university community. It addresses the long-term disastrous consequences of NCLB and color-blind ideology in fostering the regressive resegregation of unequal education, and the proliferation of a politics of resentment and national reification of individual rights over social responsibility. Finally, it addresses the convergent aims of these discursive policies and practices, which bolster corporate capital, divisively antagonize the working class along racial and ethnic lines, and further polarize racialized class hierarchies. This chapter highlights the pervasive need for educators as civic participants to oppose policies manifested in local classrooms or the global arena that block the path toward critical education and the realization of the democratic strivings of youth and adults. Introduction The Cascadian Subduction Zone is the site of a pending natural disaster. This 680-mile fault in the earth’s crust is a silent harbinger of a seismic shift to befall the Pacific Northwest, in northern California, Oregon, Washington State, and mid-Vancouver Island by 2100.1 At this long sloping fault, two of the earth’s tectonic plates, the Juan de Fuca oceanic and North American continental plates have collided, thrusting one in a locked position under the other.2 This silent slip, quiet subduction, and deformed position of the oceanic plate under 123

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124  •  Enora R. Brown the force of the continental plate generate intense friction, compression, and internal strain. Inexorably, the inaudible cumulation of stored energy will erupt causing the abrupt violent disengagement of the two plates and their propulsion into a cataclysmic 9.0 earthquake on the Richter scale and farreaching tsunamis from North America to Asia.3 This massive interplate earthquake provides a metaphoric image of two convergent plates on the social landscape—the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) with its attendant discourse of standardization, and the upsurge in anti-affirmative litigation shrouded in deracialization discourse or color-blind ideology. The discordant orchestration of these neoliberal policies and their discursive justifications will quietly and persistently wreak havoc on the poor and racially marginalized in schools and society, while providing support for the further accumulation of corporate capital. This will not be a disaster in the classical sense—a sudden cataclysmic event that swiftly brings great damage, loss, destruction, and misfortune to the populace. Rather, the synchronous plates of No Child Left Behind and standardization on the one hand, and anti-affirmative action legislation and deracialization on the other, complementarily serve to dismantle and restructure public education, further relegating poor youth, especially African Americans and Latinos, to the social and economic margins of society. These convergent policies represent a seismic shift in the social landscape, generating corrosive, long-standing reverberative effects in society, no less devastating or far-reaching than single event catastrophes like the Cascadian disasters of Katrina, 9/11, or the war in Iraq. This chapter discusses the neoliberal policies of NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and anti-affirmative action and the national mantras that accompany them—standardization and deracialization. It considers their impact on the pedagogical practices and educative relationships within two schools—one public school on probation under NCLB in a working-class African American community and the other an independent, integrated school in an upscale university community. It addresses the long-term disastrous consequences of NCLB and color-blind ideology in fostering the regressive resegregation of unequal education, and the proliferation of a politics of resentment and national reification of individual rights over social responsibility. Finally, it addresses the convergent aims of these discursive policies and practices, which bolster corporate capital, divisively antagonize the working class along racial and ethnic lines, and further polarize racialized class hierarchies. This chapter highlights the pervasive need for educators as civic participants to oppose policies manifested in local classrooms or the global arena that block the path toward critical education and the realization of the democratic strivings of youth and adults.

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The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind  •  125 No Child Left Behind to the Rescue or Independent Disaster? In America, no child should be left behind. Every child should be educated to his or her full potential. . . . Schools must have clear measurable goals focused on basic skills and essential knowledge. . . . Annual testing in every grade gives teachers, parents and policymakers the information they need to ensure that children will reach academic success. . . . Schools that improve achievement will be rewarded. Failure will be sanctioned. . . . Students in persistently low-performing schools will be given choice (Bush, 2001, 2–3, 7).4 The No Child Left Behind Act ushered in a new chapter in the history of reform in public education, with potential consequences that are unparalleled since the advent of universal public education in the late 1800s. President Bush’s opening quote suggests that federal mandates of standardization, accountability, and flexible funding are the means to close the achievement gap by 2014, which has been widening across the racial and class divide since 1994, to insure quality education for all children, especially poor children across racial and ethnic lines, and to provide greater freedom of “choice” for parents in the education of their children.5 These mandates are to be fulfilled through annual standardized testing of students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8, the incursion of corrective actions against nonperforming schools, for example, school closings and reduced funding, and the promotion of school vouchers and privately run charter schools available in the educational marketplace. Ostensibly, No Child Left Behind will rescue children from failing schools, push them to attain high national standards, and hold educators, school districts, and parents accountable for their success and failure. Bush asserts in the Foreword, “these reforms express my deep belief in our public schools and their mission to build the mind and character of every child, from every background, in every part of America.” 6 Despite the president’s assertion, considerable critique of the intentions, consequences, and structural function of NCLB surrounded its adoption in 2002. With neoliberalism on the rise as it accompanies the shift from an industrial to globalized technological economy, skepticism surrounded the espoused beneficence of this educational reform, and the underlying political and corporate interests served by standardized, privatized education.7 Major concerns surfaced about the erosion of public education, the inattention to the history of socioeconomic inequalities and low achievement, and the far-reaching, deleterious effects of NCLB on the life trajectories of the poor children and youth of color that it was purported to serve. There was vociferous criticism of NCLB’s promotion of regurgitative education that espoused rote learning, privileged lower-order thinking, equated standardized test scores with valid, reliable assessment of student learning, and undermined students’ ability to engage in higher-order thinking and exploratory analyses in knowledge

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126  •  Enora R. Brown construction across disciplines.8 After NCLB became law, these criticisms erupted into full-scale opposition to the haltingly uneven, ill-planned, and ill-funded implementation of the law and its erosion of public education. Once NCLB had moved from the chambers of the capitol to the nation’s classrooms, teachers, students, parents, and local school systems struggled for four years to sustain the education of youth amidst inadequate funding, scripted direct instruction for students’ test preparation, anxiety-producing pressure to raise test scores, and punitive sanctions against poor students of color, bilingual (limited English proficient) and special needs youth, and “nonperforming” schools who failed to elevate test scores. School districts’ implementing NCLB faced overwhelming problems. Poor communities of color have witnessed and opposed neighborhood school closings; increased violence with student dislocation and school mergers; funding cuts for probation-status schools; excisions of multidisciplinary curricula, such as the humanities, arts, and social and physical sciences, and rote test preparation in reading and math; inattention to ESL (English as a second language) and learning disabled students’ needs and increased test failure; increased class size; built-in failure to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements; rising dropout rates; and the deskilling and deintellectualization of teachers nationwide.9 The imposition of formulaic, rigid curricular programs, test-taking drills, and watered-down curricula produced the narcotizing effects of student and teacher burnout, manifested in rising dropout rates and teacher transfers from low-performing schools. Title I schools were bound to NCLB’s mandates and sanctions, and forced to accept military access to student information for recruitment, disproportionately targeting poor communities of color. In contrast, some wealthy white schools avoided penalties through state-negotiated policy changes, and avoided the intense pressure experienced by poor schools of color.10 The outcomes after four years are far from promising. Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project reports no significant increase in students’ academic proficiency; no closure of the achievement gap is evident in 2006 or probable by 2014, given the current trend in performance. A quarter of the nation’s schools in poor communities of color, almost 23,000, failed to reach AYP requirements, and over 10,000 schools were identified as in need of improvement, a step in the series of sanctions for school failure that culminate in the school’s privatization or placement in state receivership.11 In addition, the efficiency of tests in measuring progress has been challenged, as improved test scores seemed to reflect students’ familiarity with test taking rather than student gains in academic proficiency.12 In light of shifting trends in achievement prior to NCLB’s implementation, the improvements in test scores cannot be directly attributed to the high-stakes testing policy.13 Despite earlier assertions, NCLB has widened the achievement chasm, reduced educational quality and funding, and filled the coffers of curriculum and test publishers, tutoring entrepreneurs,

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The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind  •  127 education management organizations (EMOs), and business-turned-charterschool CEOs (chief executive officer). Though the quality of work and the ethical practices of EMOs and other corporate entities have been questioned, and poorly made, unreliable tests have made millions for investors, and racially and economically marginalized students and schools have been consigned to the barracks of probationary status and failure.14 In the face of this sobering reality, the report notes that the Bush administration has used flawed data that promotes misleading claims about NCLB’s success. As Gary Orfield states in the Foreword, “In Shakespearean terms, we’ve been experiencing a massive process ‘full of sound and fury,’ signifying nothing.” 15 Even fierce champions of NCLB recognized the failed achievement and problems of implementation. Though many Democrats and others did not challenge the underlying assumptions of NCLB or its role in restructuring education, they recommended revisions to the law, including growth models to assess student improvement versus the attainment of national grade norms, a psychology of encouragement for student and school performance versus the punitive culture of sanctions, and higher ceilings for non-English proficient and special needs students. They proposed strategies to increase student transfers and transportation to “high-performing” schools to make flexibility spending a reality.16 They sought funds to stem the tide of law suits against states for unfunded, mandated programs and services, and by 2006, 50 states had introduced legislation to reject all or part of NCLB.17 Even the CATO Institute, a right-wing bulwark of neoliberalism noted, “the NCLB statute is a reform strategy at war with itself. It virtually guarantees massive evasion of its own intent, ordering state education agencies to do things that they mostly don’t want to.” 18 Most disturbing is NCLB’s institutionalized promotion of school resegregation, bolstered by voluntary integration and growing opposition to affirmative action.19 Many white schools across the nation devised measures to exclude African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans from admission, in order to maintain their AYP, to avoid Title I status for student remediation, and to preserve their racial homogeneity.20 White flight and a new tier of college preparatory magnet schools, in predominantly in white neighborhoods, have siphoned off high-achieving students with high test scores, and the few magnet schools in communities of color also have few white students. In low-performing schools, dropouts have increased as low test scores and grade retentions have risen, and seasoned, dedicated teachers have transferred to affluent white schools or left the profession, as the demoralizing experience of NCLB has raised ethical questions. Thus, wealthy communities have drawn more experienced, well-paid teachers, leaving low-resourced schools in African American and Latino communities with many new, inexperienced teachers, commissioned to educate under the adverse conditions of NCLB. The result is the institutionalized resegregation of schools and relegation of

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128  •  Enora R. Brown working-class schools of color to probationary status on the social hierarchy’s bottom rung.21 By 2005, these glaring challenges precipitated Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s creation of online videos and fact sheets, such as How No Child Left Behind Benefits African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, to salvage the hemorrhaging support for NCLB.22 The fact sheets report that the test scores of students of color are “at an all time high” and the achievement gap is “at an all time low,” statements that blatantly contradict the research.23 Of course, President Bush declares, “It is working! It is here to stay,” an assertion that painfully mimics his call, “Stay the course!” in Iraq, despite abysmal failure and the unconscionable loss of human life, all in the name of democracy and in the service of capital. The rhetorical optimism in the face of abysmal failure is punctuated with the president’s 2007–2008 budget, which doggedly sustains NCLB with a few changes and less money, amplifying the failure and horrid conditions in schools that it creates. NCLB will be cut by $15 billion, only half of the amount promised for Title I was allotted, and overall funding for education will be cut by $2.1 billion. However, $100 million was found for a voucher program for private schools to advance the campaign for the state’s divestment in public education, offering schools up for privatization as fresh sites ripe for the creation of new capital markets.24 No Child Left Behind came to the rescue for neoliberalism, the state, and profit-seeking investors, and became an independent disaster for the masses of youth who deserve a quality education and for all who cherish equality. Underlying Assumptions and Ideological Supports for NCLB The avowed goal of No Child Left Behind, to ameliorate the racial disparity in students’ educational outcomes through standards, accountability, and flexible funding, is based on two implicit and dangerously flawed assumptions. First, it assumes that the persistent differential in the test scores and school performance among African American, Latino, and Native American students and white students, is a manifestation of the absence of a coherent instructional program and objective, fixed, high standards of assessment, rather than a symptom of a cumulative history of oppression and racial discrimination. This view equates the process of education with the method of assessment, replaces the critical construction of interdisciplinary knowledge with false measures of educational progress, and reduces the source of student outcomes to technical issues that are confined to individual schools and the privacy of classrooms, that is, poor instruction and lax measures of assessment. Secondly, it implies that sanctions are needed because teachers and administrators with low expectations of students of color (Bush’s notion of “soft racism”) have been lenient in their routine social promotion of youth to successive grades, and have lacked the moral fiber to demand that African American, Latino, and Native American students measure up to, and parents

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The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind  •  129 invest in, the same rigorous academic standards as their white counterparts.25 This assumption reduces the racial differential in achievement to an artifact of individual character or implies a manifestation of internalized cultural or racial malaise, that is, teacher (in)competence, student motivation, or families’ (dys)functional valuation of education. Though racial meanings pervade educative relationships, critical thought, not standards, is a solution. These assumptions undergird the imposition of rigorous standards, school surveillance, and sanctions to combat racial leniency, laziness, and the poor instructional practices that generate school failure. This narrow, skewed construction of the source of the racial achievement gap, positions this disparity as a private matter reflecting individuals’ relative normalcy as racialized beings, rather than as a symptom of sociohistorical relationships in society. The achievement gap among African American, Latino, Native American, and Europeans becomes a function of unclear curricular goals, poor instruction, student deficiencies, and teacher incompetence, unconnected to the exploitative legacies of slavery, colonization, and genocidal westward expansion, which have mutated into new forms of race and class inequality. By rendering mute the legacies of oppression and their organic link to present structures of inequality, the failure of the poor and students of color becomes a predicted default outcome, masked as the inherent flaws of these youths. This strategic omission makes the implementation of NCLB’s objective a quantifiable, race-neutral standards and progressive series of programmatic and financial sanctions—a logical and fair solution for all children, regardless of race, creed, or color. It holds individual educators and students responsible for their own teaching and learning, makes each school fiscally accountable for the education it provides, and gives parents the personal freedom to pursue their child’s education in the competitive marketplace of vouchers and charter schools. Despite the direct correlation between test scores and income, it does not give students of color or poor youth preferential treatment, but is indiscriminate in holding each child to the same performance standards as those who are racially privileged and wealthy. As a pillar of neoliberal policy, NCLB allows the state to abdicate its social responsibility for public education along with other social services, to transfer them to the private sector as sources of corporate investment, and to redefine democracy as individual freedom and responsibility in the marketplace. By failing to address the history of Jim Crow segregation, racial, ethnic, and language discrimination that created and sustains educational inequalities, it shifts the blame for the ever-widening racial achievement gap onto students, parents, and teachers, whose (in)competence, laziness, lack of motivation, leniency, and wise or poor educational choices are manifest in the standardized test scores of the children.26 The State Department’s secret reclassification and removal of over 55,000 pages of historical documents from public access since 1999 indicates their abdication of social responsibility and ability

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130  •  Enora R. Brown to “hide/rewrite” history.27 These practices enable the reduction of societyinduced inequalities to individual flaws, justifying the state’s abandonment of education as a social good, and its transfer of responsibility to the private realm of the individual, who deserves the sanctions for failure or privileges for success. Bush’s rhetorical vow for NCLB to end the “soft racism of low expectations,” places blame on individual teachers for the failure of students of color, while NCLB institutionalizes racism writ large, through high-stakes testing, resegregated schools, and sanctions against the marginalized youth who are demonized for their failure and thrust out of schools as dropouts into the reserve army of the unemployed, the few abysmally low-paying part-time jobs, the military, or the array of newly built supermax prisons. Advocacy for the primacy of the individual and the legitimacy of an achievement meritocracy serve a crucial function in supporting NCLB. Neoliberalism is grounded in and perpetuates the ideology of rank individualism, which spurned the entrepreneurial spirit endemic to early nineteenth-century capitalist expansion; it relies on and is legitimated by benevolent regimentation, a brand of compassionate conservatism, whose state-imposed corrective and constrictive measures are provided “for your own good,” and are marketed as purveyors of individual freedom and market choice. The discourses of standardization and deracialization are grounded in individualism and are forms of benevolent regimentation, which play a pivotal role in leveraging the public support for and accommodation to NCLB as it begins to restructure and privatize education. Standardization discourse is flanked by regulatory measures of accountability, which benevolently purport to enhance students’ academic proficiency and preparation for their future viability as free agents of labor in the workforce. Regulatory surveillance of standards constricts the mobility of youth within and across institutions, for example, grade promotion, tracking, choice of high school, position in the labor market. Standardization is imbued with an ideological commitment to meritocratic individualism and race-neutrality, which reveres the “objective” judgment of one’s ability on the basis of personal merit, sans the social assignations of race, ethnicity, or social class. Standardization is bolstered by colorblind ideology, which guides anti-affirmative action’s deracialization efforts to privatize race by removing race-conscious measures from the public sphere. The Silent Slip of Anti-Affirmative Action Deracialization policies at the national and state level take the form of antiaffirmative action initiatives, which began with the Bakke Case in 1978, thirteen short years after affirmative action legislation was passed in 1965, to be revisited by the Supreme Court in November 2006.28 Anti-affirmative action challenges efforts to redress a history of institutionalized social inequality against people of color and women through race- and gender-conscious measures, by promoting race neutrality under the guise of restoring, preserving,

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The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind  •  131 and protecting equality.29 Litigation and legislation efforts seek to end racial assignments that were designed to counter school segregation and compensatory measures to level and diversify the playing field in school admissions. Race-conscious measures are reconstructed as reverse racism, discrimination against whites, preferential treatment for the “undeserving,” and as social practices that lower standards and undermine the individual effort and the meritocratic ideals of the nation. The Human Genome Project’s groundbreaking confirmation that race is not a biological category is being used to usher in the denial of the significance of race as a social category that structures social inequality. The excision of race from national discourse is touted as a means to ensure color-blind equality for all, while rendering silent the pervasive ideological and institutional entrenchment of racism. Because affirmative action obviates the power of the test score, NCLB needs deracialization as a particular discourse on race to justify its dismissal of the history of oppression, which supports the achievement gap. Fueled by the backlash of a politics of resentment, “angry white men” and others resist the relinquishment of power and the cumulative material and social advantages of white privilege.30 This color-blind racism operates institutionally and relationally. Beneficently, color-blind ideology frees the individual to market her or his independent self, ostensibly unfettered by the social meanings of race. Its regulatory function is obscured by denying the social significance of race in positioning individuals in the social order. Deracialization is a powerful silent partner for standardization in national policy. It gives credibility to the “fairness” and objectivity of standardized testing and legitimates the awards or sanctions earned by individuals on the basis of personal merit. Unspoken, is the regulatory disregard for difference embodied in standards and de­racialization policies that codify the social, economic, and racial stratification existing in schools and other societal institutions. It frees the marketplace of revealing its preferences, while exercising them with fervor. Standardization and deracialization convert a history of structural relations of social inequality into indicators of individual merit and prowess or deficiency and incompetence. They undergird the aims of NCLB and anti-affirmative action efforts to institutionalize the primacy of individual race-neutral gain over responsible social commitment against economic and racial inequality. Ultimately, this denial of social inequality and construction of social ills as individual deficiencies serves the interests of corporate capital, paving the way toward the privatization of education and other social goods. Most insidious was Proposition 54, the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI), proposed by Ward Connerly, former University of California Regent proponent of Proposition 209. It would ban state and local government, educational institutions, contractors, and employers from classifying individuals by race, ethnicity, color, or national origin.31 This call for race privacy restricts the social meanings of race to the individual’s private life, and gives free reign in the

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132  •  Enora R. Brown public arena to the social dynamics of race that shape societal hierarchies. Under the guise of preventing the state’s racial profiling, the RPI would prevent the collection of data tracking patterns of discrimination. Touted as a step toward a color-blind society, it would blind the populace to the damaging effects of the elimination of affirmative action; aid, not prevent, the state from racial profiling; hide the entrenched, proliferate nature of the scourge of institutional racism; and eviscerate civil rights enforcement’s already weakened ability to prove the intentionality of racism in the public domain.32 Racial privacy bolsters notions of test score anonymity in the standards movement. It surfaced in the Department of Education’s proposal to change the counting of white students and youth of color in response to 2000 U.S. Census Bureau needs, including counting Latinos/as in a separate category, removing mixed-race children from a specific racial category, and questioning 4th graders to determine how they self-identify as Hispanic across five categories.33 This move facilitates the escalating process of pitting African Americans against Latinos in the race to acquire microscopic crumbs from the table of plenty, and constructing a favored minority and model minority in the workplace. Imposed arbitrary shifts in racial classifications are powerful tools in the numbers game of determining which Other is the majority, worthy of recognition, redress, or honorary white status.34 White privilege, which fuels whites’ politics of resentment, and the antagonism fueled among disenfranchised people of color, insures further division of the working class and an identity politics that supports the temporary ascendance of the reigning empire of global capitalism. Despite its temporary defeat on California’s 2003 ballot, the RPI represents the state’s relentless campaign to deracialize the public sphere. Racial privacy relies on essentialist, fixed notions of race, devoid of the social stigma or privilege embedded in these meaning-imbued racial categories and the strong social imperatives that promote individuals’ racial selfassignation, for example, the relative value of race and color. Racial privacy policy converges with the Bush administration’s concerted efforts to dismantle affirmative action’s race-conscious assignments, reinforcing the institutionalized privilege and normative affirmative action of whites, while obscuring the plunging position of youth of color within the social order. Color-blind ideology’s denial of race renders invisible the protracted devastation generated by neoliberalism’s NCLB, saving it from past and present structural explanations for the achievement gap and other social disparities. Deracialization relegates race to the private sphere of the individual, denying its significance in the social lives of individuals and the public arena of society’s institutional policies and practices. The twin plates of NCLB and anti-affirmative action, imbued with the ideological force of standardization and deracialization, pose as homogenizing policies for the common good. They deny and hide the deep structures

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The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind  •  133 of race-class inequality that undergird the achievement gap, mask de facto segregation of schools and gross funding disparities in education, and exacerbate race and class stratification in schools and society under the veil of equality. As standardization robs education of its intellectual rigor and power as a source of critical thought and change, it justifies students’ grade retention, school closings, and profitable school takeovers in predominantly African American and Latino poor communities by corporate investments in privatized education. Color-blind policy that deracializes the social terrain is a necessary handmaiden of standardization. It is based on the premise that social inequality and an even playing field have been achieved through the Civil Rights Movement, thereby attributing students’ success or failure to social Darwinist notions of survival of the fittest. Thus, the state and corporate sector’s public-private collusive partnership in the resegregation and class stratification of schools is unseen, and deepening disparities in education emerge as the “natural” outgrowth of students’ inherent abilities, differential motivations, and relative values. The hypnotizing refrain of democracy-asindividual-choice accompanies the benevolent regimentation of the standards movement, and the discourse of deracialization allows for the regressive silent slip of Cascadian proportions. Race, the fundamental pillar of capitalism in these United States, was founded on the extermination of the Native Americans, enslavement of African Americans, and the early colonization of Mexico and Puerto Rico. As such, it was and is pivotal to the molding of capitalism on North American soil, both in the past and present. Hence, the denial of race from the right and from some corners of the left poses an unparalleled threat to the struggle for economic and social equality in schools and in the society at large. The subtle but powerful impact of NCLB and its accompanying discourses are operative in the national arena, and their reproduction is revelatory as they are woven through and negotiated on the daily landscape of two divergent urban schools. NCLB: Standardization and Deracialization in Two Schools Two K–8 schools were the sites for an ethnographic inquiry into the significance of NCLB and standards and deracialization discourses: (1) Downerstown, a large working-class African American public school on probation under NCLB in a poor, pregentrified community, and (2) Upton, a small integrated, independent upper-middle-class school in an upscale university community. Downerstown’s integrated faculty serves Head Start preschool through 8th grade students in a poor, 100 percent African American community with a long history in civil rights, whose working-class families have struggled historically for their own and their children’s education. Downerstown receives Title I federal funds, must adhere to NCLB mandates for standardization and accountability, and has been on probation for five years.

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134  •  Enora R. Brown Upton’s shifting student body is approximately 65 percent African American, 30 percent European American, 3 percent Latino, and 2 percent Asian and Indian, is middle class to very wealthy, and all middle school teachers are European American middle class. Upton and the community have a history of progressive politics, and the school’s written policy against high-stakes testing is part of their educational philosophy. They secured Title I funds for ongoing programming, but are not bound by NCLB’s testing mandates and sanctions. Classroom observations; teacher, parent, student interviews; archival materials; and immersion in school life revealed interesting patterns in the two schools’ negotiation of NCLB and related discourses across race-class lines. Standardization Almost one-third of the Downerstown students have raised their test scores to or above the national average in reading and math. Despite unprecedented improvement, the school has not reached its required AYP, and mandatory restructuring is pending. The anticipated disruption from sanctions, for example, school closing, staffing overhaul and firings, and private charter school management, hangs heavy over the school and its classrooms. The welcoming, beleaguered staff strives to maintain morale and the school’s aim “to foster children’s academic and socio-emotional possibilities” in light of NCLB, and pressure on parents is felt as they admonish children to “pass the test” in early morning disciplinary meetings in the office. An atmosphere of tense regimentation and surveillance permeates the hallways and is embodied in the monitored curricula and in the constrained movement of uniformed students throughout the school. The principal stated, “This change has been very stressful, we have less money, and a big adjustment . . . just over the summer.” 35 The school was “adopted” by a major publisher, requiring that all curricular materials be provided by them, including teacher guides, and test preparation and tutorial materials. Their Board of Education contract forbids teachers to use any books except basal readers, prohibiting students’ reading choices and enjoyment, the foundation of literacy. A highly organized, energetic teacher fought valiantly against this absurd policy, unheard of in wealthy schools, to win the right for his students to read two books annually. Highly critical of high-stakes testing, he resists the narrowed didactic curricula and banking model of 2- to 30-minute mock tests. As students palpably chafe under the testing, he encourages them to think critically, enjoy cooperative learning, and take pride in their work stating, “These kids are smart, they can do it.” He opposes harsh racialized student discipline for infractions meriting support stating that it will destroy the student “for no reason.” 36 With few resources, his room is brimming with student work and enlivening materials that he has procured. His commitment and resistance embody his Freirian pedagogy of

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The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind  •  135 hope within an unnatural disaster.37 Downerstown exemplifies the immediate effects of privatization and standardization on school life and the projected effects of reducing social inequality to a test score on poor African American students’ life trajectories; simultaneously it provides a powerful example of one of many forms of resistance exercised by educators who are committed to quality education for all youth. Upton’s official statement against standardized testing parallels its opposition to tracking and commitment to promote creative, thoughtful, problem solvers. Their policy has shown signs of wear in the national climate of highstakes testing, and 7th graders are now given practice tests in competitive preparation for magnet high schools. Despite their philosophical commitment, standardization and accountability have crept into this independent space, prompting shifts in school practices, student anxiety about their unfamiliarity with textbooks, teachers’ concerns about being accountable for results, and parental emphases on the quality of children’s future high schools. Logs of Upton middle schoolers’ 25- to 50-book self-directed reading program starkly counters the corporate-state imposition of a two-book limit on the students at Downerstown. At face value, though little has changed Upton’s hallway gatherings and resource-rich computer equipped environs, school personnel are working vigilantly to maintain its calm, intimate climate of social and intellectual energy, cooperative learning, teacher–student collaboration, innovative interdisciplinary project-based curricula, attention to social issues, and creation of lifelong learners amidst the infusion of NCLBinduced change. Despite its independent school status, Upton grapples with the impact of standards within the national climate, as reflected in students’ comments: “We learn to think. . . . I have my own ideas . . . and we’re able to discuss them in class.” “I love to read . . . [but] we should be using textbooks so that when we get to high school, we will be ready.” Educators lament: “The internal situation is changing . . . because of the external . . . it’s a different market. . . . Miller East [a premier high school] used to call. . . . They don’t call anymore.” Upton strives to maintain its center of gravity amidst the destabilizing effects of the standards disaster. 38 Deracialization Color-blind ideology legitimated the infusion of standards at Downerstown, but its presence was not explicit. However, Upton’s negotiation of standards and deracialization discourses were clearly interwoven. The school’s philosophical opposition to standardized tests reflected ambivalent tensions between white school personnel’s color-blind adherence to pedagogical principles and some African American parents’ verbalized concerns about their children’s high school preparedness. Tacit racial meanings marked educators’ and parents’ positions on test preparation and self–other ascriptions as progressive and conservative. Racial tensions around standardization reflected

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136  •  Enora R. Brown the comfort of whites’ social and material privilege versus the tenuousness of African Americans’ income sans wealth accumulation and their requisite pursuit of protective dominant cultural capital for their children’s social mobility.39 Heightened competition for high school admissions prompted curricular changes, which unearthed submerged racial tensions and knowledge hierarchies between white teachers of “major subjects,” and black teachers of “minor subjects.” 40 Politics of resentment and color-blind ideology emerged in educators’ recurrent tacit comments during meetings and informal conversations, for example, the problem of “[black] girls’ social agenda,” “their loudness, popularity” “they’re so privileged.”41 White educators’ feelings of discomfort, social disequilibrium, and resentment surfaced as they wrestled with the inverted experience of African Americans’ upper-class position in relation to their own moderate economic status, and its implications for their own and others’ identities. Their sentiments about Upton’s shift in racial composition from white to black majority, and the social class differential between students and educators, indicated trouble beneath calm waters. Race talk by teachers and students was surrounded by ambivalence, honoring the voices of some and requiring the silence of others. While discussions of race, immigration, and other issues were encouraged in the curriculum, spontaneous classroom conversations and faculty inservice meetings, African American students and faculty were admonished for their vocality and for “racializing” unfair practices, and some white educators presented race-neutral defenses of school philosophy, decorum, and disciplinary practices. Upton’s commitment to diversity and social justice did not preclude racially-imbued incidents that marked African American youth and faculty as “a problem,” 42 juxtaposed against the press for color-blindness and the denial of racism in the school. The progressive face of race-neutral discourse belied social inequality in school practice, and the threatened loss of power and privilege experienced by whites through curricular and demographic changes. Race and class dynamics at Upton mirrored stratified relations in society. Particular youth identities emerged through racialized social groups, which paralleled students’ attendance at magnet versus neighborhood high schools. The apparent compatibility among European American teachers and students, for example, common academic interests and comportment, coalesced with their frustration with the “social agenda” and popularity of some African American youth. Concordantly, African American students felt estranged from and disregarded by some teachers and formed cohesive “family-like” relations, which gave them a place to belong and reaffirm themselves in the face of stigma attached to their “social style,” and provided a healthy protective antidote to racism and class-based resentment. Their social resistance to marginalizing experiences in the classroom became the object of disciplinary action that reaffirmed negative identificatory ascriptions. The perceived disinterest

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The Quiet Disaster of No Child Left Behind  •  137 and disrespect from the “social students” and the standards-induced pressure on teachers to prepare students for high school admission precipitated yearend grading policy changes, notably the addition of a behavioral component to students’ subject grades. As a sanction, this racially coded dimension of grades based on behavior could promote de facto tracking, impacting students’ high school choices and life options, in accord with the stratified consequences of standardized testing. Simultaneously, students, parents, and faculty made efforts to alter, resist, and understand the race and class dynamics of which they were a part. Students across racial lines raised questions amongst peers and educators that rendered race and class discussable topics, critiqued their academic and social experiences at Upton, and wrestled with the relative security of their life options in the face of privilege or racism. Parents and teachers created a forum to address racial issues that surfaced, and educators generated academic and professional development initiatives to grapple with standardization and Upton’s race and class dynamics. As they made issues visible amidst ambivalence and opposition, youth and adults expanded their own and others’ thinking, invested in Upton as an equitable school community, and countered the disastrous consequences of being silent about standardization and deracialization. This chapter considers the deleterious effects of standardization and deracialization, national discourses that accompany the neoliberal policies of NCLB and anti-affirmative action. It examines their role in privatizing education, in masking historical social inequalities, and in justifying the deepening race-class chasm and surveillant regimentation. This inquiry addresses the pervasive impact of these dominant discourses on policies and practices in the local contexts of a poor public and wealthy independent school, and examines how they are differentially negotiated, affirmed, contested, and reworked in the schools. The powerful impact of standardization and deracialization, embodied in NCLB, is revelatory as they weave through the daily landscape of both schools. Each school’s dynamics indicate challenges and possibilities faced in addressing systemic processes that take root in local practice—the race and class gatekeeping functions of standardization and deracialization. The Cascadian disaster lies in the silence surrounding the muted slip of the tectonic plates of standardization and deracialization, allowing the damaging forces of neoliberal policies and their corporate interests to go unchecked. We cannot afford to hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. It is incumbent upon us as educators and responsible civic participants to disrupt the silence and counter the enslaving ideologies and policies—standardization, deracialization, individualism, and benevolent regimentation that precludes democracy and forestalls new ways of thinking and being in the world. While disasters may not be completely avoidable, critical education, voice, and social action are promising forces of change in the midst of both natural and unnatural disasters.

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138  •  Enora R. Brown Notes















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1. Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, “The Cascadia Subduction Zone—What Is It: How Big Are the Quakes? How Often?” July 2, 2002, http://www.pnsn.org/ HAZARDS/CASCADIA/simple_cascadia_zone.html (accessed September 27, 2006). 2. Robin Lloyd, “Tsunami-Generating Earthquake Near U.S. Possibly Imminent,” Live Science website, January 3, 2005, http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050103_cascadia_tsunami.html (accessed September 27, 2006). Western Coastal & Marine Geology, “Tsunamis and Earthquakes: Local Tsunamis in the Pacific Northwest,” U.S. Geological Survey website, http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/ tsunami/cascadia.html (accessed September 27, 2006). 3. Science Daily, “Atlantic Floor Destined to Slip under North American Continent,” October 22, 2001, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/0110 19074950.htm (accessed October 8, 2006); Ker Than, “Orphan Tsunami Gets a Frightening Parent,” December 20, 2005, Live Science website, http://www. livescience.com/forcesofnature/o51220_orphan_tsunami.html (accessed September 27, 2006); Natural Resources Canada, “Geodynamics: Cascadia Subduction Zone,” March 15, 2006, http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geodyn/cascadia_e.php (accessed September 27, 2006). 4. George W. Bush, 2001. “No Child Left Behind.” Foreword by President George W. Bush, U. S. Department of Education website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ news/reports/no-child-left-behind.html (accessed March 10, 2006). 5. Michael Sadowski, “Closing the Gap One School at a Time,” Harvard Education Letter, May/June 2001, http://www.edletter.org/past/issues/2001-mj/gap.shtml (accessed October 29, 2006). 6. Bush, “No Child Left Behind,” Foreword [government document]. 7. Enora Brown, “Freedom for Some, Discipline for ‘Others’: The Structure of Inequity in Education,” in Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools, ed. Kenneth Saltman and David Gabbard (New York: Routledge, 2003), 127–151; Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (New York: RoutledgeFalmer Press, 2004), 9–11, 23–40; David Hursh and Camille Martina, “Neoliberalism and Schooling in the U.S.: How State and Federal Government Education Policies Perpetuate Inequality,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 1(2), October 2003, http://jceps.com/pageID=article&articleID=12> (accessed October 8, 2005). 8. Stan Karp, “Band-Aids or Bulldozers: What’s Next for NCLB?,” Rethinking Schools Online, Spring 2006, http://rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/ bushplan/band203.shtml (accessed March 24, 2006). 9. Alice Ginsburg, “NCLB in Education: Solving a Crisis or Creating One?,” Penn GSE Perspectives in Urban Education, 3(3), Spring 2005, 1–14, www.urbanedjournal.org (accessed March 28, 2006); Henry Giroux, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear (New York: Palgrave Press, 2003), 71–80; Karp, “Band-Aids or Bulldozers”; Yvette Laypayese, “Latina/o Teacher Insurgency to English-Only Policies in Urban School Classrooms,” Penn GSE Perspectives in Urban Education, 3(3), Spring 2005, 1–12, http://www.

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urbanedjournal.org (accessed March 28, 2006); Linda McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000), 3–20. 10. James Ryan, “The Perverse Incentives of The No Child Left Behind Act,” New York University Law Review, Spring, 2004, 932–989. 11. Stan Karp, “Band-Aids or Bulldozers.” 12. Wayne Au, “Closing the Door on Our Kids,” Rethinking Schools Online, 19(3), Spring 2005, 1–4,  http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/bushplan/ clos193.html (accessed March 24, 2006); Monty Neill, Lisa Guisbond, Bob Schaeffer, James Madden, and Life Legeros, “Leaving Children Behind: How No Child Left Behind Will Fail Our Children,” Phi Delta Kappan, 85(3), November 2003, 225–228. 13. Jaekyung Lee, Tracking Achievement Gaps and Assessing the Impact of NCLB on the Gaps: An In-Depth Look into National and State Reading and Math Outcome Trends (The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2006), 1–15. 14. Karp, “Band-Aids or Bulldozers”; Alex Molnar, School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity (New York: Routledge, 2005); Kenneth Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools: A Threat to Democracy (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 15. Lee, Tracking Achievement, 6. 16. Jack Jennings, “Year 3 of the No Child Left Behind Act,” Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP), Education Policy Brief 3, no. 6 (spring 2005): 9; Lowell Rose, “No Child Left Behind: The Mathematics of Failure,” Educational Horizons (Winter 2004): 121. 17. Karp, “Band-Aids or Bulldozers.” 18. Lawrence Uzzell, “No Child Left Behind: The Dangers of Centralized Education Policy,” Policy Analysis #544, May 31, 2005, the Cate School website, http://www. cate.org/pubs/policy_report/v27n3/cpr-27n3.pdf (accessed March 24, 2006). 19. Hursh and Martina, “Neoliberalism and Schooling”; Lipman, High–Stakes Education, 171–180; Ryan, “Perverse Incentives,” 924; Paul Street, Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post–Civil Rights America (New York: Routledge, 2005), 12–18, 50–56. 20. Ryan, “Perverse Incentives,” 961. 21. Elaine Allensworth and Todd Rosenkrantz, Access to Magnet Schools in Chicago (Chicago, IL: Consortium on Chicago School Research, 2000), 13–20. 22. Margaret Spellings, How No Child Left Behind Benefits African Americans, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, August 2005; Margaret Spellings, How No Child Left Behind Benefits Hispanic Americans, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, August 2005; Margaret Spellings, How No Child Left Behind Benefits American Indians, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, August 2005, http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/achieve/ edpicks.jhtml?src=az (accessed October 29, 2006). 23. U.S. Government, “Fact Sheet: The No Child Left Behind Act: Challenging Students Through High Expectations,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2006/10/print/20061005-2.html (accessed October 29, 2006). 24. U.S. Department of Education, “FY 2007 Budget Summary,” http://www.ed.gov/ about/overview/budget/budget07/summary (accessed October 29, 2006); The Honorable George Miller, Senior Democratic Member, House of Representa-

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tives, Committee on Education and the Workforce, Bush Fiscal Year 2007 Education Budget: Breaks Promises, and Puts College Farther Out of Reach for Millions of Americans, Executive Summary, February 2006, 2. 25. Michael Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David Oppenheimer, Marjorie Shultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of Color-Blind Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 107. 26. Joe Spring, Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill), 1994, 1–16. 27. Scott Shane, “U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review,” New York Times, February 21, 2006, 1. 28. Americans for a Fair Chance, Washington, DC, “The History of Affirmative Action Policies,” October 12, 2003, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/aahist. html (accessed October 30, 2006); Tim Wise, Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (New York: Routledge, 2005), 15. 29. Wise, Affirmative Action, 68. 30. Cameron McCarthy, The Uses of Culture: Education and the Limits of Ethnic Affiliation (New York: Routledge, 1998), 91–94; Ruth Frankenburg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minn, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1. 31. Ward Connerly, Proposition 54: Classification by Race, Color, or National Origin. Initiative Constitutional Amendment, 2003, http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ bp_2003_statewide_special/prop54.pdf (accessed October 21, 2006). 32. Patricia Williams, “Racial Privacy,” The Nation, June 17, 2002, 9. 33. Chungmei Lee and Gary Orfield, “Data Proposals Threaten Education and Civil Rights Accountability,” The Civil Rights Report (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 11. 34. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “We Are All Americans: The Latin Americanization of Race Relations in the U.S.,” Race and Society, 5, 3–16; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “ ‘New Racism,’ Color-Blind Racism, and the Future of Whiteness in America,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003). 35. Personal Communication, Principal, Downerstown Middle School, April 14, 2005. 36. Personal Communication, Classroom teacher, Downerstown Middle School, April 15, 2005. 37. Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004). 38. Student interview, Upton Middle School, Chicago, IL, May, 2006; Faculty Retreat, Upton School, Chicago, IL, May, 2006. 39. Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1997), 152–154; Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 157–160. 40. Personal Communication, Teacher, Upton Middle School, May 2006. 41. Faculty Meeting, Upton School, April 3 & 4, 2005; Personal Communication, Teacher, Upton Middle School, September 21, 2005. 42. Personal Communication, Teacher, Upton Middle School, June 2006.

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7

No Corporation Left Behind

Pepi Leistyna

Leistyna contends that we are in the midst of an economic disaster with serious implications for people both domestically and internationally. The logic of neoliberalism has been strategically implemented since the 1970s in the United States. As the wealth of the nation is getting more consolidated in the hands of a few, as a direct result of this economic practice, advocates of this agenda are using the government to implement policies that reinforce and work to justify gross inequities and social injustices. This chapter takes a look at neoliberal education policies associated with the No Child Left Behind campaign, and shows how, in what is proving to be a “no corporation left behind” agenda, such a disaster and the human suffering it brings is not inevitable. Disasters are far too often blamed on Mother Nature and thus represented as if they are unavoidable. But truth be told, most disasters are largely the products of human negligence, indifference, greed, and structured suffering. Take neoliberalism, for example. Presented as a natural process for which there is no alternative (the popular acronym TINY), neoliberalism in reality is a political and economic ideology that works to largely eliminate governments’ power to influence the affairs of private business. In the name of privatization the goal is to maximize profits—with the vague promise that wealth and prosperity will eventually make their way down to the rest of society. In order to achieve this end, standards such as a minimum wage, job security, health insurance, collective bargaining rights, child labor laws, and environmental protections are replaced with an unrestricted flow of production and trade, and a global division of labor. It is ironic that elite private powers obsessed with neutralizing government regulations have been successful in using the state to protect their own interests while wreaking havoc on the rest of the planet. It is important to take a critical look at the blatant contradiction embodied in downsizing government while expanding its powers to limit democratic participation; that is, how government is being used by corporate powers to establish discriminatory and exclusionary policies and practices that work to justify today’s gross inequities, especially those caused by capitalism and its class structure. This 141

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142  •  Pepi Leistyna chapter uses the current education agenda in the United States to illustrate this point. Economic Disaster and Its Discontents While neoliberals and neoconservatives keep talking about how strong the economy is in the United States—a sure sign of the success of their economic ideals and practices—it is important to keep in mind that the country is over $8.3 trillion in debt. In fact, if neoliberal economic logic is so successful, why is it that the Bush administration has had to borrow more money from foreign governments than all forty-two of the presidential administrations that preceded it? “Communist” China now owns $1 trillion of our national debt. The reality is that neoliberal economic logic constitutes nothing more than a disaster, unless of course you belong to the super rich. For these folks, the economy is doing exceptionally well. The stock market just broke the 12,000 mark, a new record. This is fantastic news for the richest 1% of Americans who control about 40% of the nation’s wealth. The nation’s wealthiest 10% own almost 90% of all stocks and mutual funds (Dollars and Sense and United for a Fair Economy 2004). While one in two Americans don’t own stocks, the ubiquitous numbers from Wall Street imply that the market will help those in need and the country as a whole. Instead of looking to the market, which cannot solve what it in fact creates, concerned citizens need to expose the ways in which white supremacy, sexism, classism, and other forms of discrimination embedded in neoliberal practices play a serious role in limiting one’s access to social, economic, institutional, and legal power. The harsh reality is that class mobility in this country is more restricted than ever before, unless of course the direction is downward. Within these neoliberal economic shifts, which began in the 1970s, the middle class is imploding into the working class, which in turn is imploding into the working poor, who are literally relegated to life on the streets. Census data show that the gap between the rich and the poor in this country is the widest it has been since the government started collecting information in 1947. In fact, with the exception of Russia and Mexico, the United States has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income in the industrialized world. While the nation’s median household income is $44,389—down 3.8% from 1999—by 2002, the average income for the top 0.1% of the population was $3 million. Thirty-seven million people in this country live in poverty, a number that is up 1.1 million from 2003. Keep in mind the federal poverty thresholds: one person under 65 = $9,214, two people under 65 with one child = $12,207. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are 25.5 million people who rely on food stamps to avoid hunger—a number that is up 2 million from 2004; 6.8 million families live in poverty; 17% of the nation’s children, or about 12 million kids, are compelled to endure inhumane economic

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  143 conditions. And yet in this post-Katrina world, where federal malfeasance unwittingly exposed the raw poverty that exists in this country, the current administration and both Republican-run houses, just before Christmas 2005, pushed through $50 billion in spending cuts to such social programs as food stamps and Medicaid. An Urban Institute study recently revealed that about 3.5 million people are homeless in the United States (a number projected to increase 5% each year), and 1.3 million (or 39%) of them are children (National Coalition for the Homeless 2002). Americans without health insurance number 45.8 million, which includes 9.2 million kids. “Overall, nearly 1 in 5 full time workers today goes without health insurance; among part-time workers, it’s 4 to 1” (Krim and Witte 2004, A01). As compared with 2001, there were 5 million fewer jobs providing health insurance in 2004. These statistics are particularly interesting given that “the average compensation for the top health care executives at the top 10 managed healthcare companies, not including unexercised stock options, is $11.7 million per year” (Jackson 2001, 3). Neoliberalism is particularly hard on women. On average, women make 77 cents to a man’s dollar. Median income for men is $40,800; for women, it is $31,200. The leading occupations for women are all lower-middle- and workingclass jobs. In addition, the majority of jobs at the bottom of the economic scale are held by women, especially women of color. “Minority women are even more likely to be low earners”—in 2003, 33.9% of black women and 45.8% of Latinas earned low wages (Economic Policy Institute 2004/2005, 130). While racism, like gender, cannot simply be conflated with the economic base of capitalism, we certainly need to look at the ways in which it is used to exploit diverse groups within capitalist social relations. It is also crucial to look at the ways in which racism has historically served an important role in keeping at bay working-class unity and maintaining a system of labor exploitation. The proportion of racially subordinated workers earning low wages is substantial—30.4% of black workers and 39.8% of Latino/a workers (Economic Policy Institute, 2004/2005). The median income of racially subordinated families is $25,700, as compared with white families at $45,200 (Dollars and Sense and United for a Fair Economy 2004). A consistent pattern in the data has shown that the unemployment rate for African Americans and Latinos/as over the years has remained more than double that of whites. While about 10% of white children live in poverty in the United States, over 30% of African-American and Latino/a kids experience economic hardship. In this age of downsizing, outsourcing, and offshoring, the current administration has bragged about creating new jobs for Americans, but it fails to inform the public that these are overwhelmingly part-time, adjunct, minimum-wage positions that provide no pension, union protection, or health care benefits.

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144  •  Pepi Leistyna Part-time, temp, or subcontracted jobs currently make up 30% of the workforce and this number is rapidly increasing. As the federal minimum wage is currently $5.15 an hour, a wage that is sustained by powerful corporate lobbyists, full-time workers in the United States make about $10,712 per year. This makes it impossible to afford adequate housing throughout the country. It’s no wonder that one out of every five homeless people is employed. It is important to note that contrary to popular myth, the majority of minimum-wage workers are not teenagers; 71.4% are over the age of 20. Instead of addressing such issues, neoliberals serve up myths of meritocracy and life in a melting pot where economic success miraculously emerges if one is willing to submit to their agenda. Within this logic, the answer to these gross inequities and injustices, which they see themselves in no way responsible for initiating and perpetuating, is to create “a better system of education.” But what exactly are they offering? Corporate Schools Since President George W. Bush signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), standardized curricula and high-stakes testing have been officially embraced as the panacea of academic underachievement in public schools in the United States. The act, ushered in by big business interests (for a detailed version of the history of this corporate story, see Suchak 2006), engenders a hitherto unheard of transfer of power to the federal government, granting it the right to largely determine the goals and outcomes of these educational institutions. As a direct result of this new agenda, school administrators, teachers, parents, labor unions, and communities are stripped of any substantive decisionmaking power in the nation’s public schools. In blatant disregard for the Constitution—given that the founding fathers gave Congress no power to legislate when it comes to public education, leaving such decisions in the hands of individual states—NCLB required that by 2003 students in third through eighth grades be evaluated in mathematics and reading, and then reevaluated once in high school. By the 2007–2008 school year, federal requirements also demand that states administer tests in science in elementary, junior high, and high school. By the year 2014, all students must be proficient in these subject areas. Schools that do not meet this criteria will be stripped of their government funding, threatened with closure, or placed in the hands of charter schools or other such private management companies. Under pressure to produce results on these standardized tests or face the consequences, many school administrators have been forced to drastically narrow their curriculum and cut back on anything and everything that is perceived as not contributing to raising test scores. In many cases, this includes the elimination of two-way bilingual education, creative reading, interdisciplinary studies, music and art, and community and athletics programs. Within this

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  145 one-size-fits-all standards approach to schooling, the multifarious voices and needs of culturally diverse, low-income, racially subordinated, and linguisticminority students are simply ignored or discarded. As a direct consequence of this political climate, public schools are being inundated with prepackaged and teacher-proof curricula, standardized tests, and accountability schemes. In his bid for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush, as governor of Texas (1994 to 2000), effectively used what was referred to as the Texas Miracle to spearhead his educational policy plans based on standards and high-stakes testing. Declaring himself the “education president,” Bush would also use the “miracle” to help push through the No Child Left Behind legislation. While spokespersons for conservative organizations, studies funded by advocates of the testing industry, and much of the mainstream media raved about the work being done in Texas, and the fantastic decrease in dropout rates and increase in academic achievement that occurred since TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) had been implemented, the so-called miracle was in fact a scam (CNN Presents 2005; Haney 2000; McNeil 2000).1 Those students who were perceived as potentially lowering the overall test scores were retained in grades where testing was not required, especially ninth grade; or they were placed in special education classrooms or labeled limited English proficient (LEP) and were thus exempted from taking the exam. Coupled with a long list of discriminatory practices that predate the standardization movement, but continue to fester, this trend has resulted in extremely high dropout rates in Texas. It is not as if Rod Paige, the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District (HISD), could have been unaware of allegations of discrimination related to the TAAS exam or the mass exodus of students from his schools, given that he was elected to the district’s Board of Education in 1990, had been the superintendent of HISD since 1994, and was listed by Inside Houston Magazine as one of “Houston’s 25 most powerful people in guiding the city’s growth and prosperity.” 2 The Texas NAACP notes: On October 4, 1995, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) received a complaint filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), Texas State Conference against the Texas Education Agency (TEA), Austin, Texas. The complaint raised concerns pertaining to the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) and its alleged discriminatory impact on African-American and Hispanic/Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. (Texas NAACP 1995) High dropout rates are fantastic for raising test scores, but they simultaneously call into question the overall success of the standards program in place; so while they are often encouraged by corrupt administrators, they need to disappear from public view. In a self-serving and malicious move, Paige and members of his administration cleverly manipulated the numbers and claimed

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146  •  Pepi Leistyna that the dropout rate of local schools was 1.5%, rather than the actual figure of 40% (60 Minutes II 2004). In reality, Texas schools, in particular those in Houston (the 7th largest school district in the country), have some of the worst dropout rates nationwide. There were also widespread stories of encouraging students to cheat on the TAAS in order to raise the scores (CNN Presents, 2005), as well as reports of the monopolization of the entire curriculum by prep classes that were teaching solely to the test (Haney 2000). Praised for his “success,” in 2001 Paige was named National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators, and was appointed Secretary of Education by President George W. Bush. Conservatives insist ad nauseam that “scientifically based research” inform and sustain the nation’s educational practices, policies, and goals. However, the empirical studies that are used to buttress the Bush agenda, under close scrutiny, are easily stripped of any legitimacy. The well-funded think tanks that produce much of the research and literature to support conservative causes have an obvious, ideologically specific perspective. A recent example of how data can be manipulated, packaged, and presented as “scientific research” is the official report signed and circulated by the congressionally appointed National Reading Panel (NRP). The report, that informed Bush’s Reading First literacy campaign, is replete with inconsistencies, methodological flaws, and blatant biases (Allington 2002; Coles 2000). For starters, Bush’s educational advisor (when he was the governor of Texas), G. Reid Lyon, headed the NRP. A staunch phonics advocate, Lyon hand selected the panel and made certain that virtually all of the participants shared his views. There was only one reading teacher on the NRP. However, by the end of the group’s investigation into effective literacy practices, she refused to sign the panel’s final report, maintaining that it was a manipulation of data, and that the cohort failed to examine important research that did not corroborate its desired findings. As Stephen Metcalf (2002) reveals: Widmeyer [the public relations firm hired by the government to promote the panel’s work] had represented McGraw-Hill’s flagship literacy product Open Court during the Texas literacy drive, and now it counts McGraw-Hill and the Business Roundtable among its most prominent clients. “They wrote the introduction to the final report,” says NRP member Joanne Yatvin. “And they wrote the summary, and prepared the video, and did the press releases.” McGraw-Hill has been laughing all the way to the bank ever since, tapping into the $6 billion that the president has set aside to fund his literacy campaign. And guess who’s been recruited to hold the federal purse strings: Christopher Doherty, the guy who spearheaded the move to bring McGraw-Hill’s

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  147 DISTAR (Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading) to public schools in Baltimore (Metcalf 2002). Embracing what is in fact an old neoliberal approach dressed up as innovative reform, the political machinery behind NCLB has effectively disguised the motivations of a profit-driven industry. Schools now give nearly 50 million tests per year and the annual value of this market ranges from $400 million to $700 million (Frontline 2006). The General Accounting Office estimates that by 2008, up to $5.3 billion will be spent by states trying to meet the requirements of this legislation (Miner 2005). However, this figure does not include the enormous costs of prep sessions, practice tests, scoring and reporting, data storage, and let’s not forget the nearly $7-billion-per-year market for instructional materials. But the enormous expense does not end there. Ben Clark (2004) reminds us of another lucrative market: Under NCLB, if a school fails to improve math and reading test scores within three years, a portion of its federal funding will be diverted to “parental choice” tutoring programs. . . . These outsourced programs are run by private companies such as Educate Inc. owner of Sylvan Learning Centers whose revenues have grown from $180 to $250 million in the past three years and whose profits shot up 250% last year. The potential for funneling taxpayers’ money into private pockets is astounding. This is precisely why it is important for the public to watch closely how money is earmarked when politicians increase the federal budget for education: what often appears to be a concerned call to increase spending to improve schools for our nation’s youth is actually a ploy to increase profit potential for those kingpins playing the standards game. The ultimate contradiction that the high-stakes testing movement seems to be in no hurry to reconcile is that in this era of accountability and “scientifically proven methodologies,” the private firms that are benefiting from this trend have little to no oversight in terms of their daily operations and the quality and performance of their products and services. Unlike other areas of industry that are highly regulated, though not for long if neoliberals have their way, there is no federal agency that independently investigates testing company products and practices. It is not even clear in the research what these high-stakes tests evaluate in terms of student competence. While a score may be indicative of how well prepared a student is for a particular testing instrument, it reveals little to nothing about his or her overall abilities (Haney 2000; Kohn 2000; McNeil 2000; Sturrock 2006; TC Reports 2000). In other words, the entire industry is built on theoretical ambiguities and empirical uncertainties rather than scientifically based research. Louisiana conducted a study of 91 of its school districts and “found that $300 million was paid to tutoring companies in one year ‘with almost no scientific evidence that this spending has contributed to academic achievement’” (Schools Matter 2005). To add

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148  •  Pepi Leistyna insult to injury, unlike public school teachers, those “educators” who work for private schools or tutorial companies that are receiving federal money under NCLB do not need to be credentialed. It is also important to know the actual power brokers who are reaping the benefits of this movement. While many corporations (e.g., Edison Schools/ Newton Learning Corporation, Educational Testing Service’s ETS K-12, Advantage Learning Systems, Measured Progress, Data Recognition, Questar Educational Services, Kaplan, Princeton Review, British Petroleum, AT&T, Tribune, IBM, and Dupont) are in the race to get a piece of this pie, there are four big publishing houses that have virtually monopolized the industry: Harcourt Brace, Houghton Mifflin, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. As Metcalf (2002) notes, “the so-called Big Three—McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin and Harcourt—[were] all identified as ‘Bush stocks’ by Wall Street analysts in the wake of the 2000 election.” It is interesting to note that three of the four publishing giants are internationals, and given the conservative pitch on global competitiveness and national security, other than for financial gain, it is not clear why such companies would have any vested interest in improving the education of students in the United States. By the end of the millennium, when the testing movement was really heating up, Harcourt Brace’s educational division was pleased to inform its shareholders of an almost 30% increase in sales. The international conglomerate, which also owns Holt, Rinehart and Winston, boasts annual revenues of over $5 billion. Willing to go to almost any length to maximize its profits in Texas, Harcourt Brace pitched its course materials as being published by “the same company that helps to write the TAAS tests” (Bacon 2000). What is unethical and self-serving about this practice is that any use of prep materials that developmentally coincide with the content of the exam, compromises the validity of the scores (Gluckman 2002). In other words, prepping of this kind is a subtle form of cheating; but for Harcourt, student success on the exam means guaranteed contracts. Houghton Mifflin also gained from the early race to nationalize standards as its testing division’s profits grew by almost 18% in 1999. With a keen understanding of how information processing is a key component of the standards market, in 2003 Houghton Mifflin purchased Edusoft, a profitable company that specializes in data storage and online tests. The conglomerate now boasts more than $1 billion in annual sales. Pearson currently has long-term contracts with more than 20 states and its 2005 profits were up 29%. Since the implementation of NCLB, their sales on assessments alone are up more than 20%. In its 2005 “Performance Report” under the subtitle “Continued Investment for Future Growth,” Pearson reassures its shareholders that it will greatly increase its profits from U.S. schools by a steady investment in school publishing, basal curriculum programs for reading, science, and social studies, and school testing (where it already maintains

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  149 contracts in Texas, Virginia, Michigan, and Minnesota with a lifetime value of $700 million). It also mentions the creation of Pearson Achievement Solutions, which targets the growing market for teacher professional development and integrated school solutions. It is interesting to note that there is not a single word in the report about the academic achievement of students. When Congress allocated $3 billion per year for teacher training in its reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2001, Pearson decided to take a big bite out of that market share by acquiring National Evaluation Systems, Inc. (NES), which produces assessments for teacher certification. Teacher burnout, a serious side effect of this era of standards and accountability, is actually a virtue in a profit-driven industry. As Pearson notes in its 2006 press release: There are approximately three million public school teachers in the US. Approximately 2.5 million new teachers will need to be hired in the current decade, as 700,000 current teachers retire and 1.8 million are expected to leave the profession prior to retirement. On average, nearly 6% of the teacher workforce does not return for each new academic year and half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. (Metcalf 2002) With 280 offices in 40 countries, McGraw-Hill is a major player in the publishing world. A simple look at this New York–based company’s website and one can see how profits have consistently soared since the advent of the standardization craze. With contracts in 23 states, McGraw-Hill’s Terra Nova, Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), and California Achievement tests are the most lucrative of its assessment instruments. Trying to expand its $1.4 billion textbook sales, “McGraw-Hill lobbyists used the statewide results on their own California Achievement Tests to convince the state legislature that California schools needed the McGraw-Hill Open Court and Reading Mastery program to improve students reading performance” (Clark 2004). Expected to teach at least part of the day from the McGraw-Hill Open Court materials, “according to Ben Visnick, [president of a local teachers’ union in California], ‘School district employees and instructional facilitators—we call them Open Court police—inspect the classrooms to verify that the right posters are on the walls and they want everyone in the district on the same page every day’” (as cited in Clark 2004). While the California Department of Education guidelines prohibit the use of test-prep materials written for a specific test, the practice is common nonetheless (Gluckman 2002). In the Fortune 500 world (2006), McGraw-Hill comes in at 359 with over $6 billion in annual revenues. But perhaps what is most interesting about this corporation is its deep connection to the Bush dynasty. In his article in The Nation, “Reading between the Lines,” Metcalf (2002) lays out the depth of this nepotism, describing how the two families have been chummy since the 1930s

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150  •  Pepi Leistyna when they vacationed together in an exclusive area in Florida. He is worth quoting at length here: Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the national grant advisory and founding board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. McGraw in turn received the highest literacy award from President Bush in the early 1990s. . . . The McGraw Foundation awarded current Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige its highest educator’s award while Paige was Houston’s school chief; Paige, in turn, was the keynote speaker at McGraw-Hill’s “government initiatives” conference last spring. Harold McGraw III was selected as a member of President George W. Bush’s transition advisory team. . . . An ex-chief of staff for Barbara Bush is returning to work for Laura Bush in the White House—after a stint with McGraw-Hill as a media relations executive. John Negroponte left his position as McGraw-Hill’s executive vice president for global markets to become Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations. And of course, under Bush Jr., Negroponte would go on to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq (2004 to 2005), and is now the Director of National Intelligence. The word intelligence here has two frightening implications: a scary thought in terms of national security given the well-documented horrors that Negroponte was involved in while trying to subvert the growth of democracy in Latin America when he was U.S. ambassador to Honduras (1981 to 1985) under Reagan; and a scary thought in terms of what our children learn in schools that are under the influence of a standards regime that works diligently to engineer history as it sees fit; much in the way that Negroponte himself worked to keep his actions in Latin America from becoming public knowledge. McGraw III, on the other hand, as part of a group of “education leaders,” was invited to speak at the White House by George W. Bush on his first day in office. Bush Jr. and McGraw-Hill have been partners in crime before. As governor, Bush joined forces with the publishing giant in order to pitch their proposed phonics-based literacy program to the Texas Education Agency, which was trying to establish a statewide reading curriculum. For a period of roughly two years, most often at the invitation of the governor, a small group of reading experts testified repeatedly about what would constitute a “scientifically valid” reading curriculum for Texas schoolchildren. As critics pointed out, a preponderance of the consultants were McGraw-Hill authors. (Metcalf 2002) As to be expected, these experts tooted their own horns in front of TEA, calling for a reading program that was right in tune with a slew of new textbooks and materials from McGraw-Hill, a market that the company easily cornered with the support of the governor (Clark 2004).

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  151 In the world of crony capitalism, these kinds of deals are made all the time. Look at how Bill Bennett, the former secretary of education under Reagan (1985 to 1988), and drug czar under Bush Sr. (1989 to 1990), has been cashing in lately. Bennett’s online home/school company K-12 Inc. recently received $4 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The funds are intended for an online charter school in Arkansas—Arkansas Virtual Academy (Homeschool Place.com 2006). Not only is it morally questionable how Bennett’s for-profit business came about getting the grant, especially since other programs that had been turned down had better independent reviews (Ohanian 2006), but it is also disconcerting that federal funds are being diverted away from public schools in order to subsidize education for home-school students. Sure, NCLB has set aside money for its Voluntary Public School Choice Program with the expressed purpose of giving students a chance at a better education; however, only 25% of the students who have participated in K-12 Inc.’s program are from public schools (Ohanian 2006). Meanwhile, Bennett has been working his inside contacts to cut deals in other states around the country. Though Bennett extols universal morality in his Book of Virtues (1993), it is important to remember that this is a guy who has a multimillion dollar gambling addiction, and who on his syndicated radio talk show expressed to a caller: “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down” (CNN.com 2005). This is a guy who doesn’t even support public education and yet uses taxpayers’ money for his own business ventures. As Intel director and former Federal Communications Commission chair Reed Hundt revealed about the former secretary of education: I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him for help in seeking legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. . . . He told me he would not help because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education. Well, I thought, at least he’s candid about his true views. (as cited in Hoffman 2005) It is also important to remember that Bennett used start-up money from Knowledge Universe to get K-12 Inc. up and running. Knowledge Universe is owned by Michael Millikin, the Junk Bond King who ripped off investors for billions of dollars in the 1980s and consequently spent a couple of years behind bars—actually, there were no bars where Millikin did time. And when he was done with his sentence, a period during which he learned how to prepare traditional French dishes from the prison chef, he was allowed to keep over $2

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152  •  Pepi Leistyna billion that he had accumulated from his criminal escapades. It certainly does not seem virtuous for Bennett to use blood money for any purpose, let alone to profit from the very taxpaying public from which it was originally stolen. It is also hypocritical for a staunch supporter of neoliberalism—an opponent of government influence and assistance—to apply for the federal grant in the first place. There is ample room for nepotism in state and federal politics, especially when it comes to family connections. As revealed in the USA Today (2006) article by Jill Lawrence, “Congress Full of Fortunate Sons—and Other Relatives,” there are more than fifty U.S. senators and representatives who are closely related to governors and other members of Congress. But what better position is there to be in when it comes to old-boy networks than to be the grandson of a former senator, the son of a former CIA director and president of the United States, the brother of the incumbent governor of Florida, and the brother of the former governor of Texas—now president of the country. Neil Bush, the president’s youngest brother, in the spirit of NCLB, is pushing to sell to states around the country online, multimedia educational products and test-prep software produced by his Austin-based company Ignite Inc. Founded in 1999, one of Ignite’s first targets was Florida public schools where the company has been pitching its products as helping students prepare for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). While the Florida Education Association has expressed some concern about a potential conflict of interest in developing a business relationship with Neil Bush, given that his brother is the governor, the youngest sibling adamantly denies any discussion about his business affairs with either of his brothers. Ignite’s materials are currently being used in a pilot program in Orlando and the company hopes to be able to market an early–American history course throughout the state at a cost of $30 annually per student. It is looking to sink its teeth into what looks to be a $60 million deal. The company has already come under some heavy criticism for its dumbed-down version of history, which includes a lesson on the Seminole Wars that presents, in cartoon form, a football game with “the Jacksons vs. the Seminoles.” One can only imagine how history will be engineered by Neil Bush when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. The company also plans to develop software for math, science, and the language arts, as well as programs for special needs and linguistic-minority students. Ignite has already successfully pedaled its education wares in California, New York, Ohio, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Arizona. But, the majority of its 40,000 users are in Texas. Much of the over $20 million that Ignite has generated to materialize and sustain its operations has come from international oil and technology companies in such undemocratic countries as Kuwait and China, which have a long history of human rights abuses. However, some of the financial support has

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  153 actually been arranged for by his mom, the former first lady who campaigns around the country rallying business leaders about the virtues of her sons’ education policies and curriculum packages. She recently made a donation to the Katrina Disaster Fund stipulating that some of the money had to be spent on Ignite’s educational products and their implementation in public schools in Houston, the city where many of the hurricane evacuees found high ground (Garza 2006). Not only is this inappropriate in the general practice of nonprofit donations, but it provides yet another example of how the rich are brilliant in getting tax breaks for themselves while simultaneously profiting. If everything goes as planned, Neil Bush could use more than just his family name for influence and access. Given that the government has agreed to fund a portion of state costs for technological products and services for the classroom, and the president is being heavily lobbied to increase the $1.5 billion already allocated for private research and development of educational technology (Scherer 2001), Ignite will be eligible for federal dollars. The company certainly has an advisory board fit for the job of soliciting these monies: Ignite has loaded its advisory committees with Bush loyalists, assuring the company a sympathetic ear in Washington. According to the company, its big-name consultants include Bill Brock, a former senator from Tennessee who chaired the Republican National Committee; Bob Stearns, a Houston investor appointed to a Texas technology board by George W.; Peter Su, a former campaign adviser of the president, and two executives from Bessemer Trust, an exclusive investment firm that manages a portfolio for Neil’s dad. (Scherer 2001) But put aside for a moment the gross conflict of interest here, as well as the possibility of international firms giving Neil Bush money in order to gain access to the president of the United States. Let’s even put aside his testimony during divorce proceedings that revealed his marital infidelity with prostitutes while on business in Asia, and instead focus on the financial track record of the man behind this education project and why the public should have no confidence in his management skills, let alone in a financial endeavor that involves the youth of this nation. The reason that most people do not know much about the youngest Bush heir is largely because his political career died in the late 1980s, during his father’s tour as president, when he was the acting director of Silverado Savings and Loan in Colorado, a company that went down with the S&L ship. Neil Bush’s scandalous behavior cost the taxpayers over $1 billion. While angry protesters picketed outside his home demanding prosecution and retribution, a grand jury investigation never pursued the case to that end and young Bush was thus never charged with a crime. His banking activities were nonetheless restricted by federal regulators and he was ordered to pay a $50,000 fine. A

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154  •  Pepi Leistyna civil lawsuit was eventually settled against Bush and other Silverado executives for the sum of $49.5 million. Neil Bush has a long track record of failed business ventures and a history of wheeling and dealing with sketchy characters, including people that he solicited money from in order to start Ignite Inc. (Bollyn 2005; Carlson 2003; Democracy Now 2004). This includes dealings with the Saudi Bin Laden construction group, Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who has been prosecuted for fraud, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the controversial Unification Church. And why all this talk about helping to give the children of the United States a fighting chance to compete in a competitive global economy? In spite of all the rhetoric about lending a hand to the youth of this nation by fighting for a better system of public education, U.S. corporations are huge fans of outsourcing jobs and exploiting cheap labor both domestically and internationally. Neil Bush has actually augmented Ignite’s profit structure by outsourcing 70 jobs to Mexico in a partnership that he forged with Grupo Carso Telecom (Carlson 2003). With capital flight and global outsourcing, both blue collar and white collar jobs have been and continue to be exported by U.S. corporations to nations that pay below a living wage and that ensure that workers have no protection under labor unions and laws that regulate corporate interests and power. As the Federal Reserve has acknowledged, these jobs will not be returning even if there is a major upswing in the U.S. economy. It is important to note, that by cheap labor, we are often talking between 13.5 and 36 cents an hour; we’re also talking about a total disregard for child-labor laws and environmental protections (National Labor Committee for Worker and Human Rights 2003). American workers are being blamed by corporate heads for not being educated enough to compete in a global economy, and yet we have one of the most educated and productive workforces in the world, regardless of the fact that our public education system is highly class based. In this era of globalization with enormous job loss, outsourcing, and offshoring, corporations need a scapegoat for their avarice, and the scapegoat is the nation’s workforce, which is not working hard enough and yet, since 1975, productivity is way up (163%); this same workforce is asking for too much money, and yet wages are stagnant (115%) and corporate profits are through the roof (758%). It is ironic that corporations are simultaneously claiming that public schools are not doing an adequate job of preparing a qualified labor force in the United States, while moving their operations to third world countries where there is enormous illiteracy, and where in the spirit of neoliberalism, they can exploit the seemingly endless pool of low and semiskilled labor. And of course, these are the same forces, a la Negroponte, that influence U.S. foreign policy, which works to keep these countries destitute.

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  155 When you consider the fact that NCLB is already underfunded by more than $40 billion, and has left millions of children in its wake, a chilling reality sets in: all of this rhetoric about accountability, efficiency, effectiveness, and excellence in public education is really an ideological trap intended to ensure that public schools fail, thus paving the way for their complete privatization. The stealth onslaught of privatization and commercialization of this vital institution should come as no surprise given that education reform has been masterminded, in large part behind closed doors, by a handful of corporate executives, politicians, and media moguls who have already profited handsomely from the over $600-billion-per-year education industrial complex (Bacon 2000; Gluckman 2002; Miner 2005). It’s an interesting form of class warfare where you take taxpayers’ money and use it to provide them with a poor education. Keep in mind that the elite children of this country do not attend these institutions, they go to private schools where there is no highstakes testing. The massive budget cuts for war and other corporate exploits, and the frantic deficit spending that guts domestic funding for education, health care, and other public needs and services are part of a conscious effort to wipe out any money to sustain the public sector, paving the way for privatization. As all good capitalists know, the overriding objective of corporations is to maximize their profits. So what they have to do in order to shape public policy in their own interests—and gain consent on those rare occasions when the general public is involved in the process—is disguise their profit-over-people mentality by wrapping themselves in an image of expertise and compassionate concern for the education and future of our children. So the pending question is: Are we willing to consent to such deceit and the disaster that has already pounded the majority of the population in the United States, and surely awaits those with their heads still above water? Notes

1. Similar to experiences with the Vallas Miracle in Chicago and the New York City Miracle. 2. This reference is taken from the White House webpage at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/paige-bio.html (accessed 10/31/06).

References Allington, R. 2002. Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum: How ideology trumped evidence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Bacon, D. 2000. School testing: Good for textbook publishers, bad for students. Pacific News Service, http://alternet.org/story/39/ (accessed 10/31/06). Bennett, W. 1993. Book of virtues: A treasury of great moral stories. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bollyn, C. 2005. Bush family financed by foreign money. American Free Press.net, http:// www.americanfreepress.net/html/bush_family_financed.html (accessed 10/31/06).

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156  •  Pepi Leistyna Carlson, P. 2003. The relatively charmed life of Neil Bush: Despite Silverado and Voodoo, Fortune still smiles on the President’s bother. Washington Post, Sunday, December 28, D01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35297-2003 Dec27?language=printer (accessed 10/31/06). Clark, B. 2004. Leaving children behind: Exam privatization threatens public schools. CorpWatch, http:// www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11543 (accessed 10/30/06). CNN.com. 2005. Bennett under fire for comments on blacks, crime, http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:MEh jtC3_OI4J:www.cnn.com/2005/ POLITICS/09/30/bennett.comments/+ Bill+Bennett,+the+former+Secretary+o f+Education&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 (accessed 10/01/06). CNN Presents. 2005. High stakes. Lanham, MD: Cable News Network Inc. Coles, G. 2000. Misreading reading: The bad science that hurts children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Democracy Now. 2004. No Bush left behind: When you’re barred from banking, why not bank on education? Democracy Now website, http://www.democracynow. org/article.pl?sid=04/03/12/1534244 (accessed 10/30/06). Dollars and Sense and United for a Fair Economy, eds. 2004. The wealth inequality reader. Cambridge, MA: Economic Affairs Bureau. Economic Policy Institute. 2004/2005. The state of working America. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Fortune. 2006. Fortune 500, Fortune magazine, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/ fortune/fortune500/ (accessed 10/31/06). Frontline. 2006. The testing industry’s big four. Public Broadcasting Service, http:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html (accessed 10/31/06). Garza, C. L. 2006. Former First Lady’s donation aids son: Katrina funds earmarked to pay for Neil Bush’s software program. Houston Chronicle, March 23, http:// chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/3742329.html (accessed 10/31/06). Gluckman, A. 2002. Testing … testing … one, two, three: The commercial side of the standardized-testing boom. Dollars and Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice, http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2002/0102gluckman.html (accessed 10/31/06). Haney, W. 2000. The Texas miracle in education: Missing students and other mirages. Education Policy Analysis Archives 8, no. 41, http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41/ part5.htm (accessed 10/31/06). Hoffman, T. 2005. The candid Bennett. eSchool News: Ed-Tech Insider, October 4, http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2005/10/001190.php (accessed 10/31/06). Homeschool Place.com. 2006. X U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett and President Bush’s Brother Neil Bush. The Homeschool Place, http://www.edu-cyberpg. com/Culdesac/billbennett.html (accessed 10/31/06). Jackson, D. Z. 2001. Who’s better off this Labor Day? Numbers tell. Ms. Foundation for Women, http://www.raisethefloor.org/press_bostonglobe.html (accessed 10/31/06). Kohn, A. (2000). The case against standardized testing: Raising the scores, ruining the schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Kohn, A., and P. Shannon. 2002. Education, Inc. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Krim, J., and G. Witte. 2004. Average wage earners fall behind: New job market makes more demands but fewer promises. Washington Post, December 31, A01.

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No Corporation Left Behind  •  157 Lawrence, J. 2006. Congress full of fortunate sons—and other relatives. USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-07-relatives-cover_ x.htm (accessed 10/31/06). McNeil, L. 2000. Contradictions of school reform: Educational costs of standardized testing. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Metcalf, S. 2002. Reading between the lines. The Nation, January 28, http://www.fairtest.org/nattest/Nation%20piece%20bush%20links.html (accessed 10/31/06). Miner, B. 2005. Keeping public schools public: Testing companies mine for gold. Rethinking Schools 19, no. 2 (winter), http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ archive/19_02/test192.shtml (accessed 10/31/06). National Coalition for the Homeless. 2002. http://www.nationalhomeless.org/who. html (accessed 10/31/06). National Labor Committee for Worker and Human Rights. 2003. http://www.nlcnet. org (accessed 10/31/06). Ohanian, S. 2006. Grant to Bennett’s K-12 Inc. challenged. Susan Ohanian website, http://www.susanohanian.org/atrocity_fetch.php?id=2910 (accessed 10/31/06). Pearson. 2005. Performance report. Pearson website, http://www.pearson.com/index. cfm?pageid=151 (accessed 10/31/06). Pearson. 2006. Pearson enters certification market, acquires National Evaluation Systems, America’s leading teacher certification testing company, press release, April 2, http://www.pearsoned.com/pr_2006/042506.htm (accessed 10/31/06). Scherer, M. 2001. That other Bush boy. Mother Jones, May/June, http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2001/05/neilbush.html (accessed 10/31/06). Schools Matter. 2005. Hauling away the federal treasury. Schools Matter website, http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2005/09/hauling-away-federal-treasury. html (accessed 10/31/06). 60 Minutes II. 2004. The “Texas miracle.” CBS News, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/ 2004/01/06/60II/main591676.shtml (accessed 10/31/06). Sturrock, C. 2006. States distort school test scores, researchers say. Critics say California among those that lower standards for No Child Left Behind. Chronicle, June 30, http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/ 06/30/MNG28JN9RC1.DTL (accessed 10/31/06). Suchak, B. 2006. Standardized testing: High-stakes for students and for corporate bottom lines, http:// www.nomoretests.com/insider.htm (accessed 10/31/06). TC Reports. 2000. High-stakes testing and its effects on education. Teachers College, http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=3811 (accessed 10/31/06). Texas NAACP. 1995. TAAS resolution commitment, http://72.14.207.104/search?q= cache:zzHwpR6B1bIJ:www.texasnaacp.org/taasrc.htm+TAAS+exam,+english+ and+spanish&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=10 (accessed 10/31/06).

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8

The Schools Are Failing

Think Tanks, Institutes, Foundations, and Educational Disaster Philip Kovacs

This chapter explores the role of neoconservative and neoliberal think tanks, institutes, and foundations in producing educational disaster. Once disaster has been produced and marketed, the same organizations offer and implement corporatist policy solutions, which arguably exacerbate existing issues or lead to new crises. As a conceptual lens for understanding the cycle, the author asks the reader to conceive of think tanks as Hollywood film studios and to temporarily consider the creation and implementation of educational policy as a process similar to the production of a summer blockbuster. What follows then is a chapter detailing the production of a classic disaster film—The Schools Are Failing. Through a discussion of actors, stages, the editing process, and film distribution, this chapter offers progressive scholars insight into how think tanks produce educational disaster, while at the same time implementing neoconservative and neoliberal educational policy “solutions.” Arguing for a progressive educational politics where scholars participate publicly and politically, Kovacs investigates the role of critical and organic intellectuals in realizing progressive educational policy aimed at ending educational corporatism. Unlike natural disaster, political disaster forces a society to discover and pursue the political ideals that under less threatening circumstances might simply bore it.1 This chapter explores neoconservative and neoliberal think tanks, institutes, and foundations as producers of educational crisis, disaster, threat, and terror. As a conceptual lens for understanding the production process, I ask the reader to think of these organizations as Hollywood film studios, spaces where ideas are generated, given shape, produced, and distributed. What follows then is a chapter detailing the production of a classic Hollywood disaster film—The Schools Are Failing. Through a discussion of setting, actors, plot, 159

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160  •  Philip Kovacs special effects, and distribution, I hope to offer progressive scholars insight into how extreme Right policy organizations produce educational disaster in order to make neoconservative and neoliberal educational salvation reality. Imagining a progressive educational politics where scholars participate publicly and politically, I offer an alternate ending to the film. Causal Stories Deborah Stone’s theory of causal stories proves instructive for understanding how specific policies are created, marketed, changed, and contested.2 The salient points of her theory for this chapter are as follows: • “Political actors deliberately portray problems in ways calculated to gain support for their side.” 3 Such support is generated through problem definition: the active manipulation of images or conditions by competing political actors. • Political actors “compose stories that describe harms and difficulties, attribute them to actions of other individuals or organizations, and thereby claim the right to invoke government power to stop the harm.” 4 • Causal stories have two dimensions. “On the empirical level, they purport to demonstrate the mechanism by which one set of people brings about harm to another set. On the normative level, they blame one set of people for causing the suffering of others.” 5 • A story is more likely to be successful if it “captures or responds to a ‘national mood.’” 6 • Stories are more likely to be successful if the storytellers have “visibility, access to media, and prominent positions.” 7 • “Causal stories need to be fought for, defended, and sustained” because there is always someone with a competing story.8 The Setting The year is 2007, and U.S. citizens have much to fear. The country’s Homeland Security Advisory System has been in place for over 1,700 days, not one of which has seen the threat level drop below “elevated.” As terrorists seek new ways of destroying the United States, officials counter by banning liquids and gels from airplanes. “All Americans should continue to be vigilant,” advises the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “and report suspicious items or activities to local authorities immediately.” 9 While global warming threatens coastal cities, creating climate refugees, pandemic bird flu spreads slowly across the planet, poised to kill those who survive SARS and the country’s obesity epidemic. Set in a larger cultural context of crises, death, and destruction, filming for The Schools Are Failing takes place within America’s “failing” public school system. As the camera zooms in on a typical suburban high school, Newt Gingrich’s testimony before the Senate Committee on

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The Schools Are Failing  •  161 Commerce, Science, and Transportation sets the mood. The second greatest threat to America, he warns the audience, is U.S. public education; “only the threat of a weapon of mass destruction in an American city [is] a greater danger.” 10 Cut to mushroom cloud for effect. According to Stone, “agents compose stories that describe harms and difficulties, attribute them to actions of other individuals or organizations and thereby claim the right to invoke government power to stop the harm.” 11 In order to make publics more amenable to their policy solutions, neoconservative and neoliberal think tanks, institutes, and foundations provide a number of narratives depicting public schools in various states of crises or danger, harming children, communities, and the country. Blaming various entities for the failing public school system, these organizations invoke government power, that is, No Child Left Behind, to “save” children. According to neoconservatives and neoliberals, crises and dangers inside U.S. public schools include, but are not limited to: • A dropout crisis with boys,12 who are hurt by feminized public school classrooms.13 • A dropout crisis in general.14 • The terrorist organization known as the NEA (National Education Association).15 • Threats from unions in general, who don’t have children’s interests in mind16 because they are only interested in protecting jobs, limiting accountability and safeguarding their privileges,17 all of which move public education in an “unsustainable” direction.18 • Lazy teachers, who are more interested in job security than performance and who are generally the wrong type of people for the job in the first place.19 • Pinko-commie teachers,20 whose dedication to social justice harms children living in poverty.21 • Anti-Judeo, anti-Christian, Paganist teachers who, in addition to sexually corrupting children, regularly work to turn children into spies against their parents.22 • Colleges of education, which ignore the nation’s most pressing problems,23 primarily because “rigorous training in math, science and literacy takes a backseat to theories about victimization and inequality.” 24 • Wasteful inefficiency, a result of schools extracting as much as possible from taxpayers25 despite having more money than ever before.26 • Rampant, underreported school violence.27 • A virulent, anti-American, multicultural curriculum that threatens to break up the cohesiveness of the country.28 • A crisis in math.29 • A crisis in science.30

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162  •  Philip Kovacs • A crisis in world history.31 • A crisis in social studies.32 • Failing middle schools, “where academic achievement goes to die” as a result of a focus on emotional and social development.33 • Obsolete high schools, which in addition to being broken and flawed, cannot teach children, “even when working properly.” 34 • Activist judges.35 Narratives that serve to scare citizens into accepting various reforms are part of what Frank Furedi calls a politics of fear.36 “The term ‘politics of fear,’” explains Furedi, “contains the implication that politicians self-consciously manipulate people’s anxieties in order to realize their objectives.” 37 As Furedi notes, however, it is not just politicians who engage in a politics of fear, as “political elites, public figures, sections of the media and campaigners are directly culpable for using fear to promote their agenda.” 38 These public figures are necessary, explains Corey Robin, because most people “make decisions about what to fear and how [they] respond to fear with the help of trusted intimates and advisors.” 39 Such advisors include parents, friends, and teachers, as well as more distant figures such as the think tank–housed experts who use media to forward any of the above story lines. In the case of neoconservative and neoliberal educational reformers, fear serves both as a means of frightening citizens into accepting legislation they might otherwise not accept, or for that matter care about, and as a unifying element for coalition building, connecting individuals and groups who might not work together otherwise. For example, in their efforts to end public education, neoconservatives who favor strict control of illegal drugs, a merging of church and state, and banning abortion work with neoliberals who often oppose all three. “Provoking a common reaction to a perceived threat,” explains Furedi, “can also provide a focus for gaining consensus and unity.” 40 This consensus and unity occurs among the policy groups manufacturing the fear, as well as their target audiences, as concerned parents, citizens, and media personalities adopt language and ideas created in think tanks, institutes, and foundations. The main effect of the politics of fear, concludes Furedi, “is to enforce the idea that there is no alternative.” 41 Given all that is wrong with public education, both neoconservatives and neoliberals argue that there is no alternative to various educational crises except for accountability and choice, the two mantras repeated with religious intensity by the actors in The Schools Are Failing. The Actors In order to garner support for their causes, Stone explains, “political actors use narrative story lines and symbolic devices to manipulate so-called issue characteristics.” 42 The actors in The Schools Are Failing use think tank, institute, and foundation support and research to forward multiple story lines in order

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The Schools Are Failing  •  163 to manipulate public, private, and governmental organizations. Both Maxine Green and Paulo Freire suggest that understanding and naming obstacles is key to overcoming them. Central to any progressive response to the neoliberal and neoconservative assault on public education then, is understanding and naming the political actors who forward the meme “our schools are failing.” Raja Halwani defines a public intellectual as anyone who devotes time to address the public on issues of both public and personal concern.43 In some ways the political actors in The Schools Are Failing are public intellectuals, as they speak publicly, and privately, to shape opinion on issues of both public and private concern. Public intellectuals, however, have traditionally been defined as those who serve people in the face of corporate or federal power. Noam Chomsky, voted the top public intellectual in a 2005 global poll, 44 asserts that, “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” 45 Moreover, and important to remember as elites within the U.S. government use terror to justify discarding everything from international human rights agreements to the U.S. Constitution, Chomsky argues that “intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.” 46 Extending beyond Chomsky, Edward Said further explains the term, noting that the role of the public intellectual has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely swept under the rug.47 Think tank–housed, corporate-funded intellectuals do quite the opposite, as they use power and fear to forward neoliberal and neoconservative orthodoxy and dogma. Therefore, the actors in The Schools Are Failing might best be understood as neointellectuals, individuals who turn the term public intellectual on its head. In The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey argues that U.S. citizens would never allow themselves to be governed by an intellectual class. “It could be made to work,” he wrote, “only if the intellectuals became the willing tools of big economic interests.” 48 This has undoubtedly occurred, as big economic interests support a number of researchers, scholars, and intellectuals, housing them in think tanks, institutes, and foundations in order to (1) support their work, and (2) keep them at their beck and call.49 While public intellectuals serve people in the face of corporate or federal power, keeping elites in check, neointellectuals serve power in the face of people, producing research to justify all sorts of policy and behavior. Antonio Gramsci’s explanation of the organic intellectual offers insight into today’s neointellectual, though the term organic is not without its problems.50

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164  •  Philip Kovacs When people today hear the term organic, they often associate it with being good for them or the environment or both. While organic is generally associated with biodiesal fuel, hormone-free meat, or carrots grown without chemicals, organic does not always mean “good for human consumption.” Hemlock, Socrates might remind us, is organic. Therefore, when scholars such as Regina Andrea Bernard romanticize the do-gooding organic intellectual “drinking a half-caf, venti, caramel latte with extra foam in a Starbuck’s Coffee Bar,” dispersing sacred knowledge, they sell half-truths, as organic intellectuals are not necessarily good for all people.51 Organic intellectuals may represent people and people power, but they may also function to serve the interests of ascendant or dominant ideologies, a fact Gramsci makes quite clear. Christopher Clement reminds us that, “a mode of thought becomes dominant in society when it expresses the particular experiences and practical dilemmas of the dominant class or group.” 52 In education, the mode of thought being forwarded by the dominant class is that public schools are failing and can only be saved through regimentation and privatization. Organic intellectuals, Clement continues, function to sell and maintain ideas for the dominant group by providing “the means by which the dominant class advances its particular experiences and interests as a general and objective conception of all society.” 53 Importantly, the “process of ‘masking’ dominant interests positions intellectuals as permanent fixtures who continuously develop and reinforce a network of supportive ideas under the guise of ‘true philosophy.’” 54 In educational policy today, neointellectuals, such as Jay P. Greene, Frederick M. Hess, Krista Kaffer, and Chester Finn, individuals who developed within specific organizations for the explicit purpose of “advancing particular [i.e., neoconservative and neoliberal] experiences and interests,” are by Clement’s definition organic intellectuals, as they mask dominant interests while at the same time acting to convince multiple publics that reform efforts such as NCLB (regimentation) and choice (privatization) are good for them. Douglass Kellner’s work on the functional intellectual is also instructive for understanding the political actors starring in The Schools Are Failing. Functional intellectuals produce, use, and misuse research in order to further corporate power. In the words of Kellner, they “serve to reproduce and legitimate the values of existing societies.” 55 Kellner elaborates: Functional intellectuals were earlier the classical ideologues, whereas today they tend to be functionaries of parties or interest groups, or mere technicians who devise more efficient means to obtain certain ends, or who apply their skills to increase technical knowledge in various specialized domains (medicine, physics, history, etc.) without questioning the ends, goals, or values that they are serving, or the social utility or disutility of their activities.56

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The Schools Are Failing  •  165 One problem with Kellner’s definition is his assertion that these individuals do not question the ends, goals, or values they are serving. Functional intellectuals, such as Newt Gingrich and Chester Finn, believe very strongly in what they are doing. A second problem with Kellner’s use of the term functional is that all intellectuals function, some for authoritarianism and others for participatory democracy. Recognizing these two problems, Kellner’s larger point holds for neointellectuals, who function to “reproduce and legitimate” business interests, via the distribution and amplification of research (see Special Effects below), which they distribute in various spheres. C. Wright Mills offers final insight into the neointellectual. He calls this type of intellectual a “consultant” loyal to “unenlightened despots.” “It is a loyalty,” writes Mills “that seems strained neither by despotic incompetence nor by dogmatic silliness.” 57 To prevent the deterioration of their role, Wright argues that intellectuals should “remain independent to do one’s own work, to select one’s own problems, [and] to direct [their] work at kings as well as to ‘publics.’” 58 Neointellectuals are not independent, as they are bought and paid for by neoconservative and neoliberal interests. While they may be able to direct their work at kings and publics, that work always represents the interests of the individuals paying for it. The Plot Recall from Stone, “agents compose stories that describe harms and difficulties, attribute them to actions of other individuals or organizations and thereby claim the right to invoke government power to stop the harm.” 59 The plot for The Schools Are Failing is simple and straightforward. Public schools in the United States are failing due to low expectations, poor teaching, obsolete schools, teacher unions, teacher colleges, a pagan teaching force, and so forth. The federally mandated NCLB, which regulates and disciplines schools with the intent of opening them up to competition via vouchers and charters, is going to save them. Once the neointellectuals save children from the failing schools, the United States will resume its dominant position in the global marketplace, which according to neoconservative and neoliberal elites, will be made safer by the spread of democracy. Neointellectuals generate research to ensure this particular ending, using the media, as well as local, state, and federal political connections and appointments to make their policy reality. Jay P. Greene, for example, has spent much of 2006 frantically hyping a dropout crisis, which he has already solved.60 In one particular scene then, unresponsive schools and teachers are the villains, and Greene is the hero, saving children and the country from economic ruin with research purporting choice to be the only alternative. Greene never considers that his own corporatist policy recommendations may in fact be forcing many children out of classrooms.

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166  •  Philip Kovacs Special Effects According to Stone, causal stories have both an empirical and a normative dimension. The actors in The Schools Are Failing use both empirical and normative argument to (1) create the illusion of widespread crises and danger, and (2) attribute the cause of those dangers to various individuals or groups. Chris Mooney’s recent work, The Republican War on Science, details neointellectual engagement in both.61 He argues that these political actors participate in “political science abuse” to generate research, empirical and normative, to garner support for their particular causes.62 “Science,” explains Mooney, amounts to a process—institutionalized at leading universities, research facilities, and scientific journals worldwide—for systematically pursuing knowledge about nature and, in the social sciences, ourselves. As its core, this process features the testing and retesting of hypotheses to ensure that they withstand the most withering scrutiny.63 Political science abuse, on the other hand, is “any attempt to inappropriately undermine, alter, or otherwise interfere with the scientific process, or scientific conclusions, for political or ideological reasons.” 64 In The Schools Are Failing, political science abuse amounts to a special effects process as data is tweaked to make the unreal, real. Using Mooney’s categories as a framework, I include a few brief examples of how this abuse occurs in the field of educational policy setting. According to Mooney, individuals engage in political science abuse by: • Undermining science itself—such as when creationists call evolution “just a theory” or when neointellectuals attack multiculturalism, a theory and product of social science, calling it dangerous and partisan.65 • Suppression—quashing scientific reports that do not support political philosophies, as was the case with a 2004 Department of Education report critical of charter schools.66 • Targeting individual scientists—either discrediting scientists or attempting to silence them, as with David Horowitz’s list of dangerous college professors and social scientists.67 Similar targeting occurred when Massachusetts state officials refused to let Alfie Kohn speak at a conference on standardized tests.68 • Rigging the process—controlling the input of data in a policy debate by either packing a panel with scientists who are like-minded or by airing one side of the story, as was the case with Krista Kaffer’s testimony before the House Budget Committee concerning educational reform.69 • Hiding errors and misrepresentations—making false claims or distorting data, as is the case when neoliberals and neoconservatives claim

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•

•

•

•

all schools are failing or claim there has been no increase in test scores despite doubling the amount of money spent on public schools.70 Magnifying uncertainty—hyping scientific uncertainty to prevent one type of action or to allow another, such as when opponents of teachers’ colleges claim there is no scientific evidence supporting teacher certification.71 Relying on the fringe—when politicians handpick experts whose views match what they want to hear, as was the case when John Boehner (ROH), used one of Jay P. Greene’s “working papers” to support NCLB, arguing there was irrefutable proof that NCLB was a success.72 Ginning up contrary science—generating science in order to manufacture uncertainty or consent, as is the case when neoconservative think tanks, institutes, and foundations manufacture report after report in order to build consensus for accountability-based reform and choice initiatives.73 Dressing up values in scientific clothing—claiming scientific justification for purely political moves, such as when market fundamentalists claim competition works, despite having no research to prove it or basing their claims on research with one of the above flaws.74

In addition to the moral hyperbole used to create the setting for The Schools Are Failing, neointellectuals engage in any number of the above to “prove” public schools harm children. The only alternative is hyper-regulation or privatization. Having set the tone and the mood with argument and evidence, the actors become distributors, targeting multiple publics in order to garner support for their cause. Distribution Stone argues, “assertions of a causal theory are more likely to be successful if the proponents have visibility, access to media, and prominent positions.” 75 In order to convince public, private, and governmental organizations that schools are failing and can only be saved through accountability and choice, think tanks, institutes, and foundations have created a marketing infrastructure that uses print, radio, television, and the web, as well as personal testimony, to influence the creation of educational policy.76 Jay P. Greene, for example, appeared on NPR, CNN, and PBS to forward propaganda concerning his dropout crisis.77 When Oprah Winfrey, whose show has an estimated 49 million viewers, picked up the meme, she used Greene’s work for evidence.78 ABC, Winfrey’s home network, is also home to 20/20, which aired John Stossel’s attack on public education, “Stupid in America,” twice in 2006. When he is not “reporting” for 20/20, Stossel works closely with the Cato Institute, a neoliberal/libertarian institute that lists ending public education as one of its goals.

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168  •  Philip Kovacs In addition to explaining the neointellectual, Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks is also instructive for understanding the distribution of The Schools Are Failing. Gramsci argues that intellectuals operate as “the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.” 79 Said differently, actors such as Greene and Stossel forward narratives consistent with neoliberal and neoconservative needs, building consensus as they speak before audiences, publish in newspapers and journals, and appear on television. The subaltern functions of these actors are twofold. The first involves generating “spontaneous” consent by the population “to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group.” 80 This consent, according to Gramsci, “is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.” 81 In short, consent follows distribution, made more effective by power and prestige. Consider here two particular consent-generating incidents made possible by position, function, power, and prestige; both involve the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), an institute “whose mission is to actively support parental choice to empower families and increase quality educational options for Black children.” 82 In 2002, the BAEO partnered with the Department of Education, which gave the organization $600,000. Then Undersecretary of Education Gene Hickok (formerly a Bradley fellow at the Heritage Foundation) explained the purpose of the grant: “We want to change the conversation about parental choice by positively influencing individuals who are resisting parental choice options and get them to reconsider their outlook.” 83 This “full scale media campaign,” according the Department of Education’s press release, used “direct mail, television, radio, newspapers, the Internet and door-to-door visits.” 84 Essentially, tax dollars were spent on a media campaign for privatizing schools. Hickok has also been accused of “positively influencing individuals” by withholding reports, commissioned by his own office, that are critical of charter schools. The New York Times had to use the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to one such report.85 In addition to funding the BAEO, the Bush administration attempted to positively influence individuals through the use of paid journalists, as was the case with black commentator Armstrong Williams. Williams, a prestigious radio show host and one of the founding directors for BAEO, received $240,000 to support NCLB. Williams’ payment was part of a $1.3 million contract given to Ketchum Public Relations, and Ketchum’s payment was part of a much larger campaign to sell NCLB to various American publics. According to the Office of the Inspector General, “media relations firms, advocacy groups, and other private companies received nearly $5 million in grants to help galvanize public support for [NCLB] without disclosing that they received taxpayer funds to do so.” 86 Selling an idea, recall from Stone, is “more likely to

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The Schools Are Failing  •  169 be successful if the proponents have visibility, access to media, and prominent positions.” The second subaltern function of the political actors distributing The Schools Are Failing involves using “the apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively.” 87 In addition to creating research that purports to show public schools in various states of crises, neointellectuals such as Frederick Hess, Krista Kaffer, Jay P. Greene, Terry Moe, and Chester Finn generate political support for legislation that forces schools, teachers, students, and parents to consent to standards-driven privatization initiatives. No Child Left Behind (federal legislation) legally accomplishes long-standing neoconservative and neoliberal goals by (1) regulating knowledge and meaning according to neoconservative and neoliberal desires, and (2) transforming public education into private spaces where production and knowledge can be similarly controlled. An Alternate Ending If neoconservative and neoliberal think tanks continue their efforts at scaring citizens of the United States out of a public school system sans critique, they may succeed in “saving” children from the terror, crises, danger, and disaster they attribute to public education. Despite their relentless efforts at ending public education, it is not a forgone conclusion, provided individuals and organizations who believe that children, and the country, deserve more than corporate-sanctioned schooling stand up in united opposition. Given such a stance, I offer an alternate edition of The Schools Are Failing, one where the “bad guys” are the neointellectuals attempting to end public education, while the “good guys” consist of a broad coalition of diverse individuals brought together by necessity. One of the hallmarks of the Hollywood disaster movie is the coalition forced into existence by devastating climate change or various creatures wreaking havoc across the country. Consider here the lanky, Jewish scientist teamed up with a tough, black marine to save the world from aliens, or the aquaphobic, small-town cop working with an Ivy League scientist to kill a man-eating shark, or perhaps more unlikely, the poststructural feminist working with a Marxist and a local PTA leader to resist neoconservative and neoliberal educational reform. Should the educational Left, if there is a body deserving that title, prove capable of forming such a coalition, it must engage publicly and politically to end neoconservative and neoliberal fear mongering. This requires rejecting the politics of fear, as danger, disaster, crises, and terror offer little for “beginning, renewing, or restoring a robust republic of energetic virtue and galvanizing purpose.” 88 In place of a politics of fear might be what Giroux calls a “politics of hope,” one offering a renewed vision of participatory democracy as a social system capable of meeting the various demands of life in the twenty-first century.89 While such a project may sound utopian and idealistic,

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170  •  Philip Kovacs I wish to remind the reader that utopian ideals have led to the formation of several unlikely coalitions and successes. Arguably, without utopian idealism, without a politics of hope, there would be no United States of America, no women’s suffrage, no ongoing movement for equal rights. The alternate ending to The Schools Are Failing, the ending with a robust democratic social order created and maintained through public education, begins with a voice-over much different than Newt Gingrich’s, one that celebrates the accomplishments of a school system that incorporates and educates millions of diverse children every year, despite constant attack, underfunding, and federal legislation, each of which exacerbates existing issues.90 Informing that voice-over might be scholarly reports that debunk think-tank research such as that forwarded by the Fordham Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the Manhattan Institute;91 independent or progressive institutes that refute neointellectual propaganda, such as Jay P. Greene’s dropout crisis;92 the work of unions such as the American Federation of Teachers’ point-by-point critique of John Stossel’s “Stupid in America;” 93 and the work of testing reform advocates such as the organization Fairtest.94 The main issue for individuals and organizations opposed to the neoliberal and neoconservative movement against public schools is, arguably, the failure to recognize that we share a common threat and have much to benefit from working together to oppose it. While neoconservatives and neoliberals clearly recognize a monster to slay, Marxists, poststructural feminists, progressives, teachers, students, parents, and concerned citizens remain isolated, often unaware or unconcerned that public education (1) faces the threat of nonexistence in the first place, and (2) has the potential to become a space where diverse individuals engage in democratic revival and is therefore a space worth saving. Articulating such a message and amplifying it across diverse groups lies beyond the scope of this chapter but seems a project worthy of pursuit.95 Notes

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1. Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5. 2. See Deborah A. Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas,” Political Science Quarterly 104, no. 2 (1989). 3. Ibid., 282. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 283. 6. Ibid., 294 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 293. 9. Quote taken from the DHS homepage. The threat level was “high,” meaning a “high risk of terrorist attacks,” http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=29 (accessed September 1, 2006).

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The Schools Are Failing  •  171 10. See Newt Gingrich, “We Must Expand Our Investment in Science,” testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, http://www.aei.org/include/news_print.asp?newsID=15562 (accessed November 9, 2004). 11. Stone, “Causal Stories,” 282. 12. See Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates, Civic Report No. 48, April 2006, http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_48.htm (accessed June 26, 2006). 13. See Gerry Garibaldi, “The Feminized American Classroom—And How it Hurts Boys,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 6, 2006, http://www.manhattan-institute. org/html/_chicsuntimes-the_feminized_american.htm (accessed August 13, 2006). 14. See Jay P. Greene, “There’s a Dropout Crisis in Dallas Public Schools,” Dallas News, May 3, 2006, http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-winters_03edi.ART.State.Edition1.3800347.html (accessed August 10, 2006). 15. See John King, “Paige Calls NEA ‘Terrorist Organization,’” CNN.com, February 23, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/23/paige.terrorist. nea/ (accessed August 10, 2006). 16. See Frederick M. Hess and Martin R. West, “Taking on the Teachers Unions,” AEI Publications, March 29, 2006, http://www.aei.org/publications/ pubID.24132,filter.all/pub_detail.asp (accessed August 13, 2006). 17. See Frederick M. Hess and Martin R. West, “Time to Take on Teachers Union,” AEI Publications, April 5, 2006, http://www.aei.org/publications/ pubID.24165,filter.all/pub_detail.asp (accessed August 10, 2006). 18. See Howard Fuller and George A. Mitchell, “A Culture of Complaint,” Education Next (summer 2006), http://www.educationnext.org/20063/18.html (accessed August 15, 2006). 19. See Terry M. Moe, “Politics, Control, and the Future of School Accountability,” in No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practice of School Accountability, ed. Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2003), 84. 20. See Sol Stern, “Pinko Teachers Inc.,” New York Post, March 12, 2006, http://www. manhattan-institute.org/html/_nypost_pinko_teachers_inc.htm (accessed August 13, 2006). 21. See Sol Stern, “The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug,” City Journal, (summer 2006), http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html (accessed August 10, 2006). 22. See Joel Turtel, Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie to Parents and Betray Our Children (New York: Liberty Books, 2004–2005), 31–59. 23. See Kate Walsh, “Fwd: Teacher Education: Coming Up Empty,” Ed Excellence 16 (March 2006), http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=353 (accessed August 10, 2006). 24. See Sol Stern, “When Activism Masquerades as Education,” New York Daily News, 21 July 21, 2006, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/ story/436703p-367945c.html (accessed August 10, 2006). 25. See John T. Wenders, “Pork Barrel Education,” Cato.org, August 16, 2005, http:// www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4210 (accessed August 13, 2006).

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172  •  Philip Kovacs 26. See, for example, Krista Kafer, “The Promise of No Child Left Behind.” Testimony before the House Budget Committee Democratic Caucus Senate Democratic Policy Committee, July 17, 2003, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/ tst071703.cfm (accessed November 9, 2004). 27. See Neal McCluskey, “Violence in Public Schools: A Dirty Secret,” School Reform News, May 1, 2005, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17123 (accessed August 13, 2006). 28. See Gregory Rodrigues, “Why Multiculturalism Should Scare You,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2006, M5. 29. See David Klein et al., The State of State Math Standards (Washington, DC: The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2005), http://www.edexcellence.net/institute/publication/publication.cfm?id=338&pubsubid=1116 (accessed August 13, 2006). 30. See Paul R. Gross, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Michael J. Petrilli, Less Than Proficient (Washington, DC: The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2005), http://www. edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=350 (accessed August 13, 2006). 31. See “In State Academic Standards, World History Gets Lost in Translation,” Press Release, June 6, 2006, http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/about/ press_release.cfm?id=26 (accessed August 13, 2006). 32. See Chester E. Finn Jr., “The Social Studies Wars,” The Daily Report, May 12, 2003, http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/we/2003/finn05.html (accessed August 13, 2006). 33. See Cheri Pierson Yecke and Chester E. Finn, Jr., Mayhem in the Middle: How Middle Schools Have Failed America, and How to Make Them Work (Washington, DC: The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 2005), http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=345 (accessed August 20, 2006). 34. See Bill Gates, “Prepared Remarks for the National Education Summit on High Schools,” February 26, 2005, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speeches/BillgSpeeches/BGSpeechNGA-050226.htm (accessed August 8, 2006). 35. See Frederick M. Hess, “When Unaccountable Courts Meet Dysfunctional Schools,” American Enterprise, July–August 2006, http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.24573,filter.all/pub_detail.asp (accessed August 15, 2006). 36. Frank Furedi, The Politics of Fear (London: Continuum, 2005). 37. Ibid., 123. 38. Ibid. 39. Robin, Fear, 173. 40. Furedi, Politics of Fear, 132. 41. Ibid. 42. Stone, “Causal Stories,” 282. 43. See Raja Halwani, “Introduction to the Philosopher as Public Intellectual,” Metaphilosophy 33, no. 5 (October 2002): 495. 44. See Duncan Campbell, “Chomsky Is Voted World’s Top Public Intellectual,” The Guardian, October 18, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1018-02.htm (accessed August 18, 2006).

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The Schools Are Failing  •  173 45. Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in The Dissenting Academy, ed. Theodore Roszak (New York: Random House, 1967), 256. 46. Ibid., 255. 47. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 2006), 11. 48. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago, IL: Swallow Press, Inc., 1927), 205–206. 49. For more on this see Philip Kovacs, “Think Tanks, Institutes, and Foundations,” in Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: The Effects of School Reform in a Neoliberal/Neoconservative Age, 2nd edition, ed. David Gabbard (Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum, in press). 50. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–15. 51. For Regina Andrea Barnard’s treatment of the organic intellectual, see “Live from Hell’s Kitchen, NYC,” in What You Don’t Know About Schools, ed. Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 263. 52. Christopher Clement, “Organic Intellectuals and the Discourse on Democracy: Academia, Foreign Policy Makers, and Third World Intervention,” New Political Science 25, no. 3 (September 2003): 351. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. See Douglas Kellner, “Intellectuals, the New Public Spheres, and TechnoPolitics,” http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner (accessed August 15, 2006). 56. Ibid. 57. See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 180. 58. Ibid., 181. 59. Stone, “Causal Stories,” 282. 60. For the crisis, see Jay P. Greene, “There’s a Dropout Crisis in Dallas Public Schools.” For the solution, see Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, “The Effects of Residential School Choice on Public High School Graduation Rates.” Working paper, http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_09.htm (accessed August 10, 2006). 61. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 62. Ibid., 17–24. 63. Ibid., 14. 64. Ibid., 17. 65. See Gregory Rodrigues of the New America Foundation, “Why Multiculturalism Should Scare You,” Los Angeles Times, 18 January 2006, M5. 66. See Gerald Bracey, “The 15th Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education,” Phi Delta Kappan 87, no. 2 (October 2005): 145, http://www.americatomorrow.com/bracey/EDDRA/ (accessed March 17, 2006). 67. See David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2006).

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174  •  Philip Kovacs 68. A Massachusetts Superior Court judge recently ruled Kohn’s First Amendment rights were violated. See the Associated Press, “Judge Says DOE at Fault for Silencing MCAS Critic,” Boston.com, August 1, 2006, http://www.boston. com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/08/01/judge_says_doe_at_fault_ for_silencing_mcas_critic/ (accessed August 15, 2006). 69. See Krista Kafer, “The Promise of No Child Left Behind.” Kafer’s testimony relied on the work of think tank–housed researchers. 70. For a lengthy treatment of misrepresented data and public education, see Gerald W. Bracey, Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U.S., 2nd ed. (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004) and Gerald W. Bracey, Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006). 71. See, for example, Frederick M. Hess, “The Predictable, but Unpredictably Personal, Politics of Teacher Licensure,” Journal of Teacher Education 56, no. 3 (May/June 2005): 192–198. 72. See News from the Committee on Education and the Workforce, “New Report Debunks NEA-MoveOn.org Excuses for Poor School Performance; Proves High Standards are Key to Closing Achievement Gaps in Education,” http://edworkforce.house.gov/press/press108/second/09sept/nclb090904.htm (accessed August 13, 2006). 73. See Philip Kovacs and Deron Boyles, “Think Tanks, Institutes, and Foundations: Conservative Influence on U.S. Public Schools,” Public Resistance 1, no. 1 (May 2005), http://www.publicresistance.org/journals/1.1-3Institutes.htm#_edn58 (accessed June 13, 2006). The authors focus on four neoconservative organizations and their attempts to undermine public education with the use of in-house reports. 74. Ibid. Greene circumvents the peer review process by publishing outside of scientific journals, dubbing his research “working papers.” 75. Stone, “Causal Stories,” 294. 76. For more on this infrastructure, see Kovacs and Boyles, “Think Tanks, Institutes, and Foundations.” 77. See Greene’s biography at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/greene. htm (accessed August 10, 2006). 78. See The Alliance for School Choice, “Time/Oprah Winfrey Polls,” http://www. allianceforschoolchoice.org/media_center.aspx?IITypeID=3&IIID=2611 (accessed August 13, 2006). 79. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 12. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Quote taken from the organization’s (Black Alliance for Educational Opportunities) homepage, http://www.baeo.org. 83. See “Bush Funds Black Voucher Front Group: Your Tax Dollars Pay for Propaganda Blitz,” The Black Commentator, Available online at http://www.educationforthepeople.org/bush%20funds%20black%20vouchers.htm (accessed December 30, 2005). 84. See “Education Department, BAEO Form Partnership to Reach Parents About Landmark No Child Left Behind Act,” Press release, http://www.ed.gov/news/ pressreleases/2002/10/10152002a.html (accessed December 30, 2005).

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The Schools Are Failing  •  175 85. See Bracey, “The 15th Bracey Report.” 86. See Corey Murray, “Critics Blast ED’s ‘Propaganda’ Probe,” eSchool News, http://www.eschoonews.com/news/pfshowStory.cfm?ArticleID=5874 (accessed December 30, 2005). 87. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 12. 88. Robin, Fear, 23. 89. Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004), 125–144. 90. For a number of issues with standardized tests in general and No Child Left Behind in particular, see Sandra Altshuler and Tresa Schmautz, “No Hispanic Student Left Behind: The Consequences of ‘High Stakes’ Testing,” Children and Schools 28, no. 1 (January 2006): 5–14; The Center on Education Policy, From the Capital to the Classroom: Year 4 of the No Child Left Behind Act (Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy, 2006), http://www.cep-dc.org/nclb/Year4/ Press/ (accessed May 5, 2005); Linda Darling-Hammond, “From ‘Separate but Equal’ to ‘No Child Left Behind’: The Collision of New Standards and Old Inequalities,” in Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools, ed. Deborah Meier and George Wood (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004), 3–32; James Ryan, “The Perverse Incentives of the No Child Left Behind Act,” New York University Law Review 79 (June 2004): 932–990; and Claus Von Zastrow, Academic Atrophy: The Condition of the Liberal Arts in America’s Public Schools (Washington, DC: Council for Basic Education, 2004), http://downloads.ncss.org/legislative/AcademicAtrophy.pdf (accessed December 31, 2005). 91. For detailed analysis of reports from these neoconservative and/or neoliberal organizations, see the Education Policy Research Unit’s Think Tank Review Project, online at http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/epru_2006_thinktankreview.htm. 92. See Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy, Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trends (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2006), http://www. epi.org/content.cfm/book_grad_rates (accessed August 21, 2006). 93. See the American Federation of Teachers, Stupid on ABC: The John Stossel Agenda (Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers, 2006), http:// www.aft.org/presscenter/downloads/sidebyside.pdf (accessed August 20, 2006). 94. See FairTest at http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speeches/BillgSpeeches/BGSpeechNGA-050226.htm. 95. For an example of what such a coalition might look like and do, see http://www. educatorroundtable.org.

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9

Disaster Politics and the Right-Wing Assault on Public Schooling and Public Space

A Dialogue between Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky

Bill: Mike:

Bill:

Michael, I think you should talk a little bit about the politics of disaster, thinking about the last few days and the last couple of years, what do the politics of disaster have to do with education policy? One of the ways the politics of disaster have been used is in the attack on public space. Since President Bush’s “ownership society” speech in 2004, we have seen a steady erosion of public space and public ownership. One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how the enemies of public space and public education have positioned themselves as “radicals,” and how progressive educators find themselves—a bit incongruously—in the position of defenders of the status quo and they try and defend public space and public schools. The area of change, especially of radical change, is now the domain of the very conservative elements centered around the Department of Education, and the big right-wing think tanks like Heritage and Fordham. In many ways the politics of disaster come into play because in order to attack public space, the “radicals” have to pose public space as being totally bureaucratic, inequitable, and unresponsive—unsalvageable. This, incidentally, is not unlike our own critique of bureaucratic institutions. But in order to justify closing public schools, turning them over to private management companies, attacking them on the basis of their test scores, the radical right must make the case that public systems work so badly because they are public, and that the only solution, or the optimal solution, is ownership or private management. Abigail Thurnstrom, from the neocon Manhattan Institute, said recently that “No Child Left Behind is the last hope for public education. If it doesn’t work, we have to do away with the whole system and start over.” The ideological right-wingers constantly frame the 177

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178  •  Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky

Mike:

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discussion in terms of catastrophe and disaster. As long as we’ve been involved in trying to change schools, the language has continually escalated, and meaning has been manipulated, shifted, and become itself a real site of conflict. So “A Nation at Risk” declared that if a foreign power had declared war on America, they couldn’t have done worse than this. And now we have E. D. Hirsch’s new book The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap. Hirsch is taking on the mantle of equity to hammer home his narrow and defeating curricular reforms. And one of the interesting things is that when they set the conditions for this discussion, they always set it solely on the basis of test scores when it comes to assessing public schools. It’s not that I’m against private schools or private education. I’m not. But in the past, the perceived superiority of private schools has been used as a cudgel to beat down public education. Now there’s all this new evidence, which this conservative administration has produced, showing that private schools are doing worse than public schools when they’re educating the same kids. When they reluctantly released the results of these studies, the privatizers’ response was, “Well, test scores are not a good measure.” Here’s a statement from Joseph McTighe, the executive director of the Council for American Private Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private elementary and secondary schools: “statistical analysis has little to do with parents’ choices on educating their children. In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids.” So suddenly, to the head of the Council for American Private Education, test scores aren’t the real world. Even though this is what’s always used in the politics of disaster. It’s been their big stick to throttle public education. And a way to shape policy and funding. For example, in the last budget go-around the Department of Education shifted about $240 million away from building small learning communities, and about the same amount into the line of private school support. And so this research is about the real world. And it brings up an important question for us as educators for social justice: Is reform possible? You see, the question of reform to people like us, who think that there’s major systemic problems that have to be addressed, has always been laced with contradiction. Sometimes we equate reform with tinkering around the edges of change. Some have even talked about the “inevitable failure” of school reform in the most pessimistic ways. But now the whole language of reform has shifted, and it’s the new conservatives who say it’s impossible to reform public education. Now they’re the ones who insist that we have to blow up

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the system, and by blow up the system they mean, get rid of, totally eradicate the public space. Okay. Let’s delve into three key questions: Is reform possible? What is the role of research and what research is worthwhile? And how important are test scores in terms of gauging change? But let’s start with this: Is reform possible? I think it’s useful to note a central contradiction: the capitalist imperative—competition, hierarchy, dog-eat-dog—is in direct conflict with the democratic notion of equality and participatory democracy. They have no easy fit, and that’s why people are constantly frustrated when they find their democratic dreams for decent classrooms and schools crushed from above. On the other hand, it seems to me ridiculous to say that the schools aren’t a potentially fruitful site of struggle, that there’s a temporal projection: first change society, then change the schools. The schools are and always must be sites of hope and struggle, and we should see them as contested spaces. Too often progressive educators and reformers get exhausted and they say, “Well, why should this be contested space?” It’s in the nature of a school and a classroom to be a contested space, and we should enter the contest with our eyes open. Yes, but even within this system of inequality, reforms are winnable. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in winning voting rights for millions of people and removing some of the most horrendous examples of racial discrimination. We both were part of the movement which helped to end the war in Vietnam. School reform is possible if it is connected to a social movement of this scale. Bill Gates gave a talk to a governor’s conference on education last year, an education summit, and he said, “The American high school is obsolete.” He went on, comparing reform of American high schools with trying to turn a Smith-Corona typewriter into a computer.” He sets up a paradigm which says that reform is impossible. And of course, when he’s saying this, I imagine all these high school teachers and students thinking of themselves as obsolete, and that there’s really nothing you can do, and how narrowing and demoralizing that is. Now, after investing over a billion dollars in high school restructuring, Gates Foundation leaders are complaining that restructuring is too hard and that “failing schools” need to be closed, opening the door, now from the liberal establishment, for privatization. In Chicago right now there’s an initiative that really is owned by Mayor Daley, called Renaissance 2010. Ren10 is also driven by a group called the Civic Committee, a “reform” committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a corporate group

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that was part of the coalition that represented the first wave of Chicago school reform. The club is in fact the top 500 capitalists in Chicago. Yes. And they launched this program, Renaissance 2010, about four years ago, and the premise was that over the next ten years, we would create a hundred new schools in the city of Chicago. This sounded like a great opportunity, just what the city needs to do— restructure these big factory-type high schools and middle schools, and create a whole new initiative around new schools, and engage teachers and community and parents. The initiative even co-opted our language of small schools and autonomy. It turned out instead to be a school-closing initiative as well as an attempt to erode public space. In fact, the plan calls for almost two-thirds of these hundred new schools to be turned over to EMOs, educational management organizations, like Edison Corporation. And for the last four years that’s exactly what’s been going on. As Chicago’s school CEO puts it: “We’re in the business of education.” Another point on their agenda is to change the whole relationship between the public schools hierarchy and teachers by taking away bargaining rights for teachers, making membership in the Chicago Teachers Union illegal. Beyond this, these companies use their control of public property to leverage loans and real estate. And so they see it as a windfall, even though that’s illusory in many cases. And these new-school franchises are distributed to this whole new high-growth industry of private school management firms, whereas public school teachers and urban communities trying to start new schools have had tremendous obstacles put in their way. Here, I’m thinking of the Little Village community, where it took a 19-day hunger strike by parents in order to start a new high school. Now, they’ve actually divided the city up into four classes of new schools: charter schools, contract schools, what they call performance schools, and regular public schools. Each category has its own level of autonomy, its own funding apparatus, its own rules. And in a way Renaissance 2010 is just replicating, to a much higher degree, the system’s basic inequities. It has intensified that gap: they shut down schools; they move schools; they close other schools, nearly all in the black community. They have no regard to what neighborhoods they move them into, or for the ability of the new school to handle these new kids. At many of the new schools, new levels of violence have broken out. More kids are fighting over fewer resources. Cultural differences haven’t been taken into account. A parallel could be drawn with the disruption of kids’ lives following Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of New

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Orleans kids had to be moved into schools around Houston. And they’re doing this at the same time that the schools are facing massive budget cuts, the layoffs of thousands of teachers in the city. And so this is a real disaster—not to the same catastrophic degree of Katrina, but just as much a result of a bankrupt social policy, and impacting the same population of kids in the city. And, you know, this is what reform Chicago-style has come to mean to many citizens. What’s so important about Renaissance 2010, and the way you lay it out is that you see coming together what might look like disparate, separate policies, that taken one by one may seem confusing or innocuous. But what they add up to is an insult on the idea of public education. The very thought that there should be a public space where people come together and democratically affect their futures is what’s under assault here. And you see it also in the obsession with a single metric to define school success. You see it with the ascendancy of zero tolerance policies. You see it with all the proliferating metaphors about the school as free market. But in Renaissance 2010, you see housing policy, globalization policy, and school policy coming together in a draconian way. It’s a big, coordinated assault on the communities. Yes, that is all a reflection of the “ownership society” in action. And the thing that really hurts is that a lot of this is being done under the banner of “small schools.” We’ve identified with it, and we’ve helped to create the language that’s now being used to dismantle public space and public education. For example, a word like autonomy, which we always used to mean teachers having more control over their teaching, over the teaching and learning environment, has now become a word used to give freedom to private management companies to run schools in ways that fail to serve all kids. I’ve even heard now some of that language being used by people in the small schools movement to rationalize why they’re not serving special needs kids, Spanish speaking kids, or students with behavioral issues. It’s because they need the “autonomy” to create these new schools, they say, and maybe in three or four years, once we’ve had time to fully establish the school, they’ll be able and ready to serve special needs kids. I recently heard this from some New York smallschools people who said, “We’re not really prepared to handle the needs of special education kids maybe for another three years.” And I wondered what would’ve happened if, instead of saying special education kids, they would have said “We’re not ready to serve Black or Latino kids for three years.” It’s what the New York Times’

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Samuel Freedman called, “the not-so-public part of public schools: lack of accountability.” And it always comes in the rhetoric of beneficence and progress and progressivism. And yet how did they get away with it? For example, the assault on public schools in Chicago doesn’t have its equivalent in public schools in suburban Winnetka or even Evanston. How do they get to couch this in these terms, how do they frame it in such a way that people don’t rise up and resist? Well I think there’s a certain sensibility to what they’re saying. I think they build on the critique that we helped create. People feel like public space, government, bureaucracy, all need to change, and maybe they’re not even reformable. I think that people have grown cynical, for example, about politics. Now they look at the scandals in government with a wink and a nod, and when somebody says “government, there’s no way to really reform it. It just has to be blown up,” I think people kind of nod. They resonate with that, without realizing that this bureaucracy, which has become such an impediment in the lives of people, also serves a purpose, to mediate and regulate fairness, and to try to constrain the gross inequities built into the system. But now you sound like you’re defending bureaucracy. It seems to me that the agenda setters have set it up as the status quo versus radical change, and set it up as bureaucracy versus freedom, and they’ve left out all kinds of progressive alternatives. One being, and I think this is what we saw in the whole New York experience of small schools over the last 25 years, one being the possibility that within a public framework, you can actually create democratic, close to the ground, public spaces where decent education can be enacted. Yes, we do need a certain degree of bureaucracy in a public system. It’s not just about creating these nice small autonomous spaces at the expense of the majority of kids who are still in the big factory schools. But the people who led that reform had the idea that they would act as a critique, that people would see the power of it and demand that kind of change. And of course, as I said earlier the larger system isn’t going to fully allow that. So when you have a progressive impulse in schools meeting the capitalist impulse in the larger society, something has to give. Even among those people you’re talking about, the visionaries, two trends emerged coming out of the eighties. One was the idea to create these small democratic schools, and create autonomy for themselves, and try to group together with others to build this little community. The other trend was to see the creation of these new

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democratic alternatives as a critical force, to make an impact on the rest of the system. A kind of insurgency from behind and below. When charter schools first were developed here in Chicago, we helped start the first six or seven, and we saw them as this potential critical force. And instead what happened was a shift, really about six, seven years ago, where many of the early charter school state associations, for example, were disbanded and were brought under the hegemony of conservative, national charter school organizations. They pulled in people who were progressive and funded them heavily through some very reactionary foundations. Some of the early charter schools started by teachers and community folks resisted that, and became a part of the systemic change movement. So they saw themselves as not only a model and an alternative, but they saw themselves as insurgent within the system, and not simply coexistent. If you look at the history of union struggle, it’s the same thing. White, skilled workers at certain times have been just a class or group serving their own very narrow interests at the expense of African American and immigrant workers, for example, or the larger society. We have a whole tradition of this, especially when it came to the question of free labor and slave labor. In school reform you have the same emergent themes. This is, of course, in the nature of social struggle. The core of the question for Americans, and frankly in school reform it’s the same thing, the core of the question is race. Race is where it all breaks down and falls apart. We can see another example in the labor movement, which is the crisis in health care. Once labor unions fifty years ago decided they were going to fight for health care within the contract, rather than fight for it as a larger social issue, a demand on the whole system for the benefit of all, the die was cast. And where we are today is a result of that? And another place they get away with using that kind of language and those kinds of metaphors is in the culture of disaster and fear. If you spread the culture of fear, then anything can be justified, from invading other countries to the most horrific kinds of reactionary changes. Take a situation like New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Katrina, where there were billions of dollars which we thought and hoped would be available to help rebuild the city and bring back the people who lost their homes. Instead it’s being parceled out to private management companies to create new models of schools very much in the framework that the Heritage

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Foundation visualizes. All the old discredited people—William Bennett, Rod Paige—come in and influence and drive the new schools in New Orleans. In their vision, the district will be freed from those people who they’ve driven out of the city. But it’s being done under the framework of, “Oh, let’s create some beautiful new small, privately-managed charter schools.” And what they’re going to do, I fear, is use this Katrina approach just the same way they’re using Renaissance 2010 in Chicago, as models for change in other cities, replicable models. And so the comparison is that Renaissance 2010, which calls itself a new schools initiative but is actually a schools-closing initiative, and Katrina, which is a catastrophe model that opens with wiping out whatever existed and starting over as a market-driven system, both focus on the crème de la crème and the masses of kids be damned. Exactly. Sometimes I think groups like the Civic Committee in Chicago must wish they had a social Katrina that could have closed the schools without all this resistance from the community they’re facing now, and then they could go ahead with their pure, perfect, replicable model. And that brings up the question of, if reform is possible, how does it take place? In my mind progressive, humane change can only happen with the most deep-going community engagement—if people are to transform public education into a democratic, equitable system, which it needs to be, it’s going to take a movement, a social change movement, on the scale of the American Civil Rights Movement or greater. And this is something that the new radicals on the right fear. Instead, they feel like the way to change schools is like the way to build a chain of Starbucks or of Wal-Mart stores. They call it something like Replication Inc., or replicable models. And they think that in this way they can teacher-proof these new schools—build in a set prepackaged curriculum, and train the deskilled clerk/teachers in the same way that Starbucks would train its baristas. They think they can make teachers completely interchangeable. And they’re hiring very young teachers with no experience to work in some of the toughest communities, and these teachers will surely burn out after two or three years—they’re trying to do it on the cheap because that’s the competitive model, and because they’re profit driven. This is true across the board. Your vision of reform, my vision of reform has to do with change within a democratic context and toward a more participatory and just situation. So to us the people with the problems are also the people with the solutions, and if you leave those people out, you’re not crafting any kind of reform that we would recognize as democratic or progressive. It’s a reform

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based on the culture of experts, the culture of professionals, who always know better than the people, and it’s a model of service rather than of solidarity. That’s one of the things we have to address at the deepest level—reform for what? Reform toward what kind of social order? I remember having a conversation with one of the top CPS administrators, a fellow who came to the system from the corporate world. And I remember talking to him about community engagement. And the words he kept using were, “We have to rein these people in, rein them in.” He said even if we have a community engagement process, the point of it would be to reign people in, “because right now,” he says “the people in the community are running around saying all kind of things and we have no control over that.” And I said, “I think the people in the community have much more to contribute to this process than the way you’re talking about them.” And he said “Give me an example, Mike.” And I said, “Well, how about Little Village High School, where parents fought so hard to get a new school built and actually went on a hunger strike for nineteen days, and finally the city came up with the money to get their new high school.” I said, “Now they have this wonderful beautiful new high school, the pride of Chicago, and it really was generated from a community-based movement.” He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “You know, I think that that Little Village High School fiasco was the biggest catastrophe in Chicago in the last fifty years.” I asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “We let those people blackmail us into getting them a school.” There you have the ownership mentality and the politics of disaster. This is where I think that a lot of our young teachers, new teachers, get hoodwinked into thinking that the only model they can imagine coming into a system like Chicago is the model of service and the model of bringing civilization from the mountaintop. What drew us to school reform in Chicago, certainly in 1988, was the fact that it was a lot like the Civil Rights Movement. It was people on the move demanding something better for themselves, for their community, for their children. It was a vision generated from the oppressed, the outsiders themselves. I think this is the Civil Rights Movement of the twenty-first century. Who will have access to the wonderful things that society is capable of producing, and who gets to ride that train into the new millennium? And that’s largely a question of who has access to education. But let’s look back now and say, “We’ve got a decade of this battle going on—how has their model worked?” Now we’re finding, we’re hearing that these privately managed schools are no

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better than their local neighborhood schools, even though some have received millions of dollars in extra funding and support as well as political support from the White House and the elite. You were saying some disparaging things about research a minute ago, and I wanted to get into this question because the Education Department has defined research for us now. They won’t fund anything except a medical, clinical-type model of research—control groups, replicability, generalizable results, the whole scientific hog. And so part of the question is what is the value of research and what’s the range of things that might be useful from our point of view? One thing that strikes me is the phrase “the research says.” That term has a kind of mystifying effect in schools. If I go into a school and I say, “Well the research says you ought to do that,” what I mean is you ought to genuflect in front of this. This is powerful. And its contrapositive has the same effect. If I say, “There’s no research …” When I was in a school and somebody was trying to get a spoken-word curriculum into some English class, and the principal said, “There’s no research that shows that spoken word will help these kids on their reading scores.” And I said, “Well, is there any research to show that Hamlet helps kids on their reading scores?” He said, “You’re just being silly.” But it has that kind of mystifying logic. Statistical research has a role, it seems to me, to help us in fighting for equity. Sure, if it shows us which schools are failing which kids. But it’s rarely used in that way. But here’s what it is to them [reading from the Education Week report comparing public and private schools]: “An Education Department official, who insisted on anonymity because of the climate surrounding the report, said researchers were ‘extra cautious in reviewing it and were aware of its political sensitivity.’” So you see, he’s really admitting that this “objective study” is a political animal. And so when it came out, they released it very quietly, and they said it’s of no real importance, this study, even though they spent millions and millions of dollars generating it. You talked about how school reformers pointed out that statistical comparisons can help to identify which schools were failing which communities, and that statistics in that case are not a stick to beat up on teachers or a stick to beat up on students. That’s an important distinction, but I also think that the very notion that we can quantify everything, that everything worth knowing can be measured, is a myth. In a democratic society, where we assume that people are always works in progress, where society is always in flux, the idea

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that an objective standard measure is always the measure we’re searching for is not correct. Of course you’re right, but I think we have to battle them on that turf also. I agree. For example, we have about a hundred and forty schools in Chicago, regular public schools, not charters, not privately managed schools, that have made tremendous progress over the last ten years, and when I say progress, I mean based on their data. You mean partly based on their data, but that’s not the only thing. Right. But that’s part of it. If you discuss it on their terms, in other words how their reading scores and math scores have gone, these schools, which are more democratically operated with more school councils, and have paid a lot of attention to professional development and best use of time and space and creating good learning environments, they’re outperforming the rest of the district. One thing I think we have to challenge is any conclusions that claim to tell the whole story of what’s going on in a school. In other words, I want to make a strong distinction, and I want to argue this in the public square, and I want to argue it with teachers, that standards and standard setting in a democratic school system and a democratic society should be the work of everybody. That is, we should all be about the business of setting standards. Standardization is not the goal of a democratic school system. One size fits all, everybody the same, one curriculum that everybody follows in the same way— that’s not the goal of a democratic system. But I think that standard setting is something that we should all be a part of. And when you get down to testing and assessment and evaluation, the process should be open, it should be participatory, and it should loop back to the classroom so that teachers can do a better job. All examinations are not bad things, of course, but what we’re saddled with today mostly is ex-animations, tests that suck the life out of us. Given what you said earlier about public space and public education being contested territory, how do we make that case without being labeled as soft on accountability and standards? It’s like anything else—if you go along with the status quo, and if you go along with the direction of narrowing these things, you won’t have to defend yourself. But if you try to interrupt it and offer something new, you have to be smarter, clearer, more visionary. When I talk to parents on the west side of Chicago or in Winnetka, and I talk to them about what they want for their kids, and we talk

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188  •  Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky about what education is about, I don’t hear parents saying, “I want my kid to have a great test score.” People want their kids to be able to participate fully, to work, to be good people. There’s a disconnect between these broad aspirations and the school wars. We’ve talked endlessly in the school debates in this country about the direction of education. We talk about competition with the Japanese, and we talk about competition with Europe. It seems to me absolutely absurd that a kid in the third grade in Chicago would be motivated by trying to beat out some Japanese kid from Kyoto, and I’m not sure what its value is. We have to argue with people about the meaning of education. Most parents want for their kids the capacity to work, the capacity to participate, the capacity to be free people in a democratic society, and that’s the kind of schools we should build.

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10

The Patriotic Prejudice

9/11 on Campus David Gabbard

Beginning with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, this chapter examines attacks leveled against university faculty by the neoliberal/neoconservative right since the tragic events of 9/11. The author demonstrates how these attacks conform to the role assigned to a special class of pseudo-intellectuals described by neoconservative philosopher Leo Strauss as “the wasps.” The author will also show how such attacks must be understood alongside the larger assault on science as part of neoconservatism’s more general hatred of modernity and democracy, which informs what David Harvey describes as neoliberalism’s pursuit of the restoration of class power. I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. —Thomas Jefferson (1816) Scottish philosopher David Hume would have deeply appreciated the issues addressed in the Wachowski brothers’ screen adaptation (Silver, Wachowski, and Wachowski 2006) of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s comic book, V for Vendetta (2005). “People should not be afraid of their governments,” says the protagonist, V. “Governments should be afraid of their people.” Likewise, the Wachowskis, who also wrote and produced The Matrix (1999) and its sequels, would appreciate Hume’s surprise “to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their ruler” (cited in Chomsky 1992, 352). As dramatized so poignantly in V for Vendetta (Silver, Wachowski, and Wachowski 2006), Hume believed that “Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. ’Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular” (cited in Chomsky 1992, 352). 189

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190  •  David Gabbard We should reserve judgment on Hume’s absolutist statement that government founds itself only on the opinion of the governed. Few would deny the role that propaganda has historically played in the art of statecraft, and for those of us in market societies, in the efforts of the private power to maintain its effective hegemony over the state apparatus (see Gabbard forthcoming). Perhaps owing to the efficacy of that propaganda, however, most Americans today lack consciousness of the violence once so regularly exercised by private power to keep the aspirations of the public in check. Some of that violence, of course, has been structural. We find it so deeply ingrained within the nature of the capitalist state that it becomes difficult to distinguish state power from the private power of the corporate plutocracy that owns and controls the institutions responsible for the production and distribution of the goods and services upon which the rest of the population depends for survival. This dependency relationship already bestows tremendous political power to the ownership class, introducing heteronomy—a relation in which one person must submit to the will of some external authority—as one of the two dominant principles that define our values (see Fotopoulos 1999). Individualism constitutes the other dominant principle that defines the operative values within our market society. One of the most significant moments for understanding the evolution and intensification of private power’s heteronomy over the rest of U.S. society occurred in 1886 when, in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court deemed that corporations were entitled to the same rights under the Constitution as individuals. The rhetoric of democracy, which the plutocratic ownership class reserved for itself at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 by restricting the voting franchise to white males of sufficient property, has inspired a long list of populist movements to pressure the government into extending democratic rights and freedoms to greater numbers of citizens. Seldom do citizens today, however, learn about the severity of the resistance mounted against those populist movements or from which quarters of society that resistance stemmed. One incident of such violence, which holds particular value for our understanding of 9/11 as a propaganda event, occurred on May 4, 1886 at the Haymarket Square in Chicago (see Green 2006; and Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University n.d.). When police moved in to break up a peaceful demonstration protesting the killing and wounding of striking workers by police the day before, someone threw a bomb into the crowd. The explosion killed seven policemen and three demonstrators. Though eight of the anarchists who’d organized the demonstration were convicted (four of them hanged, another committed suicide) on conspiracy charges, no one ever knew or reported the identity of the bomb thrower. Belatedly for those executed, the governor of Illinois pardoned the remaining three organizers due to the obvious lack of evidence in the case. Rumor has it that a Pinkerton guard hired by one of the corporations had actually committed the crime as part of a

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  191 propaganda effort to discredit and demonize the labor movement by convincing the public to associate the unions with crime, violence, and other disreputable behavior. In this manner, private power worked to gain public support for the corporate and state use of political and physical violence as means of suppressing workers’ rights to organize their own efforts to secure legal protections from the structural violence of capitalist relations. Though the scale of violence at the Haymarket Riots pales in comparison to the events of 9/11, we must bear in mind that plutocratic elites have frequently demonstrated no restraint in staging acts of violence against ordinary American citizens to achieve their goals. In fact, the instigation of violence became a prime mechanism for generating public opposition to organized labor. In 1895 more than two hundred U.S. corporations pooled their massive resources to create the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Appointing Samuel Prescott Bush, the great-grandfather of our current president, to head the organization, NAM went on to become the first propaganda organ of the ownership class (see Shaw 2003; and Hatfield 2000). After WWI, NAM leased the talents of Edward Bernays and Walter Lipmann, who had each served on Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Commission, which produced propaganda to generate public support for U.S. entry into the war (see Carey 1996, 21–22). Bush went on to later work for the Remington Rand corporation, where he helped Remington become the most profitable arms dealer of World War I by selling guns and ammunition to both the allied forces and Germany. Years after the war, James Rand published a propaganda strategy that seemed to use the Haymarket bombing as a sort of paradigm for creating a “scientific” method for breaking strikes. This method, dubbed the Mohawk Valley Formula, consisted of nine elements designed “to arouse such public fear and hatred of workers’ movements to the point where the public at large do to labor, on industry’s behalf, what the individual employer could no longer do legally. This tactic, it was reported at the time, envisages a public opinion aroused to the point where it will tolerate the often outrageous use of force by police or vigilantes to break a strike” (Carey 1996, 25). The Mohawk Valley Formula First: When a strike is threatened, label the union leaders as “agitators” to discredit them with the public and their own followers. Conduct balloting under the foremen to ascertain the strength of the union and to make possible misrepresentation of the strikers as a small minority. Exert economic pressure through threats to move the plant, align bankers, real estate owners and businessmen into a “Citizens’ Committee.” Second: Raise high the banner of “law and order,” thereby causing the community to mass legal and police weapons against imagined vio-

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192  •  David Gabbard lence and to forget that employees have equal right with others in the community. Third: Call a “mass meeting” to coordinate public sentiment against the strike and strengthen the Citizens’ Committee. Fourth: Form a large police force to intimidate the strikers and exert a psychological effect. Utilize local police, state police, vigilantes and special deputies chosen, if possible, from other neighborhoods. Fifth: Convince the strikers their cause is hopeless with a “back-towork” movement by a puppet association of so-called “loyal employees” secretly organized by the employer. Sixth: When enough applications are on hand, set a date for opening the plant by having such opening requested by the puppet “back-to-work” association. Seventh: Stage the “opening” theatrically by throwing open the gates and having the employees march in a mass protected by squads of armed police so as to dramatize and exaggerate the opening and heighten the demoralizing effect. Eighth: Demoralize the strikers with a continuing show of force. If necessary turn the locality into a warlike camp and barricade it from the outside world. Ninth: Close the publicity barrage on the theme that the plant is in full operation and the strikers are merely a minority attempting to interfere with the “right to work.” With this, the campaign is over—the employer has broken the strike (Rand 1934). A year after the Roosevelt administration’s passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, which granted unions the right to organize and enter into collective bargaining with employers, NAM heavily promoted the Mohawk Valley Formula to all of its member corporations. Instigating violence to discredit the domestic enemy became a standard means for justifying violence as a means of securing the heteronomy of capital’s control over society. To suggest that forces within or around the Bush administration took a page from the Haymarket Riots and the Mohawk Valley Formula to plan the horrifying events of 9/11 may seem far-fetched. When we consider the recommendations of the Project for a New American Century’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century (2000), however, we clearly detect a similar logic at work. In the broadest terms, this report’s recommendations stem from PNAC’s recognition of the United States as: the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances, which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present, the United

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  193 States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. (i) One of its key recommendations included the redeployment of U.S. military forces to southeastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Strategically placed in the middle of those two regions of the globe, of course (if we read between the lines), is the Middle East, to which the report directs considerable attention. Identifying the “unresolved conflict with Iraq” as the “immediate justification” for creating “a substantial American force presence in the Gulf,” PNAC also recognized that the need for the United States to assume “a more permanent role in Gulf regional security transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein” (14). Effecting this repositioning of American forces to the Middle East, along with its numerous other recommendations, the PNAC asserted, “must occur within the larger framework of U.S. national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets. The United States cannot simply declare a ‘strategic pause’ while experimenting with new technologies and operational concepts. . . . Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” (51). While this would seem to suggest that the PNAC acknowledged the necessity of patience in reaching its goals, other elements of the document communicate a far greater sense of urgency. The report states: Today the United States has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It faces no immediate great-power challenge; it is blessed with wealthy, powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world; it is in the midst of the longest economic expansion in its history; and its political and economic principles are almost universally embraced. At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals. The challenge for the coming century is to preserve and enhance this “American peace.” (iv) Writing for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and subsequently Harper’s magazine, Greg Palast (2005) revealed how the Bush administration began planning the invasion of Iraq and the disposition of its oil shortly after taking office if not before. We also know that Bush manipulated intelligence to justify the invasion on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was close to being able to develop nuclear weapons (see Sunday Times 2005; and Pincus 2005, A18). Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney set out to convince the American public that Saddam worked with al Qaeda to carry out the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11 (see Milbank and Deane 2003; Pincus and Milbank 2004; and MSNBC 2004). Further, while Democrats and some Republicans have begun calling

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194  •  David Gabbard for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Bush has told the American people that we will continue to occupy the country with our military until well after he leaves office in 2009 (CBS News 2006). The occupation may last longer than that, coming closer to the “more permanent role in Gulf regional security” called for by the Project for a New American Century. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified on February 17, 2005 in Congress: “I can assure you that we have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq” (cited in Graham-Felsen 2005). That testimony is contradicted however, by Global Security Watch’s report from March 23, 2004: it was reported that “U.S. engineers are focusing on constructing 14 enduring bases, ‘long-term encampments for the thousands of American troops expected to serve in Iraq for at least two years. The U.S. plans to operate from former Iraqi bases in Baghdad, Mosul, Taji, Balad, Kirkuk and in areas near Nasiriyah, near Tikrit, near Fallujah and between Irbil and Kirkuk … enhance airfields in Baghdad and Mosul.’” (cited in Zeese 2006) Furthermore, the Christian Science Monitor reported in April 2006: the Pentagon would prefer to keep its bases in Iraq. It has already spent $1 billion or more on them, outfitting some with underground bunkers and other characteristics of long-term bases. Some U.S. bases in Iraq are huge, e.g., Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad, occupies 15 square miles, boasts two swimming pools, a gym, a miniature-golf course, and a first-run movie theater. The $67.6 billion emergency bill to cover Iraq and Afghanistan military costs includes $348 million for further base construction. (Zeese 2006) Taken in combination with the size of the new U.S. Embassy (100 acres) still under construction, it would appear that Baghdad will serve as the center for PNAC’s planned U.S. domination of the Middle East for many years to come. Scholarship in an Age of Compulsory Patriotism Was 9/11 the Haymarket bomb tossed into the American crowd to justify the enactment of PNAC’s plans to create a global American empire? Did the neoconservatives work to engineer their own New Pearl Harbor to manufacture the requisite levels of public consent for imperial conquest conducted in the name of an endless war on terror? Even to ask such questions invites scorn and ridicule, particularly when those questions come from university professors, who along with members of the allegedly liberal media, have long been viewed as the worst purveyors of what conservatives call the Vietnam syndrome. One of the leading neoconservative intellectuals, Norman Podhoretz, defined this political malady as “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force” (cited in Chomsky 1995).

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  195 Hawkish elements within conservative circles associate the Vietnam syndrome with university professors, of course because what eventually became a populist movement to end America’s imperialist aggression against Vietnam began on college campuses. To quote what has become a mantra among those who now seek to inoculate universities from the scourge, “the same people who ran anti-war demonstrations in the 60’s are now professors” (Capozzi 2006). Members of the allegedly liberal media suffer similar attacks because, unlike too many in their field today, they made some effort to uphold the ethical standards of their profession. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, most reporters at least attempted to take seriously the charges that journalism’s “first obligation is to the truth,” and its “first loyalty … to citizens” who need “accurate and reliable information … to function in a free society” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001). Vietnam was the first televised war, and journalists did not shy away from bringing the realities of war into the nation’s living rooms. When the Pentagon Papers proved that Lyndon B. Johnson knowingly committed the United States to war under false pretenses, the media actually spent more time examining the evidence than it did trying to smear and discredit the source of that evidence as being traitorous and un-American. Journalists of that era still sought to maintain some degree of independence from those they covered in order to fulfill their professional missions as “independent monitors of power” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001), not stenographers of power. While the Federal Communication Commission’s 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which required media outlets to present multiple perspectives on issues, has proven to have allowed corporate interests to make major strides toward weakening the Vietnam syndrome in commercial media (see Randall 2005; and McChesney 2003), inoculating the universities has proven more difficult for them. The neoconservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) helped to forecast that fate as early as November 11, 2001 when its chairman and president (Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal) posted their coauthored Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It. “In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks,” the report began, Americans across the country responded with anger, patriotism, and support of military intervention. The polls have been nearly unanimous—92% in favor of military force even if casualties occur—and citizens have rallied behind the President wholeheartedly. Not so in academe. Even as many institutions enhanced security and many students exhibited American flags, professors across the country sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America.

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196  •  David Gabbard While America’s elected officials from both parties and media commentators from across the spectrum condemned the attacks and followed the President in calling evil by its rightful name, many faculty demurred. Some refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil. Some even pointed accusatory fingers, not at the terrorists, but at America itself. (Martin and Neal 2001, 1) Not surprisingly then, Defending Civilization originated the jingoist phrase “Blame America First” (2) so commonly used today by the chief agents of neoconservative media power (e.g., Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and others) to demonize anyone who dares criticize the neoconservative and neoliberal policies of the Bush administration. Martin and Neal would have us believe that they did not intend to threaten academic freedom with their report. They present Defending Civilization as an innocent and honest expression of their disagreement with those scholars who reacted to 9/11 as a moment to reflect on the question why foreign agents could possibly hate America so badly as to commit such vicious acts of terror. For them, George W. Bush had provided America with the answer to that question in his September 20 address to a joint session of Congress. For Bush, as well as for Martin and Neal, 9/11 resulted from the terrorist’s hatred of “what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their [the terrorists’] leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” (Bush 2001). Ironically, of course, we know the Bush administration was never “democratically elected,” and we could just as easily question the number of Republicans in Congress who also benefited from the vote rigging in the 2000 and 2004 elections that put and kept Bush in office (see Miller 2005; Kennedy 2006). We also know that the enactment and enforcement of the Patriot Act (I and II) and other measures taken in the name of homeland security have eroded the very things—the freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble—that Bush alleged to have motivated the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center (see Cole 2003, 2005; ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) 2005; and Democracy Now! 2005). Further, we know that Bush and the neoconservatives have compromised our freedom of religion by manipulating and courting religious extremists from among the fundamentalist Christian community to secure a populist electoral base for their otherwise decidedly antipopulist, plutocratic, and imperialist agenda (see Scherer 2005; Olsen 2005). But the point here is that the none-too-subtle message communicated by Martin and Neal goes beyond disagreeing with those who would challenge Bush’s portrayal of America as the innocent victim of some totally irrational hate crime. Their message goes beyond disagreeing with those who would point to the arrogant hypocrisy of an American president’s proclamation that “If

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  197 any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they [sic] have become outlaws and murderers, themselves” (cited in Martin and Neal 2001, 2). If Martin and Neal genuinely wanted to express disagreement, they would have articulated some basis for that disagreement, some evidence to support their side in a debate. They would have to present evidence that refutes the historical record of the American government’s involvement in the killing of innocents, which dates back to the genocidal policies effected in the name of what public school textbooks continue to whitewash as Westward Expansion or Manifest Destiny. As in a court of law, they would have to build a case to disprove the claim that by Bush’s own standards, the U.S. government has long been an outlaw and murderer. This would not be an easy task. On one hand, the U.S. government has an established record of sponsoring outlaws and killers. For example, in the early 1980s, the man whom Bush appointed as the first U.S. ambassador to postinvasion Iraq and who now heads the government’s intelligence community, John Negroponte, helped coordinate death squads in Honduras and El Salvador (see Democracy Now! 2004; Buzzflash 2004). He also aided the same neoconservatives now at the helm in supporting the terrorist operations of the Contras in Nicaragua with funding from illegal arms sales to Iran, who was then fighting a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to whom they were also selling arms—including weapons of mass destruction (i.e., chemical and biological weapons). On the other hand, the U.S. government has also killed tens and hundreds of thousands of innocents through its own direct military actions in North America, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Panama, and, most recently, Iraq. Moreover, Martin and Neal offer no evidence that would discredit the factual record that supports those of us who, if we suspend all doubts and simply accept the official story on the events of 9/11, recognize that the foreign policies of the U.S. government have given many peoples a variety of reasons to hate us. If an international court of law were to apply the U.S. government’s definition of terrorism—“the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature … through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear” (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command 1997)—to the government’s own militarist actions over the course of its entire history, that court of law would win multiple convictions. For this reason alone, the United States has consistently refused to subject itself to the rule of any international court, just as it has historically refused to become a full signatory to the United Nations’ genocide conventions (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; see Gabbard 2006). Martin and Neal have no interest in debate, however. That’s not the function of ACTA; it’s not a debate club. ACTA (originally called the National Alumni Forum) was established in 1995 by Lynne V. Cheney, wife of the current vice president, after she left her chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986 to 1993) where Martin and Neal had served under her.

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198  •  David Gabbard ACTA functions as one of a plethora of overlapping, right-wing think tanks, institutes, and foundations created since the early 1970s that coordinate with the corporate-created stable of right-wing media celebrities to advance a neofascist agenda stemming from the convergence of neoliberal and neoconservative projects. As David Harvey (2005) explains, neoliberalism constitutes a project aimed at the restoration of class power, and neoconservatism has functioned to militarize that project. Apart from the previously discussed Project for a New American Century, which seeks to overcome the Vietnam syndrome in using military force to effect a global American empire, this neofascist agenda’s domestic goals include eliminating all New Deal legislation and programs from the 1930s, as well as most of the civil rights laws created since the 1960s. In order to overcome the Vietnam syndrome’s “sickly inhibitions against the use of military force” (cited in Chomsky 1995), neofascism demands the suppression of any remaining vestige of critical, democratic, and egalitarian (i.e., liberal) thought and speech on America’s campuses. This would appear to contradict Martin and Neal’s following statement: This is not an argument for limiting free speech on college campuses. The robust exchange of ideas is essential to a free society. But academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism. If some faculty are inclined to criticize America, it seems only reasonable to insist that colleges and universities transmit our history and heritage to the next generation so that students can decide for themselves. (Martin and Neal 2001, 8) Notice, however, how they frame the issue. They counterpose “criticisms of America” to “our history and heritage,” which needs to be transmitted “to the next generation so that students can decide for themselves.” So, we have a duality. On the one hand, there are criticisms of America that are not part of our history and heritage, implying that such criticisms are not as true, or at least not worthy of being transmitted to the next generation. On the other hand, there is our history and heritage, which is true and essential to students’ learning. Lynne Cheney (2001) struck the same chord a month earlier in an address to the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture where she shared her thoughts “about our schools and about what we should be teaching our children in the wake of the September 11th attacks on our country. . . . At a time of national crisis, she said: I think it is particularly apparent that we need to encourage the study of our past. Our children and grandchildren—indeed, all of us—need to know the ideas and ideals on which our nation has been built. We need to understand how fortunate we are to live in freedom. We need to understand that living in liberty is such a precious thing that generations

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  199 of men and women have been willing to sacrifice everything for it. We need to know, in a war, exactly what is at stake. (Cheney 2001) Among the many things she says students should learn, Cheney emphasized the importance of letting students know “how hard the establishment of this country was,” citing Benjamin Rush’s account of the “‘labors and fears and sorrows and sleepless nights’ they all [the signers of the Declaration of Independence suffered, and of ‘the pensive and awful silence’ as they stepped forward to sign what was believed by many of them to be their death warrants.” But would Ms. Cheney also have our students read Dr. Rush’s thoughts on education? In “Thoughts upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic” (1786), Dr. Rush, the “father of American psychiatry,” stated that “the principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice, and it is well known that our strongest prejudices in favor of our country are formed in the first one and twenty years of our lives. . . . Our schools of learning,” he argued, “by producing one general and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.” The quotes below come from the same document: In order more effectually to secure to our youth the advantages of a religious education, it is necessary to impose upon them the doctrines and discipline of a particular church. Man is naturally an ungovernable animal, and observations on particular societies and countries will teach us that when we add the restraints of ecclesiastical to those of domestic and civil government, we produce in him the highest degrees of order and virtue. . . . Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. . . . In the education of youth, let the authority of our masters be as absolute as possible. The government of schools like the government of private families should be arbitrary, that it may not be severe. By this mode of education, we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age, and I have often thought that society owes a great deal of its order and happiness to the deficiencies of parental government being supplied by those habits of obedience and subordination which are contracted at schools. . . .

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200  •  David Gabbard From the observations that have been made it is plain that I consider it as possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state. Further, Cheney sorely laments the fact that less than 25 percent of our students “knew that James Madison was the father of the Constitution.” Would she also find it lamentable if students didn’t learn that, in deliberating on writing that document, Madison asserted that “our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation, putting in place checks and balances in order to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” She might also find it lamentable that today’s students know so little of one of the patron saints of today’s neoliberal/neoconservative movement, Alexander Hamilton. In Hamilton’s words: all communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well born; the other, the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they will therefore maintain good government. (cited in Parenti 2006) We might ask Cheney, as well as Martin and Neal, whether these direct quotations from our founding fathers constitute criticisms or whether they stand as part of our history and heritage? Where do they fit within the “ideas and ideals on which our nation has been built”? Should we include or exclude them from our curriculum? While we should agree with Martin and Neal that “academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism,” we must wonder what criticism they would level against us for presenting them to our students. Would their criticism be based on Rush’s assertion that “the principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice,” particularly, to borrow from Cheney, “at a time of national crisis”? What purpose would such “prejudice” serve? Would it satisfactorily foster the “habits of obedience and subordination” demanded of “republican machines”? In its Statement of Professional Ethics (1966), the American Association of University Professors declare, “as teachers, professors encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. They hold before them the best scholarly and ethical standards of their discipline.” In meeting those standards, professors, guided by a deep conviction of the worth and dignity of the advancement of knowledge, recognize the special responsibilities placed upon them. Their primary responsibility to their subject is to seek and

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  201 to state the truth as they see it. To this end professors devote their energies to developing and improving their scholarly competence. They accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending, and transmitting knowledge. They practice intellectual honesty. Although professors may follow subsidiary interests, these interests must never seriously hamper or compromise their freedom of inquiry. (American Association of University Professors) Based on this statement, cultivating the prejudices demanded by patriotism would violate scholars’ professional ethics and their commitment to the critical self-discipline and judgment demanded by intellectual honesty in seeking and stating the truth as they see it. Herein lies the unstated criticism that Neal and Martin direct at their targets. They provide no scholarly grounds for criticizing, for example, Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whom they cite as having said, “[i]magine the real suffering and grief of people in other countries. The best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror” (Neal and Martin, 2001, 12). Therefore, they leave us to conclude that the basis for their criticism of Gusterson’s remark stems not from any scholarly failures on his part, but from his failure to satisfactorily promote the patriotic prejudices demanded of republican machines. Conclusion If Martin and Neal expressed their views on the comments made by scholars in the wake of 9/11 as private individuals, we could easily dismiss them with little concern. That, however, is not the case. They speak not as private citizens, but as the chairman and president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and its Defense of Civilization Fund. As stated previously, ACTA represents just one in a network of various neoliberal/neoconservative think tanks, institutes, and foundations that is so vast that some refer to it as “the labyrinth” (National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy 1997). Those dedicated to inoculating universities from the Vietnam syndrome include not only ACTA, but also Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch, and David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which supports the Orwellian-named Students for Academic Freedom, among others. The labyrinth also includes the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, and a litany of over 200 other such right-wing neofascist organizations dedicated to restoring unbridled corporate control over government and society. Among their many functions, these groups provide talking points to such right-wing media pundits and authors as Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, as well as Fox News. Members of these various groups also occupy key positions within the Bush administration itself. Karl Zinsmeister, for example, who has

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202  •  David Gabbard just replaced Karl Rove as Bush’s top domestic policy advisor, came from the American Enterprise Institute. The labyrinth receives its funding from four primary sources, known as the “four sisters” because their philanthropy overlaps across so many of the same organizations. They include the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the foundations of Richard Mellon Scaife. These same four sisters that fund ACTA and its Defense of Civilization Fund, also fund another group that has figured prominently in this analysis of 9/11 as a New Pearl Harbor designed to liberate corporate militarism from the Vietnam syndrome. Namely, they fund the Project for a New American Century. References American Association of University Professors. 1966. Statement on professional ethics, http://www.aaup.org/statements/Redbook/Rbethics.htm (accessed June 19, 2006). American Civil Liberties Union. 2005. Homeland Security officials wrongly arrested peaceful protesters in Georgia, charges ACL, September 22, http://www.aclu. org/safefree/general/20154prs20050922.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Bush, G. W. 2001. Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American people, September 20, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/200109208.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Buzzflash. 2004. Bush appoints death squad ambassador to Iraq, April 24, http://www. buzzflash.com/contributors/04/04/con04175.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Capozzi, R. 2006. Inmates run academic asylum. Campus Report Online, April, http://www.campusreportonline.net/main/articles.php?id=840 (accessed June 19, 2006). Carey, A. 1996. Taking the risk out of democracy: Corporate propaganda versus freedom and liberty. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. CBS News. 2006. Bush: Successor decides Iraq pullout, March 21, http://www.cbsnews. com/stories/2006/03/21/politics/main1425182.shtml (accessed June 19, 2006). Cheney, L. V. 2001. Mrs. Cheney’s remarks at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, October, http://www.whitehouse.gov/mrscheney/news/20011005.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University. 2000. The dramas of the Haymarket, http://www.chicagohs.org/dramas/ (accessed June 19, 2006). Chomsky, N. 1992. Deterring democracy. Boston, MA: Hill and Wang. Chomsky, N. 1995. Rollback part I. Z Magazine, January, http://www.chomsky.info/ articles/199505--.htm (accessed June 19, 2006). Cole, D. 2003. Patriot Act’s big brother. The Nation, March 17, http://www.thenation. com/doc/20030317/cole (accessed June 19, 2006). Cole, D. 2005. The missing patriot debate, May 30, http://www.thenation.com/ doc/20050530/cole (accessed June 19, 2006). Coulter, A. 2006. Godless: The church of liberalism. New York: Regnery. Crooks and Liars. 2006a. O’Reilly defends Coulter’s ideas about 9/11 widows. http:// www.crooksandliars.com/2006/06/10.html#a8666 (accessed June 19, 2006). Crooks and Liars. 2006b. David Horowitz laughed off of Larry King. http://www. crooksandliars.com/2006/06/12.html#a8692 (accessed June 19, 2006).

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  203 Democracy Now! 2004. Dems ignore Negroponte’s death squad past, look to confirm Iraq appointment, April 28, http://www.democracynow.org/article. pl?sid=04/04/28/1449257 (accessed June 19, 2006). Democracy Now! 2005. Pentagon caught spying on U.S. anti-war and antinuclear activists, December 15, http://www.democracynow.org/article. pl?sid=05/12/15/155219 (accessed June 19, 2006). Fotopoulos, T. 1999. Mass media, culture, and democracy. Democracy and Nature 5(1), http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol5/ fotopoulos_media.htm (accessed June 19, 2006). Gabbard, D. 2006. Before predator came: A plea for expanding first nations scholarship as European shadow work. In Indigenous worldviews and scholarly challenges to “anti-Indian” hegemony, ed. Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) 219–231. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gabbard, D. Forthcoming. Knowledge and power in the global economy: The effects of school reform in a neoliberal/neoconservative age, 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Graham-Felsen, S. 2005. Operation: Enduring presence. AlterNet, July 28, http:// www.alternet.org/waroniraq/23755/ (accessed June 19, 2006). Green, J. 2006. Death in the Haymarket: A story of Chicago, the first labor movement, and the bombing that divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon. Harvey, D. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hatfield, J. H. 2000. Fortunate son: George W. Bush and the making of an American President. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press. Jefferson, T. 1816. Letter to Samuel Kercheval, June 12, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=459 (accessed June 19, 2006). Kennedy, R. F. Jr. 2006). Was the 2004 election stolen? Rolling Stone Magazine, http:// www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen (accessed June 19, 2006). Kovach, B., and T. Rosenstiel. 2001. Introduction to The elements of journalism: What newspeople should know and the public should expect. New York: Crown. Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists, http://www.journalism.org/resources/publications/books/elements_intro.asp (accessed June 19, 2006). Martin, J., and A. Neal. 2001. Defending civilization: How our universities are failing America and what can be done about it, http://www.goacta.org/publications/ Reports/defciv.pdf (accessed June 19, 2006). McChesney, R. W. 2003. The FCC’s big grab: Making media monopoly part of the Constitution, Counterpunch, May 16, http://counterpunch.org/mcchesney05162003. html (accessed June 19, 2006). Media Matters for America. 2006a. Plugging new book in latest solo Today appearance, Coulter attacked liberals, 9/11 widows, June 6, http://mediamatters.org/ items/200606060006 (accessed June 19, 2006). Media Matters for America. 2006b. Horowitz continued to defend Coulter: It wasn’t Ann who crossed the line. It was these widows who crossed the line, June 13, http://mediamatters.org/items/200606130013 (accessed June 19, 2006). Milbank, D., and C. Deane. 2003. Hussein link to 9/11 lingers in many minds. Washington Post, September 6, A01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?p agename=article&contentId=A32862-2003Sep5 (accessed June 19, 2006).

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204  •  David Gabbard Miller, M. C. 2005. None dare call it stolen: Ohio, the election, and America’s servile press. Harper’s Magazine, August, http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare. html (accessed June 19, 2006). Moore, A., and D. Lloyd. 2005. V for Vendetta. New York: Vertigo Press. MSNBC. 2004. Cheney blames media for blurring Saddam, 9/11, June 18, http://www. msnbc.msn.com/id/5233810/ (accessed June 19, 2006). National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy. 1997. Moving a public policy agenda: The strategic philanthropy of conservative foundations, http://www.mediatransparency.org/conservativephilanthropy.php (accessed June 19, 2006). News Hounds. 2006. Fraudulent Ann Coulter the latest recipient of Republican rehab on Fox News, June 8, http://www.newshounds.us/2006/06/08/fraudulent_ ann_coulter_the_latest_recipient_of_republican_rehab_on_fox_news.php (accessed June 19, 2006). Olsen, T. 2005. Weblog: Former DeLay aide: ‘Wacko’ Christians will believe anything. Christianity Today, November 4, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/ 144/55.0.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Palast, G. 2005. Baghdad coup d’etat for Big Oil. Harper’s Magazine, April, http:// www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=418 (accessed June 19, 2006). Parenti, M. 2006. A Constitution for the few: Looking back to the beginning, International Endowment for Democracy, http://www.iefd.org/articles/constitution_ for_the_few.php#13 (accessed June 19, 2006). Pincus, W. 2005. British intelligence warned of Iraq War, Washington Post, May 13, A18, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/12/ AR2005051201857.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Pincus, W., and D. Milbank. 2004. The Iraq connection: Al Qaeda-Hussein link is dismissed. Washington Post, July 17, A01, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Project for a New American Century. 2000. Rebuilding America’s defenses: Strategies, forces, and resources for a new century, http://www.newamericancentury.org/ RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf (accessed June 19, 2006). Rand, J. 1934. The Mohawk Valley formula, http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/ Mohawk_Valley_Formula (accessed June 19, 2006). Randall, S. 2005). The Fairness Doctrine: How we lost it, and why we need it back. Extra! Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, January/February, http://www.fair. org/index.php?page=2053 (accessed June 19, 2006). Rush, B. 1786. Thoughts upon the mode of education proper in a republic. In A Plan for the establishment of public schools and the diffusion of knowledge in Pennsylvania; to which are added, thoughts upon the mode of education proper in a republic, http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/rush.htm (accessed June 19, 2006). Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (May 10, 1886). Scherer, M. 2005. Abramoff-Scanlon school of sleaze. Salon.com, November 3, http:// dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/11/03/abramoff/index.html (accessed June 19, 2006). Shaw, C. 2003. The Bush empire: How four generations of arms, oil, fascism, and U.S. government defiance made America’s first family. Newtopia Magazine: A Journal of the New Counterculture II:3 (July–August). Silver, J., A. Wachowski, and L. Wachowski, producers, J. McTeigue, director. 2006. V for Vendetta. [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Brothers.

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The Patriotic Prejudice  •  205 Silver, J., A. Wachowski, and L. Wachowski, producers, A. Wachowski, and L. Wachowski directors. 1999. The Matrix. [Motion Picture]. United States: Warner Brothers. Sunday–Times (London). 2005. The secret Downing Street memo, London–Sunday Times, May 1, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html (accessed June 19, 2006). U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. 1997. TRADOC Reg 525-13, http:// www.tradoc.army.mil/tpubs/regs/r525-13.htm (accessed June 19, 2006). Zeese, K. 2006. We’re staying!: Unless the Iraqis force the United States out, the evidence shows the U.S. isn’t leaving. Democracy Rising, April, http://democracyrising.us/content/view/469/151/ (accessed June 19, 2006).

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III

Disaster and Global Implications

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11

Beyond Cheap French Fries

Remembering the Social in Social Disaster

Michael W. Apple

In this chapter Michael Apple provides a specific example outside the United States of the social rootedness of what often count as natural disasters. He illustrates how this label obstructs our recognition of how the global metropole is intimately implicated in creating the conditions in which these social disasters are constantly produced. He concludes by situating this specific example in the conditions in which millions of people are forced to live. What Is a Disaster? Language helps produce ideologies and identities. It positions us in relation to others. Indeed it helps create binaries in which a we is created at the same time as its opposite—a they—is also established. Thus, each important social concept we use has what might be called “constitutive outsides” (Butler 1993). Good requires bad. White requires black or brown. For me to be seen as moral and committed to “freedom,” there needs to be a category of “despised others” who are deemed to be immoral or potential or real terrorists (Apple 2006). This is one of the most important ways in which we create a situation that causes us to miss what is actually happening in the real world. Let me give an example of how language can create a perceived reality that covers as much as it reveals, that mystifies real social and economic relations. I was observing a thoughtful teacher who was holding a discussion on current events in an elementary school classroom. Students were cutting out stories from newspapers and then sharing news events involving natural disasters. One of the natural disasters that caught their attention was a tragic mudslide in an area of Latin America in which hundreds of people died. The newspapers categorized events such as these in their usual ways; but there is nothing natural about such disasters. Yes, it rained a good deal, causing an entire mountainside to collapse. But the use of the word natural misconstrues, in truly frightening ways, what actually happened. The mudslide that buried hundreds of people was socially produced. Poor people are condemned to build their dwellings on unsafe mountainsides 209

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210  •  Michael W. Apple because the safe land is too expensive and is owned by wealthy classes. Rains, often torrential, come each year, and each year entire families die as their homes are washed away in a sea of mud. We can only understand tragedies such as these by asking why poor people build their homes on unsafe land. We don’t need to look very far to find an answer. They have no choice. Wealth and its defense, and the poverty such wealth entails, kills them. I mention such things at the outset of this chapter because words such as disaster imply relations of power. Such words embody a decision to say that this particular event is a disaster, and something else is not. Our ordinary understandings of such concepts also often involve seeing such things as somehow natural, as out of our control, and as one-time events caused by freaks of nature. Yet disasters such as the ones discussed in that classroom are not one-time events, nor are they there and then not there. As the murderous consequences so vividly on display in the wake of Hurricane Katrina make obvious, they build over time and their social roots, causes, and effects can be specified, often in painful detail. In what follows, I shall provide a specific example outside the United States of the social rootedness of what we often count as natural disasters. I shall also show the way in which this label obstructs our recognition of how the global metropole is intimately implicated in creating the conditions in which these social disasters are constantly produced. Finally I will situate this specific example in the conditions in which millions of people are forced to live. I need you to take a trip with me in order to accomplish these tasks. Education and Cheap French Fries The sun glared off of the hood of the small car as we made our way along the two-lane road. The heat and humidity made me wonder if I’d have any liquid left in my body at the end of the trip, and led me to appreciate Wisconsin winters a bit more than one might expect. The idea of winter seemed more than a little remote in this Asian country for which I have a good deal of fondness. But the topic at hand was not the weather; rather, it was the struggles of educators and social activists to build an education that was considerably more democratic than what was in place in that country at the time. This was a dangerous topic. Discussing it in philosophical and formalistically academic terms was tolerated there. Openly calling for it and situating it within a serious analysis of the economic, political, and military power structures that exerted control over so much of this nation’s daily life was another matter. As we traveled along that rural road in the midst of one of the best conversations I had engaged in about the possibilities of educational transformations and the realities of the oppressive conditions so many people were facing in that land, my gaze was somehow drawn to the side of the road. In one of those nearly accidental happenings that clarify and crystallize what reality is really like, my gaze fell upon a seemingly inconsequential object. At regular intervals,

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Beyond Cheap French Fries  •  211 there were small signs planted in the dirt a few yards from where the road met the fields. The sign was more than a little familiar. It bore the insignia of one of the most famous fast food restaurants in the United States. We drove for miles past seemingly deserted fields along a flat hot plain, passing sign after sign, each a replica of the previous one, each less than a foot high. These were not billboards. Such things hardly existed in this poor rural region. Rather, they looked exactly—exactly—like the small signs one finds next to farms in the American Midwest signifying the kinds of seed corn that each farmer had planted in her or his fields. This was a good guess it turned out. I asked the driver—a close friend and former student of mine who had returned to this country to work for the social and educational reforms that were so necessary—what turned out to be a naive but ultimately crucial question in my own education. “Why are those signs for ***** there? Is there a ***** restaurant nearby?” My friend looked at me in amazement. “Michael, don’t you know what these signs signify? There’s no Western restaurants within fifty miles of where we are. These signs represent exactly what is wrong with education in this nation. Listen to this.” And I listened. The story is one that has left an indelible mark on me, for it condenses in one powerful set of historical experiences the connections between our struggles as educators and activists in so many countries, and the ways differential power works in ordinary life. I cannot match the tensions and passions in my friend’s voice as she told this story, nor can I convey exactly the almost eerie feelings one gets when looking at that vast, sometimes beautiful, sometimes scarred, and increasingly depopulated plain. Yet the story is crucial to hear. The government of the nation has decided that the importation of foreign capital is critical to its own survival. Bringing in American, German, British, Japanese, and other investors and factories will ostensibly create jobs, create capital for investment, and enable the nation to speed into the twenty-first century. (This is of course elite group talk, but let us assume that all of this is indeed truly believed by dominant groups.) One of the ways the militarydominated government has planned to do this is to focus part of its recruitment efforts on agribusiness. In pursuit of this aim, it has offered vast tracts of land to international agribusiness concerns at very low cost. Of particular importance to the plain we are driving through is the fact that much of this land has been given over to a supplier for a large American fast-food restaurant corporation for the growing of potatoes for the restaurant’s French fries, one of the trademarks of its extensive success throughout the world. The corporation was eager to jump at the opportunity to shift a good deal of its potato production from the United States to Asia. Because many of the farmworkers in the United States were now unionized and were (correctly) asking for a livable wage, and since the government of that Asian nation officially frowned on unions of any kind, the cost of growing potatoes would be

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212  •  Michael W. Apple lower. Further, the land on that plain was perfect for the use of newly developed technology to plant and harvest the crop with considerably fewer workers. Machines would replace living human beings. Finally, the government was much less concerned about environmental regulations. All in all, this was a fine bargain for capital. Of course, people lived on some of this land and farmed it for their own food and to sell what might be left over after their own, relatively minimal, needs were met. This deterred neither agribusiness nor the government. After all, people could be moved to make way for “progress.” And after all, the villagers along that plain did not actually have deeds to the land. (They had lived there for perhaps hundreds of years, well before the invention of banks, and mortgages, and deeds—no paper, no ownership.) It would not be too hard to move the people off of the plain to other areas to free it for intensive potato production and to “create jobs” by taking away the livelihood of thousands upon thousands of small-scale farmers in the region. I listened with rapt attention as the rest of the story unfolded and as we passed by the fields with their miniature corporate signs and the abandoned villages. The people whose land had been taken for so little moved, of course. As in so many other similar places throughout what dominant groups call the third world, they trekked to the city. They took their meager possessions and moved into the ever-expanding slums within and surrounding the one place that held out some hope of finding enough paid work (if everyone, including children, labored) so that they could survive. The government and major segments of the business elite officially discouraged this, sometimes by hiring thugs to burn the shantytowns, other times by keeping conditions so horrible that no one would want to live there. But still the dispossessed came, by the tens of thousands. Poor people are not irrational, after all. The loss of arable land had to be compensated for somehow, and if it took cramming into places that were deadly at times, well what were the other choices? There were factories being built in and around the cities, which paid incredibly low wages (sometimes less than enough money to buy sufficient food to replace the calories expended by workers in the production process), but at least there might be paid work if one was lucky. So the giant machines harvested the potatoes and the people poured into the cities and international capital was happy. It’s not a nice story, but what does it have to do with education? My friend continued my education. The military-dominated government had given all of these large international businesses twenty years of tax breaks to sweeten the conditions for their coming to that country. Thus, there was now very little money to supply the health care facilities, housing, running water, electricity, sewage disposal, and schools for the thousands upon thousands of people who had sought their future in, or had literally been driven into the city. The mechanism for not building these necessities was quite clever. Take the lack of any

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Beyond Cheap French Fries  •  213 formal educational institutions as a case in point. In order for the government to build schools it had to be shown that there was a “legitimate” need for such an expenditure. Statistics had to be produced in a form that was officially accepted. This could only be done through the official determination of numbers of registered births. Yet the very process of official registration made it impossible for thousands of children to be recognized as actually existing. In order to register for school, a parent had to register the birth of the child at the local hospital or government office, few of which existed in these slum areas. And even if you could somehow find such an office, the government officially discouraged people who had originally come from outside the region of the city from moving there. It often refused to recognize the legitimacy of the move as a way of keeping displaced farmers from coming into the urban areas and thereby increasing the population. (This is a situation that is now found in a considerable number of nations, including China for instance, where millions of rural citizens have found their way into its burgeoning cities looking for work.) Births involving mothers who had no “legitimate” right to be there did not count as births at all. It is a brilliant strategy in which the state creates categories of legitimacy that define social problems in quite interesting ways (Fraser 1989). Foucault would have been proud, I am certain. Thus, there are no schools, no teachers, no hospitals, no infrastructure. The root causes of this situation rest not in the immediate situation. They can only be illuminated if we focus on the chain of capital formation internationally and nationally, on the contradictory needs of the state, on the class relations and the relations between country and city that organize and disorganize that country. My friend and I had been driving for quite a while. I had forgotten about the heat. The ending sentence of the story pulled no punches. It was said slowly and quietly, said in a way that made it even more compelling. “Michael, these fields are the reason there’s no schools in my city. There’s no schools because so many folks like cheap French fries.” I tell this story for a number of reasons. First, it is simply one of the most powerful ways I know of reminding myself and all of us of the utter importance of seeing schooling relationally, of seeing it as connected—fundamentally—to the relations of domination and exploitation (and to struggles against them) of the larger society. Second, and equally as important, I tell this story to make a crucial theoretical and political point. Relations of power are indeed complex, and we need to take very seriously the postmodern focus on the local and on the multiplicity of the forms of struggle in which we need to be engaged. It is important as well to recognize the changes that are occurring in many societies and to see the complexity of the power/knowledge nexus. Yet in our attempts to avoid the dangers that accompanied some aspects of previous grand narratives, let us not act as if capitalism has somehow disappeared. Let us not act as if class relations do not count. Let us not act as if all of the things we learned about how the world might be understood politically have

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214  •  Michael W. Apple been somehow overthrown because our theories are now more complex. And let’s not all too quickly employ language that disguises what is happening. The real roots of what count as disasters are made more visible in this narrative. The denial of basic human rights, the destruction of the environment, the deadly conditions under which people (barely) survive, the lack of a meaningful future for the thousands of children I noted in my story—all of this is not only or even primarily a text to be deciphered in our academic volumes as we pursue our postmodern themes. It is a reality that millions of people experience in their very bodies every day. Educational work that is not connected deeply to a powerful understanding of these realities (and this understanding cannot ignore a serious analysis of political economy and class relations without losing much of its power) is in danger of losing its soul. The lives of our children demand no less. The Social Reality of Disasters The narrative I’ve included in the second section of this chapter is but one of many, many others that could be included here. Recent crucial work on the realities in which so many people live (exist) makes even more visible the depth and breadth of these kinds of disasters, social and physical disasters that we tend to make invisible due to the lenses we use to view and think about our world. The conditions I described in the previous section are not aberrations, they are often the norm. One-third of the global urban population now lives in slums. Even more staggering is the fact that over 78 percent of urbanites in the least developed countries live in slums (Davis 2006, 23). What does this mean? Again let me use a linguistic form to illuminate this. Certain words that we consider nouns are better thought of as verbs. Take housing, for example. It is not a thing. Rather it is the result of a complex, ongoing, and often dangerous trade-off among contradictory needs. Thus, the urban poor who live in the slums I noted in the partly autobiographical second section of this chapter “have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and … personal safety.” And while the very worst situation is “a … bad location without [government] services or security” (Davis 2006, 29), in many instances these people have no choice. When the dismal lack of educational, health, and legal resources are added to this situation, it is hard to find words powerful enough to cover the immense resourcefulness and creativity these daily conditions require. But it is not just the we in the global metropoles who misrecognize or simply ignore what this means. Local governments in these nations, often responding both to the differential power relations reproduced by economic and governmental elites there and the ideological needs of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank (Davis 2006), collude in the production of such a politics of misrecognition. For example, many third world cities exist in

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Beyond Cheap French Fries  •  215 something like an epistemological fog, one that is sometimes willfully opaque. Most governments know the least about the slums, about the housing in them, about the services that they need and (almost always) don’t get, and so on. The lack of knowledge here provides an epistemological veil (Davis 2006, 42). What goes on under the veil is a secret that must be kept from public view. To know is to be subject to demands. Thus, the very lack of Foucault’s panopticon constitutes a form of control. The role of the IMF in this process is crucial. Its policies have constantly created these conditions and have made them considerably worse over time (Davis 2006, 66–69). Mike Davis is clear on what is happening throughout what we call the third world: “As local safety nets disappeared, poor farmers became increasingly vulnerable to any exogenous shock: drought, inflation, rising interest rates, or falling commodity prices. Or illness: an estimated 60 percent of Cambodian small peasants who sell their land and move to the city are forced to do so by medical debts” (Davis 2006, 15). The economic crisis in these slums is experienced by the people living there in extraordinarily powerful ways. Rather than thinking about jobs in the usual sense of that term, it is better to think of “informal survivalism” as the major mode of existence in a majority of third world cities (Davis 2006, 178). Even if education was indeed available, informal survivalism may preclude children taking advantage of it. It is important not to give the impression that the utter degradation being visited upon millions of people like the ones in my friend’s story has led only to a politics of simple acceptance. The informal proletariat of these slums are decidedly not passive. Even within a single city, slum populations can support a bewildering variety of responses to structural neglect and deprivation, ranging from charismatic churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street gangs, neoliberal NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], and revolutionary social movements. But if there is no monolithic subject or unilateral trend in the global slum, there are nonetheless myriad acts of resistance. Indeed, the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism. (Davis 2006, 202) This is a crucial realization. My point in this part of the chapter has not been to reproduce the all-too-usual picture of the third world as a site of famine, wars, and natural disasters (Apple 2000). Rather, I want us to see the true depth of what we have helped create. And at the same time, I want us to recognize, as the quote from Davis indicates, that the accompanying usual vision of passive poor people who are simply buffeted by the forces of nature are instead immensely creative and also often actively refuse to be turned into simply victims (Apple and Buras 2006).

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216  •  Michael W. Apple Conclusion I have used a narrative format here—a story—to raise serious questions about the assumptions embedded in our ordinary language. I have taken the ways in which the category of natural disaster—a category that one can find in the media and even in progressive pedagogy—links curricula to daily events as in the classroom I observed, and showed how such a category misses the social creation of such events. Many deeply committed educators and activists are rightly focusing attention on the social production of the murderous situation surrounding Hurricane Katrina and its continuing aftermath. This is an absolutely crucial intervention. However, while not minimizing the horrors of this continuing tragedy, I have instead focused our attention on international relations of domination and exploitation. I have taken the more invisible (to whom?) destruction of people’s lives, communities, bodies, and futures, and connected all this to something that so many people in the United States and elsewhere experience every day—the eating of cheap French fries. My arguments have been partly linguistic, but my larger points are not. The very nature of how many of us live our lives—lives that include the guilty pleasures of enjoying fast food—are deeply implicated in producing the conditions that our commonsense language covers. Linguistic transformations, hence, are not sufficient. We may need to realize that like so many of the products we so easily take for granted, eating cheap French fries might better be thought of as a metaphor for the larger reality of eating the futures of the people who are all too often invisible to us. How do we convey that to our students? There are models of doing exactly that in such places as the powerful journal Rethinking Schools, in the stories of critical and democratic education found in the new second edition of Democratic Schools (Apple and Beane 2007), and in the systemwide commitment to critical education in the schools of Porto Alegre, Brazil (Apple et al. 2003). In the process of building on these experiences, we might also want to limit our own and our students’ consumption of cheap French fries. References Apple, M. W. 1996. Cultural politics and education. New York: Teachers College Press. Apple, M. W. 2000. Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. 2006. Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, God, and education, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., and J. A. Beane. 2007. Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education, 2nd edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Apple, M. W., and K. L. Buras, eds. 2006. The subaltern speak: Curriculum, power, and educational struggles. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., M. Cho, L. Gandin, A. Oliver, Y. K. Sung, H. Tavares, and T. H. Wong. 2003. The state and the politics of knowledge. New York: Routledge.

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Beyond Cheap French Fries  •  217 Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that matter. New York: Routledge. Davis, M. 2006. Planet of slums. New York: Verso. Fraser, N. 1989. Unruly practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rushdie, S. 1993. Midnight’s children. London: Jonathan Cape.

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12

The Independent Women’s Forum Teaching Women’s Rights in the “New Iraq”

Robin Truth Goodman

This chapter focuses on a recent U.S. Department of Defense $2 million grant to the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) with the mission of promoting the democratic participation of women in the “new Iraq.” The IWF sets up educational training centers and conferences. Iraqi women are invited to be students of women from outside Iraq who are business leaders in their own countries. Once trained in democracy, these 150 Iraqi women were supposed to return to their own communities and teach others, including developing curricula for children. Both as an educational enterprise and as a practice that teaches its own set of cultural meanings, the IWF grant is part of a larger pedagogical moment that promotes the U.S. invasion of Iraq as aiming predominantly at the suppression of the veil in order to allow the liberal tradition of freedom and democracy—in the form of women’s free expression—to emerge quite naturally from under it. Part of this rhetorical gesture has to do with seeing the veil as a constraint on par with the social, that is, as a constraint on the individual defined through private choices. The case of the Independent Women’s Forum demonstrates the ways that the drive for corporate imperialism has attacked the veil as a social constraint, as a coded analogy for the state institutions and regulative public interventions that are really being targeted. Much of the official rhetoric and media sound bites surrounding the U.S. conquest of Iraq with democracy have to do with the democratization of Iraqi women. In these scenarios, women are liberated into democracy through, first and foremost, the shedding of the veil. The insistence of unveiling as a form of democratization follows many of the familiar narrative trajectories of the civilizing mission. As Marnia Lazreg has pointed out, the French also managed the ceremonial unveiling of women in order to liberate them. The status of the Algerian women, down to their position in the home, made French women uncomfortable on the one hand, and on the other, gave them evidence of the superiority of their own cultural values. Unveiling allowed French women to witness “the triumph of her culture over that of the colonized.” 1 Women in 219

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220  •  Robin Truth Goodman the current war, just as in other colonialist interventions, mark the legitimacy of colonialist violence. The veil has as much to say about the culture of the colonizer as it does about the culture of the colonized. In such encounters, the veil steps in as a marker of cultural difference, but also as a focal point for the articulation of a division between individual will and repressive social power. In the feminist tradition, the veil has been treated in two main, though contradictory, ways that interact in justifying the war: (1) the veil is an original, savage evil that Enlightenment will defeat;2 and (2) the veil is exemplary of Enlightenment’s promise of sovereignty and decision, opening up a freedom defined through the expression of women’s autonomous will. The United States interest in the veil not only sets those who have democracy above those who do not, but also teaches that democracy plays out as a constant struggle of the individual to resist and rise above the rulings of social order. U.S. policy is using women to mobilize ideologies of freedom around practices of entrepreneurship. This association envisions freedom as the disassociation of work from the historical institutionalization of labor that defines labor as a collectivity in struggle with mechanisms of power mostly referenced through the nation-state. Discussions of the veil uncover a concerted attempt on the part of power to use unveiling as part of a pedagogical project to redefine democracy by equating it—against historical accounting—with an economic sphere autonomous from the state, and by insisting that state power serves only to stifle what women’s bodies are made to represent: sex, expression, and commerce. This appropriation of unveiling marks a moment in the postcolonial when the state as an instrument of democracy and development is giving way to an eclipsing of such state functions through a moralization of business. Registering new meanings in the defense of such a democracy, the veil participates in a broader attack on regulation, public oversight, and state interventions in profit-based initiatives both at home and abroad. This paper concerns a recent U.S. Department of Defense $2 million grant to the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) with the mission of promoting the democratic participation of women in the “new Iraq.” The IWF sets up educational training centers and conferences. Iraqi women are invited to be students to women from outside Iraq who are business leaders in their own countries. Once trained in democracy, these 150 Iraqi women were supposed to return to their own communities and teach others, including developing curricula for children. Both as an educational enterprise and as a practice that teaches its own set of cultural meanings, the IWF grant is part of a larger pedagogical moment that promotes the U.S. invasion of Iraq as aiming predominantly at the suppression of the veil in order to allow the liberal tradition of freedom and democracy—in the form of women’s free expression—to emerge quite naturally from under it. Part of this rhetorical gesture has to do with seeing the veil as a constraint on par with the social, that is, as a constraint on

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The Independent Women’s Forum  •  221 the individual defined through private choices. The case of the Independent Women’s Forum demonstrates the ways that the drive for corporate imperialism has attacked the veil as a social constraint, as a coded analogy for the state institutions and regulative public interventions that are really being targeted. The present imperialist moment has a particularly insidious relationship to the history of feminism and women’s movements. Feminist theorists have noted that the tradition of Western feminism exported its modes of social and epistemic analysis as a form of imperialism, where the freedom of Western women to travel and observe outside of Europe became a sign of liberal free-thinking, the conquest of reason, prevailing humanism, and enlightened superiority, often counterposed to degraded versions of Otherness. “It seems particularly unfortunate,” writes, for example, Gayatri Spivak, “when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism. An isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm” (114).3 This understanding of the relationship between Western feminism and imperialism has been applied in scholarship on the current war as well. Kevin Ayotte and Mary Husain have likened the Bush policy to “colonial feminism,” where “efforts to ‘liberate’ Afghan women according to an explicitly Western model of liberal feminism” that encourages unveiling as a practice standing in for liberation, 4 homogenizes Islam, depoliticizes women’s plight in the Muslim world, and fetishizes unveiling. In stark contrast, actually, I argue here, the Bush Administration is using an avowed and quite self-conscious anti-feminism as the mode of imposition for its particular brand of empire. The idea that U.S. military power will save the women of Afghanistan and Iraq from the fate of the veil starts with the presumption of women’s victimization and promotes a material representation of women as the pre-conscious surface on which political struggle is waged. Against the grain of feminism, the Administration is developing an idea of women as outside of politics, as threatened by politics, even feminist politics. Feminism—like the social, the State, the public, and the Taliban—is regulatory, executes rules, and weighs values: it invites—indeed, demands—intersubjectivity. In this, the Bush Administration has been able to collapse the liberating function of feminism into the constraining function of the veil, where the veil—in the Bush rhetoric—serves as the symbolic equivalent of social belonging for women, the connection between the female individual and her social life-world, her self-formation through community. What the Administration wants to put in the ideological place of the forms of liberation promised by feminism is the promise of liberation in the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is good for women, while feminism—appearing in the veil—is anti-freedom. Thus, U.S. empire now expands through expanding impositions of backlash. The idea that power has other, more dominant modes than repression has been a common theme in research that follows from the work of Nietzsche

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222  •  Robin Truth Goodman and Foucault, among others. The veil, though, places the idea of repression on women: through women, repressive power operates and though their unveiling, resistance to repressive power is spectacularly evident and freedom is guaranteed. This way of telling the story about repressive power serves two purposes in the war’s justifications. First, the focus on the veil offers moral promise and democratic freedom only through trade in women’s work. Women, considered outside of or counter to the public in their domestic work, serve as the model for a new labor regime that sees wage labor as free only when autonomous from the state and other organizational controls—that is, as private—despite all the evidence that the welfare state or the socialist state often intervened to build labor productivity and better conditions of life. Women serve to reframe privatization and free trade as moral. Second, by opposing the veil to women’s free choice, the focus on the veil also uses an ideology of consumption—privileging a model of choosing the forms of work the way we choose items to consume—in order to describe an organization for work. The IWF’s attack on feminism is curious, as such an attack on a political movement that is predominantly liberal in its mainstream forms seems to counter the transformation of Iraqi society into a consumer market. However, the IWF’s attack on feminism instead serves to translate First World consumerist identities as a symbolic model for Third World laboring bodies ripe for corporate appropriation. This representational “sameness” allows First World ruling-class women to seem morally justified in their identifications with and planning for Third World women workers. Debates over the status of the veil, both within academia and within the mainstream, register how the veil has taken on the role of a pedagogical apparatus. Lila Abu-Lughod, for example, talks about how the political discourse surrounding the veil now tends to turn political and economic problems into cultural and aesthetic issues or tastes: “the joys of wearing nail polish” becomes the symbolic form in which is understood “the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated,” including the “ones that worked to artificially divide the world into separate spheres.” 5 The veil produces social and cultural meanings, identities, and relations between identities, as it acquires symbolic value and institutional form, reconstructs gender as producing knowledge about the relationships between nations and within empires, and evokes certain types of political positions and certain types of statements about power and authority. As Henry Giroux has said, “Representations are always produced within cultural limits and theoretical borders, and as such are necessarily implicated in particular economies of truth, value, and power.” 6 Frantz Fanon’s famous essay on unveiling, “Algeria Unveiled,” documents how the veil can be manipulated to speak for a variety of strategic intentions and interests, from the French message of colonial dependence and enlightenment to the National Liberation Front’s (FLN) needs to create a dedicated insurgent class that recruits the allegiance of a civil population for

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The Independent Women’s Forum  •  223 the war of decolonization. The veil has not always assumed the cultural form it has now, that is, as a dividing line between democracy and nondemocracy, where it takes on the meaning of a repressive social sphere that stands in the way of the private will that democracy demands. Steeped in the Lacanian mirror, the Fanonian veil gives entry to a symbolics of difference that inscribes a revolutionized national independence within women’s self-formulation as the social. What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family and society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society authenticates and legitimizes the family. The colonial structure is the very negation of this reciprocal justification. The Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a form of existence limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat.7 Unlike the politics of the veil invoked in the Iraqi invasion, the Fanonian veil does not indicate an idea of the social as a constraint to the private will, a suppression of autonomy, and therefore a constraint to democracy, but rather (on the contrary) the veil opens up the very possibility of the social as a politics of difference. There is no opposition between public action and private life. Indeed, the women who wear the veil often understand unveiling, rather than veiling, as an unwarranted constraint on social freedom, which they find more essential than the stark individualism constructed through atomized forms of wage labor. Feminist ethnographer Aihwa Ong, for example, discusses how Malaysian women prefer the veil to corporate wage labor because the veil offers them the protections and securities of their Muslim communities, if also restrictions on movement, sexual practice, family planning, work possibilities, choice of living conditions, and belief.8 However, stories about unveiling now tell about the development of economic self-reliance, that is, of the privatization of enterprise, rather than of social or institutional power building and family transformation through political involvement. The IWF is using the rhetoric of women’s rights to promote an ideology of self-sufficiency that turns the Iraqi people into private laborers rather than managers of their own society. It also spreads a vocabulary of self-help in order to support privatization initiatives that depend on shrinking both government regulations and democratic input. The new politics of the feminine moves away from Fanon’s formulation of the private as an avenue through which a politics of democratic liberation gets implemented and realized in favor of a formulation of the private as a vulnerable realm of an essentialized democratic freedom that is under constant threat of attack and annihilation from, ironically, democracy’s institutions. United States policy in Iraq proves a deep cynicism in the administration’s claims to be democratizing the Middle East through involving Iraqi women

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224  •  Robin Truth Goodman in the political system. In point of fact, women in Iraq achieved legal equity in 1958 when women’s groups helped to oust the British-imposed monarchy; in 1970 Saddam Hussein made gender discrimination illegal (although it is clear that he was able to get around all laws, including this one, quite easily); and according to UNICEF, Iraqi women were the envy of the Arab world, enjoying professional status, equal education, equal wages, and high literacy rates.9 This is not to congratulate Saddam’s regime, which did institutionalize rape as torture, but rather to underscore that the U.S. invasion actually destroyed rather than pursued democratic advantages for Iraqi women brought by 85 years of political organizing. Lucy Brown and David Romano have recently tried to assess and evaluate the changes for women first in Saddam Hussein’s rise to power and then in the U.S. invasion. In an article entitled “Women in Post-Saddam Iraq: One Step Forward or Two Steps Back?”, they note that the Bathists expanded rights to women in the first part of their regime, and this included granting women positions in the hierarchy. However, in the second part of the regime, with the lack of civil society, the economic downturns, the ravaging of the war with Iran and later with the U.S., and the stability of the patriarchal traditions, women’s rights were reversed, exemplified through the fall of their literacy rate from 75% at the height of Iraq’s prosperity to 25% in the nineties. They then go on to analyze post-invasion (2003) Iraq by region (the Sunni center, the Shi’ite south, and the Kurdish north). They conclude that provisions and rights to women were not coming out of the new regime but rather were influenced by foreign workers, the Occupation’s forces, U.N. policy, and NGOs. Women, they say, are mostly losing status and possibility because of the lack of security. Though providing essential on-the-ground detail, Brown and Romano start with the assumption that the U.S. had good intentions and did its best, and the situation just naturally led to this conclusion that colonialism would be the best bet for the women of Iraq.10 My argument here is, rather, that the U.S. was using the situation in Iraq to promote the idea of independent labor for imperialist exploitation. Immediately after the invasion in 2003, there were a number of reports from Iraqi women who were increasingly secluded in their houses due to the devastation of public security and policing.11 As incidents of brutal rape and kidnapping were on the rise, women were also testifying to neglect on the part of the police and public authorities to respond to such violence against women, including when U.S. personnel were notified. Women’s groups even had to try to convince the judges in Saddam Hussein’s war crimes trial that rape should be one of the counts on the list, as the new Iraq has not implemented procedures to try rape as a crime in most situations. Not only has public safety collapsed in the wake of the invasion, disproportionately affecting women, so have other public protections like clean water, job security (particularly in the public sector and even within U.S. reconstruction projects;

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The Independent Women’s Forum  •  225 unemployment figures range from a consistent report of 27 to 40%, according to the Brookings Institute study referenced by the Democratic Policy Committee in the U.S. Senate, to 60 to 70% claimed by Aljazeera),12 and health provisions against infection.13 According to a recent report in the Guardian, women “have to queue five hours a day to get kerosene or petrol,” and this in a country that is a major producer of oil.14 A 2004 UN survey documented increasing rates of infant mortality, chronic malnutrition among children, decreased life expectancy, growing contamination of the water supply, and contingently, significant setbacks in the social role of women, including declining levels of education and literacy.15 Additionally, as part of what the United States was calling the democratic process, “honor killing” was legalized in Iraq’s new constitution, as were sharia law and clerical courts, and hundreds of women have died by the hands of their own relatives due to a custom that was in decline at the time of the invasion in 2003, according to the Iraqi police and Baghdad’s forensics institute.16 Instead of benefiting from a new mobility, these newly democratized women were more than ever subjects of the veil. The deterioration of women’s lives in Iraq is contingent on the language of legitimacy that states the occupation has the duty of at least rhetorically ensuring equal participation while simultaneously pursuing policies that materially achieve the opposite. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense put out a call for proposals for a new $10 million grant program to, in the words of then Secretary of State Colin Powell, “train Iraqi women in the skills and practices of democratic public life.” 17 The State Department’s goal, as stated in April Palmerlee’s 2002 memo, was to “promote freedom, faith and free markets through promoting women’s issues” in Iraq.18 The grant money was awarded to a group called the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), founded ad hoc in 1992 under a former name, Women for Judge Thomas. The IWF’s agenda, as stated on their website (http://www.iwf.org), is antifeminist. IWF has taken positions in favor of Harvard University’s former president Larry Summers because he recognized that men’s and women’s brains were different and so men made better scientists. In this recognition, they say, he offended the evil feminists who hold all the power to persecute this poor defenseless man who was formerly treasurer in the Clinton White House and chief economist of the World Bank. IWF has, as well, insisted that activism against the battering of women has outlived its need. While insisting that the federal government not intervene in domestic affairs, even when they lead to violence, and that the federal government cannot do anything against gender discrimination on campus, the IWF advocates for the federal government to intervene in curtailing feminist curriculum in universities. Additionally, they have supported Students for Academic Freedom (David Horowitz’s organization that targeted professors for taking positions against the war), particularly in its claims that feminism has taken over the classroom, politicized the curriculum, and disrupted the learning of traditional and canonical knowledge. Members of the

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226  •  Robin Truth Goodman Independent Women’s Forum include Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president; Linda Chavez, secretary of labor in the Bush Administration; Christina Hoff Sommers, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; and IWF president and CEO Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer, nominated by George W. Bush to the National Advisory Committee on Violence against Women, after serving on the first George Bush’s Council on Competitiveness, as well as the director for Koch Industries, an energy company. The Independent Women’s Forum is the Halliburton of women’s rights. The antifeminist agenda of the IWF uses an attack on feminism in the name of the freedom of women to spread a pro-corporatist and pro-privatization ideology,19 which gels with the administration’s general policy of transforming Iraq into what Naomi Klein has called a neoliberal experiment, devoid of public regulations, the “Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” or “Bomb before You Buy.” 20 Noting that immediately after the invasion, museums and public offices were looted as U.S. troops stood by and watched, Klein shows how the destruction of the public sector in Baghdad was part of the administration’s broader strategy of a neoliberal experiment that would leave all governance matters open to private bidding. Such a shrinking of public controls has been accompanied by a rise of crimes against women, as the police force is not adequate to patrolling streets and public areas. David Harvey has called this “accumulation through dispossession.” 21 According to Marx, Harvey says, imperialism is the result of an overaccumulation of capital and the need for capital always to expand into new outlets. “Privatization,” he continues, “of social housing, telecommunications, transportation, water, etc. . . . has, in recent years, opened up vast fields for overaccumulated capital to seize upon. . . . Put another way, if capitalism has been experiencing a chronic difficulty of overaccumulation since 1973, then the neo-liberal project of privatization of everything makes a lot of sense as one way to solve the problem.” 22 The unveiling of women is wielded as an attack on democratic institutions rather than as a sign and a proof of their construction. Combined with the American Islamic Congress and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Independent Women’s Forum organizes and supports “democracy” training sessions for women’s leadership. The American Islamic Congress is connected to the Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education (RISE) Project sponsored by USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development).23 RISE, in turn, was subcontracted to Creative Associates, Inc., a no-bid private contractor that was instrumental in selling public schools to private corporations in Haiti and Nicaragua before they became the exclusive education management company in the new Iraq.24 A participant at an IWF summit on “democracy, economic liberty, free markets and women” in Iraq described the IWF session as “only on [the] free market for the Iraqi women delegates who came for a ten day democracy training.” 25 While opposing the federal supports in Title IX against gender discrimination

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The Independent Women’s Forum  •  227 and the Women’s Educational Equity Act, IWF’s mission statement certainly exemplifies the tendency to support the expansion of business, indicating that IWF “is dedicated to advancing the spirit of enterprise and self-reliance among women, and supporting the principles of political freedom, economic liberty, and personal responsibility” (http://www.iwf.org). As Condoleezza Rice stated as she accepted the Woman of Valor award from the IWF, “This is an organization that is promoting individual responsibility and economic liberty and democracy and it’s making a true difference in the lives of women around the world, especially the women in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.” 26 Like the cuts to welfare in the United States, the destruction of Iraq’s public institutions is accompanied by an ideological campaign that holds people rather than politics responsible for the conditions of life that make them impoverished, and promotes free enterprise and competition as the cure to all social ills. Independence then means a challenge to social responsibility in general, but a denial of corporate responsibility in particular, and a formulation of choice as self-sufficiency or isolation, an avoidance not only of benefits but of any sort of provisions or corporate infrastructure for production. This allows for first world women to form a political commitment to third world freedom by projecting their own uplifting forms of life as solutions for structural poverty. First world advocacy of antifeminist women’s rights turns moral the idea of free labor as independent of the social, as autonomously deciding entrepreneurs, as piece producers, as atomized like consumers, as nonpoliticized. First world women’s identification with third world women ends up formulated as a happy tale of choice that veils over policies designed to de-skill or semi-skill workers, cheapen wages, and automatize labor from state or other organizational supports. Moralities of consumption, translated into ideologies of work as independent choice, allow for the imperialization of labor through its privatization, that is, its symbolic and material separation from the state. Personal initiative and responsibility in market relations is being sold to Iraqi women as their democratic future. It also furnishes the rationale for the shrinking of government. The IWF has linked such personal responsibility to the proletarianization of women’s labor, but a postwelfare vision of proletarianization that leaves workers and women devoid of public protections and therefore exponentially exploitable in their private positions. The IWF and its associates’ “democracy training” has granted Iraqi women the opportunity to learn such vital skills as computers, sewing, knitting, embroidery, baking, and pickling. The IWF is claiming that it is training women in leadership roles that will allow them selfsufficiency: “The women should be encouraged to form cooperative markets to sell their products and thereby fund their women centers. Many women understood that financial self-sufficiency was also an important goal for the women’s centers so that they wouldn’t be dependent on government funding.” 27 Yet the IWF is actually pushing women into low-skill job categories

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228  •  Robin Truth Goodman and service roles linked to traditional domesticity and the reproduction of women as the symbols of the private sphere. Rather than for roles of leadership, women’s jobs are being envisioned as low-capital-intensive chores, focused on the production of pieces, independent of wider organization like unions, and orphaned by the democratic government institutions against which citizens can make rights claims under traditional liberalism. It would be impossible for these women to milk such skill sets beyond what they need for their own and their families’ survival in order to build institutional centers that would replace government. Through women’s capacities as workers, public services are being transferred into private responsibilities, as Zygmunt Bauman has described the tendencies of neoliberalism.28 Dispossession of national product can be understood, in this case, as the capitalization of women’s labor. The IWF has rejected the idea that the inequalities in women’s wage differentials are unfair because, they reason, women will quit to have families and so are worth less to the corporate system. In fact, they have opposed the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women because its equal wages clause is “antithetical to free market principles” (http://www.iwf.org) Advocating for paying women less is, of course, one of the policies that work globally to drive down wages in total, in order to be competitive in the corporate race to the bottom. That said, you might be surprised to hear that I agree with George W. on something: I agree with him that the fate of democracy closely correlates with the fate of women. However, the Iraq War’s very terms of self-legitimation are allowing practices that undermine the saving of women as much as the rescuing of democracy. Women have become a testing ground for the end of democracy, for the radical suspension of public institutions to make way for private investments, the wide-scale disempowerment of systems of public security, the suppression of public supports falsely understood as a victory for private initiative and individual (read: corporate) freedom. Women have served as pedagogical symbols through which social value is communicated and exchanged, standing in for certain cultural lessons about power, democracy, and the ways they work. Support for what the administration says this war is about is not support for this war but for something else entirely. This war is waged not only for oil, which is obvious, but for the radical restructuring of democracy on a corporate model, where the people can be taught, paradoxically, that their own economic exploitation proves their political freedom. Notes

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1. Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 136. 2. For Wollstonecraft, the veil was an extreme manifestation of an irrationalized “tyranny of the private,” where women, because of the division of labor, were denied access to public participation, education, and the vote. “When they

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[women] marry,” she says of the frivolity of their education, “they act as such children may be expected to act:—they dress; they pain, and nickname God’s creatures.—Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio!” (Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd edition, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988/1975), 10). 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press), 114. 4. Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain. “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal, 17, 3 (Fall 2005): 117. 5. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 784. 6. Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 219. 7. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haaken Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), 66. 8. Aihwa Ong, “State Versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies and the Body Politic in Malaysia,” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 9. Hibaaq Osman, “V-Day Spotlight 2005: Women of Iraq, under Siege,” V Day, October 2003, http://www.vday.org/contents/vcampaigns/spotlight/iraq. 10. Lucy Brown and David Romano, “Women in Post-Saddam Iraq: One Step Forward or Two Steps Back?” NWSA Journal 18, 3 (Fall 2006): 51–70. 11. Lauren Sandler, “Women under Siege,” The Nation (December 29, 2003): 11–15. 12. Democratic Policy Committee (DPC), “Bush Administration Reports on Operations in Iraq Overstates Progress on the Ground,” DPC, October 17, 2005, http:// democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new.cfm?doc_name=fs-109-1-110.; Ahmed Janabi, “Iraqi Unemployment Reaches 70%,” Aljazeera.net, August 1, 2004, http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A66151CB-2105-418B-BFAA-73211A631611.htm and Remi Kanazi, “Accepting Reality: Americans Have Lost Iraq War,” Aljazeera. com, March 17, 2006, http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=10959. 13. David Cortright, “Iraq: The Human Toll,” The Nation, July 24, 2005, http://www. thenation.com/doc/20050801/cortright. 14. Haifa Zangana, “Quiet, or I’ll Call Democracy: Iraqi Women Were Long the Most Liberated in the Middle East. Occupation Has Confined Them to Their Homes,” Guardian, December 22, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/ story/0,,1378411,00.html. 15. UNICEF, “At a Glance: Iraq,” UNICEF, 2004, http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/iraq.html. 16. Vivienne Walk, “Marked Women: A Rash of Unpunished Honor Killings Highlights the Harrowing Dangers Females Face in the New Iraq,” Time, July 26, 2004, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040726665048,00.html or http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/press/media/0407231.

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230  •  Robin Truth Goodman 17. Colin L. Powell, “Statement by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell: Grants to Support Democratization Training for Iraqi Women,” Embassy of the United States, Baghdad, Iraq, September 27, 2004, http://usembassy.state.gov/iraq/040927_ grant.html. 18. April W. Palmerlee, “Women’s Issues from the U.S. Department of State: Women in the Global Community,” International Women’s Issues, September 19, 2002, http://www.state.gov/g/wi/. 19. Laura Flanders and Laura Ross, “Antifeminists Hit Iraq,” The Nation, November 15, 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041115/flanders. 20. See Naomi Klein, “Privatization in Disguise,” The Nation, April 10, 2003, http:// www.thenation.com/doc/20030428/klein  and “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” The Nation, April 14, 2005, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein. 21. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45. 22. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 149–150. 23. See Iraq Foundation, “The Iraq Foundation RISE Project,” Iraq Foundation, 2002, http://www.iraqfoundation.org/projects/rise/index.html. See also, DevTech, “Revitalization, of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education (RISE) Project U.S. Agency for International Development (2003–2004),” DevTech Systems, Inc., 2005, http://www.devtechsys.com/services/activities/rise.cfm. 24. See Kenneth J. Saltman, “Creative Associates International: Corporate Education and ‘Democracy Promotion’ in Iraq,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 28 (2006): 25–65. 25. Laura Flanders and Laura Ross, “Antifeminists Hit Iraq.” 26. Condoleezza Rice, “Remarks at the Independent Women’s Forum upon Receiving Woman of Valor Award,” U.S. Department of State, May 10, 2006, http:// www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/66139.htm. 27. Shereen Gharouf and Eleana Gordon, “The Heartland of Iraq Women’s Conference Preliminary Report,” Iraq Foundation, October 4–7, 2003, 17, http://www. iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/knov/hilla.pdf. 28. Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American Anthropologist 104(3): 783–790. Ayotte, Kevin J. and Husain, Mary E. 2005. Securing Afghan women: Neocolonialism, epistemic violence, and the rhetoric of the veil. NWSA Journal , Vol. 17, no. 3 (Fall): 112–133. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1999. In search of politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brown, Lucy and Romano, David. 2006. Women in Post-Saddam Iraq: one step forward or two steps back? NWSA Journal 18 (3): 51–70. Cortright, David. 2005. Iraq: The human toll. The Nation, July 24. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050801/cortright. Democratic Policy Committee (DPC). 2005. Bush administration reports on operations in Iraq overstates progress on the ground. DPC, October 17, http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new.cfm?doc_name=fs-109-1-110.

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The Independent Women’s Forum  •  231 DevTech. 2005. Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education (RISE) Project, U.S. Agency for International Development (2003–2004). DevTech Systems, Inc., http://www.devtechsys.com/services/activities/rise.cfm. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. A dying colonialism. Trans. Haaken Chevalier. New York: Grove. Flanders, Laura, and Laura Ross. 2004. Antifeminists hit Iraq. The Nation, November 15, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041115/flanders. Gharouf, Shereen, and Eleane Gordon. 2003. The heartland of Iraq Women’s Conference preliminary report. Iraq Foundation, October 4–7, http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2003/knov/hilla.pdf. Giroux, Henry A. 1992. Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York and London: Routledge. Harvey, David. 2003. The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iraq Foundation. 2002. The Iraq Foundation RISE Project. The Iraq Foundation, http://www.iraqfoundation.org/projects/rise/index.html. Janabi, Ahmed. 2004. Iraqi unemployment reaches 70%. Aljazeera.net, August 1, http:// english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A66151CB-2105-418B-BFAA-73211A631611. htm. Kanazi, Remi. 2006. Accepting reality: Americans have lost Iraq War. Aljazeera.com, March 17, http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=10959. Klein, Naomi. 2003. Privatization in disguise. The Nation, April 10, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030428/klein. Klein, Naomi. 2005. The rise of disaster capitalism. The Nation, April 14, http://www. thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein. Lazreg, Marnia. 1994. The eloquence of silence: Algerian women in question. New York and London: Routledge. Ong, Aihwa. 2003. State versus Islam: Malay families, women’s bodies and the body politic in Malaysia. In Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, 381–412. New York and London: Routledge. Osman, Hibaaq. 2003. V- Day spotlight 2005: Women of Iraq, under siege. V Day, October, http://www.vday.org/contents/vcampaigns/spotlight/iraq. Palmerlee, April W. 2002. Women’s issues from the U.S. Department of State: Women in the global community. International Women’s Issues, September 19, http://www.state.gov/g/wi/. Powell, Colin L. 2004. Statement by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell: Grants to support democratization training for Iraqi women. Embassy of the United States, Baghdad, Iraq, September 27, http://usembassy.state.gov/iraq/040927_grant.html. Rice, Condoleezza. 2006. Remarks at the Independent Women’s Forum upon receiving Woman of Valor Award. U.S. Department of State, May 10, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/66139.htm. Saltman, Kenneth J. 2006. Creative Associates International: Corporate education and “democracy promotion” in Iraq. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 28: 25–65. Sandler, Lauren. 2003. Women under siege. The Nation, December 29, 11–15. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. UNICEF. 2004. At a glance: Iraq. UNICEF, http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/ iraq.html.

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232  •  Robin Truth Goodman Walk, Vivienne. 2004. Marked women: A rash of unpunished honor killings highlights the harrowing dangers females face in the New Iraq. Time, July 26, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040726-665048,00. html or http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/press/media/0407231. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1988/1975. Vindication of the rights of woman, 2nd edition, ed. Carol H. Poston. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Zangana, Haifa. Quiet, or I’ll call democracy: Iraqi women were long the most liberated in the Middle East. Occupation has confined them to their homes. Guardian, December 22, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1378411,00.html.

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13

U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World

The Deeper Implications of the Current Systemic Collapse of the Neoliberal Regime Greg Tanaka

Consistent with world systems analysts, this chapter contends that a U.S. economic crisis or even collapse is presently underway. Such an outcome portends a total loss of legitimacy of the underlying free market ideology and its usefulness as a rationale for today’s federal education policy. Alternatives are possible. The author argues that social change approaches hinged upon a 1990s notion of resistance theory will lose effectiveness as the dominant regime undergoes systemic collapse. During such times, it would seem far more timely and fruitful to explore and test alternative education models that offer some chance of inserting with them, or sustaining, a new and improved overall social system (e.g., a new democracy). Elements of Collapse When the men from Think Tank X began passing out bright Kelly green baseball caps, we laughed and began to put them on. It was only two years after the Rodney King riots, or L.A. Rebellion of 1992, and we had come to attend a day-long retreat at the all-new Sunset Canyon Recreation Center high atop a hill overlooking UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). I felt honored as the lone graduate student sitting among assistant police chiefs, assistant school superintendents, fire department commanders, Parks and Recreation and Health Department officials, and leaders from other agencies in Los Angeles to engage in a simulation to learn how a local government might better respond to crisis. “Your mission, should you accept it, is to create a model city government that responds in better ways to crisis than in the past.” The smiling convener in his fifties could not hide his sense of hope and confidence as he continued. “The goal of this exercise is to build a more harmonious community. Should you accept your mission …” 233

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234  •  Greg Tanaka Through this storytelling, I inquire into the limitations of systems analysis as a tool for U.S. democratic governance deployed by think tanks today. In parallel with the narrative, I argue that the larger challenge in exploring the social forces impacting U.S. schooling lies not in the race fear or “end of the West” notions linked to the 9/11 apocalyptic discourse, but rather the tangible reality of a U.S. economic collapse, which is already underway. With this collapse comes a loss of legitimacy not only for free market capitalism as a system and driving force behind the current neoliberal U.S. democracy, but also its education policy No Child Left Behind. World systems theorists are among those who see in free market capitalism a recipe for disaster. Wallerstein (2004, 156) warns of the danger of reversal of three trends that had given structural advantage to free market capitalism and generated extraordinary returns for U.S. elites: low labor costs, low materials costs, and low rates of taxation. With this “unstable structure,” Wallerstein (2005, 331) predicts an epic battle between democracies promoting economic hierarchy and the onset of a new democratic system that is egalitarian. “We can call this a battle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre,” Wallerstein (2004, 160) writes, referring to a place in Switzerland where capitalists from nations promoting free trade meet to plan the coming year and a second place, in Brazil, where the democracy is instead controlled by the people themselves. Arrighi (2005, 26) adds to this a concern that America’s growing reliance on foreign debt to fund its highly leveraged economic growth is “without precedent in world history,” ironically giving an advantage to China (23). At least one reviewer sees a chink in the armor of world systems thinkers, however, noting that Arrighi and Silver (1999) exhibit “little or no problematization of whether the current era may be witnessing an ongoing systems reorganization that might change the logic of systems functioning” (Chew 2001). In other words, the benefits of today’s approach to world systems analysis may well be limited to the era of free market capitalism, which is coming to an end. A capital markets overview nonetheless supports a contention that the U.S. economy, reflecting the core traits of neoliberalism, is in the early stages of collapse: • Neoliberalism’s promise that free markets will bring cheaper goods to U.S. consumers from countries opened to U.S. producers (hence “free”) came true but also resulted in the exportation of jobs out of the United States, a trampling of local businesses abroad, a large U.S. trade deficit, and a realization by “invaded” countries that the United States never intended to free its own markets to them. • The deregulation of U.S. businesses, a second core trait of neoliberalism, brought higher U.S. corporate profits and a proliferation of fast-return vehicles like hedge funds, derivatives trading, and private

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U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World  •  235 equity buyouts, but also scandals demonstrating markets cannot regulate themselves and a condition of overspeculation and frenzy feeding last seen before the 1929 Stock Market Crash. • To fuel this hectic pace, the U.S. government printed more dollars without underlying security. So while it was claiming to fight inflation by raising rates from 4 to 4.25 percent in November 2005, the United States was also letting the money supply grow by an inflationary 8.7 percent (Jubak 2006a). With money being pumped into the system and nothing to back it, the dollar declined in value. • By 9/11 another outcome of neoliberalism—overfinancialization— had set in, with layers of financial instruments stacked one on top of another like a house of cards ready to fall. It was “a mountain of debt” (Monthly Review 2002). • Also by 9/11, U.S. households were bearing the brunt of another core trait: the widening gap between rich and poor. With incomes for 90 percent of U.S. households not growing from 1950 to 2000, U.S. markets could “only stimulate demand through the creation of debt, both personal and public” (Tabb 2006, 12). Six years after 9/11, the consumer is further tapped out with high credit card debt, inflated mortgage debt, diluted real wages, job downsizing, loss of health and pension support, and a negative savings rate. The result of the above traits is a staggering level of accumulated debt in multiple markets at the same time. Worse, the United States has a whopping $49 trillion in unfunded debt and total commitments linked to Social Security and Medicaid payments. With a gross domestic product of just $13 trillion per year, the need for long-term financing looms large as a means of stretching these massive debt payments over time—and this at a time when issuing 30- or 50-year Treasury bonds would trigger a return of high rates and a collapse of the housing market. In accumulating debt it cannot pay off, and in drawing down its Social Security fund, the United States is by some accounts already bankrupt. In the face of this debt-driven crisis, the “systems” way of knowing of Wallerstein and Arrighi does not position them to present us with fresh alternatives. Wallerstein comes closest to moving off a systems epistemology, but in the end only romanticizes the Porto Alegre democracy as a generalized “spirit” he does not develop further. In a similar way, education progressives have yielded the terrain by failing to move from a 1990s “resistance to hierarchy” mode to the performance of macro social change (e.g., testing alternative democracies). During a systemic collapse, it would seem more fruitful to depart from this mode of resistance (Gitlin 2006, 2) and test new education models that teach U.S. citizens how to better understand, and reclaim, their democracy.

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236  •  Greg Tanaka The Interconnectedness of Capital Markets “In this simulation, you will have a mayor, form policy, and respond to events that arise. This simulation will therefore test …” With words to this effect, the three facilitators at the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center all smiled as they stood with their backs to a long picture window that ran along the far end of the conference-style meeting room. The thirty-five or so of us who served as guinea pigs sat along two long rows of tables, eagerly awaiting the rest of our instructions. In a city that had experienced the pain and dislocation of the L.A. Rebellion of 1992, we were hopeful that our participation in this exercise would contribute to a new model of civic governance that would promote better relations between ethnic groups, which had come to comprise some 70 percent of the city’s population. In the interest of saving time, the organizers selected from our group a middle-aged African American woman with a highly professional demeanor and conservative attire to be our “mayor.” While almost three-quarters of us were of color, we noticed the three facilitators from Think Tank X were over fifty, white, and male. We also saw that the organizers had donned different colored baseball caps from the bright green ones we were wearing. Theirs were white. Not widely known to the public, the federal government undertook several shrewd actions following the 9/11 bombings to rescue a teetering U.S. economy, steps that now magnify the current risk of collapse. With the financial system facing a collapse, the government pulled a rabbit out of the hat by discontinuing the sale of 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds. This triggered a decline in rates charged for mortgages, and on seeing this, homeowners rushed to their financial institutions to refinance their mortgages at the lower rates. Commissions from those transactions injected much needed cash flow into the banking system. Here’s the rub: the United States cannot bring back this long-term borrowing mechanism to cover, or match, its mounting long-term debt (e.g., from two foreign wars) without triggering the very opposite effect—the return of dangerously high mortgage rates for homeowners. Further: • After 9/11 the United States masked its underlying inflation rate by eliminating M3, the most inclusive money-supply measure, when it should have added an M4 or M5 to better track the massive flows of “new forms of money” (Jubak 2006a) like derivatives, hedge funds, and other speculative trading. • The United States also masked the inflation rate by choosing to understate the future impact of today’s reliance on cheap Chinese goods

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U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World  •  237

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(Jubak 2006b; Cowen 2006). With Chinese labor and materials costs going up, a lagging inflation effect will one day hit the U.S. economy and shock the debt-laden consumer. The government database for unemployment and cost of living has further masked the true state of the economy. To account for reduced job quality, increased part-time employment, and those no longer looking for work, the United States should publish a full-time employment or living wage index. To account for increased worker health care and pension costs, the United States needs a total or real cost of living index. Absent these, the government is unable to track and report variables that signal the timely need for adjustment. A strategy to shift the risks of fast capitalism on to the homeowner has led to a housing bubble, and with this the threat of more inflation, a liquidity crisis, a monetizing of Treasuries, and a stampede out of the dollar (Pomboy 2006). On top of the federal deficit and trade gap, a sudden disintermediation defined by large foreign investors departing the U.S. markets would be devastating. With opaque reporting, this crisis can be further masked by the selling of oil from U.S. strategic oil reserves and the leasing of gold by central banks. As seen following 9/11 and Katrina, free-market capitalism’s abandonment of public government in favor of privatization has greatly weakened the U.S. infrastructure, leaving no safety net to fall back on in times of collapse.

In masking the true condition of the economy, the neoliberal regime is only exacerbating the economic snap to come and visiting a new and horrific terror upon U.S. children and families—demonstrating the ultimate folly in letting markets govern the state. There is one final straw: the major segments (or capital markets) of an economy are so closely interconnected that great strength in one area—for example, households or banking or manufacturing or the federal government—can counterbalance weakness in other areas. With this interconnectedness of capital markets, however, the total collapse of a leading segment like housing, or a weakening of all segments at the same time, can bring down the entire system. With no more rabbits to pull out of the hat, the onset of this economic collapse casts epochal doubt on the free market model that buttresses the neoliberal democracy and its education policy, No Child Left Behind. Fungibility and No Child Left Behind The White Hats told us we would be divided into four teams, each meeting on a different side room of this conference center. One group became the mayor’s office, another became the Police Department, a third became

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238  •  Greg Tanaka the L.A. Unified School District, and so forth. The day was to be divided into three modules with each module giving us a chance to react to a different event by discussing and then forming new policy. From their words we could tell the White Hats had become serious and were getting into the moment. The first crisis was a 15 percent cutback in the overall city budget. We were asked to devise a strategy to respond to the crisis in a way that maintained our mission but led to the reductions needed. We were also told that we could send an emissary once during each module to any of the other groups to ask questions or relay a request. From my participation in my group’s response to the moments of crisis presented in each of the three modules, I learned much about how negotiation between government agencies can proceed during unforeseen events visited upon a city government. Following the budget crisis came two more modules in which (a) a thirteen-year-old black teenager was shot by the police and (b) segments of the city were beginning to riot in response to the shooting. It was beginning to feel like the L.A. riots all over again. Even with all the structural economic weakness, I suggest there is a deeper source of collapse of the U.S. neoliberal regime—its concept of fungibility and the resulting inability of a society to create new meaning. Fungibility, in reference to capital, means having a common, homogeneous medium of exchange (e.g., the U.S. dollar) between different traders. Under this way of knowing, difference is abhorrent as transactions can only be smoothly entered into when traders have a common medium of exchange. To prosper, a free-market mentality must therefore diminish all forms of personal meanings or shared group meaning (i.e., culture) that would threaten the fungibility that undergirds a free-market regime, or its capital would cease to be fungible. In other words, fungibility is inherently destructive of culture, forecloses the creation of new, shared meaning, and deprives a country of a future capacity to build new forms of cohesion through social exchange across difference. I mention the above to underscore that the current national education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), appears to enact the very same mentality with respect to learners and learning: it treats all students as if they were fungible. Under a standardized test-driven mentality, children are interchangeable and treated as if they all learn in the same way. Further, teachers are prevailed upon to teach to that presumed homogeneity, assess outcomes as if all students in a given classroom could one day perform at an identical level, and surrender all opportunity to teach children how to create new meaning and become independent, critical thinkers in their own right.

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U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World  •  239 Reduced to fungible units like any other commodity, students and teachers alike must now perform to a common standard of high-stakes testing, or be labeled “underperforming.” In this regard, it is no surprise that educational anthropologist Norma Gonzalez (2004, 17) has asked, “Is our notion of quality tied up with global economic practices and texts that define educational achievement and success in an atomized fashion, conflating education with discrete skills and market performance?” With its stated aim to “ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to attain a high quality education,” Cochran-Smith (2005) joins many in pointing out that NCLB has failed to provide adequate funding to achieve any of its three cornerstones: highly qualified teachers (HQT), adequate yearly progress in all schools (AYP), and improvements for minority children. Reports indicate that NCLB’s emphasis on testing leads some states to lower standards for teachers (Southwest Center for Teacher Quality 2004), does not benefit families constrained by economic and political disadvantage (Mickelson and Southworth 2005) or rural geography (Jimerson 2005), and pushes lower-performing students out the back door (Orfield et al. 2004). A clearer connection can be now traced between the education law and its underlying democracy. In a study of six geographically diverse states, Kim and Sunderman (2005, 12) report, “the NCLB subgroup policy puts racially diverse schools at greater risk of failing.” In declaring an aim to uplift all children, NCLB appears to magnify existing inequities. In an uncanny correlation to this, David Harvey (2005, 64–65) has come to define the neoliberal state as one that is governed by free trade and individual property rights, and holds each individual “responsible for his or her own actions and well-being (so that) individual success or failure are interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings” (emphasis added). In other words, like its education policy NCLB, the current U.S. democracy reflects an unmistakable chimera in the “declared public aims of neoliberalism—the well-being of all,” which conflicts with “actual consequences—the restoration of class (hierarchies)” (79, emphasis added). Instantiating fungible and homogenizing units in place of the richness and particularity of different student perspectives, histories, and imaginations, the greatest weakness in a neoliberal democracy might now be seen as “the cumulative loss of meaning” deriving from its homogenizing effects of fungibility, which render its people fearful, without anchor, without compass. In valorizing individualism and competition, Harvey argues (2005, 82), “the anarchy of the market (might) even lead to a breakdown of all bonds of solidarity and a condition verging on social anarchy and nihilism.” It was in another era of globalization of cultures, in the Russia of The Possessed, that novelist Dostoevsky traced the roots of terrorism in Europe to its own lack of religious faith (Billington 2006). In a similar way, the roots of terrorism in the United States may one day be traced to a lack of meaning that leaves a decultured,

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240  •  Greg Tanaka marketized society unable to know right from wrong, anesthetizes citizens from recognizing how their country’s actions can hurt others, and radiates outward a new nihilism. I note the above to underscore that construction of the self, as one antithesis to fungibility, is likely to be where the project of democratic renewal must begin its work. Thus, with the collapse of free market capitalism comes a fresh opportunity to replace the empty, soulless quality of a standardized, “neoliberal student” and standardized “neoliberal teacher” with the richness that derives from having learners who develop their own notions of self in relation to others (meaning) while helping others do the same—and teachers who teach to that mutuality. One wonders, is that already a different democracy? Alternative Democracies Are Possible It was after lunch when the facilitators told us the modules portion of the simulation was over and we would now have a chance to deliberate as a whole. “Let’s hear your group’s recommendations for how municipal units can work together to solve a crisis, shall we?” the senior White Hat said to the gathered officials. “Mayor, would you like to facilitate this?” Reaching the podium, the stately mayor looked out at the participants who sat in two long rows of seats and tables and asked if we had any questions. A slender, athletic male in his early sixties was first to raise his hand, and when called upon he spoke tentatively. The only man I had known before this day, the high-ranking official from the Los Angeles Police Department spoke softly but quickly touched a chord in us all. “Here’s what I think,” he began, “I love all the chance for dialogue in this simulation and so I want to thank the facilitators for this. But at the same time, I feel a little bit manipulated. We’ve been doing this exercise obediently for about four hours now but there is one tiny group making all the rules. And it isn’t us.” With these words, the senior White Hat seemed to freeze and he struggled to maintain his ready smile. “You wanted us to model how a democratic city government responds to crisis,” the police official continued, “but it doesn’t feel like we have any power. Instead of making our own policy and moving the city forward as we’d like, we spend all our time reacting to one crisis after another that you present to us.” He paused briefly before finishing. “It doesn’t feel right.” One by one, other invited participants began to chime in, adding to what had spontaneously become an open criticism of the simulation exercise

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U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World  •  241 itself. While each individual had a point to make, the collective feeling was unmistakable. An exercise that had been conceived and funded to study how to improve civic response to urban crisis was beginning to spin out of control for the White Hats. “But we have to keep the simulation going!” interjected another White Hat, unable to hold back the strain in his voice. He rushed to add that this was all part of the exercise, to see how officials feel and then make the city work even through a crisis. When he saw that the audience was staring back at him, unmoved, the White Hat looked to the mayor in desperation and asked her if she wouldn’t mind steering the group back to completing the exercise. Pausing for an instant, the mayor began to speak. Alternative models of democracy exist that treat schooling as a primary vehicle by which future citizens are prepared for direct participation in a democratic government, and they may be worth considering now. I find the autonomous communities of Chiapas, Mexico most intriguing. With indigenous populations at the mercy of U.S. corporations that entered into and swamped their local agriculture and industry, citizens responded by shoring up their local democracies, internally. Hamlets, towns, and cities in the southern onethird of Mexico became self-functioning democracies with citizens deliberating and making decisions from the bottom up, instead of ceding that duty to elected representatives in a neoliberal democracy or wasting energy in resistance to that hierarchy (McLaren, Flores, and Tanaka 2001). In Chiapas, pre-K to 12 schooling, directed by women elders, gives every child voice and teaches the intersubjective skills to be good listeners and be supportive of others. A second model of participatory democracy lies in the region surrounding Porto Alegre, Brazil (mentioned by Wallerstein), where dialogue-based Freirean schooling teaches local publics the duties and responsibilities of participatory public budgeting, or PPB (Baiocchi 2003; Deantoni 2004). Importantly, this shows that participatory democracy can work across a large region and be sustained by Freirean pedagogy. A third model can be found in the town of Reggio Emilia, Italy, where decision making for the school budget is conducted by the community. With children taught from a very young age to identify questions and address them in groups (Malaguzzi 1993), this emergent form of schooling instills a sense of complementarity in which all children grow as a part of a process of helping other children to grow, suggesting yet another valuable precursor for direct democratic participation. Fourth, a culturally based practice of participatory democracy can be found in the Kaupapa Maori model of New Zealand, where Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999/2005, 156) reports an “indigenous agenda focuses strategically

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242  •  Greg Tanaka on the goal of self-determination.” Unlike the Western concept of collaboration between individuals, Maori participants affirm a deeper sense of connectedness that links identity to community well-being. Democratizing there is a process of “extending participation outwards” (156). A fifth project is now underway, in which I am involved. A group of applied education researchers is taking scholarly research assessing No Child Left Behind to volunteer members of the U.S. public who are being formed into citizens’ panels (e.g., Guston 1999) where they will undergo training and then propose “the next” U.S. education policy. While nonbinding, one aim is to attach a degree of public notoriety to the panel recommendations and let this informed public consensus percolate upward to federal and state policymakers, thus modeling participatory democracy on a nationwide scale. Yet other variants of direct civic engagement can be seen in the decentralized government of Kerala, India (Isaac and Heller 2003), the Calpulli autonomous community in San Bernadino, California (Rodriguez 1998), Eastside Café’s performance-based autonomous community in East Los Angeles (Flores 2004), a schooling approach in Sweden that views children as future agents of social change (Lancy 2006), and the MollyOlga community-based arts project of New York (Fine et al. 2000). Finally, one U.S. model of civic participation stands as an example of what can be lost under a market-based democracy. In 1988, communities in Chicago were given the right to govern their own public schools through local school councils (or LSCs). The LSCs determined budget policies, supervised hiring and firing, designed long-term plans, measured progress, and even served as a training ground for people of color who later became elected officials (Fung 2003, 113). More recently these LSCs came to an end when a new mayor replaced them with corporate-run public schools (Lipman 2005, 54; Hursch 2006, 21), ending a wonderfully novel project of enhanced civic engagement. What the above models have in common is a trait of getting local publics directly involved in policy making from the bottom up. The belief is that a local-to-national flow of meaning in a participatory democracy offers each citizen an opportunity to feel a direct connection to her or his government—and be personally involved in the meaning making process. In contrast, world systems thinkers exhibited awkwardness in considering that democracy might become a process within local publics in place of representation in, or resistance to, a hierarchical system. With its potential for humility and soul making, the practice of participatory democracy ushers in new ways of knowing, being, and inter-relating that make small the cold logic of capital, fungibility, and systems analysis.

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U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World  •  243 U.S. Education after 9/11 “I have listened to the group,” the mayor began, as she stood behind the podium looking back and forth between the White Hats standing at her side and the participants who sat before her. “I have to say that I agree with what everyone has said,” she continued. “All of us participants never had any real say in what decisions would be made.” Hearing this, the three White Hats of Think Tank X stood as if caught in a kind of camera snapshot, frozen in time. On their faces could be seen a conflicted state of continuing hope and mounting anxiety about a world that wasn’t the one they intended. Facing her people, the mayor said, “I know the organizers want us to finish this day with some group decision making but I can’t do this anymore … I quit!” Foreshadowed by the events of 9/11, I argue that U.S. education researchers have a new duty in this time of neoliberal systemic collapse to test incursions that reclaim the democracy and minimize the chances of neoliberal recrudescence. Such incursions would have to resolve a number of deeper concerns. The first concern was evident in the simulation itself: an unmistakable absence of humanism in a systems approach to running the world. The breakdown of this think tank approach to civic governance demonstrated that blind adherence to an epistemology that hopes to solve all human problems through linear, compartmentalized thinking can overlook much—and if relied on to an extreme, perhaps even be the proximate cause of a collapse. The mechanistic approach to crisis nodes and outcomes intended in the exercise suggests that a false sense of security can attach from sticking with a belief in parsimony and predictability as defining characteristics of an advanced civilization. In fact, NCLB might now be seen as a kind of poster child for neoliberalism and a desperate attempt by a small, elite group to turn a far larger population of people (who are middle class, working class, rural, of color, and all looking for meaning) into automatons who are more easily manipulated because they are denied meaning and subjected to the alienation that begins with standardization in school. If the United States aims to build security, its next education policy will need to recreate meaning and culture. A second concern revealed itself as a chasm in ways of knowing and assigning meaning between the White Hats and the Green Hats. While one might see the humor in a spontaneous uprising by public officials who had been convened in order to study the very opposite—how to promote public order during times of crisis—the larger concern revealed here is that the systems way of knowing of the White Hats holds a peculiar inability to adapt itself

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244  •  Greg Tanaka to populations that are ethnically and racially diverse; systems analysis is inapposite diversity. With the United States becoming increasingly diverse, the subtle, stubborn racism/sexism/classism of this chasm was shamelessly encoded in the coloring of hats worn that day, signaling whose democracy it was and whose it was not. Where the participants were overwhelmingly of color, diverse in gender, class, and professional training—and wore green hats—the think tank leaders were all male, systems thinkers, racialized as white, and culturally nonspecific. The symbolism in having Think Tank X leaders wear white hats was inescapable: television westerns told us the ones wearing white hats were the heroes. It grated. One implication for the next democracy, then, is that it will have to bridge cultures more effectively than in this simulation. If a diverse democracy is ever to be participatory, its citizens will likely benefit from pre-K through 16 education that is intercultural. I have found in field research that intercultural storytelling can be one way of teaching a diverse group of students how to create and share meaning with each other (Tanaka 2003, 135), suggesting there are alternatives to neoliberalism and its anomie. Third, revealed in this exercise was the larger possibility that a systems approach to running the world is simply too binary and confrontational to be a palimpsest for global human society. In refusing the status of “atomized citizen” in a preplanned democracy, the simulation participants demanded to be subjects and agents who have voice, govern their own democracy, and help each other along the way. Missing from this think tank’s emphasis on order, pathways, and decision nodes, was any examination of the importance of having the kind of shared approaches to human agency and subject making—mutuality—demonstrated by these participants (see, for example, Couldry 2004, 8; Ricoeur 1992, 183; Tanaka 2002, 283). If the United States is to become a better global citizen one day, its future education will need to teach to this, too. Fourth, there is a growing suspicion in my mind that the very notion of systems analysis may be incompatible with democracy. The breakdown of the simulation reveals that a larger tension exists between its function as a neoliberal tool to control a compliant, consuming public, and the opposing belief that democracy is intrinsically by, for, and of the people. Tocqueville (1835, 322) expressed early concern about a U.S. democracy in which citizens of western states (the Midwest and South today) do not have the skills and norms of direct participation he saw in New England town meetings (a concern that may well apply across all U.S. geographies today). In the absence of direct citizen participation in provincial or local civic decision making (95), he feared the U.S. democracy could turn into an “aristocratic government” controlled by “rich men” (225; compare Ober 1989, 334). As seen in this simulation, systems analysis (from a think tank funded by rich men) can become an instrumentality to control the democracy.

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U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World  •  245 With the outcome of this simulation, where the study of an uprising itself led to an uprising, the notion of a neoliberal democracy was seen as an illusion, a misnomer, not a democracy at all. So when the mayor of this imagined city said, “I quit,” it spelled more than an end to a preplanned simulation: the White Hats could do nothing, the exercise was over, and so was their pretense to democracy. At the same time, a resolution of this crisis in favor of the people did not solve the larger problem of how to engage members of future publics in their democracy without the anarchy seen there. Not at all intended by the White Hats, the actions of these participants may already have adumbrated something akin to an organic democracy where meaning is established on an as you go basis by the people themselves, rather than falling back on a system or structure. Stated in another way, U.S. educators might teach future citizens the democratic skills Touraine (2000, 284) envisioned in a “school for the subject”: The fate of modern democracy, defined as a politics of the Subject, will be decided mainly in our schools and cities. In educational terms, we have to construct a school for the Subject and for inter-cultural communication, or in other words recognize that the goal of education is not to train and prepare young people … for their future economic roles. Its goal is to train and educate them to be themselves. I will now suggest that the simulation did not fail at all, but rather served to demonstrate in clear terms what might be wrong with the operation of a democracy that is informed and controlled by private think tank researchers who are predisposed to a system, much like NCLB, that looks for and rewards preconceived, measurable results rather than vesting power in the public it serves. In other words, the most lasting ramification of this neoliberal collapse may be the rare opportunity it presents to remake the democracy along the lines of participatory democracies now seen around the world. Fifth, the peaking and decline of this neoliberal system begs the question, what precautions might be taken now to minimize the possibility of recrudescence of a belligerent, win-lose, free market mentality that would foreclose all possibility of mutuality based global economics. The impulse to recrudescence took root before: as the Dionysian democracy of the 1960s and 1970s ripened, neoliberals were already scheming how to dismantle the Great Society and reinstate their secular trend toward free market capitalism begun in the 1940s. To preempt a return to neoliberalism, progressive educators may want to pay close attention to what the simulation participants wished for most: a democracy that gives people a capacity to remake that democracy each day, as subjects, rather than operating as fungible objects in a simulated exercise. So for the urban representatives who came to the UCLA Sunset Recreation Center with such curiosity and high hopes, a true democracy was never encountered, only the illusion of a democracy concocted and controlled by

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246  •  Greg Tanaka Think Tank X. Under such circumstances, the idea of revolt may have seemed justified at the time in relation to a perceived loss of democracy. But in a town that is 70 percent of color and had experienced two major riots in fifty years, the very idea of anarchy is anathema. If we are to avoid a recrudescence of the twin free market evils of fungibility and democratic unraveling, the future energies of U.S. progressives might be better directed to discovering the meanings that come from a sense of mutuality—the interconnectedness of humans—in a participatory democracy. Acknowledgment Special thanks to Maria Rousey and Cindy Cruz for assistance with this manuscript. References Arrighi, Giovanni. 2005. Hegemony unraveling. New Left Review 32: 23–87. Arrighi, Giovanni, and Beverly J. Silver. 1999. Chaos and governance in the modern world system. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. 2003. Participation, activism, and politics: The Porto Alegre experiment. In Deepening democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance, ed. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, 45–76. London: Verso. Billington, James H. 2006. Dostoevsky’s prophetic novel: The Possessed foresaw political terrorism on the eve of its birth. Wall Street Journal, January 28–29, 2006, P12. Chew, Sing C. 2001. Book review: Arrighi and Silver, Chaos and governance in the modern world system. Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, cjsonline.ca/ reviews/chaos.html. Cochran-Smith, Marilyn. 2005. No child left behind: 3 years and counting. Journal of Teacher Education 56(2): 99–103. Couldry, Nick. 2004. In place of a common culture, what? Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 26: 3–21. Cowen, Tyler. 2006. China is big trouble for the U.S. balance of trade, right? Well, not so fast. New York Times, September 7, 2006, C3. Deantoni, Nicolas. 2004. The Freirean approach to education and participatory democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 2004, San Diego, CA. Fine, Michelle, Lois Weiss, C. Centrie, and R. Roberts. 2000. Educating beyond the borders of schooling. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 31(2): 131–151. Flores, Roberto. 2004. Autonomous Community Building as Pedagogy for Participatory Liberation: A Comparative Analysis of Chipas and East Los Angeles. Unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA. April 16, 2004. Fung, Archon. 2003. Deliberative democracy, Chicago style: Grass-roots governance in policing and public education. In Fung and Wright, eds., Deepening democracy, 111–143. Gitlin, Todd. 2006. The intellectuals and the flag. New York: Columbia University Press. Gonzalez, Norma. 2004. Disciplining the discipline: Anthropology and the pursuit of quality education. Educational Researcher 33(5): 17–25.

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U.S. Education in a Post-9/11 World  •  247 Guston, David H. 1999. Evaluating the first U.S. consensus conference: The impact of the citizens’ panel on telecommunications and the future of democracy. Science, Technology & Human Values 24(4): 451–482. Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hursch, David. 2006. The crisis in urban education: Resisting neoliberal policies and forging democratic possibilities. Educational Researcher 35(4): 19–25. Isaac, T., M. Thomas, and Patrick Heller. 2003. Democracy and development: Decentralized planning in Kerala. In Fung and Wright, eds., Deepening democracy. Jimerson, Lorna. 2005. Placism in NCLB: How rural children are left behind. Equity and Excellence in Education 38(3): 211–219. Jubak, Jim. 2006a. Fed kills a key inflation gauge. Jubak’s Journal, March 31, 1–3.     . 2006b. Stagflation: A new peril for stocks. Jubak’s Journal, July 4, 1–3. Kim, James S., and Gail L. Sunderman. 2005. Measuring academic proficiency under the No Child Left Behind Act: Implications for educational equity. Educational Researcher 34(8): 3–13. Lancy, David F. 2006. Book Review of Eva Poluha. 2004. The Power of Continuity. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, June 9, 2006. Lenkersdorf, Carlos. 1996. Los hombres verdaderos: Voces y testimonios tojolabales. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Lipman, Pauline. 2003. High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform. New York: Routledge. Malaguzzi, Loris. 1993. History, ideas, and basic philosophy. In The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education, ed. C. Edwards, L. Gandini, and G. Foreman, 49–98. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. McLaren, Peter, Roberto Flores, and Greg Tanaka. 2001. Autonomy and participatory democracy: An ongoing discussion on the application of the Zapatista method in the United States. International Journal of Education Reform 10(2): 130–144. Mickelson, Roslyn Arlin, and Stephanie Southworth. 2005. When opting out is not a choice: Implications for NCLB’s transfer option from Charlotte, North Carolina. Equity & Excellence in Education 38(3): 249–263. Monthly Review. 2002. Slow growth, excess capital, and a mountain of debt. Monthly Review, April, 1–14. Ober, Josiah. 1989. Mass and elite in democratic Athens: Rhetoric, ideology, and the power of the people. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Orfield, Gary, D. Losen, and J. Wald. 2004. Losing our future: How minority youth are being left behind by the graduation rate crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Civil Rights Project. Perelman, Michael. 2006. Some economics of class. Monthly Review 58(3): 18–28. Pomboy, Stephanie. 2006. MacroMavens Report. Cited in Alan Abelson, 2006, Infestation of bugs. Barron’s Financial Weekly, October 2, 2006, 8. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rodriguez, Mariangela. 1998. Mito, identidad y rito: Mexicanos y Chicanos en California. Mexico: Ciesas. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999/2005. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Southwest Center for Teacher Quality. 2004. Unfulfilled promise: Ensuring high quality teachers for our nation’s schools. Chapel Hill, NC: Southeast Center for Teaching Quality. 22.

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248  •  Greg Tanaka Tabb, William 2006. The power of the rich. Monthly Review 58(3): 6–17. Tanaka, Greg. 2002. Higher education’s self-reflexive turn: Toward an intercultural theory of student development. Journal of Higher Education 73(2): 263–296.     . 2003. The intercultural campus: Transcending culture and power in American higher education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1835. Democracy in America. New York: Vintage Books. Touraine, Alain. 2000, Can we live together? Equality and difference. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. Alternatives: The United States confronts the world. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2005. After developmentalism and globalization, what? Social Forces 83(3): 321–336.

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14

The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after September 11

Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson

In this chapter Novelli and Robertson examine the changing relationships among education, international development aid, and the merging of security and development. In particular the authors consider the possibility that the War on Terror, just like the predecessor conflict the Cold War, threatens to prioritize geopolitics as the new rationale for development policy with potentially damaging effects for the promotion of a more needs-based global development policy that concentrates on the poorest and most needy countries and population sectors. Within this view, framings of potential disaster become the basis for development policy. The international development community has not yet been swept up into the war on terror, but it stands on the threshold. The international development architecture is already being transformed. Donor governments must act quickly to ensure that their development aid mission to deliver effective aid and to meet specific human development goals— even as they pursue other goals—stays at the forefront of the emerging aid regime.1 Introduction The events of September 11, 2001 appear to be radically altering the geopolitical and geostrategic activities of the dominant Western powers and posing a challenge to the global consensus that emerged toward the end of the last century around the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Within the space of three years, two major wars were fought by U.S.-led coalitions on two predominantly Islamic countries: Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of these conflicts remain politically, socially, and militarily unresolved. Furthermore, the terror bombings in Bali, Madrid, and London have shaken the foundations of Western conceptions of internal security and reframed debates on freedom of speech, information, and movement. This shift in global geopolitics is of great importance to issues related to international aid, development, 249

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250  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson and education, yet the literatures on these issues remain sparse and embryonic. In this chapter we examine the changing relationships among education, international development aid, and the merging of security and development. In particular we speculate on the possibility that the War on Terror, just like the predecessor conflict the Cold War, threatens to prioritize geopolitics as the new rationale for development policy with potentially damaging effects for the promotion of a more needs-based global development policy that concentrates on the poorest and most needy countries and population sectors. Merging Security and Development Since the end of the Cold War there has been an increase in conflict in many low-income countries, which predates the events of September 11, 2001. Throughout this period there has also been a reconceptualization of the relationship between development and security, which while still ongoing, poses a challenge to agencies working in these two separate fields. This has had serious consequences, not least in the blurring of the line between military and security interests and development and humanitarian activities.2 The shift toward the securitization of development emerged out of the changing global security situation after the end of the Cold War.3 Despite initial optimism of a peace dividend, conflict and war did not disappear: Immediately after the end of the Cold War there was a rise in major conflicts in every region except Latin America, followed by a fall in each region from the mid-1990s. At the end of the 1990s, there was a resurgence of serious conflict in Africa; in 1998, the number of serious conflicts was at the same level as at the peak in the early 1990s. Africa suffered by far the largest number of major conflicts during the 1990s, with more than 40% of the total. However, lesser conflicts (those with deaths of 25–1000 annually, and more than 1000 cumulatively) were concentrated in Asia.4 Central to this process was the appearance of what has been termed new wars, which differed significantly from Cold War era conflicts and required radically different local, regional, and international responses.5 Conflict in low-income countries as a percentage of total conflicts increased during the 1990s, with 40 percent taking place in Africa.6 Most disconcerting of all is that 9 out of the 10 of the lowest countries in the HDI (Human Development Index) experienced conflict during the last decade. Picciotto7 notes the difficulty of merging development and security: until recently, security and development issues have been framed in isolation from one another. The development discourse has focused on economic management and social development while national security strategies have relied on assessments of geopolitical threats and

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  251 the design of military responses. . . . For diplomats and defence specialists, security still aims largely at the protection of the homeland against hostile states. By contrast, for aid donors and voluntary development agencies, human security is defined in terms of access to productive employment, health and education, social safety nets, etc. The end result is that more often than not aid has yet to be combined with other policy instruments in a coherent package. While Picciotto8 treats the merging of security and development as a difficult but necessary task, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Christian Aid9 question whether these two different and largely separate concerns should be coordinated together at all. Of greatest concern is that aid workers and relief organizations begin to be seen as mere adjuncts to the broader military and security concerns of the most powerful nations so reminiscent of the conduct of the Cold War: Aid has always, to some extent, been given with at least one eye on the self-interest of the giver—be it to secure influence, trade or strategic resources. But the past 15 years have seen a marked change, advocated for and applauded by Christian Aid, towards vital aid funds being far better targeted at alleviating poverty. Now, however, we seem poised to return to some of the worst excesses of the recent past, when whole nations and regions were blighted by the subsuming of their interests to a global crusade. Aid was then allotted on the basis of where a country stood in the great Cold War confrontation.10 Nine days after the New York attacks, in a speech to the U.S. Congress, President Bush set the tone for policy to come in the post 9/11 period when he stated: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” He went on to say that the United States will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.11 In 2003, the then head of USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), Andrew Natsios, made explicit what merging U.S. foreign policy, security, and aid meant for U.S.-funded NGOs, as Klein12 (a columnist for the Globe and Mail) notes: On May 21 in Washington, Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID, gave a speech blasting U.S. NGOs for failing to play a role many of them didn’t realize they had been assigned: doing public relations for the U.S. government. According to InterAction, the network of 160 relief and development NGOs that hosted the conference, Mr. Natsios was “irritated”

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252  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson that starving and sick Iraqi and Afghan children didn’t realize that their food and vaccines were coming to them courtesy of George W. Bush. From now on, NGOs had to do a better job of linking their humanitarian assistance to U.S. foreign policy and making it clear that they are “an arm of the U.S. government.” If they didn’t, InterAction reported, “Natsios threatened to personally tear up their contracts and find new partners.” This preoccupation by USAID represents a broader concern of the U.S. government that there is an image problem necessitating increased public diplomacy to tell “America’s assistance story to the world” 13 and win over the hearts and minds of the international community. This reflects growing concern on the part of powerful states, particularly the United States, to be seen individually and visibly acting in the humanitarian and development field, which threatens to reduce willingness to pool funds in multilateral institutions in the long term. This is exemplified in the creation by the United States of new high-profile initiatives, such as the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), which bypasses multilateral organizations working on the same issues. The MCA is not the only new mechanism for US aid delivery. Indeed, a small and decreasing percentage of US aid tends to be channelled through multilateral institutions. In 2004 this dropped to 5 per cent of US aid flows, as US bilateral aid increased more rapidly than multilateral aid. While it has continued to fund its existing multilateral commitments, assistance to Iraq and the fight against HIV/AIDS bear witness to the same trend reflected in the creation of the MCA: a turn towards new mechanisms which eschew multilateral cooperation and the technical expertise and experience concentrated in existing aiddirecting institutions.14 While the United States was the most active in initially promoting the merging of security and development, the EU (European Union) quickly followed by reinterpreting the relationship. Javier Solana, the EU’s head of common foreign and security policy, speaking to heads of state at the European Council in 2003 stated: European assistance programmes, military and civilian capabilities from Member States and other instruments such as the European Development Fund. All of these can have an impact on our security and on that of third countries.15 The most notable change has been the definition of what constitutes official development assistance (ODA). This definition is controlled and regulated by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and for the first time in

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  253 its history has recently allowed certain military and security funding to be directed via the aid budget.16 As Picciotto notes: The DAC strictures on the types of aid eligible for Official Development Aid (ODA) status have been adjusted in partial compliance with the wishes of donors who wish to allocate aid funds to programs managed by the military, development training for security forces and security sector reform assistance programs that involve working with military establishments.17 While the current changes have been significant, consensus has not as yet been reached on two further key proposals that could radically alter ODA budgets and allow funding for training the military in nonmilitary matters and peacekeeping expenditures. These issues will be revisited in the DAC High Level Meeting of Ministers and Heads of Aid Agencies in 2007. Paradoxically, attempts surrounding the coordination of policy related to the MDGs have been eclipsed by coordination of security policy: coherence is now emerging in one area which may pose more of a risk to development assistance than the lack of it. Following the search for greater coherence across agencies to meet human security and development objectives in the 1990s (with very limited success), real coherence is emerging—centred not on a development agenda but rather on achieving global and regional security imperatives which cut across and often run counter to the pursuit of human security and development.18 In the rest of this chapter we examine the relationships among this new security environment, development aid, and education. A key question posed within the literature is whether the post–September 11 period represents the beginning of a new cold war that threatens to redirect and reorganize the consensus built around setting the Millennium Development Goals19 intended to channel aid to a widely agreed set of development outcomes. We review the impact on education aid, not only in terms of the volume of aid flows and their geographical dispersion, but also on the type of educational interventions. In all aspects we argue that there is evidence of a shift, though it is too early to draw any definitive conclusions, on the future trajectories of educational aid and development policy more generally. Approaches to Security and Development The literature reveals diverse responses to the threat of terrorism and conflict, largely as a result of the different views as to the underlying rationale for what causes security problems and conflict and what type of interventions might be appropriate.20 Much of this literature refers to the new wars that have emerged, which involve nonstate actors and intra-or trans-state conflict—the War on Terror being one exemplary case.

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254  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson Picciotto21 lays out three broad theoretical approaches to the relationship between development and security, which we now develop in order to gain some insight into the possible relationships between the two. The first draws on the modernization theorist, Samuel Huntington22 and his thesis surrounding a “clash of civilizations.” The second draws on the work of Mark Duffield 23 and explores the relationship between structural inequalities within the global economy and polity and violence. The third draws on the work of Paul Collier and explores intrastate conflict from a neoliberal rational choice perspective, where violent acts are regarded as generated by individual motives of greed. Each of these underlying theories, as we will show, is likely to lead to very different developmental and educational policy interventions in relation to the issue of the War on Terror. Clash of Civilizations Huntington’s post Cold War work 24 argued that while previous conflicts engaged “princes,” “nation states,” and then “ideologies” (Cold War), today’s conflicts are located around civilizations. He suggests that cultural differences have become the key driver of global insecurity both within and between states, while the key conflict is between Islam and Christianity. Within this worldview, one can see how educational policy interventions would likely be targeted at addressing the cultural obstacles and differences that divide the two groups. This can help us understand why, in the present period, the central thrust of USAID’s educational aid thinking is directed particularly, though not exclusively, toward altering perceptions of the West within Islamic societies. According to USAID’s administrator for Asia and the Near East, James Kunder, “our current education approach responds to the overall goal of moderating radical intolerance and anti-Western ideologies.” 25 Kunder clarifies this by recognizing the need for “a multi-sectoral strategy that fosters socio-political stability and economic growth.” In sum, this represents an important policy shift from the 1980s where it was centrally preoccupied with neoliberal reforms. Kunder points to the increases in education spending that have emanated from this: Since 2001, USAID’s education portfolio in the Near East and South Asian region has dramatically expanded from 1 to 13 programs. The budget for education in the following 13 countries rose from $99.5 million in FY [fiscal year] 2002 to nearly $274.5 million in FY 2004: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, West Bank/Gaza, and Yemen.26 In terms of programs, Kunder mentions the translation and broadcasting of an Arabic version of Sesame Street across Egypt (Alam Simsim) and Bangladesh (Sisimpur). These programs will “reach as many as 4 million pre-school age children who will watch Sisimpur in Bangladesh, which premiered on

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  255 April 15, 2005. Alam Simsim reaches 86% of rural Egyptian children and 45% of their mothers. Program themes include learning to be tolerant, practicing good hygiene and getting a head start in school.” 27 There has also been a parallel increase in funding for educational and cultural exchanges between the United States and the Muslim World: The President’s Budget also supports the Department of State’s efforts to communicate our values abroad by providing more than $1.2 billion for public diplomacy programs to inform, engage, and support freedom-loving people around the world. For example, the Department of State will fund annual exchanges of about 35,000 Americans and people from other countries to share perspectives on our policies, people, values, and society.28 Evidence from the 2005 U.S. budget also identifies the need to use education as a vehicle for addressing U.S. security concerns: For there to be security in the long run—both in the Greater Middle East and here at home—we must marshal the energy and ideals upon which our Nation was founded and work to promote democracy in the region. The President’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) promotes political, economic, and educational reform efforts in the Middle East, especially focused on opportunities for women and youth. MEPI funds grants, partnerships, training, and technical assistance. The President proposes to increase funding for this important initiative in 2005 to $150 million.29 Many commentators have noted the role played by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) during the Cold War.30 It is also possible to see its central role in the new post-9/11 era: The President also proposes to double funding to $80 million in 2005 for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for a Greater Middle East Leadership and Democracy initiative. The Endowment is a grant-making foundation that distributes funds to private organizations for the purpose of promoting democracy abroad. NED focuses on democracy building through civic education, developing political parties, encouraging a free press, and promoting human rights.31 There have also been shifts in U.S.-funded media broadcasting; once focused on the Soviet Union and its allies, it is now shifting toward the Middle East and Asia: The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) broadcasts news and information throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and to Cuba, and provides information on U.S. policies and activities, as well as cultural and educational programming. Since 2001, BBG has shifted

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256  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson its funding to focus on broadcasting to regions that are the most critical in the War on Terror, including the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Pacific. This includes revamping Arabic radio broadcasting to the Middle East and launching a new Arabic satellite TV network. BBG has also revamped Persian radio broadcasting to Iran to appeal to broader audiences.32 These kinds of interventions, if informed by a Huntington conceptualization of the problem, can be viewed as oriented more toward changing perceptions than altering the inequalities that exist in the world. One key document produced by the U.S. Government Accountability Office33 addressed the issue of the “anti-Americanism” that is “spreading and deepening around the world” 34 and recommended setting up “a national communications strategy” to coordinate interagency contact with the rest of the world. Implicit in the USAID conceptualization is that projects address the “hearts and minds” of poor population groups, not the underlying structural inequalities which, according to Duffield,35 contribute to insecurity and conflict. Structural Inequalities and (In)security Duffield 36 argues that increased violence in many parts of the world is a product of the highly exclusionary contemporary informational economy and polity where large geographic parts of the world are marginalized. He suggests that the neoliberal global economy and its related governance mechanisms lock many groups out of the benefits of globalization and increase the likelihood of entry into illicit activities such as crime and violence. This argument is also advanced by the ILO (International Labour Organization)37 and the UN (United Nations).38 Intervention within this framework is likely to address the “human security” and “insecurity” that produces violence. This kind of conceptualization is evident in all of the major donors. The DfID (Department for International Development), for instance, notes: UK development assistance helps build global peace and stability for the longer term, by reducing inequality and exclusion, supporting the development of capable, responsible states and reducing conflict. Money spent on reducing poverty is money spent for a more secure world.39 Likewise, Australian Aid (AusAID) has a similar take. Australian policy has been deeply influenced by the events of September 11, particularly the Bali bombing, which left almost 200 Australians dead.40 While this preoccupation has led to increased military and security measures, it also appears to be interpreted more broadly—addressing the inequalities, poverty, and social exclusion that have arisen over the last two decades of economic reform and transformation. While poverty provides no justification for acts of terror, entrenched poverty can create an environment in which terrorist networks may be

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  257 fostered. Terrorist leaders can exploit the frustrated, the poor and the politically and economically excluded. The aid program restricts environments conducive to terrorism by assisting the poor to access basic services, including quality and affordable education, improving their employment prospects and helping them cope with risk and vulnerability.41 The interrelationship between poverty and terrorism also functions in the opposite direction. AusAID notes: Terrorism threatens poverty reduction and stability in our region. This in turn impacts on Australia’s security and prosperity. The aid program plays a significant role in broader efforts to counter terrorism, drawing on its own expertise and experience in building capacity and promoting environments for growth and poverty reduction in the Asia-Pacific region.42 There is a conscious attempt to address the fact that poverty may act as a catalyst to security problems, and that all of the OECD members have, to a greater or lesser extent, taken on board this aspect of preventing terror. As Christian Aid notes: From the start of the post–Cold War era, donors, especially the US, began to realise that targeting poverty could also deliver security benefits. In 1994, the Congressional Budget Office’s paper, Enhancing US Security Through Foreign Aid, noted: A brief survey of the world’s trouble spots show[ed] a fairly striking correlation between economic malaise on the one hand and domestic unrest and political instability on the other. If the United States can address those problems by using its foreign aid to help to create economic opportunities and invest in human capital, then the chance of conflict may be reduced.43 This may lead to shifts in the geostrategic focus of aid to countries whose “instability” might pose a greater threat to Western interests than others, particularly where the West has interests in natural resources. The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID), while stressing that its priorities remain on the least developed countries, nevertheless suggests: we will pay greater attention to countries that play a critical role in promoting regional stability—or instability. This will include poor countries, such as Angola, as well as Middle Income Countries, such as South Africa. We will work in some of these countries through our bilateral programmes. Elsewhere, we will work through multilateral agencies, including the European Union, which operate in a wider range of Middle Income Countries than DfID; for example, in the Middle East and North Africa.44

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258  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson Cosgrave45 notes that even in humanitarian aid, which was previously targeted on the basis of need, there has been a shift in emphases. He cites Kosovo as an example of a place where a disproportionate amount of aid was allocated to the situation compared to other equally difficult conflicts. Likewise, he notes: Afghanistan and Iraq are both the targets of large amounts of Humanitarian Aid, but here the intention appears to be more about delivering a regime change dividend than about humanitarian assistance.46 Woods47 notes that U.K. foreign policy and aid budgets have both shifted noticeably toward Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He estimates that the U.K. military budget in Iraq has surpassed £2.5 billion, and that between financial years 2001–2002 and 2004–2005, expenditures on Iraq and Afghanistan would be in the region of £4.5 billion. The DfID’s own direct contributions to Afghanistan have increased from £35 million in 2002–2003 to over £70 million in the following two years. Likewise DfID’s aid to Iraq in 2003–2004 increased to £207 million. Similar patterns of aid growth are notable in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Indonesia. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan are now at the top of DfID’s bilateral recipients, which while not affecting low-income country aid levels, has led to reductions in spending to middle-income countries estimated at ₤100 million in 2004–2005 and 2005–2006.48 However, Woods49 notes that so far the financing for the War on Terror has largely emerged from outside traditional aid budgets. Homoeconomicus and Rational Choice Theories The third and final major approach reflects mainstream liberal ideas. Drawing on rational choice theories of human action, Collier and Hoeffler50 suggest that wars are driven less by justified grievances and far more by personal and collective greed. In this approach, humans engaged in conflict are viewed as economic agents seeking out profit. As a result, the route to peace and security is not through addressing inequality and structural exclusion, but through cutting off access to the resources of violent actors. This approach has gained sympathy in the United States and with the World Bank. In practical terms this results in attempts to cut off financial networks and illicit activities that lead to the purchase of weapons. This framework treats security issues as crimes and seeks to increase the opportunity costs of engagement by cutting off funds and addressing “enemy” groups through military force. This strategy has less substantive educational content, although increased interest is placed on “good governance” involving, for example, training civil servants to prevent corruption. As Picciotto51 notes, each of these theories sheds some light on an aspect of the security issue, however each misses out on other important aspects. Both

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  259 Huntington and Collier and Hoeffler avoid issues of poverty and inequality, while both Collier and Hoeffler and Duffield avoid issues of cultural conflict. In future policy, we may well see a combination of these different strategies emanating from the OECD countries. Being able to identify these different theories of conflict enables us to understand that recent security concerns do not inevitably mean that the MDGs will be placed at risk. If donor nations take a more structural approach to security, this might lead to more policies aimed at addressing global inequality and poverty, albeit in selective geographical areas. The recent interest in Africa might well reflect the recognition of this. Cosgrave,52 however, is far more pessimistic, arguing that the poor are likely to lose out in the new security environment as funds go to countries and areas where security is the major issue. Woods see three key challenges for foreign aid: None of these challenges is new, but each risks being magnified and exacerbated by the “war on terror” and the war in Iraq. The first concern is the goals of aid. Donors may hijack foreign aid to pursue their own security objectives rather than those which would help the poorest. The second concern is about money. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the wider war on terror have been extremely costly, and the debts incurred may soon gobble up aid budgets. The third concern is about the delivery of aid. Major donors are failing to coordinate aid through existing multilateral institutions, choosing instead to create their own new mechanisms and pursue their own priorities.53 Aid and the New Security Environment While the post–September 11 environment is very different from the security threats involved with the Cold War, we can learn from the uses that overseas aid were put to by the competing blocs. Some writers argue that there is a close relationship between the volumes and direction of foreign aid and voting patterns within the United Nations during the Cold War era.54 Likewise, Cosgrave show how patterns of overseas aid and ODA often mirrored the concerns of the major powers, a process that continues to date: Forty years ago one eighth of all Aid went to India. Newly independent Algeria got 7% of all aid spending in 1962 at the end of the long war with France. The pattern of aid varies with different political developments over the years. In 1972, during the Vietnam War, Vietnam was the second largest recipient, and anti-communist Indonesia came next. Pakistan, the bulwark against al-Qaeda, and a battleground in the war on terror was the largest aid recipient in 2002.55

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260  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson Crucially, the geography of aid was based less on perceived humanitarian need and more on political alliances, which often led to a blind eye being turned to human rights violations. In the post–Cold War environment, two contradictory but related phenomena began to emerge. On the one hand, the end of the Cold War led to less politically motivated aid and a shift to channeling aid to those in least developed countries, grouped around a set of common goals (MDGs): With the end of the Cold War, new criteria emerged. There was increasing concern about the lack of development in sub-Saharan Africa and concern about the impact this would have on developed countries. Flows of migrants from developing countries were already a very contentious issue in the west. Donors set international development goals at conferences throughout the nineties culminating in the Millennium Development Goals in September 2000.56 Secondly, there was an overall decline in overseas aid, largely related to the lack of necessity for powerful nations to court less-developed countries. This downward pattern is reflected in decreased overall OECD/ODA contributions as a percentage of GNP (gross national product) between 1990 and 1997.57 However, after 2000 this began to change. Substantial increases in overall ODA were pledged in the March 2002 Financing for Development Conference by the United States and the EU.58 This was projected by the DAC to increase overall ODA to $75 billion in 2006, up from $52 billion in 2001. While not at the levels of the Cold War era, volumes of aid do appear to be increasing. Despite the stagnation in ODA levels from 1990 to 2000, aid to education managed to slightly increase its percentage from 9.8 percent in 1990 to 11.2 percent in 1995. However, it began to steadily decline from 2000 onward. Basic education did manage to steadily increase its percentage of overall aid from 0.1 percent in 1993 to 2.2 percent in 2002. This is set to continue, with increased pledges to UPE (Universal Primary Education) from Canada, Nordic Countries, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.59 Nevertheless the new pledges still fall short of the estimated resources required for the achievement of the two educational targets by 2015.60 It remains to be seen whether the new security realities and the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan may further reduce the possibilities of UPE and gender quality by 2015 and further reduce the possibilities of achieving the MDG goals. As Cosgrave notes: In October 2003, the US pledged 20 billion dollars for reconstruction in Iraq. This amount is equal to one and a half times the USA’s annual development aid budget. Pledges by other donors were far smaller, but those like the UK, the European Commission, or Spain that have pledged an amount equivalent to 20% of their annual development budget for Iraq will have to dig deep. This will have a cost for existing development

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  261 programmes as most countries have drawn contributions for Afghanistan and Iraq from existing budgets.61 In order to explore these patterns in detail, we will now look more closely at the literature, which outlines the volume and direction of aid from the biggest donor, the United States, and one of the biggest recipients, Pakistan, to see what patterns might be emerging. The Case of the USA As Woods notes: The United States is at present the largest provider of development aid. Already in 2002 it accounted for 23 per cent of global development aid, the top six recipients of which were Egypt, Russia, Israel, Pakistan, Serbia and Colombia. Since 2002 US aid flows have almost tripled. Between 2002 and 2004 US aid rose from $12.9 billion to $33.2 billion, including $18.6 billion for Iraq in the 2004 supplemental budget. Is the increase in aid due to the new security imperatives? Most of the increase in US aid has been destined for projects designed to serve the security imperatives prevailing in the wake of September 11. Hence, almost all of the $2 billion supplemental in 2002, the $4 billion supplemental in 2003 and the $20.1 billion supplemental in 2004, plus roughly $2 billion annually in “budgeted” funds—a total of approximately $32 billion over the past three years—went to help countries on the front lines of Afghanistan, to build support for the war on Iraq or to fund the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan.62 None of the top recipients appear on the least-developed country list, however they do represent countries of vital geostrategic and political importance for the United States. Absent from Woods’ analysis are the new budgeted resources for HIV/AIDS, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which pledged $15 billion between 2003 and 2008 to combat HIV/ AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean63 and the Millennium Challenge Account, which committed $1 billion in 2004, $1.5 billion in 2005, and requested $3 billion for financial year 2006 for aid focused on low-income countries.64 These initiatives draw attention to the fact that while the United States may be acting increasingly unilaterally, it is not reducing its commitment to the MDGs. However, the United States’ new geostrategic priorities have facilitated the return of Pakistan into an alliance with the West. The Case of Pakistan The unprecedented attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 dramatically reoriented American policy interests in South Asia. Before the attacks, the George W. Bush administration had nearly relegated

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262  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson Pakistan to the category of a “rogue state” because of its coup against a democratically elected government, its support for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, its involvement in terrorist insurgency in the Indiancontrolled Kashmir, and its involvement in nuclear and ballistic missiles deals with China and North Korea. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration did a complete volte-face in its dealings with Pakistan.65 In the late 1990s, Pakistan had an uneasy relationship with the international community after first testing nuclear weapons (1998) and then being governed by General Musharraf after a military coup (1999). International aid flows decreased, with the United States cutting back aid by $40 million in 1999 to leave total aid in 2000 at $88.5 million.66 Likewise, the United Kingdom reduced aid from around $60 million per year prior to the nuclear testing and the military coup to $23.7 million in 2000.67 All this quickly changed after September 11, 2001 following Musharraf’s commitment to support the War on Terror. From that point on, significant aid has gone to Pakistan.68 In 2002, U.S. aid increased from $88.5 million to $775 million. The DfID’s aid to Pakistan increased from a low of £12 million in 2001 to £64 million in 2003–2004, with a further projected increase to £90 million by 2007–2008.69 All of these increases place pressure on DfID’s commitment to spend 90 percent of its budget on the least developed countries. Politicization of Aid to Education Beyond trying to understand the shifting pattern in overall aid volumes, it is also important to understand the form and use of aid to education. There are clear dangers of following an aid policy based on the presumption that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.70 During the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s the United States, via Pakistan, channeled a great deal of resources to a range of armed mujahideen fighters that had been recruited from across the Islamic world and from Afghan refugee camps along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Education was not immune from these processes and USAID provided substantial grants to develop school textbooks to be used to promote anti-soviet propaganda through recourse to radical Islam: Special textbooks were published in Dari and Pashtu, designed by the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha under a USAID grant in the early 1980s. Written by American Afghanistan experts and anti-Soviet Afghan educators, they aimed at promoting jihadi values and militant training among Afghans. USAID paid the University of Nebraska U.S.$51 million from 1984 to 1994 to develop and design these textbooks, which were mostly printed in Pakistan. Over 13 million were distributed at Afghan refugee camps and Pakistani

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  263 madrasas “where students learnt basic math by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles.” 71 Craig, in findings from doctoral research on primary education in Afghanistan, found that during the 1980s textbooks promoting violence were produced and widely distributed thanks to the USAID grants. In the following example he shows a math textbook for 4th grade children that asks the following question: The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3,200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.72 During this same period there was a general reduction in funding for state schools due to fiscal crisis and an increase in religious boarding schools known as madrasas in Pakistan. It is these same madrasas that have now become the focus of the United States as alleged promoters of Islamic violence: The only way to end the culture of violence we now face is to undermine the institutions that sustain it. Radical groups require radical schools. A nuanced approach can be mounted towards the challenges that stem from militant Madrassahs.73 USAID has responded to this by increasing funding to state school education in both Pakistan and Indonesia, and recently invested large amounts of funding in the education sector.74 USAID’s strategy is to deny recruits from terrorist organizations by offering better alternatives: basic education vs. radical madrasas, skills training vs. unemployment, and the development of micro-enterprise generated jobs vs. terrorism out of a sense of hopelessness and desperation. USAID targets areas where terrorist recruiting conditions are the strongest: large Muslim communities, relatively poor communities, areas characterized by high youth unemployment, and where there are large pockets of disaffected groups.75 An earlier USAID report notes that: The United States has been short-sighted in leaving countries or abandoning the social and educational sectors. This lack of vision creates a vacuum in which extremism may flourish. NGO activity, no matter how useful and energetic, cannot substitute for state capacity. That is why taking control of the education ministry often forms a vital part of the agenda of any fanatical creed when it wins power. However, education with a strong secular bias (though by no means anti-religious), open to both sexes, offers one of the most effective ways to delegitimise terrorism.76

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264  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson The report continues: In this new era, many “old” development strategies may find new life in the context of economic assistance aimed at combating terrorism over the longer term. For example, vocational training and craft apprenticeship put idle hands to work; job creation will help drain the pool of potential recruits to terrorist organizations.77 The cases of Pakistan and Afghanistan show how the United States is now following an educational policy that seeks to address both the structural inequality caused by poverty and the cultural hostility to the West, partly spurned by their own earlier policies of neoliberal structural reform and anti-Soviet propaganda. Overall, the example of U.S. Cold War policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan show the potential policy outcomes and unintended consequences of intentional action in the field of aid to education. Conclusion In this chapter we have argued that there is a shift in aid policy as a result of changes in the wider security environment. Furthermore, the different theoretical approaches to understanding the relationship between security and development demonstrate that the consequences of these shifts can be diverse. There is also considerable concern that the negative impacts of economic globalization might either contribute to or exacerbate conflict and security, while at the same time undermining global commitments to the Millennium Development Goals and the nature of aid to the poorest countries in the world, including education aid. Although the evidence is fragmentary, partial, and selective, there nevertheless appear to be clear warnings that the more consolidatory approach that developed during the 1990s toward international development policy may be under threat from the new security focus of the post–September 11 period. On the other hand, in both Washington and London opposition to the militarized strategy of the Western alliance continues to grow, both inside and outside government, and there is some evidence that the respective administrations appear to be belatedly recognizing that the military strategy is failing to deliver expected policy results and that a more consolidated approach might be necessary. Strengthening education systems in marginalized countries, improving the volume and quality of international aid, and addressing global inequalities may yet reemerge as far better policy interventions than the overwhelming violence that has characterized the overall policy response of the United States and the United Kingdom since 9/11, which has created such deadly consequences. Let us hope so, for all our sakes.

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  265 Notes







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1. See N. Woods, “The Shifting Politics of Foreign Aid,” International Affairs 81, no. 2 (2005): 393–409. 2. Woods, “Shifting Politics.” 3. F. Stewart, “Conflict and the Millennium Development Goals,” Journal of Human Development 4, no. 3 (2003): 326–350. 4. F. Stewart, “Conflict and the Millennium,” 327. 5. M. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: the Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001). 6. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), Human Development Report: International Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid Trade and Security in an Unequal World (New York: UNDP, 2005), 154, http://hdr.undp.org/reports/ global/2005 (accessed January 16, 2007). 7. R. Picciotto, “Memorandum Submitted by Professor Robert Picciotto,” International Development Department at the House of Commons, U.K. Parliament, 2005, 1, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmintdev/464/5031502.htm (accessed January 16, 2007). 8. Picciotto, “Memorandum,” 1. 9. Christian Aid, The Politics of Poverty: Aid in the New Cold War (London: Christian Aid, 2004). 10. Christian Aid, Politics of Poverty, 1. 11. G. Bush, “Address to Joint Session of Congress,” Washington, DC: (September 20, 2001), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html (accessed January 16, 2007). 12. N. Klein, “Bush to NGOs: Watch Your Mouths,” Globe & Mail, June 20, 2003, http:// www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030620/ CONAOMI20/TPNational/Columnists (accessed January 16, 2007). 13. GAO (Government Accounting Office), U.S. Public Diplomacy: Interagency Coordination Efforts Hampered by the Lack of a National Communication Strategy (Washington, DC: United States Government Accountability Office, 2005), 8. 14. Woods, “Shifting Politics,” 400. 15. Christian Aid, Politics of Poverty, 14. 16. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), Conflict Prevention and Peace Building: What Counts as ODA? (Paris: OECD, 2005). 17. See Picciotto, “Memorandum,” 1. 18. See Woods, “Shifting Politics,” 397. 19. Christian Aid, Politics of Poverty. 20. See M. Duffield, Global Governance; D. Jung, Shadow Globalization, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars: A Political Economy of Intra-State War (London: Routledge, 2003); and H. Münkler, The New Wars (Oxford: Polity, 2005). 21. See Picciotto, “Memorandum.” 22. See S. P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49; S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); S. P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations—Response,” Millennium-Journal of International Studies 26, no. 1 (1997): 141–142.

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266  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson 23. M. Duffield, Global Governance; M. Duffield, “Governing the Borderlands: Decoding the Power of Aid,” Disasters, 25, no. 4 (2001): 308–320. 24. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations. 25. U.S. Mission to the U.N. Agencies in Rome, USAID Works to Improve Education from Morocco to Philippines (Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, 2005), http://usunrome.usmission.gov/UNIssues/ sustdev/docs/a5042102.htm (accessed January 16, 2007). 26. U.S. Mission to the U.N. Agencies in Rome, USAID Works. 27. U.S. Mission to the U.N. Agencies in Rome, USAID Works. 28. “Winning The War on Terror: The Budget for Fiscal Year 2005,” in United State’s of America, President’s Budget for Year 2005 (Washington, DC: Office of Management and Budget, 2005), 18, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/ fy2005/budget.html (accessed January 16, 2007). 29. “Winning The War on Terror: The Budget for Fiscal Year 2005,” 17. 30. W. I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1996. 31. “Winning The War on Terror: The Budget for Fiscal Year 2005,” 18. 32. “Winning The War on Terror: The Budget for Fiscal Year 2005,” 18. 33. GAO, U.S. Public Diplomacy. 34. GAO, U.S. Public Diplomacy, 1. 35. Duffield, Global Governance. 36. Duffield, Global Governance. 37. ILO (International Labour Organization), A Fair Globalization: Creating Opportunities for All, Report of the Director-General on the World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalization (Geneva: ILO, 2004). 38. UN (United Nations), The Inequality Predicament: Report on the World Social Situation 2005 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs: New York, 2005), http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/rwss.htm (accessed January 16, 2007). 39. DfID (Department for International Development), Fighting Poverty to Build a Safer World: A Strategy for Security and Development (London: DFID, 2005). 40. AusAID, Counter-Terrorism and Australian Aid (Canberra: AusAID, Australian Government, 2003). 41. AusAID, Counter-Terrorism, 4. 42. AusAID, Counter-Terrorism, 11. 43. Christian Aid, Politics of Poverty, 11. 44. See DfID, Fighting Poverty, 23. 45. J. Cosgrave, “The Impact of the War on Terror on Aid Flows,” Action Aid, 2005, http://www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/114_1_war_terror_aid.pdf (accessed January 16, 2007). 46. Cosgrave, “The Impact of the War on Terror,” 7. 47. Woods, “Shifting Politics,” 7. 48. Christian Aid, Politics of Poverty. 49. Woods, “Shifting Politics.” 50. P. Collier and A. Hoeffler, Greed and Grievance in Civil War (Washington, DC: World Bank Development Research Group, 2000). 51. See Picciotto, “Memorandum.” 52. See Cosgrave, “The Impact of the War on Terror.”

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The Politicization of Development Aid to Education after 9/11  •  267 53. Woods, “Shifting Politics,” 393. 54. See, for example, P. Lundborg, “Foreign Aid and International Support as a Gift Exchange,” Economics and Politics 10, no. 2 (1998): 127–141; and T. Y. Wang, “U.S. Foreign Aid and UN Voting: An Analysis of Important Issues,” International Studies Quarterly, 43 (1999): 199–210. 55. See Cosgrave, “The Impact of the War on Terror,” 12. 56. See Cosgrave, “The Impact of the War on Terror,” 15. 57. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), “Aid rising sharply, according to latest OECD figures,” Chart 3, 2005, http://www.oecd. org/document/11/0,2340,en_2649_34447_1894347_1_1_1_1,00.html (accessed January 16, 2007). 58. See K. Mundy, Education for All and the New Development Compact (Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada, 2005). 59. Mundy, Education for All, 18–19. 60. See, for example, B. Bruns, A. Mingat, and R. Rakotomalala, Achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015: A Chance for Every Child (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2003); and also E. Delamonica, S. Mehrotra, and J. Vandemoortele, “Education for All: How Much Will It Cost?” Development and Change 35, no. 1 (2004): 3–30. 61. See Cosgrave, “The Impact of the War on Terror,” 2. 62. Woods, “Shifting Politics,” 398. 63. U.S. State Department, The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief: U.S. Five Year Global HIV/AIDS Strategy, 2004, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/29831.pdf (accessed January 16, 2007). 64. MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation), Millennium Challenge Corporation: Reducing Poverty through Growth, 2005, http://www.sac.gov/cio/Adobe_ SACC2006_3.ppt (accessed January 16, 2007). 65. R. J. Kozicki, “The Changed World of South Asia: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India after September 11,” Asia Pacific: Perspectives 2, no. 2 (2002): 1–11. 66. Christian Aid, Politics of Poverty. 67. Christian Aid, Politics of Poverty. 68. See Picciotto “Memorandum.” 69. See DfID, Fighting Poverty, 10. 70. This point is well made by A. Coulson, “Education and Indoctrination in the Muslim World: Is There a Problem? What Can We Do About It?” Policy Analysis 5 no. 11 (2004). 71. ICG (International Crisis Group), Pakistan; Madrasas, Extremism and the Military (Islamabad/Brussels: International Crisis Group Asia, 2002), 13. 72. See D. Craig, “‘A’ Is for Allah, ‘J’ Is for Jihad,” World Policy Journal XIX no. 1 (2000): 92–93. 73. P. W. Singer, “Pakistan’s Madrassahs: Ensuring a System of Education Not Jihad,” Analysis Paper 14 (2001): 1–10. 74. See USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), FY 2004 Performance and Accountability Report (Washington, DC: USAID, 2005); see also C. S. Bond, “Indonesia and the Changing Front in the War on Terrorism,” Heritage Lectures, no. 875 (2005). 75. See USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), 10.

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268  •  Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson 76. See J. Clad, USAID’s Role in the War on Terrorism (Washington, DC: USAID, 2001), 2, http://pdf.dec.org/pdf_docs/pnacn919.pdf (accessed January 16, 2007). 77. Clad, USAID’s Role, 4.

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15

The Potential Disaster of Education for Sustainable Development

Richard Kahn

In this chapter Richard Kahn draws on the tradition of critical theory and his work with Douglas Kellner to address one of the most important dimensions in any concern with education and the politics of disaster—struggles over ecological education. He shows how neoliberals and neoconservatives have hijacked ecopedagogy in tragic ways and considers possibilities for critical pedagogical approaches to challenging the present trajectory of environmental devastation and collapse. The stakes for such a pedagogical and political movement could not be higher. Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers … Yes! — Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation (ZDNet 2001)1 Etymologically, a disaster is a kind of misfortune, and so it is one of the great ironies and sorrows of the present age that disasters have become prime fodder for the sort of laissez-faire economic development that aims mainly at the creation of private fortunes for well-connected corporations and individuals. Of course if such fortunes were only epiphenomena of more peaceful, just, and balanced societies—in short, ecological societies—then perhaps critical tempers could be mollified to some degree. However, as numerous studies have revealed, ongoing economic reconstruction programs that seek to integrate regional economies into the global neoliberal framework appear not only to have generally failed to improve most people’s lives, but have disastrously grown the gaps between the rich and poor (Scott 2001; Thorbecke and Charumilind 2002; Pew Research Center for People and the Press 2003). Hence, alterglobalization movements have arisen that seek to challenge the hegemony of this agenda (Kahn and Kellner forthcoming), and indeed, philosophies that have stressed cultural empowerment for “less developed” nations, instead of their capital improvement, can now be traced back nearly fifty years. In edu269

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270  •  Richard Kahn cational circles, for instance, theories opposing the instrumental extension of global capital into the third world date to at least the early texts of radical theorists such as Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, who promoted “cultural action for freedom” (Freire 2000) and a founding form of post-development theory (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997), respectively. There is also the political and economic global Third Way of so-called liberal centrists like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, whom the New York Times has referred to as the “Impresario of Philanthropy” (Dugger 2006) because of his Clinton Global Initiative and his work on behalf of disaster relief related to the recent Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. The rhetoric of this approach champions sustainable development as a win-win-win for people, business, and the environment, in which the following policy goals are upheld: (1) development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland 1987) and (2) development improves “the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems” (Munro and Holdgate 1991). In its tendency to deploy quasi-leftist slogans, Clintonian Third Way politics claims that it wants to put a human face to globalization and that it supports inclusive educational, medical, and civic development throughout the global South in a manner much akin to that demanded by leaders in Latin America and Africa. But if this Third Way political vision really intends to deliver greater equity, security, and quality of life to the previously disenfranchised, it is especially noteworthy that it also mandates that “existing property and market power divisions [be left] firmly off the agenda” (Porter and Craig 2004, 390). A 2000 speech by Clinton to the University of Warwick exemplifies this claim and so reveals why astute globalization critics such as Perry Anderson have characterized Thirdwayism as merely “the best ideological shell of neoliberalism today” (Anderson 2000, 11). In his speech, Clinton rhetorically plugs building the necessary “consensus” to allow for the opening of previously closed markets and rule-based trade, such as that sponsored by the International Monetary Fund, in the name of a global humanitarianism, which can overcome disasters such as global warming, disease, hunger, and terrorism: I disagree with the anti-globalization protestors who suggest that poor countries should somehow be saved from development by keeping their doors closed to trade. I think that is a recipe for continuing their poverty, not erasing it. More open markets would give the world’s poorest nations more chances to grow and prosper. Now, I know that many people don’t believe that. And I know that inequality, as I said, in the last few years has increased in many nations. But the answer is not to abandon the path of expanded trade, but, instead, to do whatever is necessary to build a new consensus on trade. (Clinton 2000)

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The Potential Disaster of Education for Sustainable Development  •  271 The neoliberal market mechanism remains largely the same, then, in both Third Way welfarism and the aggressive corporatism favored by the current Bush administration. The only difference between them may be the nature of the trade rules and goals issued by the governing consensus. In this, the Clinton Global Initiative is a poster child for the ideology of most U.S. center-left liberals, who believe that administrations can learn to legislate temperance by creating more and more opportunities for intemperate economic investment in alternative, socially responsible markets. The sustainable development vision thereby maintained is of a highly integrated world society, centered and predicated on economic trade, presided over by beneficent leaders who act in the best interests of the people (while they turn an honest profit to boot). However, in this respect we might wonder along with Garret Hardin, “Quis custodies ipsos custodes?—Who shall watch the watchers themselves?” (Hardin 1968, 1245). Sustainable development has increasingly become a buzzword uttered across all political lines; one is as likely to hear it in a British Petroleum commercial as on Pacifica radio. In 2005 the United Nations ushered in the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, and has thereby challenged every nation to begin transforming its educational policies such that a global framework for ecological and social sustainability can be built in relatively short order. Just what kind of sustainable development is education for sustainable development supposed to stand for, though? Is it consonant with alterglobalization views, or is it rather synonymous with neoliberalism in either its Bush or Clinton variants? It charges institutions (especially educational institutions) with altering their norms and behavior in the name of environmental protection, but can a top–down movement for organizational change really address the fundamental failures of present institutional technique? The ecosocialist and founder of the German Green Party, Rudolf Bahro, noted that most institutional environmental protection “is in reality an indulgence to protect the exterministic structure,” which removes concern and responsibility from people so that “the processes of learning are slowed down” (Bahro 1994, 164). Does education for sustainable development amount to something radically different from this? How truly necessary is it anyhow? An Ecological Defense of the Apocalyptic It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing. —Elizabeth Kolbert (2006) The political left has long been suspicious of catastrophist ideas and language. This is understandable—the politics of apocalypticism generally run counter

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272  •  Richard Kahn to enlightened reason, critical deliberation, and a rigorous sense of tolerance. Further, as fears of impending disasters can flirt, formally or informally, with millenarian aspirations, the largely secular left has been ideologically predisposed to disregard such fears as reactionary fantasies. The unchecked neoconservative-led reaction to 9/11 has certainly provided ample evidence that this manner of disaster politics, when devoid of popular disbelief and critique, can manifest disastrous consequences such as unending war, Machiavellian imperialism, and the brutalization of democracy via Big Lies and countless megaspectacles that seek to convince people that they must win at all costs against the forces of “evil.” One can find similar logic spouted across the AM radio dial, produced by all manner of xenophobic, racist, classist, and misogynistic individuals and groups. Finally, far-right organizations such as the LaRouche movement, hate groups like skinheads, and armed militias who fear the erection of a New World Order, all frequently invoke widespread social disaster as either presently underway or frightfully imminent. In all these cases, it is claimed that disaster can be avoided through dehumanization processes in which true believers consent to violence in the name of peace and the limitation of others’ freedoms in the name of liberty. In recent years, the democratic establishment has also shown itself willing to capitalize on the public’s fears of catastrophe. In particular, elements of ongoing and potential ecological crises, which are at least scientifically real, have been exploited to garner support for the Democratic Party, its candidates, or various voting propositions developed by its constituency. For example, during the 2004 presidential race, the MoveOn PAC (political action committee) helped sponsor mass viewings of the absurd film The Day after Tomorrow, in which global climate change is spectacularly portrayed as generating natural disasters and glacial advance over the eastern seaboard during the span of only a few days. MoveOn’s idea was not to educate people about the dangerous levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, but rather to score political points against Republicans by creating environmental concerns among potential voters through a theatrical depiction of natural disaster coupled with carefully placed advertisements targeting George W. Bush’s woeful environmental policy record. More recently, Al Gore produced perhaps the first spectacular lecture with his broadly viewed global climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. While his movie offers much more science than showmanship, a crucial aspect of the film is the way in which Gore’s own questionable track record on the issue has been therein recast as instead exemplifying the sort of maverick and visionary leadership that deserved the presidency in 2000 and may deserve a presidential nomination in 2008. In yet another example, liberal film and music celebrities like Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, and Jay-Z have been drafted (many through the Clinton Global Initiative) to promote sustainable development by attaching their star power to environmental causes.

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The Potential Disaster of Education for Sustainable Development  •  273 Pitt is sponsoring architectural contests in which developers vie for opportunities to rebuild New Orleans as a “green” city that includes state-of-the-art technology, high-density housing, live–work communities, and energy-saving designs. In a July 15, 2006 article in the Washington Post, Linda Hales quotes Pitt as saying, “We want to rebuild intelligently.” Yet missing in all this hoopla is the fact that New Orleans is by definition not sustainable as a city. This goes well beyond its wetlands loss and low elevation, for it is only a matter of time until nature successfully overcomes the upstream machinations2 of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the flow of the Mississippi River and thereby keep it directed toward New Orleans. Eventually, perhaps soon, the Mississippi River will break its banks and pour headlong into the adjacent Atchafalaya River. Once this occurs, New Orleans will almost instantly turn from a vital economic port town to a peninsular city cut off from the river’s flow, which will in turn come to empty into the Gulf of Mexico a couple of hundred miles to New Orleans’s west (McPhee 1989). Does anyone now bent on intelligent and sustainable reconstruction of the city, much less those that live or hope to live there, even recognize this ecological fact? Despite reasons to be critical of, if not downright cynical toward, the political exploitation of natural disasters, the reality is that our present historical moment is constituted by planetary ecological crisis to such a degree that environmentalism can no longer be swept aside as a single-issue political concern of bourgeois whites. As the historian E. P. Thompson (1980) has written, it appears that exterminism may indeed prove to be the last stage of civilization, a thought echoed by an alarming number of recent texts charting the burgeoning relationships between social and ecological disasters (Kunstler 2005; Brown 2006; Rees 2003; Diamond 2005; Flannery 2006; Posner 2004). The environmental movement that has arisen over the last few decades certainly has not been without significant accomplishments, but its inability to offer holistic social critiques and real cultural alternatives has resulted in the continued exponential rise of ecological crises regardless.3 For example, since the first Earth Day of 1970 we have witnessed a form of endless growth political economy that is literally overproducing and consuming the planet toward death. Wholly without precedent, the human population has nearly doubled during this time period, increasing by some 2.5 billion people (Kovel 2002, 3). Similarly, markets have continued to worship the gods of speed and quantity and refused to conserve. The use and extraction of nonrenewable energy resources, such as oil, coal, and natural gas, has followed and exceeded the trends set by the population curve despite many years of warnings about the consequences inherent in their overuse and extraction, and this has led to a corresponding increase in the carbon emissions known to be responsible for global warming. Likewise, living beings and organic habitats are being culled and destroyed in the name of human production and consumption at staggering rates. Tree

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274  •  Richard Kahn consumption for paper products has doubled over the last thirty years, resulting in about half of the planet’s forests disappearing (Kovel 2002, 4), while throughout the oceans, global fishing has also doubled resulting in a recent report finding that approximately 90 percent of the major fish species in the world’s oceans have disappeared (Weiss 2003). As a result, there is expected to be no extant commercial fishery left active in the world by 2048 (Worm et al. 2006). Meanwhile, the forty-mile-long drift and biomass nets that are routinely used by the fishing industry to trawl the ocean bottoms are causing incalculable damage to the ocean ecosystem and such nets are also drowning and killing about one thousand whales, dolphins, and porpoises daily, some of the very species already near extinction from centuries of commercial hunting (Verrengia 2003). Since the end of the 1960s, half of the planet’s wetlands have either been filled or drained for development, and nearly half of the Earth’s soils have been agriculturally degraded so as not to support life (Kovel 2002). Finally, as giant corporate agribusinesses have consumed the family farm, and as fast food has exploded from being a cultural novelty to a totalizing cultural staple across the world, vast unimaginable slaughterhouses (brutal and ecologically ruinous production lines in which thousands of animals are murdered for meat harvesting every hour) have also become the business standard (Singer and Mason 2006). Almost all of these trends are escalating and most are accelerating. Even during what recently amounted to a current economic downturn, transnational markets and development continued to flow and evolve, and the globalization of technocapital (Best and Kellner 2001) continues to fuel yet another vast reconstruction of the myriad planetary political, economic, and sociocultural forces into a futuristic information society. Over the last few decades then, humanity has unfolded like a shock wave across the face of the Earth, one that has led to an exponential increase of transnational marketplaces and startling achievements in science and technology, but one that has also had devastating effects on planetary ecosystems, both individually and as a whole. Most telling has been the parallel tendency over this time period toward mass extinction for the great diversity of nonhuman species, including vast numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Comparing the numbers involved in this catastrophe with the handful of other great extinctions within the prehistoric record has led the esteemed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey to dub this age as the time of “the Sixth Extinction,” a great vanishing of creatures over the last thirty-odd years such as the planet did not see during its previous sixty-five million (Leaky and Lewin 1995). The critical theorist Herbert Marcuse referred to the sort of systemic disregard for life evinced by statistics such as these as “ecocide” (Kellner 2005, 173)—the attempt to annihilate natural places by turning them into capitalist cultural spaces, a process that works hand in hand with the genocide and dehumanization of people as an expression of the market economy’s

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The Potential Disaster of Education for Sustainable Development  •  275 perpetual expansion. More recently, others speak of ecocide as the destruction of the higher-order relations that govern ecosystems generally (Broswimmer 2002), as when economies of need take areas characterized by complexity and diversity (like the Amazonian rainforest) and reduce them to the deforested and unstable monoculture of soybeans for cattle feed. However, while it is no doubt possible to disable an ecosystem from sustaining much life, it is not clear that one can actually kill it. Instead, we are witnessing a process by which bioregions are being transformed pathologically from natural ecologies of scale that support life to capitalist ecologies that function beyond limit and threaten death. In this way, the current globalization of neoliberal capitalism, which institutes classist, racist, sexist, and speciesist oppression, is a sort of biocidal, or as I ultimately argue elsewhere (Kahn 2006), a zoöcidal agent. In response to the evidence of planetary ecocide, biocide, and zoöcide, critical educators have begun to wonder if global institutions are capable of interpreting the idea of the “limits to growth” (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows 2004) in any fashion beyond an open-market neoliberalism. Again, in its most egalitarian form, sustainable development is offered as a political and economic platform that can generate wealth among the poor (and rich), raise living standards for all, and protect the environment. Yet as the environmental theorist Ted Trainer notes, the mean present standard of living enjoyed by those across the planet is already estimated to utilize somewhere between two to four times the amount of sustainable resources provided by the Earth proper. Therefore, if the world’s population continues to rise toward nine billion people, and if global living standards increase commensurate to the rhetoric of sustainable development boosters, it can be reasonably calculated that in order to have a sustainable planet by the year 2070, it will be necessary to have technoscientific advances capable of enabling sixty times as much production and consumption as is presently maintained (Trainer 2002). Further, future sustainable industries could afford to generate only one-half to onethird the amount of their counterparts’ present environmental costs (Trainer 2002). But according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s GEO-3 report, a vision of continued growth of this kind is consonant only with planetary extinction: either great changes are made in our global lifestyle now or an irrevocable social and ecological crisis will grip the world by 2032 (United Nations Environment Programme 2002). The Promises and Costs of Education for Sustainable Development? Even the most casual reading of the earth’s vital signs immediately reveals a planet under stress. In almost all the natural domains, the earth is under stress—it is a planet that is in need of intensive care. Can the United States, and the American people, pioneer sustainable patterns of

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276  •  Richard Kahn consumption and lifestyle, (and) can you educate for that? This is a challenge that we would like to put out to you. —Noel J. Brown, United Nations Environment Programme It was during 1992, at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that an attempt to make a systematic statement about the interrelationship between humanity and the Earth was conceived of and demanded—a document that would formulate the environmental concerns of education once and for all in both ethical and ecological (as opposed to merely technocratic and instrumentalist) terms. This document, now known as the Earth Charter, failed to emerge from Rio, however. Instead, Chapter 36 of the 1992 Earth Summit Report went on to address the issue in the following manner: Education is critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity of the people to address environment and development issues. . . . It is critical for achieving environmental and ethical awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behavior consistent with sustainable development and for effective public participation in decision-making. (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development 1992, 2) In 1994, Maurice Strong, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, renewed interest in the Earth Charter and received a pledge of support from the Dutch government. This led to a provisional draft of the document being attempted in 1997, with the completion, ratification, and launching of the Earth Charter Initiative at the Peace Palace in The Hague occurring on June 29, 2000. The initiative’s goal was to build a “sound ethical foundation for the emerging global society and to help build a sustainable world based on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace” (http://www. earthcharter.org/innerpg.cfm?id_page=95, accessed January 4, 2007). While hardly a perfect document or initiative, the Earth Charter’s announced mission was still nothing short of revolutionary, as it attempted a bold educational reformulation of how humans should perceive their cultural relationship to nature, thereby casting environmental and socioeconomic/political problems together in one light and demanding long-term, integrated responses to the growing planetary social and ecological problems. It was hoped that at the 2002 Earth Summit meetings in Johannesburg, South Africa (the World Summit for Sustainable Development) the United Nations would adopt and endorse the Earth Charter. However, the summit proved disappointing in many respects, and while Kofi Annan optimistically closed the summit by announcing that $235 million worth of public–private partnerships had been achieved because of the conference and that this put sustainable development strategies firmly on the map, social and environmen-

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The Potential Disaster of Education for Sustainable Development  •  277 tal activists found the World Summit for Sustainable Development to be a sham for mostly the same reason.4 Thus, the W$$D (as its critics called it, due to its apparent pro-business agenda and bad taste in staging an Olympics-style, posh event on the outskirts of the Soweto shantytowns’ appalling poverty) articulated a central divide between large-scale corporate and governmental technocrats and the more grassroots-based theorists, activists, and educators proper. As a result of the considerable pressure exerted by the U.S. delegates (and the additional political and economic interests of the other large states and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]), the 2002 summit ultimately refused to consider ratification of the holistic, pointedly socialist in spirit, and nonanthropocentric Earth Charter educational framework (Gadotti forthcoming). Instead, education for sustainable development was promoted as a new crucial educational field to be integrated across the disciplines and at all levels of schooling. The critical environmental educator Edgar González-Gaudiano (2005) has remarked that like environmental education before it, education for sustainable development might be a “floating signifier” or “interstitial tactic” capable of providing diverse groups opportunities to produce alliances as part of the construction of a new educational discourse. However, he also finds it troubling that nonenvironmental educators “either appear to be uninformed or have shown no interest in the inception of a Decade that concerns their work” (244). For his part, Bob Jickling (2005) is worried by the apparently instrumentalist and deterministic nature of education for sustainable development thus far. In his opinion, it is extremely troubling that education for sustainable development’s tendency as a field to date is to treat education as merely a method for delivering and propagating experts’ ideas about sustainable development, rather than as a participatory and metacognitive engagement with students over what (if anything) sustainable development even means. Indeed, if this is all that is to be expected of and from education for sustainable development, then it may be concluded that it basically amounts to the latest incarnation of what Ivan Illich cynically referred to as the prison of the “global classroom” (Illich and Verne 1981). Yet it should be pointed out that despite his serious reservations, Jickling notes that there may be many educators already doing good work under this moniker as well. The next decade will ultimately decide whether education for sustainable development is little more than the latest educational fad, or worse yet, that it turns out to be nothing other than a seductive pedagogical “greenwash” developed by and for big business-as-usual in the name of combating social and ecological disasters. Due to the inherent ideological biases currently associated with the term sustainable development, the decade now underway demands careful attention and analysis by critical educators in this regard. Specifically, educators will need to explain how, and if, notions of sustainability can critically question the various recipes for disaster (in all of their

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278  •  Richard Kahn left, center, and rightist formulations) that are the well-established social and human development models. On the other hand, education for sustainable development could be the boost that education desperately needs in order to finally begin to adequately deal with the apocalyptic demands now being wrought upon society by planetary ecological crises. In this way, environmental education could at last move beyond its discursive marginality and a real hope for an ecological and planetary society could be sustained through the widespread development of radical socioeconomic critiques and the sort of emancipatory life practices that could move beyond those programmatically offered by the culture industries and the state. Notes



1. Ballmer is the CEO of Microsoft Corporation and was recently ranked as the 24th wealthiest individual in the world by Forbes.com (http://www.forbes. com/lists/2006/10/Rank_1.html). 2. These occur about 300 miles north of New Orleans at what is called the Old River Control Structure. Due to numerous near failures of the structure, an auxiliary structure was built nearby in 1996. 3. Part of the blame for this must be the inability of environmental education to have wide influence as a field. While there are many reasons for this, environmental education’s tendency to focus on outdoor, experiential pedagogy, particularly premised on essentialized views of wilderness and nature, has helped to marginalize it further. 4. For coverage critical of the Bush administration’s hand in the World Summit for Sustainable Development, see the stories dated August 26 to September 6, 2002 on my weblog at http://getvegan.com/blog/blogger.php. On Annan’s speech, see “Sustainable Development Summit Concludes in Johannesburg: UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan Says It’s Just the Beginning” at http://www.un.org/jsummit/html/whats_new/feature_story39.htm (accessed January 4, 2007).

References Anderson, Perry. 2000. Renewals. New Left Review 11(1): 11. Bahro, Rudolf. 1994. Avoiding social and ecological disaster: The politics of world transformation. Bath, U.K.: Gateway Books. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 2001. The postmodern adventure. New York: Guilford. Broswimmer, Franz J. 2002. Ecocide: A short history of the mass extinction of species. London: Pluto Press. Brown, Lester R. 2006. Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble. New York: W. W. Norton. Brundtland, Gro Harlem. 1987. Our common future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clinton, William J. 2000. Remarks by the president to the community of the University of Warwick. December 14, Coventry, Warwickshire, England. Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Penguin.

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The Potential Disaster of Education for Sustainable Development  •  279 Dugger, Cecilia. 2006. Clinton, impresario of philanthropy, gets a progress update. New York Times, April 1. Flannery, Tim. 2006. The weather makers: How man is changing the climate and what it means for life on earth. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Freire, Paulo. 2000. Cultural action for freedom. Boston, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Gadotti, Moacir. Forthcoming. Paulo Freire and the culture of justice and peace: The perspective of Washington vs. the perspective of angicos. In Paulo Freire and the possible dream, ed. Carlos Torres and Pedro Nogera. Denmark: Sense Publishers. González-Gaudiano, Edgar. 2005. Education for sustainable development: Configuration and meaning. Policy Futures in Education 3(3): 243–250. Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162: 1243–1248. Illich, Ivan, and Etienne Verne. 1981. Imprisoned in the global classroom. London: Writers and Readers. Jickling, Bob. 2005. Sustainable development in a globalizing world: A few cautions. Policy Futures in Education 3(3): 251–259. Kahn, Richard. 2006. The educative potential of ecological militancy in an age of big oil: Towards a Marcusean ecopedagogy. Policy Futures in Education 4(1): 31–44. Kahn, Richard, and Douglas Kellner. Forthcoming. Resisting globalization. In The Blackwell companion to globalization, ed. George Ritzer. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Kellner, Douglas, ed. 2005. Herbert Marcuse: The new left and the 1960s. New York: Routledge. Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2006. Field notes from a catastrophe: Man, nature, and climate change. London: Bloomsbury Publishers. Kovel, Joel. 2002. The enemy of nature. New York: Zed Books. Kunstler, James Howard. 2005. The long emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin. 1995. The sixth extinction. New York: Doubleday. McPhee, John. 1989. The control of nature. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Meadows, Donella H., Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows. 2004. The limits to growth: The 30-year update. Boston: Chelsea Green Publishing. Munro, David A., and Martin W. Holdgate, eds. 1991. Caring for the earth. A strategy for sustainable living. Gland, Switzerland: The World Conservation Union, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Wildlife Fund. Pew Research for the People and the Press. 2003. Views of a changing world. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Porter, Doug, and David Craig. 2004. The third way and the third world: Poverty reduction and social inclusion in the rise of “inclusive” liberalism. Review of International Political Economy 11(2): 387–423. Posner, Richard A. 2004. Catastrophe: Risk and response. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rahnema, Majid, and Victoria Bawtree, eds. 1997. The post-development reader. London: Zed Books. Rees, Martin. 2003. Our final century: Will the human race survive the 21st century? London: William Heinemann.

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280  •  Richard Kahn Scott, Bruce R. 2001. The great divide in the global village. Foreign Affairs 80(1): 60–177. Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. 2006. The way we eat: Why our food choices matter. New York: Rodale. Thompson, Edward P. 1980. Writing by candlelight. London: Merlin. Thorbecke, Erik, and Chutatong Charumilind. 2002. Economic inequality and its socioeconomic impact. World Development 30(9): 1477–1495. Trainer, Ted. 2002. What is sustainable development? EDucate! Magazine 5. Karachi: 38–40. United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. 1992. Promoting education, public awareness and training. In Agenda 21, 221–227. Geneva: UN. United Nations Environment Programme. 2002. Global environmental outlook 3: Past, present, and future perspectives, 13–15. London: Earthscan. Verrengia, Joseph B. 2003. Scientists raise alarm over sea-mammal deaths. Associated Press, June 16. Weiss, Rick. 2003. Key ocean fish species ravaged, study finds. Washington Post, May 15. Worm, Boris, et al. 2006. Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science 314(5800): 787–790. ZDNet. 2001. More News: Why Ballmer’s “monkey boy” dance was a tour de force. August 24, http://review.zdnet.com/4520-6033_16-4206342.html (accessed January 4, 2007).

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Contributors

Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. He is highly regarded and internationally known as an important voice in contemporary progressive education. His books include Ideology and Curriculum, 25th Anniversary 3rd Edition (Routledge, 2004), The State and Politics of Education (Routledge, 2003) and Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God and Inequality, 2nd Edition. (Routledge, 2006). Bill Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and founder of both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society. He teaches courses in interpretive and qualitative research, urban school change, and teaching and the modern predicament. Ayers has written extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the political and cultural contexts of schooling, and the meaning-making and ethical purposes of students and families and teachers. His books include with Jean Ann Hunt and Therese Quinn, Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader (The New Press and Teachers College Press, 1998); Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice (Teachers College Press, 2004), and Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2004). Enora R. Brown is Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Research at DePaul University in Chicago. She is the author of publications on the subjects of urban school policy and practice, identity formation, human development, and middle school. She is co-editor with Kenneth Saltman of The Critical Middle School Reader (Routledge, 2005). Kristen L. Buras is Assistant Professor of Multicultural and Urban Teacher Education at Emory University in Atlanta. She is co-editor of The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power and Educational Struggles with Michael W. Apple. Her work has been published in the Harvard Educational Review, Education Review, Educational Policy, Z Magazine, Subaltern Speak, and Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy. Her forthcoming books include Rightist Multi­ culturalism: Core Lessons on Neoconservative School Reform (Routledge, in 281

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282  •  Contributors press) and Can a City School the Nation?: Reconstruction, Race, and Resistance In Post-Katrina New Orleans. David Gabbard is a Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at East Carolina University. He has earned national and international recognition for his work in critical educational policy studies and democratic educational theory. Along with five published books, his record of scholarly production includes over fifty articles and book chapters. The first edition of his Knowledge and Power in Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000) received the Critic’s Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association in 2001. He co-edited with Kenneth Saltman Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (Routledge, 2003), and with E. Wayne Ross co-edited Defending Public Schools: Education Under the Security State (Greenwood Press, 2004). He also co-founded and co-edits Public Resistance: An Academic Journal to Confront the Lies of the Right with Karen Anijar-Appleton. Henry A. Giroux is the Global Television Network Chair at McMaster University. His most recent publications include Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism (Paradigm, 2006), America on the Edge (Palgrave, 2006), and Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Paradigm, 2006), from which this chapter was adapted. Robin Truth Goodman is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of numerous articles and several books on the subjects of literary theory, education, globalization, feminism, and postcolonialism including World Class Women: Global Literature, Education, and Feminism (Routledge, 2004), Infertilities: Fertile Fictions of Barren Bodies (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and with Kenneth Saltman Strange Love, Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Jane Anna Gordon is a William Penn Fellow in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Research Fellow at Temple University. Her publications include Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967–1971 (Routledge, 2001). She is the co-editor with Lewis Gordon of Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). Lewis R. Gordon is the Laura Carnell University Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University. His publications include Her Majesty’s Other Children (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) which won the Gustavus Myer’s Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights.

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Contributors  •  283 Nathalia E. Jaramillo is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. A former elementary school teacher in Riverside, California, Nathalia’s current interests include the ideological underpinnings of domestic and international education policy and their relation to the transnational capitalist class. Richard Kahn is a Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of several articles on the environment and education. His work can be accessed at http://www.richardkahn. org. Mike Klonsky is an education writer, teacher, and researcher. He currently serves as director of the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago. He has written extensively on the benefits of small schools as well as on broader school reform issues. He is the author of Small Schools: The Numbers Tell a Story (University of Illinois Small Schools Workshop) and is co-editor of Simple Justice: The Challenge for Teachers in Small Schools (Teachers College Press). He also teaches graduate courses on “Teacher Leadership in School Change” and “Politics of School Reform.” Philip Kovacs is completing his PhD in educational policy studies at Georgia State University on the topic of chapter 8, The Schools Are Failing: Think Tanks, Institutes, Foundations, and Educational Disaster. Pepi Leistyna is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics Graduate Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he coordinates the research program and teaches courses in cultural studies, media literacy, and language acquisition. Speaking internationally on issues of democracy, public education, and social justice, Leistyna’s books include: Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy (Harvard Education Publishing Group, 1996); Defining and Designing Multiculturalism (SUNY, 2002); Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action (Blackwell, 2004); and Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use (Rodopi Press, 2003). His recent documentary film with the Media Education Foundation is called Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class (Media Education Foundation, 2006). Pauline Lipman is Professor of Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has published articles, books, and book chapters on the social context of urban school reform, culturally relevant teaching, neoliberal urban development, and the politics of race education. Her book High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (Routledge, 2004) develops a case study of Chicago school reform to analyze the relationship of educational accountability to the restructuring of the labor force,

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284  •  Contributors globalization, neoliberal urban development, and the cultural politics of race in urban school districts. The book was a winner of the 2004 American Educational Studies Critics Choice Award. Her book Race, Class, and Power in School Restructuring (State University of New York Press, 1998) which also won the American Educational Studies Critics Choice Award is a qualitative study of the influence of race and class power relations on urban school reform. Her current research examines the privatization of education in Chicago in relation to gentrification, global city development, and the politics of race in the city. Peter McLaren is Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. An internationally recognized figure in critical education he is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of approximately forty books and monographs. Several hundred of his articles, chapters, interviews, reviews, commentaries, and columns have appeared in dozens of scholarly journals and professional magazines. His recent books include Capitalists and Conquerors: Critical Pedagogy Against Global Empire (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Mario Novelli is a lecturer in International Development at the University of Amsterdam. His work explores the relationship between globalization, education and development and has published on issues of the global governance of education, critical ethnography and knowledge production in trade union movements. He is currently in Colombia and co-writing a book on Globalization, Labor and Knowledge for a Routledge Series on Rethinking Globalization. Susan Robertson is Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Bristol and Coordinator of the Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies. The author of numerous publications on globalization and education, she has worked at the University of Bristol to create the first centre of its kind in the UK, the Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies (GES). Along with her colleague Roger Dale, she also is founding editor for the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education. Greg Tanaka is an Assistant Professor at Pacific Oaks College and recipient of the AERA Early Career Award. He is the author of The Intercultural Campus (Lang, 2003).

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Index

A

B

accumulation by dispossession, 2 ACTA, see American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) adequate yearly progress (AYP), 5 NCLB, 126, 239 Afghanistan primary education, 263 reconstruction, 261 African Americans, 77 Hurricane Katrina, 71 agribusiness, 211 aid Bush administration, 142 development, 249–264 foreign, 142 humanitarian, 258 New Security environment, 259–261 politicization of, 249–264 Algerian women, 219 American Civil Rights Movement, 184 American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), 195, 201 four sisters, 202 American Dream racism, 72 American public schools, 28 American slavery, 62 American workers education, 154 An Inconvenient Truth, 272 anti-affirmative action neoliberal policies, 137 policy deracialization, 130 aristocratic government, 244 Asia potato production, 211 tsunami, 1 disaster relief, 270 atomized citizen status, 244 AYP, see adequate yearly progress (AYP)

BAEO, see Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) benign neglect, 103–118 bien nacidos, 72 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 7 biopolitics creation, 60–64 critical education, 61 defined by, 50 of disposability, 48 emancipatory, 60–64 immaterial labor, 51 public considerations, 61 social labor, 51–52 through pedagogy, 60–64 Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), 168 Black Skin, White Masks, 36 Blair, Tony, 270 Brief History of Neoliberalism, 15 Broadcasting Board of Governors, 255 Brown, Michael, 112 Brown v. Board of Education, 108, 114 Bush, George W., 72; See also No Child Left Behind (NCLB) BAEO, 168 class inequalities, 54 detainees, 53 economic benefits of tax cuts, 56 education leaders, 150 education president, 145 2000 elections, 196 2004 elections, 196 emergency relief pleas, 78 foreign aide, 142 freedom of religion, 196 Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone, 81 human suffering, 64 ideological hostility, 56

285

RT6595Z.indb 285

4/25/07 9:04:16 AM

286  •  Index 9/11, 251 Pakistan, 261–262 private financial gain, 56 race inequalities, 54 Third Way welfarism, 271 Bush, Neil, 153 Ignite Inc., 154

C CAII, see Creative Associates International, Incorporated (CAII) California Racial Privacy Initiative, 132 Canadian soldiers, 44 capitalism disaster, 2, 15, 87 schooling, 2–5 free market, 234 dangerous trends, 234 global, 215 race, 133 structural crises, 87 urban poor, 215 capitalists, 15 collateral damage, 83 Cascadian Subduction Zone, 123 catastrophes, 26 Canadian soldiers, 44 public fears, 272 Somalia, 44 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) corporate agenda, 94 militarization agenda, 94 reform, 180 Chicago Teacher’s Union, 93 child-labor laws, 154 China foreign debt, 234 legitimate right births, 213 Christian Aid preventing terror, 257 Christian America, 79 Christian Right organization, 105 citizen, atomized, status, 244 civilization clash, 254 Civil Rights Movement, 184 Chicago, 185 reconstruction, 103

RT6595Z.indb 286

Civil War, 106 class inequalities, Bush administration, 54 class mobility, 142 clean slate language, 97 Clinton, Bill, 270 Cold War, 250 collateral damage, 83 colonial feminism, 221 colonialism, 37 Commercial Club of Chicago, 89 Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), 149 corporate-run public schools, 242 corporate schools, 144–154 corporate wage labor, 223 CPS, see Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Creative Associates International, Incorporated (CAII), 8 creative democracy, 4 crime, 117 crisis, public education, 35 critical education, 61 CTBS, see Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) cultural exchanges between U.S. and Muslim world, 255

D damnum, 37 debt, foreign, 234 debt-driven crisis, 235 Defending Civilization, 196 Defense of Civilization Fund, 201 democracy alternative models, 241 creative, 4 free market, 80 global agenda, 64 market-based fundamentalism, 58 neoliberalism’s corporate ethic, 58 organic, 245 promotion, 8 Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute, 7 democratic school systems, 216 goal, 187

4/25/07 9:04:16 AM

Index  •  287 Department for International Development (DfID), 256 Department of Defense United States (U.S.) IWF, 219 Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 160 FEMA, 47 Hurricane Katrina, 111–112 depoliticization, 72 deracialization, 131 detainees, 53 development, approaches, 253–259 development aid, politicization of, 249–264 development assistance committee, 252 DfID, see Department for International Development (DfID) DHS, see Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Direct Instruction for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading (DISTAR), 147 disaster capitalism, 2, 15 schooling, 2–5 disasters, 25 economic, 141–155 education capitalizing, 5 failing public schools, 159–170 feasting on, 87–99 law enforcement, 35 liberal democracies, 34 low-income individuals, 55 military intervention, 35 monsters, 26 natural, 25 category of, 216 examples, 209 political exploitation, 273 political economy impact, 87 political response, 31 politics, 31, 35, 60, 272 reading the signs, 25–38 social reality, 214–216 structural crises of capitalism, 87 disaster victims

RT6595Z.indb 287

cultural, 30 portraits, 29, 30 discipline, 97 Discipline and Punish, 28 disposable subjects production, 50–54 regulation, 50–54 dispossession, accumulation, 2 DISTAR, see Direct Instruction for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading (DISTAR) distribution of income, 142 distribution of wealth, 142 dual authority, 80

E Earth Summit meetings (2002), 276 economic disasters, 141–155 economics, neoclassical, 11 economy, 234–235 education; See also Public education; Public schools; Schools critical biopolitics, 61 disasters capitalizing, 5 failing public schools, 159–170 domestic funding budget cuts, 155 exchanges between U.S. and Muslim world, 255 federal budget for, 147 George W. Bush, 145 leaders, Bush administration, 150 meaning, 188 neobliberal, 13 policy, 243, 264 potential disaster, 269–278 private firms, 147 privatization, 3 Hurricane Katrina, 10 role of democratic participation, 13 U.S. policy, 264 educational management organizations (EMO), 3 NCLB, 127 elections Bush administration, 196

4/25/07 9:04:16 AM

288  •  Index Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, 144 emancipatory biopolitics creation of, 60–64 emergency relief pleas Bush administration, 78 EMO, see educational management organizations (EMO) empire of camps, 52 environmental regulations capital, 212 European Union (EU) foreign policy, 252 security policy, 252 extraterritoriality, 52

F failing public schools, 159–170 Fairness Doctrine, 195 faith-based political theory, 78 Fanon, Frantz, 37–38 FCAT, see Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) fear politics, 162 public, catastrophes, 272 Feder, Ellen, 30 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 106 Department of Homeland Security, 47 Hurricane Katrina, 106 private insurance officials, 111 state insurance, 111 federal money, 148 federal politics, nepotism, 152 federal poverty thresholds, 142 FEMA, see Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) feminism, 221 colonial, 221 IWF’s attack, 222 feminist politics, 221 flood protection, 110 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), 152 foreign aid, 142

RT6595Z.indb 288

foreign debt, 234 foreign policy, 252 Freedman’s Bureau, 107 Civil War, 106 freedom of religion, 196 free market capitalism, 234 democracy, 80 French women, 219 functional intellectual definition, 164 role of, 164–165 fundability concept, 238

G gangsta, 45 garrisons of extraterritoriality, 52 Gasset, Ortega Y, 32 global agenda, 64 global capitalism Hurricane Katrina, 73 urban poor, 215 global geopolitical domination, 90 global insecurity, cultural differences, 254 globalization, negative modalities of militarism, 61 racial segregation, 61 global warming, 80 GO, see Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone Great Society, 245 Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone Bush administration, 81 Mexico, 82 Gulf regional security, 194

H Hamilton, Alexander, 200 Haymarket Riots, 191 health insurance, 143 highly qualified teachers (HQT), NCLB, 239 HISD, see Houston Independent School District (HISD) Homeland Security Advisory System, 160 homelessness, social, 54

4/25/07 9:04:16 AM

Index  •  289 homo sacer, 52 honor killing, 225 Houghton Mifflin, 148 housing bubble, 237 definition, 214 Houston Independent School District (HISD), 145 HQT, see highly qualified teachers (HQT) human development goals, 249 humanitarian aid, 258 human rights denial of, 214 Hurricane Katrina, 117 violations, 117, 260 human suffering, 64 Hume, David, 189 hurricane damage, insurance policies, 79 Hurricane Katrina, 2, 9–11 African Americans, 71 aftermath, 56 American public schools, 28 America’s war with the poor, 73–84 banshee’s wail, 71–84 black anarchism, 74 black victims, 27 Bush administration, 43, 48 capitalist marketplace, 83 capitalist overhaul of education, 82 chaotic conditions, 107 citizens in the United States, 43 Civil Rights Movement, 71 criminal options for the poor, 47–50 dead bodies, 46 Department of Homeland Security, 111–112 disaster relief, 270 divine warning, 28 educational privatization, 10 estate tax for deaths, 81 faith-based political theory, 78 FEMA, 106 gangsta, 45 global capitalism, 73 global warming connection, 80

RT6595Z.indb 289



government disaster, 110 government failure, 110 government programs, 110 government response to aftermath, 47–48 human rights violations, 117 impact on national borders, 84 levees, 112 low-income African American residents, 104 market relations, 63 martial law, 49 media silence, 45 media stories of violence, 75 military terms, 75 New Orleans, 43, 75 politics of disaster, 98 politics of disposability, 43–64 public numbness, 45 racial lessons, 60 racism, 47 reconstruction, 81 refugees, 49 rogue nations, 83 seizures of urban school districts, 92 survivors, 76 United States, 50 victims, 47 federal strategy, 117 Washington DC, 43 Hurricane Katrina Disaster Fund, 153 Hussein, Saddam, 193

I ideological hostility, 56 Ignite Inc., 154 IMF, see International Monetary Fund (IMF) immaterial labor, 51 Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) agenda, 225 antifeminist agendas, 226 democracy training sessions, 226 educational training centers, 220 Iraq, 219–228 new Iraq, 220 private laborers, 223

4/25/07 9:04:17 AM

290  •  Index

proletarianization of women’s labor, 227 U.S. invasion of Iraq, 220 individualism definition, 190 informal proletariat, 215 informal survivalism, 215 insurance Americans without, 143 FEMA, 111 health, 143 hurricane damage, 79 state, 111 intellectual(s) functional definition, 164 functional role, 164–165 organic definition, 163–164 role of, 164 intelligence definition, 150 International Monetary Fund (IMF) global humanitarianism, 270 ideological needs, 214 Iraq capitalizing on disasters, 2 destruction of public institutions, 227 human-made disasters, 1 reconstruction, 261 United States policy, 223 unresolved conflict, 193 Iraqi women, 225 British-imposed monarch, 224 democratization, 219 equal wages, 228 post-Saddam, 224 Saddam’s regime, 224 violence against, 224 IWF, see Independent Women’s Forum (IWF)

J Jim Crow segregation, 129

K katastrephein, 26 killing, honor, 225 Klein, Naomi, 1

RT6595Z.indb 290

L labor biopolitics, 51 social, 51–52 language of discipline, 97 law enforcement, 35 lazy population, 105 legitimate right births, 213 levees, 35 Hurricane Katrina, 112 liberal democracies, 34 liberalism principles, 33 low-income people, 89

M Madison, James, 200 madrasas, Pakistan, 263 major catastrophes, 80 Malaysian women, 223 market fundamentalism, 11 democracy, 58 martial law, 49 MDG, see Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Mexico distribution of income, 142 distribution of wealth, 142 GO Zone, 82 Middle East, 194 militarism globalization, 14 mutually reinforcing forces, 57–61 military actions, 197 intervention, 35 Milken, Michael, 3 Millennium Challenge Account, 252 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), 249 Mohawk Valley Formula, 191–192 monster, 26 moralism, 32 Muslim and U.S. exchanges, 255

N National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 191

4/25/07 9:04:17 AM

Index  •  291 Mohawk Valley Formula, 192 National Endowment for Democracy (NED), 255 National Evaluation Systems (NES) Inc., 149 National Liberation Front’s (NLF), 222 natural catastrophes Canadian soldiers, 44 Somalia, 44 natural disasters, 25, 210 category of, 216 examples, 209 political exploitation, 273 NCLB, see No Child Left Behind (NCLB) necessarily bureaucratic state, 12 necessarily efficient private sector, 12 NED, see National Endowment for Democracy (NED) negative globalization modalities of militarism, 61 racial segregation, 61 neoclassical economics, 11 neointellectual definition, 165 role of, 165 neoliberal agenda, 96 neoliberalism, 14 anti-affirmative action policies, 137 benevolent regimentation, 130 corporate ethic, 58 dynamics, 60 education, 13 educational reformers, 162 education writers, 13 globalization of, 98 IMF, 12 individualism, 130 language, 96 students, 240 women, 143 nepotism, 152 NES, see National Evaluation Systems (NES) Inc. New Deal Legislation, 198 New Imperialism, 14 New Orleans African American population, 76

RT6595Z.indb 291



benign neglect, 109 Bush administration, 112–113 capitalizing on disasters, 2 coalition of low-income groups, 80 Department of Homeland Security, 50 emergency relief pleas, 78 looters, 75 low-income African American families, 105 martial law, 49, 95 Mississippi River, 273 neoliberal education experiment, 115 post-Katrina, 107 private forms of transportation, 73 public housing, 113 public sector jobs, 79 racial history, 104 racist right-wing policies, 106 rebuilding, 83, 117 refugees, 49 reinvestment, 88 schooling disinvestment, 114–118 schooling neglect, 113 urban warfare, 75 New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS), 9, 10, 114 FEMA, 116 private firms, 116 state resources, 116 New Security environment, 259–261 NGO, see nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) 9/11, see September 11, 2001 NLF, see National Liberation Front’s (NLF) No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 2, 5–7, 123–137 accountability system, 90 anti-affirmative action, 132 Bush administration, 72 capitalizing on disaster, 8 deracialization, 123, 137 erosion of public education, 126 fundability, 237–240 growth models, 127 national standards, 125

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292  •  Index

neoliberal education policies associated with, 141 neoliberal policies, 124, 129, 137, 169 Performance Report, 148 public education reform, 125 public schools, 6 quality of education, 134 restructuring education, 127 school districts, 93 school resegregation, 127 social issues attention, 135 soft racism, 130 standardization, 123, 137 underfeeding, 155 underlying assumptions, 128 urban school impact, 133 youth of color, 125 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) Christian Aid, 251 disaster, 31 NOPS, see New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS)

O official development assistance, 252 organic democracy, 245 organic intellectuals definition, 163–164 role of, 164 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 252 outsourcing, 154 ownership class, 190 ownership society speech, 177

P Pakistan Bush administration, 261–262 madrasas, 263 participatory public budgeting (PPB), 241 patriotism depoliticization, 72 prejudice, 189–204 scholars’ definition, 201 PEPFAR, see President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)

RT6595Z.indb 292

Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship, 32 planned poverty, 54–57 Plessy v. Ferguson, 107 political actors, 162–165 political economy, 87 political science abuse, 166 ways individuals engage in, 166–167 politics disasters, 31, 35, 60, 272 political economic critiques, 18 fear, 162 federal, nepotism, 152 feminist, 221 population African American, 76 lazy, 105 New Orleans, 76 slum, 215 urban area increases, 213 post-Civil War Reconstruction, 103 post-Katrina New Orleans, 107 post-9/11 world, 233–246 potato production, 211 Asia, 211 poverty, planned, 54–57 PPB, see participatory public budgeting (PPB) President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), 261 primary education, Afghanistan, 263 primitive accumulation, 14 private financial gain, 56 private insurance officials, 111 private school management firms, 180 privatization educational, 3, 133 smash and grab, 5 progressive educational politics, 160 project of world empire, 95 proletariat, informal, 215 public education crisis, 35 economic differentiation, 16 mass media, 17 politics of disaster, 99 privatization, 16

4/25/07 9:04:17 AM

Index  •  293 profit, 15 teacher burnout, 149 teacher certification, 149 public educators, 136 public fears, 272 public good, 60 public housing pre-Katrina New Orleans, 113 public intellectual definition, 163 role of, 163 public schools; See also New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) accountability, 182 under achievement, 144 class dynamics, 136 colorblind ideology, 135 corporate-run, 242 crises, 161–162 disasters, 94, 161–162, 177–188 failing, 159–170 golden opportunity, 9 hyper-regulation, 167 low-income people of color, 96 neoconservative movement, 170 neoliberalism, 11–17, 170 versus private education, 178 privatization, 167 racial dynamics, 135, 136 racialized social groups, 136 reform, 179 Renaissance 2010, 181 right-wing assault on, 177–188 silver lining, 9 standards, 187 test scores, 178 urban, 180 right-wing policy, 92

R race achievement gap, 129 capitalism, 133 inequalities, 54 profiling, 132 role, 96 social meanings, 131 Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI), 131

RT6595Z.indb 293

California 2003 ballot, 132 racism, 37 American Dream, 72 capitalist social relations, 143 reverse, 131 soft, 129 Radio Factor, 49 reconstruction anti-immigrant politicians, 82 pre-Katrina New Orleans, 109 religious freedom, 196 Renaissance 2010, 7–8, 93 capitalizing on disaster, 8 Chicago, 97 globalization policy, 181 housing policy, 181 NCLB, 7 school employee unions, 98 school policy, 181 resistance theory, 233 reverse racism, 131 reverse suburbanization, 91–92 Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education (RISE), 226 RISE, see Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education (RISE) RPI, see Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI) Russia distribution of income, 142 distribution of wealth, 142

S Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36 Schmitt, Carl, 33 schools; See also Public schools democratic, 187 disaster capitalism, 2–5 economic democracy, 98 goal, 187 political democracy, 98 reform Chicago, 180 privatization, 17

4/25/07 9:04:18 AM

294  •  Index race, 183 skilled workers, 182 state, 263 science definition, 166 security approaches, 253–259 development relationship, 250–253 EU policy, 252 segregation, 108 Jim Crow history, 129 September 11, 2001 Bush administration, 251 foreign agents, 196 foreign policies of U.S. government, 197 Haymarket bomb, 194 inflation rate, 236 MDG, 253 neoliberal systemic collapse, 243 U.S. economy, 236 Western powers geostrategic activities, 249 SES, see Supplemental educational services (SES) shadow state, 118 slavery, 62 slum populations, 215 smash and grab privatization, 5 social disaster, 209–216 social homelessness, 54 social justice, 63 social labor, 51–52 social reality, 214–216 Social Security Fund, 235 social struggle, 183 soft racism, 129 Somalia, 44 spatial fix, 87 standardized testing, 137 state insurance, 111 state schools Indonesia, 263 Pakistan, 263 suburbanization, 91–92 suffering, 64 supplemental educational services (SES), 6

RT6595Z.indb 294

survivalism, 215 sustainable development costs of education for, 275 planetary ecological crises, 278

T TAAS, see Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tax cuts, 56 technocapital, 274 terrorism, 60 relationship with poverty, 257 U.S. government’s definition, 197 Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), 145 Texas Education Agency, 150 Third Way welfarism, 271 Till, Emmet Hurricane Katrina, 46 murder, 53 tsunami Asia, 1 disaster relief, 270 2002 Earth Summit meetings, 276

U UK, see United Kingdom (UK) UN, see United Nations (UN) UNDP, see United Nations Development Program (UNDP) United Kingdom (UK) foreign aid budgets, 258 foreign policy towards Iraq, 258 United Nations (UN) Cold War era, 259 Millennium Development Goals, 249 United States, 197 United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 74 United States (U.S.) Agency for International Development, 8 Department of Defense, 219 economy, 236 foreign policies, 197 IWF, 219 Muslim exchanges, 255

4/25/07 9:04:18 AM

Index  •  295 terrorism, 197 Universal Primary Education (UPE) Afghanistan, 260 Iraq, 260 UPE, see Universal Primary Education (UPE) urban area population increases, 213 urban crisis civic response, 241 urban poor, 215 urban public schools, 92 urban school policy, 88 urban warfare, 75 U.S., see United States (U.S.) U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 8

V Vietnam syndrome, 194 Vietnam war, 45 Voluntary Public School Choice Program, 151

W Wagner Act, 192 war, feminist tradition, 220

RT6595Z.indb 295

War on Terror, 250 Washington Consensus, 12 waste militarization logic, 59 modernization logic, 59 neoliberalism logic, 59 welfare queen, 45 Western feminism, 221 women, 227; See also Independent Women’s Forum (IWF); Iraqi women Algerian, 219 corporate wage labor, 223 French, 219 labor capitalization, 228 Malaysian, 223 neoliberalism, 143 privatization, 222 Women’s Educational Equity Act, 227 World Bank, 214 World Summit for Sustainable Development, 277 World War II economic relations, 89 social relations, 89

4/25/07 9:04:18 AM

RT6595Z.indb 296

4/25/07 9:04:18 AM