Extractive Education:

                The current debate over educational policy is being waged on an unequal battlefield.  The assumption that drives much of the public conversation is based in the faulty assumption that this is a debate between two sides pursuing the same outcome through different means.  That is, the assumption is that both progressives and conservatives want to improve and save public education albeit following severely different strategies.  My contention is that that assumption is false.  The current policy debate over educational policy needs to be framed in a way that highlights the intentions of those attacking public education not as potential saviors but as intentional destroyers of those institutions.

In their recent book, Why Nations Fail ,Darren  Acemoglu and James Robinson introduce the notion of ‘extractive’ institutions, institutions that are run by elites to extract wealth or other social capital from a society for their benefit instead of distributing or expanding wealth for the whole society.  While their analysis is mostly focused on the way economic institutions play this role, the concept lends a clarity and precision to the plight of institutions of education in the current context.  In short, it makes it possible to see the practices and politics of education in America since the Nation at Risk fervor as intentional and not accidental in terms of the impact they have had on public education.  ‘Extractive Education,’ then describes education that feeds the status of the elite instead of benefiting the broader social context and most specifically, without benefiting the students in those institutions.

How else would we make sense out of the thirty year war on public education except to see it as a means for the elite to eliminate the social capital and mobility that education provided in the first decades following the Second World War?  The object of these policies, NCLB is the poster child of this effort, while couched in terms of educational reform have really been the deactivation of the role education plays in expanding social capital and providing meaningful access to non-elite students.  Critics of these measures site data and research that proves to anyone interested in a fair analysis, that the educational reforms and testing regimes of the last two decades are counter- productive, and the prevailing consensus in the research and reform community seems to be that the next study will finally and conclusively prove the failure of the educational policies in place.  The problem, as Acemoglu and Robinson make clear in their analysis, is that for the people directing the policy, the elites who promote and implement policy over the objections of the research community, the policies are not failing, they are doing exactly what is intended. Just as tax codes and financial regulations are used by elites to turn the markets into ‘extractive’ institutions, the educational policies of the last few decades are guaranteeing that schools will protect rather than challenge a cultural concentration of power and influence.

There are several characteristics of what an extractive educational system would look like.  The particular arrangements could vary, but the general trend of moving resources that used to be directed to broadening access and expanding the public benefit of the institution are being replaced by trends that shrink the benefits and restrict the access.  In recent years, the following trends have been evident and widely reported on in American education;

1.       System Participants are Restricted and Their Resources Reduced:  If you accept, as I do, that the assault on the educational system has nothing to do with improving that system, but is instead directed at transforming the educational system from an expansive and democratic system to an ‘extractive’ one, then attacking  the people who work in the system makes sense.  The attacks on teachers are not so much about improving education or even the much trumpeted idea of accountability as they are a systematic dismantling of public education.  Teachers have become the ‘welfare queens’ of this round of public hysteria.  Just as Reagan used the trumped up idea of the welfare queen to rip apart the safety net in the 80’s – and poverty has increased ever since – this attack on democratic inclusion has an equally fallacious villain : the bad teacher.  To be sure, there are bad teachers, but there are bad doctors, lawyers, and legislators, too,  and the country doesn’t seem to be on the brink of mass lynching because of it.  Teachers get singled out in this process for two reasons.  The first is that destroying their credibility is critical to destroying the credibility of the institution (think Wall Street bankers) and limiting their potential to save children in the system helps accelerate the move away from public and democratic educational institutions to private and restrictive versions.  Could teachers do better?  Sure they could, but reducing their benefits, cutting their salaries and limiting their freedom of practice hardly seems like a recipe for improving the profession. If it were, imagine what we could do with the aforementioned bankers.  It is impossible to conclude that the attack on teachers has anything to do with improving education.  The second reason for the attack is to limit their effectiveness.  The last thing the shift to an extractive version of education can tolerate is unexpected success.  However limited teachers might be, if freed from the restraints of invalid standardized testing and allowed to actually interact with their students, they would ‘save’ more children, and in an extractive model that is simply unacceptable.  Teachers have to be attacked and their credibility destroyed so that evaluative measures can be put in place that guarantee as little social mobility as possible.

2.       Limiting Social Mobility:  If we understand that the purpose of extractive institutions is to benefit an elite, then it should be no surprise that the elite wants to keep their numbers small.  One way to look at the pitiful results of the standardized testing diaspora of American  education is to say that too many children are failing, but from the perspective of an extractive set of practices that is precisely the result desired.  What gets reified and replicated in this version of extractive education is the status of the elite.  Time after time, what the test results show is that the socio-economic status of the parents is the best predictor of testing success.  It is such a stable component of test results that is  impossible to see it as a coincidence or an accident.  Instead, it makes far more sense to see it as the desired outcome.  Standardized testing creates an invalid measure of student learning in so many ways, but it creates one desired outcome that is essential to extractive education: it reifies the social status of the elites.  How else can we understand the politics of continuing a testing regime that has so many problems and limitations.  It helps, of course, that by putting our money in testing we are supporting private and not public interests, but the main value of this approach is that it makes it harder for teachers, students, and parents to engage in an educational practice that might help their children move upward or change the distributional schemes of the society. This is not to say that every use of standardized testing is invalid, but when they are used in high stakes assessment to rate teachers and schools there is little or no validity.   Add to this the lurid and absurd spectacle of charter school lotteries and the admission practices of elite institutions, and we have a perfect picture of how education becomes a scarcity instead of something that the whole culture can partake in and benefit from.

3.       Extracting Resources: The obvious consequence of extractive educational practices is that resources that used to be dedicated to a public institution will be reduced or diverted to private business interests.  This step is so obvious that it needs little commentary except to point out that the rhetoric surrounding these moves is not about educational reform.  The hidden winner in this type of policy, even more than vouchers and charter schools, is the money diverted from public education to standardized testing.  The millions upon millions of dollars being spent to develop, administer, and score standardized instruments that have little validity, even just in a parallel sense, is spent not to enhance education but to produce and reify predictable data points that validate the rest of the political agenda of extractive educational policy.  Not only does the money support the political and economic agenda of extraction, but it now goes into business and not schools.  The end result of these policies, of course, is the complete destruction of public  education and the creation of a private educational system for elites.  This will limit the access of marginal classes and free the elites of the tax burden of public education. These ideas were first developed by the Mackinaw Center in 1986 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  They also helped pioneer the use of shoddy data to under estimate the success of public education and over-hype the success of private charter initiatives to spin the public debate over the effectiveness of public education.

4.       The Triumph of Elite Institutions:   The end result of extractive educational policies is return education to the practice of credentialing and benefiting an elite that can then culturally dominate the rest of society.  Prior to the last part of the 19^th century which ushered in the revolution of the American university, education beyond wage earner status was restricted to the upper class or the people Gramsci called “the hundred at Eaton.”   The changes in the economy after the Civil War required the change in educational policy as a new managerial class emerged to run the capitalist empires of the robber barons.  The post WWWII wave of democratized higher education marked by the GI Bill and the growth of Community Colleges saw an even greater expansion of access and mobility.  It is precisely this expansion that the move to extractive educational practices is intended to roll back.  The current globalized economy, based as it is in financial transaction and not labor based production, is not only not aided by an expansion in educational opportunities, it is threatened by it.  Perhaps for the first time since the demographic pressure of the Black Death gave the concept of skilled labor a foothold into economic prosperity and brought the feudal economies of the Middle Ages to an end in the Renaissance, the surplus of labor is so great that it is a burden and not an asset to the kind of wealth produced in the current economic system.  Add to that the fact that the productivity of individual workers keeps increasing, and the picture for ‘work’ in the future economy is nothing short of dire.  The lessons of the collapse of 2008 is not that job growth is difficult but that for the people who run and benefit from an economy based in financial markets it is completely unnecessary.  That fact will translate to educational policies designed to shore up the elite institutions at the expense of public education.  An early example of this can be seen in the recent move by the SAT to offer early testing to students who are recommended and can afford $5000 for an intensive three week prep course.  In this scenario, even the pretext of equal opportunity and participation is gone.

If the people who want to augment and improve public education want even a chance at success, they must reposition their arguments and their policies on a broader economic and political strategy.  There is no way to save public education in the midst of economic and political policies that favor a smaller and richer elite at every turn.  Indeed, there is no need to do so.  The political system will not produce results contradicted by economic reality.  Progressive defenders of public education and the role it plays in a democratic society must come to grips with the fact that the defense they pose also requires at least a somewhat democratic economy.  The war waged on public education, as well as other public institutions, by an isolated and extractive elite  is not new and will not stop at charter schools.  If democracy matters then public education must be part of that formation.  Losing the battle over public education makes it highly unlikely that any other democratic institutions will survive. Those fighting on the front lines over the future of education should understand the scope of the battle and not be distracted by proposals that, whatever their individual merit, are part of the agenda to dismantle the link between public education and democratic mobility.  As it stands, America has become one of the societies with the least economic mobility – only Great Britain is worse in the industrialized world.  Educational policy alone will not reverse that trend, but the dismantling of the public education system will guarantee that it will not be reversed in the foreseeable future.