Topic: current state of thinking (summary)

While this is still not a "research question" (or "phenomenon of inquiry" if you, like me, are less fond of the "lab report" structure inherent in most dissertation thinking and want a less scientistic euphemism, though I still can't embrace the term; but that's a Meta: post for another time), my thinking about "what I want to learn" is sitting in this formulation in my word processor currently: How do we construct a more powerful public narrative for the idea of engaged citizenship as the purpose for public schooling?

This is really coming out of opposition toward the dominant public narrative about the purpose of public schooling, that schools exist to train workers for the new economy so that America can maintain its dominance. I call this the Global Economic Competitiveness frame (GEC), and see it coming largely out of A Nation at Risk for a variety of rhetorical and historical reasons. (About which many posts will definitely follow.)

I’m deeply influenced in this line of thinking by David Labaree’s Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals in American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 39-81. [and by virtue of going to a “hippie school” for undergrad]. So I’m interested—on a larger political, ethical level—in creating the conditions where politicians don’t mention “developing good citizens” as the poor stepchild in their list of reasons why we need to do something about education, but rather place it at the center of their list of reasons (and, of course, alter their policy prescriptions accordingly). On a research level, I’m interested from the standpoint of how did GEC so effectively eclipse (for example) the competing equity frame that gave us Head Start and other programs looking to use education as a tool to ameliorate social ills.

Among my many concerns about GEC are:

• Rhetorically, that it normalizes a business paradigm where competition becomes an essential part of education (and by extension, American supremacy in that competition—in education and elsewhere—is taken for granted—as an “is” and an “ought”), where measurement is paramount, and money is the ultimate measure
• Practically, that it reduces learning to job training—if it’s just that, why should the public have to pay instead of the employers it’s designed to benefit?
• On a policy level, that there’s no evidence that what we do in education has any relevance to what happens in the economy—the generation that created the personal computer and internet revolution is the same one that was graduating from (or even dropping out of) the educational system that was supposedly so bad that “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” And even as those revolutions gave us the longest sustained period of economic advancement in history, we didn’t hear anyone credit the education system.
• And more, but that’s a start…
  

So I want to call for us to get smarter about how we think and talk about the purposes of public education so that we can be more successful at improving education. One way I see of doing that is overthrowing the GEC and replacing it with something better. But that’s a tall order, so I’m interested in how that happens; I think by being smart about how it happens in the media will help shape how it happens in politics as well. (Tangent post will be created about media vs. politics strategies if needed.)