Jajuna

This is the introduction to a book chapter I was working on. I ended up ditching it and doing something else. I might come back it at a later time.

Contemporary life is punctuated by a variety of seemingly interminable forms of insecurity. Economic instability, proliferating anxieties over the self and the Other, eroded social safety nets, permanent war, and a looming environmental apocalypse all mark an encroaching political-economy of risk and uncertainty. To borrow a well-worn neologism from Ulrich Beck, we increasingly inhabit a “risk society” marked by an ever expanding constellation of ontological fears both real and imagined. In turn, new insecurities give way to new geographies and technologies of risk management and social control from the high-tech fortification of domestic life to the heightened policing of public spaces, institutions, and marginalized populations. In an atomized political culture dominated by commercial concerns and values, shared public responsibility for security collapses into private, corporate-led technocratic solutions and expanded law enforcement powers. The central danger born from this cycle of risk and control is the suffocating pressure it exerts on the critical and imaginative resources necessary to question and thereby collectively address the underlying systemic causes of human insecurity and suffering.

This climate of expediency and fear has enabled a culture of control to take root in public education. In recent years, school systems across the United States have turned to the corporate and criminal justice sectors in order to ostensibly make schools “safe”. This has meant the adoption of new risk management strategies and enormous outlays of public capital on CCTV cameras, ID card systems, metal detectors, biometric scanners, drug and weapons sweeps, armed security police, zero tolerance policies, and lock-down procedures. To get a sense of scale, today, 79% of all US school districts are now wired with surveillance cameras, with many cameras, such as in the Chicago Public Schools, directly monitored from police stations. Since the year 2000, the Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Service (‘COPS’) has freed up as much as $350 million dollars annually to place armed police in schools. The New York City Public Schools now have more police patrolling the halls than the total number of officers in the Boston Police Department. These trends represent an unprecedented incursion of state power into public schools precisely at a time when commitments to equitable distributions in resources are being eclipsed by attempts to restructure education through market reforms and corporate governing strategies.

School securitization is generally presented as a politically neutral and/or inevitable response to various imminent threats. However, the securitization of educational environments needs to be understood as symptomatic of a shift away from the material and ethical referents of social democracy and toward the austere mechanisms of the corporate state. This is marked by rampant commercialization/privatization, public disinvestment, the precaritization of work, and the expansion of economic and sociopolitical inequalities. As David Garland has observed, the “insecure character of today’s social and economic circumstances becomes the social surface that gives rise to our newly emphatic, overreaching concern with control and to the urgency with which we segregate, fortify, and exclude.” This intensive desire for control extends into public education through pervasive insecurities over youth. On the one hand, the securitization of education is presented as necessary to protect children from various perils. In this narrative, youth are imagined as under siege predominately from dangerous “Others”: terrorists, pedophiles, pandemic viruses, and criminals. Here, school securitization provides a means to assuage the anxieties of parents and to fulfill the needs of policy makers for “order, efficiency, and predictability in an increasingly complex, scary, and fragmented social world.” On the other hand, in the corporate media, television, and films, youth, particularly working class and minority youth, are often presented as morally corrupt and predatory. These “folk devils” of popular imagination work to legitimate “enhanced” practices of discipline and punishment in schools as well as the suspension of civil rights for youth.

Seizing on these trends is a corporate security industry – currently one of the fastest growing commercial sectors in the US. Education has become a particularly hot market for security firms as school orders now frequently outstrip sales to prisons and airports. According to Jim Dodrei of Texas based Garret Metal Detectors,

we never dreamed there would be markets in schools. Now its the largest-selling segment of our business…three or four years ago we would hear parents saying, ‘We do not want metal detectors. It looks like a prison’ now they are demanding a safe environment.

Clamoring for more “safety”, parents, administrators, and politicians have come to increasingly rely on the corporate sector/media for defining and providing the “expert” knowledge and technology of school security. Christopher Robbins has recently written that as “safety is reified as a commodity, schools can never have enough safety.” Within a rush to the corporate sphere, educational environments are only thought to be made “safe” after the “security industry organizes the visual field…in ways that permit a persistent redefinition of what “safer” means, what devices promote the next level of safety, and who is seen as a threat.” Within neoliberal culture, school “safety” comes to signal a material and immaterial process of affective labor: a making “safe” for the consumption of security commodities and the securitization of schools and youth.

The corporate media and private security industry consistently mobilize fear in order to promote an agenda of securitization in public education. In particular, narratives of “child protection” and “child demonization” have come to define the school safety debate. This chapter explores the tensions within this discursive framing particularly as it reveals a symbiosis between commercialization and various embodied and sociopolitical states of exceptionality. I suggest that this has three primary consequences: (1) it enriches and empowers the security and law enforcement industry at the expense of the public (2) it obscures forms of structural violence which create and sustain insecurities in the educational system and in the lives of youth more broadly; (3) lastly, it normalizes a culture of risk and control in public education which delimits the conditions of possibility for conceiving security within social rather than militaristic terms. What is crucially needed is a reconnection of risk and security to questions of public responsibility, investment, and justice. Ultimately, a new ethics of safety must be cultivated through substantive commitments to social advancement, human agency, and equity.

I had to chuckle today when I saw this column in the New York Times by David Brooks. It offers heaping praise for Obama’s $4.3 billion dollar “Race to the Top” education program. I was struck by the piece because Brooks so effortlessly refuses to question his own assumptions. Essentially, education secretary Arne Duncan and the federal government have created this fund to reward those states that most enthusiastically embrace what Brooks refers to as “real educational reform”. What this “real reform” signals is more school privatization,  union busting, voucher schemes, and standardized testing.

What really gets Brooks excited though is merit pay. I can understand why. Who doesn’t think good teachers should be rewarded for a job well done? The problem is that whenever it has been attempted historically it has been a miserable failure - breeding a toxic mix of cronyism, resentment, and animosity among teachers. For example, in the school I taught at in Chicago we had “merit pay” which basically meant whoever was “in” with the principle and administration received a bonus (for more on merit pay as well as other insights into the history of school reform see the Tyack and Cuban book “Tinkering Toward Utopia”).

According to Brooks, the integration of merit pay “will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs.” And what would be the criteria for judging the value of a teacher? He states “there is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores.”

Test scores!

Standardized tests are nothing but a bludgeon: a malicious instrument which deadens the talent and creativity of teachers as well as the joy and curiosity of students. In other words, test scores do not, can not, stand as a measure of anything which resembles actual learning.

This quote more or less gets at the political resonance of all this:

“I’ve been deeply disturbed by a lot that’s going on in Washington,” Jeb Bush said on Thursday, “but this is not one of them. President Obama has been supporting a reform secretary, and this is deserving of Republican support.”

The republicans love Arne Duncan and his version of “reform” because it continues the trend set by the Bush administration to treat education as an adjunct of the corporate state. This means more teaching to the test, more punitive accountability schemes, and the perpetuation of corporate managerial frameworks, economic values, workforce discipline, and business interests - not too mention opening the public education sector to huge profits. For an account of what is deeply wrong with this agenda check out this article by Mark Slouka in Harper’s Magazine. It is a deeply prescient critique of the current corporate led regime of school reform and a brilliant defense of the liberal democratic tradition in public education. This quote is emblematic:

What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.

In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.

That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.