The impact of globalization on public education

*This next entry is an extract from Soil of Misfortune: Education, Poverty, and Race in a Rural South Florida Community, my 2005 PhD. dissertation. The complete work can be read at the Wimbley Library of Florida Atlantic University or purchased online.

With the global economic crisis of the early 1970s that was marked by a 2.5 drop in world economic expansion; the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates by the United States in 1973; and the decline by President Ronald Reagan at a 1981 economic summit to update the system of national and global regulations insuring the development of poorer countries, northern “corporations began experimenting with strategies to increase their profits by reducing their labor and other costs” (Brecher and Costello 1998). Minimizing production costs by moving capital around the world would be the first order of business. This would create decentralized production controlled by a concentrated core consisting of government agencies, world banks, and multinationals. A corporate culture was born supported by interpretive communities made up of think tanks and business-backed universities. The language of deregulation, neo-liberalism, and supply side economics categorized their ideology. The result was a downward leveling – cuts in wages, social and public services, and environmental protection.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a new “Corporate Agenda,” was conceived within the Republican Party by uniting seemingly irreconcilable groups that resisted and resented the racial, religious, and gender based social movements of the previous two decades (Brecher and Costello 1998). The United States would once again play a key role in defining the philosophy of the World Bank and the policies of the International Monetary Fund in this post-Bretton Woods era, but it would not be to the benefit of debtor countries – countries disproportionately of color. It would also not benefit communities of color within the United States, communities in the wake of the new imperialism of the postcolonial era.

Ironically, those that are proponents of globalized unregulated markets argue that contemporary world societies are becoming societies of knowledge. The implications of such an assertion are, as Stromquist writes:

(1)“high knowledge will be needed at all levels of

economic activity, (2) individuals and countries can

‘make it’ by relying solely on the acquisition of

knowledge and skills, and (3) no impediments exist

for the acquisition of such knowledge”(2002).

In reality, at least 50% of jobs created for the developing economy will not require university study, but job-based technical training or trade experience. In many localities, globalization has actually created a retrograde movement in regards to wages. Using 2002 data, Stromquist cites California as an economic center of globalization that had more workers at poverty-level wages in 2002 than it did a decade before. The vaunted job growths of the 1990s Clinton era were mostly in lower paying jobs. What becomes apparent is that the globalized economy does need highly trained, highly educated workers, but it also requires large numbers of workers in labor-intensive positions. Stronquist points out:

An important dynamic that globalization will create

will be the demand for a relatively small number of

university trained graduates while ensuring that

there will continue to be persons with lower levels of

education and that they understand their situation as

part of a fair process that allows the success of only

those who are most meritorious (2002).

Carnoy, in agreement, observes that government policies, enacted by nation states to better compete in the global arena, often hurt the lower educated and benefit the higher educated. Globalization is encased in an ideological packaging that promotes bias against raising wages and social wages. It favors policies that maintain higher levels of unemployment for the benefit of controlling variable capital. Welfare state policies are abandoned, unions are weakened, and lower minimum wages are maintained as an argument for increased employment. Unite this ideology of high profits, low wages with the increased need for higher skilled workers as a result of technological advances, and one realizes that higher education equals higher returns raising the need for more advanced education. The question is who has access to quality higher education? Lower income students, like those in the Belle Glade and Pahokee communities of West Palm Beach, Florida whose parents are less educated and therefore reaping little from the global package, are not likely to have equal access to higher learning (Carnoy in Stromquist and Monkman et. al. 2002).

Using this reality, unregulated market advocates have responded by blaming the phenomena on inefficient public schools, institutions that have failed “to respond to their interests in developing a well-trained, efficient labor force that will increase economic productivity…” (Stromquist 2002). This is the rhetoric behind globalization and education, primarily espoused by the World Bank and organizations like the International Association for Evaluation of Educational Achievement. The World Bank has historically supported increasing quality education, but always in the context of reducing the cost of public service. It has recommended concentrating funding to lower educational levels, increasing privatization to higher educational levels, decreasing public per pupil costs in areas with established high student/teacher ratios, and decentralizing – removing the control on the institutions of schooling by centralized governments and giving that control back to the local communities. Their theory is that by decentralizing education increased productivity will emerge, measured by systems of assessment such as FCAT. But the ideology of free markets as it pertains to education is not just about economic efficiency. It is also about opposing government participation at any level. Carnoy writes:

In a nutshell, globalization enters the education

sector on an ideological horse, and its effect on

education are largely a product of that financially

driven, free-market ideology, not of a clear

conception for improving education (in Stromquist and

Monk man et. al. 2000).

There is no disputing that the educational reforms of the last twenty years have been market driven. These financial reforms have a tendency to reorganize and redistribute access to quality education away from low socio-economic communities, showing clearly the unequal distribution of salaries and highly sought after knowledge. By implementing the most damaging of these finance reforms, the measurement and comparison of school outcomes nationally and internationally, organizations like the World Bank and the IEA can quickly assess the nation states possibilities for higher economic and social productivity. The comparative data accumulated from national and international assessment tools are not, however, used by these organizations in ways that are best suited for improving schooling. Instead, the data is used to maintain system efficiency “mainly in financial terms” (Carnoy in Stromquist and Monkman et. al. 2000).

In an April 2004 issue of Expansion Management, a business journal exclusively dedicated to growth strategies for companies operating within the global economic structure, the Palm Beach County School District ranked third in the nation among the 65 largest metropolitan areas. Among all 331 metropolitan centers in the United States, Palm Beach County was ranked 46. The study compared school districts throughout the country comparing college-board scores, graduation rates, beginning and average teacher salaries, student teacher ratios, and per pupil expenditures. Categories weighted heavier in the study are college-board scores and graduation rates, while not surprisingly, “community and state spending are less important to the overall final score” (King 2004). The study makes notoriously poor districts like Washington D.C. and Kansas City among the best in the nation by including the surrounding high-achieving suburban public schools to the mix, balancing the high dropout rate and low test scores of the metro inner schools – schools that are populated by low-socio economic minority students. Bill King, Chief Editor of Expansion Magazine and author of the article closed it with this sentence:

The important point is that a metro area is really

one big labor market and, in order to get an overall

picture of the quality of public education, you have

to include the suburban and ring city school districts

in your evaluation (2004).

The current conservative American political culture of “business runs everything” has had an immense influence on U.S. schools. This current education climate can be traced to the senior George Bush, our first “education president” who pledged that America would surpass the world in math, science, reading, writing, and other skills related to business–processes by the year 2000. Business, he espoused, would reinvent the American school, ignoring all traditional systems of schooling and breaking through the historical restraints that conventional schools work under. Heavy emphasis would be placed on a national curriculum, choice programs, and nationwide testing. All of this, of course, would and should occur without any increase in federal funds (Farnen in Farnen and Sunker et. al. 1997).

Of the main areas appropriated by the new plutocracy, testing proved to be the most powerful rhetorical tool for the next batch of political leaders, on the right and left, and the most devastating for low socio-economic student populations. Though there are possibilities for the use of testing as a true improvement to schools and schooling - locally conceived assessment tools that specifically address school improvement regardless of cost – the main application in the current educational environment is for the development of “national policies for resource use with the intention of decreasing per student public resources…” (Carnoy in Stromquist and Monkman et. al. 2000). This is a mantra among conservative groups across the country. As Peter McLaren points out, in the late capitalist America of today “test scores based on information filtered from the Western canon and bourgeois cultural capital and developed in the business salons of the Prozac generation are used to justify school district and state funding initiatives” (in Farnen and Sunker et. al. 1997).

The neo-liberal democracy of the 21^st century United States insures differently empowered publics. What few successful mainstream public schools are left, cater to the needs of power and privilege in society, ensuring the natural transmission of advantage from one generation to the next. Intergenerational continuity is maintained – working-class students will most likely end up with working class jobs (McLaren in Farnen and Sunker et. al. 1997). Add the question of race to the construct and the outcome looks even bleaker.