The Ideology of Education: The Commonwealth, the Market, and America's Schools

6. Education as Ideology

he central purpose of this book was to assess whether marketbased education reforms were more likely to produce positive, utilitarian change (improved economic prospects through higher levels of human capital, more equitable distribution of social and economic opportunity), or cultural change (a reshaping of normative institutional goals and how they shape individual attitudes and behavioral predispositions). The starting point to understanding these contrasting claims was to specify two value systems that defined and isolated the competing policy camps, and to claim these value systems constituted separate ideologies of education. These ideologies form differing pictures of the world and education’s role within and to it, establish different priorities in educational goals, and favor differing institutional models and education policies to reflect these visions and priorities. Although not formal deductive or inductive causal theories, these contrasting ideologies provided a reasonably stable and systematic platform for comparative empirical analysis. Their assumptions and beliefs about how the world should work generated a set of empirical propositions to test the assumptions and likely effects of the prescriptions that spring from these competing ideological frameworks. The overall inference from those empirical tests is that, although not without some merit, the functionalist claims of the market ideology are suspect in a number of key areas, and they seriously underestimate the negative social-democratic effects of market reforms on educational goals and civic values. The claims supporting market reforms rest to a considerable extent on normative beliefs about how the world should work, rather than empirical evidence about how the world is working. The analyses undertaken here tend to lend credence to a conflict theory perspective regarding market-based education reforms, i.e., they are as much about “smuggling values” as they are about boosting productivity or equalizing social and economic opportunities. 127 6 Education as Ideology T Such findings have little impact on the market’s status as a value system , and they are unlikely to change any normative beliefs about the pros or the cons of market-based regulation. These analyses do raise a number of questions about market-based analytical constructs, such as public choice. As employed by academic policy analysts, these frameworks frequently support the argument that the market is a ready response to known failures in public education. Yet market-based theoretical frameworks are far from value neutral. They import into education studies normative preferences about the goals of education and reinforce assumptions about a wide range of relationships whose empirical validity is debatable. There is a common normative foundation to the market as a value system and as an analytic construct, and market-based analyses thus end up pushing values as well as promoting instrumental responses to problems in education. It is important to specify those normative assumptions and their implications for policy analysis and education reform. ASSUMPTIONS Advocates of market-based reform commonly make a set of assumptions regarding the goals and performance of public schools, and a further set of behavioral assumptions about individuals. Generally, the purpose of education is assumed to be largely economic in nature, the individual is assumed to bear the primary costs and benefits of schooling , and public schools are assumed have a poor performance record (for variations, critiques, and surveys of such arguments see Friedman 1982, Chubb and Moe 1990, McCabe and Vinzant 1999, Schneider et al. 2001, Apple 1986, Paris 1994, Hanushek 1994, Berliner and Biddle 1995, Mayer and Peterson 1999, Tyack and Cuban 1995, 141). Given this, it is assumed a rational individual seeking to satisfy his or her own self-interest will seek out high quality educational services that confer economic benefits, and that if competitive service providers are free to respond to such demands they will provide those high quality educational services (e.g., Becker 1993, Chubb and Moe 1990). These assumptions serve to define the basic problem of education and also provide the justification for its reform. Yet, as the analyses presented here indicate, the empirical veracity of these assumptions is open to challenge , and a case can be made that they are grounded to a significant extent in ideology, in a perspective of what the world should look like through the lens of a particular set of values. The goals of education and the presumption that individuals are its primary stakeholders have been discussed at some length in various 128 The Ideology of Education places throughout this book. While market advocacy and analysis tilts towards a...