Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform by Mark Hlavacik (review)

When Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos opened her now infamous confirmation hearing by affirming her commitment to “school choice,” few were surprised. After all, DeVos had long supported charter schools and school vouchers and had been tapped by Donald Trump to bring those reforms to the Department of Education. Her statement affirmed the rights of students and parents who “no longer believe that a one-size-fits-all model of learning meets the needs of every child.” Rather, “they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, religious or any combination thereof.”

Mark Hlavacik’s timely study encourages us to see in DeVos’s words a now commonplace indictment of a failing public school system, one run by bureaucrats insisting on “one-size-fits-all” solutions to diverse local educational problems. Hlavacik describes this rhetorical strategy as one of “public blame,” designed to identify who is at fault for the failings of the U.S. public education system. Furthermore, “public blame” is for Hlavacik the central strategy by which educational reform has been pursued since President James Carter’s creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979. Intimately tied to the rise of the accountability movement among politicians and education scholars, public blame emerges not just as a rhetorical strategy for pursuing educational reform; rather, it is an increasingly central aspect of reform itself.

Assigning Blame maps the impact of public blame on education reform efforts with clarity and insight. Hlavacik focuses on five case studies to ground his analysis: Milton Friedman’s advocacy of school vouchers via his Free to Choose television series; the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s (NCEE) indictment of public education in its report, A Nation at Risk; Jonathan Kozol’s examination of East St. Louis and other urban and suburban schools in Savage Inequalities; the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act’s adoption of the language of accountability; and Diane Ravitch’s transformation from NCLB architect to NCLB critic. The account that emerges establishes public blame as “the predominant resource of educational policy advocates” (6).

Furthermore, blame has three important functions within education reform debate. It is a “political animal” that allows reform advocates to identify rivals and attach a variety of negative motives to their behavior (10). It also “traffics in agency,” ascribing choice to people’s action and making accountability a central aspect of the assignation of blame (11). And finally, insofar as blame assigns culpability for a perceived failure, it “enacts ethical judgment” (11). Within Hlavacik’s case study chapters, these functions are examined via specific forms of public blame. Milton Friedman’s debate with educational policy professionals in Free to Choose is read as an example of ad hominem argument, with Friedman’s characterization of professionals as bureaucrats serving as his principal means of assigning blame to them for failing public schools. In contrast, A Nation at Risk sees the NCEE engage in self-blame on behalf of a negligent nation, a strategy that makes use of reluctant testimony to exhort the country at large to action.

Hlavacik’s discussion of Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities offers an analysis of geographic metaphors, such as the equation of East St. Louis with the third world, and the manner in which Kozol uses those metaphors to assign blame to environmental factors. While Hlavacik offers this discussion as a means of understanding why Kozol’s call for school desegregation was met instead with calls for increased funding and philanthropy, he perhaps spends too much time unpacking Kozol’s descriptions of urban schools rather than tracing the relationship between Kozol’s metaphors and the blame they make possible. The chapter that follows, however, is perhaps this study’s strongest. Hlavacik’s analysis of the language of the NCLB Act reveals the manner in which the act’s insistence on accountability establishes ritualistic scapegoating—focused on the public blaming of schools and teachers for underperformance—as a central aspect...