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The Fantasy Economy w/ Neil Kraus
4 Plays8 months ago
Stop me if you’ve heard these before:
American public schools are failing,
American students are falling behind their global peers,
The future of American innovation, economic equality, and global competitiveness depends on schools today preparing students for the job market of tomorrow,
School reform is only tool we have to fix these urgent issues
Each of these sentiments have become conventional wisdom at this point, and they’ve appeared in the platforms of both major American political parties if not explicitly, then through familiar buzzwords: school choice, competition, data-driven accountability, college and career readiness, STEM education, and gaps of all kinds: the skills gap, the achievement gap, and the employment gap, to name a few. And when your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails… But it may also be the case, despite the flaws of public education throughout the nation’s history, that American public schools became “failing schools” exactly when they needed to, to fit the needs of politicians and industry, and to fit schooling into the new economic order that came to dominate the last half century.
At the global level, this narrative even fuels reactionary stories of civilizational struggle and the “decline of The West. As an Italian economist lamented for GIS Reports earlier this year, “There are only two ways Western educational systems can reverse the current trend and offer more appealing prospects: Allowing private schooling to flourish and Bringing about radical reforms in state schooling.”
The most likely outcome, he predicts is a steady decline, writing, “the vicious spiral that links poor education to inequality, social tensions, more government intervention and, finally, low productivity and stuttering economic growth will likely dominate the future of many Western countries for years to come.”
This last line captures what my guest today describes as The Fantasy Economy. Neil Kraus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. His most recent book, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, describes in powerful detail how exactly our popular, bipartisan conventional wisdom about America’s “failing schools” and the decline of of the American student came to be: as the result of a deliberate project to shift the responsibility for economic precarity and inequality away from industry and policy and place it squarely on the shoulders of educators and schools. “Ultimately,” he writes, “ we must see the fantasy economy for what it is—a misleading, political campaign in the interests of corporations and the wealthy.”
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Transcript
K-12 Schools and Economic Futures
00:00:00
Speaker
I start the book with a quote.
00:00:02
Speaker
This is, again, Reagan administration money that's going to Columbia Teachers College.
00:00:07
Speaker
Change the mission of K-12 schools to take educational responsibility for the economic futures of all students.
00:00:14
Speaker
That is a cataclysmic shift.
00:00:16
Speaker
Cataclysmic shift.
00:00:18
Speaker
that today we take for granted.
00:00:19
Speaker
We talk in a language, the assumptions we adopt that, well, yeah, of course, that's why we have charter schools to prepare students for these jobs.
00:00:28
Speaker
And the fact that we've put it all on the education system, and that's what I argue is killing education.
00:00:38
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 155 of the Human Restoration Project podcast.
00:00:43
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington.
00:00:45
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Julia Valenti, Brandon Peters, and Simeon Frang.
00:00:54
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
00:00:56
Speaker
And we're so proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years.
00:01:02
Speaker
If you haven't yet, consider rating our podcast in your app to help us reach more listeners.
Challenging Conventional Education Views
00:01:08
Speaker
And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
00:01:19
Speaker
Now, stop me if you've heard these before.
00:01:22
Speaker
American public schools are failing.
00:01:24
Speaker
American students are falling behind their global peers.
00:01:27
Speaker
The future of American innovation, economic equality, and global competitiveness depends on schools today preparing students for the job market of tomorrow.
00:01:38
Speaker
And school reform is the only tool we have to fix these urgent issues.
00:01:43
Speaker
Each of these sentiments have become conventional wisdom at this point, and they have appeared in the platforms of both major American political parties, if not explicitly, then through familiar buzzwords.
00:01:53
Speaker
School choice, competition, data-driven accountability, college and career readiness, STEM education, and gaps of all kinds.
00:02:02
Speaker
The skills gap, the achievement gap, and the employment gap, just to name a few.
00:02:07
Speaker
And when your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails.
Fantasy Economy in Education
00:02:11
Speaker
But it may also be the case, despite the flaws of public education throughout the nation's history, that American public schools became failing schools exactly when they needed to, to fit the needs of politicians and industry, and to fit schooling into the new economic order that came to dominate the last half of the century.
00:02:32
Speaker
At the global level, this narrative even fuels reactionary stories of civilizational struggle and the decline of the West.
00:02:40
Speaker
As an Italian economist lamented for GIS reports earlier this year, quote, there are only two ways Western educational systems can reverse our current trend and offer more appealing prospects, allowing private schooling to flourish and bringing about radical reforms in state schooling, unquote.
00:02:58
Speaker
The most likely outcome, he predicts, is a steady decline, writing, quote, the vicious spiral that links poor education to inequality, social tensions, more government intervention, and finally, low productivity and stuttering economic growth will likely dominate the future of many Western countries for years to come, end quote.
00:03:19
Speaker
And this last line captures what my guest today describes as the fantasy economy.
00:03:25
Speaker
Neil Krauss is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
00:03:31
Speaker
His most recent book, The Fantasy Economy, Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, describes in powerful detail how exactly our popular bipartisan conventional wisdom about America's failing schools and the decline of the American student came to be.
00:03:48
Speaker
as the result of a deliberate project to shift the responsibility for economic precarity and inequality away from industry and policy and place it squarely on the shoulders of educators and schools.
00:04:01
Speaker
Ultimately, he writes, we must see the fantasy economy for what it is, a misleading political campaign in the interests of corporations and the wealthy.
00:04:11
Speaker
Neil Krauss, thanks so much for joining me today.
00:04:14
Speaker
Thanks very much for having me.
00:04:15
Speaker
Happy to be here.
00:04:16
Speaker
Well, let's just start from the top.
Reports Influencing Education Perception
00:04:18
Speaker
What are those core tenets, the beliefs of the fantasy economy as you describe it?
00:04:23
Speaker
And how is it different from, I suppose, you know, the real economy that we all live in?
00:04:28
Speaker
No, that's a great question.
00:04:30
Speaker
There are, as I see it, there are kind of two major tenets of the fantasy economy.
00:04:36
Speaker
And they're very simple and they kind of reinforce each other.
00:04:39
Speaker
One is that the education system is always failing.
00:04:43
Speaker
It's always underperforming.
00:04:44
Speaker
It started with the K-12 education system really in the early part of the education reform movement.
00:04:51
Speaker
But then in the last 15 or so years, that's been applied to higher ed as failing.
00:04:57
Speaker
So that's sort of the first general assumption.
00:05:01
Speaker
It's not even really necessary to state that in the fantasy economy.
00:05:05
Speaker
It's like a belief we don't have to state because we all know that we all believe it.
00:05:09
Speaker
And then the second tenet, which flows from the first, is that the characteristics of the workforce are always inadequate.
00:05:17
Speaker
They're never enough.
00:05:19
Speaker
There are never, and this is described in several different ways, there are never enough workers in general.
00:05:26
Speaker
There are never enough highly skilled workers.
00:05:28
Speaker
There are never enough STEM workers.
00:05:32
Speaker
There are never enough manufacturing workers.
00:05:35
Speaker
That the workers that we do have are just not up to the task and all these different
00:05:42
Speaker
jobs.
00:05:42
Speaker
And so that feeds the first one.
00:05:45
Speaker
That's the skills gap.
00:05:46
Speaker
And that's why we have to always, always change the education system because of the fact that, see, the workforce is failing again.
00:05:54
Speaker
We need to have more charter schools, school choice, accountability.
00:05:59
Speaker
We need to have more STEM programs and higher ed and so forth.
00:06:02
Speaker
So that's kind of how I see the logic of the main tenets of the fantasy economy.
00:06:07
Speaker
I think, as you mentioned in the book, like reports like 1983 is a nation at risk.
00:06:13
Speaker
That was something that's familiar to me.
00:06:15
Speaker
I think it'll be familiar to most listeners.
00:06:16
Speaker
But it seems like a sacred text of that fantasy economy that I didn't know so much about until encountering it in your book was Workforce 2000.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:27
Speaker
And you'd be remiss for thinking that it was written anywhere near the year 2000.
00:06:31
Speaker
But it's kind of like, I think, a companion to a nation at risk from a little bit later on in the 80s.
00:06:36
Speaker
And while it seems like a nation at risk is more of the political document that set the T for Workforce 2000 to provide the playbook for the next two decades of reform, because I think what you're saying is these ideas weren't always inherent or ingrained in the way that we think about schools.
00:06:52
Speaker
So
00:06:53
Speaker
Can you explain how these reports mischaracterized or misrepresented American education and how they misled policymakers on both sides of the aisle?
00:07:03
Speaker
A Nation at Risk, I mean, as you mentioned, has received a fair amount of attention.
00:07:09
Speaker
And in the book, I tend to draw on other scholars because there's a whole library full of research of very valid criticisms of the report and
00:07:21
Speaker
published in 1983, and the title is kind of what stuck.
00:07:26
Speaker
The country was at risk because the assumption was the schools were failing.
00:07:29
Speaker
And it was based on commissioned research.
00:07:32
Speaker
In other words, researchers were paid, presumably, by the Reagan administration.
00:07:38
Speaker
It was not based on scholarly work or the standardized testing analysis was focused mainly on the SAT, which I talk about in the book.
00:07:49
Speaker
and how that changed over time.
00:07:52
Speaker
And it changed because a lot more people were taking it, a lot more students were taking it in the 70s and early 80s than they were in the 60s.
00:08:00
Speaker
And that was a really important, in the popular mind at the time.
00:08:03
Speaker
I mean, I graduated from high school in 1986, and I remember
00:08:07
Speaker
you know, sort of vaguely, but I do remember just the uproar in the popular press about the schools in the 80s, that the schools were failing, all these jobs were leaving the country, not because of anything other than the fact that we didn't have enough skilled workers, right?
00:08:25
Speaker
There was nothing, no other factors in most of the coverage I remember at that time.
00:08:31
Speaker
But then, as you mentioned, the report Workforce 2000 was published in 1987.
00:08:36
Speaker
It was funded by the Reagan administration.
00:08:37
Speaker
It was produced by the Hudson Institute, which is still around, by the way.
00:08:40
Speaker
The Hudson Institute is still a think tank.
00:08:43
Speaker
I don't know if they do much domestic policy anymore, but they're sort of this futuristic business think tank that had been around at that point for a while.
00:08:54
Speaker
And they produced this report, Workforce 2000.
00:08:58
Speaker
And as I read that report,
00:09:01
Speaker
I quote from it throughout the book.
00:09:03
Speaker
I think almost in every chapter, there's something on Workforce 2000 because it's really so revealing.
00:09:09
Speaker
And what was amazing to me was that there wasn't more critical scholarship on Workforce 2000.
00:09:19
Speaker
I mean, there's some academic work, but it was just confined to, you know, major journals that nobody's, you know, that the media is not going to read and so forth.
00:09:28
Speaker
And but I mean, it's the whole playbook for the last 40 or 50 years.
00:09:32
Speaker
I mean, it starts with the preface, which is written by and I don't have it here in front of me, but Reagan's book.
00:09:41
Speaker
Secretary of Labor, I believe.
00:09:43
Speaker
And I quote from that.
00:09:44
Speaker
And he talks about, this is what Republicans haven't really said out loud in decades.
00:09:50
Speaker
And that is that all these social programs from the 30s and the 60s, and he named several of them.
00:09:56
Speaker
may no longer be relevant in this high-skill, high-education economy because the whole report just painted this utterly fictional picture of what the labor market would be in 2000.
00:10:15
Speaker
It used some official data, but most of it, throughout the report, the Hudson Institute cites the Hudson Institute.
00:10:24
Speaker
as a source.
00:10:25
Speaker
And, you know, there's no bibliography.
00:10:27
Speaker
And I ended up buying 20-some copies, and they're actually different copies that were produced.
00:10:31
Speaker
Their front and back cover are different, right?
00:10:35
Speaker
The contents of all the 20-some I own, physical copies, are identical.
00:10:41
Speaker
The technical appendix is not in any of the published versions that I was able to find.
00:10:48
Speaker
And then I just stumbled.
00:10:50
Speaker
Nobody, I didn't see them cited.
00:10:51
Speaker
I stumbled upon a couple of
00:10:54
Speaker
partially declassified versions of this report with all these supporting materials and pages left out and which, uh,
00:11:03
Speaker
I don't know.
00:11:05
Speaker
I think I sent an inquiry, a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA library, and I don't think I got a response.
00:11:11
Speaker
Why was anything related to a report on the workforce ever classified in the first place?
Corporate Influence on Education Policies
00:11:16
Speaker
I have no idea.
00:11:19
Speaker
Somebody else should write that book because it seems to me to be pretty unusual.
00:11:23
Speaker
That report laid out the notion that
00:11:28
Speaker
And then the preface was, well, these social programs might not be necessary anymore.
00:11:32
Speaker
And then the 100 or so pages in the report were all these trends of business and the population.
00:11:38
Speaker
And the gist of it was that there are going to be all these high-skill, high-education jobs by the year 2000.
00:11:45
Speaker
So this is 1987, right?
00:11:48
Speaker
And that therefore, we have to make all these changes, including reforming the schools and changing the educational system in order to prepare students further.
00:12:01
Speaker
It's usually cited as the origins of what has come to be known as the skills gap, which is, again, is sort of an assumption that nobody even questions ever since.
00:12:13
Speaker
So yeah, those two reports, and the former, again, A Nation at Risk, has been written a lot about
00:12:18
Speaker
A lot of great stuff.
00:12:20
Speaker
And Workforce 2000, not quite as much.
00:12:23
Speaker
So I did spend a lot of time with that in the book.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, I found that to be incredibly illuminating because, yeah, it seems like that part of the narrative kind of gets forgotten or it's ignored, as you said, by the press or popular education writers, media and that.
00:12:43
Speaker
And it seems like that became then the playbook, not just for the tail end of Reagan,
00:12:48
Speaker
You know, the first Bush administration, but then throughout the 90s and the Clinton era, teeing up, it really is like the thing that sets in motion all of the ed reform that we have lived in and currently live with today.
00:13:01
Speaker
I wonder if we could speak to those foundations, as you mentioned, the Hudson Institute, because that plays a big role in the
00:13:09
Speaker
formulating and perpetuating the idea of the fantasy economy in the popular imagination as well.
00:13:16
Speaker
Because I think a lot of people imagine these foundations, whether it's the Hudson Institute, maybe more obscure for the popular perspective, but like the Gates Foundation, you mentioned the Center on Education and the Workforce and
00:13:29
Speaker
all of these to kind of be more, I don't know, apolitical or supportive even or benign at worst in their influence on schools and education policy.
00:13:37
Speaker
But I think you make a pretty convincing case that they're working in their own self interest and have an outsized influence on shaping both popular conversations about schooling and the policy that guides those.
00:13:51
Speaker
Could you elaborate on that at all?
00:13:53
Speaker
Sure, sure.
00:13:55
Speaker
Many years ago, I mean, I teach public policy and American politics.
00:13:59
Speaker
I teach a bunch of different classes, but among them is public policy.
00:14:03
Speaker
And I started reading on conflicts of interest in medicine and healthcare research.
00:14:13
Speaker
And I came across the federal government's open payments database.
00:14:19
Speaker
in which we can all look up our medical providers and see where they're getting outside money from.
00:14:24
Speaker
This became a very big political issue.
00:14:27
Speaker
I mean, that was put in the Affordable Care Act and
00:14:31
Speaker
And I remember at the time thinking, wow, that's significant.
00:14:35
Speaker
I mean, there are all these doctors and teaching hospitals and, you know, across the country that are receiving some receiving large sums of money from pharmaceutical firms, from device firms, from all kinds of medical interests.
00:14:52
Speaker
And now we have a right to know where they're getting their money because social psychology research shows us that if you receive gifts from, and this is also, this is why we got that database because it's been shown in psychology for decades that if you receive gifts from someone and you have, there's sort of a norm of reciprocity.
00:15:12
Speaker
You have a, not because you're corrupt or not because you're intentionally doing something wrong, but because you're human.
00:15:20
Speaker
If you give me something, then I naturally want to give you something.
00:15:23
Speaker
And so I started looking into all this funded research in education, because it's really at odds with a lot of official data coming out of mainly federal agencies, but also state agencies.
00:15:37
Speaker
And it's also at odds with much scholarly research.
00:15:41
Speaker
And foundations have always presented that.
00:15:44
Speaker
Well, not always.
00:15:45
Speaker
Not always.
00:15:46
Speaker
This is the key point here.
00:15:48
Speaker
In the last several decades, they've always sort of presented themselves as not self-interested, as simply concerned about education for everybody.
00:15:59
Speaker
I mean, who can object to wanting to support the education of low-income, you know, Black kids, Hispanic kids, low-income white kids, whatever?
00:16:07
Speaker
I mean, who's going to oppose that?
00:16:09
Speaker
And of course, I don't oppose.
00:16:12
Speaker
Everybody should get an outstanding education.
00:16:14
Speaker
That goes without saying.
00:16:16
Speaker
But I discovered that in as recently as the 50s and 60s, foundations would really fund, especially higher ed, and they would do so to advance the interests of the corporations.
00:16:36
Speaker
The Esso Education Foundation, which I never even heard of before I started reading the stuff for the book, was a huge funder of higher ed in the 50s and 60s.
00:16:47
Speaker
Individual colleges and universities, Change Magazine, which I talk about in detail in the book.
00:16:55
Speaker
This is an oil company, right?
00:16:58
Speaker
And then I looked at their funding, higher ed.
00:17:02
Speaker
I have an example, I think, in the book about a hospital at the University of Dayton.
00:17:06
Speaker
It has nothing to do with the oil industry.
00:17:09
Speaker
But I suspect they funded a lot of oil research related to the industry as well as other interests do.
00:17:19
Speaker
But then the politics of the 60s really changed quite a bit and campuses became politicized.
00:17:27
Speaker
The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and also K-12 teachers were starting to go on strike.
00:17:37
Speaker
around the country.
00:17:38
Speaker
And, you know, there were a number of, you know, you know, activists who in higher ed and, and also in teachers unions who wanted, you know, college faculty to be, be able to go on strike just like their K-12 teachers were doing in many cities.
Neoliberal Policies and Education
00:17:55
Speaker
And that was, that was not a popular idea in corporate America at all.
00:17:59
Speaker
And, and, and what I argue in the book is that they sort of, um,
00:18:05
Speaker
corporations kind of transform the public perception of foundations to be, to be simply charitable givers and, and not self-interested at all.
00:18:17
Speaker
And that really, and then they started funding, this is long before Gates, of course, right?
00:18:23
Speaker
They started funding the Academy and, and,
00:18:26
Speaker
you know, higher ed and increasingly K-12 in a massive way, in a massive way.
00:18:33
Speaker
And not only funding individual colleges, universities, researchers, charter schools, and now, of course, foundations fund the Education Writers Association.
00:18:46
Speaker
They fund the press all over the place.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:50
Speaker
You know, and I think that the reason we haven't really thought about, back to the whole notion of conflicts of interest, we haven't thought about what about the Gates Foundation?
00:19:00
Speaker
What about the Lumina Foundation?
00:19:02
Speaker
How is it in their interest to advocate sending everybody to higher ed?
00:19:08
Speaker
What's so wrong with that?
00:19:09
Speaker
Well, it's in their interest because they are fundamentally...
00:19:15
Speaker
In support of neoliberalism and all the main beliefs of neoliberalism, that we don't need unions, that privatization is the answer, that outsourcing of jobs is just fine, that an economy built for owners and shareholders is as it should be.
00:19:33
Speaker
None of that stuff is popular.
00:19:35
Speaker
None of that stuff has ever been popular, right?
00:19:38
Speaker
That monopolies should be allowed to form if that's basically what the economy leads to.
00:19:44
Speaker
None of that stuff has ever been popular.
00:19:46
Speaker
I mean, you couldn't go to Michigan or Wisconsin or, I mean, I grew up in upstate New York in 1985 and give a speech laying that all out and then say, vote for me, you know?
00:19:56
Speaker
By the way, we're going to destroy unions and send you jobs overseas.
00:19:59
Speaker
Please, can we have your vote?
00:20:02
Speaker
So you can't do that.
00:20:03
Speaker
Politicians are smart.
00:20:04
Speaker
They're aware of the contours of public opinion.
00:20:08
Speaker
And so in order to really streamline this really new approach,
00:20:16
Speaker
new sort of very different than the post-war consensus of a mixed economy to streamline a much more free market based economy.
00:20:27
Speaker
that has all the tenants that I just named and among others.
00:20:30
Speaker
You have to focus on the schools.
00:20:32
Speaker
And this is why I start the book with a quote.
00:20:36
Speaker
This is, again, Reagan administration money that's going to Columbia Teachers College.
00:20:41
Speaker
Change the mission of K-12 schools to take educational responsibility for the economic futures of all students.
00:20:49
Speaker
That is a cataclysmic shift, cataclysmic shift, that today we take for granted, right?
00:20:54
Speaker
Right.
00:20:56
Speaker
We talk in a language, the assumptions we adopt that, well, yeah, of course, that's why we have charter schools to prepare students for these jobs.
00:21:05
Speaker
And the fact that we've put it all on the education system, and that's what I argue is killing education.
00:21:12
Speaker
That's why in Wisconsin, for example, and many other states,
00:21:16
Speaker
public universities are getting cut, even though states have budget surpluses, because we're assumed to be failing because there are 30 and 40 and 50 year olds out there that are not making enough money, that are working in jobs that don't require a college degree, not because there aren't enough jobs for college graduates, not because people's wages have been held down for decades, but
00:21:39
Speaker
because of your local English department didn't properly prepare that student.
00:21:43
Speaker
That's why he or she is working at a warehouse at age 30.
00:21:47
Speaker
So I think to enable, really, to bring about neoliberalism, corporate America really needed something, and the fantasy economy really allowed that to happen.
00:21:57
Speaker
And again, I remember I graduated in 1986 from high school.
00:22:01
Speaker
It was almost like a weekly occurrence where another plant was shutting down.
00:22:05
Speaker
And it was always about, well, we just, the schools, they'd just deflect and talk about, well, the schools didn't prepare.
00:22:10
Speaker
Well, this...
00:22:11
Speaker
I don't know.
00:22:12
Speaker
The plant was doing fine for 80 years.
00:22:14
Speaker
What happened?
00:22:14
Speaker
All of a sudden in 1985, I mean, it made no sense at all, I think intuitively, but the message was so overwhelming and it was absolutely everywhere.
00:22:25
Speaker
And I make this argument in the book too.
00:22:26
Speaker
It's just absolutely everywhere.
00:22:28
Speaker
Unions were a little bit of a different message, but then what happened?
00:22:33
Speaker
Well, unions were slaughtered and most of them went away.
00:22:38
Speaker
And so when the academy is being funded by
00:22:41
Speaker
All these interests that are trying to sort of focus solely on the schools and unions are instead of a third of the workforce, they're about 10, 12 percent.
00:22:50
Speaker
You know, the rest is history, as they say.
00:22:54
Speaker
To kind of bring it back to that issue of neoliberalism, so far from the invisible hand, neoliberalism uses government intervention to make room explicitly for private capitalist market activity to the exclusion of all these other economic arrangements.
00:23:11
Speaker
So it's not exactly a coincidence that...
00:23:14
Speaker
these private foundations kind of rose to prominence and influence and agenda setting and driving public opinions about schools at the same time that the public influence and I guess the public nature of public education really has been downgraded with each successive decade and each successive type of reform.
00:23:36
Speaker
We were talking before I hit record that you were hesitant to put that in your subtitle, The Fantasy Economy, Neoliberalism, Inequality in the Education Reform Movement.
00:23:46
Speaker
And you've spoken about it here, about how, about why that's the label that you would give to these kinds of reforms.
00:23:54
Speaker
But could you speak to why you were hesitant at first to perhaps include that label in your title?
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, no, I was hesitant because I think my understanding of the term before I really changed my mind and put it in the subtitle was that's a very academic term.
00:24:11
Speaker
People are not going to understand it.
00:24:14
Speaker
People are going to dismiss the book.
00:24:17
Speaker
Oh, he's just another Marxist, et cetera.
00:24:20
Speaker
which I'm, of course, not.
00:24:21
Speaker
That's why I cite James Madison at the beginning and say, well, Madison talked about economic interests in the 1780s, long before Marx was born.
00:24:30
Speaker
But I think it's very important, especially to younger people, to have them understand
00:24:36
Speaker
And also, and everyone, but particularly younger people, by younger, I basically mean, I don't know, what am I talking about?
00:24:43
Speaker
People under the age of 35 or something?
00:24:45
Speaker
I mean, I'm not sure what the cutoff is, but this isn't always how things have worked.
00:24:51
Speaker
This isn't how capitalism has always worked.
00:24:54
Speaker
That we used to have a lot of organized labor in the United States.
00:24:57
Speaker
That employers used to have employer-sponsored defined benefit pensions.
00:25:03
Speaker
that we used to have regular or at least occasional increases at the national level in the minimum wage, that we didn't use to shut down plants when the stock was actually going up because it wasn't going up fast enough in order to relocate jobs overseas so the stock will go up at a faster rate.
00:25:25
Speaker
All of the stuff that the economy didn't use to be built only for owners and shareholders.
00:25:30
Speaker
This is a relatively recent thing.
00:25:32
Speaker
This is a 1980s thing, basically.
00:25:35
Speaker
The ideas have been around forever.
00:25:37
Speaker
And if you want to talk about the 19th century, that's another thing, right?
00:25:40
Speaker
That's before pretty much all regulation.
00:25:42
Speaker
But for most of the 20th century, right, we had a fairly active state and we had wide participation in labor unions.
00:25:52
Speaker
And of course, there was
00:25:55
Speaker
systemic racism and sexism, of course, those things were impeded.
00:26:01
Speaker
Democracy's development and the benefits of the economy were not shared equally.
00:26:08
Speaker
I'm not suggesting that they were.
00:26:10
Speaker
But at the same time, when you look at median wages and going up and down, a rising tide did lift all boats in 1950.
00:26:20
Speaker
And the CEO didn't make 450 times what an average worker at that employer made.
00:26:27
Speaker
Maybe, yeah, made a lot more.
00:26:28
Speaker
Sure.
00:26:28
Speaker
The CEOs have always made a lot more, but I mean, 50 or a hundred times more versus 400 times more, 350 times more.
00:26:36
Speaker
This stuff is all a recent development.
00:26:38
Speaker
And I wanted to make the point, like that word, I think captures it because that word really describes the last several decades in a concise way.
Cracks in the Fantasy Economy
00:26:47
Speaker
So that's why I landed on that word because
00:26:50
Speaker
And the book really is an argument in favor of how we got to, it's sort of a theory of neoliberalism, really, as much as anything else.
00:26:58
Speaker
Like, how did we get to this point?
00:26:59
Speaker
Yes, it's about the education reform movement, but it's really a, you know, a, I don't want to say theory or idea or book or whatever about how we got to all this inequality.
00:27:11
Speaker
And, uh, and, and why is it we're, how is it we got to the point where we're focusing solely on the schools to mitigate it when the schools can't change the labor market.
00:27:20
Speaker
So I thought neoliberalism was the best way to kind of concisely put that in the title.
00:27:25
Speaker
And, and I think the word is being used more, uh, in the last year or so more in mainstream discussion.
00:27:31
Speaker
Um, it's not solely an academic word.
00:27:35
Speaker
And, um,
00:27:36
Speaker
So I'm happy if I am in some small way to be a part of that.
00:27:40
Speaker
But people need to know, particularly younger people, this stuff is all just a set of choices that we've made in the last few decades.
00:27:48
Speaker
There's nothing inevitable about any of this.
00:27:51
Speaker
Exactly.
00:27:51
Speaker
The current situation, the current arrangements didn't fall from the sky or were gifted on stone tablets, right?
00:27:58
Speaker
It's part of this explicit political economic project.
00:28:02
Speaker
And I think your book, better than a lot of others that take that label for granted and just throw it out there, perhaps without defining it or anything else, your book makes a really explicit case for
00:28:14
Speaker
what this is, right?
00:28:15
Speaker
What are the bounds of this and how is the real economy and this fantasy economy distinct, but also how they're a product of this political project that you obviously root in the historical record too.
00:28:27
Speaker
And I think as we've been talking about, the fantasy economy has enjoyed this bipartisan support for decades and in my entire lifetime.
00:28:34
Speaker
I'm not here to make you feel old, Neil, but I was born in 1986.
00:28:38
Speaker
So it's all that I have known.
00:28:39
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:28:40
Speaker
The year you said you graduated from high school, I was like, oh, that's when I came into this earth.
00:28:44
Speaker
So, you know, it's something that I have lived with my entire lifetime.
00:28:48
Speaker
But I wonder, as school reform movements become associated with today, at least, right-wing extremism perceived negatively by popular majorities, I think we see...
00:29:00
Speaker
We've seen sort of the ebb and flow of the culture wars, the popularity of voucher programs at the K-12 level, perhaps even Josh Shapiro being passed up on the Harris ticket because of some voucher school baggage.
00:29:14
Speaker
And I think we've seen how disastrous it's been for higher ed takeovers, especially in Florida.
00:29:20
Speaker
I think like the new college and recent work that's come out about Ben Sasse's involvement at the University of Florida.
00:29:26
Speaker
And even how...
00:29:27
Speaker
notions of human capital have been challenged in the popular discourse.
00:29:31
Speaker
Like you've mentioned, more people, younger people, I think even popular YouTubers, streamers are talking more about this idea of neoliberalism and just how implausible these notions are when they're backed up by the reality, whether it's ideas of decades of educational decline that are super implausible, or even your book,
00:29:55
Speaker
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's work, John Shelton's The Education Myth, Annie Abrams Shortchanged, all these kind of popular things are coalescing around this idea.
00:30:05
Speaker
So I wonder, are there significant cracks that are beginning to emerge in the foundation of the fantasy economy, perhaps as it especially relates to education and
00:30:15
Speaker
I don't know if there's a second question.
00:30:17
Speaker
We can come back to this.
00:30:18
Speaker
But how do we reclaim those narratives about public education and make a positive case for learning for life rather than training for work?
Reclaiming Educational Narratives
00:30:27
Speaker
a lot wrapped up in there.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that there are cracks emerging, and I'm glad you mentioned those books, particularly John Shelton's book, The Education Myth, which is an outstanding book, and John's a good friend of mine and a great union leader and scholar, and he and I started to see our books.
00:30:46
Speaker
We were writing them at the same time, and we kept going back and forth and talking about, hey, yeah, what did you find?
00:30:52
Speaker
And hey, what did you find?
00:30:53
Speaker
And
00:30:54
Speaker
That sort of thing.
00:30:54
Speaker
So it was great to be writing at the same time he did.
00:30:58
Speaker
I think there are significant cracks.
00:30:59
Speaker
I mean, listen to, you know, there's a new ad in the Harris-Walls campaign in which she says something to the effect of, you know, we want an America where you can work one job and make a living or something to that effect.
00:31:23
Speaker
That's a cataclysmic shift from Clinton and Obama.
00:31:28
Speaker
Obama was very much a human capital guy, very much a school choice.
00:31:34
Speaker
He was just sort of a softened, watered-down version of Bill Clinton's bridge to the 21st century or whatever.
00:31:40
Speaker
And I think he sincerely believed all that.
00:31:44
Speaker
I'm not suggesting otherwise.
00:31:45
Speaker
I think Clinton, I guess he sincerely believed all that, that education can cure all these things.
00:31:53
Speaker
But I think that there's too much evidence to the contrary.
00:31:58
Speaker
Everybody knows someone who's, if not themselves, who has a degree that they owe $50,000 for a public university degree.
00:32:09
Speaker
Why is that?
00:32:10
Speaker
They have a master's degree and they're working in a job that doesn't really require a master's.
00:32:14
Speaker
It only requires a bachelor's or maybe a two-year or worse.
00:32:18
Speaker
Why is that?
00:32:20
Speaker
There's just millions of people in these categories.
00:32:24
Speaker
And you can only gaslight the public, I think, so long about how we just can't find enough skilled workers.
00:32:30
Speaker
I think the cracks are emerging because people know that, hey, down the street, six or eight miles, they just built another warehouse and there's 1,500 jobs.
00:32:41
Speaker
Those are the jobs that dominate our economy.
00:32:43
Speaker
And I think that's the way in to sort of reclaiming education.
00:32:50
Speaker
you know, that, you know, making education more about what it used to be more about and taken for granted, that it's about creating, you know, as you say, learning for life, about creating democratic citizens, about at every level, about human growth and just learning about history and literature and science and all the things that make for an educated person that
00:33:17
Speaker
that allow individuals to pursue their interests one day, that bring people joy and pleasure.
00:33:25
Speaker
And, you know, no, I'm not a poet or I'm not a literary person, but I love to go see plays because
00:33:35
Speaker
You know, I learned about drama and poetry and things like that in several of my classes or whatever, you know.
00:33:44
Speaker
I mean, it's about being a full person.
00:33:49
Speaker
And I think that the problem I encounter all the time and I think
00:33:56
Speaker
is that education, like I almost think there's more of an audience for what I'm saying outside of education.
00:34:01
Speaker
Within education, we talk so much.
00:34:06
Speaker
And I understand this.
00:34:07
Speaker
I mean, I just wrote a book about it.
00:34:08
Speaker
I mean, so much of this campaign has been targeted at us, targeted at education.
00:34:12
Speaker
I mean, a lot of the funded research is being done within ed schools, right?
00:34:16
Speaker
Within Teachers College at Columbia, within public policy schools, right?
00:34:23
Speaker
And so we're trying to sort of, at least the work that you mentioned by several people and myself, we're trying to get education to think differently about educators rather, to think differently about education and to talk differently about education.
00:34:42
Speaker
Because if we talk about nothing but STEM and we don't say, well, hey, wait a minute, there's really not a ton of STEM jobs.
00:34:49
Speaker
There never have been and there never will be.
00:34:52
Speaker
then it's not going to go well for us.
00:34:55
Speaker
It's not going to go well for us.
00:34:57
Speaker
Again, I cut educators slack because I read all their literature.
00:35:02
Speaker
That's what's in the book.
00:35:03
Speaker
I read all these reports by the Chronicle of Higher Ed and I quote them extensively.
00:35:08
Speaker
And this is what I admit, oh, all these light bulbs cut, this is why I hear this at all these meetings, right?
00:35:14
Speaker
Because this is all they're reading.
00:35:15
Speaker
These are all their conferences.
00:35:17
Speaker
And now, right now, the hard part is that
00:35:21
Speaker
oh, higher ed is getting it from all these different angles.
00:35:24
Speaker
And if you just read the higher ed press, it's just a constant stream of the public is losing confidence in higher ed, all the rest of it.
00:35:32
Speaker
Thanks a lot.
00:35:33
Speaker
Thanks for your support.
00:35:36
Speaker
I mean, this is the higher ed press, right?
00:35:38
Speaker
And not questioning any of the frames, not questioning any of the narratives, not questioning any of the data that's being presented to them.
00:35:47
Speaker
And then...
00:35:48
Speaker
Sure enough, administrators read all this stuff and come to meetings and say, well, guess what?
00:35:52
Speaker
We're going to jettison majors and build another STEM building.
00:35:56
Speaker
And this is happening at every university in the country, practically, except for elite schools and flagships.
00:36:01
Speaker
They're immune from this debate.
00:36:03
Speaker
But all the other schools, this is where it's all sort of playing out.
00:36:07
Speaker
So I guess my thought is always that educators need to think differently about education.
00:36:14
Speaker
Educators need to talk differently.
00:36:15
Speaker
Because if we don't, parents are not going to, students are going to think only instrumentally about education as job preparation and not about learning for life, as you say.
00:36:28
Speaker
And we're the ones doing it, right?
00:36:31
Speaker
But we have to talk differently and think differently about it, we as educators.
Closing and Call to Action
00:36:34
Speaker
And I think that that
00:36:36
Speaker
I see signs of that around the country, I do.
00:36:39
Speaker
No, well, that's great.
00:36:40
Speaker
I appreciate you taking the time to join me today, Neil.
00:36:43
Speaker
The book, of course, is The Fantasy Economy, Neoliberalism, Inequality in the Education Reform Movement.
00:36:48
Speaker
I would highly recommend that and getting involved in the work to help make these things possible at the local level, state level, national level to, like you said, Neil, change the dialogue, change the way that we think about education, to begin to make active policy changes to have that happen.
00:37:05
Speaker
So I appreciate you joining me today, Neil.
00:37:08
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:37:08
Speaker
I appreciate being here.
00:37:12
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:37:15
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:37:19
Speaker
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00:37:23
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:37:30
Speaker
Thank you.