Capitalism vs. education: Why our free-market obsession is wrecking the future

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/capitalism_vs_education_why_our_free_market_obsessions_are_wrecking_the_future/


Michelle Rhee, Karl Marx, Michael Bloomberg (Credit: Reuters/Hyungwon Kang/Wikimedia/Jonathan Ernst/Salon)

The 2014 State of the Union address was billed as the speech in which President Obama would finally reveal himself as the progressive champion we’d been promised. In the weeks prior, senior administration officials leaked word that the president would use his platform to declare income inequality the “defining challenge of our time,” a claim he’d first made two years prior, in a highly touted speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. Then, in early February, news came that the phrase “income inequality” had been scrapped from subsequent drafts, replaced by an emphasis on “ladders of opportunity.”

In Osawatomie, the president decried runaway inequality as a threat to the legitimacy of American democracy. In the State of the Union, he paid lip service to the divergent fortunes of “those at the top” and of average wage earners, before transitioning into boilerplate calls for improving education and cutting taxes on domestic manufacturers. As the “ladders” metaphor suggests, the speech framed the crisis facing the vaunted middle class as one of economic mobility, rather than inequality. The word “inequality” was spoken only three times, “opportunity,” thirteen.

Even in Osawatomie, after describing in bracing detail how automation and globalization devalued American labor, producing an economy where weak demand is propped up by credit card debt, the president transitioned from diagnosis to prescription. Not with a call for robust income redistribution, or a proposal for aggressive government hiring, but by declaring, “We need to meet the moment… It starts by making education a national mission.”

The point here is less to criticize the Obama administration’s timidity than to illustrate the incredible onus our politics places on education. We have an economy in which 46.5 million Americans live in poverty, the real unemployment rate is above 12 percent, and our 400 wealthiest citizens enjoy as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. But a political system designed for gridlock, the grossly disproportionate influence of the rich, and Americans’ ideological aversion to class politics conspire to make it politically inadvisable for a Democratic president to even speak the words “income inequality” before a national audience. Absent the political will to explore redistributive structural reforms, we’re left with “ladders of opportunity,” and a vision of economic salvation through higher test scores.