The Political Economy of School Lunch: Neoliberalism and the Welfare State

• In Event: Confronting Neoliberal Education: Policy Reform, Institutional Negotiations, and Possibilities for Structural Change

Abstract

Background and Objectives

“Reforming the public schools has long been a favorite way of improving not just education but society” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995, p. 1). The establishment of universal and compulsory schooling nurtured not only massive growth in public education during the twentieth century, but also created the institution in which it was most convenient to locate social provision programs (Cohen, 2005), and thus shaped the rationale for them in terms of educational opportunity rather than merely the elimination of poverty (Cohen, 2005; Katz, 2013; Kantor & Lowe, 2013). Schooling is thus a defining component in the creation, expansion, and character of the American welfare state.

The federal National School Lunch and Breakfast Program (NSLP), established in 1946, and administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), subsidizes and regulates the serving of more than seven billion meals per year (USDA, 2014). The program’s most recent reauthorization: the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHKFA) of 2010, endeavors to expand access to the USDA’s child nutrition programs as a means to “reduce childhood hunger, [and] improve the nutritional quality of meals to promote health and address childhood obesity” (Congress, 2010, p. 2). My study examines the NSLP and HHKFA as quintessential examples of an “educationalized welfare state” (Kantor & Lowe, 2013).

Conceptual Framework and Methods

This research employs cultural political economy (Sayer, 2001) as a conceptual framework for examining the historical and contemporary landscape of school food, which allows for an exploration of the linkages between “education policy… and larger political, economic, and cultural processes…. [that] cannot be understood fully if considered distinct from broader social policy and ideological discourses….” (Dumas & Anyon, 2006, p. 149). Furthermore, critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993), and critical policy analysis (Lipman, 2011) were used to analyze congressional reports and hearings regarding the HHKFA. This analysis attends to the ways in which the neoliberal ethos influenced policy-makers’ understanding and framing of the issues of hunger and obesity and the use of education policy and schools to address it.

Findings and Scholarly Contribution

This research finds that market-oriented school food policies and programs have opened the cafeteria door to private, corporate interests at the expense of children’s nutritional needs. Furthermore, HHKFA has located the issues of hunger and obesity at the individual rather than structural level, and has thus failed to redress the intersected inequities of class and race reflected in the disproportionate rates of hunger and obesity among poor communities of color. While this research finds that there is a need to move beyond educational prescriptions in the work of solving our nation’s problems, an analysis of the case of school food emphasizes the important role that schooling plays in the nation’s social welfare; and thus portends the ways in which the privatization of public education undermines welfare provision in the United States, and increases social inequality in a way that is dangerous to the democratic foundations and possibilities of our system of education, and ultimately the nation.

Author

• Christyna Serrano, University of California - Berkeley