The Politics of Wisconsin's Educational Budget "Crises": Political Discourses of Scarcity, Normalization, and the Dangerous Outsider

• In Event: Interrogating Governing Discourses in Early Childhood and Childhood Studies and Policies Through a Foucauldian Lens

Abstract

Educational policy changes made in Wisconsin during the months preceding the 2016 elections in the United States are frequent and large-scale, linked to speeches about budget crises and ideas about valuing education. In recent months, teacher certification requirements, tenure for university professors, and funding for public schools, universities, and charter schools have been the focus of debate, or changed without debate. Through various mechanisms of power, education has been made scarce on a public school level (Kindergarten through university levels); one of the rationales for this scarcity is due to budgetary manipulations. At the same time, high value is placed on education, evaluating the “success” and “value” of individuals and nations through the lens of human capital theory (see Lightfoot Rueda & Peach, in press, projected publication August 2015). This intersection of these highly-charged discourses creates a sense of tension and competition for scarce resources.
Another of the early twenty-first century taken-for-granted ideas is that of “normalization”. By implementation of national educational policies and by creating rigorous standards for teaching and assessment (of children and of teachers), then linking these standards to graduation (for students) and promotion or job continuation (for teachers) these standards and the tests which accompany them are the priorities in discourses about education. The accompanying idea is of the non-normal as a “dangerous outsider”:
The normal was one of a pair. Its opposite was the pathological [italics added]
and for a short time its domain was chiefly medical. Then it moved into the
sphere of – almost everything. (Hacking, 1990, pp. 160)
Linking normality with pathology as Hacking does nuances the designation of “not normal”. Non-normality was not only linked with disease, it moved into a prediction about the future of the child who was at risk. The designation of “at risk” loses the rich depth of experience and strength of diverse lives into the flattened categorization of not normal, suspect, or diseased; as Foucault says: “Disease is perceived fundamentally in a space of projection without depth, of coincidence without development. There is only one plane and one moment” (Foucault, 1973, p. 6). Ignoring social issues such as unequal access to economic and social resources, and giving only a nod to the impact of cultural differences on schooling issues such as ways of learning (i.e. cooperative vs. competitive), social groupings, standardized test performance, and language use results in an ongoing “problem” and economy of “reform” for children who are marginalized in a monolithic society.
In this analysis I posit that these policy changes and the ideas about the value of education are part of the “chimera of scarcity” (Foucault, 2007), and of the dangerous outsider, used to shape and manipulate the emotions of voters. I talk about these intertwining threads of power and the chimera of scarcity, drawing on by Foucault on the politics of scarcity, educational policy changes in Wisconsin in late 2015-early 2016, and ideas about normalization and the dangerous outsider.

Author

• Ruth Peach