Kids Are the New Cash Crop: The Promise and Limits of Educating for Economic Development in the New South, 1960–2000

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

This poster encapsulates my dissertation, which traces changes in the political economy of the New South from the Jim Crow era during the late 20th century through a close examination of North Carolina education and economic development policy. It brings together histories of political economy, education, and civil rights in order to understand how a southern Jim Crow state transitioned from a low-wage industrial and agricultural political economy to the service oriented “New Economy” centered on “human capital” intensive endeavors such as finance, research, and automated manufacturing.

My project draws on archival government and nonprofit records, personal papers, and oral history to understand policy construction at the state level and its effects in the plantation belt in eastern North Carolina, where a break from the Jim Crow political economy promised the greatest possibilities for more equitable development. During the 1960s and 1970s, both white elites and African American activists in the black belt looked to industrial recruitment to stimulate economic growth. By the early 1980s, a policy network that grew out of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty uprooted intellectual and political support for low-road industrial recruitment as a development strategy. Converted policymakers promoted education at all levels to incubate small businesses, train skilled workers, and stimulate research. However, this strategy did little for rural areas and small towns, traditional centers of political power that depended on industrial recruitment after agricultural mechanization. Equity-oriented policymakers shed few tears for the loss of low-wage industries to Asia and Latin America. But their focus on “indigenous entrepreneurship” for rural development failed to stem rural job losses, placing outsized pressure on education to generate economic returns. While the “New Economy” meant more graduates could remain in the state’s urban hubs, rural communities were stuck as impoverished export zones whose best hope for their children was migration—albeit no longer necessarily out-of-state. Today, urban–rural political divides threaten public investments in education, research, and business creation that were vital to reinventing the state’s economy.

This dissertation stresses how the civil rights revolution created policy opportunities for educational investment and the pursuit of higher wage employment in the South. After 1965, new networks of liberals—white and African American—remained in the state to promote equitable development in state government as well as ostensibly private nonprofits. They focused policy attention on problems of outmigration, educational attainment, and equal opportunity in the workplace. This dissertation illuminates the role of liberals—rather than conservatives—in shaping the neoliberal turn in international political economy during the late 20th century. While other scholars have emphasized the way that conservative elites reshaped policy during the 1970s and 1980s, this dissertation shows why equity-oriented liberals framed education in market terms of “human capital” and emphasized economic, rather than democratic, rationales for schooling. By framing the economic transitions of a rural U.S. state in the context of the global fragmentation of production during the late 20th century, this work brings attention to the constraints on policymakers who sought to reduce inequality in what we now see as a new “Age of Inequality.”

Author

• William D. Goldsmith, Duke University