It's Not Business as Usual: Implications of Business-Inspired School Reforms in the Era of Financialization

• In Event: 35.045 - The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses — Revisiting Larry Cuban's Book 15 Years Later

Abstract

Purpose
In The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can’t Be Businesses, Larry Cuban (2004) demonstrated why historical efforts to shape schools in the image of business have threatened their public ethos and democratic mission. But in 2004, scholars in disciplines such as sociology, political science, and economics, were just beginning to advance a research agenda focused on the “financialization” of the economy and documenting massive shifts in the governance, strategies, and cultures of private sector corporations since the 1970s (van der Zwan, 2014)—the era coinciding with standards-based reforms, accountability, and marketization in education. In light of this research, the purpose of this paper is to explore what it means for schools to emulate businesses in the era of financialization. In particular, what are the implications for the democratic mission of public schooling?

Theoretical Framework
The concept of financialization captures more than the growth in wealth and importance of the banking sector; it refers also to the way non-financial corporations have been destabilized as organizations in the name of shareholder value ideology (Lapavitsas, 2013). Facilitated through decades of deregulation policies, this destabilization has narrowed the array of stakeholders that corporations traditionally served, threatened the long-term sustainability of firms, and increased employee insecurity (Davis, 2009; Krippner, 2011; Lazonick, 2017; Locke & Spender, 2011; Sennett, 2006).

Mode of Inquiry and Evidence
This contribution, classified as a conceptual paper, presents evidence from recent business-inspired school reforms that demonstrate a remarkable consistency with the trends of financialization in the private sector. I draw evidence from new decentralization and privatization policies such as portfolio management (Mathis & Welner, 2016; Saltman, 2010), the rising influence of venture philanthropists (Kumashiro, 2012; Scott, 2009), and the use of high-risk, complex debt securities to fund public schools in a context of budget austerity (Russel, Sloan, & Smith, 2016). As in financialization, evidence from school reform points to policymakers’ tendency to defer to the market rather than make difficult political choices about how to distribute scarce resources. Evidence also points to the transfer of the risk associated with providing a public education onto individuals, including the teachers and leaders whose employment has become increasingly insecure and the students and families that public schools are intended to serve.

Conclusions and Scholarly Significance
Evidence of consistency between recent school reforms and trends in private sector financialization suggest that while business may have historically been a problematic model for public schooling in the U.S., business is now a uniquely unqualified model. This paper’s use of the concept of financialization allows us to understand how private sector firms conduct business today. In turn, financialization reveals not only “why schools can’t be businesses,” as Cuban’s (2004) subtitle claimed, but also why today’s businesses—based as they are on destabilization, insecurity, a short-term outlook, and a narrow purpose of serving only the few, most powerful stakeholders—pose even greater threats to the democratic mission of public schools.

Author

• Michael Ian Cohen, University of Northern Colorado