“WHAT YOU EARN DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU LEARN”
Education Presidents, Education Governors, and Human Capital Rising
While Reagan’s presidency shrunk the promise of American social democracy, it did not arrest the growth of the notion that investing in education could serve the alchemical purpose of ensuring all Americans had the equal opportunity to compete in an uncertain world. As the Democratic Party shifted right, employing education as the means to arm working Americans with the skills to compensate for the government interventions that would no longer be there, some Republicans like George H.W. Bush sought to show their education bona fides too. Supporting public education allowed Bush to separate himself from the hard-hearted approach of Reagan while cultivating a conservative version of the education myth. Indeed, Bush was responding to the fact that public education had grown as a political concern for Americans, particularly in the years after A Nation at Risk and myriad other reports asserted the system was in decline. The 1988 campaign, in fact, was the first in American history to have a primary debate (there was one for each party in fact) solely on education. Dukakis could tout his experience with education reform as governor of Massachusetts, and Bush sought to counter it by prioritizing human capital on the campaign trail.
At a New Hampshire high school in January 1988, Bush proclaimed, “I want to be the Education President. I want to lead a renaissance of quality in our schools.”1 Elsewhere, splicing together Lyndon Johnson’s assumptions about education and the clarion call of ANAR, Bush asserted, “I believe as I look into the future—our ability to compete around the world, our ability to solve the problems of poverty that are unsolved in this country . . . whatever it is, education has got to be the priority. Better schools mean better jobs.”2
Bush had run as an establishment Republican against Reagan in 1980, famously referring to the Gipper’s supply-side fantasies as “voodoo economics.” After winning the primary, Reagan added Bush to the ticket that year for ideological balance. More conservative Republicans continued to be skeptical of Bush in 1988, and he had had to move to the right on abortion and evangelical Christianity in order to win the nomination.3 Still, on a number of issues, he remained more moderate than Reagan, and with heavily racist undertones, he attacked Dukakis for permitting a “revolving door” policy on crime. Bush easily defeated the Massachusetts Democrat by 7 percentage points in the popular vote and a large majority in the electoral college (426–111). Initiating the push for national standards, Bush as president helped to further advance the idea that human capital through education represented the means for American workers to find opportunity and, if they succeeded, security, in a globalizing world. Given the increasing characterization of education as a commodity, it is not a surprise that more conservative political figures than Bush also, for the first time, successfully won market-based education reforms like vouchers. In Wisconsin, Governor Tommy Thompson developed the latter policy in concert with civil rights activists in 1989. This reform leaned on the education myth to do the work of building consent for school choice: its proponents argued that the connection between education and economic opportunity was too important—particularly for communities who had been locked out of good jobs—to deny parents a choice.
Democrats, however, were best equipped to employ the education myth for political gain. The DLC became much more politically assertive after 1988, and its most important figure, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, was the nation’s single loudest purveyor of the education myth. Clinton’s coronation as chair of the DLC in 1990 represented the culmination of a major shift in the Democratic Party. In a more globally integrated America, Clinton and other new Democrats believed American working people could no longer hope good blue-collar jobs would come back, and it was folly to even try to protect them. Instead, they should embrace change, and one of government’s most important roles would be to ensure everyone had a fair shake, without any guarantees, in the world economy.
Indeed, during his career as governor of Arkansas and on the campaign trail in 1992, Clinton consciously turned his back on political support for those Americans who sought blue-collar livelihoods.4 To even attempt to credibly advance such a move, however, Democrats like Clinton had to argue they could ensure public education functioned better. Schools, they believed, had to respond to market forces by meeting the needs of employers for more skilled workers in a meritocratic economy increasingly centered on “knowledge.” As had earlier efforts at federal education policy such as ESEA, the agenda of Clinton and the DLC used education and other social policies to overcome supposed “deficiencies” that existed in those left behind by American capitalism. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric, marked by the often-repeated phrase “What you earn depends on what you learn,” highlighted the fact that by 1992, investing in public education and advancing the notion of meritocracy represented the central economic argument of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the social democratic alternatives FDR proposed in the Second Bill of Rights or those for which Randolph, Rustin, King, Humphrey, Hawkins, and Scott King had advocated in the 1960s and 1970s were increasingly absent from the party’s political center.
From Charlottesville to America 2000
True to his campaign promise, President Bush made public education a rhetorical priority during his first year in office. In the years after ANAR, calls to make the American education system more competitive to enhance human capital for economic purposes had continued at a rapid pace. For example, the Committee for Economic Development, an organization comprised of business executives and educators, in 1985, pointed to “increasing evidence that education has a direct impact on employment, productivity, and growth, and on the nation’s ability to compete in the world economy.” The committee contrasted low graduation rates and the “lack of preparation for work” among those who did graduate against the higher graduation rates and science and math test scores of the Japanese.5
Workforce 2000 (1987), a futurist report based on the research of experts published by the conservative Hudson Institute, argued that the nation’s new jobs would require more education. Funded by Reagan’s Department of Labor, the study essentially advocated more focus on job preparation—both in and out of schools—which would purportedly make American workers more competitive. Workforce 2000 predicted that the economy of the 1990s would be marked by relatively steady growth, a more diverse workforce, and a larger share of service jobs (a trend Daniel Bell had pointed to in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society). It would be pointless to try save manufacturing work, the report argued, and instead Americans should focus on training workers for jobs that required “much higher skills.”6
The report called on the United States to continue its shift away from worrying about its share of world trade. Instead, Workforce 2000 asserted American policymakers should work to improve overall economic growth, particularly in the Global South, while making the new service industries (in healthcare, education, retail, and government) in the United States more productive. To do these things, American policymakers needed to better tap the nation’s human potential, making the workforce more inclusive by “reconcil[ing] the conflicting needs of women, work, and families” and “integrat[ing] Black and Hispanic workers fully into the economy.” Workforce 2000 rightly advocated for policies improving working conditions and benefits for women workers. As for integrating minorities excluded from the job market, however, the report continued the well-worn path of the Great Society, Reagan’s job-training fantasies, and Hart’s call for entrepreneurialism to argue that minorities needed “both cultural changes and education and training investments.” Schools were vital, because “as the economy grows more complex and more dependent on human capital, the standards set by the American education system must be raised” by introducing more market competition.7
Economist Gary Becker also pointed out that in 1989, the diminished wages of young Americans by the end of the Reagan years had “stimulated renewed academic interest in the analysis of human capital.” Giving the University of Chicago’s Ryerson lecture in 1989, Becker asserted, without accounting for the downward pressure on wages from capital flight, lack of a jobs plan, or the concerted war against unions, that
trends in the earnings of young persons in the United States provide good reason for concern about the preparation they are receiving. The trend has been disastrous for the 15 percent of all students and much larger percentage of inner-city blacks who fail to complete high school. Their real wage rates have fallen by more than 30 percent since the early 1970s. Whether because of school problems, family instability, or other forces, young people without a college education are not being adequately prepared for work in modern economies.8
Governors, particularly those leading southern states, also sought to make public education more responsive to the supposed needs of employers, assuming it would attract more business to their region. The National Governors Association (NGA), for instance, became a prominent proponent of the notion that improving education outcomes would, in the words of Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, allow Americans to “meet stiff competition from workers in the rest of the world.” That year, in fact, the NGA put into place an “action plan” creating seven task forces representing, in the words of one observer, “probably the most concentrated effort ever mobilized [in the NGA’s history] for the improvement of education.”9 The next year, the NGA published a report entitled Time for Results: The Governors 1991 Report on Education, which pushed for higher standards for teachers and students, new technologies, and more efficient use of resources in schools.10 In an appearance on Meet the Press to discuss American teaching practices, Alexander argued that state governments sought reforms because “this goes to the bottom line of every American family—will your paycheck be less in the ’90s because we can’t compete with Koreans who are ready to outdo us? I think the public is going to demand of us that we do it and the governors, I believe, are ready to push.”11
Though the southern governors who supported this argument included Republicans like Alexander, prominent proponents also included DLC education reformers like Arkansas’s Bill Clinton, South Carolina’s Richard Riley, and North Carolina’s Jim Hunt. (Clinton and Riley, for instance, had each chaired one of the NGA’s task forces in 1987.) Clinton was the most prominent of a group of southern governors who consciously sought to employ what historian Brent Cebul has called “supply-side liberalism”—good fiscal stewardship and state-led postindustrial economic development—to move in the 1980s beyond the assumptions of the New Deal.12 Education and human capital played a prominent role in that overarching vision.
President Bush believed the states were vital in improving America’s schools and had pledged on the campaign trail to prioritize working with governors. Once in office, his administration organized a national education summit, held in September 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia. For Bush, the purpose of the summit, just the third time in American a history a president had organized a meeting with the nation’s governors, was twofold: cultivating an image as a prominent supporter of education and developing strategies for helping states improve education.
Democrats went into the summit seeking investment: Clinton, by then chair of the Democratic Governors Association, called for dramatically enhanced federal funding for education and saw reform as vital for the future of poor and minority students.13 The NEA also argued for more federal education funding. Citing education cuts since Reagan took office, President Keith Geiger pointed out, “There is no issue more important to our nation’s future than education. . . . Money will not cure every problem that ails education, but it is short-sighted to believe that the cure won’t require any more money.”14
At the summit, there was ample time built in for informal conversations, many of them shielded from the gaze of the media. The meeting featured six working groups, each of which was co-chaired by one Democratic and one Republican governor. The working groups included the topics of teaching and learning, governance, school choice, postsecondary education, and perhaps most important, “A Competitive Workforce and Life-Long Learning.”15 Employing assumptions pushed extensively since ANAR, the latter working group took as given that “as a nation we face the twin challenges of educating our youngsters in the latest technologies while encouraging our older workers to acquire new skills. We cannot afford a poorly trained workforce if we are to maintain our position of world leadership.” The group called for businesses to partner with schools to ensure students had the right education for the supposed growing number of jobs requiring advanced learning, lauded the JTPA for providing valuable job training, and called on states to invest more of their funds in similar programs. It also proposed greater assessment of college graduates and for “strengthening the teaching of math, science, engineering, and increasing the number of graduates in these fields.”16
The summit’s conclusions, a joint statement by the president and the governors, framed future recommendations by calling for a set of national goals:
As a Nation we must have an educated workforce, second to none, in order to succeed in an increasingly competitive world economy. Education has always been important, but never this important because the stakes have changed: Our competitors for opportunity are also working to educate their people. As they continue to improve, they make the future a moving target. We believe that the time has come, for the first time in U.S. History, to establish clear, national performance goals, goals that will make us internationally competitive.17
The next January, Bush, after working with the governors, announced six national education goals in his 1990 State of the Union address. In a speech that reflected on the winding down of the Cold War, the president asserted:
In the tough competitive markets around the world, America faces great challenges and great opportunities. And we know that we can succeed in the global economic arena of the nineties, but to meet that challenge, we must make some fundamental changes—some crucial investment in ourselves.
Yes, we are going to invest in America. This administration is determined to encourage the creation of capital, capital of all kinds: physical capital—everything from our farms and factories to our workshops and production lines, all that is needed to produce and deliver quality goods and quality services; intellectual capital—the source of ideas that spark tomorrow’s products; and of course our human capital—the talented work force that we’ll need to compete in the global market.
Let me tell you, if we ignore human capital, if we lose the spirit of American ingenuity, the spirit that is the hallmark of the American worker, that would be bad.
Then after thanking Clinton and a handful of other governors, Bush called on the nation, by 2000, to ensure every student went to school “ready to learn”; every student was assessed at least once every four years; the high school graduation rate increased to 90 percent; the United States had the best students in the world in math and science; the nation’s schools would be drug free; and most fantastically, that “every American adult [would] be a skilled, literate worker and citizen.”18 The next summer, the president and the NGA established a National Education Goals Panel, comprised of officials from the executive branch, six governors, and four congressional leaders, which would measure both the federal and state governments’ progress.19
While Bush and the nation’s governors did the most to advance the human capital imperative in the late 1980s and early 1990s, business interests did their part to further the notion that investing in education was necessary for workers to succeed in a competitive global economy. Fortune magazine, for instance, began hosting an annual summit on education beginning in 1988. The 1990 summit illustrates how businesses pushed for investment in individual human capital. Jim Hayes, publisher of the magazine, lauded Clinton for his work in advocating for public education before pointing out that “business executives are indeed taking a leadership position in the long-term revolution to save public education.” Lamenting the decline of standards for students, Hayes argued that “corporate America is determined to find ways to help schools turn out a new generation of workers who can read, write, compute, and yes, think, if for no other reason than for pure survival.”20
The evening’s featured speaker, however, went even further. President of Brown University, Vartan Gregorian, placed the moment in the broader sweep of American history. Citing the support for education in the nineteenth century, Gregorian pointed out that “America placed its fate in the future by developing public schools for all. It did so in the belief that a better-educated citizenry would inevitably provide a stronger democratic society and a more prosperous one.” Following the well-worn path of declension charted by ANAR, Gregorian fretted that the system now faced four challenges: “functional illiteracy, growth and explosion of knowledge and complexity of learning, a mismatch between skill and talent, and the decline of our public-school system.” Because of the rapid shift of technology, “the age of industry . . . is yielding to the age of information. Technical knowledge becomes obsolete so quickly that one can no longer bank on the skills of a single specialty. What we need learn, therefore, is how to learn, ever over and over again.”
Citing the leaders of Xerox and Apple Computers, in addition to the Workforce 2000 report, Gregorian worried about the slow growth of the economy and pointed out that women, minorities, and immigrants were increasingly entering the American workforce, making it much more diverse than before. Specifically referring to the “new knowledge economy,” Gregorian argued, “investing in science and engineering and having a well-educated technical and skilled work force is becoming a high national priority of our Nation.” He then lauded the corporate leaders—Coca Cola, R.J. Nabisco, IBM, and GE, for example—taking it on themselves to invest their own money and “prestige” into pushing the American education system onto the right course. He concluded by calling for a “new form of alliance” between businesses and the nation’s schools and universities to ensure students had the skills they needed to compete in this new global economy. Of course, Gregorian’s argument said little about the necessity of higher minimum wages, more power for workers in the workplace, or social supports for those who could not make it in this more competitive world. But an argument that education was responsible for the problems inherent in the American economy was palatable to corporations and politicians alike because it meant little had to fundamentally change.21
By the end of 1990, Bush worried about his reelection prospects without a major political achievement in public education. He swapped out his education secretary Lauro Cavazos (a holdover from the Reagan administration who replaced Bennett in 1988) with Lamar Alexander. Alexander was an articulate public advocate for education reform, and in April 1991 he and Bush unveiled a plan called America 2000, which called for tests that governors could voluntarily adopt to measure progress toward the nation’s education goals. It also proposed the New American Schools Development Corporation, to be led by business leaders to “generate innovation in education”; merit pay schemes for teachers; and report cards for states and school districts. Most controversially, the plan also called for private school vouchers. Congressional Republicans opposed the increased federal presence in education, while Democrats opposed both the voucher scheme and the proposal’s limited fiscal investment. The bill that left the Democratic Congress conference committee rejected most of Bush’s initial proposals, including vouchers, the business innovation corporation, and testing. The conference bill was filibustered in the Senate and died before reaching the president’s desk.22 While Bush failed to pass any major education reforms, by turning so much public attention to the schools, his four years in office did a good deal to strengthen the education myth, particularly since he was the most prominent Republican up to that point in American history to push it.
Vouchers for Human Capital
The movement to make schools “accountable” galvanized space for disruptive education reform efforts. Some of these reforms built on calls from far right, free-market conservatives to have schools compete in the same way private businesses competed for sales or even in the way nations supposedly competed with each other in a zero-sum game for economic opportunities. Some of these plans continued Bennett’s argument for choice, that families should choose schools that taught their preferred values, while others argued choice would ensure those who lacked opportunity could maximize it by shopping around for better education. The latter represented a rational response for parents who had been told for two decades that the acquisition of human capital would, as if by magic, make their children successful in a supposed economic meritocracy. By the end of the 1980s, this competition appeared to be even more critical as the possibility of other aspects of social democracy—such as public-sector jobs, union representation, and under Reagan, in particular, social services—had been stripped away. In other words, though the impetus for choice-based models largely came from education reformers, more choice in public education—particularly when deep inequities existed, as in the case of race—made sense as a rational response to neoliberalism.
The Charlottesville summit had featured a working group on Choice and Restructuring that took as its premise that “the more parents accept responsibility for the educational progress of their children, the more likely it is the children will succeed.” The group concluded that choice “stimulates efforts to improve our schools by inspiring constructive competition among schools and encouraging parents to get involved in school improvement efforts.” The working group lauded Minnesota, which had passed two laws in 1987 and 1988 under Democrat-Farmer-Labor governor Rudy Perpich giving families in the state the opportunity to choose schools across districts. While it did not get into the discussion of charters (at that time, a conversation just beginning) or vouchers (as Bennett had been pushing) the working group argued that states should expand choice by creating more public magnet schools.23
Charter schools would ultimately become the primary avenue for reformers to push school choice in America, but conservative advocates in the late 1980s and 1990s mainly advocated for the more obviously market-based voucher model. Given the years of calls for developing human capital as the only solution to ensure Americans had a shot at long-term economic security, it made sense that calls for vouchers would be strongly linked to the education myth.
The first argument for vouchers in the United States dates to 1955, when neoclassical economist Milton Friedman (a colleague and mentor of Gary Becker at the University of Chicago who also espoused a conservative version of the education myth) made the case that Americans should be free to spend the dollars allocated for their children’s public education at any institution of their choosing. In an essay entitled “The Role of Government in Education,” Friedman outlined the principle that government intervention should be as limited as possible. In fact, he believed there were only three basic functions for government: (1) enforcing contracts and ensuring free markets, (2) mitigating “neighborhood effects” in which an individual’s actions imposed costs on other people for which they could not be individually compensated, and (3) “paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible individuals.” Friedman believed that since society required a citizenry with a minimum level of common values and literacy (though he had a much less grand vision for society than Horace Mann), and since there were so many differences between the means of parents, schools should be supported by the state. He argued, however, that government should not have the authority to determine the kind of education for which tax dollars paid. In Friedman’s ideal system, government
would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, non-profit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units.
But Friedman also argued government should not directly subsidize education—here he largely referred to professional education—that primarily enhanced one’s human capital. Because these investments paid off directly to individuals, Friedman believed the state should stop subsidizing such programs and instead offer additional financing for such “capital” just as businesses could borrow to attain physical capital. He argued such investments should be paid off over time as workers earned higher wages.24
In the years since Friedman’s essay, voucher schemes—called “tuition grants” to private schools—were employed by southern segregationists to circumvent court-ordered desegregation. They were also supported by some liberals as a creative method for desegregating schools. By 1980, Friedman had won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on inflation and gained a prominent platform to push for vouchers in the ten-part series that aired on PBS that year called Free to Choose (an entire episode was devoted to arguing for school vouchers). Constituencies frustrated by teacher strikes in the early 1980s, inspired by Friedman, also advocated for vouchers as an alternative to the public school system.25
In addition to Friedman, William Bennett, of course, had also pushed for vouchers in the Reagan administration, in service of preserving American values. But it wasn’t until notions about the importance of accessing human capital had become political commonsense that conservative voucher advocates were able to gain traction with other political constituencies. The best example of this is the influential book published in 1990 by John Chubb and Terry Moe, two fellows at the centrist Brookings Institution. Chubb and Moe spent the 1980s studying public schools. Building from the premise that the nation’s schools were failing, the duo diverged from the recommendations of ANAR, arguing that the “existing institutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the problem.” The authors pointed to the growing realization, particularly among the business community, that the education system, as the institution “responsible for shaping America’s ‘human capital,’ understandably attracted close scrutiny. . . . From an economic standpoint, America clearly needed better—and more rigorous education. But beyond that, it needed education of a different kind.” A “dynamic economy well suited to modern conditions,” Chubb and Moe agreed with the education system’s critics, “requires workers who are not only technically knowledgeable and well trained, but who also have the capacity for creative, independent thought and action—since technology and the requirements of productivity are constantly changing and cannot be learned once and for all.”26 To complete the reforms necessary to achieve educational excellence, reformers needed to circumvent the teacher unions and other education professionals with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Chubb and Moe’s analysis of the nation’s schools argued that private schools were “organized more effectively than public schools are and . . . this is a reflection of their far greater autonomy from external (bureaucratic) control.” This premise led the authors to conclude that public schools needed to be liberated to meet the supposed needs of businesses and consumers, and the way to do that was through choice. Parents should be able, the authors argued, to send their kids to any school that met their needs. Chubb and Moe assumed parents had both the knowledge and motivation to help their kids acquire the appropriate human capital, and a competition on these grounds would force public schools to improve once they began losing students.27
A major problem with this logic, of course, was the assumption that schools that “do a better job of satisfying consumers will be more likely to prosper and proliferate.”28 For how would parents, even if they approved of a school’s pedagogical goals or believed their children were prospering, know whether their kids’ long-term human capital needs were actually being served by schools until years after they entered the job market? Further, even if this logic worked, what would happen to those students whose parents had no interest in helping them select the right schools? And what if, even after students acquired the right “human capital,” they still lived in a community in which there were few jobs and they lacked either the will or the resources to relocate?
Despite these obvious problems, Chubb and Moe proposed the education system be realigned through a system of indirect vouchers, as their scheme would ensure that states remove most regulations, including tenure protections and reducing standards for teachers to the bare minimum. “Any group or organization that applies to the state and meets these minimal criteria,” they concluded, “must then be chartered as a public school and granted the right to accept students and receive public money. Existing private schools will be among those eligible to participate.”29 Though this system was not technically a voucher system, by opening up public dollars to virtually any school, it was a voucher scheme in all but name.
Indeed, though all-out voucher schemes have not been nearly as prevalent in American school districts as charters have, vouchers attained their first permanent toehold in American politics in 1989 in Wisconsin, just as Chubb and Moe finished the empirical research that supported Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. The Wisconsin story is illustrative since it brought together a surprising coalition of conservative Republicans under Governor Tommy Thompson and Democratic-leaning civil rights activists.
Milwaukee followed the pattern of many American cities in the twentieth century: thousands of African Americans after World War II moved there seeking good jobs and to escape the unapologetic white supremacy of the South. In the 1960s, civil rights activists sought to desegregate schools and housing and faced brutal resistance from whites in the city, prompting the moniker the “Selma of the North.”30 Though these efforts led to some important changes, Milwaukee continued on its path as one of the most racially unequal cities in America, a distinction it still holds today. In part, this inequality was exacerbated by the fact that the city lost the most manufacturing jobs of any in the country between 1960 and 1985.31 As had been the case elsewhere, this decline disproportionately impacted African Americans.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Black Power activist Howard Fuller led a fight for community control over schools and resisted integration schemes that put the burden on African Americans to leave neighborhood schools to go elsewhere.32 Fuller worked with Polly Williams, an activist elected to the state legislature, in 1987–88, to establish an independent, all-Black district within Milwaukee. The plan was premised on the idea that integration efforts had failed, and so Blacks needed control over their own schools. Opposed by the NAACP and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA), the bill made it through the state assembly but ultimately failed in the senate.33
A Democrat, Williams believed liberalism had failed to provide her constituents in Milwaukee access to good jobs, housing, and schools, which motivated her to work with Republicans when she thought doing so would expand these opportunities. “If you’re drowning and a hand is extended to you,” she argued at a conservative PAC’s American Opportunities Workshop hosted by Newt Gingrich in 1990, “you don’t ask if the hand is attached to a Democrat or a Republican. From the African American position—at the bottom, looking up—there’s not much difference between the Democrats and the Republicans anyway. Whoever is sincere about working with us, our door is open.” Williams’s support for vouchers made her a favorite of conservatives, and she counted Bennett, Alexander, and President Bush among her supporters. Williams, in fact, served as the featured speaker at conferences sponsored by Bush’s Department of Education, the conservative Bradley Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the conservative newspaper the Washington Times.34
Catholics in Milwaukee had sought vouchers in the city since the 1950s, and many Republicans across the country took an interest in vouchers in the late 1980s.35 One of those Republicans was the state’s governor Tommy Thompson, who had won election in 1986 in part by feeding off the resentments of white Wisconsinites toward public employees, Native Americans, and African American welfare recipients.36 After taking office, Thompson garnered national attention for seeking to discipline the poor. Working with a Democratic legislature, Thompson succeeded in passing two programs—Workfare and Learnfare—which tied welfare payments to job training and the school attendance of the kids of AFDC recipients, respectively.37
In his 1988 budget address, influenced by Bennett’s call for using religious schools to build conservative values, Thompson proposed a voucher program for secular and religious schools in Milwaukee County. Prominent supporters of vouchers in Milwaukee also included the Bradley Foundation. Chartered in 1942 as a philanthropic organization funded by the Allen-Bradley Company, the foundation’s assets exploded in value when Allen-Bradley was sold in 1985, and it became a prominent political actor bankrolling conservative politics and think tanks across the country. Bradley, in fact, was a major funder of Chubb and Moe’s study.38
For African Americans in the city, the call for vouchers came at a time in which activists were looking for new ideas for schools that had not been successful in overcoming the poverty and trauma Black students experienced. In this context, though Williams opposed programs like Learnfare, she was open to working with Thompson on vouchers. After the legislature deleted Thompson’s voucher plan from the budget, he introduced a new version in 1989. Though this proposal did not pass either, the idea was picking up steam. In March, Milwaukee Area Technical College hosted a conference on education, which included Chubb, Moe, and Fuller. The crowd, according to historian James Nelsen, “clearly favored the voucher advocates.”39 Williams developed her own voucher plan, in part to counter a school district plan that would only allow vouchers for the families of “at-risk” kids. Williams’s proposal was centered on Milwaukee and only included nonsectarian private schools. The Parental Options Choice Bill, as it was eventually called, was introduced in the assembly in October 1989, and after making it through both houses of the legislature, Thompson signed it into law on April 27, 1990. Though liberal white Democrats, the NAACP, and teacher union lobbyists opposed it, Williams and Fuller both supported it, and enough Democrats joined the legislature’s Republicans to pass the nation’s first voucher program outside the South. The law would pay for 1 percent of Milwaukee students to go to private, nonsectarian schools. Several years later the program would be expanded to include religious schools, too. Other states have since experimented with vouchers, including Ohio, which in 1995 also passed a law funding private school vouchers in Cleveland.40
Williams’s perspective on vouchers, connected to the promise of economic security, is notable. The Democrat supported the proposal because the effort to integrate schools in Milwaukee, she argued, had failed miserably to serve Black children. “Our children are filling up white schools that were half empty,” she remarked in 1990. “The only value black students had was (state) money. . . . They want to keep the white neighborhood schools stable and keep their people employed. . . . Our kids are put in ‘cages’—put on buses. Their kids are safe and secure in their own environments with their mommies and daddies.”41 As her comments make clear, despite the promise of Brown v. Board of Education as well as the efforts of social democrats like the Kings, Randolph, Rustin, Hawkins, and Chisolm, the United States had failed in powerful ways to ensure many African Americans access to economic security. After decades of failures by Democrats—and the growing disregard of social democracy by Republicans like Reagan and Thompson—it made sense to seek greater choice, particularly if access to human capital represented the only shot at a good job. In many important ways, the voucher movement signified the fracturing of the American tradition of common culture through public schools, an irony indeed given the argument Bennett and others had made for providing families more choice.
The GI Bill in a Funhouse Mirror
Perhaps no political effort in the Bush years best illustrates how far the United States had shifted from the promise of a broader social democratic vision than the president’s proposal in June 1992 for a “GI Bill for Children.” At that point, Bush was mounting a reelection defense against Bill Clinton, and the bill was essentially a voucher plan, providing parents up to a thousand dollars to spend on a school (public or private) of their choice. In the words of one scholar, the plan was “clearly designed to help Bush repair his damaged relationship with the right wing of the Republican Party,” in part caused by his support for greater federal involvement in public education evidenced by America 2000.42 And, it is no surprise Bush pushed for the so-called GI Bill for Children after several years in which Republicans sought market-based approaches to education. In fact, Bush’s announcement of the bill lauded both Thompson and Williams by name.43 Beyond firming up his right flank, however, Bush’s comments in support of the bill elsewhere illustrate the continued growth of the myth that education should serve as the primary means for facilitating the possibility of economic security in America. “For too long,” he asserted, “we’ve shielded our schools from competition . . . it is time we began thinking of a system of public education in which many providers offer a marketplace of opportunity, opportunities that give all of our children choices and access to the best education in the world.”44
Referring to the plan as the GI Bill was highly misleading, however. It is indisputable that the 1944 GI Bill systematically discriminated against Black service members, a legacy that was never rectified by the time Fuller and Williams pushed for vouchers in Milwaukee. But the GI Bill of 1944 also included a much broader set of social supports for employment and housing, even if those supports were limited to veterans and thus mostly accrued to men. Bush’s GI Bill for Children, however, only offered a pittance of opportunity through education. It certainly did not include the right to be free from poverty or the right to health-care and other important services that are essential if students are to do well in school. Not only that, but for the Education President, the bill likely would have destabilized public schools by siphoning students toward private schools. As NEA president Keith Geiger pointed out: “The real G.I. Bill helped millions of poor and middle-class Americans have access to education. Bush’s parody on the G.I. Bill will not only block that access, but is a dangerous threat to our public education system.”45
Bush and other conservatives criticized unions like the NEA for hamstringing education reforms. Ironically, however, while teacher unions opposed vouchers (rightly, as threats to public education), they nonetheless invoked the education myth to fight, too, as it had gained a stranglehold on political possibilities in the United States. In 1992, for instance, Geiger supported a national fund for education technology, arguing that “the federal government must expand educational opportunity so that business and industry can take full advantage of our nation’s diversity, improve productively, and compete as a nation.” Why? Because “to revitalize the American economy, the United States must do more to make sure all citizens are fully prepared for the high-skill, high-productivity, high-wage jobs. . . . At present, the skills needs in the emerging workplace of tomorrow don’t match the educational opportunities available to students today.”46
Moving into the 1990s, it seemed more and more evident that while politicians might still disagree on how students would access new opportunities to attain human capital, the notion that doing so was the best—perhaps the only—way to given individual Americans a shot at economic security was all but beyond reproach. For Democrats, this put the education myth at the center of the party’s political strategy for the next generation.
Reinventing Democrats: The Rise of the DLC
In the wake of Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, the DLC went beyond simply recruiting and serving as a platform for candidates. In 1989, the DLC organized a think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), modeled on the conservative Heritage Foundation, to push the party further toward ideas that, while more systematically distributed, were not all that different than those of Hart, Dukakis, and the neo-liberals.47 The DLC also began publishing a magazine called The Mainstream Democrat later that year, which soon became The New Democrat.
The New Democrat in the early 1990s served as a hub for the DLC agenda, in which market-based, human capital intensive education reform played a critical role. In the September 1991 issue, for example, an unattributed piece skewered President Bush’s America 2000 education plan as woefully insufficient, calling it nothing more than “a little pork barrel” that would not solve the “nation’s education crisis.”48 Liberal Democrats, however, did not escape criticism. As the next issue of the New Democrat argued, a budget proposal for more federal investment in education was, by itself, only likely to facilitate more bureaucracy: “At a time when Democrats and Republicans are agreeing with parents that some sort of school choice is needed to improve the system, the Democratic plan seems to be just another old style liberal reaction to a problem: don’t fix what’s broken, just throw more money at it.”49
In September 1991, Seymour Martin Lipset argued that redoubling efforts to enable African Americans to be more competitive in the schools was necessary to eliminate the disproportionate poverty of Blacks. Indeed, like much of the material that came out of The New Democrat, Lipset had no reservations that the nation’s education system was a meritocracy. It just needed to be made fairer: “To return to the image of the shackled runner, Americans are willing to do more than remove the chains. They will go along with special training programs and financial assistance for previously shackled runners, enabling them to catch up with those who have forged ahead because of unfair advantages. But most Americans draw the line of predetermining the results of the competition.” The author concluded that more national service would help to level the playing field: “Those with inadequate education and skills could be trained for positions which are in demand, while helping to rebuild publicly supported infrastructure or delivering social services.”50
For New Democrats, even a tougher stance on crime needed to be paired with support for the right education. Democrats—especially Clinton—supported “tough-on-crime” laws that massively increased incarceration in the United States in the 1990s. In a New Democrat piece criticizing Bush for being soft on crime, David Kurapka argued Democrats should lock up more Americans, “because the record shows that locking up criminals does reduce crime, particularly with repeat offenders.” But education was the key to preventing crime in the first place: “We need to improve the economic opportunity in the inner city, with ideas like national service, which provides an education in exchange for community work, and youth apprenticeship, which provides training for those not attending college.”51 As was the case with the assumptions policymakers in the Johnson administration had made regarding the kinds of “deficits” poor people needed to fix before they could get good jobs, this piece also bought into fantasies that getting those in the inner city the right skills and proper attitude would reduce crimes that stemmed from poverty and chronic lack of economic opportunity. Unfortunately, given the long postwar history of American jobs moving away from inner cities, enhanced education was at best a partial solution to a massive structural problem that persists to this day.52
Perhaps the most representative issue of the New Democrat in the early 1990s was devoted to David Osborne (a PPI senior fellow) and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government, an influential book that served as the DLC manual for how to reshape government. As the New Democrat’s editor’s note summed it up:
Those of us at the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council have been intrigued by David Osborne’s work since we met him three years ago. Since then, we have shamelessly parroted his ideas and routinely refer to the kind of twenty-first century government we are searching for as “Osbornian.” We believe that the foundation for a new politics—one that focuses on solutions and ultimately restores people’s faith in democratic government—can only be based on government which is in keeping with the world of the twenty-first century.53
Osborne and Gaebler’s book argued that “our governments are in deep trouble today” and required dramatic change. Government, the two argued, had been “last reinvented . . . during the progressive era and New Deal. . . . Today, the world of government is once again in great flux. The emergence of a postindustrial, knowledge-based, global economy has undermined old realities throughout the world, creating wonderful opportunities and frightening problems.” The book relayed “snapshots of existing entrepreneurial governments” in the hope that officeholders elsewhere would follow suit, and the authors referenced Total Quality Management (TQM), based on W. Edwards Deming’s business philosophy that centered customers in the production process and favored a decentralized approach to management. Though Osborne and Gaebler were not the first to do so, they would use Deming’s methodology as the core of their vision, particularly as it related to public education.54
Indeed, Osborne and Gaebler prominently featured education in their analysis of dysfunctional government and argued that schools should be forced into meritocratic competition. Citing a few anecdotal examples of school districts (made up disproportionately of poor families) where students failed to do well on standardized tests, the authors asserted the nation’s “public schools are the worst in the developed world.” Osborne and Gaebler positively referenced examples of school choice—in East Harlem and in Minnesota—and performance incentives for teachers and principals in South Carolina. “When it comes to the effects of competition,” the authors asserted, “education is no different than any other service industry.”55
Osborne and Gaebler believed that investing in public education was not enough: to fully endow education with the right market signals, the system needed to be opened up to choice. In fact, the authors enthusiastically quoted Governor Thompson, fresh off his deal to bring vouchers to Milwaukee: “Competition breeds accountability,” Thompson asserted. “Schools providing a higher quality education would flourish, the same way as a business that improves its quality for its consumers. Schools failing to meet the needs of their students would not be able to compete, and in effect would go out of business.”56 The impact of TQM in Thompson’s breathless zeal for treating education like a business is obvious.
The New Democrat special issue on Reinventing Government touted Florida Democratic governor (and DLC member) Lawton Chiles, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell for bucking union resistance to institute market-based reforms.57 As DLC founder Al From summed it up, “Democrats should demand radical change: in education with charter schools and more choice, not private school vouchers; in vocational education with European-style apprenticeship programs to provide an upward mobility track for non-college bound youths; and in college aid with national service so young people earn scholarships by serving their country.”58
By 1992, the DLC had established a clear vision for the Democratic Party: a turn away from the social democratic promise of the New Deal, market-based reforms to public institutions, and crucially, investment in human capital as the way to arm individual working Americans for a global economic Battle Royal. Though the organization’s ideas featured a number of high-profile champions, undoubtedly the most important moment in the DLC’s history occurred in March 1990 when rising superstar governor Bill Clinton replaced Georgia senator Sam Nunn as chairperson.
Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas, unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1974 at the age of just twenty-eight during the election that catapulted New Politics Democrats to a huge majority following Watergate. Four years later, Clinton was elected governor of his home state, becoming the youngest state executive in the country. During his first term, he focused largely on roads and transportation. Booted out of office following the 1980 election (he was blamed for a revolt of Cuban refugees in a federal facility in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and saddled with an unpopular tax hike on vehicle registrations), Clinton won the office back in 1982. From 1983 on, Clinton pushed entrepreneurialism and postindustrial development, establishing entities like the Arkansas Science and Technology Development Authority and the Arkansas Development Finance Authority.59 Significantly, as part of this effort, he consciously chose to make education reform his political focus as governor, seeing it as a winning strategy, particularly in the wake of ANAR. His wife Hillary chaired the state’s Education Standards Committee during his second term, and Bill built on the committee’s recommendations to successfully increase education funding, adopt new accountability measures for schools, begin high school entrance exams, and initiate controversial teacher testing opposed by the Arkansas Education Association. Clinton was credited with modest increases in student graduation rates, and he gained a national reputation as a brilliant education reformer (media often made a point of emphasizing that he was a Rhodes Scholar).60 This work catapulted him into a leadership position on education in the National Governors’ Association, most prominently at the Charlottesville summit in 1989.61
Clinton had been a member of the DLC from its onset, and From recruited him for chair both because of the Arkansas governor’s prolific fundraising and because he believed the rising star had an excellent chance of bringing the DLC’s agenda onto the national stage should he win the presidency in 1992. Clinton spent 1990 and 1991 proselytizing for the DLC and working to build up state chapters across the country. These chapters would then provide delegates to the May 1991 Cleveland Convention, a “seminal event in the history of the New Democrats” in the words of one insider, in which the DLC “unveiled its most detailed—and hence most controversial—policy manifesto; showcased its organizational breadth across the country, and arguably, launched the presidential candidacy of its chairman.”62
More than a thousand delegates attended the gathering. Standing atop the work of the neo-liberals, the convention began with the premise that global competition with other industrial nations was leaving the United States behind. Too many people in the United States lacked healthcare, American prisons locked up too many people, and there was no path for working people without college degrees to get good jobs. As Clinton, who chaired the convention, framed it, Democrats had to offer “opportunity for all.” Economic growth was paramount, which for the Arkansas governor meant expanding free trade and new technologies, and education and job training were vital in facilitating the meritocracy that would grow the pie without upsetting the nation’s economic structure. As DLC chair, Clinton found another platform for pushing the education myth in the late 1980s, work begun as governor of Arkansas, and then through the NGA.63
Though Osborne and Gaebler’s book hadn’t yet been published, the delegates at Cleveland referenced their ideas, specifically calling to streamline government. Clinton used the very term reinventing government in his framing mantra of “opportunity, responsibility, choice, a government that works, and a belief in community.” One of the convention’s most important resolutions explicitly used the term too: “We believe in reinventing government. We want to eliminate unneeded layers of bureaucracy, and give citizens more choice in public services, from child care and care for the elderly to public schools.”64
Human capital thus played a major role in the DLC’s vision for prosperity in a global society, and the New American Choice Resolutions explicitly blamed workers’ lack of education for diminished standards of living and downward pressure on wages:
Whereas, economic growth and individual prosperity in American now depend on the ability of U.S. workers and businesses to outperform foreign competitors in both U.S. and world markets;
Whereas, in the new global economy, as investment capital and advanced technologies flow freely among many nations, the critical factors in outperforming foreign competition are the skills, training, and talents of a nation’s workers, and the ability of a nation’s businesses and government to organize and marshal these skills and talents. . . .
Whereas, policies that have neglected making investments to train, develop, organize, and marshal Americans’ skills and talents, or that have tried to shield America’s businesses and workers from the challenge of the global economy, have produced the slowest gains in working Americans’ incomes and productivity since the Great Depression and declining average wages;
. . . . Now therefore, be it RESOLVED by the 1991 Democratic Leadership Council Convention, that our government should take the necessary steps to increase the prosperity of all Americans by enabling them to meet the challenge of global competition.65
The last “whereas” specifically went after labor and social democratic policies designed to uphold the place of workers in a world in which their employers had gone to war against them.66 In fact, with the right investments in human capital in place, the delegates welcomed free trade, urging Congress to “fast track” a deal with Mexico.67 Meanwhile, union activists protested the DLC’s position on NAFTA outside the convention.68
The delegates in Cleveland proudly drew on the work of Robert Reich.69 Reich, who met Clinton as a fellow Rhodes Scholar, graduated from Yale Law School, which he attended with both Bill and his future wife Hillary. After serving in Carter’s Federal Trade Commission, Reich took a position at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In the early 1980s, Reich, with Ira Magaziner, had argued that the declining competitiveness of American industries required a national industrial policy to make the US manufacturing sector more competitive. At that time, Reich had already begun to advocate for “programs of retraining, relocation, and targeted investment [so that] hardships caused by industrial restructuring can be remedied in ways that do not hinder economic progress.” Still, in 1982, Magaziner and Reich also argued for the US government to promote specific industries—as the Japanese did—rather than simply cede manufacturing jobs to other nations or allow the wages of blue-collar workers to spiral ever downward under pressure from employers shifting work to cheaper locations. In fact, Magaziner and Reich had sharply criticized both Reaganomics and American corporations, asserting they had “overemphasized the importance of cheap labor in production at the expense of productivity improvements and long-term market penetration.”70
It was Reich’s argument for public investment in human capital, however, that gained wide purchase in neo-liberal circles by the end of the 1980s. Reich had been an important adviser to Dukakis, for instance, and had also advised the Clintons on education reform in Arkansas.71 Osborne and Gaebler, in fact, thanked Reich for “significant intellectual debts” in the acknowledgments of Reinventing Government.72
By the early 1990s, in fact, Reich had shifted decidedly away from arguments for industrial policy and toward a full-throated embrace of investment in human capital. In The Work of Nations (1991), a clear reference to Adam Smith’s classic argument against mercantilism in 1776, Reich pushed for a more liberal version of Schultz’s human capital than that of Becker and Friedman’s conservative version. Reich believed there was still a place for a robust state, but it should focus on equipping workers to compete in an economy increasingly built on knowledge.
Arguments about the shift in the United States toward a “knowledge society” originated in 1960, when management expert Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge work. By 1993, Drucker was arguing that the United States had already shifted to a full-blown “postcapitalist” knowledge economy increasingly divided into knowledge workers and service workers. The former alone directed “wealth-creating activities,” however: “The leading social groups of the knowledge society will be ‘knowledge workers’—knowledge executives who know how to allocate knowledge to productive use, just as the capitalists knew how to allocate capital to productive use.” Though Drucker massively underestimated the wealth and power that “knowledge executives” such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others would amass in the years since the 1990s, he argued that nations were turning the page on manufacturing, and as Bell had argued in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, he believed ensuring the “dignity” of service workers would be a monumental challenge.73
Reich’s argument in The Work of Nations represented the growing intellectual shift among both Democrats and Republicans away from arguments for sustaining the livelihoods of manufacturing workers. In Minding America’s Business, he and Magaziner had sought to provide a governmental framework for American manufacturing firms to become more competitive internationally in order to increase workers’ wages and continue to provide permanent, sustaining jobs moving forward. The necessity for such a policy was existential, they argued, for on that question, “the future prosperity of the United States will be won or lost.”74
By the early 1990s, however, even those like Magaziner who had argued for a national industrial policy were moving toward education and job training as the solution to make Americans broadly prosperous. A good example of this trend is the report by the National Center on Education and the Economy, called America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages (1990). Chaired by Magaziner and co-chaired by Carter’s former labor secretary Ray Marshall and Reagan’s labor secretary Bill Brock, the report brought together liberals and conservatives, and also included former Democratic governor James Hunt; former chair of the EEOC Eleanor Holmes Norton; Karen Nussbaum, director of feminist labor organization 9to5; and Howard Samuel, president of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department (IUD).
The report began by citing the fact that, recently, the “incomes of our top 30 percent of earners increased while those of the other 70 percent spiraled downward.” The difference mapped onto the approximate number of Americans who had college degrees. Instead of offering political supports for the bottom 70 percent, however, such as facilitating good jobs, a higher minimum wage, or stronger unions rights, the report argued that “the key to maintaining, to say nothing of improving, our standard of living is productivity growth—more products and services from every member of the workforce.” To do so employers needed to reorganize work, and workers needed more skills to facilitate this shift.75
Oddly, the report admitted there was no immediate skills shortage since employers mostly prioritized workers with a “good work ethic and appropriate social behavior.” America’s Choice argued, nonetheless, that raising education standards and requiring companies to invest more in job training (it suggested 1 percent of their annual budget) would force organizations to employ labor models closer to those of the supposedly more productive nations of Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. “The reason we have no skills shortage today,” the report concluded, “is that we are using a turn-of-the-century work organization. If we want to compete more effectively in a global economy, we will have to move to a high productivity work organization.”76
By the early 1990s, resigned to the belief that not only was the economy global, but most major corporations were effectively global, too (or would be soon), Reich had gone even further than that. Only by ensuring American workers were contributing the knowledge work to these corporations, Reich believed, would the United States be successful as a nation. Here, Reich built on globalist trends in both politics and in the public intellectual sphere. In 1987, for instance, the Hudson Institute’s Workforce 2000 study asserted that “as the world economy has become more integrated, the United States, like all other nations, has progressively lost control of its economic destiny. The growing importance of trade means that no nation can expect sustained growth unless the world economy grows.”77 And, adding to his argument about the postcapitalist knowledge society, Peter Drucker believed the nation-state was losing its ability to help its citizens: “Certain it is that in politics we have already shifted from the four hundred years of the sovereign nation-state to a pluralism in which the nation-state will be one rather than the only unit of political integration.”78
Building on a decade of work in the neo-liberal and DLC milieu, Reich concluded that American workers could only guarantee themselves a livelihood if they were able to become “symbolic analysts” whose primary tasks were to “solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols.” These workers included engineers, financial and management consultants, research scientists, public relations executives, journalists, and others. Most symbolic analysts, according to Reich, were college graduates, and he supposed the key in getting all Americans to succeed in the growing knowledge economy was simply to bring more of them into it. To do that, he believed the symbolic analysts who had prospered had an obligation to invest in the training and education of manufacturing and service-sector workers. Thus, the nation needed major public investment in education—at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.79 The massive investment in public education represented a clear distinction from conservative versions of the human capital argument, but it shared the basic premise that the economy was a meritocracy in which broader social democratic policies were both undesirable and unnecessary.
Reich’s argument drove the DLC agenda on education. Building on almost a decade of jeremiads, beginning with A Nation at Risk in 1983, about the failed state of American education, the DLC delegates in Cleveland in 1991 resolved that “this nation guarantee upward mobility and equal opportunity through a sweeping reorganization of public schools and an assured way for all citizens to have an ability to obtain a college education.” The convention endorsed the National Education Goals for the year 2000 that came out of the Charlottesville conference. It also pushed for more accountability through rewards and punishments, public school choice plans, charter schools, alternative certification for teachers, and “greater incentives to get and keep good teachers.” The delegates also endorsed a “new, civilian GI Bill that would promise a college education in return for voluntary national service.”80
The Rise of Clinton
The growing influence of the DLC and its vision for that which would not disrupt existing social and economic structures nourished Clinton in his ascendance to the nomination of the Democratic Party. In fact, the array of candidates in the 1992 primary highlighted the shift of the Democratic Party toward the DLC agenda: aside from the more social democratic populist Tom Harkin (Iowa), Clinton’s major competition came from the neo-liberals Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown.81 Indeed, as it was for Tsongas and Brown, investment in postindustrial knowledge industry and education served as critical components of Clinton’s pitch to the American people in the election of 1992. The backing of the DLC, in addition to Clinton’s political skills, however, gave the Arkansas Democrat an advantage the others lacked, and he locked up the nomination.
Education was central in Clinton’s general election campaign, particularly since reform had been one of his signal claims to achievement as governor of Arkansas. Bush also integrally involved education in his reelection argument, as he had tried to claim the title of Education President. In fact, as Becker noted in the third edition of Human Capital (1993), in 1992 “both President Clinton and President Bush emphasized the importance of improving the quality of the labor force. A dozen years ago, this terminology would have been inconceivable in a presidential campaign.”82
Even so, Clinton, employing the slogan “Putting People First,” more prominently featured the human capital argument. Indeed, Clinton made his friend Robert Reich’s argument a centerpiece of the vision: “In the emerging global economy, everything is mobile: capital, factories, even entire industries. The only resource that’s really rooted in a nation—and the ultimate source of all its wealth—is its people. The only way America can compete and win in the twenty-first century is to have the best-educated, best-trained workforce in the world, linked together by transportation and communication networks second to none.”83
The Clinton campaign advocated for more government investments, but only did so in line with Osborne and Gaebler’s notion of “reinventing government” through more market incentives and public-private partnerships. The absence of any broader social democratic alternatives was notable. A proposed $20 billion Rebuild America Fund, for example, would be “leveraged with state, local, private sector, and pension fund contributions. User fees such as road tolls and solid-waste disposal charges will help us guarantee those investments.” Education, specifically, investment in human capital, was absolutely fundamental: “Putting people first demands a revolution in lifetime learning, a concerted effort to invest in the collective talents of our people. Education today is more than the key to climbing the ladder of opportunity. In today’s global economy, it is an imperative for our nation. Our economic life is on the line.”84
Clinton’s campaign, therefore, paralleled Reagan’s in 1980 in one very concrete way: in the context of economic downturn, the Arkansas Democrat offered the dreamy promise of economic prosperity for all without any tough choices. In Reagan’s case it had been to limit government; in Clinton’s, it was to make the right investments so workers, as if by magic, would all get the right skills to excel. Indeed, the latter campaign’s explanation for rising income inequality is telling: “In an era when what you earn depends on what you learn, education too often stops at the schoolhouse door. While our global competitors invest in their working people, seven of every ten dollars American companies spend on employee training goes to those at the top of the corporate ladder. High-level executives float on golden parachutes to a cushy life while hardworking Americans are grounded without the skills they need.”85
The campaign argued that no fundamental realignment in the American economy was necessary. Instead, the new Democratic regime would simply “give students the chance to train for jobs or pay for college, and provide workers with the training and retraining they need to compete in tomorrow’s economy.” Neither diminishing workers’ rights, the growing power of employers, nor the shift of jobs from the United States to lower-wage workers elsewhere was a part of the discussion. Instead, once the government closed the human capital gap by forcing multinational corporations to spend more on training, the enhanced skills would somehow lead them to treat their workers better.86 In Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, in fact, he pointed out that human capital was his priority: “The most important family policy, urban policy, labor policy, minority policy, and foreign policy America can have is an expanding, entrepreneurial economy of high-wage, high skill jobs.”87
Clinton handily won the electoral college race by 370–168. The popular vote was much closer, however, as the Arkansas governor won 43 percent of the popular vote and Bush won about 37.5 percent. However, 18 percent went to third-party protest candidate Ross Perot, which highlighted the fact that many Americans were not happy with either major party (exit polls showed Perot’s votes came at about the equal expense of both Bush and Clinton). Importantly, much of Perot’s support came from his rejection of free trade and support for an American industrial policy.88 Compelling evidence, in fact, indicates that Clinton won largely because Americans blamed Bush for the recession.89 Nonetheless, as had been the case with Reagan in 1980, the defeat of an unpopular president gave the incoming chief executive a seeming mandate. In Clinton’s case, that would mean more myth making.