PUTTING SOME PEOPLE FIRST
The Total Ascendance of the Education Myth
In 1993, Bill Clinton was inaugurated as president, with a Democratic Congress and the hope he could enact much of the DLC agenda. In his inaugural address that January, he called on Americans to “face hard truths.” “Profound and powerful” forces of globalization and technology were “remaking our world.” In this context, the only path for “renewal” would come from the understanding, building on Reich’s Work of Nations, that the world was one in which “we must compete for every opportunity.” His speech called for no big social democratic alternatives, but instead investment and “sacrifice” to win the future.1 Its ideas ascendant in the administration, the DLC vision permanently altered the political narrative around how Americans understood economic opportunity, tipping the scales definitively toward the education myth. Clinton’s first term, in fact, brought a major free trade deal that signified once and for all to nonprofessional-class workers that the Democratic Party would have little for them aside from promises of training for better jobs. Federal education policy, including Goals 2000, the Improving America’s Schools Act, and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, built on the assumptions of the Bush administration and furthered the notion that schools should serve primarily to build human capital.
But these policies brought a stinging rebuke in the 1994 midterms, at least in part because organized labor did little to help Democrats that had just negotiated NAFTA. Clinton, however, moved even further right, agreeing to a draconian welfare reform in the reelection year of 1996. The combination of these policies meant that those left behind were disproportionately African American and Latino, particularly as the manufacturing working class had grown increasingly more diverse in 1970s and 1980s.
Reelected with a strong economy behind him, however, Clinton used his second term to continue to push for connecting public education to human capital, and national teacher union leaders supported this “reinvention” of American public education too. Taken together, by the end of the 1990s, intellectuals like Reich, political figures like Clinton, the DLC, and top union leaders—indeed, the nation’s political center—had shifted decisively toward a new set of assumptions that structured mainstream politics for the next two decades: public investment in education and retraining workers to meet the needs of increasingly empowered employers would bring opportunity for prosperity and security, but only when workers could appropriately commodify themselves. In this context, there no longer existed, at least in the political mainstream, even the faintest social democratic alternatives to assist the victims of continuously growing economic inequality. Populist conservatives like Pat Buchanan, building on the strategy Nixon and Reagan had employed in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, continued to channel the anxieties of some Americans excluded, either economically or culturally, from this “meritocracy.”
The DLC President
One of Clinton’s immediate priorities, rightly, was expanding access to health-care, as this was a growing worry among Americans as costs, premiums, and deductibles were all on the rise while real wages grew slowly.2 However, after sinking a great deal of political capital into healthcare reform that would not have radically restructured workers’ reliance on employers for care, Clinton watched his proposal, developed in large part by Hillary, die without even garnering a vote in Congress. The president also developed divisive solutions to social policies such as whether homosexuals would be allowed to serve openly in the military. In addition, deficit hawks in the administration almost immediately stymied serious consideration of the investments in education and training Reich envisioned in The Work of Nations.3
The failure of healthcare reform and other parts of the Clinton agenda led many immediate postmortems to see the first two years of Clinton’s first term—before his embrace of a softer version of the GOP’s agenda in the 1994 Contract with America—as a major failure. Reich, for example, whom Clinton appointed secretary of labor, felt let down by Clinton’s lack of attention to his human capital agenda, as the title of his memoir of his time in the administration—Locked in the Cabinet—makes clear. The first half of Clinton’s first term, however, elevated the education myth in two important venues: first, the successful negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and second, federal education and training policy that, while lacking the massive investment Reich wanted, nonetheless strengthened the expectation that schools should be accountable to the needs of employers.
Indeed, Clinton’s biggest achievement, which further weakened the promise of secure blue-collar jobs, was NAFTA. George H.W. Bush’s administration initially negotiated the deal, which created a free trade bloc between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Like Bush, Clinton argued the treaty would boost the American economy.4 But many Americans were unconvinced, and congressional ratification was highly controversial. Ross Perot articulately criticized NAFTA, for instance. In a televised debate with Vice President Al Gore on CNN in 1993, the populist political candidate pointed out that NAFTA would motivate American corporations to seek out cheaper labor in Mexico.5 Labor unions hoped Clinton would negotiate strong worker protections—thus limiting the job losses of American workers—into the agreement before it was ratified. The administration negotiated a side agreement on labor rights, but it lacked enforcement provisions, and the AFL-CIO led a massive opposition drive. Labor was, therefore, incensed that the agreement passed with more Republican votes than Democratic votes (132 House Republicans backed it, while only 102 Democrats did). Clinton pledged to defend any Republicans who voted for it in the 1994 midterms.6
For many blue-collar workers, however, NAFTA was merely the latest and most spectacular example of seeing their interests sold out in favor of the professional-class notions of meritocracy driving American politics. For example, in Wisconsin, NAFTA came on the heels of a prominent fight for the jobs shipped elsewhere by American Motors Company (AMC). In the 1960s, AMC was the largest employer in Wisconsin, and the benefits of the autoworkers’ union contract accrued to white workers as well as the African American and Latino workers who had moved to the city during and after World War II. In 1988, the plant in Kenosha (by then owned by Chrysler) closed, costing workers 5,500 jobs and in the process, altering the entire political culture of the city. The workers organized to save their jobs, and Jesse Jackson even made the effort a cause célèbre during the presidential primary campaign that year. The growing professional class in the city, however, which included the new mayor and the teachers who sought to ensure working-class students bought into public education, saw the workers as getting what they deserved for failing to seek an education and relying on the prospect of a blue-collar livelihood and a union. The workers viewed the situation differently: believing in their work as a contribution to the nation, they saw the country letting them down when their political leaders failed to do anything to save the labor equity these workers had put into the company and thus the promise of a decent retirement.7
Indeed, the battle over NAFTA showed that for many working people, Clinton’s agenda had little to make workers’ lives better. Though Clinton did see his ambitious plans to fund postindustrial, technological development stymied by deficit hawks and conservative Republicans, his tone-deafness on NAFTA nonetheless stemmed from an overly optimistic attitude about the economy and the myth of economic advancement through education that he and Reich worked for years to elevate.8 An interaction with Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, early in Reich’s tenure as secretary of labor in 1993, was illuminating. Reich was clearly aware that the labor movement faced trouble in 1993, in part because of structural changes in the economy: “Workers in big industries dominated by three or four companies,” he pointed out, “were easier to organize than workers in the small and medium-size service businesses (retail, restaurant, hotel, hospital, office), which have been creating most of the jobs for twenty years. And blue-collar male factory workers were easier to mobilize than pink-collar Hispanics, Asians, and blacks—mostly women—in rapidly expanding but low-paying clerical, custodial, cashier, child-care, data entry, and telemarketing jobs.”9
Still, the labor secretary seemed unconcerned about the growing leverage of employers under a dysfunctional labor law. By the end of the Kirkland years, the labor movement had made its fair share of mistakes. In fact, its lack of investment in organizing was a major reason why John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) led an insurgent campaign for AFL-CIO president in 1995. But the AFL-CIO had invested significant money and energy into Clinton in 1992, and the organization hoped that with a Democratic Congress, the president would prioritize a bill to ban striker replacements, a tactic used increasingly by corporations to break unions’ most important leverage in labor stoppages.10
Instead, labor’s most important agenda item did not even make it onto the long list of the new administration’s priorities for the first term. While Reich did float a compromise to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)—that they not oppose striker replacement in exchange for labor getting out of the way of NAFTA—it was a nonstarter, and the effort died in a Senate filibuster after businesses lobbied hard against it. Reich tried unsuccessfully to sell NAFTA by arguing to its union opponents that “workers who lose their old jobs because of free trade can be retrained for new jobs that pay as well or better.”11
Education became a major part of the Clinton human capital agenda with the passage of Goals 2000: The Educate America Act of 1994. Here Clinton worked closely with fellow southern Democratic governor Richard Riley (South Carolina, 1979–87) whom Clinton appointed secretary of education in 1993. Like Clinton, Riley was an education reformer: during his tenure as chair of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB)’s Commission for Educational Quality, for example, the SREB published a report titled Goals for Education: Challenge 2000, which issued twelve national goals that looked similar to what Bush and the governors eventually proposed in 1990.12
In the Education Department, Riley drafted Clinton’s signature education policies: Goals 2000 and the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994 (a reauthorization of ESEA). Though this legislation faced opposition from conservatives for increasing federal involvement, it hardly revolutionized education in the United States. It did, however, significantly strengthen the argument, gaining wider purchase among both Republicans and Democrats, that aligning the skills of the nation’s young people with the needs of American employers represented the main avenue for facilitating individual economic opportunity.
Goals 2000 built on the six education goals emanating from the Charlottesville summit in 1989. The bill proposed eight national goals for the year 2000, as well as a National Education Standards and Improvement Council (NESIC), which would be responsible for “certifying” state standards-based education reform plans, required to receive grant funding from the Department of Education.13 Another portion of the bill established a National Skills Standards Board to connect worker training outcomes to the needs of employers.
Indeed, proponents of the bill, including both Riley and Reich, argued for more accountability and a tighter connection between education and labor to meet the needs of American employers and, presumably, create more economic opportunity for workers. At House subcommittee hearings in April 1993, Riley breathlessly asserted that “I am deeply concerned about the quality of elementary and secondary education in America. We must improve our education system if we are to prosper as a democratic country and build a high-skill, high-wage economy.” Repeating an argument that could have come from ANAR or any number of similar reports since, Riley elaborated, “The other countries against which we compete for jobs expect all of their students to take challenging course work in a variety of academic areas. . . . As we approach the 21st century our prosperity and dreams hinge upon education as never before. The global economy is characterized by an information-rich world dependent upon technology and filed with high-skill, high-wage jobs.” Further, previewing the landmark 2001 reauthorization of ESEA, Riley argued, “We cannot afford to leave any student behind.”14
Though Riley gave lip service to the “social imperative” of education in “an ever-changing democracy,” his examples of high-quality education to which the nation’s schools should aspire were mostly about teaching Black and Latino kids mathematics (Riley referenced Jaime Escalante, for instance, made famous by the 1988 film Stand and Deliver). Indeed, education was vital for the future economic opportunity of Americans, as Riley employed Clinton’s language on the 1992 campaign trail: “In a world in which what you earn depends on what you learn, today’s young people will be destined for lower pay unless we can help many more of them take and master more challenging subject matter.”15 Riley’s argument was human capital with no alternative: without a robust education built on math and science, economic insecurity was simply destiny.
The next week, Reich testified to the same committee. He pointed out that as the United States recovered from the recession that began during Bush’s presidency, fewer Americans than expected had ended up getting their jobs back. Companies continuing to cut payroll (a trend begun in the 1980s), advances in technology, and increased international trade all added up to “enormous structural changes.” The committee members would not be surprised to learn that little could be done except for people to seek new work: “This means people have to change jobs, more than ever before. Americans have to get new skills, more than ever before. They have to know how to get the skills, where to get the skills, what skills they need, and where the jobs are.”16
But there was a second problem: “Most American workers have seen their real inflation-adjusted earnings for their cohorts, for their age group, continue to decline, on average, since 1977. . . . Even Americans who have jobs are seeing that it is getting harder and harder to get a job that pays well, that pays as well as the jobs we had before.” Who was falling behind? Those without college degrees. As Reich pointed out, college graduates were the only workers seeing inflation-adjusted raises. Thus, for the secretary of labor, the “moral of the story is that much of the decline in nonsupervisory wages, I believe, can be attributed to educational deficiencies, simply not being ready for the new world of work.” Though he eschewed “simple or easy solutions,” Reich argued that the Goals 2000 legislation would help solve the problem of “educational deficiency” as well as the “mismatch” between those who had the skills and the jobs that were out there. While Reich certainly wanted more Americans to be able to access higher education, the nationally recognized skills standards Goals 2000 promised would also help those without college degrees make sure they could attain the “credential that will get them a good job.”17
Under questioning from the committee chair, Reich, however, pointed to a stark reality in the future of the nation’s economy: “Employers around America are spending approximately $30 billion a year training their employees. . . . It turns out, on closer inspection, that approximately two-thirds of this sum, about $20 billion, is spent on employees who already have college degrees. The 75 percent of Americans without 4-year college degrees, who are in the most need and are most in danger of losing their way economically, are getting a relatively small portion of that $30 billion package.”18 After the 1980s, when budgets had squeezed education and employers had increased downward pressure on their workers—all while Democrats lost three presidential elections—one could understand why a moderate argument about job training for American workers was palatable. But, as Reich argued for funding for Goals 2000, corporations continued to seek lower labor costs from the bottom echelons of their workforces—either through cheaper labor elsewhere, automation, or eliminating union protections that had defended workers from that competition. In such a climate, new retraining standards were unlikely to move the needle.
The assumptions embedded in Goals 2000 were important because they also formed the basis for the reauthorization of ESEA during the Clinton presidency: the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994. The law changed American education by shifting the formula for Title I appropriations toward schools with greater needs while increasing expectations for the accountability of these schools toward their students’ performance. To receive federal funds, states now had to develop content standards in core academic areas and develop plans to improve schools. Schools received more flexibility in using Title I funds but faced the possibility of being taken over by either a school district or the state if their test scores did not improve. An important bridge to No Child Left Behind (2001), disadvantaged students now faced no-excuses expectations, no matter what kind of impediments there might be to learning.19
Finally, the Clinton administration’s School-to-Work Opportunities Act, also passed into law in 1994, furthered the connection between education and jobs by providing seed money for states to link high school learning with the workplace. As the legislation made clear, the goal was to “improve career prospects and academic achievement in high school, and thereby boost enrollment in postsecondary education and increase the likelihood of high-skill, high-wage employment.”20
In fact, Clinton’s education and training policy and NAFTA represented his two major achievements in the first half of his first term. Though Reich may have been disappointed there had not been more investment in human capital—certainly nothing like a civilian GI Bill came close to materializing—the administration’s first two years powerfully advanced the myth he, Clinton, the neo-liberals, and the DLC had been pushing for more than a decade.
Right Moves
Clinton’s first-term accomplishments were purchased with a high price, however. Because of his push for NAFTA, labor turned against Clinton, which helped facilitate the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.21 Further, his education agenda was criticized by the GOP’s conservative wing for extending the reach of the federal government, and it also played a role in some Republicans’ critique of Clinton. (In fact, the GOP-led Congress of 1995–96 repealed key elements of the Goals 2000 Act, including NESIC.)22 In 1994, the GOP picked up ten governors, eight seats in the Senate, and fifty-four seats in the House, giving them control of both chambers for the first time since the 1940s. New House Speaker Newt Gingrich and a much more conservative caucus pushed for draconian versions of DLC policy items like “tough-on-crime” laws and limiting the social safety net to force the poor to work harder. The GOP vision was all sticks and no carrots.
In this milieu, Clinton pivoted right, too, seeking “triangulation” by softening some of the most stringent aspects of the Republican agenda.23 Perhaps the signal statement of that strategy was Clinton’s famous 1996 State of the Union speech, in which he declared big government dead but differentiated himself from the hard-core antigovernment nostrums of the Gingrich Republicans:
The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves. Instead, we must go forward as one America, one nation working together to meet the challenges we face together . . . Our goal must be to enable all our people to make the most of their own lives—with stronger families, more educational opportunity, economic security, safer streets, a cleaner environment in a safer world.24
That vision, in fact, drove Clinton’s efforts at shaping the most significant limit to American social democracy during his two terms in office: the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996.
Clinton and the DLC had long been fascinated with using government “sticks” to enforce personal responsibility to reduce poverty, and that personal responsibility took the form of “family values,” where government could use punishment to reinscribe two-parent, heteronormative gender roles.25 A New Democrat article from September 1991, for instance, about the problem of “deadbeat dads,” pointed out that in Arkansas, where Clinton was governor, the state had been working with credit agencies to “wreck their credit.”26 It took Republicans, however, as had been the case with NAFTA, to give Clinton the space to enact an agenda built on “personal responsibility” for the poor.
Calls to reduce “welfare” as an entitlement had long been a goal of conservative proponents of human capital. Feminist welfare rights activists in the 1960s and 70s challenged a system of economic security built around male breadwinners, and though they never fully established the right of all Americans to sustainable social support, their lobbying had resulted in dramatically expanded access to welfare benefits. In the decades since, conservatives sought to limit welfare since many recipients, particularly Black women, were seen as not having “earned” benefits. Ironically, by the 1980s, some welfare opponents, rather than continuing to criticize the construction of poor families, were instead pointing to changing gender norms to advocate for combining limits to benefits to the promise of job training. The Hudson Institute’s Workforce 2000 (1987), for example, linked calls for higher education standards and the shift of the national economy toward the service industry with a recognition that women, in the future, would make up a larger portion of the labor force. The report leaned into the trend, and in fact, sought to force more women to work in order to limit welfare benefits: “Now that a majority of non-welfare women with young children work, it no longer seems cruel to require welfare mothers to do so. The current system should be replaced with one that mandates work for all able-bodied mothers (except for those caring for infants) while providing training, day care, and job counseling.”27 In Wisconsin, Governor Thompson had made welfare reform a major priority, too, signing into law a program to replace AFDC before Clinton completed federal reform in April 1996. The Wisconsin Works program required low-income parents either to get a job or to complete an “employability plan” that included work training for those not yet deemed “job ready” to continue to receive funding. Clinton’s welfare reform also allowed Thompson to go even further, capping lifetime benefits.28
The GOP takeover of Congress made welfare reform into a pressing agenda item for Clinton. Though historians have argued Clinton used his veto power to prevent even more punitive versions of reform, the bill he signed on August 22, 1996, was plenty draconian, forcing states to create work requirements for public assistance, replacing benefits with block grants, limiting lifetime benefits to a maximum of five years (and allowing states to set even shorter limits), and strengthening child support enforcement.29 As had been the case with NAFTA, proponents of welfare reform touted education and job training as the missing pieces that would combine with the “motivation” of no longer having welfare cash payments to allow poor Americans, disproportionately African American and Latino, to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. Welfare reform, however, did little more than continue to punish poor Americans for the structural lack of jobs in neighborhoods bereft of economic investment. To the extent that inner-city welfare recipients engaged in behavior that shut them out of the job market, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson explained in 1996, such responses were logical adaptations to a social fabric in which work had “disappeared.”30
The overarching result of Clinton’s first term was to exacerbate the upsurge of inequality in the United States. In fact, in the twenty years after 1996, the number of Americans living in extreme poverty skyrocketed. Further, the version of PROWRA Clinton signed actually diminished the possibility of using job-training programs to help workers at the lower end of the job market get the skills for a living wage job; instead, training programs, according to economist Gordon Lafer, began “to focus almost exclusively on an ideological agenda aimed at reinforcing the value of hard work at low wages.” Predictably, though millions of working people lost financial support in the years after PROWRA, most of these workers were unable to find stable jobs that could support their families.31 The education myth represented the glue that made the further diminution of social democracy palatable for many Democratic policymakers.
Teacher Unions and the Education Myth
National teacher unions that had supported Clinton embraced the education myth too, likely for strategic reasons. Both the NEA and AFT had endorsed Clinton by large margins in 1992, and that support did not wane four years later.32 By the 1990s, a growing chorus on the right argued teacher unions were preventing the education reform necessary to advance the human capital of future generations of Americans. For example, as Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole asserted in his acceptance speech at the party’s national convention on August 15, 1996: “If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. . . . And to the teacher unions I say, when I am president, I will disregard your political power, for the sake of parents, the children, the schools, and the nation.”33 In this context, the choice to support Clinton’s more palatable vision of education reform made tactical sense.
Albert Shanker, despite the trepidation of much of the AFT membership, was an early supporter and advocate of more rigorous standards in education. Shanker called Bush’s proposal for America 2000, which included specific language about the “knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy,” “bold and comprehensive. More so than any President or Secretary has come up with.”34 As part of Bush’s Education Policy Advisory Committee, Shanker suggested the administration focus on “letting kids know that they are going to have to perform in school to get into college or get a job.”35
In 1992, Shanker was even more enthusiastic about Clinton and standards-based reform, offering early support for the Arkansas Democrat while most union leaders backed Tom Harkin, and the two remained very close until Shanker’s death in 1997. During the Clinton administration, Shanker was a prominent supporter of tougher standards for both schools and students, and all that implied about education’s role in facilitating economic opportunity. In 1993, for example, Shanker argued in his column Where We Stand that Congress should support Goals 2000 because it would help the poorest Americans to become more “employable,” pointing out that “they could qualify for jobs that are now moving to other countries because our young people don’t have the skills to do them.”36
NEA national leadership helped advance the education myth too. In a 1996 speech at an Education International roundtable, for instance, NEA president Bob Chase attempted to defend public education from Republicans’ voucher schemes and to advocate for greater racial equity in America’s schools. Chase, a Connecticut teacher who had risen to NEA vice president, was elected president in 1996. In the speech Chase conceded public education needed to be reformed to accommodate its important function of facilitating human capital acquisition in a global economy.
Indeed, it is notable how closely Chase’s account of the changing landscape in the United States resembles that of Clinton and Reich: “The constant realignment going on in the world—and the nation—demands a labor force that is well educated, increasingly versatile and continually learning to reshape itself to the needs of the economy. And that brings added urgency to the need for all schools to do a better job.” Chase went on to assert that educators should “view their students as clients and partners—capable of performing to higher standards, given enough time and adequate resources.” The speech invoked management techniques like Total Quality Management and asked if schools could be modeled along business practices, but Chase neglected to mention any structural barriers an increasingly diverse student population faced in American cities. Nor did Chase assert that teachers bore much responsibility in the classroom beyond building the capacities of students to “possess higher-level thinking skills and to utilize the tools of the Information Era.”37
By 1997, Chase went on to outline a widely circulated vision for a “new unionism” to reform public education, built on ensuring kids would acquire the right skills for the twenty-first century. In the late 1980s, the NEA Research Division’s series of publications called Eye on the Economy had begun touting the connection between education and economic growth. The “new unionism” embraced by Chase as a “cornerstone” of his presidency, then, gave voice to trends already emergent in the NEA.38 Further, given Dole’s dark characterization of teacher unions, the NEA’s doubling down on supporting Clinton in 1996 made perfect sense. But embracing the agenda of Clinton and the DLC meant embracing human capital as the primary function of the nation’s schools.
Clinton’s State of the Union address in February 1997, the first after his successful reelection campaign, was a victory lap that envisioned an even greater role for connecting education and human capital to economic opportunity. After a first term in which “we have won back the basic strength of our economy” Clinton warned the nation not to become complacent: “The new promise of the global economy, the Information Age, unimagined new work, life-enhancing technology—all these are ours to seize. . . . if we do not act, the moment will pass—and we will lose the best possibilities of our future.”39
Clinton’s “number one priority for the next four years” was ensuring “all Americans have the best education in the world.” Continuing to push the accountability argument of his first-term agenda, Clinton pitched a major education investment—around $50 billion—in his Call to Action for American Education. The plan was built on ten principles. As had been the case for virtually every other proposed human capital investment from Gary Hart onward, Clinton nodded to “character” education, asserting in the sixth principle that “we must teach our students to be good citizens.” But virtually every other principle called to create higher standards in the service of skills acquisition in an internationally competitive economy.
Principle #1, in fact, asserted the need for “a national crusade for education standards . . . representing what all our students must know to succeed in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.” Anticipating No Child Left Behind, Clinton called for every state to “test every 4th grader in reading and every 8th grader in math to ensure this standard is met.” Another principle pushed for greater community college access: Clinton had not given up on the DLC idea of a GI Bill for America’s Workers comprised of new training programs for those who could no longer access union manufacturing jobs. Most controversially, Clinton pushed hard for more school choice to “foster competition and innovation that can make public schools better.” Just six years after Minnesota had authorized the nation’s first charters, Clinton envisioned three thousand new charter schools by the end of his second term.40
But what about those workers who could not benefit from investment in public education, school choice, or worker retraining? What about the Americans who would be dropped from welfare rolls under PRWORA? Clinton’s plan amounted to imploring corporations, out of the goodness of their hearts, it seems, to give them a job: “I challenge every religious congregation, every community nonprofit, every business to hire someone off welfare. And I’d like to say especially to every employer in our country who ever criticized the old welfare system, you can’t blame that old system anymore, we have torn it down. Now do your part. Give someone on welfare the chance to go to work.”41
The day after Clinton’s address, Chase enthusiastically endorsed it in a signature speech at the National Press Club. Indeed, he left no doubt that the NEA had moved in the same direction as the AFT in embracing education reform and tougher standards.42 Similar to the many other reinventions the DLC wing of the Democratic Party had imagined, Chase’s speech—“The New NEA—Reinventing Teacher Unions for a New Era”—argued the union had to change: “The imperative now facing public education could not be more stark. Simply put, in the decade ahead, we must revitalize our public schools from within, or they will be dismantled without.” Chase believed the union had sometimes “protect[ed] the narrow interests of our members, and not to advance the interests of students and schools.” And what were the interests of students and schools? These became apparent in the series of pledges with which Chase concluded his speech:
To parents and the public, NEA pledges to work with you to ensure that every classroom in America has a quality teacher. This means we accept our responsibility to assist in removing teachers—that small minority of teachers—who are unqualified, incompetent, or burned out.
To the business community, NEA pledges to work with you to raise and enforce standards for student achievement, to ensure that high school graduates are—at a minimum—literate, competent in the basic skills, equipped for the workplace.
To President Clinton and the Congress, we at NEA pledge our enthusiastic support for the extraordinary agenda—a truly 21st century agenda for children and education—set forth in last night’s State of the Union address.43
A 1999 NEA publication entitled Investing in Public Education: The Importance of Schools in the New Global Economy showed just how far the national union had come toward embracing the education myth. The work began by explaining, in language that could have come from Hart’s A New Democracy, Reich’s The Work of Nations, or Clinton’s 1997 State of the Union: “The agricultural and manufacturing industries that made America great in the middle and late twentieth century are becoming less important economically. In this new and emerging economy, access and control of electronic information and technology will greatly determine both individual and national economic accomplishments.”44
In making the case for enhanced public education funding, the publication, citing Gary Becker, referenced the importance of human capital in an increasingly global and service-oriented economy. In fact, the changing needs of employers led the study to conclude with the same inequality as destiny argument Richard Riley made in support of Goals 2000 in 1993: “If a person living in the United States does not possess the knowledge and skills to master technology, their wages will drop continuously until they equal the wages of similarly ‘unskilled’ workers who live in less economically developed countries.”45
Given the political realities of the 1990s and the trajectory of the Democratic Party, one can understand why making such an argument would be attractive. But, given that trade policy—a political choice—further motivated American manufacturers to seek cheaper labor elsewhere, and given the shrinking social safety net, this argument effectively gave up on doing anything for those who couldn’t get the right education.
Clintonism and Its Discontents
As Bill Clinton reflected in 2013, his goal as head of the DLC had been to elevate a vision that, by somehow doing all things for all people, would not upset the global capitalist order. “The DLC believed that the Democratic Party’s fundamental mission,” Clinton remembered, “was to expand opportunity, not government. . . . And we called for an end to the era of false choices. We were pro-growth and pro-environment; pro-labor and pro-business; pro-work and pro-family; pro-middle class and pro-antipoverty efforts that work.”46
Clinton’s view, however, was based on the mythology that embracing meritocracy and investment in human capital could paper over any negative repercussions caused by dismantling the government safety net and making American jobs more susceptible to capital flight. The promise that a greater pie would compensate those who lost in the global competition was fanciful. All the way back in 1984, neo-liberal Randall Rothenberg had argued the labor movement represented the main source of resistance to a market-driven, human capital approach to economic prosperity:
A clash seems inevitable, for virtually every single issue promoted by the neo-liberals seems to run counter to the interests of organized labor as they are currently expressed. . . . And of course, no single issue currently divides the Democrats as the problem of free trade versus the protectionism that organized labor so dearly wants. But there is more. . . . Labor’s vitality has been dependent on large, national industries; collective bargaining has thrived on the ability of centralized unions to negotiate with centralized industries . . . an economy that requires constant adaptation to improve productivity and match the needs of the global market cannot admit of a labor movement whose very existence is predicated on a rigid system of rules.
As Rothenberg also pointed out, the neo-liberals would face resistance from “special interests”—among them, African Americans, who were also largely being excluded from the spoils of the postindustrial society.47
Rothenberg could not have been more prescient. Indeed, unions and their “rigid system of rules,” as well as other “special interests” such as the civil rights movement, had been important advocates for social democracy. Carter’s lukewarm embrace of unions and the failure of labor reform hinted at this conflict, and the clashes between Reich, Clinton, and the AFL-CIO over NAFTA would prove it. As the power of “special interests” like labor diminished, there would be fewer vocal advocates protecting those who could not become “symbolic analysts” in the global economy.
In Putting People First, Clinton and Gore had promised to ban striker replacements and to repeal Section 14(b) of Taft-Hartley, which allowed states to make union security clauses illegal. But Clinton’s time in office highlighted how right was Rothenberg’s account of the choice Democrats would face in the United States. Clinton, Gore, Reich, and the DLC prioritized market-driven, human capital policies because they promised economic prosperity without altering the growing power that employers were amassing at the expense of working people. They put little political capital into social democratic protections like enhancing the ability of workers to collectively bargain, and as with welfare reform, actively undermined other protections. Under Democrats in the 1990s, any possibility of broad social democratic alternatives to neoliberal capitalism shriveled into nothing more than desiccated remains.
In the 1990s, the economic inequality emergent during the Reagan years continued to rise dramatically as almost all of the profits of economic growth were racked up by multimillionaires and billionaires or, to a lesser extent, the symbolic analysts Reich had hoped would include a much broader group of people. Indeed, as the former secretary of labor noted in his 1998 memoir, the economy was quite strong in the decade, corporate profits and the stock market had exploded, and both unemployment and inflation were low. And yet, he pointed out, “half of all workers are still earning less than they did in 1989. And despite modest gains among the working poor, the 1990s have witnessed greater polarization of income than at any other time since the Second World War. We are fast becoming two cultures—one of affluence and contentment, the other of insecurity and cynicism.”48
Some economists have argued that increased inequality since the 1980s derived in large part from “lethargic” education growth in the late twentieth century, since new technologies demanded more college-educated workers, while the education system failed to supply them.49 It is hard to imagine, however, that an expansion of education of any kind could have come close to compensating for the disastrous national policy choices made during the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton years. But even the political efforts to expand access to higher education in the 1990s further exacerbated inequality. In fact, a key piece of Clinton’s second-term agenda was a college tuition tax credit signed into law in 1997. While asserting that this credit would help all Americans, Clinton knew it would disproportionately help wealthy families. Clinton’s own pro–Wall Street treasury secretary Robert Rubin, in fact, opposed them for this reason. Not only did these credits expand inequality, but they also helped inflate college tuition costs for everyone else while the Pell Grant program continued to lose relative value.50
In summary, even if more education were the answer, the increase in the college wage premium—the extra income the average college graduate could expect—would not have been enough. Simply put, not everyone could be upwardly mobile, and for those in the vast group of Americans in the bottom two-thirds of the economic distribution, the policies of the DLC championed by Clinton facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs and made it ever more difficult to access the social safety net. And they replaced these jobs and social supports with false promises. Further, the 1994 Crime Bill, touted by Clinton and other Democrats like Delaware senator Joe Biden, which stiffened penalties on a series of infractions, provided funding for new prison construction and institutionalized inequitable penalties for crack cocaine. Even though crime rates had been declining, the bill would play a major role in expanding the percentage of Americans incarcerated.51 Thus the combination of NAFTA and the failure of striker replacement reform made blue-collar jobs more precarious, the PRWORA removed the floor from beneath the poor, and criminal justice policy locked increasing numbers of impoverished Americans in prison for long sentences. By overemphasizing the connection between education and economic opportunity through the rhetoric around Goals 2000 and other education policies, the Clinton administration made it even more difficult for working Americans to understand what had gone wrong. Instead, for many of these Americans, resentment and disaffection with the political system grew.
Indeed, as Reich also pointed out in his memoir, the midterm election of 1994 represented a revolt of white men in the downwardly mobile middle class who feared their long-term economic outlook. “The largest defections from the Democratic Party,” Reich highlighted, “were men without college degrees—nearly three out of four working men—whose wages have been dropping for a decade and a half. They tilted to Republicans sixty-three to thirty-seven percent.”52 Telling these voters to simply get a college degree or to retrain for jobs that were no longer secure was a recipe for political disaster. The United States certainly was shifting toward a society in which many jobs required more knowledge than had been the case in the past, something both Bell and Drucker had foreseen decades before. Further, more and more jobs in knowledge and service, especially in the growing fields of health and education, were filled by women workers.53 The threat to male blue-collar jobs in the 1990s contributed to the continued prominence of what historian Robert Self has called “breadwinner conservatism” that had emerged in response to women, seeking greater economic equality but threatening a particular vision of the nuclear family, entering the labor market in larger numbers in the 1960s and 1970s.54 The demographics Reich cited, then, were not surprising, and represented a flowering of the political conflict between “populism and elitism” that Bell foresaw in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
Pat Buchanan’s bid for the Republican nomination in 1996 provides us a window into this growing resentment. Buchanan, a conservative populist who began as a Nixon speechwriter, had made a career mobilizing anti-elite sentiment, pioneering an argument that characterized liberals—especially those with academic credentials—as elites who opposed the needs of the so-called silent majority in the important election of 1968 and during the Nixon presidency.55 In 1992, Buchanan sought disaffected Republican voters, particularly those hit by the recession in Bush’s last year in office. He garnered 38 percent of the vote in New Hampshire by going after Bush on both economic and cultural issues. In his bid to be the party’s nominee four years later, Buchanan stressed his opposition to cultural pluralism (following in the footsteps of Bennett), NAFTA, and undocumented immigration.
Buchanan’s campaign challenged the inevitability of a “postcapitalist” knowledge society in which nations would be helpless to protect the livelihoods of their citizens from global competition that Drucker, Reich, and others had argued was a force that could not be stopped. In one particularly memorable speech, for instance, Buchanan asked, “What has global competition done for the quality of life of Middle America? What, after all, is an economy for, if not for its people?”56 Buchanan did not win the nomination, of course, but he garnered almost 3.2 million votes that year. And, arguably, his areas of greatest strength were in states hard hit by the flight of manufacturing capital: Buchanan won the Missouri caucus and 34 percent of the vote in both Michigan and Wisconsin (Dole only won 51 percent and 53 percent, respectively), in contrast to California, for example, where Dole won 64 percent–18 percent. By the 1990s, particularly after Democrats shifted completely away from a capacious version of social democracy and toward free trade and globalism and free markets, the cultural conservativism of many blue-collar whites was no longer constrained by the economic value of voting Democrat.
After the 1996 election, Reich, disappointed, left the president’s cabinet. In his second term, Clinton went even further down the road to neoliberalism, passing the Financial Services Modernization Act (1999), which removed the firewall between commercial and investment banking in place since 1933, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000), which prevented federal regulation of credit default swaps and other high-risk instruments.57 These laws exacerbated wealth inequality while setting the stage for the economic catastrophe of 2008.
In the 1990s, Clinton and the DLC abetted market-driven education reform in states and school districts across the country, paving the way for the titanic change ushered in by the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. In the years to come, the education myth would only grow more powerful, reaching its high point less than a year after Clinton left office.