“Notes” in “THE EDUCATION MYTH”
Notes
PREFACE
1. Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the DECLARATION of INDEPENDENCE in Defense of Equality (New York: Liveright, 2014), 145.
2. Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little, Brown, 2017).
INTRODUCTION
1. On the meaning of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights, see Harvey Kaye, The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 114–47.
2. Nancy Beadie, Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early American Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
3. Tracy Steffes, School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
4. Cristina Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
5. David Labaree, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
6. I build on the work of W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, who compare this development to religious faith. See The Education Gospel.
7. Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2020), especially chapter 4.
8. Danielle Allen, Education and Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 5–18.
9. Lane Windham, Knockin’ on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
10. I use the terms neo-liberal and neoliberal differently in this book. Neo-liberal, a term coined by Randall Rothenberg, refers to a specific historical movement of Democrats in the 1980s, which I explain in chapter 5. Neoliberal is a broader analytical term that refers to a political economic philosophy built on privatizing public services, making workers more flexible by reducing or eliminating worker protections, and facilitating private capital accumulation. Most scholars view the latter as emerging in the 1970s and gaining wider purchase in American politics from that point until the recent past or even the present.
11. By this point, there are scores of empirical studies highlighting the continued growth of inequality, both in terms of income and in wealth, from about 1980 to the present. Most Americans have seen their wages stagnate or only grow a little since that time, while the wealthiest 10 percent, 1 percent, and 0.1 percent, respectively, have all enhanced their wealth dramatically, and exponentially so the higher up in the wealth distribution. For an aggregation of some of this evidence, see Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik, and Rakesh Kochnar, “Trends in Income and Wealth Inequality,” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/. See also Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, Oct. 2014, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-zucmanNBER14wealth.pdf; and Saez and Zucman, “Trends in Income and Wealth Inequality: Revising after the Revisionists,” NBER Working Paper Series, Oct. 2020, file:///C:/Users/sheltonj/Downloads/w27921.pdf. Though their argument puts too much stock in building individual human capital as the solution to economic inequality, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn highlight, qualitatively, what life looks like for many Americans who lack college degrees. See Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).
12. For the failed promise of human capital to pay off for many college graduates, see Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, and Sin Yi Cheung, The Death of Human Capital? Its Failed Promise and How to Renew It and an Age of Disruption (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), chapters 4 and 5. For the single best treatment of how students from limited means fare in college, see Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
13. Sandel, Tyranny of Merit, 25.
14. Ashitha Nagesh, “US Election 2020: Why Trump Gained Support among Minorities,” BBC News, Nov. 22, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54972389.
15. T. H. Marshall has referred to these “social rights” as the right to a certain level of economic security that is “not proportionate to the market value of the claimant.” See “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Citizenship and Social Class, ed. Marshall and Tom Bottomore (London: Pluto Press, 1993), 28.
16. “Biden’s Electoral Win Was Narrow in the ‘Tipping Point’ State,” The Conversation, Nov. 15, 2020, https://theconversation.com/bidens-electoral-college-win-was-narrow-in-the-tipping-point-state-labor-surges-in-victoria-150143.
17. Bryan Caplan, The Case against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
CHAPTER 1. FROM INDEPENDENCE TO SECURITY
1. Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin: A History, 1848–1925, vol. 1 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), 275–95, 508–25. On the Wisconsin Idea, see Gwen Drury, “The Wisconsin Idea: The Idea that Made Wisconsin Famous,” https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/wiscidea/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/496-week-2-Rq1-and-RC1.pdf; Chad Alan Goldberg, “The University’s Service to Democracy,” in Education for Democracy, ed. Goldberg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 3–52; and Charles McCarthy, The Wisconsin Idea (New York: MacMillan, 1912).
2. Dan Kaufman, The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 25–26; Robert Ozanne, The Labor Movement in Wisconsin: A History (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1984), 129–33.
3. On the role of reformers’ attempts to use of public education during the Progressive Era, see Steffes, School, Society, & State.
4. Danielle Allen, Our Declaration.
5. See Harold Hyman, American Singularity: The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the 1862 Homestead and Morrill Acts, and the 1944 G.I. Bill (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).
6. See Jefferson’s Second Draft of the Virginia Constitution, before June 13, 1776, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0161-0003.
7. As Steve Fraser has pointed out, Jefferson was joined by Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, among others, who feared what dispossession from land would mean for the future of American democracy. See The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown), 70–74.
8. Thomas Paine, “Agrarian Justice, Opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly, Being a Plan for Meliorating the Condition of Man,” 1797.
9. Harvey Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 132–39.
10. Johann Neem, Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 6–12.
11. Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” June 18, 1779, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-02-02-0132-0004-0079.
12. “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination,” Jefferson argued, “it appears to me, that in memory [African Americans] are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Penguin, 1999), 146.
13. “Land Ordinance of 1785,” https://www.in.gov/history/2478.htm; “An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio, 1787,” https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=8&page=transcript.
14. Benjamin Rush, Thoughts upon Female Education Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government, in the United States of America: Addressed to the Visitors of the Young Ladies’ Academy in Philadelphia, 28 July, 1787, at the Close of the Quarterly Examination (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1787).
15. Labaree, Someone Has to Fail, 72–73. “In the antebellum period, this meant expanding government to provide canals, turnpikes, and railroads; penitentiaries, hospitals, asylums, and poorhouses; common schools and normal schools. This amounted to a huge increase in the role of the state.”
16. Julie Reuben, “Patriotic Purposes: Public Schools and the Education of Citizens,” in The Public Schools, ed. Susan Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7–8.
17. William Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 10–44. Other important reformers who sought to advance public education for this purpose included Unitarian pastor Charles Brooks, Massachusetts congressman Joseph Richardson, Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens, and educator Henry Barnard. See Donald Warren, To Enforce Education: A History of the Founding Years of the United States Office of Education (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), 30–47.
18. Horace Mann, “Means and Objects of Common School Education,” Lectures and Annual Reports on Education (Boston: Rand and Avery, 1867), 39–88, 41. Italics in original quotation.
19. Mann, “The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government,” in Lectures and Annual Reports, 150.
20. Horace Mann, Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education, Together with the Fifth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board, Covering the Year 1841 (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, State Printers, 1842), 70, 82.
21. Mann, Fifth Annual Report, 86–120, 86, 89, 120.
22. Mann, Twelfth Annual Report (1849).
23. Helen Sumner, “Rise and Growth in Philadelphia,” in History of Labour in the United States, vol 1, ed. John Commons and Associates (New York: MacMillan, 1926), 169–230, 224, 225. As Katznelson and Weir point out, there has long been a history of working-class support for education throughout American history. See Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the American Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
24. Neem, Democracy’s Schools, 24.
25. Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 21–112.
26. Hilary Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8–9.
27. Lloyd Jorgensen, “The Origins of Public Education in Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 33 (September 1949): 16, 21.
28. Curti and Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin, 13–14.
29. Curti and Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin, 22.
30. Howard Peckham, edited and updated by Margaret Steneck and Nicholas Steneck, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817–1992 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–15.
31. Curti and Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin, 64.
32. Curti and Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin, 75–76.
33. David Wilmot, speech in the House of Representatives, 1847.
34. Abraham Lincoln, “Address on the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” 1854.
35. Lincoln, “Annual Address to Congress,” December 1861.
36. “An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” Sep. 30, 1859, https://www.nal.usda.gov/topics/lincolns-milwaukee-speech
37. Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinckle, A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity ( New York: Basic Books, 2015), 41–50.
38. Holzer and Garfinckle, A Just and Generous Nation, 88.
39. Hyman, American Singularity, 36.
40. The promise of the Morrill Act was significantly expanded later, through the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890, as well as the creation of the USDA Cooperative Extension Service with the Smith-Lever Act (1914). See Christopher Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 57–60.
41. Warren, To Enforce Education, 58–76. Quotation in Bernard Steiner, “Life of Henry Barnard, The First United States Commissioner of Education, 1867–1870,” Department of the Interior Bureau of Education, Bulletin, 1919, No. 8. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919). National Education Association Collection, George Washington University, Box 2244, Folder 4.
42. Hyman, American Singularity, 46–47.
43. See, for example, “Letter from Henry Bram, Ishmael Moultrie, and Yates Sampson to the Commissioner of the Freedmens’ Bureau, Oct. 1865,” https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/2621.
44. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, Updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015).
45. James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988), 28, 148–85.
46. Rosanne Currarino, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
47. The best synthetic account is Fraser’s The Age of Acquiescence.
48. Carlos Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1994).
49. Fraser, Age of Acquiescence, 97–102.
50. Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
51. Katznelson and Weir, Schooling for All, 75–76, 150–77. Groeger, The Education Trap, 111–22.
52. Groeger, The Education Trap, especially chapters 2 and 4.
53. Groeger, The Education Trap, chapters 3–4.
54. Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe, “The Price of Human Capital: The Illusion of Equal Educational Opportunity,” in Public Education Under Siege, ed. Michael Katz and Mike Rose (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 77.
55. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 182.
56. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 87.
57. Labaree, Someone Has to Fail, 11.
58. Reuben, “Patriotic Purposes,” 12; and Jaroslav Pelikan, “General Introduction: The Public Schools as an Institution of American Constitutional Democracy,” in The Public Schools, ed Susan Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson, xviii.
59. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Free Press, 1916), 86–87.
60. Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 59–91, 158.
61. Margaret Haley, “Why Teachers Should Organize,” National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Third Annual Meeting, June 27–July 1, 1904.
62. Jon Shelton, ed., “Why Teachers Should Organize,” study guide for “Teaching Labor’s Story” project, http://www.lawcha.org/wp-content/uploads/7-2-Why-Teachers-Should-Organize-FINAL.pdf.
63. Patricia Aljberg Graham, Schooling America: How the Public Schools Meet the Nation’s Changing Needs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7–35.
64. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
65. Reuben, “Patriotic Purposes,” 13.
66. The Towner-Sterling Bill: An Analysis of the Provisions of the Bill; A Discussion of the Principles and Policies Involved; And a Presentation of FACTS AND FIGURES Relating to the Subject (Washington, DC: The National Education Association, 1923), National Education Association Collection, George Washington University, Box 2255, Folder 14.
67. The Towner-Sterling Bill, NEAC, Box 225, Folder 14.
68. The quest for a federal department of education did not die with the failure of Towner-Sterling. In 1928, the NEA lobbied for yet another bill to elevate public education to a cabinet-level position, the Curtis-Reed Bill. The AFT, a much smaller organization with about ten thousand members, also supported it. Hearing before the Committee on Education, House of Representatives, Seventieth Congress, First Session on H.R. 7, A Bill to Create a Department of Education and for Other Purposes (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1928), 2–4.
CHAPTER 2. TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS
1. Michael Bennett, When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (Washington: Brassey’s, 1996), 1–30.
2. Steffes, School, Society, & State, 83–117.
3. Peter Drucker, from the vantage point of 1993, argued the GI Bill “signaled the shift to the knowledge society.” See Post-Capitalist Society (New York: Harper Business, 1993), 3. “Future historians,” he predicted, “may well consider it the most important event of the twentieth century.”
4. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 20–53.
5. Kaye, The Fight for the Four Freedoms; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–39 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapter 6; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); and David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapters 9–10.
6. Transcript of National Labor Relations Act (1935), https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=67&page=transcript.
7. Steven Attewell, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), chapters 1–3.
8. Brinkley, The End of Reform, 245–46.
9. Adolph Reed Jr., “The New Deal Wasn’t Intrinsically Racist,” The New Republic, Nov. 26, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/155704/new-deal-wasnt-intrinsically-racist.
10. On the meaning of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights, see Harvey Kaye, The Fight for the Four Freedoms, 114–47.
11. Franklin D. Roosevelt Address to the National Education Association, June 30, 1938, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-the-national-education-association-new-york-city.
12. Kathleen Frydl, The GI Bill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 81. Bennett, When Dreams Came True, 80–81.
13. Bennett, When Dreams Came True, 90–91.
14. Kaye, The Fight for the Four Freedoms, 134–36.
15. The Veteran’s Guide (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1944).
16. Hyman, American Singularity, 65–66.
17. Loss, Between Citizens and the State, 91–120; Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22–23, 89–92.
18. Statement of Mr. Philbin, Congressional Record, Jan. 1944, 357.
19. Extension of Remarks of Hon. Marion T. Bennett of Missouri, Jun 15, 1944, Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 78th Congress, Second Session, Appendix, Volume 10—Part 10, A3046.
20. Extension of Remarks of Hon. Dean Gillespie of Colorado, June 13, 1944, in Congressional Record... Appendix, A3082.
21. “Statement of Mr. O’Hara,” Congressional Record, Jan. 1944, 357–58.
22. “Extension of Remarks of Hon. Samuel A. Weiss,” Congressional Record... Appendix, June 13, 1944, A3008.
23. Michael Bennett, When Dreams Came True, 86–88. All veterans under the age of twenty-four who were in school two years before being drafted were automatically eligible for the education provisions of the GI Bill.
24. Hyman, American Singularity, 69. Enrollment of veterans in college exploded from about 88,000 in 1945 to over a million by 1946, over 40 percent of the college-age population. See Bennett, When Dreams Came True, 18. On social mobility, see Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens, 48–53.
25. Mettler, From Soldiers to Citizens, 7–8.
26. Bennett, When Dreams Came True, 155–59.
27. Frydl, The GI Bill, 333.
28. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 138.
29. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapter 3.
30. Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic, 138.
31. Mettler, From Soldiers to Citizens, 55.
32. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005); Frydl, The GI Bill, 7.
33. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 128–33; and Mettler, From Soldiers to Citizens, 74–75.
34. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 121.
35. As The Veteran’s Guide pointed out, “Your former employer is required by law to reinstate you in your former position or to a position of like seniority, status, and pay if your circumstances meet the qualifications set forth in the law” (28).
36. Stephen Bailey, Congress Makes a Law: The Story behind the Employment Act of 1946 (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 42.
37. Attewell, People Must Live by Work, chapter 4.
38. “Statement of Hon. Robert F. Wagner,” Full Employment Act of 1945 Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency United States Senate (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945), 1–3.
39. The Grange was typical of opposition in the Senate, and later, the House: “The Government’s chief role in a free enterprise system is to see that it is free—that its citizens are protected from physical or economic aggression or interference, so that each may develop his talents in his own way according to his capacity, energy, and ingenuity, just long as his activities do not interfere with the rights of others.” See Full Employment Act of 1945 Hearings, 589.
40. “Statement of the Most Reverend Bernard J. Sheil, D.D., Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago, and Director of the Catholic Youth Organization, Archdiocese of Chicago,” Full Employment Act of 1945 Hearings, 611–12.
41. “Statement of Walter White, Secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” Full Employment Act of 1945 Hearings, 615–21, 617, 616.
42. “Statement of Paul G. Hoffman, President, Studebaker Corp., and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Committee for Economic Development,” Full Employment Act of 1945 Hearings, 706.
43. “Statement of Francis J. Brown, Consultant, American Council on Education,” Full Employment Act of 1945 Hearings, 770–71.
44. Murray alone issued twenty-five statements between January 1945 and February 1946, and authored publications ranging from American Political Science Review to the International Teamster to The New Republic. See Bailey, Congress Makes a Law, 69–76, 81–98.
45. Harry Truman, “Special Message to the Congress Presenting a 21-Point Program for the Reconversion Period,” September 6, 1945, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/128/special-message-congress-presenting-21-point-program-reconversion-period.
46. On the reserve army argument, see Michal Kalecki, “Political Aspects of Full Employment,” Political Quarterly 14 (1943): 3. For other arguments against the more robust version of the bill, see Bailey, Congress Makes a Law, 130–78. And for a convincing argument of the radical implications of full employment see Michael Dennis, “The Idea of Full Employment: A Challenge to Capitalism in the New Deal Era,” LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History 14, no. 2 (May 2017): 69–93.
47. “Statement of George Terborgh of the Machinery and Allied Products Institute,” House Hearings on H.R. 2202, 614, quotation in Bailey, Congress Makes a Law, 165.
48. Hugh Norton, The Employment Act and the Council of Economic Advisers, 1946–1976 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 99.
49. Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), xiii.
50. Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 26–27.
51. Letter to Wagner from Walter Reuther, Full Employment Act of 1945 Hearings, 1186–87.
52. Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 280.
53. Winant, The Next Shift, 10.
54. Metzgar, Striking Steel, 39.
55. Kaufman, The Fall of Wisconsin, 25–26; Ozanne, The Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 129–33.
56. Ozanne, The Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 60–70, 136–39; Darryl Holter, “Labor Law: Wisconsin’s ‘Little Wagner Act’ and the Road to Taft-Hartley,” in Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology, ed. Darryl Holter (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999), 186–91.
57. Goldin and Katz, The Race between Technology and Education, 196.
58. Frydl, The GI Bill, 308.
59. Goldin and Katz, The Race between Technology and Education, 269.
60. “Table 33—Current Fund Revenue of Institutions of Higher Education, by Source of funds, 1889–90–1989–90,” National Center for Education Statistics, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Standpoint, 1993, 89, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf.
61. Goldin and Katz, The Race between Technology and Education, 250–52. Women born in 1955 began to attend college at higher rates than men born at the same time, a trend that continues to this day.
62. The committee also included, for example, the future president’s brother Milton Eisenhower, then president of Kansas State University; Nobel Prize–winning nuclear physicist and Washington University of St. Louis chancellor Arthur Compton; Ball State president John Emens; New School philosopher Horace Kallen; and corporate executive Murray Lincoln.
63. Harry Truman, “Letter of Appointment of Commission Members, Washington, D.C., July 15, 1946,” in Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of The President’s Commission on Higher Education, https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.89917/2015.89917.Higher-Education-For-American-Democracy-A-Report-Of-The-Presidents-Commission-On-Higher-Education-Vol-I---Vi_djvu.txt.
64. Truman Commission, Higher Education for American Democracy, 1–2.
65. Truman Commission, Higher Education for American Democracy, 8, 14.
66. Truman Commission, Higher Education for American Democracy, 27, 10.
67. Truman Commission, Higher Education for American Democracy, 30, 36–46.
68. Loss, Between Citizens and the State, 117.
69. Mettler, From Soldiers to Citizens, 136–43.
70. Majority Opinion, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
71. Labaree, Someone Has to Fail, 30.
CHAPTER 3. EDUCATION’S WAR ON POVERTY IN THE 1960S
1. For an excellent account of the intellectual development of human capital theory, see Brown, Lauder, and Cheung, The Death of Human Capital? especially chapter 2.
2. Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
3. On the differences between Becker and Schultz, see Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017), 219–27. On the Chicago school more generally, see Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 63–68.
4. Theodore Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” Presidential Address at the Seventy-Third Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, St. Louis, December 28, 1960, reprinted in The American Economic Review 51, no. 1 (1961): 1.
5. Becker, Human Capital, 12.
6. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” 3.
7. Becker, Human Capital, 16.
8. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” 15.
9. Joshua Zeitz, Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House (New York: Viking, 2018), 47–57.
10. Cooper, Family Values, 221–22
11. Attewell, People Must Live By Work, 180–84.
12. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” 14.
13. Lyndon B. Johnson, “State of the Union Address,” Jan. 8, 1964.
14. Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 8.
15. Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks at the University of Michigan,” May 22, 1964, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/may-22-1964-remarks-university-michigan.
16. See, for example, Doxey Wilkerson, “Federal Aid to Education: To Perpetuate or Diminish Existing Educational Inequalities?” AFT Publications, AFT Collection, Walter Reuther Archives, Wayne State University, Box 2, folder 17.
17. Title I, “The National Defense Education Act, 1958,” https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-72/pdf/STATUTE-72-Pg1580.pdf.
18. Sandel, Tyranny of Merit, 156–63.
19. Graham, Schooling America, 107.
20. House of Representative Hearings before a Sub-committee of the Committee on Education and Labor, 85th Congress (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1958). Quotation in Lee Anderson, Congress and the Classroom: From the Cold War to “No Child Left Behind” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 46.
21. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 235–38.
22. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 64.
23. Annelise Orleck, “Introduction,” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980, ed. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian (Athens, GA; University of Georgia Press, 2011), 10.
24. Guian McKee, “‘This Government Is with Us’: Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty” in The War on Poverty, ed. Orleck and Hazirjian, 38.
25. Anderson, Congress and the Classroom, 61–62.
26. Zeitz, The Great Society, 146–51.
27. Graham, Schooling America, 136–37. About 90 percent of school districts would receive some federal funding.
28. The shift was profound: before ESEA, only about 1 percent of school budgets came from the federal government, most of which came in the form of money for vocational education and other minor programs. Reese, America’s Public School, 241.
29. Lyndon Johnson State of the Union Address, Jan. 4, 1965, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-4-1965-state-union.
30. “Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Education Program,” Jan. 12, 1965, Subcommittee on Education for the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, US Senate, Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 Background Material with Related Presidential Recommendations (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 11–12.
31. “Message from the President,” Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 14.
32. House of Representatives, Report from the Committee on Education and Labor to the Whole House on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 1–2.
33. United States Senate, Elementary and Secondary Act Hearings before the Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 631.
34. Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Elementary and Secondary Education Act Report together with Minority Views and Individual Views (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 81–88, 87.
35. As Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe put it, “By institutionalizing the idea that poverty and income insecurity were chiefly matters of education... the Great Society actually increased expectations about what education could accomplish. As a result the federal commitment to education and its role in social policy remained firmly in place despite the backlash against the Great Society’s own educational programs.” See “Educationalizing the Welfare State and Privatizing Education,” in Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child and Even Chance, ed. Prudence Carter and Kevin Welner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 32.
36. Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal, “From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education,” Dissent (fall 2012), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/from-master-plan-to-no-plan-the-slow-death-of-public-higher-education.
37. Cooper, Family Values, 227–28.
38. The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, “State Investment and Disinvestment in Higher Education: 1961 to 2015,” Postsecondary Education Opportunity 272 (February 2015): 17–24.
39. Coordinating Committee for Higher Education, A Comprehensive Plan for Higher Education in Wisconsin (1965), 3.
40. Betty Brown, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay: From the Beginning (Green Bay: University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, 2000), 27–28.
41. Brown, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, 30–32. “Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Report of the Committee of Twenty-Five on Organization for Higher Education,” CCHE #83, 1964 Working Paper, October 1964.
42. Coordinating Committee for Higher Education, A Comprehensive Plan for Higher Education in Wisconsin (1966), 5.
43. Coordinating Committee for Higher Education, A Comprehensive Plan for Higher Education in Wisconsin, 9, 18, 27.
44. Loss, Between Citizens and the State, 156–60. About 1.5 million students used NDEA student loans to go to college between 1959–69.
45. Lyndon Johnson, “Special Message to Congress: Toward Full Educational Opportunity,” Jan. 12, 1965, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-toward-full-educational-opportunity.
46. Becker, Human Capital, 121. Contemporaries of Becker, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy had a different view of the function of expanding access to higher education. Under monopoly capitalism, they pointed out, it was not really possible for enterprising young Americans to start businesses. So, “a substitute mechanism has been found in the educational system. Through low-tuition state universities, scholarships, loans, and the like, boys and girls who are really able and ambitious (desirous of success, as society defines it) can move up from the inferior part of the educational system. From there the road leads through the corporate apparatus or the professions into integration into the upper-middle, and occasionally, the higher, strata of society.” See Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 172.
47. On “supply curves,” see Becker, Human Capital, 138.
48. “Statement of Hon. Winston Prouty, a US Senator from the State of Vermont,” United States Senate, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Part I (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 96–97.
49. William Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 121–61.
50. Jerald Podair, Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 37–41.
51. Transcript of A. Philip Randolph speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
52. On capital flight in American cities and its implications, see Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Winant, The Next Shift.
53. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary, Feb. 1, 1965.
54. Daniel Levine, Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 188–89.
55. “A Freedom Budget for All Americans” (1967), text in Jerald Podair, Bayard Rustin, 140.
56. “Hearings of Sen. Abraham Ribicoff Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization,” Dec., 1966, quoted in Daniel Levine, Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement, 191.
57. Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 145–79.
58. The commission, officially titled the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was charged on July 29, 1967. It was bipartisan, including Republican mayor John Lindsay (vice chairman), United Steelworkers president I. W. Abel, and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, among others.
59. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1.
60. Rustin argued, “We have gone far enough to arouse expectations but not to satisfy them—and that is a dangerous thing to do.” “The Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, An Analysis by Bayard Rustin,” AFT Office of the President Collection (AFTOPC), 1960–1974, Box 1, Folder 2.
61. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1.
62. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 4–7.
63. See, for example, Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Abridged ed., ed. Joseph McCartin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Thomas Reid Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Among the many primary documents the Kerner Commission could have consulted: Jacob Riis’s photo-essay How the Other Half Lives (1890); Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1905); and the findings of Basil Manly’s report for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (1915).
64. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 11.
65. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 11–12.
66. “The Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, An Analysis by Bayard Rustin,” AFTOPC.
67. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 62–98.
68. On the rise of white Americans’ anxieties about “law and order,” see Jon Shelton, “Letters to the Essex County Penitentiary: David Selden and the Fracturing of America,” Journal of Social History 48 (2014): 135–55.
69. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 93.
CHAPTER 4. NEW POLITICS
1. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1976), ix–xv. Italics in original quotation. Bell pointed out that the number of teachers in the United States increased from about 1.3 million in 1954–55 to 2.1 million by 1964–65 and to 2.8 million in 1970 (215).
2. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, xvi–xviii.
3. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 44.
4. Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969).
5. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2009).
6. Kenneth Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 13.
7. US Census Bureau, “CPS Historical Timetables: Years of School Completed by People 25 Years and Over, by Age and Sex: Selected Years, 1940 to 2019,” https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/educational-attainment/cps-historical-time-series.html accessed 5/29/2020. As Daniel Bell characterized it in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, this was a “democratization of higher education on scale that the world has never seen before. No society has ever attempted to provide formal education for the bulk of its youth through age nineteen or twenty (the junior college level) or through age twenty-two, yet this has now become the explicit policy of the United States” (216).
8. Burton Kaufman and Scott Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter, 2d ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006), 26.
9. Charles Clotfelter, Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017), 97.
10. Iver Peterson, “‘New Vocationalism’ Now Campus Vogue,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1973.
11. Hearing One Transcript, Dec. 8, 1970; Office of the Governor-Elect Press Release, Dec. 4, 1970; and “Suggested Press Release on Budget Hearings,” Wisconsin Governor Patrick Lucey Records, 1971–77, University of Wisconsin Archives and Records Management, Series 2419, Box 184, Folder 39.
12. Letter from Lucey to Joseph Sobek, Apr. 22, 1971, and Lucey letter to Ed Weidner, Apr. 30, 1971. Lucey Records, Series 2419, Box 185, Folder 14. In background preparation for hearings in December 1970, the administration pointed out that “society demands of the individual both employable skills and a liberal arts background to adjust and operate in today’s complex world.” See “Section 4—Reducing Limitations of the Two-Year Technical Education Effort,” Lucey Transition team hearing preparation document, also in Box 185, Folder 14.
13. “Mission of the University of Wisconsin System,” https://www.wisconsin.edu/about-the-uw-system/. As business analyst and futurist Peter Drucker points out, the increasing use of the term human resources was coeval with the growth of human capital and the advent of the knowledge society. See Post-Capitalist Society, 66.
14. Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame US: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1–16, 71–95, 95.
15. Joyce Baugh, The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011), 165.
16. According to Randall Rothenberg, “The Class of ’74 was one of the largest freshman classes in congressional history. Scholars and professionals, they were well-educated men and women who had been fired up by John and Robert Kennedy.” See The Neo-Liberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 41. See also Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 152.
17. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America, March–April 1977, 7–31, 9.
18. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” 11–17.
19. Barbara and Ehrenreich, “The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism,” Radical America 11, no. 3 (May–June 1977), 8. As they went on to argue, “The commonly held attitudes of the working class, are as likely to be anti-PMC as they are to be anti-capitalist—if only because people are more likely, in a day-to-day sense, to experience humiliation, harassment, frustration, etc. at the hands of the PMC than from members of the actual capitalist class” (19).
20. On American policymakers’ failure to develop an industrial policy, see Stein, Pivotal Decade, in chapters 7–8. On the decline of manufacturing, see Windham, Knockin’ on Labor’s Door, 107–27; and Ira Magaziner and Robert Reich, Minding America’s Business: The Decline and Rise of the American Economy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 1–2.
21. Windham, Knockin’ on Labor’s Door, especially 1–81.
22. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 66–67.
23. National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, Technology and the American Economy, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1966), xii, 9.
24. Automation Commission’s Report on Technological Development,” Monthly Labor Review, Mar. 1, 1966, 274–77. In fact, Reuther believed the right to a job was even more urgent than the commission report, arguing in a footnote for “productive employment and adequate incomes for all who are willing and able to work” (276n1).
25. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 107–10.
26. “Unemployment Rate, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 extracted Aug. 16, 2021.
27. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 114–19.
28. “Unemployment Rate, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 extracted Aug. 16, 2021.
29. “Statement of Eli Ginzberg, Chairman, National Commission for Manpower Policy,” October 3, 1974, The Emergency Jobs Act: Hearings before the Select Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives Ninety-Third Congress, Second Session (1974), quotation on 73.
30. “Statement of Nathaniel Goldfinger, Director, Department of Research, AFL-CIO,” October 10, 1974, The Emergency Jobs Act (1974), 149–50.
31. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 120–23.
32. In a letter from January 1976, George Caudelle, secretary-treasurer of the North Georgia Building and Construction Trades Council, asserted that “for the best part of his four-year term as Governor, Carter did little in support of Labor’s programs. You can trace his interest in, and support of, Labor issues to his decision to go national.... I would characterize his term in office as a period of smiles and broken promises.” Further, in 1971, Carter wrote the National Right to Work Committee that he opposed repealing the state’s right-to-work law. See “Labor Voter Facts on Jimmy Carter,” AFT President’s Office: Albert Shanker Collection (AFTPOASC), Reuther Archives, Wayne State University, Box 49, Folder 14.
33. AFL-CIO General Board Statement, Aug. 28, 1976, AFTPOASC, Box 49, Folder 14.
34. Wayne Urban, Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000), 171–209.
35. “Educators Help Carter/Mondale to Victory,” NEA Now, Nov. 8, 1976.
36. Diana D’Amico Pawlewicz, Blaming Teachers: Professionalization Policies and the Failure of Reform in American History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020).
37. Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); and Jon Shelton, “Teacher Unions and Associations,” in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald (London: Springer, 2020).
38. Stein, Pivotal Decade.
39. Albert Shanker, “Where We Stand: Equal Rights for Public Employees,” New York Times, Feb. 20, 1977.
40. David Stein, “Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Jobs Guarantee,” Boston Review, May 17, 2017, https://bostonreview.net/articles/david-stein-why-coretta-scott-king-fought-job-guarantee/.
41. Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). Cooper, Family Values, 21. Windham, Knockin’ on Labor’s Door.
42. Marisa Chappell’s work has shown that while the fight over full employment ultimately led to a bill with “breadwinner” bias, both feminists and civil rights activists had pushed to establish a true “right to a job” for everyone. See The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 125–38. In my view, a meaningful version of Humphrey-Hawkins, even the more limited version that still privileged breadwinners, could nevertheless have set expectations on which future activists could have further dismantled the version of American social democracy that privileged whites and privileged men.
43. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 131–40.
44. David Chappell, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Random House, 2014), 66–68; Weir, Politics and Jobs, 134–35; Stein, Pivotal Decade, 140.
45. Stein, Pivotal Decade, 118–22. As Stein describes him, “Humphrey was the one candidate who had his eyes on the changes in the American economy, as well as the support of constituency groups that made liberalism a majoritarian political project.... He abstained from the emotionally satisfying anticorporatism, critiqued conventional Keynesianism, and offered social democratic solutions to repair the racial divisions in the party” (138).
46. Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1976, Hearings before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, May 20, 21, and 25, 1976 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), 6.
47. Letter from Coretta Scott King to Full Employment Action Council Board Member Albert Shanker, Mar. 5, 1976, AFT President’s Office Al Lowenthal Collection, Box 3, Folder 1. See also Chappell, Waking from the Dream, 68–70.
48. Andrew Levison, The Full Employment Alternative (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1980), 157; Helen Ginsburg, “Historical Amnesia: The Humphrey-Hawkins Act, Full Employment and Employment as a Right,” Review of Black Political Economy 39 (March 2012): 121–36, especially 130.
49. Michael Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
50. Jeff Greenfield, “What Makes Hubert Not Run?” New York Times, April 4, 1976.
51. “Statement of Hubert Humphrey,” Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1976, Hearings, 132, 137.
52. “Statement of Augustus F. Hawkins, Representative in Congress from the State of California,” Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1976, Hearings, 142.
53. In addition to the discussion here, see Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 275–76; and Attewell, People Must Live By Work, 226–39.
54. “Statement of Carl Madden, Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America; Accompanied by Richard S. Landry, Staff Executive, Banking and Monetary-Fiscal Policy Committee,” in Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1976, Hearings, 214.
55. Soma Golden, “Democrats Put Focus on Jobs,” New York Times, May 22, 1976; Greenfield, “What Makes Hubert Not Run?”
56. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 138.
57. Greenfield, “What Makes Hubert Not Run?”
58. Attewell, People Must Live by Work, 248.
59. “1976 Democratic Party Platform,” July 12, 1976, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1976-democratic-party-platform.
60. Charles Mohr, “Udall Calls Carter Evasive on Jobs Bill,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 1976. At a conference organized by the FEAC, Carter called the bill “laudable” but did not endorse it. He later endorsed it “at the prodding of labor and black groups,” according to journalist John Lee, but “his heart doesn’t seem to be into it.” See John Lee, “The Economic Scene: Prices, Jobs, and Voters,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 1976.
61. “Jimmy Carter on the Issue of: Jobs and Unemployment” undated campaign material, in AFTPOASC, Box 49, Folder 14.
62. Chappell, Waking from the Dream, 74–76.
63. Ginsburg, “Historical Amnesia,” 131. See also Kaufman and Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter, 134–35.
64. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 124–29.
65. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton: 2009), 185–212.
66. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 136–37.
67. Stein, “Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Job Guarantee.”
68. Jimmy Carter, “State of the Union Address,” Jan. 19, 1978, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-19-1978-state-union-address.
69. “Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act” (Humphrey-Hawkins Act), Public Law 95–523, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/full-employment-balanced-growth-act-humphrey-hawkins-act-1034.
70. “Statement of F. Ray Marshall, Secretary, Department of Labor,” Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1976, Hearings, 180–84. Early in the Carter administration, Marshall had advocated for guaranteed public service jobs for welfare recipients, so this stance appears to have been pushed by Carter. See Burton Kaufman and Scott Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter, 65–66.
71. “Statement on the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (S.50) before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs for the Chamber Commerce for the United States,” by Dr. Jack Carlson, May 8, 1978. Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, Hearings before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, United States Senate (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978), 42. Questioning of panelists by Senate committee, Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, Hearings, 156.
72. Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, Hearings, 229–30.
73. Windham, Knockin’ on Labor’s Door, 57–81.
74. On the right’s efforts to stop labor law reform in 1978, see Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 288–96; Stein, Pivotal Decade, 180–90; and Jon Shelton, “‘Compulsory Unionism’ and Its Critics: The National Right to Work Committee, Teacher Unions, and the Defeat of Labor Law Reform in 1978,” Journal of Policy History 29, no. 3 (2017): 378–402. On Carter, see Martin Halpern, Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 123–26.
75. David Stein, “Full Employment and Freedom,” Jacobin, May 25, 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/full-employment-humphrey-hawkins-inflation-jobs-guarantee.
76. Stein, Pivotal Decade, 192–204, 225–337. As David Stein points out, “In 1979, only a year after the law was passed, under Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the hearings bordered on farcical, with Volcker asserting that controlling inflation should continue to take precedence over the Fed’s employment mandate—a direct contravention of the NCFE/FEAC’s goals. The infamous ‘Volcker Shock’ then raised interest rates to heretofore-unfathomable levels and helped bring rates of unemployment for Black workers to as high as 19.5 percent in 1983.” See “Full Employment and Freedom.”
77. Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (London: Verso, 1988), 152–56.
78. “Jimmy Carter on the Issue of: Education,” Undated Campaign literature, AFTPOAS, Box 49, Folder 14. See also, “Statements by President Jimmy Carter on a Separate U.S. Department of Education,” NEAC, Box 2246, Folder 4.
79. Eisenhower message to Congress, “Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1953,” https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title5a-node84-leaf134&num=0&edition=prelim.
80. Zeitz, Building the Great Society, 153.
81. AFT Press Release, “AFT Outlines Early Childhood Drive in Campaign Manual,” Mar. 31, 1976; and AFT Press Release, “Battle Over Day Care Sponsorship to Headline AFT QuEST Consortium ’75,” April 24, 1975, in AFTPOASC, Box 49, Folder 3.
82. Carter Education Task Force First Meeting note, June 15, 1976, AFTOPASC, Box 49, Folder 14.
83. “A State Department of Education—Issues,” sent to the HEW Team Transition Planning Group, Dec. 8 1976, AFTOPASC, Box 49, Folder 15.
84. “Citizens Committee Asks for White House Meeting to Seek Support for Cabinet-Level Education Post,” NEAC, Sep, 23, 1977, Box 2246, Folder 4.
85. The NEA publication, The NEA Reporter asked teachers to send letters to Carter. See “Teacher—It’s Time for You to Talk to Jimmy Carter,” NEA Reporter 15, no. 6 (Sept 1977): 1; Letter from Gerry McDonough to Jimmy Carter, Oct. 20, 1977; and Letter from Marilyn Parnell, Sep. 20, 1977, NEAC, Box 2246, Folder 1. There are six folders of letters alone in Box 2246.
86. Carter, “State of the Union Address,” Jan. 19, 1978, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-19-1978-state-union-address.
87. “Statement of Hale Campion, Under Secretary, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, May 17, 1978,” NEAC, Box 2244, Folder 1. Califano, however, also likely sought to ham-string the proposal by calling to include a number of programs he knew loud constituencies would oppose: Head Start, Indian Education, and CETA training programs. See “Califano Launches Drive to Keep the ‘E’ in HEW,” National Journal, Feb. 25, 1978.
88. “NEA Hits ‘Dancing Around Philosophical Outskirts’ of Education Department Issue before Senate Committee,” Oct. 13, 1977, NEAC Box 2247, Folder 1. See also, “Statement of John Ryor, President of the National Education Association,” House Hearings, HR 13443, 55–67.
89. “Statement Adopted by the Twelfth Constitutional Convention, AFL-CIO,” December 1977, House Hearings 1978, 320–21. Public Employee Department, AFL-CIO, “Opposition to a Federal Department of Education,” Sep. 21, 1977 and “Resolution for AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department Convention on a Separate Department of Education,” NEAC, Box 2247, Folder 1.
90. “Pro and Con: Should There Be a Separate U.S. Department of Education?” Times Herald (Port Huron, MI), Dec. 4, 1977.
91. “Statement of Hon. Shirley Chisolm, a Representative in Congress from the State of New York,” House Hearings, 380.
92. “Education Department Opponents Force Bill Off House Schedule,” Congressional Quarterly, Oct. 7, 1978, 2752; Harrison Donnelly, “Education Department Survives by One Vote in House Committee,” CQ, May 5, 1979, 836; Harrison Donnelly, “Education Department Passes House, 210–206,” CQ, Jul. 14, 1979, 1411; Harrison Donnelly, “Conferees Drop House’s Controversial Education Department Amendments,” CQ, Sept. 15, 179, 2026; Harrison Donnelly, “Education Department Wins Final Approval,” CQ, Sept. 29, 1979, 2112; Anderson, Congress and the Classroom, 125.
93. Vice President Walter Mondale, “Remarks at Meeting of Ad Hoc Committee on a Cabinet Department of Education,” Jan. 24, 1979. NEAC, Box 2247, Folder 5.
94. News release on the Department of Education Organization Act, Oct. 17, 1979. NEAC, Box 2472, Folder 4.
95. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 424–75, 451.
96. Philip Shabecoff, “Kennedy Offers Broad Health Plan and Challenges Carter to Support It,” New York Times, May 15, 1979; and Hedrich Smith, “Kennedy Declares His Candidacy, Vowing New Leadership for Nation,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 1979. See also, Attewell, People Must Live by Work, 259.
97. Stein, Pivotal Decade, 271.
CHAPTER 5. “AT RISK”
1. “How Groups Voted in 1976,” https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1976; “How Groups Votes in 1980,” https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1980.
2. As Judith Stein has pointed out, the evidence shows that Reagan beat Carter because Americans wanted to see change, not because Reagan was a conservative. See Pivotal Decade, 262–63.
3. Charles Holden, Zach Messitte, and Jerald Podair, Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019). Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
4. On the increasing prominence of the conservative version of human capital in the 1970s, see Cooper, Family Values, 226.
5. Ronald Reagan Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1981, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/inaugural-address-january-20-1981.
6. Gordon Lafer, The Job Training Charade (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 162.
7. Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 186–91.
8. Adam Nelson, “The Federal Role in Education: A Historiographical Essay,” in Rethinking the History of American Education, ed. William Reese and John Rury (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 268.
9. “Federal Education Funding,” Classroom Agenda for the Education Summit, NEAC, Series 7, Subseries 12, Box 2542, Folder 18. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this represented $3 billion less in FY 1989 than FY 1979. See also Richard Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 233–34; and Maris Vinovskis, The Road to Charlottesville: The 1989 Education Summit (A Publication of the National Educational Goals Panel, September 1999), 8, https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/negp/reports/negp30.pdf
10. Cooper, Family Values, 232–41.
11. “Statement of the National Education Association on the Confirmation of Secretary of Education-Designate Terrel Bell before the Senate Committee of Labor and Human Resources, Presented by Willard McGuire of the National Education Association,” NEAC Collection, Series 7, Subseries 8, Box 2244, Folder 5.
12. Pat Ordovensky, “Bell, Home Again, Opens Fire,” Idaho Statesmen, Feb. 3, 1985.
13. “Introduction,” A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, National Commission on Excellence in Education, April 1983.
14. “A Nation at Risk,” ANAR.
15. “The Risk,” ANAR.
16. Magaziner and Reich, Minding America’s Business.
17. Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 38–39. See also David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, who referred to ANAR as a deliberate “misinformation campaign” in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 3. Finally, the Energy Department’s Sandia Report in 1989 showed the methodology used by ANAR was deeply problematic, scores on neither the SAT nor the NAEP were declining, and claims of a skills gap were simply false. Deputy Education Secretary David Kearns, however, buried the report, and the government never issued it. See Deborah Duncan Owens, The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 98–103, 128–29.
18. “Table 222.85, Average National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Mathematics Scale Score, by Age and Selected Student Characteristics: Selected Years, 1973–2012,” National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_222.85.asp. As Deborah Duncan Owens points out, ANAR relied on SAT scores as their only longitudinal test, and the SAT was far from representative. Further, declining SAT scores actually resulted from more students taking the test in the 1970s. See The Origins of the Common Core, 7–17.
19. “Hope and Frustration,” ANAR.
20. “Excellence in Education,” ANAR.
21. “Recommendations A-E,” ANAR.
22. Graham, Schooling America, 168–71.
23. Michael Oreskes, “Shanker Urges Teachers to Aid School Reforms,” New York Times, May 1, 1983.
24. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 272–80, 272.
25. Urban, Gender, Race, and the National Education Association, 264.
26. National Education Association, “An Open Letter to American on Schools, Students, and Tomorrow,” National Education Association, 1984, AFTOPASC. Box 51, Folder 9.
27. Shelton, Teacher Strike! 48.
28. Joseph McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). On PATCO as precedent for other strikes, see Stein, Pivotal Decade, 267.
29. Stein, Pivotal Decade, 267–70; Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2019), 136–81.
30. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 216.
31. Adam Mertz, “Growing Realignment: Land, Labor, Taxes, and the Decline of Wisconsin’s Democratic Majority,” PhD diss., University of Illinois-Chicago, 2019, chapter 8.
32. Michael Rosen and Charlie Dee, “Briggs & Stratton’s Demise: Greed, Mismanagement, Blaming Others,” Wisconsin Examiner, Sept. 28, 2020, https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2020/09/28/briggs-strattons-demise-greed-mismanagement-blaming-others/.
33. Lafer, The Job Training Charade, 156–89.
34. Lafer, The Job Training Charade, 1–2.
35. Lola Fadulu, “Why Is the U.S. So Bad at Worker Retraining?” The Atlantic, Jan. 4, 2018.
36. Lafer, The Job Training Charade, 1–3.
37. Lafer, The Job Training Charade, 1–3; 157.
38. On the connection between labor reform and the Panama Canal treaty, see Halpern, Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents, 157.
39. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 373–77. See also, Reagan in debate over the canal on Firing Line on Jan. 13, 1978, https://www.c-span.org/video/?154034-1/firing-line-panama-canal-treaties.
40. Department of Education briefing document on Bennett, NEAC, Box 2244, Folder 6.
41. Letter from Bennett to Clarence Thomas, Jan. 16, 1984, and NEA Memo “William Bennett Nomination,” Jan. 14, 1985, GWU, Box 2244, Folder 6.
42. As Christopher Newfield puts it, the culture wars were actually “economic wars,” which represented “a kind of intellectual neutron bomb, eroding the social and cultural foundations of a growing, politically powerful, economically entitled, and racially diversifying middle class, while leaving its technical capacities intact.” See Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 5–6.
43. John Podhoretz, “William Bennett, the Idea Warrior,” Washington Times, Jun. 11, 1984.
44. Ronald Brownstein, “In Person... William Bennett,” National Journal, Nov. 17, 1984.
45. William Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984), 1–2.
46. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
47. Newfield, The Unmaking of the Public University, 51–52.
48. Reese, America’s Public Schools, 249.
49. Bennett Speech to Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry, May 14, 1985. NEAC, Box 2244, Folder 7.
50. Bennett Speech to Conference on Civic Virtue and Educational Excellence, Apr. 19, 1985, NEAC, Box 2244, Folder 7.
51. See, for instance, “Bennett Offers Revised School Voucher Plan,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 16, 1987.
52. Bennett speech at the National Catholic Education Association Annual Convention, Apr. 10, 1985, NEAC, Box 2244, Folder 7.
53. “Bill Bennett Finally Turns Republican,” Washington Post, June 27, 1986.
54. Rothenberg, The Neo-Liberals.
55. The literature on neoliberalism is vast. See, for instance, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
56. Rothenberg, The Neo-liberals, 23–27.
57. Charles Peters, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” The Washington Monthly, May 1983, 10–11.
58. On the “Atari Democrats” see Rothenberg, The Neo-liberals, 79–91.
59. Peters, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” 11–12.
60. Rothenberg, The Neo-Liberals, 87–90.
61. Rothenberg, The Neo-Liberals, 139, 193–94.
62. Gary Hart, A New Democracy (New York: Quill, 1983), 20–21.
63. Hart, A New Democracy, 83–84.
64. Hart, A New Democracy, 92–93.
65. According to an NEA analysis in 1982, the bill was introduced in the House “at the request of the National Education Association.” See “Analysis of Legislative Proposals Affecting Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education,” Sep. 15, 1982. NEAC, Box 2255, Folder 5.
66. National Education Association, “National Defense Education Act: An NEA Policy Paper,” Feb. 1983, 2, NEAC, Box 2255, Folder 5.
67. Text of the High Technology Morrill Act, introduced to the US Senate by Sen. Paul Tsongas, NEAC, Box 2255, Folder 5.
68. Hart, A New Democracy, 102–4.
69. “1984 Democratic Primary Debate,” Mar. 18, 1984.
70. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 64–68.
71. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 81.
72. Al From with Alice McKeon, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
73. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 78.
74. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 64–119.
75. Geismer, Don’t Blame Us, 251–79.
76. William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency (Progressive Policy Institute, 1989), 18, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Politics_of_Evasion.pdf.
CHAPTER 6. “WHAT YOU EARN DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU LEARN”
1. Vinovskis, The Road to Charlottesville, 23.
2. Patrick McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 52–57, 53. See also “The Basic Speech: George Bush,” New York Times, Feb. 4, 1988.
3. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 221–23.
4. Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).
5. Committee for Economic Development, Investing in Our Children: Business and the Public Schools (1985), 2. Citation and context in Vinovskis, The Road the Charlottesville, 6.
6. William Johnston and Arnold Packer, eds., Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century (Indianapolis, IN: Hudson Institute, 1987), xiii–xvii, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED290887.pdf.
7. Johnston and Packer, Workforce 2000, xiv, xxiv.
8. Becker, Human Capital, 18.
9. Chris Pipho, “Governors Push Better Schools Coalition,” Phi Delta Kappan (October 1986), 101.
10. Vinovskis, The Road to Charlottesville, 17–18, 17.
11. NBC News, Meet the Press, May 18, 1986. Reuther Archives, AFT Collection: Educational Issues (AFTCEI), Box 51, Folder 9.
12. Brent Cebul, “Supply-Side Liberalism: Fiscal Crisis, Post-Industrial Policy, and the Rise of the New Democrats,” Modern American History 2 (2019), 139–64.
13. Vinovskis, The Road to Charlottesville, 23–36; Maris Vinovskis, From A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind: National Education Goals and the Creation of Federal Education Policy (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009), 23–24.
14. Keith Geiger, President, National Education Association, “Opening Statement,” Sept. 20, 1989, News Conference. NEAC, Box 2542, Folder 12.
15. Vinovskis, The Road to Charlottesville, 28.
16. “The Summit Conference on Education Working Groups,” AFTCEI, Box 51, Folder 6.
17. The President’s Education Summit with Governors, University of Virginia, September 27–28, 1989, “Joint Statement,” AFTCEI, Box 51, Folder 6. See also Vinovskis, Road to Charlottesville, 38–39.
18. George H.W. Bush State of the Union address, Jan. 31, 1990, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/january-31-1990-state-union-address.
19. White House Press Release, July 31, 1990, AFTCEI, Box 51, Folder 6.
20. “Welcome Remarks by James D. Hayes, Publisher, Fortune Magazine, ” Fortune Annual Education Summit, 1990, AFTCEI, Box 115, Folder 19.
21. Address of Vartan Gregorian, President, Brown University, Fortune Magazine education summit, 1990, AFTCEI, Box 115, Folder 19.
22. George H.W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the National Education Strategy,” Apr. 18, 1991. George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum Archives, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/2895; Patrick McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 65–69.
23. “The Summit Conference on Education Working Groups,” AFTCEI, Box 51, Folder 6.
24. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education” (1955), https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEFriedmanRoleOfGovttable.pdf.
25. Jim Carl, Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education (New York: Praeger, 2011), chapters 1–3; Free to Choose, episode 6, “What’s Wrong with Our Schools?” directed by Peter Robinson (Video Arts Production, 1980); Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! 186–90.
26. John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (Washington, DC; Brookings Institution, 1990), 3–9.
27. Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, 190.
28. Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, 33.
29. Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, 219.
30. Patrick Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
31. James Nelsen, Educating Milwaukee: How One City’s History of Segregation and Struggle Reshaped Its Schools (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015), 126.
32. Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 167–93.
33. Carl, Freedom of Choice, 105–7; Dougherty, More Than One Struggle, 189–91; Nelsen, Educating Milwaukee, 131–33.
34. Carl, Freedom of Choice, 87, 116. For the full program, see GOPAC’s American Opportunities Workshop 1990, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lPJ-2O-E4g.
35. Carl, Freedom of Choice, 88.
36. Mertz, “Growing Realignment,” chapter 8.
37. Carl, Freedom of Choice, 118–19.
38. Nelsen, Educating Milwaukee, 147–49; Carl, Freedom of Choice, 119–23.
39. Nelsen, Educating Milwaukee, 149.
40. Carl, Freedom of Choice, 87–88, 117–75.
41. Matt Pommer, “Rep Jolting School Powers,” The Capital Times (Madison, WI), June 18, 1990.
42. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 69.
43. George H.W. Bush, “Remarks Announcing Proposed Legislation to Establish a ‘GI Bill for Children,” June 25, 1992, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/4488.
44. “Remarks of President Bush at the New Education Choice Initiative Ceremony,” June 25, 1992. Bush speech quoted in McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 68.
45. “Statement by National Education Association President Keith Geiger on the New Educational Choice Initiative, June 26, 1992,” NEAC Box 2542, Folder 11.
46. “Statement by Keith Geiger,” NEAC, Box 2541, Folder 18.
47. The PPI’s most important initial backer was the New York hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt, who in exchange for agreeing to donate $1.5 million over three years was made chairman of the PPI Board of Trustees. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 137.
48. “Back to School,” New Democrat, Sept. 1991, 2.
49. “Recess,” New Democrat, Dec. 1991, 2.
50. Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Real Civil Rights Debate,” New Democrat, Sept. 1991, 13, 14.
51. David Kurapka, “Crime and Bushment,” New Democrat, Dec. 1991, 16–18.
52. See, for example, Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
53. “Editor’s Note to excerpt from David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government,” New Democrat, Mar. 1992, 4.
54. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Reinventing the Public Sector (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1992), xv, xvi–xvii, 17, 172. On Deming, see Mary Walton, The Deming Management Method (New York: Perigee, 1986), a book blurbed by Robert Reich: “W. Edwards Deming is to management what Benjamin Franklin was to the Republican conscience—a guide, a prophet, and instigator.” Xerox executive David Kearns, appointed deputy secretary of the Department of Education by George H.W. Bush, argued that failing schools could be turned around by using TQM as early as 1989. See Owens, The Origins of the Common Core, 91–93.
55. Osborne and Gaebler, Reinventing Government, 1, 17, 94.
56. Osborne and Gaebler, Reinventing Government, 94.
57. Ron Sachs, “Florida Rebounds” (12–13); David Kurapka, “The Second City?” (13–14); and Elaine Kamarck, “The Philadelphia Story” (14–16), New Democrat, Mar. 1992.
58. Al From, “Reinventing the Democratic Party,” New Democrat, Mar. 1992, 32.
59. Cebul, “Supply-Side Liberalism,” 16.
60. See, for example, “Arkansas Overhauling Its Education System,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 1983; and William Schmidt, “Teachers Up in Arms Over Arkansas’s Skills Test,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 1984.
61. Michael Tomasky, Bill Clinton (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017), 7–11. David Maraniss, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 409–18. See also McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 79–80.
62. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 163–65, 174–77, 177.
63. Bill Clinton, “What We Believe,” The New American Choice Resolutions, 3–4.
64. Clinton, “What We Believe,” 5, 9. Emphasis in original.
65. “Restoring America’s Competitive Edge, Part Two: Meeting the Global Challenge,” The New American Choice Resolutions, 17. Emphasis in original.
66. Kate Bronfenbrenner, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing, ” Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper #235, May 20, 2009.
67. “Restoring America’s Competitive Edge,” New American Choice Resolutions, 18.
68. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 187.
69. “Restoring America’s Competitive Edge, Part Two,” New American Choice Resolution, 35.
70. Magaziner and Reich, Minding America’s Business, 1–8.
71. Geismer, Don’t Blame Us, 268–69. Robert Reich, Locked in the Cabinet (New York: Vintage, 1988), 17.
72. Osborne and Gaebler, Reinventing Government, xi.
73. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, 4–9.
74. Magaziner and Reich, Minding America’s Business, 106.
75. National Center on Education and the Economy, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, 2–3, http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Americas-Choice-High-Skills-or-Low-Wages.pdf.
76. National Center on Education and the Economy, America’s Choice, 3.
77. Johnston and Packer, Workforce 2000, 3.
78. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, 4.
79. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1991), 177–80.
80. The New American Choice Resolutions, 23–25, 40–41. Indeed, the DLC cited Chubb and Moe’s Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.
81. See, for instance, “We’re All DLCers Now,” New Democrat, Mar. 1992, 1. Harkin, in fact, referred to himself as the only “real Democrat” in the race. See Judith Miller, “Tom Harkin’s Old-Time Religion,” New York Times Magazine, Feb. 9, 1992.
82. Becker, Human Capital, xix.
83. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Putting People First: How We Can All Change America (New York: Times Books, 1992), 6. As Reich pointed out in his memoir, “I’ve burdened Bill with every one of my books and articles, and urged him to run. And he did. And he used my ideas.” Locked in the Cabinet, 9.
84. Clinton and Gore, Putting People First, 9.
85. As Michael Sandel has pointed out, Clinton publicly employed a version of the phrase “what you earn depends on what you learn” at least thirty times during his presidency. Tyranny of Merit, 86.
86. Clinton and Gore, Putting People First, 17–19.
87. Bill Clinton, “A New Covenant”: Address to the Democratic National Convention, Jul. 16, 1992.
88. John Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American Politics and European Politics (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016), 46–51.
89. 96 percent of the electorate in 1992 believed that the Bush administration had either made the economy worse or done nothing to make it better. See Kenneth Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 207.
CHAPTER 7. PUTTING SOME PEOPLE FIRST
1. “First Inaugural Address of William J. Clinton,” Jan. 20, 1993, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/clinton1.asp.
2. Jeremy Rosner, “Take Two Aspirin,” New Democrat, Dec. 1991.
3. Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, 28–31.
4. As Thomas Frank points out, the professional-managerial class, particularly academic economists, supported the claims of NAFTA despite the fears of many unions that it would lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar manufacturing jobs. See Listen, Liberal, 86–89.
5. “1993 NAFTA Debate: Al Gore vs. Ross Perot,” Nov. 9, 1993, CNN.com, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/09/02/nafta-debate-1993-al-gore-ross-perot-entire-larry-king-live.cnn/video/playlists/larry-king-live-interviews/.
6. Timothy Minchin, Labor under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 195–206.
7. Kathryn Marie Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
8. On Clinton’s development agenda, see, for instance, Brent Cebul, “Supply-Side Liberalism,” 158–62.
9. Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, 66.
10. Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, 66–70.
11. Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, 66–70, 93–95, 133–34.
12. Vinovskis, The Road to Charlottesville, 19–20.
13. Vinovskis, From A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind, 114–16.
14. “Statement of Hon. Richard Riley, Secretary of Education,” Hearings on H.R. 1804—Goals 2000: Educate America Act (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1993), 4–5.
15. “Statement of Hon. Richard Riley,” 5–6.
16. “Statement of Hon. Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor” Hearings on H.R. 1804, 45–46.
17. “Statement of Hon. Robert Reich,” 45–48.
18. “Statement of Hon. Robert Reich,” 55.
19. William Celis, “Schools to Get Wide License on Spending Federal Money under New Education Law,” New York Times, Oct. 19, 1994; Anderson, Congress and the Classroom, 149–50; McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 95–97.
20. Department of Education Analysis of School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994, https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/Biennial/95-96/eval/410-97.pdf
21. Minchin, Labor under Fire, 209–10.
22. Anderson, Congress and the Classroom, 154–55.
23. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2006 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).
24. Bill Clinton, State of the Union address, Jan. 23, 1996.
25. Cooper, Family Values, especially chapter 2.
26. Bruce Reed, “The Parent Trap,” Mainstream Democrat, Sept. 1991, 18–21.
27. Johnston and Packer, Workforce 2000, xxvi.
28. Carol Jouzaitis, “Welfare Reform: Now It’s Up to States,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 30, 1996.
29. Wilentz, The Age of Reagan, 364–67.
30. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
31. Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin, “What Is the Evidence of Worsening Conditions among American’s Poorest Families with Children?” Mar. 2, 2016, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/551caca4e4b0a26ceeee87c5/t/56d9f10f1bbee030291fedce/1457123600812/Shaefer-Edin-SIPP-WorseningConditions3-2-16.pdf; Lafer, The Job Training Charade, 191.
32. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 80.
33. Bob Dole, “Acceptance of the Republican Party Nomination for President,” Aug. 15, 1996.
34. Quotation in Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 333.
35. “Minutes of the Tenth Meeting of the President’s Education Policy Advisory Committee, Jan. 22, 1992, AFTPOAS, Box 49, Folder 32.
36. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 334–46. Albert Shanker, “Where We Stand: Two Kinds of Equity,” New York Times (paid advertisement), Jun. 13, 1993.
37. Bob Chase, “Education Reform: Into the New Millenium,” Education International Roundtable of Teacher Organizations, Dec. 1996, NEAC, Box 2443, Folder 8.
38. Urban, Gender, Race, and the National Education Association, 271–75.
39. Bill Clinton, “State of the Union Address,” Feb. 4, 1997.
40. Clinton, “State of the Union Address,” Feb. 4, 1997.
41. Clinton, “State of the Union Address,” Feb. 4, 1997.
42. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 373–74.
43. Bob Chase, “The New NEA: Reinventing Teacher Unions for a New Era,” Before the National Press Club, Feb. 5, 1997, NEAC, Box 2541, Folder 8.
44. Investing in Public Education: The Importance of Schools in the New Global Economy (1999), NEAC, Box 2540, Folder 13.
45. Investing in Public Education.
46. Bill Clinton, “Foreword,” in Al From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power, x.
47. Rothenberg, The Neo-Liberals, 245–46.
48. Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, xiii.
49. Goldin and Katz, The Race Between Technology and Education, 93.
50. Charles Petersen, “Serfs of Academe,” New York Review of Books, Mar. 12, 2020.
51. Frank, Listen, Liberal, 92–94, 111–15.
52. Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, 193–206.
53. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, xvii.
54. Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 6.
55. Holden, Messitte, and Podair, Republican Populist, 70–134.
56. Quotation in Judis, The Populist Explosion, 51–53.
57. Stein, Pivotal Decade, 288; Lemann, Transaction Man, 165–78.
CHAPTER 8. LEFT BEHIND
1. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 5, 55. Italics in original.
2. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 7–8.
3. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 252, 283.
4. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 10, 70–72. 263.
5. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 12, 320.
6. See for example, the New York Times feature story by Emily Eakin, “The Cities and Their New Elite,” Jun. 1, 2002, as well as Herbert Muschamp, “Who Gets IT?” New York Times, May 18, 2003; and David Leonhardt, “In Most of the U.S., A House Is a Home But Not a Bonanza,” New York Times, Aug. 6, 2003. For useful critical retrospectives of Florida’s influence, see Oliver Wainwright, “‘Everything Is Gentrification Now,’ but Richard Florida Isn’t Sorry,” The Guardian, Oct. 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/26/gentrification-richard-florida-interview-creative-class-new-urban-crisis; and Jonathan O’Connell, “This Guy Convinced Cities to Cater to Tech-Savvy Millennials. Now He’s Reconsidering,” Washington Post, April 17. 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/digger/wp/2017/04/17/as-the-creative-class-divides-america-its-inventor-richard-florida-reconsiders/.
7. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 105–45.
8. Gov. Tommy Thompson, “State of the State Address,” Jan. 29, 1997.
9. Owens, The Origins of the Common Core, 136–38; Jack Jennings, Fatigued by School Reform (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 53.
10. “Full Text of Bush’s Campaign Speech on Education,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1999.
11. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 146–64.
12. Guy Stuart, “Databases, Felons, and Voting: Errors and Bias in the Florida Felons Exclusion List in the 2000 Presidential Elections,” John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Faculty Research Working Papers Series, September 2002, https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=546004070078007088024111113001127089068051017087011048030017029024113119013021031030044116007120119127097117120026025047076079123115103007126030123027090076023086014023005017120124095070085112004117095028001023004127114107086099098029001069077&EXT=pdf; Wade Payson-Denney, “So, Who Really Won? What the Bush v. Gore Studies Showed,” CNN.com, Oct. 31, 2015. https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/index.html.
13. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 101.
14. Joseph Lieberman Statement, Congressional Record (hereafter referred to as CR), May 2, 2001, S4147.
15. Keith Bailey, “Testimony before the Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives,” quoted in McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 175.
16. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 165–76; Owens, Origins of the Common Core, 133–34.
17. Bill Frist statement on the Better Education for Students and Teachers Act, CR, May 1, 2001, S4056.
18. Dale Kildee statement, CR, May 21, 2001, H2396.
19. Charles Rangel statement, CR, June 13, 2001, H3080.
20. Statement of Ted Kennedy, CR, May 1, 2001, S4063.
21. Statements of Paul Wellstone, CR, May 1, 2001, S4060 and S4075–76.
22. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 177–83; 107th Congress, Public Law 110. https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/1/text.
23. Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 11–13; William Reese, America’s Public Schools, 332.
24. Ben Feller, “NEA Political Targets Education Law, Mulls Presidential Endorsement,” Associated Press, July 3, 2003.
25. NEA Press Release, “NEA President Rallies Members for Great Public Schools for Every Child,” NEA Collection, NEAC, Box 2540, Folder 1.
26. Vinovskis, From A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind, 189–90.
27. Kantor and Lowe, “The Price of Human Capital,” 81.
28. Neil Kraus, The Fantasy Economy, forthcoming manuscript. Or, as Lee Anderson argues, “By 2001, no one challenged the antipoverty rationale of No Child Left Behind.” See Congress and the Classroom, 22.
29. George W. Bush State of the Union Address, Jan. 29, 2002, https://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html.
30. CPS Historical Time Series Tables, Table A-1, “Years of School Completed by People 25 Years and Over, by Age and Sex: Selected Years 1940 to 2019,” https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/educational-attainment/cps-historical-time-series.html.
31. “Executive Order #289, Relating to the Creation of the Governor’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on 21st Century Jobs,” in Governor’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on 21st Century Jobs, The New Wisconsin Idea: ‘The Innovative Learning State,’ July 1997, i.
32. “Executive Summary,” Governor’s Blue-Ribbon Commission, The New Wisconsin Idea, 1–4.
33. For a critique of the “New Wisconsin Idea,” see Chad Goldberg, “The University’s Service to Democracy,” 11.
34. Governor’s Commission, The New Wisconsin Idea, 7–17, Attachment A, and Attachment C.
35. Governor’s Commission, The New Wisconsin Idea, 7, 9, 22.
36. Governor’s Commission, The New Wisconsin Idea, 33.
37. Marc Eisen, “What Would Tommy Do?” Isthmus, Apr. 14, 2016, https://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/a-republican-governor-was-once-uws-greatest-champion/.
38. Clotfelter, Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, 97–102; Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 10–11.
39. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 9, 80–88.
40. Cooper, Family Values, 225.
41. See, for example, the declining support per student for public funding for higher education: https://shef.sheeo.org/report/. As the 2006 Spellings Commission pointed out, “Unmet financial need among the lowest-income families (those with incomes below $34,000 annually) grew by 80 percent from 1990 to 2004 at four-year institutions, compared with seven percent for the highest-income families” (11).
42. Clotfelter, Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, 170–72; Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do about it (Washington, DC: Brooking Institution, 2017), 107–13.
43. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 176.
44. Neil Kraus has highlighted the role of foundations in purveying the erroneous assumption that education is responsible for labor market outcomes during this era; see The Fantasy Economy, forthcoming, MS in possession of the author.
45. A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, A Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Pre-Publication Copy, September 2006, vi–vii, https://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/pre-pub-report.pdf.
46. A Test of Leadership, 1–5.
47. A Test of Leadership, 9. Italics in original.
48. Goldin and Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, 323–26, 350. For a compelling critique of Goldin and Katz’s argument regarding causation, see David Labaree, Someone Has to Fail, 203–5.
49. BLS numbers are from 2012, cited in Neil Kraus, Fantasy Economy.
50. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 37.
51. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 129–38.
52. Michael Anft, “The STEM Crisis: Reality or Myth?” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 11, 2013, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-stem-crisis-reality-or-myth/.
53. Herb Childress, The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 23; American Federation of Teachers, American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997–2007, 5–11, AFT Collection—Publications, Box 2, Folder 36.
54. Charles Clotfelter, Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, 80–81.
55. Barack Obama, “Remarks in Janesville, Wisconsin: ‘Keeping America’s Promise,’” Feb. 13, 2008, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-janesville-wisconsin-keeping-americas-promise.
56. Barack Obama, “Remarks in Janesville, Wisconsin.”
57. Kaufman, Fall of Wisconsin, 185; Scott, “Heading South: US-Mexico Trade and Job Displacement after NAFTA,” May 3, 2011, https://www.epi.org/publication/heading_south_u-s-mexico_trade_and_job_displacement_after_nafta1/.
58. Obama won the popular vote 52.9 percent to 45.7 percent and the electoral college by a rout: 365–173.
59. Frank, Listen, Liberal 20–43.
60. Frank, Listen, Liberal, 143–47.
61. Frank, Listen, Liberal, 29–36.
62. Mike Elk, “Abandoning EFCA Is Obama’s Political Suicide: Lessons from Three Presidents on Workers’ Rights,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abandoning-efca-is-obamas_b_414209.
63. Minchin, Labor under Fire, 286–96.
64. Robert Maranto and Michael McShane, President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 51–55.
65. Linda Darling-Hammond, “Evaluating No Child Left Behind,” The Nation, May 21, 2007, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/evaluating-no-child-left-behind/.
66. Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education (New York: Routledge, 2011), 19.
67. Maranto and McShane, President Obama and Education Reform, 66–67; Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education, especially chapters 1–3.
68. And in fact, Obama was the speaker for the inaugural meeting of DFER, who recommended Duncan over Darling-Hammond for secretary of education. Ravitch, Reign of Error, 26.
69. Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2015.
70. Maranto and McShane, President Obama and Education Reform, 93–97; “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand,” New York Times, May 17, 2010.
71. Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, 2010, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address. Italics added by author.
CHAPTER 9. THINGS FALL APART
1. Andrew Kersten, The Battle for Wisconsin: Scott Walker and the Attack on the Progressive Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
2. Mertz, “Growing Realignment,” chapter 9.
3. Patrick Marley and Lee Berquist, “Barrett, Walker Stick to Game Plans in Final Debate,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Oct. 29, 2010.
4. Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), chapter 5.
5. Marc Levine, “Race and Male Employment in the Wake of the Great Recession: Black Male Employment Rates in Milwaukee and the Nation’s Largest Metro Areas 2010,” UW-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development, Working Paper, 2012. African American turnout declined from 73.1 percent (higher than the state’s overall turnout) in 2008 to 46.3 percent in 2010 (lower than the state’s overall turnout of 49.7 percent). Wisconsin Elections Commission, “General Election Voter Registration and Absentee Statistics 1984–2016,” https://elections.wi.gov/elections-voting/statistics/turnout; Andra Gillespie and Tyson-King Meadows, “Black Turnout and the 2014 Midterms,” Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Oct. 29, 2014, 1–5, https://jointcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Joint-Center-2014-Black-Turnout-10-29-14_0.pdf.
6. Judis, The Populist Explosion, 53–59.
7. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016).
8. I discuss much of this in my essay, “Walker’s Wisconsin and the Future of the United States,” in Labor in the Time of Trump, ed. Jasmine Kerrissey et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 69–86.
9. Jeffrey Keefe, “Are Wisconsin Public Employees Over-compensated?” Economic Policy Institute, February 10, 2011, https://www.epi.org/press/news_from_epi_epi_study_finds_wisconsin_public-sector_workers_under-compens/.
10. Dave Umhoefer, “Recall Candidate Kathleen Falk Says Governor Scott Walker Enacted the ‘Biggest Cuts to Education in Our State’s History,’” Politifact, Feb. 19, 2012.
11. Valerie Strauss, “How Gov. Walker Tried to Quietly Change the Mission of the University of Wisconsin,” Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2015.
12. Jon Shelton, “The Factory that Ate Wisconsin,” Dissent 65 (4): 99–103.
13. Amanda Terkel and John Celock, “Ohio Issue 2: Controversial Anti-Union Law Defeated by Voters,” Huffington Post, Nov. 8, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ohio-issue-2-_n_1083100.
14. Sean Sullivan, “The Michigan Right-to-Work Battle, Explained,” Washington Post, Dec. 10, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2012/12/10/the-michigan-right-to-work-battle-explained/. Melissa Daniels, “Pennsylvania’s Public School Staffing at 10-year Low,” Pittsburgh Tribune, Aug. 14, 2014,” https://archive.triblive.com/news/pennsylvania/pennsylvanias-public-school-staffing-at-10-year-low/. On the right-to-work laws efforts to target teacher unions, see Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (New York: The New Press, 2020), 53.
15. Sam Sanders, “The Surprising Legacy of Occupy Wall Street in 2020,” All Things Considered, Jan. 23, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/23/799004281/the-surprising-legacy-of-occupy-wall-street-in-2020.
16. For more on this, see Jon Shelton, “Teacher Unionism in America: Lessons from the Past for Defending and Deepening Democracy,” American Educator 42 (spring 2018): 30–40.
17. Joanne Barkan, “Firing Line: The Grand Coalition against Teachers,” in Public Education under Siege, ed. Katz and Rose, 40.
18. Chicago Teachers Union, The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve: Research-Based Proposals to Strengthen Elementary and Secondary Education in the Chicago Public Schools (Chicago: Chicago Teachers Union, 2012), www.ctunet.com/blog/text/SCSD_Report-02-16-2012-1.pdf, quotation on p. 14.
19. Micah Uetricht, Strike for America: Chicago Teachers against Austerity (London: Verso, 2014), 2.
20. Tracy Jan, “Obama Campaign Attacks Romney’s Record As Bain Capital Executive,” Boston.com, May 14, 2012, https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/noprimarytagmatch/2012/05/14/obama-campaign-attacks-romneys-record-as-bain-capital-executive.
21. “Romney on ‘47 Percent’: I Was ‘Completely Wrong,’” CNBC, Oct. 5, 2012, https://www.cnbc.com/id/49299714.
22. “Full text: Obama’s 2015 State of the Union Address,” USA Today, Jan. 20, 2015, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/01/20/full-text-obama-2015-state-of-the-union/22064089/.
23. “Full text: Obama’s 2015 State of the Union Address.”
24. Clotfelter, Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, 98. Only about 28 percent was composed of Pell grants, while tax benefits made up the other 12 percent.
25. A Test of Leadership, 4.
26. “Remarks by the President on College Affordability—Buffalo, NY,” Aug. 22, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/22/remarks-president-college-affordability-buffalo-ny.
27. See the website, https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/.
28. Jamie Dimon and Marlene Seltzer, “Closing the Skills Gap,” Politico Magazine, Jan. 5, 2014, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/closing-the-skills-gap-101478#.UzgKOPldWT8.
29. Halah Touryalai, “Jamie Dimon Gets $20 Million for His Worst Year as CEO, Why the Big Raise?” Forbes, Jan. 24, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2014/01/24/jamie-dimon-gets-20-million-for-his-worst-year-as-ceo-why-the-big-raise/?sh=3f3b325b1869.
30. Paul Krugman, “Job Skills and Zombies,” New York Times, Mar. 20, 2014.
31. “Remarks by the President and Vice President at Bill Signing of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act,” Jul. 22, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/22/remarks-president-and-vice-president-bill-signing-workforce-innovation-a.
32. “Transcript of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Launch Speech,” TIME, Jun. 13, 2015, https://time.com/3920332/transcript-full-text-hillary-clinton-campaign-launch/.
33. Kaufman, The Fall of Wisconsin, 184; Michael Memoli, “Hillary Clinton Once Called TPP the ‘Gold Standard,’” Los Angeles Times, Sep. 26, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trade-tpp-20160926-snap-story.html.
34. Robert Scott and Elizabeth Glass, “Trade Deficits with TPP Countries Cost More than 2 Million U.S. Jobs in 2015,” EPI briefing paper, Mar. 3, 2016, https://www.epi.org/publication/trans-pacific-partnership-currency-manipulation-trade-and-jobs/.
35. Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), 292–93.
36. Sanders, Our Revolution, 42–47; Bernie Sanders, “America Must End High-Stakes Testing, Finally Invest in Public Education,” USA Today, Jan. 8, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/08/bernie-sanders-education-no-child-left-behind-testing-column/2827348001/.
37. Sen. Bernie Sanders Announcement Speech, Burlington, VT, May 26, 2015, http://www.p2016.org/sanders/sanders052615sp.html.
38. Sanders, Our Revolution, 354.
39. Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), especially 89–96, 115–32, 203–10.
40. Matt Karp, “Bernie Sanders’s Five Year War,” Jacobin, Aug. 28, 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/bernie-sanders-five-year-war.
41. Kaufman, Fall of Wisconsin, 180–89.
42. Donald Trump, Presidential Announcement Address, June 16, 2015, https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/.
43. Trump, Presidential Announcement Address.
44. Hannah Fraser-Chanpong, “Hillary Clinton Apologizes for Saying She’d Put Coal ‘Out of Business,’” CBS News, May 2, 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-apologizes-for-saying-shed-put-coal-out-of-business/.
45. Katie Reilly, “Read Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Remarks about Donald Trump Supporters,” TIME, Sep. 10, 2016, https://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/.
46. Matthew Yglesias, “Donald Trump and the Indiana Carrier Factory, Explained,” Vox.com, Dec. 1, 2016, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/1/13804918/donald-trump-carrier.
47. Roper Center for Public Research, “How Groups Voted in 2008,” “How Groups Voted in 2012,” and “How Groups Voted in 2016,” https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2008; https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2012; https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2016.
48. Sarah Jaffe, “Whose Class Is It Anyway? The ‘White Working Class’ and the Myth of Trump,” in Labor in the Time of Trump, ed. Kerrissey et al., 88–95.
49. Geoffrey Skelley, “Just How Many Obama 2012-Trump 2016 Voters Were There?” Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Jun. 1, 2017, https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-many-obama-2012-trump-2016-voters-were-there/.
50. Yamiche Alcindor, “Some Who Saw Change in Obama Find It Now in Donald Trump,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/us/politics/obama-donald-trump-voting.html.
51. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 281.
EPILOGUE
1. Emma Kerr, “See High School Graduation Rates by State,” US News and World Report, Apr. 28, 2021, https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/see-high-school-graduation-rates-by-state; National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts,” https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=27.
2. Scott Horsley, “After 2 Years, Trump Tax Cuts Have Failed to Deliver on GOP’s Promises,” NPR, Dec. 20, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/789540931/2-years-later-trump-tax-cuts-have-failed-to-deliver-on-gops-promises; Anne Marie Knott, “Why the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) Led to Buybacks Rather Than Investment,” Forbes, Feb. 21, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/annemarieknott/2019/02/21/why-the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-tcja-led-to-buybacks-rather-than-investment/?sh=d90530c37fbc.
3. On DeVos and the privatization movement she represents, see Schneider and Berkshire, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.
4. See, for example, Peter Greene, “Judge Rejects Betsy DeVos Plan to Send Federal Funds to Private Schools,” Forbes, Aug. 22, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/08/22/judge-rejects-betsy-devos-plan-to-send-federal-funds-to-private-schools/?sh=ac90ba923295.
5. Ben Popken, “Why Trump Killed TPP—And Why It Matters to You,” ABC-News, Jan. 23, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/why-trump-killed-tpp-why-it-matters-you-n710781.
6. Richard Trumka, “USMCA is a Huge Win for Working People,” CNN.com, Dec. 20, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/opinions/usmca-huge-win-labor-rights-trumka/index.html.
7. John Judis, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt against Globalization (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018), 70–71.
8. Shelton, “The Factory That Ate Wisconsin.”
9. Josh Dzieza, “Wisconsin Report Confirms Foxconn’s So-Called LCD Factory Isn’t Real,” The Verge, Oct. 21, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/21526765/foxconn-lcd-factory-not-real-confirmation-wisconsin-report-exclusive.
10. Jon Shelton, “Red State Teacher Strikes and the Roots of Teacher Militancy,” Labor and Working-Class History Association, Newsletter 2018, 6–9; Elizabeth Catte, Emily Hill-iard, and Jessica Salfia, eds., 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike (Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2018); Eric Blanc, Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strikes and Working-Class Politics (London: Verso, 2019).
11. Dylan Matthews, “4 Big Questions about Job Guarantees,” Vox.com, Apr. 27, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/4/27/17281676/job-guarantee-design-bad-jobs-labor-market-federal-reserve.
12. “The Freedom Dividend,” Yang2020, https://www.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/.
13. Madeline Will, “The New Flavor of Teacher Strike: More Than Just Pay Raises,” Education Week, Jan. 25, 2019, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/01/25/the-new-flavor-of-teacher-strike-more.html.
14. Jon Shelton, “There Is Now Way Forward without Organized Workers,” Jacobin, Nov. 7, 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/11/ctu-strike-chicago-teachers-union-public-schools-organized-labor.
15. Kalyn Belsha, “Chicago Teacher Union Leaders Back Sanders, Becoming Latest to Offer Personal Endorsements As Unions Tread Carefully,” Chalkbeat, Mar. 4, 2020, https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/3/4/21178699/chicago-teachers-union-leaders-back-sanders-becoming-latest-to-offer-personal-endorsements-as-unions.
16. Glenn Thrush, “‘Accelerate the Endgame’: Obama’s Role in Wrapping Up the Primary,” New York Times, Apr. 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/politics/obama-biden-democratic-primary.html?auth=login-email&login=email.
17. Chris Riotta, “Biden Sparks Outrage after Suggesting Black People Don’t Know How to Raise Children: ‘Put the Record Player on at Night,’” Independent, Sep. 13, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/joebiden-black-parents-record-player-slavery-criminal-justice-debates-2020-speech-a9104346.html; Alexandra Kelley, “Biden Tells Coal Miners to ‘Learn to Code,’” The Hill, Dec. 31, 2019, https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/476391-biden-tells-coal-miners-to-learn-to-code.
18. Karp, “Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War”; Clotfelter, Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, 213–19.
19. For a conservative version of this argument, see Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (New York: Encounter Books, 2018).
20. Lisa Lerer, “Joe from Scranton Didn’t Win Back the Working Class,” New York Times, Dec. 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/us/politics/biden-blue-collar-voters.html; Craig Gilbert, “If WOW Counties Were Ever a Political Bloc, They Are No Longer,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Nov. 22, 2020; Anya van Wagtendonk, “Milwaukee’s Black Turnout Down in 2020,” Urban Milwaukee, Nov. 13, 2020, https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2020/11/13/milwaukees-black-turnout-down-in-2020/.
21. Ford Fessenden, Lazaro Gamio, and Rich Harris, “Even in Defeat, Trump Found New Supporters across the Country,” New York Times, Nov. 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/16/us/politics/election-turnout.html.
22. Mindy Isser, “Are Trump Voters a Lost Cause?” In These Times, Jan. 2021, 15; Matt Karp, “The Politics of a Second Gilded Age,” Jacobin, Feb. 17, 2021, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/02/the-politics-of-a-second-gilded-age.
23. Ryan Nicol, “Impact Politics Leaders Tout 2020 Success, Including Backing Florida’s Minimum Wage Increase,” Floridapolitics.com, Dec. 10, 2020, https://floridapolitics.com/archives/388088-impact-politics-2020-success.
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