““AT RISK”” in “THE EDUCATION MYTH”
“AT RISK”
The Acceleration of the Education Myth
On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the fortieth president in American history. The previous November, the Gipper resoundingly defeated Carter in an unequivocal rejection of the former Georgia governor, which was the first time since 1932 an incumbent president had lost a reelection campaign. Reagan won by almost ten points in the popular vote in addition to winning a resounding 489 electoral votes. A large explanation for this rejection was Carter’s abject failure on the economy, and support for Kennedy’s primary challenge suggested that, for most Democrats at least, Carter’s problem had not been an excess of social democracy. Union households, for example, had gone for Carter 62–38 in 1976; after the Democrat’s failure to deal with the nation’s economic challenges, that margin was sliced to 48–45 in 1980, and Carter may have lost that demographic entirely were it not for third-party candidate John Anderson siphoning votes from Reagan.1 Indeed, Carter had failed to pass any significant social democratic reforms, instead opting for regressive tax policies and allowing the Federal Reserve to send the American economy into recession. Then he had lectured Americans against too much material want in his famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in 1979. Reagan’s campaign, however, promised a presidency to make the economy great again.2
Reagan began his political career in California, as a governor (1967–75) who took on higher education and the growing professional class. In 1976, he ran as a conservative populist against the incumbent Gerald Ford. Indeed, Reagan attempted to mobilize resentments similar to those Nixon targeted in 1968 and 1972 and that were, at least in part, built on opposition to educated elites.3 Further, Reagan’s campaign consciously sought to take on the public sector, framing social goods like public education as taking from productive taxpayers. Here Reagan tapped into the heightened prominence of Gary Becker and Milton Friedman’s conservative version of the education myth, which touted the importance of education but sought to privatize investment as much as possible.4
Reagan and other Republicans employed the landslide in 1980 to argue that Americans had rejected social democracy and thus to further reduce the state’s role in ensuring economic security. In fact, his inaugural speech sounded like a mirror image of the vision FDR laid out in 1944. As had been the case in the 1930s, Reagan pointed out that “these United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions.” In the 1970s, Americans suffered “from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. . . . Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor.” If working people could relate to this state of events as their grandparents had in the 1930s, however, Reagan flipped the promise of the New Deal on its head: those who worked, he argued, suffered from a “tax system which penalized successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.”
Carter’s policies had brought on the worst of both worlds: he had raised the relative tax burden for many working-class people while failing to substantively improve their lives with any new government interventions—except for elevating the tenuous narrative that government could help individuals develop their own human capital through education. Reagan, however, proposed a drastically new course. “In this present crisis,” he asserted, “government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.” Separating “the people” from a government beholden to special interests, Reagan argued that “this administration’s objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination.” Reagan’s color-blind language intended to leverage that mythology to convince Americans, wrongly, that government interventions had hurt them. He concluded, therefore, it was “time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”5
President Reagan, fully at war with social democracy, spent eight years putting this vision into action. Bargaining with a Democratic Congress, the president won huge tax cuts that disproportionately helped the already wealthy. Reagan sought economic deregulations, particularly those begun in finance and banking, creating an economy structured around leveraged buyouts and corporate take-overs that further undermined blue-collar jobs. And, he threw down the gauntlet against unions, firing striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and populating the National Labor Relations Board with appointees hostile to workers.6 Following the Reagan recession of 1982–83, the economy turned around just in time for his reelection campaign in 1984, and he was easily reelected over social democrat Walter Mondale. By the end of his second term, the economy overall had improved since the stagflation of the 1970s, but poverty also rose dramatically as the Gipper’s budgets cut social programs.
One of the areas of government Reagan could not ultimately roll back, however, was public education. Breaking with a decades-old consensus around increasing federal support for education, Reagan did win federal cuts. But his larger goal to significantly curtail federal influence in education by abolishing the federal Department of Education failed. The growing importance of the education myth had become too politically entrenched by then. In fact, Reagan’s own secretary of education, Terrel Bell, convened a task force that crafted the momentous report, A Nation at Risk, which blamed the diminishing economic security of Americans on the failure of the education system to keep them internationally competitive. Despite Reagan’s views on the federal role of education, the education myth continued to grow, particularly as a political response to an increasingly unequal economy. Further, Reagan himself helped to facilitate this myth by pushing fantasies that increased federal investment in job training would help workers whose livelihoods were under duress from the combination of antiunion practices and capital flight.
The Reagan administration also sought to renew the role of education in deepening American patriotism, particularly during the former actor’s second term. Appointed by Reagan in 1985, Education Secretary William Bennett, a staunch cultural conservative, sought to restore his version of American values and the tradition of Western civilization to prominence in the nation’s education system. This effort sought to cast Democrats, particularly beginning in the late 1980s and 1990s, as unconcerned with the values of the American polity. Seeking to combat Reaganism, a growing group of neo-liberal Democrats shifted course, seeking to move the party in a winning direction by touting entrepreneurialism and the alchemical power of public investment in education.
A Nation at Risk
After Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, he worked with a Democratic Congress to pass an enormous tax cut, at the time the largest in American history.7 Reagan believed in supply-side economics, which postulated that the United States government could offset the revenue lost from tax cuts with larger revenues generated by the economic growth the cuts would stimulate. This supposition was not borne out in reality as large tax cuts, in fact, led to greater federal deficits, not greater taxation income. Reagan also cut funding to social programs, particularly those he believed should not be funded by the federal government. The latter prominently included the Educational Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981, which slashed the budget for education, particularly for desegregation programs, and replaced categorical funding with block grants.8 Over the course of his two terms, further cuts reduced the proportion of the federal budget spent on public education from about 2.5 percent of total spending in fiscal year 1979 to just 1.7 percent in FY 1989. These cuts hit the poorest school districts the hardest.9 As a cultural conservative, Reagan also sought, unsuccessfully, to bring prayer back into schools and to provide tax credits for private school tuition. Building on his efforts as governor of California to connect tuition-free higher education with welfare and government handouts, Reagan’s first budget also slashed student aid for higher education, limited Pell grants, and made student loans less accessible.10
The Reagan administration’s most dramatic goal, however, was abolishing the cabinet-level Department of Education Congress had just created in 1979. This effort failed to gain traction in part because of Reagan’s own education secretary. A moderate Republican from Utah, Terrel Bell played a role in building the mainstream political consensus around the importance of federal funding for education that had emerged by the 1980s. Having served as US Education Commissioner in 1970–71 and 1974–76, Bell supported the elevation of the cabinet-level Department of Education, and the NEA approved of his appointment as the department’s second secretary in 1981.11 Bell was tasked by Reagan, however, with eliminating the very department he was appointed to administer. His four years in the administration were tumultuous, as Bell constantly fought with the “right-wing radicals” who wanted, in his view, to cut education spending to the bone.12
In part an effort by Bell to prevent the department’s demotion, the new secretary created the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1981. (Reagan, in fact, had declined to appoint the presidential commission for which his secretary of education had asked.) Bell appointed David Gardner, a former colleague from Utah, as chair, and the remainder of the eighteen-member commission included teachers, parents, corporate leaders, school board members, university professors and presidents, and school administrators (including from private schools). Bell tasked the commission with examining teaching and learning, the connection between “social and educational” changes and student achievement during the past twenty-five years, and in particular, the state of education at the high school and college levels. By focusing on secondary and postsecondary education, the commission could connect students’ skills with their future economic livelihoods, and this charge was made more evident when Bell tasked the commission with “comparing American schools and colleges with those of other advanced nations.”13
Indeed, the economic turmoil for working people over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s found its way prominently into the report’s findings, which histrionically blamed the decline of the American education system for the fact that other industrial nations—especially Japan—had caught up to the United States in manufacturing performance. Indeed, A Nation at Risk (ANAR), began by breathlessly invoking threats to the economic structure of the United States:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and as a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.14
Setting the tone for an explicit international competition, the commission pointed out that the world was now “one global village.” Though characterizing the world as a village might mean nations collaborated with each other, ANAR instead pointed to the economic competition in which the United States was purportedly falling behind. The Japanese made “automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export.” The South Koreans had built “the world’s most efficient steel mill” and American machine tools were “being displaced by German products.”15 It was true that other manufacturing nations were catching up to the United States in productivity and gaining market share in many industries in which the profitability of American industry had been unmatched. Focusing on the education system, however, was far from a natural leap. One way to make the United States more competitive, for instance, as the report implied with its references to Japanese subsidies, could have been to develop a national industrial policy. As business consultant Ira Magaziner and public policy expert Robert Reich argued, in fact, around the same time, an overarching industrial policy may very well have made American manufacturing more internationally competitive.16
Instead, ANAR connected competition between industrial nations to education, asserting that “knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce and are today spreading throughout the world as vigorously as miracle drugs, synthetic fertilizers, and blue jeans did earlier.” Though the report dutifully argued Americans should revivify the “intellectual, moral and spiritual strengths of our people which knit together the very fabric of our society,” this entreaty was clearly secondary to the economic importance ANAR larded onto public education. The report highlighted some of the supposed deficiencies of an education system in which the aggregate of American students failed to score higher on standardized tests than students in other nations did, especially in math and science. Unsurprisingly, however, none of ANAR’s “indicators of risk” quantified Americans’ supposed lost moral, intellectual, or spiritual strength relative to other nations.
Scholars have since shown that fears about declining test scores at the time were seriously exaggerated.17 The most representative longitudinal test in the United States—the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—for instance, showed that from 1973 to 1982, math scores for Americans remained virtually unchanged with a slight increase overall for thirteen-year-olds and a slight decrease for seventeen-year-olds. African Americans and Hispanics saw increased scores, in fact, in virtually every age range tested, and racial achievement gaps decreased.18 In fact, Americans might have actually celebrated such scores given the economic turmoil of the decade that challenged school budgets and the ability of students to do well. Nevertheless, the decreased competitiveness on standardized tests relative to other nations, ANAR argued, was a serious issue because of the supposed demand for new jobs in computers, robotics, and other technologies.
ANAR pointed to testimony from students, parents, and teachers expressing frustration that “more and more young people emerge from high school neither ready for college nor for work.” The report could have concluded with an argument for ensuring everyone had access to good jobs. Instead, it strengthened fears that the education system was not doing enough to make workers ready for the jobs that would supposedly become available, asserting that “this predicament becomes more acute as the knowledge base continues its rapid expansion, the number of traditional jobs shrinks, and new jobs demand greater sophistication and preparation.”19
As the answer to these problems, the commission argued the nation must prepare “through the education and skill of its people to respond to the challenges of a rapidly changing world.”20 Such a society would be committed to life-long learning, ensuring students got the skills they needed and workers were invested in retraining, a clear attempt to navigate the decade-long downward pressure on livelihoods for nonprofessional workers. The report called for a greater focus on math, reading, science, and technology; higher expectations and more rigorous standards; enhanced instructional time in the schools; and recruiting and retaining better teachers by setting higher standards and providing performance-based pay. Importantly, in a stark departure from Reagan’s vision of dismantling the federal presence in education, the commission also called for greater fiscal support to make these changes: “The Federal Government has the primary responsibility to identify the national interest in education. It should also help fund and support efforts to protect and promote that interest.”21
In sum, though Reagan sought to reduce federal support for education, his administration through ANAR both sustained and heightened the growing bipartisan consensus that education could solve the nation’s economic problems. Though the report recommended buttressing the nation’s human capital stock, the premise had shifted from that of the NDEA back in the 1950s, which was based on the notion that total human capital advanced the collective goals of the United States during the Cold War. The myth asserted by ANAR certainly followed the premise that the collective education level of the nation was important, but primarily because it would facilitate individual opportunities to access sustainable jobs. As the Reagan administration cut into the social welfare state, such a narrative became all the more important. Indeed, the conclusions of ANAR fit perfectly with Reaganism because it blamed government and American workers for their own “deficiencies,” even if those deficiencies supposedly represented the product of poor schools.
Though it was the most prominent, ANAR was not the only arena for this argument. Other education reports, such as the Twentieth Century Fund’s Making the Grade (which came out the same week as ANAR) and the Committee on Economic Development’s Action for Excellence, made similar arguments about the necessity of improving education.22 Surprisingly, Albert Shanker of the AFT seconded ANAR’s call to improve public education. The union president, who had sought to temper criticisms of public education in the 1970s, agreed in 1983 that the ANAR report was right, and the nation’s schools needed serious reform. Shanker further argued that teacher unions should work with business, particularly since he believed the necessity of a more educated workforce made improving schools imperative. Doing so would also prevent businesses from supporting dramatic moves like vouchers, Shanker believed, and with union support, greater consensus around the importance of education outlined in ANAR would prevent more federal budget cuts from the Reagan administration.
In fact, Shanker even argued teachers should “rise to the challenge of corporate willingness to spend billions more on education provided that there are improvements.” And, presaging George H.W. Bush’s national conversation about education in Charlottesville in 1989, Shanker, in 1983, called for a “national summit” of business and education leaders to determine how to improve public education.23 According to historian Richard Kahlenberg, Shanker’s intervention in support of ANAR was “pivotal” in elevating public consensus for the document’s argument, and it influenced other union leaders like the NEA’s Bob Chase, who would, a decade later, push the nation’s other union to embrace education reform and collaboration with business too.24
But in the early 1980s, the NEA stood out in its opposition to the findings of ANAR, seeing the recommendations instead, in the words of one historian, “as a continuation and intensification of the Republican attacks on public schools and public teachers.”25 Representing a clear alternative to the calls to link the downward pressure on workers with the supposed deficiencies of the American education system, the NEA at the time responded to the proliferation of these dire education reports by rejecting the notion that public education should serve the interests of job training. In July 1983, the NEA’s national representative assembly formed a Blue-Ribbon Task Force on Educational Excellence, which issued a report in the wake of ANAR entitled, “Open Letter to America on Schools, Students, and Tomorrow” (1984). While the union welcomed calls to improve public education, the teachers laid out an agenda that refuted the assumptions of A Nation at Risk. The letter pointed to the necessity of building a robust public education system that taught students to be good citizens and held high standards without resorting to calls to reduce student outcomes to job readiness. While the NEA report pointed out there would certainly be new technologies in the future, they should be thought of as new opportunities for learning, not threats to the livelihoods of working people. In fact, the report pointed out that in 2001, not only would Americans be able to “return to school to learn new work skills. They will also find myriad opportunities in schools to enrich their lives outside of work.”
The “Open Letter to America” called for students to become “active participants in the learning process” and for schools to coordinate a systematic response to students facing trauma from poverty or drug abuse. “Children whose families are going through crisis cannot devote their full attention to instruction,” the letter pointed out, calling on schools to be at the center of guaranteeing social services: “Local governments [should] coordinate badly needed health and welfare services for our students through the school.” Further, eschewing merit pay, the report instead called for “the proportionate across-the-board salary increases all teachers need and deserve” to be treated as professionals.26
The Political Economy of Reaganism
While furthering the myth that improving education could help Americans thrive in a leaner economy, the Reagan administration also helped to make that economy significantly leaner. Perhaps most important, Reagan accelerated efforts on the right—from both corporations and conservative politicians—to weaken unions. In 1981, members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), a union that had endorsed Reagan, walked off the job over salaries that had been eroded by inflation and to improve working conditions. Consistent with a similar critique he made of striking Los Angeles teachers in 1970 as governor of California, President Reagan fired and replaced them.27 Reagan’s actions in 1981 motivated private-sector employers, such as Greyhound Bus Lines and Eastern Airlines, to use striker replacement as a tactic to reduce worker power too.28
The “Reagan recession” of 1981–82 caused unemployment to spike into double digits, as the president accepted an economic downturn to fight inflation by keeping interest rates high. How much the effort actually reduced inflation is debatable; prices stabilized in part because of shifts in global oil prices. Nevertheless, inflation declined, and the economy grew in the 1980s. Much of this growth, however, was not due to increases in productivity but in financial services and the proliferation of credit. Reagan’s economy was characterized by deregulating banking and the emergence of new forms of financial transactions in which investors leveraged debt to take charge of productive assets, extract value—often by laying off workers and/or reducing labor costs—and then sell them for a profit.29 Tax cuts combined with cuts to social services significantly increased the wealth gap between the very rich and the very poor.30
States like Wisconsin, which had a disproportionate amount of stable, blue-collar jobs, fared the worst, as Reaganism exacerbated trends already underway in the 1970s. Wisconsin’s economy comprised about 36 percent manufacturing in 1963, a number that declined to 33 percent by 1977, and fell even further to 28 percent by 1986. These jobs were replaced by service-sector jobs that paid significantly less and were much less likely to have a union.31
In fact, a strike at Briggs and Stratton illustrates the impact of Reaganomics and its war on social democracy following a decade in which Democrats at the national level failed to advance meaningful industrial policies capable of supporting blue-collar jobs. In 1983, Briggs and Stratton, a highly profitable small-engine manufacturer based in Milwaukee, leveraged the wave of concession bargaining occurring in manufacturing outfits across the United States in the early 1980s and trumped-up fears about Japanese competition to demand workers accept a wage freeze, a two-tier wage system, and to subcontract work to nonunion contractors. Briggs and Stratton provoked a strike and began moving jobs to a non-union factory in Georgia. In the ensuing years, workers continued to make even deeper concessions, but the company further shifted production to the south and to Mexico anyway. After years of exploiting loose credit policies to acquire other companies and buy back stock rather than invest in new research and development, the company enriched its executives and shareholders. Its two factories in Milwaukee’s North Side, which provided jobs to a number of African American workers, were shuttered, and the company finally declared bankruptcy in 2020.32
One social service Reagan was willing to invest in during this time, however, was job training, furthering fictions that American workers could do better for themselves just by getting the right human capital. Reagan’s vision of government sought to limit access to higher education to stanch the growth of the professional class: first as governor of California where he sought to diminish public investment in the state’s generous system of higher education and as president by limiting federal investment in Pell grants and student loans. Indeed, Reagan clearly sought to stoke the resentments Bell foresaw in 1976 and that the Carter administration made worse.
But Reagan was willing to invest in nonacademic job training. The much-diminished Humphrey-Hawkins Act had set federal goals for unemployment and provided the government, at least in theory, with some limited tools to meet those goals. Reagan, however, believed the government should play even less of a role in creating jobs than Carter had. When he came into office, CETA had already been reauthorized until 1982. The program funded almost 750,000 public service jobs in 1978 and despite cuts pushed by the Carter administration, still provided about 400,000 when Reagan was inaugurated. The new president hoped to quietly eliminate CETA’s funding for public service jobs when the law expired. The high unemployment rate of the Reagan recession (rising from 7 percent in January 1981 to over 10 percent by the end of 1982), however, forced Reagan to do something to show he was helping Americans acquire jobs.33
For Reagan, and for the business community that supported him, fictions that federal support for job training would significantly reduce unemployment replaced even the vestigial promise of a jobs policy that existed at the end of the Carter administration. As economist Gordon Lafer has shown, job-training policy before Reagan constituted merely a “minor backwater of federal employment policy.” After working with Congress to pass the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), in 1982, however, “the administration of President Ronald Reagan explicitly replaced job creation with job training as the focus of federal employment policy.”34
JTPA passed Congress with wide majorities in both houses in 1982. The bill promised short-term job training to more than one million workers at the low-wage end of the job market. Empowering local business councils to decide how to spend training funds, it would ultimately lead to about $3 billion in spending each year from 1984 through 1998.35 The premise of the JTPA was fundamentally flawed, however, and in reality, did very little to improve the livelihoods of working people. This stagnation occurred not because workers lacked skills, but because during the 1980s employers were able to pay substandard wages (sometimes assisted by stoking fears of shifting jobs overseas), unions were weaker, and racial discrimination continued unchecked.36
Though Reagan’s economic agenda departed in some dramatic ways from postwar liberalism, the fundamental assumptions around job training were not all that different from those embedded in the Great Society. Indeed, as had been one of the central assumptions of the War on Poverty, poverty and unemployment to Reagan were explained by the individual deficiencies of workers. The president’s argument, however, removed the Great Society’s limited recognition that structures existed that might make it difficult for those with fewer resources to access good jobs and, as a consequence, that the poorest Americans should have a safety net. Instead, focusing on job training allowed politicians to convey the “unlikely hope,” in Lafer’s words, “that poverty can be ended without conflict.” Reagan’s JTPA, indeed, helped to shoehorn nonacademic job training into the education myth too.37
Conservative Protectors of the Nation
Reagan’s political economic vision was, rhetorically at least, tied to reinstilling pride in American nationalism. The administration had no interest in any national industrial strategy of the kind called for by Magaziner and Reich that might have facilitated broad prosperity for Americans in a more competitive global economy. Reagan, however, argued that the GOP would restore American power and national pride in a changing world. Particularly after the humiliating limits on the nation’s previously unfettered international standing in the 1970s—including the fall of Saigon and the global energy shocks caused by petroleum exporting nations in the Middle East—Carter’s volitional cession of American power further opened space for Reagan’s argument. In particular, Carter’s failure to bring home fifty-two American hostages following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 loomed large, as did even his signature success as president. Indeed, the Panama Canal treaty in 1978, for which Senate ratification likely came with the high price of losing labor reform, was met with disapproval from Reagan, who had made the negotiation into a major campaign issue in his challenge to Ford in the 1976 primary.38 After it was ratified, Reagan portrayed the treaty as one of many examples of the decline of American exceptionalism, only this time perpetrated willingly by Democrats. On the campaign trail in 1980, he often employed some version of the line “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we should tell [Omar] Torrijos [the leader of Panama] and company that we are going to keep it.”39
It is no surprise, then, that, even while cutting budgets, Reagan’s vision for restoring American nationalism included the public education system. He found an enthusiastic advocate for this effort in conservative Catholic William Bennett, whom Reagan appointed to head the Department of Education following Bell’s resignation in 1985. Bennett, after earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas and a J.D. from Harvard Law, was hired as a professor and assistant to John Silber, the conservative president of Boston University. In 1981, Reagan appointed him chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) before elevating him to secretary of education four years later.40 A Democrat at the time of his appointment, Bennett, like Reagan, was driven by the fear that liberal permissiveness threatened the American values that had made the nation exceptional. He believed revitalizing those values, which stemmed from America’s emergence from the Western Christian and enlightenment tradition, would strengthen American nationalism.
A key part of this argument centered on the fiction that the United States was defined by the ideal of colorblindness. In fact, Bennett’s most highly publicized effort at the helm of the NEH was to refuse to comply with a directive from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to set goals for more women and minority hires. In a letter to EEOC chairperson Clarence Thomas, Bennett argued, “It was the glory of America to proclaim to the world: all men are created equal. . . . Blindness to color, race, and national origin is the hallmark of civilized justice as embodied in the principles of this Republic.”41
Here Bennett’s argument fit within a broader strategy by some conservative elites to arrest the development of multiracial democracy in the 1970s. The growing culture wars around issues of affirmative action and racial inclusivity, for instance, emerged at just the time when many middle- and working-class Americans were expecting a more democratic politics and economy that could truly make progress toward eliminating racial inequality. Bennett’s argument for safeguarding the legacy of American “culture” by deepening the nation’s commitment to the humanities in higher education appears not to be directly linked to the service of stifling the economic demands of working Americans. Still, Bennett’s time heading the NEH corresponded with the continued growth of corporate “business consciousness” and the empowerment of free-market think tanks and conservative politicians like Reagan who helped the already wealthy at the expense of working people. Using culture as a wedge to divide Americans by race and class, as Bennett did, certainly helped the political economic goals of the right.42
Bennett’s intellectual project, then, beginning with the NEH and ramping up as secretary of education, was to restore nationalism by pushing Americans to connect their identity to the supposedly timeless values of the Western tradition. Indeed, Bennett sought to revitalize study of the classics and as chair of NEH, castigated left liberal professors for politicizing the humanities.43 Bennett appeared to truly believe Americans’ commitment to their nation would be improved with a common cultural appreciation, even if such a call was tone-deaf, or even outrightly hostile, to the inclusion of minorities. He reportedly argued that “the greatest advances in the humanities have already been made” between ancient Greek history and the Renaissance and saw little place for work that wasn’t done by white men. Stemming from this premise, the NEH during Bennett’s years at the helm significantly reduced grants to fields in Black studies and women’s studies.44
As chair of NEH, Bennett also oversaw a series of meetings with higher education faculty (which included Silber and conservative education professor Checker Finn) on undergraduate instruction in the Humanities. This work led to a published assessment by Bennett entitled, “To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education.” As the title suggests, Bennett argued that “the humanities, and particularly the study of Western civilization, have lost their central place in the undergraduate curriculum.” He lamented both the plummeting decline of humanities majors and that most undergraduates received a degree without studying ancient Greece and Rome. For these developments, Bennet blamed “a failure of nerve and faith on the part of many college faculties and administrators.” In the 1970s, many colleges and universities had shifted more programs toward professional fields as students viewed them as increasingly necessary to find a sustainable job. Bennett clearly sought to defend Western civilization from the perils of the professional class, while not understanding that students were choosing professional degrees because of the growing difficulty of finding good jobs without them. Nevertheless, Bennett suggested that “study of the humanities and Western civilization must take its place at the heart of the college curriculum.”45 Bennett’s report received a good deal of attention as one of the most prominent in a series of similar arguments by conservatives in the 1980s, such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which also criticized universities for cultural relativism and shifting away from the classics that, when refracted through the great American thinkers, had supposedly formed the genesis of national greatness.46
Bennett, therefore, was a perfect appointment for Reagan, who often mobilized historical examples of American exceptionalism to tout individual initiative and conservative values while justifying diminishing government services for the poor. In this way, the war on the livelihoods of most working people continued apace. In higher education, Bennett followed the lead of Reagan, who had ignited his political career by arguing that university faculty and students represented a threat to American values during his 1966 run for governor of California.47 Upon leading the Department of Education, Bennett became, in the words of one historian, “an unofficial minister of morals, calling for more personal responsibility, higher standards, and improved test scores.”48
As Bennett framed it very early in his tenure as secretary, he sought to advance “three C’s” in American education: Content, Character, and Choice, which he described in a series of speeches during his first year in office. Though he never directly criticized the premise of A Nation at Risk, Bennett argued that American education needed more than just enhanced instruction in math and reading. In fact, the education secretary overtly argued that skills were not enough for American workers to get good jobs. On the contrary, he believed the education system should discipline future workers, many of whom saw a much leaner opportunity for economic security in the Reagan years. Just as Mann highlighted how public education made workers more docile as early as the 1840s, Bennett argued that “evidence shows that when recent high school graduates fail in their jobs, it’s usually not for lack of skills. They usually get fired because of poor work attitudes and habits, tardiness, and undependability.” Bennett thus concluded that to ready new generations for the job market, schools should teach students “a sense of honor, independence, degrees of thoughtfulness, fidelity to task and to people, kindness, honesty, respect for the law, diligence, fairness, standards of right and wrong, and self-discipline.”49
Further, the humanities were crucial in understanding why Americans should take pride in their nation. In another speech from 1985, he chastised schools for teaching a superficial version of American history: “Too often our high school graduates know too little or nothing of the Magna Carta or even the Bible, the Greek polis, the Federalist papers, or of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.” He went on to excoriate “cultural relativism”: “If all traditions are equally valid, then there is clearly not much point in transmitting a particular cultural heritage, a distinctive set of social and political values.” Bennett believed, by contrast, there were timeless American values that were diminished when the history of those Americans who were never able to fully access their rights as citizens were included.50
Bennett, also like Mann in the 1840s, understood education as advancing a particular vision of the nation, and one that could discipline unruly workers and political critics alike. Unlike Mann, though, Bennett did not seek to compel Americans to attend public schools. Over the course of his four years as secretary, Bennett sought to bestow on Americans the means to choose private schools. By advocating for various forms of vouchers, Bennett sought to further “common values.”51 Bennett, however, never seemed to grasp the irony of attempting to restore a common American culture by undermining the institution perhaps most responsible for encouraging that culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the late 1980s the most successful arguments for the conservative human capital mythology around vouchers connected education to economic opportunity. The education secretary, interestingly, did not make an economic argument for school choice, however. The best argument for vouchers, for Bennett, was to allow parents to “choose . . . schools where their own values will be extended instead of lost.”52
Given Bennett’s place in the administration and his push for a conservative version of American history, it is unsurprising that he left the Democratic Party in 1986, viewing the GOP instead as the party that would protect American values.53 Bennett believed in and advanced a version of civic nationalism that was consistent with the conservative economic position of Reagan Republicans. For Bennett, nostalgic fictions about America as a color-blind, classless society in which opportunity could be had by all fit neatly into Reagan’s economic argument. Importantly, conservative Republicans like Bennett made this forceful case for culturally strengthening the nation at a time when Democrats had begun to cede the idea that the American tradition meant social democratic interventions to improve people’s lives and instead began to fully embrace the global economic race to attain human capital.
The Democrats: Neo-Liberals Rising
Over the course of the 1980s, the Democratic Party was thoroughly remade. In spite of Carter’s dramatic defeat in 1980 after shifting away from the social democratic center of the postwar era, a growing number of Democrats took the lesson from Reagan’s victory that Americans were supposedly moving right, particularly on economic questions. The ascendant education myth thus represented the linchpin of their new vision for giving working people a crack at economic security in a more competitive world.
This wave of Democrats formed the foundation of what journalist Randall Rothenberg, in 1984, called “neo-liberals.”54 Not reducible to the growing “neoliberal” wave of politics, economics, and intellectual theory that has become essential in understanding the seismic shifts in American and global society since the 1970s, the neo-liberals who emerged in the Democratic Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s were part of that trajectory.55 Rothenberg counted among them Democrats who were some of the most important leaders in Congress, statehouses, and on the perennial shortlist of presidential candidates in the 1980s: Colorado senator Gary Hart, Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, Missouri representative Dick Gephardt, Tennessee representative Al Gore, California governor Jerry Brown, North Carolina governor James Hunt, and Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Among the intellectuals Rothenberg listed were Charles Peters, founder of the Washington Monthly, and Robert Reich, then a lecturer at Harvard. These neo-liberals believed in stronger investment in defense and opposed “interest group politics” and bureaucracy in the name of economic growth. In short, they were “prepared to leave the mechanism of the New Deal behind.”56
A central aspect of their growth agenda was entrepreneurial creativity. As Peters argued in an influential piece in the Washington Monthly, “Economic growth . . . is essential to almost everything else we want to achieve. Our hero is the risk-taking entrepreneur who creates better jobs and better products.”57 Hart, Brown, Bradley, Gephardt, and others were sometimes called “Atari Democrats” because of their support for a burgeoning “information” economy built on entrepreneurial activity, new technology, and knowledge.58 To turn the page on Rooseveltian social democracy would require new “human capital,” and government should invest in education, but only if the investment was subject to market forces. As Peters argued, “We aren’t against government, period, as . . . many conservatives appear to be. But we are against a fat, sloppy and smug bureaucracy. We want a government that can fire people who can’t or won’t do the job. And that includes teachers. Far too many public school teachers are simply incompetent.” Writing in the wake of ANAR, Peters concluded, “Public schools have to be made better, much better, if we are to compete economically with other technologically advanced countries, if we are to have more Route 128s [in suburban Massachusetts] and Silicon Valleys.” To ensure supposed equality of opportunity for people of color, a growing obsession of the Democrats who wanted to shift the party to the right, schools were crucial: “The urban public schools have in fact become the principal instrument of class oppression in America, keeping the lower orders in their place while the upper class sends its children to private schools.”59
Rothenberg argued that neo-liberals were set apart from other Democrats because they recognized the “postindustrial economy is ‘human-capital intensive,’ meaning that the rapid pace of industrial change demands not workers skilled at single repetitive tasks, but workers with the knowledge, education, and ability to adapt to a variety of tasks as the needs of industry shift.” Neo-liberals thus sought out new methods for using government investment to satisfy the needs of employers for human capital. For example, Brown worked to spur development in Silicon Valley, Dukakis along the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, and Hunt the North Carolina research triangle, while “traditional liberals” had focused their efforts on older urban areas.60
Neo-liberals sought to make education more responsive to market forces by experimenting with ideas like using private-industry employees as teachers and merit pay in the public schools. In contrast to what they viewed as the low expectations of JTPA, they also sought retraining programs that would give adult workers skin in the game and thus more tangible rewards by adding new skills. Neo-liberal economist Pat Choate, for example, developed a plan for “Individual Training Accounts”—modeled on Individual Retirement Accounts—jointly financed by contributions from employees and employers, which would only pay off for workers when they received training that bore fruit in higher wages.61 Whereas conservatives in the GOP wanted to keep education costs down in order to finance tax reductions, neo-liberals wanted to spend money, but only if it would lead to economic growth by providing workers the skills new businesses desired.
The most important of these Democrats was Gary Hart. Hart’s high-profile campaign for the presidential nomination in 1984 and in 1988 (before revelations of an extramarital affair forced him out of the latter race) put his views squarely in the national political mainstream. Further, of everyone in the group, Hart was best able to articulate a vision for a future built on entrepreneurialism, a renewed emphasis on market forces, and investment in human capital.
In his 1983 book A New Democracy, for instance, Hart painted a picture of a country whose citizens were wracked by economic insecurity, but he argued the problem was bigger than taming inflation and limiting government: “The United States has increasingly become part of an international economy. We are no longer self-sufficient, nor the undisputed leader. New actors on the world stage influence American economic conditions to a degree that is unprecedented, and to many of us, disquieting.” The key to succeeding in such a world was recognizing the path forward would come “not through simple solutions nor through sheer power but primarily through creative use of our ingenuity and inventiveness—and by working together.”62 Here was an optimistic vision of American renewal to rival Reagan’s. If Americans just got on the right side of the learning curve, they could all be winners in the new global capitalism.
Hart, anticipating the argument George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton would make in support of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), welcomed a competition in which he believed Americans would thrive when trade barriers were removed. Paralleling the conclusions of ANAR, Hart believed Americans would excel in this competition as long as education was deployed properly: “Fundamentally . . . we need a new employment strategy that invests in our human assets to obtain the highest and most productive return for the economy, the nation, and the workers themselves.”63
Also, as with ANAR, Hart paid lip service to the importance of education in developing good citizens, but when it came to federal investment, he clearly prioritized the technical and scientific. For example, in A New Democracy, he cited his work authoring the American Defense Education Act in 1982, a clear attempt to leverage the notoriety of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. The bill was designed to “provide incentives and support to schools that, first, set targets for improving the instruction they offer in mathematics, the sciences, communications skills, foreign languages, and technology, and second, meet the goals they have established.”64 Here, Hart had the strong backing of the NEA, which invoked similar arguments to ANAR about the importance of technology.65 An NEA policy paper predating the publication of ANAR from February 1983 argued, “We face the dawn of a new century, a period accompanied by the most profound changes that our nation and the world have yet to see. We are part of one of the deepest, yet perhaps most subtle, revolutions in the history of the human race—brought on by the continuing wave of technological innovation.” In words that could have been lifted directly from ANAR, the paper argued NDEA was necessary to “prepare U.S. citizens to ride the crest of this wave of technology into the future. [Doing so] remains our best hope for maintaining our stature as a nation and as a world leader.”66
Hart further cited his support for Senator Paul Tsongas’s High Technology Morrill Act to pair federal investment with contributions from state governments and businesses to increase the numbers of science and engineering degrees from American universities. Tsongas’s bill, which assumed an international competition with other nations that prioritized “the relationship between education and economic growth” consciously invoked the Morrill Act as “a useful model for fusing the interests of government, industry, and education into a national policy for economic growth.”67 Hart also endorsed Choate’s ITA proposal.68 Though the Colorado senator inveighed against the “simple solutions” of Reaganism—specifically he slammed supply-side economics as a “quick fix”—his own brand of entrepreneur-driven capitalism was similarly built on easy choices: simply invest smartly in the education of America’s working people, and nothing would need to be done to upset the nation’s social, political, or economic structure.
The 1984 presidential primary provided Hart the platform to push the Democratic Party toward an embrace of neo-liberal ideas. Former Minnesota senator Walter Mondale, who had been Carter’s vice president (and was selected as a running mate in 1976 in part because of his high regard by labor unions and the traditional New Deal coalition), was the front-runner. Civil rights activist and social democrat Jesse Jackson also entered the race. Hart, with strong showings in New Hampshire and Iowa, ascended to join Mondale and Jackson as one of the three major candidates. Mondale ended up easily winning enough delegates for nomination, but his cumulative popular vote margin over Hart’s was small (about 38 percent to 36 percent).
Though the social democrats Mondale and Jackson combined to win a large majority of Democratic voters, Hart’s campaign made a major impact on the party. Indeed, the Colorado senator set up a dynamic in which he framed his ideas in A New Democracy as a fresh contrast to the Mondale campaign. (Mon-dale had sought to undermine this framing by asking, famously, “Where’s the beef?”) In a debate in Chicago, featuring a physical copy of the book from which Hart read and Mondale criticized, the former slammed the latter for playing the politics of “old agendas and old arrangements.” Jackson, by contrast, prioritized the “25,000 in this sub-zero weather homeless tonight and 600,000 malnourished” in Chicago, arguing for an “industrial policy that makes sense” to solve the problems of poverty and unemployment.
Hart, in response to a question about how his presidency would help African Americans, highlighted his shift from the postwar social democratic promise of the Democratic Party, arguing for an entrepreneurial fix to racial inequality. “I have put forward proposals, as I have for this entire economy, that seek to open up economic opportunity in the future, particularly for those young Blacks getting into our economy,” Hart argued. “If I have the chance . . . to say that the issue in the 1980s is not whether Rosa Parks rides in the front or back of the bus but whether her son can own and operate the bus company, then I think I will get my share, or more, of the Black votes.” Under questioning from a Jet Magazine reporter about high unemployment rates for African Americans, Hart answered with a pitch for urban enterprise zones and human capital investment, characterizing himself as a “strong proponent of a whole range of new education and training initiatives, including individual training accounts for all workers, including Blacks, and the ADEA, that would increase educational investment across the board, including urban schools.”69
In the end, Reagan handily won the general election in 1984 with almost 59 percent of the popular vote and a massive electoral college majority. Mondale only won his home state and Washington, DC. Opposite Reagan’s enormous advantage of being an incumbent in an economy entering a period of growth, Mondale faced an insurmountable challenge. While Democrats lost sixteen seats in the House, however, they still maintained a huge majority of seventy-one seats and picked up two Senate seats. These circumstances left it unclear whether voters were truly rejecting a broad version of social democracy, but for some party insiders, that was the clear lesson they took from Mondale’s massive defeat.
The formation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985 represented the most important development in this shift following Reagan’s reelection. Al From, a former congressional staffer, founded the DLC to push the center of the Democratic Party toward a new electoral coalition focused on “ideas, not constituency groups.” Never a grassroots organization, the DLC was comprised of party insiders and elected officials and was backed almost exclusively by wealthy donors solicited by its elected official members. Its initial base of elected officials from the South and the West (Al Gore from Tennessee and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, for instance, were important early figures), the DLC hoped to recapture voters who had supported Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Like the more loosely organized neo-liberals, the DLC would focus its energy on pushing the party toward “sustained economic growth, equal and expanding opportunity and the aggressive defense of freedom with the promotion of democratic values abroad.”70
If that agenda sounds like a more palatable version of Reagan conservatism, that’s because it was. (Social democrats like Jackson and Iowa senator Tom Harkin, for example, would employ that exact critique as a pejorative.)71 The key idea that distinguished the DLC agenda from Reagan conservatism, in fact, was education: that by investing in human capital, all Americans could have the chance to prosper in the global economy. As From remembered it, the “party’s first imperative was to revive the American economic opportunity by fostering broad-based economic growth led by a robust private sector generating high-skill, high-wage jobs. . . . Government’s proper role is to foster private sector growth and to equip every American with the opportunities and skills that he or she needs to succeed in the private economy, not to pick ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ and not just to redistribute wealth.”72 Beginning in 1985, then, the DLC began to recruit “New Democrats”—often from Sunbelt states where voters had been abandoning the party—and pushing for an economic growth agenda built around free trade and investment in human capital.73
From 1985 to 1988, the DLC did not push too hard, trying to avoid contention that might cost Democrats elections and instead worked to alter the rules in the party primaries to favor southern candidates like Gore. In fact, we have the DLC largely to thank for the southern-heavy composition of “Super Tuesday” that persists to this day.74
Though Jackson’s strong showing in the South in the 1988 primary highlighted the continuing purchase of social democratic ideas in the party, the central ideas of the DLC, nevertheless, were on the rise. Though Massachusetts governor Dukakis was not connected to the DLC, he won the nomination in 1988 largely on the strength of the growing suburban knowledge workers in the Democratic Party. Indeed, though Dukakis was derided on the right as a “Massachusetts liberal,” his support for public-private investment in technology, human capital, and welfare reform symbolized not the old politics of New Deal labor-liberalism but the continued shift of the Democratic Party toward the interests of postindustrial knowledge workers and the growing myth that economic opportunity stemmed from one’s ability to acquire the right kind of human capital in a meritocratic competition.75
Nevertheless, Dukakis’s dramatic defeat by Reagan’s vice president George H.W. Bush—an enormous lead for the Massachusetts governor dissipated over just a few months as the Bush campaign portrayed Dukakis as soft on crime—led the DLC to take a much more adversarial stance toward the Democratic Party. William Galston and Elaine Kamarck (who had worked for Gore and for Babbitt, respectively), argued that, in spite of the fact that Democrats had gained seats in Congress in 1988, Dukakis’s defeat showed the party was outside the American mainstream. Unsubtly titled The Politics of Evasion, their statement argued for cultivating middle-income voters by moving right: “The next nominee . . . must squarely reflect the moral sentiments of average Americans; and he must offer a progressive economic message, based on the values of upward mobility and individual effort, that can unite the interests of those already in the middle class with those struggling to get there.”76
In short, the lesson DLC Democrats took from the 1988 election was to more vigorously push toward targeted government intervention that would facilitate the competition of working people in the global economy. It presumed that those (disproportionately white) workers who had made it into the “middle class” deserved to do so, and that somehow those struggling to get there could do so with more “effort.” The obvious contradiction was that it would be impossible for everyone to move up in such a competition. By the end of the 1980s, however, DLC Democrats were not the only group to hunt political points by employing the education myth. Seeking to develop an identity that would distinguish him from the callousness of Reagan conservatism, former vice president Bush sought to harness the power of the ascendant myth for Republicans.
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