The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.
The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance…
What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing – the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
V. I. Lenin, “Dual Power” (1917)
In an essay written in the wake of Bush’s 2004 election, “All God’s Children Got Values,” Michael Walzer noted how the triumph of the ideologically driven politics of contemporary conservatism had brought to power a movement which proudly embraced the idea of ‘revolution,’ with all of the rhetorical extravagance, all of the unshakeable zeal that one possesses knowledge of the Truth, and all of the unsparing criticism of the existing order of things that term implies. For many a generation, it had been the American left that was the primary bearer of the revolutionary idea, and significant parts of that left reveled in political hyperbole, embraced ideological dogma, and sought to overturn everything under the heavens. But today, in a political inversion, it is the American right that has a messianic solution — an unregulated, laissez-faire market — which it offers as the answer for every problem. The American conservative right has become, in Walzer’s parlance, ‘inegalitarian Bolsheviks.’
Nowhere is the revolutionary program and rhetoric of the American right more in play than in the field of education. In this regard, it is interesting that the first piece of evidence Walzer offers for his thesis is Richard Rothstein’s New York Review of Books review of Abigail and Stephan Thernstroms’ book on the achievement gap, No Excuses. Rothstein objected to the Thernstroms’ sweeping, reductionist argument that there is one meaningful cause and one cause only of the achievement gap – what they describe as flawed cultures of neglect and excuse among communities of color. Starting from this premise, their proposed program – market-based schools propounding a ‘no excuses’ message – is the only solution they could possibly find acceptable. Their dismissal of all other reforms targeting the achievement gap is, Rothstein argues, an example of the single-minded partisanship that has “poisoned” educational debate. In his view, educational problems like the achievement gap are complex, with many causes; they must be addressed on a number of different fronts in complementary, but distinct, ways; and real progress will be gradual. Here Rothstein, public intellectual of the left, is the political pragmatist, painfully aware of the complexity of the problems being addressed and firmly committed to transforming piece by piece, not overthrowing in one fell swoop, the existing world. By contrast, the Thernstroms, the public intellectuals of the right, are the zealous revolutionaries.
There is no shortage of examples of revolutionary calls from the educational right. On a recent Friday, Eugene Hickok, Heritage Foundation fellow and deputy secretary of education in the first Bush administration, appeared on the pages of the Washington Post calling for “an American education revolution.” Hickok argues that NCLB doesn’t go far enough, that it is insufficiently revolutionary. As a consequence, it will be impossible to meet the law’s promise that “every child will be proficient in reading and math by 2014.” For Hickok, the root of the problem is “the American education system,” “the existing institutional architecture of American public education.” He proposes, therefore, that we “put aside the tiresome debate over public versus private education,” which, it appears, means nothing less than that we put aside any recognizably public system of schooling. In order to make this case for the elimination of public schools, the existing public schools are dressed up in all of the pejorative characterizations which have become depressingly familiar to those who follow educational debates with revolutionaries of the right: they are government schools, instruments of self-perpetuating bureaucracies, and so on. Similarly, the laissez-faire market alternative is cloaked in positive sounding glittering generalities, around such terms as freedom, ownership and equality. A straightforward proposal for privatizing public schools, such as vouchers, is nowhere to be found.
Hickok’s presentation operates almost entirely at the level of rhetoric, associating public schools with negative images and his undefined market alternative to the public schools with positive connotations. But one does not have to go too far to find more forthright presentations of what the revolutionary agenda of the educational right entails. The day before Hickok’s column appeared in the Washington Post, the boys at the Fordham Foundation offered some revealing observations on the recent report of the National Charter School Research Project discussing a symposium on “The Future of Charter Schools and Teachers Unions.”* “The authors would like to think that a ‘third way’ exists in this fight,” their weekly Gadfly opines, “but like the Cold War, we will only have ‘détente’ when one side goes away for good.” No weak-kneed Mensheviks, blinded by liberal notions of dialogue and pluralism, at the Fordham Foundation: they have studied how to conduct a revolution, and understand full well that you have not won such an encounter until your political opposition has been eliminated. [If you can’t get enough snarkiness from your daily round of the blogs, you can listen to the boys at the Fordham Foundation make the same points on their podcast here.]
But these declarations operate primarily in the world of political discourse. The full practical scope of the revolutionary orientation of American educational conservatism is most evident where it has achieved its fullest programmatic victory — the city of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina created an opportunity for the Bush Department of Education and its Louisanna allies to take out an entire system of public schools and the union which represented the educators in those schools, United Teachers of New Orleans. In its stead, a new system of schools, mostly charters and entirely non-union, publicly financed but largely unaccountable to the public, has been created.
New Orleans represents an accelerated version of a model of change embraced by various elements of the American educational right — one which has as its ultimate goal the elimination of the existing systems of public schooling, together with the unions which represent the educators who work in them. New Orleans is their shining city, the future they would like to bring to a number of major urban centers with struggling public school systems, suffering from years of government neglect, calculated policies of underfunding and poor management. The goal is to bring these systems to a state of institutional collapse, where they could then be replaced in their entirety by alternative systems, “union free.” The “union free” part should be understood as a central political objective of this strategy: it is designed to eviscerate what the American right sees as one of the most significant institutional supporters of their electoral opposition.
There is a crucial distinction to be drawn here between educational pluralists and educational revolutionaries. Educational pluralists see the establishment of public schools of choice and individual charter schools as components of an effort to create within existing public education more good school choices, especially in poor communities; the term educational reformer properly belongs to them, as it describes their project of incremental change and improvement, school by school. By contrast, educational revolutionaries seek the wholesale replacement of the existing system of public education with a different system, based on a different organization of power – one in which the voices of teachers and parents are entirely marginalized, unions are eliminated and the decisive levers of power are controlled by private, largely corporate entities. It is public in name only.
What is especially worthy of note here is how closely this revolutionary agenda follows the Leninist theory of dual power, captured in the quotation from Lenin that begins this posting. The objective is to create a competing system of schooling, a competing system of power, and then replace the first system with the second. Is it possible to read this March 2005 New York Times article on the establishment of charter schools in the original hometown of the Fordham Foundation, Dayton, Ohio, and not see in these developments the same Leninist political logic, the same political strategy of dual power, that was realized in New Orleans? All that is different is the pace of the change.
It remains to be seen whether the recent election results, with the losses of the Congressional right, represents the first wave of a turning of the political moment, and thus, a substantive defeat for the revolutionary politics of the right those forces represented. That depends in part upon the educational reformers: it is our task to develop a convincing alternative, a vision of educational change that is transformative, deepening — not destroying — the public character of American schools.
* Personal disclosure: I was one of the teacher unionist participants in that symposium, and I have been involved in the establishment of the UFT Charter School.
