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Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
9(6) 772 –779
© 2009 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708609348575
http://csc.sagepub.com
Obama’s Betrayal of Public
Education? Arne Duncan
and the Corporate Model
of Schooling
Henry A. Giroux1 and Kenneth Saltman2
Abstract
This article criticizes Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as U.S. Secretary of
Education suggesting that it represents a corporate and penal model of school reform.
The authors contend that Duncan’s record as “CEO” of the Chicago Public Schools
represents the implementation of educational policies and pedagogical approaches
antithetical to the democratic values of public and critical education.
Keywords
Public School Corporatization, Obama’s Education Policies, Arne Duncan, Corporate
model of schooling, militarization of schools
Since the 1980s, but particularly under the Bush administration, certain elements of
the religious right, corporate culture, and Republican right wing have argued that free
public education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from
a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to transform
schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and
values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the marketplace. As the edu-
cational historian David Labaree (cited in Kohn, 2001) rightly argued, public schools
have been under attack in the last decade “not just because they are deemed ineffective
but because they are public.”1 Right-wing efforts to disinvest in public schools as
critical sites of teaching and learning and govern them according to corporate inter-
ests is obvious in the emphasis on standardized testing, the use of top-down curricular
mandates, the influx of advertising in schools, the use of profit motives to encourage
student performance, the attack on teacher unions, and modes of pedagogy that stress
rote learning and memorization. For the Bush administration, testing has become the
1McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
2DePaul University, Chicago
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Giroux and Saltman 773
ultimate accountability measure, belying the complex mechanisms of teaching and
learning. The hidden curriculum is that testing be used as a ploy to de-skill teachers by
reducing them to mere technicians, that students be similarly reduced to customers in
the marketplace rather than as engaged, critical learners, and that always underfunded
public schools fail so that they can eventually be privatized. However, there is an even
darker side to the reforms initiated under the Bush administration and now used in a
number of school systems throughout the country. As the logic of the market and the
crime complex2 frame the field of social relations in schools, students are subjected to
three particularly offensive policies, defended by school authorities and politicians
under the rubric of school safety. First, students are increasingly subjected to zero-
tolerance policies that are used primarily to punish, repress, and exclude them.
Second, they are increasingly absorbed into a crime complex in which security staff,
using harsh disciplinary practices, now displace the normative functions teachers
once provided both in and outside of the classroom.3 Third, more and more schools
are breaking down the space between education and juvenile delinquency, substitut-
ing penal pedagogies for critical learning and replacing a school culture that fosters a
discourse of possibility with a culture of fear and social control. Consequently, many
youth of color in urban school systems, because of harsh zero-tolerance polices, are
not just being suspended or expelled from school. They are being ushered into the
dark precincts of juvenile detention centers, adult courts, and prison. Surely, the dis-
mantling of this corporatized and militarized model of schooling should be a top
priority under the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Obama has appointed as his
secretary of education someone who actually embodies this utterly punitive, anti-
intellectual, corporatized, and test-driven model of schooling.
Barack Obama’s selection of Arne Duncan for secretary of education does not bode
well either for the political direction of his administration or for the future of public
education. Obama’s call for change falls flat with this appointment, not only because
Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and penal model of pedagogy
but also because he does not have the slightest understanding of schools as something
other than adjuncts of the corporation at best or the prison at worse. The first casualty
in this scenario is a language of social and political responsibility capable of defending
those vital institutions that expand the rights, public goods, and services central to a
meaningful democracy. This is especially true with respect to the issue of public
schooling and the ensuing debate over the purpose of education, the role of teachers as
critical intellectuals, the politics of the curriculum, and the centrality of pedagogy as a
moral and political practice.
Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, presided over the implementation and
expansion of an agenda that militarized and corporatized the third largest school system
in the nation, one that is about 90% poor and non-White. Under Duncan, Chicago took
the lead in creating public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draco-
nian student expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a
growing police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools, and fired
entire school staffs. A recent report, “Education on Lockdown,” claimed that partly
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774 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9(6)
under Duncan’s leadership “Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become infamous for
its harsh zero tolerance policies. Although there is no verified positive impact on
safety, these policies have resulted in tens of thousands of student suspensions and an
exorbitant number of expulsions.”4 Duncan’s neoliberal ideology is on full display in
the various connections he has established with the ruling political and business elite
in Chicago (Hursh & Lipman, 2008). He led the Renaissance 2010 plan, which was
created for Mayor Daley by the Commercial Club of Chicago—an organization repre-
senting the largest businesses in the city. The purpose of Renaissance 2010 was to
increase the number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of
accountability—a code word for legitimating more charter schools and high-stakes
testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago’s 2010 plan targets 15% of the
city district’s alleged underachieving schools to dismantle them and open 100 new
experimental schools in areas slated for gentrification. Most of the new experimental
schools have eliminated the teacher union. The Commercial Club hired corporate con-
sulting firm A. T. Kearney to write Ren2010, which called for the closing of 100 public
schools and the reopening of privatized charter schools, contract schools (more charters
to circumvent state limits), and performance schools. Kearney’s Web site is unapolo-
getic about its business-oriented notion of leadership, one that John Dewey thought
should be avoided at all costs. It states, “Drawing on our program-management skills
and our knowledge of best practices used across industries, we provided a private-
sector perspective on how to address many of the complex issues that challenge other
large urban education transformations.”5
Duncan’s advocacy of the Renaissance 2010 plan alone should have immediately
disqualified him for the Obama appointment. At the heart of this plan is a privatiza-
tion scheme for creating a market in public education by urging public schools to
compete against each other for scarce resources and by introducing choice initiatives
so that parents and students will think of themselves as private consumers of educa-
tional services (“Creating a New Market of Public Education,” n.d.). As a result of his
support of the plan, Duncan came under attack by community organizations, parents,
education scholars, and students. These diverse critics have denounced it as a scheme
less designed to improve the quality of schooling than as a plan for privatization,
union busting, and the dismantling of democratically elected local school councils.
They also describe it as part of neighborhood gentrification schemes involving the
privatization of public housing projects through mixed finance developments
(Saltman, 2007). (Tony Rezko, an Obama and Blagojevich campaign supporter, made
a fortune from these developments along with many corporate investors.) Some of the
dimensions of public school privatization involve Renaissance schools being run by
subcontracted for-profit companies—a shift in school governance from teachers and
elected community councils to appointed administrators coming disproportionately
from the ranks of business. It also establishes corporate control over the selection and
model of new schools, giving the business elite and their foundations increasing influ-
ence over educational policy. No wonder that Duncan had the support of David
Brooks, the conservative op-ed writer for The New York Times.
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Giroux and Saltman 775
One particularly egregious example of Duncan’s vision of education can be seen
in the conference he organized with the Renaissance Schools Fund. In May 2008,
the Renaissance Schools Fund, the financial wing of the Renaissance 2010 plan
operating under the auspices of the Commercial Club, held a symposium, “Free to
Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market in Public Education,” at the exclusive
private club atop the Aon Center. The event was held largely by and for the business
sector, school privatization advocates, and others already involved in Renaissance
2010, such as corporate foundations and conservative think tanks. Significantly, no
education scholars were invited to participate in the proceedings, although it was heav-
ily attended by fellows from the pro-privatization Fordham Foundation and featured
speakers from various school choice organizations and the leadership of corporations.
Speakers clearly assumed the audience shared their views.
Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the
new market in public education as a “movement for social justice.” He invoked corpo-
rate investment terms to describe reforms, explaining that the 100 new schools would
leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock
investments, he said, “I am not a manager of 600 schools. I’m a portfolio manager of
600 schools and I’m trying to improve the portfolio.” He claimed that education can
end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating
good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to
embrace public education. “We’re trying to blur the lines between the public and the
private,” he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the pri-
vate sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual
capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obsta-
cle to business-led reform. He also insisted that the CTU opposes charter schools (and,
hence, change itself), despite the fact that the CTU runs 10 such schools under
Renaissance 2010. Despite the representation in the popular press of Duncan as concil-
iatory to the unions, his statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep
hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under
Ren2010 are deunionized). Thus, in Duncan’s attempts to close and transform low-
performing schools, he not only reinvents them as entrepreneurial schools but, in many
cases, frees “them from union contracts and some state regulations” (Karp & Myers,
2008). Duncan effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of the
Nobel Street charter schools, who openly called for the closing and reopening of every
school in the district precisely to get rid of the unions. What became clear is that Duncan
views Renaissance 2010 as a national blueprint for educational reform, but what is at
stake in this vision is the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the discred-
ited and tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives love to embrace.
In spite of the corporate rhetoric of accountability, efficiency, and excellence, there
is to date no evidence that the radical reforms under Duncan’s tenure as the CEO of
Chicago Public Schools have created any significant improvement. In part, this is
because the Chicago Public Schools and the Renaissance Schools Fund report data in
obscurantist ways to make traditional comparisons difficult if not impossible.6
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776 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9(6)
Moreover, in part, examples of educational claims to school improvement are being
made about schools embedded in communities that suffered dislocation and removal
through coordinated housing privatization and gentrification policies. For example, the
city has decimated public housing in coveted real estate enclaves, dispossessing thou-
sands of residents of their communities. Once the poor are removed, the urban cleansing
provides an opportunity for Duncan to open a number of Renaissance Schools, catering
to those socioeconomically empowered families whose children would surely improve
the city’s overall test scores. What are alleged to be school improvements under
Ren2010 rest on an increase in the city’s overall test scores and other performance
measures that parodies the financial shell game corporations used to inflate profit
margins—and prospects for future catastrophes are as inevitable. In the end, all Duncan
leaves us with is a Renaissance 2010 model of education that is celebrated as a business
designed to save kids from a failed public system. In fact, it condemns public schooling,
administrators, teachers, and students to a now outmoded and discredited economic
model of reform that can only imagine education as a business, teachers as entrepre-
neurs, and students as customers.7
It is difficult to understand how Barack Obama can reconcile his vision of change
with Duncan’s history of supporting a corporate vision for school reform and a pen-
chant for extreme zero-tolerance polices—both of which are much closer to the
retrograde policies hatched in conservative think tanks, such as the Heritage Founda-
tion, Cato Institution, Fordham Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, than to
the values of the many millions who voted for the democratic change he promised.
As is well known, these think tanks share an agenda not for strengthening public
schooling but for dismantling it and replacing it with a private market in consumable
educational services. At the heart of Duncan’s vision of school reform is a corpora-
tized model of education that cancels out the democratic impulses and practices of
civil society by either devaluing or absorbing them within the logic of the market or
the prison. No longer a space for relating schools to the obligations of public life,
social responsibility to the demands of critical and engaged citizenship, schools in
this dystopian vision legitimate an all-encompassing horizon for producing market
identities, values, and those privatizing and penal pedagogies that both inflate the
importance of individualized competition and punish those who do not fit into its
logic of pedagogical Darwinism.8
In spite of what Duncan argues, the greatest threat to our children does not come
from lowered standards, the absence of privatized choice schemes, or the lack of rigid
testing measures that offer the aura of accountability. On the contrary, it comes from a
society that refuses to view children as a social investment, consigns 13 million chil-
dren to live in poverty, reduces critical learning to massive testing programs, promotes
policies that eliminate most crucial health and public services, and defines rugged indi-
vidualism through the degrading celebration of a gun culture, extreme sports, and the
spectacles of violence that permeate corporate-controlled media industries. Students
are not at risk because of the absence of market incentives in the schools. Young people
are under siege in American schools because, in the absence of funding, equal
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Giroux and Saltman 777
opportunity, and real accountability, far too many of them have increasingly become
institutional breeding grounds for racism, right-wing paramilitary cultures, social intol-
erance, and sexism (Gaines, 1999). We live in a society in which a culture of testing,
punishment, and intolerance has replaced a culture of social responsibility and compas-
sion. Within such a climate of harsh discipline and disdain for critical teaching and
learning, it is easier to subject young people to a culture of faux accountability or put
them in jail rather than to provide the education, services, and care they need to face
problems of a complex and demanding society.9 What Duncan and other neoliberal
economic advocates refuse to address is what it would mean for a viable educational
policy to provide reasonable support services for all students and viable alternatives for
the troubled ones. The notion that children should be viewed as a crucial social
resource—one that represents, for any healthy society, important ethical and political
considerations about the quality of public life, the allocation of social provisions, and
the role of the state as a guardian of public interests—appears to be lost in a society that
refuses to invest in its youth as part of a broader commitment to a fully realized democ-
racy. As the social order becomes more privatized and militarized, we increasingly face
the problem of losing a generation of young people to a system of increasing intoler-
ance, repression, and moral indifference. It is difficult to understand why Obama would
appoint as secretary of education someone who believes in a market-driven model that
has not only failed young people but, given the current financial crisis has also been
thoroughly discredited. Unless Duncan is willing to reinvent himself, the national
agenda he will develop for education embodies and exacerbates these problems, and as
such, it will leave a lot more kids behind than it helps.
Authors’ Note
Giroux’s essay is available at http://www.truthout.org/121708R.
Declaration of Conflict of Interest
The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interests with respect to their authorship or
the publication of this article.
Financial Disclosure/Funding
The authors declared that they received no financial support for their research and/or authorship
of this article.
Notes
1. For an interesting commentary on Obama and his possible pick to head the education depart-
ment and the struggle over school reform, see Kohn (2008).
2. This term comes form Garland (2002).
3. For a brilliant analysis of the “governing through crime” complex, see Simon (2007).
4. Advancement Project (2005, p. 31) in partnership with Padres and Jovenes Unidos and
Southwest Youth Collaborative. On the broader issue of the effect of racialized zero toler-
ance policies on public education, see Robbins (2008). See also Giroux (2004).
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778 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9(6)
5. See www.atkearney.com.
6. See Chicago Public Schools Office of New Schools 2006/2007 Charter School Performance
Report Executive Summary.
7. See Shipps (2006).
8. See, e.g., Summary Report (n.d.); also see Mukherjee (2008, pp. 1-36).
9. As has been widely reported, the prison industry has become big business with many states
spending more on prison construction than on university construction. See Warren (2007).
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Bios
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and cultural studies at
McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include the following: Take Back
Higher Education (coauthored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), The University in Chains:
Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007), and Against the Terror of Neo-
liberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008). His newest book, Youth in a Suspect
Society: Democracy or Disposability?, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.
Kenneth Saltman is an associate professor in the department of Educational Policy Studies and
Research at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Capitalizing on
Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (2007) and editor of Schooling and the Politics
of Disaster (2007).
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