1

Education reform within the current economic system is a neoliberal

adjustment that empowers the ruling class even if they improve educational
access, they merely indoctrinate more students to submit to capitalist ideology.
McLaren 15 [Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University,
author of over 45 books, one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy, Cummings, Jordy. The Abode of Educational Production:
An Interview with Peter McLaren, Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 26, 2015]
Clearly from where I sit, a spontaneous wave of indignation has swept throughout the United States, an uprush of animosity against
intolerable indignities suffered by the working-class, and people of color. The social character of our life-activity, forged by the
hammer blows of value-producing labor and stamped by the impact press of capitalist social relations, rests on the pervasive
dependence and dehumanization of workers, the ever-increasing interdependence of capital and labor. The ontological conception

of alienation was unpacked magnificently by Marx and that was what first drew me to his work. There is nothing
more alienating than schools , which serve as conceptual, emotional, and
epistemological prisons for too many students. The miasmic system of capitalism in which we are
inextricably enmeshed is one whose flexibility, omnipresence and omnivalence of oppression has been as expansive
as the air that we breathe. But our labor power is both key to our enslavement and our liberation.
Everywhere people are clamoring for justice. We have been stricken to the quick by an outlawry and scoundrelism
exercised with prideful efficiency by the ruling class but the problem is not with personal behavior of capitalists, as egregious as that
might be, but with the structure of capitalism itself. Youth here in the United States are fed up with war, yet I teach classes where
the entire population of students who enrolled in my courses have never not known a time where their country was at war. At this
time of endless wars against terror, there are no wistful interludes between wars. Wars
today are forever ongoing and
we merely suffer between the exasperating diminuendos and crescendos of events. Now, for
We are a society that fights
instance, the latest crescendo is the push forward by the Islamic State.

symptoms and refuses to treat the root causes of our ongoing crises of the
environment, of terrorism, of resources, of personal security, of education and so on. One of the most entangling of these
disconcerting relationships is how capitalism structures, organizes and mediates all of these antagonisms
in contextually specific ways. In the current interregnum we are, for all intents and purposes, existing as human capital.
We have sold our life-activity to other people and some sections of the population (such as the
African American populations who are being replaced as cheap labor by the Latino/as), are relegated to surplus
populations that are unable to sell their labor-power. To acknowledge that we live in a capitalist society is to
tremble and shudder. Witness today the prodigious and virulent expansion of surveillance technology beyond the exigencies of any
agreed-upon notion of decency, technologies that efface the divisions between the real, the hyperreal and the suprarenal and lock
us into a scenario much worse that even Orwell envisioned, a scenario where will become willing agents of capital. We have sold our
labor-power for a wage and we can only use those silver dollars squeezed out of the profit ledger of the capitalist to cover the eyes
of our corpse and hope that the ferryman of Hades will convey our soul across the waters of the Styx or Acheron as quickly as
possible. We are prone in this society to be critical of primary assumptions and of course to protect them from attack they are
solemnly made sacerdotal, and hide behind religious prerogatives. As I have argued for decades, the capitalist marketplace is the
new God. I live in Old Town, Orange, in California and the most convenient coffee shop for me is in a Wells Fargo bank. Truly, the
building from the inside looks like a cathedral. My friend at UC Santa Barbara, Bill Robinson, notes that the negative of an anti-
capitalist movement does not necessarily involve the positive (and here we can clearly see he is echoing Hegels negation of the
negation) of an alternative post-capitalist or socialist project. Which is precisely why, along with my Marxist humanist comrades, I
have called long and hard for a philosophy of praxis grounded in absolute negativity. Here, I have been influenced greatly by the
work of Hegel and Marx, and Dunayevskayas theory of state capitalism. Ive learned that you cant separate Hegels dialectical
method from this Absolute Idea (the transcendence of the opposition between theory and practice). Just as Hegel advised us to
always, ceaselessly, call into question the grounding ideas from which a phenomenon is grasped, we need to break down external as
well as internal barriers to liberation through a philosophy of praxis grounded in absolute negativity. Regrettably, Marxs ideas have
been ripped out of their revolutionary soil by decades of toxic bombardment by the corporate media and repotted in greenhouse
megastores where, under hydrofarm compact fluorescent fixtures, they can be deracinated, debarked and made safe for university
seminars and condominium living alike for highly committed twentysomethings who like to whistle to ballpark tunes in their faux-
Victorian bathtubs. For me, Marx provides a dizzying macro-level montage of society filled with autonomous narratives that evoke
ineluctable paradoxes that take on new meaning when put all together. In other words, what
I find most useful in Marx
is his dialectics of internal relations, how all of social life is internally related. To stick with a film
metaphor, Marx gives you that tracking shot with voiceover spiked with the ambient noise of workers marching forwarda
relentless tracking shot that wont let you escapeand you have to follow it. Once the setting of the drama has been established,
you become the protagonist and you are obligated to play the drama out. As we struggle for the supersession of property and labor
determined by need and external utility, we look to Marx for direction in building a new society based on
co-operation and production absent the pressures of external determination, where all
manner of people interact and collaborate in freely associated,
spontaneous and unpredictable ways . As a teacher, I am interested in how global capitalism is
dialectically interwoven with underdevelopment, and how this process is related to the production
of knowledge, specifically in school systems and how such school systems teach us how to think,
to research, and to develop our methodological skills that often leave us degage and docile. Prior to the
the primary mission of mass schooling was to create
ascendency of neoliberal capitalism,

the deep character of the nation state by legitimizing the superiority of

elite culture , trans-coding the culture of the ruling class with the culture of the nation state so that both were essentially
seen as natural symmetrical reflections of each other. Schools
were important mechanisms in the invention of
the identity of the modern nation state in the era of industrialization and played an important role in developing the
concept of the citizen (a concept always contested by many groups, including conservatives, liberals and radicals). However,
schools today (since the mid-1980s), are discernibly shifting their role from building the nation state and
creating democracy-minded citizens to serving the transnational corporations in their endless quest for profits. The
nation state, it appears, is losing its ability to control capital by means of controlling the transnational corporations.
Corporations have become in many instances more powerful than nation states (although I am not
diminishing the role of nation states here). Schools that were once an important political entity that had a
public code-setting agenda in creating conventional rules and regulations to be followed by each
citizen are fast becoming part of the private sector bent on creating consumers within the
capitalist marketplace. As society abandons its outmoded historical garb and takes on new forms, the perpetuity of the
existing social order is increasingly called into question. So-called non-political forces those associated with financial and
commodity markets are now the dominant forces of indoctrination and code setting within our market society and this has greatly
impacted education. Our
collaborative existence as consumers has produced a closure on meaning
through the very activity of opening up our desire to consume market commodities by means of a
default set of blinders created by a capitalist imaginary that provides the formula or criteria of choice. Industrial capitalist schooling
was occupied with conventional problem solving designed to provide students with the rules and conventions to solve particular
problems via rule-based reasoning. Knowing the rules of the democratic state was the most important goal and this was often
taught by means of a text book-assignment-recitation pattern. With the advent of consumer society and the replacement of
Western high culture with transnational corporate culture (which relies on well-trained technical workers), the
focus has
moved away from conventional thinking to technical thinking. What this ultimately excludes, of course, is
critical reflection, or producing knowledge from real-life problems or what Richard Quantz calls meaningful action. Meaningful
action does not always take place in situations where relevant knowledge is available or where people are aware what the right
choices and actions might be. Meaningful knowledge does require some knowledge of technical reasoning but it requires as
well the ability to interpret and critique to make moral choices and to commit to some action even when relevant knowledge is not
available. It requires larger patterns of understanding and reasoning and it requires us to create and recreate
its own foundations and goals as it goes along. Given the abandoning of political institutions such as schools
by the state, the focus has been on technical problem solving as a means-ends reasoning that
involves selecting from available rules those that will help individuals achieve a particular given
end. In short, critical reflection is not a priority . It is in fact, the enemy of todays
education, even as schools tout the value of critical literacy and social justice agendas. Being a Marxist educator means that I see
education as a path to socialism. Simply put, my struggle as a teacher is to create protagonist agency to fight three very powerful
forces, what I call the triplecidesgenocide, ecocide and epistemicide. I see capitalism as a form of genocide (see the work of Gary
Leech) and a number of my students have been developing the field of ecopedagogy (turning traditional forms of environmental
education on their heads) addressing the issues of ecoside, sustainability, ecosocialism and alternative epistemologies found often
in first nations cultures. The
moral imperative behind todays neoliberalism reflects a distinct form of
neo-mercantilism. The move in the US economy in the 1970s towards financialization and export
production helped to concentrate wealth in the hands of CEOs and hedge-fund managers and, as
Chomsky and others have noted, this led to a concentration of political power, which in turn leads to
state policies to increase economic concentration, fiscal policies, deregulation of the economic,
and rules of corporate governance. Neoliberalism as it factors the field of education reflects the
logic of possessive individualism, urging all citizens or potential citizens to maximize their
advantage on the labor market ; and for those who are unable to accomplish this
requirement a requirement, by the way, that functions as a moral imperative such as undocumented workers, they must
as a non-market underclass live in a bottom-tiered netherworld of sweatshop labor that serves
those of more fundamental worth to the social order the more successful capitalist class. All
that is to have worth in neoliberal democracies must be directly linked to the functional needs
of capitalism, so that capitalism and the capitalist class can reproduce itself along with capitalist society, and the capitalist
worldview that legitimates the entire process. So here we can see neoliberalism linked to legal systems and
mechanisms of legitimation that will help secure the market as the only authentically potent form of
political and social organization. The state, in other words, becomes synonymous with the market.
Certainly global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank comprise the ramparts
behind which neoliberal ideology is to be protected at all costs, and it is important to view these institutions as basically
controlled by the wealthy western powers, the United States in particular. And it is in this sense that neo-liberal ideology is an
imperialist ideology. Anything left outside market forces would be under suspicion of being subversive of civilization after all, there
is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. We could even say that we are living in a neoliberal modernity, in which the
capitalist
class is gaining power by dispossessing the working-class and selling or renting to the public
what was commonly owned. Neoliberalism is a revolution from above on the part of the
transnational capitalist class to give ever more structural advantage to the global capitalist
production system. Between this global ruling-class and the working class still exists the shrinking middle class, a fragile buffer
between the rich and the poor. According to sociologist Bill Robinson, we inhabit a loosely constituted historic bloc, a social base in
which the transnational capitalist class produces the consent of those drawn into this bloc and exercises moral, political and
economic leadership hegemonic leadership in the classical Gramscian sense. My focus as a Marxist is on this emerging
transnational hegemony this new historic bloc based on the hegemony of transnational capital where, of course, the US is
definitely playing a leading role. While national capital, global capital and regional capitals are still prevalent, the hegemonic fraction
of capital on a world scale is now transnational capital. The
purpose of the transnational ruling class is the
valorization and accumulation of capital and the defense and advance of the emergent
hegemony of a global bourgeoisie and a new global capitalist-historical bloc. This historical bloc is
composed of the transnational corporations and financial institutions, the elites that manage the supranational economic planning
agencies, major forces in the dominant political parties, media conglomerates, and technocratic elites. Capitalism, which Marx
portentously argued was written in letters of blood and fire, continues to be reproduced as robbery, as outlawry. As a Marxist
educator, I raise these issues with my colleagues, with my students, but mostly I raise them in the context of arguing that

critical pedagogy must not remain solely in the classroom but become
part of a transnational social movement .
Reformist approaches like the plan refurbish neoliberal institutions and sap
energy from growing radical movements the impact is authoritarianism that
causes planetary destruction only the alternatives politics of refusal produces
critical transformations.
Giroux 17 [Henry A. Giroux, professor in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada, Henry A. Giroux on
Militant Hope in the Age of Trump, Tikkun, Jan 18, 2017, http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/henry-giroux-on-militant-hope-in-the-
age-of-trump]
Crucial to rethinking the space and meaning of the political imaginary is the need to reach across
specific identities and to move beyond single-issue movements and their
specific agendas . This is not a matter of dismissing such movements, but creating new alliances that allow them to
become stronger in the fight to not only succeed in advancing their specific concerns but also enlarging the possibility of developing
a radical democracy that benefits not just specific but general interests. As the Fifteenth Street Manifesto group expressed in its
2008 piece, Left Turn: An Open Letter to U.S. Radicals, many groups on the left would grow stronger if they were to perceive and
refocus their struggles as part of a larger movement for social transformation.[7] Any
feasible political agenda must
merge the pedagogical and the political by employing a language and mode of analysis that
resonates with peoples needs while making social change a crucial element of the political and
highly
public imagination. At the same time, any politics that is going to take real change seriously must be
critical of any reformist politics that does not include both a change of
consciousness and structural change . If progressives are to join in the fight against authoritarianism in
the United States, they will need to create powerful political alliances and produce long-term organizations that can provide a view
of the future that does not simply mimic the present. This requires aligning private issues to broader structural and systemic
problems both at home and abroad. This is where matters of translation become crucial in developing broader ideological struggles
and in fashioning a more comprehensive notion of politics. Movements
require time to mature and come into
fruition and depend on an educated public that is able to address both the structural conditions
of oppression and how they are legitimated through their ideological impact on individual and
collective attitudes and modes of experiencing the world. In this way radical ideas can be connected to action
once workers and others recognize the need to take control of the conditions of their labour, communities, resources, and lives.
Struggles that take place in particular contexts must also be associated to similar efforts at home and abroad. For instance, t he
ongoing privatization of public goods such as schools can be analyzed within increasing attempts
on the part of billionaires to eliminate the social state and gain control over commanding economic and cultural
institutions in the USA. At the same time, the modeling of schools after prisons can be connected to the
ongoing criminalization of a wide range of everyday behaviors and the rise of the punishing
state. Moreover, oppressive economic, political, and cultural practices in the U.S. can be connected
to other authoritarian societies that are following a comparable script of widespread
repression . For instance, it is crucial to think about what racialized police violence in the United States has in common with
violence waged by authoritarian states such as Egypt against Muslim protesters. This allows us to understand various social
problems globally so as to make it easier to develop political formations that link such diverse social justice struggles across national
borders. It also helps us to understand, name and make visible the diverse authoritarian policies and pedagogical practices that point
to the parameters of a totalitarian society. This is especially true in addressing the ongoing criminalization of Blacks and the rise of
new forms of domestic and state terrorism. As Nicholas Powers points out, The old racial line between Black and White has been
redrawn as the line between criminal and citizen. Up and down the class hierarchy form poor to wealthy, Black people have to
dodge violence, from macroaggressions to economic sabotage and from public shaming to physical attacks every day another
person of color is shot by police, and the hole left inside families are where love ones used to breathe. The cops not only steal the
lives of our children; they steal the lives of everyone who loved them. A part of us freezes, goes numb.[8] Critical Thinking, Critical

making the political more pedagogical becomes central to

Culture In this instance,

any viable notion of politics . That is, if the ideals and practices of democratic governance are not to be lost,
there is a need for progressives to address and accelerate the production of critical formative cultures that promote dialogue,
debate and, what James Baldwin once called, a certain daring, a certain independence of mind capable of teaching some people
to think and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything.[9] Thinking
is
dangerous, especially under the cloud of an impending neo-fascism, because it is a crucial
requirement for constructing new political institutions that can both fight against the
impending authoritarianism and imagine a society in which democracy is viewed no longer as a remnant of the past but rather as an

This merging of education, critical thinking, and

ideal that is worthy of continuous struggle.

politics is necessary for creating informed agents willing to fight the

 systemic violence and domestic forms of repression that mark the
authoritarian policies and repressive practices of the Trump
administration . Under the Trump presidency, the worse dimensions of a neoliberal
order will be accelerated and will include : deregulating restrictions on corporate power, cutting
taxes for the rich, expanding the military, privatizing public education , supressing civil

liberties, waging a war against dissent, treating Black communities as war

zones, and dismantling all public goods . Such actions make it all the more imperative for progressives
to challenge a market-driven society that erodes the symbolic and affective bonds and loyalties that give meaning to social
existence. Appealing to the economic interests of the public is important, but it is not enough. Hope has to be fed by the lessons of
history, the recognition for collective action, and the willingness to feel ones way imaginatively into the situation of others.[10]
Hope is not only about expanding the limits of the radical imagination, it is also about recognizing that resistance is a necessity that
has to be rooted in a realistic assessment of the roadblocks ahead. Refusing
a politics of disconnection means
taking on the crucial challenge of producing a critical formative culture along with corresponding
institutions that promote a form of permanent criticism against all elements of oppression and
unaccountable power. One important task of emancipation is to encourage educators, artists, workers, young people and
others to use their skills in the service of a politics in which public values, trust and compassion can be used to chip away at
neoliberalisms celebration of self-interest, the ruthless accumulation of capital, the survival-of-the-fittest ethos and the
financialization and market-driven corruption of the political system. Political
responsibility is more than a
challenge it is the projection of a possibility in which new identification, affectations, and
loyalties can be produced to enable and sustain new forms of civic action, political organizations, and
transnational anti-capitalist movements. A radical democracy based on the best principles of a democratic socialism
must be written back into the script of everyday life, and doing so demands overcoming the current crisis of memory, agency and
politics by collectively struggling for a society in which matters of justice, equity and inclusion define what is possible. Neo-
fascism thrives on the disparagement of others, nativism, ultra-nationalism, an appeal to
violence, an unchecked individualism, and the legitimation of an alleged preferred people to dominate others. These are the
elements of a formative culture rooted in nihilism, cynicism, economic insecurity, unrestrained anger, a paralyzing fear, and the
collapse of public values and the ethical grammar that gives a democracy meaning. At work here is the undeniable fact of how

education is at the center of politics, and can be used for either

oppressive or emancipatory ends . This suggests strategies aimed at the development
of alternative, progressive educational apparatuses , grounded in the pedagogical
necessity to make knowledge and ideas meaningful in order to make them critical and
transformative . This means appropriating and using the symbolic and intellectual tools of
persuasion, identification, and belief as crucial political strategies. I am not talking about a facile appeal to a
notion of consciousness raising. Rather, I am emphasizing the necessity for progressives to work in
conjunction with labour unions, educational unions, and other social movements to develop the
institutions necessary for a critical formative culture that can change the consciousness, desires, identities,
investments, values, while providing a sense of agency of those who lack the tools of civic literacy and
critical frames of reference necessary for understanding the conditions that produce misery,
exploitation, exclusion, and mass resentment, all the while paving the way for right-wing populist movements.
democratic public spheres along with the public they
Under the reign of casino capitalism,

support are disappearing . One consequence is a warfare state built not only on the militarization of the
economy but also on what my colleague Brad Evans calls armed ignorance. Such ignorance represents more than a paucity of
ethical and social responsibility, it
is also symptomatic of an educational and spiritual crisis in the United
States. A culture of fear, hate and bigotry has transformed American politics into a pathology.
Fear cripples reason and makes it easier for authoritarian figures to engage in what might be called terror management. Trumps
speeches mobilized millions with the drug inducing appeal of uncertainty, fear, and hatred. David Dillard-Wright insightful
commentary on Trumps use of fear makes clear how he used it as both a political and pedagogical tool. He writes: The Trump rally
speeches go through a litany of perceived threats to the American worker: the immigrants taking our jobs, the terrorists who want
to kill us, the media who want to silence us. Trump is no social psychologist, but he has an instinctive sense for crowds: the
purpose of this rhetoric is to tear down the listener to a point of malleability, at which point, he alone supplies the answer (as in his
I alone can fix it speech at the Republican National Convention in the summer). He drowns the listener in fear and then reaches out
a helping hand from the threat that he, himself, has conjured. This verbal waterboarding breaks down the Trump fan into a panicked
rage and then channels that fear and anger into the pretend solution of a giant wall or jailing Hillary Clinton, which not incidentally,
also places Trump at the center of power and control over his fans lives. Fear actually short-circuits rational thought and gets the
rally-goer to accept the strongman as the only way to avoid the perceived threat.[11] The
appeal to mass produced
fear legitimates a politics that tramples the rights of minorities, young people, and dissidents.
Moreover, it reinforces a violent and corrupt lawlessness that extends from the highest reaches of
government and big corporations to the para-militarization of our schools and police forces. Domestic terrorism
becomes normalized as unarmed Blacks are killed by the police almost weekly, while more and more members of the population are
considered excess, disposable, redundant, and subject to the bigotry of escalating right-wing groups, corrupt politicians, and policies
that benefit the financial elite. And with the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency, a fog of authoritarianism will all but
diminish any vestige of democracy and civic literacy. Such a prophecy is not simply the stuff of science fiction. As David Remnick
predicts the Trump administration will usher in both a withering of public values and a democratic sensibility leading to a dystopian
social order immersed in misery, violence, and cruelty: There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme
Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to
say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader
who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many
varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish
and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event and its a stretch is that this election and the years to
follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.[12]

The world is on the brink of nuclear war , ecological extinction , an

accelerating refugee crisis , and a growing culture saturated in violence ; yet,
the public is persuaded that the burning issues of the day focus on the breakup of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashians loss
of $11-million in jewelry to thieves, or the endless focus on the banality of Reality TV and celebrity culture. In addition, violence is
now treated as a theatrical performance paving the way each day for the next news cycle operating primarily as spectacle and
entertainment. Moral and political hysteria is in fashion and has undermined the public spheres that
promote self-reflection, dialogue, and informed judgment. Informed exchanges and arguments that rely on evidence have been
displaced by a culture of shouting, emotion, lying, and thuggery. War comes in many forms and is as powerful as a form of ideology
and identification as it is in the service of multiple forms of violence. Once
we recognize the metrics of war as both
crisis of politics and education, we can mobilize against both its ideological and material
relations of power. But time is running out .
The alternative refuses neoliberal recovery in favor of developing collective
anti-capitalist pedagogies only delinking education reform from capitalism
cultivates revolutionary subjects capable of radical structural change.
Slater 15 [Graham Slater, Department of Education, Culture, and Society, University of Utah, Education as recovery:
neoliberalism, school reform, and the politics of crisis, Journal of Education Policy, Volume 30, 2015 - Issue 1]
The neoliberal logic of recovery constitutes what De Lissovoy (2012) calls violation: The simultaneous process of building and
breaking, of construction and destruction, which seeks its surplus and satisfaction in the injury to the very identities it is complicit in
producing (463). In this sense, violation can be understood as a process of subject formation. For De Lissovoy, education
is a
central mechanism in the process of cultivating student subjectivities that are prepared for a
fundamental demoralization, marginalization, and punishment (465). Mainstream educational discourses of
meritocracy and the American Dream, which purport a post-Brown vs. Board equality of opportunity and encourage
students to develop their human capital potential, all serve to build a promissory educational
mythology (Pierce 2013) that is regularly broken by the symbolic and epistemic violence of
Eurocentric curricula , high-stakes testing failure, and the school-to-prison pipeline regime targeting students of
color across the nation. Recovery, like violation, is similarly duplicitous. As crisis becomes an increasingly plangent characteristic of

social life, the logic of recovery attempts to desensitize social subjects to this ontological
assault . Forcing alternatives to neoliberal dependency to recede in social memory, neoliberals
seek to cultivate subjectivities that are inured to the cycle of crisis and recovery. Because crisis is a
structural element of capitalism, the active proliferation of neoliberal reforms under the guise of recovery is an act of bad faith a
violation. The logic of recovery is a complex and adaptive thread in the fabric of neoliberal education reform. At its heart is the

As crises proliferate ,
notion that neoliberalism is the sole arbiter of social health in the early twenty-first century.

neoliberals use recovery to obscure their complicity in that very process .

Recovery is an insidious brand of politics that seeks to normalize the exceptionality of crises and to
cultivate subjectivities that are increasingly accustomed to crisis, destruction, and neoliberal
rehabilitation . In doing so, neoliberalism undermines alternative responses to
crisis that might seek to exit the cycle of crisisaccumulationcrisis that has become central to capitalist profiteering (De
Lissovoy, Means, and Saltman 2014). Refusing the terms of neoliberal recovery: autonomy, community, and educational exodus If
neoliberal theorists and policymakers have incorporated a material and discursive mechanism of recovery into education reform,

how should communities, teachers, and students respond in the face of

crisis ? What modes of resistance are they to enact ? How are they to exert
transfigurative forms of agency on precarious, violent, and dispossessive circumstances? Indeed, the extent
and magnitude of neoliberal crises make both political theory and activism a delicate endeavor. Without a doubt, crises have
an indelibly affective character (DeLeon 2011). Historically, this has played to the favor of neoliberal
reformers, as the immediate need for safety, health, and recuperation in the face of crises often
forestalls radical political transformation. Against the misappropriation of political potential, I draw upon two
rich theoretical and political traditions black radicalism and post-Marxism in order to make a case for
rethinking education reform against neoliberal recovery , in the hope of
delinking the relationship between crisis and recovery in neoliberal society. Developing a
collective position of refusal to future crises is a complex endeavor. Just as crisis and recovery works on
cultivating a politics of refusal is an
individuals and communities at the level of subjectivity,

equally subjective project . iek (2009) suggests that when faced with coercive politics, we should
resist the impulse to act uncritically either to accept recovery or to respond impulsively and
instead should control our fury and transform it into an icy
determination to think to think things through in a really radical way , and to ask
what kind of society it is that renders such blackmail possible (17). Perhaps, in the context of recovery, this
embracing crisis , naming it as a structural element
might mean simultaneously
of capitalism , and dwelling in that inherent absurdity . Cazdyn and Szeman (2011) offer a
useful clarification of this notion. They write, crisis
occurs in capitalism not because capitalism has gone
wrong but because it has gone right it has worked as it is designed to work. For this reason, they
continue, one must be open to and try to hold the contradictions of capitalism rather than try to immediately manage, resolve,

or repress them (141). This to work to

is important, not to delay recuperation or redemption from crisis, but rather
cultivate radical subject positions indeed, revolutionary subjectivities from
which transfigurative action can emerge out of bounds of normalized or prescribed possibilities. In this
sense, the difference between recovering and not recovering should be understood as a

subjective response , rather than as a strictly material or physical matter. Far from arguing
that being against recovery implies that communities violated by neoliberal crises should not
attempt to recuperate from capitalist-inflicted traumas, taking a stance against recovery might
mean cultivating a collective position of refusal , in which communities affirm their
ability to break the circuitous logics of neoliberal recovery and create post-crisis futures in
healthy , autonomous , and fundamentally anti-capitalist terms .
 2
The United States federal government should withhold ten percent of Title I
funding from any state that fails to implement a Guaranteed Tax Base that
equalizes school financing across each state based upon mandatory per-pupil
minimums.

The CP solves and avoids politics

Arocho, 14 Joshua Arocho is a J.D. & M.A. Candidate at the University of Michigan Law
School & School of Education. (Joshua Arocho, Inhibiting Intrastate Inequalities: A
Congressional Approach to Ensuring Equal Opportunity to Finance Public Education, 112 Mich.
L. Rev. 1479, LexisNexis, SRA)

To address this problem, Congress should create a new condition in the next reauthorization of
Title I of NCLB to appropriate additional funding that is conditioned on states' implementation
of equal access programs, such as the Guaranteed Tax Base, a system that provides state
subsidies to inflate artificially the property values in low-property-value school districts. n111
withhold current Title I funding from states that choose
Alternatively, Congress could
not to implement such programs. This move would be a dramatic shift in school
finance policy. As of 2007, only three states used the Guaranteed Tax Base. n112 Congress
should use the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which withheld federal funds from states
that chose not to raise the legal drinking age to twenty-one, n113 as a model to structure the
new language of Title I. That language would read as follows:
The United States Department of Education shall establish an Equal Educational Opportunity
grant to be made available to the states. All states choosing to implement an Equal Access
formula for school finance, such as a Guaranteed Tax Base, shall receive grant funding
proportionate to the amount of pupils in its education system, which shall amount to a 10%
bonus in Title I funding. All states not implementing such an Equal Access formula forfeit the
right to any bonus grant funding under this Section.
In the alternative, if Congress is unable to appropriate additional funds under Title I, it could
more closely follow the National Minimum Drinking Age Act by withholding 10 percent of
current Title I funding from states that choose not to adopt a Guaranteed Tax Base formula. This
would obviate the need to seek additional appropriations in a political climate in which raising
taxes is difficult, if not impossible.
This plan relies on an established idea from education researchers and state reform efforts--the
Guaranteed Tax Base--as a basis for helping states to develop equitable, yet flexible, funding
formulas in response to the federal mandate. Under a Guaranteed Tax Base, the state
"guarantees" each school district a certain amount of taxable property value per pupil and
allows each individual school district to set its own tax rate, subject to a mandatory minimum.
[*1497] For school districts with assessed property valuation below the state-set guaranteed
tax base, the state subsidizes the balance. For example, if the state sets the guaranteed tax base
at $ 250,000 per pupil and the school district has only $ 70,000 of taxable property per pupil,
then the state must subsidize the district for the revenue that would be generated under the
district's chosen tax rate with the additional $ 180,000 of taxable property per pupil. Like the
Foundation Formulas, the Guaranteed Tax Base thus has the advantage of guaranteeing each
school district a minimum level of per-pupil funding, but it also enables low-property-value
school districts to raise more than the foundation level if they choose to tax themselves at a
higher rate. Moreover, this plan does not force the equalization of school funding but rather
leaves each school district with a question to be addressed at the local level: How much do we
value education? By not mandating equalized spending between low-property-value and high-
property-value districts, states should not face opposition from more affluent communities that
do not want the quality of their children's education to be affected by a leveling down of
education spending. n114
 3
Federal intervention in education crushes federalism and spills over to other
areasgets modeled globally
Can re-highlight to get a disasters impact
Patrick S. Roberts Patrick S. Roberts is an Associate Professor at the Center for Public
Administration and Policy (CPAP) in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University. "The Centralization Paradox," American Interest, 6-
10-2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/10/the-centralization-paradox/
ableism-edited
w
The fact that Derthick was not famous outside her professional circle probably says something
about broader trends in American society and politics. Derthick was for many years one the
ablest expositors of the Anti-Federalist tradition in American political thought, a tradition that
lives on in the form of resistance to the overweening power of the presidency and the creeping
centralization of government authority in Washington. Her work shows why federalism remains
part of the core of American identity and the bedrock of the Constitutions commitment to
self-government. It also shows why the distortion of the balance within American federalism lies
at the root of the political distemper we have experienced in recent times. The matter so far
sounds simpler than it is. Derthick, who was a protg of Edward Banfield and a colleague and
friend of James Q. Wilson, was no simple thinker. Many observers have argued that whats
wrong with the U.S. political system is that it has too weak an Executive Branch relative to the
Legislative and Judicial Branches. From Samuel Huntington to Francis Fukuyama, the argument
has been that we are a Tudor polity heavy with parties and courts, that Federal and state
bureaucracies are hidebound and slow because, unlike most European and other democracies,
they are encumbered by mounds of pointillist but often pointless and inconsistent directives
from lawmakers and judges. The more nuanced question, then, is this: Can the American
political system be simultaneously overbalanced toward the central, Federal government and
yet still suffer from a relatively weak Executive? Martha Derthick understood perhaps better
than anyone that it could. Anti-Federalists such as Patrick Henry and George Mason were
formally those who opposed the ratification of the Constitution and a strong central
government. They were dismayed at how much power some framers of the Constitution wanted
to take away from the states. More broadly, they worried that the complexity of the new
government, and particularly the separation of powers, would obscure the responsibilities of
politicians to their constituents and their lines of accountability to the public at large.1 In other
words, in the original tension, as understood by the Founders, between a republican form of
government and a democratic form, the Anti-Federalists leaned somewhat optimistically toward
the latter. Martha Derthick never referred to herself as an Anti-Federalist. Like most people
today, she quoted the famous Federalists such as James Madison far more often than she cited
the Anti-Federalists.2 In some sense, Americans are all Federalists now, at least in so far as we
are all members of one nation governed under the Constitution (a post-Civil War amended
Constitution at that). If Anti-Federalism is merely a collection of historically specific and partisan
ideas then it is a museum piece, an artifact in the history of ideas. If, however, Anti-Federalism
represents an orientation toward power that favors the local and is suspicious when authority is
concentrated and concealed, then it is part of a debate in which we are still engaged. Elvin Lim
has aptly described the ongoing debate between the inheritors of the Federalist and Anti-
Federalist traditions as a Lovers Quarrel that traverses political parties and ideologies
throughout American history.3 Derthick did not want to return to the Articles of Confederation,
but she did favor the parts of the Constitution that protected the sovereignty of the statesthe
foundational crucibles of self-government in a large, extended republic. She used her knowledge
of the founding period to shed light on how far America had drifted from its original
constitutional design, particularly through the erosion of local deliberation by commandeering
profiteers masquerading as advocates of rational design and the public interest. Her position
should not be confused with states rights arguments. Like Madison, she was critical of state
legislatures as fonts of political demagogy, but like the Anti-Federalists she worried that the
same forces could infect national politics. Her work highlights one of Americas central
contributions to the world: how decentralized federalism can preserve liberty in a large republic,
and how each citizen can maintain the delicate balance of being a member both of a state and
of a larger nation. American federalism offers hope to nations [devastated] crippled by
regional differences and overbearing central governments: the benefits of a small republic
through membership in states and the benefits of a large republic through membership in one
nation. In recent decades, however, federalisms benefitscivic deliberation and laboratories of
democracyhave been themselves [devastated] crippled by an increasingly national,
centralized, and presidentialized political culture. The principal lesson from Derthicks work is
that policy interventions invariably have unintended consequences. At their best, policymakers
anticipate consequences and plan for contingencies. At their worst, they ignore or even conceal
the self-serving consequences of their proposals. For example, the end of smoking in airplanes,
bars, and restaurants in the United States is considered a triumph for public health. Derthicks
Up in Smoke reminds us of the knavish tricks that led to this triumph. Crusading state Attorneys
General and trial lawyers joined forces to extract riches from the 1998 Master Settlement
Agreement (MSA) that sharply increased taxes on cigarette sales and created a powerful
constituency that benefits from the tobacco industry.4 State governments now have a
substantial interest in seeing revenue from smoking continue. The tobacco settlement shows
the prescience of the Anti-Federalist concern that judicial decrees replace democratic
deliberation when politicians opt for expedient solutions. (Here is a stellar example from
Derthicks analysis of how a fear of excessive centralization and an appreciation of a weak
executive can coexist happily.) Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, one Anti-Federalist,
writing under the name of Brutus, warned that judges would not limit themselves to the plain
meaning of laws and the Constitution, but would reconstruct words according to their spirit.
Interpreting laws according their spirit and applying them to new contexts may seem perfectly
reasonable. The Founders never envisioned the internet, or drone spy cameras, for instance,
and judges must apply law to changing contexts. But Brutus and the Anti-Federalists worried
that judges and politiciansthe Tudor courts and parties, againwould take advantage of
laws and rules to satisfy their own narrow interests in ways not intended by the public mandate
behind the original law or the Constitution. They were indeed prescient. At the founding, states
and the national government each had separate spheres. The national government pursued
foreign policy, and the states formulated education, health, and welfare policies, among others.
In modern federalism, the spheres overlap. States and the national government share
responsibilities for a range of activities. Politicians at all levels of government propose policies to
meet public concerns, and they attempt to shift costs to other levels of government or other
institutions. In the case of the tobacco settlement, state Attorneys General shifted the cost of
public services to addicted smokers, who paid increased taxes on tobacco products. Like the
Anti-Federalists, Derthicks sympathies lie with local communities and, through them, with the
principle of subsidiarity. But to principle she joined the practical: Local governments, being at
the bottom of the political food chain, have less opportunity to outsource the financing and
implementation of their goals than do states or the Federal government. Alas, over time, local
governments have lost significant control over setting their own priorities.5 With the
capillaries of the body politic thus impaired, the entire body has suffered. To show this ill
health, Derthicks first book unpacked the development of the usually uninspiring topic of
federal grants-in-aid with her characteristic verve and humor.6 She described early public
assistance grants to states as entreaties to change their behavior. As befits her Anti-Federalist
sympathies for subnational governments, she characterized intergovernmental relations as a
diplomatic rather than a hierarchical process: Federal enforcement is a diplomatic process. It is
as if the terms of a treaty, an agreement of mutual interest to the two governmental parties,
were more or less continuously being negotiated. In these negotiations, numerous diplomatic
forms and maneuvers are observed, especially by the federal negotiators. Her vision of
intergovernmental relations was one of polite discussion, continuous negotiation and
accommodation, and threats held in reserve. The Federal ability to withhold funds is in fact one
of the major resources of federal influencebut it is of use mainly as a potential resource. It lies
at the foundation, as a weapon in reserve, of all federal enforcement activity, and the nature of
that activity is such as to make the best possible use of it. In Derthicks view, what began as a
reasonable adaptation of federalism to a new era of national government expansion has
become, in its worst iterations, a club that the Federal government can use to beat the
states into submission without opportunity for public involvement. For example,
Congress and the President went too far in demanding state compliance with education reforms
in the initial get-tough period of No Child Left Behind. At the same time, she observed, the
Federal governments authority to selectively enforce laws by granting waivers poses problems
for the rule of law. Executive waivers have an uncontroversial origin as a tool to adapt Federal
government involvement to differences among states.7 If waivers are used often and
selectively, however, they raise questions about why a law is not applicable to all citizens, or
why it is a law rather than just a good idea. President Obama has issued more than a thousand
temporary waivers exempting businesses and labor unions from various provisions of the
Affordable Care Act. The constitutional source of the Presidents right to issue waivers to laws is
murky at best. At worst, the Presidents unilateral suspension of the law threatens the rule of
law itself. Government works best, in Derthicks view, when it operates through deliberation at
the lowest possible level. Citizens can more easily observe government operations at the smaller
scale, look their chosen representatives in the eye, and together decide what their communities
should do through discussion and debate. Where local action is not possible or desirable,
national level programs should be given clear goals, and, above all, Executive Branch agencies
should hit the sweet spot between too much autonomy and too little. Thus, in Agency Under
Stress, Derthick shows how the Social Security Administration suffered from a lack of innovation
when it was the domain of experts alone.8 So yes, bureaucrats can be henpecked by courts and
parties, to be sure, but left alone they can be highly inertial, too. This led Derthick to the
conclusion that experts should be on tap, not on top. In other cases, politicians, judges, and
advocacy lobbies henpeck relentlessly, hobbling administrative agencies so severely that they
cannot see straight or work effectively. For example, Derthick pointed out the absurdity of
bureaucracy-ensconced school reformers who purport to improve student achievement by
punishing the teacher workforce.9 Honest observers can differ on whether the generic problem
with bureaucracy is too much autonomy or too little, but the problem isnt really amenable to
generic determination. Each situation is different and things change; Derthick understood that.
Nevertheless, she believed that the lack of transparency in state and national policy should be
cause for concern for anyone who holds democracy to be the best form of government because
it offers citizens informed consent. If democratic decision-making processes are transparent, the
rules of the game are clear, and citizens have an opportunity to debate and discuss the wisest
course of action, then, rational apathy given its due, democracy can provide for informed
consent. If the authors of policy hide behind the scenes, or bury their designs in obscure tax
credit amendments, the authority for government action becomes unclear, special interests
have a field day, and citizens are pushed away from meaningful participation. Then the political
process fails at offering the meaningful informed consent that gives the political system
legitimacy. The Anti-Federalists worried that the Constitution would oppress people from two
directions. They suspected that the legislature would be unable to stand up to the unchecked
power of the Supreme Court, and they feared that the populist presidency would grow in power
until it overwhelmed popular rule and sober self-government. Such concerns have risen to high
collective consciousness many times in American history. The trope of the imperial presidency
rings out from Lincoln to FDR to Richard Nixon. Several contemporary observers of the American
political scene have predicted that, if the United States government were ever to fall, a despotic
presidency would be to blame. Derthick did not frame her criticism of American politics in such
apocalyptic terms, but she did worry that the rise of a populist presidency could obscure how
policy is actually made and put too great a distance between citizens and the policy process. A
populist American President appears on television and video daily as a sponsor of grandiose
policy proposals: free community college education; a mission to Mars. The populist-style
President himself is a product of the cauldron of election contests that demand ambitious
proposals but offer hazy details on implementation or any reasonable metric as to how such
proposals might be evaluated. This sort of President nowadays invariably gets absorbed into an
Nowhere is this form of
electronic celebrity culture saturated by advertising language.
political theater more evident than in recent education policy, where proposals for
reformfirst charter schools, then school choice and vouchers, then smaller class sizesappear
as flavors of the month without enough time having passed to evaluate their effects.
Meanwhile, laws emerge behind the scenes from issue networks rather than the minds of
lawmakers. The presidentialization of everything has spread beyond health, welfare, and
education to other domains, including disaster management.10 At the founding, disaster
management was a responsibility for states and localities, if for the government at all. Today,
the President is the responder-in-chief to any major disaster, from floods to hurricanes to oil
spills.11 Disasters make for good news stories, and responding to them is one way in which the
President and the Federal government can palpably affect citizens lives and deliver benefits.
The President cannot issue waivers in disaster management, but he does have sufficient
discretion to issue declarations that trigger Federal resources to flow and pre-planned
protocols to spring into action.12 The number of disaster declarations has increased over time.
While no dough for snow was once a rallying cry at the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, it is now routine for the President to declare snow disasters. In emergency
management, as in the tobacco settlement, politicians sometimes derive benefits from a social
ill. Disaster losses offer politicians an opportunity to come to the rescue. It is too perverse to say
that politicians hope for disaster losses, but they do have more incentives to respond ably than
to take steps to prevent disaster losses in the first place by, for example, limiting development in
flood plains and other risky locations. Questions about how to manage sustainable
development, however, depend on context and buy-in rather than on rational planning.13
These decisions are best left to communities, which can draw on expert guidance to come to
their own decisions about implementation. Making the presidency thelocus of
policymaking in areas previously reserved for the states, such as education or
welfare, risks closing off avenues for participation and for creative implementation in
different regions . Critics of the contemporary Anti-Federalist approach might point out
that state legislatures, elected judges, and city councils are even more likely to be captured by
special interests than Presidents.14 In reply, a defender of local and state prerogatives would
point out that centralization is at best a temporary fix to special-interest control, and often no
fix at all. Derthicks study of the Federal and federalized tobacco settlement shows how
mercenary state officials engaged in a race to the trough of tobacco settlements. Todays
term special interests conveys just what the Anti-Federalists were worried about. The best
way to defeat narrow, particularistic interests is to reinvigorate participatory processes,
electoral contests, and opportunities for interaction with the bureaucracy that implements laws
and policy. This doesnt mean that more democracy can always solve the problems of
democracy; sometimes opening the policy decision process just makes it easier for well-
organized groups to employ the logic of collective action to accrue even more political
leverage.15 But it does mean that shutting the citizenry out of the process will ultimately
undermine the legitimacy of the government as a whole. Derthicks The Politics of Deregulation
offered a salutary example of how the public policy process can serve the public interest rather
than narrow, particularistic interests. She explains in that book why the time was ripe for a
consensus among economists to lead to deregulation of the trucking, banking, and airline
industries in the late 1970s.16 Economists agree about many topics, but only occasionally do
their ideas lead to policy change in the general interest.17 The rise of expertise in government,
new communication technologies, and, most importantly, arguments that served both the Left
and the Right propelled deregulation from the realm of expert ideas to policy action. Though
often associated with conservatives, deregulation proceeded apace during the presidency of
Jimmy Carter. Derthicks portrayal of how deregulation came about defied the stereotype of
government agencies as slow to change. She showed how ideas can persuade bureaucrats to
join coalitions for reform. Here, as in other cases, she was at pains to demonstrate how settled
truths about political behavior are often not true at all. Reading through Derthicks oeuvre
shows the virtues of an orientation toward political power that leans more Anti-Federalist than
Federalist. She recognized the advantages of nationhood but observed that democracy is best
practiced when power is local, transparent, and, as much as is possible, open to all.
Nevertheless, she understood well the dark side of political subsidiarity. She drew attention to
the fact that the tenacity and violence of southern resistance to changes in race relations gave
federalism a very bad name. . . . When a system of decentralized power was seen to produce
flagrant violations of fairness (now literally seen on national television), the system itself was
discredited.18 Derthick came of age during the civil rights struggle, when claims for states
rights fell under suspicion of being covers for racism and the preservation of what was a de facto
single-party system. She completed her Ph.D. under the direction of V.O. Key, a scholar of
American elections at Harvard, but Edward Banfield employed her to assist in compiling reports
on the politics of cities.19 Banfield soon became embroiled in the racial politics of the 1960s by
writing a book about why the tall and foreboding, racially segregated Chicago housing projects
were doomed to make the problems they intended to solve worse. This view is now
conventional wisdom, thanks in no small part to the pioneering anti-social engineering work of
The Public Interest, which twice hosted Derthick essays. But at the time it brought down a
virulent, early form of political correctness on Banfields head that followed him from Harvard to
Penn. Perhaps this perspective on university life is what helped Derthick decide to spend much
of her career at the Brookings Institution, where she served as director of its Governance
Studies Program from 1978 to 1983. She ultimately returned to university life as a chaired
professor at the University of Virginia and continued to write articles and books and take an
interest in students even after her formal retirement in 1999. Derthick described herself as a
journalist by temperament and method, a disposition perhaps inherited from her father, who
was a reporter and editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She had a deep respect for the facts, an
early instinct she never lost. Her modesty, however, understates the depth of understanding
found in her method. To begin with, she read everything, from scholarship to government
reports. Then she spoke to people involved in whatever she was studying. She folded all that she
learned into beautiful prose. She was not afraid to master the quotidianwhat policymakers do
and how they define their tasksand not only the ideas that presumably motivate them.
Derthick was concerned with what mattered most: meaningful participation in government;
citizenship in the fullest sense of the term; effective public services; and structuring government
so that markets and regulation each have their place.20 She respected the careful work of
economists and policy analysts who evaluated the actual effects of policy interventions. But she
also knew, along with sociologist Peter Rossi, that the better the test, the closer the effects get
to zero.21 Because of her relentless pragmatism, diligence in pursuing detail without regard to
the procrustean influence of theory, and her lucid writing style, the American Political Science
Association gave her name to its award for the best book that made a lasting contribution to
the study of federalism. In 2006, the proud recipient of the Martha Derthick Award was none
other than Derthick herselfthough, as she reminded people, she was not on the nominating
committee.22 While her intellectual identity formed during the social upheavals of the 1960s,
unlike many of her contemporaries she did not believe the solution to social problems lay in a
unitary form of government, which she saw as a nod toward social authoritarianism. Instead,
she believed, solutions could only be found in the push and pull of mutual accommodation
among the Federal government, states, and localities, and in opportunities for meaningful
participation at all levels. Local communities are where people decide what they want to do and
who they want to be. They are the only avenue most Americans have for deliberationfor
meeting with one another to discuss their collective goals and plans. Pushing more
policymaking down from the Federal heights to states and localities will not satisfy everyone,
nor should it. It does not allay concerns about states that enshrine discrimination in law, or
states that give short shift to their most vulnerable citizens, or states so weak that they fail
without Federal government intervention, as appeared to happen during Hurricane Katrina in
Louisiana. The modern-day Anti-Federalist looks much better, however, when considering how
open a system of state sovereignty and local control is to many different kinds of interests. State
sovereignty leads to a greater number of genuinely empowered elected and appointed
officeholders, and to a wider variety of policy experiments. In the nation as a whole, state
sovereignty can allow the parts of the United States that want to be red to be red and the
parts that want to be blue to be blue simultaneously. If governments ultimate purpose is to
serve a diverse and ever-changing society, there is a strong case for preserving Derthicks
modern Anti-Federalist legacy. If more of us understood that, perhaps we would not have had
to wait for an obituary to recognize a leading light in that vanguard.
Federalism solves war
Calabresi 94 (Steven, Calabresi, Assistant Prof Northwestern U., 1994, Michigan Law Review,
p. 831-2)

First, the rules of constitutional federalism should be enforced because federalism is a good thing, and it is the best and most important structural
feature of the U.S. Constitution. Second, the political branches cannot be relied upon to enforce constitutional federalism, notwithstanding the contrary writings of Professor
Jesse Choper. Third, the Supreme Court is institutionally competent to enforce constitutional federalism. Fourth, the Court is at least as qualified to act in this area as it is in the Fourteenth Amendment area. And,
fifth, the doctrine of stare decisis does not pose a barrier to the creation of any new, prospectively applicable Commerce Clause case law. The conventional wisdom is that Lopez is nothing more than a flash in the
pan. Elite opinion holds that the future of American constitutional law will involve the continuing elaboration of the Court's national codes on matters like abortion regulation, pornography, rules on holiday
displays, and rules on how the states should conduct their own criminal investigations and trials. Public choice theory suggests many reasons why it is likely that the Court will continue to pick on the states and
give Congress a free ride. But, it would be a very good thing for this country if the Court decided to surprise us and continued on its way down the Lopez path. Those of us who comment on the Court's work,

a
whether in the law reviews or in the newspapers, should encourage the Court to follow the path on which it has now embarked. The country and the world would be a better place if it did. We have seen that

desire for both international and devolutionary federalism has swept across the world in recent
years. To a significant extent, this is due to global fascination with and emulation of our own American
federalism success story. The global trend toward federalism is an enormously positive
development that greatly increases the likelihood of future peace, free trade, economic growth,
respect for social and cultural diversity, and protection of individual human rights. It depends for its success on the
willingness of sovereign nations to strike federalism deals in the belief that those deals will be kept. The U.S. Supreme Court can do its part to encourage the future striking of such deals by enforcing vigorously our
own American federalism deal. Lopez could be a first step in that process, if only the Justices and the legal academy would wake up to the importance of what is at stake
 Equity
There has been decades of pumping money into education with no effect this
one will be no difference and will end up hurting the economy.

Jennifer A. Marshall, 3-15-2011, (Jennifer is a Director of Domestic Policy at The Heritage

Foundation, Vice President for the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, and the
Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow , "Effects of the Federal Role and Intervention in
Education," Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/testimony/effects-the-federal-role-
and-intervention-education, Mtan)
Major federal intervention into local schools began with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA).
Since then, a half-century of continually expanding, ever-shifting federal intervention into local schools has failed to improve American academic achievement. But it
has caused an enormous compliance burden , dissipating dollars and human
capital that could have been more effectively directed to achieve educational excellence. The damage should be calculated not only in terms of
decades of wasted fiscal and human resources and on-going opportunity costs. We must also take stock of how
federal intervention has created a dysfunctional governance system that undermines direct
accountability to parents and taxpayers, while at the same time encouraging bureaucratic expansion and
empowers special interests. Specifically, we should count the following costs of compliance with federal policy: The proliferation of federal programs and
increased federal prescription to leverage systemic reform have created a confusing policy maze that only a limited set of experts can navigate. The growth of state
bureaucracies to administer and comply with federal programs has given rise to a client mentality that undermines effective educational governance and accountability that
ought to be directed toward parents and other taxpayers. The administrative set-asides and red tape associated with federal programs diminishes education dollars as they pass
through multiple layers of bureaucracy. I commend this subcommittee and the larger committee for renewing attention to a pressing problem in education policy today. Serious
investigation like this into the scope and effects of federal intervention has not taken place for more than a decade, despite massive growth in the federal role in education.
Policymakers need much more information than any of us here today will be able to present. Studies by the Government Accountability Office and others are needed to get a
full and updated accounting of the extent and impact of the federal role in schools today. This information is essential to inform policy choices that will restore dollars and
decision-making to those closest to the student. Washingtons role currently stands in the way of that objective, and the first order of business is to take stock of that obstacle.
1. The proliferation of federal programs and increased federal prescription to leverage systemic reform have created a confusing policy maze. Proliferation of Federal
Programs Washingtons role in education has grown to the point where it is difficult to keep track of all the odds and ends of federal intervention into this or that aspect of
education. Programs include things like Womens Educational Equity, the Native Hawaiian Education Program, the Carol M. White Physical Education Program, and the
Challenge newsletter to spread the word about how to fight drugs and violence in schools.[1] Even the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has had a hard time counting up
all the education programs, or even defining what a federal program is. Using a narrow definition that excludes programs that dont enhance student learning through school
GAO determined in 2010 that
activities and curricula (which leaves out, for example, food and nutrition programs administered through schools),

there were 151 K-12 and early childhood education programs housed in 20 executive branch
and independent federal agencies, totaling $55.6 billion in average annual expenditures. According to
GAO, 91 percent of these programs are federal grant programs, distributed primarily to state and local school districts. States were eligible for 65 of
the grant programs; local districts for 57 programs.[2] This multiplication of programs means multiple applications, monitoring of program notices, and program reporting. This
increases administrative overhead and erodes coherent, school-level strategic leadership based on the needs of individual students. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the
most significant of the federal laws affecting K-12 education. Programs funded under NCLB constituted $25 billion in 2010 . NCLB includes more than 50
programs under 10 titles, running more than 600 pages. NCLB is the eighth reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). The original ESEA

In 2006, the Office of Management and Budget found that No Child Left Behind cost states an additional 7
included just five titles and 32 pages.

million hours in paperwork at a cost of $141 million.[3] Federal Prescription Increased through Systemic Reform Between 1965 and
the mid-1990s, the federal role in education focused on compensatory and categorical aid, aiming to supplement resources for specific student populations (e.g., low-income or
English language learners) or categorical purposes. In the mid-1990s, the federal role expanded beyond these specific interventions to leveraging system-wide education reform
from Washington. This systemic or comprehensive reform seeks to influence all aspects of the public school system to produce change in all public schools by working top-down
from Washington, D.C. No area of education policy is off limits from federal oversight and federal regulation in this model, opening the door to ever-deeper encroachments into
and ever-wider compliance demands on local schools. For example, No Child Left Behind prescribes in great detail the measurement of student progress on a specified testing
regimen for all schools and all students. Each state must complete a Consolidated State Application Accountability Workbook to explain in great detail how it will meet the
laws prescriptive requirements for judging student progress.[4] Most states completed accountability workbooks run around 50 pages long, though some are much longer.
For example, Georgias is 95 pages and Floridas is 128 pages. Accountability is important, but we also need to ask, accountability to whom and for what? The accountability
prescribed by No Child Left Behind focuses on fine-tuned aggregate calculations that are most useful for bureaucrats to chart school-wide, district-wide, or state-wide progress
information that is useful for the application of federal carrots and sticks. Calculations like safe harbor to account for differences in progress among groups are not the kinds of
information that empower parents. On the other hand, that kind of detail does absorb countless hours of bureaucratic explanation and compliance calculations on the part of
schools, districts, and states. Thats characteristic of federal intervention as whole: it is distracting because of the many compliance burdens it puts on states and localities, but it
is also detracts from proper accountability to those who have the most at stake in education, parents and other taxpayers. Case Study in Complexity and Prescription: Title I
Title I of NCLB is particularly complex and prescriptive, leading to many hidden costs associated
with program administration and compliance with program stipulations. A Heritage Foundation report by researcher
Susan Aud describes the complexity of Title I funding, noting that, due to the increasing complexity of the funding structure, it is likely that no more than a handful of experts in
the country clearly understand the process from beginning to end or could project a particular districts allocation based on information about its low-income students.[5]
Because of the complexity in Title I, many dollars are soaked up in administrative costs and never make it to the classrooms. For example, the report estimates that in FY 2004,
there were approximately 8.4 million children in the United States eligible for Title I, Part A. With $13 billion in funding available in 2007, each child should have been eligible for
Title I is a good example of the
$1,500. Yet, in Florida, for example, Title I, Part A funding amounted on average to just $554 per student.[6]

increasing complexity in federal education funding. Title I, Part A originally comprised just one
program, the Basic Grant Program. Today it consists of four grant programs: Basic, Concentration Grants, Targeted Grants, and Education
Finance Incentive Grants (EFIG). There are rules to determine the total grant amount awarded to each state for each of the four programs, using calculations based on the
number of eligible children in each states local education agencies (LEAs). However, the rules for determining eligibility are not uniform across the four programs of Title I, Part
A.[7] Concentration grants are supplemental to the Basic Grant. In order to be eligible for the Concentration Grant, an LEA must have at least 6,500 eligible students, or else 15
percent of the total number of students must be eligible. The Targeted and EFIG grants are more complex. A complicated system of weights is applied to determine eligibility.
For the Targeted grant, the weights are determined by four thresholds, with five weighting categories for each of the four types of thresholds, as well as different weights for
the percent calculations versus the number-of-children calculations.[8] Additionally, the rationale for the weights is not completely clear in the legislation. Determining
eligibility for the EFIG is even more complexincluding 60 weighting categoriesand incorporates not only weights but an equity factor for each state. The kind of complexity
we see in just NCLB, Title I, Part A illustrates the overall problem we have today with education resources lost on deciphering, applying, and reporting on federal program
The Obama Administrations Race to the Top (RTTT) competitive grant program offers a
specifics. Case Study: Race to the Top

recent example of the compliance burdens that result each time a new strategy emerges from
Washington, D.C. Although 41 states exerted enormous energy to apply for $4.35 billion in federal
funding (a small program compared to Title I at $15 billion), just 11 states ultimately won RTTT awards. Many states grant
applications totaled hundreds of pages; some states even sent representatives to Washington to
give presentations on why their state deserved the additional funding. Floridas Race to the Top application, for example, totaled
327 pages and included a 606-page appendix. Illinois application was 187 pages plus a 644-page appendix, and California submitted an application totaling 131 pages in length
with a 475-page appendix. Some states submitted lengthy applications without receiving awards. Louisiana, for example, submitted an application totaling 260 pages with a 417-
The significant amount of time and money expended on the states thorough grant
page appendix.

application will not be recouped by taxpayers.[9] Not Just Legislation: Regulations and Guidance Education regulations
can be found in Title 34 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Hundreds of pages are dedicated to specifying the operation of the
Department of Educations elementary and secondary education programs. The Title I program has 65 pages of regulations to accompany it, prescribing everything from setting
The complexity of these
and measuring progress on academic standards, to outreach to parents, to identifying highly qualified teachers.[10]

regulations is illustrated by the section that describes the duties of a paraprofessional. The regulations
dictate that a paraprofessional can have seven specific duties and may not perform duties other than

those listed. Furthermore, the paraprofessional may not perform his or her duties unless under the direct supervision of a teacher who meets the several
requirements of a highly qualified teacher, as outlined by the regulations. The regulations also provide three components of what direct supervision means.[11] More than
60 pages dictate the operation of federal Impact Aid, defining each step from the application process to the distribution of funds. The regulations include how the Secretary
determines the timely filing of an application and how local education agencies are to count the membership offederally connected children.[12] In addition to regulations,
the Education Department has issued guidance on elementary and secondary education on 100
occasions since the passage of No Child Left Behind.[13] 2. The growth of state bureaucracies to administer and comply with federal programs has given rise to a client
mentality that undermines effective educational governance and accountability that ought to be directed toward parents and other taxpayers. Federal intervention beginning
in the mid-1960s has shifted state education systems orientation toward this new funding source and led to increased state education bureaucracy. Before the 1965 passage of
ESEA, the role of state departments of education varied according to each states need. ESEA converted them into a network of state education agencies (SEAs) charged with
disseminating federal grants to local districts and implementing federal education policy. A massive growth in state education bureaucracy followed: between 1966 and 1970,
Congress appropriated $128 million for SEAs, and their staff doubled during that period.[14] Growth in the last half-century has been dramatic: in the early 1960s, just 10 state
education agencies had more than 100 employees. By 2002, five state education agencies had more than 1,000 employees.[15] Federal funding significantly underwrites state-
level education bureaucracy. In fiscal year 1993, 41 percent of SEA funding came from the federal government.[16] Administrative bloat resulting from federal regulations does
not stop at the SEA level; it trickles down to the school level. Trends since the 1950s indicate that the number of teachers as a percentage of school staff has declined
significantly. In 1950, more than 70 percent of elementary and secondary instructional staff was composed of teachers; by 2006, teachers made up just slightly more than 51
percent of public school staff. Administrative support staff increased from 23.8 percent to 29.9 percent during that same time period.[17] Another problem with this
bureaucratic bloat is the fact that the proliferation of federal programs seems to be reflected in a lack of integration within the program-oriented divisions of state education
agencies. Similarly, local administrative staff seem to operate in silos when it comes to federal programs. As a 2010 GAO report noted, Of the district staff who had
administrative responsibilities, two-thirds reported administrative responsibilities for only 1 [program]; few staff had responsibility for more than 3 programs.[18] In this way,
federal programs detract from integrated, strategic education leadership at the state, local and building level. 3. The administrative set-asides and red tape associated with
federal programs diminishes education dollars as they pass through multiple layers of bureaucracy. The federal Department of Education has spent the past three decades taxing
states, running that money through the Washington bureaucracy, and sending it back to states and school districts. But for 30 years, this spending cycle has failed to improve
education. A dollar gleaned from state taxpayers and sent to the federal Department of Education is then sent, through complex funding formulas or grant programs (see the
Title I discussion above), back to state education agencies. SEAs in turn send that money to local education agencies, which in turn send that money to individual schools. Each
step along the way diminishes the funds available to local schools as a result of administrative set-asides and other spending. By one 1998 estimate, between just 65 to 70 cents
A 1999 GAO study of 10 specific federal programs found that by the
of every dollar makes its way to the classroom.[19]

time a federal dollar reached a local school district, between 1 to 17 percent of the funding
had been drained on administration. GAO found that Overall, 94 percent of the federal education funds received by the states for these 10
programs [studied] was distributed to local agencies such as school districts. If the $7.3 billion appropriation for the Title I program is excluded, the overall percentage of funds
too much federal funding may be spent
states allocated to local agencies drops to 86 percent.[20] The same 1999 GAO report found that

on administration and that school personnel are incurring hidden administrative costs as they
spend time fulfilling administrative requirements related to applying for, monitoring, and
reporting on federal funds.[21] The report noted the difficulty in determining what constitutes administrative activities because what is considered
administration varies from program to program.[22] Even the federal funds that reach school districts are not immune from the administrative compliance burden. Reports
from school districts provide real-life examples of the administrative burden felt from heavy-handed federal regulations. A Fairfax County, Virginia, school district, for example,
noted: The school division lengthened the standard teacher contract from 194 days to 195 just to allow for extra [NCLB] training time. The cost of setting aside a single day to
train the roughly 14,000 teachers in the division on the laws complex requirements is equivalent to the cost of hiring 72 additional teachers. The law also affects
paraprofessionals: an extra days training equates to the cost of hiring about ten additional instructional assistants. There are roughly 1,000 administrators who require training
as well. A days training represents the cost for four additional assistant principals. Thus, each day out of the year that is set aside to explain the law results in a missed
opportunity to assign 86 instructional personnel year-round to interface directly with the communitys children and work directly to address their academic needs.[23] The
administrative compliance burden siphons resources that should be directed to students. Moreover, it is unclear whether the reports required of states are always used in a
meaningful way by the U.S. Department of Education. During a lecture delivered in April, 2007 at the Heritage Foundation, then Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) recalled his visits to
the U.S. Department of Education as chairman of a House subcommittee on oversight and investigations: We'd knock on doors, asking, Do any of you read the reports? Who
reads these reports and this paperwork that comes back from the states, and who issues these rules and regulations? Have you ever been to Colorado? Is there anybody here
from Michigan? you'd have to go through the building for a while before you'd find somebody And is anybody here from the Second Congressional District of Michigan?
No, but they're putting together all these mandates and requirements without knowing the parents, kids, school boards, or the economic conditions of the people that they're

The federal role in education has created an

writing all these rules and regulations for. Conclusion:

enormous compliance burden for states and local schools. Some of this can be quantified in
terms of paperwork, time, and resources. But the cost of compliance should also be calculated in terms of the erosion of good governance in
education. The proliferation of federal programs and the ever-increasing prescription of federally driven systemic reform distract school-level personnel and local and state
leaders from serving their primary customers: students, parents, and taxpayers. The status quo engenders a client mentality as officials at the state and local level are consumed
with calibrating the public education system to Washingtons wishes. To succeed, education reform must be more accountable directly to parents and taxpayers.

The majority of the achievement gap is explained by pre-K inequality- their

focus fails
Barnett & Lamy 13Barnett: Board of Governors Professor and Director of the National
Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University; Lamy: developmental and
educational psychologist and research fellow with the National Institute for Early Education
Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University (W. Steven Barnett and Cynthia E. Lamy, Closing the
Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance, Achievement
Gaps Start Early, 4/23/13, chpt 7)//JLE

100 Overcoming the Obstacles We Create for Schools These very early ability dierences emerge from a complex set of family
circumstances that vary within and across racial and ethnic groups. The majority of the school readiness
gap between White children and their African American and Hispanic counterparts can be explained by family background
characteristics other than race or ethnicity, particularly family income, parental education,
family structure, and the conditions of the neighborhood, as well as by indicators of home experiences
that support early learning, such as the number of books or educational toys in the home. 8 When
researchers look closely at family behavior, a portion of the dierence in early abilities is explained by dierences
in early parenting, especially how parents talk, read, and play with their children (see also Rothstein, chapter 5, this volume). 9 Variations in
childrens very early experiences with languagehow many words are spoken to them, how often they are spoken to, the extent to which they are
encouraged to use their own developing language abilities and emergent preliteracy skillspredict not just their earliest vocabulary but also their later
vocabulary in elementary school. 10 A similar relationship is found between early home mathematics experiences and knowledge of mathematics. 11
Of course, many factors beyond parent-child interaction in the home in uence childrens early cognitive and social development, including their
health, nutrition, exposure to environmental toxins, danger, violence, and emotional stress. Prenatal exposure to tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and maternal
stress can a ect development before a child is born. Adverse e ects on early brain development may impair a childs cognitive, social, and emotional
development and mental and physical health over a lifetime. 12 Th e risk of exposure to these adverse e ects steadily increases as income and
parental education decline. 13 Racial-ethnic group di erences in exposure are partly due to group di erences in income and education. However,
discrimination itself also may adversely a ect maternal health in ways that harm childrens prenatal development. Even very early ability di erences
are strongly linked to later achievement. Language
development before age three predicts reading
comprehension in high school. 15 Early math skills also strongly predict achievement in
elementary school and high school. 16 There is very little change in achievement
gradients between age ve and age eighteen . 17 In sum, those distressing, attention-grabbing
dierences in achievement test scores and high school graduation rates can be largely explained by
dierences in abilities that are evident well before children enter
kindergarten . We wish it were otherwise, and it is possible that more equitable opportunities to learn within formal schooling could
repair much of this early damage, but in the present situation children who begin school substantially behind are unlikely to ever catch up. 18 To

be successful, eorts to decrease inequality in achievement and reduce

school dropout rates should begin in the rst ve years, when the
problem originates . Of course, such eorts cannot end there as every year of a childs life matters.

Vague conditions fail

Robinson, 16 - * Professor, University of Richmond School of Law (Kimberly, No QUICK Fix FOR
EQUITY AND EXCELLENCE: THE VIRTUES OF INCREMENTAL SHIFTS IN EDUCATION FEDERALISM
27 Stan. L. & Pol'y Rev. 201 2016, Hein Online)

If conditions encouraging states to adopt funding systems that promote equal access to an excellent education were included as a

new program within the ESEA or Title I, the critical question that remains is the nature and scope of
the conditions . Vague conditions that merely require advancing equity and excellence in
funding are unlikely to result in meaningful reforms, just as the current watered-down
comparability requirements are doing little to require equitable funding.'85 Instead, conditions within ESEA should
require states to address the primary shortcomings of funding systems that I have outlined in Part I. Substantial scholarly consensus
exists on the need for progressive funding systems to target additional funding to students with greater needs. 186 Therefore,
adopting and maintaining a progressive funding system should be an essential condition for any
new ESEA program or for a modification to Title I.

Cross-x proves- there are other barriers to solving inequality racism,

environments that families are located in, and family iincome means they
cant solve all of inequality
Progressive funding already exists in 2/3rds of states with no effect
Lindseth, 17 - Alfred A. Lindseth is an attorney at the law firm Eversheds Sutherland (US)
(Federal Courts Cant Solve Our Education Ills Education Next, Spring,
http://educationnext.org/federal-courts-cant-solve-our-education-ills-forum-san-antonio-
rodriguez/

Arguments to equalize funding ignore the reality that in many places, schools with
concentrations of poor or academically struggling students already receive at least as
much funding per pupil as other schools. Even the Education Law Center, an advocacy
organization that supports plaintiffs seeking fair (that is, more) public-education funding,
recently reported that two-thirds of the states provide equal or progressive funding for high-
poverty school districts. Particularly in large urban districts, funding levels for disadvantaged or
struggling students are often more than equal. Should those targeted funding differences be
held unconstitutional? Or would equal educational opportunity require even more unequal
spending, as Professors Ogletree and Robinson argue in their companion essay?
 Competitiveness
Alternate causes outweigh
Artigiani, 12 - Founder, President Emerita, and Member of Board of Directors of Global Kids
(U.S. Education Reform and National Security, Independent Task Force Report of the Council on
Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/report/us-education-reform-and-national-security

National security requires a healthy economy, energy independence, investments in research

and development, strong defense, a thriving civil society, a respected and involved diplomatic
corps, and, most of all, a healthy and high-functioning political system. (The current political environment
is a clear demonstration of what happens when we have a publicand public officialswho are uninformed and/or ill-informed
about our nations history, our political system, and the values upon which it was built.) Certainly schools must play a
critical role in assuring that these needs of national security can be met. Yet, while some of the data are disturbing,
nothing in this report convinces me that that our public schools
constitute a very grave national security threat facing this country . Indeed,
claims of alarm can only set the stage for dramatic actions unsupported
by evidence : in this case, market-based approaches to school reform, that, overall, have not demonstrated their
effectiveness. Indeed, charter schools and vouchers are diverting funds and energy away from neighborhood schools, and the more
successful ones rely on additional support from private sources (voluntary taxation), a situation that is neither sustainable nor
scalable. Moreover, the drive toward competition can diminish individual commitment to the common good, thus undermining
the very nature and purpose of public education: preparing young people of all backgrounds to become informed and active citizens
who understand their rights and responsibilities to contribute to society and participate in the shaping of policies that affect their
communities and the larger world.

Worst case, is the US loses competitiveness against allies means no impact

Walt, 12 Stephen Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard (U.S. Education Reform
and National Security, Independent Task Force Report of the Council on Foreign Relations,
https://www.cfr.org/report/us-education-reform-and-national-security

report exaggerate s the national security rationale for reforming

First, the
U.S. K-12 education . It says a troubled public education system is a very grave national
security threat facing this country, but it offers only anecdotal evidence to support this
unconvincing claim. The United States spends more on national security than the next twenty
nations combined, has an array of powerful allies around the world, and remains the world
leader in science and technology. It also ranks in the top 10 percent of the worlds 193 countries
none of the states whose children outperform
in educational performance, and
U.S. students is a potential rival . Barring major foreign policy blunders unrelated to K-
12 education, no country is like
ly to match U.S. military power or overall technological supremacy for decades. There are good
reasons to improve K-12 education, but an imminent threat to our national
security is not high among them.
There is no conclusive, reverse-causal evidence that proves a link from
education to the economy
OECD 10 International economic forum with 35 member countries (The Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development, The High Cost of Low Educational Performance,
OECD publication, 2010, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/44417824.pdf)//JSL
The consistency of growth with test scores seen here with the previous regional picture is quite remarkable. Moreover, once information is

included on cognitive skills, school attainment bears no relation to economic

growth . In other words, added years of schooling do not affect growth unless they yield greater achievement.17 Of
course, much of the observed cognitive skill is developed in schools, so this does not say that schools are irrelevant. It does say that the quality of
schools, as determined by increases in student achievement, is very important. Whether
or not this is a causal relationship is
indeed a very important issue from a policy standpoint. It is essential to know that, if a country managed to improve its achievement in
some manner, it would see a commensurate improvement in its long-run growth rate. Said differently, if the figures simply reflect other factors that are

correlated with test scores, a change in test scores may have little or no impact on the
economy (unless the other factors also changed). Indeed, analysis of prior estimates of school attainment have been identified as possibly
reflecting reverse causality; i.e., improved growth leads to more schooling rather than the reverse (Bils and Klenow, 2000). It
is difficult to
develop conclusive tests of causality issues within the limited sample of countries included in the analysis. Nonetheless,
Hanushek and Woessmann (2009) pursue a number of different approaches to ruling out major factors that could confound the results and that could
lead to incorrect conclusions about the potential impact. In the end, none
of the approaches addresses all of the
important issues. Each approach fails to be conclusive for easily identified reasons. However, the
combination of approaches, with similar support for the underlying growth models, provides
some assurance that the most obvious problematic issues are not driving the results. First, this
estimated relationship is little affected by including other possible
determinants of economic growth . In an extensive investigation of alternative model specifications, different
measures of cognitive skills, various groupings of countries including eliminating regional differences, and specific sub-periods of economic growth,
Hanushek and Woessmann (2009) show a consistency of the alternative estimates - both in terms of quantitative impacts and statistical significance -
that is uncommon to most cross-country growth modelling. Moreover, these estimates complement prior findings that measures of geographical
location, political stability, capital stock, population growth, and school inputs (pupil-teacher ratios and various measures of spending) do not
significantly affect the estimated impact of cognitive skills.18 The only substantial effect on the estimates is the inclusion of various measures of
economic institutions (security of property rights and openness of the economy) which reduces the estimated impact of cognitive skills by 15%.19
These specification tests rule out some basic problems of omitted causal factors that have been seen in other work, but of course there are other
possible omitted factors.20 Second, to tackle the most obvious reverse-causality issues, Hanushek and Woessmann (2009)
separate the timing of the analysis by estimating the effect of scores on tests conducted until the early 1980s on economic growth in 1980-2000. In this
analysis, available for a smaller sample of countries only, test scores pre-date the growth period. The estimate shows a significant positive effect that is
about twice as large as the coefficient used in the simulations here. In addition, reverse causality from growth to test scores is also unlikely because
additional resource in the school system (which might become affordable with increased growth) do not relate
systematically to improved test scores (e.g. Hanushek, 2002). Third, the analysis traces the impact on growth of just the variations
in achievement that arise from institutional characteristics of each country's school system (exit examinations, autonomy, and private schooling).21
This estimated impact is essentially the same as previously reported, lending support both to the causal impact of more cognitive skills and to the
conclusion that schooling policies can have direct economic returns. Nonetheless, countries
that have good economic
institutions may have good schooling 19 institutions, so that this approach, while guarding against
simple reverse causality, cannot eliminate a variety of issues of omitted factors in the growth
regressions.22 Fourth, one major concern is that countries with good economies also have good school
systems - implying that those that grow faster because of the basic economic factors also have
high achievement. To deal with this, immigrants to the United States who have been educated in their home countries are compared to
those who were educated in the United States. Since it is the single labour market of the United States, any differences in labour-market returns
associated with cognitive skills cannot arise because of differences in the economies of their home country. Looking at labour-market returns, the
cognitive skills seen in the immigrant's home country lead to higher incomes - but only if the immigrant was educated at home. Immigrants from the
same home country schooled in the United States see no economic return to home-country quality, thus pinpointing the value of better schools.23
While not free from problems, this difference-in-differences approach rules out the possibility that test scores simply reflect cultural factors or
economic institutions of the home country.24 It also provides further support to the potential role of schools to change the cognitive skills of citizens in
economically meaningful ways.
International comparisons that show the US falling behind are flawed no
accounting for societal makeup
Carnoy and Rothstein 13 - *Vida Jacks Professor of Education and Economics at Stanford
University and a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute with a Ph.D. in economics
from the University of Chicago AND **Research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and
senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University
of California (Berkeley) School of Law (Martin and Richard, What Do International Tests Really
Show About U.S. Student Performance?, Economic Policy Institute, 1/28/13,
http://www.epi.org/files/2013/EPI-What-do-international-tests-really-show-about-US-student-
performance.pdf)//JSL **Note: glib means shallow or superficial
Evidence-based policy has been a goal of American education policymakers for at least two decades. School reformers seek data
about student knowledge and skills, hoping to use this information to improve schools. One category of such evidence,
international test results, has seemingly permitted comparisons of student performance in the
United States with that in other countries. Such comparisons have frequently been interpreted to show that American students
perform poorly when compared to students internationally. From this, reformers conclude that U.S. public education is failing and

that its failure imperils America's ability to compete with other nations economically. This report, however, shows that such
inferences are too glib . Comparative student performance on international tests should
be interpreted with much greater care than policymakers typically give it. This care is essential for three
reasons: First, because academic performance differences are produced by home and community as
well as school influences, there is an achievement gap between the relative average performance of students from higher
and lower social classes in every industrialized nation. Thus, for a valid assessment of how well American schools
perform, policymakers should compare the performance of U.S. students with that of students
in other countries who have been and are being shaped by approximately similar home and
community environments. Because the distribution of students between social classes varies from country to country,
differences in overall average scores between countries reflect, to varying extents, differences in school quality and differences in
the degree of social inequality. Likewise, because the social class distribution also varies within the United States by state,
comparisons of students in particular U.S. states where international tests are administered should also compare students in these
states with students in other states and countries who have similar social class characteristics. Policymakers
and school
reformers may acknowledge these realities, but frequently proceed to ignore them in practice,
denouncing relative U.S. international test performance with sweeping generalizations that make no attempt to compare students
from similar social class positions. We have shown that U.S.
student performance, in real terms and relative to
other countries, improves considerably when we estimate average U.S. scores after adjusting for
U.S. social class composition and for a lack of care in sampling disadvantaged students in particular.
With these adjustments, U.S. scores would rank higher among OECD countries than commonly reported in readingsixth best
instead of 14thand in mathematics13th best instead of 25th. Second, to
be useful for policy purposes,
information about student performance should include how this performance is changing over
time. It is not evident what lessons policymakers should draw from a country whose student
performance is higher than that in the United States, if that country's student performance has
been declining while U.S student performance has been improving. Policy implications become especially
challenging if relative U.S. performance has been improving for some social class groups but deteriorating for others. Because U.S.
policy is especially concerned with the performance of disadvantaged children, it would be wise to focus attention on trends over
time of similar children in other countries, whether their overall national averages are higher or lower than the overall U.S. average.
It makes little sense to hold up as successful models for the United States educational policies for lower social class students in
countries where their performance is in sharp decline, even if trends in the average performance of all students in such countries
obscures the performance of disadvantaged students.
 Solvency
Statistical analyses and cross-national comparisons show funding has no effect
Hanushek 05 [Eric A. Hanushek, was Professor of Economics and Political Science at the
University of Rochester for two decades, and was recently appointed as a Senior Fellow of the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has held many senior government management
and advisory positions related to education, and he is a member of the editorial boards of a
number of the worlds most prestigious educational research journals. His books and research
articles have become essential texts for professors and postgraduate students at major
universities who are working in the fields of the economics of education and educational policy
analysis, 2005, "Economic outcomes and school quality," The International Institute for
Educational Planning and The International Academy of Education,
http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%202005%20IIEP%20Ed
ucPolSeries.pdf]//Rank
Much of school policy is traditionally thought of as an exercise in selecting and ensuring that the
optimal set of resources, somehow defined, is available. Matched with this policy perspective
has been a line of research considering the relationship between resource usage and student
performance. If the effectiveness of different resources or combinations of resources were
known, it would be straightforward to define an optimal set of resources. Moreover, we could
often decide about policies that would move us toward such an optimal set of resources.
Unfortunately, this alludes us.
Schools in the United States have been the focus of extensive research. Both aggregate data
about performance of schools over time and more detailed school and classroom data point to a
There is a lack of any consistent or systematic effect of
simple conclusion:
resources on student achievement . While controversial, partly because of the conflict
with existing school policies, the evidence is very extensive (Hanushek, 2003).
Most other countries of the world have not tracked student performance over any length of
time, making analyses comparable to the United States discussion impossible. Nonetheless,
international testing over the past four decades permits an overview of spending across
countries. Seven different mathematics and science tests (the data for the growth analysis) were
given between the early 1960s and 1995 to students at different grade levels in a varying set of
Performance bears little relationship to the
voluntarily participating nations.
patterns of expenditure across the countries. Hanushek and Kimko (2000)
estimate models that relate spending, family backgrounds, and other characteristics of countries
estimation consistently
to student performance for the tests prior to 1995. This
indicates a statistically significant negative effect of added resources on
performance after controlling for other influences. Similar findings hold for the
OECD countries.
Existing statistical analyses in less developed countries have shown a similar inconsistency of
estimated resource effects as that found in the United States (Hanushek, 1995). In general, a
minority of the available studies suggests much confidence that commonly identified resources
class size, teacher experience, and teacher salaries positively influence student performance.
There is generally somewhat stronger support for these resource policies than that existing in
United States analyses, hinting that the importance of resources may vary with the level of
resources. Nonetheless, the evidence does not indicate that pure resource policies can be
expected to have a significant effect on student outcomes.
In sum, a wide range of analyses indicate that overall resource policies have not led to
discernible improvements in student performance. It is important to understand what is and is
not implied by this conclusion. First, it does not mean that money and resources never matter.
There clearly are situations where small classes or added resources have an impact. It is just that
no good description of when and where these situations occur is available, so that broad
resource policies such as those legislated from central governments may hit some good uses but
also hit bad uses that generally lead to offsetting outcomes. Second, this statement does not
mean that money and resources cannot matter. Instead, as described below, altered sets of
incentives could dramatically improve the use of resources.
The evidence on resources is remarkably consistent across countries, both developed and
developing. Had there been distinctly different results for some subsets of countries, issues of
what kinds of generalizations were possible would naturally arise. Such conflicts do not appear
particularly important

K-12 focus doesnt solvethe first 5 years outweigh

Barnett & Lamy 13Barnett: Board of Governors Professor and Director of the National
Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University; Lamy: developmental and
educational psychologist and research fellow with the National Institute for Early Education
Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University (W. Steven Barnett and Cynthia E. Lamy, Closing the
Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance, Achievement
Gaps Start Early, 4/23/13, chpt 7)//JLE

IN THE UNITED STATES, considerable public attention is focused on closing the achievement gap
between children from poorer and wealthier families. 1 Typically, this gap rst becomes a
highly visible public issue when children reach third or fourth grade and take state and national
standardized tests for the rst time. Concern intensies again during the high school years,
when so many low-income and minority high school students drop out or fail to pass exit exams,
and average achievement test scores continue to di er among socioeconomic groups. The
achievement gap does not start at third or fourth grade, however. Signicant differences in the
precursors of academic skills are evident from the earliest years of life and are
associated with family circumstances, including income. Eorts to close the achievement gap
must begin with eorts to close the opportunity gap that is the source of much of this early
dierence in abilities.
While group dierences in childrens abilities and achievement typically are thought of as gaps,
we approach this topic from a somewhat dierent perspective. We recognize that what is
commonly thought of as a vast gap between disparate groupsrich versus poor, Blacks and
Hispanics versus Whitescan be seen upon closer inspection to be a gradient or gradual slope
in which childrens abilities steadily increase over the entire family income range. Dierences
between minorities and Whites similarly can be seen to result from dierences in economic and
social circumstances and family characteristics that vary within as well as between groups.
Recognition that the achievement gap is actually a steady, gradual change along an income or
socioeconomic gradient allows us to see that the achievement and opportunity problem is not
limited to children in poverty or to minority groups but aects the vast majority of Americans.
 To understand achievement gradients it helps to see them. Figures 7.1 and 7.2, based on data
from the Early Childhood Longitudinal StudyKindergarten cohort of 1999, display the
gradients for childrens cognitive test scores and teacher ratings of childrens social abilities by
income quintile at kindergarten entry. Viewed this way it is obvious that there is no sharp
dividing line between the poor who are in the bottom quintile and everyone else. Instead we
see a smooth, steady decline in scores moving from high to low income. Looking at achievement
test scores, children at the median income are as far behind children in the top income quintile
as poor children are behind those at the median income. Of course, not every child is at the
average for their income level; some have higher abilities and others lower. These gradients are
very persistent so that they look very much the same at tenth or twelfth grade as at
kindergarten. Th is pattern recurs in the gradient for high school dropout rate by family income.
2
Sizeable dierences in childrens abilities
Ability gradients emerge very early in life.
by family background appear before age ve .3 Hart and Risley found that three-
year-olds from low-income families knew only about half as many words as those from higher-
income families.4 More recent studies nd Black children far behind their White peers in pre-
academic skills by age three.5 By the time they enter kindergarten, children in poverty
can be 12 or 18 months behind the average child .6 As we noted earlier,
inadequate progress is not limited to children in poverty. Across the entire income spectrum,
nearly 40 percent of American children at age ve are classi ed as not ready for kindergarten,
and most of these children are not poor.7

Exogenous factors overwhelm extra funding

Darby and Levy, 11 Derrick Darby is the Associate Professor of the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Kansas. Richard E. Levy is a J.B. Smith Distinguished Professor of
Constitutional Law at the University of Kansas School of Law. (Derrick Darby and Richard E. Levy,
SLAYING THE INEQUALITY VILLAIN IN SCHOOL FINANCE: IS THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION THE
SILVER BULLET?, 20 Kan. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 351, LexisNexis, SRA)
[*370] It is overly simplistic to assume that there is a perfect correlation between educational
funding and outcomes. To be sure, it seems clear that fully funded education will, overall, achieve better results than
education not funded at all. It is also clear that educational inputs, such as teachers, facilities, and other learning resources - all of

which cost money - will have some influence on educational outcomes. On the other hand, by no means clear
it is
that improving funding and inputs will alleviate persistent educational
inequalities . Even assuming that the funding spent matters and that funding is devoted to the most effective educational
inputs, n93 the educational and social science literature suggests that educational outcomes
are dramatically
affected by exogenous factors, such as a student's family background and neighborhood
environment, not to mention individual choice, effort, and taste for education. n94 While there has
been considerable debate within the literature about whether and how various factors affect educational outcomes, it is reasonably
clear that efforts to
improve educational outcomes must take into account many factors beyond
funding and material resources.
50-year statistical analysis years shows weak correlation in resource funding
and quality of education ************
Hanushek 3senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and research
associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Eric A., The Failure of Input-Based
Schooling Policies, The Economic Journal, 2/13/03, JSTORE. Vol. 113 No. 485)//JLE
1. School Inputs and Outcomes Much of the policy discussion throughout the world concentrates on schooling inputs, a seemingly
natural focus. And, with the longstanding importance that has been attached to schooling, considerable change has occurred in the
levels of common inputs. Class sizes have fallen, qualifications of teachers have risen, and expenditures have increased.

little evidence exists to suggest that any significant changes in

Unfortunately,

student outcomes have accompanied this growth in resources devoted to

schools . Because many find the limited relationship between school inputs and student outcomes surprising and hard to
believe, this section delves into the evidence available on this score in some detail. These data on aggregate cost and
performance provide strong prima facie evi- dence that simple resource policies are not
generally effective . Much of the cur- rent policy discussion argues that with additional resources it would be possible
to implement programmes or approaches that lift student achievement. Of course, these are precisely the same arguments made
over the past decades. The validity of current proposals rests on these current proposals being notably
superior to the policies of the past (which were hypothesised at the time also to be superior policies). The simplest
and perhaps clearest demonstration of the resource story is found in the aggregate US data over
the past few decades. The US, operating under a system that is largely decentralised to the 50 separate states, has
pursued the conven- tionally advocated resource policies vigorously. Table 1 tracks the patterns of pupil- teacher
ratios, teacher education, and teacher experience. Between 1960 and 2000, pupil-teacher ratios fell by almost
40%. The proportion of teachers with a master's degree or more over doubled so that a majority of all US teachers today have at
least a master's degree. Finally, median teacher experience - which is more driven by demographic cycles than active
policy - increased significantly, almost doubling since its trough in 1970. American teachers are heavily unionised, and the
most common structure of teacher contracts identifies teacher education levels and teacher experience as the driving force behind
salaries. Thus, as teacher inputs rise and as the numbers of students per teachers decline, expenditure per pupil rises. As seen in the
bottom row of Table 1, real expenditures per pupil more than tripled over this period.4 In fact, this period is not special in US
schools. Over the entire 100 years of 1890- 1990, real spending per pupil rose by at a remarkably steady pace of 31/2% per year
(Hanushek and Rivkin, 1997). Over this
longer period, real per student expen- diture in 1990 dollars goes
from $164 in 1890 to $772 in 1940 to $4,622 in 1990 roughly quintupling in each 50 year
period.5 [*CHART OMMITTED*] The question remains, what was obtained for these spending increases? Since
the early 1970s, a random sample of students in the US has been given tests at differing ages in various subjects under the auspices
of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. These tests have been designed to provide a consistent measure of
performance over time. Figure 1 gives performance data for the same period as the previously described input data. In this Figure
the pattern of average performance by 17-year-olds is traced for reading, mathematics, and science. The performance
of
students in mathematics and reading is ever so [*CHART OMITED*] slightly higher in 1999 than 30 years
before when spending was dramatically low- er.6 The performance of students in science is significantly lower
in 1999 than it was in 1970. Writing performance (not shown) was first tested in 1984 and declined steadily until 1996
when testing was discontinued. The only other test that provides a national picture of performance over a long period of time is the
Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. This college admissions test has the advantage of providing data going back to the 1960s but the
disadvantage of being a voluntary test taken by a selective subset of the population.7 Scores on this test actually plunged from the
mid-1960s until the end of the 1970s, suggesting that the NAEP scores that begin in the 1970s may understate the magnitude of the
performance problem.8 In simplest terms, input policies have been vigorously pursued over a long period of
time, but there is no evidence that the added resources have improved
student performance, at least for the most recent three decades when it has been possible to compare
quantitative outcomes directly. This evidence suggests that
the efficacy of further input-based policies depends
crucially on improved use of re- sources compared to past history.