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EJC0010.1177/0267323115597853European Journal of CommunicationPeck

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European Journal of Communication

2015, Vol. 30(5) 587­–603
(Neo)Liberalism, popular © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0267323115597853
struggle for the future of ejc.sagepub.com

US public education

Janice Peck
University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Abstract
The idea that the US public school system is ‘broken’ and needs reform has become commonplace
over the past three decades. The article argues that the quest to transform public education
revolves around powerful intersecting forces: ideational activism by education entrepreneurs,
financial backing from billionaire philanthropists and hedge fund managers, bipartisan political
endorsement, a compliant press and receptive culture industries. The aim of these combined
forces, in which media play a central role and liberal tropes of freedom, choice and equality of
opportunity are prevalent, is to build ideological consensus around private and market alternatives
to public education.

Keywords
Class, education, ideology, media, neoliberalism

A 2008 New York Times Magazine headline asked, ‘How Many Billionaires Does It Take
to Fix a School System?’ (Tough, 2008). This question could be posed because it was
common sense that the American public (state) school system was ‘broken’ (Krueger,
1998: 29), thanks to repeated assertions by politicians, pundits and philanthropists that
had been widely disseminated by the media. I was thus not surprised when, having men-
tioned my research on media and the debate over public schools, three colleagues from
my university regaled me with claims that American public education is in crisis and
needs reform. Citing the plight of poor children of colour in urban schools and the threat
of the United States falling behind global competitors because of its failing school
system, they echoed the indictment of public education in the documentary Waiting for
Superman (2010), which they had found convincing.

Corresponding author:
Janice Peck, University of Colorado Boulder, 1511 University Avenue, 478 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
Email: janice.peck@colorado.edu

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588 European Journal of Communication 30(5)

I was struck by the paradox of my colleagues’ bleak view of public education, given
that we work at a state research institution, are products of public schools and received
our degrees from public universities. And I pondered the irony that they consider them-
selves political liberals committed to state-supported education as a human right and the
basis of a viable democracy. But even after admitting their children had received good
educations from public schools in our well-heeled university town and surrounding sub-
urbs, they clung to their sense that the state-funded education system is in serious trou-
ble. Where, I wondered, did my co-workers acquire an understanding of the problem
with public education so tied to solutions that promote the privatization of the American
school system.
In an analysis of Teach for America (TFA), a ‘prototypical liberal education reform
organization’ that sends college graduates to teach for 2 years in low-income schools,
Andrew Hartman (2011) notes the ‘ironies of contemporary education reform’ (p. 51). In
the name of ‘delivering justice’ to underprivileged children, he argues, TFA and its allies
have ‘advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers’ that fuel attacks on
teachers’ unions and been the vanguard in ‘forming a neoliberal consensus about the role
of public education – and the role of public school teachers – in a deeply unequal soci-
ety’. That consensus includes the themes cited by my colleagues: US public education is
a failure, especially for disadvantaged children in urban schools; the derelict school sys-
tem has dire consequences for US economic and political power relative to Asia and
Europe,1 and the fairest and most rational solution to this problem is the privatization of
public education. My colleagues’ acceptance of this diagnosis of public education’s
malaise and the putatively necessary remedies attests to the success of the education
reform agenda, which has tapped into tenets of liberal ideology, including choice, com-
petition, merit, self-reliance, equality of opportunity, the individual versus a leviathan
state, the fluidity of social hierarchies and the permeability of structural constraints.
Although the trope of broken schools is bipartisan and ubiquitous – Republican
George W Bush and Democrat Barack Obama both proclaimed themselves education
reform presidents with similar rhetoric promoting comparable policies – it is worth
recalling its history. The attack on public education in the United States has roots in A
Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on
Excellence in Education, 1983), a study commissioned by Ronald Reagan, who hoped to
use it to shrink or eliminate the federal Department of Education. Although the report
said nothing about school choice, market competition or privatization, its declaration that
public education was fostering ‘a rising tide of mediocrity’ (p. 9) planted the idea that
American schools were failing and launched a wave of reform efforts during a time of
dramatic cuts in government funding of education. In the 1990s, school districts adopted
outcome-based education based on standards that could be quantitatively measured.
George H W Bush in 1989 backed the creation of national curriculum standards for pub-
lic education that the Bill Clinton administration enacted in 1994. Clinton was an ardent
supporter of publicly funded, privately run charter schools and counted the proliferation
of state laws permitting them as a signal accomplishment of his presidency (Clinton
Presidency: Expanding Education Opportunity, n.d.). A standards-driven approach to
education was codified with George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act,
passed in 2001 with overwhelming Republican and Democratic support, which used
results from annual tests on standardized curriculum to rank and discipline schools and

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Peck 589

teachers. By 2009, a fixation on standards and testing, preference for market solutions,
and scepticism towards government had achieved such consensus that Obama’s Race to
the Top (RTT) initiative incorporated all three principles.
Over three decades, the idea that the American public school system is broken was
transformed from a question, to a hypothesis, to an article of faith. Once considered an
essential individual right and foundation of a functioning democracy, public education in
the United States is being transformed.2 Contemporary education reform is premised on
market-based values – accountability, choice, competition and entrepreneurialism – and
market-driven strategies, including deregulation, privatization, data-based decision mak-
ing, high-stakes test-based evaluation for students, teachers and schools, and weakening
of teacher tenure and seniority rights (Cersonsky, 2013; Karp, 2012; Miner, 2013;
Ravitch, 2010; Saltman, 2007). Directed primarily at low-performing urban schools with
a majority of low-income African American and Latino children, education reform
exhibits a neoliberal faith in privatization in the form of charter schools (publicly funded,
privately managed schools with more freedom to hire/fire teachers and accept/reject/
eject students, comparable to UK academies and free schools); school vouchers (state
subsidies in the form of tax credits that parents apply to the cost of private and religious
schools); and for-profit and non-profit education management organizations (EMOs) and
charter school management organizations (CMOs).
In a critique of Waiting for Superman, Diane Ravitch (2010), who as George W.
Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Education was a proponent of testing and choice and is
now a vocal critic, characterized the struggle over public education thus:

There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that
public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public
provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the
private sector is always superior to the public sector. (p. 24)

This article examines that clash of ideas as an ideological struggle over the future of pub-
lic education in American society. It seeks to understand why public education came to be
seen as a problem at a particular historical moment, how the problem has been defined,
and how that definition has determined what counts as appropriate solutions. Equally
important are questions of who possesses the power and resources to disseminate their
judgments about public education and turn them into policy and practice, and who is sub-
jected to those decisions, for what political ends and with what social implications.
Situating the campaign to reform US public education within the rise of neoliberal restruc-
turing and the transformation of US urban policy in conformance with neoliberal political
values, the article argues that the campaign to reform public education, in which media
play a powerful role, can be understood as ideological class practices implicated in the
upward redistribution of wealth and power that is the hallmark of neoliberalization.

Neoliberalization and the making of new urban policy

The neoliberal political project gained force during the 1970s’ structural crisis of the
global economy, with its declining rate of profit, diminished economic growth, and com-
bined inflation and unemployment that marked the end of the post-World War II boom

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590 European Journal of Communication 30(5)

and undermined confidence in the dominant Keynesian economic model. The elections
of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States
commenced a transformation of the two nations’ economies through deindustrialization,
growth of the service sector and a shift of investment from goods to finance, and of the
role of the state in the economy by means of tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and
reduced spending on public infrastructure and social programmes. As this dual economic
makeover was exported to the periphery it was christened globalization. What David
Kotz (2003) terms ‘neoliberal restructuring’ (p. 15) and Jamie Peck (2010) designates
‘neoliberalization’ (p. 7) is an interlocking political, economic and ideological project to
establish a new set of rules for governing the functioning of capitalism. Peck character-
izes neoliberalization as ‘an open-ended and contradictory process’ (Peck, 2010) aimed
at ‘the capture and reuse of the state, in the interests of shaping a pro-corporate, freer-
trading “market order”’ (pp. 7, 9). For Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (2005),
neoliberalization’s fundamental objective is the creation of a ‘new social order’ (p. 9) to
restore the ‘power and income of the upper fractions of the ruling classes’. Because that
involves channelling wealth and power upward and economic insecurity downward, the
success of the new order has depended on the ability to ‘establish a new social compro-
mise in an environment of rising inequality’ by ‘associating a broader social strata to the
growing prosperity of the few, really or fictitiously’ (Duménil and Lévy, 2002: 45).
Tracing the history of neoliberalism as an intellectual and political project, Peck con-
siders the role of think tanks as an instrument to bring social policy into correspondence
with free-market values. He proposes that the success of neoliberal policies has depended
on think tanks’ ability to achieve a ‘major ideational and ideological realignment’ (Peck,
2010: 137) of public thinking about the proper role of the state and its relationship to the
economy. As Peck (2010) argues, contrary to its ‘trademark antistatist rhetoric, neoliber-
alism was always concerned – at its philosophical, political, and practical core – with the
challenge of seizing and retasking the state’ (p. 4). The Manhattan Institute, established
in New York City in the late 1970s, was a prominent force in laying the groundwork for
the neoliberalization of education policy. Treating New York as a laboratory, the institute
forged its reputation by focusing on urban issues – welfare reform, law and order, race
relations and education policy – with an eye towards ‘reframing the debate around
America’s cities, their alleged pathologies, and their putative salvation’ (Peck, 2010:
137). In so doing, the institute and successor think tanks crafted a ‘meta-strategy’ to
‘name and narrate’ (Peck, 2010) the ‘urban problem’ (p. 140) using ideas and language
that simultaneously expressed and ‘put to work an increasingly pervasive political ration-
ality’ (p. 138). The success of this neoliberal reframing of US urban policy can be seen
in the three-decade shift from welfare to workfare programmes, from policies concerned
with the social causes of crime to punitive law-and-order policing, from Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society expansion of the social safety net to an emphasis on individual
charity and private philanthropy, and in the accelerating push towards privatization and
consumer choice in fundamental social goods, including education and health.
This is the context in which the link was forged between the rhetoric of choice and
the rhetoric of failing schools. Buoyed by and working in tandem with the mandates of
the NCLB Act and the RTT initiative, education reform has become synonymous with
a ‘corporate-backed, market-driven, testing-oriented movement in urban education’

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Peck 591

(Cersonsky, 2013). Since the 1990s, as educational privatization became the default
solution to the challenges facing America’s urban schools, the quest to transform public
education has revolved around a set of powerful intersecting forces: ideational activism
by education entrepreneurs, financial backing from billionaire philanthropists and
hedge fund managers, bipartisan political endorsement supported by lobbyists and think
tanks and the assistance of a compliant press and receptive culture industries. Together,
the activities of these individuals and institutions constitute a meta-strategy to erode
confidence in public education and build ideological consensus around private and mar-
ket solutions. A crucial part of that process, in which media are thoroughly implicated,
has involved deploying the liberal tropes of freedom, choice and equality of opportunity
in the quest to name and narrate what’s wrong with public education and what should
be done to fix it.

Naming and narrating the problem

A researcher surveying the electronic landscape of the education reform issue cannot
help noticing the prevalence of a particular genre of images: photogenic African
American and Latino children in spotless school uniforms intently focused on their les-
sons and teachers or engaged in a lively group exercise, thereby embodying the benefits
of their escape from failing public schools. Such images show up not only in the web-
sites, reports and press releases of education reform organizations, but in mainstream
media coverage – an indication of the important function these children play in education
reform’s broken schools narrative. In that romantic narrative, the children are victims,
the villains are public school teachers, especially teachers unions, who put their own
interests in job security above students’ need for a quality education, and the heroes are
the reformers and their benefactors seeking to rescue children from the flawed public
education system.
Prominent heroes include education reform entrepreneurs Wendy Kopp, founder and
CEO of TFA; Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Success Academy Charter School network
in New York City; Geoffrey Canada, founder of New York’s Harlem Children’s Zone
charter school; Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington DC schools and founder
of StudentsFirst lobbying organization; and Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, founders of
the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school network and charter manage-
ment organization. Chief among the movement’s benefactors are billionaire philanthro-
pist organizations – Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation,
Walton (Walmart) Family Foundation – which together have poured some US$4.4 billion
into various school reform projects in the last decade (Beamish, 2011). Another major
source of money is wealthy individuals from the financial sector – hedge fund managers
and venture capitalists who serve on the boards of charter schools and for-profit and non-
profit EMOs. Hedge fund managers have been particularly prominent in New York City,
according to Barbara Miner (2010), where ‘charters are overwhelmingly controlled by
hedge fund directors and finance capitalists who sit on the boards of directors that are
legally responsible for running a charter and establishing its financial, educational and
personnel policies’ (p. 5). One such New York hedge funder, Whitney Tilson, took his
passion for education reform a step further in 2005 by founding Democrats for Education

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Reform (DFER), a political action committee that strives to drive a wedge between
Democrats and the nation’s two major teachers’ unions while raising Wall Street money
for Democratic candidates who support the goals of corporate education reform (Hirsch,
2010; Karp, 2012; Miner, 2010; Tultican, 2012). The political and media fields have also
produced education reform heroes, including former New York City mayor Michael
Bloomberg and his former school chancellor Joel Klein, now the CEO of News
Corporation’s educational technology subsidiary, the current US Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan and his boss Barack Obama, media mogul Oprah Winfrey and filmmaker
Davis Guggenheim.
In keeping with their heroic personae, education reformers routinely couch their goals
in language drawn from the US civil rights movement (Weiner, 2013). Upon being nomi-
nated Secretary of Education, Duncan said education ‘is the civil rights issue of our
generation and the one sure path to a more equal, fair and just society’ (Obama, 2008).
TFA’s website proclaims that ‘in our country today, the education you receive depends
on where you live, what your parents earn, and the color of your skin’ and vows to cor-
rect this ‘serious injustice’ (Teach for America 2015); KIPP’s website touts its track
record ‘in helping students from educationally underserved communities develop the
knowledge, skills, character and habits needed to succeed in college and the competitive
world beyond (‘About KIPP’ 2014); the Broad Foundation declares its aim ‘to ensure
that every student in an urban public school has the opportunity to succeed’ (Broad
Foundation Education, 2013); the website of DFER proclaims a commitment to ‘fighting
on behalf … of low-income children of color … trapped in persistently failing schools’
(‘Statement of Principles’ 2013).
Such civil rights talk is not new; as Janelle Scott (2012) notes, ‘for at least two decades,
conservatives have argued that school choice was the last unachieved civil right’ (p. 72).
Its prevalence in education reform discourse draws sustenance from widely acknowl-
edged disparities in academic performance (measured by standardized test scores, course
selection, dropout rates, college attendance) between low-income and middle- to upper
income students and, because African American and Latino students are over-represented
in the lower economic rungs, between them and their White counterparts. Aimed specifi-
cally at closing this racialized ‘achievement gap’, the very title of Bush’s No Child Left
Behind Act evokes the spirit of the civil rights era (Bush, 2002). Because education
reformers consider the poor performance of public schools and teachers to be the cause of
the achievement gap, their solution is to relocate children to new private educational set-
tings where they can succeed. Hence, the recurrence across education reform’s discursive
terrain of variations on the phrase ‘poverty does not determine destiny’ (TFA, 2011).
The rhetorical power of this phrase stems from the fact that over the past three dec-
ades, racial segregation of housing and schools in the United States has dramatically
worsened. In 2012, 80% of Latino students and 74% of Black students were in schools
where the majority of students were not White, and the average Black or Latino child
attended schools where nearly two-thirds of the students were low-income. Racial segre-
gation and concentration are particularly severe in the nation’s largest metropolitan
areas, including Chicago, New York, Detroit, Boston, St Louis and Pittsburgh, where
education reformers have poured much of their energy and resources (Orfield et al.,
2012: 7–9). The racial wealth and income gap in the United States is equally stark and

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accelerating; in 2009, the median wealth of White families was US$113,149 compared
to US$6325 for Latino families and US$5677 for African American families (Shapiro
et al., 2013: 1). The combined effects of racial and class segregation have marked conse-
quences for school quality. US public schools get money from local, state and federal
governments, with latter contributing the least. State funding comes from income and
sales taxes and local money comes from property taxes. The extent to which a given state
relies on property taxes to fund public education greatly affects the amount of inequity
between schools. For example, students from wealthy families who live in property-tax
rich suburbs and have parents who can contribute money for special purposes attend
well-funded public schools (like those of my colleagues’ children), whereas urban and
rural children from less-affluent communities face very different educational circum-
stances: in addition to having lower levels of parental participation and financial contri-
bution, schools where poverty is concentrated have ‘high rates of teacher and staff
turnover, outdated and unchallenging curricula, limited extracurricular offerings, low
achievement and poor graduation rates’ (Orfield et al., 2012: 39).
While education reform discourse relies on civil rights language like equality, fair-
ness and freedom, the private charter schools created to rescue disadvantaged children
from public education bear little resemblance to the elite private schools and colleges
attended by education reform entrepreneurs, their wealthy patrons, their political allies,
and their respective offspring (Winerip, 2011). Scott (2013), a scholar whose work
focuses on the politics of education, points out that ‘the schools generated from this
[elite] leadership tend to emphasize a highly regulated approach to instruction, with
longer school days and years, and rigid norms around student behavior and discipline’
(p. 10). In Success Academy classrooms, two New York Times reporters note, ‘children
sit in blue and orange uniforms, usually with their hands folded, their feet flat on the
floor, listening to teachers – most just out of college – barking out orders, sometimes
in startling tones’ (Baker and Hernandez, 2014). Describing a typical KIPP school day
that begins with math drills at 7 a.m., education historian Andrew Hartman (2011)
observes that

in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities:
for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. The
assumption behind such reforms is that inner-city children can succeed only through
regimentation. (p. 55)

Such critical assessments of the kind of schooling being delivered by education reform-
ers to poor and minority children are relatively rare, however, especially in mainstream
media.
A look at a subset of education reform institutional actors and their political and media
connections illustrates their complex, mutually beneficial relations. Since its origin in the
1989 thesis of Princeton University undergraduate Wendy Kopp, TFA has been cast as a
defender of educational equality and incubator of educational leaders. In its expansion
from 500 college graduates placed in classrooms in 1990, to 11,000 placements in 2013,
TFA has seen alumni become charter school founders, heads and staff of educational
management and charter management organizations, leaders in education-reform

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friendly foundations, school board members, school superintendents and elected state
officials. TFA’s website states its goal to have 250 of members in elected office, 300 in
policy or advocacy leadership roles and 1000 ‘in “active” pipelines for public leadership’
(Cersonsky, 2012). Scott (2008) considers TFA a ‘pipeline’ (p. 163) to the private educa-
tion management sector: former TFA corps members teach in KIPP schools, work for
other CMOs and EMOs and hold leadership positions at the Broad Foundation. As one
study notes, TFA is the most common work experience among founders and upper man-
agers of ‘nationally prominent entrepreneurial educational organizations’ (Higgins et al.,
2011).
Among the education entrepreneurs who were TFA recruits are Michelle Rhee and
KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and David Levin. DFER’s Whitney Tilson was among
TFA’s founders and is a board member of KIPP Academy Charter School. All of the big
foundations behind education reform – Gates, Broad and Walton – supply substantial
money to TFA, with Broad its most generous patron (Blume, 2011). KIPP’s board of
directors includes Wendy Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth – a founding member of TFA,
former president of Edison Schools, one of the largest for-profit educational manage-
ment organizations in the United States, and board member of the Broad Center for the
Management of School Systems (Scott, 2008) – as well as Reed Hastings, founder and
CEO of Netflix.

Media and/for Education Reform

Hastings’ service on KIPP’s board reflects the prominent presence of top executives
from media and communication technology industries across the landscape of corporate
media reform. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has given money to TFA, KIPP and DFER’s
advocacy wing, Education Reform Now (Fang, 2013). Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
gave US$100 million to reform efforts in Newark, New Jersey schools. eBay founder Jeff
Skoll launched Participant Media in 2004 with the goal of creating entertainment vehi-
cles (film, television) that ignite social action campaigns; among those vehicles is
Waiting for Superman (2010). Philip Anschutz, conservative owner of the Weekly
Standard, the Washington Examiner and the entertainment conglomerate AFG, produced
the pro-charter, anti-teachers union movie Won’t Back Down (2012), which was distrib-
uted by News Corporation’s Twentieth Century Fox, and he partnered with Participant
Media to produce Waiting for Superman. News Corporation CEO and owner of an online
education software and testing company Rupert Murdoch used his Wall Street Journal as
a platform to praise the power of communications technology to transform American
schools (Murdoch, 2011). Overshadowing all of these figures is Bill Gates, the world’s
richest man worth US$76 billion, whose US$36 billion (Goodell, 2014) foundation is the
world’s largest private grant making organization, and whose involvement in education
reform extends in myriad directions. In Miner’s (2010) view (p. 3), the prominence of
these ‘analog conservatives and digital billionaires’ in education reform rests on their
mutual ‘embrace of market-based reforms, entrepreneurial initiatives, deregulation and
data-driven/test-based accountability as the pillars of educational change’.
Given that reformers and their organizations represent themselves as champions
of educational equality for underprivileged children, education reform has received

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significant friendly coverage from mainstream media. TFA, with its Peace Corps and
civil rights era associations, has been embraced by standard bearers of liberal journalism,
including Newsweek, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Washington Post
and The Charlie Rose Show. As Hartman (2011) notes, ‘From its inception, the media
anointed TFA the savior of American education’ (p. 51). Geoffrey Canada has been fea-
tured across national media, including 60 Minutes, The Today Show, Nightline, Charlie
Rose, The Oprah Winfrey Show, USA Today, New York Times and Late Night with Jimmy
Fallon, whose host introduced him as a ‘passionate advocate’ for children (‘Geoffrey
Canada’ 2014; ‘Geoffrey Canada talks’ 2011; Tough, 2004). Such language is common
in media representations of education reform figures: A Time magazine cover posed
Michelle Rhee in a classroom clutching a broom to sweep out old educational practices
and labelled her a ‘revolutionary force’ (Ripley, 2008: 36). In an episode promoting
StudentsFirst, Oprah Winfrey declared Rhee a ‘warrior woman’ (Oprah calls Michelle
Rhee, 2010). A New York Times reporter dubbed Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz an
‘education crusader’ (Gootman, 2008). Canada, Rhee, KIPP’s Feinberg and Levin, Joel
Klein and Bill Gates were stars of Waiting for Superman, while another pro-education
reform documentary, The Lottery (Ashman-Kipervaser et al., 2010), showcased
Moskowitz.
While all education reformers seek favourable media treatment, the Gates Foundation
surpasses all in the scope of its efforts to shape public perceptions. Gates has supplied
money to education reform advocacy groups (New Teacher Project, Teach Plus,
StudentsFirst), to think tanks that produce studies and interpret education issues for jour-
nalists (American Enterprise Institute, Thomas B. Fordham Institute), and to a philan-
thropic advisory firm ‘to mount and support public education and advisory campaigns’
(Dillon, 2011: A1). The foundation has also funded or formed partnerships with media
organizations to promote education reform. Besides giving US$1.4 million to the
Education Writers Association to provide training and resources for journalists (Ruark,
2013), the Gates Foundation in 2009 joined forces with Viacom, the world’s fourth larg-
est media conglomerate, to weave education storylines into current and future TV pro-
grammes (Arango and Stelter, 2009: C1). The following year, partnered with the Broad
Foundation, Gates funded ‘NBC News Education Nation’ featuring public events and
programmes on education reform and gave US$2 million (Barkan, 2011) to Participant
Media for a ‘social action campaign’ (p. 58) to support the message of Waiting for
Superman (Strauss, 2010). As an education analyst noted, the Gates Foundation ‘has
influence everywhere in absolutely every branch of education, whether you’re talking
about the federal, state or local levels of government, schools, the press, politicians or
think tanks’ (Anderson, 2010: A1).
News media are predisposed towards philanthropic foundations, particularly when
their stated aim is helping children. When those same foundations are a major source of
education research funding, reporters may also find it difficult to find expert counter
perspectives. Once the range of expert opinion on an issue has been established, reports
tend to reproduce the viewpoints of official and expert sources on which journalistic
routines rely. As those sources and perspectives have coalesced around corporate educa-
tion reform’s narrative of broken schools, it has become the dominant frame within
media coverage. Thus, a study of a year’s worth of articles on education reform from

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596 European Journal of Communication 30(5)

newspapers in a dozen cities across the United States found themes consistent with the
positions of corporate education reform: a consensus that ‘America’s educational system
is broken’ (Manuel, 2009: 54); an ‘overwhelmingly negative assessment of teachers,
their preparation and the unions that represent them’ (p. 29); ‘negative constructions of
government’ and positive references to ‘entrepreneurship, financial incentives, and pri-
vate sector ingenuity’ (p. 39).
Although support by billionaire benefactors plays an important role in promoting cor-
porate education reform’s agenda, the key to building consensus around the broken
schools narrative has been bipartisan political support for neoliberal education policies,
which strongly influences mainstream media representations. In 2008, the editors of a
volume examining charter schools and corporate education reform, expressed hope that
Obama’s election meant the United States was on ‘the cusp of a new political dialogue’
that might loosen the ‘conservative stranglehold on political debate’ and create ‘opportu-
nities for progressives to regain the initiative’ in addressing public education (Dingerson
et al., 2008: xii). However, at the very moment they were heralding Obama as a possible
saviour of public education, he was preparing to carry on the three-decade assault on
public schooling and become corporate education reform’s greatest champion. This
returns us to the contradictions at the intersection of liberalism and education reform. It
is precisely because the project to neoliberalize public education has had bipartisan sup-
port – and especially because it has the support of the Democratic Party, which had his-
torically been identified as a friend to organized labour, including teachers – that the
discourse of broken schools has been able to achieve the status of common sense.
W Lance Bennett et al. (2007) argue that whether an issue becomes ‘news’ (p. 49) and
how it is covered is determined by the ‘core principle of the mainstream [US] press sys-
tem’, through which ‘mainstream news generally stays within the sphere of official con-
sensus and conflict displayed in the public statements of key government officials who
manage the policy areas and decision-making processes that make the news’. In covering
a given policy area, journalists attend to the ‘perceived power of the factions that are
lined up for or against the dominant options’ (Bennett et al., 2007). News stories thus
track with the political parameters established by official sources. As the authors note,
‘the prominence of various perspectives in the news doesn’t have so much to do with
whether they’re supported by available facts, but whether they have powerful champi-
ons, and whether they go unchallenged, or survive challenges, by other powerful players’
(Bennett et al., 2007: 50). Corporate education reform certainly has powerful champions
in the ‘managers of choice’ (Scott, 2008: 149) located in the big foundations, hedge
funds, TFA, charter schools, education and charter management organizations, DFER
and think tanks. But their efficacy has been immeasurably enhanced by a quarter century
of bipartisan political support culminating in the ascendance of their most avid supporter
in Barack Obama.
In the run up to the 2008 presidential elections, major figures in the education reform
movement recognized the importance of maintaining bipartisan support. In 2007, Eli
Broad and Bill Gates launched their US$60 million ‘Ed in ’08’ initiative to pressure
presidential candidates to make education reform a campaign priority (Herszenhorn,
2007). All of the candidates fell in line and Obama’s platform included support for char-
ter schools and merit pay for teachers (Knopp, 2008). In August 2008, DFER sponsored

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Peck 597

a pre-convention seminar titled ‘Ed Challenge for Change’ attended by a ‘coalition of

foundations [including Gates and Broad], nonprofits, and businesses supporting the
charter school movement’ that featured denunciations of teachers’ unions and calls for
Obama to select Arne Duncan, a corporate education reformer as CEO of Chicago’s
public schools, as his Secretary of Education (Goldstein, 2008; Tultican, 2012). When
Obama appointed Duncan, DFER took credit, as did the Broad Foundation, whose annual
report said the appointment

marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars
have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments – charter schools,
performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time, and national standards
– the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other
reformers have planted. (Broad Foundations, 2009–2010: 5)

Obama’s connections to the education reform movement are extensive. The Gates
Foundation not only supplied top aides to Duncan, but its ‘projects align so closely with
President Obama’s agenda that critics say it resembles an arm of the government’
(Anderson, 2010: A1). Barkan (2011) notes that Duncan quickly integrated the
Department of Education into the ‘network of revolving-door job placement that includes
the staffs of Gates, Broad, and all the thinks tanks, advocacy groups, school management
organizations, training programmes, and school districts that they fund’ (p. 55). Obama’s
relationship with DFER predates his presidency. In 2005, as an Illinois senator he
attended the founding meeting of the organization ‘sponsored by a group of financial and
charter school entrepreneurs’ (Karp, 2012). At TFA’s twentieth anniversary summit,
Obama delivered a video message congratulating TFA for its ‘continued belief in the
potential of America’s children’ and Duncan gave the keynote address (Neale, 2011).
Waiting for Superman’s director Davis Guggenheim directed a 10-minute biography of
Obama shown at the Democratic National Convention, a 30-minute infomercial for
Obama’s 2008 campaign and a 17-minute film for the 2012 campaign. Shortly after the
release of Waiting for Superman, Obama played host in the Oval Office to Davis and the
film’s five students and their families; extensively covered by the media, the event pro-
vided ‘a huge boost for the charter school movement’ (Perone, 2010). With this degree
of official consensus on the issue of education reform, mainstream media have little
incentive to stray from the parameters set by major power factions. Only when there is
strong disagreement within the realm of official politics is the mainstream press moved
to present alternative perspectives in a serious and extended way.

Following the money

Commenting on the key institutional actors driving the education reform agenda, Barbara
Miner (2010) observes, ‘Take away the Gates, Walton and Broad Foundations, Teach for
America alumni, DFER, and a few essential hedge fund and investment managers, and the
pro-corporate charter movement would shrink significantly’ (p. 8). But if their numbers
are small, their combined economic resources, interdependent relationships, connections
to bipartisan political support and access to media have given this circle of institutions/

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598 European Journal of Communication 30(5)

agents outsized influence in shaping the diagnosis of and cure for the problem of public
education, with significant potential rewards beyond the satisfaction of rescuing children.
In a Washington Post opinion piece, the dean of Howard University’s School of Education
challenged the idea that TFA, EMOs and billionaire foundations were guided simply by a
commitment to civil rights and educational equality. In her view,

Urban school reform is not about schools or reform. It is about land development. … about
exporting the urban poor, reclaiming inner city land, and using schools to recalculate urban land
value. This kind of school reform is not about children, it’s about the business elite gaining
access to the nearly $600 billion that supports the nation’s public schools. It’s about money.
(Qtd in Strauss, 2013)

The figure she cites is the annual expenditure on American kindergarten to twelfth
grade (K-12) education, which is viewed in certain quarters as the ‘next big “undercapi-
talized” sector of the economy’, similar to health care in the 1990s (Fang, 2011). Jonathan
Kozol recounts being shown a document written by securities analysts describing the
benefits of opening up public education to private enterprise. Kozol writes: ‘From the
point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “the K-12
market is the Big Enchilada”’ (Kozol, 2007: 8). Rupert Murdoch has clearly signalled his
interest in the big enchilada. Announcing News Corporation’s entry into the for-profit
education business with the acquisition of an education subsidiary specializing in testing
and assessment technology, he described K-12 education as ‘a $500 billion sector in the
US alone that is waiting to be transformed’ (Fang, 2011).
Economic opportunities to be gained from school privatization are plentiful:

•• Direct government funding. State money allocated to students follows them to

charter schools.
•• Reduced labour costs. Most charter schools are non-union with greater flexibility
to hire and fire, when compared to public school teachers, who are the largest
single group of US public sector employees comprising a third of unionized pub-
lic sector workers (Hirsch et al., 2012: 1).
•• Return on investments. In response to foundations and think tanks pushing the
idea of using market mechanisms to generate wealth and jobs in poor communi-
ties, which have been crippled by the combination of deindustrialization and
defunding of government programmes, US Congress in 2000 passed a bill offer-
ing incentives to invest in low-income communities. The resulting New Markets
Tax Credit programme provides a 39% tax credit on investments paid out over
7 years. Taking advantage of this programme, hedge funds and banks investing in
charter schools get the 39% credit, interest on the original investment, and possi-
bly additional tax credits linked to job creation or historic preservation. Charter
school investors can potentially double their money in 7 years (Gonzalez, 2010;
Rawls, 2013).
•• Increased property values. Many of the urban public schools deemed failing and
forced to close are in gentrifying neighbourhoods, making new charter school
investments even more attractive (Miner, 2010; Saltman, 2007: 137–143;
Strauss, 2013).

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Peck 599

•• Creating markets for products. High-stakes testing spawned a multi-billion dollar

industry to produce and score tests. By 2005, schools were generating US$2.5 bil-
lion a year for the testing industry (Kozol, 2007: 9). The online learning industry
is undergoing dramatic expansion as it lobbies school districts to require online
courses and create for-profit virtual schools (Fang, 2011).

Recognizing the value of the public education sector, Hess (2005: 6) notes that because
it is almost entirely funded by public taxes, the aspirations of billionaire foundations to
remake public schooling will ‘stand or fall on their ability to shape public institutions or
redirect public expenditures’. Mathieu Hilgers (2013) argues that the successful imple-
mentation of neoliberal restructuring depends on cultivating internalized ‘categories of
perception that shape how agents problematize their experience, reinterpret their past and
project themselves into the future’ (p. 82). The extent to which the narrative of broken
schools has become common sense suggests that the forces of corporate education reform
have so far been winning the clash of ideas over public education’s future. Their ability to
cultivate categories of perception can be seen in my colleagues’ embrace of Waiting for
Superman, just as universally mandated high-stakes testing and the 300% increase in the
number of charter school students in the last decade (National Alliance for Public Charter
Schools, 2014) attest to their success at shaping institutions and redirecting public funds.
At TFA’s twentieth anniversary celebration, Michelle Rhee, on stage with Joel Klein,
Geoffrey Canada and Dave Levin before an audience of 11,000, compared the early 1990s
when charter schools were emerging to the education reform movement today: ‘The dif-
ference’, she said, ‘is that now we’ve hit the mainstream with Waiting for Superman and
NBC’s Education Nation’ (TFA, 2011). While Rhee may be overestimating the corre-
spondence between popular media and popular opinion, as key resources and sites for the
selection, orchestration and distribution of social knowledge, media are central to the
process in which struggles for hegemony, or perceived legitimate leadership, are waged.
This is the heart of what Stuart Hall (1977: 340) has termed media’s ‘ideological work’.
The forces of corporate education reform have become mainstream in the context of
the massive upward redistribution of wealth that is the foundation of neoliberal restruc-
turing, of the destruction of the urban industrial manufacturing base and reduction of
public sector jobs and their replacement by a low-wage service economy, of the dramatic
increase in racial and class segregation and resulting poverty among inner city children
and resource-starved urban public schools, and of the erosion of meaningful philosophi-
cal and policy differences between the Democratic and Republican parties, which over
the past three decades have converged around the notion that government is the cause
and the market is the solution to nearly every societal problem (Peck, 2008). This larger
context is largely missing from the broken schools narrative that spans public policy,
political speeches, foundation reports and grants and charter organization press releases,
and, because these are now also the dominant sources of information about the problem
with public education, missing also in the stories produced by corporate media. The
romantic narrative of education reform asks, in the name of fairness, equality and free-
dom, that we support policies of wealthy benefactors who promise to save disadvantaged
children from their otherwise certain dead-end futures by extricating them from their
public schools and inadequate unionized teachers. The question it does not raise is how
the forces of education reform movement may themselves be implicated in producing the

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600 European Journal of Communication 30(5)

conditions of unfairness and inequality that have limited those children’s future in the
first place, and what they now stand to gain from the privatization of public education.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice (2012) contend, ‘the education crisis is a national security
crisis’ (p. 7).
2. The United States is not alone in this endeavour; neoliberalization of state education has
taken root in other Anglophone Western capitalist democracies (Benn, 2011; Blackmore and
Thorpe, 2010; Collini, 2013).

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