The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy

THE

EDUCATION

MYTH

How Human Capital Trumped

Social Democracy

Jon Shelton

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS     ITHACA AND LONDON

For Lester and Erline Shelton,

who taught me love and kindness

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. From Independence to Security: Education and Democracy from the Nation’s Founding

2. To Secure These Rights: Education and the Unfinished Project of American Social Democracy

3. Education’s War on Poverty in the 1960s

4. New Politics: Democrats and Opportunity in a Postindustrial Society

5. At Risk: The Acceleration of the Education Myth

6. What You Earn Depends on What You Learn: Education Presidents, Education Governors, and Human Capital Rising

7. Putting Some People First: The Total Ascendance of the Education Myth

8. Left Behind: The Politics of Education Reform and Rise of the Creative Class

9. Things Fall Apart: The Education Myth under Attack

Epilogue: A Social Democratic Future?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. From Independence to Security: Education and Democracy from the Nation’s Founding

2. To Secure These Rights: Education and the Unfinished Project of American Social Democracy

3. Education’s War on Poverty in the 1960s

4. New Politics: Democrats and Opportunity in a Postindustrial Society

5. At Risk: The Acceleration of the Education Myth

6. What You Earn Depends on What You Learn: Education Presidents, Education Governors, and Human Capital Rising

7. Putting Some People First: The Total Ascendance of the Education Myth

8. Left Behind: The Politics of Education Reform and Rise of the Creative Class

9. Things Fall Apart: The Education Myth under Attack

Epilogue: A Social Democratic Future?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Series Page

Copyright

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Guide

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

Preface

Start of Content

Epilogue: A Social Democratic Future?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Series Page

Copyright

Preface

This is a book about what has been politically possible in American history: specifically, the narrowing of political opportunity, over the past fifty years or so, toward the idea that only those who acquire the right human capital are worthy of economic security and social respect. I argue the path we’ve been on now threatens our very democracy, imperfect as it is. Indeed, in the recent past, Americans have seen our nation become increasingly unequal and our politics become increasingly divisive. It is not an exaggeration to say we face a political crisis on the scale of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. Further, as I have studied our past, I have become convinced there is only one path forward that will save us: a dramatic recommitment to social democracy, or the idea that every citizen in our country deserves not just equality before the law and the right to political participation, but also a set of social and economic rights that guarantee a fundamental level of human dignity and equality. For a democracy to function, we all need economic security, which includes the right to a livelihood. Furthermore, everyone’s contribution to our society through their work each day must be valued, no matter what their education level.

I want to begin by putting my cards on the table: my position, and the premise of this book’s argument, stems from my perspective as an historian, as a union activist, and as a teacher, respectively. First, as an historian, I believe in the promise of American democracy. Embedded in the Declaration of Independence, our nation’s political creed, is the idea that governments are instituted in order to secure every citizen’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, I recognize the limits to those rights—around race, gender, and social class—in the late eighteenth century. I also recognize that no one was talking about guaranteeing jobs in 1776. But, as an historian, I also understand that things change over time. The promise of American democracy is that we are all equals and we are all entitled, as the political theorist Danielle Allen puts it, to equal access to the machinery of American government.¹ In a modern world where one’s livelihood is subject to a whole host of forces outside of one’s control—from racism to macroeconomic conditions—ensuring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness requires the machinery of government to do much more than it did in an agricultural society that had accommodated chattel slavery. Most Americans, for much of the twentieth century, understood that reality, but unfortunately, a different narrative—one based on the idea that you only deserve an economic livelihood if you get yourself the right education—has dramatically lowered our expectations in our recent past.

Second, I am a proud member of my union (UWGB-United) and serve as vice president of higher education for the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin. As a labor activist, I understand the dignity of work. A crucial aspect of the American social democratic promise is the ideal of industrial democracy: that no matter where one works, every worker has the right to have a say in their working conditions and the means to make them better. Social democracy also means our society should value the important contributions every worker makes each day, and that no worker should be devalued for not having specific academic credentials. No job, no matter what level of training it requires, should be bereft of economic security, and no one should be excluded from having healthcare or a home because of the job they work.

Finally, I am a teacher. I began my career teaching high school, and for the past decade, I’ve been teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, which is very much a nonelite institution. Most of my students come from working families, and many are the first in their family to go to college. They grow up in both urban and rural parts of Wisconsin, and though I’ve never systematically asked, there seems to be a rough level of parity between those who grew up in conservative environments and those who grew up in more liberal environments. Most of them, however, have internalized as common sense the idea that acquiring education constitutes their primary shot at a decent livelihood. Some of them appreciate this possibility, while others resent it and clearly come to college grudgingly. Others still object to any intrusion—like general education courses—on their pragmatic path to a specific career. But virtually every student understands that without more education, they seem to have a limited chance at long-term economic security. In this respect, they are like millions of millennials across the country who have internalized the notion that, above all, their lives should be devoted to acquiring human capital. For this generation, the economic and political assumptions of the world in which they have come of age have been nothing short of catastrophic, causing them to live with heightened levels of economic insecurity, stress, and anxiety. ²

In this regard, they view education differently than Americans in the past. Sure, generations that came before us have seen public education as important in acquiring skills to do well in the labor market, but Americans in the past half century are unique in seeing public education as being the primary—even the sole—avenue toward any chance at economic security. The reason for this prevailing view is because politicians, intellectuals, and others have pushed the notion that investing in human capital could replace social democratic alternatives that were once at the center of our political mainstream.

This book, then, explains how education—once a major piece of a broad vision for helping Americans gain economic security and facilitate democratic citizenship—was reduced, since the 1960s, to little more than a commodity through which to compete for a diminishing number of good economic opportunities. In the recent past, neither major party has offered much of a realistic vision to help working people enjoy more economic security or live better lives. The result has been growing political disaffection and division across the political spectrum. To restore and deepen American democracy at this critical time, we must think much more broadly about public education and its place in a nation that ensures all of us true life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Introduction

In his State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights. While the original Bill of Rights appended to the Constitution in 1791 promised a core set of civil liberties, Roosevelt’s proposal offered the guarantee of economic freedoms to all Americans. Following a decade of reforms that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression and refashioned the basic social contract, FDR pointed out that in our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a Second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. The method with which Roosevelt ordered his proposed economic rights was highly significant.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

Only after the rights to economic security had been established did FDR propose the right to a good education. While Roosevelt clearly believed education was a necessary right (and in fact, the right to an education had been an expectation of many Americans since the nation’s founding), education was not reducible to helping one succeed in the job market.¹

Alternatives as bold as FDR’s Second Bill of Rights continued to be at the center of the American political mainstream for decades after World War II. Indeed, policymakers—mostly Democrats but including some Republicans too—believed the government played a crucial role in ensuring access to economic security for working families. They believed labor unions played a major role in that trajectory and sometimes pushed for big alternatives: including a serious proposal in 1945–46 to create an economy that would guarantee every American breadwinner a job. In the years that followed, social democratic activists and policymakers persisted in pushing big alternatives to deepen the nation’s commitment to social democracy. In 1966, for example, labor leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin proposed a Freedom Budget for all Americans they believed represented the next logical progression of the Civil Rights movement by ending poverty. A decade after that, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and California Representative Augustus Hawkins (D-CA) proposed a bill that would once and for all guarantee every American the right to a job. Supported by Coretta Scott King as Martin Luther King’s legacy, and guaranteeing jobs to women workers too, a robust version of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act could have meant major strides toward a multiracial social democracy transcending the male breadwinner–centered version that had emerged during the New Deal.

Though the American social democratic promise never reached the heights FDR proposed in 1944, for the next three decades, there were important alternatives at the center of the American political mainstream. These alternatives coexisted, however, with another political narrative that grew exponentially during the same time: what I call the education myth. Premised on the reality that education could in fact provide Americans new skills, this myth asserted that building human capital through education represented the best, and increasingly, the only way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As the twentieth century progressed, this myth choked off social democratic alternatives like the Freedom Budget or a robust version of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, leaving the nation’s political center bereft of any realistic ideas that would guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system.

The Education Myth tells this story. I’m certainly not the first historian to point out how Americans have sought to use the education system for socioeconomic gain. In the nineteenth century, as historians like Nancy Beadie and Michael Katz have pointed out, respectively, some Americans used the education system to develop social capital through economic networks, while others used it to discipline unruly workers.² By the twentieth century, Progressives sought to use education to solve the problems of economic inequality and poverty, and an entire education gospel emerged that saw education as an essential economic and social solvent.³ Even many working people, as Cristina Groeger’s important book shows us, saw the public education system as a vehicle to acquire new skills and to do better in the labor market.⁴ I’m also not the first historian to show how problematic it is to expect the education system, by itself, to overcome economic inequality and create social mobility.⁵ What my book adds to the exceptional work of other historians is to show how this unrealistic expectation about public education, which once coexisted with other mainstream alternatives about how to ensure economic independence, and later, economic security, has, in the recent past, utterly quashed those alternatives.

Though the Constitution only explicitly outlined civil and political rights, the document’s preamble, through the notions of forming a more perfect union and promot[ing] the general welfare, promised the growth of a nation that would facilitate new opportunities for its citizens. While most early architects of the political entity that became the United States, like slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, did not intend to fully (or at all) include women, Native Americans, or enslaved African Americans in this promise, they nonetheless sought to provide enabling freedoms such as access to land and public education that would make a wider circle of American citizens economically and politically independent.

From the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the Homestead Act (1862), American policymakers sought to help individual citizens gain the economic independence that would make them good citizens. By the Civil War, most states outside the South guaranteed public education in their constitutions, and the Morrill Act (1862), signed into law during the war by President Abraham Lincoln, expanded access to both liberal and practical higher education through land grants to state colleges and universities. To be sure, these policies mostly targeted white Americans, and came at the expense of Native American sovereignty. Many of those who were excluded, however, such as the enslaved people who played a major role in the war to end slavery in the 1860s, leveraged this promise to fight for their own economic and political independence.

From the 1870s to the 1930s, as it became clear that most Americans would have to sell their labor each day to survive, working people stopped pushing for economic independence and started to demand security and industrial democracy. For the most part, working-class activists sought economic security through union recognition and collectively bargained agreements. Some workers did begin to seek increased economic opportunity through access to public education, but it was not the only, or even primary, way most Americans thought about attaining greater economic security. The New Deal actualized much of the call for this expansion of social democracy by ensuring labor rights through the Wagner Act (1935) and social programs like Social Security (1935), but despite the comprehensive vision FDR proposed in 1944, further efforts to expand social democratic gains mostly fell short during these years. Broader expansions of economic security, however, continued to appear on the horizon: a Democratic Congress sought to ensure a virtual guarantee of a job in 1945, and later, Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman (1945–53) proposed a program for universal healthcare, but conservatives stymied these possibilities. Though more Americans accessed good jobs and health insurance after World War II, these rights were never fully guaranteed, and benefits accrued disproportionately to white working men around a breadwinner model in which the labor of women was mostly invisible.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the US economy became more complex and more jobs required greater skill, access to education became tied more closely to economic opportunity, continuing a process that had begun in the first half of the twentieth century. The GI Bill (1944), by providing, among other things, virtually tuition-free access to higher education for veterans, expanded expectations for both economic security and the idea that education could enhance one’s opportunities in the labor market. States dramatically increased spending for public education, including both K-12 schools and state universities.

African Americans and other minorities protested against the gross inequities that existed in this postwar expansion of social democracy. Though many of these inequities were never fully rectified, there were meaningful efforts, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, to reduce the gap. At the same time, there were also enhancements in other enabling freedoms in the two decades after World War II, such as the expansion of Social Security and the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid. Still, for the most part, the period of reform under President Lyndon Johnson (1963–69) centered on the notion that the best way to alleviate poverty was to expand access to education and job training, not through broader efforts to ensure everyone had jobs, union rights, and healthcare.

The limitations of the reform agenda under Johnson, in fact, represented the beginning of an important trend. Over the past fifty years, the broader vision of American social democracy has been narrowed considerably: economists and other intellectuals, corporate interests, and politicians—most prominently Democrats but on both sides of the partisan aisle—have successfully pushed an erroneous narrative that access to the right education is all that is needed to give everyone an equal opportunity to secure a good life. This narrative is, in fact, a mythology, promising to bring good jobs and economic security, as if by magic, to all those who play by the rules. Indeed, much like the ancient study of alchemy, which sought to turn base metal into gold, this education myth promises to magically help the acquirer overcome any structural impediments—economic downturn, a geographic lack of jobs, and racial inequality, for instance—in order to find a job in an increasingly competitive marketplace that will provide a decent livelihood.⁶ At the same time, efforts to enhance most other aspects of social democracy, such as guaranteeing the right to a job, a living wage, a union, childcare, healthcare, or housing, were either stopped in their tracks or rolled back.

This myth has increasingly relied on the fiction that the economy is a meritocracy: that those who succeed in getting the right education deserve economic security, while those who fail to get a good job deserve their fate. Philosopher Michael Sandel has referred to this way of thinking as the tyranny of merit, pointing out that even if our society could be a true meritocracy (it isn’t, and almost certainly never will be), neglecting the value of every citizen in our nation would still be disastrous. Indeed, those Americans who have not been winners in the human capital competition of the last fifty years, Sandel rightly argues, have lost the social esteem nonprofessional-class workers might have once enjoyed in past eras.⁷

Finally, the education myth has impoverished what political theorist Danielle Allen calls the human potentiality of civic and political engagement. By focusing only on economic opportunity, our education system over the past half century has mostly told every new cohort of students that learning to become good citizens in a democracy is no longer valuable.⁸ The result is an American politics increasingly defined by the notion that our government primarily serves to facilitate marketable education and that citizenship is defined not by one’s overall contributions to their community but by their ability to spin their education into economic prosperity.

The Education Myth explains how we got to this point. By the 1970s, a more complex economy required greater numbers of college-educated professionals, and for many of these workers, acquiring education had been a route to their relative success in the labor market. This transition occurred at the same time corporations went to war on nonprofessional workers, shifting production to areas where they could pay manufacturing workers less, making it more difficult for American workers to unionize, or investing in largely nonunion sectors like healthcare that leveraged existing racial and gender inequities.⁹ Consequently, the growing professional class began to believe education—in a supposedly fair, meritocratic competition—was the key to success for everyone else too. In contrast to other explanations for the direction of the Democratic Party in the 1970s (some of these suggest Democrats were increasingly beholden to special interests such as unions, feminists, or civil rights activists), the reality was that over the course of the decade, more and more Democratic politicians saw themselves as representing this growing professional-class constituency. A new generation of officeholders—like Delaware senator Joe Biden—helped thwart a resurgent social movement to ensure the right to a job and universal healthcare in the 1970s.

Jimmy Carter (1977–81) was a driving force in this new Democratic Party, and while his administration helped elevate the status of public education, creating the federal Department of Education in 1979, it also diminished social democratic possibilities in other arenas of American life by declining to support a jobs guarantee and only lukewarmly fighting for workers’ rights. The late 1970s, in particular, represented an important missed opportunity to create a truly multiracial democracy built on the foundation of economic security for all that no longer treated women as ancillary partners in a family dominated by a male breadwinner. Unfortunately, the failures of the Carter years narrowed future political possibilities. Later Democratic leaders Bill Clinton (1993–2001), elevated by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and Barack Obama (2009–17) fervently advanced policies to tie education more closely to human capital as well as brokering trade deals (for Clinton, the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] and for Obama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP]) that put even more downward pressure on livelihoods for those without college degrees. Negotiating such deals undermined one of the fundamental premises of the American promise: that the nation exists to provide economic opportunities for average Americans, not workers elsewhere. In Clinton’s case, he also collaborated with a Republican Congress to shred the social safety net for the poorest Americans while spending millions to incarcerate more working people, disproportionately Black and Latino, for lengthier prison sentences.

The education myth was driven primarily by Democrats, then: first in the 1960s by a Johnson administration that viewed education and job training as more important than broader social democratic interventions, then by New Politics Democrats representing professional-class constituencies in the 1970s, and finally, by the neo-liberals and the New Democrats of the DLC in the 1980s and 90s, respectively.¹⁰

Some Republicans, such as Education Secretary Terrel Bell, who commissioned the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, advanced a conservative version of the myth. By 2000, in fact, the education myth had become so consuming that even Republicans as prominent as President George W. Bush (2001–9) employed it, seeking political gain at the expense of Democrats, and touting school accountability through the No Child Left Behind Act as the way to provide Americans a shot at good jobs while liberalizing trade relations with China and undercutting manufacturing in the United States. Other Republicans, however, like President Ronald Reagan (1981–89), presidential candidate Pat Buchanan (1992 and 1996), and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (2011–19), mobilized populist working-class resentments against the more educated professional class who had most strongly advanced the education myth. By 2010, political actors like Walker had established the playbook that the reactionary populist Donald Trump would use in 2016.

As this myth increasingly motivated policymakers’ actions, inequality in the United States exploded and more and more Americans—about 65 percent of the population today lack college degrees—have struggled with long-term economic insecurity and disenchantment with the political process.¹¹ Especially since the economic crisis of 2008, even many college graduates have struggled to find the kinds of jobs the education myth says they should have been able to get, instead toiling in precarious conditions with low wages and massive student debt.¹²

And so, a primary—perhaps the primary—point of contention in American politics over the past decade has been between those who doubled down on this myth and those who are revolting against it. This conflict does not follow strict partisan lines, and because we tend to see so many political debates through a partisan lens, not enough Americans understand what is happening. But the education myth seems to be losing its salience. On the left, millennials and others shut out of the supposed meritocracy are in revolt against the Democratic Party: neoliberals like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden had to muster the entire party establishment to suppress the social democrat Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, for example, and as a result, Biden’s agenda has already shifted toward a grudging embrace of a somewhat broader set of economic rights. Further, social movements in the past decade, led by teacher unions committed to racial justice and broad political economic change, have organized dozens of high-profile and successful actions in pursuit of a broader vision of social democracy.

Donald Trump’s ascent on the right, capturing both the Republican Party and the presidency in 2016, and winning even more votes four years later, owes a heavy debt to those Americans who believe they are left out of an economy that has largely catered to well-educated elites. But Trump also speaks to the loss of social esteem among those outside the professional class because they have not measured up to the cultural values of the highly educated constituency at the center of the Democratic Party.¹³ Though Trump especially mobilized white Americans without college degrees, his inroads with both African American and Latino voters in 2020 should give pause to Democrats who think a more demographically diverse America alone will eventually defeat Trumpism.¹⁴

The Education Myth tells this story, beginning by explaining how the expansion of public education in the United States was embedded in an expanding democratic promise. In the first three chapters of the book, which move swiftly from the nation’s founding through the end of the 1960s, I show how this promise, limited as it was, set up a vision for a political system that would advance, first, economic independence for American citizens, and later, economic security. Public education played a growing role in these expectations, and developing Americans’ civic and political capabilities (even as it sometimes sought to eliminate the distinct cultural practices of immigrants and other ethnic minorities) represented a major component of what American policymakers, intellectuals, and reformers thought public education should do.

I don’t intend to romanticize these developments. At the beginning, most Americans were excluded from that promise. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, those left out—men without property, women, African Americans, and others—demanded the nation make good on its founding premise. In many cases, those whose basic civil and political rights had never been fully acknowledged, like African American union leader A. Philip Randolph, were the most visionary advocates for enhancing social democratic expectations for all Americans. These expectations also revolved around the gendered notion that men were primary breadwinners and economic security flowed through a hierarchical family. And, in fact, by the last great period of American reform, the Great Society, problematic views about the cultural deficiencies of African Americans and other poor Americans played a major role in narrowing the promise of social democracy toward the acquisition of human capital.

In the past half century, however, our political system has greatly diminished the limited social rights won by Randolph and others, and until very recently has successfully constricted even any serious consideration of more. Chapter 4 begins to tell that story, showing how some Democratic leaders, increasingly driven by professional-class notions of meritocracy in the 1970s, stifled important reforms like the right to a job while elevating public education to a greater level of symbolic significance. Conservative Republicans led by Ronald Reagan, as I show in chapter 5, cut federal education spending, but by the 1980s, even Reagan could not arrest the trajectory of the education myth. A growing consensus around the importance of education to ensure American economic competitiveness led even many moderate Republicans, like the president’s own education secretary Terrel Bell, to push for greater investment. The report Bell commissioned, further propelled the myth by making exaggerated claims about the supposed problems with the American education system and why those problems were limiting the livelihoods of new generations of workers. At that point, even prominent Republicans like George H. W. Bush, as I show in chapter 6, sought to highlight their embrace of investment in human capital for political gain.

Bill Clinton, however, first as governor of Arkansas, then as chairperson of the Democratic Leadership Council, and finally as president, rode the crest of the education myth to the greatest political fortune. Indeed, as chapter 7 makes clear, investment in public education proved central to a much-reduced set of expectations at the core of the Democratic agenda—one that would make corporate America happy while stealing the political thunder of a new hard right group of conservative Republicans by the end of the 1990s. In chapter 8, I explore the high-water mark of the education myth: the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act (2001) showed that there was little dissent in any mainstream political quarter, and Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, published the same year, pointed to the growing cultural dominance of the professional class as well as the resentment from those left out of it. In chapter 9, I highlight the first significant political manifestations of the revolt against the education myth, showing how the failure of Barack Obama to make good on his promises on economic security helped empower a new wave of Republicans, like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, who exploited the grievances of many voters with a Democratic Party that seemed only to cater to professionals.

Finally, in the last chapter, I document the growing cracks in the education myth. Trump’s rise, following a similar playbook as Walker, capitalized on both economic and cultural resentments in winning a major upset over Hillary Clinton, who, like Obama, is a quintessential professional-class meritocrat. I also document the revolt against the myth on the left, as political figures such as Bernie Sanders and unions such as the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) have pushed for a much more robust version of social democracy in which public education, as it was for FDR, is only one piece of a wider set of social and economic rights necessary for full citizenship.

Before moving on, I must clarify a few of my positions in this book. By social democracy, I mean the ideal that government should cultivate positive freedoms for all of its citizens by providing new economic and social rights. This terminology is important, and not a term Americans typically use to understand politics. Many Americans today think of politics along a continuum between conservatism and liberalism. They believe conservatism means the government plays a limited role in regulating the economy and liberalism means the government plays a bigger