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“Cooperative School Governance”

Relations of production characterize the economy. The way people treat one another as they produce their lives together shapes the kind of social formation they live within. Educating for new relations of production–changing existing relations–can therefore recharacterize that economy. Capitalist relations of production, for example, are exploitative.

One alternative to exploitative relations of production is the cooperative relation of production. From the Park Slope Food Co-op in New York City to REI to cooperatively-run restaurants, childcare facilities, and factories, a number of large and small organizations use cooperative models of governance which, to varying degrees, undermine the exploitative quality of capitalist relations of production. The lines between workers, employees, and owners blur in these organizations. Yet these organizations and their alternative relations of production are neither commonplace nor well-known. Is it possible to educate for a greater awareness and abundance of cooperative relations of production? Can this help to create a certain density of anti-capitalist learning in the United States?

Two parallel questions emerge with respect to cooperative education, which derive from two meanings of education. Roughly speaking education can be becoming and/or schooling, the latter a special case of the former. Education as becoming is when an entity–individual or collective–changes its constitution in some meaningful way. Education as schooling is a special case of becoming: when individual or collective change is directed by institutions loosely resembling schools which the state, in any iteration, organizes and legislates for children and adults who identify somehow as students. All this is to say that the present essay broaches two questions simultaneously: 1) Can cooperative schooling help people learn the commons? 2) Can cooperative education in institutions beyond schools help people learn the commons?

I will focus more attention on the first question, borrowing reflections and research from surveys and texts addressing the second. The proposal of this essay is that cooperative schooling is one option for unlearning capitalist relations of production and learning new relations which take the commons seriously.

The next two questions that arise concern the scope of the cooperative governance intervention in educational institutions. 1) How would cooperative governance work in K-12 schools in the United States? 2) How would cooperative governance work in higher education? The motivations, concerns, and models for governance would differ between these two scopes. In this research I will consider precedents for both, as well as motivations and models for primary, secondary, and tertiary education.

Some resources

philadelphia O&O: A worker education program. (Of peripheral interest, to focus my project: this is NOT what I’m interested in, though it is interesting):

The educational program of PACE (aka PACE of Philadelphia) was also path-building. Formed in 1976 as the Delaware Valley Federation for Economic Democracy, a branch of the short-lived Federation for Economic Democracy, PACE was given several responsibilities that have become familiar territory for technical assistance organizations – feasibility studies, organizational and legal structure, loans and capitalization planning, and advocacy. Their worker education program was, it appears, unprecedented. PACE trained more than 700 worker owners in the transition for A&P to O&O.

Rather, I’m interested in schools for students (adults or children) that are governed cooperatively. Some precedents and resources include:

• Illinois special ed coop?
• Cooperative colleges in Kenya and Spain
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_education
• Social movements and cooperative education: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/mar/26/free-university-cooperative-model-sustainable-alternative
• A cooperative elementary school: http://www.ucoopschool.org/
• Center for cooperatives at UW-Madison: http://www.uwcc.wisc.edu/

The following post is meant as a guide to writing the next two weeks’ blog posts, which can take a variety of forms. I will write my step-by-step process as an example. 

Essentially, the example will follow two steps: finding materials and summarizing information from these materials into a blogpost reflection.

In your posts, include this sort of material in list and paragraph style. I will accept multiple formats, so long as the writing demonstrates to me that you are researching questions to analyze your personal experience.

I. Finding materials

Using my questions, I have found several documents that will lead me to a clearer picture of the social formation, repressive status apparatus, and ideological state apparatuses at the time of my personal experience. I will read and skim these documents to put together an economic and political picture of my personal educational experience for next week’s post.

Wikipedia page for the year 1994
United States 1990 Census base page
Connecticut-specific census material from 1990
A possible testing scandal in western Connecticut in the early 1990s?
Selected Education Laws and Policies in Connecticut c.1980
Wikipedia page for a major federal educational policy passed in 1994

II. Some preliminary findings

In 1994 NAFTA was implemented for the first time, Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president of South Africa, and Bill Clinton was president. The population of Danbury, CT was roughly 66,000. Per capita household income was $19,300 in 1989 dollars (translating to $36,292.02 in 2014).

What was the educational policy of the land and how did this result in my taking a state-mandated standardized test? Were there any political or economic incentives/pressures to do so?

There was a law passed in 1984, the year I was born, called PA 84-265. This called for “Statewide Mastery Tests.”

1984: Statewide Mastery Tests

Statewide mastery tests were implemented for the 4th, 6th, and 8th grades with the passage of PA 84-265. Mastery tests are comprised of reading, writing and math sections. This test was formulated to measure students’ academic achievement individually and as a whole in order to make pertinent curriculum changes. Mastery test scores are also used to identify schools in need of state assistance.

Through an article reference to this piece of legislation I found the “Connecticut Mastery Test.” 

Before 1984 such tests were not required in the state of Connecticut. Why would that law pass at that time? I know from previous research that the (in)famous report A Nation At Risk was published a year before, which is an extremely divisive and rich text. Republicans under the Reagan Administration created a sense of urgency about public education as never before in this report, whose first paragraphs read:

All, regardless of race or class or economic status, are entitled to a fair chance and to the tools for developing their individual powers of mind and spirit to the utmost. This promise means that all children by virtue of their own efforts, competently guided, can hope to attain the mature and informed judgement needed to secure gainful employment, and to manage their own lives, thereby serving not only their own interests but also the progress of society itself. Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur– others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

Did NAR inspire PA 84-265?

More materials, questions, and findings:

Video on “A Nation at Risk” report

From John Bellamy Foster’s “Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital”

What changed matters decisively for the worse was the onset of economic stagnation beginning with the 1974-75 recession, and continuing with a declining economic growth trend ever since. Real economic growth in the United States dropped, decade by decade, from the 1970s on, putting increasing pressure on education. Total government spending on K-12 education as a percentage of GDP had risen in the 1960s and early 1970s, reaching 4.1 percent in 1975, only to fall to 3.6 percent a decade later, in 1985. The percentage of public school revenue coming from local government plummeted from 53 percent in 1965 to 44 percent in 1985 due to a widespread property tax revolt. Consequently, funding became more centralized at the state level.24

Schools, meanwhile, were forced to cope with growing deficits from the larger society. The percentage of U.S. children living in poverty rose from 14.4 percent in 1973 to 22.7 percent in 1993; while the proportion of poor children living in extreme poverty—defined as half the official poverty rate—increased from around 30 percent in 1975 to over 40 percent in 1993. Rising numbers of increasingly impoverished children arrived in the public schools, bringing with them more pressing needs, leading to greater strains on limited school resources.25

Finally, a question: If the Sandia Report found that the data analysis of A Nation at Risk was invalid–that it fell to Simpson’s Paradox–what does that mean for the meaning of the report at the time, as well as our continued use of it for justifying educational policy?

1) It seems like we can conclude that the energy behind the reforms, and their continuation, is entirely political and economic. If the data behind “failing schools” was incorrect in the 1980’s, the national fervor that developed around its rhetoric was just that: rhetoric. But behind rhetoric is an agenda, and the Reaganian vision of US political economy appears to be that agenda.

2) Are we still under the influence of that vision if we continue to use justifications from A Nation at Risk?

Like all children, I enjoyed summertime. The summer of 1994 was a particularly exciting one: I’d be going to a camp for two weeks for the first time, and then traveling with my parents on vacation.

Earlier that year I took several state-mandated standardized tests in reading, writing, and mathematics. I was in fourth grade. I remember feeling nervous while taking the tests: everything at school stopped, the normal routines and lessons to which I’d grown accustomed ceased and the test became our focus. On the day of the test our teacher handed out the workbooks with the image of the state of Connecticut on the front. The paper was gray, thin, and smelled like grassy pulp. I don’t remember the questions themselves, but I do remember looking around and seeing my classmates taking the test also. I remember the time written in chalk on the chalkboard in front of us, alerting us to when we’d started and when we would have to stop, and our teacher waiting for us to finish, watching to make sure we didn’t cheat. It was a little unpleasant, but largely unmemorable.

After school ended, maybe the week after school was over and summer was about to begin, I remember sitting in my room. My mother knocked on the door and asked me to come outside, where our house had a small deck. I followed her and my father was sitting in shirtsleeves. The sun was strong and my mother sat next to him. In his lap was an envelope with the image of Connecticut on the front. He reached into the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper, which had lines of text printed in block letters. There were numbers and words placed next to one another: my state test scores.

My father asked me to come over and look at the piece of paper. I did, and saw that under one of the categories it said “unsatisfactory.” He said that if I did not score higher on such tests in the future, then I wouldn’t be allowed to go to summer camp. I remember feeling nervous and confused. It got under my skin. The feeling was a kind of anxious disturbance, a guilt without understanding. It was the first time a state test had effected my life in some way, and I didn’t understand why it might be so important that I get certain scores on them.

I recall this memory because standardized testing is uniquely prevalent in contemporary educational policy and practice. Students take standardized tests now more than ever, and the results of these tests are much more consequential: teacher salaries, school administration, and district funding are now all dependent to some degree on the results of test scores.

I would like to know what the political and economic context of that state test was at the time I took it in 1994. I read these two moments of contact with the state test (taking it and seeing the result) as two interpellations, or hailings, by the combined forces of the state and economy (the repressive state apparatus holding down the social formation, composed of modes of production). The test is an ideological state apparatus with a certain character, which played a certain role in reproducing the relations of production of the society around me by interpellating me.

So I have some questions. I’d like to know more about the state and the economy at that moment in 1994, and what the functionality of that ideological apparatus was. I want to know about the repressive state apparatuses, particularly the educational policy and its history that made the test necessary (local and national). I want to know what the purpose of the test was, politically and economically. I want to know both the economics of that test (who made it, for how much, etc) and the economic context of the test (what the country’s GDP, unemployment, and demographic breakdowns at local and national levels).

I am not necessarily interested in claiming that the test was bad or good (for me, for others), but rather understanding its social role–the social issue of the test– using the theory we have constructed in the first half of the semester.

Two sets of questions emerge:

First, what was the average household income in my neighborhood, as compared with the rest of the state and the US? What were the demographics of that region at the time? What was the wider economic context in the US? What was the US’s economic power at the time, globally-speaking? What were the economic differences between white, middle class families and families of other races and backgrounds in that area and across the country? More specifically, were the tests created by a private company? Were they graded by that company? Which company was it, and what was the nature of the contract with my school district? Who owned that company and how did they get that contract? Second, politically: What were the educational policies in Connecticut at that time? Were they informed by federal policy as well? Were schools held accountable in the same way to those tests as schools are now? What was the frequency and intensity of testing at that time? What was the political rhetoric about education, and curricular trends popular at the time?