Given the toll the recession has taken on state and local governments, policy makers face “unprecedented challenges” and say they “have no other choice” but to make cuts in education. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, borrowing a now-ubiquitous phrase, has called the necessity to do more with less “the new normal.” I don’t dispute the difficulty of budgeting in the recession, nor the fact that education spending includes waste that should be cut. But we need to resist the framing of our situation as inevitable and normal. This framing makes the recession a catastrophe without culpability, neutralizing the civic and moral dimensions of both the causes of the recession and the way policy makers respond to it. The civic and moral dimensions also are diminished by the powerful market-based orientation to economic and social problems. Antigovernment, anti-welfare-state, antitax—this ideology undercuts broad-scale public responses to inequality.

Read full article [here].
by Mike Rose, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: September 11th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.