Keeping Company in Controversy: Education Reform, Spheres of Argument, and Ethical Criticism

There is no shortage of debate over how to repair our educational infrastructure. National standards or more local control? Vouchers or better public schools? More parental involvement or more teacher autonomy? A greater federal presence.... or fairer local school taxes? More multicultural diversity or more emphasis on what Americans share in common? These are honest disputes. But I am convinced that the problem is simpler and more fundamental.... It stems from a dearth of democracy: an absence of democratic will and a consequent refusal to take our children, our schools, and our future seriously. -Benjamin Barber "America Skips School" (44-5) Benjamin Barber observes widespread disagreement in the United States concerning education reform. Similarly, the Sandia National Laboratories report, "Perspectives on Education in America," notes, "although the call for education reform is widespread, our review of education commentary suggests to us that there is little consensus on how the nation should accomplish such a change" (Sandia National Laboratories 306). This lack of consensus is not derived from a shortage of effort, since nearly 25% of Americans are involved in public schools as either students or staff (Tyack & Cuban 141). Many issues have surfaced and resurfaced during various stages of the ongoing national education reform debate. Multiculturalism in the curriculum, computers in the classroom, affirmative action, and economic competitiveness frequently have occupied center stage in public deliberation about schooling. Between the early 1980s and the present, rapidly proliferating education reform rhetoric has emerged in response to broader underlying cultural, political, and economic problems. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk, which likened the deteriorating quality of our schools to an "act of war" inflicted upon us by some foreign power. Since its publication, various advocates and reformers have used A Nation at Risk to justify a variety of conflicting conclusions about the status of American schools, the need for changing them, and the likely effectiveness of proposed changes (Hunt & Staton). Plainly the domain of education is steeped in controversy. Yet, while there is little popular consensus on education reform issues, the American culture does possess a profound faith in schools. As Gerald Bracey claims, "whenever faced with a large national problem, the United States has always turned to its schools" (Final 19-39). John Dewey argued that education sustains a culture and maintains its character over time. Indeed, in the United States, education de bates play a central role in the formation of cultural identity. As Tyack and Cuban argue, "School reform is also a prime arena for debating the shape of the future of the society. Such debate is a broad civic and moral enterprise in which all citizens are stakeholders" (136). It is worthwhile to explore the prospects of public deliberation with the subject of education reform rhetoric in mind, because such rhetoric has the potential to yield useful insights into our understanding of public deliberation as a constitutive process and a moral phenomenon. Indeed, some scholars outside of communication have already made this connection. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, for example, suggest guidelines for rethinking the language of education reform and educational possibility. They argue that we should rethink the discourse of education reform and reformulate it as a crisis in citizenship and ethics. Similarly, David Purpel and Svi Shapiro write: In spite of all the heightened concern for education, however, we believe the public is being ill served by the nature and quality of the current debate and dialogue. We believe that those who have framed the public discourse have failed to clarify the profound nature of the underlying issues and, moreover, have compounded that failure by providing a discourse that trivializes and vulgarizes those issues. …