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Surrendered: Why Progressives Are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education
In this dynamic book, Kevin Kumashiro offers a necessary intervention to help progressive educators and advocates take back public education. This book highlights how the broader Left (progressives, liberals, Democrats, teacher unions, civil rights organizations) are often talking about the “problem” in ways that were framed by forces contrary to the goals of democracy and justice, and in so doing, are advancing “solutions” that cannot help but be counterproductive. Kumashiro explains when, why, and how this has happened, particularly regarding the insidious nature of popular “reforms.” He also dives into some of the biggest battles in education today, such as affirmative action, free speech and hate speech, bullying and violence, teacher shortages, and student debt. Surrendered offers a different path forward for K–12 and higher education by showing readers how to establish a progressive agenda, employ language, and harness evidence more effectively. Book
- GenresEducation
112 pages, Hardcover
Published October 30, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 26, 2024
Author Kevin K. Kumashiro challenges the left in a concise and direct manner to band together and make the necessary changes for the sake of public education. He provides an approachable examination of the several viewpoints that comprise public education so that we may learn about the forces that have shaped it to this day and the possibilities in organizing and dreaming of a better educational system. This is essential reading for every educator who wants to better educational conditions.
January 18, 2023
Surrendered: Why Progressives are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education by Kevin Kumashiro c. 2020 (87 pages—Teachers College Press)
Bio: “Kevin Kumashiro is an internationally recognized expert on educational policy, school reform, teacher preparation, and educational equity and social justice.”
Key Quotations
• “What counts as common sense is often what stabilizes the status quo, or at least enables U.S. to navigate that status quo, and, in so doing, preserves the privileges therein. Common sense cannot help but to be political, to be implicated in the injustices of our times, and thus, common sense can become intolerant, dogmatic, and insistent, especially when leveraged strategically for oppressive ends. To frame common sense is to convince the masses to buy into a specific story of what and how the world is and must be” (10).
• “When framed as common sense, whether or not backed by research, a reform is more likely to be supported, just as reforms that run counter to what is framed as common sense are more likely to be opposed” (10).
• “In a democracy, education should aim not only to prepare students in the wide range of literacies that constitute the world as it is, but also challenge and nourish their individual and collective capacities to imagine and create the world that is not yet, the world as it could or should be, and if they so choose, to build the tools to change all that is before them. To do so, education would need to involve questioning, rattling, challenging, and at times, remaking the common sense of our times, not conforming to it, or authorizing it, or normalizing it” (12).
• “Trying to uphold the narrow definition of good requires that schools proliferate the many ways of being bad. To serve its primary purpose of sorting, schools need to push some up and pull all others down” (15).
• “ . . .[T]he ideological shift was one that even more squarely positioned the very enterprise of education as being like that of any other industry, to be guided by the Neoliberal tropes that, from the 1970s onward, have implied that there is no alternative. / Neoliberalism? That now-commonsensical notion that the public section has failed, and that the private sector can do better if education—or healthcare or the economy—were simply to allow and incentivize competition as in a free market” (20).
• “Genetically there is more diversity within race groupings than there is between groups. There is not some biologically based determinant for all that gets attributed to race. What, then, makes for race? A much more helpful and accurate way to think about race is as an instrumental construct, a way to talk about groups to advance particular ideologies and systems” (25).
• “By the mid-1800s, common schools had spread across the country, a movement often credited to the vision and leadership of Horace Mann, an educator, lawyer, and elected leader from Massachusetts, known for calling education ‘the great equalizer of the conditions of men,’ who pushed for open, free schools with a common curriculum and structure. One thread across common schools was their curricular focus on moral instruction” (31).
• “The National Education Association (NEA) formed in 1857 (as the National Teachers Association), initially as a professional association focused on legislative and policy advocacy, but in the early-to-mid 1900s it would gradually evolve into a union of teacher and other school personnel, engaging more forcefully in collective bargaining and pushed to the Left in order to compete with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT formed in 1916, primarily by the teachers in Chicago who were frustrated with the priorities of the NEA. From its origins, the AFT focused on improving the conditions for teachers, and through their advocacy and bargaining, demonstrated the impact of teachers acting collectively . . . In subsequent decades, the AFT would align with the more inclusive, Socialist, and militant industrial union organizing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), pushing the profession to the Left in the same way CIO pushed labor organizing in general to the Left” (33).
• “Examples of curricular initiatives outside of the public schools included the Citizenship Schools, which by the early 1960s had burgeoned across the South to teach literacy and citizenship rights to African Americans in order to foster civic engagement and domestic participation . . . Similar were the Freedom Schools, launched in the Freedom Summer of 1964 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to counter the ‘sharecropper’ conformist education of mainstream schooling by raising critical consciousness about issues of inequities in society” (38).
• “The year 1972 also saw the formation of the Business Roundtable that would bring together 300 of the top CEOs in the United States with the goal of shaping economic and social policy to support profits for individual corporations, as well as global dominance by the broader U.S. sector. Public education is the primary pipeline of workers, and unsurprisingly, the Business Roundtable soon targeted educational policy. In 1989, it released a report, Essential Components of a Successful Educational System, offering ‘essential principles’ that would shape how to think of educational improvements in terms of narrow, rigid articulations of standards and accountability, bolstering and guiding the high-stakes testing regime that was already shaping educational reform. The Business Roundtable helped to frame the crisis of public schools in terms of student achievement, launching a national obsession with ‘closing the achievement gap’ that would shape the agendas of even the left-leaning organizations like the teachers unions for the next quarter century and, in so doing, mask systemic and structural injustices by framing the problem and solution in terms of individual performance and accountability” (42).
• “By the 1980s, both Republicans and Democrats were supporting policy initiatives that placed great faith on the market and competition to drive system improvement, whether that system was the economy or education. This so-called Washington Consensus privileged, at least rhetorically, certain structures or conditions as necessary for success—such as fiscal austerity, privatization, market liberalization, individual accountability that incentivized entrepreneurialism, and system deregulation and decentralization that disincentivized market controls—while obscuring the contradictions that coexisted. Such contradictions include grossly subsidizing some as others face austerity, or the over-regulation of some as others enjoy under- or deregulation . . .” (43).
• “This Neoconservative equating of global security with the interests of the corporate elite broadened the scope of U.S. democracy to include Imperialist expansion without regard to other nations’ boundaries or relationships to the United States—thus justifying our intervention anywhere, even within the borders of our allies—at the same time that it severely narrowed the identity of U.S. democracy by framing any critique of the U.S. economy as antipatriotic and a sign of loyalty to the Communism already defeated” (45).
• “Beginning in the 1940s, but mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, time and again, as countries fell into economic turmoil and sought help, the global financial institutions withheld support unless these countries agreed to implementing fiscal austerity, deregulation, and the other conditions that would transform their economies to look more like the free market” (45).
• “Calls for choice, and more pointedly, vouchers, effectively reframe school funding from a social investment and a public good to a private investment and an individual commodity, a reframing credited largely to the work in the 1950s of Friedman and his students and colleagues . . . But the reality is that marketizing economies, was never meant to improve the situation for the masses, and when implemented, has not succeeded at doing so. From the free-market economic reforms foisted upon struggling countries that would open up opportunities for profit out of disaster to the choice and voucher initiatives offered as a means to avoid desegregation and to consolidate wealth, Neoliberal initiatives function to dismantle the public sector, to privatize as a way to fuel corporate profits, and thus, to turn the haves into have-mores” (48).
• “The science of testing, like all of science, is less neutral arbiter of truths and more a tool that will always already be implicated in only certain worldviews, including standardized testing, which has origins in eugenics. Science, like any knowledge production, like all of education, cannot help but to be partial; the content and processes and frameworks of scientific inquiry cannot help but to have cultural biases; and therefore, the uses of science have always been and should always be contested. / High stakes testing animates and embodies the Neoliberal imperative that educational effectiveness and success reflect individual responsibility and capacity and, hence, that educational improvement results from measuring performance and holding people accountable” (51).
• “Rather than assuming that affirmative action prevents the most qualified Asian Americans from getting in [to a college], how about examining how affirmative action can help to define even more broadly, accurately, and ethically the meaning of ‘qualified’? / What if universities were to serve a democratizing function by preparing students not merely to fit into the world as it is, but also to imagine and create the world as it could be? The capacities and potentials of applicants would be less about previous success at being the good student, and more about the potential to build a more democratic future that is still in the making” (60).
• “US law does not recognize that words can wound, can injure, which is the basis of the prohibition of hate speech, but where the law falls short is in misattributing where the harmfulness of hate speech originates” (66).
• “Reframing the debate on free speech requires reframing the central arguments about why such protections are needed. Pedagogically, it is not the case that all speech needs to be aired in order for learning to happen, because hate speech can serve to curtail learning: It can injure others in the room, it can re-enact the very forms of oppression being cited, thus silencing all who are implicated in that citing, preventing all from the collective deliberating inquiry that even the defenders of hate speech articulate as a prerequisite for learning. / The same is true for political arguments. It is not the case that all sides must have equal voice in order for democracy to thrive, because democracy is not only about voicing diverse ideas. No, it is also about collectively deliberating these ideas, which cannot and should not be attempted without the prerequisite that each participant hold themselves accountable for examining and challenging the ways that any speech, including their own, can draw on discursive histories and power relations in ways that injure, that oppress, that run counter to democracy. / The purpose of protecting the freedom of speech in a democracy should be to protect the freedom to question and challenge the oppressive histories and power relations that prevent the realization of democracy, not simply the allowance of anyone to say anything without any accountability for what results” (67).
• “Critics call Sanders’s proposals [for healthcare and student debt relief] Socialist, but the proposals are not anywhere near as Socialist as they could or should be. Medicare for All is a helpful comparison . . . Yes, Medicare for All would make public the health insurance system, turning it into what is called a single-payer system, but what it would not do is make public the much larger healthcare system, which means that the government would not take over hospitals, doctors would not become government employees, and other features that would constitute socialized medicine. Medicare for All would change how people access and pay for healthcare, moving the financial burden from the individual to the collective . . . / The same is true with student debt relief. Although expensive, it is nonetheless a one-time, short-term remedy for the past and current harm enacted by predatory lending that does not address the sorting function of higher education. The more ambitious proposal of free tuition for public colleges and universities makes higher education accessible now and in the future by moving the financial burned from the individual to the collective . . . Free tuition is not socialized education, and debt relief is even less so” (81).
Bio: “Kevin Kumashiro is an internationally recognized expert on educational policy, school reform, teacher preparation, and educational equity and social justice.”
Key Quotations
• “What counts as common sense is often what stabilizes the status quo, or at least enables U.S. to navigate that status quo, and, in so doing, preserves the privileges therein. Common sense cannot help but to be political, to be implicated in the injustices of our times, and thus, common sense can become intolerant, dogmatic, and insistent, especially when leveraged strategically for oppressive ends. To frame common sense is to convince the masses to buy into a specific story of what and how the world is and must be” (10).
• “When framed as common sense, whether or not backed by research, a reform is more likely to be supported, just as reforms that run counter to what is framed as common sense are more likely to be opposed” (10).
• “In a democracy, education should aim not only to prepare students in the wide range of literacies that constitute the world as it is, but also challenge and nourish their individual and collective capacities to imagine and create the world that is not yet, the world as it could or should be, and if they so choose, to build the tools to change all that is before them. To do so, education would need to involve questioning, rattling, challenging, and at times, remaking the common sense of our times, not conforming to it, or authorizing it, or normalizing it” (12).
• “Trying to uphold the narrow definition of good requires that schools proliferate the many ways of being bad. To serve its primary purpose of sorting, schools need to push some up and pull all others down” (15).
• “ . . .[T]he ideological shift was one that even more squarely positioned the very enterprise of education as being like that of any other industry, to be guided by the Neoliberal tropes that, from the 1970s onward, have implied that there is no alternative. / Neoliberalism? That now-commonsensical notion that the public section has failed, and that the private sector can do better if education—or healthcare or the economy—were simply to allow and incentivize competition as in a free market” (20).
• “Genetically there is more diversity within race groupings than there is between groups. There is not some biologically based determinant for all that gets attributed to race. What, then, makes for race? A much more helpful and accurate way to think about race is as an instrumental construct, a way to talk about groups to advance particular ideologies and systems” (25).
• “By the mid-1800s, common schools had spread across the country, a movement often credited to the vision and leadership of Horace Mann, an educator, lawyer, and elected leader from Massachusetts, known for calling education ‘the great equalizer of the conditions of men,’ who pushed for open, free schools with a common curriculum and structure. One thread across common schools was their curricular focus on moral instruction” (31).
• “The National Education Association (NEA) formed in 1857 (as the National Teachers Association), initially as a professional association focused on legislative and policy advocacy, but in the early-to-mid 1900s it would gradually evolve into a union of teacher and other school personnel, engaging more forcefully in collective bargaining and pushed to the Left in order to compete with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT formed in 1916, primarily by the teachers in Chicago who were frustrated with the priorities of the NEA. From its origins, the AFT focused on improving the conditions for teachers, and through their advocacy and bargaining, demonstrated the impact of teachers acting collectively . . . In subsequent decades, the AFT would align with the more inclusive, Socialist, and militant industrial union organizing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), pushing the profession to the Left in the same way CIO pushed labor organizing in general to the Left” (33).
• “Examples of curricular initiatives outside of the public schools included the Citizenship Schools, which by the early 1960s had burgeoned across the South to teach literacy and citizenship rights to African Americans in order to foster civic engagement and domestic participation . . . Similar were the Freedom Schools, launched in the Freedom Summer of 1964 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to counter the ‘sharecropper’ conformist education of mainstream schooling by raising critical consciousness about issues of inequities in society” (38).
• “The year 1972 also saw the formation of the Business Roundtable that would bring together 300 of the top CEOs in the United States with the goal of shaping economic and social policy to support profits for individual corporations, as well as global dominance by the broader U.S. sector. Public education is the primary pipeline of workers, and unsurprisingly, the Business Roundtable soon targeted educational policy. In 1989, it released a report, Essential Components of a Successful Educational System, offering ‘essential principles’ that would shape how to think of educational improvements in terms of narrow, rigid articulations of standards and accountability, bolstering and guiding the high-stakes testing regime that was already shaping educational reform. The Business Roundtable helped to frame the crisis of public schools in terms of student achievement, launching a national obsession with ‘closing the achievement gap’ that would shape the agendas of even the left-leaning organizations like the teachers unions for the next quarter century and, in so doing, mask systemic and structural injustices by framing the problem and solution in terms of individual performance and accountability” (42).
• “By the 1980s, both Republicans and Democrats were supporting policy initiatives that placed great faith on the market and competition to drive system improvement, whether that system was the economy or education. This so-called Washington Consensus privileged, at least rhetorically, certain structures or conditions as necessary for success—such as fiscal austerity, privatization, market liberalization, individual accountability that incentivized entrepreneurialism, and system deregulation and decentralization that disincentivized market controls—while obscuring the contradictions that coexisted. Such contradictions include grossly subsidizing some as others face austerity, or the over-regulation of some as others enjoy under- or deregulation . . .” (43).
• “This Neoconservative equating of global security with the interests of the corporate elite broadened the scope of U.S. democracy to include Imperialist expansion without regard to other nations’ boundaries or relationships to the United States—thus justifying our intervention anywhere, even within the borders of our allies—at the same time that it severely narrowed the identity of U.S. democracy by framing any critique of the U.S. economy as antipatriotic and a sign of loyalty to the Communism already defeated” (45).
• “Beginning in the 1940s, but mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, time and again, as countries fell into economic turmoil and sought help, the global financial institutions withheld support unless these countries agreed to implementing fiscal austerity, deregulation, and the other conditions that would transform their economies to look more like the free market” (45).
• “Calls for choice, and more pointedly, vouchers, effectively reframe school funding from a social investment and a public good to a private investment and an individual commodity, a reframing credited largely to the work in the 1950s of Friedman and his students and colleagues . . . But the reality is that marketizing economies, was never meant to improve the situation for the masses, and when implemented, has not succeeded at doing so. From the free-market economic reforms foisted upon struggling countries that would open up opportunities for profit out of disaster to the choice and voucher initiatives offered as a means to avoid desegregation and to consolidate wealth, Neoliberal initiatives function to dismantle the public sector, to privatize as a way to fuel corporate profits, and thus, to turn the haves into have-mores” (48).
• “The science of testing, like all of science, is less neutral arbiter of truths and more a tool that will always already be implicated in only certain worldviews, including standardized testing, which has origins in eugenics. Science, like any knowledge production, like all of education, cannot help but to be partial; the content and processes and frameworks of scientific inquiry cannot help but to have cultural biases; and therefore, the uses of science have always been and should always be contested. / High stakes testing animates and embodies the Neoliberal imperative that educational effectiveness and success reflect individual responsibility and capacity and, hence, that educational improvement results from measuring performance and holding people accountable” (51).
• “Rather than assuming that affirmative action prevents the most qualified Asian Americans from getting in [to a college], how about examining how affirmative action can help to define even more broadly, accurately, and ethically the meaning of ‘qualified’? / What if universities were to serve a democratizing function by preparing students not merely to fit into the world as it is, but also to imagine and create the world as it could be? The capacities and potentials of applicants would be less about previous success at being the good student, and more about the potential to build a more democratic future that is still in the making” (60).
• “US law does not recognize that words can wound, can injure, which is the basis of the prohibition of hate speech, but where the law falls short is in misattributing where the harmfulness of hate speech originates” (66).
• “Reframing the debate on free speech requires reframing the central arguments about why such protections are needed. Pedagogically, it is not the case that all speech needs to be aired in order for learning to happen, because hate speech can serve to curtail learning: It can injure others in the room, it can re-enact the very forms of oppression being cited, thus silencing all who are implicated in that citing, preventing all from the collective deliberating inquiry that even the defenders of hate speech articulate as a prerequisite for learning. / The same is true for political arguments. It is not the case that all sides must have equal voice in order for democracy to thrive, because democracy is not only about voicing diverse ideas. No, it is also about collectively deliberating these ideas, which cannot and should not be attempted without the prerequisite that each participant hold themselves accountable for examining and challenging the ways that any speech, including their own, can draw on discursive histories and power relations in ways that injure, that oppress, that run counter to democracy. / The purpose of protecting the freedom of speech in a democracy should be to protect the freedom to question and challenge the oppressive histories and power relations that prevent the realization of democracy, not simply the allowance of anyone to say anything without any accountability for what results” (67).
• “Critics call Sanders’s proposals [for healthcare and student debt relief] Socialist, but the proposals are not anywhere near as Socialist as they could or should be. Medicare for All is a helpful comparison . . . Yes, Medicare for All would make public the health insurance system, turning it into what is called a single-payer system, but what it would not do is make public the much larger healthcare system, which means that the government would not take over hospitals, doctors would not become government employees, and other features that would constitute socialized medicine. Medicare for All would change how people access and pay for healthcare, moving the financial burden from the individual to the collective . . . / The same is true with student debt relief. Although expensive, it is nonetheless a one-time, short-term remedy for the past and current harm enacted by predatory lending that does not address the sorting function of higher education. The more ambitious proposal of free tuition for public colleges and universities makes higher education accessible now and in the future by moving the financial burned from the individual to the collective . . . Free tuition is not socialized education, and debt relief is even less so” (81).
July 1, 2022
Great book, especially if you’re into wonky historical framing of the who, what, where, when, how, and why of educational systemic oppressions and our continual attempts at “fixing” them through a piecemeal, individualistic, neoliberal-indoctrinated weltanshauung.
Kumashiro is a dope thinker, and I wish more people listened to him:
“In this moment, when there is so much reason for despair, I also see much reason for hope. Where I turn for inspiration and sustenance are social movements; the organizing and uprising of m individuals and organizations and communities to collectively analyze, imagine, reframe, pause, redirect, instigate, illuminate- all in the service of changing society. Social movements change policy and law, they transform institutions and social relations and the very conditions of life, and they do so through collective action to queer the ideas that have become normalized and commonsensical, even among Progressives, including the ideas about the purposes of education, its problems, and the possibilities that lie ahead.”
We must collectively organize and disrupt the “common sense” understandings we’ve been socialized to believe are impenetrable. “It is what it is” + “rugged individualism” = recipe for stagnation, at best, and regression, most likely.
If you’re not ready to burn this system to the ground and rebuild, at the very least are you willing to make your familiar strange?
Kumashiro is a dope thinker, and I wish more people listened to him:
“In this moment, when there is so much reason for despair, I also see much reason for hope. Where I turn for inspiration and sustenance are social movements; the organizing and uprising of m individuals and organizations and communities to collectively analyze, imagine, reframe, pause, redirect, instigate, illuminate- all in the service of changing society. Social movements change policy and law, they transform institutions and social relations and the very conditions of life, and they do so through collective action to queer the ideas that have become normalized and commonsensical, even among Progressives, including the ideas about the purposes of education, its problems, and the possibilities that lie ahead.”
We must collectively organize and disrupt the “common sense” understandings we’ve been socialized to believe are impenetrable. “It is what it is” + “rugged individualism” = recipe for stagnation, at best, and regression, most likely.
If you’re not ready to burn this system to the ground and rebuild, at the very least are you willing to make your familiar strange?
December 20, 2020
A lot of history and politics were skillfully packed into this short book. Though I have heard many of the ideas in this book before, the way he organizes and explains the concepts of Neoliberalism, common sense, common good (etc) in relation to public education, is very helpful. I plan to share some of these ideas with my preservice teachers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews