I was able to set up these local food projects in BSC because of my position in the schools. For six years prior to the start of the research, I worked in Bailey County creating and executing student programming as part of federal grants in the district that help get more kids to college. I was a known entity to the kids that I recruited and trusted by the district and school administrations.
That access was key to the success of the program because Bailey County Schools, like many rural schools in Appalachia and across the country, can be very insular. A small, rural district, BCS serves 8,000 students in 5 elementary schools, 2 middle and one high school spread out over a 300+ square mile landmass. Every school day, BCS students get on buses that follow creeks down hollars to join the county’s single east-west highway that parallels the tributaries of the country's river systems. It is not odd for a student to be on a bus for an hour or more both to and from school.
When a BSC child gets off the bus, they have a 50/50 chance that the principal of their school is immediately related to half of the other principals in the district. Before the last
Superintendent retired, the district’s chief executive was married into the dynasty that has run the district for decades. I think the factor that got me my job in the district was the fact that the senior member of the search committee had been my 8th grade PE coach. Although the district was recently commended for the percentage of its teaching staff that has earned Nationally Board certification (NBPTS, 2019), the majority of BCS teachers and administrators got their degrees at one of the handful of regional colleges within an hour and a half drive.
Highland HS is two main buildings connected by an elevated corridor with a walkway underneath. The original architectural plans were drawn for a school in Florida and “the
breezyway” was intended to provide kids the opportunity to be outside as they changed classes. In the 1980s it also offered kids the opportunity to terrorize other students by hanging them off the breezeway. I can remember seeing more than one kid dangling upside down 30 feet above the pavement with a couple wise guys holding onto their ankles. As society became more litigious and risk averse, the breezeway was closed in with windows. It is now much nicer to walk from one building to the other during the Appalachian winter.
Building A houses the administration offices, the auditorium and most of the classrooms including a full auto garage, a huge bay for the wood shop and an equally huge bay for the agriculture classes. Building B houses the science and early childhood education class, the gym and the school cafeteria. Approximately eight hundred kids and a hundred faculty and staff walk the halls each day. In a small community like Bailey County, teachers and students frequently know each other outside of school as well, either as a coach, a family member or they go to the same church. That multiplicity of roles translates into students receiving a particularly high level of personal attention and care from the staff at their school. I have never worked with more sincere and well-intentioned people.
Pedagogically, BCS is firmly rooted in the educational zeitgeist of our time. The district and high school’s mission both state an intention “to help all students to achieve their full potential as life-long learners and global citizens.” In its focus on global goals for local
education, the district’s mission statement is in lockstep with both state and federally articulated goals for public education. For years, the explicit goal of state and federal education policy was to prepare children to compete in the global marketplace (NC State Board of Education, 2017; Mechaber, 2011; National Governors Association, 2010; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, nd). The rhetoric of global citizenry firmly roots the focus of BCS and U.S. public education in the
narrative of globalization. Globalization is the idea that “capital has now become a free-floating entity, organizing production transnationally, independently of national boundaries” (Rao, 2000, p. 173). Undergirding the narrative of globalization is neoliberalism.
The basic tenet of the neoliberal doctrine is that goods and services – including education – are most effectively delivered by the free market and therefore should be privatized (Spring, 2008). Neoliberalism includes “the dramatic expansion of that eloquent fiction, the free market; the drastic reduction of government responsibility for social needs; the reinforcement of
intensely competitive structures of mobility both inside and outside the school” (Apple, 2001). In short, neoliberalism is the belief that the commons should be enclosed; this includes the
commons of public education.
The neoliberal agenda for education is characterized by expansion of the free market; reduction of government investment in education; competition between schools and between teachers and between students; centralization of curriculum; corporatization of governance structure; and an accent on testing (Apple, 2001; Giroux, 2010; Spring, 2008; Marginson, 2002; de Oliver, M., & Briscoe, 2001). Further, the marketization of education positions global capital as the arbiter of valid knowledge to the exclusion of other, local knowledges (Richardson, 2012). The neoliberal push to privatize public education shifts the locus of curriculum creation away from the school districts and into the boardrooms of private, educational resource and testing companies (Hill & Kumar, 2009). Giroux (2010) warns that what is lost with the neoliberal marketization of education “are the economic, political, educational, and social conditions that provide a supportive culture for democracy to flourish” (p. 188- 189).
My experience in BCS has taught me to recognize “instructional time” as a piece of neoliberal education argot. It is measured by the minute each day and jealously guarded from
such threats as excessive bathroom breaks or field trips. BCS leadership takes as gospel Raleigh’s neoliberal, edumetric directives regarding end-of-grade test scores, attendance and graduation rates and, more recently, ACT scores. In staff meetings and faculty observations, EVVAS growth scores are used as an operationalization for school and teacher effectiveness. Created by a global business and data analytics software company, the EVVAS software uses a student’s end-of-grade test scores as input for a “value-added model” that is meant to describe a teachers “effectiveness” (SAS, 2020). Value added teacher evaluation models such as EVVAS have been roundly criticized for their assumption that teachers are responsible for and control student leaning and for their heavy reliance on state-administered end-of-grade testing; reliability and construct-validity have also been called into question (Robinson, 2017). Moreover, the tool applies a corporate capitalist vocabulary and approach to the inherently non-business activity of teaching. The fact that it is used by the State of NC to describe the quality of a teacher’s teaching is a crystalline example of private, corporate inroads into public education.
To increase its performance on these metrics, Highland High School has dedicated significant resources to para-curricular programming such as school-day ACT prep sessions and summer credit recovery bootcamps. These interventions almost always use corporately produced, publicly purchased online preparation and/or remediation software. These activities center
neoliberal metrics as the school’s learning goals and normalize the narrative that schools should be run as businesses.
Ironically, these edumetric prep programs at Highland High are paid for by the federal grant that I administrate, the GEAR UP grant. The core of GEAR UP’s service provision model is the cultivation of “public-private partnerships” in participating schools (Chough, 2018). “Public-private partnerships” have long been recognized as neoliberal wolves in sheep’s
clothing, because they provide an avenue for private corporations to establish their product as a core service of public schools (Linder, 1999; Miraftab, 2004). Private companies participate in the grant-funded, time-limited partnership on that hope that, once the grant money runs out, the schools will be so dependent on their service that the district will pick up the cost with hard money. I have sat in meetings in which well-intentioned people have discussed at length the administrative acrobatics required to continue funding services that had been provided by expiring grant programs; it was as if the well-being of the service provider was paramount.
A huge beneficiary of the public-private partnerships are educational technology
companies (Juneman & Olmedo, 2019). As a 1-1 school, Highland High puts a Chromebook in the hands of every Freshman when they walk through the door and that laptop stays with the student through their Senior year. While the cost of the Chromebooks don’t distract local resources (they are paid for with grant funding), they act as a portal and technological platform for numerous pieces of educational software - USATest Prep, Tutor.com, PLATO - to which the school subscribes.
In a truly macabre twist, the grant funding that pays for Highland’s Chromebooks comes from the Golden Leaf Foundation. The Foundation was established through monies paid by cigarette manufacturers to the state of NC as part of the Master Settlement Agreement (Jones et al., 2007). The Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 was the largest civil litigation settlement in U.S. history in which four cigarette companies settled with 46 states, four territories, Puerto Rico and DC to “recover costs incurred to treat sick and dying cigarette smokers” (Public Health Law Center, 2019). So the penance paid by one corporate industry for knowingly decimating the health of entire generations with an addiction to nicotine now is enabling another corporate
industry to get entire generations addicted to the dopamine hits they get from the digital experience (Tschaepe, 2016).
As it turns out the new addiction is even more deadly than the old one. As Dr. James Lavine of the Mayo Clinic told the LA Times: "Sitting is more dangerous than smoking"
(MacVean, 2014). Prolonged sitting is associated with increased risks of cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and back pain (Van Uffelen et al., 2010). Chromebooks themselves require students to be stationary, and by giving digital devices a central role in the education process, schools are signaling to students that they not only condone but place high value on interacting with the digital. Indeed, every time I walk through the commons area at Highland HS during mid-class breaks, it is like I am walking through a sea of silent cranes. The student’s heads are bowed in mute interaction with their phones. We’ve traded one deadly addiction for another. The logos of the profiting corporations have changed, but this time public education - Highland HS included - is pushing the addictive substance.
By focusing the attention of the public education system on the agendas and technologies of the global economy, neoliberal public education privileges the desires of multinational
organizations over the development of local, community economies (Schafft, 2010) and the epistemology of global capital over local ways of knowing (Wane, 2008). In this respect, neoliberal public education exhibits the intention and mechanisms of a colonial education system. In the next chapter, I trace the metamorphosis of territorial colonialism into economic neocolonialism and frame the neoliberal education model as the rightful inheritor and