Winners and losers: that’s what we’re left with in the winner-take-all society. We see evidence of this all over the place, as (for example) Steven Greenhouse reports in the New York Times on forced wage cuts as the latest employment trend. The ongoing punishment of working people—forcing wage earners with middle-class incomes back into working poverty—is taking place even as our elites treat themselves to ever-sweeter luxuries. I won’t comment on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to a hedge fund manager, or on Michelle Obama’s time away at Spain’s most expensive resort, except to say that one begins to miss the Carters and plain cardigans.

Smelling the Money

This yawning split between winners and losers is the all-important context in which to evaluate Barack Obama’s signature education initiative, appropriately dubbed “The Race to the Top” (RTTT). Because this is Obama’s program (and because so many liberals either count themselves among the achievatron class or else identify with it), RTTT has garnered far too little criticism. Cornel West has reported that he engaged Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a major private tussle about it. And West’s critique is the same as mine: this program will significantly add to the burden of underachieving poor children, making them double losers as students who attend “loser” schools in a mad scramble for funding.

There are other problems, of course, some having partly to do with the carelessness with which the states enacted the desperate measures needed in order even to qualify for RTTT funding. My home town newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, recently devoted a full-page editorial these problems, concluding: “Race to the Top has unfortunately emphasized big and fast over well-structured and thoughtful.” And last week the New York Times ran a juicy Page One report on the droves of hustlers and charlatans who have already tried claim a piece of the action: shameless operators who know zero about education but who promise local school agencies quick results. “Many of these companies clearly just smell the money,” noted Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy in Washington DC.

I want to stick to the ethical frame. When a consortium of civil rights groups dared recently to question the idea of using competitive grants to spur reform, our president snapped back that his “Race” program could in no way be seen as an attack on minority children because “lifting up quality education for all our children… is the central premise” of the program. Well, ah, yes: RTTT certainly does lift up the idea of quality schooling and will doubtless benefit some children. But does it also lift up the ideal of equality and equal access for all? And what of the vast majority of students who receive no benefit; and who will suffer as their school systems are branded as losers? On these all-important questions, Obama is silent.

And it seems that hardly anyone has bothered to notice what the program itself represents pedagogically and thus ethically as well. Does it not reinforce what is already most ethically dubious in our operational values—i.e., naked, ruthless competition for too few prizes, and competition that is premised on an economy of scarcity rather than on an economy of abundance?

Creative Destruction

RTTT is part of a doleful trend to save a lucky few at the expense of the commons. Over the past 30 years we have already seen many public policy moves to pluck some potentially successful students from the flames of unpromising school environments: e.g., the school voucher movement, the (related) strong and continuing effort to capture public funds for parochial education, certain strands within the charter school movement, and George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative. What no one likes to admit is that while all of this tinkering has been going on, America’s urban schools have, on balance, grown progressively more segregated by race and class and have generated still worse academic results.

Along with this we have seen powerful private individuals push their way onto the national stage seeking to play the role of education hero by applying Joseph Schumpeter’s formula of “creative destruction” to public education systems. These individual players (my own city’s Eli Broad comes to mind) are people who do not really accept the 19th and early 20th century concept of quality common schooling—which really was “America’s best idea” (which is not to say that the creation of a national park system was a bad idea). The well-heeled wannabe saviors have all rallied behind the Obama-Duncan cash competition to induce states to trash established practices and put forward the most edgy and experimental ideas in order to boost student achievement on standardized tests: as if we do not already have enough teaching-to-the-test going on, and as if America’s public school teachers were not already anxious enough about retaining their jobs and delivering good results.

No one is suggesting that US public education is not in need of serious research-based innovation; the question is whether staging a race by dangling $3.6 billion dollars over the heads of freaked-out and desperate state and local school authorities is the way to go.

“This Will be Good for You”

Common schooling—an education that lifts up everyone, not just a few—has deep religious roots. Recall that as the Israelites leave Egypt, they are repeatedly urged to repudiate Egyptian ways; i.e., to leave behind the ways of abusive power and excessive personal acquisition. They are instructed in ways of maintaining the commons and sharing God’s abundance. Initially they have no king. And when they finally acquire one, the idea of kingship remains the idea of serving and maintaining the commons. Kings who forget this are ipso facto unworthy of David’s throne and have forfeited God’s blessing and favor. I could go on, but suffice it to say that what are called Sabbath-jubilee ethics are all about maintenance of the commons so that each one made in God’s image and likeness may flourish free of oppression. The Hebrew prophets persistently, sometimes obnoxiously, remind the rulers and the people of these initial operating instructions and recall the old covenants relating to godly and interdependent living.

There is no doubt that American common schooling bears significant traces of this Hebraic legacy. New England’s public education pioneers understood that good schooling and literacy represent a form of democratic power and add to the people’s capacity for self-government: no king. But what esteemed theologian Walter Brueggemann calls a persisting “royal consciousness” remains a huge problem.

I want to suggest that the “Race to the Top” controversy encapsulates the problem of persisting royal consciousness. Significantly, the battle lines here are between different cohorts of Democrats. And it is by no means a question of troglodyte teachers unions on one side and the enlightened advocates of social mobility on the other. This fight is emblematic of the larger fight for the soul (I use that term loosely) of the Democratic Party. It is about the reach of a Social Darwinist, or royalist, mindset of one segment of the party—a reach commonly signified by tags like “New Democrat” or “neo-liberal.”

To me the current fight is even reminiscent of the successful campaign by financial elites to “update” United States trade policy during the Clinton years. They pushed through the NAFTA and WTO agreements even though millions of working-class Democrats and thousands of US manufacturing centers were cruelly slaughtered along the way. That carnage is by now very well documented. With a handful of exceptions, neither Mexican workers nor US workers received any benefits at all from the NAFTA, whereas a very significant part of our current immigration problem stems from its devastating and crippling effects inside Mexico. The only distinct winners have been the bi-national corporate elites and the US investor class. Yet the same well-placed and well-paid neo-liberal types who gave us the NAFTA and other skanky trade deals have the nerve to keep saying, “Trust us. We know better than you. This will be good for you.” Very much what Mr. Obama has been saying about his RTTT program.

Ethically speaking, this much should be obvious: public education must never be structured like one of those ghastly reality television shows in which the winners are lauded (and often given false hope) while the losers are shunted aside and humiliated. Public education must remain among the public goods that will be treated and funded as a commons—which also means that this is one field that cannot be exposed to widespread private enclosure or to the whimsies of the royal consciousness.

And there is one more thing to consider. Racing their way through an ultra-competitive funding matrix, even those school systems (and teachers and students) who can gasp their way across the finish line will remain in an ethically challenged condition. Because, as Bill Coffin used to say, “Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”