Corporate Leaders, Resistant Youth, and School Reform in Sunbelt City: The Political Economy of Education

Abstract

This paper reports on a 1988 field study of a chamber of commerce Task Force on Education and Jobs in a southern U. S. city we call Sunbelt City. It highlights a local controversy among business and education leaders over school reform. We argue that this local problem reflects a growing national trend of business intervention in public schools around a putative “crisis in education” over the quality of students not bound for college. Local and national capitalists hold that schools “fail to educate, ” producing a labor pool that cannot and/or will not work diligently. We draw on resistance literature in education to argue that non-college bound students' educational outcomes are realistic responses to the unstable and unpromising labor market in the United States. We believe the resulting local policy paralysis, seen in Sunbelt City, reflects capitalists' inability to see how they contribute to an array of contradictions in the social fabric.