ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the book we asked whether schools constructed in the political spectacle are the schools we want-schools that enhance the best in children and in society. To guide the reader to answer that question we provided a set of theoretical ideas that frame schools within education policy and education policy within a perverse, irrational, and anti-democratic form of politics. We brought together a mass of concrete details that tie those ideas to the hard ground of experience of real people in real times and places and institutional contexts. We have made the case that all of the elements of political spectacle are present in the current political culture, with significant consequences on policy, hence on schools themselves. In this final chapter we synthesize this evidence and analysis into ten lessons we hope to pass on to the reader. We then ask whether education policy, as the field traditionally defines it, can do any good at all in the current political climate.