Neoliberalism in the classroom:
Current school reform in the United States of America
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Publisher Description
Neoliberalism is increasingly recognized as a term to describe the political condition in which we now live globally. As a political perspective, neoliberalism views all social and political relationships through the lens of the market. How does this perspective perceive public education and how has the politics of neoliberalism affected this sphere. For the last two decades a massive neoliberal experiment has been conducted within American K-12 education, the results of which are only now starting to become apparent. Charter schools in the US now educate millions of students. They appeal to parents who want more school choice and higher academic achievement. But there are many negative social impacts of such schools that tend to get obscured by the politicians and powerful business advocates of this model of public education.
This article gives a brief overview of the history of the charter movement, profiles the key non-profits supporting it, and critiques the social agenda behind the movement. The work of educational historian Diane Ravitch and political theorist David Harvey are referenced extensively to capture both the educational and overtly political dimensions of US school reform.
Brian Elliott has taught at universities in Scotland, Ireland, Turkey, and the United States. He is the author of four books on contemporary European philosophy, including Constructing Community (Lexington 2010) and Benjamin for Architects (Routledge 2011). He is currently working on a book on the politics of climate change.
Customer Reviews
Great summary of the crisis in the education system
Neoliberalism is the past few decades characterized by privatization, deregulation, tax write-off‘s for the rich, giving public and social welfare for the rich, and canceling public and social welfare for the poor. It is the widening of the capitalist market economy to commodify everything in anything. Including the education system. This means that the education is getting more and more under the control of business elites and corporations and the non-profits they fund, and less and less under control of who is most effected by these decisions, the teachers, children, parents and the community schools are in.
“Reformists” in education support the market driven approach, which is characterized by an explosion of charter schools. On the surface they claim freedom of choice in school gives students more freedom. This is a rhetorical gimmick to hide their goals of putting schools under control of the rich.
This control is done through so called accountability through standardized testing. Standardized tests are created by corporations schools must pay in order to receive federal funds. The standardized tests themselves must meet the standards of the rich and powerful, so it’s the rich and powerful that ultimately are the owns keeping schools accountable. And the rich and powerful have no one keeping them accountable.
Meanwhile, teachers unions, and generally most teachers, students and parents are against standardized testing and prefer schools be held accountable by teachers, students and parents. This would be democracy in practice.
So ultimately it’s a question of who keeps schools accountable. The authority of the rich and powerful through standardized testing, or teachers, students, parents and their communities through democracy.