Introduction to “The Politics of Educational Reforms”

Abstract

It has become increasingly clear that education is a site of conflict. This essay examines the ideological positions that now dominate educational reforms and suggests a number of roles that critically democratic educators should play in -confronting these reforms. It then details the contributions that the authors -included in this special issue make toward understanding both the limits of current reforms and the possibilities of interrupting them.     

The End of Public Schools? Or a New Beginning?

Abstract

Public education is becoming increasingly privatized as private philanthropic organizations, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and corporations, such as Pearson, dominate the policy-making process, and more students enroll in publicly funded but privately administered charter schools. The privatization of education results from the dominance of neoliberal ideals promoting market competition, individualism, and standardized testing. In response, we call for replacing neoliberalism with social democratic policies emphasizing community, trust, and democratic deliberation.     

Freeing the Mind of the Oppressed

This article examines the evidence that supports and rebuts the claims of school resegregation. By examining both types of evidence and considering them complementary (James 1986 James, F. 1986. A new generalized “exposure-based” segregation index: Demonstration in Denver and Houston. Sociological Methods and Research, 14(3): 301–16. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Kelly and Miller 1989 Kelly, P. and Miller, W. 1989. Assessing desegregation efforts: No “best measure.”. Public Administration Review, 49(5): 431–37. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the author gives the reader a deeper understanding of the current trends in school segregation. First, the literature on the topic of school segregation is discussed. Then follows a discussion of the methods used in the study and the findings. The conclusion includes implications of the findings.     

PSYCHIATRY

This article describes the reading instructional program that first-graders in an urban school located in a large, Midwestern city received as a result of a grant initiative. Various assessments of the children's reading revealed some important areas for reading success were missing. As a result, suggestions were shared with the school staff to balance the first-grade reading curriculum. However, one confounding variable prevented the teachers’ ability to change their instruction.     

The Changing Influence of Educational Policy and Race on Metropolitan Inequality, 1970–2010

Abstract

Schools do not receive much recognition within urban sociological research for the role they perform in shaping the demographic, structural, and social features of neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan areas. In contrast, this article links schools, and the racial avoidance that operates through educational policy, to the extreme economic polarization of metropolitan areas. The author considers why the expansion of school choice has not yet produced the decline in economic polarization that research suggested it might.     

Teaching: A Job or a Profession? The Perceptions of Educators

Researchers designed a study to investigate educators’ perceptions about whether teaching is a job or a profession. A survey was developed to investigate factors such as individual definitions of a job and a profession, years of experience teaching, grade level or category of education, and individual perceptions of a profession. The respondents were 401 upper-level undergraduate preservice teachers and graduate students who were professional educators. Data collected showed many aspects of individuals’ perceptions of teaching including control of teaching and working situations, ethics, and personal perceptions of being a professional. Based on the findings from the study, researchers concluded that educators believe teaching is a profession.     

Assembling,disassembling and reassembling ‘youth services’ in Austerity Britain

This paper moves from a reading of processes that are transforming public services in ways that amount to a dismantling of the welfare state in the UK. In order to interrogate these processes, the paper focuses on ‘youth’ and ‘youth services’. Framed by an analysis of the aggressive disinvestment of ‘austerity’, we take up Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage as a tool to map and understand the apparently disparate factors or components that come together to produce a ‘youth service assemblage’ and its disassembly and reassembly. As we do this we demonstrate the usefulness of assemblage as way of encountering the productivity of relations across components and avoiding an account that over-states the force or scope of ‘policy’. The paper concludes that by analysing in terms of assemblage, new challenges for thinking about politics emerge, in particular the limits of thinking in terms of a resistant political subject and the need to engage ambiguity.     

Wooden dolls and disarray: rethinking United States’ teacher education to the side of quantification

ABSTRACT

According to the 2013 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), most teacher education programs are failing in the United States. These programs, NCTQ insists, are not preparing new teachers with sufficiently ‘scientific’ methods and are, in the process, failing to properly train prospective teachers how to ‘lead the classroom’ (p. 2). In the deficit discourses employed by NCTQ, teacher education programs have become a cesspool of ‘mediocrity’ (p. 1) where the overall findings ‘paint a grim picture of teacher preparation in the United States’ (p. 17). We actually agree that things are grim, but for very different reasons and in very different spaces. Using NCTQ’s ‘Teacher Prep Review: A Review of the Nation’s Teacher Preparation Program’ as an entryway, the authors argue that the report typifies not only an alarmist approach usually found in conservative attempts at social policy and reform, but also further reifies quasi-empirically based research as the best (indeed the only) method by which to measure effective teacher education programs. The authors deconstruct the taken-for-granted assumptions within the NCTQ text, challenging quantification as a research/policy paradigm while arguing for the value of newly imagining educational possibility through risk and creation.     

A Race to the Top From the Bottom of the Well? The Paradox of Race and U.S. Education Reform

Abstract

This article explores the paradox of “race” and U.S. education reform in the 21st century. I consider how the invisible ontology of race and its entangled relationship with class divert our attention from economic inequality and undermine policies intended to redress racial inequality in schools. I conclude that the education research community must unpack its use of “race” and focus on the role of racism in the maintenance of racial caste in America's schools.     

Capitalizing on crisis: venture philanthropy’s colonial project to remake urban education

This article focuses on the increased power of venture philanthropy to shape education in urban communities of color in the USA. The author situates venture philanthropy’s expanded influence in urban school districts in the nexus of urban disinvestment, neoliberal governance, wealth concentration, and economic crisis. The author argues that billionaire philanthropists are using the fiscal crisis of the state to shape education policy and governance, operating as part of the ‘shadow state’. Capitalizing on austerity politics and their philanthropies’ embeddedness in the state and advocacy organizations, venture capitalists deploy their enormous wealth and political influence to restructure urban school districts that predominantly serve low-income African American, Latino, and other students of color. The goal of their neoliberal agenda is to restructure education to serve economic competitiveness and to open up the public education sector to capital accumulation. The fusion of the state and capital, through the interrelation of venture philanthropy and government at all scales, to impose policies of disenfranchisement, public school closings, privatization, and appropriation of Black urban space, constitutes a new colonialism. The article illustrates this dynamic through case studies of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.     

Middle-class parents’ educational work in an academically selective public high school

This article reports the findings of a study on the nature of parent–school engagement at an academically selective public high school in New South Wales, Australia. Such research is pertinent given recent policies of ‘choice’ and decentralization, making a study of local stakeholders timely. The research comprised a set of interviews with parents and teachers (n = 15), through which parents – all members of the school’s Parents’ and Citizens’ group – theorized and explained their involvement with the school, and teachers spoke about their views on this involvement. Results are organized around three themes: ‘how parents worked to nurture their children’s schooling’, ‘reasons behind parents’ involvement with the school’, and ‘communication and use of parental resources by the school’. Overall it was found that while parents were making significant efforts to involve themselves in the education of their children and with the school more broadly, the reasons for their involvement were not always consistent, but instead revealed a range of motivations for and conceptions of parents’ roles within schools, which at times were at odds with the teachers’. Through this, the study contributes to our understanding of middle-class parent engagement at an unusual and particular type of school.     

谁改变了我们的常识?——美国教育保守主义运动与教育不平等

本文考察和分析了美国教育走向保守主义的趋势及其所引发的冲突和斗争。美国教育政策的保守趋势运动是多元的,存在着不同的取向,主要有四种力量构成新自由主义、新保守主义、威权民粹主义和正处在上升阶段的由专业人员和管理人员所构成的新中产阶级。本文侧重探讨了保守主义在改造美国教育的运动中居于领导地位的前两支力量,并认为在教育和社会政策领域,这些力量成功地构建成一个联盟,该联盟成功的重要原因在于对常识的改造,作者将之称为“保守主义的现代化”。     

The complexities of workplace experience for lesbian and gay teachers

Discrimination against lesbians and gay men has been endemic throughout Australia’s history. However, in twenty-first century Australian society there are signs of growing sophistication and acceptance of sexual diversities. Despite this, schools continue to be organisations where sexual ‘difference’ is marginalised and silenced, having ramifications on the professional lives of lesbian and gay teachers. This article, based on qualitative research with 14 lesbian and gay teachers working in metropolitan Sydney, explores the ways in which schooling micro-cultures and systemic practices affect participants’ working lives. In particular, it highlights the ways in which these teachers negotiate the complex discursive fields in schools to perform their ‘professional’ teacher subjectivities in ways that are personally functional and effective, and simultaneously organisationally ‘acceptable’ in what has been for lesbian and gay teachers, traditionally hostile workplaces.