State disinvestment,technologies of choice and ‘fitting in’: neoliberal transformations in US public education

Given state cuts to US public education, overcrowding and underfunding in urban district schools continue to grow. Yet, how parents understand the role of state disinvestment on underfunded and overcrowded public schools remains relatively unexamined. Drawing from an ethnographic study of school choice in Arizona, I explore how a group of white parents from diverse income and educational levels, who exited their child from a district school to enroll in a charter school, articulated state disinvestment in their everyday lives. Findings show that parents blamed local schools for what were largely the effects of state disinvestment. In particular, parents connected underfunding and overcrowding with a lack of district responsiveness to individual concerns to express the view that dire conditions were a personal and not a collective problem. Concurrent with the view that they were ‘were forced to choose’ a charter school due to a lack of district responsiveness, parents developed the belief that choice makes education more equal, especially for students who don’t ‘fit in’ to the district school. In total, findings highlight how technologies of choice enter into local cultural and material struggles to transform the relationship between parents and schools from a social to an economic one.     

Putting “the system” into a school autonomy reform: the case of the Independent Public Schools program

The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school communities with a range of responsibilities. This paper seeks to better understand the kind of post-welfare form of government IPS enacts. Using concepts from the governmentality literature, this paper analyses documents related to the program, and interview data collected from key government officials responsible for the initiative. It finds that while IPS renders operable a neoliberal critique of the public sector by implementing the processes of contractualization, it also diverges from the ideal schema of neoliberalism. Analysis reveals that a number of strategic, pragmatic and political concerns have resulted in what some may view as a contradictory rationality of “the system” being instituted as a key element in this autonomizing reform. The paper calls for attention to the actual operationalizing of neoliberal reform projects to gain a nuanced understanding of modern regimes of rule.     

Neoliberalism and curriculum in higher education: a post-colonial analyses

In an era of internationalisation and globalisation, neoliberal agendas have now become important aspects of many institutional and national governments’ higher education policy. A major aspect of these neoliberal agendas is their impact on the curriculum. This paper critically examines the impact of neoliberal agendas on curriculum through a postcolonial and decolonising lens, drawing on research conducted in the African context to illuminate the theoretical analysis presented. Drawing on 48 semi-structured interviews and documentary analyses across three public universities in Ghana, we examine the relationship between neoliberal agendas, neo-colonialism and curriculum imperatives in African higher education. The analysis illuminates the ways that hegemonic discourses connected to neoliberal agendas re-privilege Western-oriented values and perspectives and impact the curriculum changes in African higher education institutions.     

Governing through parents: a genealogical enquiry of education policy and the construction of neoliberal subjectivities in England

In this paper we explore the various spaces and sites through which the figure of the parent is summoned to inhabit and perform market norms and practices in the field of education in England. Since the late 1970s successive governments have called on parents to enact certain duties and obligations in relation to the state. These duties include adopting and internalizing responsibility for all kinds of risks, liabilities and inequities formerly managed by the Keynesian welfare state. In this paper we examine how English parents are compelled to embody certain market norms and practices as they navigate the field of education. Adopting genealogical enquiry and policy discourse analysis as our methodology, we explore how parents across three policy sites or spaces are constructed as objects and purveyors of utility and ancillaries to marketization. This includes a focus on how parents are summoned as (1) consumers or choosers of education services; (2) governors and overseers of schools and (3) producers and founders of schools.     

Metaphors of nature and development: reflection on critical course of sustainable business

This article examines the role of metaphors of nature, sustainable development, and neoliberalism in business education. The research underpinning this article focused on a shift in the language business students used in response to a critical course on the neoliberal economic model. Results of the examination of metaphors before and after this course suggest a change in these higher education students’ perceptions toward the recognition of culturally unique and ecologically sensitive ways of conceiving environment and human development. The study also shows that intervention courses can play a role in disrupting how university students view nature in relation to neoliberal economics, business practices, and social relations. It is argued that the alternative conceptions of nature and development help to inform and empower students about solutions to the sustainability challenges.     

The marketised university and the politics of motherhood

In this paper, we offer a critique of neoliberal power from the perspective of the gendered, sexualised, raced and classed politics of motherhood in English universities. By using dialogical auto-ethnographic methods to examine our own past experiences as full-time employed mother–academics, we demonstrate how feminist academic praxis can not only help make the gendered workings of neoliberal power more visible, but also enable us to nurture and sustain alternative ways of being and working in, against and outside the university. Far from desiring greater inclusion into a system which enshrines repressive logics of productivity and reproduces gendered subjectivities, inequalities, silences and exclusions, we aim to refuse and transgress it by bringing feminist critiques of knowledge, labour and neoliberalism to bear on how we understand our own experiences of motherhood in the academic world.     

Challenges to critical legal education: A case study

The article analyses the impact of the neoliberal policy framework and managerialism on critical legal education in the context of Waikato Law Faculty, University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. The delivery of critical legal education challenges the ideology and implementation of current tertiary education policy and training because it is designed to deliver critical knowledge and not just vocational information. Waikato Law School was established in 1990 the year the neoliberal tertiary policy was enacted in the Education Amendment Act 1990. It represented an attempt to introduce a more critical and inclusive approach to legal education. The article provides an account of the struggle to maintain a critical approach under a statutory framework that requires conformity to government policy designed to cut the cost of tertiary education and integrate universities into a neoliberal policy framework. The case study is intended to illustrate the insidious influence of the policy on undermining a legal education that prepares students to think critically. It is also intended to illustrate that it is possible to resist this interference in the fundamental role of the academic to be the critic and conscience of society.     

Creating Educational Destruction: A Critical Exploration of Central Neoliberal Concepts and Their Transformative Effects on Public Education

Individualism and competition are central neoliberal concepts that have profoundly altered the U.S. public education system. This article draws on poststructuralist theory and advances the argument that these concepts have produced problematic policies and deeply flawed school choice mechanisms such as charter schools and school vouchers. I also explore how educational activists contested neoliberal ideology and reshaped reality as they defeated a neoliberal education policy in North Carolina.