Loosely Defined: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Discursive Contestation in Post-Brown Education Reform

Abstract

ABSTRACT This critical policy analysis examines how U.S. education reform in the post-Brown v.Board of Education era co-opted civil rights language to advance neoliberal and White supremacist agendas. By tracing the evolution of key terms like equality, freedom, and choice in influential policy texts from 1954 to 1965, the paper illuminates discursive strategies used to naturalize market-based reforms and deflect attention from structural racism. While focused on the U.S. context, the analysis has broad international relevance, as similar processes of rearticulating civil rights language to serve neoliberal ends can be observed in education reforms globally. The analytical framework developed here can be adapted to examine how concepts of equality, freedom, and choice operate in education policies across diverse national settings. This work advances understanding of how ostensibly progressive language can be used to deepen educational inequalities.