Race to the Top and the Exclusion of Welfare Recipients From Educational Policy Discourse

Abstract

In 2009, President Obama and his administration sought to overhaul the existing educational reform program and launched their initiative titled Race to the Top (RTTT). RTTT, a competitive grant program, comprised six priorities designed to help states reform their current educational systems. Priority five calls for states to evaluate their current adult education programs and explore how they could improve those programs through the collaboration of community and states agencies. States currently support, design, and implement adult education programs under the federal guidelines of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). Although WIA addresses the needs of a targeted population of adult learners, it does not specifically address the educational needs of welfare recipients. Welfare recipients, who are among those considered to be in dire need of education and training, lack the support of policy to access adult education programs. This article explores the tensions that exist between the espoused purpose of RTTT and WIA, using the state of Texas’ adult education policies as a case example. By using critical discourse analysis, we examine the policies in RTTT and WIA at the state level that defines the nature and scope of adult education. This form of analysis provides an opportunity to critically examine and explore the language of these various policies by focusing on not only what is present in the text but also on what is absent from it as well.