Neoliberal Education Reform Research Articles

The university in the global age: reconceptualising the humanities and social sciences for the twenty-first century.

By any metric, the twentieth century university was a successful institution. However, in the twenty-first century, ongoing neoliberal educational reform has been accompanied by a growing epistemological crisis in the meaning and value of the humanities and social sciences (HaSS). Concerns have been expressed in two main forms. The governors of tertiary education systems—governments, private investors, university managers and consultancy firms—have focused on how HaSS can adapt to the perceived research needs of the 21st century. At the same time, a competing set of discourses has been generated by scholars and researchers employed within the critical HaSS themselves. This article considers what these differing perspectives mean for reconceptualising HaSS for the twenty-first century. After surveying the contemporary climate, this article examines the findings of key reports on the future of the humanities from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Alongside those of Western Europe, these university systems are arguably the key drivers for the global university system. It is argued that these reports provide an opportunity for emerging universities to reflect on their research priorities and developmental strategies. The article concludes with some reflections on the wider consequences of the globalising of the university system, the increase of China's influence in Asia, and ponders the prospect of post-human/ist futures of the humanities.

Special Issue: Unequal Schools and Communities: A Critical Examination of Neoliberal Education Reform

Over the past twenty years, neoliberal education reforms have gained increasing momentum across the United States, emphasizing school choice, market discipline, standardized testing, high-stakes ev...

Edtech disruption logic and policy work: the case of an Israeli edtech unit

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the intersection between neo-liberal educational reforms and educational technology in the Israeli education system, through a study of the policy work of an edtech research and development unit in Israel named MindCET, which operates a startup accelerator and other activities and programs. Based on ethnographic research from the first two years of MindCET’s operation (2013–2014) alongside analysis of interviews and publications, I explore the edtech sector discourse and practices expressed by MindCET and the ways in which it attempts to promote educational reforms based on technologies, methods, and reasoning from the techno-business world. The article traces the disruption logic of MindCET – which evolved from disruptive innovation business theory – and how this logic is manifested in MindCET’s activities and educational policy work. I claim that MindCET’s policy work is implemented not by promoting in-system change, but rather through its disruption mode: a set of activities that distribute connections, ideas, possibilities, and experiences that are intended to create conditions and mindsets for willingness for disruptive change in education.

Between global and national prescriptions for education administration: the rocky road of neoliberal education reform in Qatar

Utilizing a framework derived from institutional analysis, this paper examines the implementation of Qatar’s education reform initiative dubbed “Education for a New Era – ENE,” This initiative transferred all public schools in Qatar into Charter Schools, called “Independent Schools,” starting 2004, and granted them broad decision-making authorities in pedagogical, managerial, and financial matters. By 2016, however, education administration reverted to centralized control. This study argues that the ENE initiative included contradictions that impeded the achievement of its main goals. Furthermore, the initiative was caught between global and national prescriptions for education and its role in society, which raised bureaucratic as well as popular resentment against it.

“People, Not Profits”: The Professional Organizations We Need

Author(s): Golden, Noah; Bieler, Deborah | Abstract: This article uses a scrapbook design to narrate the authors’ experiences protesting the use of high-stakes performance assessments in teacher preparation programs by engaging in demonstrations during—and proposing policy at—the annual conventions of a large national teachers’ organization. These narrations are used to raise questions about how professional education organizations define advocacy at a time when neoliberal education reforms limit educators’ capacity to carry out our collective responsibilities to marginalized and vulnerable youth. The authors suggest that in the current political climate that has dehumanized youth, demoralized their teachers, and disempowered teacher educators, educators need professional organizations that explicitly name injustices associated with the reductive curricula and for-profit tests that are hindering local teachers’ and teacher educators’ responsiveness to learners and engagement with democratic processes. In response to these injustices, the authors argue that teachers’ professional organizations must do far more to work boldly both against the de-professionalization of educators and toward a re-professionalization of educators that centers rather than marginalizes advocacy and activism.

Book Review—Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work

Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work (Baldridge, 2019) presents a case study of a community-based after-school organization that supports youth cultural, identity, academic, and political development. This book highlights the organization as it tries to navigate neoliberal educational reforms.

Parental action and neoliberal education reform: Crafting a research agenda

ABSTRACT Neoliberal reforms of public education have promoted a role for parents as individual consumers trying to maximize gains for their own children by choosing from a marketplace of schools. A diverse range of scholarship has explored how parents react to this imposed role, challenging neoliberal conceptions of parental choice by revealing the many factors that shape the enrollment decisions parents make and highlighting the ways that existing inequalities are reproduced through systems of market-driven and unregulated “choice.” A separate emerging literature has examined an alternative role for parents under neoliberal regimes—as collective democratic participants in pursuit of more equitable conceptions of public education and largely in opposition to neoliberal education policies. In this paper, we review the academic literature examining these two visions of parental action under neoliberalism, identify limitations in the literature on collective parental action in opposition to neoliberal reforms, and outline a set of research questions for scholars to address to help enhance our understanding of this important domain.

Neoliberalising Education: New Geographies of Private Tuition, Class Privilege, and Minority Ethnic Advancement

AbstractGeographic research on neoliberalism has explored the restructuring of educational landscapes wrought through marketisation of preschool, school and higher‐education provision and considered the responsibilisation of parents and children for educational outcomes. This study develops understanding of the contingent emergence of neoliberal educational reform, and its progressive and regressive impacts, through an examination of the burgeoning private tuition market in England and Wales. The paper outlines the contours of the previously hidden supplementary education industry, demonstrating that it reinforces regional and classed inequalities, while opening possibilities for ethnic minority advancement. Conceptually, the paper advances debate about socio‐spatial specificity in neoliberal change, showing that the intersection of policy, free markets and consumer behaviour reshapes the educational landscape in ways that extend beyond state intention and control. Through these processes, contingent market forms are produced that offer social mobility for some, but ensure the social reproduction of enduring regimes of power.

‘Black crisis’ and the ‘likely’ privatization of public education in New Orleans and Liberia

ABSTRACT Neoliberal education reforms in schools serving sizeable Black populations throughout the United States have proliferated and are being transported to Black educational contexts abroad. Building on a framework of Coloniality, antiBlackness and a review of Black colonial education this relational analysis argues that contemporary neoliberal education reforms not only resemble the early 20th century movement to spread Black industrial education from the American South to regions of the global South- including regions of West, South and East Africa but also reproduce logics of antiBlack coloniality. This framework is applied to two cases: the chartering of schools in New Orleans Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2016 decision to privatize the entire school system in Liberia. Far from ‘unlikely’ this article argues that the application of market-based reforms to schools in the Black Souths (the ‘urban’ ghettos of the United States as well as the ‘underdeveloped’ global South) is a continuation of 20th century colonial education interventions and the persistent claim of Blackness as always in crisis.

The problem of now: Bernard Stiegler and the student as consumer

The student as consumer has emerged as a common motif and point of contestation in educational philosophy over the past two decades, as part of the critique of the neoliberal educational reform agenda that followed Lyotard’s (1984) mapping of the postmodern condition. In addition, the consumer-orientated student has assumed a problematic presence in secondary-school classrooms and higher education institutions, a fact that has led to the general lament for the dehumanisation of education under a market logic. Expanding upon these narratives of ‘loss’, Bernard Stiegler’s account of the student as consumer builds upon the Lyotardian view to reveal the neurological, generational and psychical implications of what he terms the ‘battle for intelligence’, which is a result of the proletarianisation of knowledge via the imposition of marketing technologies on the psyche of the youth. This leads not only to a consumer mind-set co-opting education, but a process of ‘short-circuiting’ disrupting the educative process itself. This article will consider Stiegler’s apocalyptic vision of youth malaise in comparison to the previous notion of students as consumers in the classical and Marxist narratives he revises. It will then outline the new challenges this poses to contemporary educators, as well as the possibility of translating his utopian call to action to pedagogical practice, both of which constitute the 'problem of now'.

Rhetoric, Reality, and Politics: The Neoliberal Cul-de-Sac in Education

In Barbara Ferman’s collection, The Fight for America’s Schools, grassroots resistance to neoliberal education reform holds the spotlight. Her geographic lens is the Pennsylvania/New Jersey region. In this article, the geographic focus shifts to Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. Experiences in these two cities show how the neoliberal agenda is protected in the face of disappointing results. The Memphis case centers on a state takeover driven by a market ideology. Its experience underscores that reducing local representation to an inconsequential advisory role also diminishes what education policy leaders believe they need to consider. D.C. offers a more complex narrative, one haunted by the corrupted metrics of Campbell’s Law. In both cities, the neoliberal toolbox proved unable to deliver in practice what the drawing board had promised.

Vertical and Horizontal Discourse: A Bernsteinian Perspective of Preservice Teachers’ Conceptualizations of Using iPads in Early Elementary Teaching Environments

ABSTRACTPolicymakers’ neoliberal education reforms, which define education through economic rather than democratic principles, continue to promote the integration of mobile devices into early childhood classrooms to provide students with new learning opportunities while preparing them for the job market. Although many schools have begun integrating such devices into their classrooms, research has highlighted that teachers find it challenging to incorporate mobile devices into their teaching, even when they are trained to do so. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the challenges preservice teachers face when implementing technology in their current and future classrooms through a sociological lens. Specifically, we employed Bernstein’s notion of vertical and horizontal discourse to examine a sample of first-semester preservice teachers’ conceptualizations of using iPads in their current and future teaching environments. Our findings highlight the challenges teacher educators face when supporting preservice teachers in moving beyond deep-seated horizontal understandings of what school and teaching should look like. Our findings also suggest that teacher educators have a responsibility to strengthen preservice teachers’ vertical discourse around teaching so that they will engage in pedagogical practices that go beyond a set of skills to be acquired and replicated with technology or otherwise.

Negotiating conflicting discourses of quality teaching in Fiji: Initial teacher education and practicum at the University of the South Pacific

This article identifies a number of conflicting discourses informing education in Fiji and their impact on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) students. The socially constructivist progressivism of the Ministry of Education and the ITE provider is being eroded by a set of socially conservative discourses symptomatic of neoliberal education reforms elsewhere. It is the Practicum where the conflict is most acutely evidenced. To highlight the conflict 90 ITE students, as ethno-graphic fieldworkers, have used an accepted quality teaching checklist to record the teaching they witnessed while on practicum. The resulting misalignments between discourses of quality teaching identified in this article and highlighted by ITE students contributes to debates about what constitutes effective teaching in Fiji. Additionally, despite the multi-discursive reality of Fijian education the article suggests ITE based on a learning-centred rather than learner-centred approach where teachers make critical choices for teaching based on links between pedagogy, context and consequence.

What enables communities to resist neoliberal education reforms? Lessons from Newark and Camden, New Jersey

ABSTRACT Neoliberal education reformers advance a set of strategies intended to improve public education by incorporating market-based approaches. To facilitate the adoption of these often unpopular ideas, neoliberal reformers advocate for governance mechanisms that make it more challenging for communities to control their public schools. The prevalence of such undemocratic governance mechanisms has grown over the last decade, undercutting communities’ efforts to organize in opposition to the neoliberal education agenda. However, these governance mechanisms do not necessarily shut down the organizing. We examine what facilitates sustained community resistance to neoliberal reform in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms and find that access to social and economic capital and timely access to information via an engaged press are present in the existing accounts of such resistance. We explore this emerging hypothesis via in-depth comparative case studies of Newark and Camden, New Jersey. Our analysis of these 2 cities provides additional evidence for the hypothesis that access to social and economic capital and to information makes sustained resistance possible. We also identify a third variable, extreme political control as manifested through political machines, that intersects with the other variables to limit the sustainability of resistance movements in the presence of undemocratic governance mechanisms.

A Critical Paradox: The Politics of an Urban Community-Based Nonprofit In Expanding Educational Opportunities to Underserved Youth

ABSTRACTNonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs) increasingly provide services that are traditionally thought to be a governmental responsibility. Through a qualitative case study, we examine the role, politics, and sustainability of a nonprofit CBO aimed at expanding opportunities for underserved youth. Our findings explain how this CBO worked to diligently meet these youth’s needs and filled a gap resulting from the state and district’s negligence within, and largely resulting from, neoliberal education reforms. Findings also point to a critical paradox that reflects the pressure for CBOs to subscribe to neoliberal practices. Study implications include the need for greater connection between public education and community partners.

#ThisisanEducationElection: The Changing Role of Media in Education Organizing

In November 2011, a coalition of New York City (NYC) education organizers and advocacy groups launched the PS2013 campaign to place public education at the center of the 2013 mayoral race. Activists developed a complex and situated communications strategy to influence a new space of political engagement, namely mayoral elections. This article is empirically grounded in a qualitative case study of the media strategies of the two-year PS2013 campaign to transform dominant discourse market-based school reform. I document and critically examine a fluid and strategic repertoire of media technologies and tactics deployed by education activists used to communicate with corporate news media, mayoral candidates, as well as their own constituencies and allies. In this way, the paper contributes to the critical scholarship on the role of media in contemporary education organizing against neoliberal education reform.

Análisis crítico de las reformas educativas emprendidas desde 1990 en docentes investigadores de Lima Metropolitana

<p>La presente investigación tuvo como objetivo generar una teoría acerca de la Reforma Educativa Neoliberal, emprendida desde 1990 y desarrollada con distintos matices en los periodos gubernamentales, desde Fujimori hasta Ollanta Humala. Este estudio se desarrolló dentro del paradigma cualitativo, con metodología de teoría fundamentada y descripción de la situación fenoménica. La muestra estuvo conformada por seis informantes, quienes proporcionaron los datos a través de la técnica de la entrevista a profundidad. Como resultado, se halló la carencia de una teoría explicativa que desvele el trasfondo de esta Reforma Educativa, además de docentes que no se identifican con dicha reforma, los aciertos y desaciertos de la misma. Los aportes amplían el universo teórico reflexivo de la sociedad, que tiene que ver con la educación peruana.</p>

Neoliberal Education Reform as Black Capitalism

28 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 1 82 No.1 NEOLIBERAL EDUCATION REFORM AS BLACK CAPITALISM By Mellissa Gyimah and Ebony Rose Capitalism, historically, has been both a figment of the imagination and within arm’s reach for the Black masses in the United States. But, “Black capitalism” as defined by Manning Marable1 connotes several key components that make it unique to the Black community: 1. The accumulation of capital by individual Black entrepreneurs 2. Strategies designed to maintain control over the Black consumer market in the US 3. Collective programs to improve the economic condition of all Blacks within the overall framework of US capitalism There is a contrasting idea that Marable introduces in his classic text How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black Americathat Black capitalism is a “social myth.”2 Marable argues that Black capitalism was “perpetuated by individual Black entrepreneurial ‘success stories’ and by economic barrier established by the system of segregation.”3 Here we have two ideas of Black participation within the White supremacist, anti-Black, political economy4 —one in which Blacks are under the assumption that US capitalism is not structurally racist and that our progress can be accelerated and therefore alleviated by a small handful of Black elites; and on the other hand, one in which Black capitalism is a “social myth.”5 We take a third position that is dialectical and nuanced, but invites readers to come to their own conclusions or propose other arguments. We argue that Blacks know that the US has historically and continues to fail and neglect their cultural, social, political, educational, and economic needs, but absent a clear and viable alternative to the White supremacist racial state, the status quo is somewhat malleable. An example of this is the current educational reform movement and Black participation in it, not as victims who have suffered the disproportionate impacts of a racial neoliberalism, but as social actors and economic agents, too.6 For us, the education reform movement meets the criteria of Black people’s participation in the political economy by a) trying to accumulate social, cultural, and economic capital,7 b) trying to control and have more input into our children’s education by fighting for charter schools and choice,8 and c) trying to improve both the economic and social well-being of Black people. David Harvey9 explains neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices, proposing that the well-being of humans can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. In this context, neoliberalism is characterized by three traits: the aggressive pursuit of new markets; an effort to scale back or eliminate obstacles to the mobility of capital, including protections for wages; and a reframing of economic stratification and polarization as the effect of individual choices and abilities.10 Neoliberalism presents itself as promoting equality and access across race and class, but this rolled out differently in practice, showing a racialized agenda.11 The complex origins and meanings of charter schools and voucher systems germinate from neoliberal and neoconservative ideology in the 1980s. The voucher and charter systems continue to be extended vis-a-vis a neoliberal agenda at a time when the lives and livelihoods of Black students and families is under a more visible call for Black economic and cultural freedom.12 Therefore, Black people believe that they are reappropriating the neoliberal racialized agenda within the education system, by reconfiguring neoliberal logics of hyper-individualism, color-blindness, free enterprise, privatization of public goods and services, and trade deregulation. Choice, for Black families, becomes the vehicle to provide a better education for their Black children by taking the redistribution of public tax dollars that were disproportionately spent on White children to fund Blackrun schools and neighborhood charter schools, to fit the needs of their families, their communities, and the Black collective.13 BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO. 1 | 29 82 No.1 With all of this in mind, are Black people just being smart and pragmatic by embracing these neoliberal agendas in order to exercise their agency and self-determination? Are they reconfiguring neoliberalism and using it as...

Neoliberalism, Black Masculinity, and Black Male Youth: The Value Of Transdisciplinary Studies To Urban Educators

Drawing on Critical Race Theory and a transdisciplinary framework, this article considers how hegemonic neoliberal discourses contribute to and reinforce negative constructions of Black masculinity and the implications for educating Black male youth (BMY). Neoliberal secondary educational reforms of the last three decades in Ontario, which have resulted in heightened standardization in schools and promote norms of individual attainment, competition, and social control, have served to intensify the stigmatization and alienation BMY. In response to the interlocking racial, gendered, and class oppression they experience within the prevailing neoliberal context, many BMY have increasingly embraced a defensively situated resistant Black masculinity. We argue that, rather than viewing the communities and counternarratives of BMY as sites of deficiency, educators need to conceptualize the experiential knowledge of such young people as that which can nourish transdisciplinary knowledge production and be integrated into classroom curricula and pedagogy. Inviting the cultural wealth of BMY into school can help bridge the divide between schools and the communities of such youth, thereby making mainstream schooling more inclusive by diversifying curricula, democratizing the classroom, and challenging the neoliberalization of education. The authors highlight Hip-Hop as an example of cultural wealth that illuminates the knowledge and lived realities of BMY and can be utilized by urban educators to promote academic engagement and intercultural exchange in classrooms.

Provocateur Pieces: From “Turning the Page” to Getting Our Noses out of the Book: How NCTE Can Translate Its Words into Activism

This article raises questions about the role of NCTE in an era of widespread education reform that often runs counter to a wide body of scholarship and members’ understandings of ways to build strong, equitable educational systems. The authors call on NCTE to reinvent itself primarily as a space from which to take action toward equity and justice. This provocateur piece offers a loving critique of NCTE’s notion of advocacy at a time when neoliberal education reforms limit educators’ capacity to carry out our collective responsibilities to marginalized and vulnerable youth.