Neoliberal Education Reform Research Articles

Conforming to reform: Teaching pre-kindergarten in a neoliberal early education system

Policymakers’ neoliberal education reforms have altered the landscape of publicly funded early education in the United States and across the globe. Practically speaking, these reforms expect early childhood teachers to prepare their students for success in elementary school and later life by providing them with a specific set of knowledge and skills. This creates a new set of challenges for early educators who strive to prepare their culturally and linguistically diverse students for school in a manner that addresses their individual, cultural, and sociopolitical needs. The study discussed in this article set out to examine how teachers who were identified as meeting their students’ various needs prepared them for success in elementary school. In doing so, it became apparent that these teachers struggled to define their practices as well as the construct of effective teaching in ways that went beyond policymakers’ neoliberal conception of the early education process. This article examines this tension and considers what is possible for teachers and the field of publicly funded early education in these highly structured neoliberal systems of governance.

Bringing the Market in, Letting the Science out. Neoliberal Educational Reform in Romania.

The “factory” logic and the focus on career-driven, market oriented neoliberal policies in higher education have dramatically shifted the focus of education and research, as well as altering the fundamental values and tenets of traditional academic life. In our paper we will try to explore the impact of neoliberal reforms in higher education in a post-communist country – Romania. Therefore, we are trying to answer a number of research questions: what are the main characteristics of neoliberal ideology? How are they reflected in policy decisions throughout the world, particularly in the higher education area? In this context, what is the impact of neoliberal policies and practices for the Romanian higher education system?

Performers and postulates: the role of evolving socio-historical contexts in shaping new teacher professional identities

In this article we investigate the generative causes of variation in the professional identity of new teachers. Building on previous work that has shown a link between professional identity and socio-political context, we argue that the context experienced in late adolescence and early adulthood is particularly significant in shaping how beginning teachers think of themselves as teachers. This finding suggests that the linear response to neoliberal education reform described in much of the critical literature may be too simple to account for the range of ways teachers interact with the system. There is, therefore, a need for greater diversity in research approaches to work with the complexity of social systems in and around schools. To support this call for methodological diversity, we borrow the life story model of identity as a theoretical framework and use a computer-assisted phenomenographic analysis technique to find new ways into the research data.

Education as recovery: neoliberalism, school reform, and the politics of crisis

Building upon critical education policy studies of crisis, disaster, and reform, this essay develops a theory of recovery that further elaborates the nature and operation of ‘crisis politics’ in neoliberal education reform. Recovery is an integral process in capital accumulation, exploiting material, and subjective vulnerability in order to bridge crisis to crisis. Capitalizing on crises, neoliberal reformers position privatization as the mechanism of recovery. Rather than acknowledge their complicity in creating crises, neoliberals externalize the demands of recovery onto schools, teachers, and students. This essay calls for critical educators, social justice advocates, and communities subjected to crises to refuse the neoliberal terms of recovery and to affirm the collective potential to break the cycle of crisis and recovery so intrinsic to capitalist accumulation. Although this essay emphasizes the dialectic of crisis and recovery in United States education policy, this lens is relevant across a variety of national and transnational contexts.

Economics and Education for Human Flourishing: Wendell Berry and the Oikonomic Alternative to Neoliberalism

Neoliberal ideologies and policies have transformed how we think about the economy, education, and the environment. Economics is presented as objective and quantifiable, best left to distant experts who develop algorithms regarding different monetary relations in our stead. This same kind of thinking—technical, numerical, decontextualized, and ostensibly objective—infiltrates how we think about education and the environment. For example, neoliberal education reform focuses on using test scores and markets as a way to measure and improve learning and teaching. Similarly, environmental issues are presented as problems to be solved through new technologies and market efficiency. In response, we critique neoliberalism using the philosophy of the agrarian poet and writer Wendell Berry who abhors how neoliberalism disconnects humans from one another and the traditions that sustain them in their communities. Rather than neoliberalism's rootless entrepreneurial individual—homo economicus—we suggest that freedom, instead, resides in one's ability to flourish in one's place in the world. Such flourishing cannot occur without reinvigorating the traditions, including Aristotle's oikonomics, that have allowed people to live sustainably in their social and ecological communities.

Securing the State through the Production of ‘Global’ Citizens: Analyzing Neo-Liberal Educational Reforms in Jordan and the USA

From a human capital perspective, schooling has long represented an engine of economic growth, individual advancement, and competitiveness in the global market. In recent years, this theorization of schooling has become linked with articulations of national security in both the Global North and South, as policymakers, private sector actors, and international donor agencies frequently describe economic growth and opportunities for individual advancement as requisites to social and political stability. Lost amid the current US foreign policy discourses about the Middle East is an analysis of how neo-liberal educational reforms in both regions are similarly reconfiguring relationships between the nation-state and its young citizens. In critically interrogating how the sociopolitical work of schooling is articulated in Jordanian and American education policy texts, this article argues that neo-liberal discourses of ‘choice’, ‘accountability’ and ‘participation’ in current regimes of education reform seemingly produce new formations of citizenship locally (national security) and globally (global citizenship). Yet, this reordering of civic relationships serves to reify the (economic) interests of the nation-state and maintain a specific global hegemonic order. However, the article also highlights ways in which peoples' movements in the United States of America (USA) and Jordan are challenging the notions that these policies are merely tacitly accepted by most.

Moments or a Movement? Teacher Resistance to Neoliberal Education Reform

Public school teachers in the USA are working in an era of intense interference from neoliberal reform policies. Corporate-driven forces are working to dismantle unions, narrow curricula, replace neighborhood schools with charter schools, tie student test scores to teacher evaluations and replace university-prepared career teachers with ‘elites’ from Teach for America who have five weeks of teacher training and a two-year commitment to teach in ‘high need’ schools. Nevertheless, teachers across the USA are engaging in social action to combat neoliberal reforms. This article examines instances of teacher action and asks: are these moments of teacher resistance or the beginning of a movement of teacher resistance to neoliberal school reform? ‘Mr Horn, could you please come see me in my office?’ Momentarily transported back in time to my own middle school years, I bravely answered, ‘Sure, Mrs Thomas.[1] I’ll be down in a minute.’ This was the first time Mrs Thomas, my principal, had called me to her office, but as I nervously weaved my way through the noisy halls of Pioneer Middle School and down the stairs, I was pretty sure why I had been summoned and only wondered why it had taken so long. About a week before, I had been formally observed by one of my assistant principals, Mrs Vaughn. All teachers at Pioneer were observed regularly by administration, and for language arts and math teachers, observations were in place to closely monitor our compliance with the prescribed America’s Choice curricula (America’s Choice, n.d.). Two years earlier, Pioneer had failed to make annual yearly progress (AYP) for five consecutive years, and in accordance with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, and because it was a Title I school, Pioneer had been restructured. Through the restructuring process, a completely new administrative team had been brought in, 65% of the teaching staff was

The Problem of Securing Opportunities for Study in Art Education in the Context of the Neoliberal Educational Reforms

The Problem of Securing Opportunities for Study in Art Education in the Context of the Neoliberal Educational Reforms

Racism as Policy: A Critical Race Analysis of Education Reforms in the United States and England

Critical race theory (CRT) views education as one of the principal means by which white supremacy is maintained and presented as normal in society. The article applies CRT to two real-world case studies: changes to education statutes in the state of Arizona (USA) and the introduction of a new measure of educational success in England, the English baccalaureate. The analysis highlights the globalized nature of neoliberal education reform and its fundamentally raced and racist character.

Toward a theory of the educational encounter: Gert Biesta’s educational theory and the right to the city

This paper outlines a theory of the educational encounter, the space of, and the right to that encounter. Situated in response to neoliberal educational reforms, this theory is developed through a reading and synthesis of the educational theory of Gert Biesta, the architectural component of his theory, and literature on the right to the city. The author argues that the notion of the encounter is latent yet central in Biesta’s work and that it can be further cultivated and more precisely attended to by turning to theoretical work on the right to the city, which is engaged here primarily through the lens of the encounter. Several themes are drawn out from the literature that can help in formulating a theory of the educational encounter such as the habitat/inhabit dialectic, the use/use-value/exchange-value framework of space, and the role of struggle in the production and maintenance of space.

First Nations assimilation through neoliberal educational reform

The authors undertake a geographically sensitive analysis of the influential 2010 Free to Learn report. Free to Learn proposes a reform of the funding system for First Nations students to remove funds earmarked for First Nations education from First Nations government control, convert universities into managers of First Nations student funding, and convert First Nations community members into entrepreneurs. Free to Learn employs two strategies: scalar obfuscation and the cultivation of historical geographic ignorance to obscure the links between their proposal for neoliberal educational reform and the long‐standing assimilative strategies of the Canadian and pre‐Canadian state. The authors explore the economics and demography in the report and expose its deep links to colonial and assimilative policies of the recent and distant past. They link this report to the larger theatre of education in Canada where cultures are frequently reduced to mutable symbols in an ahistorical context. They close with a reflection on the challenges and dangers of taking a political stance with limited understanding of the forces at work in the environment of neoliberal reform prevailing in Canada.

New Urban Teachers Transcending Neoliberal Educational Reforms

This article presents 7 years of qualitative research into the emerging understandings of a population of 456 beginning 7 to 12 urban teachers who supplied 130 participants who were enrolled in a total of 26 MSEd English Language Arts courses over 7 years. These were interviewed while teaching in urban schools focused primarily on testing and accountability systems, and their class writings were used to present seven of their voices in this study. The study investigates participant engagement in two theoretical frameworks emphasized in the courses: first, the neoliberal ideology of testing and accountability; second, the transactional tradition of aesthetic education. The study finds that education students need not passively acquiesce to neoliberal reforms, but can reclaim a culturally critical stance in their teaching.

Views from the blackboard: neoliberal education reforms and the practice of teaching in Ontario, Canada

This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each other on issues of managerialism, privatisation and punitive accountability mechanisms. Both schoolteachers and adult educators made references to a reduction in autonomy and to an emerging ‘culture of fear’ in educational institutions and programmes. The experience of teachers highlights contradictions between the promises of neoliberalism and the ground-level impact of policy.

Slow violence and neoliberal education reform: Reflections on a school closure.

Slow violence and neoliberal education reform: Reflections on a school closure.

新自由主義的教育改革の政治過程とその分析視角

新自由主義的教育改革の政治過程とその分析視角

On the Experience of School Study

In “A Case for Study: Agamben’s Critique of Scheffler’s Theory of Potentiality,” Tyson Edward Lewis give us a very rich and thoughtful essay. I like very much the idea of the question mark as an invitation for stupefaction and I especially appreciate the way in which he criticizes two main discourses that seem to structure our actual educational regime: (1) the attractive discourse on the fulfillment of each individual’s true potential, which we know in Europe as the “development of one’s talent” — maybe to be translated as capability in Israel Scheffler’s terms — and implying that everybody has her/his particular talent or talents and should have equal opportunities to develop them; and, (2) the equally attractive discourse of “learning.” To go, so to say, beyond “capability/talent” and beyond “learning” (to use Gert Biesta’s phrase) seems to me indeed of crucial importance if we want to maintain something which we call “public education” or even “the school” (that is, I believe, what Lewis refers to when he mentions the threads of neoliberal educational reform). Let me say that I take the school here not as the institution we have known ever since the nineteenth century, which in my view is one of the ways in which “school” has been tamed, but as being the democratic invention of a particular esthetic arrangement — understood as a materializing and spatializing of “free time” (of undestined, uneconomic, unproductive time), the original meaning of the Greek schole — which, by its very acts of separation, profanation, and disclosure disrupts the connection between a certain social position or background, some body and particular capacities, propensities or capabilities. And which, thus, offers an experience of potentiality, which indeed is itself not to be understood in terms of capacities, propensities, or capabilities. One could consider the invention of school to be the disruption of Plato’s fable of the metals, saying that some are born mixed with gold, others with silver and still others with iron, each therefore being especially fit for particular positions in the social order. Plato himself says it is indeed just a fable or fairy tale told to maintain the social order (I suspect that not on the level of “theory” but of discourse the tale of potential often sounds like a perfected version of the tale of the metals). The disruption operated by the school has to do with the school being a place for study (and exercise) and not primary for learning.

The Class and Culture-Based Exclusion of the Chilean Neoliberal Educational Reform

In this article I analyze the class- and cultural-based exclusion produced by the Chilean neoliberal educational reform, carried out during the period from 1990 to 2010. This educational reform follows the same neoliberal model applied to the economy of the country. Although some indicators improved in relation to coverage and public spending in education, the performance gap among social groups increased. In addition, at a cultural level, the reform promoted the value of individual productivity negatively affecting some of the cultural behaviors developed by low-income groups as a consequence of and as reaction to the exclusion they suffer. Namely, by stressing the notions of human capital and quality education, the reform has tended to reinforce these students’ fatalism, and limit the scope of the organizations they form to improve their academic and social opportunities.

High school diversification against educational equality: a critical analysis of neoliberal education reform in South Korea

Recent reforms of high school education in Korea have focused on transforming the uniform and standardized system into a deregulated and diversified system that has an emphasis on school choice and competition. Situating the high school diversification policy in the context of the recent controversy of the neoliberal educational reform, this study argues that school diversification in Korea is deeply impaired and unfulfilled, such as in situations in which the school differentiation and elite high school credentials struggle are reinforced by the peculiar nature of the Korean educational market, namely the hakbul-based society and the development of private educational markets. It suggests that special attention should be drawn to integrate the reform efforts for high school diversification into the ways in which the policy is being configured and delivered within the pursuit of educational equality and social justice.

Crafting and dismantling the egalitarian social contract: the changing state-society relations in globalizing Korea

Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, the Korean developmental state implemented a series of drastic egalitarian educational policies that were primarily geared toward social integration. While promoting social mobility and educational expansion, they provided the basis of the egalitarian social contract in Korea's educational policymaking for decades. Since the 1990s, however, the Korean state has implemented neoliberal education reforms that led to the rapid dismantling of the egalitarian framework for the country's educational policymaking. These neoliberal reforms were strongly supported by the affluent middle class that prefer elitist education and can afford expensive private education. The general direction of change in Korea's educational policymaking suggests both significant change and continuity in the character of the Korean state and its relations to society since the 1990s. The contemporary Korean state still maintains a highly strategic and activist orientation in adopting and implementing policies although its policies are increasingly neoliberal in content. In doing so, the Korean state is gradually abandoning its broad social base and mobilizational capacity, while increasingly connecting with the upper segments of the middle class.

The emotional geographies of neoliberal school reforms: Spaces of refuge and containment

This paper draws from a larger research project about the post high school transitions of young people who were at school during New Zealand’s neoliberal reforms. Our participants included a group of four young men excluded from school and redirected to an Alternative Education programme. Their accounts of their experiences at school differed starkly from what they said about their Alternative Education programme. The emotional content of their accounts reveals how the social and material practices of these respective education sites are constituted differently. Alternative Education operated as a space of refuge from alienation experienced in mainstream schooling as well as a site of containment, separating Alternative Education students from their mainstream peers. Focusing on the emotional geography of one Alternative Education programme offers insight into the emotional geographies of mainstream schooling and, more broadly, of neoliberal education reforms. Drawing on ideas from Massey and Bondi, we demonstrate how alienation is produced and manifested on different scales: teacher–student interactions, school exclusions and policies establishing Alternative Education. The Alternative Education programme discussed here provides a barometer of the broader emotional geographies of New Zealand’s neoliberal education reforms.