Obama-Duncan Educational Reform and the Politics of Neoliberalism
One of the most startling absences that dominates the Obama administration's emphasis on educational reform is how little it thinks about or advocates the notion that students should be educated for democratic citizenship, engage in debates about public values and ethics and learn the knowledge and skills necessary for economic opportunity. Instead, the public purpose and democratic goals of schools are downplayed, if not undermined, by an emphasis on policies, values and social practices that mimic the market-driven values of the existing mode of casino capitalism. For example, Duncan's "Race to the Top" agenda emphasizes expanding efficiency at the expense of equity, prioritizes testing over critical pedagogical practices, endorses commercial values rather than public values, accentuates competition as a form of social combat over cooperation and shared responsibilities and endorses individual rights over support for the collective good - all of which are values that come out of the neoliberal play book in which the public is a term of opprobrium and self-interest coded as parental choice is the only recognizable motive for engaging in educational reform.[30]
It is not surprising that Race to the Top is cloaked as a contest based on the old standard free-market notion of competition, but instead of a contest that simply mimics market values, there is also at work an ideological agenda tied to dismantling teacher unions, removing protections for teachers and positioning future teachers at the mercy of administrators who believe that educational reform is mostly about creating data systems to measure how people teach and learn effectively. This educational movement could have been put together by Bernie Madoff, and speaks clearly to how casino capitalism has produced an anti-reform movement more appropriately understood as a form of casino education.
Link:
http://www.truthout.org/teachers-without-jobs-and-education-without-hope-beyond-bailouts-and-fetish-measurement-trap60146
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