Provide your own working explanation of neo-liberal educational policies. What are the goals and values of neo-liberalism and how is in enacted in some current educational policies?

In your later posts, consider the ethical issues at play here: To what extent do neoliberal educational policies align with democratic practices of education?

Week 12: Educational Policy

Educational Policy Part 1

Educational Policy Part 2

• What are the competing goals of education policy in the US?
• Who has been historically, and is currently, influential in deciding educational policy (both formally and informally)?

• Privatization
• political ideology
• neoliberalism
• federalism
• grassroots movements

READ

+ Love (2019) “We Want to do More than Survive” (chapter 1)

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+ Ayers, Kumashiro, Meiners, Quinn, Stovall, from “Teaching Toward Democracy” (excerpt)

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Assignments due on Wednesday of this week, 11:59 pm.

Discussion Forum postings for Week 12

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Brittany Aronson] Jean Anyon, an educational economist, argued in her book “Radical Possibilities,” that we have been attempting educational reform in U.S. cities for over 40 years. As a nation, we have been counting on education to solve the problems of unemployment, joblessness, and poverty for many years. But education did not cause these problems and education cannot solve them. Today we are going to focus on key educational policies that have shaped public education in the United States, as well as consider the tensions that exist for public education in a pluralistic democracy. A historical examination of policy can inform the decisions that we make in the future. In part one of this video we will focus on unpacking privatization, political ideology and neoliberal discourses. In part two, we will follow that by understanding what federalism is and how it’s influenced public education, as well as how grassroots movements for social change have had impact. Take a second and read this meme. “I wish a politician with no teaching experience would just come in and tell me how to teach” said no teacher ever. As a former teacher, I can certainly attest to the satire of the message that this meme is sending. We often hear critique from teachers and educational scholars that policymakers are disconnected from the realities of school and the people with whom their policies are impacting. Why is that and how this come to be this way? The tools you’ve acquired through the social foundations of education can help us to move forward, provide needed critique, and work toward change in educational policy. There are several competing discourses within educational policy, and while we are not going to get into the specifics of each of these discourses, we should have an idea of how ideology shapes these competing discourses. Where do all of these competing discourses come from? Remember that ideology refers to the big ideas shared by society and reinforced throughout our institutions, and that discourse refers to the ways we communicate ideology. Specifically when we are talking about political ideology, we don’t necessarily mean political parties, although they might be related. Political ideologies might include whether you identify as liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, or anarchist. There are different political theories that inform these ideologies. These labels have to do with general beliefs that these groups hold regarding how society works or how it should work. It is, of course, political. Political ideology shaped how most Americans build their political opinions. But where do these come from? Political scientists sometimes refer to the process by which individuals establish their personal political beliefs as political socialization. There are four main factors that contribute to our political identities: family, social group membership, such as race, gender, religion, ethnicity, education, and the political conditions that one lives through. Ultimately, political ideologies are complex and change over time depending on life circumstances. So now that we have an understanding of what political ideology is, we can focus on one very popular economic political theory that impacts educational institutions. You might have heard comments before regarding neoliberal influences on education, especially now that you are a college student in higher education. But what does that mean? Neoliberalism refers to a theory of political and economic practices that propose human-advancement can be achieved best by allowing for individual, entrepreneurial freedoms. Basically is the idea that society should be shaped by the free market and the economy should be deregulated and privatized. The idea behind this is that what works in the private sector should also work in the public sector. Neoliberalism shares its roots with classical liberalism, or the idea that people are free to live their lives without a great deal of interference from the government. Neoliberalism really isn’t a new idea but it takes a new approach. Neoliberalism is a discourse that we may not entirely see, but it has real material effects. Education is a great example of this. Let’s return to the concept of the public versus the private that was introduced at the beginning of the course. This is a hot topic in education as critical scholars argue to support public education. But what does “privatizing” education even mean? Perhaps one of the biggest controversies in the privatization of education are charter schools and school vouchers. Charter schools are publicly funded independent schools, that are privately run, whether that be from a group of leaders in a community, or large philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation. School vouchers allow for public money to be used for students to attend private schools. While ruled unconstitutional in most states, several states, including the state of Ohio, have supported these initiatives. Most of the controversy around the privatization has to do with the idea of shifting schools from being publicly run and funded, to more private control. The neoliberal idea behind this is that competition will produce progress. Education Week, an educational policy news source, explains that advocates see in privatization ventures the combined virtues of government and business. They argue that the government’s oversight function and its responsiveness to the needs of citizens can be retained while taking advantage of private enterprises ability to be more efficient, reduce costs, and maximize production. And in this case, production refers to student achievement. That sounds good right? Who wouldn’t want students to achieve? Opponents, however, see the pressure for profit replacing student achievement as the driving force within schools. In fact, one out of six charter schools are for-profit schools. Opponents see individual needs—particularly those of children with the highest amount of need—being sacrificed to the needs of corporate stakeholders. They fear that school districts won’t be nearly vigilant enough in monitoring schools’ performance or children’s well-being. There are also real concerns with making access to education a competition. If access to schools becomes a competition, that means there will always be winners and losers in the game of school. How did we get here? When did education become such a hot-button issue? We’ll discover this next in part two.

[Brittany Aronson] Historically, education has been deemed a state issue and in fact federal funding only accounts for about 8% of each state’s education budget. However, over the past several decades, there has been an increasing amount of federal involvement in educational policy. Federalism is known as the relationship between the levels of government. Let’s take a quick tour of the major federal policies impacting education today. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed as one of the biggest efforts to improve educational equity. It wasn’t until nearly 40 years later that this act was reauthorized and was known as The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, or commonly known as NCLB. This act was passed with an impressive amount of bipartisan support, meaning that both Republicans and Democrats were behind the idea of increasing federal involvement in schools to increase student achievement. Full of optimism, educational policymakers set a goal for 100% proficiency on the reading and math assessments by the year 2014. The purpose of NCLB was to increase student achievement through strategies such as improving teacher and principal quality, as well as increasing the number of highly-qualified teachers and principals in schools. This idea of “highly-qualified” meant that teachers would possess a bachelor’s degree in full state certification or licensure, and they would prove that they have adequate content knowledge for each subject instructed. However, it may not be surprising that NCLB did not live up to its promise. Many scholars argue that not only did NCLB fail to live up to its promises, but it actually exacerbated the very inequalities it was intended to alleviate. Essentially, the premise that increasing testing and standardization for schools that have historically scored low on standardized assessments in the first place, did not bode well in reality. Additionally, the mandates that NCLB put in place were not funded, which put additional pressure on school districts that were already underfunded. Per NCLB’s requirements, these schools not reaching annual yearly progress, or AYP, were put on suspension plans, and then after three years they were either taken over by the state or completely closed. In 2009, the Obama administration enacted a new law. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, Race to the Top was initiated for applying states to improve the quality of education through government grants. These grants focused on four goals: using data to drive instruction, raising standards, turning around historically low performing schools, and improving teacher and principal quality. Of the $4.35 billion dollar budget in the Race to the Top fund, $350 million dollars were committed to creating rigorous assessments that could be internationally benchmarked. This was largely in part of Race to the Top’s goal of restoring America’s educational reputation as a leader by 2020. Patrick McGuinn, professor of political science, argues that the “Great Recession” helped the Obama administration lead Congress to enact the ARRA. The use of a competitive grant process to distribute such a large amount of federal education funds was innovated and unprecedented. Desperate for federal funds at a time of state-budget crisis, all but four states applied for the grant. The momentum from Race of the Top helped place education front and center in the national discourse. Perhaps one of the biggest implications from the Race to the Top initiative was the creation and implementation of the Common Core Standards. These national standards, which states were incentivized to adopt were designed to align with college and work expectations, or as we commonly heard “career readiness,” and internationally benchmarked so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society. The Common Core Standards was another highly bipartisan project. In the midst of all this, NCLB was scheduled to be reauthorized in 2007, but disagreements between Congress and President Obama about the future of federal education policy resulted in the law not being revised and reauthorized until December 2015. During this time, states struggled with the costs and consequences of implementing the law as more and more schools failed to meet the NCLB-mandated goals of increasing student proficiency to 100% by 2014. The administration offered a plan in 2011 that would enable states to apply to the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver from NCLB’s accountability provisions. In December 2016, Congress finally addressed the long overdue congressional reauthorization of NCLB, achieving the bipartisan passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. ESSA went into effect during the 2017-2018 academic year and officially replaced NCLB and its associated waivers. While the federal government’s authority in some areas is reduced under ESSA, it’s important to note that parts of NCLB will still remain in place and have influence over state education systems. However, there is strong language limiting the Education Secretary from forcing or encouraging states to adopt any particular set of standards, such as the Common Core. ESSA’s most significant change from NCLB was around accountability. Under ESSA, states are given much more freedom in picking their own academic goals for schools. For example, states have to include at least four indicators of progress in their accountability plans that they submit to the U.S. Department of Education. Three of these are supposed to be academic indicators, such as proficiency on state tests, but states must also choose an additional non-academic indicator of school quality, such as the measure of student or teacher engagement, or school climate. There is one last thing we’d like to leave you with today. Many critics of these bipartisan educational policies argue that teachers are uniquely positioned to help shape our educational system, they’re often left out of policy discussions and decisions. This is led to the creation of many grassroots movements that organize educators, parents, students, and communities to push back against the one-size-fits all approach to education, excessive standardized testing, and attacks on teachers. One example of this is a group of teachers who organize in New York City to form the grassroots education movement. In response to the popular documentary “Waiting for Superman,” they produced a counter narrative called “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman” featuring the voices of teachers and students impacted by Neoliberal school reforms. Another example is a movement led by parents known as the Opt-Out Movement, which encourages parents to let students “opt out” of testing by letting schools know your child will not be taking the state test. Despite the fact that ESSA requires schools to have 95% test participation, no school or district has ever lost federal funding because of opt outs. Ultimately, when thinking about educational policies and reform, it often seems as if teachers, parents, and students hold little influence over the policies that impact them. However, we know that some of the most significant changes in history came not from the top-down, but from grassroots movements. People fighting for similar issues organize and demanded change to occur. This is a form of agency that we all have in American democracy. How will you use your agency as a stakeholder in education?