Selling School Reform: Neoliberal Crisis-Making and the Reconstruction of Public Education

AbstractThis study asks how neoliberal reform became the hegemonic framework for racial justice and educational equity. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I examine three reform projects that operate on different terrains – or scales – of ‘governmentality’: that of broad public sense-making, that of district policymaking, and that of individual and community-based subjectivities. The first project (Chapter Two) was a national publicity campaign funded by the Broad and Gates foundations. In this chapter, I use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to understand how reformers used language to shape public consciousness, pointing to the continuity of an educational “crisis discourse” first manufactured in the Reagan era. Chapter Three examines the state takeover and neoliberal reconstruction of an urban school district. Using the theoretical framework of “disaster capitalism” (Klein, 2007), I trace how the neoliberal reform network penetrated the district, fundamentally reshaping its structures and processes. In the fourth chapter, I use ethnographic methods to study the effects of ‘punitive privatization’ on a school site steeped in historical traditions of anti-racist and anti-capitalist critique. I argue that neoliberal accountability is “devitalizing” (McDermott & Hall, 2007) to the political vision and practices of the school, and that it works to co-opt dissent and redirect parent participation. Taken together, these projects demonstrate both coercive and consensual processes: the corporate reform network penetrates public institutions and democratic processes, redirecting them to do the work of marketization and capital accumulation. At the same time, it employs sophisticated and well-funded marketing to articulate these projects across a breadth of terrains and at different scales. Each project demonstrates how market advocates, driven by venture-philanthropic funding, position their work as the only possible means for racial justice and educational equity. The findings point to two powerful aspects of neoliberalism: its role in creating and manipulating educational crises and its ability to absorb and reframe challenges to capitalism