No Child Left Behind and other education reforms promoting high-stakes testing, accountability, and competitive markets continue to receive wide support from politicians and public figures. This support, the author suggests, has been achieved by situating education within neoliberal policies that argue that such reforms are necessary within an increasingly globalized economy, will increase academic achievement, and will close the achievement gap. However, the author offers preliminary data suggesting that the reforms are not achieving their stated goals. Consequently, educators need to question whether neoliberal approaches to education should replace the previously dominant social democratic approaches.
Education in both England and the United States has undergone a profound change over the last two decades as part of neo-liberal and neoconservative political reforms. The reforms have been characterized by efforts to standardize the curriculum, to implement standardized tests in order to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable, to increase school choice, and to privatize education provision. While the reforms in both countries have similarities, differences in the structures of schooling and in the relative political strength of neoconservatives and neo-liberals help to account for policy divergence.Over the last several decades, primary and secondary education in the United States and England has undergone a profound transformation. While not desiring to romanticize the past, not long ago most students attended the local school to which they were assigned, learned from teachers who used and adapted the school's and district's curriculum, and were evaluated based primarily on teacher-prepared assessments. Now, however, students are increasingly given a choice of which school to attend (although, as we shall see, some students have more choice than others), learn from teachers who use a curriculum required by either the state or national curriculum or the standardized test, and are evaluated to a significant degree by those standardized tests. I will summarize some of the educational reforms occurring in both the United States and England with the aim of showing how they arise from similar neo-liberal and neoconservative political rationales, and the similarities and differences between how the policies have been implemented. The differences between the two educational systems have more to do with differences between the two governmental systems than with the overall policy objectives. Lastly, I will briefly describe how the policies fail to achieve their ostensible goals.
Over the last decade education in the United States has undergone perhaps its most significant transformation. Where in the past public schools have been primarily under the control of the local community, control has shifted to the state and federal levels. Furthermore, state and federal governments have introduced standardized testing and accountability as a means to hold teachers and students responsible. These reforms have been successfully introduced because reform proponents have provided three principal rationales for the reforms: they are necessary within an increasingly globalized economy, they will reduce educational inequality and they will increase assessment objectivity. After describing the reforms implemented in New York and Texas and by the federal government through the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act, the author discusses a range of evidence that the reforms have not achieved their ostensible goals and that resistance to the reforms is beginning to emerge from US educators and citizens.
In this speech, Hursh shows how public education in the United States is undergoing profound changes. Education policy has been hijacked by the unelected and unaccountable corporate reformers who aspire to overhaul the education system through a corporate model of privatization and market competition. They aim to privatize education through expanding the number of publicly funded privately administered charter schools, and hand over making tests and curriculum to corporations. They desire to replace public state-run teacher education programs with programs run by charter schools, such as the Relay Graduate School. They shift where education policy is made: away from the local and public levels where parents, teachers, community members and students can have input, and towards private and often dark spaces where wealthy philanthropists, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and hedge fund managers dominate. He also shows how educators, parents, students, and community members have collaborated in pushing back against the corporate reformers and have repealed some of the corporate reforms.
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