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If we are to understand the educational reforms of the last several
decades, we must place the reforms within the rise and supremacy
of neoliberal theory. It is only by understanding the profound
shift in social and economic goals that we can make sense of the
rise of standardized testing, auditing, and accountability in
education, the increased emphasis on education for economic productivity,
and the increasing control over education by national and international
governing bodies.
The articles in this special issue focus on neoliberalism and
its impact on education and society in the USA, the United Kingdom,
Portugal, and Brazil. As described in several of the articles,
neoliberalism arose as the capitalist response to economic and
political gains by the middle and working class, women, and people
of color made during social democratic administrations after World
War II. Beginning in the 1970s, with the elections of Ronald Reagan
in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in England, neoliberal political
and corporate leaders began arguing that the government had no
little or no direct responsibility for the public welfare but,
instead, economic well-being would be ensured through economic
growth in an increasingly globalized economy. Under neoliberalism,
governments, observes David Harvey (2006), are to ‘optimize conditions
for capital accumulation’ by creating ‘a ‘good business climate’’
(p. 25), by reducing the corporate tax burden and decreasing
governmental spending on social services, privatizing or deregulating
sectors formerly run or regulated by the state such as transportation,
telecommunication, oil and other natural resources, welfare and
education, and creating, where possible, competitive markets and
free trade. Education, therefore, should be privatized and where
that is not possible, subjected to market forces.
Neoliberalism requires not only changes in the social and economic
structures but in individuals themselves.
Neoliberalism proposes that human well-being can best be advanced
by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within
the framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets
and free trade. (Harvey, 2005, p. 2)
Consequently, neoliberalism perceives of and promotes the individual
as an autonomous entrepreneur responsible for his or her self,
progress and position. Lemke (2002) describes neoliberalism as
seeking
to unite a responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational
individual. It aspires to construct responsible subjects whose
moral quality is based on the fact that they rationally assess
the costs and benefits of a certain act as opposed to other alternative
acts. (p. 59)
The market becomes central within such a conception of the individual.
Every social transaction is conceptualized as entrepreneurial,
to be carried out purely for personal gain. The market introduces
competition as the structuring mechanism through which resources
and status are allocated efficiently and fairly. The ‘invisible
hand’ of the market is thought to be the most efficient way of
sorting out which competing individuals get what. (Olssen et al,
2004, pp. 137‑138)
Under neoliberal rationality, the state plays a central role
in creating the appropriate conditions, laws, and institutions
necessary for markets to operate. This includes producing and
reproducing particular discourses, practices and structures that
enable neoliberalism to persist and prosper. As the authors in
the issue show, proponents of neoliberalism have worked to reshape
how we talk and think about the world, and the social structures
we act within. Under neoliberalism, we are to accept that the
purpose of education is to promote economic growth rather than
social well-being, that efficiency, even in education, is achieved
only through competition, and that standardized tests are required
to provide objective assessments so that inefficient schools can
be identified, improved, or eliminated.
However, the authors also note that neoliberal policies are both
contradictory and resisted. For example, neoliberals decry state
intervention because they presume that administrative and bureaucratic
structures are inherently inferior to markets as a means of allocating
resources. But, as Thrupp & Wilmot (2003) point out, all markets
depend on the state for regulation (Sayer, 1995, p. 87).
Recent educational reforms have been noted not for the government
intervening less in the lives of educators, parents, and students,
but more. In the USA, in cities like Chicago (see Lipman &
Hursh in this issue), states like Florida and Texas, and in the
passage of No Child Left Behind, governments, with corporate executives
as cheerleaders, have intervened in education to create a system
in which schools compete with one another and are assessed through
standardized testing. In fact, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), made
into law by a Republican president and congress that only a few
years earlier had called for closing the Department of Education,
represents the greatest intervention of the federal government
into education in the USA (DeBray, 2006). NCLB has shifted educational
control from the local and state levels to the federal level.
This intrusion has not gone unnoticed.
Furthermore, while neoliberalism is promoted as the most efficient
way to provide for economic growth and equality, and to improve
schooling and decrease the achievement gap, data cast doubt on
whether those goals can be achieved. In the USA economic inequality
continues to increase and several years after the implementation
of the testing and accountability systems at the states and federal
levels, the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students
is no longer narrowing but remaining the same or widening (Lee,
2006). In England, school choice enables the schools with high
test scores to skim off the better students from schools with
lower test scores; consequently, the schools that are already
behind end up with even more challenging students and fall further
behind (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000).
That neoliberalism has not delivered on its promises has not
surprised observers like Harvey (2005), who concludes that the
neoliberal vision cannot be achieved and is, therefore, ‘a failed
utopian rhetoric masking a successful project for the restoration
of class power’ (p. 203). Because neoliberalism cannot deliver
on its promises, it is not always welcomed and is, therefore,
sometimes implemented only through the authoritarian measures
of the corporate and governmental elite. In some countries, neoliberalism
has been instituted only through military violence, as in Chile
in 1973 when the US backed military coup removed from power the
elected President, Salvador Allende, and instituted a dictatorship
under Augusto Pinochet, and more recently, in Iraq, where after
the invasion the US privatized public enterprises, opened businesses
and banks to foreign control, eliminated trade barriers, and substantially
limited unions and the right to strike (Harvey, 2006, p. 10).
As several of the authors show, implementing neoliberalism has
required gaining control over the government and the media, and
ignoring the voices of those who will be negatively affected by
neoliberalism. In some countries, alternatives, such as the Citizen
Schools in Brazil, have been created. Elsewhere oppositional political
movements have formed, such as Teachers for Social Justice in
Chicago and the Coalition for Common Sense in Rochester, New York.
The contributors to this issue provide a valuable overview of
neoliberalism as it has been instituted in several countries and
point towards what an alternative politics might look like. For
example, David Gabbard, in ‘Militarizing Class Warfare: the historical
foundations of the neoliberal/neoconservative nexus,’ shows how
neoconservatives have assisted in developing the legal and cultural
context in which neoliberalism might overcome resistance and thrive.
Gabbard states: ‘Neoconservatism has provided a solution to a
crisis in neoliberalism – the crisis of how to manufacture the
public’s support for an agenda that was so decidedly contrary
to the public’s larger interests.’ He traces the rise of market
liberalism in the fourteenth century, the closing of the commons,
the criminalization of poverty and the conjoining of neoconservatism
and neoliberalism in the philosophy of Leo Strauss. Gabbard describes
how neoliberals have controlled the media in order to control
citizens.
Joao Paraskeva, in ‘Kidnapping Public Schooling: perversion and
normalization of the discursive bases within the epicenter of
New Right educational policies,’ also examines the way in which
neoliberals and neoconservatives have used the media to gain hegemonic
control over the way in which we think about education, the economy,
and democracy. Paraskeva analyzes neoliberal policies that began
with the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, in which educational
policy shifted away from equity and comprehensive schooling to
selectivity, productivity, parental choice, and institutional
competition. He shows how neoliberals have changed the dominant
discourses regarding the role of government and the purpose of
schooling by substituting individualism and the market for egalitarian
norms and values (Apple, 2000).
Pauline Lipman & David Hursh, in ‘Renaissance 2010: the reassertion
of ruling-class power through neoliberal policies in Chicago,’
provide, as an example of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner
& Theodore, 2002), a detailed analysis of the rise of and
resistance to Chicago’s educational policies. They describe how
corporate and political leaders have gained control over economic
and educational policy and created Renaissance 2010, a plan for
remaking not only the public schools but also the city itself:
to transform Chicago from an industrial hub into a corporate,
financial and tourist center, a command center for the global
economy (Sassen, 1994, 2004). Over the past 25 years successive
city governments have concentrated public resources and legislation
to facilitate downtown development and gentrification of working-class
and low-income neighborhoods, dramatically transforming the urban
landscape. In the process of becoming a global city, not only
has the city become spatially and economically segregated, but
also the corporate and political leaders, particularly embodied
in the Commercial Club of Chicago, have developed a dual school
system, one for the white middle and upper class and the other
for the poor, mostly people of color.
Likewise, Luis Armando Gandin, in ‘The Construction of the Citizen
School Project as an Alternative to Neoliberal Educational Policies,’
argues that the neoliberal policies being instituted in Brazil
are being resisted as proponents of the Citizen School project
use the neoliberal discourse of decentralization and autonomy
to rearticulate an alternative project, the Citizen School. In
contrast to neoliberalism, Citizen Schools aim to provide everyone
with guaranteed access to a public space for the construction
of citizenship, to not merely transmit knowledge to students but
to transform knowledge.
Sandra Leaton Gray, in ‘Teacher as Technician: semi-professionalism
after the 1988 Education Reform Act and its effect on conceptions
of pupil identity,’ shows the effect of recent British Conservative
and New Labour governments on education, in particular how the
increased auditing and control over teachers’ work, or the ‘new
managerialism,’ has undermined teachers’ professionalism and students’
identities as learners. Instead, neoliberal policies, in preparing
students for the labor market, have standardized both teachers
and students, thus alienating them from the educational process.
Similarly, Dave Hill examines the effect ‘new managerialism’
has had on teacher education in England and Wales in ‘Critical
Teacher Education, New Labour, and the Global Project of Neoliberal
Capital.’ These past and current neoliberal governments, he argues,
have radically transformed teacher education with the goal of
preparing students for the workplace, compliant to management’s
requirements. Schools, consequently, have narrowed their curriculum
and practices. Hill ends his analysis by describing what a Radical
Left proposal for teacher education might look like.
While Hill shows how neoliberals desire to reshape the student
into an economically productive, non-critical citizen, Penny Griffith,
in ‘Neoliberalism and the World Bank: economic discourse and the
(re)production of gendered identity(ies),’ argues that the discourse
of the World Bank reproduces particular hierarchical gendered
identities. The World Bank does this by limiting their consideration
of gender inequality to women differing in their ability to ‘accumulate
human capital in the home and the labor market’ and ignoring the
structural and cultural ways in which that inequality is reproduced.
John Clarke, like Gandin, suggests that neoliberalism has not
yet been universalized. In ‘Citizen Consumers and Public Service
Reform: at the limits of neoliberalism?,’ he examines the United
Kingdom’s National Health Service to uncover the political and
governmental difficulties in converting users of the national
health services into the ideal consumers as envisioned by neoliberal
theorists. Based on 106 interviews of both providers and users
of health care services, he uncovers people’s resistance to thinking
of themselves as either customers or consumers of health services.
The issue is rounded out by two reviews of Harvey’s recent book:
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), the first by Kenneth
Saltman and the second by Victoria Perselli.
References
Apple, M. (2000) Official Knowledge, 2nd edn. New York:
Routledge.
Brenner, N. & Theodore, N. (2002) Cities and the Geographies
of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, in N. Brenner &
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in North America and Western Europe, pp. 2‑32.
Oxford: Blackwell.
DeBray, E. (2006) Politics, Ideology and Education: federal
policy during the Clinton and Bush administrations. New York:
Teachers College Press.
Gillborn, D. & Youdell, D. (2000) Rationing Education:
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