Policy Futures in Education

ISSN 1478-2103

Volume 8 Issue 1 2010

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Henry A. Giroux. Zombie Politics and Other Late Modern Monstrosities in the Age of Disposability, pages 1‑7
Sigrid Haunberger. Did Educational Expansion Trigger the Development of an Education Society? Chances and Risks of a New Model of Society, pages 8‑21
Brian McKenna. Exposing Environmental Health Deception as a Government Whistleblower: turning critical ethnography into public pedagogy, pages 22‑36
John Opute. Managing Reward in Developing Economies: the challenge for multinational corporations, pages 37‑47
Alex Means & Kendall Taylor. Assessing the Debt: George W. Bush’s legacy and the future of public education under Barack Obama, pages 48‑60
Mark T. Yates & Richard D. Lakes. After Pell Grants: the neoliberal assault on prisoners, pages 61‑70
Khalida Tanvir Syed. Storied Understandings: bringing Aboriginal voices to Canada’s multicultural discourse, pages 71‑81
Stuart Tannock. Learning to Plunder: global education, global inequality and the global city, pages 82‑98
Janet Mansfield. ‘Literacies’ in the Arts: a new order of presence, pages 99‑110
D. Brent Edwards Jr. Trends in Governance and Decision-Making: a democratic analysis with attention to application in education, pages 111‑125
Tina (A. C.) Besley. Digitized Youth: constructing identities in the creative knowledge economy, pages 126‑141

OCCASIONAL THOUGHTS
Henry A. Giroux. Torturing Children: Bush’s legacy and democracy’s failure, pages 142‑147

Zombie Politics and Other Late Modern Monstrosities in the Age of Disposability

HENRY A. GIROUX McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.1

At present Americans are fascinated by a particular kind of monstrosity, by vampires and zombies condemned to live an eternity by feeding off the souls of the living. The preoccupation with such parasitic relations speaks uncannily to the threat most Americans perceive from the shameless blood lust of contemporary captains of industry, which Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone, has aptly described as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. Media culture, as the enormous popularity of the Twilight television franchise and HBO’s True Blood reveals, is nonetheless enchanted by this seductive force of such omnipotent beings. More frightening, however, than the danger posed by these creatures is the coming revolution enacted by the hordes of the unthinking, caught in the spell of voodoo economics and compelled to acts of obscene violence and mayhem. They are the living dead, whose contagion threatens the very life force of the nation.

Did Educational Expansion Trigger the Development of an Education Society? Chances and Risks of a New Model of Society

SIGRID HAUNBERGER Department of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of Berne, Switzerland

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.8

This article focuses on the question of whether educational expansion leads to a new type of society, the education society. Taking into consideration the combined elements of three models of society (the post-industrial society, the knowledge society and the information society) – the chances and risks of an educational society will be elicited and, subsequently, confronted with an empirical validation. It turned out that modern societies are not education societies. Only a society which reflects upon the difficulty of the unfair distribution of opportunities through the differential access to knowledge and institutional obstacles of the educational system can become an actual education society.

Exposing Environmental Health Deception as a Government Whistleblower: turning critical ethnography into public pedagogy

BRIAN McKENNA Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Michigan Dearborn, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.22

This article focuses on the author’s applied anthropological work with the Ingham County Health Department between 1998 and 2001. Government administrators were reflexively aware that nobody had ever stepped back to assess the area’s overall environmental health and rank the issues according to some criteria, such as by the ‘most urgent problems’, and then help resolve them. They requested a holistic analysis. The author, an anthropologist, was hired to investigate virtually all of the environmental health problems in the region. This initiative, as originally conceived, was envisioned as a challenge to traditional ways of doing business at the Environmental Health Bureau of the Health Department. The Health Department leadership explicitly sought to create a model that turned the ‘public’s health into the ‘People’s Health’. Paradoxically, after several disturbing findings became apparent, Health Department officials began to work diligently to prevent the impending publication of the first report, ‘The Story of Water Resources at Work’ in August 2000. The article describes how the author used the methodology of critical ethnography to chronicle the processes of hegemony in the work environment, and how he acted as a critical public pedagogue by employing extant cultural forms to communicate these corruptions to citizens at large. In so doing it charts the surprising contingencies that resulted from his resistance.

Managing Reward in Developing Economies: the challenge for multinational corporations

JOHN OPUTE Faculty of Business, Computing & Information Management, London South Bank University, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.37

Reward has been, and continues to be, subject to significant changes in developing economies; the industrial relations model prevalent being driven by the complex socio-economic and cultural paradigms and the increasing demands of globalisation. The issue of reward in developing economies is therefore central and dependent on numerous contextual factors. The research presented in this article focuses on emerging trends in reward management practices in a developing economy, like Nigeria. Nigeria, with a population of about 140 million people and the economic opportunities derivable from its oil wealth, provides substantial opportunities for industrialisation. Consequently, the country continues to attract investment by multinational corporations. However, because of its evolving industrial relations setting, reward management is complex. This can be seen in the context of the interlocking roles of national institutions, culture, socio-economic factors and employee engagement in developing an appropriate framework. The framework of the research is based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected from 11 companies, through interviews and questionnaires. The conclusion points at the significant role industrial relations must assume. In particular, it highlights how essential contextual factors and employee engagement are in generating a supportive framework for the challenges facing multinationals in reward management.

Assessing the Debt: George W. Bush’s legacy and the future of public education under Barack Obama

ALEX MEANS Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada
KENDALL TAYLOR Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.48

This article utilizes Gloria Ladson-Billings’ notion of educational debt in order to explore the historical, economic, and cultural politics of education reform under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It tracks the No Child Left Behind Act across a number of fields in order to claim that Bush’s expansion of the educational debt should be understood as both an exacerbation of systemic inequality as well as the erosion of the democratic purposes of public education. In conclusion, the article forecasts ahead to the future of the educational debt under the Obama administration by looking at the policies implemented in Chicago under former Chicago Public Schools chief executive, and now current secretary of education, Arne Duncan. The authors contend that the sociopolitical infrastructure of Bush’s No Child Left Behind presents a fundamental challenge to progressive educational reform under an Obama administration.

After Pell Grants: the neoliberal assault on prisoners

MARK T. YATES & RICHARD D. LAKES Georgia State University, Atlanta USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.61

The number of prisoners in the United States has accelerated over the past thirty years, giving it the highest incarceration rate in the world. The rise in the prison rate has coincided with the ascendancy of neoliberal policies of governance. These include, deregulation of markets, reduction of welfare services, and harsh punitive measures for those who transgress social mores. Contained within neoliberal criminal policy is the proclivity to utilize prisons as a means to maintain societal inequities. This article examines the link between prisoner education policy and wider social and economic policies that disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. Neoliberal prisoner education is predicated, in part, upon the privileging of vocational training over liberal, higher learning. Current policy, typified by the recently passed Second Chance Act, reinforces hierarchies both in education and in the workplace by narrowly defining prisoners as human capital within the market.

Storied Understandings: bringing Aboriginal voices to Canada’s multicultural discourse

KHALIDA TANVIR SYED Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.71

This article discusses the implications and complexities of Canada’s multicultural policies for aboriginal students in its post-secondary education systems. The author, a Pakistani-Canadian multicultural educator, interviewed an Aboriginal-Canadian multicultural educator, to discuss the cultural differences, divisions, and resistances between immigrant and aboriginal perspectives on multiculturalism. What emerged was an examination of belonging, of cultural identity, and of learning and sharing through stories, which is presented here in narrative form. Rather than offering solutions of suggestions for change, this attempts to offer a bridge of understanding – so that Canada’s immigrant and aboriginal cultural minorities can learn together, how to support each other’s voices in the multicultural discourse that informs political and educational policies.

Learning to Plunder: global education, global inequality and the global city

STUART TANNOCK Cardiff University, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.82

Most research and policy discussions of education in the global city have focused on the ways in which globalization and the emergence of global or globalizing cities can create social, economic and educational inequality locally, within the global city itself. Global cities, however, are, by definition, powerful places, where the core institutions, structures and processes of the global economy are constituted and controlled; as such, they are places where decisions and actions taken locally can have significant and often destructive effects all over the globe. This article presents a case study of a series of partnerships between public institutions of education and the global corporate mining sector in Toronto, Canada to serve as both example and metaphor of how global city education often helps to create, exacerbate and legitimate inequalities and injustices, not just locally, but regionally, nationally and globally, between the city and the rest of the world.

‘Literacies’ in the Arts: a new order of presence

JANET MANSFIELD Auckland, New Zealand

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.99

Through a somewhat interruptive analysis, this article argues that the arts ‘literacies’ policy strategy which has become a feature of curriculum policy in the New Zealand Curriculum Framework since the year 2000, presents and promotes a new hegemonic strategy of normalization and reduction. Policy language is an ideologically loaded language, and in a sense, the article attempts, through critical philosophical post-structuralist discourse, what could be considered as a decolonization of the ideologically loaded language of curriculum policy for the arts in education. Paradoxes, contradictions and power politics abound within policy, which can often lean upon assumptions, apparently ‘natural’ and rational thinking. By resisting these paradoxes we may extract the rhetorics and codes of such modes of representation to reveal inadequacies. In the case of the arts, this article challenges the application of ‘literacies’ to the arts as an economically expedient strategic act that promotes diminishing arts as normative practice.

Trends in Governance and Decision-Making: a democratic analysis with attention to application in education

D. BRENT EDWARDS Jr Department of Educational Leadership, Higher Education, and International Education, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.111

Recent decades have witnessed the rise in popularity of a handful of related yet distinct approaches to governance and decision-making in many different contexts that either relocate the level and location at which decisions are made or how they are made, or both. True for developing as well as developed countries, and for both the public and private spheres, this article explicates four of these trends (decentralization, democratic decentralization, deliberative democracy, and empowered participatory governance) in terms of their theory and definition, goals, and implementation – with particular attention to their application in education. Furthermore, the article invokes a framework for analysis that permits an assessment of the extent to which each approach to decision-making facilitates participation along four dimensions: breadth, depth, range, and control. Lastly, this article discusses weaknesses in theory and practice across all four decision-making variations and proposes areas for further research. The results of this inquiry are relevant for theorists and practitioners given the fact that many policies and reforms – often incorrectly – are lumped under the term decentralization.

Digitized Youth: constructing identities in the creative knowledge economy

TINA (A.C.) BESLEY University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.126

The article elaborates on the notion of building knowledge cultures and the creative knowledge economy, referring largely to work jointly written with Michael A. Peters. It then discusses some of the recent research findings about US youths’ engagement and identities in the digital world that have become available since 2007. It examines the creativity of youths and the constructive means they use to develop new identities and subjectivities that resist the worst excesses of the market while engaging and negotiating the emergent social media and developing their own hybridized sense of style in music and culture. Finally, the article looks at youth and creativity–the implications for the creative knowledge economy with this new generation of digital natives and how education might finally take an active role rather than banning children’s participation.

Torturing Children: Bush’s legacy and democracy’s failure

HENRY A. GIROUX McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.1.142

Nowhere is there a more disturbing, if not horrifying, example of the relationship between a culture of cruelty and the politics of irresponsibility than in the resounding silence that surrounds the torture of children under the presidency of George W. Bush – and the equal moral and political failure of the Obama administration to address and rectify the conditions that made it possible.

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