Public borders,private crossings: Anthropological approaches to neoliberalism in US educational policy and spaces

Abstract

Educational policies across the globe reflect the ascendancy of neoliberalism. According to neoliberalism, the market represents a superior mechanism to govern (Peters, 2012), and thus, the role of the state is to enable the agency of the market (Rose, 1999). In the United States, the federal report A Nation at Risk (1983) formalized the direct influence of a neoliberal rationality on the formation of educational policies. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) and The Race to the Top (2010) represent successive assertions of market values on educational reform. At the same time, there is a fundamental contradiction within neoliberal logic: while the state is to refrain from interfering in the market, it must simultaneously intervene to govern schools (Hursh, 2005). Based on these trends, the articles in this special issue highlight critical tensions between public versus private values, practices, and discourses that emerge from the proliferation of a neoliberal logic into the educational sphere. In different ways, each of these articles map out a unique facet of neoliberalism in education to complicate the often totalizing critiques of market-based logics in order to demonstrate the complex ways that people rearticulate and resist education policy in an era of neoliberal ascendancy.

Current educational policies across the globe reflect the ascendancy of neoliberalism—a political and economic philosophy that operates to re-organize the public sphere through the imposition of a market-driven approach to governance (Brown, 2006) and an ideology of austerity (De Lissovoy, 2015). According to the ideology of neoliberalism, all aspects of society—including education, healthcare, and the environment—should be transformed, by state action when necessary, into commodities bought and sold on the market (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberalism is effective at governing societies partly because it extends beyond the economic sphere to produce deeply appealing “discourses and ideologies that promote individual self-interest, unrestricted flows of capital, deep reductions in the cost of labor, and sharp retrenchment of the public sphere” (Lipman, 2011: 6). According to neoliberal ideology, the market represents a superior mechanism to regulate and govern (Peters, 2012), and thus, the role of the state is to encourage policies that enable the agency of the market (Hall, 2005; Rose, 1999). Individualism, choice, and competition represent central tenets of a neoliberal rationality that influences the formation of policies for which education serves as a primary mechanism to advance market-driven interests.

In education, neoliberal “market values” and neoconservative “traditional values” have combined (Apple, 2006) to create a dominant paradigm in which educational institutions are to undergo significant reform while simultaneously reducing funding for public schools in an effort to privatize them (Hursh and Martina, 2003). In the United States, the federal report A Nation at Risk (1983) triggered a panic over the nation’s declining global competitiveness in educational achievement, holding the public schooling system responsible for the economic recession of the 1980s (Hursh, 2007). The answer to such a nationwide crisis in education was, according to neoliberals, to impose a new surveillance regime of standardized testing (Gilliom, 2008). At the same time, the federal government used the discourse of school “failure” to push for privatization (Koyama, 2010), which would increase educational quality by providing a competitive “market” in which the best schools would attract the largest number of families and outcompete low-performing schools (Hursh and Martina, 2003). In doing so, A Nation at Risk signaled the repercussions of the shift from a Keynesian social welfare state to trickle-down Reaganomics on the formation of educational policies. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) and The Race to the Top (2010)—two key pieces of neoliberal educational policy in the United States—represent successive assertions of private and corporate values on the public domain through the formation of educational policies (Hursh, 2007). For example, although the stated goal of NCLB was to eliminate the achievement gap, analyses of government documents indicate that the actual intent was to frustrate parents with the public education system to where they would move their children to private schools (Hursh and Henderson, 2011; Hursh and Martina, 2003). Additionally, NCLB explicitly fosters the relationship between public schools and the private sector by mandating supplemental educational services such as after-school tutoring managed by for-profit corporations that benefit from the reproduction of school “failure” (Koyama, 2010). Consequently, it is not surprising that NCLB has failed in its stated goal; in fact, the achievement gap has increased since NCLB was introduced in 2002 (Hursh, 2007) as the state pushes the purpose of schooling away from the public good and toward an individualistic, private good (Labaree, 1997).

However, there is a fundamental contradiction within neoliberal logic: while the state is to refrain from interfering in the market, it simultaneously must intervene to govern schools but must do so indirectly, “from afar” (Hursh, 2005: 6). To deal with these inherent contradictions, the neoliberal agenda advances (Apple, 2006) a common-sense, taken-for-granted discourse that appeals to deeply held cultural values of freedom, individual autonomy, and human dignity (Harvey, 2005), producing an ideology of heightened individualism and self-responsibilization—the individual is paramount, and is solely responsible for their success or failure within the system (Davies and Bansel, 2007). One way to make sense of this apparent contradiction is to understand neoliberalism’s rise to hegemony as operating through Foucault’s (1994) notion of governmentality (Baltodano, 2014; Giroux and Searls Giroux, 2009), where, in addition to policy prescriptions, the state imposes new discourses—or mentalities—that subjects are encouraged to take up as their own (Davies and Bansel, 2007). Through these new discourses, the state governs and regulates people’s subjectivities by “structur[ing] the possible field of action of others” (Foucault, 1994: 341) and, by internalizing the discourses, individuals come to govern themselves. Through this process, the contradictions of neoliberal ideology are resolved at the level of subjectivity by producing a discourse of neoliberalism as “common sense” that becomes incorporated into the deepest levels of cultural meaning-making. Neoliberalism instantiates itself as the inevitable outcome of naturally unfolding social and economic processes, making it difficult to imagine alternatives (De Lissovoy, 2015; Lipman, 2011).

Based on these trends, the articles in this special issue are designed to highlight critical tensions between public versus private values, practices, discourses, and interests that emerge from the proliferation of neoliberal rationalities into the educational sphere. These articles, each in a different way, map out a unique facet of neoliberalism in education, complicating and nuancing the often totalizing discourse that comes along with critiques of market-based and competitive logics. Each article demonstrates the importance of constructing knowledge through careful and nuanced qualitative research in the interpretive anthropological tradition, in order to pinpoint the complex ways that people rearticulate and resist education policy. In particular, these articles use ethnographic and other forms of qualitative, discourse analytic, and historical research to explore the possibilities and limits of neoliberalism as a conceptual tool for understanding the meanings of current educational policies by exploring some of the following questions: What, specifically, do we mean by neoliberalism? Might there be multiple neoliberalisms? How do interpretive approaches to policy analysis offer important insights into the cultural and social logics of policy that problematize increasingly taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between neoliberalism and educational policy (Shore et al., 2011)? How does “peopling policy” (Ball, 1997) problematize essentialized and bounded notions about the relationship between neoliberalism, policy, and social actors?

By taking up these questions, the articles in this issue lay theoretical ground for explaining how the dialectics of structure and agency mediate the tensions between public and private values portrayed in the intersections of a neoliberal political economy with educational policy (Brayboy, 2012). For example, Baltonado argues that theoretical and methodological paradigms in educational anthropology must radically shift to address neoliberalism. Baltonado demonstrates the degree to which venture philanthropists and mega-foundations influence education policy in the name of altruism and charity. Because philanthropic intentions are ostensibly good, the public often fails to recognize the border between public and private, and the line between democracy and plutocracy becomes blurred. As Baltonado shows, education “reforms” that are influenced by the visions of venture philanthropists are often quite racialized and gendered – that is, white elite men dictate what they deem appropriate kinds of change for poor or working class, black and brown communities.

While Baltonado paints a macro-level portrait of the political economy of education reform in the United States, Convertino’s ethnographic perspective focuses on local enactments of the broader charter school debate. In particular, Convertino provides an interpretive and contextualized analysis to highlight how social actors drew on a neoliberal logic inscribed in the national debate to produce competing claims about the meaning of local school choice. This article also demonstrates that local misinformation due in large part to an overall lack of information intersected with a broader circulating neoliberal discourse to reproduce a locally, polarized school choice debate that eclipsed the possibility of a more collective, democratic discourse about the role of public schooling for the public good. Furthermore, by closely considering in what ways local actors drew on the wider charter school debate to formulate conflicts about school choice at a local level, Convertino demonstrates that national and local proponents and opponents alike used an economic rationality to define both sides of the debate, thus reducing democratic deliberation over major educational policy changes to a bottom line logic.

Like Convertino, McWilliams focuses on local enactments of school choice, but this time, from the perspectives of students, teachers and administrators at a traditional, public, neighborhood school in Philadelphia. McWilliams examines how actors in this public school experience stigma and shame as a result of affiliation with their institution. McWilliams reflects on the moral associations that "neighborhood school" invokes within an expanding educational marketplace. Looking at the ways that race, educational quality and lack of school choice impact the school community, she reminds us that living in an era of "advanced choice" necessitates that the privilege to choose is unevenly distributed. For those who do not have the luxury of choice, the implications can be dire.

Policies move and take shape across settings because people appropriate and enact them in complex, messy ways. The same is true for research in education. To this end, Brown explores how staff members in a Brooklyn public school construct their identities after reading the ethnographic critique of the school’s neoliberal construction of need, college-readiness, and social justice. Brown discusses the ambivalence of staff members as they agree with Brown’s position, but struggle to find ways to resist the problematic conflation of white upper- or middle-class identities with saviorism, and brown or black urban, working-class identities with neediness. Teachers commented that this conflation was prevalent in the school’s marketing to its philanthropic funders, but were unsure of how to resist it. In this way, Brown shows how people enact policy with hesitation, sometimes furthering and sometimes attempting to struggle against neoliberal subject formation, especially as it overlaps with the construction of raced and gendered identities.

Rounding out the perspectives in this volume that focus on neoliberalism in venture philanthropy and education (Baltonado), the charter school debate (Convertino), the stigma that comes along with not entrepreneurializing the self in an era of advanced choice (McWilliams), raced and gendered enactments of neoliberalized identities (Brown), Wilson focuses on neoliberal discourses in an elite private school following the progressivist Sudbury model. Wilson demonstrates the tension between radical transformation of the educational experience in this school within the larger context of the neoliberal alternative education industry that constrains possibilities for this radical transformation to occur. Tracing neoliberal ideology into the discourses and practices of a private school through Foucault’s (1994) notion of governmentality, Wilson shows how the progressivist Sudbury model, while seemingly existing—and indeed, creating a market for itself—in opposition to neoliberal values, ultimately draws from the same neoliberal assumptions of heightened individualism, autonomy, and schooling for private purposes and profit that prevail in the discourses, policies, and practices of neoliberal public schooling.

As Wilson discusses the ways in which neoliberal ideologies masquerade as progressive in an elite, private school, Nygreen demonstrates the ways in which neoliberal governmentality becomes a part of the "both/and" discourse of community-based, Freirean, popular educators who must begin "teaching to the [state standardized, high stakes] test" to maintain funding for their program. Nygreen shows the ways that the educators in this program tried both to continue to impart consciousness-raising, anti-oppressive education to students as well as raise their test scores. She finds that this "both/and" thinking functions as a technology of neoliberal governance, and demonstrates the dangerous ways that audit culture shapes our work in education.

In total, this special issue references and analyzes some of the range and variation in the ways that neoliberal logic intersects with educational policy in order to name, define, and challenge the parameters of neoliberalism in education. Such naming is crucial in the present historical moment because, as Lipman (2011: 11) argues, “transforming subjectivities is dialectically related to restructuring social policies, and education is a critical piece.” As global neoliberal capitalism has already proven to have disastrous effects on education, the environment, and global economic inequality (Hursh and Henderson, 2011), the creation of new discourses—new mentalities—becomes particularly pressing. By naming, defining, and challenging these parameters, we hope to cultivate greater awareness, dialogue, and action toward a post-neoliberal future.