High-Stake Reforms and Urban Education

• In Event: Policy and Reform Issues in Urban Education

Abstract

Considering the promise with which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) came to prominence as a panacea to improve education as systemic reform, the authors of this paper contextualize the negative impact of the reform on urban education over the past decade (Reardon, et al., 2012; McNeil, 2000; Ryan, 2004). Next, the authors use postcolonial theory (Fanon, 1952, 1961; Memmi, 1965) to conceptualize why NCLB failed to close the achievement gaps in urban schools due to its hegemonic approach to educational policy. Approaches to reform that find their origins in postcolonial educational apparatuses, the authors argue, were never meant to serve vanquished, marginalized populations, rather only to exploit them (DeLeon, 2012; Shahjahan, 2011; Foucault, 1972). As an alternative to NCLB for urban education, the authors then revisit structural issues that have been largely ignored during the NCLB era and pose a new community-based direction for accountability that is counterhegemonic.

References

DeLeon, A. (2012). “A perverse kind of sense”: Urban spaces, ghetto places, and the discourse of school shootings. Urban Review, 44(1), 152–169.

Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press.

Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth. New York, NY: Grove Weidenfeld.

Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. London, UK: Routledge.

McNeil, L. (2000). Contradictions of school reform: Educational costs of standardized testing. New York, NY: Routledge.

Memmi, A. (1965). The colonizer and the colonized. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Reardon, S., Greenberg, E., Kalogrides, D., Shores, K., & Valentino, R. (2012). Left Behind? The Effect of No Child Left Behind on Academic Achievement Gaps Working Paper. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ryan, J. E. (2004, June). The perverse incentives of the No Child Left Behind Act. New York University Law Review, 79, 932–989.

Shahjahan, R. (2011). Decolonizing the evidence-based education and policy movement: Revealing the colonial vestiges in educational policy, research, and neoliberal reform. Journal of Educational Policy, 26(2), 181–206.

Authors

• Julian Vasquez Heilig, California State University - Sacramento

• Muhammad Khalifa, Michigan State University

• Linda C. Tillman, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill