Disrupting the Neoliberal Social Imaginary: Theorizing the Crises in News Media Coverage of Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Framing the Crisis of Education in the News: The Hidden Curriculum and Pedagogies of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Since the 1980s, news media, press journalism, and how people learn about the world around them have undergone radical shifts due to changes in communications regulation and technological advancement (McChesney, 2004; Shudson, 2003; van Dijk, 2013). What role the news media plays or should play—informing the public, serving the interests of the elite, functioning as a governing institution, engaging with an informed citizenry—in relation to a given society is of much debate within and among popular and intellectual circles. Deregulation of the telecommunications industry, new technologies, shifting interests and priorities of readership has resulted in a radical shift in the work of journalism, who produce news media, and what itself is considered “news.”
It is against this backdrop that this paper seeks to connect the real, material crises in the media with the manufactured crisis in education that diverts discussion away from the most dehumanizing elements of the neoliberal social imaginary, in order to illustrate how the neoliberal social imaginary has become one of the dominant curricular discourses of the 21st century. This social imaginary impacts all aspects of public and private life as it reinforces the “need” to eliminate all things public and collective in order to privatize them at the individual level—all in service of the belief that there is no other choice.
To accomplish this goal, this paper will illustrate that neoliberalism functions as curriculum: it presents particular cultural, social, political, and economic logics as common sense means to address the various crises of public institutions, all of which result in the market privatization of those same institutions. The first section of this paper theorizes how neoliberal politics under the guise of democratization of the news media have resulted in both the gutting of professional education journalism and the intensification of the news media representing the interests of the economic elite. The paper then considers news media reporting on education and challenges to normative media discourses about education and how they function to assert or subvert the neoliberal social imaginary. Recent literature addresses many of the issues that critics of neoliberalism have identified part of the plan to privatize education: research on teachers, their identities, and their effectiveness (Cohen, 2010; Goldstein, 2011); test scores and global competitiveness (Stack, 2006; Warmington & Murphy, 2007), charter schools and parental choice (Rotherham, 2008), relying on advocacy-oriented research and think tanks rather than educational researchers (Malin & Lubienski, 2015), as well as media-government relations and the role that the news media takes in the education policy-making process (Levin, 2004; Lingard & Rawolle, 2004; Rawolle & Lingard, 2010; Wallace, 1997). The paper concludes with a discussion of how public scholars might disrupt the neoliberal social imaginary in spite of its ascendance as a curricular logic so that they might challenge and extend the boundaries of debate about the purposes of education.

Author

• Rebecca A. Goldstein, Montclair State University