Corporate Education Reform and the Undermining of Equality

• In Event: 56.029 - Conditions and Consequences of Educational Inequalities

Abstract

Objectives
For the last several decades corporate reformers have argued that our schools are failing and can only be repaired by implementing what has been called a corporate reform agenda using standardized testing to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable, and developing education as a market where publicly funded but privately administered charter schools compete with public schools. But after years of corporate education reform, the advances made in improving student learning and closing the achievement gap have been slowed and in some cases reversed (Ravitch, 2014). This paper describes the ways in which corporate reformers have gained control over education policy, the discourses and practices instituted, and how they have undermined the influence of educators and community members. Lastly, it describes how the spreading Opt Out movement reveals how the corporate reform movement is undermining education and education equality, and pushing back (New York State Allies for Public Education, 2015).
Perspective or theoretical framework
The theoretical framework guiding this research is “grounded in a range of critical epistemologies, conceptualizing the policy-making field as a socially constructed and discursively constituted space marked by institutional heterogeneity and contending forces” within a social and historical context. Such an approach makes it possible to analyze “policy actors and actions” as politically constituted and sociologically complex (Peck & Theodore, 2015, p. xxiv). The research is also situated within the context of the rise of networks, and the shift from hierarchy to heterarchy, enable politically and financially powerful individuals and groups to have a greater impact on education policy (Ball, 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012).
Methods and data sources
This is a case study of how education policy has been transformed in New York State incorporate the corporate reform agenda. The corporate reformers, which include the governor, commissioners and chancellors of education, philanthropists, and non-government organizations, claim that their reform agenda is a new civil rights movement aiming to end inequality. The research examines the connections between the rise of high-stakes testing and the charter schools and educational achievement. Among the data examined are the scores on the state standardized exams administered as required under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and data regarding racial and socio-economic status (NYSED.gov).
Results and scholarly significance
The research demonstrated the divergence between the state goals of the corporate reform movement--- to improve education and end inequality—with the outcomes. The corporate reformers have largely succeeded in installing their reform agenda of holding educators and students accountable through standardized testing, increasing the number of charter schools, and taking over the making of curriculum and pedagogy from the teachers, but failed at improving education. New York now state has the most segregated schools of any state and student learning has not improved. Furthermore, their effort to control education policy and practices, and marginalize teachers and parents is increasingly contest and they have reversed some policies, including ones regarding the use of test scores and teacher tenure.

Author

• David W. Hursh, University of Rochester