Neoliberal Restructuring and the Exacerbation of Class Stratification: The Student Body

• In Event: 56.050 - Rationales and Realities of Market-Based School Restructuring: Evidence of Exacerbated Class Stratification Across Four Domains

Abstract

Recent market based reforms targeting students and teachers such as “grit,” biometric pedagogies, and the over-prescription of cognitive enhancement ADHD drugs have gone back in time to draw on industrial efficiency delivery models, behaviorism, and Taylorism to suggest that learning is ideally measurable directly through the bodies of students and teachers (Saltman, 2016). Examining three pedagogies of control, this paper shows that the same technologies of control and pedagogical efficacy are being used in very different ways based on the social class of students.

The prescription of ADHD medication exploded with the advent of high stakes standardized testing which links school funding to test outcomes. The first part of this paper details how the over-prescription of ADHD drugs does very different things with different classes of students. The drugs are intended to quiet, control, and keep working class and poor students from interrupting the test taking process. For professional class students, these drugs are being used to allow students to endure the drudgery of the testing process so that they can consume and display decontextualized and meaningless knowledge.

The second part of the paper details how pedagogies of grit are being applied to working class and poor students, particularly in charter schools, yet these pedagogies of grit are not being rolled out in professional class schools. Grit (Duckworth) is a pedagogy of learned self-regulation that aims for students to obey teacher authority and persist in tasks. Measurement of grit has recently been federally supported through the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2016. This section explains how grit has been popularized as a remedy to poverty (Tough); yet it fosters forms of agency at odds with students’ developing the knowledge, skills and dispositions for higher academic and economic success.

The third section details the recent development of biometric pedagogies that aim to measure learning and teaching through the bodies of students. With millions of dollars, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supported the development of Q Sensor bracelets measuring student attention to teachers. More recently technology companies such as Affectiva have developed real time, webcam software that measures student attention to a teacher and its positive or negative valence, with the aim of quantifying the efficacy of teaching and creating prescriptive methodologies based in the data. The section explains how these practices displace dispositions for dialogue. Like grit and cognitive enhancement drugs, biometric pedagogy targets working class and poor students to foster forms of agency understood through submission to authority, rather than professional and ruling class forms of agency that instead emphasize curiosity, dialogue, debate, dissent, and the assumption of student control over learning and knowledge.

This paper uses discourse analysis of the scholarly and popular literature of these three technologies of control to illustrate how the same technologies are either only used with working class and poor students or used differentially with working class and poor as opposed to professional class students.

References:
Duckworth, A. (2016); Saltman, K. (2016); Tough, P. (2013).

Author

• Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth