Co-Opting Justice: How Neoliberalism Profits From Race in Educational Reform Projects

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Increased public focus on equalizing educational opportunity, and an emphasis on expanding educational research to meet this goal, suggest that promising possibilities exist for addressing deeply entrenched racial disparities in schools. However, the assumption that increased knowledge leads to improved actions belies how neoliberal material and ideological structures shape current educational research, policy, and practice. This session illuminates the problematic consequences of neoliberalism for students of color through four cases: “no excuses” school policies, sex education curricula, secular mindfulness as behavior management, and Job Corps vocational-training. Analyses of these cases demonstrate how neoliberalism conditions underlying assumptions about race, knowledge, and achievement and the contradictory ways in which racialized and gendered forms of schooling persist in the name of educational equality.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 4: People and Politics (The Who of Curriculum)

Chair

• Nirali Jani, San Francisco State University

Papers

• Negotiating the "Scholastic": Racialized Masculinities in the Age of "No Excuses" Reforms - Angel Rubiel Gonzalez, De La Salle Academy

• Sexuality Education, Race, and the California Healthy Youth Act in Neoliberal Silicon Valley - Erica Misako Boas, Santa Clara University

• Critical Mindfulness: Exploring Neoliberal Erasure of Buddhism and Asian American Buddhists in School Mindfulness Programs - Funie Hsu, San Jose State University

• Learn So You Can Earn: Job Corps and the Racialization of 1960s Human Capital Discourses - Kenzo K. Sung, Rowan University

Discussant

• Daniel Perlstein, University of California - Berkeley