Education Populism? A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Secretary Betsy DeVos's Education Policy Discourse

• In Event: Critical Examinations of Neoliberalism and Innovation in Education Policy Making

Abstract

Scholars of political economy have raised the question of whether recent populist movements around the world signal the decline of neoliberal hegemony. What would such a decline mean for education policy, an arena that has been dominated by a neoliberal common sense for several decades? Using methods of corpus-driven discourse analysis, I investigate the policy discourse of US Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, in order to gauge the extent to which it aligns with the neoliberal common sense or draws upon discourses of populism. The findings suggest that DeVos deploys several features of populist logic and discourse even as she advocates policies that are characteristically neoliberal. I consider the implications of this discourse for education policy in the US.

Author

• Michael Ian Cohen, University of Northern Colorado