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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Since the late 1980’s, market based school reform has promised to inject private sector values of competition, choice, efficiency, and accountability into the allegedly “bureaucratic” and “inefficient” public sector. This panel examines the results of this approach across four domains: the student, the teacher, the school, and the district/system. Using a variety of research methods, the papers find that market based reforms actually exacerbate class stratification at each level examined. The significance of these studies is that, despite the promises and “rationales” of market-based reform, the “reality” is that these reforms in fact worsen economic and other forms of inequality. Considering these studies across domains provides more robust evidence for rethinking the now commonplace implementation of market based school reforms.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Examination of Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Education

Chair

• Frank M. Adamson, Stanford University

Papers

• Neoliberal Restructuring and the Exacerbation of Class Stratification: The Student Body - Kenneth J. Saltman, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• A Digital Ethnography of Teach For America: Ethnographic Analysis of the Truth For America Podcast - Julian Vasquez Heilig, California State University, Sacramento; T. Jameson Brewer, University of North Georgia

• Whose Choice? The Strategies and Results of the Charter School System in New Orleans - Frank M. Adamson, Stanford University; Channa M. Cook, Stanford University

• Edu-Solutions and the Edu-Technology Market as an American Export - Carol Anne Spreen, New York University