Education as a Security Apparatus: Historicizing the "Leaky STEM Pipeline" in the War on Poverty

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Teaching the Past and Past Teaching: History and STEM as Sites of Curricular Intervention (Table 18)

Abstract

The “leaky STEM pipeline” discourse treats the “leakage” of “diverse” students as a potential threat. Drawing upon infrastructure and security studies, this article historicizes this discourse by looking at how US War on Poverty in the 1960s turned education into a security apparatus to capture the “poor.” It examines how models of “educational pipeline” were developed to reconceptualize education in an engineering language and then taken up by educational programs to combat a “national emergency”—the school dropout problem of the “culturally deprived.” It argues those corrective and preventative educational infrastructures constructed for the War on Poverty still hold their cultural authority in US education reforms today that continue producing fears towards the “poor” and capturing them with various “pipelines.”

Author

• Lei Zheng, Peking University