| Description |
This dissertation examines the current phase of educational reform in the United States. Premised primarily on a market-based, economistic vision of the purpose of schooling, along with a punitive, technocratic approach to educational policy and practice, the corporate school reform movement has exacerbated educational inequalities, while at the same time contributing to the expansion of a precarious political economy and fractured sphere of social relations. Drawing on critical perspectives in educational theory, as well as contemporary studies in political economy, social philosophy, and critical sociology, the dissertation advances the argument that the reform movement is both predicated and dependent upon various forms of crisis in order to drive the marketdriven program of educational change. Relying on contradictory logics of investment and dispossession, and normalizing intense conditions of insecurity, corporate school reform is not only a movement that fails on its own terms; it has also played a formidable role in the aggravation of inequality and immiseration in American social life. Much of the prominent educational scholarship dedicated to this problem, though attentive to the ill effects of so-called "market reforms," is not equipped with an adequate political vision to counter the movement's fundamental contradictions. Through an immanent critique of the logics of corporate school reform, the dissertation advances an alternative educational perspective grounded in legacies of struggle and visions of liberation. |
