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This article argues that the neoliberal renaissance of the 1980s marketized education, with distinctly negative social consequences. We examine the emergence and promotion of a national-level discourse that positioned schools in the service of the economy. Based on ethnographic research conducted in North Carolina, we then show how local growth elite utilized this discourse to further their own race and class interests to the exclusion and detriment of poorer, African American parents and students. We suggest that ethnographic studies of policy formation help to socially and historically contextualize contemporary debates and denaturalize unwarranted assumptions about the public good.
Over the past 30 years, the United States has witnessed massive economic, political, and cultural changes. Dominant views of the appropriate relationship between the state and the market shifted considerably, as proponents of neoliberalism convinced power brokers and the general public that a strong market, free of government interference, would provide desired prosperity. More recently, neoliberals have advocated the application of market principles to institutions formerly reserved as "public," such as schools, some medical services, or prisons. In this article we argue that neoliberalism has reduced opportunities for social equity and democratic participation.
During this period, public education became "marketized." By marketization, we signify the intensified injection of market principles such as deregulation, competition, and stratification into the public schools. Business models and corporate influence have long affected education (see, e.g., Counts 1927; Katz 1970). The advent of tracking in the early 20th century to prepare immigrant students for working-class jobs and the consolidation of schools along the factory model are the most spectacular examples of their sway. However, we argue that the neoliberal economic and political transformations under way in the United States have renewed and altered the privileged position of corporate rhetoric in educational debates.
Marketization takes many forms, discursive and structural. Primary among those is the unqualified celebration of "choice" in schooling, whether as vouchers, charters (also known as "public school choice"), or magnet schools. The rhetoric of choice positions parents and students as consumers of schooling; it implies that all parents are equally informed, politically connected, and capable of securing for their own children the best education. Yet early studies caution that such policies easily result in increased race and class stratification....