National Reports and the Construction of Inequality

Abstract

The major national reports on education in the United States have acted to alter the very discourse of education. They shift the terrain of debate from a more social democratic concern to the language of efficiency, standards, and productivity. These reports are not only indicators of ideological shifts, however. They are themselves part of the cultural production of such altered public discourse and are constitutive elements of a particular hegemonic project. The reports and the proposals for “reforming” education that they entail are the result of an accord between right‐wing populist groups, capital, and the new middle class. Even though the documents’ perspectives on both the economy and schooling are Seriously deficient, the reports do succeed in disarticulating many of the dominant themes of the previous social democratic accord and rearticulating many of them around rightist principles. The ultimate effect may be eliminating from our collective memory why inequality in education, the economy, and in politics was of public concern.