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Abstract
Neoliberalism has brought fundamental changes to the way schools of education prepare professional educators; among them is the pressure for schools of education to produce fast-track teacher preparation programs that bypass traditional requirements. Due to the privatization of public education, a new market has emerged to train educators and administrators for charter schools. The No Child Left Behind Act has made the old multipurpose PhD in education obsolete and has led to fast-track EdDs to train school administrators to raise test scores. In this era of corporate schooling, colleges of education are competing with online and for-profit colleges to increase student enrollment. Academic capitalism has entered into the classroom and it has redefined the academic premises upon which the entire higher education system was instituted. This article asks, what are the implications of this new educational arrangement for the purpose of education and the development of a critically informed mass of democratic citizens? This article proposes a critical dialog among educators, parents, labor groups, and grassroots organizations and an action plan to stop the dismantling of public education.
Notes
1. NCATE is the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education; AACTE is the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
2. Dewey’s beliefs in the intrinsic relationship between theory and practice were fundamental for his conception of teachers as transformative intellectuals who were morally attentive to larger social reforms. Dewey believed that schools were public spaces to critically assess the excesses of the industrial movement and to advocate for those who were being silenced.
3. Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman were recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974 and 1976, respectively.
4. Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 College of France lectures had been recorded in audiocassettes and were unpublished and untranscribed until 2004, when the first edition of this work was published in French. In 2008, these lectures were translated and published in English.
5. Ordoliberalism is the term given to the neoliberal governmentality conceptualized by members of the Freiburg School after WWI in Germany and implemented in West Germany after WWII. In spite of the fact that this school had existed in parallel to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, it had opposite views on many of the key issues. Ordoliberalism impacted the development of the Chicago School of Economics in the US; however, the latter became more radical (Lemke Citation2001). Unlike Adam Smith’s assumptions about the natural forces of the market, Ordoliberalism proposed that the market is not innate, and therefore, the government has to intervene in order to protect it. The state has to create competition, and encourage demand to keep the market alive. In this view, capitalism is a social construct, created and maintained by the government (Brown Citation2003; Lemke Citation2001). There is no such thing as the “logic of the market.” It is the state that defines the life and direction of the economy.
6. Among these reports were: A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education Citation1983); A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century: The Report of the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession (Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy Citation1986); Tomorrow’s Teachers (Holmes Group Citation1986); Time for Results: The Governors’ 1991 Report on Education (National Governors’ Association Citation1991), and Goals 2000 (United States Department of Education Citation1985).
7. See for example popular films like “Waiting for Superman” (Citation2010).
8. This technique is defined as the way norms and changes are introduced gradually, “lessening the chance people will grasp the overall scheme and organize resistance” (Sklar Citation1980, 21, cited in Davies and Bansel Citation2007, 251). “Piecemeal functionalism” has been one of the most successful methods that neoliberalism has used to render itself invisible and gradually consolidate its platform of governmentality (Davies and Bansel Citation2007). The invisibility of neoliberalism makes it difficult to challenge the depth of the social reorganization carried out by this ideology.
9. Useem uses the term “institutional capitalism” to differentiate it from the family and managerial capitalism of previous eras (Torres and Schugurensky Citation2002, 435).
10. TFA is so influential in the White House that it successfully orchestrated a campaign against Linda Darling-Hammond, one of its most vociferous critics, when she was considered for a key position in the Obama administration (Miner Citation2010).
11. This is the maximum amount allowed for political lobbying for a 501(c)3 organization.
12. For example, during spring 2010, a graduate school of education in a public Tier-1, research university in the Southwest was “de-established” and collapsed into a teachers college because the university board of regents and the state legislature considered it more profitable to focus on teacher preparation than subsidizing an entire academic unit devoted to research. Tenure and non-tenure faculty were told they were “free agents” and were instructed to search for jobs somewhere else.
13. Arne Duncan’s 2009 address at Columbia Teachers College, “Teacher Preparation: Reforming the Uncertain Profession.”
14. Arne Duncan’s 2010 address at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Conference, “Preparing the Teachers and School Leaders of Tomorrow.”
15. According to the NCATE’s mission (Citation2010), “Applicants to an NCATE accredited institution will have the assurance that the institution’s educator program has met national standards and received the profession’s ‘seal of approval’” (3).
16. See for example the EdD programs in educational leadership at Vanderbilt University, University of Southern California, Pepperdine University, Arizona State University, and St Louis University among many others. The names of participants cannot be revealed because their participation was confidential according to the protection offered by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) that approved this research.
17. Some of the people who provide feedback on the quality of schools of education are alumni, superintendents, principals, and other deans of schools of education.