Toward a New Common School Movement

2009

Yale Law & Policy Review, 1996

Education in America as we know it today draws its origins from the philosophical perspectives and political objectives of the common school reformers over a century ago. For them, mass education was a primary vehicle for defining ourselves as a nation. Schools would develop civic virtue and a national character through a shared set of values reflected in the school curriculum. The common school experience, offered to all regardless of social class or ethnic background, would assimilate the hordes of immigrants coming to our shores and meet the emerging needs of industrialization. Individuals across the economic spectrum, afforded education at public expense, would both realize their own potential and support civic purposes through their enhanced participation as informed citizens sharing a common public philosophy. In other words, education would serve individual interests founded in liberal philosophy as well as communitarian goals founded in both democratic and republican theory....

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2017

A brief review of Toward a New Common School Movement by Noah De Lissovoy, Alexander Means, and Kenneth Saltman (Paradigm, 2014). Accepted in Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Education Review // Reseñas Educativas, 2016

Policy Futures in Education, 2020

This article explores the realm of educational politics and the organization of opposition to neoliberal school reform in the United States of America. A distinguishing feature of the current reform move-ment—which blends free-market rhetoric with austere governance and undemocratic corporate control—is the callous normalization of educational insecurity. In this way, the author argues, contemporary trends in US school reform mirror, but also contribute to, the broader exacerbation of social insecurity under neoliberal governance. Though neoliberal reform strategies primarily target vulnerable groups with the aim of forcing them to acquiesce to market-driven reforms under duress, their blatant hostility often provokes dissent and resistance. Drawing on Judith Butler's recent writing on the " performative politics of assembly, " the author examines two protests against neoliberal reform in an effort to think more deeply about the state of radical educational thought and the future of oppositional struggles seeking to transform the conditions of education in order to move beyond neoliberalism.

2007

[Winner of the 2008 “Critic’s Choice Award” from the American Educational Studies Association] This book has two primary goals: a critique of educational reforms that result from the rise of neoliberalism, and to provide alternatives to neoliberal conceptions of education problems and solutions. A key issue addressed by contributors is how forms of critical consciousness can be engendered throughout society via schools. This means paying attention to the practical aspects of pedagogy for social transformation and organizing to achieve a most just society. Each contributor offers critical examinations of the pragmatics of pedagogy and organizing for social transformation. It is the editors hope that the analysis of neoliberal educational reform provided in the chapters will contribute in multiple ways to the programs of critical scholars, educators and activists working for education and schools that serve the broad interests of the public and against capitalist educational practices. Contents: Foreword, Richard A. Brosio. Introduction, E. Wayne Ross and Rich Gibson. Neoliberalism and the Control of Teachers, Students, and Learning: The Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accountability, David W. Hursh. No Child Left Behind, Globalization, and the Politics of Race, Pauline Lipman. Education and the New Disciplinarity: Surveillance, Spectacle, and the Case of SBER, Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross. The Ideology and Practice of Empire: The United States, Mexico, and the Education of American Immigrants, Gilbert G. Gonzalez. Neoliberalism and the Perversion of Education, Dave Hill. Schools and the GATS Enigma, Glenn Rikowski. A Marxist Reading of Reading Education, Patrick Shannon. Paulo Freire and the Revolutionary Pedagogy for Social Justice, Rich Gibson. The Unchained Dialectic: Critique and Renewal of Higher Education Research, John Welsh. Marketizing Higher Education: Neoliberal Strategies and Counter-Strategies, Les Levidow. Critical Pedagogy and Class Struggle in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization: Notes from History's Underside. Peter McLaren Author Index. Subject Index.

Pre-Publication Draft of Current Book for which I am still seeking a publisher . . . Ready to put in a draw for a month and then go back to editing -- Table of Contents below: Prefatory Aphorisms p. 4 Essay 1a –Dedication Broken into a Dozen Parts (1-2): An Introduction to Systems of Pressure p. 8 Essay 2 – Democratic Education and Markets: Segmentation, Privatization and Commodification p, 26 Bullet Points on Hegemony, Paradigm Change and Social Learning p, 114 Essay 3: Neo-Liberalism, Educational Politics and Hegemonies of Social Learning p. 117 Essay 1b –Dedication Broken into a Dozen Parts (3-6): TFA and the Directed Narrative p. 254 Essay 4: Wishful Thinking: Hegemony, Class and Trust p. 333 Essay 1c –Dedication Broken into a Dozen Parts (7-9): Gaping Elites p. 362 Essay 5: Schooling: Marx, Poker and the Privileged Politics of Groups p. 425 Essay 1d –Dedication Broken into a Dozen Parts (10-12): Conclusion of a Bifurcated System p. 456 Epilogue: Democracy as an Aspiration Only p. 529

Since the idea of charter schools took hold in the 1990s, the school reform movement in the United States has expanded rapidly. Ideologically defending itself in the name of school choice and accountability, in reality the movement focuses on dismantling school boards in favor of direct mayoral control and allowing private companies to supply school services. Recently a spate of documentary films - most notably Waiting for Superman - have carried the ideological message to greater swathes of the American public. This paper argues that the US school reform movement is radically regressive, led by an economic elite, and essentially at odds with the democratic civic and political role of a public school system.

Many argue that it is futile to see schools as agents of social reform, much less revolution, rather they are agents of class division in the service of elites (e.g., Marsh 2011 and Blacker 2013). Resistance to class oppression is merely a defensive strategy where the question is, as Willis (1977) might put it, not so much why elites appropriate so much power and wealth but why the rest let them. It is this question that a re-imagination of the strategic power of co-operation addresses because it directly challenges both competition and inequality by returning to the ambivalent role of education and the discourses of freedom, democracy, commerce and work that liberalism and neoliberalism have misappropriated. The argument will take place in 4 steps. First, education as a practice of liberation has to be separated from the process of governing the masses through the discourses, mechanisms and practices of schooling. Second, this separation enables exploring and challenging the hierarchies through which elites dominate and thus opens the possibility for what may be called the society of equals. Thirdly, if the idea of a society of equals can be accepted as grounding democratic freedoms, then the way is cleared for co-operative forms of social organisation in general and education in particular. Finally, generating democratic, co-operative forms of curricular action provides the basis for a public able to critique all social forms - such as political, governmental, economic, cultural - in order to organise and undertake action for mutual benefit.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

What might a common education mean in the 21st century? In this unflinchingly imaginative volume, critical scholars and educational activists investigate the intricate ways that education has been pulled into a contest between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies. In its institutional and informal configurations alike, education has been been identified as perhaps the key stake in this struggle. Insisting on the urgency of an education that breaks free of the bonds of enclosure, the essays included in this volume weave together bright threads of radical thought into a vivid tapestry illustrating a critical framework for enacting a global educational commons.