| This dissertation explores today's neoliberal movement by looking at one of its effects, the fast-growing school-choice reform movement, whose forms include voucher programs, charter schools, and home schools. This movement leaches money from the public-school system and, frequently, forms schools that both privilege identity formations and are isolated from society. Both situations have ramifications for American nation (re)formation. Neoliberals are privatizing formerly public functions, such as education, in order to fuel emerging markets. The school-choice reform movement is an effect of these market pressures. As such, school-choice reform is not concerned with either children or education, despite its many claims to the contrary. Rather, both children and their education are objects that can be restructured so that they produce profit. To facilitate the growth of the market and the movement, school-choice reformers are targeting poor schools in urban areas and are using high-stakes testing to label schools “failing.” Further, school-choice reform is a vehicle for both the continued production and intensification of both class and racialized formations in the society. The author defines and discusses the history of the American liberal dialectical formation which both includes and has produced today's neoliberalism; the emerging for-profit sector of the education market and the use of high-stakes testing; the powerful web of relationships among neoliberals fomenting what is a passive revolution in the society; and the voucher, charter-school, and homeschooling situations as of fall 2002. The charter-school situation in Washington, D.C, is explored in depth as a local example of what is occurring all across the country. The author used Marxist critique and analysis to describe the material situation at hand and close-reading methodologies from the discipline of literature. She used established texts in the disciplines of history, economics, philosophy, anthropology, education, and sociology. But, as this movement is so fast-moving, evidence from local and national media and, above all, the Internet, were mined for evidence about the material situation. This dissertation is meant to be an intervention into the passive revolution being carried out by neoliberals. |
