'Training' the Body Politic: Essays on the School Reform Orthodoxy

<p>These essays represent my attempt to grapple with fundamental questions about what I see as the upside-down nature of educational reforms in American society. Why is there a never-ending crisis in America’s public schools? What does it mean when the educational specter from different periods of history is discredited and yet the specter keeps being recycled decade after decade? For example, elites propagated crisis narratives to galvanize support for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation at the turn of the century. Countless researchers then documented the adverse impacts of NCLB on America’s schools and yet that literature never led to an acknowledgment from elite reformers about the crises generated by top-down solutions to the specter of crisis. I argue that the American public is still under the spell cast by the most successful iteration of that specter, which is the publication of the landmark federal report, A Nation at Risk (ANAR), in 1983. ANAR convinced the public that ‘bad schools’ were posing an existential threat to our nation’s economic well-being. ANAR provided no explanation of what actually caused the worst economic recessions at the time (1980-82) since the Great Depression, but it channeled an inchoate anxiety in the population towards scapegoating schools. ANAR also failed to inform the public about research on the connections between socioeconomic disadvantages (SEDs) and student achievement on standardized tests.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Year dc:date.available

2021

Author dc:creator

• Naghshineh, Jahan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Scot Danforth
• Dr. Penny Bryan
• Dr. Peter McLaren

• school reform
• No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
• income-achievement gap
• accountability
• A Nation at Risk
• poverty
• Curriculum and Instruction
• Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
• Educational Leadership
• Education Economics
• Elementary and Middle and Secondary Education Administration
• Elementary Education
• Elementary Education and Teaching
• Humane Education
• Other Teacher Education and Professional Development
• Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_dissertations/37

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.chapman.edu:education_dissertations-1036