Public borders, private crossings: Anthropological approaches to neoliberalism in US educational policy and spaces

Abstract

Educational policies across the globe reflect the ascendancy of neoliberalism. According to neoliberalism, the market represents a superior mechanism to govern ( Peters, 2012 ), and thus, the role of the state is to enable the agency of the market ( Rose, 1999 ). In the United States, the federal report A Nation at Risk (1983) formalized the direct influence of a neoliberal rationality on the formation of educational policies. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) and The Race to the Top (2010) represent successive assertions of market values on educational reform. At the same time, there is a fundamental contradiction within neoliberal logic: while the state is to refrain from interfering in the market, it must simultaneously intervene to govern schools ( Hursh, 2005 ). Based on these trends, the articles in this special issue highlight critical tensions between public versus private values, practices, and discourses that emerge from the proliferation of a neoliberal logic into the educational sphere. In different ways, each of these articles map out a unique facet of neoliberalism in education to complicate the often totalizing critiques of market-based logics in order to demonstrate the complex ways that people rearticulate and resist education policy in an era of neoliberal ascendancy.