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Journal of Educational Administration and History
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Learning from the neo-liberal movement: towards
a global justice education movement
Kenneth J. Saltman
To cite this article: Kenneth J. Saltman (2015) Learning from the neo-liberal movement:
towards a global justice education movement, Journal of Educational Administration and
History, 47:3, 315-326, DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2015.1038697
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2015.1038697
Published online: 27 May 2015.
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Date: 08 April 2016, At: 06:18
Journal of Educational Administration and History, 2015
Vol. 47, No. 3, 315– 326, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2015.1038697
COMMENTARY
Learning from the neo-liberal movement: towards a global justice
education movement
∗
Kenneth J. Saltman
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Department of Educational Leadership, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth,
Dartmouth, MA, USA
This commentary suggests that a countermovement for educational and
social justice must learn from the dominant global neo-liberal
movement and its successes in creating institutions and knowledgemaking processes and networks. Local struggles for educational justice
are important, but they need to be linked to a broader educational
justice movement. Such a movement itself has to be seen as part of a
struggle for genuine democracy.
Keywords: neo-liberalism; education; global; social movement; critical
pedagogy
Introduction
The last 20 years have seen the rise and policy dominance of a neo-liberal
movement in public education. Guided by the economic imperatives of privatisation, deregulation, and a project of ruling class restoration, a number of
relatively new knowledge-making institutions have come to comprise a
loosely affiliated network. For-profit and non-profit educational corporations,
think tanks, venture philanthropies (VPs), corporate consultancies, associations, and political lobbying organisations form a loosely affiliated network
representing corporate and political interests. Globally, this list can be
expanded to include multinational corporations and supranational organisations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO)/GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), World Bank, USAID (United States Agency for
International Development), and NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations).
This network has worked hard to privatise schools, putting in place corporate
managerial reforms, reducing the social and individual role of schools to
worker training, and standardising knowledge and curriculum. The resultant
transformation of the culture of education worldwide has succeeded in promoting repressive, positivist, and anti-critical pedagogical approaches. By
∗
Email: [email protected]
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
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‘anti-critical’, I mean approaches that decontextualise knowledge, hiding how
knowledge is produced in relation to political and social forces and struggles
over power.
In this commentary article, I briefly analyse the neo-liberal education
movement and propose ideas for building a countermovement for educational
and social justice. The contributors to this special issue are united by their
criticisms of elements of the neo-liberal educational movement in different
contexts. Each article focuses on a different neo-liberal knowledge-making
project. Yet, all the pieces are united by a criticism of the corporatisation
of knowledge making, subjectivity formation, and the corporate hijacking
of governance over educational policy and practice. Courtney criticises the
production of new corporate leaders and knowledge in English schools.
Bailey dissects the rising neo-liberal discourse of resilience and the contribution of Teach First to managerialism in the UK. Williamson explores
the governance implications for institutions and individuals of new forms
of learning analytics and data science in the UK. Bellei et al. detail the outsourcing and privatisation of school improvement in Chile’s already privatised voucher system – the original experiment in radical experiment in
neo-liberal restructuring. Sapieri, Grimaldi, and Vatrella criticise the Italian
expanding use of educational consultancies as a form of neo-liberal privatisation and the expansion of corporate culture and logic into the public educational system. I suggest that we need to bring these various neo-liberal
knowledge-making projects, contexts, and institutions together and see
them as a totality. That is, new consultancies, knowledge-making institutions
and practices should be seen as part of a rightist global movement that economically pillages public institutions and undermines the possibilities for
public forms of education to contribute to genuine democracy throughout
economic, political, and cultural spheres and throughout all institutions. I
suggest that we take the broad view and imagine building a new counter
network, a new education movement that is organised not around the principles of capital accumulation and a waste production model of economic
growth destined for the demise of the planet, but that is instead organised
around normative ethical and political values of justice, power sharing,
equality and freedom from exploitation, and the development of critical intellectual cultures and the radical imagination (Aronowitz 2008). I begin by
mapping the neo-liberal educational movement adding to the collection of
articles here a focus on the USA but one that reaches into the global. I
take the liberty here of discussing my own work on the topic of mapping
the neo-liberal knowledge-making network over the past 15 years to do
so. I conclude by suggesting possibilities for a new countermovement and
the need to overtly embrace normative principles in the course of expanding
from mapping and criticising neo-liberal education in its various guises to
replacing it by building new institutions and connecting those that already
exist.
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The neo-liberal movement
There are two principal forces driving the expansion of the neo-liberal restructuring project and its new knowledge-making institutions: profit motive and
ideology. Education has come to be seen by business as a vast resource to
pillage. In the United States, the business press and investors have described
educational spending as a $500 billion per year opportunity, comparing it to
military, entertainment, and agriculture (Business Week 2002). The long-standing neo-liberal restructuring of the social state has involved cutting and privatising the caregiving institutions, including education. The more recent financial
crisis and subsequent politics of austerity have been used to justify the acceleration of these long-standing trends.
Some of the most prominent ‘market-based’ reforms in the United States –
such as for-profit charter school expansion, voucher schemes, and scholarship
tax credits – skim public money out of the system, draining as profit money
that would otherwise go into educational provision. Educational profiteering
takes form as large test and textbook publishing corporations such as Pearson
and McGraw-Hill lobby for standardised testing and curricular standardisation
to do their multi-billion dollar contracting business. Media corporations such as
Apple, Microsoft, and News Corp aggressively market tablet hardware with
Common Core software to public districts, making big margins and capturing
scarce public education tax dollars while angling to commodify student data
(see Means, in press). In some instances, the profit takings are subtler. For
example, non-profit charter school administrators capture massive salaries,
and systematically higher administrator pay comes at the expense of lower
teacher pay than in traditional schools; non-profit charter schools become a catalyst for numerous for-profit contracts and lucrative real estate deals; increasingly non-profit charter schools become a means to subcontract to for-profit
management companies. These for-profit efforts must be understood in relation
to the vision and aspirations of the advocates of privatisation.
In the USA and globally, the neo-liberal movement aims to transform public
education into a private industry.1 A crucial step towards achieving this end is
to re-envision universal free public education into a consumer service – that is
to change education from being a public good to a private good. The reframing
of public education as a private good plays a crucial role in the neo-liberal
movement, in part, by educating citizens to think of education as an individual
rather than shared responsibility (see work by Chomsky in Otero 2002). The
neo-liberal movement also seeks to transform the role of the teacher from an
engaged public intellectual with autonomy to a low-paid and deskilled
worker who delivers prefabricated knowledge that has been designed by
experts elsewhere. It aims to transform the public administrator into a corporate
and military leader concerned more with control and data-driven metrics than
service to the public. It aims to make knowledge a deliverable commodity
that can be standardised and measured and controlled for efficiency. As such,
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K.J. Saltman
the movement presupposes that knowledge should not be the basis for the collective political agency of students to learn to address public problems. Nor
should knowledge be understood as dialogically created. Nor should knowledge be comprehended in terms of how it relates to broader material and symbolic interests and contests. Instead, the neo-liberal movement frames
knowledge as a commodity that ought to be consumed and then regurgitated
and displayed for academic promotion and the chance ultimately of economic
inclusion. Education in this view ought to accommodate individuals to the
existing increasingly exclusionary order by enforcing the ‘right’ knowledge
created by the ones who know, experts who are elsewhere (Apple 2006).
Ideology is the second principle force driving the expansion of the neoliberal restructuring project and its new knowledge-making institutions. Most
of the people who have embraced and aggressively promote neo-liberal restructuring schemes do not stand to benefit financially from these reforms. They are
true believers. Ideologically, neo-liberal educational restructuring has stitched
together a number of market-based metaphors to suggest that public schooling
and the public sector more generally has ‘failed’, that only ‘competition’ and
‘choice’ apply the necessary ‘market discipline’ to shake up the necessarily
bureaucratically and hopelessly ‘inefficient’ public sector, that individual
opportunity for inclusion into the existing economy can only come through
the expansion of market models of reform. In the USA, through such metaphors, the business logic of ‘creative destruction’ has taken hold and public
schools are said to need to be allowed to ‘fail’ just like business (though not
the sorts of private businesses deemed ‘too big to fail’ like banking, automobile,
and insurance). Neo-liberal ideology also calls for parents and students to be
viewed as consumers of education and teachers to be seen as service delivery
agents. As the articles in this collection illustrate well, a crucial role of neoliberal knowledge-making institutions is to produce subjects who understand
themselves through a business optic of managerialism, consumerism, and entrepreneurship and not through the civic lens of political agency, collective selfgovernance, and shared labour for shared benefit.
Neo-liberalism deepens the long-standing social and cultural reproduction
functions of schools that have historically prepared the next generation to fill
the same class functions as their parents. Techniques of reproduction increasingly apply pedagogies of repression to working class and poor students so
that they learn vocational basic skills and docility that will allow them to
take their places at the bottom rungs of the economy or in prison. Neo-liberalism promotes pedagogical models for professional class students organised
around entrepreneurialism, consumerism, and individualised modes of selfcontrol. All students are being subject to positivist approaches to curriculum
in which standardisation and standardised testing dominate. Such testing delinks knowledge from the conditions of its production, from student and
teacher subjectivities, and from its relation to the social forces that produce
their experiences. Neo-liberal reforms of pedagogy are squarely focused on
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denying the role of knowledge and learning for students to assume social and
political agency. The type of social and political agency suppressed by these
reforms are necessary for both self-governance and for questioning, changing,
and democratising existing institutions of the economy, political system, and
culture. Increasingly, neo-liberal reforms are turning to more direct control of
the body through pharmacology, information technology, scripted lessons,
and learned self-regulation. Altogether, such pedagogical techniques marginalise, or totally erase, learned forms of interpretation, judgement, and critical
forms of inquiry that form the basis for criticising oppressive realities and imagining alternatives.
In the last decade, I have attempted to map out the network of knowledge-making institutions that comprise the neo-liberal movement so that citizens can comprehend and contest it, imagining instead revitalised public and
democratic roles for public schools. In Capitalizing on disaster: taking and
breaking public schools, I focused on how right-wing think tanks, political
lobbying organisations, politicians, and anti-public intellectuals aimed to
seize, dismantle, and privatise public schooling by taking advantage of
natural and human-made disasters (Saltman 2007). I highlighted the parallels
between neo-liberal restructuring projects in Chicago, post-invasion Iraq,
post-Katrina New Orleans, and national education policy in the USA to illustrate how public school dismantling and privatisation were part of a broader
coordinated effort to dispossess poor citizens of communities, gentrify sections of cities, and create investment opportunities for rich investors and
corporations.
Knowledge makers played a central role in accomplishing the agenda. For
example, following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast, a coordinated bevy
of think tank fellows, pundits, academics, and politicians described the destruction of the New Orleans public schools as the ‘silver lining’ of the devastating
storm. Paul T. Hill and Jane Hannaway of the Urban Institute, Clint Bollick of
the Alliance for School Choice, and neo-liberal godfather himself, Milton
Friedman, among many others, aggressively promoted the narrative that this
was the perfect opportunity to implement what legislative action failed to
achieve for the right: vouchers and charter networks. School boards and city
planners refused to reopen public schools that had been closed, effectively dismantling the teachers union and aiding in the dispossession of populations from
sections of cities. For-profit corporate consultants from Alvarez and Marsal,
who had already been hired to capture millions of dollars in consulting fees
while cutting millions of dollars from the budget of the underfunded New
Orleans schools, trudged through the floodwaters and save the personnel files
from the district offices in order to fire all of the public school teachers. The
point not to be missed here is that the knowledge-making institutions (think
tanks, consultancies) played a central role in setting the stage for the radical
neo-liberal education agenda by naturalising a market fundamentalist vision
for change, by recasting the narrative of these events, by breaking and
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making schools and administrations that would be fertile for future neo-liberal
projects and ideologies to take hold.
In my 2010 book, The gift of education: public education and venture philanthropy, I examined the rise of corporate philanthropies as a new and powerful if not dominant educational policy force (Saltman 2010). Since the early
2000s, foundations such as Gates, Broad, and Walton transformed how philanthropy could be used to wield influence on public policy. VPs are a hijacking of
policy and governance by the super-rich. For example, the billionaires behind
these foundations were able to avoid paying taxes on hundreds of millions of
dollars, but then use this money strategically to promote privatisation in the
form of charters and vouchers, to promote corporate and military rather than
democratic models of educational leadership, and to promote positivist
reforms and standardisation of curriculum and school models, union-busting
and teacher deskilling.
Part of what distinguished venture philanthropists from prior philanthropy
was the maintenance of a high degree of control over the use of the money
after it was given. The VPs essentially purchased public governance. By ‘leveraging’ their ‘investments’, the VPs promised large sums of money to cashstrapped schools, districts, and states on the condition that administrators
compete to adhere to the policy dictates of the foundations: privatisation and
precaritisation of the teacher workforce. Teacher hiring, placement, and retention would be subjected to test-based evaluation linked to database tracking projects intended to tie pay to test score outcomes. The VP model of influence was
adopted by the U.S. Department of Education, as can be seen in the signature
Obama ‘Race to the Top’ policy that follows the funding model and goals
and was designed by key staffers from the Gates Foundation. Ravitch (2014)
misleadingly characterised VP in education as a ‘billionaire boys club’. This
is misleading because it blames individuals without blaming systems: it fails
to register not only how VP represents a broader ideological and political economic trend but also how it has spawned a decentralised, yet highly effective and
coordinated new bureaucracy.
The VPs funded what I called in The failure of corporate school reform a
New Market Bureaucracy (Saltman 2012). The New Market Bureaucracy is
composed of a network of local, district, state, and national organisations that
take on various roles in promoting elements of the neo-liberal education movement. For example, large venture philanthropists such as Gates support the
funding arm of charter expansion such as the New Schools Growth Fund.
They invest in lobbying support organisations such as the National Charter
School Alliance, state charter school organisations such as the Illinois
Network of Charter Schools, political lobbying organisations such as the Alliance for School Choice, district offices dedicated to expanding privatisation
schemes such as Chicago’s Renaissance Schools Fund (renamed New
Schools for Chicago). Chicago’s New Schools for Chicago operates out of
the Commercial Club of Chicago that represents the largest corporations in
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the city. Corporate consulting firms such as McKinsey and A.T. Kearney have
designed plans for the privatisation of districts and states and their globe-trotting consultants such as Michael Barber (now at Pearson), Andrew Moffitt,
and Paul Vallas function like corporate management consultants advising
administrators and politicians to privatise, commercialise, dismantle, sell off,
and embrace corporate culture models of ‘accountability’ such as ‘datadriven instruction’, ‘data-driven leadership’ and so on.
I called this decentralised yet coordinated infrastructure the New Market
Bureaucracy in education because a central promise of neo-liberal educational
restructuring since the early 1990s was to de-bureaucratise ‘the hopelessly
bureaucratic and inefficient’ public school system by injecting market discipline
in the form of competition and consumer choice (see Chubb and Moe 1990).
Yet, what has been created under the guise of neo-liberal deregulation is a
new form of privatised regulation through a largely privately controlled
bureaucracy that is set up through ‘non-profits’ but that is working to transform
the system into a for-profit industry.
Learning from the neo-liberal movement: building a global justice
movement for education
I suggest that a countermovement for educational and social justice must learn
from the neo-liberal movement and its successes in creating institutions and
knowledge-making processes. Local struggles for educational justice are important, but they need to be linked to a broader educational justice movement. Such
a movement itself has to be seen as part of a struggle for genuine democracy and
the democratising of all institutions. What is being eradicated by these neoliberal reforms is the possibility of imagining and enacting deeply democratic
forms of life.
The neo-liberal movement has been largely successful at capturing common
sense, framing language and ideas, building institutions and infrastructure,
taking over policy discourse, and also taking over public discourse. The neoliberal education movement has both vast funding sources and an army of
(anti-)public intellectuals. The infrastructure of the movement is composed of
(1) the for-profit and non-profit businesses that have inserted themselves into
the public system and that include not just school management companies
but teacher and leadership preparation organisations, contracting companies,
test and text publishers; (2) the large philanthropies that peddle influence and
fund projects; (3) political and legislative lobbying organisations such as American Legislative Exchange Committee and the Alliance for School Choice; (4)
think tanks that produce a constant stream of policy advocacy supporting the
neo-liberal moves such as Hoover, Heritage, American Enterprise Institute,
Fordham, and so on; (5) academic journals and academics who serve as think
tank fellows; (6) corporate consultancies such as Eduventures, McKinsey,
and other paid advisers who advocate education as a business (see Gunter
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et al. 2014); (7) corporate media such as NBC television and the films like The
Lottery, Waiting for Superman, The Cartel, Won’t Back Down.
The strongest suit of the neo-liberal infrastructure is its deep pockets that can
pay for all of this activity at corporate development, policy advocacy, design
and implementation, think tank propaganda, and corporate media productions.
Another vast strength of the neo-liberal movement is the fact that governments
have been hollowed out by corporate power and hence policy implementation
follows not from the will and action of citizens but from purchased elections.
Another vast strength of the movement is its ability to ride the broader ideological wave that is the culture of neo-liberalism, making the takeover of public
education by corporations and corporate culture common sense. Yet another
strength is the failure of the liberal public education model to break from replicating a racialised class hierarchy in schooling in terms of the way rich liberals
have managed to capture public school resources for themselves and their kids
and have failed to racially and ethnically integrate schools. And while neoliberal restructuring has been proved to worsen the historical trends with
more inequality in resources and more segregation, even the poor have been
convinced that they may as well ‘give the market a chance’ (even though it
has been the historical linkages to the market that have produced the radically
unequal system).
The weakest parts of the neo-liberal movement include its weak intellectual foundation, its lack of support by educated citizens, its failure to be supported by evidence on its own terms such as test scores and cost savings and
efficiencies, its failure to desegregate urban or rural schools, and the way it
leaves in place the privileged school arrangements while targeting the
schools of the poor for resource extraction (Saltman 2012). It is also at
odds with human freedom understood through collective aspirations for
people to be free from domination and exploitation of others and nature
(Giroux 2006).
The left has the capacity to build a vibrant movement for global educational
justice. However, the left does not have vast capital to draw on and it does not
have the financial and symbolic power of mass media to bolster the ideological
underpinnings. The left does, however, have vast intellectual and knowledgemaking resources that have not been adequately developed and mobilised.
These knowledge-making resources come in the form of academics who
already have income for their work as scholars and teachers, K-12 teachers, teachers unions, cultural producers such as artists, community organisers. Institutions that can be struggled over for a coordinated and networked
educational justice movement include public schools, universities, school
boards, teacher education programmes, educational research programmes in
higher education, unions, professional associations, government administration
such as departments of education. And while many of these institutions are
already fighting for educational justice issues such as against privatisation,
high-stakes testing, union-busting and value added modelling, the crucial
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move is for these struggles to be linked through a broader educational justice
movement framed through normative aspirations and values.
There are unprecedented opportunities that are currently underutilised to
develop new institutions that can be networked. For example, the Internet
can be used to create websites that represent new policy institutes, social
media to organise people quickly, and the capacity of the knowledge workers
to piggyback off of existing careers, associations, and revenue to develop
these institutions. Different institutes that can be nodal points in this new educational justice network can make different contributions to the movement.
Some of these new institutes can develop policy advocacy, others can
provide critical pedagogical guidance, others can offer free critical curriculum,
others can serve to do political lobbying and activism, some can be involved in
developing deep relationships between the educational justice movement and
organised labour, others between the movement and political parties, the movement and mass media and journalists, yet others between the movement and
scholars in a wide range of academic fields. All of these efforts can come
together to forge a new common sense about educational and social justice
that can counter the way corporate media has managed to do temporarily.
The educational justice movement needs to be guided by a set of largely universal principles informing the development of these new institutions that can
be networked to form a massive movement that can win over common sense
about education and influence educational policy locally, nationally, and
globally.
I suggest here some initial tentative principles for a network of knowledgemaking institutions. I develop these further in my recent book, Toward a new
common school movement, co-authored with Alex Means and Noah De Lissovoy (De Lissovoy et al. 2014a).
(1) The neo-liberal educational restructuring movement promotes hierarchical social relationships in the interest of capital accumulation. An educational
justice movement has to begin with the assumption that the goal is more democracy throughout the society – in the economy, in the political system, and in the
culture – and that there is never enough justice. That means that education must
create the conditions for shared labour for shared benefit. Educative institutions
themselves need to be democratised with horizontal rather than vertical models
of governance and critical pedagogies. But an education justice movement must
aim for broader justice globally not only for schools. Such an overarching
aspiration for global justice has to include expanding the commons of the
natural environment, the commons of knowledge and information, and the
commons of shared labour and energy for shared benefit (De Lissovoy et al.
2014a, 2014b). An education justice movement can create the formative
culture to build a global commons and resist the neo-liberal enclosure of the
commons that takes the form of the privatisation of public goods and services,
the enclosure of the natural world, the capture of collective labour for individualised benefit, and the attempts to commoditise the bio-information that forms
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the basis for life. Education has to be seen as necessarily creating a future that is
not defined through capitalist accumulation, economic growth, pillage of the
natural world, and human exploitation. It has to be seen as the condition for
human freedom and equality and the symbiosis between people and the
planet. It is crucial that an educational justice movement sees democratising
all institutions as a primary aim.
(2) Neo-liberal restructuring deskills and disempowers teachers. As Wolff
(2012) contends, economic democracy requires ending the separation
between workers and managers throughout all institutions. In schools, such a
just transformation requires ending the separation between teachers and administrators. Teaching must be seen as a socially engaged intellectual endeavour,
and teachers must collectively govern their work places.
(3) An educational justice movement has to reject liberal and conservative
versions of knowledge and culture that are oriented around transmission of
knowledge culture, and consensus forged within historical symbolic hierarchies, and instead recognise the political nature of knowledge and culture. In
this view, knowledge and culture are always contested and imbricated with
material struggles. The recognition of the politics of knowledge and culture
must also be joined by a recognition of the educative nature of politics and
the political nature of education (Giroux 2012). The formative culture created
by educational institutions builds the politics of the future. Such a recognition
of the politics of culture and knowledge centrally involves a project to challenge
symbolic violence in its multifarious guises as central to education, including
challenging white supremacy, eurocentrism, patriarchy, and, heteronormativity.
Towards the goal of building an education justice movement, knowledgemaking workers can create institutes and centres to do a variety of knowledge-making activities such as local studies, advocacy reports, reviews of
research, build inventories of critical pedagogical practices, lessons, and institution-building projects that can be shared. These local institutes can be networked together and linked to existing educative institutions and activist
movements such as the student movement in Chile, teacher union leadership
that broadens issues of education justice to questions of social justice such as
the CORE leadership in Chicago, students fighting debt servitude in Quebec
and around the world.
An education justice movement will create not only new knowledge-making
institutions but also counter what Courtney has described here as the ‘new corporatization of leadership in English schools’ and what Bailey describes as the
neo-liberal ‘resilient subject’, instead creating new egalitarian subjectivities.
Critical and transformative leaders and teachers continue to be committed to
building the common and egalitarian social relations. An education justice
movement will develop as a political force to challenge the new market
bureaucracy and the commercial and non-profit operators in their various
union-busting and teacher de-skilling guises such as Teach First (detailed
here by Bailey) and Teach for America, the commercial consultancies.
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A networked education justice movement will also develop as a knowledgemaking force that rejects the positivism of standardised testing and curriculum
and the new commercial ‘big data’ data capture fetish (discussed here by Williamson), instead promoting the uses of technology for building an educational
commons and for fostering not surveillance, normalisation, and arbitrary
control but rather forms of learning that critically interrogate both subjective
experience and its formation through objective forces (Means, in press). In
this view, knowledge is inextricably linked to the pursuit of freedom from domination, exploitation, and vertical social relations and linked instead to
humanisation, agency, and a critical comprehension of the self and social
world as the basis for the radical imagination of new social institutions and
modes of living.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note
1. A number of scholars have been mapping the neo-liberal movement globally
including Helen Gunter, Stephen Ball, Fazal Rizvi, Joel Spring, and Michael
Apple. Christopher Whittle, a pioneer at privatising and commercialising public
education in the USA and UK, announced in 2009 at the American Enterprise Institute that he envisioned a global private industry in education with concentrated
ownership by a small number of very large corporations. The WTO and the
World Bank are actively involved in framing education as a private industry.
The paper in this special issue ‘External technical support for school improvement:
critical issues from the Chilean experience’ provides an important example of the
way that the earliest neo-liberal education experiment in Chile stitches together
commercialization with punitive ‘accountability’ policy.
Notes on contributor
Professor Kenneth J. Saltman teaches in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
PhD program at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the author most recently
of The Failure of Corporate School Reform (2012), The Politics of Education: A Critical Introduction (2014), and Toward a New Common School Movement (2014).
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