Resisting Neoliberal Schooling

This book critiques the use of rubrics in assessment and evaluation within education and the effects of the rubric as a tool for social and intellectual control. This powerful theoretical intervention goes beyond the most dangerous academic repressive theory and standardization.

Neoliberalism is having a detrimental impact on wider social and ethical goals in the field of education. Using an international range of contexts, this book provides practical examples that demonstrate how neoliberalism can be challenged and changed at the local, national and transnational level.

This book, written by an impressive international array of scholars and activists, explores the mechanisms and ideologies behind neoliberal education, while evaluating and promoting resistance on a local, national and global level.

In light of the overwhelming presence of neoliberalism within academia, this book examines how academics resist and manage these changes. The first of two volumes, this diptych of critical academic work investigates generative spaces, or ‘cracks’ in neoliberal managerialism that can be exposed, negotiated, exploited and energised with renewed collegiality, subversion and creativity. The editors and contributors explore how academics continue to find space to work in collegial ways; defying the neoliberal logic of ‘brands’ and ‘cost centres’. Part I of this diptych illuminates the lived experiences of changing academic roles; portraying institutional life without the glossy filter of marketing campaigns and brochures, and revealing generative spaces through critical testimony, fiction, arts-based projects, feminist and Indigenous critical scholarship. It will be of interest and value to anyone concerned with neoliberalism in academia, as well as higher education more generally.

This book outlines the creative responses academics are using to subvert powerful market forces that restrict university work to a neoliberal, economic focus. The second volume in a diptych of critical academic work on the changing landscape of neoliberal universities, the editors and contributors examine how academics ‘prise open the cracks’ in neoliberal logic to find space for resistance, collegiality, democracy and hope. Adopting a distinctly postcolonial positioning, the volume interrogates the link between neoliberalism and the ongoing privileging of Euro-American theorising in universities. The contributors move from accounts of unmitigated managerialism and toxic workplaces, to the need to decolonise the academy to, finally, illustrating the various creative and counter-hegemonic practices academics use to resist, subvert and reinscribe dominant neoliberal discourses. This hopeful volume will appeal to students and scholars interested in the role of universities in advancing cultural democracy, as well as university staff, academics and students.

From pressure to "teach to the test" and the use of quantitative metrics to define education "quality," to the rise of "school choice" and the shift of principals from colleagues to managers, teachers in New York, Mexico City, and Toronto have experienced strikingly similar challenges to their professional autonomy. By visiting schools and meeting teachers, government officials, and union leaders, Paul Bocking identifies commonalities that are shaping how teachers work and public schools function. While arguing that neoliberal education policy is a dominant trend transcending the realities of school districts, states, or national governments, Bocking also demonstrates the importance of local context to explain variations in education governance, especially when understanding the role of resistance led by teachers’ unions.

This volume makes the novel contribution of applying Nancy Fraser’s concept of progressive neoliberalism to education in order to illustrate how social justice efforts have been co-opted by neoliberal forces. As well as recognising the lack of consensus surrounding the very nature of Fraser’s concept of progressive neoliberalism, the book delivers a diversity of perspectives and methodological orientations that offer critical and nuanced examination of the diverse ways in which progressive neoliberalism has shaped education in North America. Documenting manifestations of progressive neoliberalism in areas including anti-racist education, teacher education, STEM, and assessment, the volume uses qualitative empirical research and critical discourse analysis to identify emerging tools and strategies to disentangle the progressive aims of education from neoliberal agendas. Offering a rarely nuanced treatment of the phenomenon of neoliberalism, this text will benefit scholars, academics, and students in the fields of education policy and politics, the sociology of education, and the philosophy of education more broadly. Those involved with the theory of education and multicultural education in general will also benefit from this volume.

Ward Churchill : Foreword: Remembering the Future? - Emma Pérez: Preface - Acknowledgments - Anthony J.Nocella II/Erik Juergensmeyer: Introduction-A Tactical Toolbox for Smashing Academic Repression - Part I.Neoliberal Education - Nick Clare/Gregory White/Richard J.White: Striking Out! Challenging Academic Repression in the Neoliberal University through Alternative Forms of Resistance: Some Lessons from the United Kingdom - Mary Heath/Peter Burdon: Academic Resistance: Landscape of Hope and Despair - Mark Seis: Parasites, Sycophants, and Rebels: Resisting Threats to Faculty Governance - Part II.Resisting - Camila Bassi: On Identity Politics, Ressentiment, and the Evacuation of Human Emancipation - Conor Cash/Geoff Boyce: Cutting Class: On Schoolwork, Entropy, and Everyday Resistance in Higher Education - Erik Juergensmeyer/Sue Doe: Owning Curriculum: Megafoundations, the State, and Writing Programs - Part III.Reclaiming - Laura L.Finley: Bureaucratic Stifling of Student and Faculty: Reclaiming College and University Campuses - Ryan Thomson: Reclaiming Campus as an Event Site: A Comparative Discussion of Student Resistance Tactics - John Lupinacci: Interrupt, Inspire, and Expose: Anarchist Pedagogy against Academic Repression - Part IV.Organizing - Diana Vallera: One of the Best Contracts in the Nation? How Part-time Faculty Organized for a Collective Bargaining Agreement - Sean Donaghue-Johnston/Tanya Loughead: Organizing Adjuncts and Citizenship within the Academy - Emil Marmol/Mary Jean Hande/Raluca Bejan: On Strike in the Ivory Tower: Academic Repression of Labor Organizing - Part V.Black Lives Matter In Education - Shannon Gibney: Racial Harassment in the "Postracial" Era: A Case of Discipline and Resistance in the Black Female Body - Kelly Limes-Taylor Henderson: On Academic Repression, Blackness, and Storytelling as Resistance - Z.B. Hurst: Black Student Unions and Identity: Navigating Oppression in Higher Education - Afterword: Southwest Colorado Sociology Collective - Contributors' Biographies - Index