Full Description
Neoliberal education reforms promise (but often don't succeed) to improve student outcomes and provide more equitable educational opportunities to students with different backgrounds.
They hold schools accountable for their performance through high-stakes testing and linking performance to rewards and sanctions, and by empowering parents. This book presents a critical and objective appraisal of these neoliberalist education reforms. Mustafa Toprak considers the practical elements of neoliberal reforms, including voucher systems, choice, accountability, competition within and between schools, educational inequalities, and high-stakes testing, and in doing this, contributes to social justice debates and the idea of education as a common good. He uses reforms in Chile as a case study and offers a critique of its neoliberal educational reforms. Rather than discrediting all the central tenets of neoliberal education, Toprak considers the pros and cons of these reforms for students, teachers, schools, and societies and proposes new reforms to ensure that policies accurately and responsively address the needs of all stakeholders.
Contents
Introduction
Part I: What is Neoliberalism?
1. Introducing Neoliberalism
2. Neoliberalism in Education
Part II: Battlefronts
3. Education as a Common Good
4. School Choice and Inequalities
5. High-Stakes Standardized Testing
6. Educational Accountability
Part III: Evidence From the Field and New Directions
7. Chile: What Has Gone Wrong
8. How Should the Future Look?
Conclusion
References
Index
