ABSTRACT
To what extent able students stayed out of teaching because of its poor rewards and to what extent because of the nonsense that gured so prominently in teacher education, it is dif cult to say.
—Richard Hofstadter (1962, 318)
In the regressive moment we saw how public education became racialized and gendered in the American popular imagination. We saw how public schools become screens onto which national crises were projected, their causes relocated and avenged through “school reform.” Now we understand that teachers’ positions of “gracious submission” to anti-intellectual, often ideologically driven, politicians are in fact covert racialized and gendered positionings in which the academic-intellectual-freedom to develop the curriculum and devise the means of its assessment has been usurped by those same politicians in the name of “accountability.” As Linda McNeil (2000, 7) has pointed out, the “conservative transformation of American public education [has occurred] through the use of technicist forms of power.” Such “accountability” is one face of fascism in America today.
