Corporate Educational Reform and the Making of the the Destruction of Teachers as Public Intellectuals

Since the 1980s, one of the central ideological tactics that the political right has used to justify the privatization, defunding, and denunciation of public schooling has been the demand for introducing consumer choice into public education. This move captures the public desire for local control and autonomy, delinks it from collectively determined educational policy, and links it instead to the individualized promise of elite commodity consumption and the sheen of consumerism. Academic journals have published tens of thousands of articles debating “school choice” while think tanks have churned out countless advocacy pieces. First the Republican party and more recently much of the Democratic party have embraced market-based school reforms, taking their cues from armies of heavily funded influence peddling organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform, American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC), and the network of right-wing think tanks such as Heritage, Hoover, and American Enterprise Institute (AEI).