ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses traditional approaches to policy analysis with critical policy analysis, the latter of which provides a realist perspective for analyzing policy in an era of widening inequality and political divisions across lines of race, class, gender, geography, and citizenship. A critical engagement and analysis of such policies requires an understanding of the political ideologies and assumptions that inform neoliberal education policy and reform. Classical liberalism emphasized political freedom and individual rights and supported capitalist relations of production, private property, and unregulated markets. While neoliberalism in its more global sense refers to the free-market economic models developed by Milton Freidman, Gary Becker, and other economists at the University of Chicago, its pervasiveness has extended to the political and cultural domains of society. As a neoliberal economic model has become more dominant, humanistic goals for schools have receded in importance as neoliberalism has reduced the goals of public schooling to economic ones.
