Introduction

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Approaches to Politics and Policy of Education provides a broad overview of educational policy and politics from critical perspectives engaging with both foundational and cutting edge topics. In critical perspectives, educational policy debates and programs for reform are about more than narrow questions of efficacy, say to raise test scores or for simply more educational inclusion, fairer school spending, or even cultural responsiveness. Rather, policy and reform debates represent contested visions for schools and society by social groups vying for hegemony. Critical approaches to educational policy and politics see schooling and education more broadly as contested terrain in which competing visions for education are imbricated with the material and symbolic interests and cultural ideologies of different classes and cultural groups. Contests by different classes and cultural groups over education involve competing visions for what knowledge and whose culture matters, how money and resources should be used, who should control schools and what broader social role they serve. From a critical perspective, contests over education need to be understood as part of a broader set of social antagonisms that take form at different scales structuring the global, the national, the local, and the individual. A critical perspective hence rejects liberal and conservative tendencies for educational reformism that delinks educational problems from broader social, political, economic, and cultural problems and structures. The critical perspective aims to situate educational policies, politics, and practices within these broader problems and structures and views education as a crucial means for social transformation. As well, a critical perspective presumes that schools are not merely sites of socialization or even merely sites of domination and oppression. A critical perspective presumes that schools are inevitably sites in which cultural meanings and identifications are produced fostering particular forms of social subjectivity and agency.