ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the ways in which the neoliberal corporate reforms have transformed education, with their emphasis on high stakes standardized testing, privatization, and accountability, or what Ball describes as the tyranny of numbers. It argues that the current corporate education reform movement has replaced the once dominant social democratic social imaginary that emphasized collective action, community, trust, and common purpose with neoliberal conceptions emphasizing free markets, individual choice, and competition. The neoliberal or market fundamentalist social imaginary diametrically differs from that based on the social democratic principles that prevailed from mid-1930s to the early 1970s. In education, neoliberal policies echo both Friedman's economic and political goals of creating markets, efficiency, privatizing services including schools, and expanding the economy. The rise of neoliberalism in the United States was accompanied by increasing attacks on public education, beginning with the 1983 report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) that declared that everyone were a nation at risk.
