Ideology of Education, The
The Commonwealth, the Market, and America's Schools
Publication Year: 2003
Published by: State University of New York Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
Contents
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pp. vii-
List of Tables and Figures
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pp. ix-x
Preface and Acknowledgments
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pp. xi-xv
Anyone reviewing the academic educational policy literature may be forgiven for concluding that, as Peter De Leon put it, the policy sciences have become “yet another vested tool for interest groups” (1997, x). These studies are routinely employed as partisan weapons in educational policy debates, and there is grumbling from the left and the right that...
1. Ideology and Education
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pp. 1-18
Public education and the market have both been described as secular religions. The market because it purports to possess divine attributes that, “are not always completely evident to mortals but must be trusted and affirmed by faith” (Cox 1999, 20). Public education because it embodies a “cosmological” belief among Americans that schooling offers a sure path...
2. Education and the Economy
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pp. 19-45
Market-based education reforms are frequently justified by the claim that schools inadequately respond to the demand for economically valuable knowledge. The belief that education’s primary function is to meet this demand by creating and transferring the intellectual skills that provide economic opportunity is at the heart of the market’s functionalist...
3. Education and Equality of Opportunity
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pp. 47-73
As the previous chapter details, numerous studies raise questions about the external efficiency of schooling. Education outputs, especially test scores, have a tenuous claim to represent economically valuable cognitive skills, and raising these outputs seems unlikely to boost productivity in the aggregate (Levin and Kelly 1994). Yet these same outputs undoubtedly play...
4. Institutional Structure and Educational Goals
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pp. 75-100
The arguments and analyses in the preceding chapters empirically challenge the market’s arguments in several ways. Value systems seem to do a better job of predicting aggregate productivity than test scores and the useful knowledge and skills they are held to represent. These test score measures in turn seem to be at least partially reflecting social inequities...
5. Education and Civic Culture
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pp. 101-125
According to any number of commonwealth-oriented scholars and analysts, the primary purpose of public education is to “indoctrinate the coming generation with the basic outlooks and values of the political order” (Key 1961, p. 316). In this perspective schools are repositories and replicators of value systems that manifest themselves in norms and behavioral...
6. Education as Ideology
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pp. 127-150
The central purpose of this book was to assess whether market-based education reforms were more likely to produce positive, utilitarian change (improved economic prospects through higher levels of human capital, more equitable distribution of social and economic opportunity), or cultural change (a reshaping of normative institutional goals and how...
Notes
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pp. 151-156
Methodological Appendix
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pp. 157-169
References
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pp. 171-190
Index
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pp. 191-196
E-ISBN-13: 9780791487327
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791456453
Print-ISBN-10: 0791456455
Page Count: 196
Illustrations: 15 tables, 6 figures
Publication Year: 2003
