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9781469668208 Academic Inspection Copy

From the New Deal to the War on Schools

Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State
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In an era defined by political polarization, both major U.S. parties have come to share a remarkably similar understanding of the education system as well as a set of punitive strategies for fixing it. Combining an intellectual history of social policy with a sweeping history of the educational system, Daniel S. Moak looks beyond the rise of neoliberalism to find the origin of today's education woes in Great Society reforms. In the wake of World War II, a coalition of thinkers gained dominance in U.S. policymaking. They identified educational opportunity as the ideal means of addressing racial and economic inequality by incorporating individuals into a free market economy. The passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 secured an expansive federal commitment to this goal. However, when social problems failed to improve, the underlying logic led policymakers to hold schools responsible. Moak documents how a vision of education as a panacea for society's flaws led us to turn away from redistributive economic policies and down the path to market-based reforms, No Child Left Behind, mass school closures, teacher layoffs, and other policies that plague the public education system to this day.
Daniel S. Moak is assistant professor of African American studies at Ohio University.
"The contemporary US education system suffers from a multitude of problems: overworked and undervalued teachers, overreliance on standardized tests, and systemic racial inequality, just to name a few. Anyone seeking to understand why needs to pick up a copy of Daniel Moak's excellent book. . . . [A]n essential study in the field."--Historical Studies in Education
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