The Politics of Identity and the Marketization of U.S. Schools

Abstract

This chapter seeks to develop a locally grounded understanding of the advancement of neoliberal approaches to government within the arena of public education. The discussion analyzes a case of local debate over the “marketization” of education in one community as a focus for illuminating the relationship of translocal struggles over political and educational restructuring to particular, localized conflicts. I examine the processes of cultural production at play in this debate, in which a group of parents used a neoliberal vocabulary to argue for parental choice of curriculum materials and instructional methods in their children’s classrooms. This group represented themselves as “customers” of schools and argued for their entitlements to “consumer choice.” This claim was vigorously contested by an opposing group of parents and teachers who challenged the legitimacy of the “customer” identity and of descriptions of schools in the idioms of the market. The discussion considers the clash between competing modes of representation—particularly the politics of identity surrounding the characterization of parents as the “customers” of schools—as a focus for examining the relationship between processes of local debate and more enduring changes in the political economy of education.