Neoliberalism

  After reading “Education Policy, Race, and Neoliberal Urbanism” by Pauline Lipman and “Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge” by Apple I have come to the notion that The No Child Left Behind Act is a route that Neoliberals have found to be of their advantage.  The idea is to turn the public schools’ entity from a public sphere to a private sector.  What does this mean?  Well let’s take a look at one of the biggest money making private businesses, “Insurance Companies”. Healthcare is financed primarily through private insurance companies and millions of people are uninsured in the United States.  Even though Medicare and Medicaid exist, which are government health programs, you either have to be disabled, 65 or older, or you have to be poverty stricken.  This means that if you don’t have the means to pay for your insurance you are out of luck.  The uninsured are more likely to be poor and low income than higher income.  This is what neoliberalism is all about, a capitalist world, where the wealthy have the tools of production and the rest simply don’t.  If the public school system in the United States did become privately owned then what would happen to the children of low and middle income families? 

There are many problems associated with the No Child Left Behind Act which gives an alternative to privatizing public schools.   Because of NCLB a lot of teachers have had to put their focus off of the school’s curriculum to prepare their students for the high-stakes testing that the NCLB act demands for.  Schools are bound to the teachings of these tests to raise the test scores.  The problem with this is that schools that are found in low income neighborhoods are not equipped with the necessary materials to adequately educate their students.  Due to the lack of funds the students are not able to enjoy the advantages that the schools in the wealthier neighborhoods have.  For instance, computers, smartboards, textbooks, libraries, sports, etc.  The lower down the socio-economic ladder you go, the poorer the quality of education students receive.  In the long run these schools are most likely to fail the benchmark and are forced to close their doors.  The NCLB Act has opened the doors to neoliberals by identifying these schools as a failure to the concept of education.  Apple states that Neoliberals believe that schools have not prepared the students for their future as capitalists and this is why they view schools as “black holes”.  They do not believe that schools are doing their job in which they have failed to educate our children.  “Underpinning this position is a vision of students as human capital.  The world is intensely competitive economically, and students- as future workers- must be given the requisite skills and dispositions to compete efficiently and effectively” (apple 38).   Apple believes that if we “return to a “common culture”, make schools more efficient, more responsive to the private sector we will be able to solve a lot of our problems (Apple 35). In the long run, I don’t believe neither Apple nor the neoliberals really care about furthering children’ education, but they are more consumed about the money they will profit from by getting their hands on the public school system.  I believe that by privatizing schools we will be facing the same problems that we are encountering with our healthcare system.