Chapter 3: Ignored Under Obama: Word Magic, Crisis Discourse, and Utopian Expectations

Despite conservative and libertarian efforts to paint President Barack Obama as a socialist, Obama’s policies often expand neoliberal commitments that originated under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, especially policies addressing public education (see the first edition of this volume, Thomas, 2011a, 2011b). Those neoliberal realities, however, are masked by crisis discourse and utopian expectations driven by civil rights analogies, personified by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: simultaneously, public education is identified as a failure, poverty is acknowledged only as “not an excuse,” and somehow in-school-only education reform is championed as the sole mechanism for transforming society.

Addressing writing instruction in the wake of Hitler and World War II, English educator and future president of the National Council of Teachers of English, Lou LaBrant (1950) sounded an alarm: