Chapter 4: The Obama Education Marketplace and the Media: Common Sense School Reform for Crisis Management

When Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States many people believed in his campaign messages of hope and change. His tenure as President, however, has been one less marked by hope than it has been marred by Congress-induced government shutdown, Supreme Court decisions that undid a half-century’s progress in voting rights, the violation of privacy rights by the National Security Agency, and the continuing privatization of public goods at an accelerating rate. Among those public goods under attack is public education.

Rather than roll back some of the more egregious education policy decisions enacted in the previous decade, the Obama administration has continued to advocate for school reform efforts that redefine the purposes, processes, and structures of education in terms of the market, global competition, and American exceptionalism (Giroux, 2009; Giroux & Saltman, 2009; Kruger, 2010). The administration continues to support ideologies and practices—like the development of the Common Core Subject Standards and additional testing for all students in grades K–12, more accountability for teachers, and more choice for parents—within the educational policy and reform landscape, harnessing significant federal funding to enact educational ideologies, policies, and practices that further entrench market practices and values as the only solution to a perceived crisis in American public education. The Obama Administration has also exacerbated the shift to market practices in U.S. public education by continuing to leverage education grant funding as a carrot for enacting reform measures like teacher evaluation systems, developing public-private partnerships for education reform, and restructuring failing schools.