Chapter 9: No Child Left Behind: The Rise of Educational Markets and the Decline of Social Justice

NCLB, while ostensibly aiming to improve education, embodies the neoliberal solution to educational inequality by increasing the Federal government’s control over schooling and reorganizing schooling along economic lines in which markets and school choice are introduced. Furthermore, based on Iris Young’s description of deliberative model of democracy, NCLB undermines the possibility for people to participate in the process of setting educational and social goals. Instead, NCLB promotes an aggregative system of democracy in which individual preferences are tallied but reasons for those choices are ignored. Lastly, NCLB intentionally denigrates and undermines the expertise of educational professionals in preference for supposedly objective standardized testing.