Chapter 6: Neoliberal Education Reform’s Mouthpiece: Education Week’s Discourse on Teach for America

Neoliberal corporate educational reform in the United States, as part of the wider global education reform movement (GERM), serves to indoctrinate students into accepting and conforming to the present system of neoliberal global capitalism. Along with the rise of neoliberalism as the globally dominant political-economic ideology, GERM arose in the 1980s and has been embraced by many countries throughout the world (Ross & Gibson, 2007a; Sahlberg, n.d.). GERM is promoted by private enterprises as well as international organizations, such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), who have become instrumental players in the education policy of many countries (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Sahlberg, 2013); the most notable countries include the United Kingdom, Chile, Australia, and the United States. According to Pasi Sahlberg (2013), GERM consists of the following five common features: standardization, the creation of “core” subjects, “low-risk” ways to achieve educational and student learning goals, borrowing and implementation of corporate management models to improve education, and test-based accountability policies (para. 5–9). One can observe all five of these corporate educational reform initiatives in the United States.