The Master's Market: Analyzing the Role of Marketization in Public Education Reform

Abstract

Since the Bush administration passed the "No Child Left Behind Act" two decades ago, policy interventions aimed at improving America's education system have embraced a market-based approach, based in the belief that expanding options for choice can improve the quality of public schools and the educational outcomes of marginalized students attending them. But, the efficacy of public-school alternatives that market policies have expanded, particularly charter schools, is widely contested. Further, scholars have criticized how marketization targets and at times exploits the marginalized students in the urban enclaves these policies are most frequently enacted in. Scholars have long recognized the contradiction of market-based reform, but the roots of the marginalization that school choice perpetuates remains widely debated and the introduction of the market only complicated their analyses. In her famous essay critiquing the academy’s habitual failure to meaningfully engage non-normative theory, research, and ways of knowing, black lesbian scholar and writer Audre Lorde states that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never bring about genuine change” (Lorde, 1979, p. 151). In this thesis I borrow from Audre Lorde’s analytic of “The Master’s Tools” to explore how market-based education policies fail to meaningfully address educational inequity. as Lorde articulates in her 1979 speech on a different matter, market policies have at best allowed educators to “temporarily beat him at his own game” (Lorde, 1979, p 151). That is, produce uneven outcomes that suggest a version of equity but are far from “bringing about genuine change” (Lorde, 1979, p 151). This paradigm, termed “The Master’s Market,” offers an approach to Critical Policy Analysis frameworks that recognizes the market as a co-conspirator in the maintenance of systemic injustices often attributed primarily to systems of governance.No embargoAcademic Major: African American and African StudiesAcademic Major: Public Management, Leadership and Polic