Future Imaginaries of Urban School Reform

Autor/in	Nespor, Jan
Titel	Future Imaginaries of Urban School Reform
Quelle	In: Education Policy Analysis Archives, 24 (2016) 2, (116 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1068 2341
Schlagwörter	Urban Schools; Educational Change; Discourse Analysis; Heuristics; Trend Analysis; Futures (of Society); Educational Policy; Neoliberalism; Educational Planning; Urban Planning; Policy Analysis; Imagination; Case Studies; Ohio + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Urban area; Urban areas; School; Schools; Stadtregion; Stadt; Schule; Bildungsreform; Diskursanalyse; Heuristik; Trendanalyse; Future; Society; Zukunft; Politics of education; Bildungspolitik; Neo-liberalism; Neoliberalismus; Bildungsplanung; Stadtplanung; Politikfeldanalyse; Case study; Fallstudie; Case Study
Abstract	Drawing on analytic heuristics from critical discourse analysis and cultural political economy (Jessop, 2010; Wodak, 2002), this article examines the temporal premises and "futures" embedded in a report and reform proposal created in a mid-sized, American city, Columbus, Ohio, in 2013. The product of a city-wide commission appointed in response to a school 'cheating' scandal, the report is both a condensation of key premises and claims circulating through national education policy discourses, and an effort to fit those ideas to a particular urban locale. This fitting involves aligning the city with a particular neoliberal representation or "imaginary" of the future that pervades current education policy discourse and planning. The article unpacks the temporal premises associated with this imaginary and shows their influence on the city's planning. Among other things, the discourse individuates scholastic time and subordinates the present to a distant future that is represented as an already-known or predictable state of affairs. It positions practices such as standardized testing as temporal technologies for predicting the child's position in the imagined future, and reframes racially- and class-based inequalities as differences in the kinds of futures towards which groups are oriented. The effect is to overwrite political questions of what kind of future we might want to create with technical questions of how best to prepare for an inevitable future we can't avoid. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	Colleges of Education at Arizona State University and the University of South Florida. c/o Editor, USF EDU162, 4202 East Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL 33620-5650. Tel: 813-974-3400; Fax: 813-974-3826; Web site: http://epaa.asu.edu
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01