The Bloustein School, with support from the Daniel Tanner Foundation, will host the third annual conference, “Educational Reform, Communities, and Social Justice: Exploring the Intersections” on Friday, May 18 in New Brunswick, to enable researchers studying the diverse implications of recent school reforms to share their findings and ideas, and to help shape a broader collective research agenda.
Registration is required by visiting http://edandsocialjustice.wixsite.com/rutgersedconference. Cost is $25 per person.
Over the past twenty years, neoliberal education reforms have gained increasing momentum across the United States, emphasizing school choice, market discipline, standardized testing, high-stakes evaluation, privatized management, and the reframing of public education as a site for capital investment. Proponents argue that competition, combined with standardized measures of performance, forces traditional public schools to operate more efficiently and makes it easier to allocate resources to the people, interventions and organizations making the most progress. Critics counter that neoliberal reforms exacerbate educational inequalities and can have dramatically differential consequences for low-income and wealthier communities.
Understanding the intersections between these reform strategies and questions of social justice, community development, and urban policy calls for interdisciplinary engagement that bridges the confines of traditional academic disciplines. Increasingly, scholars of psychology, education, politics, sociology, urban studies, economics, planning and many other fields are asking what broader impacts neoliberal efforts to reform public education are having, particularly on our most vulnerable communities.
The highlight of the conference will be a lunch plenary panel of distinguished scholars who will identify and discuss the key questions that should guide research moving forward at the intersections of education reform, communities, and social justice. The panelists are Professor Bruce Baker (Rutgers Graduate School of Education), Professor Elise Boddie (Rutgers Law School, Newark), and Tyler E. Brewster, MS Ed (Co-Founder of Peer Connect).
More than 25 research papers on topics that examine the intersection of neoliberal education reforms and social justice, will be presented. Research areas include the impact of new federal administration on K-12 education; parent, teacher, and/or community activism for and against neoliberal reforms; educational governance, public accountability, and community disenfranchisement; schools, gentrification and urban development; the impact of private funding on education policy and practice; school closings; the impact of neoliberal education reform on higher education; teachers’ race, class, gender, retention, equity, training and tenure; the impact of and alternatives to high stakes standardized testing; parental perceptions of and resistance to high stakes standardized testing; how schools control and discipline students; inequality and segregation by race, income, special needs and English Proficiency, and more.
Space is limited. Registration is required by visiting http://edandsocialjustice.wixsite.com/rutgersedconference. Cost is $25 per person.