In his political classic The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey offers up an observation that would surely resonate with contemporary readers.The social situation has been so changed by the factors of an industrial age that traditional general principles have little practical meaning. They persist as emotional cries rather than as reasoned ideas…. The developments of industry and commerce have so complicated affairs that a clear-cut, generally applicable, standard of judgment becomes practically impossible. The forest cannot be seen for the (...) trees nor the trees for the forest.1To clarify his point, Dewey continues with four examples in which the concepts employed by situated social actors to grasp the increasing .. (shrink)

The task of this article is to interrogate the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) model to develop a more robust understanding of a prominent trend in the charter school movement and education policy more generally. To accomplish this task, this article details the findings of a synthetic analysis that examines the KIPP model as a Hegelian whole concept operative in a specific mode of social reality. The guidance for this analysis is grounded in a rather straightforward research question. Given the (...) prominence that the KIPP model has achieved in the charter school movement in the United States, what can a synthetic analysis tell us about not only KIPP, but also the larger charter school movement? (shrink)

Education, Crisis, and the Discipline of the Conjuncture constructs a history of the present through conjunctural analysis and builds on this inquiry to construct a model for critical educational scholarship and pedagogical practice that can contribute to the urgent political demands of this historical moment.

The task of this article is to carry out a synthetic analysis of the concept of the educational marketplace as it is used in the popular discourse of education reform so as to unpack what has become a commonsensical idea in American politics. It is a conceptual framework that has opened an ever-expanding sovereign space in the American state for the colonization of a public institution by the private sphere by means of public policy. The results of this analysis suggest (...) that the reform policies associated with the concept of the educational marketplace are ineffective in raising average student achievement, have a high probability for generating significant social costs, and are a manifestation of an articulation of power now in ascendancy in the United States. (shrink)