Hello bloggers! I hope as you continue to follow my blog you gain an understanding of the importance of diverse literacy education. This week I will continue to discuss literacy education; specifically, I want to discuss the effect neoliberalism has on the education of literacy. In the simplest terms, neoliberalism is the support of policies that promote privatization in public spheres that are regulated by the government. When there is a problem in one if the spheres, such as education, neoliberals have a private outsource solve it. Apple’s definition of neoliberals is “they are guided by a vision of the weak state. Thus, what is private is necessarily good and what is public is necessarily bad. Public institutions such as schools are ‘blackholes’ into which money is poured –and then seemingly disappears…” (38). In other words, public schools are seen as money pits, so private schools and other ways to make them more profitable come into play. Vouchers are just one example of how neoliberal policies leaves the problem of education or challenge of reforming education to private sources. Neoliberalism negatively effects literacy education in several ways.
Students are seen as products and consumers instead of individual people. They are seen as consumers by private companies that offer money to schools. One example that I find shocking is Channel One, a for-profit network that gave financially low schools equipment in return for having students watch the channel every day. Some could argue that this is a great opportunity for students to be exposed to digital literacy. As an English teacher, I can see how incorporating watching the news could benefit students in a unit on journalism or public speaking; however, I can not see it be useful everyday. Moreover, “the technology is hardwired so that only Channel One can be received, but also mandatory advertisements for major fast foods, athletic wear…Thus, under a number of variants of neliberalism not only are schools transformed into market commodities, but so too now are our children” (Apple 42). Clearly, the students are being targeted as consumers as education is placed second. This reminds me so much of M. T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed. If you have not read I recommend that you do; please read the following review http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-feed-by-mt-anderson/. The novel takes place in the future where children and adults are directly connected to the internet or “feed” implant in their brain. They are constantly bombarded by advertisements and children are educated by the “feed”. An example of privatization in the novel is the following line, “Of course everyone is like, da da da, evil corporations, oh they’re so bad, we all say that, and we all know they control everything. I mean, it’s not great, because who knows what evil shit they’re up to. Everyone feels bad about that. But they’re the only way to get all this stuff, and it’s no good getting all pissy about it, because they’re still going to control everything whether you like it or not” (Anderson 49). The character describes how corporations have taken over because they need “stuff’. Students are also seen as products. Apple states that there is a second part of neoliberalism, “willing to spend more state and/or private money on schools, if only the schools meet the needs expressed by capital”. In essence, students need to meet the standards because a lot of money is going into “making them”.
National and state standards along with high stakes tests are used to make public education worth the money put in to it. After taking several regents, the SATs, and this weekend the CST for teacher certification I still ask myself the same question, “How is this extremely long multiple choice test really going to tell someone I have a sufficient amount of knowledge on this topic? Unfortunately, teachers “teach to the test” because they want their students to succeed, yet students miss out on learning what is outside the tests. Specifically, academic or scientific literacy is taught to students so that they pass high stakes exams; however, we are in a new age where that form of literacy will not help students in the real world. As Alvermann states, “I would also have us take note of a challenge that will grow in magnitude as NCLB- driven policies make their weight felt increasingly at the middle and high school levels. That is, it will be important to reconcile narrowed definitions of readings…with the need to develop young people’s critical awareness as they engage with multiple sign systems” (26).
We are in the conceptual age where “making meaning and connections will be valued as will focusing on the multiple possibilities of any situation over seeking one solution” (Beers 8). The type of literacy students need to learn is “critically reading the media, popular culture, and texts in order to better read the world is a crucial aspect of critical consciousness and collective action” (Lipman 62). In other words, in a time of global warming and economic decline students need to become creative thinkers to solve problems. Multiliteracy and digital literacy become important in this conceptual age.
Teachers face the challenge of incorporating multiliteracy or digital literacy in the class room because neoliberal policies takes away their power making it seem that they are incapable of performing their job. It is stated by Apple that, “Indeed , some states in the United States not only have specified the content that teachers are to teach, but also have regulated the only appropriate methods of teaching. Not following these specified ‘appropriate’ methods puts the teacher at risk of administration sanctions” (51). I believe that there should be some commonality in the curriculum taught in the U.S.; however, there needs to be faith in us educators that we can perform our jobs. Teachers should be evaluated on how effective their methods are and not what methods they are using. Another way teachers lose their power is that “in education in particular, they constitute an offensive against teacher unions that are seen to be too powerful and much too costly” (Apple 40). If there are no teacher unions then it will be extremely difficult for teachers to make changes to improve their students’ education. Some schools that were successful in teaching multiliteracy or bilingual education are forced to change their methods due to pressures from national and state standards. For example, at Brewer school “multiple and competing educational philosophies and ideologies were at work, but the school had a core of committed culturally relevant teachers, a bold new Latino principal committed to the community, a humanistic educational vision, and bilingual/bicultural education” which contrasted with NCLB and other policies (Lipman 54). Eventually, the school changed course to meet the standards and high stakes tests. When teachers are preparing students for high stakes tests they do not acknowledge students’ multiliteracies or digital literacies. Such is the case of a student named Collin described by Beers. The student was successfully using his literacy skills to blog about environmental issues, yet he was failing in English and the teacher did not know he was an avid blogger. All in all, neoliberal policies make it difficult to incorporate multiliteracy, digital literacy in the class room because they are not seen as standard literacies.
Neoliberal policies are a challenge we have to face when teaching our students literacy. Creativity is needed to support our students’ literacies and teach them literacy skills of the conceptual age while meeting the required national and state standards. I hope this post was informative. As always, please feel free to comment on what has been presented. Check back next week for a new post on literacy.
