Tracing Neoliberal Governmentality in Education: Disentangling Economic Crises, Accountability, and the Disappearance of Social Studies

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the impact of neoliberalism in education centers on the creation of policies, curricula, and programming, positioning education as a system that produces marketable, entrepreneurially-minded, global workers (DeLissovoy, 2015; Peters, 2017). What is less known are the ways in which economic principles and mechanisms work in school systems, and how these changes affect teachers and social studies disciplines. Through a critical discourse analysis of policy and other official education documents, interviews, and focus groups with experienced administrators and social studies teachers in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada, I argue that changes in education policy between 1994-2016 have altered the purpose of public education, entangling schooling with economic and accountability goals of the province. The purpose of this qualitative study is threefold: first, using Foucault’s (2008), and later Stephen Ball’s (2013a) theorization, I investigate the extent to which neoliberal governmentality shaped education policy changes in Nova Scotia between 1994-2016. Second, I examine how these changes implicate educators in practice, including the ways teachers perceive changes to their jobs over the last decade. Lastly, I explore the state of high school social studies in Nova Scotia as a site to test the micro-effects of neoliberalism and governmentality in changing policies and practices in education. I conclude that neoliberal governmentality has emerged in distinct patterns in Nova Scotia, which articulate with specific policy technologies and practices in education. Such patterns include the strategic use of economic and educational crises to forward neoliberal policy reform, the expansion of governmental mechanisms to track student and teacher performance, and the dis-articulation of social studies disciplines from the education system.