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| On Ideological Conflicts in the School Choice Movement in America in the 1980s |
| Chen Luxi |
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Abstract Focusing on the rebuilding of the public school system that emerged in the late 1980s to the early 1990s,the research addresses the power redistribution in the U .S .school system and its expression in policy texts .The process is actually the production and the reinterpretation of the mainstream symbol of education policy texts—″Choice″in the 1980s by neoconservatives and traditionalists .Starting from questioning and exposing the low efficiency crisis of the″One Best System,″i .e .,the public school system,the neoconservatives and the traditionalists criticized the direct democratic control and hierarchical bureaucracy structure in contemporary public schools and proposed the″bottom-up″reform and rebuilding scheme,or the realization of the″Choice .″ They proceeded to concretize the abstract symbol of″Choice .″The neoconservatives believed that the schools controlled by professional authority had the maximum efficiency and the″Choice″was to grant authority to teachers,while the traditionalists thought that the schools controlled by the market had the maximum efficiency and the″Choice″was to grant an authority to market .During the shift from the inexplicable to the explicable,although there emerged conflicts in ideology between the neoconservatives and the traditionalists,they compromised in policy text writing .As a result,″charter school″became one of the most highly recommended plans for school reform at that time .While conducting the text design for″charter schools,″both the neoconservatives and the traditionalists tried to incorporate professionalization and marketization .They introduced the marketized competition mechanism and the concept of″consumer″to the public schools while guaranteeing public funds and actualizing professional autonomy in schools,thus realizing the combination of professionalization,vocationalization and marketization . In this way,they completed the whole production process of the symbol″Choice″in their text compromise and got fully prepared for its entry into the field of symbol transmission .As a result of this,the policy texts and their symbol″Choice,″proposed in the″School Choice Movement,″were reduced to self-flattering political tools for the two groups of ideology .When the abstract″Choice″was materialized into specific policy texts,the original idea and concept of″Choice″were completely lost and were replaced by the value and the interest that the neoconservatives and the traditionalists desired .And the″School Choice Movement″thus became an elaborately-designed and inevitable″political performance .″This merits our critical reflection .
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2015, Vol. 1 
