ABSTRACT
Control over public education in the U.S.A., and with it, regulation of teacher education, historically have belonged to the states. However, in the past decade national systems of education throughout the world, including that of the U.S.A., have adopted a remarkably uniform package of changes to schooling, reforms asserted as necessary to prepare workers for a globalized “knowledge economy” (Levidow, 2000). The reforms of schooling in the U.S.A. being carried out on both the national and local levels are seldom analyzed in relation to the global program for education being promoted by world financial institutions and neoliberal governments (Torres, 2005). Curiously, analysis of how this package of educational reforms has stratified schooling elsewhere in the world (Puiggros, 2004; Ramos, 1999) has not been joined to research documenting increased disparities in education in the U.S.A., for instance in teacher quality (Achinstein et al., 2004; Darling-Hammond et al., 2001) and charter schools (Wells et al., 2002). Little attention has been paid to how the contour of key components in “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), including use of data from standardized testing to drive curriculum and instruction; fragmentation of regulation and authority over schools; and privatization of school services duplicates what has been demanded in countries outside the U.S.A. by the World Bank (WB), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Torres, 2005; Weiner, 2005a). Within educational research, the topic of neoliberalism’s educational program has been neglected, and the effects on teacher education have been especially under-researched (Phtiaka, 2002).
