Thinking inside the box: Interrogating No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top

Abstract

This conceptual paper intends to interrogate the fabrication of minority children in the United States from different cultural backgrounds through current educational systems. By focusing on academically-oriented educational reform policies such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT), it articulates how minority children are ‘made up’ (Hacking, 1986) through double gestures of inclusion/exclusion which inscribe “the hope of progress and fears of degeneration” (Popkewitz, 2008, p. 12) of minority children and are embodied through their schooling. This paper questions the promise of the NCLB and RTTT that minority children can become liberated from their debilitating circumstances through the salvation of education guided by performance-based accountability policies. Inspired by Foucaultian ideas of power and discourse and Popkewitz’s inclusion/exclusion doublet, textual analysis of the NCLB and RTTT documents reveals ways in which social inequity is reproduced through institutionalized discourses embedded in and enacted by schooling for young children.