Educational Biopolitics, Innovation, and Social Reproduction

Introduction: Tensions Abound

In the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, politicians and education reformers suggested that underperforming schools were one of the main sources of economic instability. Thus imagined, “education” was framed as a matter of national security. In opposition to reproduction theorists (Bowles and Gintis 2011) who investigated how schools reproduce the social relations and inequalities of the larger social order, education reformers proposed a different thesis. They suggested that a high-achieving school will produce a thriving community and a low-achieving school will yield an impoverished community. In this latest iteration of blaming schools for economic woes, teachers endured much of the blame. Because of a lack of “data” discerning good from bad teachers, it was deemed necessary to develop innovative instruments to determine the value that teachers add to student learning and the development of human capital (Pierce 2013). The focus in the...