Aligning school mathematics with a manufactured crisis: re-rendering neoliberal and neoconservative discourses as commonsensical in a rural place

Abstract

School reform efforts are situated within social and political contexts and, as such, are susceptible to the commonsense discourses circulating through, and shaping, society. Two discourses prevalent in US education reform are those perpetuating the ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. These ideologies are inherently contradictory—with the former promoting a small state and the latter a strong state—but converge to promote their agendas, shaping school reform efforts. How this occurs is not always clear, especially in rural contexts, where there has been limited attention to ideological discourses’ relation to schooling. In this analysis, we describe how dominant, yet contradictory, discourses of neoliberalism and neoconservatism are resolved in a rural context. We find that the leaders of one rural, public school district identified fifth-grade number sense as a problem of practice needing improvement—framing the cause of their problem as misalignment and the solution as consistency within and across grade levels. In doing so, district leaders’ conversations were limited to those of standardization (e.g., state-mandated mathematics standards, approaches to timed-fact tests, and curriculum between grade levels). Alignment as a frame excluded conversations related to deeper considerations, such as students’ experiences in mathematics or issues of equity. We find that dominant discourses constrain the ways district leaders frame their mathematics-related problem and work through the frame (in this case, one of alignment) to resolve inherent contradictions and advance their agendas. We suggest that these discourses serve to distract from potentially more pressing issues in education.