Antipolitics, Education, and Institutional Choice: The Flight From Democracy

Abstract

Schools are expected to accomplish a variety of goals in modern societies, ranging from enhancing economic competitiveness to ensuring equality of opportunity to protecting students from AIDS. Increasing numbers of education policy analysts of divergent political and scholarly persuasions agree that under present arrangements for educational governance schools have failed to achieve crucial public purposes. Agreement that present arrangements have failed is inevitably accompanied by intense disagreement about how schools should be governed, and it is therefore in the antipolitics of institutional choice that the main conflicts now emerge in the politics of education. Antipolitics is often associated with a willingness to dispense with democratic governance, in order to accomplish one or another of the public purposes to which schools are dedicated.