Dan Laitsch

Teacher Education, Pro-Market Policy and Advocacy Research

Across a wide variety of fields, research has long been promoted as a useful tool in helping policy-makers devise and enact policy. In the United States, the recently enacted federal No Child Left Behind Act specifically requires the use of high-quality research in education policy-making. In this rush to emphasize research, policy-makers have over-looked a number of important considerations, including issues related to research methodologies and structures (qualitative versus quantitative, descriptive versus analytic, etc.), and ethical issues around the use, design, and funding of research studies. Policies justified by research funded, conducted and published by pro-market advocates who bypass traditionally accepted norms for completing and applying research is of particular concern. The present paper examines these three critical issues, as well as their impact on teacher education and teacher educators. Additionally, the larger role of pro-market advocacy organizations is examined, as well as the response, or lack thereof, by the education establishment. Teacher educators must actively and effectively engage in this debate if they wish to retain control of their profession and continue to promote policy based on ethically sound and methodologically appropriate research conducted in the public interest.

Smacked by the invisible hand: the wrong debate at the wrong time with the wrong people

Over the past three decades, educators have faced an increasing variety of reform proposals that can best be contextualized as efforts to commodify and privatize public education. While supporters of market-based reforms attempt to place these proposals within education theory, they are in reality firmly entrenched in neoliberal economic theory. This paper traces the evolution of neoliberal economic thought from its birth in the 1940s to its rise to prevalence in the 1970s. It looks at the continuing impact of neoliberal theory on public and political thought as well as education reform proposals. If supporters of public education are to respond adequately to these reform proposals, they will need to reframe their approach on economic, rather than educational, grounds.

Reconceiving barriers for democratic health education in Danish schools: an analysis of institutional rationales

ABSTRACT Health promotion and education researchers and practitioners advocate for more democratic approaches to school-based health education, including participatory teaching methods and the promotion of a broad and positive concept of health and health knowledge, including aspects of the German educational concept of bildung. Although Denmark, from where the data of this article are derived, has instituted policies for such approaches, their implementation in practice faces challenges. Adopting a symbolic interactionist analytical framework this paper explores and defines two powerful institutional rationales connected to formal and informal social processes and institutional purposes of schools, namely conservatism and Neoliberalism. It is empirically described and argued how these institutional rationales discourage teachers and students from including a broad and positive concept of health, the element of participation, and the promotion of general knowledge as legitimate elements in health education. This paper thus contains a perspective on health education practice, which, in a new way, contributes to explain the relatively slow progress of democratic approaches to school health education.