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Historical Moment: A Nation At Risk (1983) - National Commission On…

- - - - Historical Moment: President Lyndon B. Johnson declares an Unconditional War On Poverty (1964)
      - Due to the fact that schools had compensatory incentive to group, rank, and categorize groups of students, this only further perpetuated social injustice for those students who were the farthest from social and educational justice.
        
        "These characterizations came to provide a filter through which students living in poverty were perceived, as practicioners were required to engage in policy-generated language and rituals. Depictions of students as deficient tied policy-generated money and programs to cultural categories laden with assumptions about students' limited possibilities, potential, and promise" (The Culture Of Education Policy, pg. xv).
        
        Beneficiaries As Deviant: "Policymakers most often depict beneficiaries as different from this constructed norm with a substantial tendency toward highlighting their deficiencies, weaknesses, and lacks. Rather than investigate-or even acknowledge-the structural conditions that favor certain members of society over others, elected officials rely on representations of individual and groups of policy beneficiaries"
        
        "Edelman's Constructing The Political Spectacle highlights how language and discourse shape and structure social problems, often invisibly or at least implicitly" (Educational Policy, pg. 164).
        
        "The acts of naming and defining social problems hold great relevance for how policies shape practitioners' interpretations of their clientele....In the policy process, names are commonly used to identify and characterize populations of people. These names both represent and generate the social constructions of a policy's intended beneficiaries" (The Culture Educational Policy, pg.11).
      - "Policies focused on poverty reveal individual and collective theories of why poverty exists and persists, what might be done to alleviate its consequences (if not eradicate its existence), and what people living in poverty should do to improve their lives and those of their children" (The Culture Of Education Policy, pg.xiv).
        
        Example: The Moynihan Report (1965): "The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself".
        
        "Since, as noted by historian Alice O'Connor (2001), poverty was theorized to be caused "not [by] structural barriers but [by] 'certain characteristics'--low education, race, single parenthood of those living in poverty, educational intervention was deemed necessary" (The Culture Of Education Policy, pg.15)