In his review of the opening pages of Gary Anderson's (2009) Advocacy Leadership:
Toward a Post-Reform Agenda in Education, fellow blogger EJ over at lbjeduclass.blogspot.com notes that, although Anderson provides ample background to scaffold readers' understanding of neoliberalism and where it came from, he offers little in the way of theoretical grounding for his own concept of "advocacy leadership." A commenter subsequently hinted that the initial "slipperiness" may serve a purpose, but that Anderson does eventually get around to giving us a better sense of where advocacy leadership fits in the bigger scheme of things.
In a book-length work that, as the title suggests, advances a particular agenda, there are benefits in starting out by positing your agenda in contrast to that which it is not--in this case, neoliberal control of schooling and school reform--since the case against neoliberal control of education is (1) easily made and (2) makes the reader more friendly to the alternative. Regarding the first point, neoliberalism is the straw man that has proven himself to be a formidable opponent; that is, when one actually describes the amoral policy and its effects on the societies in which it has taken hold, it appears to be an impossibly cruel and oppressive caricature of anticommunism. That brings us to the second point.
Despite some headway during the Great Depression, communism (and socialism, with which it is popularly conflated) has been viewed by many Americans as a great evil. President Ronald Reagan even dubbed the USSR "the Evil Empire." Posters portray President Barack Obama bearing a Hitlerian moustache and labelled with the word "socialist," thus simultaneously depicting this one man as the embodiment of America's two greatest enemies (of the 20th century). Even the American reading public (as opposed to the nonreading public) would be a hard market for peddlers of alternatives to free-market ideas. And, unfortunately for advocates of change for the public good, free-market ideas tend to be a big part of the problems they seek to remedy, so any suggestion they anticipate being of worth (keeping in mind that pragmatists are not averse to using whatever tools they believe will work) is going to have to (1) address the inherent inequities of unregulated capitalism while (2) not sounding so lefty that it is dismissed without serious consideration.
The vagueness permits the case to be made for (what I anticipate will be) a reining in of laissez-faire economic principles vis-a-vis public education. Once the case is compellingly made and its alternative is shown to be workable and congruent with the [espoused] American ideals of liberty and justice for all and of all (wo)men being created equal, then the provenance and AKAs of the agenda can be revealed.
Anyone who denies that the presentation of an idea can be more important than the merits of the idea itself hasn't been paying attention. A reader need not know about Derrida's differance to be swayed by an argument that employs the concept in creating an acceptable space between neoliberalism and all that is not neoliberalism (lumped together), and is therefore communism. That one is not the yin to the other's yang--or, in Cold War terms, that there is not a zero-sum balance to concern ourselves with in this instance--can be a liberating notion for those of us who grew up being schooled to believe that the free market was worth fighting and dying for ("Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?"). Of course, those who lost loved ones in the hottest years of the misleadingly named Cold War may still cling to the belief that admitting that there can be any benefits to be derived from even mixed economies or limited spheres of "no-profit zones" (such as in education) would somehow mean that their family's sacrifice was "in vain."
Just as analogies can be used to educate and elucidate, so too can analogies be used to close the public's ears to anything a pragmatist might offer in good faith. In the latter, history can truly be a burden to the present and the future. That is, the way history has been and is being taught can truly be a burden to the present and the future.
