Does Free-market equal Common Good?

I have been thinking about the current reform emphasis and hoping for the best. Large steps are needed and schools that are failing need drastic Intervention and help. However, there is some slippage in Implementation of the reforms and they may not be responding to students who are growing apart from our common community.

As the Obama administration's educational reform movement increasingly adopts the interests and values of a "free-market" culture, many students graduate public schooling and higher education with an impoverished political imagination, unable to recognize injustice and unfairness. They often find themselves invested in a notion of unattached individualism that severs them from any sense of moral and social responsibility to others or to a larger notion of the common good (Henry Giroux, 2010; Turthout Blog; http://www.truthout.org/dumbing-down-teachers-attacking-colleges-education-name-reform59820).

assessment

Additionally, the role of assessment in supporting all students to achieve at their highest levels is not working well under current reform thinking. Continued use of one-shot high-stakes testing with the result that students become marginalized to good teaching is just not right.

At the same time, those students who jeopardize the achievement of the quantifiable measures and instrumental values now used to define school success are often subjected to harsh disciplinary procedures, pushed out of schools, subjected to medical interventions or, even worse, pushed into the criminal justice system.[1] Most of these students are poor whites and minorities of color and, increasingly, students with Special Needs (Henry Giroux, 2010; Turthout Blog; http://www.truthout.org/dumbing-down-teachers-attacking-colleges-education-name-reform59820).