Pushing up against the limit-horizon of educational change: A critical discourse analysis of popular education reform texts

With this article, we work to identify the limit-horizon of possible ideas, practices, and ways of talking about education reform and schooling via a critical discourse analysis of selected popular political and governmental texts. To do so, we explore the popular discourse of education reform in the United States through our analyses of three very different yet over-lapping social texts: four policy speeches delivered by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in 2009 introducing the Race to the Top (RttT) initiative associated with the National Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009; news media coverage of those speeches and RttT; and, two widely publicized films dealing with the subject of education reform, Waiting for Superman & Won't Back Down.