Creating Difference - Neo-Liberalism, Neo-conservatism and the Politics of Educational Reform

10.1177/0895904803260022EDUCATIONAL POLICY / January and March 2004MICHAEL W. APPLEWhat Are the Aims of Education in the New America?The Imperatives of the No Child Left Behind Act

Creating Difference: Neo-Liberalism,Neo-Conservatism and the

Politics of Educational Reform

MICHAEL W. APPLE

This article raises questions about current educational reform efforts nowunderway in a number of nations. Research from a number of countries is usedto document some of the hidden differential effects of two connected strate-giesneo-liberal inspired market proposals and neo-liberal, neo-conserva-tive, and middle class managerial inspired regulatory proposals, includingnational curricula and national testing. This article describes how differentinterests with different educational and social visions compete for dominion inthe social field of power surrounding educational policy and practice. In theprocess, it documents some of the complexities and imbalances in this field ofpower. These complexities and imbalances result in thin rather than thickmorality and tend toward the reproduction of both dominant pedagogical andcurricular forms and ideologies and the social privileges that accompanythem.

Keywords: educational reform; markets; standards; national curriculum;national testing

GRITTY MATERIALITIES

In this article, I raise serious questions about current educational reformefforts now underway in a number of nations. In pursuit of this, I shall bring

EDUCATIONAL POLICY, Vol. 18 No. 1, January and March 2004 12-44DOI: 10.1177/0895904803260022 2004 Corwin Press

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to the attention of people in the United States not only research and argu-ments about what is happening here but also evidence of similar reforms thathave appeared in other nations. I use research on the English, U.S., New Zea-land, and Scandinavian experiences to document some of the hidden dif-ferential effects of two connected strategiesneo-liberal inspired marketproposals and neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and middle class managerialinspired regulatory proposals.

There are a number of reasons for approaching these issues with an inter-national perspective. All too many discussions of education in the UnitedStates are characterized by a particular form of arrogance (We have noth-ing to learn from other nations.). Or they are unaware that many of the thingsin which we are engaged here have a history elsewhere, a history whoseeffects should make us rather cautious about engaging in the same policies.Or finally, there is an assumption that our motives are pure and our traditionsdemocratic. Hence, whatever has occurred in educational reforms in othernations (say, an increase in social inequalities in education when a particularchange is instituted) simply could not happen here. It can and it is.

In the process of critically examining a number of current reforms, Iexamine the interrelations among class, gender, and race. All three must betaken up together because, for example, in the United States 70% of working-class positions are held by women and persons of color (Apple, 1996; seealso Bourdieu, 1984). Yet, this article has another agenda as well. I also sug-gest that the rhetorical flourishes of the discourses of critical pedagogyatradition that continues to play a role in challenging parts of neo-liberal andneo-conservative policies in educationneed to come to grips with thesechanging material and ideological conditions. Critical pedagogy cannot andwill not occur in a vacuum. Unless we honestly face these profound rightisttransformations and think tactically about them, we will have little effecteither on the creation of a counter-hegemonic common sense or on thebuilding of a counter-hegemonic alliance.

Thus, I examine the ways in which the social and cultural terrain of educa-tional policy and discourse has been altered on the ground so to speak. Iargue that we need to make closer connections between our theoretical andcritical discourses on one hand and the real transformations that are currentlyshifting educational policies and practices in fundamentally rightist direc-tions on the other hand. Part of my discussion will need to be conceptual; butpart of it will appropriately need to be empirical in order for me to pull

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AUTHORS NOTE: This article is based on a much larger discussion in Michael W. Apple,Educating the Right Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (New York: Routledge-Falmer, 2001). A different version has appeared in Educational Theory.

together what is known about the real and material effects of the shift to theright in education.

My focus on the gritty materialities of these effects is not meant to dismissthe importance of theoretical interventions. Nor is it meant to suggest thatdominant discourses should not be constantly interrupted by the creativegains that have emerged from the varied communities that make up criticaleducational studies. Indeed, critical educational research, policy, and prac-tice require the fundamental interruption of common sense. However,although the construction of new theories and utopian visions is important, itis equally crucial to base these theories and visions in an unromanticappraisal of the material and discursive terrain that now exists. Commonsense is already being radically altered, but not in directions that many criti-cal educators would find comforting. Without an analysis of such transfor-mations and of the balance of forces that have created such discomfortingalterations, without an analysis of the tensions, differential relations ofpower, and contradictions within it, we are left with increasingly elegant newtheoretical formulations, but with a less than elegant understanding of thefield of social power on which they operate (Bourdieu, 1984).

Hence, although much of the literature on critical pedagogies has beenpolitically and theoretically important and has helped us make a number ofgains, it has a number of flaws. It too often has not been sufficiently con-nected to the ways in which the current movement toward what might best becalled conservative modernization (Apple, 2001a) both has altered commonsense and has transformed the material and ideological conditions surround-ing schooling. It thereby sometimes becomes a form of what might best becalled romantic possibilitarian rhetoric, in which the language of possibilitysubstitutes for a consistent tactical analysis of what the balance of forcesactually is and what is necessary to change it (Whitty, 1974). This is the taskin which I engage in this article.

RIGHT TURN

In his influential history of curriculum debates, Herbert Kliebard (1995)has documented that educational issues have consistently involved majorconflicts and compromises among groups with competing visions of legiti-mate knowledge, what counts as good teaching and learning, and what is ajust society. That such conflicts have deep roots in conflicting views ofracial, class, and gender justice in education and the larger society is ratifiedin even more critical recent work as well (Rury & Mirel, 1997; Selden, 1999;Teitelbaum, 1996). These competing visions have never had equal holds onthe imaginations of educators or the general citizenry, nor have they ever had

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equal power to affect their visions. Because of this, no analysis of educationcan be fully serious without placing at its very core a sensitivity to the ongo-ing struggles that constantly shape the terrain on which education operates.

Today is no different than in the past. A new set of compromises, a newalliance and new power bloc has been formed that has increasing influence ineducation and all things social. This power bloc combines multiple fractionsof capital who are committed to neo-liberal marketized solutions to educa-tional problems,1 neo-conservative intellectuals who want a return tohigher standards and a common culture, authoritarian populist religiousconservatives who are deeply worried about secularity and the preservationof their own traditions, and particular fractions of the professionally orientednew middle class who are committed to the ideology and techniques ofaccountability, measurement, and management. Although there are cleartensions and conflicts within this alliance, in general its overall aims are inproviding the educational conditions believed necessary both for increasinginternational competitiveness, profit, and discipline and for returning us to aromanticized past of the ideal home, family, and school (Apple, 1996,2000, 2001a; Apple et al., 2003).

In essence, the new alliance has integrated education into a wider set ofideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as thosethat guide its economic and social welfare goals. They include the dramaticexpansion of that eloquent fiction, the free market; the drastic reduction ofgovernment responsibility for social needs; the reinforcement of intenselycompetitive structures of mobility both inside and outside the school; thelowering of peoples expectations for economic security; the discipliningof culture and the body; and the popularization of what is clearly a form ofsocial-Darwinist thinking, as the recent popularity of The Bell Curve so obvi-ously and distressingly indicates (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; see alsoKincheloe, Steinberg, & Greeson, 1997).

The seemingly contradictory discourse of competition, markets, andchoice on one hand and accountability, performance objectives, standards,national testing, and national curriculum on the other hand have created sucha din that it is hard to hear anything else. As I have shown in a number ofrecent books, these tendencies actually oddly reinforce each other and helpcement conservative educational positions into our daily lives (Apple, 1996,2000, 2001a; Apple, et al., 2003).

Although lamentable, the changes that are occurring present an excep-tional opportunity for serious critical reflection. In a time of radical socialand educational change, it is crucial to document the processes and effects ofthe various and sometimes contradictory elements of the conservative resto-ration and of the ways in which they are mediated, compromised with,

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accepted, used in different ways by different groups for their own purposes,and/or struggled over in the policies and practices of peoples daily educa-tional lives (Ranson, 1995). I shall want to give a sense in this article of howthis might be happening in current reforms such as marketization andnational curricula and national testing. For those interested in critical educa-tional policies and practices, not to do this means that we act without under-standing the shifting relations of power that are constructing and reconstruct-ing the social field of power. Although Gramscis (1971) saying, Pessimismof the intellect, optimism of the will, (p. xxi) has a powerful resonance to itand is useful for mobilization and for not losing hope, it would be foolish tosubstitute rhetorical slogans for the fuller analysis that is undoubtedlyrequired if we are to be successful.

NEW MARKETS, OLD TRADITIONS

Behind a good deal of the New Rights emerging discursive ensemble wasa position that emphasized a culturalist construction of the nation as a(threatened) haven for white (Christian) traditions and values (Gillborn,1997b). This involved the construction of an imagined national past that is atleast partly mythologized and then employing it to castigate the present. GaryMcCulloch (1997) argued that the nature of the historical images of school-ing has changed. Dominant imagery of education as being safe, domes-ticated, and progressive (that is, as leading toward progress and social/personal improvement) has shifted to become threatening, estranged, andregressive (McCulloch, 1997, p. 80). The past is no longer the source of sta-bility, but a mark of failure, disappointment, and loss. This is seen most viv-idly in the attacks on the progressive orthodoxy that supposedly now reignssupreme in classrooms in many nations (see Hirsch, 1996).

For example, in Englandthough much the same is echoed in the UnitedStates, Australia, and elsewhereMichael Jones, the political editor of TheSunday Times, recalled the primary school of his day:

Primary school was a happy time for me. About 40 of us sat at fixed wooden deskswith inkwells and moved from them only with grudging permission. Teacher sat in ahigher desk in front of us and moved only to the blackboard. She smelled of scent andinspired awe. (as cited in McCulloch, 1997, p. 78)

The mix of metaphors invoking discipline, scent (visceral and almostnatural), and awe is fascinating. But he went on, lamenting the past 30years of reform that transformed primary schools. Speaking of his own chil-drens experience, Jones said,


My children spent their primary years in a showplace school where they were allowedto wander around at will, develop their real individuality and dodge the 3Rs. It was allfor the best, we were assured. But it was not. (as cited in McCulloch, 1997, p. 78)

For Jones, the dogmatic orthodoxy of progressive education had leddirectly to educational and social decline. Only the rightist reforms insti-tuted in the 1980s and 1990s could halt and then reverse this decline(McCulloch, 1997, p. 78). Only then could the imagined past return.

Much the same is being said on this side of the Atlantic. These sentimentsare echoed in the public pronouncements of such figures as William Bennett,E. D. Hirsch Jr., Diane Ravitch, and others, all of whom seem to believe thatprogressivism is now in the dominant position in educational policy andpractice and has destroyed a valued past (see e.g., Apple, 2001b; Ravitch,2000). All of them believe that only by tightening control over curriculumand teaching (and students, of course), restoring our lost traditions, andmaking education more disciplined and competitive, as they are certain it wasin the past, can we have effective schools. These figures are joined by otherswho have similar criticisms but who instead turn to a different past for a dif-ferent future. Their past is less that of scent and awe and authority but one ofmarket freedom. For them, nothing can be accomplishedeven the resto-ration of awe and authoritywithout setting the market loose on schools soas to ensure that only good ones survive.

We should understand that these policies are radical transformations. Ifthey had come from the other side of the political spectrum, they would havebeen ridiculed in many ways, given the ideological tendencies in our nations.Further, not only are these policies based on a romanticized pastoral past butthese reforms also have not been notable for their grounding in research find-ings. Indeed, when research has been used, it has often either served as a rhet-oric of justification for preconceived beliefs about the supposed efficacy ofmarkets or regimes of tight accountability or they have been basedas in thecase of Chubb and Moes (1990) much publicized work on marketizationon quite flawed research (Whitty, 1997).

Yet, no matter how radical some of these proposed reforms are and nomatter how weak the empirical basis of their support, they have now rede-fined the terrain of debate of all things educational. After years of conserva-tive attacks and mobilizations, it has become clear that ideas that were oncedeemed fanciful, unworkableor just plain extreme are now increasinglybeing seen as common sense (Gillborn, 1997b, p. 357).

Tactically, the reconstruction of common sense that has been accom-plished has proven to be extremely effective. For example, there are clear dis-cursive strategies being employed here, ones that are characterized by plain

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speaking and speaking in a language that everyone can understand. (I donot wish to be wholly negative about this. The importance of these things issomething many progressive educators, including many writers on criticalpedagogy, have yet to understand. See Apple, 1988, 1999.).2 These strategiesalso involve not only presenting ones own position as common sense butalso usually tacitly implying that there is something of a conspiracy amongones opponents to deny the truth or to say only that which is fashionable(Gillborn, 1997b, p. 353). As Gillborn (1997b) noted,

This is a powerful technique. First, it assumes that there are no genuine argumentsagainst the chosen position; any opposing views are thereby positioned as false, insin-cere or self-serving. Second, the technique presents the speaker as someone brave orhonest enough to speak the (previously) unspeakable. Hence, the moral high groundis assumed and opponents are further denigrated. (p. 353)

It is hard to miss these characteristics in some of the conservative literaturesuch as Herrnstein and Murrays (1994) publicizing of the unthinkable truthabout genetics and intelligence or Hirschs latest tough discussion of thedestruction of serious schooling by progressive educators (Hirsch, 1996).

MARKETS AND PERFORMANCE

Let us take as an example of the ways in which all this operates one ele-ment of conservative modernizationthe neo-liberal claim that the invisiblehand of the market will inexorably lead to better schools. As Roger Dalereminded us (as cited in Menter, Muschamp, Nicholl, Ozga, & Pollard,1997), the market acts as a metaphor rather than an explicit guide for action. Itis not denotative, but connotative. Thus, it must itself be marketed to thosewho will exist in it and live with its effects (Menter et al., 1997, p. 27). Mar-kets are marketed, are made legitimate, by a depoliticizing strategy. They aresaid to be natural and neutral and governed by effort and merit. And thoseopposed to them are by definition, hence, also opposed to effort and merit.Markets, as well, are supposedly less subject to political interference and theweight of bureaucratic procedures. Plus, they are grounded in the rationalchoices of individual actors (Menter et al., p. 27; see also Moe, 2000; Witte,2000). Thus, markets and the guarantee of rewards for effort and merit are tobe coupled together to produce neutral, yet positive, results. Mechanisms,hence, must be put into place that give evidence of entrepreneurial efficiencyand effectiveness. This coupling of markets and mechanisms for the gener-ation of evidence of performance is exactly what has occurred. Whether itworks is open to question.


In one of the most thoughtful critical reviews of much of the evidence onmarketization, Whitty (1997) cautioned us not to mistake rhetoric for reality.After examining research from a number of countries, Whitty argued thatalthough advocates of marketized choice plans assume that competitionwill enhance the efficiency and responsiveness of schools, as well as give dis-advantaged children opportunities that they currently do not have, this maybe a false hope (p. 58). These hopes are not now being realized and areunlikely to be realized in the future in the context of broader policies that donothing to challenge deeper social and cultural inequalities (Whitty, 1997,p. 58). As Whitty goes on to say,

Atomized decision-making in a highly stratified society may appear to give everyoneequal opportunities, but transforming responsibility for decision-making from thepublic to the private sphere can actually reduce the scope of collective action toimprove the quality of education for all. (p. 58)

When this is connected to the fact that, as I shall show shortly, in practiceneo-liberal policies involving market solutions may actually serve toreproducenot subverttraditional hierarchies of class and race, this shouldgive us reason to pause (Whitty, 1997; see also Apple, 1996, 2001a; Whitty,Edwards, & Gewirtz, 1993).

Thus, rather than taking neo-liberal claims at face value, we should wantto ask about their hidden effects that are too often invisible in the rhetoric andmetaphors of their proponents. Given the limitations of what one can say inan article of this length, I shall select a few issues that have been given lessattention than they deserve but on which there is now significant research.

The English experience is apposite here, especially because proponents ofthe market such as Chubb and Moe (1990) relied so heavily on it and becausethat is where the tendencies I analyze are most advanced. In England, the1993 Education Act (Education Regulations, 1993) documented the statescommitment to marketization. Governing bodies of local educational author-ities were mandated to formally consider going GM (that is, opting out ofthe local school systems control and entering into the competitive market)every year (Power, Halpin, & Fitz, 1994, p. 27). Thus, the weight of the statestood behind the press toward neo-liberal reforms there.3 Yet, rather thanleading to curriculum responsiveness and diversification, the competitivemarket has not created much that is different from the traditional models sofirmly entrenched in schools today (Power et al., 1994). Nor has it radicallyaltered the relations of inequality that characterize schooling.

In their own extensive analyses of the effects of marketized reforms on theground, Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz (1994) pointed to some of the reasons why

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we need to be quite cautious here. As they documented, in these situationseducational principles and values are often compromised such that commer-cial issues become more important in curriculum design and resource alloca-tion (Ball et al., 1994, p. 39). For instance, the coupling of markets with thedemand for and publication of performance indicators such as examinationleague tables in England has meant that schools are increasingly looking forways to attract motivated parents with able children. In this way, schoolsare able to enhance their relative position in local systems of competition.This represents a subtle but crucial shift in emphasisone that is not openlydiscussed as often as it should befrom student needs to student perfor-mance and from what the school does for the student to what the student doesfor the school. This is also accompanied too uncomfortably often by a shift ofresources away from students who are labeled as having special needs orlearning difficulties, with some of these needed resources now being shiftedto marketing and public relations. Special needs students are not onlyexpensive but also deflate test scores on those all important league tables(Gillborn & Youdell, 2000).

This makes it difficult not only to manage public impressions but also toattract the best and most academically talented teachers (Ball et al., 1994,pp. 17-19). The entire enterprise does, however, establish a new metric and anew set of goals based on a constant striving to win the market game. Whatthis means is of considerable import, not only in terms of its effects on dailyschool life (Gewirtz, 2002) but also in the ways all of this signifies a transfor-mation of what counts as a good society and a responsible citizen. Let me saysomething about this generally.

I noted earlier that behind all educational proposals are visions of a justsociety and a good student. The neo-liberal reforms I have been discussingconstruct this in a particular way. Although the defining characteristic of neo-liberalism is largely based on the central tenets of classical liberalism, in par-ticular classic economic liberalism, there are crucial differences betweenclassical liberalism and neo-liberalism. These differences are absolutelyessential in understanding the politics of education and the transformationseducation is currently undergoing. Mark Olssen (1996) clearly detailed thesedifferences in the following passage. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

Whereas classical liberalism represents a negative conception of state power in thatthe individual was to be taken as an object to be freed from the interventions of thestate, neo-liberalism has come to represent a positive conception of the states role increating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutionsnecessary for its operation. In classical liberalism, the individual is characterized ashaving an autonomous human nature and can practice freedom. In neo-liberalism, the


state seeks to create an individual who is an enterprising and competitive entrepre-neur. In the classical model the theoretical aim of the state was to limit and minimizeits role based on postulates which included universal egoism (the self-interested indi-vidual); invisible hand theory which dictated that the interests of the individual werealso the interests of the society as a whole; and the political maxim of laissez-faire. Inthe shift from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism, then, there is a further elementadded, for such a shift involves a change in subject position from homo economicus,who naturally behaves out of self-interest and is relatively detached from the state, tomanipulatable man, who is created by the state and who is continually encouragedto be perpetually responsive. It is not that the conception of the self-interested sub-ject is replaced or done away with by the new ideals of neo-liberalism, but that in anage of universal welfare, the perceived possibilities of slothful indolence create neces-sities for new forms of vigilance, surveillance, performance appraisal and of formsof control generally. In this model the state has taken it upon itself to keep us all up tothe mark. The state will see to it that each one makes a continual enterprise of our-selves . . . in what seems to be a process of governing without governing. (p. 340)

The results of the research by Ball et al. (1994) document how the statedoes indeed do this, enhancing that odd combination of marketized individu-alism and control through constant and comparative public assessment.Widely publicized league tables determine ones relative value in the educa-tional marketplace. Only those schools with rising performance indicatorsare worthy. And only those students who can make a continual enterprise ofthemselves can keep such schools going in the correct direction. Yet,although these issues are important, they fail to fully illuminate some of theother mechanisms through which differential effects are produced by neo-liberal reforms. Here, class issues come to the fore in ways that Ball et al.made clear.

Middle-class parents are clearly the most advantaged in this kind of cul-tural assemblage and not only, as we saw, because schools seek them out.Middle-class parents have become quite skilled, in general, in exploitingmarket mechanisms in education and in bringing their social, economic, andcultural capital to bear on them:

Middle class parents are more likely to have the knowledge, skills and contacts todecode and manipulate what are increasingly complex and deregulated systems ofchoice and recruitment. The more deregulation, the more possibility of informal pro-cedures being employed. The middle class also, on the whole, are more able to movetheir children around the system. (Ball et al., 1994, p. 19)

That class and race intersect and interact in complex ways means thateventhough we need to be clear that marketized systems in education often

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expressly have their conscious and unconscious raison detre in a fear of theOther and often are hidden expressions of a racialization of educational pol-icythe differential results will naturally be decidedly raced as well asclassed (Apple, 2001a; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; McCarthy, 1998; McCar-thy & Crichlow, 1994; Omi & Winant, 1994).

Economic and social capital can be converted into cultural capital in vari-ous ways. In marketized plans, more affluent parents often have more flexi-ble hours and can visit multiple schools. They have carsoften more thanoneand can afford driving their children across town to attend a betterschool. They can as well provide the hidden cultural resources such as campsand after-school programs (dance, music, computer classes, etc.) that givetheir children an ease, a style, that seems natural and acts as a set of cul-tural resources. Their previous stock of social and cultural capitalwho theyknow, their comfort in social encounters with educational officialsis anunseen but powerful storehouse of resources. Thus, more affluent parents aremore likely to have the informal knowledge and skillwhat Bourdieu(1984) would call the habitusto be able to decode and use marketizedforms to their own benefit. This sense of what might be called confidencewhich is itself the result of past choices that tacitly but no less powerfullydepend on the economic resources to actually have had the ability to makeeconomic choicesis the unseen capital that underpins their ability to nego-tiate marketized forms and work the system through sets of informalcultural rules (Ball et al., 1994, pp. 20-22).

Of course, it needs to be said that working-class, poor, and/or immigrantparents are not skill-less in this regard, by any means. (After all, it requires animmense amount of skill, courage, and social and cultural resources to sur-vive under exploitative and depressing material conditions. Thus, collectivebonds, informal networks and contacts, and an ability to work the system aredeveloped in quite nuanced, intelligent, and often impressive ways here. SeeDunier, 1999; Fine & Weis, 1998.) However, the match between the histori-cally grounded habitus expected in schools and in its actors and those of moreaffluent parents, combined with the material resources available to moreaffluent parents, usually leads to a successful conversion of economic andsocial capital into cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1996; Swartz, 1997). And this isexactly what is happening in England (Ball, 2003; Power, Edwards, Whitty,& Wigfall, 2003).

These claims, both about what is happening inside of schools and aboutlarger sets of power relations, are supported by even more recent syntheticanalyses of the overall results of marketized models. This research on theeffects of the tense but still effective combination of neo-liberal and neo-conservative policies examines the tendencies internationally by comparing


what has happened in a number of nationsfor example, the United States,England and Wales, Australia, and New Zealandwhere this combinationhas been increasingly powerful. The results confirm the arguments I havemade here. Let me rehearse some of the most significant and disturbing find-ings of such research.

It is unfortunately all too usual that the most widely used measures of thesuccess of school reforms are the results of standardized achievement tests.This simply will not do. We need to constantly ask what reforms do to schoolsas a whole and to each of their participants, including teachers, students,administrators, community members, local activists, and so on. To take oneset of examples, as marketized self-managing schools grow in manynations, the role of the school principal is radically transformed. More, notless, power is actually consolidated within an administrative structure. Moretime and energy is spent on maintaining or enhancing a public image of agood school and less time and energy is spent on pedagogic and curricularsubstance. At the same time, teachers seem to be experiencing not increasedautonomy and professionalism but intensification (Apple, 1988, 2000,pp. 113-136; Gewirtz, 2002). And oddly, as noted before, schools them-selves become more similar, and more committed, to standard, traditional,whole-class methods of teaching and a standard and traditional (and oftenmonocultural) curriculum (Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998, pp. 12-13). Onlydirecting our attention to test scores would cause us to miss some truly pro-found transformations, many of which we may find disquieting.

One of the reasons these broader effects are so often produced is that in alltoo many countries, neo-liberal visions of quasi markets are usually accom-panied by neo-conservative pressure to regulate content and behaviorthrough such things as national curricula, national standards, and nationalsystems of assessment. The combination is historically contingent; that is, itis not absolutely necessary that the two emphases are combined. But there arecharacteristics of neo-liberalism that make it more likely that an emphasis onthe weak state and a faith in markets will cohere with an emphasis on thestrong state and a commitment to regulating knowledge, values, and thebody.

This is partly the case because of the increasing power of the evaluativestate. This signifies what initially may seem to be contradictory tendencies.At the same time as the state appears to be devolving power to individuals andautonomous institutions which are themselves increasingly competing in amarket, the state remains strong in key areas (Clarke & Newman, 1997;Whitty et al., 1998, p. 36). As I claimed earlier, one of the key differencesbetween classical liberalism and its faith in enterprising individuals in amarket and current forms of neo-liberalism is the latters commitment to a

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regulatory state. Neo-liberalism does indeed demand the constant productionof evidence that one is in fact making an enterprise of oneself (Olssen,1996). Thus, under these conditions not only does education become a mar-ketable commodity like bread and cars in which the values, procedures, andmetaphors of business dominate, but its results also must be reducible to stan-dardized performance indicators (Clarke & Newman, 1997; Whitty et al.,1998, pp. 37-38). This is ideally suited to the task of providing a mechanismfor the neo-conservative attempts to specify what knowledge, values, andbehaviors should be standardized and officially defined as legitimate, a pointI shall expand on in the next section of this article.

In essence, we are witnessing a process in which the state shifts the blame,for the very evident inequalities in access and outcome it has promised toreduce, from itself onto individual schools, parents, and children. This is, ofcourse, also part of a larger process in which dominant economic groups shiftthe blame for the massive and unequal effects of their own misguided deci-sions from themselves onto the state. The state is then faced with a very realcrisis in legitimacy. Given this, we should not be at all surprised that the statewill then seek to export this crisis outside itself (Apple, 1995).

Of course, the state is not only classed but is inherently sex/gendered andraced as well (Apple et al. 2003; Epstein & Johnson, 1998; Middleton, 1998;Omi & Winant, 1994). This is evident in the arguments of Whitty et al.(1998); they pointed to the gendered nature of the ways in which the manage-ment of schools is thought about as masculinist business models becomeincreasingly dominant (pp. 60-62). Although there is a danger of these claimsdegenerating into reductive and essentializing arguments, there is a good dealof insight here. They do cohere with the work of other scholars inside andoutside of education who have recognized that the ways in which our verydefinitions of public and private, of what knowledge is of most worth, and ofhow institutions should be thought about and run are fully implicated in thegendered nature of this society (Fraser, 1989, 1997). These broad ideologicaleffectsfor example, enabling a coalition between neo-liberals and neo-conservatives to be formed, the masculinization of theories, policies, andmanagement talkare of considerable import and make it harder to changecommon sense in more critical directions. When these tendencies are com-bined with dominant and new middle-class discourses associated with thenew managerialism, the results can be very damaging.

For example, other, more proximate, effects inside schools are equallystriking. For instance, even though principals seem to have more local powerin these supposedly decentralized schools, because of the cementing in ofneo-conservative policies, principals are increasingly forced into a positionin which they have to demonstrate performance along centrally prescribed


curricula in a context in which they have diminishing control (Gewirtz,2002; Whitty et al., 1998, p. 63). Because of the intensification that I men-tioned before, both principals and teachers experience considerably heavierworkloads and ever escalating demands for accountability, a never-endingschedule of meetings, and in many cases a growing scarcity of resourcesboth emotional and physical (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Whitty et al., 1998,pp. 67-68).

Further, as in the research in England, in nearly all of the countries stud-ied, the market did not encourage diversity in curriculum, pedagogy, organi-zation, clientele, or even image. It instead consistently devalued alternativesand increased the power of dominant models. Of equal significance, it alsoconsistently exacerbated differences in access and outcome based on race,ethnicity, and class (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000).4

The return to traditionalism led to a number of things. It delegitimatedmore critical models of teaching and learning, a point that is crucial to recog-nize in any attempt to think through the possibilities of cultural struggles andcritical pedagogies in schools. It both reintroduced class and race restrati-fication within the school and lessened the possibility that detracking wouldoccur. More emphasis was given to gifted children and fast-track classes,whereas students who were seen as less academically able were thereforeless attractive. In England, the extent of this was nowhere more visible thanin the alarming rate of students being excluded from schools. Much of thiswas caused by the intense pressure to constantly demonstrate higher achieve-ment rates. This was especially powerful in marketized contexts in which themain driving force appeared to be commercial rather than educational(Whitty et al., 1998, p. 80).

In their own analysis of these worrisome and more hidden results, Whittyet al. (1998) and others demonstrated that among the dangerous effects ofquasi markets are the ways in which schools that wish to maintain or enhancetheir market position engage in cream skimming, ensuring that particularkinds of students with particular characteristics are accepted and particularkinds of students are found wanting. For some schools, stereotypes werereproduced in that girls were seen as more valuable, as were students fromsome Asian communities. Afro-Caribbean children were often clear losers inthis situation (Gewirtz, Ball, & Bowe, 1995; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000).

So far I have focused largely on England. Yet, as I mentioned in my intro-ductory points, these movements are truly global. Their logics have spreadrapidly to many nations, with results that tend to mirror those I have dis-cussed so far. The case of New Zealand is useful here, especially because alarge percentage of the population of New Zealand is multiethnic and thenation has a history of racial tensions and class and race inequalities.

MICHAEL W. APPLE 25

Furthermore, the move toward New Right policies occurred faster there thanelsewhere. In essence, New Zealand became the laboratory for many of thepolicies I am analyzing. In their exceptional study, based in large part on aconceptual apparatus influenced by Bourdieu, Lauder and Hughes (1999)documented that educational markets seem to lead to an overall decline ineducational standards. Paradoxically, they have a negative, not a positive,effect on the performance of schools with large working-class and minoritypopulations. In essence, they trade off the opportunities of less privilegedchildren to those already privileged (Lauder & Hughes, 1999, p. 2). The com-bination of neo-liberal policies of marketization and the neo-conservativeemphasis on tougher standards, about which I shall say more in the nextsection, creates an even more dangerous set of conditions. Their analysisconfirms the conceptual and empirical arguments of Ball, Brown, and others(Ball, 2003; Brown, 1997; Power et al., 2003) that markets in education arenot only responses by capital to reduce both the sphere of the state and of pub-lic control but also part of an attempt by the middle class to alter the rules ofcompetition in education in light of the increased insecurities their childrenface. By changing the process of selection to schools, middle class parentscan raise the stakes in creating stronger mechanisms of exclusion for bluecollar and post-colonial peoples in their struggle for equality of opportunity(Lauder & Hughes, 1999, p. 29; see also Brown, 1997).

The results from New Zealand not only mirror what was found elsewherebut also demonstrate that the further ones practices follow the logics ofaction embodied in marketizing principles, the worse the situation tends toget. Markets systematically privilege higher socioeconomic status (SES)families through their knowledge and material resources. These are the fami-lies who are most likely to exercise choice. Rather than giving large numbersof students who are working class, poor, or of color the ability to exit, it islargely higher SES families who exit from public schools and schools withmixed populations. In a situation of increased competition, this in turn pro-duces a spiral of decline in which schools populated by poorer students andstudents of color are again systematically disadvantaged and schools withhigher SES and higher White populations are able to insulate themselvesfrom the effects of market competition (Lauder & Hughes, 1999, p. 101).White flight then enhances the relative status of those schools alreadyadvantaged by larger economic forces; schooling for the Other becomeseven more polarized and continues a downward spiral (Lauder & Hughes,1999, p. 132).

Having said this, however, we need to be cautious not to ignore historicalspecificities. Social movements, existing ideological formations, and institu-tions in civil society and the state may provide some support for countervail-


ing logics. In some cases, in those nations with stronger and more extensivehistories of social democratic policies and visions of collective positive free-doms, the neo-liberal emphasis on the market has been significantly medi-ated. Hence, as Petter Aasen (1998) has demonstrated in Norway and Swe-den, for instance, privatizing initiatives in education have had to cope with agreater collective commitment than in, say, the United States, England, andNew Zealand (see also Apple et al., 2003). However, these commitmentspartly rest on class relations. They are weakened when racial dynamics enterin. Thus, for example, the sense of everyone being the same and, hence, allbeing subject to similar collective sensibilities, is challenged by the growth ofimmigrant populations from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Greater sym-pathy for marketized forms may arise once the commonly understoodassumptions of what it means to be, say, Norwegian or Swedish are inter-rupted by populations of color who now claim the status of national citizen-ship. For this reason, it may be the case that the collective sensibilities thatprovide support for less market-oriented policies are based on an unacknowl-edged racial contract that underpins the ideological foundations of a nationalimagined community.5 This, then, may also generate support for neo-conservative policies, not because of neo-liberalisms commitment to per-petual responsiveness, but rather as a form of cultural restoration, as a wayof reestablishing an imagined past when we were all one. Because of this, itis important that any analysis of the current play of forces surrounding con-servative modernization is aware of the fact that such movements are not onlyin constant motion but once again we need to remember that they also have amultitude of intersecting and contradictory dynamics including not onlyclass, but race and gender as well (Apple et al., 2003; Arnot, David, &Weiner, 1999; Epstein & Johnson, 1998).

Most of the data I have drawn on came from schools outside the UnitedStates, although they should make us stop dead in our tracks and give somevery serious thought to whether we want to proceed with similar policieshere. Yet, the United States still sits at the center of much of the discussion inthis literature. For example, charter schools and their equivalents in theUnited States and England are also put under critical scrutiny. In both places,they tend to attract parents who live and work in relatively privileged commu-nities. Here too, it would appear that any new opportunities are being colo-nized by the already advantaged, rather than the losers identified by Chubband Moe (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 42).6

In the process, this critical research suggests that there are hidden similari-ties between advocates of school effectiveness research and those committedto neo-liberal reforms. Both tend to ignore the fact that external charac-teristics of schools such as poverty, political and economic power, and so on

MICHAEL W. APPLE 27

consistently account for much more of the variation in school performancethan things such as organizational features or those characteristics that sup-posedly guarantee an effective school (Whitty et al., 1998, pp. 112-113).

The overall conclusions are clear. In current circumstances choice is aslikely to reinforce hierarchies as to improve educational opportunities andthe overall quality of schooling (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 14). As Whitty et al.(1998) put it in their arguments against those who believe that what we arewitnessing in the emergence of choice programs is the postmodern celebra-tion of difference,

There is a growing body of empirical evidence that, rather than benefiting the disad-vantaged, the emphasis on parental choice and school autonomy is further disadvan-taging those least able to compete in the market. . . . For most disadvantaged groups, asopposed to the few individuals who escape from schools at the bottom of the statushierarchy, the new arrangements seem to be just a more sophisticated way of repro-ducing traditional distinctions between different types of school and the people whoattend them. (p. 42)

All of this gives us ample reason to agree with Henigs (1994) insightfulargument that

the sad irony of the current education-reform movement is that, through over-identification with school-choice proposals rooted in market-based ideas, the healthyimpulse to consider radical reforms to address social problems may be channelledinto initiatives that further erode the potential for collective deliberation and collec-tive response. (p. 222)

This is not to dismiss either the possibility or necessity of school reform.However, we need to take seriously the probability that only by focusing onthe exogenous socioeconomic features, not simply the organizational fea-tures, of successful schools can all schools succeed. Eliminating povertythrough greater income parity, establishing effective and much more equalhealth and housing programs, and positively refusing to continue the hiddenand not so hidden politics of racial exclusion and degradation that so clearlystill characterize daily life in many nations (and in which marketized plansneed to be seen as partly a structure to avoid the body and culture of theOther)only by tackling these issues together can substantive progress bemade. Unless discussions of critical pedagogy are themselves grounded in arecognition of these realities, they too may fall into the trap of assuming thatschools can do it alone.

These empirical findings are made more understandable in terms ofBourdieus (1996) analysis of the relative weight given to cultural capital as


part of mobility strategies today.7 The rise in importance of cultural capitalinfiltrates all institutions in such a way that there is a relative movement awayfrom the direct reproduction of class privilege (where power is transmittedlargely within families through economic property) to school-mediatedforms of class privilege. Here, the bequeathal of privilege is simultaneouslyeffectuated and transfigured by the intercession of educational institutions(Wacquant, 1996, p. iii). This is not a conspiracy; it is not conscious in theways we normally use that concept. Rather, it is the result of a long chain ofrelatively autonomous connections between differentially accumulated eco-nomic, social, and cultural capital operating at the level of daily events as wemake our respective ways in the world, including, as we saw, in the world ofschool choice.

Thus, although not taking an unyieldingly determinist position, Bourdieu(1996) argued that a class habitus tends to reproduce the conditions of its ownreproduction unconsciously. It does this by producing a relatively coherentand systematically characteristic set of seemingly natural and unconsciousstrategiesin essence, ways of understanding and acting on the world thatact as forms of cultural capital that can be and are employed to protect andenhance ones status in a social field of power. Bourdieu aptly compares thissimilarity of habitus across class actors to handwriting:

Just as the acquired disposition we call handwriting, that is a particular way of form-ing letters, always produces the same writingthat is, graphic lines that despite dif-ferences in size, matter, and color related to writing surface (sheet of paper or black-board) and implement (pencil, pen, or chalk), that is despite differences in vehicles forthe action, have an immediately recognizable affinity of style or a family resem-blancethe practices of a single agent, or, more broadly, the practices of all agentsendowed with similar habitus, owe the affinity of style that makes each a metaphor forthe others to the fact that they are the products of the implementation in different fieldsof the same schemata of perception, thought, and action. (p. 272)

This very connection of habitus across fields of powerthe ease of bring-ing ones economic, social, and cultural resources to bear on marketsenables a comfort between markets and self that characterizes the middle-class actor here (Ball, 2003). This constantly produces differential effects.These effects are not neutral, no matter what the advocates of neo-liberalismsuggest. Rather, they are themselves the results of a particular kind of moral-ity. Unlike the conditions of what might best be called thick morality,where principles of the common good are the ethical basis for adjudicatingpolicies and practices, markets are grounded in aggregative principles. Theyare constituted out of the sum of individual goods and choices. Founded on

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individual and property rights that enable citizens to address problems ofinterdependence via exchange, they offer a prime example of thin moral-ity by generating both hierarchy and division based on competitive individ-ualism (Ball et al., 1994, p. 24). And in this competition, the general outlineof the winners and losers has been identified empirically.8

NATIONAL CURRICULUM AND NATIONAL TESTING

I showed in the previous section that there are connections between atleast two dynamics operating in neo-liberal reforms, free markets andincreased surveillance. This can be seen in the fact that in many contexts,marketization has been accompanied by a set of particular policies for pro-ducers, for those professionals working within education. These policieshave been strongly regulatory and have been quite instrumental in reconsti-tuting common sense. As in the case of the linkage between national tests andperformance indicators published as league tables, they have been organizedaround a concern for external supervision, regulation, and external judg-ment of performance (Menter et al., 1997, p. 8) and have increasingly beencolonized by parents who possess what is seen as appropriate economic,social, and cultural capital (Ball, 2003). This concern for external super-vision and regulation is not only connected with a strong mistrust of pro-ducers (e.g., teachers) and to the need for ensuring that people continuallymake enterprises out of themselves but is also clearly linked both to the neo-conservative sense of a need to return to a lost past of high standards, disci-pline, awe, and real knowledge and to the professional middle classs ownability to carve out a sphere of authority within the state for its own commit-ment to management techniques and efficiency. The focus on efficientmanagement plays a prime role here, one which many neo-liberals and neo-conservatives alike find useful.

There has been a shift in the relationship between the state and profes-sionals. In essence, the move toward a small, strong state that is increasinglyguided by market needs seems inevitably to bring with it reduced profes-sional power and status (Menter et al., 1997, p. 57). Managerialism takes cen-ter stage here. Managerialism is largely charged with bringing about the cul-tural transformation that shifts professional identities in order to make themmore responsive to client demand and external judgement (Menter et al.,1997, p. 57). It aims to justify and to have people internalize fundamentalalterations in professional practices. It both harnesses energy and discour-ages dissent (Menter et al., 1997, p. 91).

There is no necessary contradiction between a general set of marketizingand deregulating interests and processessuch as voucher and choice plans


and a set of enhanced regulatory processessuch as plans for nationalcurricula and national testing. The regulatory form permits the state tomaintain steerageover the aims and processes of education from within themarket mechanism (Menter et al., 1997, p. 27). Such steerage has often beenvested in such things as national standards, national curricula, and nationaltesting. Forms of all of these are being pushed for in the United States cur-rently and are the subject of considerable controversy, some of which cutsacross ideological lines and shows some of the tensions within the differentelements contained under the umbrella of conservative modernization.

I have argued, paradoxically, that a national curriculum and especially anational testing program are the first and most essential steps toward in-creased marketization. They actually provide the mechanisms for compara-tive data that consumers need to make markets work as markets (Apple,1996, pp. 22-41). Absent these mechanisms, there is no comparative base ofinformation for choice. Yet, we do not have to argue about these regulatoryforms in a vacuum. Like the neo-liberal markets I discussed in the previoussection, they too have been instituted in England; and once again, there isimportant research available that can and must make us duly cautious ingoing down this path.

One might want to claim that a set of national standards, national curric-ula, and national tests would provide the conditions for thick morality. Afterall, such regulatory reforms are supposedly based on shared values and com-mon sentiments that also create social spaces in which common issues ofconcern can be debated and made subject to moral interrogation (Ball et al.,1994, p. 23). Yet, what counts as the common, and how and by whom it isactually determined, is rather more thin than thick (Apple, 1996, 2000).

It is the case that although the national curriculum now so solidly in placein England and Wales is clearly prescriptive, it has not always proven to bethe kind of straight-jacket it has often been made out to be. As a number ofresearchers have documented, it is not only possible that policies and legisla-tive mandates are interpreted and adapted but it also seems inevitable. Thus,the national curriculum is not so much being implemented in schools asbeing recreated, [sic] not so much reproduced, as produced (Poweret al., 1994, p. 38).

In general, it is nearly a truism that there is no simplistic linear model ofpolicy formation, distribution, and implementation. There are always com-plex mediations at each level of the process. There is a complex politics thatgoes on within each group and between these groups and external forces inthe formulation of policy, in its being written up as a legislative mandate, inits distribution, and in its reception at the level of practice (Ranson, 1995,p. 437). Thus, the state may legislate changes in curriculum, evaluation, or

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policy (which is itself produced through conflict, compromise, and politicalmaneuvering), but policy writers and curriculum writers may be unable tocontrol the meanings and implementations of their texts. All texts are leakydocuments. They are subject to recontextualization at every stage of theprocess (Ranson, 1995, p. 436; see also Apple et al., 2003).

However, this general principle may be just a bit too romantic. None ofthis occurs on a level playing field. As with market plans, there are very realdifferences in power in ones ability to influence, mediate, transform, orreject a policy or a regulatory process. Granted, it is important to recognizethat a state control modelwith its assumption of top-down linearityismuch too simplistic and that the possibility of human agency and influence isalways there. However, having said this, this should not imply that suchagency and influence will be powerful (Ranson, 1995, p. 437).

The case of national curriculum and national testing in England and Walesdocuments the tensions in these two accounts. It was the case that the nationalcurriculum that was first legislated and then imposed there was indeed strug-gled over. It was originally too detailed and too specific and, hence, was sub-ject to major transformations at the national, community, school, and thenclassroom levels. However, even though the national curriculum was subjectto conflict, mediation, and some transformation of its content, organization,and its invasive and immensely time-consuming forms of evaluation, its utterpower is demonstrated in its radical reconfiguration of the very process ofknowledge selection, organization, and assessment. It changed the entire ter-rain of education radically. Its subject divisions provide more constraintthan scope for discretion (Ranson, 1995, p. 438). The standard attainmenttargets that have been mandated cement these constraints in place. Theimposition of national testing locks the national curriculum in place as thedominant framework of teacherswork whatever opportunities teachers maytake to evade or reshape it (Ranson, 1995, p. 438).

Thus, it is not sufficient to state that the world of education is complex andhas multiple influences. The purpose of any serious analysis is to go beyondsuch overly broad conclusions. Rather, we need to discriminate degrees ofinfluence in the world, to weigh the relative efficacy of the factors involved.Hence, although it is clear that the national curriculum and national tests thatnow exist in England and Wales have come about because of a complex inter-play of forces and influences, it is equally clear that state control has theupper hand (Ranson, 1995, p. 438).

The national curricula and national tests did generate conflict aboutissues. They did partly lead to the creation of social spaces for moral ques-tions to get asked. (Of course, these moral questions had been asked all along


by dispossessed groups.) Thus, it was clear to many people that the creationof mandatory and reductive tests that emphasized memory anddecontextualized abstraction pulled the national curriculum in a particulardirectionthat of encouraging a selective educational market in which elitestudents and elite schools with a wide range of resources would be well (ifnarrowly) served (OHear, 1994, p. 66). Diverse groups of people argued thatsuch reductive, detailed, and simplistic paper-and-pencil tests had thepotential to do enormous damage, a situation that was made even worsebecause the tests were so onerous in terms of time and record keeping. Teach-ers had a good deal of support when as a group they decided to boycott theadministration of the test in a remarkable act of public protest. This also led toserious questioning of the arbitrary, inflexible, and overly prescriptivenational curriculum. Although the curriculum is still inherently problematicand the assessment system does still contain numerous dangerous and oner-ous elements within it, organized activity against them did have an impact(OHear, 1994, pp. 55-57).

Yet unfortunately, the story does not end there. By the mid-1990s, evenwith the governments partial retreat on such regulatory forms as its programof constant and reductive testing, it had become clearer by the year that thedevelopment of testing and the specification of content had been hijackedby those who were ideologically committed to traditional pedagogies and tothe idea of more rigorous selection (OHear, 1994, p. 68). The residualeffects are both material and ideological. They include a continuing empha-sis on trying to provide the rigor [that is] missing in the practice of mostteachers, . . . judging progress solely by what is testable in tests of this kindand the development of a very hostile view of the accountability of teachersthat was seen as part of a wider thrust of policy to take away professionalcontrol of public services and establish so called consumer control through amarket structure (OHear, 1994, pp. 65-66; see also Gewirtz, 2002).

The authors of an extremely thorough review of recent assessment pro-grams instituted in England and Wales provided a summary of what has hap-pened. Gipps and Murphy (1994) argued that it has become increasinglyobvious that the national assessment program attached to the national curric-ulum is more and more dominated by traditional models of testing and theassumptions about teaching and learning that lie behind them. At the sametime, equity issues are becoming much less visible. In the calculus of valuesnow in place in the regulatory state, efficiency, speed, and cost controlreplace more substantive concerns about social and educational justice. Thepressure to get tests in place rapidly has meant that

MICHAEL W. APPLE 33

the speed of test development is so great, and the curriculum and assessment changesso regular, that [there is] little time to carry out detailed analyses and trialing to ensurethat the tests are as fair as possible to all groups. (Gipps & Murphy, 1994, p. 204)

The conditions for thin moralityin which the competitive individual of themarket dominates and social justice will somehow take care of itselfarereproduced here. The combination of the neo-liberal market and the regula-tory state, then, does indeed work. However, it works in ways in which themetaphors of free market, merit, and effort hide the differential reality that isproduced. Although on one hand this makes a socially and culturally criticalpedagogy even more essential, it also makes it much more difficult to actuallyaccomplish.

Basil Bernsteins (1990, 1996) discussion of the general principles bywhich knowledge and policies (texts) move from one arena to another isuseful in understanding this. As Bernstein reminded us, when talking abouteducational change there are three fields with which we must be concerned.Each field has its own rules of access, regulation, privilege, and special inter-ests: (a) the field of production where new knowledge is constructed, (b)the field of reproduction where pedagogy and curriculum are actuallyenacted in schools, and between these other two, (c) the recontextualizingfield where discourses from the field of production are appropriated and thentransformed into pedagogic discourse and recommendations (Bernstein,1990, 1996; see also Apple, 2000, 2002). This appropriation and recontextu-alization of knowledge for educational purposes is itself governed by twosets of principles. The firstde-locationimplies that there is always aselective appropriation of knowledge and discourse from the field of produc-tion. The secondre-locationpoints to the fact that when knowledge anddiscourse from the field of production is pulled within the recontextualizingfield, it is subject to ideological transformations due to the various special-ized and/or political interests whose conflicts structure the recontextualizingfield (Apple et al., 2003; Evans & Penney, 1995).

A good example of this, one that confirms Gipps and Murphys (1994)analysis of the dynamics of national curricula and national testing duringtheir more recent iterations, is found in the process by which the content andorganization of the mandated national curriculum, even in subjects such asphysical education, were struggled over and ultimately formed in England.In this instance, a working group of academics both within and outside thefield of physical education, headmasters of private and state-supportedschools, well known athletes, and business leaders (but no teachers) wasformed.


The original curriculum policies that arose from the groups were rela-tively mixed educationally and ideologically, taking account of the field ofproduction of knowledge within physical education. That is, they containedboth critical and progressive elements and elements of the conservative resto-ration, as well as academic perspectives within the specialized fields from theuniversity. However, as these made their way from report to recommenda-tions and then from recommendations to action, they steadily came closer torestorational principles. An emphasis on efficiency, basic skills, and perfor-mance testing, on the social control of the body, and on competitive normsultimately won out. Like the middle classs capturing of the market discussedearlier, this too was not a conspiracy. Rather, it was the result of a process ofoverdetermination. That is, it was not due to an imposition of these norms,but to a combination of interests in the recontextualizing fieldan economiccontext in which public spending was under severe scrutiny and cost savingshad to be sought everywhere; government officials who were opposed tofrills and consistently intervened to institute only a selection of the recom-mendations (conservative ones that did not come from professional aca-demics preferably); ideological attacks on critical, progressive, or child-centered approaches to physical education; and a predominant discourse ofbeing pragmatic. These came together in the recontextualizing field andhelped ensure in practice that conservative principles would be reinscribed inpolicies and mandates, and that critical forms were seen as too ideological,too costly, or too impractical (Evans & Penney, 1995, pp. 41-42). Stan-dards were upheld; critical voices were heard, but ultimately to little effect;the norms of competitive performance were made central and employed asregulatory devices. Regulatory devices served to privilege specific groups inmuch the same way as did markets.

But, it is important not to leave our discussion at such an abstract level or atthe level of curriculum planning. What has happened in schools themselvesin England, the United States, and elsewhere when such pragmatic standards,curricula, and tests are actually instituted?

CREATING EDUCATIONAL TRIAGE

There have been analyses here in the United States that have begun to doc-ument similar kinds of effects (Linn, 2000; Oakes, 1992; Oakes, Wells,Jones, & Datnow, 1997; Wells, Lopez, Scott, & Holme, 1999). However,unfortunately, the predominance of relatively unreflective and at timesalmost self-congratulatory policies around markets, standards, testing, andreductive forms of accountability is exactly that herepredominant. Even

MICHAEL W. APPLE 35

given the exceptional work that is being done, for example, by JeannieOakes, Amy Stuart Wells, and others on the hidden effects of some of thesekinds of policies and practices, and even given the fact that there are numer-ous examples of extremely effective schools in our urban and rural areas thatsucceed through using much more democratic and critical models of curricu-lum, teaching, and evaluation (Apple & Beane, 1995; for other nations seeApple et al., 2003), it still feels as if one has to constantly swim against thetide of conservative modernization.

Given this state of affairs, it is now even more important that we pay atten-tion to material that demonstrates what can happen in situations where thestress on higher standards and higher test scores hits both the realities ofschools and the different populations they serve. Gillborn and Youdells(2000) volume Rationing Education is just such a book. It goes into evenmore detail about the powerful, and often damaging, effects on teachers andstudents of our seeming fascination with ever-rising standards, mandatedcurricula, and overemphasis on testing.

The volume is based on in-depth research on the equivalent of middle andsecondary schools in England. It details the overt and hidden effects of poli-cies that are currently being undertaken in the United States as well. Theseinclude such things as creating a situation where the tail of a high-stakes testwags the dog of the teacher, pressuring schools to constantly show increasedachievement scores on such standardized tests no matter what the level ofsupport or the impoverished conditions in schools and local communities, topublicly display such results in a process of what might be realistically calledshaming, and to threaten schools that do not show improvement on thesetests with severe sanctions or loss of control.

Of course, there are poor schools and there are ineffective practices inschools. However, the reduction of education to scores on what are ofteninadequate measures, often used in technically and educationally inappropri-ate ways for comparative purposes, has some serious consequences. Whatthese consequences are provides the context for the story Gillborn andYoudell (2000) tell.

In many ways, Rationing Education provides what might be called amicro-economy of school life. It examines the ways in which certain valuedcommodities are accumulated by schools in a time of intense competition forscarce resources. In this case, the commodities are higher test scores and theresources are both numbers of students and public recognition of being agood school. The authors way of describing this is what they call the A-Ceconomy.

Like the United States, in England, schools exist in what is really a hierar-chical ordering, a market, in prestige and reputation. They are valued by the


number of students that get passing scores on particular national tests. Thenational tests are made public as a form of league tables in which schools arerank ordered according to their relative results. Schools with large numbersof students getting grades A-C are more highly valued than those with stu-dents whose rates of passing are lesseven though everyone tacitly knowsthat there is a very strong relationship between school results and poverty.(We need again to remember that in the United States, for example, povertyexplains much more of the variance in school achievement than any schoolreform. For more economic data see Apple [1996]).

This is straightforward and not surprising. However, this situation createsan economy that has certain characteristics. Students with predicted highertest scores are even more valuable. Students with predicted lower test scoresare seen as less useful to the schools place in the market. This too is not sur-prising. The results of such an economy, however, are powerful. There isanother key group of students who are focused on and on whom considerableresources, energy, and attention is devotedstudents who are on the borderbetween passing grades and failing grades. These studentsoften seen asmiddle class underachieversbecome objects of great value in the school.After all, if this key group can be pulled across the border into the A-C col-umn, the schools results will be that much more positive.

What could be wrong with an increased focus on students on the border?Here is one of the places where Gillborn and Youdells (2000) results areominous. In such an A-C economy, specific students are seen as moveable.Other students abilities are seen as increasingly fixed and less worthy ofattention. The class and race characteristics of these latter students are strik-ing. Poor and working-class students, students of African descent, and otherethnically different children are not valued commodities on this kind ofmarket. Even though gender divisions were less pronounced in the schoolsthat Gillborn and Youdell studied, divisions strongly rooted in racializingand class-based structures were not simply mirrored in the schools. Theyactually were produced in these institutions.

Thus, policies that were put in place to raise standards, to increase testscores, to guarantee public accountability, and to make schools more com-petitive had results that were more than a little damaging to those studentswho were already the least advantaged in these same schools. Yet, it was notonly the students who witnessed these negative effects; the voices of teachersand administrators indicate what happens to them as well. They too begin toharden their sense of which students are able and which students are not.Tracking returns in both overt and covert ways. And once again, Black stu-dents and students in government-subsidized lunch programs are the onesmost likely to be placed in those tracks or given academic and career advice

MICHAEL W. APPLE 37

that nearly guarantees that they will not only have limited or no mobility butalso will confirm their status as students who are less worthy.

Equally worth noting here is the specific way the A-C economy works tochoose those students who are deemed to have worthiness. Often, studentswhose behavior and test results are quite similar have very different careers inthe school. Thus, a Black student and a White student may be, say, on the bor-der of the A-C/failing divide, but the Black student will not be the beneficiaryof the added attention (see Gillborn & Youdell, 2000). These situations are alltoo often characterized by tacitly operating visions of ability, ones that havebeen hardened by years of discourse on the problem of Black studentachievement and especially by the increased visibility once again of suppos-edly scientific (and ultimately racist and empirically problematic) researchon genetic differences in mean intelligence between Blacks and Whites.9 As Inoted, not only would no reputable population geneticist make such a claim,but these theories also have been discredited multiple times (Gould, 1981;Selden, 1999). The fact that they reenter into our commonsense decisionmaking in schools in times of scarce resources and increased pressure showshow deeply seated they are in the sets of assumptions educators may uncon-sciously mobilize in their attempt to be pragmatic in dealing with largenumbers of students.

As previous research has clearly indicated, students are not passive in theface of these tendencies. Indeed, as Gillborn and Youdell (2000) showed, stu-dents interpret, question, and on occasion, resist. However, the scope forresistance is severely constrained, and pupils are clearly positioned as thesubject of numerous organizational and disciplinary discourses in which theyoung people themselves play little active role (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000,p. 194). In what is perhaps one of the most powerful messages of the book,the authors summarized the effects of this entire process in the followingway: It is a cruel irony that the processes of selection and monitoring thathave been adopted with the aim of heightening attainment are so frequentlyexperienced as disempowering and demotivating by the students (Gillborn& Youdell, 2000, p. 195). These experiences are turned into feelings of beingtreated unfairly, of teachers and schools being organized in ways that privi-lege the already privileged in terms of class and race. If this is the case, someof the most powerful messages reforms of this type may send is that not onlyis the world deeply unfair but also that schools themselves are prime exam-ples of institutions that simply respond to those who already possess eco-nomic and cultural capital. This is decidedly not the message that any societythat is serious about what might be called thick democracy wants to teach.But it may be what our children learn in school systems that are so driven bythe assumption that putting in place higher standards and higher stakes


testing will somehow magically solve deep-seated educational and socialproblems. A close reading of Rationing Education should make us muchmore cautious about such unwarranted assumptions.

Unfortunately, recent research on the effects of all of this in the UnitedStates confirms these worries. Linda McNeils (2000) powerful and detailedinvestigation of what has actually happened in Texas when state-mandatedreforms involving imposed standards and curricula, reductive and competi-tive testing, and attacks on teachers professionalism demonstrates in nouncertain terms that the very children and schools that these policies andpractices are supposed to help are actually hurt in the process. Similar ten-dencies toward producing inequalities have been documented in the conser-vative modernization reforms in tax credits, testing, and curricula in Arizonaand elsewhere (Moses, 2000; Wilson, 2000; see also Smith, Heinecke, &Noble, 1999). That such concerns are not to be taken lightly is documented inthe insightful in-depth analyses of the realities on the ground of these kinds ofschool reforms in urban areas in the United States. Pauline Lipmans (inpress) research on the racial effects of the Chicago public school systemsrecent reforms illuminates the clear dangers here. Smith, Heinecke, andNobles (in press) analysis of neo-liberal and neo-conservative reforms thatstress quasi markets and standardized curricula with strict systems ofaccountability also points to similar things. They show how such policiesactually function as a form of symbolic politics in which the unequaleffects produced by such policies are largely hidden from public view. Polit-ical spectacle replaces substantive transformation, and the real benefits ofsuch policies usually favor those groups with economic, social, and politicalcapital (Smith, Heinecke, & Noble, in press).

CONCLUSION

In this article, I have raised serious questions about current educationalreform efforts now underway in a number of nations. I have used researchlargely, but not solely, on the English experiences to document some of thehidden differential effects of two connected strategiesneo-liberal inspiredmarket proposals and neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and middle class mana-gerial inspired regulatory proposals. Taking a key from Kliebards (1995)historical analysis, I have described how different interests with differenteducational and social visions compete for dominion in the social field ofpower surrounding educational policy and practice. In the process, I havedocumented some of the complexities and imbalances in this field of power.These complexities and imbalances result in thin rather than thick moralityand tend toward the reproduction of both dominant pedagogical and curricu-

MICHAEL W. APPLE 39

lar forms and ideologies and the social privileges that accompany them. Ihave suggested that the rhetorical flourishes of the discourses of critical ped-agogy need to come to grips with these changing material and ideologicalconditions. Critical pedagogy cannot and will not occur in a vacuum. Unlesswe honestly face these profound rightist transformations and think tacticallyabout them, we will have little effect either on the creation of a counter-hegemonic common sense or on the building of a counter-hegemonic alli-ance. The growth of that odd combination of marketization and regulatorystate, the move toward pedagogic similarity and traditional academic curric-ula and teaching, the ability of dominant groups to exert leadership in thestruggle over this, and the accompanying shifts in common senseall thiscannot be wished away. Instead, they need to be confronted honestly and self-critically.

Having said this, however, I want to point to a hidden paradox in what Ihave done. Even though much of my own and others research recently hasbeen on the processes and effects of conservative modernization, there aredangers in such a focus of which we should be aware. Research on the his-tory, politics, and practices of rightist social and educational movements andreforms has enabled us to show the contradictions and unequal effects of suchpolicies and practices. It has enabled the rearticulation of claims to social jus-tice on the basis of solid evidence. This is all to the good. However, in the pro-cess, one of the latent effects has been the gradual framing of educationalissues largely in terms of the conservative agenda. The very categories them-selvesmarkets, choice, national curricula, national testing, standardsbring the debate onto the terrain established by neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. The analysis of what is has led to a neglect of what mightbe. Thus, there has been a withering of substantive large-scale discussionsof feasible alternatives to neo-liberal and neo-conservative visions, policies,and practices, ones that would move well beyond them (Seddon, 1997,pp. 165-166).

Because of this, at least part of our task may be politically and conceptu-ally complex, but it can be said simply. In the long term, we need to developa political project that is both local yet generalizable, systematic withoutmaking Eurocentric, masculinist claims to essential and universal truthsabout human subjects (Luke, 1995, pp. vi-vii). Another part of our task,though, must be and is more proximate, more appropriately educational.Defensible, articulate, and fully fleshed out alternative critical and progres-sive policies and practices in curriculum, teaching, and evaluation need to bedeveloped and made widely available (Apple & Beane, 1995; Brodhagen &Apple, in press). But this too must be done with due recognition of the


changing nature of the social field of power and the importance of thinkingtactically and strategically.

In Educating the Right Way (Apple 2001) and The State and the Politicsof Education (Apple et al., 2003), I have discussed in considerably moredetail the kinds of strategic alliances, and the policies and practices thatshould accompany them, that might enable us to do this. I have suggestedways both to interrupt neo-liberal and neo-conservative tendencies and cre-ate a thicker version of democracy in education on the ground. At the sametime that this is going on, however, we cannot ignore the importance ofbroadening the kinds of issues we raise and the questions we ask of the sup-posedly more democratic policies that are currently becoming increas-ingly global. This has been my task in this article. By drawing on a range ofanalyses both inside and outside of the borders of the United States, I havedemonstrated why it is so crucial to do so.

NOTES

1. This is often coupled with a particular vision of a high-skills economy. For an analysisof what these skills actually are and what may be required in a more unromantic version of theneo-liberal economy, see Brown, Green, and Lauder (2001) and Apple (1996).

2. Of course, there has been a considerable amount of literature on the question of clarityin critical educational writings, with contributions on both sides made by Burbules, Giroux,Lather, Gitlin, myself, and a number of others. My own position on this is that such a debate isessential and that although there is a danger in sacrificing theoretical elegance and the richnessand subtlety of language in our attempts to be clear, there is still a good deal of arrogance andtruly sloppy and merely rhetorical writing within the multiple communities of critical educa-tional work. Obviously, there is a need to respond to complexity; but there is also a need not tomarginalize sympathetic readers.

3. Whether there have been significant changes in this regard given the strong victory byNew Labour over the Conservatives again in the last elections is open to question. Certainaspects of neo-liberal and neo-conservative policies have already been accepted by Labour, suchas the acceptance of stringent cost controls on spending put in place by the previous Conservativegovernment and an aggressive focus on raising standards in association with strict perfor-mance indicators. See, for example, Gillborn and Youdell (2000).

4. Gillborn and Youdell (2000) demonstrated this clearly. What is also important here is thefact that this has consistently happened even in the face of overt attempts to use such policies toalter existing inequalities. See also Whitty, Power, and Halpin (1998, pp. 119-120).

5. On the issue of a racial contract that underpins nearly all social arrangements in our kindof society, see Mills (1997). I am drawing as well on Benedict Andersons (1991) position thatnations are themselves based on imagined communities.

6. This is a complicated issue, one in which there are contradictory tendencies. See, forexample, Fuller (2000).

7. See especially his discussion of the role of the state in this in Bourdieu (1996).8. This does not mean, however, that oppressed groups will not attempt to use such markets

for their own strategic purposes. That this is the case can be seen in the case of the Black activist

MICHAEL W. APPLE 41

group Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO). For a sympathetic but still critical analy-sis of BAEO, see Apple (2003) and Apple and Pedroni (in press).

9. Dance (2002) provided an exceptionally insightful examination of the fronts that Blackyouth may put on. Teachers often stereotype these students in extremely damaging ways, assum-ing the front is the real and entire person.

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state and the politics of knowledge. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (Eds.). (1995). Democratic schools. Alexandria, VA: Association

for Supervision and Curriculum Development.Apple, M. W., & Pedroni, T. (in press). Do vouchers make strange bedfellows? Teachers College

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Creating Difference - Neo-Liberalism, Neo-conservatism and the Politics of Educational Reform