EDUCATION, MARKETS, and an AUDIT CULTURE Michael W. Apple

International Journal of Educational Policies Vol.1. (1), 2007, 4-19. ISSN:1307-3842

EDUCATION, MARKETS, AND AN AUDIT CULTURE

Michael W. Apple University of Wisconsin

Changing Commonsense through concerted efforts in some of the most iv In a number of volumes over the past difficult settings to be threatened. decade, I have critically analyzed the Unfortunately, all too many of the actual processes of ‘conservative effects of this assemblage of reforms have either been negligible or negative, or they modernization’—the complicated alliance v behind the wave after wave of educational have been largely rhetorical. This is reforms that have centered around neo- unfortunate, especially given all of the work liberal commitments to the market and a that well-intentioned educators have devoted supposedly weak state, neo-conservative to some of these efforts. But reality must be emphases on stronger control over faced if we are to go beyond what is currently curricula and values, and ‘new fashionable. managerial’ proposals to install rigorous The odd combination of marketization on the forms of accountability in schooling at all one hand and centralization of control on the levels. i The first set of reforms has not other is not only occurring in education; nor is demonstrated much improvement in it only going on in the United States. This is education and has marked a dangerous a world-wide phenomenon. And while there shift in our very idea of democracy— are very real, and often successful, efforts to always a contested concept ii --from ‘thick’ counter it, vi this has not meant that the basic collective forms to ‘thin’ consumer driven assumptions that lie behind neo-liberal, neo- and overly individualistic forms. The conservative, and new managerial forms have second misconstrues and then basically not had a major impact on our institutions ignores the intense debates over whose throughout society and even on our knowledge should be taught in schools commonsense. and universities and establishes a false In many nations there have been attempts, consensus on what is supposedly common iii often more than a little successful, to in US and British culture. The third vii restructure state institutions. Among the takes the position that ‘only that which is major aims of such restructuring were: to measurable is important’ and has caused ensure that the state served business interests; some of the most creative and critical to have the state’s internal operations model practices that have been developed Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 5 those used in business; and to ‘take 1. The services or goods that are to be focused politics out of public institutions’, that is upon must be reconfigured so that they can to reduce the possibility that government indeed be bought and sold. institutions would be subject to political 2. People who received these things from the pressure from the electorate and from state must be convinced to want to buy them. progressive social movements. viii Chubb and Moe’s arguments about voucher plans 3. The working conditions and outlook of the that place educational institutions on a employees who work in this sector must be market mirror this latter point, for transformed from a model based on collective example. ix understandings and providing service to ‘the public’ on the one hand to working to produce This last point, removing politics from profits for owners and investors and subject to government institutions, is based on a less market discipline on the other. than accurate understanding not only of the state but of the market as well. While 4. When business moves into what were most economics textbooks may give the previously non-market fields, as much as impression that markets are impersonal possible their risks must be underwritten by and impartial, they are instead highly the state. political as well as inherently unstable. Under these kinds of pressures, To this, other points need to be added. To standardized and competitive labor processes guarantee their survival, firms must seek begin to dominate the lives of the newly ways of breaking out of the boundaries marketized workers. But this is not all. A that are set by state regulation. good deal of labor is shifted to the consumer. Increasingly, this has meant that the She or he now must do much of the work of boundaries established to divide non- getting information, sorting through the market parts of our lives must be pushed advertising and claims, and making sense of so that these spheres can be opened to what is often a thoroughly confusing welter of commodification and profit-making. As data and ‘products’. xii In the process as well, Leys reminds us, this is a crucially there is a very strong tendency for needs and important issue. ‘It threatens the values that were originally generated out of destruction of non-market spheres of life collective deliberations, struggles, and on which social solidarity and active x compromises, and which led to the creation of democracy have always depended’. state services, to be marginalized and xiii ultimately abandoned. Once again, in Leys’ words, ‘The facts suggest that market- It is not an easy process to transform parts driven politics can lead to a remarkably rapid of our lives and institutions that were not erosion of democratically-determined totally integrated into market relations so xiv collective values and institutions’. that they are part of a market. To do this, at least four significant things must be These arguments may seem abstract, worked on. xi but they speak to significant and concrete Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 6 changes in our daily lives in and out of and central sanctions-- becomes a good education. For more than two decades, example of this at the level of elementary and we have witnessed coordinated and secondary schools.) This has been determined efforts not only to reconstruct accompanied by a loss of local democracy. a ‘liberal’ market economy, but a ‘liberal’ At the same time, the role of the state in market society and culture. This dealing with the destructive rapaciousness distinction is important. In Habermas’ produced by ‘economically rational’ decisions words, the attempt is to have ‘system’ has been sharply reduced. xviii totally colonize the ‘life-world’. xv As As many people have recognized, behind all many aspects of our lives as possible, educational proposals are visions of a just including the state and civil society, must society and a good student. The neo-liberal be merged into the economy and reforms I have been discussing construct this economic logics. Although there will in a particular way. While the defining always be counter-hegemonic characteristic of neo-liberalism is largely tendencies xvi our daily interactions–and based on the central tenets of classical even our dreams and desires–must liberalism, in particular classic economic ultimately be governed by market liberalism, there are crucial differences ‘realities’ and relations. In this scenario– between classical liberalism and neo- and it is increasingly not only a scenario, liberalism. These differences are absolutely but also a reality--a society and a culture essential in understanding the politics of is not to be based on trust and shared education and the transformations education values. Rather, all aspects of that society is currently undergoing. Mark Olssen clearly are to be grounded in and face ‘the most details these differences in the following extreme possible exposure to market passage. It is worth quoting in its entirety. forces, with internal markets, profit centers, audits, and “bottom lines” Whereas classical liberalism represents a penetrating the whole of life from negative conception of state power in that the hospitals to play-groups’. xvii As Margaret individual was to be taken as an object to be Thatcher once famously put it, ‘The task freed from the interventions of the state, neo- is not to just change the economy, but to liberalism has come to represent a positive change the soul’. conception of the state’s role in creating the appropriate market by providing the Interestingly, because of the focus conditions, laws and institutions necessary for on measurable results and central control its operation. In classical liberalism, the over important decisions, the federal individual is characterized as having an government’s power has actually been autonomous human nature and can practice sharply enhanced. (The Bush freedom. In neo-liberalism the state seeks to Administration’s legislation concerning create an individual who is an enterprising ‘No Child Left Behind’—where schools and competitive entrepreneur. In the classical labeled as ‘failing’ on standardized tests model the theoretical aim of the state was to are to be subject to market competition limit and minimize its role based on Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 7 postulates which included universal what is happening at all levels of education, egoism (the self-interested individual); including higher education. xx And this is invisible hand theory which dictated that occurring at the same time as the state itself the interests of the individual were also becomes increasingly subject to the interests of the society as a whole; and commercialization. This situation has given the political maxim of laissez-faire. In the rise to what might best be called an audit shift from classical liberalism to neo- culture . To get a sense of the widespread liberalism, then, there is a further element nature of such practices, it is useful here to added, for such a shift involves a change quote from Leys, one of the most perceptive in subject position from ‘homo analysts of this growth: economicus’, who naturally behaves out [There is a] proliferation of auditing , i.e., the of self-interest and is relatively detached use of business derived concepts of from the state, to ‘manipulatable man’, independent supervision to measure and who is created by the state and who is evaluate performance by public agencies and continually encouraged to be perpetually public employees, from civil servants and responsive’. It is not that the conception school teachers to university [faculty] and of the self-interested subject is replaced or doctors: environmental audit, value for money done away with by the new ideals of ‘neo- audit, management audit, forensic audit, data liberalism’, but that in an age of universal audit, intellectual property audit, medical welfare, the perceived possibilities of audit, teaching audit and technology audit slothful indolence create necessities for emerged and, to varying degrees of new forms of vigilance, surveillance, institutional stability and acceptance, very ‘performance appraisal’ and of forms of few people have been left untouched by these control generally. In this model the state xxi developments. has taken it upon itself to keep us all up to the mark. The state will see to it that each The widespread nature of these one makes a ‘continual enterprise of evaluative and measurement pressures, and ourselves’...in what seems to be a process their ability to become parts of our of ‘governing without governing’. xix commonsense, crowd out other conceptions of effectiveness and democracy. In attempting to understand this, in Educating the “Right” Way I In place of a society of citizens with demonstrated the power of Olssen’s point the democratic power to ensure effectiveness that neo-liberalism requires the constant and proper use of collective resources, and production of evidence that you are doing relying in large measure on trust in the public things ‘efficiently’ and in the ‘correct’ sector, there emerged a society of ‘auditees’, way by examining the effects on the anxiously preparing for audits and ground of the suturing together of the inspections. A punitive culture of ‘league seemingly contradictory tendencies of tables’ developed (purporting to show the neo-liberal and neo-conservative relative efficiency and inefficiency of discourses and practices, for this is exactly universities or schools or hospitals). Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 8

Inspection agencies were charged with anyone who works in these public institutions ‘naming and shaming’ ‘failing’ individual must be seen as inefficient and in need of the teachers, schools, social work sobering facts of competition so that they departments, and so on; private firms were work longer and harder. xxvi When the people invited to take over and run ‘failing’ who work in public institutions fight back and institutions. xxii argue for more respectful treatment and for a The ultimate result of an auditing greater realization that simplistic solutions do culture of this kind is not the promised de- not deal with the complexities that they face centralization that plays such a significant every day in the real world of schools, role rhetorically in most neo-liberal self- universities, and communities, they are understandings, but what seems to be a labeled as recalcitrant and selfish and as massive re-centralization and what is best uncaring. Sometimes, as in the case of US seen as a process of de- Secretary of Education Page’s public democratization. xxiii Making the state comments to what he thought was a more ‘business friendly’ and importing sympathetic audience, they are even called business models directly into the core ‘terrorists’. And these ‘recalcitrant, selfish, functions of the state such as hospitals and and uncaring’ employees–teachers, education–in combination with a rigorous academics, administrators, social workers, and unforgiving ideology of individual and almost all other public employees–can accountability–these are the hallmarks of then have their labor externally controlled and life today. xxiv Once again, the growth of intensified by people who criticize them for-profit ventures such as Edison Schools mercilessly, often as in the case of major in the United States, the increasing corporations while these same businesses are standardization and technicisation of shedding their own social responsibilities by content within teacher education programs paying little or no taxes. so that social reflexivity and critical I noted earlier that it is not just the understanding are nearly evacuated from labor of state employees that is radically courses, xxv the constant pressure to altered; so too is the labor of ‘consumers’. ‘perform’ according to imposed and often When services such as hospitals and schools reductive standards in our institutions of are commodified, a good deal of the work that higher education, and similar kinds of was formerly done by state employees is things are the footprints that these shifted onto those using the service. constantly escalating pressures have left Examples of labor being shifted to the on the terrain of education. ‘consumer’ include on-line banking, airline A key to all of this is the de- ticketing and check-in, supermarket self- valuing of public goods and services. It checkouts, and similar things. Each of these takes long-term and creative ideological is advertised as enhancing ‘choice’ and each work, but people must be made to see comes with a system of incentives and anything that is public as ‘bad’ and disincentives. Thus, one can get airline miles anything that is private as ‘good’. And for checking in on one’s computer. Or as Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 9 some banks are now doing, there is an sale. To speak more theoretically, the subject extra charge if you want to see a real live position on offer is the de-raced, de-classed, bank teller rather than using an ATM and de-gendered ‘possessive individual’, an machine (which itself often now has an economically rational actor who is extra charge for using it). constructed by and constructs a reality in The effects of such changes may which democracy is no longer a political concept but is reduced to an economic be hidden but that does not make them xxviii any less real. Some of these are clearly one. economic: the closing of bank branches; Mark Fowler, Ronald Reagan’s Chair the laying off of large numbers of of the Federal Communications Commission, workers, including in higher education; once publicly stated that television is simply a the intensification of the work-load of the toaster with pictures. A conservative media fewer workers who remain. Some are mogul in England seemed to agree, when he hidden in their effects on consumers: said that there is no difference between a exporting all of the work and the television program and a cigarette lighter. xxix necessary commitment of time onto those Both positions are based on an assumption people who are now purchasing the that cultural form and content and the service; searching for information that processes of distribution are indeed was once given by the government; doing commodities. There are few more important one’s banking and airline work oneself; mechanisms of cultural selection and bagging and checking out at distribution than schools and universities. supermarkets. xxvii The classed and raced And under this kind of logic, one might say specificities of this are crucial, since the that educational institutions are simply ability to do such electronic searching and toasters with students. There is something education for example is dependent on the deeply disturbing about this position not only availability of computers and especially in its vision of education, but profoundly in its time to engage in such actions. It requires understanding of the lives of the people who resources—both temporal and financial, to actually work in such institutions and in the say nothing of emotional—that are often under-funded, under-staffed, and differentially distributed. difficult conditions now being experienced This all may seem so trivial. But there. While it would be too reductive to see when each ‘trivial’ instance is added up, educational work merely in labor process the massiveness of the transformation in terms, the intensification that has resulted which labor is transferred to the consumer from the conditions associated with this assemblage of assumptions has become rather is striking. For it to be successful, our xxx commonsense must be changed so that we pronounced. see the world only as individual Of course, many of us may be apt to see such consumers and we see ourselves as things as relatively humorous or innocuous. surrounded by a world in which Aren’t market-based proposals for such things everything is potentially a commodity for as schools, universities, health care and so Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 10 much more just another, but supposedly United States, amply demonstrates. xxxiv These more efficient, way of making services intuitions demonstrate that in our everyday available. But not only are these lives there remains a sense that there is ideologically driven ‘reforms’ not all that something very wrong with our current and efficient, xxxi the process of privatization is still too uncritical fascination with markets strikingly different than public ownership and audits. However, this optimism needs to and control. For example, in order to be immediately balanced by the immense market something like education, it must growth of for-profit on-line universities such first be transformed into a commodity, a as the University of Phoenix, an institution ‘product’. The product is then there to that exemplifies the transformation of serve different ends. Thus, rather than education into a saleable commodity. schooling being aimed at creating David Marquand summarizes the critically democratic citizenship as its worrisome tendencies I have been describing ultimate goal (although we should never in the following way: romanticize an Edenic past when this was actually the case; schooling has always The public domain of citizenship and service been a site of struggle over what its should be safeguarded from incursions by the functions would actually be, with the market domain of buying and selling...The working class and many women and goods of the public domain–health care, crime people of color being constructed as ‘not prevention, and education–should not be quite citizens’), xxxii the entire process can treated as commodities or proxy commodities. slowly become aimed instead at the The language of buyer and seller, producer generation of profit for shareholders or a and consumer, does not belong in the public site whose hidden purpose is to document domain; nor do the relationships which that the efficiency of newly empowered language implies. Doctors and nurses do not managerial forms within the reconstituted ‘sell’ medical services; students are not state. xxxiii ‘customers’ of their teachers; policemen and policewomen do not ‘produce’ public order. The fact that such things as the for-profit The attempt to force these relationships into a Edison Schools in the United States have market model undermines the service ethic, not generated the significant profits that degrades the institutions that embody it and their investors had dreamed of means that robs the notion of common citizenship of part the process of commodification is at least xxxv of its meaning. partly being rejected. For many people in all walks of life, the idea of ‘selling’ our I agree. In my mind, public schools and our children is somehow institutions are the defining features of a disturbing, as the continuing controversy caring and democratic society. The market over Channel One, the for-profit television relations that are sponsored by capitalism station with advertising now being should exist to pay for these institutions, not broadcast in 43% of all public and private the other way around. Thus, markets are to be middle and secondary schools in the subordinate to the aim of producing a fuller Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 11 and thicker participatory democratic polity initiatives in Porto Alegre, Brazil and and daily life. xxxvi It should be clear by elsewhere documents. xl We can learn from now that a cynical conception of these nations’ experiences and we can relearn democracy that is ‘on sale’ to voters and what it means to reconstitute the civic in our manipulated and marketed by political and lives. xli Education has a fundamental role to economic elites does not adequately play in doing exactly that. But it can only do provide for goods such as general and so if it is protected from those who see it as higher education, objective information, one more product to be consumed as we media and new forms of communication measure it and who interpret the intellectual that are universally accessible, well- and emotional labor of those who are engaged maintained public libraries for all, public in educational work though the lenses of health, and universal health care. At best, standardization, rationalization, and auditing. markets provide these things in radically Having said this, however, interrupting unequal ways, with class, gender, and conservative modernization requires that we especially race being extremely powerful have a more adequate understanding of both markers of these inequalities. xxxvii If that some fundamental dynamics and its social is the case—even if the definitions of the functions and roots. I want to turn to this ‘public’ were and often still are based on now. the construction of gendered and raced spaces xxxviii —the very idea of public New Managerialism in Class Terms institutions is under concerted attack. Throughout this article, I have been broadly They need to be provided–and defended– describing particular kinds of tendencies that collectively. Such things are anything but are reconstructing what counts as legitimate secondary. They are the defining knowledge, legitimate education, legitimate characteristics of what it means to be a xxxix evidence, and legitimate labor. Yet, we need just society. to be cautious about reductive analyses in Unfortunately, the language of understanding where these ideological privatization, marketization, and constant movements come from. It would be too easy evaluation has increasingly saturated to simply say that these are the predictable public discourse. In many ways, it has effects of competitive globalization, of capital become commonsense–and the critical in crisis and its accompanying fiscal crisis of intuitions that something may be wrong the state, or in more Foucauldian terms of the with all of this may slowly wither. Yet, in micro-politics of governmentality and many nations where conditions are even normalization, although there is some truth to worse, this has not necessarily happened, all of these. These tendencies underpinning as the growth of participatory budgeting, ‘conservative modernization’ are also ‘Citizen Schools’, and close relations ‘solutions’ that are generated by particular between teacher education programs and actors, and here we need to be more specific building more socially responsive and about class relations inside and outside of critical curricular and pedagogical higher education. Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 12

As Basil Bernstein has reminded us and as professional ideologies of control, I have argued at much greater depth measurement, and efficiency that accompany elsewhere, a good deal of the genesis of it. Thus, they often support such policies as and support for the policies of ‘neutral instrumentalities’ even when these conservative modernization, and policies may be used for purposes other than especially of the constant need for audits, the supposedly neutral ends this class fraction the production of ‘evidence’, is committed to. xliii rationalization, and standardization of Because of this, it is important to realize that both labor and knowledge comes not only a good deal of the current emphasis on audits from capital and its neo-liberal allies in and more rigorous forms of accountability, on government, but from a particular fraction tighter control, and a vision that competition of the professional and managerial new will lead to greater efficiency is not totally middle class. xlii This fraction of the reducible to the needs of neo-liberals and neo- professional new middle class gains its conservatives. Rather, part of the pressure for own mobility within the state and within these policies comes from educational the economy based on the use of technical managers and bureaucratic offices who fully expertise. These are people with believe that such control is warranted and backgrounds in management and ‘good’. Not only do these forms of control efficiency techniques who provide the have an extremely long history in technical and ‘professional’ support for xliv education, but tighter control, high stakes accountability, measurement, ‘product testing, and (reductive) accountability control’, and assessment that is required methods provide more dynamic roles for such by the proponents of neo-liberal policies managers. of marketization and neo-conservative policies of tighter central control in Let me briefly say more about this, since this education. is significant in terms of the self- understanding of class actors within the Members of this fraction of the upwardly administrative apparatus of the state. The mobile professional and managerial new decades of attacks on state employees have middle class do not necessarily believe in not only had the predictable effects of lost the ideological positions that underpin all employment and worsening working aspects of the conservative alliance. In conditions, although these kinds of things are fact in other aspects of their lives they continuing within higher education and may be considerably more moderate and elsewhere. These attacks also have had even ‘liberal’ politically. However, as profound effects on identities and have experts in efficiency, management, produced a crisis among many state testing, and accountability, they provide employees and managers about doubts to their the technical expertise to put in place the expertise and their ability to ‘help’ the policies of conservative modernization. xlv public. New identities that are centered Their own mobility depends on the around enhanced technical proficiency and a expansion of both such expertise and the set of assumptions that deep-seated problems Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 13 in education and the entire social sphere higher education and who does and does not can be provided by enhancing efficiency go there, seems to be experiencing a number and holding people more rigorously of the restructurings I have earlier discussed. accountable for their actions have This is a time when competition for developed over time, sponsored in part by credentials and cultural capital is intense. The neo-liberal discourses that have opened increasing power of mechanisms of spaces within the state for such expertise. restratification such as the return of high This enables those class fractions with levels of mandatory standardization, more technical forms of cultural capital centred testing more often, and constant auditing of around accountability and managerial results also provides mechanisms—and an efficiency to occupy these spaces and to insistent logic--that enhance the chances that guarantee a place for the uses of their the children of the professional and knowledge. This is an ideal situation for managerial new middle class will have less the professional and managerial new competition from other students. Thus, the middle class. They can see themselves as introduction of devices to restratify a engaging in a moral crusade—seeing population—for this is what much of it is-- themselves as being endlessly responsive enhances the value of the credentials that the to ‘clients’ and ‘consumers’ in such a way new middle class is more likely to that they are participating in the creation accumulate, given the stock of cultural capital of a newly reconstituted and more xlvii it already possesses. I am not claiming efficient set of institutions that will ‘help that this is necessarily intentional, but it does everyone’--and at the same time function to increase the chances for mobility enhancing the status of their own by middle class children who depend not on expertise. In Bourdieu’s terms, this economic capital but on cultural capital for allows for particular kinds of conversion xlviii advancement. The effects of such policies strategies, ones in which their cultural and procedures on working class students and capital (technical and managerial on students of oppressed minorities is more expertise) can be converted into economic than a little visible in an entire series of capital (positions and mobility within xlix detailed and insightful studies. higher education and the state). xlvi I want to stress the importance of this element This needs to be situated in the ways in within conservative modernization, not only which such cultural markets and because it already occupies considerable conversion strategies operate in the larger power within the state. It is crucial to focus on set of class relations in which such new this groups as well because, in the situation I middle class actors participate. My claims have described, I believe that this group is not here are complicated and I can only immune to ideological shifts to the Right and outline a wider set of arguments. thus may not be as able to be self-conscious However, the implications of these about the role they may be playing in the arguments are serious if we are to fully restructuring of educational and social understand why all of education, including policies I have been discussing in this article. Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 14

Given the fear generated by the attacks on On Possibilities the state and on the public sphere by both In this article I have discussed some of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, this ways in which certain elements of class fraction is decidedly worried about conservative modernization have had an the future mobility of its children in an impact on higher education and education in uncertain economic world. Thus, they general. I have pointed to the growth of may be drawn even more overtly to parts commodifying logics and the audit culture of the conservative alliance's positions, that accompanies them. In the process, I have especially those coming from the neo- highlighted a number of dangers that we conservative elements which stress greater currently face. attention to traditional ‘high status’ content, greater attention to testing, and a However, I have also urged us not to assume greater emphasis on schooling (and the that these conditions can be reduced to the entire university system) as a stratifying automatic workings out of simple formulae. mechanism. This can be seen in a number We need a much more nuanced and complex of states in the United States, for example, picture of class relations and class projects to where parents of this class fraction are understand what is happening—and, while I supporting charter schools that will stress have not done this here, a more sensitive and academic achievement in traditional historically grounded analysis of the place of subjects and traditional teaching practices. racial dynamics in the vision both of ‘a world out of control’ that needs to be policed and of It remains to be seen where the majority ‘cultural pollution’ that threatens ‘real of members of this class grouping will knowledge’ in the growth of markets and align in the future in the debates over audit cultures. Becoming more nuanced policy. Given their contradictory about such constitutive dynamics will not ideological tendencies, it is possible that guarantee that we can interrupt the tendencies the Right will be able to mobilize them upon which I have focused here. But it is one under conditions of fear for the future of essential step in understanding the genesis of their jobs and children, even when they what is at stake in a serious politics of still vote for, say, New Labour in electoral interruption. terms. l At the very least, it would be romantic to assume that they will be If the issue of interruption is not to only be an responsive to the claims from those people academic one, however, it requires something who are employed in institutions of higher else. We need to think more clearly about education and in education in general that what needs to be defended and what needs to the conditions under which they are be changed. Just as Marx reminded us that increasingly working are damaging and capitalism might actually be an improvement that they are creating an education that is over feudalism, we may need to take seriously less and less worthy of its name. the possibility that some of the intuitions behind new managerial impulses may also constitute an improvement over previous Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 15 visions of university life. Let me say targets, performance criteria, and quantifiable more about this. outcomes—but one that still takes the issue of There is a complicated and sometimes public accountability seriously--can be built. contradictory politics at work here. The It would need to rest, and to be constantly university has been a very real site of rebuilt, upon the constitution of ‘processes of cultural conflict: over collective memory, [critical] deliberation that enable understanding and agreement out of differing over what counts as legitimate knowledge, li over voice and participation, and over its accounts of public purpose and service’. A social and educational aims. It has also key here, of course, is what and who counts as been a site of considerable conflict over the ‘public’ and whose voices are heard. who can and cannot go to it. The intense As Nancy Fraser and Charles Mills have struggles over the university’s gendered argued and as I noted earlier, the public and raced hiring practices, ones in which sphere has historically been constructed as a it has taken decades to even begin to gendered and raced space. lii The prevailing address the cultural and social imbalances definitions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ were in serious ways, stand as eloquent witness based on a particular assemblage of to the continuing nature of the problems assumptions about who was a legitimate that need to be faced. Because of this, participant and who was not. Because of this, some forms of public accountability—to the simple assertion that the university plays a ask universities to provide evidence that crucial role based on its importance as part of they are taking seriously their social the public sphere is an insufficient defence. responsibilities concerning hiring Yes, it needs to be defended and the public practices for example--were and continue sphere is certainly under attack. But, what to be partial victories. kind of public sphere(s) do we have in mind? Furthermore, institutions of higher How should ‘it’ be reconstituted? How would education are increasingly complex places this reconstitution be integrated into what Fraser calls a politics of redistribution and a financially and organizationally. Because liii of this as well, ( democratically inclined) politics of recognition? In more everyday management skills are indeed necessary. words, given the criticisms that have been By not taking the development and made of the ways in which the public sphere refinement of these skills and dispositions in general and universities in particular have seriously, we may be creating a space that actually operated over time, what needs to will predictably be filled with those change to take account of these criticisms? committed to new managerial impulses. What we should not be doing is defending all The issue is not whether or not we need of the actually existing practices of the accountability, but the kinds of logics of university, since many of these may be accountability, and the question of discriminatory, racist, or have a history that is accountability to whom, that tend to now based in elitism. Instead, we must ask what guide the process of higher education. An specifically do we wish to defend? In asking alternative to the external imposition of this question, as I mentioned above we may Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 16 need to recognize that there are elements quantifiable targets, while public trust follows of good sense as well as bad sense in the deliberation of common purpose out of criticisms that are made about universities. difference and discord, rather than the forces The space of criticism has been taken up of competition that only create a hierarchy of by neoliberal claims and managerial class advantage and exclusion. lv impulses. But this does not mean that Ranson is not sanguine about the possibility higher education did not need to change or of building a public sphere that both that a simple return to the previous form challenges the neo-liberal and neo- and content of higher education is conservative construction of an audit culture anywhere near a sufficient set of policies. and goes beyond the limits of older versions Let us be honest. If a simple return to past of what counts as the public sphere. practices is neither possible nor wise, it is However, he does articulate a sense of what is hard to specify in advance other than in required to do so. A reconstituted vision of broad strokes the exact character of the the public and a set of practices and structures kinds of models of structures, practices, that support it are grounded in the following. and deliberative agency that should guide Trust and achievement can only emerge in a public life inside and outside of higher framework of public accountability that education. As Raymond Williams enables different accounts of public purpose reminded us, the ‘common’ has to be and practice to be deliberated in a democratic ongoingly built, since what counts as the public sphere: constituted to include common is the never-ending process of difference, enable participation, voice and critical deliberation over the very question dissent, through to collective judgment and of the common itself. liv This more critical decision, that is in turn accountable to the understanding is evacuated under the lvi public. aegis of the logics of markets and audits, since we do know that what is currently Such a vision is not simply utopian. being built/imposed is often destructive, Indeed, the history of higher education—from even in its own terms of assuming that early mechanics institutes, to ‘people’s establishing markets and audits will universities’, to the many attempts at creating restore responsiveness and even trust. closer cooperative connections between universities and culturally, politically, and Stuart Ranson summarizes these lvii economically dispossessed groups — arguments in the following way. suggests that there is a rich storehouse of This neo-liberal regime cannot realize its knowledge on possibilities for doing this. But purpose of institutional achievement and this requires the restoration of memory. Thus, public trust. Achievement grows out of historical work is absolutely essential if we the internal goods of motivation to are to go forward. Here I do not mean a improve (that follows recognition and the nostalgic longing for an imagined past; but an mutual deliberation of purpose) rather honest appraisal of the limits and possibilities than the external imposition of of what has been done before. Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 17

The task is not only historical, however. currently experiencing? The narratives of Undoubtedly, within each and every their (our) political/pedagogic lives can bear institution of higher education, within the witness to the possibility of taking steps crevices and cracks so to speak, there are toward building a reconstituted public sphere counter-hegemonic practices being built within the spaces in which we live and work. and defended. But they are too often isolated from each other and never get i Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge: Democratic organized into coherent movements and Education in a Conservative Age , 2 nd ed. (New York: strategies. Part of the task is to make Routledge, 2000); Michael W. Apple, Educating the public the successes in contesting the ‘Right’ Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality , 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); Michael W. control over curricula, pedagogy, and lviii Apple, et al. The State and the Politics of Knowledge evaluation—over all of our work. (New York: Routledge, 2003). While public “story-telling” may not be ii Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom . New sufficient, it performs an important York: Norton, 1998. function. It keeps alive and reminds iii See Michael W. Apple, Cultural Politics and ourselves of the very possibility of Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996); difference in an age of audits and Apple, Official Knowledge ; Michael W. Apple, disrespect. Ideology and Curriculum , 3 rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004); Lawrence Levine, The Opening of We have successful models for doing this, the American Mind: Canon, Culture, and History lix such as the book Democratic Schools . (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Amy Binder, In that book, James Beane and I saw our Contentious Curricula (Princeton: Princeton University role as researchers very differently. We Press, 2002). acted as ‘secretaries’ for socially critical iv Linda McNeil, The Contradictions of School Reform educators and made public their stories of (New York: Routledge, 2000); Pauline Lipman, High building curricula and pedagogies that Stakes Education (New York: Routledge, 2004); Michael W. Apple and James A. Beane (eds), expressly embodied Ranson’s vision of a Democratic Schools (Buckingham: Open university reconstituted public sphere based press, 1999), Ira Shor, Empowering Education difference, participation, voice, and (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Stanley dissent. The book went on to sell Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory (Boston: Beacon hundreds of thousands of copies in Press, 2000). multiple languages. While Democratic v Apple, Educating the ‘Right’ Way ; Mary Lee Smith, Schools was about primary, middle, and et al., Political Spectacle and the Fate of American secondary schools, it does point to the Schools (New York: Routledge, 2003). ways in which such strategic interruptions vi Apple, et al., The State and the Politics of can proceed in other institutional contexts. Knowledge . vii Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State This, then, is another task. Can we too act (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). as secretaries for some of our colleagues viii in higher education, making public their Colin Leys, Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest (New York: Verso, partial, but still successful, resistances to 2003), 3. the regime of regulation that we are Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 18

ix John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets, xxiii Ibid, 71. and American Schools (Washington: Brookings xxiv Ibid, 73. Institution, 1990). See also Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism (Baltimore: xxv Daniel Liston and Kenneth Zeichner, Teacher Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Sheila Education and the Social Conditions of Schooling Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 1991); Apple, Educating the and the New Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins ‘Right’ Way ; Dale Johnson, et al., Trivializing Teacher University Press, 2004); and Robert Rhoads and Education (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, in Carlos Alberto Torres, editors. The Political press). Economy of Higher Education in America xxvi John Clarke and Janet Newman, The Managerial (Stanford, Stanford University Press, in press) for State (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997). thoughtful discussions of the effects of marketization and competitive economic pressures xxvii Of course, this is a differentiated experience. In on universities. the United States, supermarkets are less apt to even be x Leys, Market-Driven Politics , 4. found in inner city neighborhoods populated by poor persons of color. xi Ibid. xxviii Stephen Ball, Education Reform (Buckingham: xii See Emily Van Dunk and Anneliese Dickman, Open University Press, 1994); Apple, Educating the School Choice and the Question of Accountability ‘Right’ Way . (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) for how xxix Market-Driven Politics this works, and doesn’t work, in plans to marketize Leys, , 108. education. xxx Michael W. Apple, Education and Power (New xiii York: Routledge, 1995); Apple, Official Knowledge . Apple, Official Knowledge ; Leys, Market- Driven Politics , 4. xxxi Apple, Educating the ‘Right’ Way ; Lipman, High xiv Stakes Education . Leys, Market-Driven Politics , 4. xxxii xv See Apple, Official Knowledge ; David Hogan, Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Cultural and Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). ‘Education and Class Formation,’ in Economic Reproduction in Education , ed. Michael W. xvi Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State ; Apple (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). For Apple, Educating the ‘Right’ Way ; Apple et al., the ways in which race has been and is a crucial The State and the Politics of Knowledge . dynamic, see Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Cameron xvii Leys, Market-Driven Politics , 35-36. McCarthy, Warren Crichlow, Greg Dimitriadis, and xviii Ibid, 42; See also Michael B. Katz, The Price Nadine Dolby (eds), Race, Identity, and Representation of Citizenship (New York: Metropolitan Books, in Education , 2 nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005); 2001); David Shipler, The Working Poor (New Gloria Ladson-Billings and David Gillborn (eds), The York: Knopf, 2004). RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Multicultural Education (London: RoutlegeFalmer, 2004); Michelle Fine, Lois 18 Mark Olssen, "In Defense of the Welfare State Weis, Linda Powell, and L. Mun Wong (eds), Off and of Publicly Provided Education," Journal of White , 2 nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005). Education Policy 11 (May 1996), 340. xxxiii Leys, Market-Driven Politics , 211-212. xx Apple, Educating the ‘Right’ Way . xxxiv Apple, Official Knowledge . xxi Leys, Market-Driven Politics , 70. xxxv David Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma xxii Ibid. (London: Phoenix Books, 2000), 212-213. Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 19

xxxvi Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy xlvi Bourdieu, Distinction . (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, xlvii See Bourdieu, Distinction ; Pierre Bourdieu, Homo 2003). Economicus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, xxxvii Katz, The Price of Citizenship . 1988); Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). xxxviii Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, xlviii Sally Power, Tony Edwards, Geoff Whitty, and 1989); Robin D. G. Kelly, ‘We Are Not What We Valarie Wigfall, Education and the Middle Class Seem: Rethinking Black Working Class (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003); Stephen Opposition in the Jim Crow South’, The Journal of Ball, Class Strategies and the Education Market American History 80 (June 1993), 75-112; See also (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003). Michael W. Apple and Thomas Pedroni, xlix See David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell, ‘Conservative Alliance Building and African Rationing Education (Buckingham: Open University American Support for Voucher Plans’, Teachers Press, 2000); McNeil, The Contradictions of School College Record , in press, however, on how Reform ; Lipman, High Stakes Education ; Apple, oppressed people attempt to tactically take up the Cultural politics and Education , Apple, Official subject position of the consumer and rearticulate it Knowledge ; Apple, Educating the ‘Right’ Way . to further their own collective interests. l Ibid xxxix Leys, Market-Driven Politics , 220. li Stuart Ranson, “Public Accountability in the Age of xl Apple et al., The State and the Politics of Neo-Liberal Governance”, Journal of Education Policy Knowledge . 18 (September-October 2003), 470. xli Skocpol, Diminished Democracy . lii Fraser, Unruly Practices ; Mills, The Racial Contract . xlii Basil Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control liii Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (New York: and Identity (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, Routledge, 1997). 1996); Apple, Educating the ‘Right’ Way . liv See Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (New xliii Basil Bernstein makes an important distinction York: Verso, 1989). The struggles of subaltern groups between those fractions of the new middle class to contest the narrowing of the public sphere and to that work for the state and that group who works in expand it to include the voices of marginalized groups the private sector. They may have different are documented in Michael W. Apple and Kristen L. ideological and educational commitments. See Buras, eds. The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, Basil Bernstein, The Structuring of Pedagogic and Educational Struggles . New York: Routledge, Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1990). For 2006. more on the ways ‘intermediate’ classes and class fractions operate and interpret their worlds, see lv Ranson, “Public Accountability in the Age of Neo- Erik Olin Wright, (ed.), The Debate on Classes Liberal Governance”, 476. (New York: Verso, 1998), Erik Olin Wright, lvi Ibid. For some cautions on seeing this as simply a Classes (New York: Verso, 1985), Erik Olin liberal model of ‘deliberation’, see James Avis, ‘Re- Wright, Class Counts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Pierre Bourdieu, thinking Trust in a Performative Culture: The Case of Journal of Education Policy Distinction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Education’, 18 (May-June 2003), 315-332. 1984). lvii xliv An account of a continuing attempt to organize core Apple, Ideology and Curriculum . aspects university life and work around these concerns xlv Clarke and Newman, The Managerial State . can be found in Apple, Official Knowledge . Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture - M. Apple 20

lviii Within the field of Education, the journal Teaching Education has attempted to institutionalize this task by consistently publishing accounts of critical teaching within undergraduate classes in teacher education and in graduate classes as well. lix Apple and Beane, Democratic Schools .

International Journal of Educational Policies

Vol.1. (1), 2007, 4-15.

ISSN:1307-3842