Michael W. Apple

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

This article raises questions about current educational reform efforts now underway in a number of nations. Research from a number of countries is used to document some of the hidden differential effects of two connected strategies—neo-liberal inspired market proposals and neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and middle class managerial inspired regulatory proposals, including national curricula and national testing. This article describes how different interests with different educational and social visions compete for dominion in the social field of power surrounding educational policy and practice. In the process, it documents some of the complexities and imbalances in this field of power. These complexities and imbalances result in “thin” rather than “thick” morality and tend toward the reproduction of both dominant pedagogical and curricular forms and ideologies and the social privileges that accompany them.

The Text and Cultural Politics

The school curriculum is not neutral knowledge. Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations, struggles, and compromises among identifiable class, race, gender, and religious groups. A good deal of conceptual and empirical progress has been made in the last 2 decades in answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools. Yet, little attention has actually been paid to that one arti-fact that plays such a major role in defining whose culture is taught–the textbook. In this article, I discuss ways of approaching texts as embodiments of a larger process of cultural politics. Analyses of them must focus on the complex power relationships involved in their production, contexts, use, and reading. I caution us against employing overly reductive kinds of perspectives and point to the importance of newer forms of textual analysis that stress the politics of how students actually create meanings around texts. Finally, I point to some of the implications of all this for our discussions of curriculum policy.

Markets, standards, teaching, and teacher education

Market-based approaches to teacher education are growing internationally. There are concomitant moves to create uniformity and a system of more centralized authority over what counts as important teacher skills and knowledge. These kinds of reforms are overtly meant to help. Each is closely connected to the larger arena of education, where momentous ideological transformations are underway. The possible hidden effects of these efforts can be understood only if we look both inside teacher education programs and to the larger social field of power on which they operate. The author argues that the conscious originating motives for both market-oriented and uniform standards approaches to improve the quality of teacher education may not guarantee the effects of such policies in the real world of real schools. Such reforms may have quite dangerous consequences unless we situate our efforts within an honest analysis of what is happening in education in general right now.

Understanding and Interrupting Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism in Education

In this article I describe the ideological strategies of neoliberal and neoconservative educational reforms on the educational systems of the North and West. The principal strategies entail the labelling of culturally and economically disenfranchised communities through media and political debate in ways that shift responsibility for their educational marginalisation to both teachers and these communities themselves. The goals of educational systems are then recast in narrowly economic terms that call for market-based reforms. Democratic educational reform is examined as an alternative, with specific examples from Brazil and the United States.

Power, Meaning and Identity: critical sociology of education in the United States

Abstract The sociology of education in the US is extremely varied in its theoretical and methodological tendencies, its visions of what research is for, and its political sensibilities. This article describes a number of the most interesting recent developments within critically‐oriented sociology of education in the US. It pays particular attention to work on the politics of meaning. It discusses representative examples within the sociology of curriculum. It then takes up ‘critical’ and ‘postmodern/poststructural’ work on critical discourse analysis, identity politics, political economy and the labor process, and racial formation. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the continuing tensions between the critical and postmodern/poststructural communities methodologically, conceptually, and politically.

“You Don’t Have to Be a Teacher to Teach This Unit:” Teaching, Technology, and Gender in the Classroom

Given the increasing power of conservative movements in the larger society, there is considerable pressure currently not only to redefine the manner in which education is carried out, but to redefine what education is actually for This has had a major impact on teachers’ autonomy and the definition of what counts as a skill. We argue that teaching is a specific kind of labor process, one that is currently being subject to rationalization, deskilling and intensification. Since teaching has historically been seen as largely “women’s paid work,” the gender implications of such tendencies are crucial. By interpreting teaching in gender and labor process terms, we report data from an ethnographic study of the use of a computer literacy curriculum to illuminate the effects of these tendencies on teachers’ daily lives. In this context, teachers often employed a prepackaged curriculum that deskilled them and frequently left them bored and reliant on outside experts and purchased material. Yet they also employed the curriculum for their own purposes, using it to partly solve the problems caused by their intense schedule and work load. This pragmatic response cannot be understood unless the gendered realities of teachers’ work inside and outside of the school are recognized.

Global crises, social justice, and teacher education

When the U.S. government released its 2007 census figures in January 2010, it reported that 12% of the U.S. population— more than 38 million people—were foreign born. First-generation people were now one out of every eight persons in the nation, with 80% coming from Latin America and Asia. This near-record transformation, one in which diasporic populations now constitute a large and growing percentage of communities throughout the nation and an ever-growing proportion of children in our schools, documents one of the most profound reasons that we must think globally about education. This transformation is actually something of which we should be proud. The United States and a number of other nations are engaged in a vast experiment that has rarely been attempted before. Can we build a nation and a culture from resources and people from all over the world? The impacts of these global population flows on education and on teacher education are visible all around us.

Doing things the ‘right’ way: legitimating educational inequalities in conservative times1

We are in the middle of a period of reaction in education. Many of our educational institutions are seen as failures. High drop-out rates, a decline in ‘functional literacy,’ a loss of standards and discipline, the failure to teach ‘real knowledge’ and economically useful skills, poor scores on standardized tests, and more—all of these are charges leveled at schools. And all of these, we are told, have led to declining economic productivity, unemployment, poverty, a loss of international competitiveness, and so on. Return to a ‘common culture,’ make schools more efficient, more responsive to the private sector. Do this and our problems will be solved. Behind all of this is an attack on egalitarian norms and values. Though hidden in the rhetorical flourishes of the critics, in essence ‘too much democracy’—culturally and politically—is seen as one of the major causes of ‘our’ declining economy and culture. Similar tendencies are quite visible in other countries as well. The extent of the reaction is captured in the words of Kenneth Baker, former British Secretary of Education and Science in the Thatcher Government, who evaluated nearly a decade of rightist efforts in education by saying that ‘The age of egalitarianism is over.’ He was speaking decidedly positively, not negatively. The threat to egalitarian ideals that these attacks represent is not usually made quite this explicitly, since they are often couched in the discourse of ‘improving’ competitiveness, jobs, standards, and quality in an educational system that is seen as in total crisis. This discourse is clearly present today in ‘New Labour’ in the UK and in similar policies in the US. In all too many ways, both nations’ educational policies continue trends established under earlier conservative governments. It would be simplistic, however, to interpret what is happening as only the result of efforts by dominant economic elites to impose their will on education. Many of these attacks do represent attempts to reintegrate education into an economic agenda.

Ideological Success, Educational Failure? on the Politics of No Child Left Behind

Most educators in the United States have had to confront the changed reality brought about by the federal reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, commonly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This represents a set of initiatives that can radically transform the federal role in policing and controlling core aspects of education in general and teacher education. Using a number of key volumes that have been written to either criticize or support major components of NCLB, I provide a critical reading of the assumptions behind NCLB and point to a number of its key negative implications for educational policy and practice. In the process, I point to areas where educators might look for more critically democratic alternatives.

Challenging neo-liberalism, building democracy: creating the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil

In this article, we situate the processes of educational policy and reform into their larger socio-political context. We describe the ways in which a set of policies has had what seem to be extensive and long lasting effects because the policies are coherently linked to larger dynamics of social transformation and to a coherent strategy that aims to change the mechanisms of the state and the rules of participation in the formation of state policies. We describe and analyse the policies of the ‘Popular Administration’ in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We specifically focus on the ‘Citizen School’ and on proposals that are explicitly designed to radically change both the municipal schools and the relationship between communities, the state and education. This set of policies and the accompanying processes of implementation are constitutive parts of a clear and explicit project aimed at constructing not only a better school for the excluded, but also a larger project of radical democracy. The reforms being built in Porto Alegre are still in formation, but we argue that they have crucial implications for how we might think about the politics of education policy and its dialectical role in social transformation.