Pedagogy of the Impossible: Neoliberalism and the Ideology of Accountability

Abstract

This article analyzes the ideology of accountability in contemporary education within the context of neoliberalism and its reconstruction of social relationships on the basis of the market, competition and efficiency. Drawing on contemporary critical philosophical accounts, it argues that the scholarship on education and accountability has not fully registered the way that ideology in neoliberalism works through modes of fantasy and enclosure, inhering not only in perspectives and understandings, but also in procedures, rituals and structures of subjectivity. Analyzing the political logic of test-based accountability, and taking up several specific examples of its reorganization of curriculum and assessment, the article challenges the tendency within educational theory to understand ideology in education according to the Gramscian model of hegemony and proposes a reconceptualization of accountability's ideological effects. In particular, it shows that the tradition of understanding ideology in schooling in terms of the production of 'common sense' overlooks the ideological force in contemporary education of the procedures themselves of standardized assessment and scripted curriculum. The article concludes with a consideration of the implications of this analysis for critical teaching in the context of the constraints created by test-based accountability systems.The links between the regime of accountability in schools and the broader political and economic transformation of society ushered in by neoliberalism have been much discussed (Apple, 2001;Lipman, 2004;Luke, 2004;Hursh, 2007). Within neoliberalism, social and human activity is thought to be most effectively and rationally organized when it is brought within the literal or figural structure of the capitalist market. Demanding a reconstruction of social relationships on the basis of competition and efficiency, neoliberalism expects public life generally, and education in particular, to understand its principal elements and activities either as inputs or products, whose value has to be demonstrated on the basis of quantitative and standardized measures. In the case of for-profit educational ventures, this subsumption of teaching and learning by the market is quite literal. This business-model reorganization of education also appears to enforce an ideological field within schooling, as students and teachers (and entire school communities) are trained to view themselves as fundamentally isolated and forever in competition (Saltman, 2005; Au, 2011) -salespeople for their own human capital in a world in which there are always winners and losers, and in which the losers have no one but themselves to blame for their 'inefficiencies'. The testbased accountability system in education powerfully mobilizes this competition, pitting students, teachers and schools against each other in a struggle for higher scores and superior rankings.As important as this critical discussion of accountability has been, however, I believe that it fails to capture essential elements of th...

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