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tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

Neoliberalism / Ideology / Education Policy (Dec. 2011) "There has perhaps been no time in our history when the links between a public education & democracy have been as tenuous as they are right now." - Linda McNeil, "Private asset or public good: Education & democracy at a crossroads" ... never consent to be completely at ease with what seems evident to oneself. Foucault, Dits et crits, 1954-1988, vol. 5. "[I]t is very risky to buy into, uncritically, the language of those who would govern us through the manipulation of funds and the tying of dollar values to each aspect of our work." - Bronwyn Davies Ideology: The notion of ideology appears to me to be difcult to make use of for three reasons. The rst is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scienticity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think, necessarily to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think that this notion cannot be used without circumspection. - Foucault, Truth and power Ideologic capture: Institutions ... nd it difcult to move out of a dominant design mould. They become captured by the capacity of a system to institutionalize prevailing assumptions and myths or culturally entrenched rules. - Stewart Ranson, Public accountability in the age of neo-liberal governance "We live in a world structured by capitalism, patriarchy, & racism, where the dominant ideology leads to policies that help the advantaged accumulate ever more advantages and help maintain poverty, inequality, and marginalisation. ... In the last quarter century neoliberal ideology was able to replace a welfare state ideology because it furthered this process of accumulation while still offering sufcient legitimation to maintain people's faith in the system." - Steven Klees, A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: Misleading analyses and failed policies

tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

Neoliberalism = ideology, not reality Neoliberalism = Public Choice Theory + Human Capital Theory (value added) + Agency Theory + Transaction Cost Analysis (New Managerialism, New Public Management) + Property Rights Theory Public Choice Theory: Based on the fundamental notion that self-interest dominates human behaviour and that human beings are essentially rational utility maximizers; that individuals can express their personal preferences much more effectively through market exchanges than, say, through political participation; and that the role of government should therefore be restricted to establishing high-level policy objectives rather than delivering the services per se[.] - Rizvi & Lingard Advocates for the application of economic theories to public sector institutions in the interest of making public organisation subject to the similar costs and benets as operate in the private sector. In this, PCT represents an application of economic models and theories to politics on the assumption that economic behaviour (homo economicus) describes the true state of human nature and thus is applicable to all aspects of life. - Olssen, Codd, ONeill

tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

Human Capital Theory: The policy of upskilling the workforce is a simplied version of the theory of human capital, which came to dominate debates about the importance of education in promoting economic development after the publication of the ideas of Theodore Schultz (1961) and Gary Becker (1964/1975). In the subsequent 30 years the original reservations of the proponents have been forgotten and a degraded version has assumed the status of a conventional wisdom. . . . Gary Becker, for instance, emphasised that the attention paid to the economic effects of education and other human capital is not in any way meant to imply that other effects are unimportant, or less important than the economic ones. Unfortunately, those other factors have all but vanished from consideration and need to be reintroduced into the debate. - Frank Cofeld, Breaking the consensus: Lifelong learning as social control Problems with Human Capital Theory (via Frank Cofeld, op cit): The thesis is diversionary It overshadows social capital, and other forms of capital The empirical basis of the theory is highly disputable The theory is seriously incomplete & dangerous The theory ignores polarisation The theory ignores the sexual division of labour It has created a new moral economy Other options may be more appropriate Upskilling creates credential ination [F]or Foucault, neoliberal governmentality conducts our conduct by inducing us to subjectify ourselves as self-entrepreneurs concerned with obtaining a return on our human capital. - John Protevi, What does Foucault think is new about neo-liberalism? Value-added: [T]here is no evidence that over a decade of massive effort in [high-stakes nationalized standardized assessment] has made any difference in student achievement. . . . [The] testing proliferation has resulted in only minor shifts in education funding. . . . [G]ains in schools average achievement scores were only partially due to school factors and signicantly inuenced by other factors. ... [Researchers have found that] differences in which variables were controlled for yielded completely different selections of which schools were meritorious, and there was no basis for deciding which combination of available variables to control for. ... [T]here was no valid way to measure what economists call the value added to student achievement by school efforts. - Steven Klees, A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: Misleading analyses and failed policies

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Agency Theory: Perceives the delivery of services through an organisation as a series of contracts which, if optimally established and operated, can generate signicant levels of efciency[.] - Rizvi & Lingard [R]epresents work relations hierarchically as a series of contracts between one party referred to as the principal in another referred to as the agent. The theory is concerned with problems of compliance and control in the division of labour among work relationships. Although initially developed in relation to business rms, it became adapted and extended to public sector work relations as a means of extracting the accountability and performance of employees were market incentives and sanctions did not operate. Agency Theory theorizes work relations hierarchically in terms of chains of the authority and command which can be used to characterise authority relations at all levels of the management hierarchy. Hence, a single person will be principle to those further down the chain of command an agent to those further up. Central to its focus is how one gets an agent to act in accordance with the interests of the principal. Rather than specifying a broad job specication based on conceptualisation of professional autonomy and responsibility, it species chains of principal-agent relationships in a series of contracts as a means of rendering the management function clear and accountable. - Olssen, Codd, ONeill It is precisely because men scheme and plan - they are sufciently disposed to occupy themselves in forming projects and schemes - that man will nd an opponent in every person who is disposed to scheme himself. - Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society [I]n a commercial state ... man is sometimes found a detached and a solitary being: he has found an object which sets him in competition with his fellowcreatures, and he deals with them as he does with his cattle and soil, for the sake of the prots they bring. The mighty engine which we suppose to have formed society, only tends to set its members at variance, or to continue their intercourse after the bands of affection are broken. - Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society

tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

Transaction Cost Analysis: suggest that organisational costs and transacting business can be minimised and made more efcient through vertical integration, best achieved through the privatisation of all functions of an organisation, except those that are regarded as absolutely central to organisational mission[.] - Rizvi & Lingard Seeks to analyse and account for the efciency costs of transacting business in the effect these have on organisational form ... TCE is relentlessly and explicitly an efciency argument ... [and it] tends to constitute a conservative pressure for rms not to change or not to be responsive to actual market signals. - Olssen, Codd, ONeill New Public Management: shares its assumptions with theories of agency and transactional cost analysis, and applies them to the public sector. It emphasises a range of concepts that have become commonplace in higher education around the world. Collectively these concepts amount to ... organizational ecumenism, a single idealisation of appropriate organisational behaviour. These concepts include generic management skills; quantied performance targets; devolution; the separation of policy, commercial and non-commercial function; the use of private sector practices such as corporate plans and exible labour practices; just-in-time inventory; monetary incentives; cost-cutting; and above all the privatisation of the so-called non-core functions and services. It thus emphasises a preference from private ownership and prescribes, were ever possible, the use of contracting out and competition/contestability in the provision of public services. - Rizvi & Lingard The common language of such an approach stresses concepts such as outputs, outcomes, accountability, ownership, specication, contracts, purchase agreements and so on. . . . The consequence of such a contractualism is to view all work relations as principal-agent hierarchies, thereby redening the appropriate process in termes of outputs, and where services are viewed in terms of cost and quality. - Olssen, Codd, ONeill [The practice of boards raises issues of power and representation in the public sphere. Can boards be democratic or are they illustrations of the new magistracies? Are stakeholder models appropriate to the public sphere selecting representative individuals rather than democratically elected representatives? This illuminates the nature of boards as administrative rather than democratic public spaces such as forums or councils. - Stewart Ranson, Public accountability in the age of neo-liberal governance

tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

Theory of Property Rights: argues that private ownership of the assets of an organisation results in superior protability and effectiveness. ... The emphasis on the principles of efciency, effectiveness, productivity and protability is permanent[.] - Rizvi & Lingard is the fundamental grounding theory for the conception of self-interested human behaviour assumed a neoliberal theories. as such, the incentive structure of agents and principles in AT is assumed using PRT, which is essentially a theory of ownership of property as it inheres in the individual. - Olssen, Codd, ONeill Characteristics of neoliberal structural reforms in OECD countries: an emphasis on management rather than policy, in particular a new stress on management skills in preference to technical or professional skills; a shift from the use of input controls and bureaucratic procedures and rules to a reliance on quantiable output measures and performance targets; the devolution of management control coupled with the development of new reporting, monitoring and accountability mechanisms; the disaggregation of large bureaucratic structures into quasi-autonomous agencies a, in particular the separation of commercial from non-commercial functions, of policy advice from policy implementation, of ownership and purchase responsibilities, of policy from operations, of funding, purchasing and provision of services, and the reallocation of functions for focus, synergy and information; preference for private ownership, contracting out and competition between service providers for greater efciency; the imitation of certain private sector management practices involving the use of shortterm labour contracts, the development of quality control and audit procedures, involving the development of corporate plans, performance agreements and mission statements, new management information systems and a greater concern for corporate image; a general preference for monetary incentives rather than nonmonetary incentives, and a stress on cost-cutting and efciency - Olssen, Codd, ONeill Neoliberalism, as currently practiced, can be contextualized as (via Bronwyn Davies, The (Im)possibility of intellectual work in neoliberal regimes): a move from social conscience and responsibility towards an individualism in which the individual is cut loose from the social; from morality to moralistic audit-driven surveillance; from critique to mindless criticism in terms of rules and regulations combined with individual vulnerability to those new rules and regulations, which in turn press towards conformity to the group

tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

General framing context: [T]he juridical sovereign rules men as subjects of right, while liberal government supplements juridical sovereignty with the management of people qua homo economicus as natural exchanger in natural markets; neoliberal government manages people qua homo economicus as self-entrepreneur in articial competitive markets. John Protevi, What does Foucault think is new about neo-liberalism? The real triumph of the market-based rhetoric was to shift discussion away from political concerns about the role of public education in preparing citizens for democratic participation and to redene public schooling as a good or service, like toilet paper or soap, which students and parents consume. - Kenneth Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Schools The high performing school is an organisation in which the personal is used for the sake of the functional: community is valued, but primarily for instrumental purposes within the context of the market place. - Fielding, Working the soul: The earnest betrayal of high performance schooling. "In fetishising commodities, we are denying the primacy of human relationships in the production of value, in effect erasing the social." - Stephen Ball, "Education for sale! The commodication of everything?" Thinkers such as David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Henry Giroux, Zygmunt Bauman, among others, contribute to the emerging critique of neoliberalism and neoconservativism as a political strategy for redistributing wealth upwards, of promoting the market as the only solution to social problems; that is, translating social issues into private concerns. . . . [A]dvocates for the neoliberal and neoconservative reorganization of schooling preserve the increased marginalization of the poor and the deeper entrenchment of inequalities by reducing the role of education to market functions; that is, produce ... workers who are globally competitive for the future. - Tara Stamm [Review of Saltman, 2007] The neoliberal self is largely dened in terms of income and the capacity to purchase goods. The desire for goods can be satised to the extent that the worker produces whatever the economy demands. This emphasis on consumerism makes the worker compliant to whatever must be done to earn money, since to lose ones job, to be without income, is to lose ones identity. In order to hold their jobs, neoliberal selves are necessarily exible, multiskilled, mobile, able to respond to new demands and new situations; ...security is seen as emanating from peoples capacity to adapt. Either they are exible and adaptable, open to change, capable of nding new projects, and live in relative personal security, or they are not and will be put aside when the current project nishes. ... [I]t feels good to be exible and adapt, but it also feels terrible when we realize we cannot afford to stop. - Bronwyn Davies, The (im)possiblity of intellectual work in neoliberal regimes

tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

[E]ntrepreneurial subjects ... take on the world by making a project of themselves. Stephen Ball, "Education for sale! The commodication of everything?" This new discourse on exibility and employability legitimates the already well against shift of the burden of responsibility for education, training and employment onto the individual, and implicitly denies any notion of objective structural problems such as lack of jobs, an increasing proportion of poorly paid, untrained, routine and insecure jobs. Darmon, Frade, Hadjivassilliou, The comparative dimension in continuous vocational training: A preliminary framework [N]eo-liberal governance reveals its informing code of the public sphere: the neutral principles of negative liberty according rights to individuals and individual corporations to pursue their interests unfettered by any public authority which seeks to do more than regulate market exchanges in search of justice. Rights of possessive individualism override substantive conceptions of the common good. What this is eroding is any conception of the public good as collective good determined through democratic participation, contestation, and judgment in the public sphere. It seeks to replace politics (substantive rationality) with contract (technically rational solutions). - Stewart Ranson, Public accountability in the age of neo-liberal governance

Liberalism vs. Neoliberalism: We must avoid at all costs seeing neoliberalism as a mere repetition of classical liberalism after a Keynesian interlude. So for Foucault neoliberalism is a modication of the art of governing as an exercise of political sovereignty; it is another turning point in the history of the state seen through the grid of governmentality. Its novelty consists in an interventionist state which creates conditions for the articial or purely competitive market in which homo economicus makes choices as rational self-entrepreneur. - John Protevi, What does Foucault think is new about neo-liberalism? [T]he classical formula is protect the market from government in order to allow social benets from natural exchange. The neoliberals say we must proceed on two paths: (1) we must have government intervention at the level of the conditions of the market in order (2) to spread the enterprise form throughout the social fabric. So the neoliberal formula here is use government to change society to constitute an articial and fragile market. - John Protevi, What does Foucault think is new about neo-liberalism?

tobey.steeves@gmail.com / Twitter: @symphily!

References for further reading: Giroux, H. (2004). The terror of neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Klees, S. (2008). A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: Misleading analyses and failed policies. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 6(4), 311-348 Saltman, K. (2007). Capitalizing on disaster: Taking and breaking public schools. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers. Wells, A., Slayton, J., Scott, J. (2002). Dening democracy in the noliberal age: Charter school reform and educational consumption. American Educational Research Journal, 39(2), 337-361. Wilkins, A. (in press). Push and pull in the classroom: Competition, gender and the neoliberal subject. Gender and Education.

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