Educational 'accountability' and the violence of capital: a Marxian reading

Abstract

This article investigates the accountability movement in education in order to discover its meaning within contemporary capitalism. It demonstrates how trends in educational accountability reify the consciousness and creativity of students into simple scores and indices according to a logic of commodification, as well as reinforcing white supremacist ideology by portraying neocolonial representations of student accomplishment and potential as neutral and objective. This movement's participation in bourgeois traditions of juridical reason is also explored, according to which students are constructed as always in debt to the state and as such subject to an increasing intensification of discipline and punishment. It argues that an attentiveness to the violence of these trends can help to understand what is distinctive in the current moment in global capitalism, as well as indicating the importance of conceptualizing this system as organizing processes of exploitation in the subjective as well as the economic registers.