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.