PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, 92:148–153, 2017

Copyright 
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0161-956X print / 1532-7930 online
DOI: 10.1080/0161956X.2016.1265344

What is Present and Absent in Critical Analyses of

Michael W. Apple
University of Wisconsin–Madison

In Can Education Change Society? (Apple, 2013), I describe a number of tasks in which the crit-
ical scholar/activist needs to engage. Among them are telling the truth about what is happening
in the creation of inequalities (what I call “bearing witness to negativity”), illuminating spaces of
possibility, and acting as the critical secretary of the movements and people who actively try to al-
ter these inequalities. I also say that in order to engage with these tasks, the critical scholar/activist
has to show solidarity with these movements and people—not “stand on the balcony” so to speak.
The contributions to this PEA yearbook take the first task very seriously. They clearly indicate
the power and reach of neoliberal agendas in an entire array of levels and sites. The range of issues
that these authors focus upon is impressive; the papers address such matters as school choice, the
politics of teacher unions, social networks, media, policy narratives, and charter schools. They
also point to spaces for possible interruption and in the process hint at progressive possibilities, but
to a lesser extent than might be necessary. On the whole, however, it is rare to find a special issue
that combines such breadth and depth, making this yearbook quite a valuable contribution. Indeed,
the entire volume could form the text for a rigorous seminar on the effects of neoliberalism, and I
will certainly ask my own students and colleagues to pay close attention to it. But no set of articles
can do complete justice to a topic such as this. Thus, I want to spend my time in this response to
address issues that could add to these authors’ discussion.
First, neoliberalism does not stand alone, and it takes on different forms in different contexts.
It is also not a unitary movement, since it has contradictory tendencies within it (see Ball, 2012;
Mayer, 2016). Our analyses must also be guided by a crucial question: what makes neoliberalism
sensible and acceptable? In order to understand my argument about this, I need to say something
about the nature of the dominant alliance that we are facing: the role of cultural politics in its
complicated agendas, and the social/pedagogic task it has taken up.
One of the major reasons for the growth and continuation of dominant discourse and policies
is that the very nature of our common sense about education is constantly being altered. This
is largely the result of the power of particular groups who understand that if they can change
the basic ways we think about our society and its institutions—and especially our place in these
institutions—these groups can create a set of policies that will profoundly benefit them more than
anyone else. Dominant groups have actively engaged in a vast social/pedagogic process, one in

Correspondence should be sent to Michael W. Apple, University of Wisconsin, Department of Curriculum and In-
struction, 225 North Mills Street, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail: apple@education.wisc.edu
 WHAT IS PRESENT AND ABSENT IN CRITICAL ANALYSES OF NEOLIBERALISM 149

which what counts as a good school, good knowledge, good teaching, a good student, and good
learning are being radically transformed.
Let me say more about this process. As I document in Educating the “Right” Way, in a large
number of countries, a complex alliance and power bloc has been formed that has increasing in-
fluence in education and all things social. This power bloc, what has been called conservative
modernization, often combines four major groups (Apple, 2006; Dale, 1989/1990). The first and
the strongest one includes multiple fractions of capital who are committed to neoliberal mar-
ketized solutions to educational problems. For them, private is necessarily good and public is
necessarily bad. Democracy—a key word in how we think about our institutions and our place in
them (Foner, 1998)—is reduced to consumption practices. The world becomes a vast supermar-
ket, one in which those with economic and cultural capital are advantaged in nearly every sector
of society. Choice in a market replaces more collective and more socially responsive actions. Thin
democracy replaces thick democracy (Apple, 2006, p. 11). This demobilizes crucial progressive
social movements that have been the driving force behind nearly all of the democratic changes in
our societies and in our schools (Apple, 2013).
In education, this is the hallmark of various forms of neoliberalism. This position is grounded
in the belief that the more we marketize, the more we bring corporate models into education,
and the more we can hold schools’, administrators’, and teachers’ feet to the fire of competition,
the better they will be (Anderson & Montoro Donchik, 2016). There actually is very little robust
evidence to support this contention—and a good deal of evidence that it often increases inequality
(see Apple, 2006; Lipman, 2004; Lipman, 2011; Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014). But neoliberalism
continues to act as something like a religion in that it seems to be largely impervious to empirical
evidence, even as the crisis that it has created in the economy and in communities constantly
documents its failures in every moment of our collective and individual lives. This collection of
robust evidence of course is one of the things that makes the articles included here so important.
The second most powerful group in this alliance is neoconservatives who want a “return” to
higher standards and a “common culture.” In the face of diasporic populations who are making the
United States, England, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and many other nations a vast and impressive
experiment in continual cultural creation, they are committed to a conservative culturally restora-
tive project, pressing for a return to an imposed sense of nation and tradition that is largely based
on a fear of “pollution” from the culture and the body of those whom they consider the “Others.”
That there is a crucial and partly hidden (at least to some people) dynamic of race at work here is
not unimportant to say the least (Apple, 2006; Gillborn, 2008; Leonardo, 2009; Lipman, 2011).
Neoconservatives assume something that isn’t there, a consensus on what should be “official”
knowledge. They thereby try to eliminate one of the most significant questions that should be
asked in our schools: what and whose knowledge should we teach? In their certainty over what
a common culture is supposed to be, they ignore a key element in this supposed commonness.
What is common is that we disagree. Indeed, as Raymond Williams so powerfully reminded us,
what needs to be “the common” is the constant democratic and deliberative process of asking the
question of what is common (Williams, 1989, pp. 35–37; see also Apple, 2014).
A third key element in conservative modernization is composed of authoritarian populist reli-
gious conservatives—within already dominant groups—who are deeply worried about secularity
and the preservation of their own traditions. They too wish to impose a “common.” For them, “the
people” must decide; but there are anointed people and those who are not. Only when a particu-
lar reading of very conservative Christianity—or in some other countries, this is represented by
150 M. W. APPLE

repressive forms of Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam—is put back in its rightful place as the guiding
project of all of our institutions and interactions will we be able to once again claim that this is
“God’s country.” In the process, they inaccurately construct themselves as the “new oppressed,”
as people whose identities and cultures are ignored by or attacked in schools and the media. (Do
not misunderstand me. I work with progressive religious activists throughout the world and we
need to be immensely respectful of the religious traditions that give meaning to so many millions
of people throughout this world. But the uses of this by already-dominant groups—a practice
that often functions to reproduce whiteness in the United States, Australia, and many places in
Europe—are worrisome.) It is not an accident, for example, that one of the fastest-growing educa-
tional movements in the United States right now is homeschooling (Apple, 2006; Apple & Buras,
2006). Two to three million children have been taken out of public and private or even religious
schools, most often for conservative ideological and religious reasons, and are being schooled
at home. Although the homeschooling movement is varied, these decisions are often driven by
conservative attacks on public schools and once again by fear of the “Other” (see, e.g., Apple,
2006).
Finally, a crucial part of this ideological umbrella is a particular fraction of the professional
and managerial new middle class who have occupied positions within the state. This group is
made up of people who are committed to the ideology and techniques of accountability, measure-
ment, and the “new managerialism,” to what has been called “audit culture” (Apple, 2006; Clarke
& Newman, 1997; Leys, 2003). They too are true believers, ones who believe that in installing
such procedures and rules they are “helping.” For them, more evidence on schools’, teachers’,
and students’ performance—usually simply based on the limited data generated by test scores—
will solve our problems, even though once again there is just as much evidence that this too can
create as many problems as it supposedly solves (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Valenzuela, 2005).
Demonstrating that one is “acting correctly” according to externally imposed criteria is the norm.
“Perform or die” almost seems to be their religion. Understanding this requires a more nuanced
and detailed picture of the nature of class relations and the manner in which educational policies
are formed in ways that respond to these relations (see, e.g., Wright, 1985, 2010). It also requires
a just as nuanced and detailed understanding of the ways in which new managerialism and audit
cultures participate in the construction of gendered institutional arrangements that have differen-
tial effects (Lynch, Baker, & Lyons, 2009; Lynch, Grummell, & Devine, 2012)—something that
is missing as a constitutive element in the otherwise fine contributions included here.
Although there are clear tensions and conflicts within the larger alliance of conservative mod-
ernization, in general, its overall aims are to provide the educational conditions believed necessary
both to increase international competitiveness, profit, and discipline and to return us to a roman-
ticized past of the “ideal” home, family, and school.
I have gone on at some length here, not because I disagree with what the various authors have
shown in their individual contributions in this volume, but because I want us to expand our focus
to include a wider array of forces. Indeed, I believe that we may win victories against specific
parts of the neoliberal agendas and still lose the general battle over educational policy, if we do
not recognize the other elements involved in this alliance.
Given the complexity of the alliance that is now setting much of the agenda in education that I
detailed earlier, I need to introduce a crucial concept that I have hinted at in my discussion. One
of the most important analytic tools within critical cultural analysis is that of absent presences.
 WHAT IS PRESENT AND ABSENT IN CRITICAL ANALYSES OF NEOLIBERALISM 151

This refers to the idea that what is missing may be just as important as what is actually there in
any policy, practice, text, or institution (Macherey, 2006).
Let me say more about this issue, since it bears on how I read these contributions. Even given
the very evident power of this collection of articles both collectively and individually, there are
other absences that are crucial. For example, the failure to pay attention to “authoritarian populist”
movements is striking. Yet, as I noted, among the fastest-growing educational reforms throughout
the nation, one in which millions of children are engaged, is homeschooling (see, e.g., Apple,
2006). In some ways, the homeschooling phenomenon is partly a reaction to the attention being
given to the ways in which the “crisis in public schools” is portrayed in the media. Yet it is also part
of a larger reaction to the perceived dominance of secular values in schools and the feelings that
conservative religious knowledge and ways of understanding the world are not given equal weight
in the curriculum, and in all too many cases to the creation of ideological “gated communities” in
which the culture and body of the Other are seen as forms of pollution that must be avoided at all
costs (Apple, 2006; see also Kintz, 1997; Rothermel, 2015). Struggles over culture, identities, and
whiteness, and the feeling that one is part of the “new oppressed” are core parts of the emerging
politics of education.
This focus on the intense conflicts surrounding culture and identity leads me to another ab-
sent presence. Also deserving considerably more attention are the issues surrounding the role of
curriculum struggles in the formation of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic movements.
Indeed, the absence of in-depth analyses of what is and is not actually taught, of the politics of
“official knowledge,” (Apple, 2014) is notable. Yet these have been central to recent educational
policy conflicts throughout the nation—in Texas with its textbook treatment of enslavement and
conservative values, in Arizona with its attacks on ethnic studies, in the struggles over “culturally
relevant” curricula, in the debates over climate change and evolution, and in the centrality of the
conflicts over the Common Core throughout many parts of the nation. Social movements—both
progressive and retrogressive—often form around issues that are central to people’s identities
and histories (Apple, 2013; Giugni, McAdam, & Tilly, 1999; see also Binder, 2002). More atten-
tion theoretically, historically, and empirically to the centrality of such struggles could provide
more nuanced approaches to the reasons various aspects of conservative modernizing positions
are found compelling, and just as important, to the ways in which movements that interrupt ne-
oliberal agendas have been and can be built (Apple, 2013).
A current example can be found in the successful mobilizations against censorious curricular
decisions made by the very conservative school board in Jefferson County, Colorado, that had
received a large amount of financial and ideological support by the group that the Koch brothers’
backed called Americans for Prosperity. In response to this, student protests against the curricular
policies galvanized teachers, parents, and other community groups not only to overturn the very
conservative curricular decisions but also resulted in the election of a more progressive school
board (see, e.g., Schirmer & Apple, 2017). Both neoliberal and neoconservative policies were
challenged successfully. There are important lessons to be learned here. Similar lessons can be
gained by focusing more attention on examples of lasting interruptive strategies in other nations
as well (see, e.g., Gandin & Apple, 2012).
There is more I could say about these movements, but there is a limit to what I can specify in
a brief response such as this. The major point I want to make here is that we face a difficult ana-
lytic and empirical problem. As the contributions in this issue demonstrate, we need to continue
to engage in the detailed critical analyses of the realities and effects of neoliberal policies and
152 M. W. APPLE

practices in education. Yet, while important, this is not enough. We face a much more compli-
cated set of actors and movements that have formed a tense but still tactical alliance. Without
recognizing the larger alliance of forces, we may be less nuanced than we should be in under-
standing why rightist policies have indeed become dominant, and less effective than we must
be in challenging these policies in real schools and communities not only in the United States
but elsewhere. In both Educating the “Right” Way (Apple, 2006) and Can Education Change
Society? (Apple, 2013), I point to spaces where groups with different educational and political
positions can begin to find some common ground—and this is indeed important at times. But let
us have no illusions that this will be easy or that the dangers that neoliberal policies pose to a
truly public education are not very serious.

AUTHOR BIO

Michael W. Apple is John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Pol-
icy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His writing focuses on the relationship be-
tween culture and power in education and on the politics of school reform. Among his recent
books are: Knowledge, Power, and Education and Can Education Change Society?

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