Michael W. Apple

University of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Books for and in schools are commodities. They form a central part of the political economy of publishing. They are also, profoundly, sites of cultural and ideological conflict. While always there, there are periods when these economic and ideological conflicts are even more powerful. This is just such a time. This reality asks us to also examine p...

Leading scholars combine theory and case studies to reveal how elite corporations are increasingly influencing how public education provision and services are delivered across the world.

This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key educationa...

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I examined many of the major arguments for social justice teacher unionism. This combines both more traditional union concerns over wages, working conditions, professional autonomy, and respect with a much more concerted focus by unions on social justice issues in schools, communi...

In a previous essay, I have critically examined some of the recent analyses that raise substantive challenges to the policies, practices, and politics that currently dominate the role of STEM in education (Apple, 2017). The book on which I shall focus in this essay goes beyond a number of the worries that previous volumes have expressed. It challen...

Almost all of the discussions surrounding educational policy focus their attention on particular places, especially various kinds of formal schooling. While this focus is of course crucial, it tends to ignore other educational sites where acts of teaching go on and where challenges to accepted understandings are waged. These include libraries and t...

In my Reviewing Policy section of this journal I have often analyzed a number of significant books that focus on other nations. Such an international agenda is important. Analytically such a wider perspective provides fresh insights into the lenses we employ to understand crucial sets of social relations that are created by and create educational a...

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to...

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I documented the importance of the work of Stuart Hall in the development of critical theories in education, in our understanding of "race," and in the development of much more nuanced analyses of cultural politics. I focused on two books: Familiar Stranger, Hall's personal memoir...

While some members of the critical education community(ies) may disagree, I think that it is imperative to read and learn from those groups of educators who may not have exactly the same politics as I do. A case in point is the book under discussion in this essay. It focuses on multiple on-the-ground initiatives that seek to provide more responsive...

In this book, we seek to consider the importance of education and sustainable democracy in a time of dangerous uncertainty. By engaging with multiple perspectives on participatory democracy and education, we hope to more fully understand the principles of a sustainable and collective commitment to civic virtue through education. What does it mean f...

Contemporary education research, policy and practice are complex and challenging. The political struggle over what constitutes curriculum and pedagogy is framed by quasi-markets and technocratic models of education. This has had a significant effect on larger issues of policy. But it has also had profound effects inside educational sites in terms o...

In education, the areas of critical policy studies, critical cultural studies, and critical curriculum studies all owe a good deal to a number of people. Among them are Paulo Freire, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Antonio Gramsci. Yet no such listing would be complete without the inclusion of Stuart Hall. The two books I di...

In this article, I share a number of thoughts and concerns about the current and future status of a field in which I have been a participant for five decades. I know that many others share these worries as well. Speaking honestly, I am deeply concerned that too much of the field of curriculum has lost its way. Too much of it is characterized by a c...

In education, the areas of critical policy studies, critical cultural studies, and critical curriculum studies all owe a good deal to a number of people. Among them are Paulo Freire, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Antonio Gramsci. Yet no such listing would be complete without the inclusion of Stuart Hall. The two books I di...

In my comments on this fine collection of critical policy analyses, I want to do a number of things. I shall point to the general conceptual and social orientation and commitments that provide the foundation for such research. I will then describe a number of contributions that these papers make. And finally, I shall suggest a number of areas where...

Truly substantive progressive transformations that stand the test of time require organized pressure from below, especially from groups who demand that our institutions act in more responsive ways around what Nancy Fraser calls the politics of distribution, recognition, and representation. The Fight for America’s Schools is guided by exactly this i...

In this essay, I first discuss where the article “Doing Things the ‘Right’ Way” that was published in this journal in 2005 fits into my corpus of work. In many ways, it represents a coming together of the various influences that have continued to form me over the nearly five decades I have been engaged in critically examining the relationship betwe...

The Struggle for Democracy in Education extends the insightful arguments Michael W. Apple provided in Can Education Change Society? It provides detailed examinations of both local and system-wide struggles around conflicting versions of democracy. Grounded in a key set of ethical and political responsibilities for those who care deeply about educat...

O texto aborda os desafios que atualmente se fazem presentes para a construção da democracia na educação. É apontada a necessidade de que se busque duas disposições para que a democracia possa ser vivida: que haja um reposicionamento, ou seja, que o mundo seja visto sempre pela perspectiva dos despossuídos; e que o mundo seja visto de forma relacio...

The politics of collective memory, over what counts as “official knowledge,” is crucial in education. With its primary focus on the politics of memory and how this works in the politics of school knowledge as its primary focus, Civil Rights Culture Wars gives us a rich historical picture of this process as it played out in a significant battle over...

Corporate-backed philanthropic groups have become increasingly involved in political processes in the past ten years. The Koch Brothers’ and their political advocacy groups, have become particularly prominent players. Their influence extends beyond high-profile state-level elections and increasingly have begun investing in municipal affairs of smal...

This chapter sets out to summarise the key messages and trends in the research reported in the essays in this book. We take forward the idea of corporatised governance, where we examine what the data and analysis has to say about the privatisation of public service education, and the particular contribution of corporate elites. Specifically we iden...

Just what is the role and impact of corporate elites in contemporary reforms of public sector universities and schools? Providing fresh perspectives on matters of governance and vibrant case studies on the particular types of provision including curriculum, teaching and professional practices, Gunter, Hall and Apple bring together contributions fro...

This book reports on primary research into the role and influence of corporate elites in regard to the reform of public education. This introductory chapter outlines this purpose, with a focus on corporatised governance. We outline the trends in reform, and the role of elites and corporate elites in particular, and we then provide an over view of t...

Introduction The United States is witnessing the growing power of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas. One of the major sites of the increased influence of such political forces has been Wisconsin. In 2011, the conservative Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker historically cut the state's public education budget and curtailed the collective bargainin...

Introduction Public service education has been hard won but is not yet fully achieved in many countries around the world – and where it is seemingly in place, it is not secure and is being actively privatised. In this book we not only report research about how and why this is happening, but we also specifically focus on the contribution of corporat...

Introduction The primary research and critical analysis reported in this collection of essays has made a substantive contribution to the field of critical education policy as well as to democratic discourses, through undertaking and accessing fieldwork data and through thinking productively in order to scope and bring meaning to, the relationship b...

Radical reforms are taking place to public service education in western style democracies. We identify the corporatisation of governance, and the role and influence of corporate elites within and external to institutions and public education. Supported by a Foreword from Professor Romuald Normand, we present 15 essays organised in two parts: one th...

Practice Theory and Education challenges how we think about ‘practice’, examining what it means across different fields and sites. It is organised into four themes: discursive practices; practice, change and organisations; practising subjectivity; and professional practice, public policy and education. Contributors to the collection engage and ext...

When the United States government released its 2007 census figures in January 2010, it reported that 12% of the US population ‒ over 38 million people ‒ were foreign born. First generation people were now one out of every eight persons in the nation, with 80% coming from Latin America and Asia (US Census Bureau, 2010). This near record transformati...

Educational policy in a number of nations has stressed the importance of STEM and advanced mathematics. This article examines Andrew Hacker’s analysis of the uncritical acceptance of STEM and advanced mathematics and of its empirical, epistemological, political, and educational assumptions. Although I support Hacker’s claims, I also raise a number...

Utilizando la nueva Ley que Crea el Sistema Nacional de Desarrollo Profesional Docente en Chile como caso, se explora cómo las actuales políticas educativas refuerzan a la clase media profesional y gerencial en el país promoviendo un currículo “legítimo”. La estandarización y la medición ocupan un rol fundamental al respecto controlando el desarrol...

Given the increasingly global nature of marketized school choice policies, this makes it even more crucial to investigate how the multiple scales, forms, and emphases of school choice in different countries are influenced by particular political, economic, and cultural conditions. While much of the critical research on school choice policies has fo...

This is a very difficult time in education. Neoliberal and neoconservative policies have had major effects on schools, on communities, on administrators, on teachers, and on all school staff. A new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those that guide economic and...

It has become increasingly clear that education is a site of conflict. This essay examines the ideological positions that now dominate educational reforms and suggests a number of roles that critically democratic educators should play in -confronting these reforms. It then details the contributions that the authors -included in this special issue m...

This article examines national conservative political advocacy groups' growing interest in local politics, and analyzes how they form alliances and gain political power. Following efforts to restrict collective bargaining for Wisconsin public employees, Kenosha school board members' attempts to legally protect teachers' rights provoked concern from...

While much of the critical scholarship around elite schooling has focused on the students who attend elite institutions, their social class locations, privileged habituses and cultural capital, this paper foregrounds curricular form itself as a central mechanism in the (re)production of elites. Using Basil Bernstein's conceptual framework of pedago...

In England, we might say that “the Empire has come home.” This means that while racism and the processes of racialization are indeed extraordinarily powerful, there will not only be strong similarities between say the United States and England but also significant differences in how these things play out both now and in the past. This is one of the...

Among the most important questions critical educators can ask today are the following: Can schools play a role in making a more just society possible? If not, why not? If so, what can they do? These questions provide the basis for this article by Michael Apple, as well as for the books under discussion here. The books by David Blacker, John Marsh,...

This is a time when education has become even more of a site of struggle. Dominant groups in a number of countries have attempted, often more than a little successfully, to limit criticism, to control access to research that documents the negative effects of their policies, and to deny the possibility of critically democratic alternatives. At the s...

In Educating the ‘Right’ Way (Apple, 2006a; see also Apple et al., 2003 and Apple, 2013), I spend a good deal of time detailing the world as seen through the eyes of ‘authoritarian populists’. These are conservative groups of religious fundamentalists and evangelicals whose voices in the debates over social and educational policies are now increasi...

Stuart Hall had a significant impact on critical analyses of rightist mobilizations in education. This is very visible in my own work, for example, in such volumes as Official Knowledge (2014) and Educating the ‘Right’ Way (2006). After describing an important series of lectures that Stuart Hall gave at the Havens Center for Social Structure and So...

Bourdieu’s version of field theory has had an impressive impact on the ways that sociologists of education conceptualize educational practices. These accounts tend to focus on the varying levels of ontological complicity established between students’ cultural dispositions and educational institutions. In this paper, the wisdom of these accounts is...

It was late in the evening and I had just come home after a day of teaching, filled with the combination of exhaustion, tension, and sometimes pure joy that accompanies working in schools. There was something waiting for me, a letter from Teachers College, Columbia University. I opened it with much trepidation. But the news was good.

The article examines a US public elementary bilingual, multicultural school that attempts to interrupt the reproduction of existing relations of dominance and subordination across a variety of differences. The school’s experiences illuminate the complex reality of schools as a site of struggle and compromise between at times contradictory interests...

All educational reforms have particular histories. And all of them are driven not only by technical considerations but also profoundly by cultural, political, and economic projects and by ideological visions of what schools should do. In this contribution to my Reviewing Policy section of Educational Policy, I discuss a significant contribution to...

This third edition of Official Knowledge, a classic text from one of education’s most distinguished scholars, challenges readers to critically examine how certain knowledge comes to be “official,” and whose agendas this knowledge represents. A probing and award-winning study, this new edition builds on the tradition of its predecessors to question...

In celebrating the critical insights of Zeus Leonardo's chapter, this response further illustrates why understandings of research in education must attend to the claims, inflections and subversions of history and geography in this 'other than natural' field of inquiry. Educational research, be it 'critical' or 'uncritical' in orientation, is marked...

First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I want to use this essay – basically a commentary – as a context for some political reflections on what is happening to the governance and the labour processes at universities internationally. In the process, in addition to my critical reflections on the neoliberal impulses affecting universities, I want to do two other things. First, I shall expan...

Stephen Ball's work has deservedly received a good deal of attention. In this article, I detail a number of tasks in which the critical sociologist of education – as a 'public intellectual' – should engage. I then place Ball's work within these tasks and evaluate his contributions to them. In the process, I show that one of the things that set Step...

What roles can and should teachers' unions play in the deliberations, debates, and conflicts over school reform in a time when education sits at the center of so much of our economic, political, ideological, and cultural tensions? Lois Weiner's new book, The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice, speaks directly to this question...

Over the years that I have been writing the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I have paid particular attention to critical conceptual and empirical work that either overtly supports or directly challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions that tend to guide dominant policies in education. These policies may deal with larger issues involving...

Partindo da análise de que vivemos um período de crise, não sópolítica e econômica, mas também educacional, o presente texto reflete sobrea atuação do educador/estudioso/ativista crítico. Analisa a composição eestratégias de uma aliança hegemônica de direita (que vem promovendouma modernização conservadora) que procura, além de evidenciar suasvozes...

In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the claim to subaltern status has led to a partial withdrawal from state-run institutions and to a practice of schooling that is meant to equip the children of authoritarian populist conservative religious parents both with an armor to defend what these groups believe is their threatened culture and with...

Most nations—and nations to be—have a history of people asking critical questions about schooling and about the politics of knowledge in which it participates. Is it simply reproducing the ideological goals and cultural forms and content of dominant groups? Could schooling be used to raise serious issues about existing societies? Could it go even f...

This guide accompanies the following article: Michael W. Apple, Can Education Change Society? Du Bois, Woodson, and the Politics of Social Transformation, Review of Education, 10.1002/rev3.3000