The ontological rhetorics of education policy: a non-instrumental theory

ABSTRACT

Theoretical approaches to policy have started considering the ontological dimensions of policy. Concern for the ontological work performed by policy has introduced questions about what policy is apart from its instrumentality. There exists some research in policy studies proposing the possibility of non-instrumental and ontological features of policy, but as of yet those possibilities remain suggestions. This article theorises policy in order to elicit the non-instrumental and ontological dimensions of policy. The approach taken here emphasizes the constitutive role of policy over the expressive by introducing ontological rhetorics to policy studies. After describing ontological rhetorics, the article turns to an analysis of US federal education policies as an example illustrating the continuous work of ontological rhetorics in constituting a marketised public education as an excess of the various instrumental expressions of education policy under consideration. Following the analysis, the article concludes with some speculative questions and comments about the status of the critical in non-instrumental policy studies, suggesting a new approach to critique that develops uncertainly and alongside its object.

KEYWORDS:

• Ontology
• instrumentalism
• rhetoric
• ontological politics

A central, if not the central, question for policy studies concerns what policy is. Ball (1993, 2015) directly asks this question, though in some sense each engagement with policy studies offers an answer, either directly or as given, to what policy is. Grappling with this question, or assuming an answer that allows one to proceed with their study, emphasises the theoretical aspects of policy studies. Theory, from the Greek theōros (spectator) and theōria (speculation), can provide a way of seeing an object or set of objects in order to identify and define what that object is. However, as political philosopher Rancière (2006) argues, ways of seeing, what he calls the distribution of the sensible, simultaneously makes things visible and other things invisible. In other words, theory is both a way of seeing and not seeing. In its traditional and critical approaches, policy theory has seen policy consistently as an instrumental object (Taylor and Gulson, 2015). An instrumental theory of policy is by definition a way of seeing that makes invisible the non-instrumental aspects of policy. This article is a theoretical consideration of policy that sees policy in its non-instrumentality. This is the first sense of non-instrumental theory contained in the title, a theory able to ‘see’ the non-instrumental. A second sense is discussed in the conclusion, speculating that the theory proposed here may itself work non-instrumentally.

By theorising policy in its non-instrumentality, this article considers the ‘is’ of policy. This is, in part, because before policy is a means to an end, there must exist for policy a world that can be ordered instrumentally. However, different from a world existing ‘out there’ for policy to intervene upon, the ‘is’ of policy points to how policy assumes and constitutes the world it seeks to change. For example, a policy that aims to reduce an achievement gap presumes first that there is an achievement gap, and second, that the gap can be reduced by means of policy. Only in the second moment does policy order things instrumentally. In the first, policy engages in making and/or assuming what is, i.e. the achievement gap exists. Different from asking what is policy, then, this article asks what is the is of policy; or more technically, what is ontological about policy?

Getting at the ‘is’ of policy is pursued in this article through ontological rhetorics. The aim of this article is to contribute a theoretical consideration of policy through ontological rhetorics with some empirical support from an extended policy analysis in order to theorise the non-instrumental and ontological work of policy and to offer some new questions for the status of the critical in critical policy studies. The following section considers the recent emergence of concerns specifically labelled ontological in policy studies and the split between the ontological and the instrumental suggested by this turn. In the wake of such a split, the article positions the non-instrumental and ontological as irreducible features of policy. The article frames the ontological dimensions of policy for policy studies as a move from the expressive to the constitutive, a move that requires reconceiving the role of rhetoric in policy studies that engage with discourse theory, particularly in its Foucauldian varieties. Adopting Laclau’s discourse theory (2001, 2005, 2014) highlights the constitutive role of rhetoric performed by tropes, such as metaphor, to policy studies. By developing the notion of ontological rhetorics in policy studies, the article is then able to provide an example of the kind of analysis that follows from ontological rhetorics. The analysis identifies the metaphor of public education is a market to show how the ‘is’ of policy mutates and persists across a forty year span of US federal education policy discourse. Following the policy analysis, the article concludes with some questions about the role of the ‘critical’ in policy studies to suggest a non-instrumental and uncertain mode of critique that develops alongside rather than in advance of policy analysis.

The ontological of policy and in policy studies

Policy studies has long concerned itself with the ontological role of policy, though as a term, ontology is only recently coming into the field. Understanding ontology as the area of inquiry that takes being and becoming as its central concepts, an ontological concern for policy analysis implies that policy has some stake in being and becoming. This may seem obvious given the instrumental role policy plays in education: policy is a means to some projected end, and as such, it is a tool to change what is. Yet, this concern for the ontological in policy studies comes in the wake of critical policy studies, which rejects policy as a technocratic instrument that operates objectively and apolitically (Young 1999; Levinson, Sutton, and Winstead 2009).

The discursive turn of policy studies also attends to the ontological role of policy. Largely informed by Foucault’s notion of discourse – the ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972, 49) – policy as discourse emphasises the ability of policy to define reality (Levinson, Sutton, and Winstead 2009), to ‘create’ the problems it identifies as existing ‘out there’ (Bacchi 2000), and even so far as to make us what we are: ‘We are the subjectivities, the voices, the knowledge, the power relations that a discourse constructs and allows’ (Ball 1993, 14, emphasis in original). In its critico-discursive mode, policy studies shows that policy is inherently political in its ability to create the objects of which it speaks. Different from previous technocratic modes of policy analysis, critical policy studies has the theoretical background to question the politics of what counts as change and how policy constructs what is capable of and in need of change. However, policy in this mode continues to be an instrument for change, and it is on this point that the ontological in policy studies makes its entrance.

At present, the attention to what is ontological about policy has largely derived from developments in anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Actor Network Theory (ANT), where the notion of ontological politics theorises multiple realities in which objects are performed and enacted ‘escap[ing] the possibilities of a singular narrative’ (Law 2002, 198). Understanding policy through ontological politics hinders a strictly instrumental narrative of policy by situating policy across multiple realities that ‘may clash at some points, [while] elsewhere the various performances of an object may collaborate and even depend on one another’ (Mol 1999, 83). Whereas previous modes of policy studies have maintained the instrumental status of policy, ontological politics theorises a far more open space for considering what makes policy what it is. Dispensing with the instrumental assumption of policy’s character, this recent interest in the ontological for policy studies is capable of asking what is policy apart from its instrumentality. But why consider policy as something other than a tool to achieve a particular set of outcomes, for better or worse, more or less nearly accomplished, be they techno-rationalist, socially just, or otherwise directed?

There has been a good deal of new insights into the relational complexity of policy as it operates through multiple actors in diverse contexts specifically through ontological politics. For instance, ontological politics offers a theoretical touchstone for Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012) when critiquing facile notions of policy implementation. Likewise, ontological politics supports the critique of teacher professional development programmes that endorse a monolithic ontology of learning (Riveros and Viczko 2015). Through the multiplicity of realities, ontological politics encourages a ‘slowing down’ of research in a policy environment that seeks near-immediate answers to extremely difficult questions (Singh, Heimans, and Glasswell 2014).

Ontological politics has also been used to describe a new direction for policy studies. Webb and Gulson seek to ‘repudiate the instrumentalism embedded in contemporary policy science’ (2015, 163) and identify critical policy studies, what they label policy scientificity 2.0, as having ‘masked the instrumentalism contained in 1.0 [technocratic policy studies] and repackaged [policy] as educational “reform” or educational “improvement” through a sense of “criticality” that insist[s] on “transformation” with its heroics and impositions’ (2015, 166). They anticipate from policy scientificity 3.0 an ‘ontological politics that has been displaced in education policy by an insistence on epistemology that strives for certainty, predictability and instrumentalism’ (2015, 171). Webb and Gulson offer a much-needed jolt to education policy studies and present an exciting horizon for different modes of analysis focusing on the ‘uncertainty and emergence’ (2015, 171) of policy. Their notion of policy scientificity 3.0 advances a step change in policy studies that may be for critical policy studies what critical policy studies was for technocratic policy studies, highlighting the non-instrumental and ontological dimensions of existing and future education policy.

Of particular interest for this article is the way that an ontological approach to policy studies can elicit the non-instrumental elements of policy. The non-instrumental within policy proceeds largely unanalysed due to the dominance of instrumental theories of policy. Yet, when policy studies attends to those features of policy that fall outside of or undermine policy as a means to an end, the ontological work of policy posits realities that do not operate instrumentally themselves, but provide the ground for instrumentality to proceed. In order to analyse existing policy as non-instrumental and ontological, the following section introduces the notion of ontological rhetorics. In keeping with the ontological thrust of recent scholarship in policy studies, ontological rhetorics locates those moments in policy that do not follow an instrumental logic but serve as the uncertain and emergent ground that subsequently allows means and ends to be arranged.

Ontological rhetorics in theory and policy

Drawing from Ernesto Laclau’s rhetorical theory of the social (2005, 2014), Tomasz Szkudlarek uses the notion of ontological rhetorics to highlight the rhetorical work that occurs in education theory outside of its stated goals and intentions (2016a, 2016b). As an example of how ontological rhetorics works, he points to the frequent use of claims in education about ‘what education is’ that in fact claim ‘what education should be’. For instance, ‘education is the great equaliser’ states what education is; yet persistent achievement gaps in education systems that serve diverse populations stand in direct opposition to such a claim. Thus, the ontological claim ‘evacuates significance from actual experience and displaces it to the domain of ideal values that must be craved’ (Szkudlarek 2019, 428). By linking what is to what should be craved, the claim about what education is does not actually tell us what education is but instead tells us what we should desire education to be. The equalising power of education can be an end toward which we can design new and better means, but prior to the deployment of instrumental logic, subjects must desire such an end. The subject’s desire emerges as an unexpressed excess that in turn constitutes the ground for the being of education. If there is no desire for education to be the great equaliser; then, education is not going to be that.

Ontological rhetorics offers insight into those excesses of systematic education theories as well (Szkudlarek 2013), that is, those elements of scientific educational theory that exceed its scientific functions of description and explanation. Educational theories in particular are ‘saturated with normative statements and are rich in rhetorical tropes’ (Szkudlarek 2016b, 10). But these excesses are not superfluous or mere ornament when viewed through ontological rhetorics. Educational theories in their tropological and normative excesses constitute the social by organizing ‘the visibility and invisibility of social phenomena’ (Szkudlarek 2016b, 10) which provide the grounds for social objectivity itself. In other words, the tropological and normative excesses of theory have the dual role of producing and maintaining those parts of the social that must be assumed and ignored in order for the social to be. Ontological rhetorics at this level becomes a matter of social ontology.

The ontological rhetorics of educational theories breaks from the drive to theorise education completely – an educational theory of everything, wherein all details of teaching, learning, etc., are mapped and able to be perfected or, perhaps less ambitiously, continually improved. Instead, ontological rhetorics operates on the basis of the ineradicable difference between the map and the territory, to continue the metaphor. The excesses of theory will always upset the totalising drive of a theory to identify the map with the land, and for this reason, ontological rhetorics offers some lessons not just for educational theory, but also education policy.

Ontological rhetorics when oriented toward education policy highlights what we might call after Szkudlarek, the excesses of policy. Discourses of education policy are traditionally projects of instrumentalism conceiving of policy as a means to educational improvement. From the warnings of A Nation at Risk (1983) that education policy must change direction to rescue an education system soon to drown in its own mediocrity to the definition of student growth in the US federal education initiative ‘Race to the Top’ that ties effective teaching to a rise in student test scores, education policy discourse persistently exhibits the instrumental desire to change education by means of policy. Yet, for all that is instrumental in and of policy, there remain excesses that see policies that have not achieved their ends. A clear example is No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) forecasted date of 2012, when all public schools in the US were going to have met or surpassed their Adequate Yearly Progress targets. With the passing of 2012, the US Department of Education (USDOE) was busy establishing waivers for states from NCLB and rolling out the new federal education grant initiative ‘Race to the Top’. Yet, when viewed instrumentally, the failure of education policy can be taken as the basis for ongoing education reform. We got it wrong when trying not to leave children behind, so let’s now have a race to the top. Same end, new means, let’s go! But from the side of ontological rhetorics, these failures are constitutive of policy: the map will never be the territory, a nation will continue to be at risk, a child will be left behind, someone is going to lose the race. As such, ontological rhetorics analyses discourses apart from their instrumentality by locating the excesses of policy discourse that do not proceed according to the logic of means and ends.

The ontological of ontological rhetorics

In theorising the excesses of policy, ontological rhetorics brings philosophy and rhetoric together by emphasising, first, the ontological, and second, the tropological. First, ontological rhetorics refers to ontological difference, a term coined by Heidegger (1982) to differentiate between beings and Being, or the ontic and the ontological, respectively. The ontic refers to particular beings, e.g. people, buildings, books, and other things. The ontological refers to the broader Being that particular beings are all a part of by virtue of their existing. In other words, at the level of the ontic, we are able to describe the specific entities as existing, being, a part of reality, etc. But this does not tell us anything about Being itself, only particular instances of it. Heidegger devises ontological difference to consider Being (ontological) without reducing it to just another particular instance of beings (ontic).

Laclau sees the potential of ontological difference in his social theory as a way to describe the roles of the ontic and the ontological in social maintenance and change. Particular instances of the social make up the ontic, e.g. education policies, teachers and students in a school, and so on. These ontic particularities of the social are capable of pointing toward the ontological dimension of the social, what Laclau calls the ‘fullness of society’ (2005; Butler, Laclau, and Slavoj 2000), and, as noted earlier, education policy is one site where this occurs precisely in terms of instrumentality. Education policy points toward a horizon of a fulfilled society as its end. Taking US education policy as the example for this article, this fullness shows up as the US being a winner in the competitive global marketplace, and uses the ontic contents of education, e.g. schools, teachers, etc., as the means to achieve that end. However, because of their particularity, ontic content ‘is always surrounded by an “excess of meaning” which it is unable to master and that, consequently, “society” as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility’ (Laclau 1991, 25). Through ontological difference, as it is used by Laclau, we can position education policy in an ontic domain with ontological aspirations. However, these ontological aspirations, like a public education system that makes the US the winner of global economic competition, remain aspirational due to the impossibility of the ontic contents of policy and education to shed their partiality and become ontologically determinate. The educational solution to national economic competitiveness projects a horizon where the nation has cemented its prime spot in the global market. Yet, because the ontological is always in excess of the ontic, such commanding heights are impossible to be obtained. In terms of policy instrumentality, it is impossible for ontic means to achieve ontological ends.

Ontological difference carves out a non-instrumental space in its split between the ontological and the ontic. The ontological side of this split interrupts the correspondence between means and ends and offers a way to think of policy in excess of its instrumentality. Thus means and ends are subject to the split of ontological difference that undermines any smooth deployment of instrumentality as an effective teleology. Designing particular education policies as a means to arrive at ends like increased test scores are an ontic attempt at representing the ontological fullness of a just society where achievement gaps are closed, but when we ask how this occurs non-instrumentally, we must turn to the second term in ontological rhetorics.

The rhetorics of ontological rhetorics

Rhetoric is traditionally conceived as the study of persuasion. However, Laclau emphasises the tropological aspects of rhetoric over and above the persuasive, a change described here as one from expression to constitution. The significance of this shift is key to ontological rhetorics and its concern for the excesses of policy apart from its instrumentality. The constitutive movements of tropology prevent the instrumental model of policy from taking root. In terms of ontological difference, the ontological describes the impossibility of the ontic’s task of representation, whereas the tropological describes what the ontic does in spite and because of this impossibility. This feature of the tropological to provoke social maintenance and change does not feature prominently in rhetorical studies that explore the many dimensions of persuasion, but because of the tropological emphasis of ontological rhetorics, there are some key historical moments that provide context to a tropological rhetoric that is constitutive more than expressive.

The classical tradition of rhetoric maintains the centrality of persuasion. As Aristotle writes in his Rhetoric, ‘the modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory’ (1995, 2:2152). Thus, the Western rhetorical tradition is largely concerned with the persuasive expressions of spoken and written language. In this tradition, tropes such as metaphor and irony, are figurative expressions in the service of or accessories to persuasion. A well-placed metaphor in the classical tradition is an embellishment that makes an argument all the more persuasive but is a mere accessory to the argument at stake.

Modern rhetoric experienced a shift in emphasis from persuasion to tropology, particularly in the work of Giambattista Vico, who argues that the rise and fall of civilisations follows a tropological sequence, what he terms a ‘poetic logic’, from their beginning in metaphor, then their passage through metonymy and synecdoche, and finally their demise in irony (1984). For Vico, tropology is at one level in the service of persuasion, but at a far more sweeping level is the ‘poetic logic’ of a new science that constitutes epochal changes. It is at this second level where tropology is decoupled from its ornamental role in persuasion, and its ontological role begins to take shape. While the work of Vico may be at some remove from contemporary policy studies, the significance of this shift from expression to constitution performed through tropology is difficult to overstate in light of the prominence of discourse in policy studies, and it is precisely through the notion of discourse that we arrive at ontological rhetorics.

The relation of discourse to rhetoric is relatively undeveloped in policy studies. According to Asen (2010), the discursive turn of policy studies has taken up rhetoric in episodic and non-systematic ways. Research from education policy studies bear Asen’s point out, see for example Anderson and Holloway (2018), when rhetoric appears as situated in discourse without consideration of what makes a rhetorical structure specifically rhetorical. Further complicating the inclusion of rhetoric in discursive approaches to policy studies is the primacy of Foucauldian discourse theory in the field. Rhetoric, for Foucault, is largely subject to the Platonic critique of the Sophists, who, on Plato’s account, held persuasion as their primary concern, whether it be by truth or other means. Continuing this criticism, Foucault opposes rhetoric to parrhesia, true or fearless speech (2001).¹ Thus, the prominence of Foucauldian discourse theory in education policy studies may convert this demotion of rhetoric as mere persuasion into an omission. However, the discourse theory developed by Ernesto Laclau, in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe, takes the relation between rhetoric and discourse as primary. Moreover, Laclau’s use of rhetoric emphasises its tropological over its persuasive dimensions, focusing on the constitutive rather than expressive role of discourse. The tropological allows policy analysis to proceed apart from the mapping and critiquing of instrumental successes and failure, instead focusing on the excesses of policy that interrupt policy’s drive for continual improvement through better alignment of means and ends.

The trope of copular metaphor

With the constitutive emphasis of ontological rhetorics, the excesses of policy are those unexpressed elements that operate tropologically rather than instrumentally. Admittedly, tropology as a term may be somewhat unusual in policy studies. Single tropes, metaphor and irony for example, have a colloquial status, but the study that brings them together, tropology, is far less common. In such a context, it may be helpful to point out the etymology of the ‘trope’ that tropology studies. ‘Trope’ derives from the Greek trepein meaning ‘to turn’. Tropology, then, studies or provides an account, a logos, of the turning of words and things. When understood in their constitutive dimensions, tropes work as an ontological turning. Tropes in their constitutive role are not deployed as a means to an end but as a movement of being and becoming, making one thing into another. The comparison between metaphor and simile underscores this difference. Simile takes one term and understands it in terms of a similarity with some other thing. For example, through the form of simile, we might say ‘education is like a race.’ The onus of the simile here is to compare education and a race through some shared aspect. But metaphor offers a different relation, one that is ontological rather than comparative. Through metaphor, education is a race, which means what holds for one holds for the other. Whereas through simile we might look for similarities, through metaphor we see what is. If education is a race, there are winners and losers, there are rules and judges capable of determining what’s fair and who wins, and there is a finish line or what contemporary US education policy calls ‘the top’.

The ontological stakes of metaphor were pointed out by Vico, who noted its appearance in the absence of understanding through the aphorism homo non intelligendo fit omnia (humans become all things by not understanding them) (1984, 116). For Vico, humans identify themselves in the unknown in order to make the unknown known specifically via metaphor. In philosophical terms, metaphor lives up to its etymology (meta-pherein: to carry or transfer over) in the sense that, upon reaching the limits of epistemology, metaphor carries humans over to ontology and metaphysics (Verene 2003). In what Vico calls the poetic logic, when humans encounter the unknown, the trope of metaphor makes the unknown become human. Here the ontological role of metaphor turns non-human objects into the human, e.g. the mouth of a river, the tooth of a saw, the bowels of the earth, etc. (1984, 116). Vico inaugurates metaphor as a trope that brings objects into being and offers a point of departure for thinking of the constitutive role of metaphor.

Within discourse, the operations of metaphor have the ontological role of constituting being in such a way that metaphor renders some arbitrary discourse as a natural part of reality. At the level of discourse, metaphor is a bidirectional, mutually constituting trope. Metaphor in a discursive register focuses on the processes whereby discourse partially fixes meaning subsequently constituting a system of meaning. Laclau and Mouffe point out that ‘all discourse of fixation becomes metaphorical’ (2001, 111) where such fixation is always partial and contingent. This fixation, Laclau argues, occurs when ‘metaphor establishes a relation of substitution between terms on the basis of the principle of analogy’ (2005, 19). Following the logic of substitution in terms of the metaphor public education is a market, market is substituted for public education in a way that analogizes one to the other. However, there remains a problem of generality in Laclau’s use of metaphor whereby he neglects the multiple modes according to which the trope operates. Arguably this oversight in Laclau’s work derives from his reliance on the role of metaphor in the work of Lacan, who borrows from Roman Jakobson’s use of metaphor to identify a particular kind of aphasia. This tradition of metaphor operates according to substitution. Grigg (2008) details a number of non-substitutive operations performed by metaphor that go uncommented in Lacan, such as appositive (silence is golden, for example) and extension (the mouth of a river) metaphors. Thus, the reliance on substitutive metaphor limits the role of metaphor, particularly as Jakobson and Lacan engage with it. By employing a Lacanian framework when theorizing the operation of metaphor in discourse, Laclau continues the singular sense of metaphor prevalent in this tradition. This is not to reject the particular use Laclau makes of metaphor, but to acknowledge that when approaching metaphor in multiple modes different analyses become possible.

With this in mind, this article proposes the copular metaphor, which expands the operations of metaphor in Laclau’s theory of discourse beyond the substitutive. The shift in emphasis is from one for the other (substitutive) to one is the other (copular). Holme describes the ‘copula metaphor [as] one constructed using the copula verb, “be” or “become”’ (Holme 2004, 59). This article changes copula to copular in order to emphasise the work such a metaphor does. Rather than focusing on the construction of the metaphor as copula suggests, copular places the stress on the constitutive activity of the metaphor. The copular metaphor is represented by the formula A is B. As the formula illustrates, the copular metaphor requires three components: the A term, the copula, and the B term. Within this formula, the A term is the tenor of the metaphor and the B term is the vehicle. So when using the copular metaphor public education is a market, public education, as the A term, is the tenor that the metaphor transfers into the domain of the market, the B term or vehicle. A substitutive theory of metaphor would claim that the vehicle substitutes for the tenor. As such, a substitutive analysis reads public education is a market in policy discourse as a metaphor wherein a market substitutes for public education. However, by isolating the operations of identification and grounding copular metaphor elicits a different, more directly ontological emphasis.

The task for the following analysis of federal education policy discourse will be to show the grounding and identification that renders public education into a market. Read as a copular metaphor rather than a copula metaphor (Holme 2004), public education is a market both identifies market discourse with public education, thus making them indistinguishable, and reaffirms this identity by grounding public education in the market. At a general level, identification works to make the vehicle and tenor the same object, and grounding sets one term as the cause of the other. In terms of the education policy discourse discussed below, we will see public education and the market identified with one another. This identification works outside of and in excess to instrumentality by shifting the terrain of means and ends, where education policy is a means to make public education into a market, to an ontological terrain, where public education already is a market and education policy begins from that premise. In addition, grounding each term as the cause of the other, copular metaphor works in excess of instrumentality. The reversal of grounding through which the market causes public education, which causes the market, confounds the linear means/ends relations of policy instrumentality. As such the following analysis will proceed by first highlighting the expression of means and ends in each policy and report. Then, the analysis will turn to the excess of that instrumentality wherein the constitutive work of copular metaphor makes public education and the market one.

Important to the following analysis though is not to lose sight of the role policy plays apart from marketisation. The work of marketization in US education policy, as well as education policy from other nations, e.g. the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, and international non-government organisations, e.g. International Monetary Fund and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has been well critiqued in education policy studies. But these critiques emanate largely from critical policy studies which retains an instrumental notion of policy. What is novel for this analysis is to show how the market and education emerge in policy non-instrumentally. The following analysis shows that there is an uncertain relation between education and the market when understood metaphorically. The market does not determine education in any straightforward manner. Instead, the analysis yields moments in policy where the market is determined by education as well, making any instrumental notion of policy as a means to the end of marketising education problematic.

More broadly, policy and ontology have and will continue to exist in non-market ways, times, and places (Bailey 2013), yet the ontological work of policy is just that, ontological, which is to say inseparable from policy. By viewing policy in its ontological dimensions, theory and analysis extends beyond the effects of policy to consider what policy is and the objects it creates as an irreducible feature of policy. The market is in this sense an historical variable, one that may even be approaching its conclusion in places like New Zealand where the Ministry of Education has recently signalled the need for education to move away from ‘unhealthy competition between schools [that] has significantly increased as a result of the self-governing school model’ (Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce 2018, 68). De-emphasising the market in education as an historical variable directs our attention to the non-instrumental features that persist in policy at an ontological level and belongs to the questions of what policy is and does even when the market is not the metaphorical partner of education.

Analysis of US education policy discourse through copular metaphor

The proceeding analysis focuses on a series of federal-level policies in the United States. This elicits a persistence across and an indirect communication between policies that further entrenches the metaphor of public education is a market. By limiting the scope of analysis to the following policies, the analysis shows how policies disseminated at a specific governmental level with very different administrative agendas build a metaphor by referring back to previous policies and introducing new areas that exist according to that metaphor. This movement of the metaphor across the selected policies shows how public education is a market becomes a gradual reality at national, state, school, and personnel levels non-instrumentally and amongst sympathetic and contrary political positions alike.

A nation at risk

Convened in 1981 at the behest of President Reagan by the Secretary of Education, Terrel H. Bell, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released the report A Nation at Risk (ANR) in 1983. The report is a response to ‘“the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system”’ (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983, 1), which it later famously describes as a ‘rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people’ (1983, 5). Reading ANR in instrumental terms, the report offers a series of recommendations as means to achieve ‘the best effort and performance from all students’ regardless of ability or background (1983, 24). These recommendations are presented in terms familiar to the school: curricular, teaching, and leadership reform, raised standards and expectations, and improved use of time at school.

But when reading ANR apart from its instrumentality, the excesses of ANR offer a picture of an education system comprised of competitive individuals in a free market. Throughout ANR we find warnings of ‘being overtaken by competitors throughout the world’ (1983, 5) alongside descriptions of US competition for ‘international standing and markets’ (1983, 6), ‘in a world of ever-accelerating competition’ (1983, 13) where ‘one great American industry after another falls to world competition’ (1983, 18). The risk of losing this competition falls on the ‘individuals in [US] society who do not possess the levels of skill, literacy, and training essential to this new era’ (1983, 7). ANR views US society as a collection of individuals who ‘are entitled to a fair chance to the tools for developing their individual powers of mind and spirit’ (1983, 8). This motif of the individual as the atom of society comes into full relief when ANR describes excellence in education:

We [the authors] define “excellence” to mean several related things. At the level of the individual learner, it means performing on the boundary of individual ability in ways that test and push back personal limits, in school and in the workplace. Excellence characterizes a school or college that sets high expectations and goals for all learners, then tries in every way possible to help students reach them. Excellence characterizes a society that has adopted these policies, for it will then be prepared through the education and skill of its people to respond to the challenges of a rapidly changing world. (1983, 12, emphasis in original).

The individual in ANR serves as the bridge between schools and competition. First, the individual is made into a learner who is initially in competition with themselves, testing and pushing back on their own limits. Schools push individuals further, and then society, through policy, enables individuals to respond to a ‘world of ever-accelerating competition’ (1983, 13). Policy, in excess of its instrumentality, is explicitly social ontology for ANR. Society is an aggregate of competitive individuals who comprise schools’ reason to be (ground) and make up its constitutive parts (identity).

While instrumentally ANR could be read as placing schools as a means to the end of this risk-narrative, in order to do so we must first accept that public education is able to do this, and here is where copular metaphor does its work. By identifying public education with and grounding it in a competition that the US risks losing to its international competitors, copular metaphor sets up an atomistic ontology of the school-market. The school-market’s most basic unit, the individual, is construed as a learner in competition with themselves, and schools externalise that competition by setting high expectations thus preparing the competitive individual for their place in a competitive society of high expectations. ANR identifies schools as a preparatory market and grounds them in a market-based logic of individual competition.

While the instrumental recommendations of ANR focus on schools in its own terms of curriculum, teaching, and so on, in excess of that instrumentality we find a public education defined in market-based terms of the individual and competition. The metaphor public education is a market appears as an excess of ANR in its projected society of competitive individuals, which serve to both identify public schools with the market as well as ground public schools in the market. In other words, prior to rendering schools as instruments of the market, ANR grounds public education within and identifies it with a pre-existing market society. Through copular metaphor, the being of the market is the being of public education. Subsequently, if public education is a market; then, a host of instrumental measures can be applied to improve what schools do which will act as a proxy to improve the nation’s international standing.

America 2000

President George H. Bush convened the state governors of the US for the Education Summit Conference (ESC) in 1989. From this meeting, the ESC issued a call for national goals for education. The goals were to ‘guarantee that we [the US] are internationally competitive’ in several areas, such as ‘the performance of students on international achievement tests, especially in math and science’ and ‘the level of training necessary to guarantee a competitive workforce.’ (Bush 1989). In April of 1991, Bush announced America 2000 (A2K), a policy that adopted the goals recommended by the ESC and acknowledged the lack of progress since ANR: ‘eight years after the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared us a “Nation at Risk,” we haven’t turned things around in education’ (Bush 1989, 15). Instrumentally, A2K was a means to the end of ‘transforming “A Nation at Risk” into “A Nation of Students”’ (Bush 1989, 35) through a series of strategies and goals.

A2K lays out a sequence of four strategies to realise six goals that were to collectively address the skills and knowledge gap in the US. The glossary in A2K clarifies the gap as one between a lack of knowledge and skills and ‘the world as it is today’ (Bush 1989, 38). The goals and strategies embody policy instrumentality relatively straightforwardly. For instance, the first strategy of A2K is ‘through a 15-point accountability package, parents, teachers, schools, and communities will be encouraged to measure results, compare results, and insist on change when the results aren’t good enough’ (Bush 1989, 21). A2K attaches this strategy to all six goals, one of which is for ‘the high school graduation rate [to] increase to at least 90 percent’ (Bush 1989, 19). The accountability package serves as a means to the end of increasing the high school graduation rate. Yet, in excess of its instrumentality, there exists ‘the world as it is today,’ a world where ‘we haven’t turned things around in education’ since ANR and an ontological ground from which A2K can deploy its strategies and goals.

A2K describes the world of its day as one where the US, suffering from the knowledge and skills gap ‘is idling its engines, not knowing enough, nor being able to do enough to make America all that it should be’ (Bush 1989, 15). Echoing the concerns of ANR, ‘American students are near the back of the pack in international comparisons’ (Bush 1989, 15). And extending the scope of policy, A2K points to the adult workforce in need of training, something schools could be a means to achieve, yet:

while the age of technology, information and communications rewards those nations whose people learn new skills to stay ahead, we are still a nation that groans at the prospect of going back to school. At best, we are reluctant students in a world that rewards learning (Bush 1989, 16).

The world, for A2K, stands in contrast to education as it occurs in the US. In a world that rewards learning, the US is comprised of reluctant students. In such a world, it makes sense for A2K to announce that ‘education is the key to America’s international competitiveness’ (Bush 1989, 59). At least since ANR, education has failed to close the gap between the world ‘as it is’ and students’ knowledge and skills. By transforming the US into a Nation of Students, education becomes the panacea to international economic woes and, in a strange reversal, A2K introduces a series of market-based reforms to education.

A2K introduces a number of education reforms that eventually become the centrepieces of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. For example, A2K establishes a 15-point accountability system that includes report cards for schools that ‘provide clear (and comparable) public information on how schools, school districts and states are doing, as well as the entire nation’ (Bush 1989, 22). Additionally, A2K makes provisions for school choice ‘to ensure that federal dollars follow the child,’ (U.S. Department of Education 1991, 22) and encourages ‘differential pay for teachers’ (Bush 1989, 23) based on what and where they teach, as well as how well they teach, this latter criterion serving as the basis for merit pay. In excess of its instrumental strategies and goals, A2K grounds the international market success of the US in education – education is the key – while using market-based reforms to change education. This reversal confounds any instrumental approach by first articulating education as the means to the end of succeeding in international competition, then reforming education in accordance with the market. An arrangement by which means both achieve ends and are changed according to those ends disrupts any smooth deployment of instrumentality. When considered through the work of copular metaphor, however, this circularity reveals A2K’s ontological ground: public education is a market.

It makes little instrumental sense to hold simultaneously that education is the means to success in a competitive international market and that market-based reforms are the means to improving education. This leaves us with a vicious circle where education is the market is education, ad infinitum, undermining the means-end trajectory that policy instrumentality relies upon. Yet, this is precisely what copular metaphor enacts. By grounding international competition in public education, A2K makes an ontological claim that identifies what education is – the key to international competition – with market-based reform – accountability, school choice, merit pay – effectively eliminating the gap between the world as it is and US students’ knowledge and skills. A2K’s logical steps of strategies that will achieve goals cedes to a tropological leap of transformation where education and the market become indistinguishable as a Nation of Students.

Goals 2000

In February of 1994, Congress passed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act (G2K), and President Clinton signed it into law the following month. While governor of Arkansas, Clinton co-hosted the ESC with Bush, and his G2K plan did not stray far from what the ESC had established and what Bush attempted to implement with A2K. This act was comprised of the same six goals of Bush’s A2K proposal with the addition of two more goals for teachers’ continuing education and the increase of parental involvement.

While G2K includes the goals of A2K nearly verbatim, the policy appends objectives to each goal, offering finer detail to the broad goals in their initial form. For instance, G2K copies the language of A2K on school completion cited above, writing ‘by the year 2000, the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90%’ (1994, sec. 102). The objectives attached to this goal offer the following detail:

(i) the Nation must dramatically reduce its school dropout rate, and 75 percent of the students who do drop out will successfully complete a high school degree or its equivalent; and (ii) the gap in high school graduation rates between American students from minority backgrounds and their non-minority counterparts will be eliminated (1994, sec. 102).

Reading G2K instrumentally, the transition from the goals of A2K to the goals and objectives of G2K promotes an intensification of instrumentality whereby objectives become new means to a goal. A 90% graduation rate will come through dropout reduction and eliminating the gap in graduation rates between minority and non-minority students. The objectives of G2K introduce new areas, dropout rates and minority/non-minority graduation gaps, which it cascades as objectives to the larger goal. In other words, reducing dropout rates and closing the graduation gap becomes means to the goal of a 90% high school graduation rate. Simultaneously, these objectives serve as new ends for schools to achieve, intensifying the means-ends relations established in the policy.

When read in excess of its instrumentality, G2K continues the ontological work of identifying education and the free market with one another as a ground for reform of the other. The copular metaphor of public education is a market operates throughout the policy in its focus on forming an array of national standards. G2K establishes national content standards alongside student performance standards that will be ‘internationally competitive and comparable to the best in the world’ (1994, sec. 213, 2, B, i). Additionally, G2K institutes national academic and occupational skill standards ‘that will serve as a cornerstone of the national strategy to enhance workforce skills [and] that will result in increased productivity, economic growth, and American economic competitiveness’ (1994, sec. 502, 1–2). Taken together, public education, like any other free market, must focus on the competitiveness of their standards in order to be among the best in the world, and the American labour market, like any other institution of public education, must improve the knowledge and skills of the workforce in order to make America economically competitive.

Once again confounding the instrumental relation of means to ends, G2K grounds public education in the free market and the free market in education and identifies each with the other. Public education must proceed from internationally competitive standards in order to be the among best education systems in the world. The workforce market must proceed from the enhancement of knowledge and skills that takes place in public education to ensure American economic competitiveness. Through this metaphor and echoing A2K, G2K envisions ‘‘the development of a ‘Nation of Students’ capable of and committed to the pursuit of formal and informal lifelong learning and literacy [which] is essential to sustain both national and individual economic success and to provide a nurturing environment in which all children and youth can learn and achieve” (1994, sec. 931, h, 1, D). The market and public education become one and the same when a nation of students is essential to the economic success of the US and to the provision of spaces where children can learn and achieve. Schools and markets become indistinguishable as students cycle through lifelong learning to the economic success of the US.

No child left behind

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), was introduced by George H. W. Bush’s administration and voted into law with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. ESEA was originally a part of the Johnston administration’s ‘War on Poverty’ and focused on the remediating role of education on children in poverty. Its reauthorization as NCLB set a new focus ‘to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind’ (United States Congress 2001, vol. 20, sec. 1). The achievement gap that NCLB highlights exists ‘between high- and low-performing children …, minority and non-minority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers’ (United States Congress 2001, Sec. 1001, 3). Whereas ESEA directed federal funding to local educational agencies (LEAs) based on their student population that came from low-income families, NCLB based its funding allocation on whether LEAs were able to incrementally narrow and eventually close any achievement gap that existed amongst their student population.

Setting the closure of the achievement gap as its end, NCLB established an accountability system instrumental to closing the gap. Briefly, the NCLB accountability systems were comprised of a sequence of sanctions that individual schools would undergo should they not meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a measure comprised of an array of student data including demographics, attendance, and State standardised test scores. Under NCLB, each school must show they are progressing toward the closure of the achievement gap for each disaggregated data set. If a school did not meet this goal on an annual basis, the sanctioning process was triggered for that school until they were able to meet AYP. The initial sanction offered school choice for students to leave their current school and move to a school that was currently meeting its AYP target. If a school was unable to meet AYP for six consecutive years, the final sanction would implement alternative governance, which included reopening the school as a charter school, replacing the school’s staff, and/or entering a contract with a private management company.

Instrumentally, NCLB established an accountability system as the means to both close the achievement gap and rid States of the schools and staff that did not adequately contribute to its closure. The end toward which NCLB directs accountability is a public education system where students are able to achieve acceptable test scores irrespective of background. But in excess of this instrumentality is an intensification of the copular metaphor public education is a market where the ontological rhetorics of policy blur the lines between the figurative and the literal.

Market logic sets economic entities in competition with one another to produce winners and losers, where winners are awarded a larger share of a market and losers a smaller share. Should an economic entity’s share continue to shrink, it will eventually lose its ability to participate in the market. Perhaps ironically, the explicit emphasis on public education as the key to creating successful workers in a globally competitive marketplace found in the policy discourses up to this point is largely absent from NCLB. Yet, NCLB reorganises the entirety of public education according to market logic, thus marking a complete reworking of education in specifically market-based mechanisms. Instrumentally, NCLB is a policy that sets out to close the achievement gap, an aim at least in spirit relatively consistent with its 1965 iteration where education was an instrument to alleviate poverty. Ontologically, NCLB constitutes education not merely as an instrument to improve students’ economic standing, but specifically as a market itself, subject to the rules of market competition. NCLB established AYP as the benchmark of market viability for individual schools. Failing to meet AYP targets meant a school would lose its market share of student enrolment initially through school choice implementation and ultimately through a liquidation of the school itself, reopening as a private or charter school. Thus, the instrumental means and ends of NCLB are directed toward the closure of the achievement gap, a goal premised on notions of equity and social remediation through education. Yet, through ontological rhetorics, NCLB was able to close schools through the market logic of competition where students choose to leave a failing school for a school that offered a better AYP measure.

Race to the top

As a response to the 2008 recession, the Obama administration and US Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Part of this act appropriated US$4.35 billion to Race to the Top (RTTT), an initiative to reform US public education through a state-based competitive grant program. RTTT was implemented alongside NCLB as an alternative approach to education reform in lieu of another reauthorisation of ESEA. In the opening of The Blueprint for Reform, a USDOE report offering a blueprint for the reauthorisation of ESEA ‘modelled after’ RTTT (2010, 36), a letter from President Obama’s desk speaks of the advantages of RTTT over NCLB:

Instead of labelling failures, we will reward success. Instead of a single snapshot, we will recognize progress and growth. And instead of investing in the status quo, we must reform our schools to accelerate student achievement … My Administration’s blueprint for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is not only a plan to renovate a flawed law, but also an outline for a re-envisioned federal role in education (United States Department of Education 2010, 2).

Whereas NCLB’s status as a law required compliance from states and schools, RTTT was a competitive grant program for states to voluntarily enter into. The grant rewarded success by allocating funding to those states whose applications offered education reform plans that aligned best with the priority reform areas identified by RTTT.

RTTT defines four priority areas of reform that applicants must address in order to win funding:

1. Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;

2. Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;

3. Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and

4. Turning around our lowest-achieving schools (United States Department of Education 2009a, 2).

In the first reform area, we see a return to the theme of global economic competition heralded in ANR and echoed across A2K and G2K. Additionally, RTTT carries forward in its fourth reform area the NCLB focus on individual school achievement. However, RTTT introduces a new focus for instrumental interventions in the second and third areas, namely teachers and principals. In combination, these two goals attach teacher and principal effectiveness to student growth, which is defined according to the movement in student test scores across two or more points in time (United States Department of Education 2009b, 59,840). Growth is indicated by an upward movement in those scores, and the presence or absence of growth serves as an index of effectiveness of and for teachers and principals. By linking the effectiveness of school staff to the movement of student test scores, RTTT reduces teaching and leadership to the means by which test scores move. Moreover, should teachers and principals fail to effectively increase student achievement as represented by test scores, RTTT requires grant-winning states to implement one of the four intervention models. All of the models include firing the principal and teachers from the school with the exception of the turnaround model which stipulates that no more than 50% of existing staff can be rehired, though the principal must still be replaced (United States Department of Education 2009b, 59,866).

At the instrumental level, RTTT pushes the means/ends relation of schools and the achievement gap established by NCLB down to school staff. While the ends of both policies result in school closures, RTTT is able to isolate the problem to teachers and principals by positioning them as the means to student growth. Yet, in excess of this instrumentalization of school staff, RTTT is able to further ground and identify public education with an economic market through its four reform areas.

Within the terms of copular metaphor, RTT shortens the circuit between public education and a market such that their identification is nearly total and the grounding close to concrete. The first reform area grounds the position of the nation in a competitive global economy in the standards and assessments of public education – standards and assessments that both create and reveal student growth and teacher and principal effectiveness. To win funding, states must submit a reform plan on the principle that public education is the ground whence the nation secures its position in global economic competition. The remaining three reform areas work to identify public education and its staff with the market. The data systems that measure student growth to improve the work performed by teachers and principals assume the validity of test scores as an indicator of school staff effect. Ignoring the complexity of causal determinants of test scores, e.g. the exclusion of out-of-school factors, RTTT bases its instrumentalization of school staff as means to the end of raising test scores on the ontological assumption that this is what teaching and leadership is, or should be when effective. Moreover, when teachers and principals are not effective, the intervention models of RTTT ensure staff designated as ineffective cease to be teachers and principals when turning around the lowest-achieving schools.

Speculative conclusions: the ontological in policy studies and a new critique

The task of this analysis has been to exemplify a mode of policy studies informed by the proposed non-instrumental theory of policy, an approach concerned with the ontological work of policy in excess of its instrumentality. The above analysis shows that at least since 1983, US education policy discourse has expressed that students are not doing well enough in public education and has offered a variety of instrumental solutions in order to improve students’ education. In excess of this instrumentality, however, education policy discourse has consistently constituted education and the market as one entity by identifying and grounding public education and the market with and in one another. Ontological rhetorics points to this excess and the article proposes copular metaphor as a trope that offers insight into the non-instrumental dimensions of policy discourse.

Through ontological rhetorics, the marketization of education occurs outside of policy instrumentality. The means and ends of education policy discourse described above offer differing notions of how to improve public education in the US, often through the proxy of test scores. The identification and grounding of public education and the market occur outside of policy instrumentality, frequently assuming that public education is a market in order to then deploy instrumental logics to improve markets and public education because they are the same. By locating the marketisation of education and the ‘educationisation’ of the market outside of the instrumental dimensions of policy, valid criticisms of market-oriented instrumentalism in education policy (Biesta 2007; Higgins 2011; Olssen and Peters 2005; Williams 2008) miss the ontological dimension of policy that operates in excess of policy instrumentality. As such, policy studies when viewed through ontological rhetorics does not reiterate the longstanding narrative of its instrumental in/effectivity but emphasises instead policy’s politically inflected creativity.

Recalling the opening of this article, theory as theōria involves a kind of speculation or seeing anew. The growing ontological focus on policy opens opportunities to speculate on a new mode of critique, particularly in the question of what non-instrumental critique is and does. Because the ontological dimension discussed here operates tropologically rather than instrumentally, how does critique occur at the ontological level? What is critique when directed to the ontological? Does the critical require some instrumental reason such as closing achievement gaps, mitigating oppression, increasing freedom, or can it proceed for other, specifically non-instrumental reasons? These questions point toward a theory of critique that potentially renews the work of ‘uncertainty and emergence’ (Taylor and Gulson 2015, 171) for policy studies, where the contours, colours, and contexts of policy discourses become available only as the critique develops: a non-instrumental critique that develops alongside its object rather than in advance of it. In other words, when attending to the ontological rhetorics of policy, critique itself becomes an ontic practice that takes up particular policies to discern those policies’ ontological horizons. In this vein, critique is not a means to the end of ontological horizons – horizons, after all, are endless – but a performance of new realities. Depending on the selected policies and the kinds of tropes and tropological relations employed by the critique, very different realities will emerge.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Prof. Tomasz Szkudlarek for the invaluable (and frequent) discussions and comments that contributed to the development of this paper. I would also like to thank Prof. Margaret Walshaw for her supportive feedback on a previous draft. Finally, I would like to thank the blind reviewers of Journal of Education Policy for their thoughtful feedback and guidance. Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Centre (NCN) in Krakόw, Poland (Grant Number 2014/15/B/HS6/03580).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki [2014/15/B/HS6/03580];

Notes on contributors

F. Tony Carusi

F. Tony Carusi is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Education at Massey University. His research interests include philosophy and critical theories of education and post-structural discourse theory, which he employs in the analysis of education policies and theorizing education in its social, geographical, and historical contexts. His recent work explores new modes of thinking about education apart from its instrumentality.

Notes

1. While Foucault does say that ‘parrhesia is zero degree of … rhetorical figures’ (2001, 21), he does not follow this comment to complicate or recuperate rhetoric in its relation to discourse. As such, rhetoric for Foucault retains its primarily ornamental and Sophistic status. For more on the disparagement of rhetoric in Foucault, see McKerrow (2011).