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In this regard, schools train students to coordinate individual action with the needs of the political economy, in both explicit and implicit ways. The New Deal and post-World War II political economy, in which the state functioned as the motor of social movement, was the most powerful agent of discipline in what Foucault termed the factory-society. But other forms of discipline beyond the state were also necessary, allowing for the rise of a strengthened civil society. Consistent with the above analysis, the SAT, which operated as one of many civil society mediations, developed as a functioning disciplinarian apparatus that assisted the erection of a factory-society-a society planned in accordance with the criteria of capitalist production. For example, the SAT was explicitly situated to support the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), an urgent Cold War response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik. The NDEA further empowered civil society by authorizing federal funding of K-12 programs in math and the sciences, further expanding an already existing military-industrial-university complex; the SAT identified "able" math and science students to project American technological innovation. Ironically, the U.S. relied on centralized planning and funding, and the systematic ordering of the society partly provided by the SAT, to ensure that "capitalist" production outpaced Soviet communist production. On a more implicit level, the SAT also helped, as we have seen, to formulate the American identity.³⁴

The dialectic of civil society, with its opposed forces highlighted by Gramsci and Foucault, provides a helpful paradigm for understanding the liberating and constraining components of standardized testing. However, if Michael Hardt is correct and civil society is currently "withering" (and there is a great deal of evidence to support his claim), an analysis of standardized testing must undergo a paradigmatic shift.

Hardt, building on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze, argues that civil society-factory, family, church, and school-is everywhere in crisis, shown also in the breakdown of labor unions and, pertinent to this study, education finance. On a more concrete and less theoretical level, and also on a national rather than a global level, Putnam details the breakdown of civil society (and decrease of social capital) on a number of different fronts. He attributes this breakdown, at least in part, to the multinational takeover of locally owned businesses across America (Wal-Martization). Consistent with the argument that the withering of civil society is an aspect of neoliberalism, Putnam provides evidence that as the welfare state is dismantled, social capital decreases. There is evidence that social capital, as a civic network, improves SAT student performance (and school success in general) due to increased parental involvement inherent within such a network. Higher parental involvement, and thus social capital, as a sub-stratum of civil society, refines student discipline, consistent with Foucault's theory of a disciplinarian civil society. But as school funding in America has undergone a steady decline for more than twenty years, and institutionalized social capital such as the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) incurs huge membership decline, students are more apathetic and less disciplined civic participants.³⁵

How will the multitudes of young Americans be controlled without the discipline of civil society and social capital? It is too early to know the answer to this question, but it is not too early to determine that there are both liberating and constraining possibilities. A weakened civil society, dialectically similar to a strong civil society, has both emancipating and limiting elements. According to the Gramsci model, a withering civil society stifles democratic scope, but according to the Foucault model, a weakened civil society might also weaken the state and civil apparatus of discipline, a possibly good result for those interested in freedom of activity beyond the compulsions of capitalism. This is not to argue that face-to-face civic interaction is undemocratic nor undesirable, but rather to reject Putnam and others who romanticize a bygone civil society that, in effect, entrenched capitalism and its oppressive inequalities. But whatever the drawbacks of the old civil society, it is difficult to see any liberating prospects due to the fog of neoliberal policy and its immediate effects.³⁶

Neoliberalism and the Standardized Testing Craze

The onslaught of neoliberalism-more aptly described as capitalism with its gloves off-presupposed and ensured the tensions of a crumbling civil society. Neoliberal ideology-vaunted by the Reagan-Thatcher regimes as overcoming the stagflation of the 1970s-maintains its throne as the dominant orthodoxy spearheading the globalization of capitalism. Neoliberalism, averse to economic fetters, seeks a sleek and seamless global climate that ensures investor hegemony. This in turn necessitated a stripped-down civil society, in place of the one previously fortified by the hegemony of Keynesian economic principles, including regulated capitalism. Civil society shackles global capitalism, and can only get in the way of increased centralized (corporate) profits.

Beginning with Reagan, corporate America was able to unload a large percentage of its tax burden, and thus schools that relied on corporate taxes received less funding. Media expert Robert McChesney's description of neoliberalism brings out its effects on civil society, which he theorizes as a vibrant, community-based political culture that includes public education: "Neoliberal democracy, with its notion of the market über alles, takes dead aim at this sector. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless."³⁷

Beyond these culturally degrading results, some of the immediate economic effects of neoliberalism have proven near catastrophic for the multitudes, on both a global and a domestic level. Despite claims that globalization is catapulting the developing world into the developed world, clearly the opposite is true: the United States and other developed countries are undergoing a process of third-worldization, characterized by enormous polarities of wealth. Young people typically bear the brunt of the resulting increase in poverty. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, two out of every five children in the United States run the risk of living in poor or low-income ("near poor") families.³⁸

The distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is on display in America's schools. Schools in economically advantaged neighborhoods receive proper funding, due to higher property tax bases and, when necessary, parental supplementation. A public civil society has been replaced by a privately funded infrastructure in many wealthy neighborhoods. Schools in economically disadvan- taged neighborhoods are consistently neglected as they are unable to compensate for less overall funding on the national, state, and local levels, and the lack of a viable civil infrastructure. These developments are consistent with the changing role of government in the era of globalized capitalism. According to sociologist Saskia Sassen, the ascendance of government agencies linked to furthering globalization is coupled with the decline of those linked to domestic equity (civil society). Recent education reform efforts are, perhaps more so than in the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board, antagonistic toward the egalitarian dimensions fundamental to public education. These reform efforts fail to address redistributive properties. Rather, most educational reform in the past decade has conformed to the needs and values of globalized capitalism. This includes the implementation of more standardized testing.³⁹

Although neoliberalism is grounded in some earlier, pre-Keynesian liberal frameworks of the appropriate role of the state, neoliberalism is fundamentally different: while classical liberalism (of the Smith and Mills variants) represents a negative conception of state power in that the individual is theoretically free from state intervention, neoliberalism designates a positive conception of the state's role. The neoliberal state creates the appropriate market conditions by providing the necessary institutional apparatuses, including a revamped, increasingly interventionist system of standardized testing. The previous wave of standardized testing reform and the rise of the SAT occurred within the prism of a disciplinarian civil society. Students, in order to succeed in the meritocracy, synchronized their knowledge to the knowledge of the SAT. This was the rule of American discipline. But, with the onset of neoliberalism and the gradual disappearance of civil society, the question arises: will people be disconnected from power and thus have room for movement outside the previously defined norms of American discipline? According to Hardt, power fills a vacuum, as though by osmosis. In this regard, capitalism, like a virus, continually reacts and adjusts to the new contexts it creates. National standardized testing fills the void left by fewer and fewer funds being allocated to schools. This is different from the discipline of the SAT because the new national standardized tests are a more rigorous form of centralized control.⁴⁰

The current standardized testing reform movement, which began in approximately 1985, is, "because of its scope"¾according to education researchers Mary Futrell and Walter Brown¾ "probably one of the most comprehensive reform efforts in the history of American education." Its goal is that all students in America will take high-stakes standardized tests. Attaining this goal is becoming more and more realizable as it is included in the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind framework for education reform, which was passed into law in 2001. The new law requires all states to develop standards in reading and math, with assessments linked to those standards. Now all students, beginning at the pre-kindergarten level, are subjected to an intense battery of tests. In at least twenty-nine states, these assessments are considered "high-stakes"-tests that bind results to educational and societal opportunity¾as district funding is allocated according to test results. Schools that fail to improve test scores lose already meager funds, and many failing schools fall victim to privatization and deregulation by way of charter schools. In many states, including Texas, a student must pass a standardized test to graduate from high school.⁴¹

Standardized testing is consistent with the market-oriented priorities of post-civil society, which requires that the multitudes think and behave within the narrow confines of neoliberal mandates. The new standardized testing is comparable to the external apparatus of global finance, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). National and local sovereignty are rendered meaningless by the IMF, which through financial hegemony is able to lock each country or locality into a set of rules and regulations that serves global investor capitalism. Under these conditions, the only sovereignty is that of capital itself. According to education theorist Michael Apple, based on his analysis of national testing reform in Great Britain, "the imposition of national testing locks the national curriculum in place as the dominant framework of teachers' work." The external instruments of power limit those on the periphery, teachers included, who might be struggling for democratic change. Standardized testing, much like the IMF, limits the effects of democracy, internal control, and dissent, and, most importantly in the realm of education trends and reforms, standardized testing negates multiculturalism.⁴²

Neoliberalism has sped up capitalism, which has thus sped up change, or, in the famous words of Karl Marx concerning the transforming nature of capitalism, "all that is solid melts into air." Neoliberal society is a socially unstable society, and this, coupled with the surge in immigration from the Global South that resulted from the Immigration Act of 1965, has created both real and imaginary chaos in America, resulting in an escalation of conservative and reactionary sentiment. Apple writes: "It should come as no surprise that in times of insecurity and fragmentation, there is a concomitant rise in longings for cultural and social stability and an increased emphasis on the authority of basic institutions." The new standardized testing transcends curriculum and is thus able to steer curriculum away from multiculturalism, conceived as a chaotic, un-American, moral relativist program of barbarism. This is a fear of the other, embodied in the work of Reagan's Secretary of Education (and avid gambler) William Bennett: "We have stopped doing the right things and allowed an assault on intellectual and moral standards. We need a renewed commitment to excellence, character, and fundamentals."⁴³

Multiculturalism was a necessary and long-in-coming counter to the Black-White binary and other American racial conceptions, including the ambiguities of White identity and national identity. According to African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, "multiculturalism is a conversation among different voices." Multiculturalism is a fluid and ongoing process that changes constantly, as does the necessarily revisionist scholarship that is integral to it. According to educator Bill Bigelow, multicultural curriculum "describes and attempts to explain the world as it really exists"; multiculturalism represents a diverse society and develops critical concerns. The axiomatic logic of capitalism, expressed in standardized testing, undermines multiculturalism and the critical concerns that necessarily arise within a multicultural framework. National standardized testing is a reassertion of national, and thus White, unity. It is no coincidence that, in America, the rise of all-encompassing standardized testing initiatives directly followed an increase in cultural democracy. Cultural democracy (multiculturalism) is a threat to the standard American identity of Whiteness, richness, and maleness. Standardized testing combats this "threat" by enshrining official knowledge in opposition to multicultural knowledge.⁴⁴

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