Professor Michael W Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A former primary and secondary school teacher a past-president of a teachers union, he has worked with educators, unions, dissident groups, and governments throughout the world to democratize educational research, policy, and practice. Among his many books are Ideologyand Curriculum, Education and Power, Teachers and Texts,and Official Knowledge Power, Meaning and Identity. Not only has Professor Apple been selected as one of the most influential writers on education in the 20th century, but his book Ideology and Curriculum has been chosen as one of the 20 most important volumes in the history of western education.

• 1. Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality.  Introduction.  Joseph's Story.  Conservative Agendas.  Mapping the Right.  Contested Freedom.  Marketizing the World.  Restoring.  Cultural Order.  Church and State.  Economics and religion.  Managerialism.  Analyzing Conservative Modernization.  2. Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge?  Introduction.  Neoliberalism: Schooling, Choice, and Democracy.  Neoconservatism: Teaching "Real Knowledge".  Authoritarian Populism: Schooling as God Wanted It.  The Professional and Managerial New Middle Class: More Testing, More Often  3. Producing Inequalities: Conservative Modernization in Policy and Practice.  Gritty Materialities.  Right Turn.  New Markets, Old Traditions.  Markets and Performance.  National Standards, National Curriculum, and National Testing.  Creating Educational Triage.  Thinking Strategically.  4. Who "No Child Left Behind" Leaves Behind: Class and Race in Audit Cultures.  Introduction: What No Child Left Behind Has Given Us.  Accountability and Inequality.  Changing Commonsense and the Growth of Audit Cultures.  New Managerialism in Class Terms.  The Dispossessed and Support for Audit Cultures and Markets.  On Possibilities.  Workable Alternatives.  Being Honest About Educational Reform.  5. Endangered Christianity.  Darwin, God, and Evil.  Secular Dangers.  From Insiders to Outsiders.  Southern Cross.  6. God, Morality, and Markets.  Bringing God to the World.  Politics and the Clergy.  The Electronic Clergy.  A Christian Nation and Free Speech.  Godless Schools.  We Are Not Doing Anything Different.  The Structures of Feeling of Authoritarian Populism.  How Can Hate Seem So Nice.  Turning Straw Into Gold.  7. Away with all Teachers: The Cultural Politics of Home Schooling.  Situating Home Schooling.  Satan's Threat and the Fortress Home.  Attacking the State.  Public and Private.  Conclusion.  8. Inside Home Schooling: Gender, Technology, and Curriculum.  Introduction.  Resources and the Realities of Social Movements.  Technology and the Growth of Home Schooling.  Understanding Social Movements.  Technology and Doing Home Schooling.  Home Schooling as Gendered Labor.  Solving Contradictions.  Marketing God.  Emotional Labor and the Daily Life of Curriculum and Teaching in the Home.  Conclusion: Children and Living the "Right" Life.  9. Righting Wrongs and Interrupting the Right.  Culture CountsContradictory Reforms.  "Racing" Toward Educational Reform.  Making Challenges Public.  Thinking Heretically.  Can Alliances be Built Across the Religious and Secular Divide?.  Making Critical Educational Practices Practical.  Hope as a Resource

"If there is a book that marks the beginning of a new century, with its agonies of defeat and its utopian promises, this is the book." -- Carlos Alberto Torres, author of Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism"No student of education can afford not to hear the story that Apple so ably tells." -- Jeannie Oakes, co-author of Because of the Kids: Facing Racial and Cultural Differences in Schools"In this book, Apple offers yet another closer look at the conservative trends that are having an impact on teachers, schools, and communities and offers powerful alternatives that provide both hope and purpose for those who feel the burden of the many issues that he critically examines...This book is extremely valuable...Apple provides an eye-opening critique of the ways the new Right has successfully created alliances and has become increasingly influential in our public institutions. With the knowledge gained in this book. educators can be well informed and empowered to become agents of change."--Teachers College Record, May 07, 2007