Neoliberal governmentality epistemology seeks to take peoples freedoms away and warp them until they align with the governments – this only serves to reinforce top-down power structures

Since ‘much of the action of government is language’ (Fairclough, as cited in Ball 2007, 2), the official rhetoric is not just an illustration of policy; it is also a vehicle through which social reality is constructed and maintained. In its classic meaning, the goal of rhetoric is to persuade listeners to accept speakers’ propositions as truths. From a poststructuralist perspective, the truths conveyed through rhetoric are part of the episteme that shapes people’s ideas about themselves and their life. In the Department of Education speeches, accountability operates in these two dimensions: it is used to describe, justify, and promote federal policies in education and it invokes new managerialism, naturalizes self-entrepreneurship of learning and living, and aligns the individual’s exercise of freedom and responsibility with larger political and economic concerns at the federal and state level. A product of neoliberal political rationality, new managerialism conjures up education as an economic issue to be solved through management. In the analyzed speeches, the dominance of that approach is evident in the proliferation of business vocabulary and the emphasis on performance measurement and market forms of accountability. While the sample in this study consisted of discourses from the past G.W. Bush Administration, there is little evidence that the Department of Education will eschew new managerialist approaches under President Barak Obama, despite the new rhetoric about the ‘Barack effect’ and ‘the soft power’ that surrounds ‘the symbolism of an African American president who has made education cool and exciting and infinitely promising’ (US Department of Education 2009, para. 8). As his proposals for reforming the system of student loans attest, some of President Obama’s promises for education are indeed decidedly different from the policies of his predecessor. No immediate reform plans, however, can occur outside of the nation’s neoliberal economic setting or the dominant (new managerialist) paradigm. For more than a decade, that paradigm has proven to be resilient, hybridizing with other conceptualizations of education to produce bi-lingual school principals who are versed in the rhetorics of business and pedagogy (Gewirtz, Ball, and Bowe 1995, 96–109) and tri-lingual academics who, in addition, to the languages of business and teaching, speak the vernacular of their discipline (Deem and Brehony 2005, 227).