Setting Aside Settings: On the Contradictory Dynamics of “Flat Earth,” “Ordinalization,” and “Cold Spot” Education Governing Projects

Place matters, and for schools located in the neighborhoods of towns and cities, place not only holds meaning for individuals, but shapes their experiences of school and education trajectories. This is not simply a question of meaning and identity. Rather, it is that education settings and their opportunity structures shape and are shaped by structural inequalities, in turn reproducing differences. In this paper, I make the case that the state plays an important role in producing inequality by the ways in which it governs, and that contemporary forms of governing on the global level exacerbate these differences whilst erasing the differences that matter. I explore these dynamics by focusing on socio-economic differences between schools in England, UK. I argue that a particular politics of state spatial power is at play, and that the national state and shadow sovereigns manage questions of authority and legitimacy through the use of ideologies (e.g., school effectiveness, social mobility), devices (such as rankings and league tables), and explanations of cause (such as aspiration gaps), with which one can re-express the problem of difference, not as structurally caused, but as a failure of individual effort, expectations, and aspirations.