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Devising inequality: a Bernsteinian
analysis of highstakes testing and
social reproduction in education
Wayne W. Au
a
a
Department of Secondary Education, College of Education,
California State University Fullerton, Fullerton, California, USA
Available online: 10 Nov 2008
To cite this article: Wayne W. Au (2008): Devising inequality: a Bernsteinian analysis of highstakes
testing and social reproduction in education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29:6,
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British Journal of Sociology of Education
Vol. 29, No. 6, November 2008, 639651
ISSN 0142-5692 print/ISSN 1465-3346 online
2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01425690802423312
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Devising inequality: a Bernsteinian analysis of high-stakes testing and
social reproduction in education
Wayne W. Au*
Department of Secondary Education, College of Education, California State University Fullerton,
Fullerton, California, USA
Taylor and Francis Ltd CBSE_A_342499.sgm
(Received 23 October 2007; final version received 29 November 2007)
10.1080/01425690802423312 British Journal of Sociology of Education 0142-5692 (print)/1465-3346 (online) Original Article 2008 Taylor & Francis 29 6000000November 2008 Dr WayneAu wau@fullerton.edu
High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and
regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with
particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research
on high-stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse in the
United States, the present paper applies Bernsteins concept of the pedagogic device to
explain how high-stakes tests operate as a relay in the reproduction of dominant social
relations in education. This analysis finds that high-stakes tests, through the structuring
of knowledge, actively select and regulate student identities, and thus contribute to the
selection and regulation of students educational success.
Keywords: high-stakes testing; social reproduction; pedagogic device; sociology of
knowledge
Introduction
The pedagogic device acts as a symbolic regulator of consciousness; the question is, whose
regulator; what consciousness and for whom? It is a condition for the production, reproduction
and transformation of culture. (Bernstein 1996, 53)
High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and
regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with
particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Researchers have found
these assessments to reproduce race-based and economic class-based inequalities that
generally correlate with those present in society at large. However, while this research base
has made powerful and compelling arguments about the relationship between high-stakes
testing and educational inequality, a detailed analysis of how these tests function to
reproduce inequality has yet to be done. Drawing on research on high-stakes testing and its
effect on classroom curriculum and pedagogic discourse in the United States, the present
paper applies Bernsteins concept of the pedagogic device to address this gap in the research
by explaining how high-stakes tests operate as a relay in the reproduction of dominant social
relations.
The central argument of this paper is that there is a relationship between two phenomena:
test-induced changes in classroom practices and the reproduction of race-based and class-
based inequalities in education. To explain the relationship, I apply theoretical work in the
*Email: wau@fullerton.edu
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640 W.W. Au
sociology of knowledge, particularly that of the concept of the pedagogic device (Bernstein
1990, 1996; Bernstein and Solomon 1999). This concept provides a coherent analytical
framework for understanding how high-stakes, standardized testing reproduces inequality in
schools through the selective regulation and distribution of different forms of knowledge,
and therefore through the selective regulation and distribution of different forms of identity
and consciousness. Finally, I conclude my analysis with a discussion of the relationship
between the pedagogic device and the relative autonomy of education inherent in
Bernsteins conception.
High-stakes testing, educational inequality, and classroom control
High-stakes tests are assessments that exist as a part of a policy design (Schneider and
Ingram 1997) that connects standardized test scores to student grade level promotion and
graduation, and sometimes to teacher and principal salaries, job security, and increased
public scrutiny (McNeil 2000; Orfield and Wald 2000). Test score disparities in the United
States are readily apparent. For instance, scores on the 2005 National Assessment of Educa-
tional Progress test show White students outscoring African American and Latino students
by 26 points in scaled reading scores, by 20 points in fourth-grade mathematics scores, by
23 points in eighth-grade reading scores, and by more than 26 points in eighth-grade reading
scores with these disparities persisting over time (Ladson-Billings 2006). Compounding
these disparities is evidence that increased used of high-stakes tests correlates with
increased high school dropout rates (Amrein and Berliner 2002), including that African
American and Latino students are twice as likely as White students to drop out of school,
and that students from low-income families are five times more likely to drop out than
students from high-income families (Laird et al. 2006). Thus, comparable with the findings
of researchers in the United Kingdom (see, for example, Gillborn and Youdell 2000),
researchers in the United States consistently find that high-stakes, standardized tests have a
disproportionately negative effect on low-income and non-white students generally (see, for
example, Madaus and Clarke 2001; McNeil 2005; McNeil and Valenzuela 2001; Nichols,
Glass, and Berliner 2005).
Research also highlights the controlling aspects of high-stakes testing over pedagogic
discourse in the United States (Au 2007). Specifically, this research has found that high-
stakes tests exert control over three central areas. The first is classroom content, where
high-stakes, standardized tests have defined what counts as legitimate school knowledge: If
a knowledge domain is on the test, then it is considered legitimate. In the United States this
has meant that non-tested subjects such as art, science, and social studies are pushed out of
the curriculum at both the classroom and school levels (see, for example, Renter et al.
2006). Second, high-stakes tests have been found to exert considerable control over the
form that content knowledge takes in the classroom. Classroom teachers in the United
States, in shifting their subject matter towards the knowledge domains contained on the
tests, have shifted the forms in which they present this knowledge increasingly towards that
of the tests as well (Au 2007). Specifically this has resulted in classroom knowledge being
presented as isolated facts, as bits and pieces of datum that students need to memorize for
the tests alone (see, for example, Pedulla et al. 2003). Third, research on high-stakes testing
has also found that these tests leverage control over teacher pedagogies. Teachers in the
United States are turning more towards teacher-centred, lecture-based pedagogies in an
effort to keep up with the content and knowledge forms required by the tests (Au 2007).
This has led, for instance, to substantial decreases in student-centred activities, field trips,
and opportunities for independent learning (see, for example, Taylor et al. 2001).
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British Journal of Sociology of Education 641
It is my argument here that these two phenomena race and class inequalities associated
with high-stakes tests and increased restrictions on pedagogic discourse are linked.
Granted, this argument has been made elsewhere by researchers examining the effects of
high-stakes tests on non-white student populations in the United States (see, for example,
McNeil 2000, 2005; Valenzuela 2005). One of the prime effects of this standardization,
these researchers correctly argue, is that student identities that lay outside the test-based
norms are thus subtracted from the curriculum (Valenzuela 1999). While I support these
scholars research, I suggest that high-stakes, standardized tests perform a more powerful
function of selecting student identities that is at once subtractive to some students and
additive to others through the active regulation of forms of consciousness and identity
deemed acceptable within pedagogic discourse, a regulation that takes place through the
structuring of school knowledge (Bernstein 1996). It is through such structuring that we see
how high-stakes, standardized tests act as a systematic relay of macro-level, socially
determined inequalities to the micro-level, pedagogic discourse in the classroom. This relay
is explained through the concept of the pedagogic device (Bernstein 1990, 1996; Bernstein
and Solomon 1999).
The pedagogic device
The pedagogic device (Bernstein 1990, 1996; Bernstein and Solomon 1999) explains the
regulation of consciousness in classrooms as an extension of socio-economic power relations
that exist externally to schools. Contrary to the popular usage of the term device, it is
important not to think of the pedagogic device as a physically existing machine. Rather, the
pedagogic device refers to a process whereby a set of rules for the communication and acqui-
sition of school knowledge that effectively serves to regulate consciousness in the classroom,
and, by extension, serves to legitimate specific identities within pedagogic discourse
(pedagogic discourse being the sum of communication and acquisition of knowledge at the
classroom level). Thus the concept of pedagogic device offers a conceptual framework for
understanding how the intrinsic grammar of pedagogic discourse (Bernstein 1996, 42) is
devised through the processes of communication and acquisition of knowledge. The rules
of the pedagogic device are the distributive rules, recontextualizing rules and evaluative
rules. These rules relate to each other hierarchically: the distributive rules are the most
fundamental they produce the recontextualizing rules, which in turn produce the evaluative
rules (Bernstein 1990, 1996).
The distributive rules
Bernstein explains that The distributive rules mark and distribute who may transmit what
to whom and under what conditions, andattempt to set the outer limits of legitimate
discourse (1996, 46). Or, in the words of Wong and Apple, the distributive rules mediate
the social order through distributing different forms of knowledge and consciousness to
diverse social groups (2003, 84). In performing this function, the distributive rules, accord-
ing to Bernstein (1996), regulate the gap between that which is understood to be possible
and that which is considered impossible; the gap between what is understood as existing
reality and what might be understood as potential or imagined reality. Bernstein refers to
this gap between the knowable and unknowable, between material reality and our
consciousness (ordered system of meanings) of that reality, as the potential discursive gap
(1996, 44). This gap is very important because it can become (not always) a site for
alternative possibilities, for alternative realizations of the relation between the material and
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642 W.W. Au
immaterial It is the crucial site of the yet to be thought (Bernstein 1996, 44; original
emphasis). The potential discursive gap exists as the site where consciousness can change;
where new material realities can be imagined; where new identities are envisioned; where
new social relations might be realized.
The distributive rules, as part of the pedagogic device, describe the process of the regu-
lation of the potential discursive gap, attempting to place limits of possibility on conscious-
ness, identity, and social relations via pedagogic discourse. The distributive rules operate,
for instance, through the teachers curricular planning, textbook creation and adoption by
educational institutions, or state-mandated content standards, where, through the social and
political process of content selection, the limits of legitimate knowledge and forms this
knowledge takes are established and regulated. Thus, as Bernstein notes, the distributive
rules are directly linked to relations of power in society more generally since, Any distri-
bution of power will regulate the potential of this gap in its own interest, because the gap
itself has the possibility of an alternative order, an alternative society, and an alternative
power relation (1996, 45). Consequently, the distributive rules also seek to regulate not
only what is thought of as possible or impossible, but also who has the right or power to set
the limits of possibility. As Bernstein states, Through its distributive rules the pedagogic
device is both the control on the unthinkable and the control on those who may think it
(1990, 183).
The recontextualizing rules
According to Bernstein (1996), the recontextualizing rules of the pedagogic device are
derived from the distributive rules. They refer the process in which pedagogic discourse
selectively appropriates, relocates, refocuses and relates other discourses to constitute its
own order (Bernstein 1996, 47). Thus, pedagogic discourse can be seen as a re-translation,
a re-articulation, and a recontextualization of other discourses associated with knowledge
domains outside education into pedagogic discourse. Put differently, what takes place
within pedagogic discourse is essentially a recontextualization of knowledge forms that are
developed outside education. Consequently, whether it is through teachers own curricular
planning, textbook creation and adoption, or state-mandated content standards, subject
matter content knowledge from discourses outside education are in essence being appropri-
ated, relocated, refocused, and related into the classroom vis--vis pedagogic discourse.
Further, because the form in which knowledge is recontextualized into pedagogic discourse
also carries with it implications for delivery (Apple 1995; Au 2007; Segall 2004), in
Bernsteins formulation the recontextualizing rules also dictate how knowledge is commu-
nicated within pedagogic discourse by providing a theory of instruction (1996, 49)
embedded within the recontextualized content.
The process of recontextualization in pedagogic discourse also carries socio-economic
power relations with it. In part, as a derivative of the distributive rules that seek to regulate
both what is thinkable and who has the power to think it, the recontextualizing rules explain
how that power is immediately translated into pedagogic discourse, particularly in terms of
who has the power to determine what knowledge is recontextualized and the form that
recontextualized knowledge takes. Again, whether it is through teachers own curricular
planning, textbook creation and adoption, or state-mandated content standards, the recon-
textualization of knowledge into pedagogic discourse is ultimately connected to external
socio-economic relations that grant teachers, schools, districts, and governing bodies the
power to make decisions regarding the content and form of knowledge. These decisions are,
in effect, a manifestation of the recontextualizing rules.
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British Journal of Sociology of Education 643
The evaluative rules
According to Bernstein, Evaluation condenses the whole meaning of the device (1996,
50). Thus, the final set of rules of the pedagogic device are the evaluative rules, which
regulate pedagogic practice at the classroom level, for they define the standards which must
be reached. Inasmuch as they do this, then evaluative rules act selectively on contents, the
form of transmission, and their distribution to different groups of pupils in different contexts.
(Bernstein 1996, 118)
This order of rules focuses on pedagogic discourse at the classroom level, as knowledge is
communicated and acquired between teachers and students. They illustrate how evaluation
influences pedagogic discourse through the regulation of the selection of content and the
form of transmission as well as the selective distribution of both form and content to
students as they manifest in the classroom setting. Pedagogic discourse is realized in the
classroom, in practice, through the evaluative rules. Thus, as the lowest order of rules of the
pedagogic device, the evaluative rules as a derivative of the recontextualizing rules, which
themselves are a derivative of the distributive rules provide the final step of the relay of
dominant social relations in pedagogic discourse.
The whole of the device, however, cannot be reduced to the evaluative rules alone. The
three sets of rules of the pedagogic device are hierarchical and interrelated, and they identify
how three different processes operate as dominant social relations are communicated
through pedagogic discourse. The distributive rules operate through, and provide the
structural basis for, the control over acceptable content, knowledge forms, and pedagogy. In
a sense, it is this power that defines the distributive rules, for it is this manifestation of
power and social relations that attempts to regulate what is viewed as being possible (or
impossible) within pedagogic discourse. The recontextualizing rules explain a different, yet
related, process. Based on the distributive rules, which determine both what is legitimate
and who can determine legitimacy, the recontextualizing rules selectively take other
discourses (e.g. disciplines of knowledge, political discourses) and appropriates, relocates,
and relates them into pedagogic discourse. Thus, the recontextualizing rules explain the
process of how knowledge is selected, distributed, and communicated into pedagogic
discourse, the authority of which is granted as a function of the distributive rules. However,
the recontextualizing rules only explain how knowledge is translated into pedagogic
discourse, not within pedagogic discourse as it happens in the classroom. The evaluative
rules then explain this process, and this process alone, by addressing how knowledge,
knowledge forms, and identities are selected and distributed amongst students and teachers
within pedagogic discourse as they manifest in classroom practice.
If we use the conceptual framework provided by the pedagogic device to consider the
evidence regarding educational inequality and curricular control associated with high-stakes
testing, it becomes possible to identify how these tests function as a relay for dominant
socio-economic relations to manifest in the classroom. In what follows I relate the three sets
of rules of the pedagogic device to the research evidence on high-stakes testing in order to
illustrate how this process occurs.
High-stakes testing and the pedagogic device
The distributive rules of the pedagogic device operate through high-stakes testing through
control over pedagogic discourse. Most immediately, these rules regulate what is legitimately
knowable, what is acceptable official knowledge (Apple 2000) within test-influenced
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644 W.W. Au
educational environments. Thus, as in the evidence provided above, when teachers, schools,
and school districts in the United States decide to reduce the teaching of art (a non-tested
subject) in favour of increases in the teaching of mathematics or reading (tested subjects),
we see the distributive rules of the pedagogic device in operation. Tested knowledge is
deemed legitimate while untested knowledge is deemed illegitimate for pedagogic discourse.
Content knowledge legitimacy is literally distributed through high-stakes testing.
The distributive rules are also in operation when knowledge is learned and understood
in test-related isolated fragments associated with the control over the form of curricular
content, discussed above, where teachers in the United States are increasingly turning to
teaching disparate collections of facts for rote memorization in preparation for the tests
alone (Au 2007). Here the distributive rules operate at the level of epistemology, regulating
how the world is known (fragmented, decontextualized, isolated), thus also placing limits
on other, alternative ways that humans know the world (integrated wholes and interrela-
tions). Again, the tests literally distribute what knowledge forms are legitimate within
pedagogic discourse, and therefore attempt to regulate what counts as legitimate forms of
consciousness.
The distributive rules also regulate pedagogy as well, where, through high-stakes
testing, limits are placed on ways of teaching deemed acceptable within high-stakes test
influence pedagogic discourse. As explained above, teachers in the United States are
increasingly turning to the use of lecture-based and teacher-centred instruction in order to
meet the content and form demands of the tests (Au 2007). Legitimate pedagogies are thus
being distributed through high-stakes testing, as teachers align their instruction with the
tests.
Further, we see the distributive rules operating in the determination of who has the
power to decide what counts as legitimate pedagogic discourse, as test designers and
policy-makers, who are both physically and politically distant from actual classrooms, gain
increasing control over what happens at the classroom level through high-stakes tests
(Apple 1995; Au 2008; McNeil 2000). The distributive rules enable these distant actors to
exercise their power through setting limits on what counts as legitimate knowledge,
knowledge forms, and pedagogy.
Finally, the distributive rules of the pedagogic device also distribute student and teacher
identities. The distributive rules establish that those students and teachers who fit these
specific, test-defined official or legitimate norms are selected for test-defined success, thus
illustrating the broad link between the distribution and selection of classroom discourses
and the distribution and selection of classroom identities (Bernstein 1999). This is evident
in the United States in the ways that high-stakes, standardized tests validate specific
knowledge domains, content forms, and pedagogies (Au 2007). As the range of legitimate
student and teacher identities is limited by the tests, multicultural, community, and local
knowledge are left out of the curricular content and de-legitimized within pedagogic
discourse (McNeil 2000, 2005; McNeil and Valenzuela 2001). Thus, high-stakes testing
selects and distributes students and teachers identities within test-influenced pedagogic
discourse. As the research on high-stakes testing and inequality in the United States illus-
trates, such recontextualization has had deleterious effects on non-white and working-class
students in particular.
The recontextualizing rules of the pedagogic device are also embodied within high-
stakes testing. For instance, as I describe above, research on high-stakes testing in the
United States demonstrates that these tests exert control over the content of the curriculum
(Au 2007). The rule at work in this process is that of recontextualization. Based on the
power derived through the distributive rules, the operation of this rule is evident in the
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British Journal of Sociology of Education 645
ways that the tests operate to appropriate, relocate, refocus, and relate the forms of knowl-
edge from outside of education into pedagogic discourse as test-defined, isolate pieces of
datum. A very concrete example of this comes from social studies education in the United
States, where researchers have found that high-stakes history tests have promoted the learn-
ing of a collection of historical facts (see, for example, Vogler 2005), as opposed to
promoting the teaching of historical thinking (VanSledright 2004). Further, pedagogy
itself is recontextualized on the same basis. As teachers adapt their pedagogies to meet the
test-defined knowledge structures, we see an illustration that the discourse of teaching is
itself recontextualized within high-stakes testing (Ball 2003).
Finally, high-stakes tests are a physical manifestation of the evaluative rules, the distil-
lation of the pedagogic device into classroom practices. Here we see pedagogic discourse
as a whole changed and altered because of the tests that literally sit as a set of rules for eval-
uating and regulating classroom practices and identities. Again, operating as a derivative of
the recontextualizing rules, which themselves are a derivative of the distributive rules, high-
stakes tests are a manifestation of the evaluative rules in operation. They serve as the
symbolic arbiter of pedagogic discourse, and therefore serve as the regulator of conscious-
ness in the classroom because they specify the transmission of suitable contents under
proper time and context and perform the significant function of monitoring the adequate
realization of the pedagogic discourse (Wong and Apple 2003, 85). As teachers teach the
tests, shifting knowledge content, knowledge forms, and pedagogies towards that contained
within the high-stakes tests, the day-to-day and moment-to-moment realities of classroom
interaction, of pedagogic discourse as it is concretely communicated between human
beings, are transformed as a manifestation of the evaluative rules in practice. In doing so,
as the immediate expression of the pedagogic device, the test-influenced pedagogic
discourse thus selects and distributes knowledge, identities, and consciousness as a transla-
tion of dominant socio-economic power relations external to pedagogic discourse itself. In
this way, we can see how high-stakes tests function as a relay for race and class-based
inequalities.
Regulation, relative autonomy, and the pedagogic device
Up to this point I have argued that socio-economic relations external to schools are opera-
tionalized within pedagogic discourse, with high-stakes tests functioning as the relay for this
operation. Thus it is through the test-defined distribution of knowledge and knowledge
forms, recontextualization in pedagogic discourse, and evaluation at the level of the class-
room, that social relations manifest in classroom practice through high-stakes testing. In this
way the pedagogic device limits and regulates consciousness itself through the regulation of
pedagogic discourse. This is why Bernstein refers to the device as a symbolic regulator of
consciousness (1996, 53). It is not that the device itself is symbolic, or that its control is
symbolic of something else. Rather, the device regulates consciousness through the control
of symbols, codes, and sign systems that is, through the control of knowledge by
attempting to place limits on the range of meaning-making. One could read this conclusion
in a simplistic manner, and suggest that Bernsteins (and my) formulation is just a reitera-
tion of Bowles and Gintis (1976) overly deterministic analysis of the relationship between
capitalism and inequality in education; that there is a mechanical correspondence between
the needs of capitalist production and educational outcomes. However, I would argue, as did
Bernstein (1977), that this conceptual framework provides a much more fluid and non-
deterministic way of understanding how schooling and education interact with external
socio-economic power relations.
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646 W.W. Au
Bernstein (1996) himself offers two reasons why his model of the pedagogic device is
not overly deterministic. First, the device creates its own inherent contradiction, one that
serves to subvert the device itself. He states that:
Although the device is there to control the unthinkable, in the process of controlling the
unthinkable it makes the possibility of the unthinkable available. Therefore, internal to the
device is its own paradox: it cannot control what it has been set up to control. (Bernstein
1996, 52)
Here, Bernstein is pointing out an internal contradiction of the device: as soon as you
delineate what is unthinkable, you automatically make the possibility of the unthinkable
available. Put differently, once boundaries are established in our consciousness defining
what is or is not, a cognitive structure is immediately established for thinking about what
might be. Thus, as Bernstein observes, [F]rom a purely formal perspective, the pedagogic
device cannot but be an instrument of order and of transformation of that order (1990, 206).
Our sense of alternatives (e.g. alternative forms of education, alternative social and
economic relations) is immediately conditioned by our sense of how things are now, and a
source of that conditioning is that which works to regulate our consciousness of such possi-
bilities: the pedagogic device itself.
Further, as Bernstein explains, the second reason why the device cannot be deterministic
exists externally to the device:
[T]he distribution of power which speaks through the device creates potential sites of challenge
and opposition. The device creates in its realizations an arena of struggle between different
groups for the appropriation of the device, because whoever appropriates the device has the
power to regulate consciousness. Whoever appropriates the device appropriates a crucial site
of symbolic control. The device itself creates an arena of struggle for those who are to appropriate
it. (Bernstein 1996, 52)
Here Bernstein identifies another contradiction of the device. Its very existence means that
it can be struggled over by forces both within and outside of education. A clear example
exists regarding high-stakes testing. As soon as high-stakes testing is established as a force
within pedagogic discourse, the possibility of the realization of an anti-high-stakes testing
movement is automatically created. Forces both within and outside education can now
unite around their opposition to high-stakes testing because, as Bernstein points out above,
[t]he device itself has created an arena of struggle for those who are to appropriate it
(1996, 52).
I would add a third reason why the pedagogic device is not overly deterministic. At
every level of the device, through the operation of every set of its rules, there are individual
actors and groups involved in interpretation and implementation. This guarantees that the
transmission of power and control via the device is an imperfect operation; that the device
does not transmit a perfect mirror reflection of power relations external to education. Thus,
for instance, at the level of the classroom, at the level of the evaluative rules, teachers in the
United States are taking up active resistance to high-stakes testing and the controls it
attempts to exert on their practice, even if that resistance is limited by circumstance and
evokes punishment by educational and political authorities (see, for example, Jaeger 2006).
Bernsteins formulation of the pedagogic device has its political roots in the concept of
relative autonomy (Apple 2002; Bernstein 1990), a concept usually credited to Althusser
(1971) by neo-Marxists that in reality was originally conceived within Marx and Engels
own dialectical analysis of capitalist production and its relation to social structures
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British Journal of Sociology of Education 647
(Au 2006). The concept of relative autonomy asserts that the social relations associated with
capitalist society are relatively autonomous from the economic relations of capitalist
production: that what we see happening at the level of the superstructure is not totally and
perfectly determined by the economic base of capitalism. A relatively autonomous
educational system thus might reproduce capitalist relations, but it cannot be reduced to
them alone (Apple 2002, 609). As Bernstein explains:
[T]he concept of relative autonomy plays an important role in defining the space available to
agents, and agencies in recontextualizing fields, and so a crucial role in the construction and
relaying of pedagogic discourse. Relative autonomy herepoints to all pedagogic discourse as
an arena of conflict, a site of struggle and appropriation. Relative autonomy refers to the
constraints on the realizations of the pedagogic device as symbolic ruler. Whose ruler, what
consciousness, is revealed by the discourses privileging texts and the procedures of evaluation
such texts presuppose. (1990, 209)
Consequently, even though the concept of the pedagogic device explains the communi-
cation of social power relations and the regulation of consciousness in pedagogic discourse,
the negotiation, interpretation, and acquisition of such communication and regulation
always holds the potential for resistance, disruption, and even critical intervention because
of its relatively autonomous relationship to external social and economic conditions.
The official recontextualizing field and the pedagogic recontextualizing field
Bernsteins use of relative autonomy is also apparent within his conception of the two social
fields produced by the pedagogic device: the official recontextualizing field (ORF) and the
pedagogic recontextualizing field (PRF). The ORF is created by and consists of the state and
its agents. The PRF, on the other hand, consists of teachers in schools and colleges, as well
as journals, research foundations, and publishing houses (for further discussion, see Singh
2002). Regarding their relationship, Bernstein explains that:
If the PRF can have an effect on pedagogic discourse independently of the ORF, then there is
both some autonomy and struggle over pedagogic discourse and its practices. But, if there is
only the ORF, then there is no autonomy. (1996, 48)
In the United States, high-stakes, standardized testing is a product of the ORF. Both US
federal and state governments are involved in the legitimation of high-stakes testing as the
tool for educational regulation and reform. However, the entirety of the US test industry
(test designers, test administrators, test-score interpreters and reporters, and makers of test-
preparation materials) is part of the PRF (Toch 2006). In the United States we see a weak-
ening of the autonomy of the PRF, as many parts of this field are nearly indistinguishable
from their promoters in the ORF (Au 2008), particularly as education policy creates
increased opportunities for privatization vis--vis the testing industry (Burch 2006). This
helps to explain the power relations embedded in high-stakes testing, as the decreased
autonomy of the PRF also denotes increased control over pedagogic discourse. Hence we
see that the state is attempting to weaken the PRF through its ORF, and thus attempting to
reduce relative autonomy over the construction of pedagogic discourse and over social
contexts (Bernstein 1996, 48).
However, control of pedagogic discourse is always contested, as illustrated by the
relationship between the PRF and ORF. As Wong and Apple explain, First, when the
PRF is strong and has a certain level of autonomy from the state, the discourse it creates
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648 W.W. Au
can impede official pedagogic discourse (2003, 85). For instance, discourses of social
equality often promoted in education policy sometimes contradict the official pedagogic
discourses that effectively reproduce social power relations. Second, as Wong and Apple
assert:
[B]ecause of the manifold agents within the ORF and PRF the former includes a core
consisting of officials from state pedagogic agencies and consultants from the educational
system and fields of economy and symbolic control, whereas the latter comprises agents and
practices drawn from universities, colleges of education, schools, foundations, journals and
publishing houses, and so on there is the potential for conflict, resistance, and inertia both
within and between these two fields. (2003, 85)
This second point is basic, but important. It acknowledges that, because individuals and
groups exist in both the ORF and PRF, there may be differing interpretations, implementa-
tions, and political interests within fields. This creates the potential for real conflict both
within and between fields. Again, taking up high-stakes testing as a case example, all 50 US
states have introduced legislation that rejects all or part of the No Child Left Behind
legislation, which relies heavily on high-stakes testing (Karp 2006). Even though most of
this introduced legislation has not and will not be passed into law, the fact of its introduction
demonstrates conflict within the ORF, as state agencies and agents have increasingly shown
signs of revolt against No Child Left Behind as a US federal policy. Similarly, there is
conflict within the ORF, as researchers, teachers, and activist organizations in the PRF
continue to struggle for the relative autonomy of pedagogic discourse (as well as social
justice) by challenging official pedagogic discourse through research and classroom
practice (Au 2008).
Reproduction of culture or capital?
Bernsteins formulation of relative autonomy and the selection and distribution of identities
through pedagogic discourse, however, poses an important question: What is being
reproduced through the pedagogic device? On one level, Bernstein is clearly analysing the
reproduction of culture (Apple 1992; Bernstein 1977). Such a culturalist position,
however, can prove to be problematic if one is interested in working towards social and
educational equality. If power relations are essentially cultural relations, then social trans-
formation (and educational transformation) is mainly a matter of cultural transformation,
thus leaving the inequalities associated with capitalist socio-economic relations untouched.
This is the critique of Bernstein (and Apple) made by Kelsh and Hill (2006), and, although
I disagree with their reading of Bernstein and Apple, I do share this particular political
concern regarding more culturalist analyses of power and education.
I would argue, however, that even though Bernstein did focus on culture in his analysis,
it is not necessarily because culture is the hinge upon which social and economic transfor-
mation is made. Indeed, Bernstein has consistently maintained that, while there is some
level of relative autonomy between education and capitalist production:
Education is a class-allocatory device, socially creating, maintaining and reproducing non-
specialized and specialized skills, and specialized dispositions which have an approximate
relevance to the mode of productionThe state, historically, has gained increasing control
over the systemic relationships whilst maintaining the educational system in its essential role
as a class distributor or the social relationships of production. The class-based distribution of
power and modalities of control are made substantive in the form of transmission/acquisition
irrespective of variations in the systemic relationships between modes of education and
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British Journal of Sociology of Education 649
production. In this way, the educational system maintains the dominating principle of the social
structure.
It is clear that the systemic relationships between education and production create for education
the form of its economic or material base. (Bernstein 1977, 185186; original emphasis)
Hence, Bernsteins focus is on a specific unit of analysis: pedagogic discourse. Relative to
this specific unit of analysis, Bernsteins thesis is that, in education, power is transmitted
through cultural codes and that the pedagogic device is the relay for this transmission
leaving open the possibility that both culture and education have much of their grounding
in the materiality of socio-economic configurations associated with capitalist production.
Thus, while the structure of education is generally bound by the unequal social relations
associated with capitalist economic relations, this binding is at least in part communicated
through the transmission of cultural codes (symbolic control) and, within education
specifically, the relay of these relations is the pedagogic device.
Conclusion
Synthesizing the findings and analyses from existing research on high-stakes testing in the
United States with Bernsteins conception of the pedagogic device, I have sought to
generate a theoretical explanation of how high-stakes testing operates as a relay between
socio-economic relations and classroom-level pedagogic discourse, and therefore, how
high-stakes testing reproduces social and educational inequality. This explanation began
with an overview of the research linking high-stakes, standardized tests to the production
of race-based and class-based inequalities in the United States, as well as with increased
controls over the types of content knowledge, knowledge forms, and pedagogies consid-
ered acceptable in test influenced environments. I further argued that the distributive rules,
the recontextualizing rules, and the evaluative rules of the pedagogic device operate
through such controls. Thus we see how social relations are relayed through the distribu-
tion, recontextualization, and evaluation of knowledge and knowledge forms embodied by
high-stakes testing. In this way, systems of high-stakes, standardized testing inherently
reproduce inequalities associated with socio-economic relations external to education
through the selective regulation and distribution of consciousness and identities.
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