Standards-based accountability : reification, responsibility and the ethical subject

Over the last two decades, teachers in Australia have witnessed multiple incarnations of the idea of ‘educational accountability’ and its enactment. Research into this phenomenon of educational policy and practice has revealed various layers of the concept, particularly its professional, bureaucratic, political and cultural dimensions that are central to the restructuring of educational governance and the reorganization of teachers’ work. Today, accountability constitutes a core concept of neoliberal policy-making in education, both fashioning and normalizing what counts as teacher professionalism in the ‘audit society.’ This article focuses specifically on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia, and raises questions about the impact of this reform on the work practices of English literacy teachers in primary and secondary schools. We draw on data collected as part of a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council, involving interviews with teachers about their experiences of implementing standardised testing. The article traces the ways in which teachers’ work is increasingly being mediated by standardised literacy testing to show how these teachers grapple with the tensions between state-wide mandates and a sense of their professional responsibility for their students.

Restructuring educational leadership in changing contexts: a local/global account of restructuring in Australia

The 1990s saw considerable structural reform in school education in many Anglophone nation states, marked by trends towards school-based, site-based, self-managing and self-governing schools. This article illustrates through a case study of educational restructuring in Victoria, Australia, how leadership, as a discursive practice, is redefined in the context of spatial and cultural restructuring. Restructuring produced a spatial redistribution of educational provision and individual opportunities as a result of structural adjustment reforms. These same policy moves towards post-welfarism also produced cultural shifts in attitudes to education with the rise of the new instrumentalism and entrepeneurialism. For school principals at the forefront of self managing schools, this meant shifts in resource distribution through new policy mechanisms of managerial and market accountability, and also new priorities impacting on leadership practices with a move from dialogic to decisional modes of management. The question is how recent policy moves towards learning networks and reinventing systematic support with a focus on locational disadvantage are addressing what were increased educational disparities between schools and students. Does this provide scope for more equity-driven leadership practices?

Professional identity and the contemporary university: a culture of control, accountability and virtuality?

In recent years many changes to the funding and management of universities have taken place. In the current climate of academia in Australia professional academics find themselves immersed in the culture of the managed university that uses the rhetoric of commitment to flexible delivery to put in place systems designed to increase accountability, surveillance and control. At the same time some argue that the focus on research, quality teaching and effective pedagogy has lessened. The empirical research base for this paper has enabled me to better understand some of the emerging trends my university. It looks at how changes to the experience of being academic impact on the work of academics as the power relations of the university continuously reposition them, and how academics in turn display resistance technologies. Changes to the technologies of management/administration of the university have resulted in what some academics have described as a loss of valuing of their knowledge and expertise and which may be seen by some as a threat to their opportunities to conduct productive educational inquiry.

Pathway planning and 'becoming somebody' : Exploring the tensions between wellbeing and credentialism with students at (educational) risk

This paper maps the policy shifts around the education and training of youth that frame how schools respond to issues of youth' at risk'. These shifts have occurred with the move from the self managing schools marked by market discourses of competition, autonomy and image management that supplanted earlier discourses of welfare and community, through to recent policies in Victoria arising from the Kirby Review of Post compulsory Education and Public Education, the Next Generation undertaken by the Labor government. These reports, and the policies emerging out of them, are producing new discourses about youth and schooling focusing on wellbeing, learning networks and more systemic support for schools at the same time as there is increased accountability and expectations of schools. Drawing on the school exclusion literature from the U.K, and using Bourdieu's notion of habitus, we examine the findings from a recent study undertaken on the Geelong Pathways Planning project, funded through a Victorian government strategy, to discuss how schools respond to such initiatives. The project explored the ways in which students in the Geelong region understood and worked with the job planning pathways program, and how service providers (schools, community education facilities, job networks etc) coordinated to meet the needs of individual youth. There was a disjuncture in the participating schools between the discourses of care and welfare for students at risk, and the actual practices and policies that ignored or excluded such students. This paper concludes with a discussion of what might be required systemically, in schools and in their relations to other education providers, to build the capacity to respond more effectively to all students.

Single-sex classes in co-educational schools

This research investigated social and academic outcomes from single-sex classrooms in a Tasmanian coeducational government primary school. Interviews, observations and surveys formed the basis of the evidence. Teachers, parents and children reported positive benefits from the class organisation, but these differed according to gender. Staff identified increased confidence and higher self-esteem among girls, whereas boys developed increased motivation and more commitment to schoolwork. Teachers and parents noted that boys' accountability and self-discipline improved. Teachers adopted different strategies from those used with mixed-gender classes and gained higher levels of satisfaction from teaching, attributable to increased children's time 'on task'. Paradoxically, standardised school testing indicated no increase in academic achievements. However, there may be an extended lag between establishing changed social relationships and measurable academic outcomes, suggesting that if the new class structure is to achieve its full potential, it should be established early in primary school and continue to adolescence.

New teachers, professional knowledge and educational reform in New Zealand

This thesis examines the professional knowledge of new secondary school teachers in New Zealand, their negotiation of multiple discourses encountered in policy and practice, and their processes of professional identity formation. It is also a study of policy reform. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, recent educational and social reforms have brought about major changes to the way education is managed and implemented. These reforms emphasise market ideologies promoting consumer choice and responsibility, while measuring and monitoring quality and effectiveness. At the same time, the reforms attempt to alleviate social inequality. Teachers' negotiation of an accountability culture and the dominant equity policies is a major focus of this study. The study draws upon group interviews held with nine new teachers during the first two years of their teaching careers. The group interviews were designed to elicit extended narratives from individual teachers, as well as promote more interactive dialogue and reflections within the groups. Because the interviews were conducted at different points in their early careers, the study also has a longitudinal element, allowing insight into how teachers' views are formed or changed during an intense period of professional learning. Analysis of the teachers' narratives is informed by poststructural and feminist understandings of identity and knowledge and by a methodological orientation to writing as a method of enquiry. The thesis develops three main types of discussion and sets of arguments. The first examines new teachers' negotiation of the 'macro' context of teacher knowledge formation that is, their negotiation of an educational policy environment that juxtaposes an equity agenda with accountability controls. In order to historically situate these dilemmas, the particular political, social and educational context of New Zealand is examined. It is argued that teachers negotiate competing political and conceptual debates about social justice, equity and difference, and that this negotiation is central to the formation of professional knowledge. The analysis illustrates ways in which teachers make sense of equity discourses in educational policy and practice, and the apparent contradictions that arise from placing tight accountability standards on schools and teachers to achieve associated equity goals. The second type of discussion focuses on teachers' negotiation of the 'micro' dimension of professional knowledge, looking closely at the processes and practices that form professional identity. Against stage or developmental models of teacher identity, it is argued that professional identity is formed in an ongoing, uneven and fluid manner and is socially and discursively situated/embedded. It is further argued that professional knowledge and identity are entwined and that this relationship is most usefully understood through analysis of the discursive practices that frame teachers' working lives and through which teachers work out who they are or should become and what and how they (should) think. This analysis contributes new perspectives to debates in teacher education about teacher preparation and the knowledge required of teachers in current 'new times'. The final cluster of arguments brings together these macro and micro aspects of professional knowledge and identity with a case study of how new teachers negotiated a recent educational reform of senior secondary school qualifications in New Zealand. This reform has had a significant impact on secondary schools and on the way teachers, and New Zealanders in general, think about education, achievement and success. It was found that this reform significantly challenged new teachers to question their beliefs about assessment and justice in education, and what counts as success. This case study draws attention to the tensions between equity, academic excellence and standards-based assessment, and contributes to understanding how teacher professional knowledge forms both in the context of a specific educational policy reform and in relation to educational reform in general. This study contributes new knowledge to the formation of teacher professional knowledge and identity in an educational climate of change in New Zealand. The findings offer new insights for teacher educators, policymakers and schools into how teachers build, shape and sustain professional knowledge; how they juggle contradictions between a desire for justice, policy imperatives and teacher education rhetoric; the self-constructed, but contingent nature of professional knowledge and identity; and the urgency to address identity formation as part of teacher education and to take account of the dynamic ways in which identities form. These matters need to be articulated in teacher education both pre-service and in-service in order to address teacher retention and satisfaction, and teachers' commitment to equity reform in education.

Hunger artists : literacy, testing & accountability

This article interrogates the dominant ideology that is shaping education in Victoria at the current moment. It does so by analysing the government school publication, Education Times, focusing on the years 2000–2003. During those years the Victorian Government invested a significant amount of money into improving the literacy outcomes of so-called underperforming students through initiatives such as Restart and Access to Excellence. Education Times played an important role in promoting these initiatives, and thus provides a useful vehicle for examining the ideology driving educational reform in Victoria.

Introduction : In Australian educational researcher, v.39 v.4

This special issue can be situated in the ‘affective turn’ in education. It responds to the increasing significance of affect, emotions and creativity as the foci of contemporary educational research. The resurgence of interest in these issues is symptomatic of current educational reforms and their impact on how educators should think about, and practise, teaching andwhat students need to know and howthey should learn. It is not to say that the current reforms are radically dissimilar from the previous ones in terms of their general intention to bring about change.What is different, though, is theweight they put on standards, accountability, efficiency, performativity and valueaddedness. As a result, the economic, market-driven principles of reforms have subsumed all other dimensions of education, such as its socio-cultural and relational aspects. The turn to affect is driven by a recognition that the economic rationalisation of education is at odds with its emotional and creative dimensions. The turn is registering a change in how education is managed and, indeed, what counts as education today.