Policy borrowing, policy learning: testing times in Australian schooling

Abstract

This paper provides a contextualised and critical policy analysis of the Rudd government's national schooling agenda in Australia. The specific focus is on the introduction of national literacy and numeracy testing and the recent creation by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority of the website 'My School', which lists the results of these tests for all Australian schools, including school performance against averages and against the performance of 60 other socio-economically 'likeschools' across the nation. It is argued that we are seeing the emergence of a national system of schooling (including national curriculum) as part of the reconstitution of the nation in the face of globalization and related economisation of education policy. This is the case despite Australia's federal political structure with the States holding the ostensible Constitutional responsibility for schooling. The analysis locates these and associated developments (a national schooling policy ensemble) within considerations of new accountabilities, the restructured state, neo-liberalism, globalized education policy discourses and policy borrowing and learning. The analysis also suggests that, despite the Prime Minister's swingeing critique of neo-liberalism in the context of the global financial crisis and enhanced state intervention in the economy, this national schooling agenda (the government's so-called 'education revolution'), is a hybrid mix of the neo-liberal with social democratic aspirations to do with social justice and schooling.

Principals of audit: testing, data and ‘implicated advocacy’

“…Principals in New South Wales were recruited via an informal network of schools. Participants were sought from these three relatively disparate contexts to allow for an exploration of the ways in which 'cooperative federalism' (Lingard, 2010) has played out with respect to NAPLAN and principals' work. Approval was gained from the Human Research Ethics Committees at Murdoch University and the University of Newcastle, and in line with this, participating principals provided written informed consent, and were assured of confidentiality both for themselves and their school in the reporting of data.…”

“…On the one hand, supporters argue that it gives parents the data and information to make choices about their children's schooling, in particular regarding decisions about which school or type of school to send their children to 3 . On the other hand, critics argue that the publication of the data on MySchool makes NAPLAN high-stakes for schools and principals (Lingard, 2010, Lobascher, 2011, has a range of unintended consequences including narrowing curriculum, promoting test focused pedagogies and gaming of the data (Klenowski and Wyatt-Smith, 2012), only presents a limited picture of each school (Gannon, 2012) and is used by the media to rank schools (Connell, 2013) and reinforce the message that there is a crisis in Australia's schools (Mockler, 2013).…”

The System of Middle Leadership in Secondary Schools in England and Its Implications for the Lithuanian Education System

“…Discussions around improving the educational outcomes of children and young people in schools often forget the complexity of schools in different countries and that solutions cannot be neatly borrowed from other contexts such as England and directly translated to the Lithuanian or similar contexts without longitude research (Lingard, 2010). The agendas of modernisation and reform also need an understanding of structure and culture in order to test how successful ideas and initiatives might be in a different structure and culture, that is to say, ideas which seem to work well in England may be due to the context they operate in.…”

Testing Times for the Implementation of Curriculum Change

“…Critics of high-stakes testing highlight the following themes about their use: a narrowing of the curriculum, performancerather than learning-oriented schools, increased drop-out rates, increased teaching to the test, lowering of teacher morale and defection from the profession, promoting cultural biases, increased teacher and student stress, increased pressure to cheat, negative and discriminating effects on life chances particularly for minorities, and the marginalization of subjects that are not explicitly tested, such as the humanities and physical education (Amrein & Berliner, 2002;Dweck, 1999;Ingersoll, 2003;Lingard, 2010;Mathers & King, 2001;Parkay, 2006). Parkay commenting on schools in the United States takes this even further, suggesting that standards are in fact lowered as districts downgrade benchmarks to attract more funding.…”