from this. This approach reveals a tension between the government's commitment to transparency in reporting school performance on national testing and good.
Dr Bob Lingard
Testing Times: The need for new intelligent accountabilities for schooling The advent of the Rudd federal Labor government has seen the strengthening of the national presence in schooling. This includes new national accountabilities, a national curriculum and a range of national partnerships between the federal government and the states and territories. Recently, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has been established to oversee these national involvements. These national engagements have grown out of a new cooperative federalism in respect of schooling, facilitated – at least in the early stages of the Rudd government – by Labor governments in all the states and territories. Apart from investment in school infrastructure, the most obvious manifestation of the strengthened national presence in schooling and new national accountabilities is the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). NAPLAN entails yearly full-cohort standardised testing in literacy and numeracy at years 3, 5, 7 and 9, conducted in all schools in Australia. The outcomes of these results gain a great deal of media coverage, and provoke cross-state and cross-school comparisons. Over the coming months, the federal government will also release “like school” measures, comparing school performance for policy and practice interventions. They will also prepare league tables of school performance on NAPLAN. The Federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, like all relevant stakeholders, agrees that these league tables should not be constructed simply around raw results. Instead, she says, the results should be contextualised in a number of sophisticated ways, especially in relation
to the socio-economic context of each school and expenditure at the school. While contextualised data will be more useful for policy interventions, there are good reasons to be sceptical, especially about the impact of the creation of league tables on poorer performing schools, many of which are located in the poorest communities. In particular, it looks like the initial publication later this year of NAPLAN results on the internet will provide only raw data – with all the dangerous and potentially negative effects that flow from this. This approach reveals a tension between the government’s commitment to transparency in reporting school performance on national testing and good public policy making, which necessarily takes account of diverse contextual factors. Despite claims to the contrary, NAPLAN tests have quickly become high-stakes, with all the potentially negative effects on pedagogies and curricula (Stobbart, 2008, Hursh, 2008, QSA, 2009). The Queensland
Government’s response to Queensland’s apparently “poor performance” on NAPLAN in 2008, for example establishing the Masters Review, demonstrates that the tests have become high-stakes. One likely outcome of these high-stakes tests and consequential accountability is an “uninformed systemic prescription” from above and mistrust of teachers and schools, ushering in an “uninformed professionalism” (Schleicher, 2008). Bernstein’s (1971) sociology of the curriculum demonstrated the ways in which the three message systems of schooling – curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation – sit in symbiotic relationships with each other, with change in one affecting the practices of the others. In policy terms across recent times, the evaluation message system – or more specifically high-stakes, census testing at national levels – has become the major steering mechanism of schooling systems (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). This has
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had a profound impact on curricula and pedagogies, especially in the UK (or, more accurately, England) and in the USA, where schooling has been driven by high-stakes testing and consequential accountability. As Stobbart (2008, p.24) notes: “A key purpose of assessment, particularly in education, has been to establish and raise standards of learning. This is now a virtually universal belief – it is hard to find a country that is not using the rhetoric of needing assessment to raise standards in response to the challenges of globalisation.” This has become a globalised educational policy discourse: the evaluation message system has taken the upper hand in many schooling systems around the world. However, we also need to recognise that national and provincial uptake of this discourse always occurs in vernacular ways mediated by local histories, politics and cultures. Witness, for example, how educational federalism mediates all schooling policy developments around national curriculum and testing in Australia, even when there is political alignment across the tiers of government. In this article, I consider the impact of these new accountabilities, set against an account and evaluation of the negative effects of similar policy regimes in the UK and the USA. In calling for better policy learning and rejecting blind policy borrowing, I argue the need for new educational accountabilities, linked to a new social imaginary of the place of schooling and future society. Evidence from the highest performing schools systems, such as Finland and Korea, suggests the need for “informed prescription” at the systemic level and support for “informed professionalism” at the school level within a culture of trust, innovation and on-going learning for all in schools (Schleicher, 2008). We need more sophisticated and intelligent forms of school accountability, which: •
recognise the reciprocal responsibilities of all actors, including governments, systems, schools, communities and parents
•
acknowledge the broad purposes of schooling
•
reject the view that improved test results on NAPLAN are indicative of improved schooling or a more socially just school system
•
reject the top-down, one-way gaze
upon teachers as the sole source and solution to all schooling problems •
reject a narrow construction of school league tables and a name, blame and shame approach evident in the English schooling policy context
•
recognise the centrality of informed teacher judgement and quality of pedagogies to achieving better learning outcomes for all students
•
recognise the need to address poverty so as to facilitate more equal educational outcomes.
There is still time for Australia to forego the deficiencies so evident in the UK and US in respect of high-stakes testing and their negative and reductive effects on schools, students, teachers and learning – but we need to act now.
Queensland Despite years of conservative government in Queensland (1957-1989), education in the state has had many distinctive progressive features in respect of assessment and other features of schooling. The first was the abolition of all public examinations following the
There is still time for Australia to forego the deficiencies so evident in the UK and US Radford Report of 1969. Since the early 1970s, senior secondary assessment in Queensland has been school-based and teacher-moderated with a core skills test providing the final element of moderation, adding another dimension of equity and accountability to the system. The core skills test assesses students’ capacities in relation to core curriculum goals of senior secondary school curricula. In this way, the core skills test is unusual in that its effects on pedagogy have been to stretch teaching, curricula and students, rather than reducing them to a lowest common denominator. This system is highly lauded by assessment experts across the globe – ironically, with less positive evaluations across Australia. The Howard government, for example, was critical of this approach, desiring a return to public exams in Queensland, perhaps linked to
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ambitions regarding a national curriculum. Surprisingly, to date, there has not been a strong professional or academic voice defending this progressive and educationally valuable form of secondary assessment. Research (e.g., Lingard et al, 2001) has demonstrated that upper secondary teachers in Queensland are highly assessment-literate. School-based, teacher-moderated senior assessment has been a profound form of ongoing teacher professional development and learning, characterised by informed professionalism and teacher judgement. Unfortunately, research has also demonstrated that this assessment-literacy does not stretch to other parts of the schooling system (Lingard et al, 2001). This Queensland approach is atypical in the Australian senior secondary schooling context, with only the ACT operating under a similar regime. Across all other levels of schooling, however, the professional judgement of teachers has been central to dominant assessment practices and reporting until quite recently. From the late 1990s, Queensland also saw a plethora of progressive changes and reforms in schooling. The Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (Lingard et al, 2001) documented pedagogies that made a difference to student learning across various curriculum domains and year levels of schooling, naming the productive pedagogies. Productive pedagogies were intellectually demanding, connected, supportive, yet demanding, and worked with and valued differences. These pedagogies were geared to achieving better academic and social outcomes from schooling for all students. Following the QSRLS, Professor Allan Luke, a researcher on the QSRLS, was seconded as Deputy Director-General to the state department and given a remit to rethink schooling, particularly in relation to the message systems of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment for the twentyfirst century. This led to the New Basics trial, which developed a new trial curriculum for schooling from years 1-9, to be aligned with productive pedagogies and assessment practices called rich tasks. The rich tasks were exemplary of their kind, involving assessment experts such as Dr Gabrielle Matters in their construction. The rich tasks were geared to ensuring
high intellectual demand in pedagogies and assessment practices, which were more closely aligned with high order curriculum goals. Also central to the New Basics was an attempt to align curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. The experiment recognised that investment in teachers (both pre-service and in-service) and their professional knowledges and skills was central to enhancing learning outcomes for all students across primary and secondary schools and, importantly, for achieving more socially just outcomes across schools serving different socioeconomic communities. The evaluation of the New Basics trial was very positive and affirming, documenting its positive effects on the intellectual demands and effects of schooling. Again, this was a reform in primary and lower secondary assessment practices that was lauded around the globe. As but one example, I have recently worked in Scotland, where a number of the country’s most elite independent schools, some government schools and one local authority are basing their assessment practices on the rich tasks that emerged from the Queensland experiment. The advent of NAPLAN as high-stakes testing and the state government responses have challenged these progressive reforms. In the longer term, the national curriculum also represents a potential challenge to the Queensland form of school-based, teacher-moderated, upper-secondary assessment.
The policy context of new educational accountabilities Accountability literally means to give an account. In arguing for intelligent accountabilities, I employ this definition. However, “accountabilities”, as they have been constructed by governments over the last two decades, have been linked to a range of changes, including the new public management (NPM), which has restructured the state and its modes of operation. The emphasis now is on outputs and outcomes, rather than inputs and processes. Sometimes the new accountabilities seek to create input/output equations as forms of
policy learning and accountability, but the emphasis within this NPM is on outcomes – especially outcomes that can be measured. This forces us to face head-on all of the difficulties of measurement associated with schooling, particularly in relation to measuring teaching and learning outcomes. Schools have both longterm and short-term goals and both are broader than test results. However, given the current fetish for outcome measures, measurement has become critical in policy and accountabilities, with the implicit danger of measuring what is easy to measure, rather than what is significant in terms of educational quality. This is, of course, a danger and difficulty in all forms of measurement. And those in education know only too well that what is counted is what ultimately counts. There is the additional problem picked up by the old aphorism that “you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it”. A focus on improving test scores can lead simply to enhanced capacity to take tests, rather than enhanced and authentic learning. Indeed, elsewhere in this magazine, the Queensland Studies Authority documents the well-researched and negative effects of high-stakes testing: reducing the selfesteem and commitment to learning of lower-achieving students; promoting shallow rather than deep conceptual learning through teaching to the test; and misinterpretation of test results as demonstrating improved learning rather than improved test-taking abilities. The twenty-first century demands high order outcomes for all students in terms of the individual purposes of schooling and in terms of opportunity, economic and democratic outcomes; it does not require schooling reduced to better test taking. More broadly, the NPM “steers at a distance” in a culture of low trust of those street level professionals who deliver public services like schooling. We have seen the emergence of “policyas-numbers”, a new empiricism (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). There is also a global aspect to this outcome measurement focus and the new policy-as-numbers. This is especially true in relation to schooling,
but numbers-driven global league tables exist in countless domains (universities are an example). In relation to schooling: think, for example, of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s (IEA’s) Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). There has thus been a globalising of the policy-as-numbers approach: today the “global eye” and the “national eye” govern together through comparison (Novoa and Yariv Marshal, 2003). Global measures create a worldwide commensurate space of measurement, while testing such as NAPLAN does the same at national level. Global and withinnation comparisons are today a central feature of governance. Global measures are also linked to globalisation and the emergence of a post-Westphalian1 political reality. These global restructurings have precipitated a reworking of national sovereignty and the role of the nation-state. This is especially true with respect to economic globalisation, but is also obvious in the enhanced policy relevance of international organisations to national policy making and educational policy discourses. This is more than older forms of policy borrowing; it is also a trend towards global convergence, at least in macro educational policy terms and the ways in which we talk about educational policy. Schooling, and more broadly education, are seen to have as their central purposes the production of the requisite quantity and quality of human capital within a given nation. That human capital is in turn regarded as necessary to ensuring the international competitiveness of the national economy (the boundaries of which, of course, are melting into a global economy). Policy in education thus has been economised. The (neo-liberal) globalisation of the economy and the reworking of the nation and its political functioning, demand new global comparisons of student performance as a surrogate
1 The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 set the legal framework for the sovereignty of nations. By ‘post-Westphalian’, I mean the ways in which political authority today is not only located within the borders of the nation state, but also has been rescaled, creating another layer beyond the nation, including a large range of international governmental and non-governmental organisations. The nation remains important, obviously, but works in different ways and with different influences.
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measure of the quality of the nation’s schooling, training and university systems. They demand new forms of outcome accountability and comparison. While more traditional perceptions of teachers might have seen them as servants of the state, this policy construction perhaps reconstitutes teachers as “servants of the global economy” (Menter, 2009, p.225). So the global policy convergence in schooling has seen the economisation of schooling policy, the emergence of a human capital rationale as meta-policy in education, and new accountabilities, including high-stakes testing and policy as numbers, with both global and national features. In this context, Stephen Ball (2008) has suggested there are three new policy technologies at work, for example, in English schooling. These technologies include market mechanisms to do with consumer choice (in schooling policy, school choice), new steering-at-a-distance forms of public management, and what he calls “performativity”. Ball (2006, p.144) defines performativity in the following way (here describing it in a generic fashion, as applied to the working of the NPM and its outcomes focus): “Performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as a means of incentive, control, attrition and change – based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performance (of individual subjects or organisations) serves as a measure of productivity or output or displays of ‘quality’.” As a consequence, struggles over educational policy call into question who controls the field of judgement – including who controls measurement and chooses what is measured. Again in Ball’s words (2006, p.144): “The issue of who controls the field of judgement is crucial. One key issue of the current educational reform movement may be seen as struggles over the control of the field of judgement and its values”. This is clearly evident in contemporary Australia around debates about national forms of testing and accountability: there is a dichotomy between measurement and evaluation driven by the profession and high-stakes testing controlled by governments. We can only speculate about where parents sit along this
spectrum: it often appears that the media are driving the agenda (particularly in relation to transparency), more than the electorate and parent groups. The useful concept of performativity picks up on the distorting effects of the policy-as-numbers approach necessitating school league tables. There is a focus on “being seen to perform” – or fabrication – as much as authentic performance and outcomes. This culture of performativity is particularly evident in the English schooling system, where markets and NPM have seen policy targets for improvements structured around national forms of testing. And, as we know (see, e.g., Stobbart, 2008; QSA, 2009; Hursh, 2008), when a measure becomes a target, it seriously distorts the measure. In
... we should see the English situation as a warning, not as a system from which to learn particular, we need to distinguish between the short-term and long-term effects of high-stakes accountability testing. While this kind of testing and the professional responses to it can provide gains in the short-term, and a refocusing on the basics of literacy and numeracy, the long-term effects have almost universally been degrading of schools and teachers’ work, and it is ultimately counterproductive (Stobbart, 2008, p.116). As Stobbart (ibid) notes, the focus on a narrow indicator always “distorts what is going on”. The most benign effect is the culture of performativity – being seen to perform and “glossifying” school achievements – while the most venal is outright fabrication and cheating. To avoid either set of effects – from the relatively benign through to straightforward fabrication – requires that the focus shift to enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. This in turn demands a culture of trust of teachers and investment in the enhancement of teacher skills and capacities. The erosion of trust in teachers also – obviously enough – affects teachers’ professional lives and sense of professional worth. Ball (2008) has written about how the impact of high-stakes testing and a culture of performativity in English
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schooling has affected the very souls of teachers, who feel they can no longer practise authentic pedagogies or authentic assessment practices aimed at learning across a wide curriculum, but instead are framed by the evaluation message system as mere technicians, implementing a centralised and standardised curriculum. This changes what it means to be a teacher. The culture of performativity and the distorting impact of high-stakes testing are also evident in the USA. There, highstakes testing (including most recently at the federal level, the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)) has also seen a performative distortion of schooling. As Hursh (2008) notes, NCLB has led to a decline in the quality of teaching and learning in US schools and a narrowing of focus in schools serving disadvantaged students, which further disadvantages them in the education and labour markets.
Policy learning: England and Finland England To this point I have implied the policy regime framing schools and schooling practices in England. To elaborate: in England, students sit for standardised assessment tests (SATS), linked to the national curriculum, taken at the end of key stage 1 (age 6/year 2), key stage 2 (age 11/year 6) and key stage 3 (age 14, year 9) in English, maths and science. The SATS at key stage 3 has recently been abolished because of the failure of the private contractor to deliver analysis of the test results on time. Students sit for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) at year 11, with the government targetting 30 per cent of students gaining an A*-D grade, and schools rewarded and punished according to their achievement or otherwise of this gold standard target. This is consequential accountability at work! “A” levels at the end of schooling provide another set of league tables of school performance. All of this has seen the rejection of mixed-ability teaching and the use of tight streaming in all schools, as well as a triage effect, with schools focusing on those students close to achieving test or exam targets. What we have seen is the transfer of authority from professional teachers to standardised testing instruments and the creators of
such tests – a fraction of the middle class who have benefited in career terms from this policy regime. The latest stage in schooling policy in England is articulated in the policy document, Making Good Progress: How Can We Help Every Child to Make Good Progress at School? (DCSF, 2006). This policy is designed to ensure “even better ways to measure, assess, report and stimulate progress in schools” (p.1). The policy is about retaining the focus on “absolute attainment”, with the addition of a new focus on “progress”. When Making Good Progress becomes national policy in England, it will require target setting for schools in relation to attainment, but also progress at both school and individual pupil levels. There will also be a focus on students whose progress is “blocked”. Additionally, there will be the development of sophisticated measures of school effects, or “value added”, and even more sophisticated accounts, which acknowledge the socio-economic context of a school’s catchment, developing the concept of “contextual value added”. These are better measures, but perhaps their sophistication might limit their policy use in relation to schooling policy alone. For a whole range of reasons – including policy borrowing, the flows of individual policy advisors between the countries, and political alignments – the English situation has had real policy salience in Australia. But we should see the English situation as a warning, not as a system from which to learn. Robin Alexander’s independent Cambridge Primary Review, for example, has provided a devastating attack on the effects of the English policy regimes on primary schooling there, its goals, ambience, pedagogies and curricula (the Review is soon to be published as Children, their World, their Education (Alexander et al, 2009)). In policy and political terms, there is now some belated recognition of the negative effects of the dominant policy regime, with also some stepping-back from the absolute emphasis on high-stakes testing. Despite this, there remains an incapacity to move beyond the dominant policy paradigm of seeking to achieve better educational and equity outcomes through targeting linked to league tables of performance on highstakes testing. Having said that, the motivation for the
Blair and Brown New Labour schooling reforms have been laudable, namely to improve educational outcomes for all students – and, specifically, to improve the outcomes from schooling of the most disadvantaged students so as to enhance their life chances. Yet there has been a failure to recognise that it is the quality of teacher classroom practices that count most in terms of school effects upon student learning, and especially in relation to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Recognition of the importance of teacher classroom practices demands informed prescription at the policy centre, working with a culture of trust and respect of teachers and full support for teachers to develop and practise their professional judgements. In other words: the quality of classroom practices is what counts. This means that governments need to invest heavily in ongoing teacher learning. The evidence is very clear that highstakes testing produces “defensive pedagogies” (McNeil, 2000), rather than pedagogies of the kind described in the productive pedagogies research, which make a real difference to the quality of schooling outcomes. The effects of the English policy regime are negative: de-professionalisation of teachers with reductive effects on schools, which means it is difficult for them to achieve their broad policy goals. These negative effects have emerged despite the admirable focus on disadvantage.
Finland Finland represents a counterpoint to the English experience. Finland (with Korea closely behind it) is the outstanding achiever on the OECD’s PISA, achieving high quality and high equity outcomes. Interestingly, while student scores on SATS and GCSE in England have improved across the period of performativity, England’s results on PISA still lag with mid-range outcomes, and with continuing low equity in terms of the tail of performance and its link to socio-economic disadvantage. The contrast between improvements on national tests and exams and stagnation on PISA is telling. Sahlberg (2007) has provided a good account of the key features of the Finnish policy regime, which he contrasts with “global education reform trends”. England represents an extreme version of these
trends. We can think of an Anglo-American model of school reform, and also speak of “English exceptionality” in policy terms. It is interesting in the UK context that Scotland and Wales have sought to distance their school policy regimes from the English approach. The global trend – represented by the Anglo-American model – has been towards standardisation, while Finland retains flexibility and comparatively “loose standards”. The global trend has been towards a narrowed focus on literacy and numeracy, while Finnish schooling continues to emphasise broad learning combined with creativity. Sahlberg suggests that the global education reform trend has been towards “consequential accountability” where negative consequences flow from the failure to meet targets, while Finland works with intelligent accountability and trust-based professionalism. Moreover, Finnish teachers have high status; teaching is a highly respected profession and an attractive career option for high-achieving students at the end of secondary schooling. Teachers in Finland are comparatively well paid. They also have master’s degrees, with a good number of principals having doctorates. There is a real valuing of learning for all associated with schooling. Teachers have a considerable degree of professional autonomy. There is no high-stakes testing. While teacher pedagogies appear to be teacher-centred, they are intellectually demanding. There are only government schools: in a sense, all students attend the same school. Finland has a low Gini coefficient of social inequality, that is, it is a relatively egalitarian society with a high degree of equality. But Finland is also a small and relatively ethnically homogeneous society. This suggests the need for some caution in borrowing or learning from Finland. Nonetheless, the central lessons to be learnt from Finland are the importance of social equality and the significance of teachers and their professional practices to achieving both high quality and high equity outcomes. A high status profession practising intellectually demanding pedagogies, with a lot of school-based support for learning, are key features of the Finnish system of schooling, as is intelligent accountability, which entails the system being held accountable to schools for making the desired outcomes possible.
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What does the research tell us? The Finnish case confirms what we know from educational research about the major factors impacting on student performance at school. Social class or socio-economic background of students is a major determining factor in student outcomes from schooling. More broadly, societies with a low Gini-coefficient of inequality are those societies in which there is a less substantial effect of social class of origin on probability of good school results and career success. Such societies also have a small gap between top and bottom performing students. Finland is a good case in point. The lack of economic capital is accompanied most commonly by a lack of cultural capital, which is necessary to successfully negotiate the demands of schooling. Those from poor families lacking the requisite cultural capital have to learn many things at school. Learning to do school is one aspect here. Effective schools in poor communities engage with and recognise the strengths of these communities – they not only engage with their capitals, but also attempt explicitly to give these students access to the cultural codes necessary to successfully negotiate the academic requirements of schooling. In assessment and pedagogical terms, this demands a high degree of explicitness and scaffolding. So, out-of-school factors – economic and cultural – are important when considering school and individual performance on high-stakes tests. At the same time, of all the factors that a school can control, it is teachers’ practices – their pedagogies and assessment practices (both formative and summative) – which have the most effect on student learning. This is particularly the case, as demonstrated in the seminal Coleman Report of 1966 in the USA, for ensuring equal educational opportunities for disadvantaged students. Teachers are very important for the learning of disadvantaged students. Teachers have more effect than the whole school on student learning outcomes. Any emphasis on leadership as a policy strategy must ensure a focus on leadership as “leading learning” targeted at enhancing the learning of all in schools. Townsend (2001, p.119) has summarised the research on school and teacher effects, noting that about 5-10 per cent
of the variance in student performance is due to whole school effects, while 3555 per cent of such variance is due to teacher effect. In terms of teacher effects, it is pedagogies of the kind described in the productive pedagogies research that make the difference. The defensive pedagogies which result from high-stakes testing and consequential accountability limit teacher effects in terms of higher order educational outcomes. Julia Gillard, in various speeches, has acknowledged this research, accepting the salience of social class background and good, intellectually demanding teaching
... it is teachers’ practices – their pedagogies and assessment practices (both formative and summative) – which have the most effect on student learning to student outcomes and especially in respect of outcomes for disadvantaged students. The million dollar question, of course, is how the federal and state governments should respond in policy and funding terms to these realities and research evidence. Like New Labour in England, the policy intentions of the federal government are for better school outcomes for all with a renewed focus on more socially just outcomes. This is to be lauded, after the benign neglect of social justice matters by the Howard government and its prioritising of school choice and related funding redistribution towards nongovernment schools. A more equitable school funding regime will have to be negotiated by the federal government by 2012.
Conclusion: Beyond the neo-liberal social imaginary To understand the difficulties of recognising what the research says about schools, attainment and opportunity and
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moving to a more productive schooling policy frame, I conclude by moving to a different register, sketching a big-picture sense of how we might reconceptualise schooling in the current political climate. Globalisation as experienced over the past thirty years or so has been neoliberal globalisation, an ideology which promotes markets over the state and regulation and individual advancement/ self-interest over the collective good and common wellbeing. We have seen a new individualism, with individuals now being deemed responsible for their own “selfcapitalising” over their lifetimes. Common good and social protection concerns have been given less focus and the market valued over the state, with enhanced market or private sector involvement in the workings of the state. The global financial crisis has challenged many of these takenfor-granteds of neo-liberal globalisation. Certainly we have witnessed some global and national attempts at re-regulation. However, my argument is that in social policy terms and in relation specifically to education policy, we still remain trapped within a neo-liberal imaginary as the basis for social policy. We need to imagine schooling policy otherwise. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has written a scathing and intelligent critique of neoliberalism. He states: “The great neoliberal experiment of the past thirty years has failed... the emperor has no clothes. Neo-liberalism, and the free market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy” (p.23). Following this observation, he then goes on to comment on the current political moment, which we might somewhat optimistically see as the postneo-liberal period: “With the demise of neo-liberalism, the role of the state has once more been recognised as fundamental. The state has been the primary actor in responding in three clear areas of the current crisis: in rescuing the private financial system from collapse; in providing direct stimulus to the real economy because of the collapse in private demand; and in the redesign of a national and global regulatory regime.” (Rudd, 2009, p.25) Federal government expenditure on schooling infrastructure is a central component for providing stimulus to the economy. Rudd’s comments also reveal
a binary divide between the neo-liberal focus on individual self-interest, the market and deregulation and the social democratic emphasis on the collective or common good achieved through state action. Rudd (2009, p.25) further notes: “social democrats maintain robust support for the market economy but posit that markets can only work in a mixed economy, with a role for the state as regulator and as a funder and provider of public goods.” The potential for a post-neo-liberal social imaginary – and a new framing for social policy – lies in the Prime Minister’s important observation about the role of social justice within the social democratic political project. However, the observation also indicates how we, or the government at least, find it difficult to move beyond neo-liberal precepts, to think social policy in other than neo-liberal ways. On social justice and the social democratic project, Kevin Rudd states: “Social justice is also viewed as an essential component of the social democratic project. The social-democratic pursuit of social justice is founded on a belief in the self-evident value of equality, rather than, for example, an exclusively utilitarian argument that a particular investment in education is justified because it yields increases in productivity growth (although, happily, from the point of view of modern social democrats, both things happen to be true).” (Rudd, 2009, p.25) Rudd goes on to acknowledge that in terms of social justice “all human beings have an intrinsic right to human dignity, equality of opportunity and the ability to lead a fulfilling life” (p.25). However, the Prime Minister acknowledges only part of the equation. Rudd suggests that Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning economist, argues freedom is the way to achieve economic stability and growth. Critically, in his 1999 book, Development as Freedom, Sen also argues that the purposes of economic development in the global south are freedom and more democracy – not only economic growth. This is a different way of framing what matters. In all of this, there are important implications for the meta-framing of schooling policy in Australia – in relation to both funding issues and educational matters around curriculum, pedagogy
and evaluation. Schooling must have broader goals than those implicit in the human capital rationale for schooling reform, which has underpinned national schooling policy for more than twenty years. Schooling can only achieve its more noble objectives in a society committed to more equality and to ensuring that all, irrespective of social class backgrounds, get access to high quality schooling. If we combine the Prime Minister’s critique of neo-liberalism and his valuing of equality, human dignity and freedom, with Julia Gillard’s recognition of the significance of inequality and teachers to improving educational opportunities for all, there is the potential for a national reimagining of the post-neo-liberal framework for social policy. Unfortunately, if we look at the policy reality in schooling at the national level, the human capital framework still dominates. This is evident in the central role of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), rather than the ministerial council in education, in the national schools agenda. Furthermore, aspects of the national agenda, such as national testing and league tables of performance, come out of educational changes implemented elsewhere, which have been attached to neo-liberal agendas and state restructuring. They also link to the new empiricism associated with the audit culture of the neo-liberal state. And as documented throughout this article, the impact of high-stakes, national testing will reduce the remit of pedagogies and curricula in ways disjunctive with the broader educative aspirations for schooling. More pragmatically, this approach is also disjunctive with the economic and cultural needs of a decent future Australia. Given the Rudd government’s strong commitment to quality teaching, addressing educational disadvantage, and investing in school infrastructure – and the need to rethink funding for nongovernment schools in the near future –the federal government could lead the way with a progressive post-neo-liberal schooling policy regime. Such a regime would work with the new intelligent accountabilities advocated in this article. But the danger remains that the accountability and transparency agendas will lock us into a neo-liberal social imaginary with negative educational
effects.
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QTU Professional Magazine November 2009 – 19
