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

Abstract

Historically, school leaders have occupied a somewhat ambiguous position within networks of power. On the one hand, they appear to be celebrated as what Ball (2003) has termed the ‘new hero of educational reform'; on the other, they are often ‘held to account’ through those same performative processes and technologies. These have become compelling in schools and principals are ‘doubly bound’ through this. Adopting a Foucauldian notion of discursive production, this paper addresses the ways that the discursive ‘field’ of ‘principal’ (within larger regimes of truth such as schools, leadership, quality and efficiency) is produced. It explores how individual principals understand their roles and ethics within those practices of audit emerging in school governance, and how their self-regulation is constituted through NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy. A key effect of NAPLAN has been the rise of auditing practices that change how education is valued. Open-ended interviews with 13 primary and secondary school principals from Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales asked how they perceived NAPLAN's impact on their work, their relationships within their school community and their ethical practice.

Keywords:

• NAPLAN
• audit cultures
• testing
• principals
• Foucault

Notes on contributors

Greg Thompson is Senior Lecturer at Murdoch University, Australia. He is interested in large-scale assessment systems, educational theory and teacher-student subjectivities. He is Series Editor of Local/Global issues in education (Routledge) and an Associate Editor of Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education.

Nicole Mockler is based at the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. Her research interests include education policy, representations of teachers and schools in public discourse and teacher professional learning.

Notes

1 The myschool.edu.au website was established in 2010 by the Federal Government. It provides public access to individual schools’ NAPLAN results and enables them to be compared with those of other schools.

2 In the context of this paper, we work with a definition of neoliberalism consistent with Connell: ‘Neoliberalism broadly means the agenda of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market. It also means the institutional arrangements to implement this project that have been installed, step by step, in every society under neoliberal control’ (2013, p. 100).

3 Schooling in Australia is comprised of both Government and (publicly funded) non-Government schools. The non-Government sector is very broad, comprising various Catholic systems and independent schools which, usually church-based, themselves range from small low-fee community schools to large, very wealthy, elite schools.