Assessment-based curriculum: globalising and enterprising culture, human capital and teacher–technicians in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This policy chronology traces the institution of globalised school curriculum and assessment discourses, as a vernacular and specific form of public rationalisation and educational governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Without functional national standards or national testing, official discourses constructed an assessment-driven framework as a public measurement and performance regime. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘toolkit’, this genealogy traces attempts by the government’s review and audit agency (the ERO), to lift achievement through establishing national standards, normalising assessment and strengthening market-managerial accountabilities. Therapeutic technologies of personal re/development supplemented the above through managed literacy partnerships. This was the basis for the managed reprofessionalisation of techno-entrepreneurial teachers around stipulated, data-driven and measured performances. The paper examines the centrality of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework to the reconstruction of an Enterprise Culture and the psycho-cognitive re/making and re/moralisation of individuals as responsibilised, self-managing and calculative. It posits that within a busnocratic rationality (merging business, entrepreneurial and technical-management), a calculative governmentality required educational data-systems for future population knowledge and control. The genealogy demonstrates the inextricable connection between ‘public’ rationalities, technologies of control and the re/construction of ‘private’ identity, subjectivity and ethics, under neoliberal governmentality.

Keywords:

• Neoliberal governmentality
• curriculum/assessment
• standards
• education policy
• enterprise
• genealogy
• economisation
• re/moralisation
• reprofessionalisation

Acknowledgement

The author would like to acknowledge the excellent discussions and suggestions by Dr Marian Court and Professor John O’Neill and Mr Ken Kilpin on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as the excellent suggestions from the anonymous referees.

Notes

1. Australia has embraced national testing (Klenowski and Wyatt-Smith 2012; Lingard 2010), while New Zealand has established National Standards based on Overall Teacher Judgements, that are neither national nor standardised, but exerting high-stakes effects in primary school cultures.

2. These ‘arts of government’ involved modes of thinking and forms of reason (e.g. discursive regimes) to render reality thinkable, amenable to calculation, programing and change.

3. Fabrication meant self-construction and fictionalisation for Foucault. By tracing the relation between disciplinary self-fabrication, the human sciences, self-control, and the 1980s re-emergence of Greek ethical notions of self-constitution through self-care, conceptual continuity across Foucault’s oeuvre can be traced. Olssen (2006, 34) notes Foucault’s development of these ideas, but Harrer (2005) rejects arguments of a distinct rupture in early and later work, arguing they imply the same practice. Rose (1999, 240) also rejects a ‘post-disciplinary’ logic, stressing the multiplicity of strategies, sites and complexities of fabrication in control societies.

4. Ex-Treasury official.

5. Disciplinary moralisation penetrates the body and soul to shape productive and docile subjects. Contemporary moralisation reflects secularism cosmopolitanism, consumptive and popular cultures, and is dispersed through human relations and sites requiring efficient observation, management and prediction. This enables the ethical self-management of consumers (Rose 1999, 233–234).