Education policy as numbers: data categories and two Australian cases of misrecognition

Abstract

While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling reform agenda. The first case deals with the category of students called Language Backgrounds Other than English (LBOTE) in Australian schooling policy – students with LBOTE. The second deals with the ‘closing the gap’ approach to Indigenous schooling. The LBOTE case demonstrates an attempt at recognition, but one that fails to create a category useful for policy-makers and teachers in relation to the language needs of Australian students. The Indigenous case of policy misrecognition confirms Gillborn’s analysis of gap talk and its effects; a focus on closing the gap, as with the new politics of recognition, elides structural inequalities and the historical effects of colonisation. With this case, there is a misrecognition that denies Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and cultural rights. The contribution of the paper to policy sociology is twofold: first in showing how ostensive politics of recognition can work as misrecognition with the potential to deny redistribution and secondly that we need to be aware of the socially constructed nature of categories that underpin contemporary policy as numbers and evidence-based policy.

Keywords:

• education policy
• technologies of governance
• misrecognition
• ‘gap talk’

Notes

1. Earlier feminist research in Australia on girls’ education policy also dealt with similar issues regarding how to measure the disadvantages of girls compared with boys, how to evaluate success of policy interventions and the ways in which distributive equity defined as ‘equal outcomes’ ignored the significant contribution that the content and processes of schooling made to gender inequality (see, e.g. Kenway 1991; Yates 1993).

2. This discussion takes up a Critical Race Theory view of ‘whiteness’ as not being linked with identity per se, rather it is a way of talking about a political and legal framework grounded in the ideologies of Western ‘supremacy’ and the impact of colonialist processes (Taylor 2009, 4).

3. This committee was created in the 1970s and consisted of Indigenous peoples only.

4. This policy continues to be the over-arching national policy on ‘Indigenous education’. See Luke et al. (1993) for a discourse analysis of this policy showing the ways the category functions and also denies intragroup differences amongst the White Other.

5. The Secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Moran (2009, 4–5) AO, raised concerns about 40 years of federal funding being mismanaged by State governments in delivering cohesive and efficient services to Indigenous peoples and communities.

6. The third target is to halve the gap in Year 3 literacy and numeracy.

7. In her article Moreton-Robinson reveals the deployment of race ‘neutral’, colour-blind and meritocracy strategies within a High Court ruling. The case served to protect the privilege and power of ‘white’ investment in ‘property’. In referring to this here, the pedagogy, curriculum and assessment can be viewed as ‘property’, with NAPLAN and the debates associated with it, serving to reify a socially and economically stratified structure.