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 ‘like-schools’ 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.

Keywords:

• educational accountability
• high-stakes testing
• neo-liberalism
• policy borrowing
• policy learning

Acknowledgements

The research upon which this paper is based has been developed from an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Discovery Project (DP1094850), Schooling the nation in an age of globalization: National curriculum, accountabilities and their effects.

Notes

For example, Glenn Milne (2010), columnist for the Murdoch Press's Sunday Mail, observed of the My School website: ‘As millions of parents put their mouse where their vote is, Julia Gillard can bask in the phenomenal success of one of the Rudd government's landmark initiatives’ (31 January, 2010, p. 62). An editorial (19 January, 2010, p. 13) in Murdoch's national paper The Australian, stated in relation to the website and publication of school performance data on NAPLAN: ‘Ms Gillard is to be praised for defying the education unions, and everybody who believes in equality of opportunity should endorse her determination to ensure schools account for their performance’.

There are multiple tests of various kinds that seek to ascertain performance on the cross-curricular higher order cognitive goals of senior syllabuses.

While the NPM dovetails with and complements broader neo-liberal social imaginaries, it is an organizational form and set of practices distinct from neo-liberalism.

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.

The argument here is derived from that in my book with Fazal Rizvi (2010), Globalizing education policy.