The Logics of Good Teaching in an Audit Culture: A Deleuzian analysis

Abstract

This article examines the attempted reform of education within an emerging audit culture in Australia that has led to the implementation of a high-stakes testing regime known as NAPLAN. NAPLAN represents a machine of auditing, which creates and accounts for data that are used to measure, amongst other things, good teaching. In particular, we address the logics of a policy intervention that aims to improve the quality of education through returning ‘good teaching’. Using Deleuze’s concepts of series, events, copies and simulacra, we suggest that an attempt to return past commonsense logics of ‘good teaching’ as a result of NAPLAN is not possible. In an audit culture as exemplified by NAPLAN, ‘good teaching’ is being reconceptualized through those practices and becomes unrecognizable. Whilst policy claims to improved equity and quality are admirable, this article suggests that the simulacral change to logics of good teaching may actualize something very different.

Keywords:

• Deleuze and Guattari
• high-stakes testing
• NAPLAN
• audit culture
• good teaching

Acknowledgement

The writing of this article has been assisted by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

Notes

1. NAPLAN stands for the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy and is a series of standardizsed tests given to each Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 student in Australia each year. After results have been finalizsed, school results are published online on the My Schools website where each school can be ‘compared’ with ‘like’ schools across Australia.

2. In 2010 the Australian Prime Minister outlined education as a key platform in the nation’s productivity and economic agenda. The shift in definition from social good to economic driver represents part of this capture.

3. One of the reasons for these similarities is the sense of globalized competition the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests have on national education systems. For further review Rizvi and Lingard (2010) offer an excellent analysis of the effects of PISA as a move towards a globalized education policy.

4. Deleuze goes on to argue that the pure becoming of Alice is really ‘the loss of her proper name’ understood as the shift from a fixed identity to uncertainty (Deleuze, 1990, p. 3).

5. The best expression of this for Australia is Michael Pusey’s work on the rise of economic rationalism in Australian governance (Pusey, 1991).

6. This explains why the constant calls to return to some golden age of teaching which stresses the 3Rs will never really change teaching. It is an attempt to return a model/copy that is impossible to repeat no matter how strident the calls are.

7. For a detailed examination of the phantasmic and modulatory logics contained in the Australian Federal Government’s Education Revolution, see Clarke (2012) or Thompson (2010).