Guest Editorial

The aim of this special issue is to explore the role of ‘critical’ theory in education and educational research. We undertake this task by analysing a specific empirical focus—the My School website in Australia (www.myschool.edu.au)—from four different theoretical perspectives. The My School website was introduced as a part of a broader reform process by the Australian Government to provide information about schools and to compare schools’ performance in the national testing scheme. This empirical focus was chosen because it constitutes an example of the current broader global performative accountability push in education. The website has been a controversial development in the Australian education landscape and has received significant criticisms from a number of education stakeholders. Rather than simply outlining a range of criticisms or negative viewpoints, the articles comprising this special issue all work from the premise that education research and policy analysis needs to rigorously engage with theory and philosophy. Similar to Stephen Ball’s (2006) claims of the practical role of theory, and the importance of critical theory as exemplified throughout this journal (see Forster, 1999; Maddock, 1999; Tubbs, 1996), in these articles the authors draw upon a range of conceptual tools in order to understand the conditions of the production of knowledge, to illustrate the complexity of the social and to disturb the status quo of the theory–practice nexus.

In recent years, the introduction of various neo-liberal forms of accountabilities in education has been the focus of much attention in the UK, US, and other Western countries. In Australia, the Federal Government, as a part of its ‘Education Revolution’ has introduced the My School website for the purposes of publicly displaying school performance data based on its national testing regime (National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy [NAPLAN]) which is undertaken at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The rationale offered by the government for the website include providing ‘parents and students with information on each school—its view of itself and its mission, its staffing, its resources and its students’ characteristics and their performances’ as well comparative data between schools for the purposes of ‘lifting expectations of what they and their students can achieve’ and thus supplying the information for parents to choose where to send their children to school (My School website, 2011). More recently, the website has been updated to include a socio-economic status index, called the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage or ICSEA, and also school funding and finance data. The ICSEA value assigned to schools is based upon the relative advantage of the student population. The website thus allows users to observe data for each school mostly related to NAPLAN performance. While My School is not a league table per se, it functions in a very similar capacity and in fact, some Australian newspapers (for example Queensland’s Courier Mail) have begun their own published rankings systems.

These types of education policies subscribe to the notion of performativity that Lyotard describes so well in the Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, 1984). Lyotard describes the term performativity as a new language game that refers to the best input/output equation. That is, performativity in education is not about educational ideas but rather the contribution of education and skills to the effectiveness of the social system. Therefore, there is a rise of discourses and policies that ascribe to these performative criteria, to the extent that they become the ‘only game in town.’ Other approaches to education, for example, what Lyotard terms reading, thinking, critically reflecting, and imaginative thinking are seen as less ‘valuable’ and become marginalised. Yet these are the activities that according to Lyotard (1991), we need now more than ever.

In response to Lyotard’s call and of the intensification of the performative criteria in education policy manifest in such mechanisms as the MySchool website, the articles in this special issue draw upon a range of theorists and concepts to move beyond simplistic critiques of such policies and to explicitly demonstrate the relevance and importance of theory and philosophy in relation to tangible and ‘practical’ educational issues. The articles comprising this special issue come out of a symposium presented at the recent Australia Association for Research in Education (AARE) conference in December 2011. The authors were asked to analyse any aspect of the My School website using whatever theorists, or theoretical concepts they wished, and these articles are the results of that invitation.

This special issue of Educational Philospohy and Theory brings together the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu and Emmanuel Levinas to provoke deep critical and philosophical interrogations of not only the My School website but also by implication, broader neo-liberal discourses. The adoption of these different theoretical lenses is not for the purpose of suggesting a clear, wholesome interpretation of My School but rather to embrace a diversity of approaches and discourses to highlight the contested ground through which complexity of the cultural, social, historical and political intersect.

In the first article, Sam Sellar explores the My School website as a form of transparent accountability drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Sellar argues that while these accountability mechanisms do have some benefits, they are largely inappropriate to do justice to ‘the other.’ Forms of ethical experience require opacity in the face of the other rather than through quantitative appropriation and comparison. The significance of Sellar’s argument is that he is not arguing against such technologies of accountability as forms of domination, but rather articulates how they work to foreclose the possibilities for ethical experience and practice. He also argues that forms of opacity in respect to the other are at least as important as transparent accountability mechanisms such as My School.

Richard Niesche, in the next article, draws on the work of both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, to illuminate how My School operates as a form of governmentality for school principals. Taking a different direction from Sellar’s approach, he uses the case study of a principal working at a secondary school located in a very low socio-economic status area to show how the principal responds to and works with the discursive implications as a result of the My School website. He argues that principals are becoming perpetually assessable subjects, and that while there are strict accountabilities and compliance requirements for principals, there are also spaces for what Foucault terms ‘counter-conducts.’ The task then is for school leadership to seek out spaces and ways they can utilise for the benefit of their school students and communities.

In the third article, Carmen Mills takes a broader approach to examine the implications of My School for disadvantaged communities using the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Mills explores the notion of choice for parents that the federal government promotes through the website. Drawing on Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital and habitus, Mills exposes the flaws in the parental choice argument and how the website results in the reproduction of disadvantage for those already residing in disadvantaged communities. In the second part of the article, Mills examines how the My School website is placing increasing pressure on schools to ‘teach to the test’ rather than a focus on holistic and ‘deep learning.’ She frames the reliance on scripted pedagogies in terms of the broader global surge of standardised testing. In the final section, Mills suggests a number of approaches that may be used to counter the effects of My School and lead to improved outcomes for disadvantaged communities.

In the fourth article, Christina Gowlett, takes the innovative approach of using the work of Judith Butler to ‘queery’ the rules of intelligibility around new schooling accountabilities such as My School. While drawing on the same school site for the case study as Richard Niesche, she takes a case study of a secondary school to highlight the ambivalence of subjection. She uses Butler’s concept of performative resignification to illuminate how space for thinking otherwise can be generated through the signifiers that constitute the subject. In other words, she demonstrates how this school simultaneously works both with and against the mechanics of new schooling accountabilities. One of the most exciting aspects of this approach is the use of queer theory outside of the field it is usually undertaken to provide a provocative account of one principal’s struggles to engage with My School on a day-to-day basis. This then provides interesting insights into the micro-practices of policy implementation and analysis at the school level.

In the first of two response articles, Bob Lingard critically engages with each of the preceding articles to make the case for a broader politics in moving towards a post neo-liberal social imaginary. Lingard too argues for the use of theory at all levels in educational research and research training, but with an explicit reflexivity towards the construction of knowledge in the social sciences. Lingard sees the My School website as a ‘condensation symbol’ of broader neo-liberal assemblages of schooling policy, systems and practices. Bob Lingard’s knowledge and expertise in this field is vast and his identification of the nuances of each article in relation to the theorising around My School provides a valuable contribution to the thinking about the role of theory in education and education research.

In the final article, Mary Lou Rasmussen takes up the implication of the use of the notion of critical theory mentioned at the start of this introduction. She uses the idea of critical theory as a point of departure to engage with the articles comprising this special issue. Rasmussen makes the case for the importance of these articles as a purposeful engagement between critical theory and education in terms of specific debates and lines of inquiry.

The format of this special issue slightly deviates from the more traditional structuring of articles and responses. The ordering of articles consists of the four central articles followed by the two response articles. However, rather than asking the authors to revise their articles according to the comments of the two blind reviewers, I have drawn upon a suggestion by one of the reviewers to ask each of the four contributors to respond to both the reviewers’ comments and the two response articles in a brief section within their article just before the conclusion.

The articles comprising this special issue highlight the impact and potential of theory for education research in terms of making complex theoretical issues tangible (Peters & Burbules, 2004), as well as illuminating theoretically rich understandings of a contemporary phenomenon in global education policy. The aim has not been to search for a coherent set of theories or approach but rather to purposefully bring together a range of perspectives and ideas that may not necessarily sit well together, to bring about tensions between theories. For if we wish to better understand the complexities of modern education policy and its effects, we need to look beyond any one theory or approach and set into motion the dynamics of multiple perspectives and with it the contradictions and tensions implicit in this. If we have a range of theoretical and conceptual tools at our disposal, then as educational researchers we can attempt to understand and make sense of current circumstances and possibly find new spaces for action, new frameworks and approaches and inspiration. The articles brought together in this special issue do not cover all issues related to My School or new schooling accountabilities, nor do they cover all theories or movements of thought. However, we believe that the theoretical approaches such as those used in this special issue can contribute to identifying new directions and possibilities for action that are, as yet, unconceived.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank and acknowledge the two reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments on this special issue as a whole and each individual article. This was a big undertaking and the special issue is all the better for it.