https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8796-3939
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ABSTRACT
Our aim in this paper is to examine how standards-based reforms (SBRs) relating to teachers and teaching are being constituted in Australia and the US. Our focus is not the specific impacts of these policies as enacted practices in schools or teacher training institutions, but rather the dynamics of policy production, with a specific focus on how federally-driven policies have been assembled in each country. Bringing together the notion of ‘global forms’ with the dual concepts of ‘political rationality’ and ‘political technology’ from governmentality studies, we consider SBRs as a global techno-scientific form that coheres at the level of political rationality and which can be abstracted across contexts, but which also manifests in unique place-specific assemblages of political technologies. The global form of SBRs thus represents the logics by which policymakers may attempt to align and create commonality across systems in the search for standardisation, even if this can never be fully realised in practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. For instance, the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 at the height of the Cold War further amplified the US fear of communism and placed a new dependence upon public schooling to reaffirm America’s global preeminence. During his 1958 State of the Union address, President Eisenhower directly pointed at schools as a way to combat the Soviet threat, using fear tactics that would help to shape the educational system well into the 21st century (see Johanningmeier Citation2010).
2. For instance, Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University was invited to the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) at the University of Melbourne in 2014 to present findings from her new book, ‘Teacher evaluation: What really matters for effectiveness and improvement’, as part of the Dean’s Lecture Series (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Mg92j87ig). John Hattie, a Laureate Professor of the MGSE, has advocated similar work in his role as Chairperson of the AITSL Board of Directors since 2010, and his ‘visible learning’ work has had significant traction in schooling policy and practice in Australia and the US. The work of Darling-Hammond, Hattie and the OECD is also often referenced by AITSL in its publications.
3. We of course recognise, consonant with the contingent and in-context nature of our policy assemblage approach, that previous and current trajectories of policy development do not constrain future possibilities for how a given assemblage might be re/dis/assembled.
4. This ‘rights and responsibilities’ understanding has been invoked in a number of litigation scenarios, including the seminal Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483 1954), which established the unconstitutionality of segregation based on race. Subsequent education policies, such as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) of 2001 and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2016, have also been founded upon this premise (see Hamre, Morin, and Ydesen Citation2018).
5. Of particular importance during this era was the 1998 report released by the Australian Senate, entitled A Class Act: Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession (Australian Government Citation1998), which was the first time that teaching standards had been emphasised as a strictly ‘national’ issue. It also saw the first instance when the federal government officially supported and endorsed the creation of ‘national professional teaching standards’ (Australian Government 1998, 18).
6. Despite all the ways that the APST have been mobilised to standardise teachers and teaching, it is also worth noting exactly what they are not, at least presently. The APST have not yet been used to universally determine salary or employment conditions for teachers, and the Highly Accomplished and Lead career stages have yet to be adopted or recognised by all jurisdictions (see NESA Citation2018; VIT Citation2018). This does not mean, of course, that such developments will not take place into the future. For instance, the second author of this paper was recently engaged in a policy forum in NSW in which developments to align the APST to salary levels were being actively considered.
7. It is worthwhile observing here exactly how AITSL articulates the need for TPAs: ‘The TEMAG reforms identified opportunities to further improve the quality of pre-service teachers. The issue is not that graduates weren’t of high quality before, but that we need to be confident this is the case for every graduate’ (AITSL Citation2018b, np; emphasis added).
8. Again, one cannot overstate that several key actors, such as Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, have served prominent roles in the development of teaching standards in both systems. In the US, she was the chair of the InTASC taskforce and the lead developer of the edTPA; similarly, in Australia, and as we noted in the previous section, she has worked closely with a number of actors and organisations (such as Professor John Hattie, the University of Melbourne and AITSL) to advance SRB agendas, including developing Australian versions of TPAs. We emphasise these individuals and organisations not to question their motives or agendas, but merely to note that they have been, and continue to be, key nodes and facilitators in the assembling of SBR-related schooling policy.
9. The clear diversity between the various states of the Union is not without precedent. Indeed, for much of its early history, the US was referred to as ‘these United States’, rather than ‘the United States’, reflecting the ongoing negotiation between the US as a unified national whole and a collective of distinct subnational communities. Although most common in the period before the US Civil War (1861–1865), the pluralised form (‘these United States’) is still often used, such as by President Obama at the 2013 dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
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Notes on contributors
Steven Lewis
Steven Lewis is an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow at the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre at Deakin University, Australia. His current research project, entitled ‘Globalising school reform through online teacher professional learning’ (2019-2022), investigates how schooling reform and teacher practice are being reshaped by new forms of international evidence, data infrastructures and relational policy spaces, including online learning communities such as the OECD’s PISA4U. He has recently published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Cambridge Journal of Education, Critical Studies in Education and Journal of Education Policy.
Glenn C. Savage
Glenn C. Savage is a senior lecturer in education policy and sociology of education at the University of Western Australia. His current research examines the development of national schooling reforms and how policies in federal systems are shaped by transnational flows of policy ideas and practices.
Jessica Holloway
Jessica Holloway is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow within the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre at Deakin University. Her current project, ‘The Role of Teacher Expertise, Authority and Professionalism in Education’, investigates the relationship between schools, professional expertise and democracy, and the role of teachers within these spaces. Her recent publications include ‘Discourse analysis as theory, method, and epistemology in studies of education policy: A critical synthesis of the literature’ (with Kate Anderson) in Journal of Education Policy and ‘Teacher evaluation as an onto-epistemic framework’ in the British Journal of Sociology of Education.