http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2923-0104
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ABSTRACT
In an era when evidence-informed decision-making is mooted as a means of achieving equity, data are now being used to revive the in-school stratification of students, despite sustained concerns around the long-term negative consequences of these practices. This institutional ethnography explores how teachers use data in their everyday work, and how evidence-informed decision-making supports the logic of grouping students by ability. Research data are drawn from two Australian schools where achievement data were used to group students, in response to requirements to use evidence-informed practices. This had implications for enacted curriculum and pedagogies, as teachers used grouping to differentiate instruction. Although there were no formal directives to group by ability, a cascade of performance management policies was implicated in the rise of these practices. This use of data was normalised, and ability grouping practices were evident from the early years of schooling onwards.
Acknowledgements
Ethical Leadership: A Collaborative Investigation of Equity-driven Evidence-based School Reform is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project (no. LP 120200647). This project involved collaborative work between researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), six Queensland schools and the Queensland Educational Leadership Institute undertaken between 2013 and 2015. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author only and are not representative of the views of the Australian Research Council or the Queensland Educational Leadership Institute. I would like to thank Barbara Comber, the editors, and the reviewers for their feedback and advice on this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.