The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy

Glenn C. Savage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000344004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book seeks to critically examine the impacts of 'grand designs' in public policy through a detailed historical analysis of Australian schooling reforms since the 'education revolution' agenda was introduced by the federal government in the late 2000s. Combining policy analyses and interviews with senior policy makers and ministerial advisors centrally involved in the reforms, it offers a detailed interpretive analysis of the complexities of policy evolution and assemblage. The book argues that the education revolution sought to impose a new order on Australian schooling by aligning state and territory systems to common policies and processes in areas including curriculum, assessment, funding, reporting and teaching. Using a theory and critique of 'alignment thinking' in public policy, Savage shows how the education revolution and subsequent reforms have been underpinned by uncritical faith in the power of nationally aligned data, evidence and standards to improve policies and unite systems around practices 'proven to work'. The result is a new national policy assemblage that has deeply reshaped the making and doing of schooling policy in the nation, generating complex questions about who is steering the ship of education into the future.

The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy is a must read for education policy researchers, policy makers, education ministers and school leaders, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in the complex power dynamics that underpin schooling reforms.

1

REVOLUTION

To seek to impose order on social life means to attempt to arrange people and things in relation to some idealised scheme or in accordance with a pre-defined pattern or method¹. The antonym of order is disorder, which disrupts the functioning of ordered arrangements. The history of public policy reflects repeated attempts to impose order on social life, while social life proves both partially resistant and compliant to such attempts at ordering. While politicians, bureaucrats and policy elites seek to make the complexity of social life amenable to governance, social life perpetually shows itself to be disorderly in the face of persistence. When grand designs fail to achieve the desired outcomes, implementation is seen to have failed. In response, public policy designers go back to the drawing board, to improve design, refine implementation and ensure attempts to impose order this time around are more effective.

The pursuit of order gives coherency and momentum to policy research. Its allure provides the raison d’être for the majority of policy researchers, schooled in the belief that if policy designs are more refined, implementation practices are more sensitive and evaluation methods are more sophisticated, research will help make attempts to order life more effective. These ideals are indivisible from the Enlightenment narrative of a march of progress via rational scientific endeavour and advancement. When policy studies crystallised as a field of study in the post-war decades, this ‘technical rationality’² gave it legitimacy and voice. The ‘policy sciences’ were to be scientific and based on technical, rational and usually quantitative research designs³. This logic continues to dominate how most people think about policy, despite decades of showing limited capacity to plan, predict and understand the complexity of interactions between social and policy processes. As a policy researcher recently told me when I visited the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, ‘our methods are so refined, it’s clear we have the data, the challenge is how to use it to achieve the outcomes and scale-up practices globally’. Seeking to order and align policy to data that tells us ‘what works’ is now the clarion call for policy action on a global scale.

This book enters into and extends a rich vein of scholarship that has sought to critically examine the impacts of revolutionary ‘grand designs’ intended to reorder social relations through reforms that rest on deep faith in the capacities of technical rationality. It takes as its object a set of phenomena related to what Jal Mehta calls ‘the allure of order’, based on a belief that systems can and should be standardised through applying principles of scientific administration ‘from above’⁴. It speaks broadly to a number of similar argumentative threads, including James C. Scott’s critique of attempts by states to impose rational and technical order⁵, Donald Schön’s critique of technical rationality⁶, Nicholas Tampio’s critique of standards-based reform⁷ and arguments by Robert Geyer and Samir Rihani who suggest public policy research is hamstrung by a persistent failure to recognise complexity and move beyond a dominant ‘paradigm of order’ that rests on a Newtonian vision of an orderly world driven by immutable laws⁸.

The book contributes to these lines of analysis by developing a theory and critique of what I call alignment thinking in public policy. I define alignment thinking as a specific form of technical rationality that seeks to standardise, harmonise and impose order on systems through a diverse assemblage of political technologies that are made to cohere. These technologies include, but are not limited to, standards-based reforms, evidence-based reforms, collaborative federalism, centralisation, nationalisation, harmonisation of policy and governance processes, and the production of data and accountability infrastructures that privilege national and transnational commonality over subnational and local diversity. In layman’s terms, alignment thinking refers to ways of understanding and doing policy that assume progress will come through re-arranging diverse people, ideas and practices in line with common and apparently more efficient approaches, based on evidence about ‘what works’. The allure of order is always central to alignment thinking, despite the fact that order perpetually proves to be elusive.

While my articulation of alignment thinking draws upon existing critiques in sociology, policy studies and other fields, I go beyond this work to show there are unique ways alignment thinking operates in contemporary policy contexts that are increasingly informed by transnational flows of policy ideas and practices, and governance contexts that are de-centred and polycentric. Alignment thinking can be understood as a ‘global form’⁹ of technical rationality that manifests in unique and context-dependent ways in an era marked by intensified policy mobility. Alignment thinking seeks to harness the capacities of governments, markets, networks and policy actors in novel ways. Alignment thinking is an important part of attempts by the state to govern but cannot be reduced solely to the work of the state. Alignment thinking is not simply an artefact of neoliberalism or new public management, even if it draws on ideas inherent to these modes of governance. Nor is alignment thinking just another way of talking about forms of governance that continue to privilege traces of Fordist and ‘industrial models’ of social planning. Instead, alignment thinking re-articulates these older forms into technologies of governance unique to the contemporary and with novel implications.

To inform my critique of alignment thinking, I build on an emerging body of literature on policy assemblage, extending recent attempts I have made to articulate what an assemblage approach to policy analysis means and looks like in practice¹⁰. As a policy sociologist, I draw primarily on sociological approaches to the study of public policy, but also on insights from human geography, anthropology, complexity theory and political science. Policy assemblage, I argue, can be understood as a social process of arrangement resulting from complex interactions between people and things which are embedded within existing conditions of possibility. To arrange something is to seek to bring people, ideas and practices into particular strategic relations: to make policies cohere towards certain ends¹¹. But as I will show, not everything can be arranged or made to cohere. Indeed, a vast number of factors and dynamics make certain arrangements possible, with particular impacts, while obscuring possibilities for others. We must ask, therefore, how some arrangements come to be while others do not see the light of day or were never possible in the first place. To do so, consideration is needed to history, agency, power and the hard-fought politics that determine how policies are capable of being imagined, reasoned and translated into practice in specific places and times.

While the concepts of assemblage and alignment might at first seem to share similarities, insofar as each signal purposeful attempts to arrange the component parts of policy in particular ways, it is important to clarify from the outset that these are distinct concepts and serve different analytical purposes. Central here is that processes of policy assemblage are not necessarily oriented by a normative desire to bring things into a state of alignment. Indeed, policies can be assembled and made to cohere in a remarkable variety of ways, which may or may not have anything to do with the underpinning aims of policy alignment. This book, however, examines what happens when processes of assemblage are indeed harnessed towards the development of grand designs that seek to engender policy alignment, and the radical impacts that often flow from such attempts to reorder diverse systems in line with common approaches.

To pursue these aims, this book engages in a detailed analysis of the unprecedented set of national schooling policy reforms that have taken place in the Australian federation since the landmark suite of ‘education revolution’ reforms were introduced by the federal Australian Labor Party in 2007. In many ways, this book is a history of the education revolution agenda and its extended aftermath. While the federal Labor government was only in power until 2013, its education revolution reforms ushered in a monumental period of change that continues to deeply shape reform trajectories as we enter the 2020s. The education revolution is an exemplary case of a public policy ‘grand design’, insofar as it comprised a diverse and wide-reaching suite of reforms across nearly all core areas of schooling, in the hope of reordering previously more diverse and fragmented subnational (state and territory) systems in line with a new national agenda that would ostensibly revolutionise how schooling policy and governance processes work across the federation, while at the same time promising to drive a vast number of improvements that would render the nation more globally competitive.

By combining policy analyses and in-depth interviews with senior policy actors who have been centrally involved in reforms from the education rev­olution period to the present, I offer a detailed examination of the complexities of policy evolution and assemblage. In doing so, it is not my aim to assess whether the education revolution has had the intended impacts on key performance indicators in schooling such as student achievement or equity, as it is already abundantly clear from existing evidence that in most cases it has not¹². Instead, my interest lies in understanding the extent to which the education revolution has changed how schooling policy and governance operates in the Australian federation. In other words, this book is driven by a desire to understand whether the education revolution has led to revolutionary change in the dynamics of policy production and enactment as a result of the new policy infrastructures, technologies and processes designed to set it and subsequent reforms in motion.

In pursuing this line of analysis, I argue that the education revolution and subsequent reforms sought to impose a new order on Australian schooling by aligning state and territory systems to a set of common policies and processes in areas including, but not limited to, curriculum, assessment, funding, reporting and teaching. These reforms were underpinned by significant and often uncritical faith in the power of nationally aligned data, evidence and standards to improve policies and unite systems around practices ‘proven to work’. By privileging standardisation over difference, commonality over diversity, collaboration over competition and connection over disjuncture, the education revolution established profoundly new conditions of possibility for schooling in the nation, generating reform trajectories that are now difficult to disrupt. The result is the emergence of a new national policy assemblage that has significant implications for the making and doing of schooling policy moving forward.

This chapter provides foundations for my analysis to follow. I begin by briefly considering how schooling policy and governance processes have historically been arranged in the Australian federation and how federal Labor’s education revolution reforms sought to disrupt existing norms and arrangements. Following this, I outline my theory of policy alignment and consider how the aims of alignment interact and often grate uncomfortably with the principles and constitutional division of labour underpinning the governance of schooling in the Australian federation. I then introduce the methodological and analytical approach that informed this book, with a focus on interpretive policy analysis and policy assemblage. I finish by providing a succinct overview of the argumentative structure of the chapters to follow.

Grand design par excellence: Australia’s ‘education revolution’

As a means of governing society, Australian federalism historically rests on a division of power between federal and state governments, with the latter designed to embody principles of self-rule and autonomy, while the former seeks to govern matters of national interest and steer the nation as a whole. When the constitution was established in 1901, schools were not deemed to be a matter for the federal government. Similar to other federations globally, Australia was established as a composite of relatively autonomous subnational governments¹³, each pursuing distinct social and economic goals, while forming together to ostensibly reap the benefits of union as a nation. Responsibility for schooling was to lie with the states, and national coherency was not seen to be required. Over time, these arrangements led to unique state and territory policy formations and cultures, and dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Revolution
• 2 Arrangement
• 3 Order
• 4 Disorder
• 5 Future
• Index