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Ontological politics has received increasing attention within education policy studies, particularly as a support for the notion of policy enactment. While policy enactment offers serious challenges to traditional approaches toward policy implementation, this paper takes up ontological politics as a concept that extends beyond implementation and holds consequences for policy formation as well. Analysing the different uses of evidence in recent policy documents from Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper argues that an ontological politics of evidence grounds policies in ways that define what can and cannot be enacted, what this paper terms policy enablement. The analyses illustrate an ontological politics of evidence that excludes non-experts in the first instance, and that sanitises the critical elements of enactment in the second. Both analyses highlight the ways policy enablement emerges from ontological politics and offers a supplement to policy enactment. Following these analyses, the paper offers some provisional thoughts on the relationship between enablement and enactment as an approach that attends to context as a constitutive element of policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Tomorrow’s Schools administrative restructuring, a second wave of educational change installed globalised discourses as governmentality policies in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on Foucault’s ‘toolkit’, this genealogical policy chronology traces the transformation of curriculum and assessment into a specific political rationality, unsupported by national standards (NS) or testing. Its inscription into students and teachers through technical-managerial and business-market discourses, sought to remake them as enterprising, industrious and governable within an Enterprise Culture. The paper traces the microphysics of the institution of this rationality, through the fusion of curriculum, assessment and economic policy, and the imposition of a NS accountability framework onto curriculum. Learning discourses encouraged teachers to locally breakdown objectives and activate them as NS to initiate governance by outcomes, targets and results. Reinforcing market relations, this installed the basis of performativity and measurement. By 1995, the failure to attain reliable, comparable data, calculate productivity gains and leverage standards, resulted in the government’s review and audit agency declaring standards non-existent and the framework unworkable. This paper demonstrates the centrality of curriculum assessment, even with ostensibly failing purposes, to the construction of malleable human capital and the embedding of a calculative governmentality for future population knowledge, management and control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bicultural educational policy is part of a much broader ensemble of bicultural policies that were first developed by the Fourth Labour Government elected in 1984. These policies were an acknowledgement of, and response to, the historical injustices suffered by Māori people as a consequence of colonisation. Bicultural education policy is thought to be a means of addressing the ongoing challenge of educational underachievement of Māori students in the compulsory schooling sector. At present, the dominant discourse in New Zealand education frames the educational underachievement of Māori as a problem associated with cultural differences; however, this tends to obscure explanations that focus on socio-economic disparities. This paper shows how the dominant discourse relating to the underachievement of Māori students is established in policy and maintained through various auditing systems, and how this leaves little space for other explanations or solutions. The paper advocates a move away from an either/or approach to the problem of the educational underachievement of Māori and argues for greater critical engagement with bicultural education policy in order to open up space for conversations that address both the cultural and the socio-economic factors which may affect achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on the idea of neo-tribal capitalism to argue that in New Zealand educational disadvantage is typically understood through the lens of ethnicity and that policy-makers appear blind to disadvantage that is related to socio-economic status. A clear expression of this gap is the fact that while New Zealand has strategies to lift the achievement of Māori and Pasifika school students (many of whom come from relatively poor backgrounds), there is no strategy to lift the achievement of European/Pākehā students from similar backgrounds. Drawing official statistics, this paper argues that a significant proportion of those who do not succeed in New Zealand's education are Europe-ans/Pākehās from poor socio-economic backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to use an historical approach to examine the changing nature, size and diversification of education and training in New Zealand. In particular, attention will be concentrated on the impact of the introduction of competition into the New Zealand tertiary education industry since 1989. It will examine the relationship between the various tertiary education institutions as well as the relationship between these institutions and the demands of both students and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International comparative testing, such as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has considerable impact on policymakers, the media and the general public. A central assumption underlying PISA is that global variation in students' academic performance is attributable to national educational structures and policies. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the problematic nature of this assumption. Rather than critiquing it from the outside, we turn the tools, data and presumptions of the current discourse of international comparisons upon themselves, showing that this assumption is refuted by analysis of immigrant student test scores. Data from the PISA 2009 tests show that Chinese immigrant students in New Zealand and Australia achieve math scores that are more similar to those of students in Shanghai than to their non-immigrant Australian and New Zealand peers. Thus, cultural background appears to be more consequential for the educational attainment of Chinese immigrant students than exposure to the educational systems of Australia or New Zealand. We discuss limitations of our analysis, using them as basis to discuss the shortcomings of PISA more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Zealand Progress at School project, designed to investigate school effects, found that individual progress at school is associated with a set of non-cognitive dispositions, most importantly, aspiration, self-concept, and acceptance of the institutional regime. The few schools identified as over-and under-performing were distinguished by the favourable and unfavourable dispositions of their students. School composition – or mix – effects proved in this study to be minor and relative to the output criterion, and some implications of that, including the selective effects of within-class markets, are discussed with particular reference to another contemporary New Zealand study, the Smithfield project. It is concluded that the study of school effectiveness might usefully include in its models the relationship between the properties of systems, the level of disposition, and the forms of practice they generate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]