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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]

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public schooling: (1) the commissioning of national assessment strategy policy advice, and (2) the award of contestable funding for the provision of support services to schools. It is argued that such practices advance neoliberal theories of schooling at the expense of the previous social democratic liberal settlement. The paper considers some possible consequences of increased privatisation of policy advice and service provision for understandings of and commitments to public schooling. [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 policy chronology traces the institution of globalised school curriculum and assessment discourses, as a vernacular and specific form of public rationalisation and educational governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Without functional national standards or national testing, official discourses constructed an assessment-driven framework as a public measurement and performance regime. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘toolkit’, this genealogy traces attempts by the government’s review and audit agency (the ERO), to lift achievement through establishing national standards, normalising assessment and strengthening market-managerial accountabilities. Therapeutic technologies of personal re/development supplemented the above through managed literacy partnerships. This was the basis for the managed reprofessionalisation of techno-entrepreneurial teachers around stipulated, data-driven and measured performances. The paper examines the centrality of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework to the reconstruction of an Enterprise Culture and the psycho-cognitive re/making and re/moralisation of individuals as responsibilised, self-managing and calculative. It posits that within a busnocratic rationality (merging business, entrepreneurial and technical-management), a calculative governmentality required educational data-systems for future population knowledge and control. The genealogy demonstrates the inextricable connection between ‘public’ rationalities, technologies of control and the re/construction of ‘private’ identity, subjectivity and ethics, under neoliberal governmentality. [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]

This paper raises questions regarding the ability of new qualifications frameworks and assessment systems to promote innovation and social inclusion. Of interest in this paper is the centrality of tacit skill in promoting innovation. Tacit skill is central to innovation, although its positional character is not well understood by policy-makers. It is argued that the relationship between tacit skill and innovation throws doubt on the relationship between assessment led change, and on the social and economic objectives of New Labour (in the UK) and the Labour-led Coalition (in New Zealand). This paper also reviews recent changes in the funding of higher education in New Zealand and in the UK, and explores the impact of economic change on the competition for advancement through education. This paper concludes by arguing that innovation and social inclusion are not compatible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary times, corporate philanthropy is positioned as an effective means to 'solve' a variety of social problems. Childhood obesity is one such 'problem' that has captured the interests of schools, corporations, industry groups and a number of 'not-for-profit' players. In this paper, I critically examine how the private sector uses the notion of philanthropy to shape school-based solutions to obesity and unhealthy lifestyles. By conducting a critical ethnography in two New Zealand primary schools and drawing on Foucauldian notions of government and 'practices of assemblage', I illuminate how a number of organisations officially planned to employ philanthropy as a means to govern others, as well as what actually happened when these plans met their intended targets: children, teachers and principals. Although corporations, charities and schools were assembled together through their combined 'will to give', the notion of philanthropy helped to re-assemble and re-invent private sector organisations so that they were seen to be socially responsible, healthy, and even educational. Philanthropy also worked to mask private sector players less altruistic interests: branding, public relations strategies, avoidance of stricter regulations and legislation, and the desire to profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's views on the article by John O'Neill which discusses concerns that the growth of privatisation of public schooling in New Zealand undermines the state's role in public education. He discusses O'Neill's evidence for his claims and says that the evidence fails to prove the changes and infusion of the for-profit commercial activity in state policymaking. He rejects the claim of the rising use of private consultants as the "Picot Report" shows that they are used only for advice.

This paper examines the process by which all post-compulsory education in New Zealand has become integrated under one administrative structure, the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), with the intention of developing a single coordinated system of tertiary education. In particular, adult and community education (ACE), the least formal and organised sector, is required to develop programmes that align with an externally conceived set of priorities, which themselves arise from the Tertiary Education Strategies. Using Popper's concepts of 'holistic' versus 'piecemeal' change, it is argued that such large-scale change is potentially dangerous as there are likely to be unintended, damaging consequences of such policies; consequences which are difficult to fix in modern, complex societies. In particular, ACE which is built on an insider, community-focus ethos, able itself to identify and respond to community-learning opportunities, is likely to be changed fundamentally so that the very characteristics that have made ACE effective in the past will be lost in the process. [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]

Education in many Western countries is being reformed. The paper examines the role of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in the neo-liberal reforms and their revenue gathering from students credits in a contradictory neo-liberal policy context. [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]

This article analyses findings from two studies conducted collaboratively across two educational settings. New Zealand and England, in 2001-2002. These studies examined the impact of national educational policy reforms on the nature of primary teachers' work and sense of their own professionalism and compared these impacts across the two countries. Adopting a policy ethnography approach, using in-depth interview data from samples of teachers in each country, it is argued that there have been discursive shifts in the meaning of the three key terms, autonomy, altruism and knowledge, embodied in the classical professionalism triangle. These shifts reflect policy-makers' moves from a 'professional-contextualist' conception of teacher professionalism towards the 'technocratic-reductionist' conception that accompanies neo-liberal educational reforms in many countries. Teachers in both countries experienced increasing constraints on their autonomy as they became far more subject to 'extrinsic' accountability demands. Whether these demands were perceived as enhancing or diminishing teacher professionalism depended on the manner in which they were filtered through the profession's defining quality, namely teachers' altruistic concerns for the welfare of the children in their care. [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]