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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]

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]

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]