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This paper considers the policy problematic of state–citizen relationships, reflecting on renewed calls for citizen collaboration and codesign in the provision of public services in 'new public governance'. Analysing this through recent policy reform in Australian public school governance, we examine how existing policy architectures – in this case school boards/councils – are being rearticulated in relation to such calls. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a range of policy stakeholders, we examine the diverse policy translations of citizen involvement in school governance. Our analysis highlights the contradictions and limitations of a school board/council structure for policy aspirations of citizen collaboration. While stakeholders welcomed school board member (i.e., parent) involvement in governance, this was strongly mediated by distinctions between strategic and operational decision-making, questions about the possibilities for meaningful participation, and tensions surrounding the need for skilled expert board members and community representation – particularly in disadvantaged contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding 'parent engagement' are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new 'governing parent-citizen' through which the parental labour of social reproduction is being extended, valorised and rearticulated. We examine how one major reform movement in Australia is articulating new roles for parents and community members in schools: the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia. Our analysis demonstrates the intensive policy intervention required to produce this new form of parental labour and the subsequent divisions of labour it is producing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility – as a form of ethical commitment – requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical implications for parents of two recent educational reforms developed in the national contexts of this research. Our analyses show that the emerging demands on parents for responsibility in the educational field exceed univocal forms of individual responsibilisation, encompassing expressions of responsibility that respond to collective and public goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the emergence of the term 'polycentricity' in education policy research and compares its use in education to its historical use in its 'parent fields' of political science and economics. We focus on the leading role of Stephen Ball and colleagues in popularising the term in education, inspiring other education scholars to harness the term to examine contemporary governance arrangements. Our primary argument is that in broad descriptive terms, the use of the term in education generally mirrors its use in political science and economics. Its prescriptive usage, however, is very different, with arguments about the impacts of polycentricity in education policy often contrasting sharply with arguments in political science and economics. This has resulted, we argue, in core elements of the concept being 'lost in translation'. Yet, at the same time, its use in education has also generated new and important critical insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on what doing critical policy sociology means in shifting theoretical, empirical and methodological contexts of education. We focus our analytical lens on two primary considerations. First, we reflect on the politics of criticality, examining differing claims and debates about what it means to do critical research and be a critical researcher of education policy, paying particular attention to how critical policy sociologists position their work in relation to elite power and policy networks. Second, we build on these foundations to consider the trend towards researching mobilities within critical policy sociology, arguing that contemporary 'follow the policy' research risks orienting researchers to the problems and agendas already established by elite policy agents and organisations, while obscuring the not-so-mobile forces that continue to define education policy and practice. We also raise questions about the elite networks and privileged levels of resourcing typically required to conduct this kind of research. In conclusion, we invite further discussion on the politics of knowledge production and challenges for policy sociologists seeking to be critical in shifting contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim in this paper is to examine how standards-based reforms (SBRs) relating to teachers and teaching are being constituted in Australia and the US. Our focus is not the specific impacts of these policies as enacted practices in schools or teacher training institutions, but rather the dynamics of policy production, with a specific focus on how federally-driven policies have been assembled in each country. Bringing together the notion of 'global forms' with the dual concepts of 'political rationality' and 'political technology' from governmentality studies, we consider SBRs as a global techno-scientific form that coheres at the level of political rationality and which can be abstracted across contexts, but which also manifests in unique place-specific assemblages of political technologies. The global form of SBRs thus represents the logics by which policymakers may attempt to align and create commonality across systems in the search for standardisation, even if this can never be fully realised in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematises contemporary debates in favour of 'policy alignment' by considering the complexities emerging from attempts to forge greater alignment of policies and processes across state schooling systems in the Australian federation. We begin by articulating our conceptual approach to policy alignment, after which we examine Australian and international debates relating to alignment in schooling policy. We then consider how policy actors are engaging with debates and challenges relating to alignment, drawing upon interviews with senior bureaucrats in Australian state education departments and agencies. Our findings suggest policy actors see misalignment as a problem but do not necessarily see alignment as the solution. This raises complex questions about the logic and value of pursuing alignment in federations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a review of the concept of assembling policy in the understanding of social and non-social formations in educational policies. Topics discussed include the philosophical works and perspectives of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, along with the points raised by Sebastien Ureta's book, "Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society."

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflecttransnationaltraits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary debates surrounding school funding. Taking the AustralianReview of Funding for Schooling(the Gonski Report) as our case, we analyse the policy report and its subsequent media coverage to consider what meanings are made concerning the ‘publicness’ of schooling. Our analysis reveals three broad themes of debate in the report and related media coverage: (1) the primacy of ‘procedural politics’ (i.e. the political imperatives and processes associated with public policy negotiations in the Australian federation); (2) changing relations between what is considered public and private; and (3) a connection of government schooling to concerns surrounding equity and a ‘public in need’. We suggest these three themes contour the debates and understandings that surround the ‘publicness’ of education generally, and school funding more specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the repositioning of state curriculum agencies in response to the establishment of the Australian Curriculum and the key national policy organisation responsible for its development: the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). I begin with an analysis of the federal Labor government's role in the early years of the Australian Curriculum reform, arguing that Labor was afforded a rare window of political opportunity that enabled the fundamental restructuring of curriculum policy at the national level, and which has significantly altered intergovernmental and inter-agency relationships. Following this, I engage with research literature that has sought to theorise the changing nature of Australian federalism in relation to schooling reform. I then present an empirical analysis based on interviews with policy-makers in ACARA and curriculum agencies in four Australian states (Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria). My analysis draws attention to three dominant trends: powerful new roles for ACARA in driving national reform and inter-agency collaboration; increased policy overlap and blurred lines of responsibility; and an uneven playing field of intergovernmental and interagency relationships and powers. I conclude by considering the implications of emerging reform trends for conceptualising the shifting dynamics of federalism in Australia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comparative analysis of national curriculum reforms in Australia and the USA, set against the backdrop of global trends since the 1980s. The analysis is driven by an interest in the reconstitution of national policy spaces in global times, and draws particularly upon Stephen Carney’s notion ofglobal policy-scapesas a way of understanding the complex and disjunctive flows of transnational policy ideas and practices. The paper begins by arguing that reforms since the early 1980s have been driven by global panics about globalisation, equity and market competitiveness. These global influences have underpinned parallel reform attempts in each country, including the development of national goals in the late 1980s, failed attempts at national standards in the early 1990s and rejuvenated attempts towards national consistency in the 2000s. Building on this, we argue that despite shared global drivers and broad historical similarities, reforms in each country remain distinct in scope and form, due to several unique features that inform the national policy space of each country. These distinctive national policy spaces provide differentconditions of possibilityfor reform, reminding us that despite global commonalities, policy reforms are relational and locally negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the re-articulation of social justice as equity in schooling policy through national and global testing and data infrastructures. It focuses on the Australian National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse the discursive reconstitution of social justice as equity in Australian and OECD policy, and analyse NAPLAN and PISA as technologies of governance that re-articulate equity as a measure of performance. These re-articulations are set against the extension of neo-social economistic rationalities to all domains of life and the topological production of new spaces of policy and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The term equity is ubiquitous in Australian education policy and evolves amidst ongoing debates about what it means to be fair in education. Over the past three decades, meanings and practices associated with equity have reflected broader shifts in advanced liberal governance, with equity being reframed as a ‘market-enhancing’ mechanism and melted into economic productivity agendas. In this paper, I argue that an emerging, yet, under-examined policy tension is the view that secondary schools are capable of being equitable, whilst simultaneously acting as adaptive service providers, tailoring education to different students and local markets. A dilemma here is whether or not schools should ‘tailor equity’ or whether tailoring equity is indeed antithetical to equity in so far as it implies unequal provision. To explore this tension, I draw upon fieldwork from ethnographic research in two socially and economically disparate government secondary schools in suburban Melbourne, Australia. In doing so, I explore how equity is enacted and governed by educators, how forms of equity at each school relate to versions of equity in policy and the extent to which each school tailors equity to its local community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conjunction of equity and market logics in contemporary education has created new and different conditions of possibility for equity, both as conceived in policy discourses and as a related set of educational practices. In this editorial introduction, we examine how equity is being drawn into new policy assemblages and how, in the context of marketisation, equity is evolving and being enacted in new ways across education sectors. Different conceptions of equity are considered, including the increasingly influential human capital perspective promoted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We argue that, separate from critiques of neoliberalism and its deleterious effects on equity in education, it is necessary to analyse carefully the increasing rationalisation of equity agendas in economic terms, the associated effects on education governance and policy-making, as well as on the work of educational institutions and educators. Providing an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue, we direct particular attention to the multiple, complex and often contradictory effects of the current education reform agenda in Australia, which has prioritised equity objectives and intensified performance measurement, comparison and accountability as means to drive educational improvement and reduce disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) set a target to lift Australia’s Year 12 or equivalent attainment rate from 83.5 to 90% by 2015. In the context of global financial uncertainty, the target was rationalised as a means for boosting national productivity and developing human capital to help Australia compete in the global knowledge economy. Historically, Year 12 attainment targets have been designed to pressure state and territory education systems to innovate and reform senior secondary curriculums and certificates, as retention and attainment rates depend largely on how flexible, diverse and inclusive the senior years are. In this paper, however, we argue that the COAG Year 12 attainment agenda is flawed and does very little to inspire innovation or reform in Australian senior secondary schools. Our argument comprises three parts. First, we argue that the COAG agenda is based on a weakened measure of attainment which is misleading and directs the burden for innovation away from senior secondary schools. Second, we argue that there are inherent limits in Australian secondary school systems which prevent the depth of innovation required to significantly contribute to raising Year 12 attainment. Third, we argue that the COAG agenda is further weakened by issues of equivalency, quality and comparison. Together, these arguments cast doubt over the value and meaningfulness of the COAG Year 12 attainment agenda and of target setting as a governmental strategy in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Australia, a distinct political-educational imagination drives contemporary policy and praxis. This imagination finds root in the social governance models of British Third Way policy and can be considered social capitalist. Central to such politics is a view that social governance is capable of pursuing and achieving the social democratic ideals of equity and social justice, within the architecture of a globalising and competitive capitalist economy. In this paper, I analyse Australian federal and Victorian state education policies to argue that social capitalist politics has significant implications for the ways schools are being imagined and governed. Specifically, I argue that schools are re-imagined as 'learning communities' through which excellence and equity are seen to operate harmoniously amidst a marketising system of educational services. In doing so, I feature empirical data from an ethnographic project conducted in two socially disparate Victorian government secondary schools, to highlight myriad tensions and paradoxes that emerge when each school attempts to govern itself towards policy ideals. In conclusion, I argue that policy imaginations of schools as havens of excellence and equity are difficult to take seriously when infused into the architecture of an education system that is deeply stratified and structured to discriminate between individuals in line with performance hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]