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This article contributes new insights to research on the socio-spatial dynamics of policy production by synthesizing the concepts of "policy assemblage" and "scalecraft". By conceptualizing scale as socially-crafted rather than pre-existing (a priori), we argue that assemblage and scalecraft provide generative means for examining how scale is imagined and assembled, and the boundary dynamics associated with these processes. To make this argument, we focus empirically on changes to the governance of schooling policy in the Australian federation over the past two decades. We argue that despite being a federation in which subnational (state and territory) governments maintain responsibility for schools, a new national policy assemblage has emerged that rests upon and produces new forms of boundary imagining, crossing and blurring. This is generating tensions and issues for policy actors, central to which is contestation about federal involvement in national reform. Drawing upon insights from semi-structured interviews with senior policy actors, we argue that new ways of imagining and seeking to govern schooling, at the national scale, grate uncomfortably against the realpolitik of Australian federalism, the principles underpinning the design of federal systems, and forms of scalar thinking that shape how policy actors perceive the "ideal" division of roles and responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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]