Kate O’Connor

National agendas in global times: curriculum reforms in Australia and the USA since the 1980s

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 of global policy-scapes as 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 different conditions of possibility for reform, reminding us that despite global commonalities, policy reforms are relational and locally negotiated.

Searching for the public: school funding and shifting meanings of ‘the public’ in Australian education

Abstract 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 Australian Review 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.

Classifying curriculum scholarship in Australia: A review of postgraduate theses 1975-2005

This paper discusses an initial analysis of the form of Australian postgraduate scholarship over the last four decades in relation to curriculum inquiry. The study forms part of an ARC funded project on the shifts and emphases of Australian curriculum policy from 1975 to 2005 which seeks to contribute to understandings of how Australian curriculum has developed across states and over time. Analyses of changing emphases within education thesis production are hampered by the lack of systematic and consistent indexing of the theses, but within the criteria and methods we used, the thesis analysis elicited some tantalising findings. These seem to show a changing focus away from curriculum study in the most recent decade of Australian postgraduate theses, following three decades of rising interest in that area of education. But the study also demonstrated inherent methodological and practical problems for doing the inquiry itself, in terms of (1) the ways we categorise and think about education as a field; (2) limitations of the archiving and coding practices we have put in place to sustain a sense of our own history and the need to improve these; and, (3) potentially, research assessment now in train, and its intention to categorise work via “field of research” codes.

Standards or Curriculum? Policy Constructions of the What and How of Schooling

of these connect well-rehearsed curriculum concerns about how curriculum decisions are made, by whom, and in whose interests. Others point to the importance of political and professional action, including moving beyond critique. As Taubman asks, “if we reject the Core, then what is the alternative” for ensuring all students have “the essential knowledge and skills they need to live in a democracy?” Through this collection we find a starting point for engaging with these concerns. Rather than attempting to provide a summative view of the many implications of the CCSS, these authors offer a diverse portrait of ideas—hopefully offering new theoretical lines of flight and posing provocative questions for how we, as educators and researchers, can make sense of the evolving national reform space.

Common Core State Standards: Implications for Curriculum, Equality and Policy

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have the potential to transform the design and governance of curriculum in the United States. The CCSS have been premised on human capital arguments about the centrality of “core” knowledge and skills to national economic competitiveness and productivity, while also foregrounding a commitment to greater equality of student learning and achievement. Such arguments, which promote a dual commitment to excellence and equity, are dominant within the global education policy field and have influenced similar shifts toward the nationalization of curriculum and standards in other member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, such as Australia and England. The CCSS seek to achieve their goals by combining national performance expectations in English language arts and mathematics (“college and career readiness” standards) with nationally applied test procedures in the interest of raising academic performance levels and ameliorating differences in achievement across the 50 states. Together, these measures are seen as a means for equipping individuals, businesses, and the nation with the ability to compete in intensifying global markets. With a vast majority of American states adopting the standards, it is important to reflect upon the potential impacts that the standards might have on schooling and education policy. In this Perspectives section, we engage authors in discussion around three broad questions relating to the emergence of the CCSS:

New Public Management and the Changing Governance of Universities

This chapter analyses the significant changes that have been taking place over recent decades both in the national governance and the institutional management of universities in Australia. It outlines the major political dimensions of these changes as well as the ideas and conceptions associated with them. It begins first by discussing the rise of the conception of the modern university as an industry , characterised by corporate forms, market ideas and ideals, and utilitarian conceptions of purposes. This chapter then discusses the major changes in the national governance of universities, beginning with the Dawkins higher education policy reforms of the late 1980s. Since these reforms, national governance of universities in Australia has been characterised by highly competitive research funding arrangements, comprehensive reporting and accountability requirements for the core activities of teaching and research, and a continuing reduction in public funding. Within universities these changes have led to more managerial forms of governance and organisation, the use of performance indicators that align with those used at the national level, and decreased professional autonomy of academics.

From Disciplinary Excellence to Interdisciplinary Collaboration: How Australian Academics Negotiate Competing Knowledge Agendas

This chapter draws on research with historians and physicists to elucidate a bottom-up perspective on two knowledge agendas within research policy and funding mechanisms in Australia. On the one hand the government and universities are concerned with quality and international rankings that are underpinned by disciplinary categorizations and direct and indirect peer review. On the other hand there is a drive to produce greater economic impact and shorter-term utilitarian outcomes, an agenda frequently conflated with a prioritization of interdisciplinarity and collaboration with industry. The chapter shows that the historians and physicists prize their initial disciplinary identity and training and see it as an important foundation for new interdisciplinary work. They are irritated by what they see as rigid top-down forms of research steering and funding and see some of this as counter-productive. In contrast to some policy reports, they do not see disciplinary and interdisciplinary agendas in binary terms but as important sources of mutual renewal, and largely find ways of complying with externally imposed changing agendas without changing their fundamental research commitments.

MOOC-ing the Discipline: Tensions in the Development and Enactment of a Massive Open Online Course

In the current university context, academics are required to respond to multiple and competing demands which orient both away from their disciplinary field, and inwardly towards its own norms and development. In this chapter I examine the tensions between these inward and outward facing agendas, drawing on a case study of the re-articulation of an undergraduate biological sciences subject into the form of a massive open online course (MOOC). The case study forms part of a broader PhD project which is investigating a select number of online courses (both MOOCs and for-fee online courses) being developed across two universities, with a focus on the thinking and assumptions informing the process of curriculum development. The discussion points to some of the tensions and challenges in simultaneously adhering to disciplinary conventions and engaging in outward-facing conversations where the taken-for-granted disciplinary rules may not apply.

‘What Does Your Discipline Look Like and How Does It Matter?’ Historians and Physicists Talk

This is the first of three chapters reporting and discussing findings from our research interviews with university physicists and historians. This chapter focuses on their perceptions of disciplinary fields as forms of knowledge. Their responses reiterate some of the differentiating characteristics of vertical compared with horizontal knowledge fields as well as some strong disciplinary identifications with their respective fields, and belief in its value both as a specialist field and as a more general education and vocational foundation. In terms of the changing nature of their fields, physicists were more aware of endogenous changes, and historians more concerned with exogenous ones, particularly changing institutional conditions. We discuss how those from the two disciplines see the requirements of the undergraduate curriculum and the form of progression to research.

Changing Agendas and the Governance of the School Curriculum

This chapter traces recent changes in overarching agendas and governance mechanisms related to curriculum and the schooling sector. Schooling is now more tightly coupled to economic perspectives and a skills and standards agenda that is seen as best revealed and managed by test data. Internationally the OECD is a significant driver of such data and perspectives on school, drawing some widespread critical discussion in the education literature about the effects of a ‘testing-led’ or ‘accountability-driven’ curriculum, and the prioritising of global testing data over national concerns. However there is also some renewed attention by many national governments to school’s acculturation role in the face of global developments, with reform of history and citizenship curricula often targeted. In Australia, the past decade has seen a greater attention to schooling and curriculum in national politics, and the establishment of a new national body, ACARA , which has authority for curriculum, reporting and assessment. ACARA oversees the development of a new ‘Australian Curriculum’; the conduct of a new national testing program, NAPLAN ; and the production of a new website, My School , which publicly communicates comparative demographic and performance data, about individual schools. This chapter discusses implications for curriculum substance of these new mechanisms, as well as some political points of contention.