Special issue: educational pedagogies, policies and politics: some things students, parents and teachers need to know introduction by the guest editors.

Much has been written about the current neo-liberal and neo-conservative agendas and the ways in which these are absenting the state from its democratic obligation to educate an Australian public. Neo-liberal agendas legitimate 'market forces', fabricating school 'choice' as a major driver of educational provision, providing public funding to non-government denominational schools at the expense of public schools, and promoting the corporatisation of early childhood services. These agendas place schools in competition with each other, breaking down the traditional coherence of neighbourhoods as students make long, ecologically unfriendly excursions across city suburbs to attend 'schools of choice'. Neoliberalism also involves the importation of the language and practices of private sector managerialism, accountability and quality control into public sector organisations. Accountability reforms, based on a narrow managerialist paradigm, have become a part of the dominant discourses of educational change. The perception that evaluation is positively correlated with improved performance has become an unspoken 'truth' in educational policy reform. Around the world, teachers' work is increasingly constrained by a web of evaluations. While some of this may be necessary, it does lead to a loss of creativity in the face of standardised monitoring, and a loss of productivity as teachers' energies are absorbed by regular assessments and appraisals throughout their professional careers.

Neo-conservatism also comes in several forms. One variant entails a deliberate rationing of education so that there is an increasing gap between the quality of the services available to the rich and the poor (Gewirtz, Ball, & Bowe, 1995; Lewis, Gewirtz, & Clarke, 2000). Another variant--backlash neo-conservatism--leads, for example, to the return of a history curriculum that privileges Australia's British heritage while diminishing the centrality of our multicultural diversity. By sleight of hand, it turns gender politics on its head, redefining 'boys' as the 'new disadvantaged'. Taken together these neo-liberal and neo-conservative agendas represent a substantial shift from Australia's longstanding traditional approach, which was based on a normative commitment to providing an education of quality for all Australians. Far from representing what Australian parents and teachers have traditionally valued, these agendas essentially entail an instability, a constant de-structuring and restructuring of public pedagogies, policies and politics in the name of a narrow and selective interpretation of globalisation.

In this special edition of the AJE, a number of the contributors seek to bring forward the traditional values entailed in educating an Australian public. They revisit key educational policies and pedagogies that have been targeted under the neo-liberal and neo-conservative agendas. The idea is to develop a positive frame for saying what these issues are, how the current situation is dealing with them, what values might usefully inform efforts to reinvent the agenda for educating an Australian public, and what that agenda might look like.

The contributors to this special edition were asked to consider why educational research might matter to students, parents and teachers, and how it might succeed in doing so. Four interrelated, value-rational questions suggested by Flyvbjerg (2001) provided them with a point of departure: Where are we going? Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? Is this desirable? What might be done? These questions provide a framework for generating and locating educational research that documents the pressures faced by students, parents, and teachers in relation to the current de-structuring and restructuring of educational policies, politics, and pedagogies. They also suggest a means for identifying, affirming and elaborating suitable interventions in educational policies, politics, and pedagogies.

In the first article in this volume, Pam Christie reflects on the current neglect of evident inequalities that would, in the past, have functioned as a rallying call for action. Christie argues for the importance of an ethics of education that challenges the surprisingly ubiquitous acceptance of 'things as they are'. Over the past 30 years, numerous studies in the sociology of education have confirmed that schools produce unequal outcomes for students of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. It is well known that achievement in school is closely linked to socioeconomic background and (in Australia) to Indigeneity and command of standardised English. What is striking in current public debates around schooling is that these well-established inequalities are now taken for granted. Now it is hard to raise questions about their existence, let alone their persistence. Set against this context, Christie proposes ways of working with discourses of ethics, rights and citizenship, and argues for the importance of engaging ethically across difference in these interesting times of global/local de-structuring and restructuring. Her article proposes three interrelated dimensions for an ethics of engagement in education: an ethics of commitment to intellectual rigour; an ethics of civility; and an inter-human ethics of care.

In her excursion into a hitherto neglected research topic, Carol Reid examines the barriers immigrant teachers face in Australia. Increased international labour flows are a key feature of the contemporary transitions in globalisation. There is now increasing competition among Minority World nations for temporary or permanent immigrant teachers, particularly in mathematics, science, computing and technology. Reid's research is based on a review of the recent Australian experience of importing (and exporting) teachers and presents the findings of a study of immigrant teachers in an Australian suburban high school. Her research indicates that one of the strengths of public education has been the ways in which students and teachers negotiate the changing social and multicultural landscape and, in doing so, shape the future of multicultural Australia. How this negotiation shapes the experiences of immigrant teachers in Australia is a litmus test for who we are and what we might be as a society within a markedly different global structure than existed a generation ago. Reid briefly sketches an important research agenda that could result in closer attention being paid to this nationally significant but surprisingly neglected area of educational policy and practice.

The next two articles focus on the need for a new approach to funding Australia's schools (Vickers) and to Australia's provision of early childhood education and care (Press &Woodrow). In both these contexts, policies for effecting privatisation have rapidly taken hold during the 1990s. At both the early childhood and school education levels, increases in the private sector share have been aided by federal government policies that have given private vendors untrammeled control over which aspects of the market they will focus on, and which children and families they will serve. In the absence of any legislation that prevents them from doing so, the private sector 'creams off' the low-cost, high-return components of provision. In the early childhood sector, this has led to a dearth of places for children under the age of two. In both sectors, it has led to a situation where public and community providers look after the vast majority of children who have complex needs and whose education and care carries highest costs. In contrast, the private sector providers avoid doing their fair share of the heavy lifting, even though they are handsomely supported by public subsidies provided through governments.

Together Vickers, Press and Woodrow report deep concerns about what appears to be a taken-for-granted philosophical shift from collective social responsibility to individual choice. In these circumstances, the state has become a mediator of market mechanisms while re-casting itself as a provider and regulator of residual 'safety net' services. The evidence from both these articles suggests that this inequitable system is unlikely to serve the long-term interests of Australia or its citizens. Corporate provision of childcare places downward pressure on teachers' wages and sets children's rights and interests in competition with concerns about profitability. The unchecked growth of private secondary schools leads to increased inequalities and an expensive duplication of services. In the long run, neither of these trends serves the common good.

Marianne Larsen's article examines the effects of another aspect of the neoliberal agenda: the increasing incursion of intensified state regulation via managerialism, accountability, and quality control into the lives of teachers. Her research reports on developments in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. In each of these contexts, improvements in student learning and school effectiveness are now claimed to depend on the implementation of a wide range of 'quality teacher' programs. Yet the research evidence from across these countries suggests that the heavy emphasis on teacher evaluation has negative consequences for teacher effectiveness, and thereby students' academic achievement. Accountability-based teacher evaluations often left teachers experiencing a loss of autonomy and increased levels of stress in their work. Moreover, such evaluations have been found to lead teachers to become risk-averse, inhibiting their creativity, flexibility and sensitivity to the contextualised nature of teaching and learning. In addition, the amount of time that teachers were able to devote to supporting student learning has been eroded by the demands of preparing for literacy tests (in the United States) and by the time it takes to develop professional portfolios (in Canada and the United Kingdom).

Australia's evident place in the world as an ethnically diverse, complex, globally linked community has provoked as much fear and resistance as transnational connectivities and cosmopolitanism. This fear is evident, for example, in harsh bipartisan response to asylum seekers; the apparent cruelty and indifference to those in detention centres, and the determination of many to persist with Anglo-centric imaginings of Australia's global/local trajectories. The neo-conservative polemicists at the core of this resistance seem threatened by, and seek to incite fears about current attempts at future-oriented education and training reforms which are working to respond to, and engage with the changed and changing local, regional and global realities that Australian students--the rising generation of Australian citizens and workers--face. They are undermining these reforms by a series of ideologically driven attacks, for instance by targeting as 'politically correct' Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE). The research by Deborah Henderson engages this neo-conservative project, by showing that its assumptions about knowledge are no longer appropriate for the social, multicultural, economic and political contexts in which Australia is now positioned and has been positioned by its governments over the past three decades.

At the beginning of the new millennium, a government report defined boys as the 'new disadvantaged' (Australian House of Representatives, 2002). This report drew attention to boys' under-achievement in education relative to girls, and seemed to suggest that reforms aimed at redressing the socioeconomic injustices faced by women had gone too far. One factor that was considered important in the low levels of boys' academic motivation was that schools have only a few male teachers. If boys had more male role models, the claim went, they might be more motivated. In the final article in this volume, Herb Marsh and Andrew Martin subject this proposal to an empirical test. They explore the impact of student gender, teacher gender and their interaction on academic motivation and engagement for 1701 junior and middle high school students. Their findings are clear: academic motivation and engagement does not significantly vary as a function of their teacher's gender. In terms of academic motivation and engagement, boys do not fare any better with male teachers than female teachers.

The articles presented in this volume do not offer a romantic, idealist, blue-skies vision, but rather seek to engage with the nitty-gritty of what is happening in the material world. The issues discussed range widely: from the privatisation of schools to the history wars; from the privileging of boys in the gender debate, to the barriers facing immigrant teachers in Australian schools. The evidence is drawn from pedagogues, policies to politics. The analyses presented here demonstrate the embeddedness of these issues in Australia's positioning and efforts to position itself and its students, citizens and workers with in the contemporary transitions in global/local power relations. Together these researchers help to identify, affirm and elaborate just a few of the things it is useful for students, parents and teachers to know about educational pedagogies, policies and politics. In doing so, they suggest ways forward through new discourses of ethics and rights, through a new generation of pedagogical interventions, and through reforms to our educational policies and politics.

References

Australian House of Representatives. (2002). Boys: Getting it right: Report on the inquiry into the education of boys. Canberra: AGPS.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making social science matter: Why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gewirtz, S., Ball, S., & Bowe, R. (1995). Markets, choice and equity in education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Lewis, G., Gewirtz, S., & Clarke, J. (2000). Rethinking social policy. London: Sage.

Margaret Vickers

Michael Singh

University of Western Sydney 

Margaret Vickers is Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith DC NSW 1797. E-mail: [e-mail]

Michael Singh is Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith DC NSW 1797. E-mail: [e-mail]