Review of The Search for Better Educational Standards

The Search for Better Educational Standards studies the trajectory of the National Standards policy of New Zealand (NZ) that was rolled out across the school system in 2008. The book details NZ’s experiment with national standards as education reform. The book is timely, as it was announced in late 2017 by Education Minister Chris Hipkins that NZ primary schools would no longer have to report on these standards. The Standards emerged from a seemingly perennial set of questions that those responsible for education systems ask: how can policy be a political tool to deliver improvements in perceived problems in teacher knowledge and behaviour?; add impetus to national economies through producing more skilled workforces?; and effect particular educational philosophies and politics through desired interventions? While many will appreciate The Search for Better Educational Standards for its examination of the Kiwi Standards, I think it is also a book that wrestles with significant problems for many education systems, including how systems deal with expertise and dissenting views, the effects of policy interventions that begin from the premise that schools are standardisable and therefore performative, and finally, how policy hits the ground, or is enacted, far from the corridors of power.

There have been many attempts to define education policy. Perhaps the most generative is that of Easton (1953) who defined public policy as ‘the authoritative allocation of values’. Rizvi and Lingard (2010, pp. 7-8) argue that while values extends to decisions on funding, what is funded and what isn’t, values are ‘also evident in which policy problems are framed and contexts represented’. My preference would be to see education policy as a ‘guidance device’, a strategic intervention into the complex of ideology, beliefs, cultures and histories emerging at the intersection of individuals and their institutions within a globalised policy ensemble. Policy is always an attempt to ‘cut through’ the complexity of education systems and provide simplified, deliverable and (electorally) palatable solutions.

In this context, Martin Thrupp’s The Search for Better Educational Standards studies the trajectory of one guidance device, the New Zealand policy delivering National Standards that were rolled across the NZ system in 2008. His book traces the preconditions, political formulation, intended implementation and actual enactment at the school level. The impetus, creation and implementation of the ‘Kiwi Standards’, as Thrupp explains, had only a tenuous link with research and researchers, relying on ideological formulations of ‘what schooling should be’ as extensions of ‘what the world must be like’. Thrupp’s work reminds us that education policy is political.

Thrupp begins by locating these National Standards in the global move towards accountability systems that use assessment as a tool for greater coordination. What is interesting, and indeed commendable, in the book is the forensic way that the trajectory of the standards is accounted for. This, then, is a blueprint for how one might do policy enactment research, tracing the ways that policy ideas are borrowed from other contexts and then inflected by the specific histories, cultural expectations and of a given context. Thrupp makes the point that all policies are enacted, that is, rather than being implemented in schools across a given context, policy is always interpreted and put to work by real people in real contexts facing real challenges; ‘an enactment approach requires properly considering the influences of schools’ diverse contexts on their day to day processes… and recognising the multiple issues and outlooks that could be involved’ (p.106). Thrupp argues that the enactment of National Standards in NZ schools was hampered by the ambiguity of official assessment tools supplied to schools, poor professional development (PD) and support for teachers, a significant financial burden for schools associated with necessary PD focused on the Standards as a private PD industry emerged, inconsistent advice from the Ministry as updated information, advice and material was added to the website but never seemed to replace previous advice and information so that schools struggled to identify which directions the Ministry wanted schools to take. The detail given in the book regarding how National Standards were enacted in a loose collection of school research sites, known as the RAINS schools, was highly informative. One incisive finding of the book is that the attempt to standardise NZ education served only to create more variation within and between schools.

However, rather than merely giving a recount of the book, I’d like to outline three problems, or invitations to think, indentified within the book, that remain somewhat latent within the detailed description of the enactment of the Kiwi Standards. First, what is interesting about NZ’s search for better educational standards is the implicit logic for many politicians that standardisation is, in and of itself, highly desirable. When NZ politicians floated the idea of standardised assessments, this met such strong objections that the idea was shelved. Rather than adopting standardised testing systems to drive behaviour as many countries have done, NZ opted to create standards that school would assess and report against. It would appear to be easier to reject specific tools than the logic itself.

The performance data arising from these standards were publically released, creating a sort of ‘high-stakes’ standards. So, from the outset, it appears that the NZ authorities recognised the problems with standardised assessments used for accountability purposes, deliberately attempted to create a system that standardised yet ameliorated the worst of the risks of tests, yet ultimately were unable to resist turning a standards assessemnt into a coercive instrument. As Buchanan (2014, p. 11) observes, what ‘exists’ in the social world needs to be accounted for affirmatively as a product of desire. Standardisation has maintained its attraction for educators, education systems and policymakers because it is seen to offer, or affirm some way of managing living in the education world. It is worth thinking through why it is that the desire for standardisation in education exerts such a strong hold on the ways that we seek to improve systems. To turn to Thrupp’s final paragraph he argues:

It seems likely that policies as well as personalities acted as a smokescreen for what was really going on in New Zealand, and the Kiwi Standards was one of these. What were the Kiwi Standards all about? To educators they were certainly worth fighting over but as it turns out they may just have been a distraction from a wider malaise. (p. 209)

What is this malaise that Thrupp diagnoses as gripping our thinking about education? If we are to diagnose the malaise of the school reform movement, it must be the futile desire for ever greater levels of standardisation within already fairly standardised institutions. While Thrupp offers no solutions to this, the book invites us to think through this ourselves.

Second, and relatedly, the malaise resultant from standardisation creates the conditions for performative cultures in democratic systems and institutions. Thrupp argues that mandatory assessment regimes that have stakes associated with them for educational professionals ‘tend to bring performativity to the fore’ (p. 2). The irony is that the decision to choose to use standards as an assessment system was intended to avoid the perverse incentives often associated with standardised testing regimes. It shows, as Thrupp argues, ‘just how hard it is to avoid the performativity culture’ (p. 3). When Ball (2003) wrote about the terrors of performativity in schooling, which can be understood as an effect of specific kind of datafication, the problem, or terror, identified concerns how it is that subjects are both attracted and repelled by technologies of co-ordination through a promise to do us good. Performativity, to paraphrase Debord (1988), both scares and soothes. What Thrupp’s book invites us to think again is performativity itself – is an element of performativity inevitable in education and are we really arguing about how much performativity is too much? Or does performativity always distort and corrupt the project that it seeks to measure? In other words, should we resign ourselves to performativity as the price we pay for public investment in education, and the resultant policyquo forcefully injected into those public institutions? Perhaps this explains an insight from Lyotard (1984, p. xxiv) that has often been glossed over, performative systems and cultures are result from a legitimation

“based on its optimizing the system’s performance efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear”.

Finally, the book speaks to an emergent concern about the role of the academic speaking in an area of their expertise where that expertise contradicts government policy and ministers. Chapter 8 The Politics of Research discusses the ways that Thrupp found himself and his work being represented in the media, and the pressure that can be brought to bear on an individual by the media, their institution and politicians. What is the future of expertise, given so many structures explicitly mediate against it?