Abstract
One of the peculiarities of the Global Education Reform Movement, dubbed the GERM by Pasi Sahlberg (2011, 2016), remains the combination of its ubiquity and yet the variation in its local manifestations. We see its ubiquity in a common set of principles that governments adopt when introducing large scale education reform programmes locally. These include standardisation – of curriculum and testing; system accountability – through the intensive collection and management of data; increased competition between schools for student enrolment – represented as a good, a necessary means for parents to exercise choice, and a spur to system innovation and increased efficiency; and the introduction of more private actors to what was once thought of as the state’s business – governments begin to outsource different parts of the education supply chain and its services, from schools to assessment instruments, data management services, or even continuing professional development.
Yet if this is the general recipe, taken up in the name of improving educational outcomes, the research shows that it leads to divergent results. Each careful exploration of what happens next once these principles are adopted demonstrates that no matter how far or how fast GERM has travelled the outcomes are not the same. The same recipe in different places leads to different results. This is indeed a contradiction for a reform process built on the promise that standardisation of inputs will lead to standardisation of outputs, and that holding schools firmly to account for what they do will uniformly improve student performance. If the promise was that all students would perform at the level of the best, then the GERM tools have been tried and found wanting. Yet the zombie policy prescription lives on. Why it does so, how come the original ingredients continue to move from place to place with so little concerted interest or investment in finding an alternative, remains an open question.
New Zealand from this point of view is a fascinating case. It came late to the GERM project – protected perhaps by its historically high rankings in PISA – and with a particular set of social and economic issues shaping its traction within the electoral cycle. Part of the uniqueness of the New Zealand case rests with the divided history of its people, in particular that of the indigenous Maori population and the later European settlers. The disparities in economic wealth that this history has created and how inequalities and social exclusion under these circumstances are voiced, is distinctive to New Zealand. As elsewhere, inequalities in the education system partly reflect the social zoning that sorts and segregates where middle class populations live and work. But there has been an added twist in New Zealand with a resurgence in Maori-medium schools encouraged by the opening up of the school system to parental choice alongside recognition of the historical harm that European settlers have inflicted on the indigenous population.
Against this background, the focus of Martin Thrupp’s book rests with the evolution of what he calls the Kiwi Standards, the system of testing and accountability that is peculiar to New Zealand, even as the discourse that led to its introduction shares much with large-scale education reform programmes introduced elsewhere. The book intertwines three elements to the story. One strand documents the policy history to the Kiwi Standards, how and why they became part of the political platform of the National Party in the run up to the 2007 election, and how early opposition, including in parliamentary debate (72), gave way to gradual uptake. This is also a story of policy adaptation, the kind of on-going policy work that Datnow et al (2002) memorably described as ‘building the plane while it’s flying’. Whilst political investment and interest in the policy lasts, there are numerous attempts to tweak how it works, to tighten here or loosen there, with continual adjustments taking place. But as the political cycle moves on, so political interests fade with it. By its third term in office, the National Party’s attention to education had switched from data collection and monitoring standards as levers for change to a programme of social investment that can be more selectively targeted. Thrupp shows that this changed landscape is leading to a general proliferation of ‘for profit’ activity in education, as new groups offer an increasingly diverse range of services to schools, teachers and parents, all with the promise of improved outcomes from education (207), yet no clearer prospect of them actually being realised.
If this is the official policy narrative, the second strand to the book deals with what the policy in its various iterations is doing to schools. This includes micro-stories of school-level responses to the introduction and evolution of Kiwi Standards, collected from a longitudinal study based in six schools. Here the idiosyncrasies of the Kiwi Standards policy become much more fully evident. In contrast to the policy landscape in England, where assessment has been used to exert an ever tighter grip on what teachers do in the classroom (Moss, 2017), what is most striking is the looseness of the framing. At the heart of the policy lies a requirement for teachers to pass an ‘on-balance’ judgement on their pupils’ achievement in maths, reading and writing based on their knowledge of their progress across the curriculum and over the course of a year (overall teacher judgement). The judgements are thus made without reference to tests, but against a four-point scale that records whether students are deemed to be operating above, at, below or well below the level thought appropriate for their age. Looseness in the system rests with quite what the judgements might be based on, how they would be moderated, and to whom they would be reported, in what terms. Some schools were allowed to opt out of the system altogether (49). Maori-immersion schools re-framed the scale and adapted its use to account for their own version of the curriculum. Against this background, Thrupp describes the Kiwi Standards as neither national nor standard. Yet he also shows (chapters 5 and 7) that they nevertheless begin to reshape how teachers and teacher leaders think about their work, and share that thinking with parents and pupils. Labelling of pupils increases, despite the aversion of many tutors to using the four-point scale directly with parents or students. Schools with low socio-economic catchments look least likely to benefit positively from the initiative. Staff workload intensifies. Whilst the infrastructure supporting external intervention looks extremely modest in comparison to England, and is likely to remain so, from Thrupp’s analysis (chapter 6), the language of the four-point scale, the invoking of national norms, the implication that those not operating above the national standard are not doing well enough, are all doing their work in reconfiguring social relations in schools and the communities they serve.
The final strand rests with the role of research in informing the policy’s development and its evaluation. This is largely a story of absence. There is an absence of research voices in shaping early decisions – few were consulted as the policy evolved, with the formal evaluation outsourced by tender to a commercial company. The kind of trenchant debate that the academy encourages to get to the heart of an issue, in which conflicting points of view are weighed through explicit contestation and exposure to criticism, is not tolerated when the political stakes are high. Rather, politicians seek from the research community endorsement for the strategy upon which they are already set. It is rare for policymakers to adopt the approach New Labour took to the National Literacy Strategy in England and commission independent evaluation that could usefully feed back into the policy’s design (Earl et al., 2002).
Looking across this diverse landscape, and in the light of the data he has collected, Thrupp concludes that ‘the shape of wider economic and social changes has become clearer and a broader vantage point more compelling’. Certainly, education reform as political discourse often acts as a lightning rod for broader economic and social grievances. The harder it gets to hide the social and economic inequalities that follow in the wake of de-industrialisation and economic restructuring, the more governments seem to talk about inequalities in outcomes from education, as if it was education that was to blame. The policy levers of league tables and norm-referencing produce the visible signs that some have won and others have lost. They encourage competition for scarce resources. Yet we know that other aspects of education matter more. In the words of the old marching song: Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes, Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses.