Edu-capitalism and the governing of early childhood education and care in Australia,New Zealand and the United States

Abstract

This article examines the effects of edu-capitalism and neoliberal education policies across Australia, New Zealand and United States to disrupt hegemonic policy logic based on neutral human capital. Current frameworks, standards and assessment tools govern and control how early childhood educators see and assess children and in turn develop and implement pedagogy. Issues of gender, class and ethnicity are invisible with the assumption that all children who are offered high-quality early childhood programmes have equal opportunities to be productive and therefore successful citizens. Success can be understood through universal outcomes for children and markers of what quality teaching looks like for educators. This epistemological shutter renders race-, class- and gender-based privilege as invisible or non-existent. In doing so, dominant White Western understandings of the world drive what and who is marked as ‘success(ful)’, while non-Western knowledge continues to be seen as primitive, insignificant and in need of intervention. Through analysing policy text supported by the work of post-thinkers, the rethinking, re/imagining, and remapping of early childhood that this article performs do not offer consensus but make room for both problematizations of and possibilities within the contemporary concerns of different theoretical and geographical perspectives from Australia, New Zealand and United States.

Keywords

early childhood edu-capitalism neoliberalism power quality

Introduction

Current frameworks, standards and assessment tools govern and control how early childhood educators see and assess children and in turn develop and implement pedagogy. Issues of gender, class and ethnicity are invisible with the assumption that all children who are offered high-quality early childhood programmes have equal opportunities to be productive and therefore become successful citizens. In contemporary policies, success is benchmarked through universal outcomes for children and determined by markers of what quality teaching looks like for educators. This epistemological shutter renders race-, class- and gender-based privilege as invisible or non-existent. In doing so, dominant White Western understandings of the world drive what and who is marked as ‘success(ful)’, while non-Western knowledge continues to be seen as primitive, insignificant and in need of taming and intervention. This article draws on post-thinkers in order to re-read neoliberal early childhood education policies in three Western countries. Within this text, we interrogate quality assurance to disrupt dominant discourses of the early childhood classroom within diverging and converging lines of inquiry to examine unequal power relations. This rethinking, re/imagining, and remapping of early childhood do not offer consensus but create space for both problematizations of and possibilities within the contemporary concerns of different historical, political, geographical and theoretical perspectives from Australia, New Zealand and United States.

Neoliberal and edu-capitalism education policies

Neoliberalism has its roots in classical 18th and 19th central liberal philosophy influenced by theorists such as Alex De Toqueville (1805–1859), David Hume (1711–1776), John Locke (1632–1704) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) (Braedley and Luxton, 2010), and it has clearly come to dominate global politics in the 21st century. The current embedding of this political philosophy took place during the 1980s and 1990s with Margaret Thatcher’s UK government (Angus, 2010; Connell, 2010; Jones, 1989) and Ronald Reagan in the United States (Klees, 2008). New Zealand’s Prime Minister David Lange drove this agenda in the 1980s (Thrupp, 2001) with Australia following (Pusey, 1991), particularly under Jeff Kennett at a State level in the state of Victoria (Angus, 2010; Angus and Brown, 1997; Angus and Seddon, 2000). Neoliberal doctrines of market deregulation and privatisation, formerly minoritarian views, were positioned by the new conservative majority as the cure for the global economic recession (Harvey, 2007). While liberalism places importance on ‘individual human freedom from coercion and servitude’ (Braedley and Luxton, 2010: 7), neoliberalism connects individual freedom to capitalism, where individuals can be ‘successful’ and achieve what they want through the accumulation of wealth. Braedley and Luxton (2010) further argue that neoliberalism opposes socialism, collectivism and economic redistribution. Economic and social reforms under neoliberalism privilege free market agendas such as deregulation and privatisation, that is, emphasis on the provision of goods and services by the private sector, rather than public provision. Market competition will produce positive economic outcomes that will eventually ‘trickle down’ from the rich and privileged to the poor. In the centre is the notion of individual productivity, performance and profit. Braedley and Luxton (2010) note that

… individual freedom of choice is maximized through competition. Competition is perceived as a naturally occurring social good, and the best method of social organization, enacted primarily through the mechanism of price. (p. 8)

Under neoliberal policy, capital is understood through a lens of productivity, performance and profit, with human capital comprising the individual and what benefits the individual is to the economic good of a nation. These philosophies of what is good for citizens and how to govern individuals in Western countries permeate educational policies and how childhoods are governed through everyday policies and in their educational settings.

Human capital theory

Neoliberal influences on early childhood education are well documented in numerous studies (see, for example, Mitchell, 2013; Moss, 2014; Penn, 2013). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), through its policies, is the influential driver that perceives early childhood education and care as a worthy investment with economic outcomes and purposes and uses discourses of investment in and outputs from early years education. These discourses determine what is quality and what are good standards, and how they are linked to the notion of a productive citizen, in this instance a child and family. For example, the OECD (2004) document Babies and Bosses, determines women’s return to the workforce and combining motherhood and working life. Peter Moss (2014) sums up the story of the effects of neoliberalism in early childhood:

It is a story of control and calculation, technology and measurement that, in a nutshell, goes like this. Find, invest in and apply the correct human technologies – aka ‘quality’ – during early childhood and you will get high returns on investment including improved education, employment and earnings and reduced social problems. A simple equation beckons and beguiles: ‘early intervention’ + ‘quality’ = increased ‘human capital’ + national success (or at least survival) in a cut-throat global economy. Invest early and invest smartly and we all live happily ever after in a world of more of the same – only more so. (p. 3)

Human Capital Theory is concerned with the site of the individual, her or his skills, knowledge, competencies and behaviours and how these contribute to the productivity of the nation or country. Human Capital Theory has shaped neoliberal education policies and influenced social investment (i.e. government spending), particularly in early childhood education. The investment in early childhood programmes is an intervention targeted particularly at ‘vulnerable’ families or families living in poverty as a way of creating productive future citizens who contribute to the economic viability of the country within a global economy has come to typify neoliberal educational policies and practices (Penn, 2008, 2010, 2013). Who ‘is vulnerable’ or what it means to be ‘vulnerable’ is determined by the economic and White dominant standards of Western countries. Moss (2014) describes these outcomes as a repayment for an investment. Connected to the discourses of poverty and vulnerability, Heckman and Masterov (2007) strongly advocated for investment in early education as a way of reducing unemployment, single parenthood, welfare dependency and crime. This is reminiscent of the 1960s US HighScope Perry Preschool Study. Further still, histories of the establishment of early childhood services, particularly kindergartens, document the formation of these services as charitable organisations, as places for moral reform for children and families living in poverty in New Zealand (May, 1997) and Australia (Brennan, 1998). For others, education is seen as critical to economic growth and ‘underperformance’, or poor educational outcomes are understood as an economic cost or drain (Savage et al., 2013). Neoliberal education policy entwined with principles of Human Capital Theory has strongly framed what Jill Blackmore calls ‘Edu-capitalism’ (Blackmore, 2014). Human Capital Theory and economic productivity are clearly evident in key Australian, New Zealand and American early childhood policy texts.

In July 2009, the Council of Australian Governments endorsed the National Early Childhood Development Strategy, Investing in the Early Years, to support all children to have the best start in life:

The strategy will guide Australia’s comprehensive response to evidence about the importance of early childhood development and the benefits – and cost-effectiveness – of ensuring all children experience a positive early childhood, from before birth through the first eight years of life. It will also support Australia to better meet the diverse needs of today’s families and focus on improving child outcomes and foster the health and wellbeing and productivity of our next generation. National effort to improve child outcomes will in turn contribute to increased social inclusion, human capital and productivity in Australia. It will help ensure Australia is well placed to meet social and economic challenges in the future and remain internationally competitive. (Council of Australian Governments, 2009: 4)

In 2013, the New Zealand Government set 10 challenges for the public sector to achieve over the next 5 years, including one for early childhood education. The early childhood education challenge was focused particularly on supporting vulnerable children:

We know there is a link between early childhood experiences and adult mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, poor educational outcomes and unemployment. Too many children are at risk of poor outcomes because they do not get the early support they need. The human and financial costs of not facing up to these challenges are too high. We know that remedial spending is often less effective, and more costly, than getting it right the first time. For example, treating rheumatic fever alone costs an estimated $40 million a year in New Zealand. Early intervention brings benefits in terms of reduced imprisonment and arrest rates, higher employment and higher earnings later in life. By doing better for vulnerable children, we could set them on a pathway to a positive future, and help build a more productive and competitive economy for all New Zealanders. (State Services Commission, 2013: para 1)

In the State of the Union Address in 2013, President Obama proposed an early learning agenda noting,

The beginning years of a child’s life are critical for building the early foundation needed for success later in school and in life. Leading economists agree that high-quality early learning programs can help level the playing field for children from lower-income families on vocabulary, social and emotional development, while helping students to stay on track and stay engaged in the early elementary grades. Children who attend these programs are more likely to do well in school, find good jobs, and succeed in their careers than those who don’t. And research has shown that taxpayers receive a high average return on investments in high-quality early childhood education, with savings in areas like improved educational outcomes, increased labor productivity, and a reduction in crime. (Obama, 2013: para 1)

The promotion of economic capital and a better life is evident on the US Department of Education website that promotes the promise for a ‘Middle class’ life style through the investment in high-quality preschool. The webpage titled Early Learning: America’s Middle Class Promise Begins Early cites a presidential speech:

If we make high-quality preschool available to every child, not only will we give our kids a safe place to learn and grow while their parents go to work; we’ll give them the start that they need to succeed in school, and earn higher wages, and form more stable families of their own. By the end of this decade, let’s enroll 6 million children in high-quality preschool. That is an achievable goal that we know will make our workforce stronger. (Obama, cited in Chicago Sun Times, 2014: para 52)

These simple deterministic practices allow such neoliberal thinking to penetrate every corner of child care, with education being dissociated from the idealistic outcomes of early childhood curriculums such as New Zealand’s Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996) and Australia’s Belonging, Being and Becoming (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), 2009). Furthermore, the creeping edu-capitalism shifts early years education and care further from a socialist endeavour and collectivism to individualistic capitalism under corporate business models, for profit, and to seeing childhood and education as a new, profitable investment.

Power, regulation and control

Foucault contended that the subject or individual is constructed and reconstructed through power relations (Dahlberg et al., 1999; Foucault, 1977; MacNaughton, 2005), and power exists in action and functions at the site of the body (Foucault, 1977; Gore, 1995, 1993). Power is employed and exercised in multiple ways, operating as capillaries where power can be productive and not only repressive, and circulates through and within discourses rather than being possessed by subjects (Gore, 1995, 1993). Bio-power operates as an object and strategy for the governance of human relationships (Usher and Edwards, 1994). Foucault (1980) argues that

[p]ower must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and excising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application. (p. 98)

Disciplinary power surfaced with the development of modern institutions, such as prisons, hospitals and schools (Foucault, 1977). Disciplinary power operates invisibly at the site of the individual (Foucault, 1977; Gore, 1995, 1993). Foucault provided the example of Bentham’s Panopticon as an architectural design that supported and reinforced the disciplinary power of surveillance and regulation both of the people imprisoned and of the supervisors. This Panopticon provided spaces for the prisoners to be observed and then regulated through punishment, but it also created a forum where the threat of observation affected self-regulation and normalisation behaviours. Foucault (1977) discussed the visibility and invisibility of the circulation of disciplinary power at the site of the individual when he said,

Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force … Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. (p. 187)

Disciplinary powers circulate within and through early childhood education through activities such as observation and assessment and the reporting of outcomes through frameworks and quality assurance systems. Disciplinary power can be exercised through modern institutional structures and discourses such as early childhood services and human development theories. It can also be exercised at a micro-level through what Foucault (1982) calls governmentality. Governmentality refers to the exercise of power in ways that subjugate what constitutes the actions or speech of an individual (Foucault, 1982). Rather than a structural institution that enforces control down on to the subject to regulate and normalise her, governmentality is intrinsically woven into society’s structure. Governmentality describes how disciplinary powers such as ‘regimes of truth’ constitute and re-constitute the individual using coercion and modification of thoughts, feelings, words and actions and in social formations. It describes how one person through knowledge–power formations ‘governs’ or oversees what another does (Foucault, 1994; Usher and Edwards, 1994). Knowledge supports power in action to govern the individual (Kendall and Wickham, 1999). For example, in Australia for early childhood services to receive government funding and for services and families to receive government subsidies, services must be registered as at least working towards the National Quality Standards. In New Zealand, ‘vulnerable children’ are stigmatised, and current policy encourages private investors and shareholders into the early childhood education market and to receive government subsidies and therefore enables private companies to profit from the public finances. In the United States, for example, in the state of Ohio, early childhood services do not have to be Step Up To Quality (SUTQ) rated, but the higher their SUTQ star rating, the more funding they get from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to subsidise low-income children attending the centre. So, for many services submitting to an SUTQ star rating review means they can afford to enrol more students who would otherwise not be able to pay the tuition. If services want a more equitable and diverse school, they have to pay the state to rate them so that the state can then pay the service.

Foucault disrupts the notion of a singular ‘truth’ and argues that ‘what we hold to be true about, for instance, child development or early childhood curriculum, is a fiction created through ‘truth games’ that express the politics of knowledge of the time and place’ (Foucault, 1997 cited in MacNaughton 2005: 5). How have national quality frameworks and current curriculum documents in Australia, New Zealand and the United States become truth games that represent or reflect the politics of neoliberal and edu-capital knowledge? How might we push back to work against early childhood education as an economic endeavour that streamlines and standardises childhoods?

Edu-capitalism and its manifestations

Edu-capitalism is the performance of the commodification of education. Blackmore and Sachs describe edu-capitalism as ‘… when managerialism aligns teachers and researchers with the corporate logic of economism and entrepreneurialism’ (cited in Blackmore, 2014: 500).

The logic of edu-capitalism is evident in the promotion of a corporate logic in early childhood services throughout Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and yet, edu-capitalism has become a force so far-reaching that ‘the sum of all the whirring machinery’ (Morton, 2013: 1) can be difficult to perceive. How quality is determined and how the indicators of the quality standards schemes provide insights into how edu-capitalism has permeated and manifested in early childhood education as a hegemonic force (‘common-sense’ actions seemingly for the benefit of all). The augmented reality of edu-capitalism is positioned in Morton’s (2013) hyperlocality, which means being present everywhere and nowhere in particular, all at once, at the very same time. The edu-capitalist policy operates in ways that are only partly visible and perceptible and is the discursive workings and material effects of a particular kind of stop-gap.

‘High-quality’ early education is being interrogated and renewed at the state level in the United States. Ohio’s quality rating and improvement system for licensed learning and development programmes, the SUTQ provides banners, posters, yard signs and ‘Deluxe’ sandwich boards to advertise the star quality rating (a 5-star rating system) that the service has received as a way of marketing that service to parents. As promoted on the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Ohio website,

Programs are provided one complimentary marketing item of their choice, a 4′x6′ Banner, two (2) Graphic Posters or a Yard Sign (descriptions below) when they receive their initial SUTQ Star Rating. Items can be secured from your local Resource and Referral (R and R) Agency or Ohio Department of Education Consultant … Star Rated programs may purchase any of the marketing items that have been developed for Ohio’s Quality Rating System. (Early Childhood Ohio, 2014)

Havel’s (1985) seminal philosophical work on power and ideology is manifested through citizens living in an ideologically charged system, where they participate in the public domain, for example, they attend all required meetings and display the proper flags and signs (or, for instance, the Star rating banner) and use the standardised and ideologically correct language. The citizens/teachers in this concept accept the rules of the system and place the correct sign in a visible place. The sign does not say anything surprising or new, and instead of disturbing the system, the citizens comply with the system and, in a Havelian sense, become the victims and supporters of that system. In this sense, the sign, and its public declaration, means that teachers have officially, publicly declared that they accept edu-capitalism and act as if they accept the meanings of this ideology, rather than demonstrating and performing their own notions of quality in their early years centre. The public declaration of the star rating system is the visibility of the augmented reality, the subjectification of teachers and the place where the discursive and material intersect.

Similarly, within the Australian context, advertising quality occurs online. The Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA), under the auspice of the Federal government, hosts a website called My Child (Australian Government, 2013). This site is described as a child care online portal targeted to parents to support them to locate long day care services, explore cost and financial support and provide information about the quality care and education scheme. Within this site is a national register where families can look up, assess and monitor the quality standards and improvement of the service they currently use or to assess a potential service. The service’s National Quality Standards ratings for each of the seven quality areas are listed as a public record (see ACECQA, 2013).

For both the Ohio and the Australian examples, the driving principle is the commodification of services where parents can make choices about the type of service their child attends, and the quality of the service or product is driven through competition between services. This philosophy assumes that the individual has free choice. This linear, instrumental rationality and reductionist logic creates hegemonic policy that fails to recognise the multiple narratives outside of ‘investments’, ‘marketisation’, ‘managerialism’, ‘returns’, ‘evidence-based’ and ‘human capital’ (Connell, 2013; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Moss, 2014; Rowlands and Rawolle, 2013). Neoliberal and edu-capitalist ways of thinking understand human rights and equity as the right of each individual to compete for not only services but also for achievement and success. This assumes that through early education each individual starts on a level playing field or is part of a homogeneous group, and in the case of early childhood, early education is used as an interventionist tool to move children in line. This political and philosophical stance marks the world as gender-, race- and class-neutral. Savage et al. (2013) argue that

… current market-orientated ways of thinking foster notions of meritocracy, competition and choice, which also claim links to ideas of fairness and opportunity. Market-based policies are seen as drivers that promote equity, based on the assumption that all parents are able to demand and obtain quality education for their children, irrespective of their socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, their social capital, their migrant status, gender or other factors. (p. 162)

In New Zealand, public policy is torn between the tension of the curriculum framework that has been argued as contesting neoliberal policies (Ministry of Education, 1996) and everyday performances of the control, shaping and moulding of childhoods. The ideal child has particular qualities, and children who are labelled as ‘vulnerable’, meaning ‘other’, from less ‘functioning’ environments and places are considered to be of a ‘lower quality’. The push of the neoliberal government is to remove children from the vulnerable families and spaces and to place them into compulsory child care in order for the parents to remain eligible for welfare payments (Early Childhood Council, 2013). These signs of edu-capitalism governing childhoods demonstrate how ideology penetrates every aspect of life and portray parents as unable to look after their own children because they are from a certain socio-economic background. They highlight ‘quality’ in early years centres as determined by international OECD economic indicators and elevate these indicators above the local and bicultural knowledge, relationships and partnerships that the early years curriculum is built on. The ‘vulnerable’ children thus become the Havelian (1985) victims and supporters of this edu-capitalist system.

Through this edu-capitalist lens, the individual continues to be responsible for the choices in what she or he chooses to ‘consume’ to ensure success, and if ‘success’ in economic achievement is not met, the responsibility of this sits with the individual. This removes all responsibility from the state and pushes it onto the individual family. The family needs to publicly display signs of wealth so as not to stigmatise children as reproducers of their social class and of what it represents. Issues of redistribution of wealth and other resources do not need to be addressed by governments as they do not deem themselves as ‘responsible’ or obligated to achieving equity (Rawolle, 2013). The outcome is that the same inequity narratives continue to be retold. Neoliberalism pretends to provide ‘equal’ and ‘fair’ opportunities for ‘all’ to achieve ‘success’ while it has re-inscribed, intensified and continued to create injustices and inequity. This occurs because neoliberalism conceptualises power as a product that can be gained or received and placed at the site of the individual. In this context, an individual can obtain power through the accumulation of knowledge and skills within education. It is possible for anyone to gain ‘power’ if they work hard enough where equity is understood as ‘equity of opportunity’ (Savage et al., 2013: 162). Drawing on Foucault’s conceptualisations of power opens up other ways of understanding the discourses in operation within neoliberal education policy. The identification of the individual in the modern gaze resulted in a citizen being observed, assessed, transformed and monitored (Faubion, 1994; Foucault, 1977; Rabinow, 1984). Foucault (1977) argued that within the classical age the discovery of the body as an object and the concept of individuality of the body can be analysed through observation and manipulated as a form of social discipline, normalisation and regulation. Foucault (1977) stated, ‘A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (p. 136).

Rating systems and signs of obedience and quality, as advertised via posters and banners or on websites, grades the individual service at a standard or star rating that marks the truth about the service within heterogeneous activities and knowledge about what ‘good’ or ‘high-quality’ services look and sound like. Foucault (1977) called these truths ‘regimes of truth’. He argued that ‘regimes’ exist within all societies. These ‘regimes’ circulate to establish and support rules and regulations that define and depict the truth about how the individual should act and speak. He wrote,

Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980: 131)

Educators perform these truths under the threat of spot inspections or visits from regulatory bodies and the promise of funding. Not only do regulatory bodies and parents place the service under surveillance, but educators place themselves under self-surveillance. Foucault (1977) saw surveillance operate in similar ways:

Thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the ‘physics’ of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees and without recourse, in discipline at least, to excess, force or violence. It is a power that seems all the less ‘corporal’ in that it is more subtly ‘physical’. (p. 177)

Quality markers also support the discourse of the educator as the ‘good teacher’. The good teacher understands, assesses, monitors and, where required, intervenes in the development of the child to ensure ‘success’. Quality legitimises the surveillance, measurement and social control of the child, educator and the service under the name of ‘normal’ growth and development, which results in the ‘normal’ productive future adult (Cannella, 1997).

De/reterritorialization of early childhood

To de/reterritorialize early childhood edu-capital knowledge and practices, an epistemological shift is needed to venture into/between discourses. De/reterritorialization breaks down grand narratives or ‘regimes of truth’ (Giroux, 1995). In order to do so, this article engages with the philosophical idea of education as a space for learning or exploring knowledge for the pursuit of ideas, interests, joy and challenge, valued in its own right rather than as an economic endeavour.

Meaning and definition are inscribed in discourse within the social, historical and political positions held by those who use them. These meanings emerge through power relations within institutional practices rather than from language (Ball, 1990). Language, that is, words and concepts, changes their meaning and definition when they are used in different discourses. Discourses contain multiple ideas and thoughts and position a person in a discourse as a subject that is rational, conscious, non-agentic, fixed and coherent (Weedon, 1987). Foucault talks about the ‘principle of discontinuity’ where the order and combination of words can lead to exclude or displace other orders or combinations. By juxtaposing different discourses, a ‘troubling’ of meaning and relations is possible. Foucault discussed this ‘troubling’ when he wrote,

We must make allowance for the complex and unstable powers whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it … (cited in Ball, 1990: 2)

Drawing on multiple discourses could be a point of resistance or a way to ‘trouble’ meaning within edu-capitalist early childhood spaces. For example, the SUTQ programme in Ohio awards points to services based on their adherence to the requirements in relation to learning and development. As noted earlier, the more points obtained, the more funding a service receives. Under the category of child screening and assessment, services are required to demonstrate that ‘[o]ngoing child assessment results are used to make, adjust and refine instructional decisions and to evaluate child progress (5 points)’ (Department of Education, 2013).

This activity has the potential to earn the service 5 points in the star rating system. If Foucault’s articulation that discourses of power and knowledge intersect (power/knowledge), it creates opportunities to re-imagine how this category could be preformed or (re)produced:

We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between the accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies … Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are … Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategies; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy. (Foucault, 1978: 100–102)

Surveillance or the threat of surveillance within the Australian context is not dissimilar from Ohio, where educators are asked under element 1.2.1 of the National Quality Standards to demonstrate that ‘each child’s learning and development is assessed as part of an ongoing cycle of planning, documenting and evaluation’ (ACECQA, 2013), and similar practices are present in New Zealand. As a way of assessing the quality of this element, the Guide to the National Quality Standards states that assessors from ACECQA (who come out to the services to assess their activities) and educators may observe and record ‘children’s learning and behaviour to inform their educational planning’ and are expected to use ‘their knowledge of the children’s current learning and development to evaluate and reflect on programming’ (ACECQA, 2013: 38). The New Zealand space provides interesting cracks in the neoliberal panorama to navigate other possible truths; Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996), the curriculum framework, under planning, evaluation and assessment, states that ‘[t]he purpose of assessment is to give useful information about children’s learning and development to the adults providing the programme and to children and their families’ and that ‘assessment of children’s learning and development involves intelligent observation of the children by experienced and knowledgeable adults for the purpose of improving the programme’ (p. 29). In this initial phrasing, neoliberal discourses come to the fore; however, at the end of the page, there is a final sentence that opens up possibilities to push back on dominant discourses: ‘[t]he needs of the children, not assessment procedures, should determine the curriculum’ (Ministry of Education, 1996: 29).

If we consider discourses as tactical elements, then how might we deterritorialize child assessment drawing on multiple discourses? This would mean drawing on multiple theoretical understandings and thinkers to interpret what is seen and observed about the child. Henry Giroux (1995) suggests that we need to develop border pedagogy as a way to create counter text. Creating critical approaches requires us to consider or encounter multiple discourses that invite diverse theoretical ideas, methodologies and ideological orientations. Giroux (1995) explains that

… critical pedagogy calls into question forms of subordination that creates inequities among different groups as they live out their lives. Likewise, it rejects classroom relations that regulate difference as an object of condemnation and oppression, and it refuses to subordinate the purpose of schooling to narrowly defined economic and instrumental considerations. This is a notion of critical pedagogy that equates learning with the creation of critical rather than merely good citizens. (p. 45)

How might this play out in the everyday practices for children in classrooms in Australia, New Zealand and the United States? One possible way might be through multiple interpretations of the observations and assessments that educators are required to undertake. For example, for one observation one interpretation of the child’s experience might occur using a developmental lens to seeing and assessing language and literacy skills, fine and gross motor skills, as well as cognitive skills. A second reading might interpret the observation using a gender lens drawing on thinkers such as Judith Butler (2004) and Raewyn Connell (2013, 1995) reading how the child has performed being a girl or boy and the early childhood space. A third reading might draw on Bourdieu’s (1986) work around capital where the observer focuses on how cultural capital includes or excludes the child from participating in conversations and activities based on the capital they have to access entry. Ruth Lister (2003, 2004) could provide a lens to explore and interpret poverty politics and how hierarchies of citizenship operate in the early childhood classroom based on class. A fourth reading might draw on Karen Barad (2007) or Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010) examining materiality and intra-active forces between the human and non-human worlds and the effects for understanding intra-active pedagogy and the impact of artefacts and material objects on learning. A fifth reading might draw on post-colonial interpretations of how the child reacts and interacts drawing from the writing of Gail Cannella and Radhika Viruru (2004) or Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000), an Australian Indigenous writer, to examine White privilege and what counts as true or acceptable knowledge and skills to report on outcomes and quality. While all of these thinkers lack clear consensus, they all do respond to, and resist, via diverse lenses, the neoliberal edu-capitalism in new and innovative ways.

Concluding comments

This article has utilised the logic of edu-capitalism through an unmasking of the policies that are implemented in three post-colonial countries. Dominant and alternative readings have been applied to produce diverse, contradictory and competing understandings that entangle multiple discourses of who the child is and how childhood should be or could be. The early childhood educators are engaged in the neoliberal encounter with fragments of assessment, reporting, performance and accountability to obtain a star rating and with those financial rewards to support families to have access to the service, but also to render the assessment and reporting with messy multiple ‘truths’. These ‘truths’ disrupt the notion of the knowable child who develops in universal and predictable linear patterns and encounters hybrid ‘truths’ and possibilities. It is here where educators could engage with the theory and policy, to resist rather than merely to become part of the intricate web of mechanisms of control and regulations. These are the concerns involved in promoting educationalism, where education is about valuing learning within its own right – as a pursuit of gaining knowledge and understandings about the world pasts, presents and futures, for enjoyment and out of interest, rather than as an economic endeavour. Thinking with theory and policy is a first step to disrupting the mechanisms of control and regulation, in these times of edu-capitalism.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Kylie Smith is a Senior lecturer and Research Fellow in the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education. Her research explores the intersections between theory, research and practice in the everyday early childhood classroom.

Marek Tesar is a qualified early childhood teacher and a lecturer in early childhood education and childhood studies at the University of Auckland. His research is concerned with the construction of childhoods and notions of the place/space of childhoods and early career teachers. Marek’s research and scholarship are underpinned by notions of a fair and democratic society in which creative thinking and disciplines shape professional practice and where the child’s voice and participation are taken seriously.

Casey Y Myers is a Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at Kent State University and the Coordinator of Studio and Research Arts at the KSU Child Development Center, an early years laboratory school. Her research focuses on the aesthetics and materiality of everyday school encounters and explores the application of the posthuman in relation to participatory inquiry with young children.

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