Chelsea Baker 19764793

Cultural Contexts in Primary Education edpr3004

Assessment 1: Report (50%)
Chelsea Baker 19764793
Tutor: Gail Hardy
Due: 08/04/2022
Word count: 2025

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Contents

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…pg. 3
2. The impact of Neoliberalist policy in education…………………………………………………………..pg. 3
3. Education industry as a market………………………………………………………………………..…………pg. 4
4. Heightened accountability and performativity from testing……………………………….……….pg. 5
4.1 Accountability
4.2 Performativity
5. School rivalry and self-promotion……………………………………………………………..………………..pg. 6
6. Practising school choice and inequity…………………………………………………………………….……pg. 7
6.1 School choice
6.2 Inequity
7. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..pg. 8

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Neoliberalism in Education – Option 3

1. Introduction
Education is a multifaceted sociological environment that aims to impose the cultural ideals
and conventions of the society in pupils in which it functions. Conventional boundaries
among countries and societies are dissolving, uncovering more knowledge about
educational systems throughout the world (Howell, 2016). While increased exposure to
knowledge and the ability to explore more about prospective alternative approaches are
appealing to teachers, established classroom practises are also under attack. The purpose
of this report is to outline some of the (intentional and unintentional) consequences of the
growth of the neoliberalism model in education (Savage, 2017). The Australian context, as
well as standardised assessments used as performance metrics, are given special
consideration, as well as how this affects accountability, school marketing, and school
choice.

2. The impact of Neoliberalist policy in education

The term "neoliberalism" refers to an economic framework in which the "free" market is
expanded to all aspects of our public and private lives (Gobby & Walker, 2017). This new
educational model has been designed to represent a restructuring of primary school territory
by fostering pupils intellectually, psychologically, and culturally in order to generate socially
conscious, assertive, and critical individuals since its inception (Gobby & Walker, 2017).
Regrettably, Australian governments have been observed borrowing strongly from neoliberal
initiatives in the tracks of other nations such as the United Kingdom and the United States
for the past two decades, even with the dismal impacts on learners, educators, and schools
that have been demonstrated in numerous research (Dinham, 2015). Even the Alice Springs
(Mparntwe) Education Declaration stresses the importance of education as an investment in
the nation's competitiveness (Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2019).
Neoliberalism in education, according to Connell (2013), is the monetization of access to
education, in which students are "redefined simply as customers" (p. 102). To put it another
way, everyone is competing with one another. Institutions are compelled to contend for
financing, educators contend for evaluations based on pupil performance, and families
contend for the best-performing schools (Lubienksi & Rowe, 2017). Principals, on the other
hand, have resorted to cost-cutting while attempting to recruit fee-paying households.

The concept that education should be deregulated, privatised, and subjected to market
pressures to thrive is a dominant premise circulating through the neoliberalism discourse
and practises at this moment (Dinham, 2015). This intriguing concept supports the notion

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that such approaches are primarily accountable for raising educator, school, and pupil
achievement (Dinham, 2015). The realisation that Australia's education system is now one of
the most privatised in the world, with a much greater rate of attendance in non-government
schools than in similar countries, is often overlooked or dismissed in the Australian
framework (Dinham, 2015). Governments have hastened the shift to non-government
schools in recent decades (Dinham, 2015).

3. Education industry as a market

Market theory is implicated because of Neoliberalism's operations. It gives parents and
students more power regarding educational organisations by compelling each family to
choose and pay for their children's education (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2013). It is also a
means for the government to delegate responsibilities for educational quality to the single
customer. Parents can utilise the existing data and performance metrics to select where their
child will be sent, which may be based on their socioeconomic situation. Greater familial
school choice, along with an initiative of advertising performance metrics and enabling
finances to accompany students, should result in excellent schools thriving and weak
schools changing or disappearing (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2013). Furthermore, private
schools are seldom, if ever, governed by the government, and are only implicitly constrained
by society, such as through the market force process (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2013).

To maintain this marketisation trend, the "My School" website was created to provide
households with the facts they require to assess schools, with the goal of avoiding schools
with poor performance metrics. The website, which was launched in 2010, provides a forum
for households to guarantee that they are making educated, measured, and sensible
decisions based on the information provided (Gobby, 2016). Nevertheless, these
assessments do not take into consideration social variables that influence schooling, such as
school geography and division (Lubienski & Rowe, 2017). The huge gap between school
type and socioeconomic status is seen in Figure 1, clearly displaying a association of much
higher socioeconomic status in private schools than in public schools.

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Figure 1: Distribution of Public and Private systemic schools by SES score

(Independent Schools Council of Australia, 2018, p. 3)

4. Heightened accountability and performativity from testing

4.1 Accountability
Controlled testing procedures are a mechanism for increasing educator accountability while
simultaneously improving economic competitiveness. This is recognized as test-based
accountability when a test is employed to keep people or organisations accountable for their
performance and has stakes linked to it. Advocates of test-based accountability frequently
believe that educators understand what they need to do to boost pupils' performance but are
not putting in enough effort. The adoption of test-based accountability regimes ensures that
high-stakes assessments are sufficient gauges of critical educational objectives, and thus
demands that the assessments accurately reflect established content requirements.

High-stakes assessment sceptics, primarily educators, perceive compulsory assessments as

a heinous attempt to dominate, limit, and impede pupil performance. Educators in New York
were questioned by Costigan and Crocco (2007) about their views on high-stakes testing.
The major source of worry was not just the adverse effects on pupils, syllabus, and
instructional methods, but also how educators felt unable to cope with the increased testing
load and perceived a loss of control (Costigan & Crocco, 2007). In essence, assessments
are an effective and vital tool for holding schools accountable, rewarding good achievers,
and identifying those who require assistance (Gobby & Walker, 2017). Educators, on the
other hand, have a propensity of "teaching to the test" (Howell, 2016). Evidently, this has
ramifications for the quality of education pupils get.

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4.2 Performativity
Closely related to accountability is performativity, which is a term used in education to
describe a set of restrictive standards that educators believe they need to follow to be
deemed "excellent" educators (Ball, 2003). The key motif for this notion is the National
Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). Due to the fear of being labelled
"unsatisfactory," the constraints of performativity might hinder more unorthodox or inventive
methods to instruction (Howell, 2016) It can also lead to a lack of originality and
inventiveness in instructional approaches, leading to wasted chances to captivate students
(Gobby & Walker, 2017). "We become uncertain about the reasons for actions," Ball
remarks. " Are we doing this because it is important, because we believe in it, because is it
worthwhile? Is it being done because it will be measured or compared in the end?" (p.220,
2003).

Additionally, education systems are now under pressure to show continual improvement,
with nationwide standardised assessments (such as NAPLAN) serving as an audit on this
progress (Howell, 2016). Notwithstanding this prevalent audit culture, standardised
assessments can be prejudiced against lower pupils, since users fixate on pupils who are
more inclined to progress or thrive, culminating in an educational discrepancy (Howell,
2016). Another disadvantage is that teachers and institutions are sometimes unfairly blamed
for poor performance, as if they are solely liable for all the elements that impact pupils'
learning and scholastic progress (Gobby & Walker, 2017). Figure 2 displays countries’
mathematics performance against school competition. It can be seen that Australia has high
levels of competition between schools alongside high mathematics performance, which
highlights that heightened accountability and performativity leads to good results on paper
but does not necessarily mean great quality of education follows.

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Figure 2: The relationship between competition and mathematics performance across

countries

(Organisation of Economic and Co-operation Development, 2014)

5. School rivalry and self-promotion

Heightened performativity has led to considerable neoliberal impact on performance
evaluations amongst schools (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2013). Neoliberal policies have
attempted to boost school rivalry by giving families more options for their children's schools,
in the hopes of incentivizing schools to improve the standard of education they deliver. The
private school migration has heightened the necessity for public schools to contend with
private schools for student numbers, as well as increasing rivalry among non-government
school systems (Lubienski & Rowe, 2017). Although private schools have served an
essential part in Australian education since colonial periods, government funding hikes to
private schools have increased dramatically since the 1970s, explicitly supporting the
expansion of private school student numbers (Lubienski & Rowe, 2017).   School systems
with minimal degrees of rivalry between schools, on the other hand, frequently have higher
rates of social inclusion, which means that children from various social origins go to the
same schools (Lubienski & Rowe, 2017). Institutions are frequently more socially stratified
under regimes where families may pick institutions and schools contend for admission.

On the plus side, these changes increase public accountability for institutions and reveal
disparities across them. Aside from assessing NAPLAN scores and data on the "My School"
website, emerging independence frameworks reorient school leaders as managers, who are

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progressively more accountable for activities such as advertising and "client" recruiting, as

well as the recruitment and dismissing of personnel (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2013). They have
gotten so preoccupied with school self-promotion that instructional technique and other
aspects of high-quality education have suffered as a result.

6. Practising school choice and inequity

6.1 School choice
School rivalry and self-promotion gives families the opportunity to select the best school for
their child. Neoliberalism creates new "conditions of possibility" for how people perceive and
control oneself when it pertains to school choice via school advertising and self-promotion. In
Australia, school choice is an important part of both state and federal education reform. As a
result, Australian children are more inclined to attend institutions with a restricted
socioeconomic blend, with just around a third of pupils attending institutions with a varied or
average socioeconomic level (Bottrell, 2014). The most common complaint of school choice
is that it has culminated in the "residualisation" of institutions: in a framework where families
struggle to select the "best" institutions for their children, some schools— and pupils— would
unavoidably be pushed aside (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2013). Margaret Vickers (2004), for
instance, claimed in a study of rival public high schools in western Sydney that “residualised
schools become internally homogenous as they are left with students that no one fights for,
students whose families cannot manipulate the system” (p. 18).

6.2 Inequity
Despite school choice being favourable for privileged families, it often leads to inequity
amongst underprivileged families. In comparison to other nations with parallel educational
regimes, Australia has a large accomplishment "tail" - the range between the top and bottom
scoring pupils (Bottrell, 2014). The pupils at the bottom of this "tail" are mostly Indigenous
pupils and/or pupils with poor socioeconomic standing (Bottrell, 2014). Independent private
schools recruit uneven quantities of advantaged students, while public schools recruit
uneven quantities of underprivileged pupils, particularly pupils with numerous and
multifaceted social obstacles, such as Indigenous and low socio-economic pupils (Bottrell,
2014).

Although comprehending the social situations of schooling is beneficial to teachers,

numerous educator teaching courses are structured in such a way that topics dealing with
social matters in education are separated from topics dealing with pedagogy, syllabus, and
assessment. However, social situations and therefore issues of social justice are inseparably
linked (Costigan & Crocco, 2007). Educators should adopt a viewpoint that attempts to shine

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a light on schooling practises in connection to larger historical and social circumstances and
pressures (Costigan & Crocco, 2007).

7. Conclusion
When related to education, the neoliberal ideology encourages rivalry instead of
collaboration. Rivalry is necessary, as is responsibility for the use of public expenditures.
Nevertheless, faith in teachers' competency is also required (Gobby & Walker, 2017).
If economic terms must be applied, education is an investment in humanity's progression,
not a product to be sold to the highest bidder. If neoliberal policies persist, underprivileged
households and pupils will become even more disempowered because of marketization and
school choice (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2013). Even though standardised testing provides
informative indicators on school performance for families, they do not assess other factors of
a student’s educational experience and also leave teachers feeling burnt out.

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References

Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education
Policy, 18(2), 215-228.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0268093022000043065

Bottrell, D. (2014). Schools and communities fit for purpose. In Proctor, H., Brownless, P., &
Freebody, P. (eds). Controversies in education: Orthodoxy and heresy in policy and
practice (27-38). Springer: Dordecht.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15700763.2016.1164867?
journalCode=nlps20

Connell, R. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market agenda
and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 99-112.
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?
doi=10.1080%2F17508487.2013.776990

Costigan, A., & Crocco, M. (2007). The narrowing of curriculum and pedagogy in the age of
accountability: Urban educators speak out. Urban Education, 42(6), 512-535.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240702901_The_Narrowing_of_Curricul
um_and_Pedagogy_in_the_Age_of_Accountability_Urban_Educators_Speak_Out

Department of Education, Skills and Employment. (2019). The Alice Springs (Mparntwe)
Education Declaration. https://www.dese.gov.au/alice-springs-mparntwe-education-
declaration/resources/alice-springs-mparntwe-education-declaration

Dinham, S. (2015). The worst of both worlds: How the US and UK are influencing education
in Australia. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 23(49).
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5705/bf111d877fb1d98c79fe9ceee2f41864879d.p
df?_ga=2.147565429.390357210.1650959382-1313143899.1650959382

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Gobby, B. (2016). Obliged to calculate: My School, markets, and equipping parents for
calculativeness. Journal of Education Policy, 31(4), 421-431.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680939.2015.1083124?
journalCode=tedp20

Gobby, B., & Walker, R. (2017). Testing times for assessment and pedagogy. In B. Gobby & R.
Walker (eds). Powers of curriculum: Sociological perspectives on education (pp. 322-
349). Oxford University Press.
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/reader.action?docID=5199526

Howell, A. (2016). Exploring children's lived experiences of NAPLAN. In B. Lingard, G.

Thompson, & S. Sellar. (2016). National testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment.
(pp. 164-180). Routledge.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301503007_Exploring_children
%27s_lived_experiences_of_NAPLAN

Independent Schools Council of Australia. (2018). Submission to the review of the socio-
economic status score methodology.
https://isa.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2018-02-20-ISCA-Submission-SES-
Review.pdf

Lubienski, C., & Rowe, E. (2017). Shopping for schools or shopping for peers: Public schools
and catchment area segregation. Journal of Education Policy, 32(3), 340-356.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680939.2016.1263363

Organisation of Economic and Co-operation Development. (2014). PISA in focus.

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisainfocus/pisa-in-focus-n42-(eng)-
final.pdf

Proctor, H., & Sriprakash, A. (2013). School systems and school choice. In R. Connell, A.
Welch, M. Vickers, & D. Foley (Eds.), Education, change and society (pp. 213-233).

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South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/reader.action?docID=1986002

Savage, G. (2017). Neoliberalism, education, and curriculum. In B. Gobby & R. Walker (eds).
Powers of curriculum: Sociological perspectives on education (pp. 142-165). Oxford
University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/reader.action?
docID=5199526
Vickers, M. (2004). Markets and mobilities: Dilemmas facing the comprehensive
neighbourhood high school. Critical Studies in Education, 45(2), 1-22.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254264665_Markets_and_mobilities_Dil
emmas_facing_the_comprehensive_neighbourhood_high_school

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Appendices

Figure 1: Distribution of Public and Private systemic schools by SES score

(Independent Schools Council of Australia, 2018, p. 3)

Figure 2: The relationship between competition and mathematics performance across

countries

(Organisation of Economic and Co-operation Development, 2014)

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