Critical Studies in Education 

About: Critical Studies in Education is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Higher education & Education policy. It has an ISSN identifier of 1750-8487. Over the lifetime, 884 publications have been published receiving 15865 citations.

The neoliberal cascade and education: an essay on the market agenda and its consequences

Abstract: Education has been powerfully affected by the rise of a neoliberal political, economic and cultural agenda The Australian experience since the 1980s is outlined Educators need to understand neoliberalism, and also to think about the nature of education itself, as a social process of nurturing capacities for practice Education itself cannot be commodified; but access to education can be Markets require a rationing of education, and the creation of hierarchies and mechanisms of competition Hence, the redefinition of schools and universities as firms, and the striking revival of competitive testing, as well as the expansion of public funding of private schools Teachers are placed under performative pressures that tend to narrow the curriculum in schools, and make the sector's workforce more insecure Even the knowledge base of education is impacted, with technicization of professional knowledge and a growth of cultural fakery around education Bases for alternatives exist, but have not yet found instit

Policy borrowing, policy learning: testing times in Australian schooling

Abstract: This paper provides a contextualised and critical policy analysis of the Rudd government's national schooling agenda in Australia. The specific focus is on the introduction of national literacy and numeracy testing and the recent creation by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority of the website ‘My School’, which lists the results of these tests for all Australian schools, including school performance against averages and against the performance of 60 other socio-economically ‘like-schools’ across the nation. It is argued that we are seeing the emergence of a national system of schooling (including national curriculum) as part of the reconstitution of the nation in the face of globalization and related economisation of education policy. This is the case despite Australia's federal political structure with the States holding the ostensible Constitutional responsibility for schooling. The analysis locates these and associated developments (a national schooling policy ensemble) within ...

Care of the self, resistance and subjectivity under neoliberal governmentalities

Abstract: Resistance is normally thought of as a collective exercise of public political activity. In this article, Ball and Olmedo approach the question of resistance in a different way, through Foucault's notion of ‘the care of the self’. Neoliberal reforms in education are producing new kinds of teaching subjects, new forms of subjectivity. It makes sense then that subjectivity should be the terrain of struggle, the terrain of resistance. A set of e-mail exchanges with teachers, based around Ball's work on performativity, enable the authors to access the work of power relations through the uncertainties, discomforts and refusals that these teachers bring to their everyday practice. By acting ‘irresponsibly’, these teachers take ‘responsibility’ for the care of their selves and in doing so make clear that social reality is not as inevitable as it may seem. This is not strategic action in the normal political sense. Rather it is a process of struggle against mundane, quotidian neoliberalisations, that creates the ...

Good teachers on dangerous ground: towards a new view of teacher quality and professionalism

Abstract: Ideas about what makes a good teacher are important in thinking about educational reform, and have come into focus recently. These ideas are contested and open to change. The first part of this paper traces models of the good teacher in Australia from the colonial-era good servant, through an ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, to contemporary lists of teacher competencies. The second part looks more closely at the incoherent but insistent way the good teacher is now defined under neoliberal governance by teacher registration authorities. The third part of the paper makes proposals for a new understanding of good teachers: based on understanding the labour process and occupational dynamics of teaching, the intellectual structure of Education studies, and the overall logic of education itself.

Control by numbers: new managerialism and ranking in higher education

Abstract: This paper analyses the role of rankings as an instrument of new managerialism. It shows how rankings are reconstituting the purpose of universities, the role of academics and the definition of what it is to be a student. The paper opens by examining the forces that have facilitated the emergence of the ranking industry and the ideologies underpinning the so-called ‘global’ university rankings. It demonstrates how rankings are a part of politically inspired, performativity-led mode of governance, designed to ensure that universities are aligned with market values through systems of intensive auditing. It interrogates how the seemingly objective character of rankings, in particular the use of numbers, creates a facade of certainty that make them relatively unassailable: numerical ordering gives the impression that what is of value in education can be measured numerically, hierarchically ordered and incontrovertibly judged. The simplicity and accessibility of numerical rankings deflects attention from their...