The wolf in sheep's clothing: the continuing accountability discourse in education

Abstract

The Australian government has, for some time, shone a strong spotlight on education and teacher quality. This has particularly resulted from literacy and numeracy results slipping over the last few years in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment measures of student performance. Such performance and teacher quality become inextricably linked and, almost inevitably, education is the subject of reform. In this paper, the author analyses the competing discourses of a recent government campaign for 'better' schools and improved teacher quality. The campaign examined is the 2012 Commonwealth Government campaign, launched through various media, officially known as the National School Improvement Plan, but promoted as "Better Schools for Australia". Here, the discourse of inclusive opportunity is set against that of economic rationalism. The discussion of the government campaign is firstly grounded in the literature of contesting views of the purposes of education and the ways in which the campaign contains elements of several discourses. The author demonstrates how the economic and accountability discourses dominate and deflate the other discourses of need and inclusion. The paper is concluded with a discussion of what these prevailing discourses mean for teachers and pre-service teachers and how teachers and their teaching are being positioned by the accountability discourse.