Main Content
Session Information
23 SES 06 C, Testing, Assssment, Policy
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
Neoliberalism has driven a now well-established era of governance of education at a distance, accountability, and policy as numbers across education systems in Europe, the United States and Australia. These aspects of governance are frequently positioned as essential strategies for remedying educational inequity: the monitoring of an education system ensures that all schools are meeting the needs of all students. However, the ‘architecture’ required to monitor an education system can be faulty, and an apparent attention to equity can be flawed. Such a situation will be explored in the context of Australia, revealing a problematic system of data collection, which will have resonance at an international level. Australia, like many countries has introduced significant education reform, and since 2008 has held national tests of literacy and numeracy for all students in all schools, in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Despite the multicultural, multilingual character of the Australian population, maintained through ongoing skilled migration in the face of high employment demands and the resettlement of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia, these tests are standardized, and built on an assumption of English as a first language competency. All students are required to participate in these tests with a twelve month exemption period only, for newly arrived students who are speakers of languages other than English. The capacity for measuring the performance of students who speak languages other than English is achieved through the disaggregation of test data using a category labeled Language Background Other than English (LBOTE). The definition of the LBOTE category is that it is for those students who speak a language other than English or whose parent/s speak a language other than English at home. The logic of this category is that it would identify a need on the basis of language: students who are captured within this group may require recognition that their performance may be influenced by their command of standard Australian English. However, there is no capacity to identify English language proficiency in the category and so the breadth of the definition means that students who are competent bilinguals, or even native speakers of English, but whose parents are speakers of other languages, are grouped with students who are in the early stages of acquiring English. The category definition is so broad that the disaggregated national data suggest that students in this category are outperforming English speaking students, on most domains of the tests, though the LBOTE category shows greater variance of results. These national results suggest that the data may be hiding more than they are revealing. This problem will be explored through a policy-focused theoretical framework in which policy technologies which drive statistical categories, and are built on the power of policy as numbers, will be juxtaposed against theoretical understandings of second language acquisition. Further, this problem will be situated in broader theoretical considerations related to the complexities inherent in the intersection of nation-state interests and global movement of peoples.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Appadurai, A. (Ed.). (2001). Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of Small Numbers. Durham: Duke University Press. Ball, S. J. (2006). Education Policy and Social Class. London: Routledge. Ball, S. J. (2008). The Education Debate. Bristol: The Policy Press. Collier, V. P. (1989). How Long? A Synthesis of Research on Academic Achievement in a Second Language. TESOL Quarterly, 23(3), 509-531. Collier, V. P. (1995). Acquiring a Second Language for School. Directions in Language and Education, National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, Vol 1(No.4). Cummins, J. (1981). Bilingualism and Minority Children. Ontario: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Dooley, K. (2009). Re-thinking pedagogy for middle school students with little, no or severely interrupted schooling. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8(1), 5-22. Hakuta, K., Butler, Y. G., & Witt, D. (2000). How Long Does It Take English Learners to Attain Proficiency? Santa Barbara: University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute. Jenkins, R. (2008). Social Identity (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Lo Bianco, J. (2002). ESL in a time of literacy: A challenge for policy and for teaching. TESOL in Context, 12(1). Miller, J., & Windle, J. (2010). Second Language Literacy: Putting High Needs ESL Learners in the Frame. English in Australia, 45(3), 31-40. NLLIA ESL Bandscales (McKay, P., C.Hudson and Sapuppo,M. 1994) in P.McKay (Ed),. (1994). ESL Development: Language and Literacy in Schools. Canberra: National Language and Literacy Institute of Australia. Pinson, H., Arnot, M., & Candappa, M. (2010). Education, Asylum and the 'Non-Citzen' Child. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in Numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing Education Policy. London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Programme by Networks, ECER 2021
00. Central Events (Keynotes, EERA-Panel, EERJ Round Table, Invited Sessions)
Network 1. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations
Network 2. Vocational Education and Training (VETNET)
Network 3. Curriculum Innovation
Network 4. Inclusive Education
Network 5. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education
Network 6. Open Learning: Media, Environments and Cultures
Network 7. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Network 8. Research on Health Education
Network 9. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement
Network 10. Teacher Education Research
Network 11. Educational Effectiveness and Quality Assurance
Network 12. LISnet - Library and Information Science Network
Network 13. Philosophy of Education
Network 14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Network 15. Research Partnerships in Education
Network 16. ICT in Education and Training
Network 17. Histories of Education
Network 18. Research in Sport Pedagogy
Network 19. Ethnography
Network 20. Research in Innovative Intercultural Learning Environments
Network 22. Research in Higher Education
Network 23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Network 24. Mathematics Education Research
Network 25. Research on Children's Rights in Education
Network 26. Educational Leadership
Network 27. Didactics – Learning and Teaching
Network 28. Sociologies of Education
Network 29. Reserach on Arts Education
Network 30. Research on Environmental und Sustainability Education
Network 31. Research on Language and Education (LEd)
Network 32. Organizational Education
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