This paper examines how rescaled educational accountabilities are affecting the articulation of social justice and equity policies in and through schooling. It documents the reframing of social justice in respect of performance on international comparative assessments such as the OECD’s PISA and the IEA’s TIMSS and PIRLS; for example, PISA results are defined quite narrowly in terms of ‘quality’ and ‘equity’. These assessments direct attention to socio-economic correlations with performance gaps and the extent of the gaps between top and bottom performers. Equity and inclusion agendas in education have received new policy emphasis through the publication and analysis of these assessments, particularly their linking to national economic performance, but have also been transformed in the process. Educational equity has been rearticulated as a means to drive economic growth and productivity and to reduce welfare costs to the state by increasing social wellbeing. This has reduced remits for social justice policy .

Simultaneous with the rising influence of international assessments and rescaled modes of accountability has been the rise of complementary national testing. For example, since 2008 the National Assessment Plan Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been implemented annually in Australia to provide snapshots of student performance in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Regarding this conjunction of national and global, Novoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) speak of the ‘global eye’ and the ‘national eye’ functioning as a mode of governance through comparison in schooling today. Here we see the shift toward ‘policy as numbers’ (Lingard 2011) across national and global scales, and the emergence of new forms of ‘topological rationality’ based on constant calculation and comparison of changing and coupled systems at multiple scales (Lury, Parisi & Terranova, 2012; Ruppert, 2012).

Our main objective is to examine the emergence of new national accountabilities in Australian schooling, based around NAPLAN and the related My School website, linked to global modes of accountability. My School provides publically available online performance measures for most Australian schools and enables comparison of NAPLAN performance between each school and 60 ‘statistically similar’ schools. An Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage (ICSEA) is used to determine ‘statistically similar’ schools, making issues of disadvantage central to this new mode of governance through comparison. We examine the effects of these new accountabilities in school systems (at national, state and regional levels) and in schools.

This analysis is then linked to the emergence of new global modes of accountability and an interrogation of their effects on definitions of social justice and equity in schooling. Gillies (1998) has analysed a similar conflation of quality and equity in the policy ensemble developed by New Labour in the UK. Equity and quality have been significant areas of focus for PISA, and for the education work of the OECD more broadly, intensifying pressures for education reforms within nations, while focusing attention on teachers and schools in a de-contextualised way. This has narrowed the focus of social justice policies and tends to underplay the effects of broader societal inequalities on schooling performance (Condron, 2011).

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