Myschool:Whose School?

MySchool:WhoseSchool? An Australian investigation of the mediatization of educational policy by Janet Doolan BA, La Trobe University Dip Ed, La Trobe University M.Ed, University of Melbourne Grad Dip Ed (Integration), Deakin University Grad Cert TESOL, Australian Catholic University M.Ed (TESOL), Deakin University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University November, 2015 Acknowledgements My warmest thanks to my principal supervisor, Jill Blackmore, whose humour, hospitality, warmth and wisdom inspired me from the very early days of my research, right to the end. Jill’s kindness, enthusiasm, encouragement and unfailing support, even in the most difficult of personal times, was extraordinary. I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude. Thanks also to my associate supervisor, Shaun Rawolle, for guidance, advice, excellent leads and valuable feedback, especially in preparing for my colloquium. I wrote this thesis as an off-campus student, with few opportunities to visit Deakin, but when I did, I was always warmly welcomed. Thank you to the academics I encountered along the way for their encouragement and interest, and to the library and HDR staff for their helpfulness. I want also to acknowledge the journalists and principals who generously gave of their time to be interviewed. The principals, in particular, reminded me of why I teach. I left every interview re- invigorated by their passion for education. Thank you to my family for love, support and laughter and thanks to colleagues, friends and kindred spirits, ‘companions on the journey’ whose unwavering belief in what matters most in education echoes my own. Thank you, finally, to my students, who remind me of this every day. iv Abstract The Australian Federal Government’s MySchool website, launched on January 28, 2010, provided unprecedented public access to the national literacy and numeracy results of Australia’s almost 10,000 schools. Echoing similar standardized testing and reporting regimes in comparable Anglophone nations, national testing and reporting represented a significant re-framing of Australian education, re-defining the relationship between central government and the states by strengthening national control over an area that was formerly the latter’s jurisdiction, while simultaneously re-defining teachers and schools by tightening accountability for “performance”. MySchool was fiercely contested by disparate and often antagonistic members of the education field. Their concerns were often as much with how the press would report on the policy as they were with the policy itself, the chief fear being that the website would enable newspapers to produce “league tables” ranking schools. This research is concerned with the mediatization of this policy and the processes by which it occurred. My interest in it grew from my experiences as an Australian teacher and, in particular, from the sense I have had in recent years of being “re-defined”; of my worth as a teacher being measured, calculated and assessed on the basis of the “value” I add to my students’ externally assessed results and, further, the sense that press reporting amplifies this process. The research investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, three Australian newspapers supported or contested preferred government discourses of school and teacher accountability and performance measurement in their reporting on the MySchool website. It locates this investigation in the context of each newspaper’s broader reporting on education and investigates the discursive effects of this mediatized policy on schools named in the press, from the principal’s view, through interviews with six school principals whose schools were “named” in the newspapers analysed. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields provided the overarching theoretical framework for this empirical study. The study also utilised aspects of Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse press and policy texts. To account for the multiple and complex interactions between the fields of politics, journalism, education and educational policy which emerged as central in the mediatization of this policy, the study drew on the framework of temporary social v fields and cross-field effects developed by Rawolle, associated research into the mediatization of educational policy, and wider research on mediatization. The research revealed that while the internal workings of the journalistic field had a significant bearing on how the policy investigated was re-presented in the press, relations between fields were also crucial. Indeed, the interactions and intrusions of the fields involved in both the production and reception of this policy were important in accounting not only for the discourses constructed by newspapers, but also for the different versions of the policy each created. The research found that in re-working a policy’s intent, often to suit its own value-stances on education, individual newspapers not only alter how a policy is understood by the public, but potentially alter the policy itself. In so doing, newspapers may lend powerful support to preferred central government discourses around education. Equally, they may be highly active in offering resistance. In either case, they assume a policy-making role that goes well beyond mere reporting. Moreover, they play multiple, shifting and sometimes conflicting roles in this process and, indeed, these roles appear to be different in different newspapers, suggesting that mediatization may be newspaper-specific. The research found that mediatization is not a one-way process in which the press does something to policy. It is, rather, a dynamic and contested process defined and shaped by ‘talking back’ (hooks, 1989) in which the press may also be subject to change. In investigating the effects of mediatized policy on schools, from the principal’s view, the research found that although schools and teachers often feel powerless in the face of the political, journalistic and educational policy fields’ attempts to define what schools and education ought to be, they are neither helpless nor acquiescent. They too have the capacity for dissent and, ultimately, the power to resist mediatized efforts to alter their practice and autonomy. They do this, in the end, by continuing their core “business”, guided by strong leaders who, operating from a particular habitus, can and do make a difference to how policy and press re-presentations of policy translate in practice. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. iv Abstract .................................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................. vii List of Tables & Figures ................................................................................................................ xiii List of Acronyms ............................................................................................................................... xiv Chapter 1 .................................................................................................................................................. 1 Locating the Study ................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Key research questions ....................................................................................................... 1 1.3 Locating and contextualising the study........................................................................2 1.3.1 Contextualising the MySchool story:2009-2010................................................2 1.3.2 MySchool2.0-2011 .................................................................................................... 5 1.3.3 MySchool3.0-2012 .................................................................................................... 6 1.3.4 An emerging national agenda in Australian education......................................7 1.3.5 An emerging ‘global field of performance comparison (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, p.18).....................................................................................................................................8 1.3.6 ‘challenging times for the media’(abcnews, 2012) ...................................................... 9 1.4 Locating myself in the research....................................................................................11 1.5 The study’s purpose and significance .............................................................................. 13 1.6 Theoretical Framework ..................................................................................................... 14 1.7 Methodological Framework.........................................................................................15 1.8 Chapter Outlines ............................................................................................................... 15 1.9 Conclusion......................................................................................................................16 Chapter

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