Mandated assessment policy and teachers' work: Representing and enacting teaching and learning in an age of market reforms

Standards-based reforms have decisively recast the educational landscape in the US, the UK, Europe and other Western countries. Australia is no exception, as the recent implementation of the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy shows. Research into impacts on teachers in other national settings where standardised testing has been implemented shows that teachers are being pressured to teach to the test while they struggle to maintain their own perspectives on learning because the views of so-called ‘measurement experts’ have been privileged over their own professional judgements. School leaders and teachers are also critical of the way that one shot judgements of standardised tests are being used to gauge their school’s performance.

Data for this paper are drawn from a three year, multi-site study, funded by the Australian Research Council entitled Mandated Literacy Assessment and the Reorganisation of Teachers’ Work which is investigating changes to the work of English literacy educators associated with the introduction of standardised assessments. Institutional Ethnography offers a means of investigating the complex ways that teachers enact their lives every day, as they negotiate the relationships presented to them, while also meeting the larger demands placed on them by mandated policies. We ask how teachers and school leaders have been positioned by assessment policies which focus on marketised reform and associated reformulations of what counts as proper knowledge about learners and learning. We consider the kinds of daily dilemmas and opportunities they encounter and the practices that are engendered. We show that there has been a layering of policy, for while there are new demands being introduced by recent reforms, old policy imperatives remain and must be dealt with. We discuss the ways in which educators draw upon counter-discourses and ethical practices to exert agency and mediate the impact of policy on their school communities.