The 'class/teacher' effects distortion: A critique of purely positivist teacher effectiveness research and inquiry

The current educational context, with its emphasis upon outcomes and accountability, explicitly centralizes the work and role of the classroom teacher practitioner in the learning outcomes of students. This paper argues that the teacher effectiveness debate increasingly represents an intensified incursion into the classroom in the belief that social and educational disadvantage may be overcome if improvements to the effectiveness of teachers and classroom instruction and practice occur

Who's counting? Legitimating measurement in the audit culture

What gives legitimacy to the numbers that constitute the measurement techniques of the audit culture? We argue that the audit culture's blind application of numbers to people as if there was no moral or ethical dimension to the calculation rests on a military discourse resident in mathematics. This argument is based on the genealogy presented in this paper, which uncovers a regime of measurement-by-number, sedimented as legitimate through an association with military power. We claim that this military measurement-by-number is a dubious technique of government on which the audit culture relies for its highly questionable authority

Recruiting, retaining and supporting early career teachers for rural schools

The staff of Australia’s rural schools include many early career teachers who are keen to begin their careers in geographically diverse communities. Despite often high levels of motivation to take up a rural position and many well-funded government incentives to do so, recruiting and retaining teachers remains a challenge across Australia. Against this backdrop this chapter explores the key question: How can we better prepare and support the next generation of teachers for our rural schools? The chapter firstly explores the perennial issues of rural staffing and then critically examines a range of incentives for both pre-service and in-service teachers to attract them to rural schools and communities. One of the reasons incentives appear to be failing could be that they do very little to transform the preparation and education of pre-service teachers to better work in and for rural schools and their communities. To date, teacher education providers and schools have put little effort into changing their preparation and induction models. The chapter concludes with possibilities for a ‘system’ change to address the rural staffing ‘crisis’ and raises the need for a new transformative approach to link more meaningfully initial teacher education, professional experience in and with communities and in-service professional learning (including teachers and teacher educators)