Abstract
Interviews with principals, teachers, and parents at two ‘average’ schools reveal local views about how each school compares to nearby schools rather than the socio-educationally similar schools that each school is compared against on the My School website. The two schools have pursued rather different means of doing their work well, insulating their staff from both the surveillance of public authorities and the destabilising fluctuations of market forces. The interviews were conducted with an expectation that long-standing teachers and parents would be less interested in My School while newly arrived teachers and parents would be more interested in the website. It turned out that only the principals and few others had ever looked at it, several teachers knew nothing about it, and only two parents recently arrived from overseas had actually used the information on the website. Views about it followed personal backgrounds and ideological preferences rather than anything else. On the ground, the Australian Education Union’s campaign against auditing persuaded many teachers and parents to ignore My School.
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Vandenberg, A. (2018). Two Schools. In: Education Policy and the Australian Education Union. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68047-7_5
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