E-catalog        

Introduction: Heresies and orthodoxies in contemporary schooling: Helen Proctor, Peter Free body and Patrick Brownlee -- Schools not fit for purpose: New approaches for the times: Johanna Wyn -- Schools and communities fit for purpose: Dorothy Bottrell -- Testing times: Data and their (mis-)use in schools: Peter Reimann -- Are these testing times or is it a time to test? Reconsidering the place of tests in students’ academic development: Andrew J. Martin -- Evidence-Based Policy: Epistemologically specious, ideologically unsound: Anthony Welch -- Neglecting the evidence: Are we expecting too much from quality teaching? Margaret Vickers -- Public diversity; private disadvantage: schooling and ethnicity: Carol Reid -- Building new social movements: The politics of responsibility and accountability in school-community relationships: Kelly Free body -- Does the new doxa of integrationism make multicultural education a contemporary heresy? Georgina Tsolidis -- Multicultural education: Contemporary heresy or simply another doxa: Megan Watkins -- Why global policies fail disengaged young people at the local level: Susan Groundwater-Smith & Nicole Mockler -- Education policy ‘at risk’: Kitty te Riele -- ‘Money made us’: A short history of government funds for Australian schools Geoffrey Sherington and John P. Hughes -- Beyond modernity? A sociological engagement with ‘A short history of government funding for Australian schools’: Martin Forsey -- Markets all around: defending education in a neoliberal time: Raewyn Connell.-Markets made out of love: parents, schools and communities before neoliberalism: Helen Proctor -- Who are the heretics? Patrick Brownlee and Peter Free body.

This book is the outcome of a colloquium series organized by The University of Sydney in which leading and emerging researchers were invited to name what they took to be the deep flaws at the heart of contemporary educational and policy and practice in Australia and globally — to voice their potentially ‘heretical’ views on what most urgently needs to be done. The chapters in this collection are paired to offer two takes on each topic, from supplementing to critiquing to countering, and most points in between. The issues addressed in this volume include:  the place of education in national and international marketplaces, mass testing and standardisation, the future of ‘multiculturalism’ in schools, the public funding of private schools, the complicated relationship between evidence and policy and the shifting politics of inequality. This book is based on the idea that recognising deep disagreements on big issues is a necessary accompaniment to imagining and developing productive ways forward.