between contexts. As Gorur and Wu argue ( 2015 ), even within national contexts
PISA data can be read in different ways so that a nation’s policy aspirations to be
among the‘topfive’, for example, are insensitive to the elements that contribute to a
country’s average performance. Average scores in literacy, mathematics and sci-
ence, used to justify the need for reform, do not reveal the many ways in which a
country might already be performing. For example, Gorur and Wu show that some
jurisdictions in Australia—e.g. the Australian Capital Territory (ACT)—show
performance in reading on par with reference societies in Asia and Scandinavia.
In short, the assessment that students are underperforming is too gross to be
meaningful in a policy and educational sense. Instead, national PISA rankings
produce“statistical categories applied across the globe”which“contributes to the
creation of a global commensurate space of measurement and equivalence, in turn
rendering it legible for governingand helping to create a global education policy
field”(Sellar and Lingard 2013 : 466–467; emphasis added). Such measures and
their interpretations do not just misrepresent student achievement and the relative
positioning of nations. Their very existence creates‘calculable worlds’ (Gorur
2015 : 581) that help to construct policy problems and commensurate solutions for
certain population groups.
- Teaching is all that matters
The current TE logic connects this perception of student performance directly
with the performance of their teachers. A key theme in Australian and English
policy and official discourse is that the quality of teaching is the single most
important factor in determining student achievement. The logic proceeds:“the
curriculum has passed its use-by date; our students just do not measure up; schools
are wasting opportunities; and it is the teachers who are to blame”(Skourdoumbis
2014 : 113). There is a presumed linear, causal relationship between teacher per-
formance and student achievement. Also implied is that good teaching in one
school is also good teaching in another. It is a view that strips teaching of social
context resulting in a reductive view of schools, students and teaching
(Skourdoumbis and Gale 2013 ).
Thus informed, official statements in both Australia and England regard teaching
asthe “single greatest in-school influence on student achievement” (TEMAG
2014a: 3) and thatthe“most important factor in determining the effectiveness of a
school system is the quality of its teachers”(DfE 2010 : 19). The similarity in
discourse across nations is striking, with the UK Prime Minister and (then) Deputy
Prime Minister remarking that“no education system can be better than the quality
of its teachers” (Cameron and Clegg 2010 : 3) and the recent review of
Australian TE commenting that the“quality of an education system simply cannot
exceed the quality of its teachers”(TEMAG2014a: 3).
There are two main critiques of this decontextualisation of TE. Thefirst observes
that teacher effectiveness models built on linear and exclusive student-teacher
performance relations tend to ignore influences from outside classrooms and
schools. Berliner refers to these influences as ‘exogenous variable[s]’ that are
524 T. Gale and S. Parker