Nigel Howard

Andrew Bills book is an extended case study of how, what Parsi Sahlberg calls, the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) has affected an education system that was known for a commitment to equity. The second part of the book takes up the call and examines how school leaders can and do “work against the grain”. Written for an informed, not academic, audience, it has application for anyone wanting to look at how the global reform movement plays out in different jurisdictions In Death and Life of the Great American School System Dianne Ravitch writes about the success of District 2 in New York at the end of the twentieth century. As a contributor to that success District Superintendent Tony Alvarado “… engaged literacy consultants from Australia and New Zealand to lead intensive district-wide professional development in Balanced Literacy…(p34)” That Australia played such a part in leading literacy was due in no small part to the Australian educator, Garth Boomer, who called for teachers to be “pragmatic radicals in the classroom”. The success of District 2 hailed the beginning of the global reform movement when the approach was mandated from above. Reform was shifted from the school the center. Teachers were no longer seen as reflective practitioners but rather as agents of a system that believed it knew best what should happen in the classroom. Dianne Ravitch goes on to detail how an emphasis on testing and choice mandated from the top has impoverished the American School System. Andrew’s book takes up a case study of how the global reform movement has worked against students in poverty in one system in Australia. The case study into what was known as Flexible Learning Options program resulted in thousands of students being placed in alternative learning sites with few outcomes. By making these students invisible in the politically palatable data collection the state could boast of record retention and achievement. Following this the Department for Education enters a new phase where disembodied data is the only measure of school success. Andrew details how this plays out politically and, in an interesting coda to the book, through the pages of the media. Having made the case that everything is political in the second half of the book Andrew examines how school leaders in different sites have taken on doing school differently. Shifting the locus of reform back into the school and the classroom these pragmatic radical leaders engage with making education fit the child while negotiating the politics of the system. Andrews hope for the future is that these pragmatic radical leaders work collectively with the wider educational community and that the system enters in dialogue with them in the spirit of inquiry.