Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

significance are being replaced with the “hyperactivism” of educational policy, as governments become more and more concerned with education as an economic tool (Dunleavy & O’Leary, 1987). This is not new—economic discourses have been highly influential in education for centuries. However, what is new is that these economic interests have increasingly superseded the private interests in Australian education that are conceptualisations of the individual as self-fulfilled, self-actualised and self-reflective (Reid, 2009). The privileging of this economic vision in Australian education is understood as performative—paralleling the efficiency agenda of elements within the United Kingdom and the United States.

The performative culture may best be understood as the linking of “educational achievement levels with economic development and international competitiveness between contemporary western democracies” (Burnard & White, 2008, p. 667). In practice, this linking has produced a growing emphasis on the measurement and testing of students, as well as on reporting using mandatory standards and systems, the implementation of state-sanctioned teaching methods, and the rise of modernist and bureaucratic reform agendas that prioritise neoliberal conceptions of education as business (Burnard & White, 2008). Marshall argued that this reform agenda is part of “busno-power,” or the linking of neoliberal agendas with pedagogy to shape the subjectivities of teachers and students (Marshall, 1998). In a lecture given in 2010, Barry McGaw, chair of the Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA), described federal government reforms in education as driven by globalised economic competition between countries so that reading, mathematics, and science can be valued only through comparison with other countries (McGaw, 2010). The language used was that of “best practice,” “accountability,” and “competition.” Curiously absent was the learner—could this absence represent an implicit argument that the economic needs of the nation supersede concerns for the benefits of education to the individual?

There are three common articulations of performativity, each closely aligned with certain theorists and each of which deals with specific