Embedding the reforms in New Zealand schooling: After neo-liberalism?

Abstract

Two decades of reforms to the state in New Zealand have altered policy, its making and the ways in which it is realised in micro settings. This paper uses the example of schooling to examine the rationality of these reforms, their spatial logic and what they mean for our understanding of the national state. It examines the development and practices of the Education Review Office (ERO), the body established under the reforms to evaluate and audit the performance of schools in the new national education `system'. The paper interprets neo-liberalism as a governmentality, and argues that the development of new managerial technologies of remote control such as contract and audit constitute a spatial model of control. The paper suggests that this model encourages, and relies for its efficacy upon, the cultivation of neo-liberal subjectivities. It argues that although the political projects working through the reforms have shifted, the altered rationality of the state and the models of control erected to secure it define an enduring and neo-liberalising social transformation. The shift to the `Third Way' in New Zealand's political and social economy is underpinned by neo-liberalising processes, which continue to reorganise social and economic spaces.