‘It’s Hard to Blend in’: Everyday Experiences of Schooling Achievement, Migration and Neoliberal Education Policy

Abstract

This chapter explores how the neoliberal logic of global education policy is experienced in the lives of disadvantaged migrant students in Australia. Policies based in competitive market logics not only concentrate social and economic disadvantages in certain schools but also place pressure on the pedagogical practices level to speak upward to comparison regimes instead of to the learning needs of students. These logics underpin an array of policy mechanisms which ‘identify’ migrant students and their learning needs and resource them accordingly. Currently the educational attainment of advantaged migrant students is aggregated with that of disadvantaged migrant students thus hiding the resource needs of the most disadvantaged, a move which evacuates an understanding of any of the intersectionalities which shape their access to resources. This chapter sketches this broad policy context and then complicates it with two distinctly-different resourcing experiences of being disadvantaged in this context. These cases allow insight into the way historical legacies and local contingencies interact with top-down policy. We need to better understand such instances of imbricated policy implementation as they challenge the logics of pedagogy driven by testing and performance regimes and point to different policy possibilities.