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Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding 'parent engagement' are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new 'governing parent-citizen' through which the parental labour of social reproduction is being extended, valorised and rearticulated. We examine how one major reform movement in Australia is articulating new roles for parents and community members in schools: the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia. Our analysis demonstrates the intensive policy intervention required to produce this new form of parental labour and the subsequent divisions of labour it is producing.

This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education institutions of the post-war welfare state are often characterised as being lost, attacked, encroached upon and dismantled. In this paper, I contend it is important to avoid mobilising a memory of public educational pasts that do not account for their failings and inequalities. Turning to a historical engagement with the emergence of neoliberal politics, the paper explores how challenges and contestations surrounding 'the public' from multiple standpoints converged in the rise of neoliberalism. Recognition of these convergences and contestations, I suggest, assists to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between neoliberal reform and the welfare state, and thus of the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a just and equitable public education.

Globally, national curriculum policies are up for renegotiation. These negotiations are shaped by international and national top-down accountability regimes, and an increasing turn towards curriculum centralization and standardization. The new Australian Curriculum (AC) is no exception. The AC is an important educational policy event, one in which understandings about teacher professional authority is being redefined. In this paper, we examine how judgements about teachers' professional authority are used to defend, promote and explain the AC. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents and interviews with high-level policy-makers, we argue that the AC is opening space in the policy field to reposition teachers' work by promoting a view of teachers' professional authority as constrained and defined through the written curriculum documentation.

Under the auspices of its 'Education Revolution', the Federal Labor Government is currently implementing a national curriculum for schools. Representing an important intervention into educational practice and governance, the Australian Curriculum offers a unique research opportunity, providing substantial scope for the examination of the changing systems and school-level practices entailed in large-scale curriculum reform. Research into the Australian Curriculum also presents a valuable opportunity to develop educational research methodologies that attend to the complex and multifaceted processes of curriculum reform, from systems to classrooms. Taking two of the disciplinary towers of modern curricula (English and mathematics) and Australia's two largest jurisdictions (New South Wales and Victoria) as the focus, this article draws on a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project to outline an approach to researching major curriculum reform.

In this theoretical article, we respond to a common education policy discourse that represents community participation in educational policy-making as an essentially rational solution to policy problems and as inherently progressive and democratic. We propose that conceptualising participatory politics as 'publics' challenges this discourse and provides new openings for understanding community participation in education policy reform as modes of worldmaking. Historicising the participative turn within the key decades of the 1970s and 1980s, we argue that mobilisations of participatory politics in education reform are complicated by the existence of participatory reactionary or conservative politics and by participatory politics that are either fleeting and unsuccessful, or exceed or refuse the sovereignty of the liberal democratic state. We propose that working with the theories of the publics can enable a richer understanding of the history of neoliberal education policy reform and of present and future aspirations for participatory education policy practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces an international Special Issue that addresses the significant question of how and why people organise to engage with policy making in the public sphere of education, from a historical perspective. Focusing on the phenomenon of 'grassroots' community organising during the key formation period of the 1970s and 1980s, the issue collects articles from Australia, Canada, Chile, South Korea, Spain (Catalonia) and the United States for the purpose of examining what 'grassroots' organising might look like or encompass under different kinds of states and state bureaucratic arrangements. This introductory article outlines the editors' own research into the Australian context before highlighting how the various articles individually and collectively contribute to questions of 1) expanding understanding of what it means to organise at the grassroots level; 2) the complex relationships between state and school; 3) connections and disconnections between the local, national and international educational domains; and 4) how, methodologically, to capture people, experiences and organisations that may be fully or partly absent from official top down historical records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility – as a form of ethical commitment – requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical implications for parents of two recent educational reforms developed in the national contexts of this research. Our analyses show that the emerging demands on parents for responsibility in the educational field exceed univocal forms of individual responsibilisation, encompassing expressions of responsibility that respond to collective and public goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberalism as a concept, ideology, or theoretical lens has emerged in the last couple of decades as a monolithic presence in education research, and the social sciences more broadly. We bring two aims to this Special Issue: to critique the rigour of neoliberalism as a theoretical framework utilised within education research; and second, to explore and propose an alternative to neoliberalism as a critical frame of analysis. This paper will postulate three-waves of neoliberalism, specifically ordo-liberalism, radical liberalism, and post-neoliberalism. We challenge 'big-N' neoliberalism; conceptualisations of neoliberalism as homogenous and monolithic; and, demonstrate how neoliberalism interacts with particular milieus of time and space. In reflection of Williams but also Foucault's tracing of 'discursive formations', neoliberalism as a keyword points to a genealogy of power which requires further excavation. The notion of an assemblage, enabling mutations and contra configurations, may offer a way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is provided to the special issue with articles on the theme of critiquing neoliberalism and its relationship with education on topics, including education reform, research on education and what is referred to as ordo-liberalism.