ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we argue that any substantive rethinking of school effectiveness needs to take into consideration emergent conditions of New Times (Morley and Chen, 1996), and will require a reframing of how we conceptualize the ‘effects’, ‘outcomes’, ‘products’ and ‘functions’ of schooling-the terms themselves artefacts of an industrial era. In order to understand the socio-political
significance and utility of school effectiveness research, that research needs to be reconnected with the school effects research which emphasizes schooling’s contribution (or otherwise) to the production of social inequality and equality in new educational conditions and contexts; that is, the school effectiveness literature needs to be dragged beyond a preoccupation with the comparative performance of schools and students on a narrow range of achievement indicators-both through the tracking of how schools constitute and reconstitute ‘difference’ in the population, and indeed through the ongoing problematization of the ‘value’ of such indicators in a shifting socio-demographic environment. Only then, we argue, can school effectiveness research inform a politics of education and intervention in educational policy debates in a way that does not simply tautologically reinforce the assumptions of industrial era schooling. How schools ‘make a difference’ has to address the focal questions raised by New Times and postmodernity: the various hybrid forms of difference in identity, knowledge, competence, textuality, and institutions emerging across postindustrial nation states, however differentially in terms of the actual variable spread and permutation of such changes in the very distinctive, yet interconnected, local environments of traditionally urban and rural areas, rust-belt and silicon valley communities, edge cities and new suburban spaces (Harvey, 1993).
