ABSTRACT

We are entering an age of post-standardization. Having reached a plateau of improvement in tested achievement, and a crisis of demographic renewal in teaching and leadership, most Anglo-Saxon and other developed countries are leaving behind policies that force up standards and results at any price. England’s National Literacy Strategy and Primary School Targets, the US’s gruelling process of Adequate Yearly Progress, Ontario’s strategy to reach provincial tested targets within one electoral term that vary only by one year and 5 per cent from the English benchmark from which they were borrowed, as well as Australia’s Federal literacy test that takes the achievement and education agenda away from politically more left of centre states – these are the dying embers of a reform fi re that is burning itself to a cinder.