ABSTRACT
School effectiveness has become a vast industry, legitimized through public policy, finance and educational research. As a relay of power, it currently frames the language of school practice and management. We have attempted to fracture the discourse by uncovering its epistemological bases. We have aimed to open up some discursive space, as a counterpart to the closure and certainty embedded in school effectiveness. It has been an objective to uncover submerged structures and ideologies, as well as mechanisms to ensure reproduction and transformation. We have endeavoured to interrogate what is hidden, contradictory, silenced, distorted and avoided in the commonsense rhetoric, and to show how regimes of truth coagulate politically and historically. Thus, we have identified the significance of intertextuality in shaping educational debate.
