ABSTRACT
This chapter deepens the overview of educational change in New Zealand. From the late 1980s, significant adjustments to schooling, especially with regard to curriculum and assessment, swept through education internationally. This is the focus of the chapter as it examines New Zealand’s reaction to these global trends, using music education as an example. New Zealand and Australia, the United States, and Great Britain were, for a time, the role models for how to adapt neoliberal ideologies to education while also trying to accommodate the poststructural and postmodern theories of the intellectual left. The New Zealand government, and those it contracted to develop the policy changes, also had to take into account increasingly insistent pressure from the indigenous Māori population under its bicultural commitments and a vocal, predominantly unionised teaching force. The author, having been privileged to experience and interact with government education policy and implementation during this period, writes from an insider’s perspective.
