ABSTRACT
Flipping the educational system is about subverting stale and unproductive hierarchies. It is about teachers being trusted, agentic professionals with a voice in policy and practice. In their argument for democratising education reform, Jelmer Evers and Rene Kneyber outline the need for "replacing top-down accountability with bottom-up support for teachers." Cultures of fear and compliance are negative and unproductive drivers for individual and organisational development. Too much education reform remains top-down, imposed on schools without drawing on or supporting the development of capacities within the system. Mechanistic high stakes accountability, standardisation, and bureaucratisation are accepted as the means of controlling the unwieldy system. In Australia and around the world, we need to galvanise and embolden our profession to be active agents in their own contexts and the wider education landscape, to not just flip the system but also to renew it.
