ABSTRACT
School curriculum reform has been a fraught area in relation to educational provision. The contested nature of what constitutes curriculum, and ongoing debates and controversy around what to include in the curriculum, what to exclude, and how the curriculum is to be organized, all point to how curriculum development and implementation are deeply political undertakings, and always in a state of flux. This chapter commences with a brief history of curriculum reform, and the push for increased standardization of curriculum. Given the centrality of testing processes in contemporary schooling, it then focuses on the nature of the relationship between curriculum and testing, and the logics of accountability that are expressed through this relationship. The remainder of the chapter draws on the example of the enactment of the ‘Curriculum into the Classroom’ (C2C) in Queensland, as the Queensland manifestation of the Australian Curriculum, how this was interpreted by the teachers and school-based administrators involved in this work, and what can be learned about policy enactment as this pertains to accountability processes more broadly.
