What Kind of Children Will We Get Out of This?

While drawing on the Danish experience, Gronbaek Pors exposes the underlying dynamics of the focus on performance at the expense of learning. She explores the challenge facing educational institutions around the world: the downward pressures resulting from international testing regimes such as PISA, which have come to not just to inform but to re-shape policy, as well as the inescapable expectation that educators do more with less. She argues that even as school principals are required to shift their focus from education to management, progress is being hampered by a performance-based framework. The Denmark studies, highlighting the emphasis on test scores, provide comparable lessons for Australian schooling.