New Voices, New Knowledges and the New Politics of Education Research: The Gathering of a Perfect Storm?

Abstract

This article outlines and discusses a set of related developments in the governance, reform and privatisation of knowledge production in the field of education policy. It argues that knowledge about, performative knowledge, and knowledge for leadership knowledge are key facets of the new governance and ongoing reform of public sector education but increasingly are created and sold to governments by private sector and philanthropic organisations. In all of this public sector higher education institutions are being displaced as knowledge brokers, and at the same time ‘enterprised’ and ‘hybridised’, in a new education policy knowledge market. Increasingly the idea of a public/private divide in education is redundant.