Following the release of the latest four yearly reports, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS ), the South Australian Minister for Education, Simon Birmingham, responded to an urgent question concerning the allegedly declining international performance of the nation’s students in these subjects. Citing the recent conclusion of the chief executive of the Australian Council for Educational Research, Geoff Masters, that the 20-year slide in mathematics and science learning represented a “national challenge,” the Minister (Birmingham, 2011) admitted that the results had been a “wake up” call for Australia:

Unfortunately, since 2011, Australia has fallen 10 places for year 4 mathematics performance, five places for year 8 mathematics performance and five places for year 8 science. Australia has fallen in place rankings and unfortunately we have also seen poorer performances by our students in advanced levels. Further, between one-quarter and one-third of Australian students did not achieve the national proficient standard in maths and science. These are deeply disappointing results. We have been overtaken in some areas by countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic that were on a par with us in 2011. Kazakhstan, which has a GDP per capita of just AU$14,000 compared to our GDP of more than $73,000 and which was significantly behind us in maths and science in 2011 has now overtaken us.

Birmingham and Masters have been far from alone in articulating pessimism over their nation’s comparative performance in science and mathematics. Broadly similar sentiments concerning their own country’s students’ lack of academic achievement in these key subject areas in comparison with many other countries have emanated from across the English-speaking world, including from the United States, England and New Zealand.

Neither are such sentiments particularly new. In English-speaking Western liberal democracies, politicians, policymakers and the general public, at large, perennially have long identified specific curriculum areas as being central to both individual success in the workplace and for national development in an increasingly competitive economic environment. For this reason, national and international debates concerning excellence and equity, and the tensions between these key concepts within these nations, tend to focus largely on perceived underachievement in mathematics and science rather on any shortfall in music, art, social studies or physical education standards. As a consequence, levels of student achievement in the former areas have been historically subject to continuous public and political scrutiny. Why it should be mathematics and science rather than say, music or social studies, is a question that particularly interested us in writing this book.

The interest in school mathematics and science has led to decades-old national and international debates that in turn reveal the underlying tensions between these key concepts. Over time, these debates have centred particularly on perceived underachievement in mathematics and science. One consequence of this has been that levels of student achievement in these subject areas have historically been subject to continuous public and political scrutiny. To cite but one example, the eradication of the underachievement of specific social groups is featured in the Times Educational Supplement (Smith, 2005) almost every week.

This critically examines a number of key periods and across national boundaries, centring on discrete periods where there was an acute sense of the failure of science and mathematics in schools. However, the scope of the inquiry has necessitated some limitations on the collection of evidence. While this filtering of reality is, to some extent, unavoidable, the evidence presented nevertheless enables us to better understand the nature and effects of interactions of constantly shifting coalitions of individuals across a series of boundaries. It appears that members of such coalitions may advocate, at any one time, different and sometimes conflicting different purposes and interests. In turn, this allows us to offer some tentative conclusions about what, immersed as we often are, in our contemporary environments, we might learn from history. Other books focus on some of the same policies and debates that we will be considering in the chapters that follow, but these books largely confine their analyses to specific contexts and periods rather than considering contexts and periods in direct relation to one another.

Much of the current international research literature concerning mathematics and science is either focused on the mechanics of teaching and learning or on policy advocacy that might result in improved outcomes for students. Moreover, much research tends to be focused on particular countries. To date, we still do not have extended research on the ways in which historic and contemporary concerns over mathematics and science in one country are subsequently imported into other countries. What we are particularly interested here are the mechanisms by which concern in one country amplifies existing concern in another. A related question to consider in this context is the way in which satisfactory performance in mathematics and science have been defined and redefined across time. By addressing these and related questions, we hope to substantially contribute to the current global literature surrounding the evolution of future education policy.

In the chapters that follow, we will be particularly interested in the often-hidden mechanisms that operate internationally to first trigger and then sustain debates based around claims that student achievement levels have fallen. We will also highlight the ways in which subsequent calls for action are mobilised to “alleviate” the alleged crisis. In this task, we will build upon our previous research in this area. In 2010, we examined post-Second World War debates relating to literacy and numeracy within New Zealand (Openshaw & Walshaw, 2010). In that investigation, we concluded that at certain periods such debates were translated to legislative or regulatory action leading to major nation-wide curriculum and assessment change that impacted on teaching and learning. In this new book, however, we have attempted to both widen and extend the analysis to include the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as New Zealand. At the same time, we have sought to sharpen the research focus by concentrating on the key areas of secondary school science and mathematics education—curriculum areas where, as we have shown, international debate, public concern and political interventions have been, and remain, highly visible.

Curriculum and assessment are social artefacts. We want to know what social practices and understandings trigger curriculum debates in diverse national contexts. Our interest is in demonstrating how discourses as diverse as scientific rationalism, utilitarianism, human capital investment, business-market accountability and technical/economic forms of instrumentalism, operating at distinct periods of time across Western nations, paved the way for transnational policy borrowing. This process usually, but not always, results in smaller nations (New Zealand and Australia), borrowing from nations perceived as being educational front-runners in targeted curriculum areas (The United States and England). Mapping out the historical ascent of particular policies in this way may allow us to trace insurrections and initiations from interest groups invested in specific discourses. We may also be able to track the descent of such changes through contested forces and struggles. What we do know is that different values and knowledges, sanctioned within educational legislation at different periods of time, tend to render reality in secondary school mathematics and science thinkable and calculable for those periods of time.

In presenting this research, we are not seeking to “raid” snapshots of the past merely to illustrate contemporary educational realities. Rather, the presentation of historical evidence, in ways that examine negotiation and action, is designed to assist us in better understanding the gradual and continuous nature of articulated mathematics and science “realities” across time. In so doing, we hope to explain the ways in which specific social practices and interests put science and mathematics to different uses and purposes.

Our findings have stimulated us to pose several important questions that in turn require comprehensive answers. For instance, how are extended debates over mathematics and science teaching and achievement levels amplified and finally promoted to the status of a national crisis that is seen to require urgent action? What are the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of perceived crises and articulated solutions from one country to another? How and for what purpose do interest groups in particular national contexts utilise public and professional concern over mathematics and science underachievement for particular ends? And most importantly, what and where is the evidence that student performances in these key areas have declined, improved or stabilised over generations?

In order to illustrate all of the above factors and questions, this book focuses on five discrete periods in which changes within society and the economy prompted significant school mathematics and science reform. These are:

Both the four nations we have selected and the time periods we have chosen to examine are quite deliberate for several reasons. First, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, the subjects of our case studies in each of our chosen time periods, have not only displayed an historic preoccupation regarding the relationship between secondary school mathematics and science achievement and continued economic and social well-being, but have also been influenced by one another in the way they have identified specific crises in these subject areas, often at much the same time. Second, both the problem identified and the remedies proposed, as well as the solutions eventually adopted, turn out to be remarkably similar in each nation, across each of the four case studies. In fact, one nation’s reform of curriculum, even as it is shaped by historical, political and social developments within that nation, shows a striking homogeneity with the reforms of another. Furthermore, this trend was enhanced in all the case studies by the comparatively high levels of communication between the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand concerning education. This was doubtlessly facilitated by the use of a common language, the tendency towards a commonality of educational ideas at different periods, and to shared principles of democracy and openness that in turn help to shape and to structure educational debates. Hence, identified crises over secondary school mathematics and science achievement in one nation appear to resonate elsewhere with force and speed.

Third, we found it particularly interesting that, in a number of instances, one nation’s concern was to serve as a catalyst in stimulating existing but sometimes latent concerns within the other three. To take but one example here, escalating worries within the political, scientific and educational establishments in the United States over mathematical and scientific achievement in the wake of the successful 1957 launch of Sputnik One rapidly found parallels in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. This was despite the fact that the underlying reasons for concern over mathematical and scientific achievement amongst young people varied somewhat within national contexts. Thus in the United Kingdom, a growing preoccupation with the nation’s alleged economic and industrial decline rather than any desire to surpass the Soviet Union in space was the principal driver in successive attempts at educational reform . Whereas in Australia and New Zealand, residual worries over finding new markets for existing farm products and the need to establish new industries for economic diversification in an increasingly competitive international environment were uppermost.

Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, the actual case studies and time periods the episodes fall into were chosen specifically because of their dynamic relationship with each other. For example, significant changes to the teaching of mathematics and science at the secondary level during the 1930s came about, not just due to the impact of the Great Depression, but also because of a belief common to each of thefour countries studied, that the teaching of these subjects was both too academic and too elitist. But somewhat ironically, the succeeding perceived crisis over secondary school mathematical and scientific achievement twenty or so years later was deepened precisely because it was to a considerable extent driven by the feeling amongst many politicians, educators and parents in each of our selected nations that previous attempts to make science and mathematics teaching more relevant and more “human,” so to speak, had gone too far. According to critics at the time, it had resulted, not in a greater appreciation of the social relevance of these school subjects, but rather in a new generation of students falling behind in their understanding of complex scientific and mathematical concepts, thus contributing to perceived national shortfalls in the face of new Cold War rivalries.

But once again, iro...