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Improving teacher quality has become the hallmark of Australian education reform with a plethora of measures introduced in teacher education to improve future teachers’ instructional competencies. This policy focus has also changed the discussion of strategies for addressing disadvantages in schools; improving teacher quality, as opposed to addressing structural inequalities in the system and larger society, has become the “solution.” This paper looks at the National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools (NETDS), which aims to channel high performing teacher education students to disadvantaged schools. Using the taxonomy of conservative, liberal and critical approaches to education reform, the paper first identifies the ideological contradictions inherent in the program, and then discusses, drawing on post-qualitative research literature, how the program coordinators negotiated the tensions and the moral/ethical dilemmas as we designed and implemented the program for a group of external students at University of New England. Teacher Quality as the Silver Bullet Teacher quality/effectiveness has become the central focus of education reform today. As part of this trend, a plethora of reform measures have been introduced to ensure that preservice teachers are equipped with a high level of content knowledge and pedagogic skills in areas of concern for teachers broadly, including literacy (Beck, Brown, Cockburn & McClure, 2005), mathematics (Baumert, Kunter, Blum, Brunner, Voss, Jordan & Tsai, 2010) and morality/ethics (Jones, 2009; Veugelers, 2000). Likewise, the current policy focus on teacher quality has intensified the attempt to upskill practising teachers through the introduction of professional standards and the extensive provision of professional development opportunities. Across the USA, the UK and Australia there have emerged conceptualisations of the “expert” or “quality” teacher, sometimes termed “highly accomplished teacher” or “advanced skills teacher” depending on context (Goodwyn, Fuller & Francis-Brophy, 2014). The schemes to improve pre-service teacher quality gained political momentum in Australia when an international benchmarking report showed that Australian teacher education programs drew on lower ranked student pools (mostly those in the bottom half of their university entrant cohort), compared to “best practice” programs in international contexts (mostly drawing on students from the top third) (Ingvarson, Reid, Buckley, Kleinhenz & Masters, 2014). The Australian media gave considerable attention to the quality of university-based teacher education program entrants and the allegedly poor academic Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 42, 4, April 2017 – Special Issue: Teacher Education for High Poverty Schools 85 standards of the programs (Federal Politics Editor, 2013; Ferrari, 2014; Smith, 2015). Christopher Pyne, then Federal Minister of Education, established the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) to advise on ‘how teacher education could be improved to better prepare new teachers for the classroom’ (Teaching Education Ministerial Advisory Group, 2014, p. 1), and TEMAG produced 38 recommendations by June that year. The government quickly acted on the recommendations and introduced a range of reforms to improve pre-service teacher quality: increasing the minimum Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) cut-off point for teacher education awards, requiring a new minimum standard of three Band 5 High School Certificate (HSC) results (including one in English) and the passing of the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students as a necessary condition for the final practicum placement and hence the initial teacher certification (from July 2016). Central to the rise of narrow policy focus on teacher quality-cum-effectiveness is the extensive research work by John Hattie, Chair of the Board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) (from 2014 onward). His 2009 book Visible Learning, which provides a meta-analysis of research on what in-school factors impact student learning outcomes, ‘has become a runaway best seller for an academic text’ in Australia (Thomson, Lingard & Wrigley, 2012, p. 4). Despite Hattie’s (2003) acknowledgement that socio-economic factors (poverty, health and resource disparity), which are beyond the control of schools and teachers, account for much of student performance variance, this qualification is quickly forgotten in his assertion about teacher effectiveness. According to him, the answer to improving student learning outcomes lies in the person who ‘gently closes the classroom door and performs the teaching act–the person who puts into place the end effects of so many policies, who interprets these policies, and who is alone with students during their 15,000 hours of schooling’ (Hattie, 2003, p. 2-3). To Hattie, larger systemic problems such as poverty, wealth inequality and racial segregation are out of our control as educators and hence education system should focus on what is in its control, teaching and learning. Hattie’s work has been enthusiastically endorsed by State Education Departments, schools and media and appropriated to promote a rather simplistic view that teacher practices are the only factor influencing student learning outcomes (Thomson et al., 2012). Parallel to this narrowing policy focus on teacher quality/effectiveness is the ongoing discussion of widening socio-economic disparities and Indigenous “gap” and the role of education in addressing these entrenched inequalities in education (Keddie, Gowlett, Mills, Monk & Renshaw, 2013). Standardized testing data, such as NAPLAN and OECD’s PISA, consistently point to the persistent educational inequalities faced by Indigenous and other disadvantaged students in Australian schools. The twin focuses of educational excellence and equity in PISA, which has considerably shaped the Australian education policy discourse over the last decade, helped keep social inclusion and educational equity as one of the central policy agenda. Increasingly, however, the policy discussion about educational inequalities has shifted away from the traditional attention to poverty and structural inequalities in education system (e.g., inequitable allocation of resource etc.) towards the quality of teachers who work with disadvantaged children (Thomson et al., 2012). This shift, which has taken place incrementally over the last several decades, can be most clearly observed by comparing the Disadvantaged Schools Program (DSP) launched in 1974 and terminated in 1997 on the one hand, and the 2009 Council of Australian Governments National Partnership Agreement on Improving Teacher Quality, signed by many key levels of Government on the other (Council of Australian Governments, 2009). Arguably one of the most extensive federal intervention into educational disadvantages in Australian education, DSP was created to raise student achievement and improve educational Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 42, 4, April 2017 – Special Issue: Teacher Education for High Poverty Schools 86 outcomes through the role of classroom teachers, the goal of community participation and action research (Connell, Johnston & White, 1991). As Lingard (1998) explains, DSP was premised upon the social-democratic notion of social justice, with its focus on whole school change and improved school-community relations in low socio-economic communities, rather than on fixing-up individual deficit students. This reflected the policy mindset of the time; an explicit acknowledgement of the effect of structural inequity on educational disadvantages and a combination of social justice policy framework with empowerment strategies were worked into DSP (Connell et al., 1991). Though the program was not perfect (see Connell et al., 1991) and its focus shifted over time (Lingard 1998), its explicit acknowledgement of the effect of structural inequalities on schools and student learning outcomes is notable. By contrast, the National Partnership Agreement ‘aims to deliver system-wide reforms targeting critical points in the teacher “lifecycle” to attract, train, place, develop and retain quality teachers and leaders in our schools and classrooms’ (Council of Australian Governments, 2009, p. 4). It sets out teacher quality as the key strategy for social inclusion, in particular, to address Indigenous disadvantage in education. More specifically, as part of its strategy, the agreement aims to ‘(a)ttract top non-education graduates to commit to teaching, especially in hard-to-staff schools’ (p. 9), which echoes the operational concept of Teach for America (TFA) and Teach for Australia (Ravitch, 2013). The structural inequality in Australian education system, as articulated in DSP, might be part of the education policy discourse today, as most recently observed in the call for a more equitable funding model in the 2011 Gonski Report. And yet the report was quickly overshadowed by the current infatuation with teacher quality/effectiveness as the “silver bullet” for achieving overall improvement in educational outcome and narrowing the achievement gap. Hence, as Ravitch (2013) argues in the US context, a policy consensus has emerged that ‘poverty can be overcome by effective teachers’ (p. 91). Similarly, Burnett and Lampert (2011) observe in the context of Australia that ‘the popular sense that better teachers are needed for the children most at risk is now firmly part of a very public discourse...’ (p. 447). The National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools (NETDS), the focus of our discussion, has emerged out of this particular political juncture surrounding teacher quality/effectiveness and the persistent socio-economic and Indigenous disadvantages in Australian education. NETDS, initially developed and implemented at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), recruits top perf

Thinking with/through The Contradictions of Social Justice in Teacher Education: Self-Reflection on NETDS Experience