Resisting educational inequity and the ‘bracketing out’ of disadvantage in contemporary schooling

In this chapter, data from Australia’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the My School website and the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) are considered together in order to draw out a nuanced view of how broader factors of social disadvantage are implicated in educational outcomes measured via standardised testing regimes. Of particular concern is the bracketing out (Sellar & Lingard, 2014) of social, economic and educational disadvantage, which allows policy makers, education commentators and school leaders to make claims about students, teachers and schools (Thompson & Mockler, 2016) that are decontextualised and overly simplified.