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Review: Education: Pam Poppleton and John Williamson, eds, New Realities of Secondary Teachers' Work Lives. Oxford: Symposium Press, 2004, 319 pp., ISBN 1873927142, £28.00/US$46.00

The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed far-reaching changes in the working lives of teachers worldwide. Although critics decry the fact that the overall picture of schooling seems to have changed relatively little even in this period of technological and social upheaval, there is general agreement that much has changed for teachers who are at the forefront of the schooling process: their workload has intensified (Hargreaves, 1994), while at the same time there has been a process of ‘deskilling’ (Apple, 1987; Apple and Jungck, 1992) as packaged curricula, outcomes-based management programmes and other schemes for advancing and monitoring the learning process have been introduced into schools, controlling the work of teachers and taking many decisions about pedagogy, curriculum and evaluation out of their hands. Large-scale comparative evaluations of the results of schooling, such as those conducted by the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), have put increased pressure on state educational systems to demonstrate their effectiveness in producing competitive test results, often overshadowing more vital concerns such as preparing students for adult life, for competent citizenship and economic productivity. The public call for accountability and increased control of the procedures and in particular the outcomes of schooling have impacted on the conduct of schooling around the world, albeit with very different foci and effects in different countries. In response to these developments, New Realities of Secondary Teachers’ Work Lives reports on an ambitious international study that examines the changes in teachers’ working lives in comparative perspective. The book was written by members of the Consortium for Cross-Cultural Research in Education, coming from Australia, Canada, the People’s Republic of China, England, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, South Africa and the US. Part 1 of the book reports on individual studies conducted