For most of the year, Australian teachers have worked harder than ever before, scrambling to adapt lesson resources for online learning, checking in daily with stressed-out students, and fighting for basic PPE such as hand sanitizer.

At the same time, representatives of big business, including the Liberal Party and the New South Wales (NSW) Productivity Commission, have seen an opportunity to reduce costs and ramp up “productivity.” As the commission makes clear, students are “human capital” and the goal is to further impose a competitive corporate culture within schools, in order to extract as much added “value” from teachers as possible.

They are proposing, for example, to give supervisors more power over lesson observations and to use test results and student surveys to assess individual teachers, as a stepping-stone toward performance-based pay. It’s the latest development in a decades-long effort to impose a market-based logic on Australian schools.