ACHIEVING PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional principles as well as to the more local engagements with multiple publics. Knight Abowitz sketches this bifocal nature, exploring both the unitary ideal and its parameters, as well as the less understood forms of multiple, organic publics that come into being in response to localized problems in schools or districts. These publics often fail to realize their potential in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning. The essay ultimately points to a practical application: that educational leadership of all types, and with some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public schools.     

CIVIC FRAGMENTATION OR VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION? HABERMAS,FRASER, AND CHARTER SCHOOL SEGREGATION

In this essay, Terri Wilson puts the argument developed by Kathleen Knight Abowitz that charter schools could be considered as counterpublic spaces into interaction with empirical research that explores patterns of voluntary self‐segregation in charter schools. Wilson returns to the theoretical tension between Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser over the inclusivity of the public sphere. Wilson argues that Fraser's concept of counterpublic space rests on an oversimplification of Habermas's concept of the public sphere and, further, that justifying school choice through Fraser's “multiplicity of publics” offers few resources for questioning the increasing segregation of schools. According to Wilson, Habermas's normative project—and his concept of “idealization,” in particular—offers both an answer to Fraser's critique and a better application of “the public sphere” to the issue of school choice. Wilson concludes by considering how Habermas's understanding of the public sphere as a normative ideal might serve as a useful resource for evaluating the public‐ness of charter school reform.     

ON THE PUBLIC AND CIVIC PURPOSES OF EDUCATION

A bstract .  In this review essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz discusses three recent books related to democratic public life and schooling: Susan H. Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson's The Public Schools , Walter C. Parker's Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life , and Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg's Education and Citizenship in Liberal-Democratic Societies . Abowitz details how each text is inspired by meanings of liberal democracy that evolved during the Enlightenment era, in which individual rights were constitutionally coded and equality came to be a powerful social and educational ideal, and how each book also takes up different sorts of Enlightenment traditions of public life and education, attempting to revitalize their meanings for public education today. Yet while these books are inspiring and instructive in numerous ways, they are also notable for the issues they fail to take into theoretical account, particularly the colonization of public spheres by the private and market-based spheres of commerce, and the ways in which increasing ecological crisis calls for new ways of conceiving our political and educational frameworks.     

CONSUMING THE PUBLIC SCHOOL

In this essay David Labaree examines the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve and promote public aims, such as keeping the faith, shoring up the republic, or promoting economic growth. From the other perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to advance the interests of individual educational consumers in the pursuit of social access and social advantage. In the first half of the essay Labaree shows the evolution of the public vision over time, from an emphasis on religious aims to political ones to economic ones and, finally, to an embrace of individual opportunity. In the second half, he shows how the consumerist vision of schooling has not only come to dominate in the rhetoric of school reform but also in shaping the structure of the school system.     

Imagining Democratic Futures for Public Universities: Educational Leadership Against Fatalism's Temptations

At current rates, almost all U.S. public universities could reach a point of zero state subsidy within the next fifty years. What is a public university without public funding? In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz considers the future of public universities, drawing upon the analysis provided in John Dewey's Democracy and Education. Knight Abowitz conducts an initial institutional analysis through two broad prisms: that of the political landscape that authorizes universities as public institutions, and that of the present political–economic context of public education in general and public universities in particular. Dewey's conception of democratic education is then explored; his arguments regarding aims, experience, thinking, and social intelligence provide important tools for imagining the democratic futures of public universities today.     

Contested spaces: trans-inclusive school policies and parental sovereignty in Canada

ABSTRACT

This article analyses five public consultation meetings about revisions to an LGBTQ-related school board policy on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. These meetings focused largely on the new provision that students in publicly funded schools be allowed to use the washroom that corresponds with their gender identity. Almost all of the objections to the policy revisions were articulated by parents of non-queer, or not openly queer students. We found that these parental concerns centred around two perennial issues in Canadian educational studies; namely, how schools regulate students’ gender identities and expressions, and the role of the state in publicly funded schooling. We conclude by drawing upon emerging literature on best practices for trans youth in schools to offer alternative visions for how these issues can be better addressed with the public, and parents in particular.     

Counting and accounting for social justice in the devolved school: How do indigenous students fare?

Abstract

How does a self‐managing school meet the needs and aspirations of the most disenfranchised members of its community? What responsibilities should reside with the state and the education system in the quest for more equitable schooling outcomes? In the neo‐liberal state, responsibility for addressing educational disadvantage has largely been devolved to schools within centrally determined curriculum frameworks and accountability mechanisms. But there are disturbing signs that these new arrangements are not working in the interests of the most marginalised students and their families. This article explores the nexus between school‐based management and educational equality with particular reference to Indigenous students in a disadvantaged Australian school community. It reaffirms the need for well‐resourced and vibrant education bureaucracies as an integral component of a responsible approach to school‐based management.     

The Genealogy of the School: an iconography of badges and mottoes

This paper reports on an investigation into central features of institutional schooling that, collectively, constitute the ‘symbolic architecture’ of education. In particular, this paper provides an analysis of the practices associated with school uniform, badges and mottoes, drawn from a sample of over 500 schools in the state of Queensland, Australia. The analysis reveals a large degree of uniformity in the meaning content of these school icons, derived from a common core of educational values established during the formative decades of universal school but resting on older heraldic principles. The authors contend that the propagation of these values within the iconic discourse of schooling constitute a significant ideological practice that focuses a pupil's consciousness towards social norms and further reifies the institutional character of education. These processes are not ‐straightforward but are often contested in instances where pupils recreate mottoes in ways which mock the values that are consecrated in the formal symbols of schooling.     

How and Why to Support Common Schooling and Educational Choice at the Same Time

The common school ideal is the source of one of the oldest educational debates in liberal democratic societies. The movement in favour of greater educational choice is the source of one of the most recent. Each has been the cause of major and enduring controversy, not only within philosophical thought but also within political, legal and social arenas. Echoing conclusions reached by Terry McLaughlin, but taking the historical and legal context of the United States as my backdrop, I argue that the ideal of common schooling and the existence of separate schools, which is to say, the existence of educational choice, are not merely compatible but necessarily co-exist in a liberal democratic society. In other words, we need both common schooling and educational choice. The essay proceeds in four parts. First, I explain why we need to understand something about pluralism in order to understand common schooling and school choice. In the second and third parts, I explore the normative significance of pluralism for common schooling and educational choice, respectively. In the fourth part, I show how the two can be reconciled, given a certain understanding of what pluralism demands.     

Schoolmaster's Empire: Race,Conquest, and the Centralization of Common Schooling in California, 1848–1879

This article explores how education reformers in California pioneered forms of centralized educational governance between 1850 and 1879. Challenging previous scholarship that has attributed the success of this early educational state to reformer John Swett and New England migrants, this article situates the creation of common schools in California within the larger context of American state‐building in the nineteenth‐century West. While increased state authority over education was a goal for reformers across the nation, this article contends that California's early innovations in centralization reflected a regionally specific response to the dilemmas of governing a recently acquired territory distant from eastern centers of power. The precarious nature of elite attempts to convert California into an American place, reflected in perceived lawlessness, weak governmental authority, and racial anxiety, inspired forms of educational organization commonly associated with Progressive Era responses to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. The desire to promote nineteenth‐century American racial and governmental order in California, this article concludes, powerfully shaped the growth of public education in the state, influencing the organization of schooling in ways that suggest the importance of looking beyond the Northeast to understand the development of public education in the United States.     

Private‐sector provision of schooling: an economic assessment

In many countries the school choice agenda has promoted increased inter‐school competition as a means of creating stronger incentives for state schools to raise measures of average pupil attainment. Privatization of the provision of schooling takes market‐based reforms a stage further. We identify the factors that have increased governments' concern with educational outcomes and why these concerns have led to greater interest in privatization. The rationale employed for such policies elsewhere in the public sector has been based upon efficiency gains, in that existing government failures were more harmful than future market failures. More recently it has been argued that contracting or improved regulation can control the market failures associated with privately provided schooling. Given the multiple outputs generated by education providers, privatization may be particularly attractive to governments who find that the professionalism of teachers and their public service motivation generate severe agency problems. We critically review each of these propositions and question the current practice of separating issues concerned with government funding of schooling from those concerned with its provision.     

The Finnish Educational Goals Project

Sauvala, A. 1983. The Finnish Educational Goals Project. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 27, 129‐144. The purpose of the Project was to survey the appreciation and attainment of educational goals at schools among different population groups. Parents and teachers valued the goals the most, while university students and school administrators valued them the least. The widest consensus of acceptance was elicited by the goals of over‐all personality and mental health, and by ethical‐social and work‐related goals, the attainment of which improves during schooling. Simultaneously, the attainment of esthetic, national, health and religious goals decreases. The results have been utilized, for example, in drafts for comprehensive and upper secondary school legislation. The bill includes the goal of responsibility, valued the most by vocational school teachers and school administrators, and that of appreciation for peace, valued the most by secondary school pupils.     

The relative efficiency of charter schools: A cost frontier approach

Charters represent an expansion of public school choice, offering free, publicly funded educational alternatives to traditional public schools. One relatively unexplored research question concerning charter schools asks whether charter schools are more efficient suppliers of educational services than are traditional public schools. The potential relative efficiency advantage of charters vis-a-vis traditional publics is one of the mechanisms that supports the hypotheses that charters could improve performance for their students while using the same or fewer resources, and that the systemic effect of charters could lead to improved outcomes for traditional public students without requiring an increase in education sector resources.     

Left right out: Australian education and the politics of signification

In recent years there has been a shift in popular thinking and government policy on education in Australia, away from the social democratic consensus of the Karmel era, towards a Rightist perception. While a number of sources of this movement may be identified, in this paper I will focus on the politics of discourse. Drawing on Laclau's and Mouffe's developments of Gramsci's theory of hegemony, I will explore the ways in which various educational lobby groups have sought to produce a ‘common‐sense’ concerning Australian schooling. The examination of a critical historical incident is a useful way of illustrating the strategies employed by these groups, as their political efforts are particularly concentrated at such times.

In its 1983 Education Guidelines the federal Labour government announced, amongst many things, that it intended to reduce funds to Australia's ‘best resourced’ private schools. A bitter debate between supporters of private schools and state schools ensued. On the surface each party sought merely to influence the 1984 Guidelines which would determine funding policies for some time to come. At the debates centre, however, were issues to do with the nature and purpose of schooling and what and whose interests it should serve.

This historical incident exemplifies the politics of the contending parties particularly well. Private schooling was used as a symbolic rallying point around which particular definitions of education were constructed. This paper will focus first on the discursive strategies of the private school lobby and its allies, the educational Right, then on those of the state school lobby and the Left. My contention is that the private school lobby and its allies have achieved a discursive ascendency and my intention is to suggest some reasons why this is so and how it was achieved.     

Schooling,School Improvement and the Relevance of Alasdair MacIntyre

In recent years schools have come under increasing pressure to raise levels of achievement and educational standards generally. In their attempts to respond to government expectations schools have mounted a number of specific initiatives which have much in common from school to school. Together they embody a largely unexamined notion of the nature of schooling and ‘school improvement’ in particular. This article draws on the views of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to provide a constructive critique of the ‘improvement’ initiatives currently underway in many secondary schools. It is suggested that such initiatives represent an unresolved tension between pursuing the ‘goods of effectiveness’ and the ‘goods of excellence’, which in turn reflect the more general dilemma of reconciling the traditions of modernity and pre‐modernity apparent in the existing practices of schools.     

The media,marketing, and single sex schooling

The Australian media’s interest in education, as in many Anglophone countries, is frequently dominated by concerns about boys in schools. In 2002, in a country region of the Australian State of Queensland, this concern was evident in a debate on the merits of single sex schooling that took place in a small local newspaper. The debate was fuelled by the inclusion in this newspaper of an advertising brochure for an elite private girls’ school. The advertisement utilized the current concerns about boys in schools to advocate the benefits of girls’ only schools. Drawing on research that suggests that boys are a problem in school, and utilising a peculiar mix of liberal feminism alongside a neo‐liberal class politics, it implicitly denigrated the education provided by government co‐educational schools. The local government high and primary school principals, incensed at this advertisement, contacted the paper to refute many of its claims and assumptions and to assert the benefits, to both boys and girls, of their particular schools. A letters to the editor debate then followed an article representing these government school principals’ views. These letters were from two private school principals. This country newspaper thus became a medium through which various school principals engaged with the current boys’ debate, and research associated with it, in order to market their schools. This paper examines this particular newspaper debate and argues that, in the absence of nuanced, research based, and thoughtful policy responses to gender issues, many school policies on gender are being shaped through and by the media in ways that elide the complexities of the issues involved.     

A Review of the Empirical Research on Private School Choice

Parents in the United States have had the legal right to choose the school their child attends for a long time. Traditionally, parental school choice took the form of families moving to a neighborhood with good public schools or self-financing private schooling. Contemporary education policies allow parents in many areas to choose from among public schools in neighboring districts, public magnet schools, public charter schools, private schools through the use of a voucher or tax-credit scholarship, virtual schools, or even homeschooling. The newest form of school choice is education savings accounts (ESAs), which make a portion of the funds that a state spends on children in public schools available to their parents in spending accounts that they can use to customize their children's education. Opponents claim that expanding private school choice yields no additional benefits to participants and generates significant harms to the students “left behind” in traditional public schools. A review of the empirical research on private school choice finds evidence that private school choice delivers some benefits to participating students—particularly in the area of educational attainment—and tends to help, albeit to a limited degree, the achievement of students who remain in public schools.     

THE POSSIBILITY OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN AN INSTRUMENTALIST AGE

In our increasingly instrumentalist culture, debates over the privatization of schooling may be beside the point. Whether we hatch some new plan for chartering or funding schools, or retain the traditional model of government‐run schools, the ongoing instrumentalization of education threatens the very possibility of public education. Indeed, in the culture of performativity, not only the public school but public life itself is hollowed out and debased. Qualities are recast as quantities, judgments replaced by rubrics, teaching and learning turned into exchange values. Schools should be central to public life: key locations for the regeneration of values, the cultivation of judgment, and the creation of the conditions for positive freedom. In this article Chris Higgins, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, goes beyond typical treatments of the schools as equalizer of individual opportunity to explore three aspects of educational publicity: the school as an object of communal concern, schooling as preparation for public life, and the classroom as public space.     

THE PRIVATIZED PUBLIC: ANTAGONISM FOR A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN SCHOOLS?

In an extended era of privatization initiatives, when accountability principles and competitive business logics pervade school discourse and practice, what is left of the “public” part of public schooling? When market rationality privileges individualism and competition and provides much of the justification for the aims of U.S. schools, how is the notion of the public good evidenced? In this essay Deron Boyles makes the claim that public schools inordinately function as private markets—as places where a unidirectional narrative of “givens” reinforce individualism, competition, and corporatization under the guise of merit, testing, and school‐business partnerships.     

The Effect of Catholic Schooling on Math and Reading Development in Kindergarten Through Fifth Grade

Abstract

Prior research estimating the effect of Catholic schooling has focused on high school, where evidence suggests a positive effect of Catholic versus public schooling. In this article, we estimate the effect of attending a Catholic elementary school rather than a public school on the math and reading skills of children in kindergarten through fifth grade. We use nationally representative data and a set of matching estimators to estimate the average effect of Catholic schooling and the extent to which the effect varies across educational markets. When we use public school students nationwide or within the same county to provide a counterfactual estimate of how Catholic school students would have performed in public schools, we find strong evidence indicating that Catholic elementary schools are less successful at teaching math skills than public schools (Catholic school students are 3–4 months behind public school students by third and fifth grade), but no more or less successful at teaching reading skills. Moreover, unlike prior research, we find no consistent evidence that the effects of Catholic schooling vary substantially by race or urbanicity, though our power to detect such differences is weak.