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.     

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.     

The politics of rural school reform: Escuela Nueva in Colombia

This article explores the history and politics of rural school reform in Colombia, focusing on the Escuela Nueva programme. In particular, it assesses the motivations of the Colombian State in promoting a comprehensive reform of its rural schools. We argue that Colombia's unique political context was, in large part, responsible for its novel approach to school reform. As the political context shifted, however, so to did the State's posture to rural schooling. We track the Escuela Nueva programme through three phases (grassroots, formalized and decoupled) to demonstrate how social actors, their interests at a specific point in time, and the distribution of power among them, are crucial elements for understanding the motivation and outcomes of social policy making. In other words, this research portrays education reform as a dynamic process that is continuously shaped and reshaped as political actors and institutions compete for influence and scarce resources in a variable social arena.     

Private schooling promotes political and economic freedom? An international fixed effects instrumental variables analysis

Specialised learning environments provided through private schooling may increase educational quality, which may increase the likelihood that citizens will pursue human rights through civic engagement. We employed 2-stage least squares year and country-level fixed effects and examined how private schooling could affect political rights, civil liberties, and economic freedom indices in 174 nations across the globe from 1999 to 2014. We used an innovative instrumental variable, fluctuations in the short-run demand for schooling within countries, over time, in order to predict private schooling. Our results suggest that an increased share of private schooling enrolment at the primary level leads to enhanced political and economic freedom.     

INTERCULTURALISM,MULTICULTURALISM, AND THE STATE FUNDING AND REGULATION OF CONSERVATIVE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS

In this essay, Bruce Maxwell, David Waddington, Kevin McDonough, Andrée‐Anne Cormier, and Marina Schwimmer compare two competing approaches to social integration policy, Multiculturalism and Interculturalism, from the perspective of the issue of the state funding and regulation of conservative religious schools. After identifying the key differences between Interculturalism and Multiculturalism, as well as their many similarities, the authors present an explanatory analysis of this intractable policy challenge. Conservative religious schooling, they argue, tests a conceptual tension inherent in Multiculturalism between respect for group diversity and autonomy, on the one hand, and the ideal of intercultural citizenship, on the other. Taking as a case study Québec's education system and, in particular, recent curricular innovations aimed at helping young people acquire the capabilities of intercultural citizenship, the authors illustrate how Interculturalism signals a compelling way forward in the effort to overcome the political dilemma of conservative religious schooling.     

Black Superintendents on Educating Black Students in Separate and Unequal Contexts

The negative consequences of school desegregation on Black families, educators, and communities in the US are well documented in education research today. The purpose of this article is to examine the experiential knowledge and wisdom of practice of former Black school superintendents who attended all Black segregated schools and led desegregated school districts. Using critical race theory as a methodological and analytical framework, I seek to advance our understanding of how the positive aspects of valued segregated schools can improve Black education today. Findings include Black superintendent reflections of and calls to action concerning separate and unequal schooling contexts according to the following constituencies: the Black community, the Black parent, the Black teacher, and the Black student. Building on the participant directives for political engagement and community-based activism, I conclude with a discussion about transforming Black education through a political race project aimed to resist educational inequities, advance racial justice, and promote social change in education.     

The privatization and marketization of US schooling

This paper describes the trend towards the privatization and marketization of US schooling across three domains. We begin by describing the trend in recent pro-market policy reforms — proposed or enacted — to US schooling. This reform trend can be explained in terms of the growing importance of economic theory and economic evidence in social and political discourse. Briefly, we review mainstream economic theory and evidence to see what general lessons can be drawn, with a focus on productive efficiency. In the main section of the paper, we look at the direct evidence for US schooling not only in terms of the productive efficiency of schools, but also equity in schools, freedom of choice for parents and students, and the social cohesion produced by schools. Our review reaches a number of conclusions which suggest that the trend toward privatization and marketization may generate greater productive efficiency. Although the economic analysis is deficient in several ways and may have limited pertinence for social goods such as education, it highlights the need for strong and effective systems of accountability. Regardless of whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, however, it may be difficult to prevent further steps toward marketization.     

Living and Learning at the Intersection: Student Homelessness and Complex Policy Environments

In urban districts, homeless and highly mobile students are an important contributor to achievement disparities—and their numbers are rising. To date there has been little inquiry into how broader education and housing policies shape the schooling experiences of homeless and highly mobile families. Using semi-structured interviews with 132 key community stakeholders (parents, school social workers, other school staff, and community/service personnel) in one urban area, this study explored how families living at the policy intersection of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act and federal rehousing policies, such as the HEARTH Act, experience the schooling process. These policies have important impacts on students; the McKinney-Vento Act provides them with a range of supports while recent federal policies such as the HEARTH Act are shifting where and how they are living. Taking a policy perspective and drawing insights from Lin’s network theory of social capital, the findings suggest that these policies both independently and concomitantly shape families’ life opportunities. Implications for schools, communities, and scholars are addressed.     

Student Identities and/in Schooling: Subjection and adolescent performativity

This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an “ordinary” suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the “subjection” of individuals, as well as from the field of performance studies, provides a fresh perspective to redress the potential mismatches between official multicultural education discourses and the lived schooling realities of students. In the process, it demonstrates how subjection and adolescent performativity can be useful analytics through which to understand student identities and/in schooling. The article concludes with some implications for shifts in policy, pedagogy, and practice to help schools engage with student diversity.     

Gender,sexuality and schooling: Everyday life in junior secondary schools in Botswana and Ghana

In this paper, the focus is upon daily school practices in Junior Secondary Schools in Ghana and Botswana. The data from 12 ethnographic case studies have been used to explore how the institution of schooling is gendered. The analysis focuses predominantly on the informal practices of the hidden curriculum through a theoretical perspective that highlights these institutional processes as significant to the production of gender/sexual identities. Remarkable similarities in the pervasive and inequitable gender/sexual practices within schools across country contexts are discussed in three key areas: school management and duties, gender space and gender violence. These discussions of everyday school life illustrate the ways in which both normative institutional practices and human agency produce and regulate gender/sexual identities. This micro-level analysis provides important substantive and methodological insights into what goes on inside schools and into the contexts and experiences of schooling that are significant to policy discourses of gender, education and development.     

When Choice Does Not Matter: Political Liberalism,Religion and the Faith School Debate

Liberal attempts to defend faith schooling have been conditional on the ability of faith schools to serve as a context for individual choice. A recent critique of these attempts claims that religious parents would find such moderate faith schooling unacceptable. This article sets forth a new liberal defence of faith schools drawing heavily on the distinction between political and comprehensive liberalism. Since political liberalism's understanding of personal autonomy does not include the ability to make choices, the political liberal defence of faith schools can accommodate denominational schools that limit the ability of students to choose or change their religion.     

‘Flexibility’, Community and Making Parents Responsible

This article draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore how recent political moves to legalise ‘flexibility’ mobilises education authorities to make ‘community’ a technical means of achieving the political objective of schooling the child. I argue that ‘flexibility’ in this sense is a neo‐liberal strategy that shifts relations between the governed and the State. In this way, it transforms the idea of schooling from a State run institution for the purpose of ‘community building’ to a community run institution for the purpose of making parents governable by both instrumentalising and institutionalising individualism through the force of community membership. Rather than a form of liberation from bureaucratic rule, the paper exposes how ‘flexibility’ acts as a normalising strategy that works with difference to entangle parents as community members in the process of schooling the child through the moral obligation of the contract.     

Exopedagogy: On pirates,shorelines, and the educational commonwealth

In this paper, Tyson E. Lewis challenges the dominant theoretical and practical educational responses to globalization. On the level of public policy, Lewis demonstrates the limitations of both neoliberal privatization and liberal calls for rehabilitating public schooling. On the level of pedagogy, Lewis breaks with the dominant liberal democratic tradition which focuses on the cultivation of democratic dispositions for cosmopolitan citizenship. Shifting focus, Lewis posits a new location for education out of bounds of the common sense of public versus private, nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, inclusion versus exclusion, human versus civil rights. This is the space of the commonwealth whose actors cannot be identified as ‘citizens’ but are rather the anonymous multitude. In conclusion, Lewis finds a model for organizing this commonwealth in the work of Ivan Illich, whose learning networks speak to the urgent political and pedagogical need for exodus from the conceptual vocabulary that defines much of the contemporary field of educational theory.     

Taking on Bourdieu’s ‘destiny effect’: theorising the development and sustainability of a socially just second-chance schooling initiative using a Bourdieusian framework

This article aims to theorise a storyline account of a collaborative three-year action research project into schooling re-engagement using a Bourdieusian framework. In the article we discuss how we (two teachers and a social worker) developed an alternative senior secondary school that re-engaged a sizable minority of marginalised young people back into formalised learning and consider how this school became a significant and sustainable educational alternative. Our work during this developmental period drew us into community-based activism enacting socially just curricular and pedagogical experiments. Through networked political action for schooling justice in concert with critical friends (our university partners), the marginalised young people we worked with and supportive regional youth stakeholders, we reconstructed our professional habitus as professionals into a more enabling rendering and strived to proffer through our relational, pedagogical and curricular work with students more of a transformative habitus. Our curricular and activist work inside the community extended the field of schooling relations into a more socially just orientation. This more enabling community field merged with our schooling field and enabled us to source political capital engendering secure, recurrent school funding and a purpose-built schooling facility. We claim that the market logics of schooling significantly influenced our beginning enrolment growth trajectory, and discuss how these logics compromised our ability to break through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘destiny effect’. Since its inception in 2003, the Second Chance Community College has offered a comprehensive senior secondary schooling programme for more than 1000 young people. Throughout its 12-year history, the majority of students have gone on to secure work, apprenticeships and tertiary study but only 10% of students have successfully completed their final year of schooling.     

Context matters: primary schools and academies reform in England

There is little conclusive evidence linking academies reform in England with school improvement. While this reform has been effective in improving educational outcomes in some contexts, it has been resoundingly unsuccessful in others. Nevertheless, political faith in autonomous schooling as key to a world-class education remains strong. This paper considers how matters of context impact on approaches to and enactments of this policy. Drawing on case study data from two groups of primary schools from (1) a local authority and (2) an academy chain, the paper examines the particular situated, professional, material and external factors that impact on these schools’ capacities to cope with and respond to academies reform. In light of the continued tendency within policy for schools to be dematerialised, the paper argues the ongoing significance of greater attention to matters of context in understanding how schools are navigating the complex terrain of this reform.     

Along the margins,across the borders: Teaching and learning among Veneto attrazionisti viaggianti in Italy

The article presents the findings of an ethnographic study carried out among Italian attrazionisti viaggianti (fairground and circus people) who lead a nomadic life and work in four Veneto provinces (Padua, Vicenza, Treviso and Venice). Defining parents as marginalised pedagogues engaged in the task of enculturating their children, the author explores and discusses: (1) how children of attrazionisti succeed in learning this occupational minority's culture and how enculturation and schooling are related; (2) how schooling is experienced by them and how it is interpreted by both them and their families; and (3) how schooling relates to their nomadic everyday life and to their prospects for the future. The author argues that enculturation plays a powerful and empowering role with respect to the occupational minority's cultural continuity and sense of agency but that schools’ organisational and cultural rules, on the one hand, and social prejudices against nomadism, on the other, seldom promote a positive recognition of the minority's diversity or its educational value and instead maintain it in a position of marginality within Italian stratified society.     

Silicon startup schools: technocracy,algorithmic imaginaries and venture philanthropy in corporate education reform

Technology companies are investing billions of dollars in educational technology, but also creating their own alternative schools. This article traces the emergence of four prototypical ‘silicon startup schools’ as exemplars of a technocratic mode of corporatized education reform: IBM’s P-TECH, part of its Smarter Cities program; AltSchool, a chain of schools based on ‘makerspaces’ established by a former Google executive; Kahn Lab School, a new ‘experimental’ school launched by the founder of the online Kahn Academy; and XQ Super School Project, a ‘crowdsourcing’ project to redesign American high schools funded philanthropically by the wife of Steve Jobs of Apple. Startup schools are analysed as prototype educational institutions that originate in the culture, discourse and ideals of Silicon Valley venture capital and startup culture, and that are intended to relocate its practices to the whole social, technical, political and economic infrastructure of schooling. These new schools are being designed as scalable technical platforms; funded by commercial ‘venture philanthropy’ sources; and staffed and managed by executives and engineers from some of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups and web companies. Together, they constitute a powerful shared ‘algorithmic imaginary’ that seeks to ‘disrupt’ public schooling through the technocratic expertise of Silicon Valley venture philanthropists.     

MESSIANIC PEDAGOGY

Famously, Walter Benjamin once wrote that behind historical materialism lies a disavowed theological “hunchback.” More importantly, it is only through a rejuvenated relation with this theological hunchback that historical materialism can ultimately realize its own revolutionary possibilities. While the theological dimension of critical theory has been explored in a variety of disciplines and for a variety of political and philosophical purposes, the same cannot be said for the field of critical pedagogy. In this essay, Tyson Lewis addresses this gap by focusing on mystical traditions of messianism that haunt certain strains of critical pedagogy. He contends that critical pedagogy cannot overcome certain limitations within its own project without unlocking the radical kernel of the messianic. In brief, messianism offers a potential moment for rethinking education outside of a sovereign decision over and against student life by reuniting educational time with the creative time of the now, kairos. In developing a genealogical rethinking of the messianic within critical pedagogy, Lewis focuses on the work of Paulo Freire. By articulating Freire with current theorists of the messianic, including Giorgio Agamben, we can see how the time of the messianic moment is educational time and how educational time, in its most radical formulation, is a messianic opening. Lewis concludes that a resolution of the question of authority as well as a new notion of educational time help to situate the emphasis of critical pedagogy toward a new appreciation of and respect for the theme of potentiality.     

Effects of the use of raised line drawings on blind people’s cognition

The creation of inclusive schools is no simple process as it implies huge changes that might generate resistance and fears, which can undermine the process of change. Quite often the changes in the legislation do not correspond to changes in the conceptions and/or practices of the actors involved in the process. As such, it is important to study what is happening in schools and to understand how they are managing to implement the political changes and overcome the tensions and difficulties they face. This is a comparative case study, aimed at describing five mainstream school teachers, their beliefs and practices, and how these are related to other schooling conditions. This study raises some questions, namely about the importance of an adequate regular school teacher support and an adequate education.