Fresh Perspectives on School Choice

School choice advocacy is dominated by perspectives that reflect a tendency to regard public schooling as a private service commodity. In recent years, numerous works of Anglo‐American political philosophy, sociology and legal theory have attempted to restore a conception of public schooling as an institution that cultivates civic virtue. Counterintuitively, these works also endorse prudently regulated school choice as a means of honouring public purposes while accommodating pluralism within liberal democracies. Four such recent works help outline the salient dimensions of this perspective and the disputes within it. While not a political panacea, this perspective ought to inform public deliberations about school choice and public education generally in Anglophone nations.     

QUALIFYING MY FAITH IN THE COMMON SCHOOL IDEAL: A NORMATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR DEMOCRATIC JUSTICE

In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz makes the case that charter schooling can enable multiple publics to develop and create educational visions. Charter schooling policies can enable these publics to pursue these visions and agendas on behalf of both public and common educational goals as well as goals associated with particular identities and interests. This vision of a plural public sphere, with its movement away from purely state‐run traditional public schools, challenges the common school ideal that has been part of the Western nation‐state narrative for several centuries. Yet the common school ideal need not focus on one particular kind of school structure; rather, the ideal represents a moral claim: that schools receiving public funds should provide participatory parity to all students, achieved through educational structures and curriculum shaped by principles of democratic justice. Participatory parity and its guiding normative principles, Knight Abowitz concludes, help to qualify and clarify our faith in the common school ideal shaped for a new era.     

What is Common About Common Schooling? Rational Autonomy and Moral Agency in Liberal Democratic Education

In this essay I critique two influential accounts of rational autonomy in common schooling that conceive liberalism as an ideal form of life, and I offer an alternative approach to democratic education that views liberal theory as concerned with coexistence among rival ways of living. This view places moral agency, not rational autonomy, at the heart of schooling in liberal societies—a moral agency grounded in initiation into dynamic traditions that enable self-definition and are accompanied by exposure to life-paths other than one's own. This alternative challenges the tendency in large diverse democracies (such as those of the US and the UK) to prefer common to particularistic schools, thereby placing many types of faith and secular schools on a more equal footing and providing moral justification for education in the national cultures of small liberal republics (such as Denmark, Israel and Lithuania) that maintain special relationships to particular groups while acknowledging the rights of all citizens. I call this approach the pedagogy of difference.     

‘Tomorrow's Schools’ in New Zealand: from social democracy to market managerialism

This paper uses one national case to illustrate how diverse ideological agendas of central state agencies contest the discursive space within which major education policy reforms are developed. In Aotearoa New Zealand in 1988, ‘self‐managed’ schools were promoted ostensibly to allow parents more say in their children’s education and local school administration. The Tomorrow’s Schools reform policy texts included an existing social democratic partnership rhetoric, positioning principals as professional leaders working collaboratively with elected parent boards of trustees. However, the new ideology of ‘parental choice’ of school within a local schooling marketplace, underpinned by a chief executive or market managerial model of principalship, was later operationalised through mechanisms of ‘steerage’ from the centre. To explain this shift, we examine selected policy text pre‐cursors to the reforms and identify how contrasting forms of ‘principal’ and ‘teacher’ identity emerged within social democratic, neo‐liberal and market managerial ideologies. We further show that while radical (Treasury) market liberal arguments for labour market deregulation and consumer choice failed to gain widespread support, the State Services Commission preferred market managerialist strategies for promoting public accountability of schools (based on aggregate student achievement outcome data and centrally determined national educational priorities) were successfully embedded during the 1990s.     

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.     

Schools as Communities: Four Metaphors, Three Models, and a Dilemma or Two

This paper examines two questions. The first is what it would mean for schools to be communities. This question is pursued by examining four metaphors for community: families, congregations, guilds, and democratic polities. Three models of school communities are then sketched. The second question is whether schools that are communities are inherently illiberal. The paper distinguishes between a liberal interpretation of schools as communities, where schools are viewed as limited-purpose free associations, and a communitarian interpretation where community and polity are not adequately distinguished. I argue that, within a framework of liberal pluralism, schools can be communities without being illiberal.     

Single‐sex Education for Girls: heterosexuality,gendered subjectivity and school choice

Single‐sex education for girls constitutes a focal point around which issues of gender, choice and educational decision‐making coalesce. My concern is not to enter the debate about the merits of single‐sex education for girls per se, but to examine the relationship between discourses of femininity and discourses around single‐sex schooling to see how they interact in the choice of single‐sex schools by girls and their parents. In this paper, I explore the ways in which aspects of feminist poststructuralist theory can be used to offer a more dynamic and complex account of the processes of school choice than that assumed by neo‐liberal theorists. The theory I develop is illuminated by interviews with three girls and their parents, from different social‐class backgrounds, at the point at which they were making decisions about which secondary school to apply for. A focus such as this enables me to do two things: firstly, to develop a more adequate understanding of the relationship between gender and educational decision‐making; and secondly, to critique the underlying theory of instrumental rationality, and its relationship to school choice, which has underwritten the marketisation of education in Aotearoa/New Zealand.     

Is Inquiry Learning Unjust? Cognitive Load Theory and the Democratic Ends of Education

Cognitive load theorists Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark argue that an array of inquiry-based pedagogies widely promoted in teacher preparation programmes are out of step with current cognitive science and should be eliminated for novice learners. According to these cognitive load theorists, inquiry-based pedagogies are likely to increase achievement gaps between the lowest and highest achieving students while reducing total learning. On almost any theory of justice in educational provision, an educational practice that results in the acquisition of fewer total educational goods by students and greater inequality in the distribution of goods will be considered unjust. I argue that inquiry-based pedagogies can be defended, even for novice learners, not as means to other goods but as embodiments of the least controversial liberal-democratic educational ends. I claim that once understood as part of the ends of liberal democratic education, inquiry-based pedagogies cannot be rightly eliminated from educational pathways. In addition, I argue that by interpreting cognitive load theory in light of uncontroversial liberal democratic educational ends, central claims about instructional design that are advanced by both cognitive load theorists and their opponents are either moderated or overturned. Most notably, the claim that there are no domain-general inquiry skills which need to be taught, which is advanced by cognitive load theorists against inquiry theorists, is revealed to be self-refuting. Integrating cognitive load theory into processes of liberal democratic problem-solving turns out to be a biologically secondary domain-general inquiry skill of just the sort cognitive load theorists deny exists.     

Black bodies,White rural spaces: disturbing practices of unbelonging for ‘refugee’ students

In global times, when the forced migration of refugees from war-torn countries like Sudan impacts the demography of once ethnically homogenous schooling spaces, I consider the need to better understand the geographical making of racism. This article explores the lived experience of two newly arrived Sudanese students studying at a rural high school in Australia. Using Foucaultian theory, and Foucault’s theories as they have been taken up by Judith Butler, I explore the production of educational exclusions at a rural school. I investigate the Sudanese students’ struggle for belonging against particular discourses of rural Whiteness. In the students’ rural schooling space, their Black bodies are highly visible and are discursively cast as ‘out of place’. I examine the way discourses of rural Whiteness produce schooling exclusions that implicate schools in the spatial regulation of unbelonging.     

The global middle class and school choice: a cosmopolitan sociology

In this paper we suggest the need for research which addresses school choice as a global phenomenon. That is, a form of choice which extends beyond local politics and policymaking. We consider here the educational choices and choice making contexts of a burgeoning, mobile, post-national middle class who operate on a global scale. We also sketch the educational market within which these choices are considered and realised but the main focus is on demand side issues. The paper seeks to open a space for further research, in which to ask some old and some new questions about social class and social reproduction through schooling, and to make the case for choice researchers to attend more carefully to choice in a framework of mobility, globalisation and related new kinds of social class identities and interests.     

School Choice and Social Injustice: A Response to Harry Brighouse

In his book, School Choice and Social Justice, Harry Brighouse attempts to show how a properly designed school–choice plan, guided by his liberal theory of social justice, can enhance equal educational opportunity and provide every child with an education for autonomy. In this paper, I argue that Brighouse is overly confident about the egalitarian potential of school choice. He seems to be defending a policy for what it could be, rather than looking at school choice for what it is: a flawed educational reform that makes things worse in terms of social justice. I question Brighouse's notion that the kind of school choice he advocates, one that promotes equal educational opportunity and education for autonomy, is politically feasible.     

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.     

Individualism, Diversity and Unity: Goals in Tension in Public Education

This review essay examines three recent books addressing recurring or current controversies in public education. One is historically based, a second focuses on a range of questions, and the third concentrates on the single issue of school choice. All of them, however, may be read against a backdrop of tension among three enduring liberal democratic values: individualism, diversity and unity. Public education is surely aimed at individual success and at preparing future adults to make choices, ideally among a range of opportunities. The existence of a multicultural society and the development of identity politics, however, mean that members of groups often wish to preserve their particular identities despite a common education. Finally, public education has been based on inculcating values that ostensibly we all share in common. Each of these aims may conflict with one or both of the others. Therefore, setting the proper course requires an ongoing attempt to strike the proper balance among them. It is within this framework that I examine these books.     

学校变革的三种影响力量

教育行政推动、社会需求驱动和学校自主选择是影响学校变革的三种主要力量,它们对学校变革的影响各不相同。为使学校变革能顺利推进,一方面要尽力改进教育行政管理和引导社会对教育的需求,为学校变革创造支持环境;另一方面要从学校自主选择切入,培育推动学校变革的力量。为此,要重点提升校长的教育责任感、事业心、办学理念、开拓精神、改革意志等办学品质。     

Reevaluating the Politics and Research of School Choice

This article addresses the ongoing conflicts over the effectiveness of school choice in America's educational system. After discussing the ideological foundations of the school choice movement, I analyze four controversies where the research done to evaluate school choice programs was hotly debated and inconclusive. The central holding of the paper is that these disputes are indicative of an ideologically saturated policy environment, in which opposing factions are far too eager to either condemn or support a school choice program before it has fully matured. I conclude by encouraging scholars and policymakers to examine factors beyond achievement, such as democratic participation and involvement, when considering school choice as an educational reform.     

Co-operative schools: democratic values,networks and leadership

ABSTRACT

For over a decade, co-operative schools have struck a note of discord within the highly orchestrated context of English education policy. They encapsulate an old set of ideas but re-articulate them for new times by engaging with educational frameworks which are locked into the so-called global education reform movement (GERM) based upon on standards, standardisation, a mixture of centralised and devolved accountabilities, leadership, testing and accountability. Yet co-operative schools ostensibly aim to embed a set of wide-ranging values and principles: equality, equity, democracy, self-help, self-responsibility and solidarity as well as the principles of education, democratic control and community ownership, all of which echo the history of labour movements. The co-operative legal model not only adheres to co-operative values and principles but necessitates stakeholder involvement in the governance of schools: pupils, staff, parents, community and, potentially, alumni are all expected to play a role. These are compared to David Hargreaves’ ideas about a ‘self-improving school system’. I analyse the emergence of the co-operative network and the reasons for its dramatic growth alongside the complex problems it faced. In turn, these help us to understand the possibilities and contradictions inherent in attempts to build inclusive and democratic educational networks.     

Politics,religion and morals: the symbolism of public schooling for the urban middle-class identity

Research points to sections of the middle-class repopulating the ‘ordinary’ urban public school and whilst there are key differences in how they are navigating public school choices, from ‘seeking a critical mass’ to resisting traditional methods of choice and going ‘against-the-grain’, or collectively campaigning for a brand new public school, the urban middle-class are developing contemporary methods to challenge the existing ways of thinking about middle-class choice. Drawing on this literature, this paper explores the symbolism of public schooling for relatively affluent choosers in the city of Melbourne, Australia. The positioning of public schooling as essentially secular and liberal indicates how the public school is valorised within the contemporary market place. Within a market that tends to undersell the public school, the perceived lack of organised religion and progressivism may be the unique selling point for the cosmopolitan, globalised consumer.     

Scientists,Engineers and the Society of Free Choice: Enrollment as Policy and Practice in Swedish Science and Technology Education 1960–1990

This article portrays the formation of a new problem area within Swedish educational policy in the 1960s, namely the need of scientific manpower and the demands to entice more individuals into studies in science and technology. As a consequence school science was given the mission to be interesting, fun and to change young people’s attitudes towards these subjects. In the 1970s and 1980s many initiatives were taken to increase the numbers of applicants at high school and university levels, both within curricular frames and out-of-school activities such as science clubs. Through an approach inspired by governmentality studies, I describe the strategies deployed to remedy the problem as rationalities of liberal governmentality. The actions taken were executed in a way to make school children choose science or technology out of their free will. It was an exercise of power that was not meant to restrain but instead to enable action.     

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.