Showing papers in "Journal of Education Policy in 2014"

Socioeconomic school segregation in a market-oriented educational system. The case of Chile

Abstract: This paper presents an empirical analysis of the socioeconomic status (SES) school segregation in Chile, whose educational system is regarded as an extreme case of a market-oriented education. The study estimated the magnitude and evolution of the SES segregation of schools at both national and local levels, and it studied the relationship between some local educational market dynamics and the observed magnitude of SES school segregation at municipal level. The main findings were: first, the magnitude of the SES segregation of both lowSES and high-SES students in Chile was very high (Duncan Index ranged from 0.50 to 0.60 in 2008); second, during the last decade, SES school segregation tended to slightly increase in Chile, especially in high schools (both public and private schools); third, private schools – including voucher schools – were more segregated than public schools for both low-SES and high-SES students; and finally, some market dynamics operating in the Chilean education (like privatization, school choice, and fee-paying) accounted for a relevant proportion of the observed variation in SES school segregation at municipal level. These findings are analyzed from an educational policy perspective in which the link between SES school segregation and market-oriented mechanisms in education plays a fundamental role.

Spheres of influence: what shapes young people’s aspirations at age 12/13 and what are the implications for education policy?

Abstract: Young people’s aspirations remain an enduring focus of education policy interest and concern. Drawing on data from an ongoing five-year study of young people’s science and career aspirations (age 10–14), this paper asks what do young people aspire to at age 12/13, and what influences these aspirations? It outlines the main aspirations and sources of these aspirations as expressed by young people in England in the last year of primary school (survey of 9000+ Y6 pupils, aged 10/11, interviews with 92 children and 76 parents) and the second year of secondary school (survey of 5600+ Y8 pupils, aged 12/13, interviews with 85 pupils). We demonstrate how aspirations are shaped by structural forces (e.g. social class, gender and ethnicity) and how different spheres of influence (home/family, school, hobbies/leisure activities and TV) appear to shape different types of aspirations. The paper concludes by considering the implications for educational policy and careers education.

The impact of high-stakes testing on curriculum and pedagogy: a teacher perspective from Australia

Abstract: Debates continue about how high-stakes testing regimes influence schools at all levels: their impact on teaching practices, distribution of resources and curriculum provision, and whether they achieve the intended increases in student achievement in targeted areas. In 2008, the Australian government introduced a national testing scheme, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), in which all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are required to participate, and a national website, MySchool, was established in 2010 to publish the results of all schools. This paper reports on the first national study of educators’ views on the impact of NAPLAN on Australian schools and students. Over 8000 educators from all states and territories participated in the study, and the findings indicate that the testing regime is leading to a reduction in time spent on other curriculum areas and adjustment of pedagogical practice and curriculum content to mirror the tests. The findings suggest that th...

The mathematics skills of school children: how does England compare to the high-performing East Asian jurisdictions?

Abstract: The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study are two highly respected studies of school pupils’ academic achievement English policy-makers have been disappointed with school children’s performance on these tests, particularly in comparison to the strong results of young people from East Asia In this paper, we provide new insight into the England–East Asia gap in school children’s mathematics skills We do so by considering how cross-national differences in math test scores change between ages 10 and 16 Our results suggest that, although average math test scores are higher in East Asian countries, this achievement gap does not increase between ages 10 and 16 We thus conclude that reforming the secondary school system may not be the most effective way for England to ‘catch up’ with the East Asian nations in the PISA math rankings Rather, earlier intervention, during pre-school and primary school, may be needed instead

Mapping the terrain: Teach For America, charter school reform, and corporate sponsorship

Abstract: In this paper we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA’s key role in developing and connecting personnel, political support, and financial backing for charter reform. Next we examine how the networks unfold at a local level by zooming in on a case study of New Orleans. By mapping out these connections, we hope to provide a foundation for further investigation of how this network affects policies.

A logic of appropriation: enacting national testing (NAPLAN) in Australia

Abstract: This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students’ results on national literacy and numeracy tests – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) – in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers’ learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as ‘enactment’) of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students’ learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results ...

How not to reason with PISA data: an ironic investigation

Abstract: International comparative testing, such as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has considerable impact on policy-makers, the media and the general public. A central assumption underlying PISA is that global variation in students’ academic performance is attributable to national educational structures and policies. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the problematic nature of this assumption. Rather than critiquing it from the outside, we turn the tools, data and presumptions of the current discourse of international comparisons upon themselves, showing that this assumption is refuted by analysis of immigrant student test scores. Data from the PISA 2009 tests show that Chinese immigrant students in New Zealand and Australia achieve math scores that are more similar to those of students in Shanghai than to their non-immigrant Australian and New Zealand peers. Thus, cultural background appears to be more consequential for the educational attainment of Chinese immigrant stude...

Policy Enactment, Context and Performativity: Ontological Politics and Researching Australian National Partnership Policies

Abstract: Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific practices. This set of theoretical tools are usually deployed to analyse interview data collected from a single school or cluster of schools to draw findings or conclusions about the complex processes of policy enactment. We aim to build on this critical policy studies work by, firstly, highlighting key aspects of these theoretical/methodological constructs, secondly, exploring the performative role of research in the materiality of specific contexts and, thirdly, theorising education policy research in terms of ontological politics. We ground this work in a recent collaborative enquiry research project undertaken in Queensland, Australia. This research project emerged ...

Choosing Selves: The Salience of Parental Identity in the School Choice Process.

Abstract: With the proliferation of choice policies in education, parents are increasingly positioned as ‘consumers’ tasked with choosing the ‘best’ school for their children. Yet a large body of research has shown that the process of selecting a school is far more complicated than policy-makers and researchers often predict. This article uses ethnographic data on middle-class parents in a large city who are considering sending their children to a diverse neighborhood public school to further develop our understanding of school choice. Drawing from sociological research on consumption as a social and cultural process, we examine the intersections between parents’ choice of a particular school (i.e. consumption) and their own identity construction. Our data show that the act of choosing a school can become, for parents, a means of expressing and enacting a particular identity. In this case, the intersections between identity and choice pushed many parents – invested in seeing themselves as liberal urbanites – toward...

Access to academic curriculum in Australian secondary schools: a case study of a highly marketised education system

Abstract: This study examines how access to academic curriculum differs between secondary schools in Australia, a country whose education system is marked by high levels of choice, privatisation and competition. Equitable access to academic curriculum is important for both individual students and their families as well as the larger society. Previous research has shown that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to study academic curriculum than their more advantaged peers. Less is known, however, about the extent to which this pattern is related to differential provision of curriculum between schools. We found that low socio-economic schools offer students less access to the core academic curriculum subjects that are important for university entry. We also found that the breadth and depth of courses offered is related to school sector (private or public) and socio-economic context. Previous research has shown that choice and competition are inequitable because they frequently increase schoo...

From England with love… ARK, heterarchies and global ‘philanthropic governance’

Abstract: The recent emergence of new venture philanthropists, social entrepreneurs and neoliberal policy advocates and the new ways in which they configure and perform their political agendas have brought important changes in the way in which education policy is enacted. This study takes some of the ideas sketched in previous work further and develops what was termed there as ‘philanthropic governance’. The first section analyses the transition to a new political framework characterised by new forms of coordination or ‘heterarchies’. These transformations represent new forms of governmentality and power regimes and are deeply rooted within the political economy and political philosophy of neoliberalism. The second section of the study focuses on a set of new policy actors, the ‘new’ philanthropists and explores the organisational model of a group of these philanthropic individuals and enterprises, their discourses, connections, ideological influences and agendas on the ground. Finally, the study reflects on the ne...

Interventions for resilience in educational settings: challenging policy discourses of risk and vulnerability

Abstract: ‘Resilience’ has become a popular goal in research, social policy, intervention design and implementation. Reinforced by its conceptual and political slipperiness, resilience has become a key construct in school-based, universal interventions that aim to develop it as part of social and emotional competence or emotional well-being. Drawing on a case study of a popular behavioural programme used widely in British and American primary schools, this paper uses a critical social understanding that combines bio-scientific and social constructionist ideas in order to evaluate key challenges for policy, research and practice framed around resilience. The paper argues that although critical social perspectives illuminate important contemporary manifestations of old problems with behavioural interventions, and challenge narrow, moralising definitions of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’, they coalesce with behavioural perspectives in a search for better state-sponsored responses to the shared question of how to build res...

Reputation and parental logics of action in local school choice space in Finland

Abstract: Differences in reputation between schools and in classes within schools shape parental choice in the Finnish urban context, even if the differences in school performance and the risks of making a ‘bad’ choice are relatively small. This study analyses the instrumental and expressive orders of schools in a specific educational context. Two overlapping local school choice spaces emerge: the local space of school catchment areas, and the selective space of the city in interaction with neighbouring cities. Entry into the selective space requires different forms of parental capital, and may reproduce educational and social distinctions. Institutions that provide less future exchange value according to the parental conceptions, with socially and ethnically mixed student populations and low expectations of pupils’ contentment are seen to be worth avoiding. The discussion on the choice between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools seems to be superficial and to conceal certain educational reproduction processes, which do not o...

Education policy-making and time

Abstract: This paper examines the global policy convergence toward high-stakes testing in schools and the use of test results to ‘steer at a distance’, particularly as it applies to policy-makers’ promise to improve teacher quality. Using Deleuze’s three syntheses of time in the context of the Australian policy blueprint Quality Education, this paper argues that using test scores to discipline teaching repeats the past habit of policy-making as continuing the problem of the unaccountable teacher. This results in local policy-making enfolding test scores in a pure past where the teacher-as-problem is resolved through the use of data from testing to deliver accountability and transparency. This use of the database returns a digitised form of inspection that is a repetition of the habit of teacher-as-problem. While dystopian possibilities are available through the database, in what Deleuze refers to as a control society, for us the challenge is to consider policy-making as a step into an unknown future, to engage with producing policy that is not grounded on the unconscious interiority of solving the teacher problem, but of imagining new ways of conceiving the relationship between policy-making and teaching.

Free schools in the Big Society: the motivations, aims and demography of free school proposers

Abstract: Free school policy claims to partly decentralise to local proposers decisions over who provides a free school, where and for what reasons, within the constraints of a government approval process. This article analyses empirically the people and organisations doing the proposing and their interactions with the approval process. The article begins by locating free schools within Big Society and quasi-market policies. The emerging free school landscape is then mapped and the motivations, aims and demography of a sample of 50 proposers are explored. A key distinction emerges between two analytical clusters. First, proposers able to negotiate the approval process are shown to draw on a range of professional networks, to have strongly academic educational aims and to on average not seek to specifically serve disadvantaged communities. Second, and conversely, the majority of proposers located in highly disadvantaged areas have aims and expertise that do not fit well with what the government is willing to accept. This is not conceived as a simple dualism but highlights the significance of both a lack of critical engagement with inclusion among accepted proposers and the effects of an approval process that has prioritised an unequal distribution of particular forms of professional expertise and experience.

Cultural and human capital, information and higher education choices

Abstract: This study examines ways in which economic and sociological explanations of higher education (HE) choices may intersect through student’s use of information. We find substantial positive associations between intention to go to university in England and each of: (i) parents’ education; (ii) cultural capital; and (iii) expectations of the size of the graduate premium. We also find an association between beliefs about the size of the graduate premium and cultural capital. These results support an integrated model of participation in HE in which social and economic factors are treated as complementary rather than competing explanations. The results run counter to previous research which has found that associations between participation in HE and socio-economic status (SES) largely disappear once students’ attainment is taken into account. One policy implication of this research is that some indicators of SES (notably household income, eligibility for free school meals or parental occupation) are sub-optimal f...

Using critical policy analysis to examine competing discourses in zero tolerance legislation: do we really want to leave no child behind?

Abstract: The increasing use of zero tolerance discipline policies in the USA has led to a ‘discipline gap,’ in which minoritized students receive harsher and more frequent suspensions and expulsions than their peers from dominant cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Though disciplinary decisions are made by educators at the school level, mandates regarding the disciplinary infractions that must result in exclusionary discipline are made at the federal and state levels. Using a theoretical framework that distinguishes the discourse of safety from the discourse of equity, this critical policy analysis examines how state-level zero tolerance legislation portrays educators, students, and school discipline and reflects neoliberal influence. Findings show that these policies narrowly define schools’ roles as developing academic, but not behavioral, skills. Students are portrayed as rational actors who deserve the punishment meted out by educators when students choose to behave disruptively; and educators have absolut...

Fairness in education – a normative analysis of OECD policy documents

Abstract: Educational policy depends on assumptions about fairness in education, whether they are made explicit or kept implicit. Without a view of fairness, one would be in the dark as to what should be done about the reproduction of social inequality through education, or whether or not anything should be done at all. The aim of this paper is to uncover the view of fairness in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) education policy. It is based on an analysis of the normative argumentation concerning educational fairness in a set of policy documents from the last seven years, with special emphasis on the association between social background and educational achievement. The main result of the analysis is that the OECD explicitly operate with a loose idea of equal opportunity, compatible with even a merely formal equality, but implicitly with a meritocratic variant of fair equality of opportunity. In the final section, I argue that the OECD approach to fairness suffers from a limitation in t...

Parental entrepreneurship in public education: a social force or a policy problem?

Abstract: Parental involvement in public education is an expression of joint responsibility between parents and the state in which parents are expected to comply with current educational policy. Moreover, pa ...

School decentralization as a process of differentiation, hierarchization and selection

Abstract: The Austrian ‘school autonomy policy’, which allowed schools to develop specific ‘curricular profiles’, is taken as an example for discussing processes and effects of school decentralization policies. Data from school case studies (based on qualitative interviews and document analysis) are used to analyse and interpret the processes by which schools and teachers take up policy innovations and translate it into action and structures on school and classroom level. These policy changes and the resulting governance regimes are examined from a perspective on changing modes of ‘action coordination’ between actors on different levels of a school system and from an attention to processes of ‘re-contextualization’ in multi-level governance systems. The main result is that the Austrian decentralization policy – although not explicitly based on a market approach – boosted principles of competitive coordination between schools. In consequence, it resulted in processes of differentiation and hierarchization of schools...

Educational quasi-markets, school effectiveness and social inequalities

Abstract: Over the past few decades, the figure of the market has clearly made its way into the field of education. For some authors, it represents an alternative to regulation by the public authorities, a different form of co-ordination which is better able to meet the objectives of the education systems. Through a secondary analysis of the PISA 2006 database, we test this hypothesis, as well as an alternative one which suggests that the quasi-market, rather than being linked positively to effectiveness of the education systems, would be associated with the students’ achievement dependence on their socio-economic and cultural background and on the social composition of the school they are enrolled in. Our findings suggest that the quasi-market regulation (school autonomy and competition for student recruitment) is not linked to effectiveness and tends to be associated with a stronger link between schools’ social composition and student achievement.

Schools in the making: mapping digital spaces of evidence

Abstract: In this article, the focus is on educational governing in the making. Drawing on conceptual underpinnings of socio-technical approaches, this implies an interest both on the way in which a sound knowledge base for policy measures is created, as on the distribution of that knowledge through publically available instruments. Governing by evidence only is possible when it relies on concrete instruments, such as feedback reports, publically consultable audits and examples of good practice. Since knowledge-related practices increasingly make use of online tools where knowledge is accessible for each and all, three websites are analysed in a particular way to describe the making of evidence. First, considered as active devices, the websites are analysed as essential components of the governing by evidence: by publishing specific data and information in a particular way, they come to constitute what comes to count as evidence and the way in which it comes to count. By addressing their visitors in a particular wa...

Networks in action: new actors and practices in education policy in Brazil

Abstract: This paper focuses on the role of networks in the policy-making process in education and discusses the potential of network analysis as an analytical tool for education policy research. Drawing on publically available data from personal or institutional websites, this paper reports the findings from research carried out between 2005 and 2011. Through document analysis, we investigated the composition, activities and strategies adopted by an important policy network in Latin America and traced its developments in Brazil. We adopted the categories – texts, technical artefacts, human beings and money – proposed by Callon to identify the links between the main actors and organizations in that network and drew our conceptual framework from the work of Gramsci in order to analyse the struggle for hegemony and the role of business interests in education policy-making. The findings show that the expansion of networks does not replace the State in education, but rather the State constitutes a strategic node in the...

Reforming teacher education in England: ‘an economy of discourses of truth’

Abstract: Education policy works by producing sets of ideas that become part of the ‘taken for grantedness’ of the way things should be. This frequently involves the production of hard policy texts that represent and document and illustrate what has to be done or what is desirable to do.

Foucault, Power and Education

Abstract: Every time I read Ball’s work on Foucault, I cannot but admire the way he can discuss complex notions and issues in such an accessible and clear way. This book is not an exception: it is a clear ex...

Playful Hyper Responsibility: Toward a Dislocation of Parents' Responsibility?.

Abstract: Over the past 10–15 years, state-funded schools have begun to require parents to assume an undefined and infinite personal responsibility In this article, we investigate how schools organize responsibility games to respond to this challenge and how these games affect the concept of responsibility We point to a dislocation in the way parents are assigned responsibility, because the definition of responsibility is not only a question of formulating rules or providing advice We argue that what emerges is a kind of playful hyper responsibility that identifies responsibility as the participation in a process of public exploration by parents of the definition of their specific responsibilities This has several consequences, one of which is that it becomes difficult to have a political discussion about what can reasonably be expected of parents

Rhetoric and Practice in Pre-Service Teacher Education: The Case of Teach for America.

Abstract: Teach For America (TFA), an organization that places college graduates in urban and rural classrooms for two-year terms of service, is lauded by reformers who see its five-week summer training institute as evidence that teachers have little to learn before entering classrooms. Yet, while boosters see TFA as a radical alternative to traditional teacher education, a look at the evolution of their increasingly robust summer training model hardly affirms that perception. In fact, much of what is done in the summer institute parallels the work of traditional teacher education programs in the USA – a surprising state of affairs given the rhetoric of so many TFA supporters. This project traces the evolution of TFA’s summer training institute across two decades, highlighting the growing divide between TFA’s outward-facing image and its actual work. Framing TFA’s summer institute as a case study for examining the relationship between rhetoric and practice in education, the article raises broader questions about ho...

Knowing Asia: creative policy translation in an Australian school setting

Abstract: Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enactment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to ‘know Asia’ creates space to imagine localised narrative possibilities that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobilisation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school leaders to imagine policy in innovative ways; however, it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for ‘lik...

The emergence of a market-driven funding mechanism in K-12 education in British Columbia: creeping privatization and the eclipse of equity

Abstract: Since 2002, British Columbia’s education system has undergone extensive change following amendments to the BC School Act (Bill 34). This article presents a critical analysis of policy changes to the K-12 education finance system, particularly the expansion of the legal capacity of school districts to create ‘school district business companies,’ a phenomenon that is unique within Canada. These companies enable public school districts to establish for-profit companies that operate at arm’s length from the school board, yet generate revenue from private sources to supplement government operational grants. This shift occurred in parallel with fiscal restraint measures that centralized control over the level of government funding while downloading inflationary and new costs to school boards. The result has been structural funding shortfalls for school districts across the province. Structural funding shortfalls, coupled with a push toward market-driven revenue generation, signaled to school districts that they...

Knowledge and knowers: towards a realist sociology of education

Abstract: This highly stimulating volume explores and develops a framework to understand knowledge in education and education policy. It departs from the observation by Bernstein (2000) that the core dimensi...