Resisting Educational Inequality

Reframing Policy and Practice in Schools Serving Vulnerable Communities

Susanne Gannon, Robert Hattam, Wayne Sawyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138089310
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351612548
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Resisting Educational Inequality examines poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality and when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics.

In this volume, leading scholars from Australia and across the UK examine these issues through three main focus areas:

• Mapping the damage: what are our explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality?
• Resources for hope: what do we know about how educational engagement and success can be improved in schools serving vulnerable communities?
• Sustaining hope: how might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future?

Using a range of theories and methodologies, including empirical and theory-building work as well as policy critique, this book opens innovative areas of thinking about the social issues surrounding educational practice and policy. By exploring different explanations and approaches to school change and considering how research, policy and practice might be reframed, this book moves systematically and insightfully through damage towards hope. In combining pedagogy, policy and experience, Resisting Educational Inequality will be a valuable resource for all researchers and students, policymakers and education practitioners.

1

Researching Educational Sites Serving ‘Disadvantaged’ (Sub)Urban Communities

Reframing policy and practice

Susanne Gannon, Robert Hattam and Wayne Sawyer

In the field of education, a focus on schools and other educational sites serving vulnerable communities is urgent in the present moment. This edited collection is about poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts, at a time of rising inequality when policy research suggests that such issues have been ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. The relentless economisation of all spheres of social life that is associated with neoliberalism has coincided with the emergence of big data architectures that have reconfigured schooling everywhere. This has been a perfect storm for public¹ schooling and the democratic impulses of education for social justice. Within neoliberalism, individuals are entirely responsible for the conditions of their lives, with poverty and exclusion often cast as poor decisions or bad behaviour – masking government lack of interest, punitive policy and ever-widening income gaps. Despite premature announcements of the end of neoliberalism (e.g. Peters, 2011), market rationalities now dominate all sectors of education and metrics rule for children, teachers, systems and policy makers. The waste products of capital are, as ever, the poor, their families and communities (Ashurst & Venn, 2014).

The young people who are least well served by schooling are often caught in a mesh of intersecting and compounding disadvantages. They may have experienced generational poverty or be subject to more recent exclusions forced by widening income gaps and ever-increasing endemic precarity of employment. They may belong to, or identify with, groups of people who have been historically marginalised and excluded from mainstream schooling. Geographically they are likely to be distanced from centres of power, privilege and opportunity. The compounding effects of disadvantage are felt before young people begin school and they shape futures beyond school and through the life course. Teachers who work with them need nuanced understandings of how poverty impacts on learning and opportunity. Commitment, empathy and responsive, intellectually robust, research-informed teaching strategies are important. In institutions that can be experienced as oppressive, teachers can sometimes open cracks that let some light get in. While teachers are also subject to discursive logics that foreground deficits and overlook the capacities and rights of children to education, they are potential agents of resistance and change. In collaboration, and in networks that exceed the limits of particular classrooms and schools, teachers can be keys to reframing schooling as a democratic and optimistic institution.

When these editors began teaching in state high schools in Australia many decades ago, the project of education was – at least in part, as we understood it as young teachers – to contribute to futures where lives of dignity might become possible for all citizens in a pluralist democracy. In practice, and in effect, schooling acted as a sorting machine where privilege was entrenched, and exclusion exacerbated. Articulations of social justice principles provided no purchase for critique and fewer tools for change. Teachers now have access to a volume and range of data about students that was unimaginable even a decade ago, and much of the current rhetoric around its use for improving learning suggests that data is the panacea for all educational ills. However, despite the flood of data and policy levers that mandate its use, disadvantage is increasing and schooling is in crisis, residualised in increasingly stratified and marketised educational systems. Further layers of stratification are created within schools as well as between them by streaming, setting and sorting. The notion of ‘public’ has been re-contoured from earlier ideals of justice in an egalitarian society as public and private interests have blurred (Gerrard, Savage & O’Connor, 2017: 504). Equity in education is now conceived narrowly as parental exercise of choice – to be facilitated by league tables of standardised test results – and aimed at the production of economic citizens. Recently Francis and Mills (2012) have asked if we even know ‘what a socially just education system (would) look like’. In a subsequent paper, they suggest that researchers tend to critique present trends ‘without drawing on empirical or philosophical evidence to make constructive suggestions for preferential practice’ (Francis, Mills & Lupton, 2017: 414). With this book we hope to begin to respond to this gap.

Chapters in this book use a range of theories and methodologies, including empirical and theory-building work, as well as policy critique. The authors focus on educational debates around poverty and vulnerability – in educational practice, from a system level to classroom pedagogy, and in policy. While there is no shortage of books that deal with poverty and education, this book attempts to open innovative areas of thinking on these issues by exploring different explanations, presenting different approaches to school change and considering how research, policy and practice might be reframed. Each chapter in its own way – and the book as a whole – aims to generate counter-logics that disrupt or unsettle ways of thinking that have come to dominate public discourse around education and poverty.

History of this book

Resisting Educational Inequality: Reframing Policy and Practice in Schools Serving Vulnerable Communities samples research from networks that have recently formed across Australia and the United Kingdom to facilitate knowledge-building and collaboration about poverty, education and schooling.

The network in Australia was initiated by the authors of this chapter with a three-day workshop at Western Sydney University in October 2015 that brought together researchers working in peri-urban areas marked by cumulative multiple deprivation in New South Wales (NSW), Western Australia (WA), Queensland, Victoria and South Australia (SA). The workshop was planned as a first step in developing a national research network capable of:

i co-ordinating and consolidating a research programme focused on such contexts;

ii developing multiple disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research projects to gain traction on the relevant problems;

iii gaining collaboration on larger-scale programmes of research with international significance; and

iv working across multiple national research bodies (such as the Australian Council of Deans of Education [ACDE], the Australian Association for Research in Education [AARE], the Australian Teacher Education Association [ATEA], the Australian Sociological Association [TASA] and the Australian Curriculum Studies Association [ACSA]).

We invited a group of educational researchers in Australia who have been engaged in significant empirical and theoretical research in schools serving so-called ‘disadvantaged’ communities across the country, with a view to reframing policy, practice and future research. All of the participants had long histories of working in collaboration with practitioners, unions and education systems for socially just outcomes. Subsequent workshops supported by the Australian Association of Research in Education followed at the University of South Australia and the University of Southern Queensland in 2016 and 2017. The first of these, convened by Dr Alison Wrench, focused on discussing the frontiers of action research approaches and providing colleagues with an opportunity to share views of significant research topics in different state jurisdictions, such as the different variations of school reviews being conducted by state education departments. The second workshop was convened by Dr Stewart Riddle and the focus was on refining the research programme for the emergent research network.

The UK network was formed through a 2016 British Education Research Association Research Commission grant on Poverty and Policy Advocacy which facilitated a series of six day-long workshops bringing local authorities, practitioners and researchers together in Leeds, Cardiff, Belfast, Glasgow, Oxford and Manchester – thus addressing particular localised policy effects in the four jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. The BERA Commission aimed to develop networks of research-active practitioners to engage in contextually sensitive policy deliberations on poverty, education and schooling. The network aimed to develop new critical understandings of the contexts in which children and young people learn, the factors that impede their learning, and the impacts of cumulative multiple deprivation(s) on education. They saw the need to develop better understandings of the relationships between schools and communities, recognition of resources of marginalised communities and implications for policy and research. Insights would guide future policy and research in poverty and education. This first phase of this research has recently been published (Ivinson et al, 2017).

Collaborations between the networks began with multiple symposia presented at the British Educational Research Association conference, the Australian Association for Research in Education conference, and the European Educational Research Association conferences over 2016 and 2017. Through all these interactions we increasingly recognised resonances between our contexts, and remained committed to what we might learn from, and with, one another and the various nodes of the networks. The set of papers that make up this collection have been drafted by educational researchers from the two research networks and chapters respond to the provocation outlined in the following section.

Provocation

Researching schools serving ‘disadvantaged’ communities seems urgent in the present historical conjuncture. Since the mid-1980s there is rising evidence of growing economic inequality in Australia and across the OECD (Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2012; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Inequality as a policy problem in general in Australia has come to prominence in national debates over the last decade, initially through Labor governments addressing equality of opportunity for disadvantaged cohorts in higher education, working towards a supposedly sector-blind needs-based funding model across school education and developing an individualised National Disability Insurance Scheme directed to client needs and choice. Conservative Australian governments that followed have equivocated on government responsibilities for social justice provision. The Abbott government’s first national budget, for example – borrowing a logic of austerity from other nations including the UK – was perceived by many analysts and large numbers of the Australian population as unfairly asking the poorest in our communities to contribute the most to balance the budget.

Australian educational policy agendas have in many ways followed directions that were initiated by ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the United Kingdom, where social provision had been reorganised through market economics – a trend continued under the Tory governments of David Cameron and Theresa May. In education, this led to the fragmentation and privatisation of state-funded comprehensive schools, devolution of school governance, and a proliferation of for-profit actors and Charter-style ‘academies’ that have reshaped schooling. This has been accompanied by a highly regulated school inspection regime and the forced conversion into ‘academies’ of schools deemed to be ‘failing’. Further more elaborated and nuanced analysis of education policy in Australia and the UK is found in the chapters of this book.

There is much educational policy research indicating that issues of inequality are being ignored or distorted through reframing within neoliberal logics (e.g. Ball, 2008, 2012; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Smyth & Wrigley, 2013; Au & Ferrare, 2015; Lingard et al, 2016a; Lingard, Martino & Rezai-Rashti, 2016b). Various policy actions are weakening the life chances of the least advantaged and, as many scholars have detailed, recent trends that exacerbate these problems in Australia include:

• high-stakes testing and league tables of results in the name of the choice agenda resulting in progressive residualisation of the public school sector under the auspices of marketisation and privatisation logics, leaving some with the only choice as the neighbourhood public school with increasingly diminished resources (Comber, 2012; Vickers, 2015; Lingard et al, 2016a, 2016b);

• the recasting of ‘equity’ discourse to justify redistribution of education funding to wealthier private schools at the expense of public schools serving the ‘less advantaged’ (Singh & Taylor, 2007; Kenway, 2013);

• growth in youth unemployment in ‘disadvantaged’ communities, often double the national average (Denny & Churchill, 2016);

• changes to post-compulsory schooling policy sustaining a sorting and selecting process through curriculum that privileges the cultures of more powerful groups while disengaging others (Teese & Polesel, 2003).

Researching schools serving ‘disadvantaged’ communities can be framed around inter-connected aims that have threaded through our network collaborations: (1) to develop better explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality, especially related to social class and/or poverty; (2) to consider how schools and teachers might actually improve educational engagement and success for those from families and communities that historically have struggled to advance through education; and (3) to consider how policy and practice, as well as research, might be reframed in the light of these concerns. The book is organised around these three aims as focus areas.

Authors were invited initially to write short chapters, and to nominate where, within the three sections of the book, they felt their work fitted. In the final stages of compiling the book, we have chosen to include one longer chapter in each section. Each of these is a co-authored chapter, and each focuses on the experiences of particular learners – students from western Sydney who entered university with the support of an equity scholarship for disadvantaged students, students excluded from the mainstream who are re-engaging in an alternative education setting in rural Queensland, and working-class boys learning to be literate in schools in the ex-mining communities of the Welsh valleys. While each of these three chapters delves into the detail of educational experiences from the perspectives of young people, they draw on widely different literature and theoretical framings to understand these experiences. This diversity of approaches characterises the book as we feel that attempts at ‘reframing’ educational disadvantage require many different tools for thinking. Chapters provide fresh policy critiques and re-readings of data sets, they challenge entrenched binaries that disenfranchise some students and advantage others, they give detailed historical accounts of localised policy effects, they examine the perspectives of beginning teachers working in high-poverty contexts, they examine higher education curriculum in teacher education, they elaborate extended research-informed collaborations with educators in pre-schools and schools, and they describe pedagogical reforms and school-based initiatives that appear to reengage young people in learning. The theorists that we draw upon range from Arendt, Apple, Ball, Barad, Bourdieu and Braidotti, through to Ziechner and Zipin. Each of them helps us think differently about the challenges of education and poverty. The following section outlines how we have framed up the three inter-related focus areas for the book.

Focus Area (1) Mapping the damage: Better explanations for educational inequality

There is a rich archive of research that aims to provide explanations for the ways in which schooling and social stratification interact.² There is now a reasonable sociological consensus that school retention, school completion and university entrance are strongly correlated with students’ socio-economic backgrounds, and that this is a systemic issue (Mills & Gale, 2010). As well, there is evidence to suggest that policies infused with neoliberal logics are introducing new practices and instruments that accentuate the tendencies of schooling to reproduce advantages and disadvantages, while also suppressing the capacities of schooling to further i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of contributors
• 1. Researching educational sites serving ‘disadvantaged’ (sub)urban communities: reframing policy and practice
• FOCUS AREA 1: Mapping the damage
• FOCUS AREA 2: Resources for hope
• FOCUS AREA 3: How might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future?
• Index