Challenges for Public Education

Reconceptualising Educational Leadership, Policy and Social Justice as Resources for Hope

Jane Wilkinson, Richard Niesche, Scott Eacott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138348202
• eBook ISBN: 9780429791932
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An accelerating pattern in Australia and internationally is the dismantling of public education systems as part of a long-standing trend towards the modernisation, marketisation and privatisation of educational provision. Responsibility for direct delivery of education services has been shifted to contracting and monitoring under the clarion call of school and leadership autonomy and parental choice. Part of this pattern is an increasing blurring of boundaries between the state and private sector, a move from government to new forms of 'strategic' governance, and from hierarchy to heterarchy.

Challenges for Public Education examines the educational leadership, policy and social justice implications of these trends in Australia and internationally. It maps this movement through early shifts to school-based management in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and recent moves such as the academies programme in England and charter schools in the United States. It draws on recent studies of a distinct new phase in Australian school reform – the creation of 'independent public schools' (IPS) in Western Australia and Queensland – and global policy moves in public education in order to provide a truly international dialogue and debate on these matters.

This book moves beyond critique. It innovatively brings together Australian and international perspectives and a rich range of diverse theoretical lenses: practice philosophy, feminism, gender, relational, and postmodernism. As such, it provides a crucial forum for illuminating alternate ways to conceptualise educational leadership, policy and social justice as resources for hope.

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Challenges for public education

Perils and possibilities for educational leadership, policy and social justice

Jane Wilkinson,Scott Eacott and Richard Niesche

Introduction

The genesis of this edited collection arose from an initial discussion in 2014 between us as editors about the pressing issues we saw occurring in education in Australia. One of the main areas we identified was an accelerating pattern in Australia and internationally of the dismantling of public education systems as part of a long-standing trend towards the modernisation, marketisation and privatisation of educational provision. Part of this pattern includes an increasing blurring of boundaries between the state and private sector, a move from government to new forms of strategic governance, and from hierarchy to heterarchy. Given Australia’s history as a settler nation with a history of policy-borrowing from Anglophone nations, the rise of charter schools in the United States and chains of academies in England signalled to us an ominous trend for Australian public education.

There were signs in 2014 that Australia might be moving down its US and English counterparts’ path. State conservative governments in Western Australia and subsequently Queensland had announced the formation of Independent Public Schools (IPS). Greater powers were given to school principals to hire staff, manage budgets and develop curricula. These moves were justified under the clarion call of freeing educational leaders and schools from so-called stifling red tape and moving decisions closer to key education stakeholders such as parents and local communities (Department of Education and Training, 2015). The May 2014 Federal Budget provided $70 million to fund the creation of IPS in order to ‘encourage stronger links between schools, parents and the local community’ and give ‘schools and school leaders greater autonomy … to make the decisions and develop the courses that best meet the needs of their students’ (Department of Education and Training, 2015). In the same budget, however, ‘$80 billion was cut from schools and hospitals’ (The Satellite, 2014).

The creation of IPS in Western Australia and Queensland followed early moves to school-based management. These included a three-year trial of school-based management in the 1970s in Edmonton, Canada (Townsend, Wylie & Wilkinson, 2017), New Zealand and then Victoria, Australia in the 1990s. As we witnessed the two Australian states shifting responsibility for direct delivery of education services from the state to principals and teachers under the rhetoric of greater school and leadership autonomy and parental power, we wondered: what were the consequences for schools, principals and teachers grappling with less resources, finances and access to central personnel? What lessons could be learned for public education from international experiences of school autonomy similar to IPS? What could be learned from an earlier move to autonomy in Victoria, which, it is claimed, had led to a ‘ghettoisation’ of schooling with increasing numbers of students in equity groups concentrated in low SES schools (Smyth, 2011)?

As scholars writing and researching in the areas of educational leadership for social justice, we were concerned by the equity impact of declines in public school enrolments in Australia. These declines have been fuelled by a succession of federal government funding policies which have privileged a neoliberal discourse of education as a private good, accompanied by a pathologisation of the public. Funding regimes have increasingly privileged the creation of new private schools and the subsidisation of non-government schools, making them more affordable and attractive to middle-class families. These policy trends, in turn, have led to increasing divides within government schools located in wealthier areas and those located without, and between government and non-government schools. A report into resource gaps which compared Australia to other OECD nations revealed the consequences of such moves. Australia had the largest gap in the OECD in terms of shortage of teachers in disadvantaged and advantaged schools; the fourth largest gap in the shortage or inadequacy of educational material and physical infrastructure between disadvantaged and advantaged schools; continuing high inequity in education outcomes; and one of the highest levels of school social segregation compared to comparator nations such as Canada (Cobbold, 2017).

Our concerns were that despite an increasing acceleration towards the privatisation of public education systems as part of national and international movements, there appeared to be muted public debate about the potential consequences of such moves, particularly in terms of social justice and equity. This was despite some scrutiny of the untested claims that greater autonomy afforded to IPS schools would improve student outcomes. It was despite public protests in 2014 by Western Australian public school teachers and parents in response to major cuts to school funding, while simultaneously the IPS rollout continued. There was and is growing interest in the rise of independent public schools and increasing school autonomy amongst policy-makers in Australia, signalled by the creation of IPS in two Australian states accompanied by federal government support. However, there still remains a lack of substantial and informed debate amongst policy-makers and in the public sphere about how such moves could be enacted in ways that preserve the key values of public schooling: public ownership, equity, access and public purpose (Darling-Hammond & Montgomery, 2008).

In late 2014, we held a workshop at the University of New South Wales and a subsequent symposium at the Australian Association of Educational Research (AARE) annual conference (Wilkinson & Niesche, 2014). In these forums we brought together a group of Australian and international scholars to discuss and debate these concerns. We asked participants to consider the following:

• What were the social justice implications of national and international trends towards what appeared to be an accelerated dismantling of the public education system – the process of which continues to be ‘profoundly anti-democratic and opaque’ (Pollack, 2004, p. vii, as cited in Ball, 2009)?
• Given the increasing ‘responsibilisation’ (Lingard, 2014) placed upon principals through these trends, what methods and theoretical resources could be mobilised to speak back in ways that foregrounded educational leaders’ agency, beyond the notion of leadership as a technicist exercise aiming to achieve instrumentalist goals (Wilkinson, 2017)?

These questions became the guiding focus for this book and underpin the aims of this edited collection. Hence, in responding to these questions, the book draws together perspectives from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, England and Sweden in order to:

• map increasing trends towards the privatisation of public education nationally and internationally;
• explore how a range of theoretical perspectives can help to understand this phenomenon;
• provide fresh insights into these changes and their implications for educational leadership, policy and social justice;
• contribute to debates in the public sphere and educational leadership research that foreground discussions about the public purpose of public education, as opposed to the private purposes of education signalled in dominant discourses around school autonomy and privatisation; and
• suggest ways forward that allow us to re-imagine forms of collective and socially just educational praxis in what may appear to be a beleaguered public education field.

Yet why do these issues matter? We now turn to a brief discussion and mapping of national and international literature and debates within the field in order to situate the preceding aims in terms of their wider significance and purpose.

Perils and possibilities of public education: mapping the field

The privatisation of public sector education has been underway for the last 30 years or so across a large and diverse range of countries around the world. Arguably beginning with the early adopters in Western contexts such as England, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, these shifts towards privatisation have been multi-layered and complex. In order to understand and identify the processes, structures and characteristics of these reforms it is necessary to analyse the diverse involvement of different businesses, corporations, governments and individuals in both the incorporation of private logics into education as well as more overt education reforms on a larger scale. Stephen Ball (2007) has provided a useful framework of analysis for this process. Ball analyses privatisation of, in and through education as following a multi-faceted and three-layered set of complex relationships:

1. Organisational changes in public sector institutions (recalibration);
2. New state forms and modalities (governance, networks and performance management); and
3. The privatisation of the state itself and the interests of capital (public services as a profit opportunity and effective public service provision) (Ball, 2007, pp. 83–84).

These three levels highlight the trends that have developed through the privatisation of the state and a resultant range of associated governance processes and structures. Ball and Youdell (2007) also highlight the hidden agendas behind and within these privatisation moves. These include the deployment of the language of educational reform in the form of school improvement, accountability, choice, devolution, modernisation and school autonomy. Ball and Youdell also distinguish between what they term ‘endogenous’ privatisation, that is the importing of ideas from the private sector into the public sector; and ‘exogenous’ privatisation, or the opening up of public education to the for-profit sector in the delivery of education (Ball & Youdell, 2007). This type of theorising and analysis of privatisation shows how shifts towards privatisation are occurring in many different ways, using a variety of different forms and structures. Many countries are now seeing changes to their education systems based on these market principles but these changes are also having profound effects on curriculum, assessment, teachers’ preparation, performance and educators’ day-to-day working conditions. The changes are also being felt in terms of the work and discourses of school and educational leadership.

Policy-makers, particularly in Western contexts, now widely accept that the private sector is preferable to the public in many aspects of policy and governance, including the provision of education. School choice has become one particular mantra of reforming schools to be more ‘business like’. The development of a form of quasi-market arrangement whereby parents are expected to choose between schools for their children has involved an extensive range of strategies. These include: shifts to per-capita funding; the introduction of school vouchers; the introduction of standardised testing and assessment regimes often accompanied by publication of school performance data; the withdrawal of ‘bureaucratic controls’ over recruitment and school funding; and the devolution of decision-making responsibilities to the local level, often under the clarion call of localised decision-making. These forms of new public management have had profound effects on public education systems in England and Europe (Gunter et al., 2016).

In the United States, there has been a powerful discourse of failure associated with public schooling with a concurrent rhetoric that the application of market mechanisms and neoliberal reforms are the solutions to these alleged endemic problems. Since the early 1990s this has been an approach favoured by both sides of politics in the United States but its roots can be traced back to the publication of the report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, published in 1983 under the Reagan administration. The tone and language of the report signalled a crisis in public education with the need for reform and restructuring. Since then the United States has embarked on an agenda of change and reform of education to ‘incentivise’ education such as: discourses of parental choice; moves towards school autonomy via the introduction of charter schools; the use of school vouchers and tax credits; private management of schools and a range of other market mechanisms (see Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014; Ravitch, 2014). Critics of these reforms have argued that such processes of privatisation are leading to the exacerbation of issues of poverty and inequity (Apple, 2006; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Hursh, 2016; Ravitch, 2014); that in fact, public schools perform better than private schools (Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014); and that corporate greed and corruption are pervasive in the United States as part of the privatisation of public schools (English, 2013).

The implications of these shifts have been significant for educational leadership as a field and also for the work of school leaders. In order to understand these changes, we believe a range of different theoretical approaches is needed to analyse and explain the changing contextual conditions in which school leaders carry out their work. The chapters in this collection do much of this work but it is important as a preliminary move to identify a few key trends that have emerged in recent years as a result of the neoliberalisation of education. For instance, the rise of organisations such as the National College for School Leadership in the UK signalled an acknowledgement that leadership should be based on ‘what works’, that is, a more instrumentalist framing of what constituted ‘good’ leadership for a new era of education reform and schooling. Helen Gunter powerfully outlines in her book, Leadership and the Reform of Education (2012), how the New Labour government in the UK crafted a discourse of leadership that was regarded as necessary to implemented new reforms. Here leadership, or rather a particular type of leadership, was presented as the solution to education’s problems. The language was very much in the vein of the tired models of transformational, distributed and instructional leadership but was also couched in the language of equity and social justice even though there was little real discussion of socially critical approaches to education and leadership (Gunter, 2012). In fact, Gunter argues (2012) that much of what was ‘educational’ was removed from leadership discourses as leaders were expected to adhere to ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ business models. These changes in how leadership should be understood and practised also have a history in Australia and New Zealand where school devolution and discourses of leadership framed by neoliberal models of efficiency and effectiveness were needed in order to achieve school-based management as outlined by Caldwell and Spinks (1988).

A whole leadership industry evolved out of the broader education reforms sketched above. This industry was heavily leader-centric (as opposed to teacher- and child-centric) and steeped in a school effectiveness and improvement agenda. What resulted was a discourse of de-contextualised leadership practice that while sometimes couched in the language of equity and social justice, actually resulted in more hierarchical, anti-democratic and corrupt outcomes. In fact, equity as a term has increasingly been mobilised through policy, reforms, the media, think tanks and philanthropic organisations and individuals while at the same time resulting in a dismantling of public education (Lingard, Sellar & Savage, 2014; Rawolle, 2013; Savage, 2013; Thompson, Savage & Lingard, 2016; Thomson, 2013).

Each of the chapters picks up the above threads and examines how they play out in the current context of public education, particularly in terms of their implications – perils and possibilities – for educational leadership, policy and social justice. We now turn to a description of the contribution of each chapter to explore these manifestations.

The contributions of the chapters

In a book series labelled ‘Local/Global Issues in Education’ it might be easy to default to organising the book along the geographic locations of authors and/or empirical sites. To engage in such artificial partitioning would arguably lose the most significant contribution of the work. Rather than privileging the mapping of chapters on an external terrain we instead focus on the theoretically inscribed argu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ preface
• 1. Challenges for public education: Perils and possibilities for educational leadership, policy and social justice
• PART I: Theoretical possibilities
• PART II: Local/international cases: Competing practices of a school autonomy reform
• PART III: Critical commentary: Alan Reid
• Index