Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces

The economics of public schooling and globalized education reform

Emma E. Rowe, Emma Rowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138120419
• eBook ISBN: 9781317310921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces examines government-funded public schools from a range of perspectives and scholarship in order to examine the historical, political and economic conditions of public schooling within a globalized, post-welfare context. In this book, Rowe argues that post-welfare policy conditions are detrimental to government-funded public schools, as they engender consistent pressure in rearticulating the public school in alignment with the market, produce tensions in serving the more historical conceptualizations of public schooling, and are preoccupied by contemporary profit-driven concerns.

Chapters focus on public schooling from different global perspectives, with examples from Chile and the US, to examine how various social movements encapsulate ideologies around public schooling. Rowe also draws upon a rich, five-year ethnographic study of campaigns lobbying the Victorian State Government in Australia for a brand-new, local-specific public school. Critical attention is paid to the public school as a means to achieve empowerment and overcome discrimination, and both a local and global lens are used to identify how parents choose the public school, the values they attach to it, and the strategies they use to obtain it. Also considered, however, are how quality gaps, distances and differences between public schools threaten to undermine the democracy of education as a means for individuals to be socially mobile and escape poverty.

This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of global social movements and activism around public education. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the field of education, specifically those working on school choice, class and identity, as well as educational geography.

Chapter 1

The derivatives and dissolution of public schooling in the global landscape

Public schools are historically understood as ‘non-market’ or located outside the purview of the market. This book explores contemporary tensions that are produced via the entanglement of public schooling within the economy. These tensions are played out via conflict points and consumption choices, the interplay between the social democratic collective and ‘education-as-individual-value-accrual’ (Gerrard, 2015: 855). I will set out an argument around post-welfare policy conditions, as essentially hostile to traditional public schools – those schools historically distinguishable from private schools. Post-welfare policy conditions engender consistent pressure in rearticulating the public school in alignment with the market, producing tensions in serving the more historical conceptualizations of public schooling, coupled with contemporary profit-driven concerns. Conflict points are visible in global social movements and social activism around public education. This book examines social movements, collective organization and parental networks, to how more affluent choosers are engaging with the public school, and the consumption and economics of public schooling.

In an era of globalized educational reform, the public school is experiencing radical, history-making transformations, although this is hardly new. The public school has consistently been at the centre of heated debates surrounding social welfare, economic reform and democracy. With the rapid global expansion of public schooling dissolution since the 1990s, corporate and nongovernment policy actors are increasingly and simultaneously visible and non-visible in critical policy reform. The public school tends to be utilized as a proxy for wider measures of social equity, social justice and access to learning and is at the centre of: fiscal debates surrounding supply and demand, economic efficiency, productivity and output; court-ordered interventions demanding schooling desegregation; and federal interventions into curriculum, funding and education policy. Herein, this book explores the government-funded public school – or the ‘state’ school, as it is understood in the United Kingdom¹ – from a range of various perspectives and scholarship, drawing on policy analysis and policy theory, to urban school choice studies, in order to examine the historical, political and economic conditions of public schooling within a globalized, post-welfare context.

Almost twenty years ago, Whitty et al. (1998) asked whether devolution and choice in education demonstrates a global phenomenon, amidst policy convergence across England and Wales, the United States, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia. Their questions continue to be salient today. Whilst there are key and distinct differences across these sites, there are also similarities in how policies shape, facilitate and influence consumerism and consumption of schooling, or in other words, parental choice. Government policy clearly plays a temporal and pivotal role in how parents interact with schooling. Policies intend to generate change, in that they offer ‘an imagined future state of affairs’ (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 5). The structuring of funding, and how this is delivered to schools; the role of teachers and how teachers are supported to teach; and the active dissolution of public schooling, clearly incentivize particular consumption choices.

For those parents who have the ability to choose – often referred to in the literature as ‘middle-class’ – school choice represents a critically significant and weighty decision, not only for economic reasons, but for social, political and cultural reasons, informing matters around identity, religion and family. The middle class tends to be defined via their income levels, educational qualifications and employment, and in the schooling market they are regarded as highly invested, savvy and long-term choosers. In countries such as England, Australia and the US, research posits that a key commonality of the middle classes is their relationship to education, which ‘has become a central mechanism of white middle-class identity formation’ (Reay et al., 2013: 19). The urban middle class is increasingly defined by their ‘connection to schooling … and the distinctive ways in which middle-class parents manage children and their schooling’ (Campbell et al., 2009: 18). Herein, I utilize the middle class and their relationship to education as a central analytical lens to study school choice in urban space.

My own schooling experience was a combination of private and public schooling, quite disconnected and disparate, between my primary years and my secondary years, spatially distant but also culturally distant. They were two distinct, entirely separate, schooling experiences. I grew up in a conservative Christian family and my primary school was miles away – two bus trips each morning, over an hour each way. Regent Christian Academy sat next door to the Regent Christian Church, and the two spaces were interchangeable. On our daily trips we were herded over by the teacher, clutching our Bibles in our hands, dressed in our little suits, emblazoned with Latin mottos. Regent Christian Academy was concerned with our spiritual, our religious tutelage, and our Christian upbringing; I remember a heavy focus on creationism, prayer and daily singing. In many ways it was a happy and joyful time.

At the end of year seven, my mother and father separated, under acrimonious circumstances, and we moved from the beach-side to a neighbourhood called ‘Illawong’,² from a brick home to a fibro-asbestos home that we were ‘borrowing’. My new space was far inferior to the old space, and this was inferred to me in a number of ways, mostly from clues that are dispensed along the way: I heard Illawong was dangerous and Illawong High School a breeding ground for drug dealers and would-be criminals. As place, Illawong was constructed as ‘notorious’ through a discourse of whiteness and racism. I learnt very early on that it contained Indigenous people and poverty. The two were interconnected and undesirable according to the discourse I was privy to. I became implicated with this undesirable social landscape and social identity and this was quite a memorable engagement with social exclusion. My childhood friends were disallowed from visiting, their parents citing the danger of Illawong, and the danger of socializing with ‘broken’ families.

Illawong High was like a completely different world, so completely separated from Regent Christian Academy. Some of the teachers walked out of the lessons, during classes; a group of white kids took it upon themselves to spit on me, every day if they could; an Indigenous girl befriended me, but I thought we were too different. A girl who looked like a boy came to the school, and everyone whispered and pointed.

As a school, Illawong High reminded me of a prison – violent, pointless and dilapidated. There was a strong sense of survival contained within those high barbed-wire fences and trying to escape was futile. Violent fist and knife fights broke out regularly. The facilities were non-existent, the grounds and classrooms seriously neglected. If it was back to basics, then the basics were missing – no heaters or cooling, cold in winter, stinking hot in summer; the chairs fell apart when you sat on them, so you would be forced to sit on the floor during the lesson, the other kids spitting paper spit-balls at your head. I remember the science classes with two or three Bunsen burners; our recreational equipment was the one solitary (and broken) basketball ring on gravel.

The neglected state of the school, the impression of ‘locking them up and throwing away the key’ constructed a sense of futility and meaninglessness. For the people that filled that space, we were ‘the underclass, the excluded, the marginal’ (Rose, 1996: 345). A lack of individualistic hard work or ability (meritocracy) is routinely attributed to the gross failures within schools ‘like these’ – those that are filled with poverty. However, in my view, occupation in spaces of poverty and marginalization constructs an internalized sense of failure and meaningless. Poverty and social stigma undermines a sense of agency.

Academically speaking, I was a high achiever, and incredibly introverted and shy. I hated being bullied and started to evade school as much as possible. I dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen. It wasn’t about my results. For over a year, I worked as an ‘office junior’ in the basement of an insurance company. I detested the time working there: the six-dollars-an-hour pay cheque, fetching cupcakes for my boss, filing useless pieces of paper – the never-ending filing, the cold calls. Eventually I returned to school and completed my university entrance examinations (college entrance) over the course of two years. Admittedly, there is a personal sense of frustration when it comes to my own education. I often feel it was a grandly deficient education. As an adult, I am a highly strategic and invested school chooser – overly anxious for my children, both to be schooled in the local and public primary school.

I disclose this personal narrative to point to the cultural distances reproduced via schools, the spatial contrasts and boundaries, alongside personalized experiences of class and displacement. In taking up this research around public schooling within the globalized context, I acknowledge that my own positioning is idiosyncratic and at times, contradictory; but so too, it is pragmatic and measured. In this chapter, I introduce the central scope of the book by tracing the historical narrative of privatization and globalized school choice policies to the more contemporary landscape of public school ‘derivatives’.

Free to choose

School choice, ‘like neoliberal policy itself, is a remarkably consistent phenomenon across nations’ (Doherty et al., 2013: 127). The central scope of school choice is typically characterized by the privatization of government-owned schools and the devolution of centralized ownership, which encourages parents to take up ‘choice’ – or in other words, to be rational and effective consumers. Across many national contexts, including England and Wales, the US, Australia, Chile, Sweden and New Zealand, school choice became a forefront and important policy issue for governments in the early 1980s, resulting in widespread educational reforms in the 1990s (Whitty et al., 1998). The seeds were planted far earlier though, and the political and economic changes that were brought about as a consequence of World War Two lay the contextual groundwork for the major reformation of education in years to come (Furlong and Phillips, 2002). As the workforce dramatically transformed, alongside ‘the shifting of economic policies from the Keynesian welfare model to the neoliberal post-welfare state’ (Hursh, 2005: 3), the role of education changed too, as the system experienced a significant growth of students completing secondary schooling.³

It was not only the growth of secondary students that was shifting, but also changing ideologies around consumerism, religion and democracy. In the 1960s in Australia, school choice was introduced within parliament as a parental, civil right (Marginson, 1997). From the US, leading economist Milton Friedman, from the University of Chicago, argued for greater parental choice and school vouchers, to transform the failing public school (Friedman, 1955, 1962). Friedman advocated for choice as a democratic right and fundamental libertarian freedom, and his work captures this transforming ideological landscape, putting forth the importance of the consumer in educational governance, as opposed to schooling institutions left to government control and ownership. This signals the historical beginnings of quasi-markets, but also a rethinking of democracy and freedom along consumerist lines (see Apple, 2006). Friedman’s suggestions, however, received very little attention during this time of radical social change in the US, a time in which public schools transformed under racial desegregation, via the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case (Wells, 2008).

It was later in the 1980s that ‘free to choose’ became a popular mantra across both sides of the political fence – a mantra popularized by best-selling book and ten-part televised mini-series with Milton and Rose Friedman (1980), featuring movie stars (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and politicians (Ronald Reagan).⁴ The Friedmans dedicate an entire chapter of the book to ask ‘what’s wrong with our schools?’, again advocating for the devolution of public schooling and school vouchers.⁵ Even though Milton Friedman’s suggestions made little impact in the US until many years later, these propositions were resonant in the Thatcher government in England and Wales⁶ with several pieces of legislation designed to promote competition between state secondary schools (e.g., the 1980 Education Act, 1986 Education Act, the 1988 Education Reform Act and 1992 Education (Schools) Act) (see, Whitty and Edwards, 1998; Hursh, 2005; Whitty, 2008). Government and media rhetoric echoed Friedman’s declared crises within public schools, and schools were compelled to publish the results of standardized tests and be subjected to regular inspections by ‘private inspection teams’ (Whitty et al., 1998: 44). In a complex and almost contrary outcome of autonomy and devolution, schools came under far more intense scrutiny by the state.

Whilst policies like these were evident in the 1980s in Chile, England and Wales, it was during the 1990s that significant education reform occurred in many countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, the US and Australia. Evidently, educational policy reform is consistently replicated in a variety of locations. The 1990s saw the rise of charter schools and numerous versions of the charter school, voucher systems or ‘virtual voucher systems’ and the introduction of league tables. This is effectively the development of ‘quasi-markets’ within education: a competitive and devolved education system premised on market theory, operating independently and autonomously from bureaucratic control, more efficient and productive and therefore less costly to the government, but also less costly to the consumer, and more innovative and simply, better. This would theoretically be achieved through the establishment of a clean market with minimum regulations. Decentralization should ideally offer a more satisfied experience for parents and students. Whilst certain regulations were removed that inhibited choice and competition, regulations and standardization grew in other areas. The introduction of league tables and high-stakes testing, which increasingly became correlated with enrolment levels and therefore school funding levels (particularly in Australia), and al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The derivatives and dissolution of public schooling in the global landscape
• 2 Social movements for public education
• 3 Campaigning for choice
• 4 Glocalization and evocations of whiteness in the local education market
• 5 Private versus public schools
• 6 White flight and repopulating the urban public high school
• 7 Rebranding and marketing the urban public school
• 8 After neoliberalism: Social democracy within the corporate economy
• Appendix: Methodology and data sets
• Index