Title and preliminary pages, 1-4
Acknowledgements, 7-7
Martin Forsey, Scott Davies, Geoffrey Walford The Globalisation of School Choice? An Introduction to Key Issues and Concerns, 9-25
Christopher Lubienski School Choice Research in the United States and Why it Doesn't Matter: the evolving economy of knowledge production in a contested policy domain, 27-54
Scott Davies, Janice D. Aurini School Choice as Concerted Cultivation: the case of Canada, 55-71
Martin Forsey No Choice but to Choose: selecting schools in Western Australia, 73-93
Geoffrey Walford School Choice in England: globalisation, policy borrowing or policy corruption?, 95-109
Izhar Oplatka The Introduction of Controlled School Choice in Tel Aviv, Israel: an attempt to attain a balance between integration and pluralism, 111-130
Mariano Narodowski School Choice and Quasi-State Monopoly in Education Systems in Latin America: the case of Argentina, 131-144
Kristin D. Phillips, Amy Stambach Cultivating Choice: the invisible hands of educational opportunity in Tanzania, 145-164
Andrew Kipnis Competition, Audit, Scientism and School Non-Choice in Rural China, 165-183
Prachi Srivastava School Choice in India: disadvantaged groups and low-fee private schools, 185-208
Lesley Vidovich, Yap Meen Sheng Global-Local Dynamics in Expanding School Choice in Singapore, 209-229
Julian Dierkes Japanese Shadow Education: the consequences of school choice, 231-248
Notes on Contributors, 249-252
Title and preliminary pages
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Acknowledgements
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The Globalisation of School Choice? An Introduction to Key Issues and Concerns
Martin Forsey, Scott Davies, Geoffrey Walford
As one would expect of any complex reform process, the results of recent neo-liberal reform to Australian schooling are at best unpredictable. While choice has always been part of Australian schooling, governments of all political hues have been enhancing their commitment to educational choice by increasing funding to the non-government sector. There is now no choice but to choose and parents, students, teachers, politicians and bureaucrats have been drawn further into reproducing a social system that exacerbates social inequality. However, they are not simply dominated by a new freedom of choice or by naïve consumerism. Keynesian-style welfarism remains influential enough in the political machinations accompanying the reformation of Australian schooling and, as some parents have found, the private sector does not necessarily generate greater levels of efficiency and accountability, nor are its standards automatically higher than those found in the public sector. Not only that, far from being the great source of openness, freedom and democracy that some would have us believe we will find in private enterprise, it is quite capable of squashing individual freedoms.
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School Choice Research in the United States and Why it Doesn't Matter: the evolving economy of knowledge production in a contested policy domain
Christopher Lubienski
School choice has flourished in recent years in the United States, expanding in a number of forms across almost all areas of the country. Yet even as policy makers enthusiastically embrace charter schools, voucher plans for private schools, and other school choice programs, the research basis for these programs appears to be tenuous, at best. This chapter offers a brief overview of the growth of various forms of school choice, and then examines the research for two of the most prominent models: charter schools and vouchers for private schools. The review indicates that these programs are not performing as market-based reformers claim in terms of academic achievement – the most anticipated outcome for school choice programs. However, the disjuncture between the rapid expansion of these programs and their weak empirical record illustrates the influence of a coalition of policy advocates/researchers, media, and think tanks in asserting a consensus not necessarily supported by research, and the power of these coalitions in producing the ‘information’ needed to justify ideologically-driven policy decisions. The concluding discussion considers the new political economy of education research in the USA, noting the changing roles of researchers in universities and advocacy groups, and pointing to the further politicization and commercialization of research.
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School Choice as Concerted Cultivation: the case of Canada
Scott Davies, Janice D. Aurini
Canada’s school choice movement has imported and adapted American understandings of choice in ways that underplay market rationales. Rather than hailing choice as a mechanism to boost test scores or desegregate minority students, Canadian choice-seekers are energized by emerging middle-class parenting cultures. School choice is connected to ‘concerted cultivation’, an intensive form of parenting in which middle-class parents increasingly structure their children’s lives and treat them as projects-in-the-making. Sociologists typically invoke this concept to link the varying strategies that parents use to align their child-rearing practices with school requirements, and to emphasize how such parental resources are unequally distributed by class and race. Here the concept of concerted cultivation is extended by linking this parental agency to school choice, noting that choice-seeking alters parental relations with public educators from mere supportive roles to more directing and even adversarial roles. Survey data is presented showing that wealthier and more educated parents are more likely to engage in choice-seeking, and that choosers are more likely to embrace contentious notions of parental authority. Focus group data illustrates how choice proponents rationalize their actions. It is shown that choice advocates acknowledge concerns about the potential threat of choice policies to equity, but then redraw moral boundaries by portraying choice as a responsible and necessary form of parental involvement in schooling. These findings illustrate new forms of parental agency and expressive cultural ideals in processes of class reproduction.
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No Choice but to Choose: selecting schools in Western Australia
Martin Forsey
This chapter reports on research conducted among parents and their children regarding their educational choices in Perth, Western Australia. The people targeted for this research all chose to change systems, either from so-called ‘private’ schools to the government education system, or vice versa. While choice has always been part of Australia’s schooling systems, governments of all political hues have been busily enhancing their commitment to opening up educational choices for parents and students through increasing funding to the non-government sector. Attempts to ‘de-governmentalize the state’ in education have led to parents, students, teachers, politicians and bureaucrats being drawn further into reproducing a social system that exacerbates social inequality. It is argued that Keynesian-style welfarism remains an influential element in the political machinations accompanying the reformation of Australian schooling. The free market is rarely ever free, and, as some of the parents interviewed found, the private sector does not necessarily generate greater levels of efficiency and accountability, nor are their standards automatically higher than those found in the public sector. Not only that, far from being the great source of openness, freedom and democracy that some would have us believe we will find in private enterprise, they are quite capable of squashing individual freedoms. As one would expect of any complex reform process, the results of recent neo-liberal reform to Australian schooling are at best unpredictable.
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School Choice in England: globalisation, policy borrowing or policy corruption?
Geoffrey Walford
This chapter reviews the history of school choice in England, focusing particularly on the motivations for changes in 1988 and in subsequent years. It argues that, rather than being a case of ‘policy borrowing’ from Australia, the changes that occurred in England were more a case of ‘policy corruption’. England now has a well-established choice system in the state sector and there has been a considerable amount of research conducted on it. This chapter describes and evaluates several of these studies and discusses the relationship between greater choice of school and increased standards of attainment. It then examines the research work that has been conducted on the effects of choice on social segregation and finds mixed results.
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The Introduction of Controlled School Choice in Tel Aviv, Israel: an attempt to attain a balance between integration and pluralism
Izhar Oplatka
Based on data gathered from school principals, parents of intakes, and written materials (school brochures), this chapter aims at examining the program of school choice in Tel Aviv, Israel, and at analyzing its underlying beliefs versus school reality. It is argued that whereas the advocates of the introduction of the school choice reform in Tel Aviv saw it as a result of a combination of integrative, egalitarian values with liberal, pluralistic ones, schools’ responses to this major change in their external environment were inclined towards the intensification of market philosophy rather than towards comprehensive values. This kind of philosophy seems to guide the parents in choosing the junior high school for their child. Implications and meanings of this analysis for school choice policies worldwide are suggested.
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School Choice and Quasi-State Monopoly in Education Systems in Latin America: the case of Argentina
Mariano Narodowski
Latin American educational systems experienced a large increase in the number of private schools and students throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This process of privatization of schooling is not a product of the recently labelled ‘neo-liberal wave’ of the 1990s – its roots go further back in time. The increase in the choice of private schools in Argentina can be observed even though there are no economic incentives, specific programmes or even ‘experiments’ stimulating this practice. This chapter analyzes two models of educational supply – public (or state) monopoly and educational markets and quasi-markets – and develops a third theoretical option, the quasi-monopoly, useful to understand these processes. National educational systems in Latin America continue to be based on a model of provision that is centrally guaranteed by the state in what pertains to its financing, regulation and provision. However, it seems hard to maintain that it is monopolistic if one considers the educational system as a whole and not just the sector of the school that is operated directly by the state.
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Cultivating Choice: the invisible hands of educational opportunity in Tanzania
Kristin D. Phillips, Amy Stambach
This chapter examines the relevance of the concept of choice to the educational context of the United Republic of Tanzania, where secondary school enrollment opportunity remains low and fees for study are prohibitive. In Tanzania, the concept of choice remains peripheral, not only to debates at the national policy level, but also to the way that parents and communities frame their claims to educational opportunities. Drawing on ethnographic research in two contrasting regions – Singida and Kilimanjaro – the chapter describes not how people ‘choose’ between their given options or rate the ‘choices’ open to them, but rather how they produce educational opportunities through social interaction. People cultivate and strengthen a variety of relationships, including those that involve putting oneself at the debt and the mercy of benefactors, and those that involve creating horizontal relationships of reciprocity, where people call on those with similar means and help them in turn. It is argued that it is through these relationships – rather than through a disinterested educational ‘market’ – that people in Tanzania access educational opportunity.
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Competition, Audit, Scientism and School Non-Choice in Rural China
Andrew Kipnis
The promotion of school choice has often been interpreted as part of the worldwide spread of neo-liberal governmentality. School choice, in this vision, is seen as a measure to encourage competition and thus effect the efficient production of atomized, neo-liberal subjects. School choice is imagined as enforcing market discipline on the providers of educational services, providing a neo-liberal form of audit and accountability. This chapter describes in detail the policies of one county in rural China with regard to (mostly preventing) school choice while promoting competitive exercises (between students as individuals, classes of students, teachers, schools, principals and school districts) in the extreme and conducting scientistic ‘quality’ audits. The resulting combination of governing techniques can be said to have a coherent logic of sorts, but it is not neo-liberal. In addition to providing a case study from a Chinese context, by a careful questioning of what forms of education policy, audit culture, and competition deserve to be labelled neo-liberal, this chapter suggests that great care must be taken in using that term.
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School Choice in India: disadvantaged groups and low-fee private schools
Prachi Srivastava
Increased marketisation and privatisation of schooling in economically developing countries have led to the emergence of private schooling for socio-economically disadvantaged groups. The ‘low-fee private’ sector in India is one example of a private schooling sector that is targeted to and financed by fees from lower income households that have traditionally had low participation in formal schooling. Thus, the emergence of the low-fee private sector marks the need to examine changing school choice behaviours of disadvantaged groups. Dominant middle-class hegemonic discourse in India and the wider literature has characterised these groups as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘likely to be duped’ or as ‘irresponsible’, ignorant of the benefits of schooling, and unwilling to send their children to school due to limited resources. To arrive at a more nuanced understanding, this chapter, based on a study of low-fee private schooling in Lucknow District, Uttar Pradesh, presents a model explaining the school choice processes of one group of disadvantaged households accessing the low-fee private sector. Challenging traditional assumptions, results indicate that households in the study made active choices about their children’s schooling through a complex process that involved analysing competing school sectors, incorporating their beliefs about education, analysing local school markets, and managing particular constraints.
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Global-Local Dynamics in Expanding School Choice in Singapore
Lesley Vidovich, Yap Meen Sheng
This chapter examines the opening up of school choice in Singapore. The establishment of privately-funded international schools for the first time in Singapore in 2005 marked a significant and symbolic policy shift further away from highly centralised government control of education characteristic of Singapore. With this reform, families were able to choose these fully privately-funded schools (provided they could afford the fees) rather than the previous model of schools selecting students on the basis of ‘merit’. This initiative potentially challenges the long-standing governing ideology of ‘meritocracy’ in Singapore. The chapter analyses the policy processes involved from the macro level of elite economic agencies, to the meso level of the Ministry of Education to the micro level of the new privately-funded international schools.
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Japanese Shadow Education: the consequences of school choice
Julian Dierkes
Deregulation has been a prominent aspect of Japanese educational reform discussions for the past 25 years. These discussions often refer explicitly to global discourses on school choice in general, and to British and North American debates in particular. National policy has enabled local education boards to establish school choice for primary and secondary schools. Some municipalities have implemented various forms of school choice. Although choice is being introduced into parents’ and students’ decision making at the primary and secondary level, it has been an important aspect of Japanese educational experiences for over 30 years in the form of supplementary, or ‘shadow’ education. The experience with shadow education suggests that school choice is more conducive to producing a variety of organizational forms within an education market than to producing curricular diversity.
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Notes on Contributors
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