23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
‘Closing the Gap’: Analysis of the Rhetoric Involved in Creating the Case for the Privatization of England's Schools
Joanna Dennis
Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Dennis, Joanna
This paper explores the political discourse around the privatization of England’s state education via the acdemisation programme. Academisation is a project of school reform, which seeks to move the business of state schooling away from Local Authority administration and into the private realm. There are currently over 10,000 academy schools operating in England, representing 80% of all secondary schools and 40% of all primary schools. As the number of individual academy schools and multi-academy trusts (MATs) has increased so the economies of Local Authority maintained schools become more difficult to sustain. Thus, it is possible to see how the stated political ambition that ‘all schools’ (DFE, 2010:12) should be academy schools is becoming closer to full realisation and is expected to be accomplished by 2030 (DFE, 2022).
Taking the acdemisation programme as a policy case, this paper draws upon a substantive literature review of the policy over a twenty year period (Bailey & Ball, 2016; Ball, 2009; Kultz et al. 2018; Rayner et al. 2018; West and Bailey, 2013). Tracing its inception, as a New Labour policy in 2000 , and identifying, in particular, the moment of acceleration and change that occurs with the Academies Act – the first piece of legislation introduced by the new government in 2010. Tracking the project over the recent lifetime of Conservative government it is possible to identify the ways in which it becomes an expression of neoliberal education reform and part of a wider mission to reduce the state and to extricate government from the complex problems of the day (Clarke and Mills, 2022).
This paper corresponds with, and extends, recent research by Craske (2021), which explores political rhetoric and the ‘populist logic’ (p. 279) of Conservative education reform. Through a focus on the political moment in which this radical transformation was launched and, through the analysis of political speeches, this paper explores the populist rhetoric employed to create and establish the ground for the overhaul and realignment of the purpose and value of schooling in England. Theoretically, the paper draws upon an Aristotelian concept of rhetoric and methodologically it employs contemporary model of rhetorical political analysis (RPA), which is drawn from political science (Finlayson 2012; Walter, 2017).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis paper draws upon an Aristotelian concept of rhetoric and makes use of rhetorical political analysis (RPA), which is a contemporary model of discourse analysis drawn from political science (Finlayson 2012; Walter, 2017).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe author identifies England’s academisation programme as the most profound education reform since public education began – radically changing the shape of the English school’s sector, not through the teaching profession and within public debate, but via political and economic mechanisms of accountability, governance and finance. This paper argues that this reform, though continually positioned as a school improvement initiative, is rather part of a wider ideological campaign – partially achieved through rhetorical means - to reduce the role of the state in education and to establish a marketplace for private interest (Hoctor, 2022).
ReferencesBall, S. J. (2009) ‘Academies in context: Politics, business and philanthropy and heterarchical governance.’ Management in Education, 23(3) pp. 100–103.
Clarke, M. and Mills, M., 2022. “We have never been public:” Continuity and change in the policy production of “the public” in education in England. European Educational Research Journal, 21(1), pp.13-28.
Craske, J., 2021. Logics, rhetoric and ‘the blob’: Populist logic in the Conservative reforms to English schooling. British Educational Research Journal, 47(2), pp.279-298
DFE (2022) Implementing school system reform in 2022/23 Next steps following the Schools White Paper. Department for Education [Accessed online 10 Jan 2023]
DFE (2010) The Importance of Teaching: the schools White Paper. London: The Stationery Office.
Finlayson, A., 2012. Rhetoric and the political theory of ideologies. Political Studies, 60(4), pp.751-767.
Hoctor, T., 2022. The consumer, the market and the universal aristocracy: The ideology of academisation in England. Journal of Consumer Culture, p.14695405221086068.
Kulz, C., McGinity, R. and Morrin, K., 2022. Inside the English education lab: critical qualitative and ethnographic perspectives on the academies experiment. Inside the English education lab, pp.1-264.
Rayner, S.M., Courtney, S.J. and Gunter, H.M., 2018. Theorising systemic change: Learning from the academisation project in England. Journal of Education Policy, 33(1), pp.143-162.
Walter, R., 2017. Rhetoric or deliberation? The case for rhetorical political analysis. Political Studies, 65(2), pp.300-315.
West, A. and Bailey, E. (2013) ‘The Development of the Academies Programme: “Privatising” School-Based Education in England 1986–2013.’ British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(2) pp. 137–159.
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
Debating Public Funding of Private Schools in Alberta and Ontario, Canada
Sue Winton
York University, Canada
Presenting Author: Winton, Sue
Policies to fund private schools – including private, religious schools - with public funds are now common across Europe and around the world, along with attendant concerns that they negatively impact educational equity (Zancajo et al., 2022).
In this paper I present findings from a critical policy study (Young & Diem, 2018) of long-standing debates over public funding of private schools in Alberta and Ontario, Canada. In particular, it focuses on the advocacy efforts of faith-based organizations in the two provinces since the 1960s to secure public funds for their schools. Notably, both provinces have always funded Catholic schools to some extent because of agreements made to protect education for religious minorities when Canada was formed in 1867.
I launched the research project in an effort to understand why Alberta provides public funding for private schools (including faith-based private schools) and Ontario does not. Grounded in Hajer’s (1997) argumentative discourse theory (discussed below), the study sought to answer the following questions:
1) What are the storylines mobilized in debates over public funding of private schools in Alberta and Ontario?
2) Who mobilized the storylines?
3) Why have the outcomes of the debates about public funding of private schools in Alberta and Ontario varied?
Theoretical Framework: The study is grounded in Hajer’s (1997) argumentative discourse theory. This theory posits that people draw upon discourses to understand social phenomena, including policy. Discourses are ensembles of “ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is given to a phenomenon, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices” (Hajer, 1997, p. 44). A discourse’s meaning is informed by ideologies in its historical and social contexts (Gale, 1999; Winton & Staples, 2022). In policy debates, actors present their understandings of the issue via storylines. A storyline is “a condensed statement summarising complex narratives” (Hajer, 2006, p. 69). It defines policy problems, positions actors, and constructs moral and social order. Actors mobilizing the same storyline may present different, and possibly conflicting, arguments in support of it. In fact, these individuals may not share the same goals or values. Nevertheless, their arguments reflect a similar understanding of the social world. Pointing to the examples from debates over pollution wherein actors make scientific, economic, and moral arguments in support of reducing pollutants, Hajer (2006) explains: “the arguments are different but similar: from each of the positions the other arguments ‘sound right’” (p. 71). The simplicity of a storyline conceals differences between actors mobilizing it. Together these people form discourse coalitions.
Members of discourse coalitions mobilize their arguments and shared storyline in their efforts to influence how others understand a policy and to change (or maintain) it by achieving discursive dominance. Storylines must resonate with socio-historical discourses in the wider context of a policy debate to have a chance at becoming (or remaining) dominant (Fischer, 2003). A discourse coalition and its storyline is considered dominant when many people draw upon it to understand the world (a condition called discourse structuration) and when it is reflected in institutions’ practices (the condition of discourse institutionalization).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedAdopting a comparative case study design (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016), the research team used argumentative discourse analysis (ADA; Hajer, 2006) to answer the research questions. ADA pinpoints competing storylines in a public policy debate and the members of the discourse coalitions that mobilized them. The goal of ADA is to establish how the storyline of a discourse coalition becomes dominant.
Data sources for the cases included media articles published, government documents, academic books and articles, and interviews with people who have themselves participated in the debate or represent an organization that has engaged in it. Specifically, for the Alberta case, data included 5 interviews, 6 policy documents, and 158 articles from the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, and The Globe and Mail. In Ontario, data included 10 interviews, 7 policy documents, and over 150 articles from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Articles and policy documents were published between 1960 and 2022 for both cases.
The ADAs began with a close reading of the articles to identify phrases that represented arguments for or against public funding of private schools in the direct quotes from actors or from opinion pieces. Next, we grouped repeated arguments in categories named to reflect their shared meanings and noted the type of actor that mobilized them (e.g., parent groups, religious groups and schools, public school boards, teachers’ unions). Arguments drawing on the same discourses were then fit together to create storylines, and actors mobilizing complementary storylines were grouped into discourse coalitions.
The semi-structured interviews were carried out over live video conferencing and were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Participants were asked to explain what happened during the debate, and how they made sense of what was going on. Interview data was analyzed using open coding.
Finally, we consulted academic articles and books detailing the changing cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts of Alberta and Ontario in Canada, as well as other western, English-speaking countries since the 1950s, to help us understand and explain variations in the debates and outcomes in the two provinces.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe findings reveal that faith-based organizations in Alberta and Ontario have: 1) been on both sides of the debate; 2) mobilized the same storylines; and 3) formed discourse coalitions with advocates who desire and oppose the policy for reasons different than their own. In Alberta, the publicly-fund-private-schools discourse coalition has been dominant since 1967, whereas in Ontario the public-funds-are-for-public-schools discourse coalition is dominant.
This difference between the two provinces is attributable to political and ideological factors. In Alberta, the Conservative government was in power for 44 years (1971-2015), and it favoured supporting choice for parents via public funding. Importantly, Conservatives relied on votes from rural constituents, many of whom were religious conservatives. Beginning in the 1990s, the meaning of choice was linked to competition that would improve schooling and make Albertans competitive in global markets. This policy meaning fit with the government’s neoliberal ideology, and it introduced privatization policies in multiple public sectors. It also resonated with a population that is generally populist and anti-statist (Banack, 2015).
Conversely, in Ontario, arguments mobilized by the dominant public-money-is-for-public-schools discourse coalition reflect historical discourses of public schooling in the province: 1) that public schools promote social cohesion if they are secular, and 2) that public institutions are better positioned than families or churches to elevate a society’s moral, social, intellectual, and economic status. Opponents have also argued that funding private schools is a way to “fund the wealthy” and thus would undermine the dominant discursive meaning of equity in the province. In 2007, arguments against a candidate’s election promise to fund faith-based schools were grounded in fears of religious extremism and Islamophobia. In fact, since then, faith-based advocate of public funding of private schools have stopped discussing the policy in terms of religious parents’ right to choose or fairness between all faith-based schools.
ReferencesBanack, C. (2015). Understanding the influence of faith-based organizations on education policy in Alberta. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique, 48(4), 933–959. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423915000797
Fischer, F. (2003). Reframing public policy: Discursive politics and deliberative practices. Oxford University Press.
Gale, T. (1999). Policy trajectories: Treading the discursive path of policy analysis. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20(3), 393–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630990200304
Hajer, M., A. (1997). The politics of environmental discourse: Ecological modernization and the policy process. Clarendon Press.
Hajer, M., A. (2006). Doing discourse analysis: Coalitions, practices, meaning. In M. Van den Brink & T. Metze (Eds.), Words matter in policy and planning: Discourse theory and methods in the social sciences (pp. 65–76). Netherlands Graduate School of Urban and Regional Research.
Winton, S., & Staples, S. (2022). Shifting meanings: The struggle over public funding of private schools in Alberta, Canada. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 30, (15)-(15). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.30.7002
Young, M. D., & Diem, S. (2018). Doing critical policy analysis in Education research: An emerging paradigm. In C. R. Lochmiller (Ed.), Complementary Research Methods for Educational Leadership and Policy Studies (pp. 79–98). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93539-3_5
Zancajo, A., Verger, A., & Fontdevila, C. (2022). The instrumentation of public subsidies for private schools: Different regulatory models with concurrent equity implications. European Educational Research Journal, 21(1), 44–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211023339
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
“We Have to Unlearn a Lot to Learn This”: Teachers’ Agency in a Swedish Private School Company Operating in India
Nafsika Alexiadou1, Ann-Sofie Holm2, Linda Rönnberg1, Sara Carlbaum1
1Umeå University, Sweden; 2Gothenburg University, Sweden
Presenting Author: Holm, Ann-Sofie;
Rönnberg, Linda
A for-profit education industry has emerged in Sweden during the last decades, enabled by reform decisions and policies entailing extensive marketisation and privatization in Swedish compulsory and upper secondary education. A trend is also that some of the largest Swedish free school companies have started to export their services abroad (Rönnberg et al., 2022). This paper focuses on one of these companies; LearnyComp (pseudonym) operating in India. Despite there being a global growing market for private ‘international’ primary and secondary education - and in certain geographic locations in particular (Gibson and Bailey, 2022; Gorur and Arnold, 2022; Bunnell, 2019), we still have limited knowledge on how the recent expansions and commercially-driven developments affect this sector and with what consequences (c.f. Parreira Do Amaral et al., 2019; Yemini, et al., 2022). In crossing borders, education companies enter different terrains that define and regulate schooling in very national terms. They adapt to regulatory frames around curricula, assessment, ways of organizing schooling, and traditional practices hence, operating in ‘third spaces’ they differentiate their educational offer (Hartmann, 2021, p.368). In this process, when international companies bring their own culture, ideas about teaching, and products in the form of curricular and pedagogical approaches, they disrupt in potentially significant ways the local practices of schooling and local teachers’ work (c.f. Friend, Mills and Lingard, 2022; Poole, 2022; Winchip, 2022).
Drawing on ideas of teacher agency as an active dimension of professional practice, this paper aims to analyse the capacity of the Indian teachers who work in LearnyComp to shape their practice, in their interactions with the school environment as constructed by principals, company representatives, and wider school discourses. We address the following research questions: 1) What are the conceptions of educational purpose that teachers and principals promote as important in their work and what discourses do they use around teaching, learning and pupils? 2) What perceptions do the teachers and principals have of the changes that they, as professionals, need to perform to adapt to the Swedish company ‘philosophy’? 3) What are the company discourses articulated by company representatives and company documentations, around teaching, learning and teachers, and how do they frame and shape the teachers’ work and teachers’ agency?
We draw on theoretical work that defines the dimensions of agency as relevant to teachers and their work environment (Biesta, Priestley & Robinson, 2015) and frames agency through an ecological (Biesta & Tedder, 2006) and relational approach (Pantić, 2017). Grounding agency within concrete possibilities for action, this approach allows for a nuanced analysis of teachers’ discourses around their practices, their capacity for constructing and changing practice, the beliefs and values that underpin them. The extent to which teachers are capable to autonomously design their practice, to draw on their expertise and judgement, and “to make active use of their professional space” reveals their agentic capacity and the range of their professional action (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017, p.37) and these aspects are further elaborated analytically in the paper.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe study is part of the research project Going Global (VR 2018-04897; Rönnberg, 2018) and involved extensive fieldwork at three LearnyComp schools in India, preceded by preparatory work before the on-site fieldwork as well as interviews with six high-level LearnyComp representatives in Sweden and in India. These preparations enabled an ethically-sensitive, informed access and consent for the on-site research in India. Each of the three schools was visited for two days, during which formal interviews were conducted with school principals (one former and the three active ones), and 11 teachers across the sites. To have a comprehensive overview of the schools, documents from the parent company in Sweden, and the Indian schools, from schools’ online presentations and brochures, were also collected and included in the study. Throughout, the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, 2017) ethical guidelines were carefully followed.
The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, analysed though a combination of inductive and deductive processes, framed by the ecological and relational perspectives on teachers’ practice and agency, and our focus on the interaction between teachers and contexts. In this case, ‘context’ refers to the company discourses manifested in documentations, interviews with principals and company representatives. Through a thematic coding of all interview material (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), we analysed the emerged categories from the perspective of the narratives the participants employ to describe work practices and their environment, and we then examined those against the wider discourses used in the schools’ documentation.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe analysis identified some tensions in the ways in which their agency is defined and constrained in the context of international education where various commercial actors offer alternative pedagogies. The teachers employed in the schools of our sample are Indian, with a teacher education and/or teaching experience in the Indian school system. The interviewees describe a working environment regulated by the LearnyComp educational program and the associated the Learning Platform. As a result, not only the overall goals, but also the more detailed routine objectives of teaching are largely prescribed in advance, limiting agency. Given the teachers’ enthusiastic adoption of the LearnyComp ‘philosophy’, our data suggests that LearnyComp, as a company, has been very effective in breaking what Emirmayer & Mische (1998) identify as a continuing temporal dimension of agentic action where the past informs present educational engagement in various ways. The teachers are constructed, and construct themselves, largely as receivers of knowledge and expertise, and tend to refrain from their past histories of professional experience, urged not slip back to their old-fashioned professional practices; “we have to unlearn a lot to learn this”, as one teacher said - and embrace the given pedagogy and futuristic international discourses, limiting and restricting teacher agency in particular ways. We finish by arguing that the ways in which international education companies downplays situated and local contexts raise important questions of educational purpose and values.
ReferencesBiesta, G., Priestley, M., Robinson, S. (2015). The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 624-64.
Biesta, G. & Tedder, M. (2007). Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults, 39(2), 132-149.
Bunnell, T. (2019). International Schooling and Education in the 'New Era': Emerging Issues. Bingley: Emerald.
Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. 1998. What is agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103, 962–1023.
Friend, L. Mills, K. A. & Lingard, B. (2022). Globalisation, cultural knowledges and sociomateriality in Middle Eastern education: how the global and local influence classroom practices? Globalisation, Societies and Education, OnlineFirst
Gibson, M. T & Lucy Bailey, L. (2022). Constructing international schools as postcolonial sites. Globalisation, Societies and Education, Published OnlineFirst
Gorur, R. & Arnold, B. (2022). Regulating private sector schooling in the global south: The case of India. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 52(3), 345-361.
Hartmann, E. (2021). The shadow sovereigns of global education policy: A critique of the world society approach. Journal of Education Policy, 36(3), 367–392.
Hsieh, H.-F. & Shannon, S.E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15, 1277–1288.
Oolbekkink-Marchand, H., Hadar, L., Smith, K., Helleve, I., Ulvik, M. (2017). Teachers' perceived professional space and their agency. Teaching and Teacher Education, 62, 37-46.
Pantić, N. (2017). An exploratory study of teacher agency for social justice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 66, 219-230.
Parreira Do Amaral, M., Steiner-Khamsi, G., & Thompson, C. (Eds.). (2019). Researching the global education industry. Palgrave Macmillan.
Poole, A. (2022). Beyond the tyranny of the typology: moving from labelling to negotiating international school teachers’ identities. Educational Review, 74(6), 1157-1171.
Rönnberg, L. (2018). Going Global. Application to the Swedish Research Council, grant no 2018-04897.
Rönnberg, L., Alexiadou, N., Benerdal, B., Carlbaum, S. Holm, A-S & Lundahl, L. (2022). Schools Going Global: Swedish free school companies, spatial imaginaries and movable pedagogical ideas. Nordic Journal of Educational Policy, 8 (1), 9-19.
Vetenskapsrådet (2017). Good Research Practice. Stockholm: Vetenskapsrådet.
Winchip, E. (2022). Open for business: a quantitative analysis of teachers’ experiences of marketisation in international schools. Educational Review, OnlineFirst.
Yemini, M, Lee, M. & Wright, E. (2022). Straddling the global and national: the emerging roles of international schooling. Educational Review, 74(1), 1-5.
|
