Conference Agenda

The social reforms of Hungary’s right-wing populist government have fundamentally reconfigured social and class relations (Geva 2021; Stubbs and Lendvai-Bainton 2020). Education has been a key area for building a new order in society. The government crafted an education policy discourse centering on educating a Christian nation (Neumann, 2023) and, offering favorable financial and legal conditions, invited allied Christian churches to take a greater part in education and welfare service provision. Subsequently, the share of denominational institutions has significantly increased at all educational levels, resulting in the increasing pillarization and social segregationof local educational spaces. Arguably, the churchification of education and welfare (Fodor, 2022) is a form of attenuated governance (Hackett, 2020) in the sense that the symbolic and material support offered to allied/co-opted churches distances the government from contentious policy goals, most importantly, the pacification of rural spaces through consolidating racial segregation and institutional racism (Merry, 2014).

In conversation with the literature on the role of faith schools in contemporary European educational markets (Hemming&Roberts, 2017), the presentation focuses on the effects of authoritarian-conservative education policies and policy discourse “on the ground” (Apple, 2001). Based on three town-level case studies about the discoursive strategies of local and regional church elites, the analysis explores the restructuring of local education markets and its impact on producing and solidifying inequalities and exacerbating social divisions surrounding race and class (Allen and West, 2011; Apple, 2001; Jackson, 2003).

Neo-conservative education governments have had a controversial relationship with neoliberalism (Apple, 2004; Exley&Ball, 2011). While the churchification of education is a form of privatization, the government discourse frame church-state relations as a “strategic alliance” and presents faith schools as a primary scene for socializing good Hungarians. Official policy discourses heavily draw on Christian church discourses about the importance of value-based socialization (Neumann, 2023). Rejecting market discourses, education policy-makers contend that schooling should be a “shared responsibility” and denounce former socialist-liberal governments for approaching education as a market and commodity (Neumann, 2023). The study found that while the representatives of the local state and its secular institutions describe the churchification process as the amplification of market forces, consumer choice, and school segregation locally, denominational actors distance themselves from the competition discourse, and instead, argue that high professionalism and moral integrity offers a niche that attracts families following similar values. Furthermore, they argue, that the moral integrity and smaller school size offer a family feel (Hemmings&Roberts, 2017), “safety and stability”, and ensure better student behaviour (Butler and Hamnett, 2012) compared to secular schools. At the same time, the strategy of cultural imperialism (Grace, 2015), opening up faith schools to the wider public, results in an evangelization approach that does not aim to impose religion onto anyone but instead offers it as an opportunity to explore. Thus, religion is treated situationally and strategically: religious stakeholders expect “openness” and “cooperation” from the families and the teachers, while they also emphasize being “open” to anyone who is willing to endorse religious school practices.

In the context of the church-friendly state politics and funding, faith schools have become the synonyms of well-resourced, high-quality education in the eyes of the local elites. While secular stakeholders often point out the segregation effects of the expanding faith school system and the attenuated governance strategy which refrains from coordinating and regulating the distribution of students, faith school stakeholders defend their almost-all-white schools by pointing to token Roma students and blame disadvantaged families for self-segregation and for failing to comply with school entrance expectations.

This multi-case study in six Chilean secondary schools explores the challenges for leaders and schools in an area that has gained relevance in the national and international context due to a growingly diverse student body, and social movements that bring controversial issues to the forefront: the implementation of Citizenship Education to promote student civic involvement, in an increasingly commercialized and results oriented educational system. It uses the lens of Ethical Leadership, associated with the fulfilment of the moral imperative of education, and aims to answer how citizenship education takes place in different types of schools in Chile, exploring how managerial grammar, through the instruments of planning, accountability, and evaluation, shapes the discourses and practices of Citizenship Education.

Current transformations of the educational system under neoliberal and managerial logic make it difficult for citizenship education to be a priority at schools worldwide. In Chile, there is a contradiction between de integral development of students proposed by the Law of Education and the mechanisms that educational policy establishes for planning and assessment of schools and teachers. This results in less and less time devoted to citizenship education, promoting individual success over collective learning. Law 20.911 (2016) established that each school must have an annual Citizenship Education Plan, a tool to register actions related to citizenship education, prioritising this area and making it more visible at schools. But the initial evaluation of these plans revealed that 30% of schools did not have citizenship education actions and that there was little relationship between schools and their communities (PNUD, 2018). This study aims to further explore how this educational policy is being signified by schools, directives and teachers.

Research questions:

How can the existing methodologies examining the phenomena of school choice be augmented to more effectively examine parent choice factors?

What methodologies and approaches are available from the European context to examine the school choice in the Australian context, and how does the Australian context inform research into the European sphere?

Why are Australian parents enrolling their children in non-government religious schools in such high volumes, and what are the social and political impacts, and likely impacts drawing from understanding the European experience?

Description

Research into school choice has been prolific in recent years, including studies of European school choice. (Agasisti, 2023; Maranto and Shakeel, 2021; Mohme, 2017; Maussen and Bader, 2015; Agasisti, Barbieri, and Murtinu, 2015; Melo, 2013; European Court of Human Rights, 2011). However. researching the of issue of school choice in general, and religion in school choice in particular, needs further methodological frames to effectively gather data from a key sample: parents.

One of the primary methods for researching this topic has been political economy approaches, connected to school reform research movements. These have been driven both by critical theory approaches (Verger, Fontdevila and Zancajo, 2016; Rizvi and Lingard, 2010), and neoliberal approaches (Agasisti, 2023; Agasisti, Barbieri, and Murtinu, 2015). The focus on political economy, and ‘Hard drivers’ rather than ‘Ideation’ factors, and ‘external’ rather than ‘internal’ factors, (Verger, Fontdevila, and Zancajo, 2016) have tended to underrepresent the complex and difficult to obtain field of parent choice factors. This is particularly relevant to the role of religion, leading in turn to less coherent theories and methods for gathering and analyzing parent data in the school choice debates.

The unique Australian context provides a lively comparative case for examining school choice, particularly with reference to global factors and the European experience. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2022 total Australia non-government school enrolments were 35.6%, k-12; at the secondary level, just over 40% of enrolments were in non-government schools (ABS, 2022). By comparison, the OECD average non-government proportion of schools in a national education system is 18%. Australia ranks third highest compared to other Western nations for non-government school enrolments, over 90% being Christian- affiliated, but with a rising Islamic school population (OECD, 2018). These statistics, however, seem divergent from the dominant educational narrative of centralized state education still prevailing as normative amongst both politicians and sub-policy ‘heterarchies’. (Jessop, 1998; Ball, 2012). The clash between actual enrolment trends and the older normative discourse is causing considerable political and public energy and friction, a debate in which the author has played a public part in both media and policy. One of the key drivers of these enrolment trends is parent choice.

This paper surveys a range of European nations’ approaches to school choice, including religion, using a political economy model (Verger, Fontdevila and Zancajo, 2016), and the paradigms of ‘hard drivers’ vs ‘ideation’/ ‘External’ vs ‘Internal’, but also adding the 'hard driver' of organizational theory to the suite of paradigms to examine the influence of agile structures of non-government schools (Bush, 2015).

Choice reasons are then explored from parent perspectives, based on survey samples drawn from 3 recent studies (n=12,095), including the author’s own earlier unpublished study of parents at Anglican schools (n=3500) (Hastie, 2022; Christian Schools Australia, 2023; Independent Schools Queensland, 2021). Hence the broader field of school choice studies is augmented with three additional ‘Ideation’ elements: ‘choice architecture’ from behavioural economics (Madrian, 2014; Thaler, Sunstein and Balz, 2013), Moral Foundations Theory (Haight, 2006; 2007), and Pneumatological Imagination (PI) as a mode of examining complex personal religious motivations of parents (Yong. 2017).