Pluralist Publics in Market Driven Education : Towards More Democracy in Educational Reform

"Pluralist Publics in Market Driven Education opens a conversation on the nature of the public in education systems weary from market driven educational reform. Ruth Boyask observes the characteristic of publicness within contemporary education settings, a characteristic defined by tools from public sphere and democratic education theory. Boyask's investigations of publicness in educational sites are founded in conceptualising public education as pluralist, unbounded and conditional. These concepts of the public are important for ongoing and future debate on public education. The settings Boyask examines are different in structure, function and location yet each demonstrates the push and pull between market relations (including competition, efficiency and productivity) and the desire for social equality and democracy in education. Examples of educational settings are drawn broadly from an Anglo-American imaginary that has taken hold in educational systems transnationally, with detailed observation from three research studies of education policy enactment in England. The research studies (including research on curriculum reform in a private democratic school, privatisation of regional educational services and governance in English private schools) provide contexts for examining public accountability, public service and the public good as they relate to a reconceptualised public education. Boyask's argument is that by opening a conversation about the nature of the public within these sites we bring them into the spheres of a pluralist public education. They become open to public scrutiny and through their debate arise new ideas for challenging market-driven restrictions to contemporary public education. Ruth Boyask is Senior Lecturer at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, where she does research and teaches on postgraduate programmes in education. Previously, she was Lecturer in Education Studies at the University of Plymouth, UK, and remains a member of Council for the British Educational Research Association."-- Provided by publisher Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents Tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Visualizing Pluralist Public Education Public education A methodology for policy as practice The structure of the book 2 Theorizing Pluralist Public Education Publics and their opinion The greater community of the twenty-first century Who is the public in public schooling? The uncommon public school Conclusion 3 Opening a Window on the Private Sphere Private education Limits to public purposes of private schools Conditional publicness in English private schools Privatized education Privatization in schooling 4 Mapping Governance Structures Struggle for the public in conditional public entities Corporations: For the benefit of members? Charitable, not-for-profit and public benefit organizations Public–private partnerships The rise of social enterprise and for-profit public benefit Mapping structural forms 5 Public Benefit/Public Good Contested purposes of schooling Governance for the public good in private sector schooling Conditional equality in private schooling: A research study Governance in the case study schools The extent and nature of the public good 6 Pluralist Public Accountability The school The research project Classification and framing within the projects Participation and learning inside the projects Democratic participation in education markets Public accountability in a conditional counterpublic 7 Bounded Public Service Relations between local authorities and schools Models of service Corporate model Community engagement model Entrepreneurial model Co-operative model Implications of reform across the local government sector Discussion 8 Public Education Unbounded Recontextualization in the academies programme Policy to support democratic publics Closing thoughts References Index