Some thoughts following our last policy group discussion.  Christiana has done her usual thorough job in sketching the main headlines of discussion.  Patsy has a Livescribe file if you want to return to the detail.  I have just iterated a few of the discussion points and some of the questions raised; it does not do justice to the richness of the discussion, which raised some really thorny issues.  I have added a few ramblings of my own and some interesting papers I read recently.

Policy Group Meeting 29/03/12

1. Points of Discussion:

·       Brief overview of Michael Apple’s work: e.g. Porto Alegre

·       Michael W. Apple and Anita Oliver Becoming Right: Education and the Formation of Conservative Movements

o   Focus upon the Right in the United States

o   How people ‘become right’ and what makes them choose this position?

o   Focus on the extent to which what is being discussed in this article mirrors or contradicts the UK context

·       Stefan Collini -  Higher education as a public good financed by public funds

o   How can we construct the public good?

·       Michael W. Apple and Thomas C. Pedroni: Conservative Alliance Building and African American Support of Vouchers: The End of Brown’s Promise or a New Beginning?

o   Conservative modernisation

o   Discussion on Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO)

§  Voucher support for urban working-class communities of colour

§  Alignment with conservative educational reform

§  Accepting funding from far-Right foundations

·       David Harvey – Work on Neoliberalism

·       Neoconservatism-Neoliberalism agenda

·       Discussion on French Education system

·       Jo Boaler: Alternative approaches to teaching, learning and assessing mathematics

o   Learning without limits

·       Discussion on URBAN FORUMS

o   Using Market Forces to improve Education in Manchester: Possibilities and Challenges

§  Cross disciplinary meeting chaired by Gillian Evans (University of Manchester)

§  Panel:

§  Julie Thorpe, Head of School and Youth Programmes at the Co-operative College

§  Aneez Esmail, Chair of Governors at Chorlton High School

§  Kieran McDermott, CEO of One Education

§  Christopher Ray, High Master, Manchester Grammar School and New Islington Academy

§  Professor Helen M. Gunter from the School of Education at the University of Manchester

2. Some issues

We discussed some research questions raised by the Apple articles in terms of understanding the right.  For instance:

Does the particular way the rise of the right in the USA mirror or contradict the UK situation?  What do we mean by the right and is it possible to speak of unified tendencies/blocs?  What ways has the right taken root and how do particular groupings deal with their relationships to others? What kind of theories help us understand the movement of groups into or between positions? Can we talk in similar fashion about 'left' alliances and how are they formed/dissipated?  What are the psychologies in being drawn into groups/cults/ ideological positions?

We also discussed tactical issues: Is the analysis of Citrus Valley simplistic? Is just being 'nicer' and less confrontational likely to have secured greater dialogue and hence a 'better' accommodation?  If you are a public servant in the UK and are forced to stand up for say a curricular provision against a group of vocal parents, do we have more room to delay the debate or avoid it altogether?  In France, Dave reported how their policy of the "French' system, equality across all sectors in funding and in national identity, is coming under strain in dealing with increased diversity and inequality of opportunity.  There are some really difficult issues here about the notions of public good and common schooling. From the Urban Forums it seems as if the local authority personnel have quite happily adapted to the market and the grammar school sector do not want to participate in the dialogue!  Where does that leave a 'public' education sector?

3. Some personal ramblings

I was interested in James, Maija and Ruth's posting about the Urban Forum and reflecting on the Co-operative College chain.  Mutualism and co-operatives were part of the founding of the Labour movement and seemed to have been written out of popular history.  It seems that the left has been associated with statism and that the right, especially in the USA, seemed to have successfully tarred socialism as a collective form of authoritarianism.  Whereas when I was an adolescent it was the left that anti-authoritarian and rebellious characters like me gravitated to.  Perhaps I was just naive.

The motif of bureaucracy as a brake on development has always had some resonance in the modern social imaginary (read Charles Taylor) but it is being captured in particular ways as an attack on Local Authorities.  (Perhaps we need to re-read Durkheim and Weber?)    Will this mean that those in the education community having to be less precious about local government and support those academy chains we just happen to 'like'?  This seems to me a form of moral emotivism that is played by both left and right; but how do you argue for a reasoned moral concept of public education in liberal democracies that seem intent on freedom of expression?

We noted how the right is increasingly invoking social justice as a compelling argument.  Gove's policy pronouncements are increasingly layered with notions of opportunity and social mobility, of meritocracy.  In pointing to New Labour's failure in many respects to reverse inequality through education, Gove is touching on some sore points.  However, I cannot foresee how every academy is going to be 'successful' in relation to the grade inflation going on -where satisfactory is no longer good enough and where C grade - that used to be the old grade 1 for CSEs- is no longer a respectable mark.  When the threshold is increased to 50% will everyone have forgotten about comprehensive education?  Presumably then, having scrapped local authorities and handed power to academy chains, major policy strategy will have to be dictated from the centre to an even greater degree.  How will 'failing' academies be dealt with?

Perhaps the research opportunity is to find some philosophical arguments for building a civic society as a compelling moral commitment and from which we can then devise criteria to evaluate these 'experiments'?  How many people in the research community are willing to engage in the level of moral debate that is required since the grounds on which evidence has a shared meaning are becoming thinner and thinner?  I still have grounds for some optimism but there needs to be an urgent debate about the moral purposes of education in our society and I fear that whoever runs the state is not prepared to engage in this - look what happened to the Cambridge Primary Review!  Enough rambling.

Some interesting papers I read recently:

Clarke, J. (2012) What crisis is this?, in: J. Rutherford, & Davison, S. (Ed) The neoliberal crisis (London, Soundings). http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/contents.html

Feinberg, W. (2012) The Idea of Public Education, Review of Research in Education, 36(1), 1-22.

Thomson, P. (2010) Headteacher autonomy: a sketch of a Bourdieuian field analysis of position and practice, Critical Studies in Education, 51(1), 5-20. 

ALSO check out for free, Soundings 48 and Stuart Hall's article on neoliberalism: 

http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ReadingRoom/contents.html

cities@manchester event

We (James, Maija and Ruth) attended the cities@manchester event Using Market Forces to improve Education in Manchester: Possibilities and Challenges. This was a cross discipline meeting about the impact of market forces on our education system. The panel consisted of Julie Thorpe (Head of Schools and Youth Programmes, The Co-operative College), Aneez Esmail (Chair of Governors, Chorlton High School), Kieran McDermott (One Education, COE), Christopher Ray (High Master, Manchester Grammar School and New Islington Academy) and Professor Helen Gunter (University of Manchester) and was chaired by Gillian Evans (University of Manchester). Here we summarise the key positions of the speakers and provide a short response.

Four of the panel members presented arguments supporting the diversification within and across schooling provision.  Firstly Julie Thorpe from the Co-operative College argued that the reform agenda creates a space for the development of democratic schools along cooperative and mutual lines for the benefit of local communities. Aneez Esmail, the Chair of Governors explained his reasons why the school (a successful comprehensive) is in the process of converting to an academy. He argued that within the current context of educational reform the government’s drive for increasing school autonomy as a universal model for schooling provision meant that schools such as his felt that there were few options available and that part of the decision was formed by a feeling of needing to ‘jump before being pushed’. However he felt that the opportunities afforded by opting out of LA control, would allow the school more flexibility to respond to local needs and demands. Kieran McDermott (One Education) considered that traditional approaches to schooling provision were inefficient. He gave an example of how decentralising school budgets (in this case for the EP service) the head teacher was able to cut the waiting list that had existed under centralised budget holding. Thus he argued that the freedoms granted by the marketisation of education allowed individual schools to tackle underlying inefficiency and red tape that exists within the traditional LA relationships. Christopher Ray of Manchester Grammar School considered that by setting up a Free School MGS would offer bright working class children a great education that they were currently denied in the comprehensive system. Prof. Gunter argued that there was disputed evidence that diversification of schooling provision actually improved outcomes, and was concerned that comprehensive education is democratically accountable in a way that new models of schooling are not.

For us, the implications of using market forces within the education system by increasing diversification of schooling provision are that it fragments local relationships between schools, local authorities and their communities. The use of market forces in policy development across the public sector does not address some of the root causes behind educational failure and disadvantage in our society and we are concerned that exclusion against groups of children is occurring in an increasing rate as schools continue to diversify and compete in the market. However the spaces being created by diversification in the schooling system have been taken up by the Co-operative College who now have 200 academies run along mutual, democratic and cooperative lines. It is too soon to tell the potential benefits from remodelling schools in this way, but we see opportunities for productive community engagement in the development of schooling provision to reflect local need in the model developed by the Co-operative College.  

Interestingly Ron Glatter has written around the issues of markets in education in todays Guardian and the link is provided below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/28/full-profit-making-schools

To social contracts and beyond

Christiana did a great job of summarising our recent conversation, so I've just pasted her bullet points below:
 

·       MICHAEL w APPLE: ‘Interrupting the Right: On Doing Critical Educational Work in Conservative Times’

o   How can we, as academics, build, communicate the hegemonic bloc formed by neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populist religious activists, and a managerialist class.

o   Disconnection between policy intentions and policy results

o   Parents as significant education policy actors

o   Targets and Markets do not work

o   Markets lack of morality

o   Operation of the Market (David Harvey)

o   Cooperative movement

o   What is compelling about right education

o   Social interactions and connections enable us to be together

o   Alan Touraine Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference

·                     Matters of risk (Hood, C., Rothstein, H. and Baldwin, R. (2001). The Government of Risk: Understanding Risk Regulation Regimes. Oxford: Oxford University press.).

o   How risk is understood around different things? How risk comes to be regulated and managed?

·       Social contracts

·       Porto Allegre Example; Make it an attractive political strategy in England

o   Who gets to speak, who gets to be involved

At one point in our recent conversation I foolishly brought up the question of social contracts and Helen suggested I blog on this subject.  So briefly, and at the risk of doing injustice to the subject, a brief and hasty intro.

Social contract theories in Western philosophy have a long history:

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau advocated very different forms of social contract theories, but essentially a social contract is an agreement amongst ourselves about the type of social organisation we wish to abide by.  For example, we typically submit to laws, give up some freedoms, in return for a sense of security and protection. 

Rousseau - “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” – wants a contract that ensures ‘egalité’; in a contract individuals give up certain minimal liberties in exchange for certain protections; for example, we agree to pay tax and abide by just laws in exchange for the protection of our liberty.  .

John Rawls (1921 – 2002) A Theory of Justice (1972) sparked off a lifetimes work for himself and others.  He has modified his theory several times.  He takes up some of Kant’s ideas on reason and places them into institutional arrangements and procedures for ensuring justice as fairness.  Rawls wishes to update contract theories for modern societies and in America and the UK at least we have a political class many of whom studied politics, philosophy and economics, probably at a 'top' university and will almost certainly have immersed themselves in Rawls's work

He extends Kant's thinking of an imaginary contract; for Kant an imaginary act of collective consent “is the test of the rightfulness of every public law”; does the law frame the ‘united will’ and oblige citizens as if they had consented?

Contracts carry moral weight in so far as they realise two ideas: autonomy and reciprocity; John Rawls (1971, revised 1999) A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism (1993) (The latter responded to critics by introducing the idea of the overlapping consensus - public reason – we might never agree but we can come to public consensus; builds on Mill’s notion of democracy as government by public discussion)

principles of justice in the social contract come from the “original position” - what would we agree to in an initial situation of equality from behind a “veil of ignorance” (i.e. knowing nothing about each other).  He argued we would agree these arrangements:

1) Equal right to basic liberties compatible with liberties of others                

2) inequalities permissible only if they work to the least well off members of society and equality of opportunity open to all in holding office

Difference principle: people to use their different natural talents for the common good; basic structure of society to be arranged:   “entitlements to legitimate expectations” - an entitlement only arises when the “rules of the game are in place”.

Contrary to the Aristotelian tradition Rawls argues that the notion of ‘just deserts’ for people is morally arbitrary.  What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with the facts of uneven distribution of difference.  Liberal democracies should therefore be neutral as to the ends or goods of institutions in relation to society providing they uphold these principles.  Needs a state to arrange the contract but should only be as minimal as necessary.

Rawls has a multitude of admirers and critics.  Paul Graham (2007) has done for Rawls what Jenkins does for Bourdieu -provide a neat summary.  One of the principles that emerge from Rawls is the concept of public reasoning which has been taken up by Jurgen Habermas and Amartya Sen in different ways.  The difficulty is how to maintain a liberal notion of private rights within a public dialogue that is sensitive to cultural differences.  Rawls is concerned with political arrangements, Habermas (1995) I think has a more global interest in how we defend rational notions of the common good through dialogue, he reworks Kant not through the subject but through discourse.  Sen's work is about capacities to participate in public reasoning.  I have not read much of Nancy Fraser's work but she critiques the notion of public reasoning for not accounting for gendered and power inequalities in the public sphere.  Fraser (2010) does however believe in forms of public reasoning and her theories of justice revolve around both redistribution, recognition and representation.  Themes particularly relevant for concepts of voice and justice.

 

Michael Sandel (the “encumbered self” 1984), Alasdair MacIntyre (the storied self -1994) are critics of Rawls that I'm more familiar with. 

How do we decide between competing visions of the ‘good life’, can a theory of justice (e.g. Kant and Rawls) be neutral as to these questions?  MacIntyre (2001) argues that liberalism is an intellectual tradition that contains normative values about how we ought to live and does not therefore propose ‘neutral’ theories of justice; we have to argue those out in social contexts.

Sandel (1984) has critiqued Rawls for having insufficiently taken into account issues of power but fundamentally advancing a thin conception of morality, a weak version of attachment to each other.  We cannot leave behind our narratives to arrive at the original position.  People need access to substantive values capable of motivating them that are not purely based on rational reasons but on a history of attachments and disagreements.  While we have to reflect upon and question our values we cannot escape them, they are part of our character, our ‘moral depth’.  Philosophers such as Richard Rorty have accused MacIntyre and Sandel of being communitarians – a relativist position that Rorty (1994) claims is a “wistful” attachment to some poorly theorized concept of community.    Communities have the possibility of being tyrannical and destructive of liberties.  Rawls argues that to specify in too much detail the principles of a good life would require a much more authoritarian political regime than most people would find tolerable in advanced democracies.  Rorty argues that liberal democracies do not need substantive philosophies of the 'good life' and his accusation of "terminal wistfulness" would certainly extend to Michael Fielding's work as well. 

 

 Incidentally, both Sandel and MacIntyre have rejected the communitarian label, MacIntyre (2001) argues that communitarianism is just another form of liberalism.  

 

So where does that leave us?  I argue, contra Rorty,  a need to 're-enchant' the public sphere with ethical reasoning, however wistful that might be, and that this is, contrary to postmodernism and some tenets of liberalism, a possibility - I feel another blog coming on.  But briefly, MacIntyre (1994, 2001) makes a compelling argument that it is in the context of social practices and how virtues are partly definitive of and extended by these practices and how they define their telos, that we need to seek reasoned civic engagement.  At the level of the state and a global public culture it may be that our reasons derived from differing moral traditions are now incommensurable and irreconcilable.  However, contemporary 

institutions such as schools are powerful sites not only for the content of a richer civic engagement through curriculum reform, but also for the modelling and encouragement of civic virtues.  Perhaps we need to start with what constitutes excellence as opposed to effectiveness in the learning cultures of our schools and this I would maintain requires some notion, qua Aristotle,  of human telos and flourishing.  Thanks for reading this far!

 

References;

Fraser, N. (2010) Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York, Columia University Press). 

Graham, P. (2007) Rawls (Oxford, Oneworld Publications)

 

Habermas, J. (1995) The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume 1 (Boston, Beacon Press).

 

MacIntyre, A. (1994) After Virtue: a study in moral theory (London, Duckworth).

MacIntyre, A. (2001) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London, Duckworth).

 

Rawls, J. (1973) A Theory of Justice (London, Oxford University Press). 

 

Rorty, R. (1994) Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). 

Sandel, M. (1984) The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, Political Theory, 12(1), 81-96.

 

Sandel, M. (2010) Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do? (London, Penguin).

Sen, A. (2010) The idea of Justice (London, Penguin). 

From TINA to TIAAAIT

Yesterday I heard Prof. Becky Francis (RSA) talk at Manchester Metropolitan University. In her talk she asked, and these are my words, why academics can provide an extensive and erudite critique of TINA (Thatcher’s bark that There Is No Alternative) but that we’re not so good at TIAAAIT (There Is An Alternative And It’s This)?

The result is that many left-leaning educational researchers feel frustrated and irrelevant to policy and what happens in education despite being so morally and intellectually committed to improving the experience and equity of outcomes of all children.

Prof. Francis started her talk by saying she wanted to withdraw ‘from variables to principles’ seemingly to look afresh at questions, such as, why the performance of children in English schools is so stratified right across the scale with measured increases even between higher professional and lower professional let alone the free school meal divide. Her presentation bubbled with the complexity of how particular schools tend to damage pupils and teachers with a difference in results that is so predictable and explicable yet so resistant to the development of concrete and practicable suggestions of how to take sure steps to improve things in practice, in schools.

Key to this discussion was how academics work and should work to improve education and schooling, through policy ‘impact’ or by informing practitioners. The feeling was that this task was extraordinarily challenging.

Most academics, it was pointed out, work in universities and so are not free from the shackles of managerialism and performativity that evidence suggests skew effort and resources from educating a child to ticking a box. An academic must publish or perish although now they must deliver ‘impact’ as well. Furthermore, one of the many depressing realisations was that the complexity and interrelatedness of the issues in the education extend beyond the specific and focused expertise of individual academics.

Someone asked, ‘what happens now?’ Literally what happens after the workshop? To me, this is the crux of the matter.

There is an old joke that an academic encounters no problem that can’t be solved with a workshop. This raises the question of what solution does a workshop tend to produce? Insights are shared and ideas are rounded but then the workshop finishes and whatever momentum existed in the room dissipates – if that is the right word – into email exchanges and new academic relationships and research that is often published in journals closed to many of the people the academics are seeking to influence.

This of course is not the only workshop or academic network on this theme, even in Manchester. Nevertheless, in my experience, workshops don’t join up or create a coherent and strategic whole. The challenges we face are huge and the constituency behind the increased marketisation of education is powerful and well organised. How can academics compete or contend, especially as research budgets shrink?

I suggest an online, wiki-based project that would enable academics and practitioners to collectively develop an alternative that moves from evidence to practical suggestions for implementation. Prof. Francis provided seven tensions for developing an alternative, for example, ‘engaging curriculum versus national entitlement’ and ‘local democracy versus universal principles’. These tensions could be placed onto a wiki as a starting point and researchers and practitioners could engage with these issues and gradually synthesise and formulate these into concrete ideas for action.

It is an admittedly idealistic and ambitious project. There will be a thousand tasks and deadlines that will get in the way but if the only alternative is more of the same, the same unequal outcomes and the reproduction and exacerbation of the same issues, then what is the alternative for TIAAAIT?

Beyond evidence in educational research

Michael Apple’s 2006 chapter ‘Interrupting the Right: On Doing Critical Educational Work in Conservative Times’ is an incisive call to arms that we – progressives, social democrats and recruiting for others – need to embrace.

Parents have always been hugely significant to education policy. Policies were offered to elements of the electorate asking if, for example, they were prepared for little Johnny to suffer the vagaries of 11+? and to vote accordingly. After the consumerisation of public services with the market place in schools and now the right to start a free school, parents are effectively educational policy actors. The notion of parents as policy actors raises the question of how well educational researchers communicate to parents and the public as a whole?

Apple’s paper engages with this issue. It starts with a brief description of the bleak world of ‘conservative modernisation’, the hegemonic bloc formed by neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populist religious activists, and a managerialist class.

Then Apple makes the compelling case that the right wasn’t always so powerful, that they strategically and effectively articulated the current orthodoxy and if they can do it so can we, just with fewer resources. Central to Apple’s argument is the need to engage and work at many levels from academia to the public coherently and simultaneously. The focus here is with the public, with regards to whom, Apple states,

‘I maintain that the reason that some of the arguments coming from the various factions of this new [conservative modernist] hegemonic bloc are listened to is because they are connected to aspects of the realities that people experience… because there has been a very creative articulation of the themes that resonate deeply with the experiences fears, hopes, and dreams of people as they go about their daily lives.’

There are lot of great ideas about how to engage, including the need to think heretically and build relationships with existing progressive constituents as well as those intertwined with the conservative hegemony without sacrificing too much morally or tactically.

My issue is the emphasis on evidence – whether qualitative or quantitative, supporting or contrary – in the engagement with the public. In the chapter Apple positions the role of academics in refuting the claims of the right in, for example, identifying how school choice and many of the other rightist reforms increase stratification rather than promote equality. The role of progressive academics is therefore to respond to the claims made by the right and refute them when necessary by presenting counter claims based on particular epistemological grounds, through particular theoretical lenses with varying degrees of certainty in relation to other findings. The question is will this role lead to the articulation of ‘themes that resonate deeply with the experiences fears, hopes, and dreams of people as they go about their daily lives?’

I would answer no. Evidence alone will never be enough. Of course, evidence should be the heart and lifeblood of educational research but it is only the first step. The most crucial part of the process is crafting and communicating this knowledge to inform and inspire the public, to shape and frame the debate as to the purpose of a good education and the relationship between pupils, schools and society. Most importantly this needs to resonate with what parents hope for their children and we all hope for our collective future.

The key question is what this might look like? This is something I will seek to engage with in the next blog but in the meantime I would appreciate your comments and ideas…