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