Session Information
23 SES 09 B, Privatisation and Public Education
Symposium
Contribution
Major reforms are taking place globally that are concerned with the privatization of public education. Such reforms are concerned with enabling choice and diversity: where the range of providers is extended, and where parents and families can identify and access an education that meets their needs. We plan to engage with this development by focusing on the conceptualization of privatization and the evidence base both for this initiative and the impact on public education.
Such a symposium is necessary because there is a need to bring together a range of work that will shed new light on what privatization means for public education, and how it is impacting and making a difference to public education and communities. We intend breaking new ground by undertaking the following: first, , we intend reporting from a range of sites about the varied impact of privatization agendas, and how this reform strategy is being worked through in different systems, traditions, and contemporary political agendas (McGinity, Ros Magnusdottir, Salokangas, Kauko and Beach, paper 1); second; we plan to engage with thinking and empirical work that demonstrates that privatization is not only about moving public assets into private hands, and enabling new providers to enter a marketised system (Gutierrez, Carrasco and Rasse, paper 2; Courtney, paper 3), but also to think about how education as a public matter is becoming a private issue subjected to the whim and interests of private and often elite groups (Rawolle and Rowlands, paper 4); and, third, we will report on the emerging issues of choice and diversity through examining how different experiences of choice systems operate, not least by examining the interplay between regulation and co-ordination. In working on these three main themes we intend making a contribution to the education policy field by presenting new insights into the juxtaposing of ‘public’ and ‘private’, and by pluralizing this through recognizing that there are ‘publics’ interrelated to and with ‘privates’. Such analysis needs to be rooted in an evidence base, and one that locates a rapidly globalizing reform regime within the nation state and contemporary contexts.
References
Gunter, H M., P Woods, G Woods. "Academy schools and entrepreneurialism in education." Journal of Education Policy 22 (2)(2007) : 263-285. Power, S. & Taylor, C. 2013. Social justice and education in the public and private spheres, Oxford Review of Education, 39:4, 464-479, DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2013.821854 Seppänen, P., Carrasco, A., Rinne, R. & Simola, H. (eds) (2015) Contrasting Dynamics in Education Politics of Extremes: school choice in Chile and Finland. SENSE Publishers.
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