Session Information
23 SES 09 A, Education Privatization
Symposium
Contribution
New Zealand has relatively few private schools (5%, but increasing) and yet has important elements of privatisation within its mainly public school system. Privatisation of schooling has been growing since the “Tomorrow’s Schools’ reforms of the late 1980s. These introduced ‘self-managing schools’, making New Zealand schools take up many of the features of small businesses. This is endogenous privatisation (Ball & Youdell, 2007), adopting ideas and practices from the private sector so that schools became more market-oriented and business-like. The everyday funding and operations of schools, professional learning and development, professional resources and special education have all been heavily affected by this trend. Over the last decade privatisation of education in New Zealand has also come to include public-private partnerships to build new schools and the setting up of charter schools. Nowadays many educational services are contracted out to for-profit providers and schools contract in various services as well (Powell 2015a, 2015b). Meanwhile some socially elite private schools have become ‘state-integrated’ but kept their high fees. This can be seen as a kind of privatisation through government ‘sponsoring’ of private schools. New reforms such as ‘National Standards for student achievement have also opened up privatisation opportunities. Education policy is gradually nibbling away at the public system, bringing in the private. As with the symposium as a whole, the aim of this paper is to identify and characterise private actors in compulsory schooling drawing on media accounts, education policy documents, AND reviews of previous academic writing. The paper provides an analysis of how contentious school privatisation developments have been presented to the New Zealand public given that many developments do not seem like hidden privatisation (Ball & Youdell, 2007, Burch 2009). Has the privatisation of schooling in New Zealand been the result of public apathy? Or has education been part of what has been recently characterised as a wider pattern of concealment of political intent (Gould 2016)? I argue that privatisation developments have often been framed by policymakers as being only small scale or experimental, allowing piecemeal changes that may not individually seem very important, but which together and over time gradually add up to a significant shift from the tradition of public schooling in this former welfare-state society.
References
Ball, S.J. & Youdell, D. (2007). Hidden Privatisation in Education. Brussels: Education International. Burch, P. (2009). Hidden markets: The new educational privatisation. London & New York: Routledge. Powell, D. (2015a). Assembling the privatisation of PE and the ‘inexpert’ teacher. Sport, Education and Society, 20(1), 73-88. DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2014.941796 Powell, D. (2015b). Outsourcing: the hidden privatisation of education in New Zealand. Teachers and Curriculum, 14, 29-32. Gould B. (2016, 14 December) Labour Party never really knew what they were dealing with in John Key New Zealand Herald http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11765941
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