Carl Bagley

Rejecting Schools: Towards a Fuller Understanding of the Process of Parental Choice.

In analysing the relationship between the response of secondary schools to the educational marketplace and how and why parents choose schools, this paper focuses on the crucially important but largely unexplored issue of the reasons parents have for not choosing particular schools. In essence it investigates why certain schools are rejected as opposed to selected by parents. The findings broaden the understanding of the choice process - negative reasoning playing a significant role in deciding not only which schools are ultimately chosen but which ones are even considered by parents. In particular, the findings reinforce the fact that the process of school choice is both complex and highly localised and as such has marked implications for school managers seeking to respond in a competitive educational marketplace.

Educational Research and intertextual forms of (re)presentation : The case for dancing the data

Contemporary dialogues concerning qualitative methodology focus increasingly on alternative forms of data (re)presentation. This article explores the use of dance as a medium for such (re)presentation. The article contextualizes, describes, and reflects on a performance by the authors staged at the 1998 Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association. The (re)presentation in words and movement was choreographed from research on school choice policy and its impact on families whose children have special educational needs, undertaken by one of the authors in the United Kingdom. In reflecting on the process, the article discusses some of the difficulties and advantages derived from the performance and stresses the need for creating a space for intertextual forms of data (re)presentation within the academy.

School choice and competition: a public‐market in education revisited

In 1993 the UK Economic and Social Research Council funded the Parental and School Choice Interaction (PACSI) Study into the marketisation of education, conducted by the author along with Philip Woods and Ron Glatter of the Open University. The findings from the PACSI study highlighted the localised and complex nature of markets in education and reported the ways in which senior school managers adopted a variety of strategies to respond to the local competitive arena in which they found themselves. In more than ten years since this study the UK Government has changed from Conservative to Labour and policy discourses on choice and competition have been situated alongside those of collaboration and partnership. In this shifting policy landscape the paper utilises analytical tools and findings from the original study to revisit one of the case study areas and examines the market environment in which senior school managers find themselves today. The findings reveal a stronger ‘parent as consumer’ marketing orientation and responsiveness on behalf of schools and an environment in which competition and rivalry has intensified and continues to discursively predominate.

Ni De Aqui Ni from There. Navigating between Contexts: Counter-Narratives of Undocumented Mexican Students in the United States.

Research has documented the ways in which students of Mexican origin are not succeeding academically in the same proportion as the rest of the US population. This process of educational failure occurs in the context of overt and more subtle forms of racism experienced throughout their schooling and everyday lives. Undocumented Mexican students face even harsher educational challenges as they experience life in a post‐September 11th environment of heightened xenophobic US nativism. The purpose of this three‐year study was to acknowledge the counter‐stories and learn from the counter‐life‐histories of undocumented college graduates of Mexican origin as they navigate across and between historical, socioeconomic, political and cultural boundaries, barriers and contexts. The research is grounded in the experiences, voices and perspectives of six individuals who graduated from a community college in Arizona. The study utilizes critical race theory (CRT) as an interpretive approach to both situate and challenge ahistorical, decontextualized, and one‐dimensional explanations of Mexican‐American underachievement and adopts a life history methodology to engage comprehensively with the perceptions of the interviewees.

‘I am much more than just a mum’. Social capital, empowerment and Sure Start

An earlier article published in this journal sought to recover the views of professionals concerned with the delivery and implementation of a ‘Third Way’ multiagency programme tackling the social exclusion of young children and their families known as Sure Start. The tentative findings suggested a ‘bottom‐up’ partnership perspective was held by professionals as they engaged in a process of ‘civic entrepreneurship’ to build social capital within the local community. This article tells a further part of that story as through qualitative data it recovers the views of local parents involved with the programme. The findings are important as they suggest a meaningful change in the power relationship between parents and professionals. The parents report how the project built holistically on existing strengths within the community, how professionals valued, listened to, and acted on their views, how the project changed them personally, and how collectively they became increasingly involved with the programme and empowered in the social capital building process. The concluding discussion draws on the work of Granovetter (1973) on social capital and Zimmerman (1995) on empowerment to theoretically locate and discuss the findings.

Changing Professional Discourses in Teacher Education Policy Back Towards a Training Paradigm: A Comparative Study.

Modern definitions of professions connect professional knowledge to scientific studies and higher education. In the present article we examine the changing nature of this relationship in initial teacher education in two European countries: Sweden and England. The article is based on policy analyses from recent decades of teacher education reforms. The findings suggest a policy convergence through a shared policy return that has moved teacher education back toward a teacher training paradigm.

Documents and debates Social exclusion, sure start and organizational social capital: evaluating inter‐disciplinary multi‐agency working in an education and health work programme

Social policy‐making in the UK under the Labour government has galvanized around the issue of social exclusion, identifying young children (0–4 years) and their families living in areas of high social disadvantage to be particularly at risk. This paper attempts to recover the experiences and views of professionals concerned with the delivery and implementation of a multi‐agency programme tackling the social exclusion of these young children and their families known as Sure Start. The data are based on the analysis of documentation, attendance and observation at meetings, and 32 semi‐structured interviews with members of the inter‐disciplinary team responsible for the Sure Start programmes delivery. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using open coding from grounded theorizing. The paper, in reflecting on the problems and dilemmas of multi‐agency approaches and reported in other research, considers how the preliminary findings from this study suggest the team have managed to accommodate and overcome these potential difficulties, to facilitate an integrated, holistic and user‐centred approach to the programme. The paper concludes by considering the possibility that the teams approach may be conceptually located within an organizational social capital framework as posited by Nahapiet and Ghoshal.

Critical arts-based research in education: performing undocumented historias

The article seeks to elucidate and academically position the genre of critical arts-based research in education. The article fuses Critical Race Theory (CRT), life history and performance, alongside work with undocumented American students of Mexican origin, to show how a politicised qualitative paradigmatic re envisioning can occur in which counter-histories and counter-stories can be co-created into a powerful, evocative, and transformative arts-based performance text: Undocumented Historias. The article reflects on how critical arts-based research in education can function as a means to legitimise, empower and promote the voices of the educationally and socially marginalised; evoking an experiential and sensual means of feeling and knowing by which researcher and researched may co-recover, interrogate and enrich an anti-colonialist critique of the dominant social order.

The weakening role of education studies and the re-traditionalisation of Swedish teacher education

Research suggests that certain common policy presuppositions can be identified regarding teacher education programmes in advanced knowledge-based economies, most notably the relationship between formal education (schooling) and economic production, and the role of teacher education in respect to this relationship. This article draws on the work of Basil Bernstein to engage theoretically and critique the nature of that evolving policy relationship within the context of Sweden. While the article concentrates on developments in one country, however, it is contended that the findings are symptomatic of a wider European or even global trend in which the scientific foundation of teacher education is under threat.

Implementation of School Choice Policy: Interpretation and response by parents of students with special educational needs

In England a restructured school system has been functioning throughout the 1990s. An integral aspect of this restructuring is the creation of a more competitive public-market school system aimed at enhancing parental opportunities for choice amongst publicly-funded schools. What has been the experience of the restructured system by one particular group of parents with specific needs and preferences, namely parents of students with special educational needs (SEN)? This article is intended to provide empirically-based insights into the preferences, perceptions and responses of such parents. It draws on analyses of quantitative and qualitative data generated by a large-scale, more general research study on school choice, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ref. no. R000234079). The findings reveal the depth and range of problems and difficulties encountered by parents of SEN students as they attempt to exercise choice in a more competitive public-market environment.