Sharon Gewirtz

School choice, social class and distinction: the realization of social advantage in education

Parental choice is one of the keystones of current education policy in the UK. A combination of open enrolment, per‐capita funding and deregulated admission procedures is encouraging competition between schools for student enrolments (at least in areas where there are surplus places). Parents are encouraged to see themselves as consumers of education, and ‘good parenting’ is defined, at least in part, in relation to the ‘responsibilities’ of choice (The Parents Charter, Department of Education 1992). Within education policy choice is taken to be both neutral and individualistic. In this paper, we attempt to challenge that neutrality and to argue that choice in education is systematically related to social class differences and the reproduction of class inequalities.

Cloning the Blairs: New Labour's programme for the re-socialization of working-class parents

In his speech to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in July 1999, the UK Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, set out New Labours vision for a system of education in which there is ‘excellence for the many not just the few’. He outlined what is essentially a bi-focal strategy for achieving this vision. The first focus is on the education system itself, the structures and practices that New Labour believes need to be in place if schools and services are going to meet the needs of all children and not just a privileged minority. The second focus is on the need to promote ‘a culture of achievement’, as, according to Blunkett, the vision ‘depends on changing attitudes as well as the system itself’. This paper focuses on this second strategy, more specifically the governments attempts to change the attitudes of parents. It is argued that this strategy aims to eradicate class differences by reconstructing and transforming working-class parents into middle-class ones, that it represents possibly the most important and far-reaching aspect of New Labours policy agenda, and that it has not so far received the attention it deserves. The paper is in two parts. The first part sets out what is involved in New Labours programme of re-socialization and explores the mechanisms by which New Labour is attempting to universalize the values, attitudes and behaviour of a certain fraction of middle-class parents. The second part develops a critique of this programme.

Captured by the Discourse? Issues and concerns in researching ‘parental choice‘

Abstract In this paper we look at the relationship between political, cultural and economic change, the ‘position’ of parental choice in the various policy texts (in particular, its centrality to The Parents Charter) and what we have termed the context of practice (Bowe et al., 1992). In particular, we raise some issues and concerns that arise from research to date, in terms of their methodologies, their analysis and their representations of choice. It is the failure, in all these respects, to consider the complexity and inter‐relatedness of choice‐making and political and economic change that gives rise to our concerns. We tentatively suggest a heuristic device, the metaphor of landscapes of choice, that we think might help us to explore the relationships between the various policy contexts, whilst recognising the embeddedness of the research process in precisely these contexts.

Towards a Contextualized Analysis of Social Justice in Education

This paper builds on Iris Youngs work to argue that social justice in education has to be understood in relation to particular contexts of enactment. More specifically, the author argues that it is not possible to make cross‐national or other comparative assessments of social justice without consideration of the ways in which justice is enacted in practice. The contextualized approach to justice that the author is advocating involves: first a recognition of the multi‐dimensional nature of justice and the potential for conflict between different facets of justice; second, attention to the ways in which concerns of justice are mediated by the other norms and constraints that motivate actors; and third, a consideration of the way in which contradictions between different facets of justice and these other norms and between justice concerns and the constraints that compete with justice are differentially shaped by the levels and settings in which the actors are operating. This contextualized approach is illustrated using an interview with one mothers encounters with the English education system.

Plural conceptions of social justice: implications for policy sociology

Concern with multi-faceted or ‘plural’ conceptions of justice has grown within policy sociology. This paper briefly summarizes some of the dimensions and facets of such plural models and considers their implications for policy sociology. Three implications, in particular, are considered. It is suggested that: first, plural models of justice substantially enlarge the agenda of evaluation; second, tensions within and between different facets of justice need to be acknowledged and responded to; and third, plural models entail a collapse of the distinction between evaluation and action. The paper argues that the latter two implications are frequently overlooked in policy sociology, particularly in work with a dominant focus on critiquing educational and social reproduction in a style the paper labels ‘sociology from above’. By contrast, the paper discusses examples of scholarship that meet the challenges of plural models — scholarship that has more in common with the cultural studies tradition. In so doing, the paper indicates the importance of a ‘sociology of just practices’, and a modified ‘reflective equilibrium’ approach is identified as one means of developing such a sociology.

'PARENTAL CHOICE', CONSUMPTION AND SOCIAL THEORY: THE OPERATION OF MICRO-MARKETS IN EDUCATION

Abstract Using key writings in the sociology of consumption and consumerism and analyses of the nature of postmodern society, this paper considers how parents decide upon a secondary school and the nature of their engagement with the education market.

Unravelling a ‘spun’ policy: a case study of the constitutive role of ‘spin’ in the education policy process

The term ‘spin’ is conventionally used to refer to the process and products of purposively managing information in order to present institutions, individuals, policies, practices and/or ideas in a favourable light and thereby mobilize support for them. Attempts to manage news and political communications are not new. However, the New Labour Government in the UK is frequently presented—by the media and political opponents—as being obsessively concerned with spin to the detriment of both transparency and substantive policy‐making. In the collection and analysis of the data from the ESRC‐funded study of the English Education Action Zones (EAZs) policy upon which this paper draws, spin arose as a prominent theme. For example, spin was often raised explicitly by those interviewed as an activity that they needed to be reflexive about and engage in. It was described as shaping the fortunes of the policy or in some cases as constituting the policy. Frequently overt attempts were made by those being researched to try to ‘persuade’ the researchers of a particular spin which should be put on the research questions and/or reports. The overarching purpose of this paper is to illustrate the complex relationship between spin and policy, using the English EAZs policy as an example. The first section of the paper defines spin and places the concept in historical context. It then goes on to explore the role of spin in the construction and evolution of the policy, drawing particular attention to the dynamic, endemic, and disciplinary nature of the policy of spin. Whilst spin is conventionally understood as something separate from policy, as something that is ‘done to’ policy in order to make it attractive to particular constituencies, the central argument of this paper is that spin needs to be understood as operating on two levels, often simultaneously. At one level it operates as a strategy of impression management, where a range of tactics are used to attempt to control the impression that ‘the public’ gets of New Labour policies. However, those policies and the spin that represents them to ‘the public’ cannot be understood as distinct and separate entities because the policies cannot be neatly abstracted from the spin. Thus, at another level, one also needs to focus on the constitutive role that spin plays.

Reading education action zones

This paper explores the conceptualizations of social justice embedded in the education action zones (EAZ) policy which has recently been implemented in England. Drawing on distinctions developed from Nancy Frasers work, it argues that zone populations suffer three forms of social injustice ? economic injustice, cultural injustice and associational injustice. Documentary analysis of the discourse surrounding the policy and of a sample of EAZ applications reveals that while the initiative may be based on a more complex understanding of social injustice than many preceding policies, this understanding remains inadequate. Economic injustices are recognized, but cultural and associational injustices are inadequately acknowledged. In addition, there is a mismatch between the remedies proposed in the bids and the problems they are designed to address. Although there are some redistributive and associational measures, these are likely to be superficial. For the most part, it is cultural remedies that are proposed ? but the nature of the cultural ‘problem’ to be dealt with is either unacknowledged or misrepresented. The paper concludes by arguing that while policy pronouncements and zone applications do not determine practice, it is difficult to see how some of these injustices can be tackled if they are not acknowledged or tackled at a discursive level.

Bringing the Politics Back In: A Critical Analysis of Quality Discourses in Education

This paper considers the consequences of, and tensions within, New Labours quality agenda for schools. In particular, it draws attention to the way in which official versions of quality, characterised by a narrow, economistic instrumentality, are being promoted in schools by various forms of quality control that are marginalising broader, more humanistic conceptions of quality. It is also argued that, despite New Labours rhetorical emphasis on education for citizenship, the mechanisms of quality control favoured by the government tend to produce patterns of association which are authoritarian and, therefore, unconducive to giving teachers, students and parents opportunities to participate actively in key decisions in and around schooling. The analysis presented in this paper is underpinned by a concern to bring a consideration of educational politics back into education policy debates.

What to do about values in social research: the case for ethical reflexivity in the sociology of education

This paper is intended as a contribution to the longstanding debate about the best way of handling value judgements in social research. In it we make a case for more ‘ethical reflexivity’ in the sociology of education and argue that a systematic attention to value questions should be viewed as a taken‐for‐granted component of methodological rigour. We elucidate what we mean by ethical reflexivity, why we think it is important and suggest what it entails in practice. Our arguments are developed through a discussion of, and in contrast to, Martyn Hammersley’s analysis of the role of values in social research. The central problematic that the paper addresses is the tension between, on the one hand, the goal of insulating the research process from ‘value bias’ and, on the other hand, the goal of contributing to political and social change through research. We suggest that the reason for the intractability of the problem of values in social research is a persistent failure to recognise that, in practice, these two goals are inseparable. We argue that rigour in research demands that both these goals are taken seriously and we set out some of the challenges involved in trying to combine them.