Challenging fundraising, challenging inequity: contextual constraints on advocacy groups’ policy influence

ABSTRACT

School fundraising is known to reproduce inequities in schools, yet it remains common practice in Ontario, Canada; findings from a critical policy analysis of an advocacy group’s efforts to change fundraising policy help explain why this is the case. Adopting a discursive understanding of policy, the study used rhetorical analysis to identify how the group has engaged in a decades-long struggle over the meaning of fundraising policy. The findings of the rhetorical analysis were examined in light of an historical narrative of Ontario’s social context to understand how the policy’s contexts have constrained the group’s influence. The study’s findings demonstrate that challenging school fundraising by defining the policy as a problem of equity is not strong enough to overcome neoliberalism’s pressure on parents to provide their children with educational advantages, a trend toward privatization in public education, neoconservative interests in reduced government spending, Canadians’ belief in meritocracy, and historical fundraising practices and dominant meanings. Further, the continuance of school fundraising even after Ontario’s government introduced policy that explicitly addressed the group’s concerns about equity and aimed to limit the practice challenges traditional notional of group influence and success in policy processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Advocacy
• education policy
• fundraising
• Ontario
• rhetorical analysis

Additional information

Funding

This work was generously supported by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Sue Winton

Sue Winton is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her research examines policy influences and implications of education policy for critical democracy. Previous studies include critical analyses of safe schools, bullying and character education policies; examination of the emergence and activities of advocacy groups in education; and an investigation of the meanings and enactment of school success and successful school leadership in Ontario schools. She is a former elementary school teacher and has taught in Mexico, Canada, and the US.