![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
The term equity is ubiquitous in Australian education policy and evolves amidst ongoing debates about what it means to be fair in education. Over the past three decades, meanings and practices associated with equity have reflected broader shifts in advanced liberal governance, with equity being reframed as a ‘market-enhancing’ mechanism and melted into economic productivity agendas. In this paper, I argue that an emerging, yet, under-examined policy tension is the view that secondary schools are capable of being equitable, whilst simultaneously acting as adaptive service providers, tailoring education to different students and local markets. A dilemma here is whether or not schools should ‘tailor equity’ or whether tailoring equity is indeed antithetical to equity in so far as it implies unequal provision. To explore this tension, I draw upon fieldwork from ethnographic research in two socially and economically disparate government secondary schools in suburban Melbourne, Australia. In doing so, I explore how equity is enacted and governed by educators, how forms of equity at each school relate to versions of equity in policy and the extent to which each school tailors equity to its local community.
Notes
1.COAG is the peak intergovernmental forum in Australia. COAG comprises the Prime Minister, State Premiers, Territory Chief Ministers and the President of the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA). As such, COAG agreements represent goals shared by all Australian governments.
2.At the same time, these ‘individualising technologies’ operate alongside ‘normalising technologies’ which promote ‘sameness’ in education, such as the My School website, the emerging Australian Curriculum and national testing through the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). See Radhika Gorur's paper in this edition for a detailed discussion of the relationship between My School, NAPLAN and marketisation.
3.The names of both schools and all participants have been anonymised.
4.Issues of gangs, racial violence and young people's safety in the Clapton area are discussed in the Rights of Passage report, published by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC, Citation2008).
5.These values are based on 2009 data, the year in which research was undertaken. Reportage of the ICSEA involves breaking down student population data for each school in Australia into four quarters (Top, Bottom and two ‘Middle Quarters’). According to the ICSEA Technical Paper 2009:
It shows the proportion of educationally advantaged or disadvantaged students in the school compared with the spread of students across Australia. For example, if a school was exactly representative of the range of students across Australia, the quarter percentages would all be 25%. (ACARA, Citation2009, p. 8)
6.NAPLAN tests students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in government and non-government schools across Australia. Individual school NAPLAN results are available and can be compared online at the My School website.
7.I have not included direct quotes from the website or prospectus, as a quick internet search of such quotes leads quickly to an identification of the school, thus compromising the anonymity of the school and participants.
8.In contrast to fieldwork from Bridgeway (see section to follow), Clapton educators rarely linked equity to academic success. In addition to Geoff's comment here, for example, Sarah once made the point that ‘equity is probably about giving them [students] the opportunity to learn academically just as well as they might in the more fancy school down the road’, thus suggesting equity had something to do with academic entitlement. Other than these two examples, however, Clapton educators made no other comments that reflected this understanding of equity. Moreover, these brief comments were significantly outweighed by descriptions and practices of equity that reflected the ‘caring and compensatory’ approach analysed so far.
9.It is quite likely that parents do not care so much about whether the academic playing field remains level or not. Instead, their actions might be entirely about ensuring their child is as advantaged as possible and thus not about fairness at all.
10.My School was launched in January 2010 by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). My School provides information about individual Australian schools, including literacy and numeracy data based on results in standardised National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests. See: www.myschool.edu.au
11.I acknowledge the provocative nature of ‘chameleon’ as a simile in this context and thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper, and my co-editors of this special issue, for sparking debate about this word. In using this term, I am arguing that much like a chameleon, equity appears to adapt and take on different forms in different environments. In other words, its colours/tones (i.e. its meanings and manifestations) adapt to local contexts. In making this claim, I am not suggesting that equity can (or should) mean simply ‘anything’. For example, a chameleon cannot turn into a dog or a bird, yet, it can indeed take on radically different appearances in different local contexts. Put differently, non-local conditions (whether these be genetic in the case of the chameleon or socially and politically normative in the case of equity) exert a relational determination on what the chameleon and equity can be in different contexts. Importantly, therefore, I am not suggesting that we should abandon normative definitions of equity (or frameworks for judging it) in policy, research and practice. Instead, as I argue in the sections to follow, the apparent lack of normative concepts and practices linked to equity is a real problem.