Democracy, ‘sector-blindness’ and the delegitimation of dissent in neoliberal education policy: a response to Discourse 34(2), May 2013

Abstract

As a response to the 2013 special issue of Discourse on marketisation and equity in education, this paper suggests it is important to understand how school sectors (independent, Catholic and government) continue to play a significant role in how we constitute education, markets and equity in Australia. The first part of this paper provides a genealogy of school funding in Australia, giving an overview of how Australia has reached the current state of ‘sector-blind’ school funding. We also focus on the shift in Australian schooling from a public good for national collective well-being to a private, positional good for individual advancement. The second part of the paper suggests that the notion of ‘sector-blindness’ is part of a depoliticisation of educational politics. We work from the premise that education is always and everywhere already a political project. We critique some absences in the special issue around ‘colour-blindness’ and in a coda to the paper, we provide the basis for renewing and politicising the debate about education policy by offering a ‘debate-redux’, that provides some possibilities about forms of democratic politics and education.

Keywords:

• school funding
• marketisation
• education policy
• race
• equity
• federalism

Notes

1. Government academic selective schools are little referenced but have a significant role contributing to residualising the non-selective government schools sector (Bonnor & Caro, 2007; Kenway, 2013).

2. The Whitlam Government succeeded a long period of Conservative Government, in power since 1949.

3. For a discussion of this, see Dean, 2009, and in particular, p. 23. The parallel drawn here between France and the USA is strictly related to the separation of the Church and the State. Significant differences between the two systems exist that are reflective of different political and social histories. Notably, France is a highly centralised system and the USA has a history of local control of schools at the school, district and state levels.

4. In the 2004 election, the prime ministerial aspirant Mark Latham was pilloried in part for identifying a ‘hit-list’ of elite private schools that received large amounts of public money.

5. This is the growing sector of Australian schooling (Buckingham, 2010).

6. It is worth noting Garrett's adoption of the time-honoured strategy of conservatives to label those who wished to change the status quo as ‘ideological’, as if one's own position was somehow exempt from ideology. Such purportedly ‘non-ideological’ decrials of others’ ‘ideology’ are testimony to the way ideologies seek to naturalise the current state of affairs as normal by depicting them as ‘just the way things are’.