The quasi-marketization of Australian public schooling: affordances and contradictions of the new work order

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, public schooling in Australia has been shaped by quasi-marketization that has incentivized competition between schools and installed a business logic to school governance. In this paper we argue that it is timely to consider how teachers and school leaders are understanding and responding to the affordances and challenges of this new “work order”. We define this new work order as the languages and practices that are shaping public schooling, particularly in regards to increasing commercialization caused by (and contributing to) the quasi-marketization of schooling. The data gathered for this paper comes from a survey of public school educators who were members of the Australian Education Union (AEU). Our interest is in the perceptions that public school educators had of commercialization in their school system. We show that while many teachers express concerns with the logic behind much education policy, they are far from accepting the new work order. In fact, there was a strong sense of an ethical clash between the managerial nature of much policy and bureaucracy, and strongly held beliefs that public education is justified as a democratic good.

KEYWORDS:

• Commercialization
• marketization
• public schooling
• Australia
• teachers

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the New South Wales Teachers Federation who funded the project and the Australian Education Union who assisted with participant recruitment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The AEU affiliated State unions include, Queensland Teachers Union, New South Wales Teachers Federation, State School Teachers Union of Western Australia as well as the AEU Australia Capital Territory Branch, South Australian Branch, Tasmanian Branch and Northern Territory Branch.

2. There were 29 responses that answered “No” or “N/A”. These were not included in the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the New South Wales Teachers Federation [NA];

Notes on contributors

Anna Hogan

Anna Hogan is a lecturer at The University of Queensland. Anna is interested in the commercialisation and privatisation of education and their impact on global education policy and practice. She is currently involved in projects investigating privatised provision of schooling, the commercialisation of public schooling in Australia and the impacts of ‘outsourcing’ on teachers’ work. She is Associate Editor of Critical Studies in Education

Greg Thompson

Greg Thompson is Associate Professor of Education Research at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Prior to becoming an academic, he worked as a high school teacher in Western Australia for 13 years. His research focuses on educational theory, education policy, and the philosophy/sociology of education assessment and measurement with a particular emphasis on large-scale testing. He is the Australasian Editor of The Journal of Education Policy and series co-editor of Local/Global Issues in Education (Routledge) and Deleuze and Education Research (Edinburgh University Press).