Teachers´ experiences of school choice from ´marginalised´ and ´privileged´ public schools in Oslo

ABSTRACT

Oslo introduced a combination of school choice, per capita funding, balanced management and accountability in their public schools. Recent studies point out that this has increased segregation. In this study, teachers have been interviewed about their experiences. Bernstein´s classification and framing tools have been used to analyse the consequences for schools and relations between schools and parents/students. ´Marginalised´ and ´privileged´ schools find themselves in negative and positive spirals when it comes to popularity. These spirals are classed, raced and, (in upper secondary school), also gendered. Since attracting the ´right´ students and avoiding getting the ´wrong´ ones is essential for both school categories, school choice creates a mutual interest between the school and privileged parents/students in fortifying the latter´s voice. Three findings are especially interesting: 1. Cream skimming occurs in undersubscribed schools in a strictly public-school context. 2. School choice affects internal priorities in marginalised schools so that segregation at the class level increases, thus the educational context may be more segregated than what is indicated by school level information. 3. School choice increases segregation in the local communities, as two schools near each other may have very different student compositions. Segregation is thus not only explained by segregated housing.

KEYWORDS:

• Bernstein classification and framing
• public-school choice
• segregation
• marginalised schools
• privileged schools

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The socialist coalition city council (Dahl 2017) chose not to reverse the school choice policy when it came into office, a decision that represents a break with the traditional lines between the political right and left in Norway (Hansen 2018).

2. Morken and Theie (2015) find that parents include their children´s wishes as an important consideration when choosing a different lower secondary school. It is expected that students´ influence in school choice will increase at the upper secondary level. Therefore, it is not always easy to separate between parents and students when referring to school choice. However, teachers at all school levels talk about parents´ involvement or lack of such.

3. In upper secondary education there are quite a few private schools in Oslo. In addition to 23 municipally-run upper secondary schools, there are 15 private upper secondary schools in Oslo which all have the right to receive state appropriations. These schools are approved according to the Private Schools Act and offer education that has been accredited as equally as good as under the public curricula. Students must pay a partial fee (Guneriussen 2012).

4. The interviews with the teachers form part of a larger research project focusing on how the various agents in schools (principals, teachers, parents) experience the current Norwegian educational context.

5. It should be stated that all the 12 interviewed teachers are critical to the current practice of school choice. Whether they are critical to school choice as such was not discussed; they are concerned with the consequences of the current system. They especially express concern over how school choice affects marginalised students, but also privileged students as they may become too competitively oriented, sometimes leading to too high pressure. However, this critical position may also be influenced by how they all experience that the competition between schools influences the pedagogic culture (cf. Bernstein 2000), characterised by high pressure on results, reduced professional autonomy and hard hierarchical relations (see Haugen 2018a).

6. The gendered spirals in upper secondary education may be explained by the fact that girls outperform boys in lower secondary school (Forskning.no 2014), which gives them priority at the most popular schools in upper secondary education because the admittance policy is only based on grades. A review of the relation between gender and educational results concludes that social background has a major influence on both girls´ and boys´ educational performance, but that boys may be more vulnerable to difficult home situations than girls. Moreover, there are indications that differences between the genders may increase with age.

7. Bjordal (2016) developed the categories ´marginalised´ and ´privileged´ school contexts through analysing situated, material and external contexts. In these school categories, the composition of the student body constitutes an important distinguishing signifier, and the characteristics described by the teachers here share similarities to what Bjordal finds from the school principals.

8. This school has an education programme that is also popular among privileged students.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cecilie Rønning Haugen

Cecilie Rønning Haugen is professor at the Institute for Teacher Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Her research is anchored in the sociology of education where she explores how neoliberal trends and international agents, such as the OECD, influence national policies and school practices.