Current trends indicate declining distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ sectors in education. Reformers see sector barriers as unnecessary impediments to innovation, distracting attention and effort from ‘what works’. This analysis questions whether trends in education policy are simply a natural evolution away from state control of public goods, noting the agency involved in blurring the boundaries between sectors. While the weakening of public and private distinctions is real and substantial, there are reasons for researchers and policymakers to rely on these distinctions in understanding education policy and policymaking, not so much as principles that should guide policymaking, but as means for analyzing competing interests, agendas, and beneficiaries of policies. In that respect, education policymaking itself is being privatized through a significant shift toward private interests in the making of public policy for public education. The analysis focuses on the central role that some private philanthropies play in shaping hybridized private–public policy networks in education policymaking.
In this article, I critique the foremost proponents of the adequacy and equity approaches to educational equality. I identify tensions within the adequacy approach related to positionality in education, fostering a democratic elite through higher education, and its defense of private schooling. In contrast, equity theorists are vulnerable to the leveling down critique and place too much emphasis on education as a private good. This article sketches out strategy for integrating these principles inspired by Rawls’ lexically ordered two principles of justice. Concerns about the bases of equal status as citizens can ground an adequacy standard and prevent leveling down, while a ‘level playing field’ conception for educational opportunities addresses positional competition and promotes the long-term stability of favorable background conditions. The privileging of the first principle of justice over the second also emphasizes education as a public good.
The number of refugees who have fled across international borders due to conflict and persecution is at the highest level in recorded history. The vast majority of these refugees find exile in low-income countries neighboring their countries of origin. The refugee children who are resettled to North America, Europe, and Australia arrive with previous educational experiences in these countries of first asylum. This article examines these pre-resettlement educational experiences of refugee children, which to date have constituted a ‘black box’ in their post-resettlement education. Analysis is of data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, key informant interviews in 14 countries of first asylum, and ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in four countries. The article argues that contemporary conditions of conflict usefully inform conceptual understanding of refugee education globally, including the types of schools that refugees access in countries of first asylum and their rates of access. It further identifies three empirical themes that are common to the educational experiences of refugees in countries of first asylum: language barriers, teacher-centered pedagogy, and discrimination in school settings. The article examines the theoretical and practical relevance of these pre-resettlement educational experiences for post-resettlement education of refugee children.
Implementing school choice programs and bolstering parental engagement are both frequently touted as critical steps in improving educational outcomes in US schools. Many policy makers contend that by providing parents with more schooling options for their children, parents will become more involved in their children’s education, resulting in better and more equitable opportunities. The authors consider whether more school choices necessarily translate into more robust parental involvement, by chronicling for 5 years both the opportunities for and barriers to engagement that parents encountered in the Clarksville School District as it underwent a significant period of reform. The authors conclude that school choice does not always have a positive impact on parental engagement, and engagement in turn does not always translate into better or more equitable opportunities. In some cases, increased choice may present additional challenges to parents as they struggle to find accurate information, weigh a variety of problematic options, and consider the impact of their personal decisions on their children and on the overall well-being of the district.
A significant body of literature on citizenship education and youth participation has progressively replaced political participation with other categories such as citizenship participation, community involvement or civic engagement. The demotion of political participation is also characteristic of different programmes of citizenship education embracing the same dominant categories. The article argues that this tendency reveals a depoliticised approach to citizenship education, which emphasises an apolitical view on adolescents’ participation and, consequently, a conception of students as depoliticised subjects. The depoliticisation of citizenship education risks theoretical transparency in regard to the kind of participation it aims to promote and, therefore, jeopardises citizenship education’s pedagogical efficacy. Drawing on political theory and philosophy, political science and sociological theory, the article analyses the scope and potential of the notion of political participation in order to develop an approach that is inclusive of adolescents, based on the development of their own politicity and especially thought for being enacted in the school as a central component of citizenship education.
Education policy decisions are both normatively and empirically challenging. These decisions require the consideration of both relevant values and empirical facts. Values tell us what we have reason to care about, and facts can be used to describe what is possible. Following Hamlin and Stemplowska, we distinguish between a theory of ideals and descriptions of feasibility. We argue that when feasibility constraints are used to rank competing states of affairs, two things must be articulated. First, one must explain why one feasibility constraint is preferred over another. Second, because of empirical uncertainty, one must describe the upper and lower bounds of a specified feasibility constraint. The first case implies that different optima are possible depending on, for example, what one takes to be fixed about the world. The second case implies that different optima are always possible, and the upper and lower bounds of these optima will depend on the empirical uncertainty of an estimated feasibility constraint. We then describe three distinct forms of empirical uncertainty. Careful consideration of these sources of uncertainty can help to mitigate the risks of imprecision. The article closes by considering a case study whereby a meritocratic conception of fair equality of opportunity is considered alongside competing values of priority and parental partiality.
Evidence for Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory and its contributions to understanding educational inequality has been relatively mixed. Critics discount the usefulness of core concepts such as cultural capital and habitus and most studies invoking these concepts have focused only on one or the other, often conflating the two, to the detriment of both. We disentangle cultural capital and habitus, and argue that taken together – in conjunction with practice and field – they hold significant explanatory potential. Moreover, we argue that these concepts can be incorporated into a scientific realist ‘structure–disposition–practice’ explanatory framework that seeks to address the misalignment between Bourdieuian relational constructs and standard positivist quantitative research methods. This reframing can help generate practical, actionable knowledge of the mechanisms underlying persistent socioeconomic disparities in educational attainment.
Whereas most latter-day Aristotelian approaches to moral education highlight the early habituation phase of moral development, they rarely have much to say, beyond truisms from the Nicomachean ethics, about the ultimate Aristotelian goal of cultivating fully fledged phronesis. The aim of this article is to repair the dearth of attention given to phronesis in moral education circles and to bring considerations from other, but related, discourses (such as general Aristotelian scholarship and wisdom studies in psychology) to bear on it. I pay special attention to the so-called skill analogy, which considers virtue acquisition on par with the acquisition of ordinary practical skills, but argue that current articulations of it fail to account fully for the integrative, as distinct from the constitutive, function of phronesis. I argue that the skill analogy needs to be extended to account for the fact that in order to develop fully, phronesis requires direct teaching about the nature of the well-rounded life, providing the learner with an indirect blueprint for eudaimonia. Such a blueprint cannot eschew consequentialist considerations, and to be taught well within current school systems, it needs a discrete place in the school timetable.
The quality of parenting is a crucial factor in children’s school success, and yet the schools teach almost nothing about parenting. This essay suggests ways in which we can teach about parenting without risking indoctrination or adding special courses.