Transforming Education Policy: Shaping a Democratic Future

223 Pages·2011·3.125 MB·English

by  Philip A. Woods

TRANSFORMING
EDUCATION POLICY
Shaping a democratic future
PHILIP WOODS
PHILIP A. WOODS
TRANSFORMING
EDUCATION POLICY
Shaping a democratic future
Philip A. Woods
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements v
one New openings 1
two Driving democracy 15
three Radicalising entrepreneurialism 31
four The rise of plural control 45
five A different view: organic meta-governance 57
six The concept of adaptive strategies 77
seven Embodying change 89
eight Degrees of democracy 107
nine Practice in the making 131
ten Energies for change 155
Notes 165
References 183
Index 201
iii

Acknowledgements
The ideas in this book are based on many years of research and study,
a journey of enquiry enriched through professional and personal
friendships and loving family relationships. I have been very fortunate
to share time through research projects and other settings with many fine
colleagues, too many to mention by name. I thank you all for being such
an important part of my journey. Amongst these colleagues, I especially
express my appreciation to two outstanding scholars for the insights I
have gained from their work and for their friendship and stimulating
intellectual exchanges over the years: Michael Fielding (Institute of
Education, University of London) and Peter Gronn (University of
Cambridge). My thanks also go particularly to members of the New
DEEL (Democratic Ethical Educational Leadership) network, for
their positive energy and inspiration and the value of their warm and
scholarly conversations, especially Steve Gross (Temple University),
Lisa Kensler (Auburn University), Mary John O’Hair (University of
Kentucky) and Joan Shapiro (Temple University). Thanks are due to
numerous people and institutions whose help and co-operation were
vital to the research and preparation of examples discussed in Chapters
8 and 9. These include the staff and students of the schools whose
co-operation enabled the research to take place which is drawn upon
in Chapter 8, namely Michael Hall Steiner School, especially Ewout
van Manen whose discernment and thoughtful reflections on Steiner
education have been invaluable, the fictitiously named Urbanview
Academy, and Sands democratic school; the British Academy whose
grants funded the research at Michael Hall and Urbanview Academy;
the headteachers of other schools I visited, and the staff and students I
met, who gave insights into examples highlighted in Chapter 9 (Tony
Billings of All Hallows Catholic College, Macclesfield; David Boston
of Sir Thomas Boughey Co-operative Business School, Staffordshire;
and Christopher Reynolds of Saint Benedict Catholic School, Derby;
María Cecilia Fierro (Universidad Iberoamericana León, Mexico),
who very generously wrote an English paper for me on the research
study of initiatives which form part of Convivencia Democrática y
Cultura de Paz en América Latina and which are highlighted as a result
in Chapter 9, and to Charlie Slater (California State University, Long
Beach) for alerting me to this work; Amanda Roberts (University
of Hertfordshire) whose ideas and suggestions were so helpful; and
Mervyn Wilson of the Co-operative College, whose work with others
in the co-operative movement is such an important dimension of the
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Transforming education policy
emerging education system. My thanks to Patricia Broadfoot for the
opportunity (during her time as Vice Chancellor at the University of
Gloucestershire) to work with her on an article on plural controlled
schooling which I re-worked, expanded and updated for Chapter 4
of this book. I am grateful to the School of Education, University of
Hertfordshire, for its support which enabled my participation in the
WorldBlu Awards 2010 conference in the US, and express my deep
appreciation to WorldBlu and to all the awardees and participants
at its conference who very kindly shared their views with me on
organisational democracy, especially Sam Chaltain, Elannah Cramer,
Roxanne Erdahl, Diana Fenton, Heath Mackay, Augusta Meill, Katrina
Oropel, Anand Pillai, Aaron Ross and Fraser Wilson. Traci Fenton,
founder of WorldBlu, deserves special mention for giving an insight
into her energetic and growing campaign to enhance organisational
democracy globally. I am very grateful to The Policy Press for the
opportunity to publish this work and especially thankful for the sterling
support of Alison Shaw during its preparation. Finally, my love and
deepest thanks to my wonderful life-partner and co-researcher, Glenys
– a fund of inspiration – for her constant support, critical acumen and
stimulating conversation, and for her love and faith in me, as well as to
our children, Stephen James and Elizabeth Lowri, who in various ways
are sources of unending inspiration and holistic support.
vi
ONE
New openings
Democracy serves neither society nor individuals.
Democracy serves human beings insofar as they are subjects,
or in other words, their own creators and the creators of
their individual and collective lives. (Alain Touraine, 1997,
p 19)
Sometimes we need to know when to catch the momentum of change:
or, to be more exact, to distinguish normal and repetitive waves of
newness from shifts of greater substance. After all, change is ubiquitous
in modern society. Marx’s famous observation captures that: society
dominated by capitalist relations ‘cannot exist without constantly
revolutionising the instruments of production’ and is characterised by
‘everlasting uncertainty and agitation’: ‘[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relations
... are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air ...’ (Marx and Engels, 1967,
p 83). Where can we detect, to coin an inelegant phrase, solid change?
The proposition of this book is that the ‘tectonic plates’ that constitute
the underlying structure of society are moving in the direction of
democratic relationships which are the nurturing ground for the
exploration and generation of enduring meaning; and that education
is at the heart of this opportunity. There are structural opportunities
for progressive change, and – crucially, in addition to that – our
understanding of agency is evolving in a way that is especially conducive
to taking advantage of those opportunities. Educational policy and
possibilities for a paradigm shift in education are placed in the context
of generic organisational trends that foreground participation and
meaning. The argument is not that education should follow changes
in the economy and other sectors: on the contrary, education has a
sacred task that is not reducible to the demands of the economy or blind
subservience to dominant ideas. Education, however, can and should be
stimulated by innovations elsewhere, because it is both an ideal and an
intensely practical activity. A good deal of the book, therefore, explores
what is happening in other contexts, including some business settings,
and interlaces education within the discussion.
1
Transforming education policy
New democratic times?
The hailing of more democratic times is not new. A ‘sudden growth’
of democratic and coo perative grass-roots organisations in the US
during the 1970s and 1980s, for example, prompted great interest
and an important scholarly study (recently re-published) (Rothschild
and Whitt, 2009,1 p 11). The study concluded that, whilst the ‘master
trend’ in the 20th century had been towards greater concentration in
economic and governmental power, this generated a counter-trend for
‘self-determination’: it signalled ‘a shift from production for exchange
value to production for use value, from a market calculus to a social
utility calculus’, creating spaces that ‘integrate the world of work with
the sentiments of play’ and ‘find a place for expressive impulses in an
arena ordinarily reserved for instrumental activity’ (pp 183, 191).
I should be more specific, therefore, about today. There is a confluence
of institutional changes and cultural ideas that open possibilities for
change. These constitute an influential context for education. Our
opportunity is to build upon, renew and recreate for the coming
times the democratising experience of the past; more particularly, it
is to re shape the system of governance that emerged during the latter
two decades of the 20th century – namely, the gradual adoption of a
steering role for the state. This recasting of central governance combined
markets, hierarchy and networks as modes of organisation, championed
the perceived superiority of private business dynamism, and prioritised
national competitiveness as the goal of public services, especially
education. It has been criticised as giving the appearance of devolving
power whilst in practice constraining and shaping local agendas and the
‘souls’ of professionals such as teachers2. Times are changing, however,
and possibilities opening because of the distances (from the centre to
the peripheries) entailed in that steering role, its own evolution to
involve negotiation of values, meaning and relationships (Osborne,
2010, p 10), and as a result of contemporary trends.
Two factors particularly prompted the writing of this book.
A flawed model
The first is the denting of the superiority of the private business/markets
model brought about by the financial and economic crisis begun in
2008. These economic upheavals burst a period of protracted ‘capitalist
triumphalism’ and began to allow across the political horizon of
feasible change ‘a far wider range of possibilities ... than the established
economic and political consensus had allowed us previously to entertain’
2
New openings
(Callinicos, 2010, pp 6, 16). It was rediscovered that markets ‘can be
shaped by vested interests, that economic players are not always rational,
that markets are not self-correcting’ (Brown, 2010, p 12). The ‘credit
crunch and fiscal crisis has freed our political imagination from the idea
that this is the only game in town’ (Craig et al, 2009, p 4). The state
‘roars back’ (Callinicos, 2010, p 95), albeit not necessarily in the same
direct welfare role prior to the growth of its steering function. Most
importantly, however, the crisis laid bare, as one headteacher put it to
me, the ‘spiritual emptiness of capitalism’, and led, as another described
it, to a renewed ‘discourse around values’.
As a consequence, the superior private model no longer looks so
superior. The idea that private business, markets and the role of people
as consumers constitute the preferred model for all kinds of services
and human activity is past its sell-by date. That does not mean that
the entwining of private interests and bodies in education has ceased:
these are still part of the policy community and the institutions and
relationships that make up the education system (Ball, 2007; 2008a,
p 37). The context that gave moral authority to the introduction of new
private players, however, has begun to change. The danger to the social
fabric of the ideal of relentless competitiveness, and all that was seen
to go with it (quantification of progress, management through targets
and managerialist cultural change), was made plain to see. As Stephen
Green (2009), former Chairman of HSBC, put it, ‘the world has looked
into an abyss … [T]he manifest failure of market fundamentalism …
will inevitably be the starting point for a new new [sic] world order’
and ‘a fundamentally renewed morality’.
What this latest economic crisis represented was a recurrence of the
extreme turbulence that from time to time consumes the market system.
Such crises are endemic. The depth and global scale of this one, and
the unstoppable demand it placed on governments to act in the wider
interest, however, have opened possibilities in political thinking. The
crisis in the economy and the financial sector revealed (once again)
the interdependence of business, government and everyone in society.
It displayed in a dramatic way the interconnectedness that underlies
social life, which is hidden by the apparent success of competitive
individualism. Moreover, it shifted the dynamic of the power
relationship between the private sector and the state (Callinicos, 2010).
How we understand this relationship between the state and capitalism
matters, as the relationship between education and the surrounding
capitalist-dominated society is framed by that understanding. If the
economic crisis of the late 2000s demands a change in capitalism, what
kind of change is needed? There is a range of options, summarised
3