Education Policy and Social Class: The Selected Works of Stephen J. Ball

by Stephen J. Ball

Bringing together twenty years of research and writing, this book provides an overview of Stephen Ball’s career and shows not only the development of his most important ideas but also the long-lasting contributions he has made to the field of educational policy analysis. This volume contains sixteen key essays divided into three Each chapter presents innovative ways of thinking about public policy, asking probing questions about what policy is, how policy is influenced and what effects intentional and unintentional policies have. As a body of work, this collection raises issues of ethics and social justice which are often neglected in the mass of policies that now affect every aspect of our education systems.

Genres: Education

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2005

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much of this book is concerned what must be considered, on any account, the remarkable transformation of ideology that has occurred in the last few decades. Policy, in all senses, but particularly education policy – given education is the best means of ‘normalising’ ideologies, has been a primary site of this transformation – a transformation that has normalised neoliberal conceptions of what it means to live in society.

Particularly influential have been the ideas of such thinkers as Hayek – whose extreme vision of radical free market economics would possibly even make Milton Friedman blush and was the basis of Margaret Thatcher’s oft quoted stance against civilisation – there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and their families. This book provides an analysis of the playing out of such ideas – the consequences they have provoked and the damage they have wrought to the very fabric of our social order. Despite the terrifying and daily proof the havoc the global financial crisis provides of these theories vacuous lack substance, they still continue to be the standard policy response – if now given increasingly frantically. The patient, who is dying from too much of this poison already, is constantly prescribed ever higher doses of this same ‘medicine’, whether in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The poverty of Hayek’s social theories should have been obvious to all but the ideologically blind from his gushing endorsement of the murderous Pinochet regime. At least Milton Friedman had the good taste to pretend he had nothing to do with Pinochet, despite his covert support through the Chicago Boys – but Hayek was never as concerned with democracy if it was to stand in the way of the free market.

Today the confounding of freedom with choice is so complete that to challenge the idea of the equivalence of democracy with free markets or with privitisation is to sound as if one has stood in opposition to breathing air. Both the supposed left and right of today’s political spectrum pride themselves on being able to out do each other in their ideological fervour and commitment to neoliberal extremism. The consequences were predictable back then when this stuff became fashionable – and the predictions have come to pass. We now live in a grossly unequal world and such inequality, even in the most advanced of countries, is only capable of getting worse.

If there is one thing that economists gets right (and it is tempting to say this with a smurk) it is that people respond to incentives. One of the things, also all too predictable, that was inevitable from the increasing availability of parental choice in the schooling of their children was the parents’ perception of the need to move their children into schools where there were other students ‘much like us’. This inevitably meant that schools in areas with large populations of socially disadvantaged students would become the dumping grounds for students whose parents simply cannot muster the economic resources to ‘provide’ for their children’s education. The equation between a ‘good parent’ and one that makes ‘economically rational’ decisions for their children is marked with a QED.

Except there was a time when education was seen as a social good – one which we all were prepared to pay for so as to ensure we would get to live in a society worth living in – today it has become a way of ensuring the social advantage of our own children, often at the expense of the children of everyone else. Positional advantage is the name of the game. In this dog-eat-dog world all notions of fairness and equality are abandoned. But such a world has consequences. Expect more riots, Britain.

The quasi-markets that the education system has been turned into force schools to promote themselves in ways that are focused on how they will be seen on the outside, more than how they are in reality. This forces schools to be ‘more traditional’ than they might otherwise wish to be – and to ‘teach to the test’ more than they know is good for your child. What is interesting is that certain social sites have choices that are of far greater consequence than those in other social sites. In fact, the paradox is that the middle classes tend to choose private education – education that explicitly promotes itself as ‘traditional’ – so as to avoid choices altogether. This world of parental choice is really a world in which there are endless signifiers – exam results, ranking tables, school uniforms and displays of school discipline – but where what these actually signify is virtually impossible for parents to interpret. The ability to decode these message systems into an ‘informed choice’ is anything but simple, particularly in a rapidly changing world. And given the apparent consequence of making the wrong choice – that is, a son or daughter without hope of a career or a future – anxiety is the parent’s constant companion unless they choose the most conservative of choices for their children.

There are a number of essays in this book reporting on research done by Ball in looking at how parents go about the endlessly difficult process of deciding the best school for their children. What is particularly interesting is the idea that working class and middle class parents tend to use quite different criteria for making these decisions. As he says, middle class parents tend to be ‘future oriented’ – that is, they visualise an ideal future for their child and try to see what would be necessary to progress towards that future – then any sacrifices and efforts are justified. Working class families are fixated on the present. They see all of the problems and obstacles associated with sending their children to other, more distant schools and these immediate problems trump any possible future benefits.

There is a very interesting discussion on racial divisions in British society and the impact these have on school choice – particularly Higher Education choices. A lot of this fits with Bourdieu’s ideas of how various social groupings come with different notions of the value of education, which are likewise constrained by their various expectations of achieving success within the education game. The ability of certain groups to be able to transform their social and financial capital into academic capital is something that is generally not recognised in neoliberal narratives, which rather transform advantage into a kind of educational meritocracy.

These decisions are discussed by giving life histories of various students and how they came to make their choices. While it could be argued that such life histories are far too particular, the richness of the particular is used here to highlight how different groupings within society are unable to see outside of how the world is constructed according to their expectations within it.

One of my favourite essays was towards the end where he discusses the role of the grapevine in deciding which school to send one’s children to. Because schools are more prone now to ‘market’ themselves and because everyone knows all marketing is lies, how do you know what evidence you can trust? Grapevines provide very imperfect knowledge, but friends with children already at a particular school are seen as much more reliable than glossy brochures and impossible to decipher league tables, which tell you everything except what seems most important to a parent, will my child be happy at that school?

All of this should be read against a background of what should be self-evident. There is no question that the best education systems in the world are also the most equal – that is, education systems where there is effectively no ‘freedom of choice’ for parents to decide how they will best position their child by separating their children from children of colour, or working class children, or various other children suffering from disadvantage. Our obsession with confounding freedom with choice condemns us to live in societies that will increasingly see caste systems as the norm. Naturally, we will continue with our high sounding excuses and moral imperatives to justify such selfishnesses – but selfishness has consequences. Consequences we shall long pay for.