How Schools Do Policy Ball, Stephen J; Maguire, Meg; Braun, Annette
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,
2012, 20120726, 2011, 2011-12-14, 2012-07-26
eBook, Book
Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant ...change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to be ‘implemented’ by schools. In response to this, a great deal of attention has been given to evaluating ‘how well’ policies are realised in practice – implemented! Less attention has been paid to understanding how schools actually deal with these multiple, and sometimes contradictory, policy demands; creatively working to interpret policy texts and translate these into practices, in real material conditions and varying resources – how they are enacted! Based on a long-term qualitative study of four ‘ordinary’ secondary schools, and working on the interface of theory with data, this book explores how schools enact, rather than implement, policy. It focuses on:
contexts of ‘policy work’ in schools;
teachers as policy subjects;
teachers as policy actors;
policy texts, artefacts and events;
standards, behaviour and learning policies.
This book offers an original and very grounded analysis of how schools and teachers do policy. It will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of education, education policy and social policy, as well as school leaders, in the UK and beyond.
Stephen J. Ball is the Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education in the Department of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK.
Meg Maguire is Professor of Sociology of Education in the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s College London, UK.
Annette Braun is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Sociology Department of City University, London, UK.
Foreword or Introduction 1. Beyond implementation –Towards a Theory of Policy Enactment 2. Taking Context Seriously 3. Doing Enactment: People, Culture and Policy Work 4. Policy into Practice 5. Whatever happened to... 6. Policy Enactments – In Theory and Practice
Do private and philanthropic solutions to the problems of education signal the end of state education in itswelfare form?Education policy is being reformed and re-worked on a global scale. Policies ...are flowing and converging to produce a singular vision ofbest practice based on the methods and tenets of theneo-liberal imaginary. Philanthro
A major aim of this paper is to draw attention to the insidious manner in which the deficit discourse and practices associated with neoliberal reform are de- or re-professionalising educationists ...through an acculturation process. In the context of Ireland, as elsewhere, the author identifies how the three ‘technologies’ of Market, Management and Performance have inconspicuously but harmfully changed the subjective experience of education at all levels. It is argued that the power of privatisation in service delivery gives rise to change in education as part of a slow burn; how management is altering social connections and power relations to less democratic and caring forms, and how performativity and accountability agendas are radically undermining the professionalism of teachers in the hunt for measures, targets, benchmarks, tests, tables, audits to feed the system in the name of improvement. The paper adopts a personal tenor exhorting all educationists to become increasingly critically reflexive, politically aware and urging them to reawaken to their real educational work – the ethical and moral project that most signed up to but which has since become lost.
This paper extends the author's previous enquiries and discussions of governmentality and neoliberal policy technologies in a number of ways. The paper explores the specificity and generality of ...performativity as a particular contemporary mode of power relations. It addresses our own imbrication in the politics of performative truths, through our ordinary everyday life and work. The paper is about the here and now, us, you and me, and who we are in neoliberal education. It draws upon and considers a set of ongoing email exchanges with a small group of teachers who are struggling with performativity. It enters the 'theoretical silence' of governmentality studies around the issues of resistance and contestation. Above all, the paper attempts to articulate the risks of refusal through Foucault's notion of fearless speech or truth-telling (parrhesia).
Based on the 'case' of educational reform in India, this paper explores the emergence of both new trans-national spaces of policy and new intra-national spaces of policy and how they are related ...together, and how policies move across and between these spaces and the relationships that enable and facilitate such movement. The paper is an attempt to think outside and beyond the framework of the nation state to make sense of what is going on inside the nation state. In particular, it takes seriously the need to rethink the frame within and scales at which the new policy actors, discourses, connections, agendas, resources, and solutions of governance are addressed - and the need to move beyond what Beck calls 'methodological nationalism' . In other words, the paper argues that thinking about the spaces of policy means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. To address this argument, it combines the presentation and discussion of data with some more general discussion of policy networks and mobilities.
This paper is a reflection on What is policy? Texts, Trajectories and Tool Boxes, which was first published in 1993, in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. It looks back to what ...the 1993 paper was trying to do and at some of the developments of the ideas first sketched there in my later work, in particular in the book How Schools Do Policy (2012). It also considers the continuing tensions between domination and agency, discourse and text, in policy research and the misuse of the concept of discourse in some policy analysis work.
The author was a student in two "plate glass", welfare state universities, Essex (founded 1964) and Sussex (founded 1961), although they were very different. Essex was very small, socially very ...diverse and politically "exciting", to say the least--a sort of comprehensive university. His sociology teachers there profoundly influenced him intellectually and they taught him to think. Sussex, "Balliol by the Sea" as it was dubbed, had a very different social profile and institutional habitus but was pedagogically very adventurous. The author's aim as a researcher and a teacher became to provide tools for others to think with. He was produced and formed as a welfare state academic subject in these contexts. Over the past 20 years, he has been re-formed as a neoliberal academic subject. In this personal reflection, the author examines the growth of the neoliberal university during his lifetime and laments the commodification of academic practice and the commercial ethos of much of the higher education system. (Contains 2 notes.)
Resistance is normally thought of as a collective exercise of public political activity. In this article, Ball and Olmedo approach the question of resistance in a different way, through Foucault's ...notion of 'the care of the self'. Neoliberal reforms in education are producing new kinds of teaching subjects, new forms of subjectivity. It makes sense then that subjectivity should be the terrain of struggle, the terrain of resistance. A set of e-mail exchanges with teachers, based around Ball's work on performativity, enable the authors to access the work of power relations through the uncertainties, discomforts and refusals that these teachers bring to their everyday practice. By acting 'irresponsibly', these teachers take 'responsibility' for the care of their selves and in doing so make clear that social reality is not as inevitable as it may seem. This is not strategic action in the normal political sense. Rather it is a process of struggle against mundane, quotidian neoliberalisations, that creates the possibility of thinking about education and ourselves differently.
This paper considers the sociology of education (SOE) as a modern human science. It suggests that the SOE is mired in a set of unreflexive, redemptive, Enlightment rationalities, and explores the ...messy relationships of
the sociology
with education that result from this. It is argues that the sociology of education has consistently failed to distance itself from the metaphysics, optimism and oppressions of modern schooling. That it has failed to call into question either the basic building blocks of schooling, or what we call education - pedagogy, curriculum and assessment - or the buildings themselves, the spaces of education. The paper concludes by asserting to need for critique rather than simply criticism as a starting point for thinking education differently.
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