School Reform and Inequality in Urban Australia

Abstract

Over the past three decades, government schools in Australia have been exposed to the effects of several major public policy reforms aimed at improving school performance. One is the well-documented push to marketisation or the re-organisation of school management around ‘market’ principles (see, for example, Whitty, Power & Halpin, 1998). Greater autonomy for schools through devolution of decision making, the introduction of school councils, a focus on school-based management, and the easing of restrictions on school catchment boundaries to enhance parental choice were all initiated with the promise of promoting more effective schools through increased competition. Another is the push to privatisation through increasing the levels of public funding to private providers, or what could be described as the public funding of private effort in the delivery of schooling.