A Feminist Critique of Public Policy Discourses about Educational Effectiveness

Abstract

This chapter provides a feminist critique of the development of public policy discourses about school effectiveness and improvement, in the context of globalisation and social transformations. The aim of achieving educational effectiveness and school improvements has become an international, or global, policy phenomenon, and is particularly associated with westernised and developed or late modern societies (Giddens, 1998; Slee, Weiner and Tomlinson, 1998; Avalos, 2001). Along with these developments, the social and political movement for educational improvement has shifted the characteristics of policy debates about school effectiveness away from a social welfarist perspective. There have been moves first, towards more fine-grained professional educational strategies, and second, to `new managerialism', raising public policy discourses that ignore the social, economic and family contexts of education (Morley and Rassool, 1999). Two new and revised public policy discourses have recently emerged from the transformed political movement as strategies to achieve school effectiveness, namely, parental involvement in education and training for paid work. These two public policy discourses have developed from previous social welfare strategies that centred on political rather than professional approaches to education, and are now centred on a mix of social welfare and neoliberal strategies, or what have been named `the third way' or modernisation project (Giddens, 1998).