Session Information
23 SES 07 A, Networks, Privatizations and Governance (Part 2)
Paper Session continued from 23 SES 06 A
Contribution
The recent law adopted in Greece under the new leftish government in 2015 retains 5 out of the 35 Model Schools for the following reason: the principle of ‘excellence’ underpinning the schools of this type is denounced as being in conflict with the principle of equal opportunities as it promotes the ‘elite’ education. The new government states that best practices coming from Model Schools operation could provide stable educational background for the rest of schools at public sector.
‘Excellence’ is highlighted as a major subject in political discourse among governments. The previous government in 2011, in the middle of the economic crisis, during the implementation of the first Memorandum, used the institution of Model Schools to develop a rhetoric concerning the issue of ‘excellence’ which serves specific ideological purposes, in order to meet the requirements of specific lobbies. In the name of ‘excellence’, those pressure groups seem to support the project of establishing an educational ‘elite’ in order to serve the purposes of a competitive society and financial and social development.
Nowadays, the preservation of the institution of Model Schools even by a leftish government which uses denunciatory rhetoric against ‘excellence’ is the result of lobbying of the upper middle class. The members of this class are classified as ‘Pretenders’ who lack the financial resources of ‘Elites’ but try to promote the educational career of their children in every possible way using their economic or social resources available (van Zanten, 2015). The lack of funds for Education and the depreciation of public schools leads the ‘Pretenders’ to use Model Schools in a sui generis type of ‘privatisation’ (Ball, 2009) as a way to provide their children with education of high quality.
Therefore, we wonder if Model Schools are capable to offer the opportunity for mobility and access to the networks of national and global educational ‘elites’ (Tsakiris et al, 2015) by building skills known as ‘soft skills’ (Maxwell, 2015) which are associated with leadership, communication and developing effective social relations and which are offered by ‘elite’ institutions in the globalised educational environment. These skills – described as ‘talent’ in the global labour market – are the privilege of the graduates of specific elite institutions and lead to power positions (Braun et al, 2015). We pose this question because in Greece there is a quasi-monopoly in the market of shaping the educational ‘elite’, as such skills are cultivated only in expensive private schools and schools with IB (International Baccalaureate) curricula; that is schools attended by students coming from the upper class.
We assume in this study that there are political and social networks, i.e. social structures composed of individuals or institutions which function at institutional, national and international level (Ball and Exley, 2010) exercising influence and shaping our national educational policy regarding the aforementioned issues. We also attempt to highlight the views of various institutional agents and to identify the influence of national and international networks on the direction of Greek educational policy, concerning the role of ‘excellence’ in the public schools, the possibility of access to national and global education ‘elites’ and the emerging peculiar type of ‘privatisation’ at public schools.
From the above, three main research questions arise:
a)Whether and in what extent the pressure groups that influence the Greek educational policy are related to specific political and social networks at institutional, national and international level?
b)Whether and in what way these lobbies aim at the pursuit of mobility and access to national and global educational ‘elite’?
c)Whether and in what extent discourse and action of the above mentioned lobbies refer to a sui generis type of ‘privatisation’?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, S.J. (2009) ‘Privatising Education, Privatising Education Policy, Privatising Educational Research: Network governance and the ‘competition state’, Journal of Education Policy, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 83-99. Ball, S.J. and Exley,S. (2010) ‘Making policy with ‘good ideas’: policy networks and the ‘intellectuals’ of New Labour’, Journal of Education Policy, 25:2, 151-169. Brown, P., Lauder, H. and Sung, J. (2015) ‘Higher education, corporate talent and the stratification of knowledge work in the global labour market’. In: van Zanten, A., Ball, S. J. and Darchy-Koechlin, B., eds. World Yearbook of Education, 2015. London, U. K.: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. et Passeron, J. C. (1970) ‘La reproduction. Eléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement’. Paris : Éditions de Minuit. Crozier, M. et Friedberg, E. (1977) ‘L'acteur et le système’. Paris : Éditions du Seuil. Goodwin, M. (2009) ‘Which networks matter in education governance? A reply to Ball’s ‘new philanthropy, new networks and new governance in education’. Political Studies 57, no. 3:680–7. Hay, C. (2002) ‘Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction’. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Marsh, D. and Smith, M. (2000) ‘Understanding policy networks: Towards a dialectical approach’, Political Studies 48, no. 1:4-21. Maxwell, C. (2015) ‘Elites: Some questions for a new research agenda’. In: van Zanten, A., Ball, S. J. and Darchy-Koechlin, B., eds. World Yearbook of Education, 2015. London, U. K.: Routledge. Tsakiris, D., Theohari, I. and Nikita D. P. (2015) ‘Policies in the pursuit of ‘Elite and Excellence’: delineating the educational ‘imaginary’ of parents and teachers’ presented at ECER 2015, ‘Education and Transition. Contributions from Educational Research’, Budapest, 7-11 September 2015 van Zanten, A. (2014) ‘The sociology of elite education’ (hal-sciencepo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00982726 submitted on 22 May 2014). van Zanten, A. (2015). ‘A family affair: Reproducing elite positions and preserving the ideals of meritocratic competition and youth autonomy’. In: van Zanten, A., Ball, S. J. and Darchy-Koechlin, B., eds. World Yearbook of Education, 2015. London, U. K.: Routledge.
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