ERIC Number: EJ1051206
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Dec
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1338-1563
EISSN: N/A
Being Different "and" the Same? The Paradoxes of "Tailoring" in Education Quasi-Markets
Savage, Glenn C.
Journal of Pedagogy, v3 n2 p279-302 Dec 2012
In Australia, market-based education policies promote the notion that government schools should flexibly tailor secondary education to the needs of young people and their local communities. Far from offering a "one size fits all" system, policies seek to enable clients ("parents," "students") to exercise freedom of choice in quasi-markets that offer different educational products to different individuals. The intended effect is a kind of "bespoke education tailoring," whereby schools operate as flexible service providers, adapting to the needs and desires of local markets. In this paper, I analyse the policy turn towards market tailoring as part of broader shifts towards advanced liberal governance in education. Following this, I feature interviews with educators in two socially disparate government secondary schools in the Australian city of Melbourne. In doing so, I analyse the extent to which each school tailors its marketing practices to its local community. These interviews suggest inherent contradictions emerge when tailoring is attempted in a hierarchical market with normative and rigid indicators of "brand value." Schools are caught, I argue, between paradoxical demands, requiring them to be simultaneously different "and" the same.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Educational Policy, School Choice, Secondary School Teachers, Interviews, Public School Teachers, Secondary Schools, Public Schools, Commercialization, Governance, Models, Marketing
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A