Regional Development - Catherine Doherty

Queensland University of Technology

CRICOS No. 00213J

School markets and regional development: game-keeping the middle class professional.

Catherine Doherty

Senior Research Fellow

Centre for Learning Innovation,

Faculty of Education, QUT.

[email protected]

CRICOS No. 00213Ja university for the worldrealR

School markets and aspatial, metrocentric neoliberalism

My School website: (www.myschool.edu.au)

‘Firstly, it provides parents and students with information on each school – its view of itself and its mission, its staffing, its resources and its students’ characteristics and their performances. … These comparisons provide information to support improvements in schools. Among schools with similar students, those achieving higher student performances can stimulate others to lift expectations of what they and their students can achieve.’

Logic of quality enhancement over time, but no logic of place in its enactment.

2 modes of school differentiation by place - embedded curriculum, or spatial market.


Regional development and the middle class

• Ongoing issues recruiting and retaining the middle-class professional despite lucrative incentives – ‘family issues’:

‘The higher quality education resources in the larger population centres are another major reason why families often prefer to live in these centres. This is a particularly important consideration once children reach secondary school age.’ (Haslam McKenzie, 2010, p. 366)

• MC as the counter-narrative – surplus of opportunities.


School markets and the middle class professional

Particular MC fraction particularly invested in educational strategy for inter-generational reproduction of relative advantage:

‘finding the “best” schools, the “best” universities, the most suitable peer groups within which to lodge their children’ (Campbell, Proctor and Sherington (2009) p. 23).


Space, place and mobilities

• Space of flows (Castells, 1996)• Place as locale of physical contiguity, in a relational network of places• Interdependencies of im/mobilities (Urry, 2000)• Gardening vs game-keeping the necessary talent• Choice and competition between places (Harvey, 1993) • Winners and losers• ‘Progressive’ sense of place, and the ‘power-geometry’ of differential

mobilities (Massey, 1993)

Rural/remote/regional communities not just about stable populations


Game-keeping the middle class professional

• Readings of the school market will colour the meanings made of a place.

• Judgements of quality, and the exercise of choice• Public provision may not be enough to attract the MC

family• Short-lived success• Impact of both absence and presence


A transect of educational markets


Some conclusions

• Minimal markets vs deep markets – the local Catholic school• Choice sputters out over the transect• Relative advantage available in local markets, but not always

absolute advantage• Boarding school mobility impacts on local outcomes• My School makes some things ‘transparent’ and others invisible• Enables the ‘place’ to be sized up from a distance – winners and

losers

So what?• The limits of simplistic policy for communities differently ‘placed’.


Further research

• Interview phase – cross section of human service professionals in these communities

• Survey phase – same professionals across Queensland

[email protected]


references

Campbell, C., Proctor, H., & Sherington, G. (2009). School choice: How parents negotiate the new school market in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society (Vol. 1). Oxford: Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (1993). From space to place and back again: reflections on the condition of postmodernity. In J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putman, G. Robertson & L. Ticknew (Eds.), Mapping the futures: local cultures, global change (pp. 3-29). London: Routledge.

Haslam McKenzie, F. (2010). Fly-in fly-out: the challenges of transient populations in rural landscapes. In G. Luck, D. Race & R. Black (Eds.), Demographic change in Australia's rural landscapes (pp. 353-374). Dordrecht: Springer.

Massey, D. (1993). Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place. In J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson & L. Ticknew (Eds.), Mapping the futures: local cultures, global change (pp. 59-69). London & New York: Routledge.

Urry, J. (2000b). Sociology beyond societies: Mobilities for the twenty-first century. London: Routledge.