New studies reject market-based education

The neo-liberal market-based view of education stresses the importance of individual freedom, enhancement of economic growth and facilitates young people growing through individual responsibility. Murnane & Levy (1996) have asserted that, "Market-based initiatives have been among the most durable of reforms proposed for improving American Education", and they discuss the many benefits to education as a result of market-based initiatives, as it allows for an easy signal of change when methods of schooling need to be restructured. However, an article by the Sydney Morning Herald "New studies reject market-based education" writes about the three key challenges confronting Australia's education; children entering school below their expected level of ability, our top students are falling behind their international peers and the gap between Australia's highest and lowest performing students being the largest among most developed nations. It is suggested that this is a result of Australia's "Education policies are devoted to matters that ultimately have little impact on student learning... Market-based notions of choice, competition, accountability and standardisation". Therefore, the contrasted social justice view on education may prove to be more effective in boosting Australia's success in the three key challenges.

When considering the social justice view of education, the approach derives from the idea that particular students are disadvantaged within the school environment due to social reasons rather than individual reasons. As mentioned in the article, "The gap between the nation's best students and the worst performers is the biggest among most developed countries". This negligence of equitable outcome has proven to be detrimental to Australia's overall education equity rating, which is proven through the results of Australia's most recent PISA results (Thomson, et al., 2010). This statistic demonstrates that countries such as Australia must be aiming for greater rates of equal success throughout all groups in society through the act of direct intervention, rather than solely producing equality of access, in order to truly achieve greater equity within the countries' education system.

On another suggestion made by the study within the SMH article, one of a more controversial approach is the slashing of the national supply of new teachers, and that the large expansion of the number of students enrolling as teachers should stop. Then, this money saved on educating larger amounts of undergraduate teachers would then be spent on better quality postgraduate clinical teacher education. This in turn, may bring forth the possibility of higher quality teachers, which is of great importance to producing better outcomes for students' achievement. This is proven by Hattie (2003), who states that teachers are 30% of the factors accounting for this achievement.

Therefore, if Australia is to increase the level of success of its students on an international scale, it may be of great benefit to abandon the very prevalent market orientated view of education and to adapt to more social justice notions of education. Furthermore, increasing teacher quality through an increase of postgraduate education may be an effective method.

References

Hattie, J. (2003). Teachers Make a Difference: What is the Research Evidence?, Australian
Council for Educational Research: Melbourne. Retrieved on 9/10/2013 from http://www.acer.edu.au/documents/RC2003_Hattie_TeachersMakeADifference.pdf

Murnane, R. J., & Levy, F. (1996). Sizing Up Market-Based Education Reforms. The Education Digest, 62(4), 10-14.

Thomson, S., De Bortoli, L., Nicholas, M., Hillman, K., & Buckley, S. (2010). PISA in Brief.
Highlights From the Full Australian Report: Challenges for Australian Education: Results from PISA 2009. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research. Retrieved on 4/9/2013 from http://www.acer.edu.au/documents/PISA-2009-In-Brief.pdf

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/new-studies-reject-marketbased-education-20130809-2rlvb.html (Date accessed: 8/10/2013)