EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

attended by children of better-educated andwealthy families, making things even moredifficult for children attending ordinary schools inpoor areas.’ 3In 2009, Stanford University published the firstnational assessment of charter schools and foundthat ‘37 per cent deliver learning results that aresignificantly worse than their students would haverealised had they remained in traditional publicschools’, while nearly half were no different. 4In 2010, the University of California publishedthe report Choice Without Equity, which foundthat charter schools ‘continue to stratify studentsby race, class, and possibly language’, and thatthey ‘are more racially isolated than traditionalpublic schools in virtually every state and largemetropolitan area in the nation’. 5An alternative agendaOf course, markets in education have not onlybeen the obsession of the right. New Labourassiduously took up and ran with the agenda. Ifthe debate is now to move on, the progressiveleft must do more than provide the broadbrush-strokes of an ideological alternative. Itmust be clear and specific about the reformsand innovations required to make fairness ineducation a realisable goal. What would be thecentral planks of such an agenda? Here are sixsuggested dimensions:1. School admissions are a collective projectoverseen by empowered local admissionsforums, in which the rights and interestsof all children are prioritised above a rightto choice exercised by some parents andsubverted by increasing selection, througha locally determined combination of ballotsand banded intakes.2. School status is standardised, includingthe abolition of remaining grammarschools, halting the academies and freeschool programmes, and outlawing specialadmissions policies for faith schools.3. Funding is allocated to schools on an equitableand transparent per capita basis, using aformula that takes account of social need.4. Local education authorities have clear andproperly resourced functions where this is inthe interests of efficiency and local democracyand accountability – for instance, schooladmissions, new schools and mergers, specialeducational needs and curriculum support.5. Schools have the freedom to develop theirown identity and ethos, through easing thestifling demands of the national curriculumand recognising and trusting teachers’professionalism and expertise.6. Education is treated as much more than aprotracted process of university entrance,children as more than latent units ofeconomic production. We should seek tocreate a school experience in which the fullspectrum of children’s talents are released,the individuality of children’s interestsand preferences is properly valued, andpersonhood in its fullest sense is fostered.By comparing what exists and what we mustwork towards, we see that fairness requireschoices between values and goals that are notalways in harmony. Where there is conflictbetween, say, individual choice and the commongood, competition and collective responsibility,efficiency and democracy, one must be chosento lead, the other to follow. Politics is at its mostdismal when it pretends that no such choicesexist. It is at its most courageous when the ethicalcase is made for constructing our public spacesand institutions in ways that mean we are allbetter off by paying particular attention to thetrajectory of those who start from a position ofrelative disadvantage.In conclusion, fairness is about championingan educational ethic that goes beyond selfactualisationand that assumes and fostersconcern for the other. This is not only about amoral–philosophical observation that my selfrealisationand authenticity depend on yours, butalso engages the emerging evidence that whensome are allowed to fail and social divisionswiden, outcomes suffer for everyone. 6At the end of the day, fairness sings its ownname. If we are trying too hard to explain howand where it exists, it probably does not. For weknow it when we see it – when all our childrenprosper.3 Gary Anderson, ‘Flagship Toryfree schools scheme condemnedby Swedish education ministerBertil Ostberg’, Sunday Mirror,30 May 2010, www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/2010/05/30/flagship-tory-free-schoolsdoomed-115875-22296075/.4 CREDO, Multiple Choice: CharterSchool Performance in 16 States,Centre for Research on EducationOutcomes, Stanford University,2009, p.1, http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf.5 Erica Frankenberg, GenevieveSiegel-Hawley and Jia Wang,Choice Without Equity: CharterSchool Segregation and the Needfor Civil Rights Standards, CivilRights Project, University ofCalifornia Los Angeles, 2010,p.4, http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/choicewithout-equity-2009-report/frankenberg-choices-withoutequity-2010.pdf.6 See Richard Wilkinson andKate Pickett, The Spirit Level: WhyEquality is Better for Everyone,Penguin Books, updated 2010.Education for the good society | 21