Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2440/124602
Type: Thesis
Title: Taking (back) the Wheel: Structural educational reform in the United States and Australia, and its Effect upon Inequality in Australian schooling
Author: Alozie, Chidozie Obialor
Issue Date: 2019
School/Discipline: School of Education
Abstract: This study investigated educational reform policies in both the United States and Australia to discern a relationship between policies of reform and racial segregation in education. This thesis took as its object of study educational reform policies from the United States between 1983 and 2015 and from Australia between the years 2008 and 2013, examining them through a (Foucauldian-inspired) poststructuralist policy discourse analysis, WPR (Bacchi, 2007, 2009; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) and theories of affect (Wetherell, 2012; Ahmed 2004, 2013, 2016), to gauge their import to the observed phenomena of inequality, and specifically segregation within schooling. With regards to educational inequality, and to racial segregation specifically, the literature is clear as to what has happened. The more pertinent questions, however, are how, despite all the information regarding its effects, it has happened -and especially with regards to inequality-how (and why) it persists. By beginning at the end, with observed human actions within the field of policy, this research project reveals the manner through which policy constructs its issues. It develops an understanding of educational segregation which first, challenges hegemonic conceptions of neoliberalism as well as the simultaneous reification and culpability of the conception of choice within the neoliberalised policy paradigm. It also problematises the pursuance of choice through policy as a form of ‘regulated autonomy’ (Marginson, 1997a) and a manufactured form of freedom, a false freedom, as it were. This combination of methodological and theoretical traditions furthers the development of policy analysis and contributes to the body of possible perspectives for policy analysis. Specifically, it demonstrates the facility of the WPR methodology through its unique pairing with theories of affect, and in the formulation of a mechanism of a model of affective policy circulation, identifies how and why policy manifests in specific ways.
Advisor: Maadad, Nina
Secombe, Margaret
Dissertation Note: Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Education, 2019
Keywords: policy
education reform
segregation white flight
Provenance: This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals
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