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This review has been accessed times since August 7, 2009

Ball, Stephen J. (2008). The Education Debate: Policy and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Bristol, UK: Policy Press Pp. 256         ISBN 978-1-86134-920-0

Reviewed by Rucheeta Kulkarni
Arizona State University

August 7, 2009

For Americans concerned about the increasing privatization of US public education, Stephen Ball’s recent book provides both a comforting and disturbing reminder: It’s not just us. The Education Debate is partly a primer on modern English education policy and partly a critical analysis of trends in global education policy. Ball helps English readers understand the overarching themes behind the deluge of education policy introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour party, and along the way, provides readers outside of England with a set of analytical tools to understand how their own education policies might be shaped by powerful discourses of globalization, knowledge-based economies, and free-markets.

Ball’s introductory chapter is titled “education education education policy,” after Blair’s 1996 pre-election speech declaring that his top three priorities as prime minister would be “education, education, and education.” The speech brought education policy under intense scrutiny from England’s government and media, and signaled the start of a seemingly endless stream of reform-oriented initiatives. Ball argues that the “policy overload” (p. 2) is partly a tactical effort on the part of politicians hoping to demonstrate that they are doing something, but that it also stems from a influential discourse of the “‘pressures and requirements of globalization” (p. 1). Using the methods of policy sociology, Ball looks to analyze this and other discourses linking education and the economy. He identifies two themes as central to the book: the relationship of education policy to the needs of the state and the economy, and the relationship between education policy and social class.

Chapter One introduces the reader to key concepts that are referred to and used later in the book, namely, education policy, economic necessity, and public service reform. Each of these concepts is linked in the recent emphasis on education as a servant of the economy. Ball writes,

Within policy, education is not regarded primarily from an economic point of view. The social and economic purposes of education have been collapsed into a single, overriding emphasis on policy making for economic competitiveness and an increasing neglect or sidelining (other than rhetoric) of the social purposes of education. (pp. 11-12)

Popular modern discourses, he explains, construct the need for reform by invoking terms like globalization, international economic competition, and the needs of the knowledge economy, and then require certain types of policy response. These discourses not only prioritize the economic role of education, but “privilege particular social goals and human qualities” (p. 13). Alongside the discursive power of policy, Ball highlights the material ways policy works through “technologies” such as choice, competition, and performance management. After explaining and analyzing these terms, Ball shows how they are deployed by the main multilateral forces in global education policy: the World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the European Union. His explanation details how each of these organizations wields its power, especially over poor countries, to promote deregulation and freedom for transnational markets.

Stephen J. Ball

In the second chapter, Ball offers a history of English education policy. He organizes his analysis into four periods, across which he traces both changes and continuities. Looking through the lens of social class, it is clear that historical and contemporary education policies are not as different as they might seem to the casual observer. Ball describes early education policy (1870-1944) as a “response to the need to manage the new urban working classes and to accommodate the social and political aspirations of the new middle classes” (p. 56). The classed approach to education policy yielded three tiers of public schools, motivated by a fear of the working class and an attempt to create a “useful and docile workforce” (p. 63). The next policy period (1944-1976) saw a preservation of the divisions within the public education system, although their justification shifted from income to intelligence. Comprehensive schools were created toward the end of this period, but even while vast differences remained in students’ access to quality schools, critics of comprehensive education continued to battle against their existence. In the third policy period (1976-1997), the New Right worked to dismantle the welfare state and emphasize individual choice in a free market. The final period (1997-2007) was defined by Blair’s New Labour party and their creation of a “competition state” that largely emulated business practices. Ball’s analysis shows how the different terms and strategies used over the course of 150 years of English education policy stem from a persistent social agenda based on “the aspirations and fears of the middle classes” (p. 96). He also reveals the lasting efforts of policy-makers to deracialize policy and to address issues of race, class, or gender-based inequities only when they reach crisis levels.

Chapter Three explores some specifics of New Labour education policy by analyzing one particular document, The UK government’s approach to public service reform, published by the Cabinet Office in 2006. Here, again, Ball traces the historical roots of New Labour education policy and explores the continuities with and differences from Conservative policy. He focuses on four aspects of the approach summarized in the Cabinet Office document: top-down performance management, market incentives to increase efficiency and quality of service, users shaping the service from below, and capability and capacity (p. 103). His analysis of each element as applied to education emphasizes the resulting changes in relationships and roles, most notably in the case of parents and students as consumers. Ball reveals the unintended outcomes of these approaches, including the lack of choice afforded some students under school-choice policies. Overall, Ball finds that this document is one indicator of a global policy shift in which “social and educational policies are collapsed into economic and industrial policy” (p. 149). He raises concerns about the results: a lack of trust in teachers, the rule of achievement indicators that may not represent meaningful educational accomplishments, and the marginalization of social justice issues in an approach that aspires to be so pragmatic that it is beyond class and race politics.

Ball takes up this final concern as the subject of his fourth chapter. Here, he looks at the links between race, class, gender and educational participation (including issues of truancy and enrollment in higher education), as well as at policy’s relationship to minority populations. Equity is rarely a chief goal of education policy, writes Ball; most often, equity is addressed only when tied to economic goals. New Labour’s logic is that good policy will raise all students’ achievement. Ball argues that by focusing on standards and “failing schools,” typically in inner-city areas, this approach tends to construct and address students’ lack of academic achievement as “a social problem of community and family inadequacies rather than an economic problem of structural inequality” (p. 153). He finds that even as New Labour policies avoid direct discussion of race, they blame families and cultures for academic failure. He traces policy discourses around parenting, meritocracy, and new models of schools—including academies, trust schools, and privatization—which aim to intervene via a deracialized model of entrepreneurship and competition. Ball concludes, “Equity is no longer a value in its own right within policy” (p. 191).

The final chapter is titled “A sociology of education policy” and takes up three tasks: looking at the “dissolutions and conservations” within current education policy, thinking about how education and education policy are being reconfigured in space and time, and discussing ongoing trends. He reinforces the argument he has made throughout the book that despite the state’s shift away from welfare policy much remains the same: the significance of social differentiations, the dual focus on policy for upper and lower classes, and the regard for individualism and meritocracy. Ball discusses the ways that students’ and schools’ roles have changed in an age of virtual schooling and a “borderless economy of education” (p. 201), and points out the contradictions that emerge from policies which render state power both more disperse and more extensive. As he foresees the continuation of trends like the disarticulation of the English educational system, he imagines contemporary education policy “fac[ing] two ways: towards an imaginary past of a British heritage…, within which social boundaries are reinforced, and towards an imaginary future of a knowledge economy…within which social boundaries are erased” (p. 205). American readers can easily see their own system stretched between the same two poles.

Although this book will be most interesting to readers who are familiar with English politics and policy, others will find themselves surprised at the striking similarities between the policies Ball describes and the policies they are seeing in their own contexts. Ball accomplishes his dual goals of presenting an analytical description of modern English education policy and developing a set of tools that can help readers analyze their own unique policy contexts. While the book is written for an academic audience, it may provide a useful resource to teachers and school leaders who are struggling to understand why public education and their roles within it are changing so much. Readers who share Ball’s concerns about an increasingly privatized public sphere will find that the book provides valuable analytical tools and explanations. This is not an impassioned argument for or against any one way of doing education, however; although Ball writes as a critical reader of modern social policy trends, his critique is systematic and never simplistic.

Rucheeta Kulkarni About the Reviewer Rucheeta Kulkarni is a PhD candidate in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program at Arizona State University. She is a former middle school teacher and is currently writing her dissertation on the experiences of low-income minority youth attending college preparatory charter schools. Her research interests include school choice policies, multiculturalism in schools, and heritage language education. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Editors: Gene V Glass, Gustavo Fischman, Melissa Cast-Brede ~ ER home | Reseñas Educativas | Resenhas Educativas ~ ~ overview | reviews | editors | submit | guidelines | announcements | search ~