ABSTRACT
In this 2015 article by Carmen Mills, a website My School and related choice-oriented policy in Australia is taken to task from a Bourdieuian perspective. My School purportedly aims to enhance educational accountability and parental choice over schooling by revealing the results of national examinations across schools in Australia so that parents can make informed decisions and engage in dialogue with school leaders about local results. While this policy and website may benefit middle-class and privileged members of the society, from a Bourdieuian view, it serves at the same time to decrease educational opportunity and equality for disadvantaged families in Australia, who lack the cultural capital needed to make informed educational decisions and effectively interact with local schools (as well as lacking the financial resources to pay for more expensive school ‘choices’ for their children). As cultural capital at the schooling level is based in part on the capacities and values of parents and children in the school community, the likely result of the policy is that it will exacerbate cultural and educational divides, as communities become more homogeneous and split. While Mills mentions that greater transparency and awareness are positive in enhancing educational equity over time, she nonetheless recommends changes for correcting the negative likely results of My School, to ensure education does not become more segregated and unequal, including creating more socioeconomically balanced enrolment profiles across schools, and drawing upon empirical research that questions the efficacy of choice models across diverse populations. Read alongside earlier chapters focused on choice in this collection, the chapter highlights the way the discourse has unfolded over time, in this case in the Australian context.
