ABSTRACT
I am an optimist about educational matters. I realized this by accident. The paper I had given at an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development conference in New Zealand in 1998 on ‘Innovations for Successful Schools’ (McNaughton, 1998), followed one that was a critical analysis of schools using concepts from contemporary sociology. Schools were seen to be hegemonic agencies, necessarily reproducing the inequalities we see in society. In my paper I reported experimental demonstrations of how collaborative partnerships between communities and schools can make a difference to the achievement patterns of students from communities traditionally not well served by schools. The rapporteur observed I had much greater optimism about what schools might achieve than some of my sociologist colleagues.
