Democracy, ‘sector-blindness’ and the delegitimation of dissent in neoliberal education policy: a response to Discourse, 34(2), May 2013

As a response to the 2013 special issue of Discourse on marketisation and equity in education, this paper suggests it is important to understand how school sectors (independent, Catholic and government) continue to play a significant role in how we constitute education, markets and equity in Australia. The first part of this paper provides a genealogy of school funding in Australia, giving an overview of how Australia has reached the current state of ‘sector-blind’ school funding. We also focus on the shift in Australian schooling from a public good for national collective well-being to a private, positional good for individual advancement. The second part of the paper suggests that the notion of ‘sector-blindness’ is part of a depoliticisation of educational politics. We work from the premise that education is always and everywhere already a political project. We critique some absences in the special issue around ‘colour-blindness’ and in a coda to the paper, we provide the basis for renewing and politicising the debate about education policy by offering a ‘debate-redux’, that provides some possibilities about forms of democratic politics and education.