Abstract:
This paper examines approaches to school-community engagement in policy and practice and argues for a reorientation toward equity beyond the neoliberal rationale. Over two decades neoliberal policies in Australia (and elsewhere) have perversely erased the boundaries of schools and communities as both have been incorporated into markets with business-based systems of performance and accountability. Within the context of a broad social inclusion agenda for 'raising standards' and 'closing gaps', educational disadvantage is reconfigured as underperformance and public understandings of equity are narrowly redefined in terms of performance on standardised tests. Locally and internationally, parental involvement and community partnerships for improving students' and schools' performance have been emphasised in recent educational policy as means to educational and social equity. Situated within this 'achievement turn' and associated teacher and school accountabilities, the relationship of schools and communities is disconnected from persistent structural problems of poverty, dispossession and the dismantling or diminution of many 'public' resources.