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The market alternative in education is gaining ground in policy-making circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Parental choice and school competition are seen as ways of achieving reform and raising standards while at the same time reducing State intervention into education planning. This paper interrogates the arguments made for markets and against public monopoly schooling,, and it is argued that on both counts of advocates are partial and flawed. The failure to address the bases and effects of inequalities of the market are given particular attention. It is argued that markets in education provide the possibility for the pursuit of class advantage and generate a differentiated and stratified system of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate on teacher quality and quality in teaching and teacher education has been as vigorous in Australia as it has been in the UK and the USA In Australia, however, reform in teacher education has been subsumed within a national metapolicy of corporate federalism which is an amalgam of beliefs or discourses including neo-corporatism, economic rationalism, corporate managerialism and human capital The paper analyses the most recent document on reform of teacher education in Australia (the Ebbeck Report) and shows how its policy formulation is influenced by the discourse of corporate federalism It also shows how micro-economic reform in this sector is related to reforms in other sectors of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that underwriting much contemporary educational research is a parochial fascination with education, which cannot handle educational difference, indifference, or dissent except as in some sense pathological and aberrant. Detectable in the analogies, assumptions and arguments of the educational researcher, it is argued that this fascination with education reaches its acme in the so-called 'radical' definition of educational equality, where 'statistical parity' is taken, or rather mistaken, for 'educational equality'. The intractable problems raised by such a definition in assessing educational equality in a pluralistic society are examined by reference to the work of its foremost advocate-J S Coleman [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]