A Democratic Socialist Critique
© 2026. Natalie Ross. All rights reserved.
The author is not a Democratic Socialist, rather, is demonstrating a point.
Abstract
While social cohesion is ostensibly championed as the cornerstone of democratic stability, this essay argues that contemporary educational frameworks in Australia subvert this ideal into a mechanism of neoliberal social engineering and class reproduction. Drawing on a democratic socialist framework informed by Durkheimian sociology and the social-psychological literature on manufactured consensus, the essay analyses the intersection of the marketised funding model established by the 2011 Gonski Review, the individualising ethos of school-based positive psychology and resilience programming, and the expansion of corporate and venture philanthropy into public schooling, including its assimilationist inflection in Indigenous education. It argues that each development, though framed in the language of equity, wellbeing, and opportunity, functions to mask structural class inequity, discourage collective dissent, and reconcile students, teachers, and communities to an increasingly commercialised and two-tiered education system. The essay concludes that a genuinely democratic conception of solidarity requires the decommodification of public education as a universal human right, rather than its further administration through standardised metrics of resilience, compliance, and market efficiency.
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. Theoretical Framework: Durkheimian Solidarity versus Neoliberal Productivism
A. The Dark Side of Group Dynamics
B. The Democratic Socialist Critique of “Cohesion”
C. Section Synthesis
III. The Gonski Model: The Corporate Co-optation of Educational Equity
A. The Illusion of Needs-Based Reform
B. The Commodity Student and the Marketisation of Disadvantage
C. Devolution and Privatisation
IV. Positive Psychology and Enforced Positivity as Class Pacification
A. The Individualisation of Systemic Capitalism
B. The Suppression of Working-Class Dissent
V. The Philanthropic Facade and Neo-Assimilationist Educational Foundations
A. Symbolic Inclusion via Elite Pipelines
B. The Substitution Effect and State Abdication
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
I. Introduction
Social cohesion occupies an ambivalent place in democratic theory. In one register, it names the trust, reciprocity, and mutual obligation that bind citizens together and permit collective self-governance; in another, it names the pressure toward conformity that capitalist states have long used to manage dissent and protect existing distributions of power. This essay is concerned with the second register as it operates within the contemporary Australian school system. It argues that where cohesion is proclaimed as a democratic good, it is frequently being enacted as an administrative technology of compliance — one calibrated less to the flourishing of a pluralistic citizenry than to the smooth reproduction of a market order.
The tension is not new. It is present already in the divergence between Émile Durkheim’s account of social solidarity as a moral bond generated by the division of labour, and the market rationalism that a growing body of sociological scholarship identifies as neoliberalism’s underlying normative logic — a logic that, unlike classical liberalism’s comparatively passive state, actively deploys the apparatus of government to enforce competitive market relations across social and institutional life.1 Australian schooling since the early 1980s has been reorganised according to precisely this logic, through three overlapping and mutually reinforcing developments: the marketised, needs-based funding architecture inaugurated by the 2011 Review of Funding for Schooling under the chairmanship of merchant banker David Gonski;2 the diffusion of school-wide positive psychology and “resilience” curricula that risk recasting the effects of poverty and disadvantage as deficits of individual character rather than as products of underfunded and unequal systems;3 and the growth of corporate and venture philanthropy as a substitute for public investment, including assimilationist “pipeline” programmes directed at Indigenous and other marginalised students.4
Individually, each of these developments has been defended — by governments, by philanthropic actors, and by sections of the education research community — as a pragmatic response to underfunding, disengagement, or disadvantage. Read together, however, and against a democratic socialist framework that takes seriously the class relations underlying Australian schooling, they form a coherent, if not always coordinated, apparatus: one in which the language of cohesion, wellbeing, and opportunity is mobilised to discipline dissent, mask structural inequity, and reconcile students, teachers, and communities to an increasingly two-tiered and commercialised system. Accordingly, this essay argues that contemporary educational frameworks in Australia subvert the democratic ideal of social cohesion into a mechanism of neoliberal social engineering and class reproduction, in which the marketised funding logic of the Gonski reforms, the individualising ethos of positive psychology, and the assimilationist orientation of corporate philanthropy combine to enforce emotional and behavioural compliance at the expense of collective solidarity and structural critique.
The essay proceeds in four further parts. Part II sets out a theoretical framework that reads the Durkheimian tradition against neoliberal productivism and against the social-psychological literature on groupthink and manufactured consensus, in order to distinguish genuine solidarity from coerced conformity. Part III examines the Gonski funding model as a vehicle for the corporate co-optation of educational equity. Part IV considers positive psychology and the broader “wellbeing agenda” as a technology of class pacification. Part V turns to corporate and philanthropic foundations, including their assimilationist dimension in Indigenous education. Part VI concludes by arguing that a democratic, rather than merely administrative, conception of cohesion requires the decommodification of Australian schooling.
II. Theoretical Framework: Durkheimian Solidarity versus Neoliberal Productivism
A. The Dark Side of Group Dynamics
Before either Durkheim or neoliberal theory can be usefully applied to Australian schooling, it is necessary to distinguish healthy social integration from the coercive management of consensus. Social-psychological research on group dynamics offers two complementary accounts of this tipping point. Irving Janis’s classic study of “groupthink” describes how cohesive groups, operating under stress and insulated from outside opinion, arrive at defective decisions because the pressure toward unanimity overrides critical evaluation of alternatives; members construct shared rationalisations, silence internal doubters, and rely on informal “mindguards” who shield the group from dissonant information.5 Jerry Harvey’s related but distinct “Abilene Paradox” describes organisations in which members privately agree that a given course of action is undesirable, yet collectively pursue it because each wrongly assumes that the others are in favour; the resulting “inability to manage agreement” — rather than any inability to manage conflict — is what Harvey identifies as the deeper organisational pathology.6
Both phenomena illuminate how an institutional emphasis on harmony can function to marginalise legitimate critique. Where members of a school community — students, teachers, or parents — read the outward performance of positivity and cohesion as evidence of a settled consensus, they may suppress private misgivings about underfunding, standardised testing regimes, or the commercialisation of the curriculum, producing an institutional silence that is mistaken, both from within and without, for genuine agreement. Read through Janis and Harvey, therefore, the enforced positivity examined later in this essay is not merely an individual psychological demand; it is also an organisational mechanism that forecloses the conditions under which working-class dissent could be collectively voiced and acted upon.
B. The Democratic Socialist Critique of “Cohesion”
Durkheim’s sociology supplies the normative benchmark against which this coercive dynamic can be judged. For Durkheim, social solidarity in complex, differentiated societies is “organic”: it arises not from enforced sameness but from the interdependence generated by an increasingly specialised division of labour, mediated by law and by intermediate “occupational groups” that temper individual self-interest with a sense of obligation to the collective.7 Crucially, recent comparative sociological scholarship on Durkheim’s continuing relevance has shown that this organic solidarity is precisely what neoliberal governance corrodes: neoliberalism, on this reading, is not simply the absence of state intervention but an active project of extending market rationality — competition, entrepreneurial self-management, and the disciplinary logic of the market — into previously non-market domains of social and institutional life. That same scholarship traces this logic back to Durkheim’s own critique of Herbert Spencer’s utilitarian “biological evolutionism,” which held that unfettered competition was the natural engine of social progress; Durkheim, by contrast, argued that such a doctrine would unleash economic egoism without the normative limits that organic solidarity requires, exacerbating anomie rather than social cohesion.8
It is this Spencerian logic — the evaluation of a person’s worth chiefly through economic output and competitive efficiency — that a democratic socialist critique locates within Australian education policy’s contemporary appeals to “cohesion.” State-enforced cohesion of this kind is not the egalitarian solidarity of collective struggle; it is a defensive formation that protects existing market structures from the redistributive claims that a genuinely organic, interdependent solidarity would generate. Manufactured cohesion, in other words, operates less like Durkheim’s division of labour and more like Janis’s groupthink or Harvey’s Abilene Paradox: an institutionally engineered unanimity that forecloses, rather than enables, structural critique.
C. Section Synthesis
Taken together, the Durkheimian and social-psychological literatures suggest a single analytic principle: cohesion is emancipatory when it arises from an interdependence that respects individual moral agency and permits collective dissent, and it is coercive when it is imposed as a behavioural uniformity serving external, in this case corporate and market, interests. The remainder of this essay applies that principle to three specific sites of contemporary Australian schooling — funding architecture, psychological curricula, and corporate philanthropy — each of which mobilises the language of cohesion toward the second, coercive end.
III. The Gonski Model: The Corporate Co-optation of Educational Equity
A. The Illusion of Needs-Based Reform
The 2011 Review of Funding for Schooling, chaired by merchant banker David Gonski alongside Ken Boston, Kathryn Greiner, and Carmen Lawrence, was tasked with overhauling Australia’s fragmented approach to school funding through a national resource standard supplemented by loadings for disadvantage.9 Subsequent policy-sociology scholarship has emphasised how the review’s process and framing were shaped substantially by managerial and financial expertise, and how its recommendations were subsequently reworked by the federal structure of Australian schooling: because constitutional responsibility for schools rests with the states and territories, even a nominally “national” funding standard had to be renegotiated through a complex, politically contingent set of bilateral agreements, giving continued leverage to the non-government sector and to shifting party-political interests.10 Elisa Di Gregorio’s analysis of the “scalar practices” involved in the review’s production shows that the imagined coherence of a single national standard was, in practice, persistently reshaped by these sub-national and sectoral pressures.11 The result, as Jane Kenway has argued, was a settlement that left the deeper architecture of Australia’s dual public–private schooling market — and the political compromise, popularly summarised as the principle that “no school loses a dollar,” under which existing private-sector funding levels were effectively protected — substantially intact, even as it introduced new loadings for disadvantaged students.12
B. The Commodity Student and the Marketisation of Disadvantage
The Gonski model’s loading system, by attaching additional funding to students identified as low-socioeconomic, disabled, Indigenous, or otherwise disadvantaged, has had the paradoxical effect of transforming markers of disadvantage into administratively legible, fundable categories. Kenway’s critique of the reform identifies this as a central limitation: rather than addressing why disadvantaged students continue to be concentrated in particular, typically government, schools, the review’s funding-loading logic left the underlying segregation of the schooling market unexamined, even as it made disadvantaged students newly valuable, in narrowly fiscal terms, to the institutions that enrol them.13 This fiscal legibility of disadvantage has coincided with, and helped to sustain, the rise of a substantial commercial “edu-business” sector. Anna Hogan’s analysis of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) shows how standardised testing has become a site of new governance arrangements, new forms of privatisation, and new public–private partnerships, as testing, data-analytics, and remediation products are marketed to schools competing to improve their measurable performance.14 Hogan, Sellar, and Lingard’s study of Pearson’s Australian operations similarly demonstrates how multinational education corporations have positioned their commercial products as instruments of “soft capitalism,” using the language of corporate social responsibility and international benchmarking to normalise the commercial provision of what were previously public curricular and assessment functions.15
C. Devolution and Privatisation
The marketisation of Australian schooling has been accompanied by a parallel devolution of school governance, under which principals have been granted increased authority over staffing and budgets in exchange for increased managerial and financial accountability. Brad Gobby’s study of Western Australia’s Independent Public Schools programme shows how this autonomy reform operates as a technology of “self-government”: principals are encouraged, and to a significant extent required, to conduct themselves as entrepreneurial, managerial actors — to be, in the language used within this literature, “more like a CEO” — governing their schools through corporate managerialist discourses of performance, competition, and financial responsibility.16 Jessica Holloway and Amanda Keddie’s interview-based study of thirteen autonomous school principals extends this analysis, showing that devolved autonomy, even when exercised by individual principals in pursuit of locally just outcomes, tends simultaneously to fracture the collective, system-level solidarity — the shared “social” fabric — that a genuinely just and equal public education system requires; individual discretion is purchased, in other words, at the cost of collective cohesion.17 Amanda Keddie’s broader analysis of school autonomy reform in Australia situates these dynamics within a wider social-justice critique, arguing that market logics of choice and competition embedded in autonomy policy have exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, structural inequity across the system.18 Taken together, this literature indicates that the devolution accompanying the Gonski-era funding settlement has not simply decentralised administration; it has reconstituted the public school principal as a competitive, revenue-conscious economic actor, entrenching the market logic that the funding reforms themselves helped to establish.
IV. Positive Psychology and Enforced Positivity as Class Pacification
A. The Individualisation of Systemic Capitalism
Alongside its funding and governance architecture, Australian schooling has, since the early 2000s, absorbed a substantial positive psychology and “wellbeing” agenda, drawing on character-strengths, resilience, and “grit” curricula. A systematic review of the critical literature on positive psychology identifies among its most persistent charges the claim that the discipline constitutes a “decontextualised neoliberalist ideology” that risks shifting responsibility for wellbeing and self-fulfilment onto individuals rather than onto the institutions and structures that systematically marginalise them.19 John Chambers Christopher and Sarah Hickinbottom’s influential critique goes further, arguing that positive psychology’s central constructs are not culturally or politically neutral but rather encode a “disguised ideology of individualism” that presents a historically and culturally specific, Western and market-oriented conception of the self as a universal template for flourishing, thereby occluding the social and economic conditions that shape wellbeing outcomes.20 Applied within the school setting, this individualising logic risks recasting structurally produced disadvantage — inadequate funding, overcrowded classrooms, food insecurity, intergenerational poverty — as a matter of insufficient “grit” or “resilience” on the part of the student, a pattern that Gideon Dishon and Joan Goodman’s critique of character education in “no-excuses” charter schooling shows can shade into a punitive pedagogy that individualises institutional failure as personal deficiency.21
B. The Suppression of Working-Class Dissent
This individualisation carries a disciplinary function as well as an explanatory one. Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes’s influential critique of the “therapeutic turn” in education argues that the pervasive institutionalisation of emotional literacy, wellbeing, and “positive mental health” initiatives across schools and colleges propagates a diminished view of human potential, encouraging dependence on institutionally sanctioned disclosure and self-management rather than the pursuit of knowledge or the assertion of collective grievance.22 Ecclestone’s related work with Lydia Lewis on resilience interventions warns more specifically that the policy discourse of “risk and vulnerability” underlying school resilience programmes constructs disadvantaged students as inherently deficient subjects in need of psychological remediation, displacing attention from the policy conditions that produce their vulnerability in the first place.23 Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s account of resilience as a “regulatory ideal” within what they term the psychological turn in neoliberalism shows how the demand to be adaptable, positive, and to “bounce back” from adversity functions to reframe negative experience in upbeat terms, discouraging structural critique of the conditions producing that adversity.24 Kylie Trask-Kerr’s recent study of commercial resilience programmes operating in Australian schools extends this critique directly to the local context, arguing that such programmes, often delivered by independent providers for a fee, construct a particular kind of “resilient subject” whose psychologised adaptability serves the social purposes that positive psychology’s proponents, rather than disadvantaged communities themselves, have defined.25 Read alongside Janis’s and Harvey’s accounts of manufactured consensus, this literature suggests that the school-wide promotion of enforced positivity performs a disciplinary as much as a therapeutic function: legitimate anger at underfunded, marketised learning environments is reframed as a personal or behavioural malfunction — an absence of resilience — rather than a rational response to structural conditions, thereby stifling the collective dissent that democratic socialist solidarity requires.
V. The Philanthropic Facade and Neo-Assimilationist Educational Foundations
A. Symbolic Inclusion via Elite Pipelines
The individualising logic of positive psychology has been reinforced by the rapid growth of corporate and “venture” philanthropy within Australian public schooling. Emma Rowe, Sarah Langman, and Christopher Lubienski’s study of Teach For Australia traces how this organisation functions as a central node within a wider venture-philanthropic network, embedding for-profit and quasi-corporate pathways into public schools and redirecting public attention, and in some cases public funding, toward privately governed leadership “pipelines.”26 These pipelines are frequently promoted using the language of transformation and opportunity for disadvantaged and Indigenous communities, yet Melitta Hogarth’s analysis of Australian Indigenous education policy shows how such deficit-oriented framings continue to position Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and communities as the source of the problem to be corrected, rather than interrogating the settler-colonial structures of the education system itself.27 Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews and Bronwyn Carlson’s study of the legacy of racism within Indigenous Australian education similarly demonstrates that the historical project of assimilation — requiring Indigenous students to adopt Western, and increasingly corporate, benchmarks of achievement as the price of institutional legitimacy — persists in subtler, contemporary forms, embedded within apparently benevolent philanthropic and policy discourse.28 Elite corporate pipelines of this kind thus function less as a redistribution of power than as a symbolic, individualised form of upward mobility, in which a small number of students are inducted into corporate and Western institutional norms while the structural conditions producing disadvantage across their communities remain unaddressed.
B. The Substitution Effect and State Abdication
This philanthropic expansion has been enabled by, and has in turn helped to entrench, a persistent shortfall in public investment. Jane Kenway, Rebecca Boden, and Malcolm James’s analysis of the “accumulation economy” of Australian private schooling identifies extraction, mystification, and depletion as the operative logic through which private wealth is accumulated at the direct expense of the public system.29 Within the public sector itself, Emma Rowe and Elisa Di Gregorio’s survey and interview study of public school principals shows that the resulting funding vacuum has recast the principal’s professional identity: interviewees widely regarded competitive philanthropic “grant chasing” as a “double-edged sword,” rejecting philanthropy as a viable long-term remedy for systemic underfunding even as they were compelled to spend increasing time pursuing it, at direct cost to their educational leadership responsibilities.30 Anna Hogan, Greg Thompson, Sam Sellar, and Bob Lingard’s survey of teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of commercialisation in Australian public schools corroborates this picture at the level of everyday practice, finding widespread ambivalence among educators toward an environment in which core curricular, assessment, and data functions are increasingly outsourced to commercial and philanthropic providers.31 The cumulative effect is a substitution of unaccountable, privately governed philanthropic infrastructure for universal, publicly controlled provision — a substitution which, because philanthropic funding is by its nature discretionary, competitive, and reversible, represents a significant democratic risk: unlike a legislated entitlement, philanthropic largesse can be withdrawn without electoral consequence, leaving public schools structurally dependent on the continued goodwill of donors whose priorities they did not choose and cannot democratically hold to account.
Conclusion
This essay has argued that the convergence of the Gonski model’s marketised funding architecture, the individualising ethos of school-based positive psychology, and the expansion of corporate and philanthropic governance constitutes a coercive triad that displaces democratic solidarity with an administratively engineered uniformity. The Gonski-era funding settlement, notwithstanding its equity rhetoric, quantified disadvantage in terms legible to a still substantially two-tiered schooling market, while its accompanying devolution reconstituted public school principals as competitive, entrepreneurial actors.32 Positive psychology and resilience curricula, meanwhile, have supplied the emotional and behavioural compliance required to sustain this market environment, recasting structurally produced disadvantage as a matter of individual psychological deficit and thereby discouraging the collective dissent that Janis’s and Harvey’s accounts of manufactured consensus suggest institutions readily suppress.33 Corporate and venture philanthropy has completed this triad, substituting discretionary, unaccountable private largesse — including assimilationist “pipeline” programmes directed at Indigenous and disadvantaged communities — for the universal public entitlement that a genuinely democratic education system requires.34
This pattern is consistent with a longer critical tradition in the sociology of education, from Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s account of schooling’s role in reproducing the social relations of capitalist production, to Michael Apple’s analysis of how conservative and neoliberal political forces successively capture what counts as “official knowledge” in schools, to Henry Giroux’s argument that corporate culture, when it colonises educational institutions, reduces citizenship to self-interest and forecloses the school’s and the university’s role as a democratic public sphere.35 As Apple and his co-authors have recently argued, reclaiming education for democracy requires educators and communities to resist precisely the kind of psychologised, individualised, and marketised governance examined in this essay, and to reassert education’s public, collective purpose.36
If, as Durkheim argued, genuine solidarity arises from an organic interdependence mediated by law and collective obligation rather than from enforced sameness, then the path back from coercive cohesion to democratic solidarity in Australian schooling cannot lie in further refinements of loading formulae, resilience curricula, or philanthropic partnership models. It requires, instead, the decommodification of public education as a universal, unconditionally funded human right — one whose legitimacy rests not on standardised metrics of measurable improvement, but on the restoration of students’, teachers’, and communities’ freedom to challenge, collectively and without penalty, the market structures that currently govern their schools.
Notes
1. Phil Johnson, Michael Brookes, Geoffrey Wood, and Chris Brewster, “Legal Origin and Social Solidarity: The Continued Relevance of Durkheim to Comparative Institutional Analysis,” Sociology 51, no. 3 (2017): 646–665. ↑
2. David Gonski, Ken Boston, Kathryn Greiner, and Carmen Lawrence, Review of Funding for Schooling: Final Report (Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2011). ↑
3. Llewellyn E. van Zyl, Jarrod Gaffaney, Leoni van der Vaart, Bryan J. Dik, and Stewart I. Donaldson, “The Critiques and Criticisms of Positive Psychology: A Systematic Review,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 19, no. 2 (2024): 206–235. ↑
4. Emma Rowe, Sarah Langman, and Christopher Lubienski, “Privatising Public Schools via Product Pipelines: Teach For Australia, Policy Networks and Profit,” Journal of Education Policy 39, no. 3 (2024): 384–409. ↑
5. Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). ↑
6. Jerry B. Harvey, “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement,” Organizational Dynamics 3, no. 1 (1974): 63–80. ↑
7. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984), first published 1893. ↑
8. Johnson, Brookes, Wood, and Brewster, “Legal Origin and Social Solidarity.” ↑
9. Gonski, Boston, Greiner, and Lawrence, Review of Funding for Schooling. ↑
10. Jack Keating and Malcolm Klatt, “Australian Concurrent Federalism and Its Implications for the Gonski Review,” Journal of Education Policy 28, no. 4 (2013): 411–426. ↑
11. Elisa Di Gregorio, “Imagining ‘National’ Funding in the Australian Federation: The Gonski Review and the Schooling Resource Standard,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 31 (2023). ↑
12. Jane Kenway, “Challenging Inequality in Australian Schools: Gonski and Beyond,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 34, no. 2 (2013): 286–308. ↑
13. Kenway, “Challenging Inequality in Australian Schools.” ↑
14. Anna Hogan, “NAPLAN and the Role of Edu-business: New Governance, New Privatisations and New Partnerships in Australian Education Policy,” The Australian Educational Researcher 43, no. 1 (2016): 93–110. ↑
15. Anna Hogan, Sam Sellar, and Bob Lingard, “Commercialising Comparison: Pearson Puts the TLC in Soft Capitalism,” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 3 (2016): 243–258. ↑
16. Brad Gobby, “Principal Self-Government and Subjectification: The Exercise of Principal Autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools Programme,” Critical Studies in Education 54, no. 3 (2013): 273–285. ↑
17. Jessica Holloway and Amanda Keddie, “Competing Locals in an Autonomous Schooling System: The Fracturing of the ‘Social’ in Social Justice,” Educational Management Administration & Leadership 48, no. 5 (2020): 786–801. ↑
18. Amanda Keddie, “School Autonomy Reform and Public Education in Australia: Implications for Social Justice,” The Australian Educational Researcher 44, no. 4–5 (2017): 373–390. ↑
19. van Zyl, Gaffaney, van der Vaart, Dik, and Donaldson, “The Critiques and Criticisms of Positive Psychology.” ↑
20. John Chambers Christopher and Sarah Hickinbottom, “Positive Psychology, Ethnocentrism, and the Disguised Ideology of Individualism,” Theory & Psychology 18, no. 5 (2008): 563–589. ↑
21. Gideon Dishon and Joan F. Goodman, “No-Excuses for Character: A Critique of Character Education in No-Excuses Charter Schools,” Theory and Research in Education 15, no. 2 (2017): 182–201. ↑
22. Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). ↑
23. Kathryn Ecclestone and Lydia Lewis, “Interventions for Resilience in Educational Settings: Challenging Policy Discourses of Risk and Vulnerability,” Journal of Education Policy 29, no. 2 (2014): 195–216. ↑
24. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism,” Sociological Research Online 23, no. 2 (2018): 477–495. ↑
25. Kylie Trask-Kerr, “What Kind of Society Does the Resilient Subject Need? Exploring the Role of Resilience Interventions in Education,” Pedagogy, Culture & Society, published online 26 June 2025. ↑
26. Rowe, Langman, and Lubienski, “Privatising Public Schools via Product Pipelines.” ↑
27. Melitta Hogarth, “Speaking Back to the Deficit Discourses: A Theoretical and Methodological Approach,” The Australian Educational Researcher 44, no. 1 (2017): 21–34. ↑
28. Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews and Bronwyn Carlson, “The Legacy of Racism and Indigenous Australian Identity within Education,” Race Ethnicity and Education 19, no. 4 (2016): 784–807. ↑
29. Jane Kenway, Rebecca Boden, and Malcolm James, “The Accumulation Economy of Private Schools: Extraction, Mystification and Depletion,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 45, no. 3 (2024): 346–362. ↑
30. Emma Rowe and Elisa Di Gregorio, “Grant Chaser and Revenue Raiser: Public School Principals and the Limitations of Philanthropic Funding,” The Australian Educational Researcher 52 (2025): 997–1016. ↑
31. Anna Hogan, Greg Thompson, Sam Sellar, and Bob Lingard, “Teachers’ and School Leaders’ Perceptions of Commercialisation in Australian Public Schools,” The Australian Educational Researcher 45, no. 2 (2018): 141–160. ↑
32. Gonski, Boston, Greiner, and Lawrence, Review of Funding for Schooling; Kenway, “Challenging Inequality in Australian Schools”; Gobby, “Principal Self-Government and Subjectification.” ↑
33. Janis, Victims of Groupthink; Harvey, “The Abilene Paradox”; Ecclestone and Hayes, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. ↑
34. Rowe, Langman, and Lubienski, “Privatising Public Schools via Product Pipelines”; Kenway, Boden, and James, “The Accumulation Economy of Private Schools.” ↑
35. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (New York: Routledge, 1993); Henry A. Giroux, “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” Harvard Educational Review 72, no. 4 (2002): 425–463. ↑
36. Michael W. Apple, Gert Biesta, David Bright, Henry A. Giroux, Amanda Heffernan, Peter McLaren, Stewart Riddle, and Anna Yeatman, “Reflections on Contemporary Challenges and Possibilities for Democracy and Education,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 54, no. 3 (2022): 245–262. ↑
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Hogan, Anna. “NAPLAN and the Role of Edu-business: New Governance, New Privatisations and New Partnerships in Australian Education Policy.” The Australian Educational Researcher 43, no. 1 (2016): 93–110.
Hogan, Anna, Sam Sellar, and Bob Lingard. “Commercialising Comparison: Pearson Puts the TLC in Soft Capitalism.” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 3 (2016): 243–258.
Hogan, Anna, Greg Thompson, Sam Sellar, and Bob Lingard. “Teachers’ and School Leaders’ Perceptions of Commercialisation in Australian Public Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 45, no. 2 (2018): 141–160.
Hogarth, Melitta. “Speaking Back to the Deficit Discourses: A Theoretical and Methodological Approach.” The Australian Educational Researcher 44, no. 1 (2017): 21–34.
Holloway, Jessica, and Amanda Keddie. “Competing Locals in an Autonomous Schooling System: The Fracturing of the ‘Social’ in Social Justice.” Educational Management Administration & Leadership 48, no. 5 (2020): 786–801.
Janis, Irving L. Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Johnson, Phil, Michael Brookes, Geoffrey Wood, and Chris Brewster. “Legal Origin and Social Solidarity: The Continued Relevance of Durkheim to Comparative Institutional Analysis.” Sociology 51, no. 3 (2017): 646–665.
Keating, Jack, and Malcolm Klatt. “Australian Concurrent Federalism and Its Implications for the Gonski Review.” Journal of Education Policy 28, no. 4 (2013): 411–426.
Keddie, Amanda. “School Autonomy Reform and Public Education in Australia: Implications for Social Justice.” The Australian Educational Researcher 44, no. 4–5 (2017): 373–390.
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