Power or partnership?: an analysis of the role and political positioning of the New Zealand School Trustees Association in the implementation of the Tomorrow's Schools Reforms 1989-1994

Abstract

The restructuring of educational administration recommended by the Taskforce to Review Education Administration (Picot Report) and adopted by the fourth Labour Government in August 1988 is a dynamic and contested process, the outcomes of which are yet to be determined. One site of contestation over the reforms is the New Zealand School Trustees Association. The Association was established as an ally of government in a time of radical change and has struggled to achieve recognition as the collective voice of the 2,700 boards of trustees now responsible for the local management of schools. In a decentralised and fragmented education system threatened by the efforts of successive governments to contain public spending, and a radical right agenda to introduce market forces into the education arena, such an organisation has the potential to play a significant role in defence of state funded and provided education. However the circumstances under which the School Trustees Association was formed, positions adopted by its leadership, and its dependence on state funding, have placed the Association in an ambivalent position with respect to the reform programme itself, and the various interests of the government, parents and teachers. This study of the New Zealand School Trustees Association explores the development and positioning of the organisation as a new and significant education sector lobby group. Tensions between different roles played by the Association, and in its relationship to other groups, are related to contradictions in the Tomorrow's Schools policy and ongoing debate over the nature and organisation of state funded education. The study is theoretically located within a conflict perspective on educational policy making. The speed, extent and contested nature of educational change in recent times has exposed the theoretical inadequacies of the dominant paradigm of policy scholarship according to which the state is viewed as playing the role of 'honest broker', or, as Dale has put it "an effectively neutral means of delivery of intended outcomes decided elsewhere". (1989, p. 23) "A conflict perspective allows that while public policy in a capitalist state is structurally weighted towards capitalist solutions ... the power of dominant interests is never secure, it always has to be won". (Education group, CCSS, 1981, pp. 142-3, & p. 32)