Parental Narratives of Good Education: Education Quality As a Floating and Empty Signifier and Governmental Effects in Chile

My paper examines parents' sense-making of education quality in their educational narratives. The Chilean education system has been described as a paradigmatic case of market-driven policies (school choice, competition and privatisation), which have produced deep socioeconomic school segregation (Bellei et al., 2019). To add nuances to common depictions of education quality as academic outcomes, my study approaches quality as a floating signifier. This means a term whose adscription of meaning is achieved through relations with other elements. This process is contested by multiple discourses (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002; Laclau & Mouffe, 2014). The floating character has as a condition the signifier's emptiness (Laclau, 2014), making education quality an absent fullness that mobilises and motivates the articulation of diverse practices and meanings (Clarke, 2014; Fernández-González & Monarca, 2018; Howson, 2017).

The study draws on 47 narrative interviews with parents in Santiago, Chile. Approaching narrative as a space of interactions between discourse and experience (Tew, 2002), the analysis focused on the commonalities and tensions in the meaning's articulation of education quality. The results account for the political and multifaceted character of education quality at the everyday life level. Parents have rich notions of education quality, which go beyond academic performance. When discussing quality, parents refer to well-being, children's individuality and school's social composition. The paper argues that despite the multiplicity of meaning, education quality as an empty and floating signifier has become a powerful governmental tool that promotes families' self-regulation through logics of comparability and responsibilisation.