Abstract:
This paper explores the contested notions of publicness and privatisation in schooling through the lens of charter schools in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It challenges tired binaries with which public and private schools are often romanticised, highlighting how both tend to erase indigenous notions of sovereignty, place and belonging. Drawing on critical perspectives of biculturalism and individualism in educational policy and research, the paper unpacks how charter schooling specifically has appealed to minoritised groups such as iwi and hapū (tribes), not merely due to neoliberal ideologies, but as a perceived avenue for their educational sovereignty beyond public and private systems. By critiquing the limitations of biculturalism inherent in bad-faith readings of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, it calls for a reclamation of and orientation with ancestral knowledge and indigenous literacies to cultivate a public that is not only worth salvaging, but one that explicitly resist the genocide and dispossession implicit in popular notions of privatisation, publicness and public institutions.