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To what extent it is best to see the market as a class strategy is a question which goes to the heart of research debates over school quasi-markets in New Zealand and elsewhere. Whereas most research suggests that school quasi-markets increase social and educational inequality, Stephen Gorard and colleagues have argued that school quasi-markets are relatively benign. From their perspective, class strategy research has generated a poorly supported and unhelpful ‘crisis account’. This article summarises the range of scholarship and research evidence which supports the class strategy account and considers some problems in the perspective which has been taken by Gorard and colleagues. It is argued that the claims of Gorard and colleagues have not unravelled the arguments of class strategy proponents but in important respects are rendered problematic by those arguments.

Inaugural lectures are all about celebrating scholarship but their content, of course, is not necessarily celebratory. Indeed if there is anything to be celebrated about my work to date, it is probably a stubborn refusal to be satisfied with education policy, practice and research while we have such an unequal society and important political pressures towards greater inequality. Instead, as a policy sociologist in education, I have long been drawn to uncomfortable questions about whose interests are really being served in and through education (Thrupp, 1999a). I have been interested in how developments in education policy and practice can lead to greater social inequalities and how seemingly worthwhile policies and practices can be undone by other developments (Thrupp, 1999b). In recent years I have also increasingly turned

This article argues that schools in decline in educational markets may not be as ineffective as neo-liberals assume. Rather, recent New Zealand research suggests that the fortunes of schools in the marketplace largely reflect the characteristics of their student intakes. Schools in decline typically have poor intakes. Such schools may be less attractive to parents than middle class schools. Schools with poor intakes also have to cope with often overwhelming learning and pastoral needs which constrain their ability to offer demanding academic programmes. Allowing such schools to fail and close therefore appears to be a case of punishing the victim. State intervention is required.

Researchers have an obligation to reflect on the politics of their research and of whose interests it serves in order to take steps to minimise it being used in damaging ways. This article uses the problem of the "politics of blame"— the way governments attempt to construct student or institutional "underperformance" or "failure" as the clear responsibility of schools and teachers—to illustrate the importance of researchers stepping back from specific research agendas to consider the overall positioning of their research. The case of the politics of blame illustrates the importance of researchers taking an independent stance rather than being steered too much by what is fashionable to research or what has political support from government. The article makes some suggestions about how researchers can take steps to pre-empt their research being used in damaging ways.