Privatising Education: the

Corrosion of a Societal Good?

CR-GES Panel

‗Festival of Education‘

12th June, 2012

Global Project

• Privatisation in Education Initiative

(PERI) funded by the Open Society

Foundation

• Explore different forms of privatisation

in/of education around the world

• Raise questions and generate a public

debate - http://www.periglobal.org

Setting the Context • Since the 1980s, national governments, and

international organisations like the OECD, the World

Bank, WTO, think-tanks, and small group of

education policy entrepreneurs, have been promoting

privatisation in education. Met with resistance.

• From 2000, Public Private Partnerships emerged as

the most prominent official policy discourse replacing

the term ‗privatisation‘. Over the past decade we

have seen an explosion of

• A series of different phenomena is now placed under

PPPs raising the question of what it means to talk

about the ‗public‘ and the ‗private‘.

Source: Verger (forthcoming - 2011)

Key group of transnational policy actors

What Do We Mean by Privatisation?

• Ball (2007) identifies two distinct processes at

work; privatisation in, and privatisation of

education.

• By in, we mean the injection into the learning,

school cultures, and management of

education institutions and sector of private

sector values (competition, efficiency,

outputs).

• Hidden privatisation (economic sovereignty)

Diverse Activity

• Low fee private schools

• Charter schools

• Academies

• Exclusive private schools

• Shadow schooling

• Private management of school administration

• Venture philanthropists (Gates, Hewlitt)

• Multi-stakeholder partnerships

(Patrinos, 2009)

Ball, (2007: 43)

From Ball, 2009

The Emergence of a Consultocracy

1. 6 big consulting firms control 25% of world

management consulting market (Saint Martin,

1998); by 2003, 4 firms (KPMG, Deloittes,

PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst and Young)

accounted for 45% of the global market - they have

large education portfolios. Others (MacKinsey and

Co, Creative Associates) have large education

investments

2. Proliferation of small and large ‗consultancy‘ firms

operating around the world (CfBT, Rand, Cognition

Education

Education as a Positional Good

• Yet education is also a positional good, and

as labour markets and social mobility have

either stalled, or competition has become

more intense, the pressure on education

credentials has resulted in pressure for the

marks of distinction.

http://www.periglobal.org/top-

carousel/video/video-profit-

schools-south-africa

Societal Good

• Cultivated capacities for critical thinking and reflection are

crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake. The

ability to think well about a wide range of cultures, groups and

nations in the context of the grasp of the global economy and of

the history of many national and group interactions is crucial in

order to enable democracies to deal responsibly with the

problems we face as members of an interdependent world. And

the ability to imagine the experience of another—needs to be

greatly enhanced and refined if we are to have any hope of

sustaining decent institutions across the many divisions that any

modern society contains

• (in Not for Profit by Martha Nussbaum, 2010: 10)

http://www.periglobal.org/role-

state/video/video-we-future

3 Axes of Social Justice (Fraser, 2010)

Redistribution – (economic) – the fair allocation of

divisible goods that are typically economic in nature

Recognition – (cultural) the recognition of cultural

differences such as gender, ethnicity, disability, class,

access to work, right to property and other forms of

ownership

Representation – (political) the organisation of

political space, and who can, where, and how,

advance claims

http://www.periglobal.org/top-

carousel/video/video-hong-

kongs-celebrity-tutors-turn-

millionaires

Corrosion of Character

• As Sennett remarks in The Corrosion of Character:

―The system [contemporary modern capitalism]

radiates indifference. In does so in terms of the

outcomes of human striving as in winner-take-all

markets, where there is little connection between risk

and reward. It radiates indifference in the

organization As to the absence of trust, where there

is no reason to be needed. And it does so through

the re-engineering of institutions in which people are

treated as disposable‖ (Sennett, 1998: 149).