The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform

Kenneth J. Saltman, Alexander J. Means, Kenneth J. Saltman, Alexander J. Means

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119082347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform examines educational reform from a global perspective. Comprised of approximately 25 original and specially commissioned essays, which together interrogate educational reform from a critical global and transnational perspective, this volume explores a range of topics and themes that fully investigate global convergences in educational reform policies, ideologies, and practices.

The Handbook probes the history, ideology, organization, and institutional foundations of global educational reform movements; actors, institutions, and agendas; and local, national, and global education reform trends. It further examines the "new managerialism" in global educational reform, including the standardization of national systems of educational governance, curriculum, teaching, and learning through the rise of new systems of privatization, accountability, audit, big-data, learning analytics, biometrics, and new technology-driven adaptive learning models. Finally, it takes on the subjective and intersubjective experiential dimensions of the new educational reforms and alternative paths for educational reform tied to the ethical imperative to reimagine education for human flourishing, justice, and equality.

• An authoritative, definitive volume and the first global take on a subject that is grabbing headlines as well as preoccupying policy makers, scholars, and teachers around the world
• Edited by distinguished leaders in the field
• Features contributions from an illustrious list of experts and scholars

The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of education throughout the world as well as the policy makers who can institute change.

1
Capitalism and Global Education Reform

Steven J. Klees

Introduction

Capitalism and education have been intertwined for a long time. Mass schooling developed within a capitalist world system. While the dominant discourse saw mass schooling mainly as a force for progress and development, revisionist historians pointed to how education served capitalist ends by maintaining stratification and inequality (Katz, 2001; Spring, 1973). The 1970s saw a slew of studies that elaborated and documented how education was too often reproductive of a very unequal social order (Bowles & Gintis, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Carnoy, 1974). With the onset of neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s and subsequent years, many studies have examined the problematic nature of associated educational reforms (Apple, 2006; Bale & Knopp, 2012; Hill & Kumar, 2009).

In the modern post‐World War II era with increasing forces of globalization, educational reforms have traveled around the world. There is a large research literature on policy borrowing in education (Steiner‐Khamsi & Waldow, 2012). In the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of reforms was characterized by considerable diversity and idiosyncratic and local differences. Starting in the 1980s, however, global education reform has become much more uniform. The Global Education Reform Movement, or GERM, as Pasi Sahlberg has called it, has given us a one‐size‐fits‐all set of education policies for the world – narrow versions of accountability, excessive testing, an ideology of competition and choice, and increased reliance on business and the private sector (Sahlberg, 2015; Verger, Novelli, & Altinyelken, 2012).

This chapter reflects on some aspects of this history, focusing mainly on the neoliberal era. It begins by looking at an earlier period which established two underlying refrains of the neoliberal era: schools are failures and it is the fault of the teachers. This is followed by looking at the dominant discourses used to support these and other capitalist themes. Next, it examines two of the chief purveyors of these discourses and reforms: US foundations and the World Bank. Then, one of the main neoliberal reforms posed is considered: the privatization of education and other social services. This leads to the fundamental issue of what is wrong with capitalism. To conclude, we look briefly at what might be done, both about capitalism and about education.

Schools Are Failures and Teachers Are to Blame

Immediately following World War II, in the US and elsewhere, there was often a sense of optimism about modernization and development in general and about the role of schools in particular. War‐torn countries could recover and newly independent nations could progress without having to repeat the long, slow transformation of the industrialized world. Education would be a great contributor to rapid progress everywhere.

As early as the 1960s, there was already disillusionment with the lack of rapid progress in both developed and developing nations.¹ In education, in the US this was reinforced by the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966), which collected and analyzed nationwide data, concluding that student achievement was primarily determined by family background, not school resources. In the 1970s, this was seconded by another major study by Jencks et al. (1975), which reported the lack of impact of education on income and employment as well as on student achievement. Despite significant criticisms of both studies and their conclusions, they have been used to this day to support a more tempered and pessimistic view of the potential of schooling to effect change.

This tempered view of the impact of schooling has co‐existed with a call for sweeping reform of education as a way to improve both the achievement and life chances of children. This was very much evident in the 1983 US federal government‐sponsored report, A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The report ushered in the attack on teachers and schools that has characterized the neoliberal era, and not just in the US. A Nation at Risk argued that the US was lagging behind other economies in the early 1980s, most notably Japan, and that the culprit was our educational system. The opening lines of the report said:

Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world … If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. (1983, p. 9)

As one wag said at the time, it was a repeat of Sputnik’s instigation of educational reform in the 1950s to compete with the Soviet Union – but, instead, it was as if Japan had launched a Toyota into orbit and the US schools once again were blamed for falling short. Of course, if the US educational system was in any way to blame for poor economic performance, perhaps the focus should have been on the nation’s business schools where short‐run profits were emphasized over long‐run performance.

This mixture of critique of public schools and attack on teachers has been characteristic of the neoliberal era, not just in the US, but worldwide. I do not mean to single out the Coleman Report and A Nation at Risk as the cause of this critique and attack, although they were influential. More accurately, I see them as harbingers of changing times. Globally, they were reflections of a number of underlying dominant discourses.

Dominant Discourses

Even in today’s neoliberal era, it is recognized that capitalism is faced with significant problems, what some have called the “triple challenge”: job creation, poverty elimination, and inequality reduction (Motala & Vally, 2014).² The dominant response to these problems has given us one principal answer to all three problems: the lack of individual skills. This response has been embedded in a number of intersecting and overlapping global discourses.

The mismatch discourse goes back at least to the 1950s, and probably long before that. In it, education has been blamed for not supplying the skills business needs, that is, education is blamed for the mismatch between what education produces and what business wants. Unemployment, in general, is put at education’s door, more broadly arguing that education is not teaching what the economy needs. It is, unfortunately, true that many children and youth around the world leave school without the basic skills necessary for life and work. But the mismatch discourse is usually less about basic skills and more about vocational skills. The argument, while superficially plausible, is not true for at least two reasons. First, vocational skills, which are often context‐specific, are generally best taught on the job. Second and, fundamentally, unemployment is not a worker supply problem but a structural problem of capitalism. There are three or more billion un‐ or under‐employed people on this planet, not because they don’t have the right skills but because full employment is neither a feature nor a goal of capitalism.

Underlying this mismatch/skills discourse is the human capital discourse (Klees, 2016a). In the 1950s and earlier, the neoclassical economics framework that underpins capitalist ideology and practice could not explain labor. While the overall neoclassical framework was embodied in mathematical models of a fictitious story of supply and demand by small producers and consumers, it was not clear how to apply that to issues of labor, work, and employment. Instead, in that era, labor economics was more sociological and based on the real world, trying to understand institutions like unions and large companies, and phenomena like strikes, collective bargaining, and public policy. The advent of human capital theory in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Toward a Transformational Agenda for Global Education Reform
• 1 Capitalism and Global Education Reform
• 2 The Business Sector in Global Education Reform: The Case of the Global Business Coalition for Education
• 3 Venture Philanthropy and Education Policy‐Making: Charity, Profit, and the So‐Called “Democratic State”
• 4 Nodes, Pipelines, and Policy Mobility: The Assembling of an Education Shadow State in India
• 5 Reframing Teachers’ Work for Global Competitiveness*: New Global Hierarchies in the Governing of Education
• 6 School Principals in Neoliberal Times: A Case of Luxury Leadership?
• 7 The Expansion of Private Schooling in Latin America: Multiple Manifestations and Trajectories of a Global Education Reform Movement
• 8 Global Education Policies and Taken‐For‐Granted Rationalities: Do the Poor Respond to Policy Incentives in the Same Way?1
• 9 The Politics of Educational Change in the Middle East and North Africa: Nation‐Building, Postcolonial Reconstruction, Destabilized States, Societal Disintegration, and the Dispossessed
• 10 Profiting from the Poor: The Emergence of Multinational Edu‐Businesses in Hyderabad, India1
• 11 The Bait‐and‐Switch and Echo Chamber of School Privatization in South Africa
• 12 The Violence of Compassion: Education Reform, Race, and Neoliberalism’s Elite Rationale
• 13 Uncommon Knowledge: International Schools as Elite Educational Enclosures
• 14 Startup Schools, Fast Policies, and Full‐Stack Education Companies: Digitizing Education Reform in Silicon Valley
• 15 Who Drives the Drivers?: Technology as the Ideology of Global Educational Reform
• 16 Resurgent Behaviorism and the Rise of Neoliberal Schooling
• 17 Educating Mathematizable, Self‐Serving, God‐Fearing, Self‐Made Entrepreneurs
• 18 Putting Homo Economicus to the Test: How Neoliberalism Measures the Value of Educational Life
• 19 EcoJust STEM Education Mobilized Through Counter‐Hegemonic Globalization
• 20 When the Idea of a Second Grade Education for the Marginalized Becomes the Dominant Discourse: Context, Policy, and Practice of Neoliberal Capitalism
• 21 Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurship Education: An Ethics for Capital or the Other?
• 22 The Socially Just School: Transforming Young Lives
• 23 Beyond Neoliberalism: Educating for a Just Sustainable Future
• 24 When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto
• Index
• End User License Agreement