The Developing World and State Education

Neoliberal Depredation and Egalitarian Alternatives

Dave Hill,Ellen Rosskam

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135906375
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildung Allgemein

Neoliberalism has had a major impact on schooling and education in the Developing World, with social repercussions that have affected the salaries of teachers, the number and type of potential students, the availability of education, the cost of education, and more. This edited collection argues that the privatization of public services and the capitalization and commodification of education have resulted in the establishment of competitive markets that are marked by selection, exclusion and inequality.

The contributors - academics and organization/social movement activists - examine aspects of neoliberal arguments focusing on low- and middle-income countries (including Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, China, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Burkina Faso, Mozambique and South Africa), and suggest where they fall short. Their arguments center around the assumption that education is not a commodity to be bought and sold, as education and the capitalist market hold opposing goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence.

1
Introduction

Ellen Rosskam

CONTEXTUALIZING EDUCATION LIBERALIZATION THROUGH NEOLIBERAL REFORMS, STATE GOVERNANCE, AND STABILITY OF NATION-STATES

In low- and middle-income countries, relegating education from the state—as an essential public service—to the market, is often used as an often, but not always unspoken excuse for governments to reduce spending on public services. Governments can thus allocate their budgets differently than would have been considered essential and socially acceptable in the past, particularly prior to the mid and late 1970s.

Curriculum control through the state is, in most cases, equal and equivalent nationwide, in any country. Curriculum control through private, market driven educational institutions is often left up to the individual institution, often driven to some extent by the private funders of a particular private institution. Even in countries where the state requires all educational institutions—including private institutions—to follow state approved curricula, private institutions nonetheless often have much more scope and flexibility to alter or include non–state dictated curricula. In addition, where private institutions are state required to be nonprofit, all too often the state ‘looks the other way’ when investors make personal financial profit nonetheless.

Where private educational institutions have proliferated in low- and middle-income countries, as described in all of the chapters in this book, corresponding growth of government inspectors of educational institutions has not increased in the proportion needed to monitor schools properly. On the contrary, with the proliferation of private education institutions, in low-and middle-income countries in particular, most governments have actually decreased their budget allocations to state inspectorates, shifting public budget allocations elsewhere. Where financial commitment and the needed increase in human resources for inspectorates by the state are insufficient, the space and scope for maneuvering around state required curriculum can only grow in private institutions. The bottom line becomes clear—who really knows whether a given private institution is really following the state approved curriculum to its full extent? If followed to its full extent as in public/state schools, there would be little room left in the classroom for alteration, although patterns and methods of teaching certainly leave varying degrees of room for differentiation from school to school. Particularly in middle-income countries, there tends to be a continuum of evolution in pedagogical styles, as more teachers gain exposure to different learning and teaching techniques and concepts, and where more international exchanges take place. Thus what has often been a tradition of passive rote learning has the chance to shift to more interactive and student centered learning, as opposed to strictly teacher centered learning. Middle-income countries may have more opportunities to benefit from such openings due to a generally higher level of interaction with and exchange programs with different countries, as well as more possibilities, often financial, for teachers to attend conferences where new ideas can be presented and shared, or to obtain access to continued training or skills development.¹ This trend generally has more opportunity to take root in middle-income countries, in particular. Low-income countries² tend to have fewer opportunities for teacher exchange programs, and exposure to newer teaching techniques, dedicated to the development of critical, creative, and analytical thinking skills, as well as to active student interaction and engagement in the learning process.

Neoliberal reforms in education do not come alone. They are typically accompanied by similar reforms, particularly through privatization, of a range of essential public services, which have traditionally been viewed and socially deemed as a core role of government, and with governments playing their much needed role in governing essential public services. In additional to education, other core public services which have been reformed, privatized, marketized, commercialized to a degree or another in countries around the world include: health services, pensions, social services for the elderly and for children, labor market training services, public employment services, credit rating services, and criminal care services—prisons in particular.

While global trade union federations such as Public Services International (PSI) and Education International (EI) have produced a significant body of knowledge in the area of education privatization (PSI covers all areas of public services while EI concentrates exclusively on education), much more research is still needed, particularly to describe the changes and impacts of these reforms in low income and the least developed countries. Research is needed in developing and transitional economies to further describe the impacts of these neoliberal reforms on workers in core public services, on workers’ ability to deliver quality services, and on the impacts of changes on the recipients of services. An important global state of the art review of what is known to date around the world (Rosskam [ed.] 2006) has revealed a dismal picture. The resulting trends globally indicate that a two tiered, class based system of services is appearing and which has already taken firm root in many developing and transitional economies, preceded by similar reforms in many industrialized countries. The trends indicate that those who can pay for services obtain what were, pre-1980s, essential government services—now private services. Those who cannot pay for private services either do not obtain any service at all (which is critical in all areas but which can be devastating and life altering in the areas of health and educational services), lack access to services, or get less quality services than those who can pay for private services. Concurrently, for workers in these areas of services, while the private sector in some cases may offer higher wages to attract the best workers, often conditions of work are worse than in the public sector (see, for example, Chapter 2 on Latin America, Chapter 8 on Pakistan, and Chapter 10 on Burkina Faso). Some examples of worse employment conditions in the private educational sector in low and middle-income countries include a lack of employment security, lack of severance pay requirement in the case of job loss, lack of pension contribution requirement by employers, lack of the employer requirement to provide notice in the case of laying off workers, longer working hours, weekend work, more teaching hours required per week or per month than in the public sector, lack of access to skills development and further training, and worse conditions of work in terms of occupational health and safety for workers (Schnall, Dobson, Rosskam [eds.] [forthcoming 2008]).

With a lack of government inspectors to monitor effectively the proliferation of private schools in addition to the existing number of public schools, many private educational institutions take advantage of this gap in government regulation, monitoring, and enforcement, and abandon educational workers to a life of increased insecurity. Typically, public sector schools provided and still provide employment security, a limit on working and teaching hours, pension accrual, and the requirement for the state to give notice, legally sound reason, and severance pay in the event that an educational worker was to be laid off (Hill, in Rosskam [ed.] 2006, pp. 3–54; Hartmann, Haslinger, and Scherrer, in Rosskam [ed.] 2006, pp. 55–119).

Since the 1980s, in low- and middle-income countries pressure driven by monetary loan based requirements to reduce government services and government size overall has left many countries with little choice but to reduce government spending on what were traditionally considered essential state provided services, and to shift such services to the market, with little or no control. The downsizing of core government services and corresponding state spending on such services has been accompanied by a worrying lack of governance in countries where the market has taken precedence over government provided services. Education is an area needing governance by an overarching state body. State governance is the only means of ensuring regulation and enforcement, more equitable provision of schools across country populations, and more equitable conditions and terms of work for education providers, preventing the creaming off of the best teachers and administrators to the private sector, leaving those who cannot pay for private educational services either without access or with access to poorer quality education than students attending private institutions.

It does not take much time before such inequalities reveal the inevitable social repercussions of reform catalyzed transitions. By marketizing educational services, population shifts occur in access to labor market opportunities and quality of jobs for the poor or lower-income groups who were not able to pay for private educational services prior to young people entering the labor market. This translates into increased class differentials and increased income inequality in countries that often cannot absorb the shocks that accompany the rapid growth in social disparities (see Chapter 7 on Turkey, for example). Even rich countries have difficulties in absorbing the shocks that accompany the growth in social disparities, although they are able to absorb such shocks better than low- and middle-income countries, which have little margin to address and redress even further increases in social inequality than already exist. Such shocks can manifest themselves as festering social wounds, which may take time, even decades, to emerge and require redressing to prevent social instability, particularly in low-income countries. Notwithstanding, the growth of social disparity and of income inequality must be seen as a risk factor for social instability. This is the case even for middle-income countries.

Upward mobility tends to be a myth of the promise of neoliberal economic reforms for most people, particularly those in developing countries and for the poorest segments of society in middle-income countries. Even in those developing countries where more children have gained access to primary and/or secondary education, this has not been equated with real upward mobility amongst the poor. In direct contrast, however, amongst families that can pay for private schooling and private university education in low- and middle-income countries, the social status value of private education, the financially backed and linked networks existing in and through such institutions, and the social value often equated with the quality of privately funded institutions compared with public educational services is very often a guarantee to upward mobility for young, newly educated people. Their access to quality jobs or skills based jobs in the labor market and the financially linked networks that enable parachuting graduates into good, well-paid jobs ensure a bright future for many young people in developing and transitional countries. This group tends to constitute what are viewed as the “winners” in society.

Those whose families cannot pay for such lifelong opportunities often witness their children remaining at the same socioeconomic status level as the parents or at the same level as that achieved before receiving any education at all. This group tends to constitute what are viewed as the “losers” in society. This is a major element in the cycle of poverty, and access to primary or secondary education is not the only answer to end the cycle. Equality and equity in the type and quality of education received across a population is needed to level the playing field, to help lift the poor out of poverty by providing them with equal access to opportunities on the labor market and equal access to real skills development. Achieving this requires political commitment and/or social mobilization to insist on change (see Chapter 11 on South Africa, for example).

In our post-9/11 world, there is increasing concern about creating and ensuring social stability, especially for countries considered as geopolitically “critical” to the more powerful countries. In those countries considered to be geopolitically “critical” (by the United States and member states of the European Union in particular), concerted attempts to ensure stability, to promote the rapid growth of “transitional democracy” in newly democratic or newly democratizing countries, to further democracy in already democratic states, and to ensure growth in free trade and market driven services globally are the main and often sole foci of foreign policy by the leading industrialized countries. Some of the outcomes of what is often a tunnel vision in foreign policy making include increased external pressures on sovereign states, interference in national policy making, increased pressure for market driven reforms of public services, pressure on governments to rapidly conform to international trade liberalization agreements in areas such as education, and a strong focus on militaristic action to help ensure national stability in countries considered as critical nations for the West.

These pressures are not necessarily based on principles of social justice, equity or equality. In fact, there would appear to be little, if any, concern at all for the impacts on populations from such external pressures. In addition, under such pressures and accompanying constraints, national governments often exhibit little concern for the most vulnerable groups in their countries, and frequently implement insufficient or inadequate measures to ensure equal access to quality education for all, to give one example. With the reduction in government size required as a condition of loans from international financial institutions during the 1980s and 1990s, many low-and middle-income country governments are simply unable to respond effectively to new and old challenges faced within their countries.

With many governments increasingly unable to govern effectively since the late 1980s, the private market for essential services, such as education, becomes essentially a free-for-all, with little control, regulation or enforcement by the state. Ironically, while Western foreign policy is concerned primordially with national stability in geopolitically “critical” countries, little or no attention from without or from within is given to the threat of instability as a direct result of the growth in income inequality and growth of social disparities in those same “critical” countries. History has shown repeatedly that where there is tunnel vision in policy making, there is a high risk of being blindsided, or made vulnerable from exactly where one was not looking.

The social impacts of education liberalization (and the liberalization of other essential public services) in low- and middle-income countries are a breeding ground for such risks of social inst...

Indice dei contenuti

• Routledge Studies in Education and Neoliberalism
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Neoliberalism and Education in Latin America
• 3 World Bank and the Privatization of Public Education
• 4 Argentina
• 5 Venezuela
• 6 Legacy Against Possibility
• 7 A Class Perspective on the New Actors and Their Demands from the Turkish Education System
• 8 The Neoliberalization of Education Services (Not Including Higher Education)
• 9 State, Inequality, and Politics of Capital
• 10 Global and Neoliberal Forces at Work in Education in Burkina Faso
• 11 From “Abjectivity” to Subjectivity
• 12 Mozambique
• 13 From the State to the Market?
• Contributors
• Index