Page Content
Around the world a soft revolution is taking place. This revolution is focused on how governments think about the “public” in the context of public policy, especially in the context of health and education and their public institutions. Partly, we are seeing a reframing of what constitutes public interest. While the privatizing of government utilities is one obvious shift in the idea of the public and the purpose of government, these shifts are becoming very obvious in larger institutions such as health and education.
In education, the emergence of new private actors, and indeed networks of actors, work in partnership with governments through public policy. Think-tanks, not-for-profits, intergovernmental organizations, venture philanthropists, lobby groups and corporations with educational interests are just some of the actors involved in setting the policy agenda, proposing policy solutions and offering services to deliver on the promise of these policies. For example, the reliance on public–private partnerships to fund infrastructure and provide services, and the emergence of what Ball (2007) has termed the education services industry (ESI), that delivers services in schools and systems, highlight that education is an important field for profit-making by private organizations. Private interests often don’t replace governments, rather they work for them so that the state functions as a procurer and manager of these new private actors (Burch 2009). There has been a blurring of the distinction between public and private interests in education, yet many people are unaware of this shift.
One example of blurring is the emergence of “alternate provision” of public schooling. There are many reasons for this emergence, from concerns regarding education outcomes with regards to certain disadvantaged groups; to “education for all” arguments that support the establishment of low-fee private and for-profit schools in countries like Ghana; to the school choice movement in countries like the United States and England, which has created the conditions for academy schools, free schools and charter schools. In Canada these alternative provisions include alternative schools in Toronto and charter schools in Alberta. Most forms of alternate provision involve public–private partnerships where private interests are key players. For example, education management organizations are contracted by the state to manage the day-to-day operations of some public schools. Or, in the instance of some online charter schools in the United States, hedge funds and other areas of the financial services industry invest in online schools in order to generate profits.
The shift in the work that the word public does in conversations about education is important to understand and think our way through. For example, in Australia, Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison recently argued that it is time for “for-profit” public schools. How is it that a for-profit school, a school that generates profits for a private entity, can be considered a public school? Partly, we think this occurs because what can empirically characterize the public in the imagination of policy makers has become reduced to considerations of funding alone. This is a dangerous reduction, and somewhat at odds with what may be considered the ways that the public is generally understood and used by teachers, parents and the wider public. One way to respond to this reduction is to reappraise the characteristics that constitute the public in public education. Our research, funded by the Australia Research Council, has found that across broad literatures, there appear to be four main characteristics that people articulate as being definitive of some quality of public education. These are
- funding (How is the funding of educational undertakings and schooling infrastructure sourced?);
- control (Who has oversight of a school’s operations, and how are they appointed?);
- organization of teachers (Who has oversight over the appointment, conditions and regulating of teachers in schools?); and
- access and openness (How do policies regarding student enrolment, parental/family choice and curriculum implementation work?).
While each of these is equally important, for a teachers’ association publication, the ways that systems organize teaching is worthy of some further examination. This includes the extent of unionization of the workforce, whether teachers are employees of a school/system or act as subcontractors via an education management organization, hiring done at a local level or at a system level, and focus on teacher as professionally oriented or more consumer oriented (where the consumers are students and parents). It is not as clear-cut as saying the organization of teachers is either public or private. However, it is important to foster awareness as to how private participation in public systems can impact the mission of those systems themselves. For example, differences in the ways systems organize teachers through unions and professional associations can have an impact on teacher affiliations, commitments, working conditions and teachers’ own expectations.
In 2002, Lori McNeil’s introduction to a special issue of the American Education Research Journal on charter schools made a salient point. The changing notion of the public can be understood as a shift in how education is valued in itself, from “a collective good” to “private goods” (McNeil 2002, p. 243). The ways that many government-funded schooling systems are now structured around autonomy and choice seem to accept this view of public education as a private good. In the same issue, Wells, Scott and Clayton (2002, p.338) argue that this represents the triumph of an aspiration for personal liberty over a commitment to equity and/or equality. This appears as a simple equation, where democracy equals “the freedom to consume and own within a capitalist society” and in education “the implication was freedom to choose schools and freedom from state regulation.” These are complex issues. Hence, our final point is that it seems that understanding what we mean by the public when we talk about our public systems has consequences for both contemporary and future generations.
Acknowledgements
This work is part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP170103647). Other team members include Nicole Mockler, Anna Hogan and Bob Lingard.
References
Ball, S. 2007. Education plc: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education. London: Routledge.
Burch, P. 2009. Hidden Markets: The New Education Privatization. London: Routledge.
McNeil, L. 2002. “Private Asset or Public Good: Education and Democracy at the Crossroads: Editor’s Introduction.” American Educational Research Journal 39, no. 2: 243–248.
Wells, A., J. Slayton and J. Scott. 2002. “Defining Democracy in the Neoliberal Age: Charter School Reform and Educational Consumption.” American Educational Research Journal 39, no. 2: 337–361.
Dr. Greg Thompson is associate professor of education research at the Queensland University of Technology. Prior to becoming an academic, he worked as a high school teacher in Western Australia for 13 years. His research focuses on educational theory, education policy, and the philosophy/sociology of education assessment and measurement with a particular emphasis on large-scale testing.
Dr. Kalervo N. Gulson is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His work draws on human geography, education policy studies, and science and technology studies. His current research investigates connections between education policy, mobility and artificial intelligence.
