Methods of concealed privatization: Mapping Edu-business, Policy Networks and Neoliberal Metrics

There is important research on the topic of privatization of the education sector. Specifically, processes which can be described as concealed privatization and neoliberalization by proxy can be unveiled. Two research articles map out how evolving forms of privatization and neoliberal ideological power finds new arenas within education, to control and commodify.

 

The first article studies the influence of private actors on the education of teachers in Sweden, by analyzing education policy mobility. (Player-Koro, Beach, 2017) 

 

Privatization of state education, where education and education policy are targeted by educational (edu)-businesses and sold as “market solutions” (Ball, 2009), is explored in this article. Here, privatization is not understood as carried out by removing services out of state sector control but is instead conducted through a different kind of private collaboration with the public sector, selling solutions to specific problems or through selling policy solutions, linked to issues debated in the political and public media landscape.

 

The study is conducted by examining and analyzing a particular private edu-business actor, for ethical reasons renamed the Ed-Tech consultancy, that has been a driving force behind contemporary digitization attempts of education in Sweden. This private actor, through its operation, links to global actors and cross-national policy networks, exemplifies the ongoing globalization of educational policy. 

 

The article explores two non-profit organizations called Teach for Sweden and Rebel Learners, and the cross-section of national activities and actor connections, through the lens of these companies. The two organizations can be understood as pipelines for global edu-business and international policy ideas, into the national policymaking arena of the Swedish educational sector, as the organizations have been able to receive high-level political support. Such a shift of power toward informal policy networks and a redistribution of educational policymaking, has been part of individualization and privatization of schools and the education system. One result of this shift in educational policy structure, is a growing mutual dependency between state and market. (Player-Koro, Beach, 2017)

 

Researching edu-business and policy networks

The study unpacks a specific case of involvement between edu-business and public organizations and institutions, thereby illustrating entanglements, dealings, and mutual dependency between public and private actors. 

The methodological design is a synergistic one, located between ethnography and network analysis, named network ethnography. Here the network is viewed as a representational and analytical device. The actors, consisting of organizations and people, and their connection and position to one another, constitutes the field of study. 

 

Teach for All is a transnational network consisting of more than 35 different countries, where Teach for Sweden is a member. The members of Teach for All are glued together through defining solutions for the right to equal access to education and to inequality in education. The writers of this article argue that this is in fact construction of an ideology through specific discourses of innocence, which mask technologies for creating business opportunities for private actors, to profit and prey on problems and inequities of educational inclusion (Player-Koro, Beach, 2017). These are indeed substantial problems; they are however highly complex and cannot be solved or even understood from the perspective of generic and simplified rhetoric and technological solutions aimed at offering leadership and digital competence. 

 

This research illustrates how policy-networks affect educational policy outcomes, the commodification of the education system, as well as the parasitic rather than charitable relationship between edu-business and public education.

 

Neoliberal values in expanding performance metrics 

The second research article looks at platform markets, policy networks, performance metrics and the expansion of data infrastructure in higher education. Williamson demonstrates through a conceptual framework from “infrastructure studies” how commercial aims and political objectives are fused into higher education data systems, with data infrastructure evolving into a crucial tool of government reform. That student data processing technologies are being developed and implemented to measure university performance through student data, is shown through a conceptual infrastructure analysis (Williamson, 2019).

 

Here performance metrics and the digital platform and measurement economy aligns business objectives with political aims, as common aspirations. In this way “neoliberalizing” processes of commercialization and “marketization”, is made possible by “datafication”. This in turn is creating a “student-consumer” as an “active service-user” of higher education. 

 

Governments might gain sectoral insight and control of the higher education market through accessing student data, while business that is helpful extracting the data can use it for insights and commercial advantage when developing products and monetizable “higher education data services solutions”. In this way contemporary large-scale government-led projects in higher education data infrastructure, AI and learning analytics are part of an ongoing deconstruction and reassembling of higher education. This is done in relation to the larger data environment, policy context and political economy.

 

When researching data infrastructures created to realize governmental authority in sectors such as education, the insight that politics and infrastructure are inseparable is important. Data infrastructures are crucial to a modern form of authority termed “metric power” and is to be understood as a political machinery. The use of data is central to metric power in “neoliberal” forms of governance, both historically during the post-war period as a future aspiration, as well as in contemporary times. Measurement is facilitating the forms of ranking and comparison that realize the neoliberal emphasis on competition and markets. Defining neoliberalism as the extension of the “market model” from economics to other social domains and as the “generalization of competition” establishes that the pathways of neoliberal governance today has been unblocked by the advancement of metrics. (Williamson, 2019)

 

Collective aspirations for education

These are important insights, as they reach our fundamental understanding of, and our collective aspirations as to what education is and should become.

 

If an engaged, cultured, and critical citizen can’t be deconstructed into measurable numbers and units, then what is being measured in reality and why? And more importantly; which systemic values guide the conceptualization and formulation of the questions the data is supposed to answer? 

 

Research like this helps us see, analyze, and question the concealed underlying assumptions of neoliberal ideology as it manifests itself in education and society.

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Player-Koro, C. & Beach, D. (2017). The Influence of Private Actors on the Education of Teachers in Sweden. A Networked Ethnography Study of Education Policy Mobility. Acta Paedagogica Vilnensia 39.

 

Ball,  S.  J.  (2009).  Privatising  education,  privatising  education  policy,  privatising  educational research: network  governance  and  the  ‘competition state’. Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 24(1), p. 83–99. 

Williamson, B. (2019). Policy networks, performance metrics and platform markets: Charting the expanding data infrastructure of higher education. British journal of educational technology, 50(6): 2794-2809.