© Alain Le Quernec, France
|
After
bread, education is the primary need of the people.
Georges
Jacques Danton, French
revolutionary leader (1759-94)
|
|
Buoyed by mounting criticism
of public education, the business world is investing in this new field with a managerial
mindset and enterprising spirit
 As
the winds of liberalization blow onwards, a new vocabulary is running through education
plucked straight from the corporate universe. Principals step into the shoes of managers,
parents become choosey customers while schools compete and innovate, striving to
offer an efficient, quality service, which at the end of the day yields a profit
and turns out graduates fit for the job market.
Tacitly supported by governments, the movement is gaining legitimacy worldwide, fuelled
by the grassroots and corporate interests, both of which have taken aim at public
education’s tarnished report card. In the mid-1990s, the European Round Table of
Industrialists, which gathers prominent CEOs, pointed its finger at “an ever-widening
gap between the education that people need for today’s complex world and the education
they receive.” The Merrill Lynch brokerage firm laments that “twelfth-graders in
the U.S. in the most recent international comparisons finished dead last and next
to last in math and science respectively.” Participants at the World Education Forum
in Dakar in April 2000 deemed it “unacceptable that more than 113 million children
have no access to primary education … and that the quality of learning and the acquisition
of human values and skills fall far short of the … needs of societies.”
As Motoyo Kamiya from the OECD’s Centre for Education Research and Innovation notes,
education, which typically represents 25 to 30 percent of public spending, “is becoming
more politicized and controversial both at the national level and locally, because
of decentralization.” Accounting for roughly 20 percent of total education spending,
the private sector has always provided services, textbooks or schooling via missions,
NGOs or other channels. But now, following the dismantling of state monopolies, the
whole public sector is deemed ripe for liberalization. For advocates of this process,
healthcare, along with education–a market worth two trillion dollars–are the last
bastions to be overrun.
Critics attack public education’s inefficiency and bureaucratic, often overly-centralized,
outmoded structures. Pointing to the principles that have made many a business prosper,
they argue that schools need market incentives and competitive pressures to improve
and innovate, and that these can be created through various forms of privatization.
As the European Round Table of Industrialists puts it, “the whole situation could
be turned around if school education underwent the same transformation as the workplace.”
Struck by funding cuts, higher education is at the vanguard of more commercial reforms,
from weaving closer ties with industry to tapping the online learning market. But
despite the latter’s bullish forecasts, the burgeoning of the private sector cannot
be pinned to technology alone. As Kamiya notes, a broad public sector reform movement
is underway, in which market-oriented approaches are the backdrop. In the U.K. and
the U.S., the publication of league tables, test scores and rankings, accompanied
by hefty media publicity, is “putting schools under pressure to attract students
and hence funding.” In many countries, rules are being loosened up over the right
to set up schools, while the running of public schools is being entrusted to private
outfits.
Answering
the pressure from below
Taking this
process one step further, schools are becoming business enterprises in their own
right. In western Africa, retired teachers are opening their own, while elsewhere
in the developing world full-fledged private school chains are attracting growing
numbers. Under pressure to cut spending, governments are loosening regulations and
providing incentives to the private sector. In Côte d’Ivoire, 60 percent of
secondary schools are now in private hands.
The trend seems set to stay. “What’s really pushing the for-profit sector is parental
demand for better and different education,” says the World Bank’s Harry Patrinos.
“Now, in relatively poor countries, people are demanding English, technology. They
know it’s out there and that some countries are benefiting greatly from it. They
see that the private sector is able to gear its product to those demands.”
|
