1st Edition
Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education How the Public Nature of Schooling is Changing
Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education asks how publicness is being redefined through the restructuring of nominally public school systems. Over the past few decades, governments have engineered a wave of reforms in their public systems opening them to privatisation and commercialisation. In public education systems competition, choice and autonomy have become entrenched vectors of these reforms.
This edited collection carefully examines the difference between privatisation and commercialisation and traces the varying effects privatised and commercialised policy reforms have had in different educational contexts. Many countries have approached the thorny issues of school choice and school autonomy in different ways, and this book investigates the impact of these agendas across the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and India. This book brings together contemporary, international perspectives from high-profile policy academics on both privatisation and commercialisation in public education systems under the provocation of how the ‘public’ nature of schooling is changing.
This is essential reading for those interested in the idea that current education policy reforms are reshaping what might be considered core educational practices in public schooling.
Introduction: The ‘Publicness’ of Schooling
Anna Hogan & Greg Thompson
Part I: Privatisation
1. What 'Good' is Schooling? The New Edu-Philanthropies and Education Reform
Chris Lubienski
2. Charities and State Schooling Privatisations in Aotearoa New Zealand
John O’Neill & Darren Powell
3. Mobilising Neoliberal Discourse and Fostering New Subjectivities: The Eclectic Role of Philanthropy in Contemporary Global Education Governance
Carolina Junemann & Antonio Olmedo
4. Interrogating the Private in Public School Outsourcing in Liberia
Curtis Riep & Mark Machacek
5. Hybrid Models of Delivery: State-Mandated Public-Private Partnerships in India
Radhika Gorur & Ben Arnold
Part II: Commercialisation
6. Edu-Business in Finnish Schooling
Piia Seppänen, Martin Thrupp & Sonia Lempinen
7. High-Stakes Accountability Pressures in the Expansion of a School Improvement Industry: Evidence from Chile
Lluís Parcerisa, Antoni Verger & Alejandra Falabella
8. The Flow of Public Funding to Private Actors in Education: The Swedish Case
Linda Rönnberg, Malin Benerdal, Sara Carlbaum & Ann-Sofie Holm
9. Teacher Concerns Regarding Commercialisation
Greg Thompson, Anna Hogan, Paul Shield, Bob Lingard & Sam Sellar
Part III: Publicness
10. Nationhood, Sex and the Family: Neoconservatism and the Moral Dilemmas of Privatisation in Schooling
Jessica Gerrard
11. Buying and Selling the Public School in the Market: The Politics of Space and Boundary Crossings for Urban School Choosers
Emma Rowe
12. Explaining Publicness: A Typology for Understanding the Provision of Schooling in Contemporary Times
Nicole Mockler, Anna Hogan, Bob Lingard, Mark Rahimi & Greg Thompson
Conclusion: Beyond Publicness
Anna Hogan & Greg Thompson
Biography
Anna Hogan is a Senior Lecturer of Education at the University of Queensland.
Greg Thompson is an Associate Professor of Education Research at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
'There is a quiet revolution underway in our schools – a fundamental shift from public service to private interests and business practices. The collection illustrates and examines these interests and practices at work in diverse locations around the world. This is a crucial and critical resource for anyone who wants to understand the state of education now.' - Stephen Ball, Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Educationat, Institute of Education, University College London, UK
'Hogan and Thompson have assembled the most prolific thinkers to investigate the relationship between the state, education businesses, and edu-philanthropies. Different from most other books that merely document the global spread of neo-liberal reforms, the authors of this book analyze what these reforms have done ten, twenty or thirty years later to education as a public good.' - Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA
