This section of the chapter builds on Rachel S. Turner’s conceptual map of
neoliberalism to describe how global economic neoliberalism shaped and informed public school reform in the developed world during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Turner’s map serves as a foundation for my own conceptual map of the nature of neoliberaleducation. This conceptual map, as illustrated in table 4.1, incorporates all of Turner’s core concepts of neoliberalism and, in addition to incorporating most of its adjacent and peripheral concepts, it includes several others that are specific to the realm of education reform. These additions are listed in italics.
36 Gamble, “The Western Ideology,” 4. 37 Ibid., 5.
Table 4.1: Turner’s Map of Neoliberalism’s Conceptual Configuration as Modified to Exhibit the Core, Adjacent, and Peripheral Concepts of Neoliberal Education Core Concepts Adjacent Concepts Peripheral Concepts The Market Evolution, spontaneous
order, limited knowledge, entrepreneurship, individualism, self-interest, educational excellence, standards, centralization of standards, knowledge economy/workers, core skills, core curriculum
The enterprise culture, short-term profit motives, income-tax relief,
privatisation, deregulation share-ownership,
standardized curricula and testing, high-stakes testing, parental choice, private schools, decentralization/ devolution, managerialism, human capital
Welfare Minimal state, equality of opportunity, freedom, personal responsibility, self- reliance, negative rights,
efficiency, lifelong learning, meritocracy
Reduced social expenditure, “workfare,” QUANGOs, education vouchers, charter schools, knowledge
workers, learnfare, re-skilling, public-private partnerships
The Constitution Freedom, private law, legal responsibility, abstract order, ‘rules of just conduct,’ evolution
Legal state, a ‘fiscal constitution,’ balanced budgets, restrained democratic rule Property (related to
Knowledge Economy rather than Post-Ford material accumulation: Ideas and skills rather than capital, though one does have the right to invest capital in education)
Ownership, possessive individualism, legal privilege, individual initiative, negative justice (conformity to universal rules), private associations,
educational consumer, knowledge as commodity, accountability
Educational investments, accreditation and
certification, user fees donations and fundraising
The flexibility of Turner’s map proves once again useful as one considers the multiple systems of educational structuring and loci of control that exist in public education
throughout the Western world. In England, for example, the national government controls the development of curriculum and testing for every student in the country. In the United States, where states rather than the federal government have jurisdiction over education, federal departments associated with public education can only create a suggested set of curriculum standards, which it then urges the states to use as guidelines for their own
standardized curriculum development. They can also allocate funds designed to encourage the states to follow federal curricular and organizational suggestions. In Canada, the federal government has no control whatsoever over public elementary and secondary education and must necessarily leave all curricular decisions to the provinces. Despite different centres of control, Turner’s map can be applied to neoliberal reforms in each of these education systems regardless of organizational structure and social context.
As Jenny Ozga and Bob Lingard have told us, “globalisation foregrounds education in specific ways that attempt to harness education systems to the rapid and competitive growth and transmission of technologies and knowledge linked to the national competitiveness of nations within the global economy.”38
Education, then, is most clearly linked to the core neoliberal concept of the Market and is conceived of and structured to promote job training for a competitive workforce. Education in a neoliberal society responds to a state’s need to compete in an increasingly globalized world, where both financial and human capital can easily traverse national borders and markets, while entrepreneurs, established businesses, economic capital, and skilled workers freely move about in order to secure the highest economic benefits for themselves based on the choices available to them. Employment and employability are major neoliberal concerns, as states seek to train their citizens to compete for employment in the global market; hold basic, necessary employment skills, thereby reducing unemployment and thus the
demand on the welfare state; and generate new products and services that generate jobs and contribute to the state’s economy.39
Educational reform is thus central to broader neoliberal reforms within the state because it is a platform to train future global workers who engage in free markets and, by implication, it serves as a measure of a state’s potential economic worth, all the while decreasing the burden on the state. Education is considered so important to the neoliberal ideology of economic reform that both the World Bank and the OECD have education branches. In keeping with their mandates, the World Bank’s focus on education is on
38
Jenny Ozga and Bob Lingard, “Globalisation, Education Policy and Politics,” in The
RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Educational Policy and Politics, eds. Bob Lingard and Jenny Ozga (New York: Routledge, 2008), 71.
39 Michael Apple, “Creating Difference: Neo-Liberalism, Neo-Conservativism and the Politics of
providing monetary support to “help countries achieve universal primary education and to help countries build the higher-level and flexible skills needed to compete in today's global, knowledge-driven markets, what we call Education for the Knowledge Economy.”40
The OECD’s educational mission is to “develop and review policies to enhance the efficiency and the effectiveness of education provisions and the equity with which their benefits are shared,” with an emphasis on “collecting detailed statistical information on education systems, including measures of the competence levels of individuals.”41
Discussion of the role of the World Bank in education reform is limited in this study because its efforts are focused more on developing nations. However, it is worth noting its emphasis on building skills in order to prepare students for the “knowledge economy,” as this is one of the adjacent concepts of education discussed below. The OECD’s role in and influence over education reform are focused on both developing and developed countries, and so is discussed below, particularly in relation to the core concepts of the Market and Constitution.
The primary discourses through which neoliberal education reforms take place are those of educationalexcellence and standards. They are the most dominant adjacent concepts in the conceptual map of neoliberal education presented below and they underpin most of the adjacent and peripheral concepts in all four of the core neoliberal concepts. They have been listed under the core concept of the Market, however, because they are most strongly associated with competition and choice, which are a manifestation of the adjacent concepts of evolution, individualism, entrepreneurship, and self-interest. In accordance with their primacy in the neoliberal conceptual map of education, this discussion of the nature of neoliberal education reforms begins with these two adjacent concepts.
40
World Bank, “Education,” accessed June 23, 2010,
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTSITETOOLS/0,,contentMDK:20934346~currentSite PK:95474~pagePK:98400~piPK:98424~theSitePK:95474,00.html.
41 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Education: About,” html accessed June
Core Concept 1: The Market (1) Educational excellence
The discourse of excellence that arose as part of neoliberal education reforms beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s and early 2000s grew from three distinct, yet related, perceived problems or trends: (1) lack of improvement in local, regional and national student performance despite previous reforms, (2) the introduction of international standardized testing, and (3) declining national employment. At the local, regional and national levels, states had begun to notice that, despite previous reforms, the level of knowledge and skills acquired by students in their public education systems was either static or falling when compared to previous generations. For example, in early 1980s America, little to declining improvement was made on national assessment measures such as the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT), the American College Test, and the National Assessment of American Progress when compared to earlier decades.42
Anxiety over tests results as an indicator of educational excellence became even greater with the introduction of international standardized tests developed and
administered throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. These tests were designed to assess the quality of education attained by students in particular subject areas when compared to other nations. They were developed and administered by several international
organizations, such as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the education branch of the OECD. They included tests such as the IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS, first
administered in over 45 countries in 1995), followed in 1997 by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, with 43 participating countries), and the IEA’s 2001 Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS, with 37 participating countries). The purpose of the first and third assessments is self explanatory. PISA assesses “the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the
42 James G. Cibulka, “The Evolution of Education Reform in Great Britain and the United States:
Implementation, Convergence of Two Macro-policy Approaches,” in The Reconstruction of Education: Quality, Equality and Control,eds. Judith D. Chapman et al. (London: Cassell, 1996), 108.
knowledge and skills essential in everyday life” by measuring the reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy of students about to exit secondary school.43
The failure to exhibit excellence in educational attainment on both national and international assessments in the face of growing global markets was correlated with many of the adverse effects exhibited by national economies in countries such as the United States, Australia, and England throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The 1983 American report issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education [italics added] entitled A Nation at Risk (ANAR) captures the sense of crisis and urgency portrayed by educational reformers early in this era. It would go on to inspire the ideology and structure behind most of the American neoliberal education reforms of the 1990s and 2000s.44 This highly influential document noted soon after its opening that,
Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being taken over by competitors
throughout the world. . . . The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.45
Similarly, in England, Margaret Thatcher defended the neoliberal education reforms introduced in the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) by stating, “if education is backward today, national performance will be backward tomorrow.”46 In Ontario, the Progressive Conservative’s 1995 election platform included statements such as “our children aren’t able to get the kind of education they need to secure a good and
prosperous future.”47 As these examples show, the concept of educational excellence is strongly tied to ideas of competition and global economic success, and thus to the core
43 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “About PISA,” accessed April 10, 2010,
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/.
44 For a detailed account of the path from A Nation At Risk to the Goals 2000 Act, see Robert B.
Schwartz and Marian A. Robinson, “Goals 2000 and the Standards Movement,” Brookings Papers on Education Policy no. 3 (2000):175-181.
45
National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk (Washington DC: Department of Education, 1985), 5, quoted in David Hursh, “Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Educational Policies,” American Educational Research Journal 44, no.3 (2007): 498-99.
46
Margaret Thatcher, quoted in James W. Guthrie and Lawrence C. Pierce, “The International Economy and National Education Reform: A Comparison of Education Reforms in the United States and Great Britain,” Oxford Review of Education 26, no. 2 (1990): 185.
47 Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, The Common Sense Revolution, 4th printing (Toronto:
neoliberal concept of the Market. This has particular implications for the way in which the individual is conceived within a conceptual map of neoliberal education (more on this below) and, as a logical outflow of the conception of what a well-educated individual should be, on the educational standards needed to measure the attainment of educational excellence.
(2) Standards
The concepts of standards is a reflection of the concepts of educational
excellence. Neoliberals see standards as a method for measuring educational excellence and for displaying their educational achievements to the world. As discussed below, in theory this will help nations achieve economic success—or even economic supremacy. Indeed, it is difficult to say which came first: the drive for excellence was in part spurred on by lacklustre results on standardized tests such as the SAT and TIMSS as well by the perceived role of education in rising unemployment. Yet, the drive to increase
educational excellence was undoubtedly most strongly manifested in the concept of
standards and standardization.48 Joel Spring noted that “the concept of academic
standards has a dual meaning. First, the creation of academic standards means creating a common curriculum for schools. . . . Secondly, raising standards means increasing student knowledge about a prescribed subject.”49
In the latter case, we can equate the idea of “raising standards” with the concept of educationalexcellence discussed above. It is through the first of these two conceptions of standards—creating a common curriculum and, subsequently, a mechanism for evaluating the educational/social investment made in order to ensure educational excellence occurs—that the nature of neoliberal education and its relation to core concept of the Market is most clearly manifested. However, before a proper discussion of the role of standards can occur, it is necessary to consider which knowledge and skills students must obtain in order to exhibit educational excellence under neoliberal reforms in a globalized market. For this, we must look again to the core
48 Suzanne Harris, The Governance of Education: How Neo-Liberalism is Transforming Policy and
Practice (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), 52. See also William A. Proefriedt, High Expectations: The Cultural Roots of Standards Reform in American Education (New York: Teachers College Press), 154.
49 Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Global Economy (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
concept of the Market and acknowledge that, as discussed above, one of the key ideas in the discourse of educational excellence is the ability of educational institutions to produce
enterprising individuals who engage in the market and who are marketable in and to a world of global enterprise. As Spring wrote, “in this context, education becomes a form of economic investment and, consequently, the value of education is measured by its contribution to economic growth.”50
Spring identified this system of measurement as “human capital accounting,” where states view funds allocated to education as a social investment that will allow their citizens to better compete in a world-wide neoliberal global market economy, thereby contributing to greater state economic growth.51 Mark Olssen, John Codd, and Anne- Marie O’Neill broadly summarized the main tenets of Human Capital Theory in relation to education as first put forth in the 1950s:
that education and training increase an individual’s cognitive capacity; which in turn increases productivity; and
an increase in productivity tends to increase an individual’s earnings which becomes a measure of human capital.52
By the mid-1990s, the OECD had re-defined human capital as “the knowledge that individuals acquire during their life and use to produce goods, services, or ideas in market or non-market situations.”53 The difference between these two conceptualizations of human capital lies in the motivation behind an individual’s actions. As Suzanne Harris observed, man is considered “homo economicus” in the classical liberal state, which we
can equate with Olssen, Codd, and O’Neill’s definition of human capital theory. Here, the individual’s actions are governed by pure self-interest. While the state prospers indirectly from those actions, it does not directly foster them, but rather removes impediments to the pursuit of self-interest and self-enterprise, usually through a system of negative rights. In a neoliberal state, homo economicus is replaced by “manipulated man,” whose
50 Ibid. 51
Ibid. 159-160.
52 Mark Olssen, John Codd, and Anne-Marie O’Neill, Education Policy: Globalization, Citizenship &
Democracy (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 148.
53 The OECD’s Education Committee and Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee, quoted
actions are directed by the state and its various institutions—including educational institutions—so that they are purposely entrepreneurial in the interest of the state’s prosperity.54 In Harris’s words, “the role of the state is seen as an enabling force which aims to create individuals who are enterprising and competitive,” rather than letting individuals decide if they wish to be so.55 In doing so, citizens are encouraged to take
personal responsibility for themselves.
(a) The knowledge economy and knowledge workers
Harris’s conception of manipulated man necessitates states identifying what are or might be the core strengths of their economy and workers in order to create the standards for educational excellence that foster participation in the global market. For example, David Wilson observed that, by 1998, one in eight jobs in Canada relied on “knowledge- intensive” skills rather than labour-related production-line oriented skills (up from one in sixteen in 1971).56 As free trade agreements such as the NAFTA were implemented in the 1990s and world markets began to expand, labour-related jobs began to move from their home countries to less developed countries. There, skill levels required to complete manufacturing jobs were low and the local economies allowed transnational corporations to save considerable amounts of money in production costs and in paying foreign workers much lower wages. Faced with a loss in production-related jobs, industrialized nations such as Canada, Australia, the United States, and England moved to reform their education systems in order to produce individuals that would cater to the newly dubbed global knowledge economy. In this economy, states with a high standard of living poise themselves as producers of high-technology, high-value goods and suppliers of new, innovative ideas and products.57 A knowledge economy is essentially a “value-added” economy: workers (usually referred to as knowledge workers) in such an economy strive to be innovative and or/entrepreneurial in order to create new goods and services, or to enhance pre-existing goods and services. Leonard J. Waks described such workers as,
54 Harris, The Governance of Education, 18. 55
Ibid., 19.
56 David Wilson, “The Education and Training of Knowledge Workers,” in The International Handbook
on Globalisation, Education and Policy Research: Global Pedagogies and Policies, ed. Joseph Zajda (Springer: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2005), 50.
Knowing how to access, interpret and apply new knowledge and information to