6 Neoliberalism: education as commodity
‘Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?’
Noam Chomsky
Standardized testing, international league tables, paying teachers by results and privatization: these are key features of the neoliberal model being applied to education in many parts of the world. And now education corporations are actively developing the model of low-fee private schools – ‘Starbucks schooling’ – in the emerging markets of Africa and Asia.
Atlanta, Georgia, seemed to be a shining example of the success of US President George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy. Schools in deprived areas with mainly African American populations were showing hugely impressive year-on-year gains in the federally mandated tests of literacy and numeracy. Under the leadership of school superintendent Beverly Hall, a rigorous program of target-setting and constant review had been implemented. The test scores in each school were closely monitored by a team of deputy superintendents, all reporting directly to Hall. Schools that met or exceeded their targets were rewarded: all the staff – cafeteria workers as well as teachers – were given a $2,000 bonus. Schools that failed to meet their performance targets suffered the consequences. Principals were fired, and their replacements were encouraged to appoint their own teams of teachers. No excuses for failure were tolerated. Hall, and the Atlanta school district she led, seemed to provide proof that the federal government’s policy worked. Tough managerialism with a ruthless insistence on the achievement of measurable improvements was transforming education in one of the poorest urban districts in the US.
But there was a flaw in the success story. If the increases in the test scores, particularly in schools in the poorest areas, seemed to be too good to be true, that’s because they were. The spectacular gains were the product not of better teaching but of something much simpler: cheating. In 2011 investigators discovered that around 180 teachers and school principals had been systematically inflating their students’ test scores, often for the best part of a decade. Faced with targets that they could not meet and with the threat that their schools would be closed down, as well as with regular public humiliation when previous targets had not been met, teachers resorted to telling their students the answers or altering what they had written after the papers were collected.1
These teachers were not, for the most part, venal or self-serving. They cheated because they felt they had to, to protect their students and their schools as much as themselves. They cheated because of the intolerable pressure on them to meet targets that they knew they could not achieve in any other way. Cheating was an inevitable product of the system in which they found themselves.
It would be foolish to imagine that such things happened only in Atlanta. The pressure that was applied to the Atlanta teachers, the relentless insistence on improvement and on meeting externally imposed targets, has become a dominant feature of the landscape of schooling across much of the world. It may be only a small minority of teachers, in Atlanta or elsewhere, who cross the line to engage in practices that are manifestly corrupt, but everywhere the effect is to deform educational processes, to bring about a malign alteration in values, in relationships, in identities.
The GERM (Global Education Reform Movement)
Since the 1980s, there has been a fundamental shift in how education is envisaged and how it is organized: in school systems and in how the aims of education are conceptualized, in how schools are made accountable and in how teachers’ work is regulated, in both the practices and the underlying values of day-to-day school life. These changes, originating largely in the US and the UK, have become a global phenomenon – the GERM, or global education reform movement, as Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg has called it.2
What has happened in education is part of a wider neoliberal reconfiguration, one that is political, social and economic. It involves a realignment of public and private sectors – a shrinking of the state and an expanding role for business in the delivery of public services; more than this, though, it entails a fundamentally different view of society and of the individual.
Within this neoliberal framework, education is represented not as a right, an entitlement, nor as a (public) service, nor even as a process, but rather as a commodity – a thing, to be produced, valued and exchanged in a kind of marketplace. If education is thought of as a thing, it follows that it can be measured, and that different versions of it can readily be compared with each other. And if it is a product, its worth will be an accurate reflection of the quality of work of those who produced it. Much of what has happened in education over the past three decades has been the institutionalizing of systems of standardization, measurement and comparison. These, the advocates of neoliberalism proclaim, will enable the consumers to know what they are getting and the producers to be properly accountable for what they are providing.
Standardization starts with the curriculum, with the specification by government of what is to be taught, sometimes even how it is to be taught. The degree of specification varies over time, and from country to country. But the trend is clear: the curriculum is too important to be left to local negotiation; central prescription is the order of the day. Within this model, the notion of standards is made to do a great deal of work. It is both the promise of minimum levels of acceptable performance and delivery and the assurance of standardization – the claim that judgements made in one place are equivalent to judgements made elsewhere.
More is involved than this, though, in that the rhetoric of neoliberalism is always about raising standards. Higher performance targets are set, and there is among politicians an unshakeable belief that this will, in and of itself, lead to an improvement in the quality of education. More will be expected of the producers, and more will be given to the consumers. The product will be ceaselessly enhanced.
The neoliberal model prompts other questions, however. Who are the producers and who are the consumers? And what, indeed, is the product? Let’s start with the latter question. As earlier chapters have argued, learning is a complex, social process that happens in the interaction between people and between people and their environment. Learning, and hence education, is, by definition, transformative: it involves change. But these effects are not readily reducible to a defined product.
How neoliberalism deals with this is by crassly reductive oversimplification – and by the alchemy of assessment. Learning in all its messy unpredictability is reduced to a set of outcomes: levels, grades, test scores. These products of assessment processes, that are at best mere snapshots, partial indicators of the learning that has been accomplished, become reified. The grade becomes the thing itself, the end-product of the whole process of education.
It is the focus on the grade or test score that enables precisely the kind of managerialism that was seen in Atlanta. And it is not only in Atlanta that the culture of target-setting and performance management has had unforeseen, and highly detrimental, consequences. In many countries, it has become fashionable to introduce a system of payment by results: to reward those teachers whose pupils achieve or surpass the targets that have been set, and to penalize those whose pupils do not.
The rationale for such a system is simple and seductive. It seems reasonable to provide an incentive for teachers to work harder, and even more reasonable to reward those teachers who are demonstrably good at what they do. And what could be a fairer or more objective measure of the effectiveness of a teacher than the grades that her students achieve?
In Atlanta, the system of rewards was not quite so individualized. Paying a bonus to all who worked at a ‘successful’ school indicated some sort of recognition of a collegial ethos – an understanding that schools depend on colleagues working together, and that the contributions of all staff are to be valued. In many places, though, it is the individual teacher who is credited, or blamed, for the scores of her pupils.
Such systems of reward are particularly unsuited to occupations and forms of work where there is an underlying duty of public service. In the 1990s, there was an attempt to rank the performance of cardiac surgeons in New York and Pennsylvania hospitals. ‘Report cards’ – data on the effectiveness of individual surgeons and the hospitals in which they worked – were published. As a consequence, the surgeons became reluctant to operate on the patients who were most in need of treatment, since these were the ones who were most likely to die. The doctors actually carried out more operations – but on healthier patients.3
The sophistication of the metrics used to determine a teacher’s effectiveness also varies. Often there is an attempt to take account of the pupils’ starting-points – so that what is being judged is the difference that the individual teacher has made (usually known as a ‘value-added’ measure). The ‘performance’ of teachers is, in reality, much more complex than is allowed for in any of these payment systems – and all such systems tend to have the effect of encouraging the participants to game the system. If as a teacher you are to be judged – and paid – on the basis of your pupils’ test scores at the end of the year, you might be disinclined to accept into your class a pupil who is known to attend school only rarely, or who has a reputation for being disruptive.
In any case, it is much more difficult to determine the effectiveness of an individual teacher than any of these systems acknowledge. With the cardiac surgeons, one might concede that there are more or less objective measures of the success of an operation – there is the straightforward binary of life and death. But education isn’t quite the same as medicine. Test scores are, as Chapter 5 suggested, not things in themselves but only, at best, indications of the learning that has been accomplished. Then there’s the fact that the impact that teachers have on their pupils is not so easily measurable: some effects may be immediately apparent, but others may not be realized for weeks, months or even years. And there’s also the tricky business of establishing causality – what it is that a teacher does that enables a child to learn.
The assumption behind payment by results is that the students’ test scores are the products of the teacher’s teaching, and that it is therefore easy to establish which teachers are effective. But it ain’t necessarily so. Studies of teacher effectiveness have shown that the same teacher can appear highly effective one year, with one class, and rather ineffective another year, with another class. And, indeed, within the same class, a teacher may inspire one student and fail to connect with another.
This is difficult for school managers and politicians to accept. It’s common sense that good teachers are easy to spot – but sometimes common sense is a bad basis for decision-making, let alone public policy. As Karl Marx said, if the world were as it appeared to be, there would be no need for scientific inquiry. (Just because the world looks flat doesn’t make it so.)
Just how difficult it is to establish a causal relationship between teachers’ performance and test scores is indicated by recent research in the US state of North Carolina. Jesse Rothstein found that there was a very strong positive correlation between measures of fifth-grade teachers’ effectiveness and the test scores that their students had achieved as fourth-graders (in other words, scores achieved before the fifth-grade teachers had even started teaching them).4
Nonetheless, the neoliberal orthodoxy decrees that teachers and schools are construed as the producers, responsible for the quality of the grade or test scores that are produced. This has profound effects on how teachers see themselves and on the work that they do. The emphasis on measurable outcomes – and the consequences that these outcomes have for teachers’ reputations, their pay, their futures – means that this becomes the focus of their work. The higher the stakes of the tests, the more preparation for the tests crowds out all other aspects of their role.
Schools become more like factories, with every activity regulated and subordinated to the imperative of attaining higher test scores. And, as the example of Atlanta indicates, the pressure is greatest in those schools that are situated in areas of the most intense poverty. The accountability regimes of the 21st century are driving schools back into the anti-educational practices of the 19th century – which is when payment by results started.
Increasingly, too, the effect of this narrow form of test accountability, with each individual teacher responsible for the results achieved by her own class, is to drive a wedge between teachers, to undermine the collegiality that has often been the aspect of school life that has sustained teachers and enabled them to develop and flourish.
It would be a mistake to see this individualization of accountability as an unintended consequence of high-stakes testing. It is, on the contrary, a defining characteristic of the workforce under neoliberalism. In such a system, there is no place for teacher trade unions or professional associations – bodies that represent those old-fashioned virtues of solidarity, mutual support and collective responsibility.
Teachers, like people working for Amazon or McDonald’s, are subject to a regime of surveillance and performance management, their individual outputs recorded, scrutinized and endlessly compared against targets – and against the performance of their peers. As Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister and early crusader for neoliberal values, said, ‘There’s no such thing as society.’
Australia provides a model of this accountability system in operation. The My School website provides details of every school in Australia. Data are presented on the pupils’ performance in literacy and numeracy tests over the past seven years, and how these results compare with schools that are deemed to be similar. The site announces that it is:
… an extremely valuable tool for parents and carers, school leaders, school staff and members of school communities, as well as policymakers. As the site enters its fifth year, it is routinely used to help parents make informed decisions about their child’s schooling, and contributes to both policy discussions and public debates.5
The process of education becomes one in which outcomes data serve as consumer information and in which the market values of individualism, competition and choice are taken as read. More than this, though, the outcomes data become the point of schooling: this truly is education as commodity.
It is also worth noting what this does to the students themselves, how it positions them. They are neither producer nor in any very obvious sense the consumer of schooling. They are, in effect, reduced to a cipher: the test score stands in place of the student.
Who, then, are the consumers? Parents, who navigate their way through the marketplace, choosing among the available producers? Governments as investors in the test factories? Employers, selecting employees on the basis of their test scores?
What is striking about this is how little agency remains for the students themselves. The transactions of education, that might have been assumed to have the learners as the focal point, are carried on by others around them. Education becomes something done to them, not something that they achieve.
International league tables (and PISA-envy)
The focus on test scores is crucial to the neoliberal vision of education. It is what enables standardization and hence accountability across the system. If outcomes in the form of test scores are what counts, then it becomes easy to compare one student with another, one class with another, one school with another and one state with another. And test-based accountability has now become a truly global phenomenon, shaping local and national educational priorities and policies.
Since 2000, more and more countries have participated in the periodic PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) tests, administered by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). These tests, in reading, mathematics and science, are taken every three years by 15-year-olds. The OECD then produces very detailed performance data, thereby enabling comparisons to be made between the performance of students, and hence of the education systems, in the different participating nations. Increasingly, the PISA league tables drive education policy. PISA envy inspires governments to look to higher-performing countries for solutions, ways of addressing their own schools’ perceived shortcomings.
The assumption that informs such panic-stricken responses to any slide down the league tables is that context is irrelevant – that what works well in one jurisdiction can simply be imported into another. If it works in Shanghai, then it’s just what Washington needs.
This is a pretty daft way of developing education policy. It simply isn’t feasible to isolate one aspect of how schooling is done in one culture, one society and introduce it into a completely different culture and society. Schooling, as this book has emphasized throughout, is not a neat technical, value-free matter; it isn’t reducible to outcomes or ‘deliverables’, precisely because it is embedded in a history of culturally specific practice.
This does not, of course, mean that it is impossible to learn from how things are done elsewhere – and indeed the OECD’s own analysis of the PISA data has often been much more nuanced and well-informed than the responses of headline writers and politicians would indicate. But such careful responses count for little in comparison with a nation’s place in the league table.
A further effect of the attention that is paid to the PISA tables in particular, and to high-stakes testing more generally, has been the narrowing of the curriculum. What is important is what is to be tested, and this becomes the focus of attention, of time and resources, while other aspects of curriculum, other dimensions of learning, become marginal. Literacy, mathematics and science figure prominently, become identified as the core of schooling; aesthetic and expressive aspects of the curriculum, on the other hand, are to be found only on the periphery, as occasional enhancements.
The process does not stop there. What literacy, math or science is – how these subjects are represented, what approaches are taken in the classroom – is determined by the test that is to follow. The higher the stakes, the more attenuated the curriculum becomes.
A rational interpretation of the data PISA provides might be that they reveal nothing more profound than that there is a fairly close correlation between economic development and education ‘performance’: the league tables of results consistently show a bunching of rich nations, with very small variations between them. But this isn’t an interesting story, either for journalists or for politicians.
PISA has been, and continues to be, massively influential. There is increasing evidence of national governments altering their curricula to fit in with the perceived or anticipated demands of the next round of PISA testing. But it would be a mistake to see these changes as unmediated responses to the data that PISA provides.
When governments look to other ‘high-performing jurisdictions’ for tips on how to enhance their own position in the league table, where they look and what they seek to borrow are determined by ideologically informed readings of the data. So there is a tendency to look to Singapore, Shanghai or Seoul rather than the equally high-performing Helsinki or Alberta.
The East Asian education systems offer support for the neoliberal nostra of competition, testing and accountability measures, centrally controlled, prescriptive curricula and privatization. Finland and Canada, on the other hand, pose something of a challenge to neoliberal methods and assumptions: their inclusive public schools thrive without such externally imposed pressures, their teachers are trusted to make professional judgements – and their children make progress without having to deal with the stresses of high-stakes tests.
Furthermore, PISA is changing – and changing in a way that both mirrors and facilitates the neoliberal mania for privatization. In the early years of PISA, test design, data collection and analysis were all entrusted to international consortia of professional organizations. In 2013, the OECD awarded the contract for the administration of their tests in the US to McGraw-Hill Education, the giant textbook and testing company. In 2014, the OECD gave the contract for developing the frameworks for PISA 2018 to Pearson, the largest education company in the world: Pearson will determine what is to be tested and how. It is worth looking carefully at the role that Pearson is now playing in education, particularly in the Global South.
Pearson: new markets and a new education model
In July 2015, Pearson sold the Financial Times to a Japanese company, Nikkei. John Fallon, the head of Pearson, explained the decision to sell the internationally respected newspaper that had been part of the Pearson portfolio for 58 years. The FT contributed less than £25 million ($40 million) to the company’s annual profits of around £800 million ($1.3 billion).6
Pearson, with an annual turnover of nearly $8 billion, had made the decision to focus exclusively on education. This was not out of some sense of civic responsibility; it came from a hard-headed business assessment of where the profits were to be made. Its strapline may be ‘always learning’ but, as other commentators have suggested, it might more aptly be ‘always earning’.
Pearson’s involvement in education is nothing new. It produces textbooks and test papers, online learning materials and educational software and has a large consultancy operation. In the past decade, however, it has become a truly global player, with over 40,000 employees operating in over 80 countries.7 It is in this context that the award of the contract for PISA 2018 needs to be seen. What Pearson is already doing – very successfully – is simultaneously influencing educational policy and providing solutions for the problems which it identifies (and thus creating opportunities for further profit-making interventions).
In 2011, Pearson appointed Sir Michael Barber as its Chief Education Adviser. Barber, who had been working for McKinsey (another education consultancy firm), came to prominence as head of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s delivery unit, where he had developed ‘deliverology’, his uncompromising, outcomes-focused, market-based approach to public policy.8
In government, Barber was massively influential in promoting an approach based on the assumed superiority of the private sector, so that entrepreneurial innovation was to remedy the deficiencies and failures of the old, monolithic public services. He was, therefore, the perfect recruit for companies seeking to promote for-profit alternatives to public schooling. In 2012, Barber launched the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund (PALF) as a for-profit venture fund to support the development of low-fee private schools in African and Asian countries – particularly in high-growth emerging markets such as India, Pakistan, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and the Philippines.
Pearson bought into Bridge International Academies (BIA), a for-profit chain with 400 schools already opened in Kenya as well as seven in Uganda, and plans for further expansion in Nigeria and India, with the aim of catering for 10 million students by 2015. What is significant about this venture is, of course, the scale – and it is this which drives Pearson’s investment strategy. But equally striking is the version of schooling that it represents:
The strategic feature of BIA’s business model is based on a vertically integrated Academy-in-a-box model (also referred to as ‘Starbucks-style’ schooling). This involves a radical standardization of processes and methods, including curriculum and pedagogy, and a heavy reliance on data analytics and technology that enable the company to expand rapidly and achieve huge economies of scale. A scripted curriculum, providing instructions for and explanations of what teachers should do and say during any given moment of a class, is delivered through tablets synchronized with BIA headquarters for lesson plan pacing, monitoring and assessment tracking.9
What BIA offers is thus the apotheosis of neoliberal education: privatized, centrally controlled and outcomes-focused. Its cost-effectiveness is assured, not only by the economies of scale but also because of its unique selling point: who needs a qualified teacher when you can have a tablet?
Pearson, like other edu-businesses seeking to expand into hitherto underdeveloped areas of the market, have made large claims for the success of the low-fee private schools: that they reach the poorest children, those who have not had any experience of schooling; that they are more efficient than the public schools with which they are in competition; that they produce better results, higher standards.
There is very little independent research supporting most of these claims, and the most rigorous examination of the evidence available so far casts considerable doubt on them.10 Rather than providing schooling for those children who have not had access to it, it would seem that the low-fee schools are operating in competition with the state schools, thereby further undermining existing provision.
But this argument is, in any case, not one that can be resolved by more objective evaluation data, since it depends on your view of what education is and what it is for. If education is a commodity, deliverable with the aid of scripted lessons and the rest of the paraphernalia of an ‘Academy-in-a-box’ and measurable through a few simple standardized tests, then there’s probably nothing to worry about. Pearson will indeed be always learning – and always earning.
If, on the other hand, education that is worth the name is not reducible to these processes and these products, then we need to consider some alternatives to the goods that John Fallon and Michael Barber are selling us.
1 Rachel Aviv, ‘Wrong Answer’, The New Yorker, 21 July 2014, nin.tl/cheatingscandal See also Sophie Quinton, ‘In wake of cheating disgrace, are Atlanta schools improving?’ National Journal, 2 May 2015, nin.tl/atlantaschools
2 Pasi Sahlberg, How GERM is infecting schools around the world, pasisahlberg.com/text-test
3 David Dranove et al, ‘Is more information better?’, The Journal of Political Economy, (2003) 111, 555-588; see also Sandeep Jauhar, ‘The pitfall of linking doctors’ pay to performance, New York Times, 9 Sep 2008, nin.tl/paypitfall
4 Jesse Rothstein, ‘Student sorting and bias in value-added estimation’, Education Finance and Policy (2009) 4(4), pp 537-571, and ‘Teacher quality in educational production,’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, (2010) 125(1), pp 175-214.
7 Carolina Junemann & Stephen J Ball, Pearson and PALF: The Mutating Giant, Education International, Brussels, nin.tl/Pearsonmutating
8 Michael Barber et al, Deliverology 101: A Field Guide For Educational Leaders, Corwin/SAGE, Thousand Oaks, 2011.
9 Junemann and Ball, 2015, op cit, pp 19-20.
10 Laura Day Ashley et al, The role and impact of private schools in developing countries: a rigorous review of the evidence, nin.tl/privateschoolsSouth