D. Brent Edwards  0:51
Good morning, everyone. At least good morning if you’re on the East Coast. We’re going to go ahead and get started. Welcome to the fall webinar for the Globalization and Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society. The title of today’s webinar is Puncturing the Paradigm: Education Policy in a New Global Era. The genesis of the webinar is a new edited volume that has come out, The Handbook of Global Education Policy, co-edited by Karen Mundy, Andy Green, Bob Lingard, and Antoni Verger. A few of the presenters today have participated in interviews over the last month or so in the form of podcasts with the co-chair of the Globalization and Education SIG. So, hopefully some of you have had a chance to listen to their comments on the topic of global education policy that serve as background for today’s webinar. We should make one announcement before I turn it over to the speakers. Unfortunately, in the past couple of hours. Karen Mundy and Bob Lingard have sent me messages saying that they have had issues arise at the last moment that were unexpected. So, we’re going to proceed with the speakers, Andy Green from the University College of London and Antoni Werner from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Each one of them will share comments for about 15 minutes, and then we’re going to have question and answer for 30 minutes. So, the webinar will last about an hour. It is being recorded. So, those of you who are here and who would like to share it with your colleagues, or your networks can do so afterwards. And what we’re going to try to do since Bob Lingard cannot be with us today is we’re going to follow up with him and get him to participate in a podcast so that he can still share the thoughts that he would have shared with us here today. Karen Mundy was already on the show earlier this year, and so some of her thoughts have already been recorded, and can be accessed in the form of the podcast. With that said, I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to Andy Green, or -was it Andy or Toni who we decided would make more sense content wise to go first, given the last-minute changes to the lineup?

Toni Verger  3:52
Yeah. I think that we said I’d go first.

D. Brent Edwards  3:56
That’s right. We changed it given modifications. So, with that said, I’m going to turn it over to Antoni Verger.

Toni Verger  4:06
Thank you, Brent. And good morning, good afternoon or good evening, everyone according to where you are. As Brent said, this is the book that brings us together today. This is the Handbook of Global Education Policy that I co-edited together with Karen Mundy, Andy Green, and Bob Lingard. I will focus on the chapter I produced for this book but first, I would like to maybe introduce more generally that there are different chapters in this book. This is a handbook with 40 contributions from outstanding scholars that really look at how globalization and economic globalization in particular, is really challenging education policy. It is creating new problems that education policy is supposed to address. But also, we have some interesting chapters, like, for instance, from Martin Carnoy that really show how globalization itself is not only introducing new problems in the agenda, but also making it more difficult for the welfare states to address these educational problems. At least, to do so via educational policy in the conventional way, in the way it has been done so far.

However, in my chapter, I will rather focus on another important effect of globalization, but in this case, it’s more about the challenges that globalization is putting in comparative education and in Global Education Policy Studies as such. So, what we are witnessing, and I think that the fact that for the first time, we have a handbook on global education policy with this type of title is that we are in the phase in front of an emerging and upcoming field of studies. However, there are still some gaps in this field of studies that in one way or the other, I tried to address in my chapter. So, on the one hand, we find that in Global Education Policy Studies, there’s a lot of research. A lot of scholars have been researching and especially theorizing about what is the nature of the relationship between globalization and education and about what are the drivers of global education policy. So, here we have world society theory, the globalized structure in [inaudible] education from Roger Dale and other macro theorists that have really tried to deal with this macro debate of the relationship between globalization, the state, and education. Of course, Andy Green’s work also has been looking at this from this macro perspective. And then, I think that there is now a very, very important current of studies that is looking at the other side of the coin. So, how these global education policy agendas, how these global programs are being recontextualized at the national level, how national policymakers, national stakeholders are making sense of these global agendas and interpreting them, translating them into their regulatory frameworks and everyday educational practices.

However, what I argue is that there is not so much empirical research in the middle of these two extremes. So, something is happening between global agenda setting and recontextualization. And I argue that more research is necessary on what I call in the chapter, policy adoption. So, why national policymakers embrace, engage with global education agendas, and under what circumstances they do so, whether they do it in a more free way, in a more volunteer way, under coercion, persuasion, from international players and so on. So, I think that this is a very also complicated area of research, but in any case, it is under researched. I also argue in the paper that in the most predominant approaches to global education policy, and policy transfer in particular, there is this assumption that globalization is driving toward policy convergence. So, that we are in a global education policy field in which there is like, some sort of somewhat fusion between national education systems going on. And well, I want also to challenge this assumption of globalization mechanically conducing to policy convergence. So, in a way, I will use cultural political economy as a framework to challenge these two assumptions or absences in current global education policy studies. And actually, the case study of my chapter is education privatization and I think that is an interesting case, in the sense that if we look at the statistical data on private enrollment in primary education and secondary education, we see that there is an increase in all world regions. In some regions more than in others, but in any way, we are witnessing that there is a clear expansion of education privatization all around the world. So, I want to say here in my short presentation, I will tell you what the most important theories on policy transfer, global education policy would say about why is this happening. And also, I will try to do give you my version of this phenomenon by using cultural political economy approaches.

So, in policy transfer or in mainstream policy transfer literature, we find the first assumption that is, let’s say based on theories of rationalistic approaches, rationalism, that basically they will tell you that, okay, the policies that work are those policies that will travel. So, if a school autonomy, if school accountability, if privatization are policies that work, then it makes sense that more and more countries will be willing to engage with this policy, with this policy agenda. So, there’s an assumption in rationalism that national decision makers, policymakers, politicians are, let’s say, rational agents that in the face of different problems, they will look for the most optimal policy solution, usually in a more internationalized policy space. They will look for different experiences, different national educational systems, and they will try to import those policy solutions that probably will fit better in their environment. However, this is not a very good approach for education privatization because we know from a lot of research that education privatization and related policies like voucher systems, charter schools, academies are not a policy that generates a lot of consensus in the sense that it’s not very clear that they produce more educational effectiveness. And actually, if there is something that is clear from existing research on education privatization is that these types of policies produce more inequalities. However, we still see that education privatization is expanding all around the world. I think that as a response to rationalism, the world culture theory, that is another of the big theories that provides us with an alternative that I think is important also to explore and I explore it in my chapter. So, in a way world culture theory or world society theory -it depends on who is using these labels- are skeptical of what is the rationalistic approach to policy transfer.

So, this approach is really challenging the fact that countries are adopting global policies because they need them or because these policies work, but the main reason why countries are engaging with these global agendas is because of legitimation pressures that these countries face. So, there is a need for nation states to conform to international ideas of education systems, to let’s say, more modern educational systems. And today, we know that school choice, school diversification is a global norm. So, countries will embrace in a sort of emulation strategy, these global norms independently of whether this is a policy that works or not. I feel this is a valid point. However, world culture theory is not complete enough to provide with let’s say, a more complex analysis of what are the interscalar dynamics between the global and the local. And sometimes they do not consider that these global norms, especially at the national, local level, generate conflict and are very much contested. So, they take for granted that there is a big consensus around global norms that when you look at the local level, you see that it’s not so clear that this consensus is there. So, this is why in the chapter I use cultural political economy to respond to these questions of why education privatization is spreading and how. So, very broadly speaking, cultural political economy is an approach that, I would say that it’s more an ontological approach in the sense that it’s trying to say that, in all institutional transformations, educational reforms, there is an interaction between cultural, political, and economic factors. And in the version that I use in the chapter from Bob Jessup, I highlight the fact that cultural political economy forces us as researchers to unpack policy processes in different moments and these moments are what Bob Jessup calls the moment of variation, the moment of selection, and the moment of retention. So, in this sense, cultural political economy is not only an ontological framework, it’s also a very useful heuristic framework that helps us to identify useful categories in educational reform.

So, when he talks about variation mostly, he refers to these windows of opportunity for educational reform. So, what are the contingent emergencies of new practices like in some countries, there is a PISA shock, in other countries there are external pressures from international organizations, or in other countries there is an internal dissatisfaction from public opinion with educational systems. So, there’s always a reason for promoting educational reform, that is this moment of variation. After variation happens, there is the moment of selection. That is when the key stakeholders and the government in particular are going to select some of the policy solutions that are probably according to the most appropriate to address the challenges in question. And usually, political ideology, but also economic administrative viability are very important. But the idea was to understand why some policies are selected and others are not selected, and somehow are rejected. And finally, there is the moment of retention. And I think that this is important, and here is where the political economy approach is more important, because sometimes there are governments that they select some policies, or they want to promote some reforms. But these reforms have not retained because of the political architecture or the political struggles that prevail in particular contexts. So, as I said before, if we look at the statistical data on private school enrollment, there is this clear temptation to really say, okay, there is a convergence about education privatization around the world. But after applying this CPE (cultural political economy approach) to what’s going on in different countries according to the literature, we observe that there are actually multiple policy trajectories that reflect how and why education privatization happens. And in a way, that is a work that in the handbook chapter, I defined the framework, but I could develop later on in this book I did with Clara Fontdevila and Adrián Zancajo, which is a systematic review of all the political economy literature on educational privatization. And in this book, we observe that there are different trajectories, different paths towards education privatization.

So, there is one path that is the most well-known, that is the neoliberal path toward education privatization, promoted in the 80’s, in Chile, and in the UK, where education privatization was a radical state sector reform, in the sense that it changed drastically, what is the role of the state in education. But this is only one of the ways education privatization is happening. If we go to other countries with a history of Catholic or Protestant schools, in education delivery, we find that there, they are what we call historical public-private partnerships, that they don’t follow the same rationale of the neoliberal reforms. Actually, most of these public-private partnerships were adopted in countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Argentina, much before, than the neoliberalism became hegemonic. Then we have a third trajectory that we call scaling up privatization, that is how was good choice reforms are advancing not in a very linear way, but as a back and forth dynamic, especially in countries that have a federal regime, and are very much decentralized, like the US, but also Canada, Brazil, Colombia. Then we have a fourth path, that is how education privatization is also advancing in the context of catastrophes, post crises, post-earthquakes, like in Haiti, New Orleans, El Salvador after the war, etc. So, this is a very different type of trajectory in a way where the catastrophe is used as a window of opportunity for market reformers to advance privatization reforms. Then if we go to Nordic countries in Europe, where they have a tradition of social democratic welfare states, we see that they are adopting, in a way, education privatization reforms for very different reasons. And here, the explanation is very much related to the evolution of the Social Democratic ideology in this context of the third way. And finally, we find a sixth trajectory that we call de facto privatization that is happening in low-income countries with the expansion and the emergence of what are called low-fee private schools.

So, since I think that I am running out of time, let me conclude by telling you the main conclusions of my work and the chapter in particular I’m presenting here is that: first of all, more research and in particular, more empirical research on policy adoption is necessary in comparative education. The second thing is that policy convergence in education is something that cannot be taken for granted as an outcome of globalization. And the third thing is that if we want to take globalization seriously, it requires contemplating and researching the multiple policy trajectories that global education models follow. And to do this, we need to have in-depth knowledge of the specific context in which global policies are being disseminated and adopted and, and we need to infuse local institutions and actors, including policymakers, social movement, with agency and transformative powers. This is all for now. Thank you very much.

D. Brent Edwards  21:52
Thank you very much, Toni. Thank you for setting the stage, giving some overview of some general theories and different reasons and trajectories, specifically with regard to privatization. With that in mind, let’s turn now to Andy Green from the University College London, who will build on his previous comments in the podcast on social cohesion as a global education policy. So, Andy, thank you for joining us, and I will now turn it over to you.

Andy Green  23:11
Hello, everybody. I’m going to talk about one of the chapters in the second section of the book. The chapter I wrote is about perspectives, global policies on education and social cohesion. It belongs in this second section of the book, which is really looking at some of the overarching, large-scale kind of assumptions behind global education policy. And what I argue here is that policies for promoting social cohesion and social benefits in general through education are one of the major strands in global education policy. National governments frequently cite social cohesion as one of two overarching objectives along with enhancing national economic competitiveness of public investment in education. And the global education discourses which are promoted by international policy [inaudible] very often echo the same theme. So, many, many reports from OECD, UNESCO, World Bank or the European Commission are emphasizing the importance of education for social cohesion. The terminology can change, of course, all the time. And sometimes the debate is about peace education, sometimes it’s about education in conflict societies or post conflict societies, sometimes it’s about forms of citizenship education and what they can achieve, it can be about relationship education, and all sorts of other themes. But basically, these are all relating to what you might call the social benefits of education. The European Council once famously declared in its 2000 Lisbon goal, a 10-year target to make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustained economic growth, with more and better jobs, and greater social cohesion.

These are the kinds of grand statements you often find in regional transnational policy statements. Some people are skeptical about [inaudible] education. It’s often argued that despite the rhetoric, in practice, policymakers treat social cohesion objectives as subordinate to economic objectives when it comes to education policy. I think this may be true when the two are seen in conflict, particularly in the developed countries. Skills formation tends to trump citizenship formation. In the newly formed or newly developing states, I would say education for nation building is often necessarily a top priority. And that tends to keep the focus on the social and political objectives of education. But for all that, I think it’s fair to say that countries do generally take the issue seriously. Because education is associated at the individual level with many positive social outcomes, including better health, and well-being, political and civic engagement, more voting, and so on and so forth. And this can, of course, potentially save government, taxpayer investment costs in terms of healthcare or the criminal justice system or whatever. Hence, the enthusiasm of a lot of policymakers, certainly in my country in the United Kingdom, from monetizing the social benefits of learning. That’s to say actually calculating how much the taxpayer is saved in costs for healthcare saved by people being better educated. It is fair to say that social goals are amongst the main goals in global education policy. Exactly how, what policies are promoted to achieve these may vary. But the overall objective is pretty much shared in global policy organizations.

The problem, I think, with much of the global policy on education and social benefits and social cohesion, generally, is that it’s not really clear if it works, and if so, how it works. And if you don’t know how it’s working, it’s very difficult to specify effective policies, which will really make a difference at the societal level. For most policymakers, I think, the analysis of education and social outcomes starts from the evidence on the benefits of education to individuals. So, the studies in various countries demonstrate that more educated people tend to show levels of social and political trust, higher levels of civic and political engagement of democratic values and tolerance, and to be less prone to commit acts of violent crime. These have all been shown to be true in cross country analyses, and for specific countries, given certain other contextual effects. The problem for analysis is that we don’t really know much about whether individualist effects associated with education translate into societal benefits. So, for instance, in many developed countries, education levels have been rising at the same time as levels of tolerance, trust, and political engagement have been in decline. So, the question is, what we know about the mechanism by which benefits deriving from education to individuals, how these aggregate into societal benefits or indeed if they do so at all? So, a number of different theories are proposed to explain the potential links between the effect of education on individuals and their attitudes and behaviors and on society as a whole. They generally involve stipulating a pathway or mechanism that only affects individuals and then an aggregation mechanism through which individual effects translate into societal effects. And you could characterize these generally as absolute direct effects, positional effects, and distributional effects.

So, absolute effects would occur where learning impacts on individual attitudes and behaviors directly, without being mediated by other factors -for instance, future employment. And when the impact of education on an individual is not affected by his or her education level relative to other people’s education levels. So, it’s an absolute effect. So, a number of writers would argue that the relationship between education and tolerance takes this form because education increases knowledge and cognitive ability. So, more educated individuals are said to acquire a greater breadth of knowledge of understanding, of the diversity of human conditions, which makes them more sympathetic to different lifestyles and beliefs. They’re also said to acquire higher cognitive abilities, for instance, in sifting information, and evaluating arguments, so that they can see through false stereotypes and irrational prejudices. The problem, though, is that tolerance, for instance, is declining in many countries, when education levels are rising. Now, this is not necessarily because education isn’t having any effect. It may be because other contextual factors are overwhelming or counteracting the positive effects of education. The second aggregation mechanism that is discussed in the research is called the positional effect or relational effects. So, in this scenario, the effects of education are oppositional and may not translate into societal effects at all. And this is because it is an individual’s level of education relative to others that matters, and not his or her level of education in itself. So, the famous study in the US by Nye and others, which uses this theory to explain why levels of political engagement in the US are declining at the same time as education levels are rising. So that young people are less inclined to vote. They’re less politically engaged in various ways than older generations, even though they are considerably better educated in terms of years of schooling. And the argument that’s put forward here is that the activities which constitute political engagement are essentially competitive and zero sum. So, access to political influence depends on what the authors called network centrality. And network centrality is largely determined by occupational status, which is in turn influenced by educational levels. But because education acts primarily as a sorting mechanism, it is not your absolute level of education which determines your occupational status so much as your level of education relative to other people. So, where you have positional effects rather than absolute effects, you can’t be sure that individual social benefits from education will aggregate socially at all. It will depend on relative effects between different people.

The third type of mechanism that is discussed in the literature is referred to as distributional effects. And these differ for other kinds because they cannot be conceptualized at the individual level. An individual doesn’t have a distributional effect. There are societal effects that occur as a result of the way certain goods, including education, are spread around within society. Distribution effects are widely considered in debates around the social impact of income inequality, for instance. The social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson argues for instance, that income inequality is associated across countries with a wide range of negative social outcomes in relation to public health, life expectancy, obesity, child well-being, as well as social trust, political engagement, social mobility, and crime. Now, there’s been a lot of debate about whether these associations imply causal relationships. But Wilkinson himself puts forward some compelling psychosocial arguments as to why inequality may affect individuals in ways that lead to negative societal outcomes. For instance, high levels of income inequality generate various kinds of high stakes competition which can become a source of conflict and stress and anxiety for individuals. And this in turn can lead to negative health, attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes. You can say the same case for a distributional effect in terms of skills in education. It can be used to explain the negative association which exists across countries between skills in equality and social trust. For instance, skills inequality may have a distributional effect on societal outcomes through income inequality, which it influences. But it may also have independent effects through similar mechanisms, as have been postulated by Wilkinson for income equality. So, skills inequality may, for instance, engender greater social distance between groups or individuals. And it may also raise levels of anxiety and stress as a result of more intense high stakes competition for jobs and so on.

Our conclusion, it’s fair to say that research on the social outcomes of learning does clearly show that education brings benefits to individuals in many countries in terms of improved levels of health and general well-being, higher levels of social trust, civic involvement, political engagement, and so on. But not all of these individual benefits translate into societal benefits. And this is because they’re often positional effects or because they depend on how education and skills are distributed as much as on the mean levels of skills and education in a given country. Global policy on education and social benefits and social cohesion tends to rest on a rather simplistic assumption that individual benefits automatically translate into societal benefits. But, as we’ve seen, this is not always the case. This on one hand leads to an overly optimistic  assessment of the social benefits of education for societies as a whole, and can then lead to disillusionment when these are not realized. On the other hand, it leads to a failure to realize the societal effects of  education, particularly in terms of social cohesion. Many factors contribute towards the development of more trusting and cohesive societies, not least reducing inequality of wealth and incomes. But education can also play a significant role. But it’s not just the overall levels of education that matter. A more equal distribution of educational opportunities and the consequent reduction in skills inequalities is equally important for promoting more cohesive society. So, one thing we can say about global education policy is that it concentrates overwhelmingly on proving average levels of education and average levels of skill and pays much too little attention to inequality and educational levels of inequality of skills, which in many countries are increasing with each generation. In a sense, this is sub-optimum for policies on education and social cohesion because many of them will only work through these distributional mechanisms. It matters a great deal about how education skills are spread around for positive social outcomes and positive effects and social cohesion. Thank you.

D. Brent Edwards  40:15
All right. Thank you very much both Toni and Andy. For the next 20 minutes or so I suggest that we engage questions from the audience. And to facilitate that, I have unmuted everyone so you will now have the ability to ask questions through your audios if you’d like. You can either ask a question by using the chat function in the lower right-hand corner, or you can chime in through your microphone. While you look into those options, I’m going to get us started by asking perhaps a general question, and one that I think many people are thinking about because conceptually, you both have laid out some very important issues when it comes to global education policy. But I wonder if you could comment on the methodological issue because, for example, Toni, you make the case for why we should be looking at the intersection of various factors and interests at multiple levels. And so, I wonder if you could just say a little bit about how, perhaps in your own work, you have gone about -how do you look at that in practice from a methodological standpoint? I think people might be wondering about that aspect of the study of global education policies.

Toni Verger  42:03
Okay, thank you for your question. Yeah, I think that methodology is not only about what are the methods, it’s also about what is our theory about what methods are more useful in different settings. And I think that in a global education policy field, and I think that this is something that Andy has also elaborated, but also Roger Dale and Susan Robertson, we have to go beyond methodological nationalism, methodological statism, methodological educationism. So, we have to try to build, let’s say, research designs where we contemplate that they are actors operating at different scales, that are influencing the educational policy process, also that there are non-state actors -this will be the challenge of methodological statism- that are more and more influential in education policy. Usually, maybe they don’t take the final decisions, but we have a lot of philanthropic organizations, consultancy firms and other non-state actors, social movements that are setting educational agendas. And also, when we talk about how to challenge educationism, which, I think, this is usually a big issue in comparative education. We have to look at factors that are beyond the educational fields that are affecting how and why education policy happens. So, save this, I think that there are different tools and analytical tools and methodological techniques that can be useful. And I think that of course, doing interviews is very important with different stakeholders, especially because there’s a lot of data on the policy process that is not published. So, we need to produce this data ourselves. Of course, document analysis is also something that we can use, especially when it comes to identifying what are the discourses and the agendas of key international players. And I think that more and more researchers are using social network analysis techniques to try to make sense of different global educational policy processes. Sometimes in a more quantitative version but more and more scholars are also talking about network ethnography as a way to build networks from a more qualitative perspective. So, it is what I would respond with shortly.

Andy Green  44:56
Can I add to that? I would agree with Toni about the importance of understanding the context. And of course, qualitative methods have a lot to contribute towards that, as well as quantitative methods where we have the data. One thing I would just add, though: one of the biggest difficulties, I think, for studies of globalization and education is to distinguish between the global policy rhetorics and what is actually happening on the ground and the effects it’s having in different societies. Generally, the global policy rhetorics -and of course, they’re very powerful rhetorics, which are being promoted by very powerful organizations- generally speaking, they will find a great deal more policy convergence than you will actually find on the ground. And in many ways, it’s a lot easier to analyze global policy through global policy documents because of course, they’re a straightforwardly available source of information. But we do have to distinguish between the arguments and the general vision that are put forward by policy agencies and both supranational and national, and the actual policies in use, which are adopted by different countries. And that takes you back, to some extent, to what Toni was saying about legitimation. Many governments will use global policy rhetorics to legitimate certain policies they wish to put in practice but in many cases, the policies they’re actually enforcing are quite distinct from those advocated by the global policy organizations.

D. Brent Edwards  47:37
I’m very glad you mentioned that. I just want to follow up with a quick question, before I introduce the question that was asked by one of the participants. But before we shift gears, one of the things that comes to mind is the issue that some researchers have pointed out, and that is that the same global education policy, or the same reform, in name can mean different things to different people at different levels and can even look differently even though the same label is applied. And so, what does that mean for the concept of global education policy, and how we use it and how we theorize it? How do you address that in your work?

Toni Verger  48:31
Are you responding Andy, or do you want me to go first?

Andy Green  48:37
Go ahead.

Toni Verger  48:37
Yeah, I think that actually, what you said Brent is very important in global education policy studies. So, the fact that sometimes there is like a global model, but this global model means different things to different stakeholders, or as Andy was just saying, is being instrumentalized as a way to promote very different policy agendas. So, under the label of school autonomy, school-based management, you can be promoting very different agendas. Maybe more market-oriented agendas or even progressive pedagogies can fit within these types of school autonomy school-based management labels. I think that is a fascinating stream of research to try to track these multiple translations and interpretations of global education policies.

D. Brent Edwards  49:42
Okay, thank you, Toni. Andy, I just wanted to check in with you to see if you were waiting to respond or if we should move?

Andy Green  49:51
I think we should move on. We’ve got some questions building up.

D. Brent Edwards  49:55
Okay. First, I’ll turn to Maria’s question, and she has a question that relates to both presenters. She’s asking about if you could comment on the extent to which privatization strategies are impacting social cohesion, and social stratification? And so, privatization in education as a global education policy that clearly connects to the work of both of you. So, Maria is wondering if you could comment on that.

Andy Green  50:30
I can. It’s probably easier to comment on how privatization policies affect stratification than social cohesion. The evidence is pretty clear on the first of those. Countries with already unequal educational outcomes, whether it’s in qualifications or in skills levels, those things you could measure, like numeracy and science skills. Across nationally, the countries which have the most unequal outcomes are countries which have a greater proportion of fully independent private schools. That’s to say high-fee charging elitist private schools, which had more tracking within their public school system. Whether in separate tracks within schools or separate types of school. Countries which have less standardization, or -how can I say- more differentiation in curricula and pedagogies across schools and countries which devolve funding to the regional level, which also creates inequalities. So, it may be a surprise to see this figure which the OECD produce based on the PISA studies, primarily. And what they say is that, in most countries, the level of achievement of a child depends less on their social background, than on the school they go to, and who they’re educated with. And this is due to the effects that different types of schools have on the ethos, aspiration levels, so-called peer effects and school effects. And we know this, almost certainly, from a lot of research, the countries which are most successful in reducing social reproduction or stratification through education are countries where there’s relatively little differentiation between schools.

So, the countries say, in the OECD, which have the least inequality in education outcomes are the Nordic countries still, even though they’re becoming more unequal than they used to be. And the main reason why Nordic countries have relatively narrow dispersions of achievement, and why they have smaller social gaps in achievement is because there’s very little difference between schools and relatively little education choosing is going on. Partly because you have dispersed, rural communities, and there aren’t many schools anyway. Partly because you have all through primary secondary education, there’s no break at the end of primary. So, parents tend not to send their children to a different school. And partly because school choosing policies just aren’t so developed, except perhaps in Swedish cities. So, these are outcomes of the way you structure a school system. And one aspect of the structure of a school system which increases inequalities is undoubtedly private schooling, but it depends on what type of private schooling you’re talking about. The most damaging in terms of inequality, the most damaging forms of private schooling, are the forms you find, mostly in English speaking countries, but not only, which is where you have fully independent, high fees charging, very elitist schools running alongside the state sector. And this is associated with high levels of inequality. In some countries where you have state subsidized private schools -which are semi-private schools, really- it has much less effect. And that’s what we find in all of the Nordic countries. The private schools are basically part of this state subsidized education system.

D. Brent Edwards  55:22
Alright, Toni, did you have a comment?

Toni Verger  55:29
Yeah. I think that Andy’s response was very complete. I think that there are some very good pieces of research introducing the gender perspective in the education privatization debate, especially in relation to the low-fee private schools phenomenon. And they show how poor families, when they have to -because they cannot pay fees for all the children, if they have to choose, they usually choose promoting the boy having access to the low-fee private school, which means usually, the exclusion from the education system of the daughters of these families. So, I think there are a lot of implications of the expansion of privatization from the perspective of gender. But I also like this question because I think that the gender perspective has not been very mainstream in Global Education Policy Studies. In our handbook we have a chapter from Elaine Unterhalter that is titled Gender and Education In the Global Polity. But I will say that in general, the gender perspective is not very mainstream. I am now running an educational research project that is trying to track precisely that the contextualization of school autonomy with accountability policies, and we want to go from the global to the local level, to the school level, and we want to introduce the gender perspective to see for instance, whether the male teachers or female teachers, they reappropriate or use these new frameworks in a different way from the gender perspective. But I think that this is maybe only a hypothesis at this point. And something that is really -I would say challenging from a methodological perspective. But I think that we need to try to do more, more and more in our research.

D. Brent Edwards  57:36
Okay. Thank you very much. All right, I will read Nellie’s question. Nellie is asking Toni -there’s two comments and one question as you can see there on the right-hand side, if you look at the chat box- regarding countries in the various paths of policy adoption, I think that Netherlands and Belgium are very different from the case of Argentina. It is important to consider history. In the Netherlands and Belgium, privatization was a result of strategies to satisfy national constituencies along religious lines and linguistic lines. Argentina is a much more recent case of privatization. Second comments: I’m not certain I agree with the label Jessup proposes for the third moment of adoption, why pretension? This does not always fit other cases. Question: Power is an essential part of political economic approaches, with six different possible production paths, to which extent is power part of the third theory proposed by Toni?

Toni Verger  59:06
Okay. Thank you, Nellie, for your questions. I just responded in the chat to what I meant by the third moment. Maybe it was an accent issue, but it’s not pretension, it’s retention. I wrote that down just to make it clear. So, Jessup is talking about retention, not pretension. I think that the first question on Argentina is a very important one. And it’s true that Argentina, now, is going through a second phase of educational privatization, in the sense that actually, sort of low-fee private schools are emerging in the periphery for instance of Buenos Aires. I have a very good PhD student actually working on this, Mauro Moschetti. It’s also true that there are agreements signed in the 50’s with the Catholic Church, for a public-private partnership arrangement that is really, really similar to the one of the Netherlands and Belgium when it comes to content and to the political context that made this type of P-P-P emerge. And actually, these low-fee private schools today are emerging in the context of these old, let’s say, historical, public-private partnerships. I want to highlight that there are more similarities than differences in this case. And of course, power is essential in the cultural political economy approach, but at the same time it’s challenging when it comes to understanding power as an analytical concept because it’s not something that you can observe most of the times. Of course, when we talk about a World Bank conditionality in, I don’t know…El Salvador, Nicaragua, it’s very easy to observe how that power mechanism operates. But in most cases, and I think that more and more, power is a soft form of power. And it works through persuasion and the construction of hegemony. And this is, as I say, much more challenging to capture from a methodological point of view. But theoretically, it’s clear that it should be in our research designs.

D. Brent Edwards  1:01:42
I think we have time for one more question. And that question was posed in the chat box by Yao Tang for Toni? He’s wondering, what are the effects of privatization on the strength and role of the state in education? And what does your research say about variation in this regard across?

Toni Verger  1:02:20
Right. Yeah. Sometimes it’s assumed that privatization means that the state will be less powerful in the educational system but it’s actually not the case in most cases, especially when we think about privatization in the context of the neoliberal agenda. What’s happening is that there’s a transformation of the locus of power. So, the state is not supposed to be the direct provider of education anymore, but it holds a lot of power by defining what are the objectives of the education system? What are the legitimate contents of the curriculum? The state usually evaluates through standardized testing that the performance of the school. So, there are different mechanisms that make the state to be as powerful or even more powerful than before. What is also true is that this is like the flat ontology of the market agenda in education. And there are some states that they have the capacity, and let’s say the economic and technical capacity to adopt this new role but there are other cases -especially in low-income countries, fragile states- that the state cannot play this role and privatization de facto means that a more drastic market -not a quasi-market- is being generated.

D. Brent Edwards  1:03:59
Thanks very much. At this point we will end. I would like to extend a thank you to both Toni and Andy for joining us today. I want to also express my regrets that Karen Mundy and Bob Lingard could not be with us this morning due to last minute unforeseen circumstances. So, thank you again Toni and Andy. We really appreciate you engaging with us today. Later this week, I will share the link to the webinar so that folks can share it if they wish. And with that, I think we will go ahead and conclude.

Coming soon.