Globalization and the Neoliberal Schoolhouse : Education in a World of Trouble [1 ed.] 9789004413603, 9789004413597

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Globalization and the Neoliberal Schoolhouse

Globalization and the Neoliberal Schoolhouse Education in a World of Trouble

By

John L. Lyons

leiden | boston

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lyons, John L., author. Title: Globalization and the neoliberal schoolhouse : education in a world of trouble / John L. Lyons. Other titles: Education in a world of trouble Description: Boston : Brill | Sense, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019032681 (print) | LCCN 2019032682 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004413580 (Paperback) | ISBN 9789004413597 (Hardback) | ISBN 9789004413603 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Education and globalization. | Public schools--Finance. | Privatization in education. | Neoliberalism. Classification: LCC LC191 .L95 2019 (print) | LCC LC191 (ebook) | DDC 379--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032681 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032682

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-41358-0 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-41359-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-41360-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements xiii 1 The Hope of Education in a World of Trouble 1 2 The Four Defining Elements of Globalization: Integration, Interdependence, State Erosion, Transnational Power 53 3 Globalization and the Ascendancy of the Neoliberal Schoolhouse 62 4 The Washington Consensus as Foundational Policy for the Global Neoliberal Schoolhouse 76 5 Global Governance and the Neoliberal Schoolhouse 92 6 The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: Twin Horsemen of the Edpocalypse 108 7 The World Bank’s Impact on Local Education: A Case of the Chickens Coming Home to Roost 134 8 The WB/IMF Symmetry of Influence in Global(ized) Education 153 9 The WTO and the OECD: The Other Two Horsemen of the Global Edpocalyse 167 10 The Impact of the D/evolved State on Local Systems of Education 186 11 Social Consequences of the Neoliberal Schoolhouse 201 12 Culture and Relationship in the Neoliberal Schoolhouse 223 13 Extinguishing the Flames of Our Village Burning: The Spirit and Ground of Education Re-Imagined 243 References 265 Index 300

Preface We often reach our present state and location by way of the most unexpected routes and detours. The inspiration for this book, a metanarrative on globalization and education against a backdrop of unprecedented world crises, is no exception. Its first impulses actually occurred a number of years ago with my growing dissatisfaction about the social and political irrelevance of teaching and learning in international schools. In particular, I found myself feeling increasingly uneasy with the general disregard in these schools for the world’s large and growing problems, along with a special regret for the unrealized potential of international schools and international education to actively support sources of progressive social change and transformation in the world. The thwarted and largely unfulfilled progressive impulses of international education had been a cause of discouragement for me throughout the years in my career as an international educator, spanning three decades and five continents. In this particular case, I was teaching history, economics, and world social issues at an international school in east Africa, a part of the planet no stranger to human suffering. As weeks and months lapsed into years I became more-and-more disheartened by the many ways in which our work together at the school – learners, teachers, and managers – just seemed to painfully fail to foster the sort of compassionate, aware, concerned, sacrificing, engaged “planetary citizens” that are so direly needed in the world today, and so readily possible through international education. Indeed, helping to grow such a quality of person is central to institutional mandates and moral obligations of international schools and international educators! Partly in response to my discouragement, I began researching and writing about the progressive (if mostly unrealized) possibilities of international schools against a backdrop of the many crises plaguing our planet. In 2015 Sense Publishers (now Brill) offered me a contract for a book entitled Globalization and the Neoliberal Schoolhouse: Education in a World of Trouble. My intent was to write the book as a seasoned international educator and concerned world citizen, highlighting and contrasting the possible and actual roles played by international schools in the contemporary crisis-ridden global political economy. I gladly accepted the writing contract, yet as I was working on the manuscript I quickly realized how very little I knew, and how very much there is to know, about the formal global influences (institutions, policies, principles, practices) that shape and drive schools and education at the local levels, including international schools and international education. Furthermore, in my research I repeatedly came across a concise, summative, understandable two-word term that beautifully captured the larger global field of influences

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impacting schools and schooling everywhere, often taking them far afield from the once embodied principles of quality learning, broad access, and meaningful civic engagement. The term is neoliberal globalization. New curiosity, interest, and motivation were piqued. I realized I couldn’t in good faith, with any semblance of authority, write a book about the role of international schools in the present global economy without first understanding how that economy comes to impinge upon and sculpt these schools and the human relationships they engender. Consequently, I did an abrupt turn around in my assignment with Sense Publishers. Instead of writing about international schools and world crises per se, the direction of my work quickly eclipsed. It shifted toward an examination of the numerous ways neoliberal globalization has come to negatively influence local systems of education worldwide, causing or exacerbating crises of teaching and learning around the world while effectively preventing schools, learners, and educators from reasonably responding to those crises. In my examination I referred to the brand and quality of education supported since the 1980s by emerging global political economic forces, and to some degree embodied and concretized in schools and classrooms everywhere, as the neoliberal schoolhouse. For the last three years I have attempted in my writing and research to unpack the elusive, multifarious, insidious, yet powerful and decisive, ways in which neoliberal ideology and policies, through the delivery systems provided by globalization, dominate and determine ever-larger academic, social, and cultural spaces in the life worlds of schools across the planet. The contents of my book represent that unpacking. It is an attempt to directly address questions of exclusion and narrowed access to education that result from neoliberal policies, as well as to weigh the cultural impact of private market incursions into the historically – and politically – sanctioned domains of public schools and public school learning. I also provide what I hope are fresh and encouraging approaches to our taking back popular control from destructive global neoliberal forces in education today. Finally, it is no coincidence that I begin my book with an ambitious inventory of a number of contemporary world crises, arguably of unprecedented magnitude, followed by a clarion call for one of the very few workable options remaining for a planet ravaged by war, inequality, environmental demise, and sickness: the re/vitalization of civic-minded, social justice-oriented, community-engaged, activist-framed approaches in education and learning. Yet, much has taken place in the three years since I began work on the Neoliberal Schoolhouse. Indeed, in some ways the world has taken its own unexpected side trips and detours. While I was sequestered away, researching, pondering, and writing, one very important, and, for me, largely unexpected development took place on the world stage. I had for years been loosely

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tracking and openly supporting the leftist-oriented anti-globalization movements in North America and Europe. I felt somewhat hopeful about the democratic nature and popular vitality of a series of mass anti-globalization protests that began in the last months of the 20th century and continued, more or less, until last year. These mobilizations included the pivotal “Battle of Seattle” and London’s “Carnival Against Capitalism” in 1999, protests in major cities around the world against the WTO summit in Doha in 2001, followed more recently by a crescendo of G20 demonstrations in Toronto (2010) and Hamburg (2017). Given the significance of these events, I remained hopefully convinced that any mass, popular outpouring against neoliberal globalization would have to be unflinchingly forward-looking and politically progressive, waged in a spirit of social justice and increased equality worldwide. These beliefs were further cemented by the populist, anti-authoritarian undertones of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the 99% protests in 2011, echoed and reverberated in large part by the tsunami momentum of the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in 2010, and that for months and years spread like prairie fire across North Africa and the Middle East. Yet, the severest threat to neoliberal globalization to date has come not from a broad coalition of progressive political and social interest groups, waging and raging with displays of civil disobedience at major meetings of global capitalism. Rather, the most effective current challenge to neoliberal globalization has arrived in the form of a recent surge of political flanking maneuvers and mass movements on the part of extreme alternative populist nationalism, or the “alt-right”. Astonishingly, this version of the Right has managed to galvanize the support of large segments of those excluded from the “benefits” of globalization in so-called developed countries in ways the Left has always imagined, yet has never quite accomplished. Through mass mobilizations and political canvassing, alt-right candidates have posed credible challenges and upsets to the established political order in country-after-country, from the USA to Germany and France, from Poland to Hungary and Russia, more recently in Brazil. Even historically social democratic-leaning Scandinavian states, like Sweden and Norway, are witnessing their own crest of anti-immigrant nationalistic populism (see Chapter 1). Although there has in fact been some rallying back by the Left, best personified perhaps by Bernie Sanders’ recent US Presidential bid and the congressional victory in New York state by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both self-proclaimed democratic socialists. For the most part, though, the anti-globalization Left has been dazed, confused, disoriented, and rudderless by the spreading appeal of nationalistic populism. Anti-globalization sentiments and angers should logically be an integral part of the organic life force and popular stirrings of all coherent, engaged, culturally diverse, and demographically unifying Leftist social progressive political

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movements, and should include, perhaps foremost, a generous political influx of a nation’s “working poor”. Instead, in recent months poor, disenfranchised, and un(der)employed white rural and urban workers, with much to gain and little to lose from the Left’s agenda, have flocked to the Right’s (reactionary) anti-globalization movements in numerous nations “up North” in the world’s richer hemisphere. This regressive and reactionary brand of anti-globalization tragically involves clear marks of the beast, all defended and proscribed as legitimate calls for “returns to normalcy and tradition”. The aberrations of the alt-right include, among others, racism, sexism, migrant-bashing, and vociferous nationalism, not to mention brazen and continuous attacks on the legal entitlements of LGBT communities. Education, the central focus of this book, suffers immeasurably from this reactionary brand of anti-globalization, if for no other reason than because the alt-right for all intents and purposes remains staunchly neoliberal in its educational values and policy prescriptions, albeit at the national level. President Trump’s recent nomination of school voucher-touting, student loan-enforcing, civil rights-eroding Betty De Vos, millionaire business woman turned US Education Secretary, for example, attests to a new strain of nationalist neoliberalism in education, milked from the political coffers of the “America First” movement. Similarly, it would appear that an increasing number of neoliberal cohorts of nationalist populism are now politically minding the store for schools and learning in many nations experiencing right-wing populist heat waves. Indeed, it has been the business of businesses for some time, whether national or global, to find ways to replace public goods overseen by public agencies, including education, with unregulated markets and corporate takeovers. So far the earmarks of this “conversion” appear to change things little for schools and learning. When neoliberal-oriented global governance at the local level is replaced by institutional regimes and representatives of nationalist neoliberalism, the only noticeable difference is that political decision-makers seek to do more the bidding of local capitalists than foreign capital. Old wine in an older bottle. Although it is a little too soon to see exactly how education pundits of nationalistic populist alt-right movements will handle the downsizing, privatizing, and commercializing of public education sectors under neoliberal hegemony, I am hard pressed to imagine sizable or coherent opposition. The lamentable truth is such policies invariably go hand-in-glove with both the globalized and the nationalistic versions of neoliberalism. Thus, one can almost be certain, even in the face of expected nationalistic populist coups and regime changes, that, short of a massive public response, broad-based, inclusive, and affordable quality public education is probably not going to measurably increase any time soon. Nor will the nationalist neoliberal-influenced school policies of the

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alt-right help to promote civic-minded, socially progressive forms of teaching and learning. It is simply not in their best interest for nationalists, racists, and xenophobes to promote social progress. As such, the recent and jarring emergence, momentum, and strength of multinational right-wing populism will do little more than season and flavor the political economic currents and solutions discussed in this book, while in no way changing their basic nature or their relation to education. Similarly, nationalistic populist movements represent surface changes in the broader global “background landscape” of neoliberalism within which the relationships between globalization, capital, and education are played out. I don’t believe, for example, that the recent uprisings of nationally confined Alternative Right parties across Europe will in any substantive manner change the basic analysis, reasoning, or conclusions regarding neoliberalism and education presented in my book. Although the tenets of “anti-globalization in-the-rough” espoused by contemporary nationalist populists may put a certain chill on a country’s international trade and commerce, even pull some national sectors out of multi lateral free trade and environmental protection agreements; the ultimate effects of these changes on present education policies will be so negligible as to not detract even slightly from the veracity and validity of the book’s central premises regarding the relationship between neoliberalism, education, and world problems. In short, national, regional, or global neoliberalism will all continue to erode inclusive, socially responsive education and fuel mounting crises; while inclusive, socially responsive education remains a vital antidote for fostering democracy, resuscitating civil society, dismantling harsh inequalities, and solving world problems. Should the nationalist populists ultimately win, whatever that involves, the locus of the pervasively corrosive effects of neoliberalism on education will simply shift back toward a national center of gravity at the local level, away from regional or global institutions of neoliberal governance – such as the World Bank and the IMF – that now arrange and enforce the game rules of globalization. At the end of the (school) day, then, it makes little difference for inclusive quality public education whether neoliberal globalization or neoliberal nationalism wins out. The final outcome will involve little more that the difference between six and a half dozen. Equitable, broad-based learner access to quality public schools capable of fostering principles and practices of social progress and justice will still be discouraged, even prohibited. Humanistic and progressive principles in education will continue to be replaced by the promotional ethics of market privatization, commodification, and commercialization, ultimately consummated by the on-going sell-out of both public and private institutions of learning, in exchange for human capital models of education that enhance worker productivity and serve the demands and interests of private profit.

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Whichever may prevail, national or global neoliberalism, or even if the two find a way to coalesce and blend, the progressive civic life blood of social justice-based learning and teaching will remain drained from the heart of the few remaining free public schools available. Moreover, when not contributing to or causing the gargantuan crises plaguing our planet, neoliberalism of any stripe will still offer no better response to the immense sufferings of the world than claims of having made our lives better through deregulated markets guided by some mystical, invisible, self-regulating hand of efficiency. After all is said and done, it won’t matter an iota to education or to educators if those deregulated markets and the hand that guides them are national and protectionist, or global and enforced by institutions of capitalist world governance. What will make rank though is whether social leveling between disadvantaged and privileged students, intergenerational upward mobility for the poorest learners, and the cultivation of the sensibilities and skills needed for effective civic participation and democratic engagement – progressive social attributes and processes for which inclusive, affordable, and accessible public education has historically shouldered the burden – will continue to be compromised and deformed. Without massive and effective progressive political and social opposition soon, all we will have left will be a class-based, pay-if-you-can, tiered system of largely privatized schools and learning. The exclusivity and quality of conditions in the best-endowed private schools will stand in even starker contrast than at present to those found in disadvantaged public schools in poor neighborhoods, forced in an attempt to stay afloat to adhere to learning-forlabor pedagogies that impart worker discipline and productivity standards, enforced by legislated demands supporting “dynamic” national and world labor markets.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my original editor at Sense Publishers, Peter de Liefde, for his ready understanding of my need for more time and a detour in my writing. I heard not a word of recrimination from him as I changed course from an earlier book proposal on international schools to the present work on education within a global neoliberal context. I am sincerely grateful for his poise and graciousness. A book about both the political economic complicity and the potential redemptive value of international schools and international education in a time of world crisis is still very much on my list of intended future projects. I would also like to thank my current editors at Brill. John Bennett has been consistently warm and supportive of my work, with an unfaltering confidence in my writing and my judgements. Equally, Jolanda Karada is incomparable in her sense of editorial fairness and efficiency, often responding to my questions and concerns in little more time, or so it seemed, than it took me to hit the “send” key. I would also like to thank Paul Tarc, Professor of Education at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Paul has been an understanding and supportive friend, colleague, comrade, and fellow traveler in the world of international education for a very long time. Our conversations and his writings have been a tremendous source of encouragement to me, and a handy road map to some of the best possibilities for progressive pedagogy in international education. Most of all, I am grateful to the countless friends, students, and colleagues who have charitably endured, sometimes even expressed excitement over, months and years of my long-winded commentaries on education and neoliberalism. It couldn’t have been easy!

CHAPTER 1

The Hope of Education in a World of Trouble The problems facing our world today are complex and overwhelming. They represent a number of deep, pervasive, and multidimensional crises of arguably unparalleled dimensions (globalissues.org). Global indicators regarding poverty, inequality, ill health and disease, environmental degradation, human displacement, and armed conflict are but some of the more daunting signs that the human community is at a precarious crossroads, in need of brave and genuinely transformative decisions that are without precedent. Despite the impressive economic growth of the latter half of the 20th century, the quality of life for a fifth of the world’s population had actually declined in relative, sometimes absolute, terms by the first decade of the new millennium (Elwood, 2010). Vieira (2013), for example, contends that inter-country inequalities increased globally between 1950 and 2000. Although there was considerable growth in Asian countries and developed economies, especially true in the 1980s, developing regions frequently faced serious economic challenges, including debt crises. Also, Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Bloc countries experienced declines in national income overall during this period. By the end of the first decade of this century, nearly half the world lived on less than $2 USD a day, with more than one billion eking out a fragile existence on less than $1 USD per day (Seabrook, 2009). In the poorest countries 10 million children a year died before their fifth birthday (UNESCO, 2008). Yet, over the last several decades, the World Bank and other global intergovernmental financial institutions tout the success of market-based economic policies and rapid globalization in reducing poverty worldwide. In particular, rates of extreme poverty ($1.90 USD per day) in low and medium income countries are said to have been cut by 35 percent, to 10.7 percent, between 1990 and 2013, the last year for which statistics are available (Ibid.). Admittedly, this represents a significant reduction in the “poorest of the poor” on the planet, a decline of more than 1 billion of the world’s most severely impoverished, from 1.85 billion in 1990 to 0.76 billion in 2013 (Ibid.). Yet, it must be remembered that the $1.90 USD daily cut-off involves an absolute international poverty threshold of extreme material deprivation based solely on the monetary value of income and consumption, with due consideration for purchasing power parity (PPP).1 As such, it is an extremely low poverty line and represents some of the worse conditions possible for sustaining human life. While absolute poverty thresholds may provide an expedient political unit of meaning, useful for stimulating © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_001

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policy discourse and engagement, they often fall short of the minimal income needed for the basic securities of human life (UNICEF and World Bank, 2016). For example, in India, as in many developing and emerging countries, families living on $2 a day have a child mortality rate three times the global average, and any spending on emergency family healthcare can readily mean a reduction in food and basic needs consumption which can push people below the extreme poverty line (Wagstaff, 2003). Moreover, in many low and medium income countries it is quite possible to earn and consume well above the $1.90 USD daily average and still experience dire poverty and material hardship (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2017). Nor do World Bank measures of extreme poverty account for the indigent conditions of the homeless and rural poor in so-called high income nations, where related life situations probably do not meet the low monetary threshold of extreme poverty in the developing world, yet easily reflect the severe conditions of the world’s truly poor. Thus, the exceptions, uncertainties, and arbitrariness of World Bank poverty measures critically beg the question of whether, in a world where $2 a day is often too low to attain basic nutritional needs or to garner a fighting chance of surviving the first year of life, living on anything more than $1.90 USD a day should be accepted as the end of extreme poverty (Oxfam, 2018a). Simply put, because World Bank figures of extreme poverty rely exclusively on income and consumption, they do not effectively factor in possible variations in human experience and circumstances for groups and individuals at or below $1.90 USD per day. While the involved methodology is informative, it leaves out many important aspects of human welfare. In reality poverty is “multidimensional” in nature and therefore in need of alternative measuring instruments that capture deprivation beyond income and consumption (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2017). Fortunately, there are a number of more comprehensive, inclusive, and nuanced approaches regarding what it means to be poor in today’s world (see, for example, Hickel, 2017). Perhaps among the most significant of these is the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) employed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at Oxford University, UK (see Alkire & Robles, 2017). Within the MPI framework of meaning, “multidimensional poverty” is made up of a rich combination of factors that comprise poor people’s social and economic circumstances and experience of deprivation. These include not only low income and inadequate caloric consumption, but also poor health, lack of education, political disempowerment, low quality employment, and the threat violence. Arguably, the MPI is a more accurate and meaningful construct of poverty than the World Bank’s two-variable approach. As of 2018 OPHI research had been conducted in 104 countries involving 5.5 billion people, or 76 percent of

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the world’s population. It is extremely important to note that of this vast number, spread widely across the globe, a full 25.6 percent, or 1.46 billion people, were identified as “multidimensionally poor” by the OHPI (Alkire & Robles, 2017). That is, current global research by the OPHI finds genuinely troubling levels of poverty existing at rates nearly two times higher than those indicated by the Bank’s extreme poverty world data. Furthermore, in 2017 the OPHI found that the poorest of the MPI poor, 706 million or nearly half of all research subjects, were “destitute”, meaning they were struggling under such extreme deprivations as severe malnutrition (Ibid., p. 1). Of equal importance is the fact that the World Bank, at least partly in response to criticisms regarding the inherent limits of its extreme poverty criteria, has recently revised its use of global poverty lines, increasing the extreme threshold to $3.20 and $5.50 for lower and upper-middle-income countries (Jolliffe & Prydz, 2016). According to these new, if still somewhat unknown, assessments, the total number of people living in extreme poverty is now actually 2.4 billion (Oxfam, 2018, p. 31).

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So How Poor Is Poor Enough, Anyway?

While in no way wishing to minimize or delegitimatize the potential freeing of more than a billion people in the poorest countries from the throes of abject poverty for which the World Bank and other global governance institutions seem eager to take credit, there is nonetheless an earnest need to look more fully at the inferred claims that market-driven globalization is destined to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide, or, as stated in the World Bank mission, to achieve “a world free of poverty” (World Bank, 2016). This goal means, in real world terms, a reduction of extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030 (Ibid.). As partially addressed already, such claims hinge greatly on the meaning and measure of poverty employed, and invariably involve the perhaps unresolvable question of how poor is poor enough to be truly poor?, at least from the standpoint of laying claims to reducing global poverty. Taking World Bank figures at face value, the 10.7 percent of the world’s population admittedly “extremely poor” amounts to a total poverty headcount of 746 million people (World Bank, 2016). In effect, despite the notable strides made in lowering world poverty, those identified as the poorest of the poor by World Bank criteria still number more than the total population of continental Europe, not a modest number by any standard. Yet, despite the Bank’s generally rosy forecast about conquering extreme poverty, evidence indicates that those falling below the $1.90 USD threshold have actually increased in sub-Saharan

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Africa and South Asia since 1990 (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2017). In fact, recent estimates by the International Labour Organization (ILO) indicate that almost one-in-three workers in emerging and developing countries live in poverty, as well as two-thirds of all workers in sub-Saharan Africa (ILO, 2017a). Of the 98 percent of the world’s under-nourished living in developing countries, more than 90 percent of those are in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Hunger Project, n.d.). Even in developing areas of the world with rapid economic growth, many workers, including a disproportionately large share of women, “remain trapped in low pay and poverty wages” (Oxfam, 2018a, p. 6).2 Frankly speaking, it would be highly questionable to assume that because there has been a notable reduction in the level of human misery represented by lowering daily consumption values of less than $1.90 USD, the global community is somehow correcting the persistent social and economic distortions that continue to co-exist with globalization and unregulated global markets. Luhby (2015), for instance, claims that despite the “global rising tide of unregulated markets”, 71 percent of the world’s population remain low-income or below, living off $10 or less a day, while a majority of the world’s inhabitants continue to live on about $3 daily. As a recent Oxfam Report (2017) points out: Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades (yet) one in nine people still go to bed hungry. Had growth been pro-poor between 1990 and 2010, 700 million more people, most of them women, would not be living in poverty today. Research finds that three-quarters of extreme poverty could in fact be eliminated now using existing resources, by increasing taxation and cutting down on military and other regressive spending. (p. 2) Consequently, despite claims that pursuit of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)3 has created “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history” and raised more than a billion people “out of extreme penury” (Jones, 2015, p. 1), with extreme poverty clocking at just under 11 percent worldwide, large-scale abject poverty and worsening life conditions continue in many parts of the world (World Bank, 2016). For instance, although the number of undernourished worldwide has dropped by over 20 percent since 1992, today there are 815 million people, the one-in-nine identified by Oxfam, who do not have enough to eat, nearly 10 percent more than the estimated 795 million in 2014 (World Hunger, n.d.-b). Similarly, although the global middle class nearly doubled in size during the first decade of this century, increasing to 13 percent of the world’s population, this measure still represents a relatively small fraction of the Earth’s total human inhabitants, and many of the

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economic “newly arrived” remain little more than one family illness, company downsizing, or global downturn away from slipping back into poverty (Fleury, 2014). Woodward (2015) estimates that given present patterns of global income distribution, it will require 123 to 209 additional years and an increase in world production and consumption 175 times larger than present levels, with an increase in planetary GDP of $11 trillion, before everyone on the planet can earn more than $5 a day.

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The Vulnerable Poorest

It is typically the young, powerless, and most vulnerable who suffer most from poverty. Extreme poverty afflicts 328 million children in the world today, and nearly one-half of the all deaths of children under 5 in developing countries is attributable to undernutrition, totaling as many as 3 million deaths annually (Hunger Project, n.d.). With regard to the Multidimensional Poverty Index previously discussed, children comprised 48 percent of all poor people in 2017, and in 36 of the 103 countries researched at least half of all children are “MPI poor” (Alkire & Robles, 2017, p. 1). Furthermore, more than 500 million young people survive on less than $2 a day, and nearly 43 percent of the global youth labor force is either unemployed, or working but living in poverty (ILO, 2015). It has been estimated that 260 million young people in developing countries exist entirely outside of formal employment, education, or training sectors (The Economist, 2013). This holds equally true for one in three young women (ILO, 2017b), who account for 60 percent of the world’s hungry (Hunger Project, n.d.). The lack of financial means or government support for adequate prenatal care and assistance during delivery, a common malady among the poor, caused the deaths of more than 300 thousand mothers and 2.7 million newborns in 2015. Globally, 155 million children under 5, half of whom are born in South Asia and one third in sub-Saharan Africa, still suffer from stunting as a result of inadequate nutrition (Ibid.).

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More Questions about the “Historic” Reduction of Extreme Global Poverty

As Stromquist and Monkman (2014) note, while much of the discourse on globalization is tinged with optimistic claims about increased openness and trade, a great deal of contrary evidence and counter-testimony exists regarding the on the ground effects of economic growth in many parts of the world. Indeed, the implications of many of the statistics related to poverty presented in the

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previous sections clearly support such concerns. A number of critical questions are warranted regarding overly-positive predispositions toward arriving at hard-and-fast conclusions about World Bank claims regarding the “historic reduction” of the number of “extremely poor” on the planet. As noted, the vast majority of the world’s truly poor continue to live in developing regions. Although in some instances average incomes have increased and malnutrition has declined, one-in-eight people, or 13.5 percent of the total population of the developing South, remain chronically undernourished. For example, while World Bank estimates of the massive global reduction in extreme poverty have been lauded as a successful realization of key parts of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),4 significant amounts of counter-evidence indicate that it was the relatively well-off in the developing world who benefitted most from poverty reduction, while the poorest and most marginalized were largely left behind (see, for instance, Stuart et al., 2016). In many countries, average increases in economic growth often hid significant internal disparities, such as urban-rural imbalances, gender inequities, and differential access to resources among certain ethnic, language and caste groups (UNDP, 2016). A 2014 UNDP study, for example, found that more than 75 percent of the people in developing countries lived in societies where income was more unequally distributed than in 1990s (UNDP, 2014). In a critical self-assessment of its own contribution to the UN MDGs, the UNDP (2016) concludes: The exceptional performance of a few countries often masked significant disparities within and between countries. The world as a whole halved the proportion of people living in extreme poverty after just 8 developing countries achieved the target. In such cases, divergences are hidden by averages. Behind high average rates of progress, inequalities in most countries were rising. (pp. 18–19) Furthermore, as the most populous area on the planet, Asia is home to twoout-of-three of the world’s undernourished people (World Hunger, 2018). This remains the case despite claims that growth in Asia has been a major contributing factor to the purported reduction in global income inequality, resulting in increasing incomes for those in the bottom and middle tiers, especially in China (Lakner, 2016). In fact, China’s burgeoning international trade sector is believed to have played a significant role in the Asian-led growth that propelled large reductions in extreme poverty worldwide between 2012 and 2013 (World Bank. Understanding Poverty. www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty). Yet, despite China’s global image as the enviable poster child for rapid

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market-based growth and prosperity, buttressed by a seemingly endless tsunami of middle-class expansion, as recent as 2015 a full two-thirds of the country’s population, approximately 900 million, weighed in as little more than “low-income” by world standards (Luhby, 2015). In effect, the concentration of wealth of the top 10 percent in Chinese society has grown rapidly in recent years and is now similar to the US, where the top 0.1 percent of the country controlled national assets equal to 22 percent of total GDP in 2012, an increase of more than 300 percent from 1978 (IMF, 2016). Not surprising, poverty reduction-cum-globalization has delivered few benefits to sub-Saharan Africa, where one-in-four people suffer undernourishment, the highest prevalence of any region, and where the absolute number of undernourished has actually increased while the population percentages of malnutrition have declined, from 33.2 percent in 1990–1992 to 23.2 percent in 2014–2016 (World Hunger, n.d.-a. Income figures for this part of the world also remain discouraging. Between 1990 and 2010 the number of people south of the Sahara living on less than $1 USD per day increased a full third, or more than 330 million people. In 2012, 501 million people, or 47 percent of the population of the region, lived on $1.90 a day or less, a principal factor in causing widespread hunger (World Bank, Poverty and Equity Data, n.d.). As the international relief organization, World Hunger, points out: “Poverty is the principal cause of hunger in Africa and elsewhere”. Simply put, “people do not have sufficient income to purchase enough food” (World Hunger, n.d.-a). And, germane to our discussion on the World Bank’s extreme poverty threshold, by 2013 a full half of the “extremely poor” in the world lived in sub-Saharan Africa, representing more of the world’s poor than all other regions combined (World Bank, 2016). Mounting immiseration against a backdrop of expanding globalization is also supported at the national level in a number of countries below the Maghreb. For example, by 2010 a full 88 percent of the inhabitants of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) lived below the poverty line (Elwood, 2010), and more recent examinations of extreme poverty in Liberia, Burundi, and Madagascar found poverty rates ranging from 81 to 84 percent (Fleury, 2014). Clearly, in light of the previous discussion regarding the uneven and questionable successes of market globalization for large swaths of the developing world, the World Bank’s unidimensional, one-size-fits-all, consumption-driven measure of extreme poverty rings hollow, incapable of growing enough trees to discern the larger forest. The Bank’s extreme poverty index roundly fails to account for the geographic irregularities, diverse meanings, and political, economic, and cultural factors that inform material deprivation around the world. Relatedly, continued skepticism and doubts regarding the ability of

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unregulated markets to end global poverty, a mainstay of faith in the economic assessments of the World Bank and other major institutions of global governance, have prompted words of caution from sources as diverse as Pope Francis and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim (World Bank, 2016). Indeed, the World Bank’s announced target goal of eradicating extreme poverty worldwide by 2030 requires no less than lifting an additional 50 million people out of poverty each year, the equivalent of a million people each week, for the next 12 years (Fleury, 2014). Given the stubborn entrenchment of poverty in subSaharan Africa and large parts of South Asia, combined with the disruptive and havoc-wreaking instabilities of global markets, planetary capitalism may be up against levels of systemic challenge and limits to growth bottlenecks, not to mention planetary resource depletion, so inflexible and intransigent as to be wholly misunderstood and underappreciated. One such central challenge to poverty alleviation is the tremendous and rapidly growing levels of inequality around the world engendered largely by unregulated markets, the focus of our next area of discussion.

4

Increasing Inequality and Concentrations of Wealth

One of the keynote problems arising from globalization and intimately related to the worsening conditions of many across the planet is the deepening and accelerating levels of income inequality and concentrations of wealth. By 1997, following nearly two decades of market-driven globalization, 5 percent of the world’s richest inhabitants received incomes 114 times greater than the bottom 5 percent, while the 500 wealthiest individuals on the planet had a combined income greater than the poorest 416 million (Ellwood, 2010, p. 124). In the first 10 years of this century, income differences deepened in countries representing 80 percent of the world’s population (Ibid., p. 137). By 2005 the world’s richest 20 percent received 75 percent of its income, while the bottom 20 percent received a meager 1.5 percent of total planetary earnings, and the poorest 40 percent received only 5 percent (United Nations Human Development Report, 2006). In 2014 the world’s 85 richest people had the same wealth as the poorest half of the planet’s population. In the same year seven out of 10 people lived in a country where income inequality had increased (Fuentes-Nieva & Galassso, 2014). As global inequality increased and concentrations of wealth continued, researchers in 2015 predicted that the richest 1 percent on the planet would soon own as much as the other 99 percent, controlling more than half of all global wealth by 2016 (Hardoon, 2015). Indeed, by 2017 this dire prediction had come to pass, as a mere eight men took control of planetary wealth equal to that owned by the poorest half of

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the world. Moreover, during the preceding 30 years the income growth of the bottom half of the planet had been zero, while the top one percent saw income increases of 300 percent. Furthermore, between 1988 and 2011 the incomes of the poorest 10 percent increased by less than $3 a year while the earnings of the richest one percent increased 182 times as much. One way of placing these figures into a human context is to consider that by 2017 the yearly earnings of a CEO in a Western financial stock exchange earned on average the equivalent of 10,000 people working in garment factories in Bangladesh (Oxfam, 2017, p. 2). Such stark levels of inequality have given rise to warnings of “a new gilded age, with vast amounts of wealth concentrated in too few hands”, enabled by the emergence of a global economy that “is economically inefficient, politically corrosive, and undermines our collective progress”. In simplest terms, the corrective for this state of affairs is a “more equal distribution of wealth” (Ibid., p. 6). In 2018 it was once again confirmed that “the richest 1 percent continue to own more wealth than the whole of the rest of humanity” (Oxfam, 2018, p. 19). The Oxfam Briefing Paper (2018) entitled “Reward Work, Not Wealth” cites numerous conclusions drawn by studies regarding the worsening state of inequity in the world, referred to by the report as the “global inequality crisis”. Among the findings cited are: – From 1980 to 2013 the net profits of the world’s largest corporations more than tripled in real terms, from $2 trillion to $7.2 trillion (McKinsey Global Institute, 2015); – Between 1980 and 2016 one percent of the world’s richest inhabitants received twice as much income from the increase in global growth than did the total bottom 50 percent (Alvaredo et al., 2016); – In 2017 someone became a billionaire once every two days, representing a 12 month increase in global wealth of $762 billion, enough to end the World Bank’s extreme poverty index seven times over (Forbes, 2017). – Also in 2017, the wealth of the world’s richest 42 individuals was equal to the bottom 3.7 billion, and 61 people owned as much as the bottom 50 percent (Credit Suisse, 2017). It is both paradoxical and noteworthy that the largest obstacle to reducing the copious wealth and income gap between the rich and poor in today’s world is the same rapid, unregulated globalized growth that has purportedly lifted so many out of extreme poverty in the last several decades. As Ravallion (2017) observes, with a strong commitment to pro-poor global growth with equity, one billion people could be lifted from absolute poverty within the next 15 years. Otherwise, almost half a billion people may still be living on less than $1.90 a day in 2030, the year the World Bank hopes to see extreme poverty reduced to 3 percent. Similarly, had inequality been better addressed during

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the first four decades of market-based neoliberal globalization (1980–present), an extra 200 million people would today be out of the clutches of extreme poverty. Perhaps as many as 700 million would have escaped penury had poor people benefited more from global economic growth than the already-richand-comfortable (Hardoon & Slater, 2015). According to Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, the solution to reducing global inequality is simple and straightforward. It involves little more than implementing a livable minimum wage for the world’s lower tiered workers, adequate social protection when individuals and families fall on hard times, and adequate regulation and oversight of companies to insure compliance with basic labor rights (cited by Oxfam, 2018, p. 7).

5

The Global Gender Gap and the Gendering of Disadvantage

One of the most significant indicators of the social and economic collateral damage caused by rapid market-led globalization is the stubborn and pervasive unequal gender-based distribution of the fruits and opportunities of economic growth. The pronounced difference between women and men in many social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic measures of attainment and attitude represents a veritable “global gender gap” (Briony, 2017), contributing in many ways to a worldwide gendering of disadvantage. On much of the planet, women are typically hit hardest by income inequality (Cinco-Días, 2017). More men than women worldwide own land, shares, and other capital assets (Doss et al., 2013). Women are consistently excluded from employment opportunities or are disproportionately represented in the lowest-paying and least secure types of employment (Gallup and ILO, 2017). Evidence indicates that lowest-paid workers in the global economy, and, thus, those in the most unstable and insecure social and economic circumstances, are predominantly women and girls (Oxfam, 2017). Consequently, during repeated recessionary troughs in the unregulated markets of the world economy, females in the poorest countries shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of increased workloads, both in and outside the home, or are disproportionately cast into the unpredictable and harsh informal jobs sector. During global downturns, sometimes lasting years, women and girls also disproportionately experience interruptions in education, worsening health conditions, increasing mortality rates, and spikes in domestic violence (Ellwood, 2010). Furthermore, in some areas of the world females are barred entirely from securing formal employment. In 2016 global female labor force participation was half the rate for men, and male labor involvement in emerging economies

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was 60 percent higher (UNDP, 2016). Moreover, even when men and women share the same occupational niche and bring the same or similar skills, experience, and training to to the same workplace, women are often paid measurably less for the same job (Ibid.). The average worldwide gender pay gap in 2016 was 23 percent (ILO, 2016). While the overall hourly gender pay gap in Europe is about 20 percent, in the top 1 percent of wage earners it climbs as high as 45 percent and is 50 percent for CEOs (Ibid., p. 5) As Oxfam (2018) points out: Around the world, social norms, attitudes and beliefs devalue the status and abilities of women, justify violence and discrimination against them, and dictate which jobs they can and cannot expect to hold. (p. 12) More than 500 million girls live in countries with rates of gender discrimination so severe that they are at heightened risk of death before age 5, of being denied access to basic education, of being forced into early marriage, and/or of giving birth before they are emotionally and physically ready (Save the Children, 2018a, p. 1). Stated another way, once interdependent, mutually reinforcing links between sexism and inequality are forged in social relations, the resulting gender gaps in income and wealth become foregone conclusions, albeit to different degrees in different parts of the world.5 The resulting gender-based oppression creates differential access to adequate material resources, living conditions, and life chances. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) measures gender-based differences across 144 countries in the areas of health, education, economics, and politics (Briony, 2017). In its 2017 report, the Forum found an average gap of 32 percent between women and men worldwide combined across the four dimensions, up from 31.7 percent in the previous year, and the first such increase since records began in 2006. In particular, the gap worldwide in women and men’s political and economic participation, always the largest among the four indicators, was especially severe in 2017. The author finds this increasing gender-based inequality unremarkable, though, given the larger, well-established global spike of wealth and income inequities in recent years. In 2017 the World Economic Forum estimated that, given current trends in global patterns of inequality and the widening of the economic gender gap, it would take another 217 years to close the political and economic dimension of the GGI (World Economic Forum, 2017). Yet, gender inequality is not the result of some immutable historical law or the inherent correlate of necessary economic growth. Rather, it reflects the fact that we have allowed the global marketplace to be built on the backs of the marginalized, voiceless, and powerless of the world, while passively accepting

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that the bulk of the benefits of globalization go to rich and powerful men for their own benefit. The neoliberal economic model has made all this worse for women, as “reductions in public services, cuts to taxes for the richest, and a race to the bottom on wages and labour rights have all hurt women more than men” (Oxfam, 2018, p. 12). Aside from “gendered inequality”, deepening disparities in income and wealth worldwide have also exacerbated class and identity-based conflict, unraveling social cohesion and undermining a broader sense of belonging in a functional state. In recent years, for example, dangerous levels of social polarization caused by worsening material inequality have emerged in such divergent locations as Brazil, Greece, Mali, Sri Lanka, Syria, and Uganda (Østby, 2007; Lessmann, 2013). It is also important to note that the massive income inequality and class polarization of the last four decades have taken place within a context of globalizing processes characterized by an increase in the power and presence of transnational corporations (TNCs), a topic to which we shall return numerous times. Indeed, at the beginning of this century two-thirds of the world’s 200 largest economies were not nations; rather, they were the individual holdings of 133 of the world’s largest transnational corporations (Anderson & Cavanagh, 2000). By 2015, 69 of the 100 largest economies on the planet were corporations (Inman, 2016).

6

The Geography of Poor Health: Disadvantage by Global Postal Code

Figures involving contemporary global health, poverty, and living conditions, while improving in some regards in recent years,6 nevertheless remain quite dim on a number of counts, especially in their testimony to North-South geographic-based patterns of worsening inequality. Indeed, as is the case within the overwhelming majority of countries and cities of the world, disadvantage and privilege are unequally distributed according to space and location, or zip codes. As such, it is quite appropriate to figuratively speak of “disadvantage by global postal codes”, or the differential apportionment of the world’s troubles based on where one lives. For example, of the estimated 41 million adult deaths worldwide attributable to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in 2017,7 44 percent occur in low- and lower-income countries in the Southern hemisphere, nearly double the rate of those in high income Northern countries (World Health Organization, 2018). In 2015 a full 73 percent of the world’s deaths attributable to non-communicable diseases, 28 million of the total 38 million, took place in many of these same low and middle-income countries

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(WHO, 2015a). For example, of the more than 8 million cancer deaths each year, nearly six million, or 75 percent, happen in developing regions (WHO 2015b). Predictably, hunger and malnutrition are far from being distributed with geographic equity in the world. Of the 870 million hungry people in 2016, equal to one-in-eight people on the planet, approximately 852 million, or nearly 98 percent of these, lived in developing countries (UNDP, 2016). Clearly, poor nutrition and inadequate daily calories that characterize chronic hunger, especially for the very young, can and do have huge negative effects on health, contributing to a dangerous lack of immunity and resistance against disease. Also of particular relevance to health conditions in poorer countries is the comparative dearth of clean water and effective human waste disposal in large parts of the developing world. As the UNDP (2016) points out, “access to water and sanitation facilities matters to every aspect of human dignity: from food and energy security to human and environmental health” (p. 32). At present more than one billion people live in substandard conditions worldwide, the great majority in developing countries, with minimum standards of comfort and sanitation. In addition to existing severities, an estimated three billion new houses need to be constructed by 2030 just to meet the demands of global population increases (Ibid.). Furthermore, the most recent global figures indicate 2.5 billion people worldwide lack adequate sanitation facilities and 1.8 billion consume drinking water that is faecally contaminated. Due to inadequate human waste disposal systems, one billion people continue to practice open defecation. The vast majority of these situations persist in the poorer countries of the developing South, with a disproportionately large number in sub-Saharan Africa (UNDP, 2016). Consequently, unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and lack of basic hygienic safeguards necessary to contain the spread of germs and bacteria played a significant role in as many as 870,000 deaths worldwide in 2016 (WHO, 2018a). Finally, although average life expectancy had increased to 72 years worldwide by 2016, up more than five years from 2000, there persists distinct North-South geographic markers that typify mortality rates, as well. For example, Europeans on the whole live 15 years longer than the citizens of African nations, 77.5 years compared to 61.2 years, respectively (WHO, 2016). Similarly along these lines, of the estimated 303,000 women worldwide who died from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth in 2015, 98 percent of these fatalities took place in low- and middle-income countries in the Southern hemisphere, with nearly two thirds (64 percent) in Africa (WHO, 2015c). Currently women in developing areas are 14 times more likely to die in childbirth than women in rich countries (UNDP, 2016, p. 18).

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The AIDS Pandemic and Disadvantage by Global Postal Code Revisited

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and the resulting ill health, disease, and death generated by the related Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), continue to be among the world’s gravest challenges to public health, especially in poor countries (Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018). Since the first symptoms of AIDS were reported in 1981, more than 77 million people have become infected with HIV, constituting a veritable and unrelenting global pandemic. Of these infections, an estimated 35.4 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses (UN AIDS Fact Sheet, 2018), with some researchers marking total fatalities from AIDS as high as 40 million or more (see Becerra et al., 2016). In the first 25 years of the AIDS pandemic (1981–2006), 25 million people, an average of 1 million each year, died from AIDS-related complications. This includes an estimated 2.8 million in 2005, the high point of the crisis (UNAIDS, 2006). In 2017 an estimated 36.9 million people globally were living with HIV (UN AIDS Fact Sheet, 2018). Of these, approximately half, or 18 million, mostly young and adolescent, were not receiving any form of the standard antiretroviral treatment (UNDP, 2016). Despite improvements in prevention and treatment, new HIV infections worldwide have risen by 26 percent since 2000, and AIDS-related deaths have increased by 66 percent since 2005 (Becerra et al., 2016). An estimated 5000 new HIV infections take place each day, the equivalent of about 1.8 million every year. Recent research indicates an average of 2,580 people die each day from AIDS-related causes. Most of these deaths could be avoided, or at least postponed, with adequate access to existing HIV prevention, care, and treatment services (UNICEF, 2018). Along these lines, more than 50 percent of people living with HIV are believed to not know that they are infected with the virus (UNDP, 2016). The demographics of disadvantage, often involving the apportionment of global injustice by postal code, have already been alluded to regarding several of the world’s massive social problems, including poor health. Yet, this dynamic is nowhere more notable than with regard to the incidence and treatment of AIDS cases worldwide. Although significant strides have been made to reduce the rate of transmission and to manage the symptoms of the virus, including reducing the global rate of AIDS-related deaths by 52 percent between 2004 and 2017 (WHO, 2018b), the pandemic continues to wreak disproportional physical, economic, social, and psychological havoc throughout the developing world, worsening already high rates of poverty, gender inequality, child

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mortality, and maternal illness. According to HIV Gov (2018), an official public information source of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: The HIV epidemic not only affects the health of individuals, it impacts households, communities, and the development and economic growth of nations. Many of the countries hardest hit by HIV also suffer from other infectious diseases, food insecurity, and other serious problems. A summary assessment of HIV infection rates worldwide by region, race, and gender proves disparaging. The vast majority of people with the HIV virus live in low- and middle-income countries (HIV.Gov, 2018), and the bulk of these are inhabited by people of color. Of the nearly 37 million people living with AIDS worldwide, 33 million, or 89 percent, are in the lower-income, developing countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Indeed, when looking at the AIDS pandemic from a broad global perspective, clear north/ south, developed/developing, rich/poor, and race-based imbalances emerge. Of the worldwide HIV infection rate of 37.9 million, more than two-thirds are in sub-Saharan Africa (UN AIDS Fact Sheet, 2018). With only five percent of the world’s population, eastern and southern Africa suffer more than half of all reported AIDS cases (19.6 million) (UNICEF, n.d.). In 2014 alone, 66 percent of all new AIDS infections worldwide, representing 1.4 million people, took place south of the Sahel (UN AIDS Organization, 2015). Moreover, nearly all of the nations in sub-Saharan Africa are suffering from what is termed “generalized HIV epidemics” – national HIV prevalence rates greater than 1 percent. Western and central Africa account for 21 percent of the world’s new HIV infections and 30 percent all of global deaths from AIDS-related illness. Of the 5000 new HIV infections estimated to take place around the world each day, 66 percent occur in sub-Saharan Africa (UNICEF, 2018). South Africa, for example, has the largest number of people living with HIV, 7.2 million. And, South Africa’s neighbor, Eswatini, has the highest rate of HIV infections for people 15–49 years old; 27 percent, or more than one-in-four of the nation’s adult population, have the illness (Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018). The disproportionate toll the AIDS crisis takes on poor people of color is not exclusively confined to the lower lines of longitude in continental Africa. Quite the contrary, Asia and the Pacific represent regions with the second highest rates of HIV infections, 14 percent of the world total, or more than 5 million people (Becerra et al., 2018). Furthermore, between 2000 and 2014 the estimated number of people contracting HIV in resource scarce areas of the Middle East and North Africa, areas by definition comprised of majority non-white

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populations, rose by 26 percent, while the estimated number of AIDS-related deaths in these two regions more than trebled (UN AIDS Organization, 2015). Moreover, the availability of treatment for people living with HIV in this region is lacking by an estimated one-third for all those in need, the lowest HIV treatment-to-patient-ratio in the world (Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018). Finally, a full 95 percent of all new HIV infections take place within the combined geography of central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, along with eastern Europe (UN AIDS Fact Sheet, 2018). It may be useful to conclude our discussion regarding the global HIV scourge and the (mal)distribution of disadvantage by global zip code with a brief comparative (re)summary of several of the more telling indicators of unequal North/South conditions regarding the rates of infection, treatment, and mortality for AIDS: – There are at present 2.2 million known AIDS cases, comprised of both adults and children, in western/central Europe and North America. The number of cases in western/central Africa is 6.1 million, with 19.6 million in eastern/ southern Africa, respectively. Thus, the number people infected with AIDS throughout sub-Saharan Africa is roughly three-to-nine times greater than that recorded in Europe and the United States/Canada combined (UNICEF, 2018); – In 2017, there were 70,000 new HIV infections in western/central Europe and North America, while nearly 1.2 million new infections were contracted in sub-Saharan Africa, a sum 17 times larger (UNICEF, 2018); – More than three-quarters (78 percent) of people living with HIV in western/ central Europe and North America are accessing antiretroviral therapy. The global average is 59 percent. While there is a significant variance throughout the developing world regarding the percentage of those living with HIV who have access to antiretroviral drugs and therapy, no country or region receives as much or more treatment than those in the Northern Hemisphere. Access to HIV treatment in the developing world ranges from a low of 29 percent in the Middle East and North Africa to a comparative high of 66 percent in eastern and southern Africa (UN AIDS Fact Sheet, 2018); – Of the 940,000 AIDS-related deaths globally in 2017, 13,000 (one-tenth of one percent) took place in western/central Europe and North America. In the same year, 380,000 people (40 percent of the total) died from AIDS in eastern and southern Africa, and there were 280,000 AIDS-related deaths (30 percent) in central and west Africa and 170,000 (18 percent) in Asia and the Pacific, respectively (UN AIDS Fact Sheet, 2018). Clearly, geography (along with regional levels of affluence and privilege) plays an influential role determining who in the world contracts the AIDS infection,

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who gets treated, and who survives the illnesses associated with the HIV/AIDS complex. None of these factors should be relevant.

8

The AIDS Gender Bias

Finally, it is important to point out that AIDS is also particularly ambitious in its gender discrimination. For example, complications from HIV remain a leading cause of death worldwide among women of reproductive age (Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018). More than half of all HIV infections, 19.1 million, are contracted by women or girls (UNICEF, 2018). Every week around 7000 young women aged 15–24 years become HIV positive (UNAIDS Data, 2018), accounting for a full 20 percent of all new HIV infections (UNDP, 2016). Females are at a significantly higher risk of HIV infection than their male counterparts (UNAIDS Factsheet, 2018). Of the approximately 30 teenagers aged 15 to 19 around the world who became infected with HIV each hour in 2017, twothirds were female (UNICEF Press Release, 24 July 2018). Brecera et al. (2016) claim that the worldwide prevalence of AIDS among females aged 15–19 is eight times higher than that among males in the same age range. An estimated 30 percent of all women with HIV lack adequate knowledge about the virus (UNDP, 2016). In a not-so-unique blend of gender, geography, race, and disadvantage, three-in-four new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa are among young women aged 15–19 years, and African females in that age group are twice as likely to be living with HIV than men (UNAIDS Factsheet, 2018). Finally, even though young women aged 15–24 represented only 10 percent of the subSaharan population in 2017, they accounted for a quarter of all new HIV infections that year (Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018). Despite the dire shadows cast by the preceding statistics and commentary, there have been some significant declines in deaths from AIDS in recent years, primarily from expanded access to HIV antiretroviral drugs and therapy, especially in parts of sub-Saharan Africa (see UNICEF, 2018, p. 5) While in no way wishing to discredit or minimize these advances, the previous analysis speaks for itself: HIV infections worldwide, especially in the developing South, and the AIDS complex that results in illness and death, remains one of our most formidable global public health crises. Furthermore, the troubling nature and urgency of this crisis is morally underwritten by the accompanying factors of geography, race, gender, and social standing which constitute yet another expression on the contemporary world stage of “disadvantage by zip code”. Furthermore, in a recent issue of Foreign Policy (FN), Laurie Garrett (2018) points

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out that the increased affordability of, and thus increased access to, antiretroviral treatment has contributed to a dangerous climate of complacency and cheery optimism regarding the AIDS pandemic. In fact, she points out, given the combination of growing budget shortfalls for financing AIDS programs; the dearth of available testing for those who are HIV positive but are unaware of their status; a surging and sexually active teen population in Africa’s urban centers; and, most importantly, the emergence of new, drug-resistant strains of HIV; the world may be facing the surge of a “second AIDS pandemic” in the near future, one that could very well “dwarf the scale of today’s AIDS crisis” (p. 360).

9

An Era of Lost Childhoods

Possibly the most lamentable and tragic expression of the skewed ways in which injustice and suffering are heaped on certain groups in certain areas of the world can be found in the increasing dangers of being a child in poor countries. The stark and persistent presence of multiple sources of a life-threatening adversity for millions of children in developing areas has prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to proclaim an era of “lost childhoods” for entire generations of poor and war-ravaged children in large areas of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Save the Children, 2018, Faces). In particular, children in many developing areas are more prone to suffer abject poverty, poor health and high mortality, and the physical and psychological trauma of war and violence than perhaps any other “at risk” group. Nearly 20 percent of children in developing countries – an estimated 385 million – live in extreme poverty, nearly twice the global average. Close to the same number live in “moderate” poverty, bringing the combined global total of impoverished children to more than 750 million. Significantly, but not surprising, these children live predominantly in the world’s two poorest regions: Africa (52 percent) and South Asia (36 percent), with India alone accounting for 30 percent of the world’s children living in abject poverty (UNICEF and World Bank, 2016). It is nearly universally accepted that in most instances education is the key to escaping poverty, yet children in the poorest households in the developing world are four times more likely to be out of school than children in the richest households (Save the Children, 2018). A recent study by UNESCO (2017) proposed that if all children completed primary and secondary school, more than 420 million people could lift themselves out of poverty, in effect reducing the number of poor worldwide by more than half. However, as things presently stand, children in low-income countries are almost nine times as likely to

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be out of school as those in high-income countries. This means that, on average, 33 percent of school-aged children in poor countries are not attending classes, as compared with 4 percent in high-income countries. Another way of understanding this situation is to accurately conclude that 84 percent of all out-of-school children in the world today live in low- and lower-middle income countries in the developing Global South. This represents an increase from 69 percent of children out of school in 1990, and a 77 percent non-enrollment rate in 2000 (Save the Children, 2018, p. 10). A statistical corelate of low school enrollments of children in poor families in developing countries are the relatively high rates of child labor that often go hand-in-hand with poverty. Approximately twenty-five percent of all children younger than 16 years in the world’s least developed counties are engaged in labor, compared to a mere 1 percent in high-income countries (ILO, 2017a). Not only are the poorest families in poorest countries typically unable to pay even the most modest fees associated with primary and secondary schooling, these families also often rely heavily on the financial contributions made by younger members through outside work, thus straddling the educational aspirations of generation-after-generation of poor children with a double liability. As might be expected, Africa is home to nearly half of all child laborers globally (72 million) while Asia and the Pacific account for another 40 percent (62 million) (ILO, 2013). Conclusions and implications regarding the geography and global postal code of disadvantage are equally inferable from statistics concerning the physical health of impoverished children around the world. Presently, the four most prevalent preventable causes of death for children under five are birth asphyxia, pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. In 2016 these illnesses represented the leading causes of death worldwide for 5.6 million children under five, or 15,000 deaths per day (WHO, n.d.-a). It is noteworthy that children from the world’s poorest households are twice as likely to die from these maladies before the age of five as children from the world’s richest families. The global AIDS-pandemic also poses grave dangers to the world’s youngest and poorest. An estimated 1.8 million children were living with HIV worldwide in 2016 (UNICEF, 2018), yet due to prohibitive family costs or lack of public support, only half were receiving adequate medical treatment (UNDP, 2016). In 2016, an estimated 180,000 children became newly infected with HIV and 110,000 children died from AIDS-related causes. Of the 5000 new infections each day in 2017, approximately 500 per day involved children under 15 years of age (UNICEF, 2018). Finally, of all children globally with the AIDS virus, a total of 91 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa, and the majority of these are in the poorest parts of eastern and southern Africa (Henry Kaiser Family Foundation,

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2018). In many of these cases preadolescent children in Africa are infected by HIV-positive mothers during pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding (HIV Gov, 2018). Whether due to the four major causes of preventable childhood death in impoverished countries, or from the HIV scourge, an estimated 54 million deaths of children under five are likely to take place in the world’s poorest families by 2030. Of these childhood deaths, an estimated one-half will be newborn babies (UNICEF, 2017). These figures, of course, assume rather darkly that little or no meaningful redistribution of world wealth and income will take place between the world’s richest countries and the developing South. We now consider the effects of civil conflict and war on the wellbeing of children; again disproportionately affecting those children in the poorest regions of the world.

10

Children Lost to War

Of all the imminent threats to the welfare of children and childhood in today’s world of trouble, none is so sinister as the increasing presence of armed conflict and war, concentrated in the poorest-of-the-poor nations and regions of the world. In 2016, 180 thousand people were killed in wars and conflicts worldwide, not including deaths caused by the indirect effects of violence, such as the spread of disease, poor nutrition, and collapse of health services. Furthermore, the death rate due to armed conflicts in the five previous years (2012–2016) was more than twice the average in comparison with the period 2007–2011 (WHO, 2018c). At the time of this writing, an estimated 357 million children, one-in-six on the planet, live in conflict zones and run the constant risk of being subjected to grave human rights violations (Save the Children, 2018b, p. 3). In perfect harmony with the principle of geographic-based inequality advanced earlier in this section, the majority of the world’s conflict-affected children live in the poorer countries, with two-in-six in the Middle East (especially Syria, Iraq, and Yemen) and one-in-five in Africa. Since 1990, the global child population has increased by 12 percent, while the number of children living in conflict areas has spiked by 78 percent (Ibid., p. 16). Presently, more than 165 million children on the planet are affected by what is termed “high intensity conflicts”, with Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia ranked as the three most dangerous conflict-affected countries to be a child in 2016, the last year for which comprehensive statistics were available (Save the Children, 2017). The brutalities of armed conflict on the health and well-being of the very young is no place better illustrated than in the case of the civil war in Syria, where 2,500 children were killed between 2014 and 2017. Of the country’s

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estimated 10 million children, 8.6 million are now in dire need of assistance. In 2016 nearly one-quarter of all civilian casualties were children. Furthermore, since the beginning of the conflict an estimated 6 million children have been displaced or made refugees, and 2.5 million can no longer attend school (Al Arabiya English, 2018). At least 240 million children presently live in countries directly impacted by conflict and state fragility, meaning they are the most likely of the world’s young to lack access to school and health facilities, as well as running the greatest risk of witnessing or partaking in conflict-related violence (Save the Children, 2018a, Faces). The vulnerability of children to the atrocities of war and armed conflict is higher now than at any time in the last 20 years, and the number of children killed or maimed in these conflicts has risen dramatically in the last 10 years. Between 2005 and 2016, more than 73 thousand children were killed and/or maimed across 25 conflicts worldwide, and more than 10 thousand conflictrelated child deaths occurred in 2016 alone (Save the Children, 2018b, p. 20) Physical attacks on schools and hospitals, until very recently sanctioned by law or civilized standards as safe havens for children during war, have become a “new normal” in conflicts around the world, with reported incidents roughly doubling in the last decade (Ibid., p. 3). In some instances children are being intentionally targeted in an attempt by combatants to inflict maximum emotional damage on opposition forces, or to wipe out the next generation of a particular ethnic or religious group (Save the Children, 2017). Children have also fallen victim to localized conflicts in their forced role as suicide bombers, and as part of broader causalities inflicted by such indiscriminate weapons as cluster munitions, barrel bombs, and improvised explosive devices (Save the Children, 2018b). The United Nations Secretary General’s Report on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) (2018), for instance, confirms an increase in “unspeakable violence” against children in conflict situations, characterized by an “utter disregard for any measures that could contribute to shielding the most vulnerable from the impact of war”. The report cites 21,000 “grave violations of children’s rights” from January to December 2017, an increase of nearly 75 percent from the previous year, including the killing or maiming of nearly 10,000 children. Between 2005 and 2016 there were at least 49,640 verified cases of boys and girls recruited and used by armed forces and separatist groups. The Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) Dataset reports that roughly 35 percent of all conflicts in the world between 1989 and 2009 involved some form of sexual violence against children, although the actual numbers are likely to be much higher.8 Recent specific violations against children include an eight-fold increase of attacks on schools and hospitals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and more than 1,000 children recruited and used for warfare in

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South Sudan, along with 900 instances of sexual violence committed against boys and girls. In Nigeria, almost half of the 881 verified child casualties of war in 2017 involved suicide attacks, including the use of children as human bombs (UN Secretary-General, 2018). Periods of organized violence and conflict also interrupt and deny education to millions of children, sometimes for years, and the severe mental health and psychosocial toll violence under these intense conditions takes on young minds are just beginning to be recognized (ICRC, 2018). UNICEF (2017), for example, estimates that as many as 27 million children worldwide are unable to attend school due to conflict-generated displacement, damage or destruction of schools, or retaliatory threats by religious fundamentalist forces toward educators and parents. Severe and chronic interruption of education has a chronic impact on children’s futures and on the socioeconomic recovery and development of a country. As the International Commission of the Red Cross (2018) concludes: Armed conflict and other situations of violence deprive children of food, clean water, health care – which is particularly troubling given the number of children who die of preventable illnesses, malnutrition, lack of safe shelter, and violence. These factors deprive children of the opportunity to fully experience childhood. Despite the protection afforded by international law, children are especially vulnerable to a myriad of risks. They are all too often drawn into hostilities, directly as child soldiers or indirectly, separated from their families, detained, recruited, forcibly driven from their homes, killed, injured, sexually abused or exploited in other ways.9 The Save the Children Foundation (2018b) proposes that the most effective solution to the lost childhoods of war is a multinational cooperative effort that prevents children from being put at risk of violence, upholds and enforces international laws and standards, strenuously holds violators accountable to the rule of law, and provides adequate social and psychological rehabilitation efforts for children ensnared in the throes of conflict and war (pp. 38–41).

11

Costs of the War on Terror

No taking stock of the deep and complex challenges facing our planet in the contemporary era would be complete without some attention to the world’s continuous state of high alert and apparent wars-without-end that have come to shape our lives since tragedy struck at the collective heart of the United

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States on 9 September 2001. It is far beyond the scope of this book to give effective consideration to the deep-rooted and often under-examined social and historical causes for that attack, in which 2996 innocents lost their lives, approximately 6000 were injured, and an estimated $3.3 trillion in damages were exacted in the global economy during the following decade (Carter & Cox, 2011). Yet, some consideration to the long-term effects of responses by the United States and its allies to the 9/11 attacks is germane to our present discussion of global problems. As Engelhardt (2018) points out: America’s never-ending 21st-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East – and ultimately the planet – as no other imperial power had ever done.10 Yet, the profoundly tragic events of that day could have only been imagined and executed within the fluid and rapid flows of people and objects that have become so central to globalization. Moreover, the deep and extensive changes that have taken place in the fabric and texture of the global geopolitical landscape since those attacks, along with the resulting human and financial costs of the war on terror, continue to weigh heavy on the world. Minimally they impede and limit our collective abilities and the resources needed to correct so many of the other challenges facing our planet, such as massive poverty and inequality, the deterioration of the conditions needed for adequate health, and ecological degradation. Many would argue that the conflicts which have taken place in response to 9/11 have ultimately contributed to, even exacerbated, those problems. In that light, we now proceed with a brief examination of the human and fiscal costs of the war on terror. A 2015 report by the internationally based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) attempted to arrive at “as realistic an estimate as possible” of the total body count during the first 12 years (2002–2014) of the US-led ‘war on terrorism’ in its three main zones of operation: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (p. 15). In the report’s own words: This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. (p. 15)11

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The report further contends, based on available evidence, that the total figure quoted above “is only a conservative estimate”, yet represents a figure as much as 10 times greater than that provided to the general public by decision makers and NGOs. In other words, “the total number of deaths in the three countries … could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely” (Ibid.). From a slightly different perspective, between 2010 and 2014 total casualties in worldwide conflicts related to the containment or spread of terrorism increased by 350 percent, from 49,000 to 180,000, and the majority of these deaths occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria (LaChance, 2016). In 2014 a full 18 percent of the US federal budget, or $615 billion, went to defense spending, and 27 percent of all tax payments went directly to the military, with an additional 18 percent paying for past military actions. In that same year, rates of military spending and interest costs for US campaigns abroad were estimated to be as high as $7.9 billion. Military operations by coalition forces related to 9/11 up to that point also created 3 million displaced Iraqis and nearly 2.5 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan (Carasik, 2015). Indeed, the aforementioned PSR Report observes that because of the incomprehensible level of costs in terms of human lives and suffering caused by US and coalition military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the larger policy objectives of improving global security and advancing human rights have effectively been destroyed (Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2015, p. 6). Despite deep ethical and political questions surrounding civilian casualties and mass non-combatant displacement overshadowing the continuation of NATO and coalition air strikes and ground campaigns against such groups as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, mammoth sums of taxpayer monies continue to be siphoned into military approaches to counter-terrorism. Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs (2017a) estimates that from 2001 to 2018 US financial costs for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, along with related costs of domestic Homeland Security operations, amount to $5.6 trillion. On average, this is the equivalent of at least $23,386 per US taxpayer (Engelhardt, 2018). Furthermore, with no foreseeable downscaling of operations in sight, future interest costs on borrowing for the wars add an estimated $8 trillion through 2054. In fact, the US military is conducting counterterror activities in a total of 76 countries across the globe (Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, 2017a). These expenditures toward the destruction, not the creation or even the support, of human life represent painful opportunity costs for dwindling public service sectors in nations around the world, including additional net depletions of direly needed health care, infrastructure, education, and cultural enrichment programs in an era of forced austerity.

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Recently updated estimates provided by Brown University’s Watson Institute of the human losses stemming from 9/11-spawned military operations since 2001 prove no less jarring. In 17 years of US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, more than 370,000 people have died, including 200,000 civilians, 6,800 US soldiers, and at least 6,900 thousand US contractors (Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, 2018). Numerous journalists and humanitarian aid workers have also perished. For example, on 3 October 2015, with the support of NATO special forces, a US air strike on an operation run by Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) in the northern Kunduz province of Afghanistan killed 42, including 24 patients and 14 members of that NGO (Aljazeera, 2017). Such figures, of course, do not factor in the countless thousands who have lost their lives indirectly in these wars, due to malnutrition, damaged infrastructure, and environmental degradation (Watson Institute, 2017a). Nor do they account for the tremendous social costs of the so-called wars on terror for people on both sides of the conflict. For instance, according to Watson Institute (2018) research, despite extensive and costly reconstruction efforts by US/NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11, totaling over $170 billion, both countries continue to rank extremely low in political freedom, as women are systematically excluded from political participation and experience disproportionately high rates of unemployment. Moreover, since 2001 severe erosion of civil liberties and human rights have also occurred in the US and abroad due to the often overly zealous implementation of surveillance and security measures directed toward domestic citizens (Ibid.).

12

Global Displacement and the Syrian Crisis

War, crises, and persecution, created and fomented on either side of the global terrorism divide, or engendered in the name of any of the vast number of violent ideologies in today’s world, invariably exact massive costs in the currencies of human displacement and dispossession. The world is now witnessing the highest levels of human displacement on record, with 20 people newly displaced every minute of every day as a result of conflict or persecution (Save the Children, 2018a, p. 2). The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (2018) clocks the displacement pace at 1 person every two seconds. Whatever the exact flow, by mid 2018 more than 65 million people, over half under the age of 18, had been forcibly displaced from their homes (Ibid.). Of this figure, 40 million are internally displaced, and 25.4 million are refugees who, on average, can expect to spend 17 years in exile (Save The Children, 2018a). More than

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10 million Afghan, Iraqi, and Pakistani people are living as war refugees and internally displaced persons in grossly inadequate conditions (Watson Institute, 2018) In fact, 40 percent or more of all refugees come from three countries: South Sudan (2.4 million), Afghanistan (2.6 million), and Syria (6.3 million), respectively. And, despite the vociferous claims of anti-immigrant alternative right campaigners in Europe and North America with regard to their countries being “suckers” for the world’s needy, most refugees, as many as 85 percent, seek shelter not in rich countries, but in developing and middle-income nations, with Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Turkey ranking among the top four recipients. Finally, there are at present an estimated 10 million stateless people in the world, with no recognized nationality. This group is particularly prone to risk and vulnerability because they lack the essential protections of citizenship and are systematically denied basic civil rights, such as education, healthcare, employment, and freedom of movement (UNHRC, 2018). Of all affected countries, Syria has perhaps experienced the severest portion of trauma caused by the world refugee crisis, representing a major source of regional displacement and a driving force in the exodus of migrants fleeing across the Mediterranean. A recent article in Foreign Affairs characterized the situation in the country as “the worst human security disaster of the twentyfirst century” (Abrahms et al., 2017). Although the country’s total population of 18 million make up less than one percent of the world’s inhabitants, one-third of all refugees are Syrian (Yahya, 2018). An estimated 11 million Syrians, about half the national population at the time fighting began, have been internally displaced or have fled the country since March 2011 (Abrahms et al., 2017). In a 2015 interview, then US President Barack Obama openly admitted the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose influence and attacks inside an already massively destabilized Syria forebode the continued growth of radical Islam, “is a direct outgrowth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion” (Vice News, 18/03/15, emphasis added). The power vacuum left by the Syrian civil war, and the spill-over from the yet-to-be-resolved 2003 invasion and occupation of neighboring Iraq by coalition forces, proved fertile ground for the spread of religious extremists such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State in the region (Thompson, 2015). Stimulating the spread of the very anti-Western extremist groups that US and coalition military campaigns are intended to eliminate has been a key precipitant of the refugee crisis presently unfolding in Europe and the Mediterranean. Although the present massive civil conflict in Syria began after a small group of youths were detained and tortured in 2011 for scrawling anti-government graffiti on a school wall (World Vision, 2015), the more than 5.5 million people who have fled Syria to date, along with the 6.1 million

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internally displaced, are certainly an integral part of that larger crisis (Yahya, 2018). Along with the recurrent massive waves of forced departures and human dislocations, extensive damage to infrastructure and civil institutions from the war have been equally catastrophic (Human Rights Watch, 2017). A broad popular uprisng coupled with a ruthless, entrenched, and reactive dictatorial government have exacted severe tolls on human lives in Syria. In the first four years of the civil war, more than 240,000 people were killed, including 12,000 children, and one million Syrians were reportedly wounded or permanently disabled (World Vision, 2015). According to the Syrian Center for Policy Research, an independent Syrian research organization, the death toll from the conflict as of February 2016 was 470,000 (Human Rights Watch, 2017), with an estimated 11 percent of Syria’s population killed or wounded in the conflict (Black, 2016). In March of 2018, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring organization, claimed more than half a million people had been killed in the Syrian war since its origins. Of these, a full 85 percent of the dead were civilians killed by the forces of the Syrian government and its allies, including air assaults on civilian populated areas involving joint Syrian-Russian forces (cited in Reuters, 12/03/18). Many of the social, economic, and political consequences of rampant and unmanageable violence and destruction now prevail in Syria. Between 2010 and 2015, life expectancy in the country dropped from 70 to 55, and economic losses resulting from the war were estimated to be $255 billion (Human Rights Watch, 2017). The Syrian economy, for the most part, has been shattered, and healthcare, education, and other essential human infrastructure have collapsed. Between 2.1 and 2.4 million school-age children have stopped attending school, and 5,000 to 14,000 schools have been damaged, destroyed, or occupied. An estimated 4.8 million people live in areas so affected by the war that it is difficult for aid groups to gain access and provide assistance (Worldvision, 2015). By mid 2016, an estimated 1 million Syrians were entirely beyond the reach of life-saving humanitarian aid because of escalation in the conflict. Since the beginning of the uprising, 117,000 civilians have been detained or disappeared, mostly at the behest of government forces. Torture and illtreatment are commonplace in detention facilities and thousands have died in custody; countless are held incommunicado without legal assistance (Human Rights Watch, 2017). Although half a million Syrians were able to take refuge in central Europe, mostly in Germany and Hungary, (amid great fanfare and self-applause, followed by equally great recriminations and rejection of the new arrivals), in truth it has been Syria’s closest neighbors who have borne the brunt of the spiraling immigrant crisis, with nearly five million refugees fleeing to nearby Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey (Abrahms et al., 2017) By

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2018 there are 3.3 million registered refugees in Turkey, one million in Lebanon, and 650,000 in Jordan. Throughout the entire seven years of the war, Canada and the United States have taken approximately 50,000 and 18,000 Syrian refugees, respectively (Yahya, 2018). The massive tragedy that has come to typify Syria’s attempt to create its own “Arab Spring” represents an amplified version of the numerous cases of civil war, internal displacement, and refugee crises taking shape across the planet, with the eye of numerous storms in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Besides Syria, at least 14 other conflicts have erupted or reignited around the world in the past five years, including eight in Africa and three in the Middle East (Yahya, 2018). In 2014 the UN estimated the number of people displaced by war, conflict, or persecution worldwide stood at a record 59.5 million, an increase of 8.3 million from the previous year (UNHRC, 2014). Apart from the well-publicized atrocities in Syria, wars in Ukraine, Nigeria, and South Sudan, followed in sequence by Afghanistan and Somalia, swelled the numbers of refugees and the internally displaced, leaving one in every 122 people on the planet either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum by 2015 (BBC News, 16 June 2015). According to the international relief organization, Mercy Corps (2018), 68 million people worldwide are presently displaced from their homes. In Afghanistan, for instance, unemployment, food insecurity, and political instability have caused the internal displacement of over one million, while nearly 2.6 million Afghanis have been forced to leave to neighboring Iran, Pakistan, or to Europe. Similarly, the largest refugee crisis in Africa is presently occurring in South Sudan, where more than 4 million people have been forced to flee since the start of a brutal civil war in 2013. This mass displacement includes 2.4 million South Sudanese, mostly women and children, who have been pushed into neighboring countries. And, again, government-driven violence in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State in August 2017 forced more than 700,000 ethnic muslim Rohingya to cross into southeast Bangladesh, where an estimated 212 thousand Rohingya had already taken refuge during earlier periods of persecution and violence. At present, Rohingya refugees are packed tightly into desperately overcrowded migrant camps and ad hoc communities highly vulnerable to seasonal monsoons and cyclones, and more than half of all Rohingya refugees are children (Mercy Corps, 2018). Finally, according to Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), an independent, non-profit humanitarian crisis news agency, some of the most urgent and impending humanitarian emergencies about to reach crisis dimension in the world today are: – The massive displacement crisis unfolding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where more than 1.7 million people abandoned their farms and villages in 2017;

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– Two and a half years of civil war in Yemen that has pushed nearly 30 percent of the population to the verge of starvation, inflicted severe malnutrition on 400 thousand children, and killed more than 5,500 civilians; – Four years of the mostly Muslim-Christian conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) that has left more than two million people hungry, created 633,000 internally displaced, and pushed a half million refugees to the doorsteps of neighboring countries; – The rapid descent of Venezuela from a regional economic powerhouse to a political, economic, and social catastrophe, characterized by acute shortages, hyperinflation, widespread malnutrition, and social unrest so fierce and polarized that it undermines state functionality; and – The heightened strains in post-Ghaddafi Libya caused partly by becoming the region’s largest way station for the persistent mass refugee exodus from Africa to Europe, while the tasks of internal nation-building have become near impossible due to multiple and conflicting governments, militias, and tribes.12 Let us now turn our attention to an unfortunate and largely unforeseen social, political, and moral corollary of the migrant crisis: the heightened intolerance and persecution of some of the world’s most vulnerable under the guise of a rising tide of right-wing populist nationalism in Europe and the United States.

13

Migrant Bashing, the Alt-Right, and the Rise of Populist Nationalism

Before we examine the one common denominator in all alternative right political movements today – an avowed and unabashed anti-migrant agenda – a brief consideration is in order of some of the refugee-related factors, especially in the case of Europe, that help to explain the arrival of the “immigrant question” on the political landscape today. In broadest terms, continued and intensified violence and upheaval in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia rapidly began to change migration trends in Europe at the end of the first decade of this century. According to Park (2015), these migrations came to Europe in three waves. The first occurred as thousands of Tunisians started to arrive at the Italian island of Lampedusa following the upheavals of the Arab Spring that began in late 2010, representing a drastic increase in the number of unauthorized entries into the EU from that country. The second spike also involved primarily African migrants, mostly comprised of sub-Saharan Africans living in Libya, who fled in response to the upheavals of the Libyan civil war and the ousting of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011. Finally, the worsening conditions of

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internal conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eritrea witnessed a third huge increase of migrants and refugees in 2015, the majority of whom were Syrian (Park, 2015). In the case of all three migrant “waves, however, it is important to remember that the vast majority of new arrivals were forced to abandon their homes and way of life, not because they had committed any grievous wrong, but, as is most commonly the case for the world’s refugees, because they were facing overwhelming levels of violence, danger, and insecurity in the countries from which they fled. Whatever the causes, the increase in African and Middle Eastern migrants and refugees landing on the shores of Europe by 2015 represented levels of truly historic proportion. By early December, more than 911,000 refugees and migrants had arrived from Africa or the Middle East (Spinder, 2015). At year’s end, an estimated 1,004,356 migrants had come by sea, up from 219,000 the year before, or an increase of almost 500 percent (International Organization for Migration, 2016). The resulting “migrant crisis” was plagued with numerous and well-documented tragedies. For instance, over 600 migrants from Libya drowned in the Mediterranean when their boat capsized shortly before midnight on April 18, and Austrian authorities uncovered the bodies of 71 refugees and migrants in a refrigeration truck abandoned by human traffickers in August (UNHCR, 2015). With 3,771 deaths of migrants and refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe, 2015 was the deadliest year on record for that journey, representing 70 percent of all recorded trans Mediterranean migration deaths for the year (International Organization for Migration, 2016). So, it is from this backdrop of a rapid influx of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa into Europe between 2011 and 2015 that the ensuing crisis and conservative reaction on the continent must be understood. Driven and pushed by a series of “Arab Springs” in North Africa, forced labor policies in Eritrea, and a unique combination of democratic impulses and acute destabilizations caused by the War on Terror in the Middle East, an accelerating refugee rain poured down in a very short amount of time, and Europe was left attempting to absorb the resulting floods. As the BBC News (2016) noted: The conflict in Syria continues to be by far the biggest driver of migration. But the ongoing violence in Afghanistan and Iraq, abuses in Eritrea, as well as poverty in Kosovo, are also leading people to look for new lives elsewhere. It wasn’t long before social and political discourse on the continent took a marked shift to the Right in a form and magnitude not seen since the 1930s, as

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right-wing nationalist populist parties, one-after-another, captured sectors of political power in central Europe.

14

From Migrant Receptivity to Intruder Rejection

Yet, during the first several years of the migrant rain in Europe, the moral tone and actions of many key countries remained receptive and inclusive. By 2015 more than a million asylum seekers had entered Germany under an “EASY” system of asylum processing, while Hungary went about voluntarily processing the second largest number of migrant asylum applications, 177,130, on the continent (BBC News, 2016). In 2014, the Prime Minister of Sweden, a country with some of the most liberal immigration laws in Europe, encouraged his citizens to “open their hearts” to refugees seeking shelter. A year later, 165,000 asylum seekers were allowed to enter Sweden, more per capita than any other European nation (Cerrotti, 2017). Yet, since 2015 all three countries have seen major right-wing political challenges to open border policies and refugee assistance programs. Similar movements, often referred to under the semantic umbrella of the alternative right, or “alt-right”, have spread across the continent, sharing a common rejection of cultural diversity and immigration, especially with regard to new arrivals from Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim nations. Thus, across Europe nationalist and far-right parties began making significant electoral gains, either by taking office or by pushing more moderate forces to the Right. Issues of national identity, the dislocations of globalization, deep suspicions of Islam, and Euroscepticism have come to the forefront (BBC News, 6 May 2018). Moreover, many of the Europe’s New Right movements have established links to ultra nationalist and white supremist groups that patrol their country’s borders, extort immigrant businesses, harass women in hijabs, and send small armies of thugs to political rallies to pick fights with the opposition (Holleran, 2018). “These groups do not live in fear of prosecution for hate crimes: They maintain Facebook pages and websites” (Ibid.). In the case of Germany, the increasing strength of a rightward swerve in migration policy resulted in the establishment of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party in 2013 (Financial Times, 2018). First represented as an anti-Euro party, AfD buttressed popular support for strict anti-immigrant policies in response to increased concerns among Germans regarding the disruptions of the migrant influx of 2015. The AfD Party often attempts to increase German anxieties about immigration by playing up the supposed cultural corrosive effects of Islam on Europe and German society, pointing out that many of the 1 million migrants allowed into the country by Chancellor

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Merkel in 2015 were Muslims from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan (BBC News, 6 May 2018). Similarly, despite Hungary’s inundation with migrant applications in 2015 and its historically small immigrant population in comparison to other European countries, the leader of the National Conservative Party, Viktor Orban, remains a harsh opponent of open border policies and has vowed to defend Hungary against what he claims is a loss of cultural identity due to illegal Muslim immigration. Clearly a nationalist populist, Orban was able to boost his declining approval ratings in 2015 by building a fence along the Hungary-Serbia border at the height of the migrant surge. He also imposed increased border restrictions with neighboring Slovenia, the first time in 20 years such limits had been implemented between two European Union partners (BBC News, 6 May 2018). Not surprising, the leader of Slovenia’s ruling anti-immigrant Democratic Party (SDS), Janez Jansa, has forged an alliance with Orban and uses many of the same anti-migrant tactics (Financial Times, 2018). Shortly after construction of the Hungary-Serbia border fence, other EU countries began to impose their own limits on shared border crossings, from increased passport checks to sending police onto cross-border trains to summarily detain and question brown and black passengers. Another alarming expression of increased anti-migrant and racist sentiments in Hungary is the recent emergence of the extremist Hungarian Guard (Magyar Gárda), whose leaders talk openly about carrying on the legacy of the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s wartime fascist party that murdered thousands of Jews during the holocaust (Holleran, 2018). In numerous other nations in Europe, strong and vocal right-wing nationalist populist movements, with vigorous anti-migrant platforms, also pepper the political landscape. In France, where 47 percent of participants in a recent poll agreed that their country “doesn’t feel like home anymore” due to foreigners (Osborne, 2016), Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front continues to be a significant political presence (BBC News, 6 May 2018). Although soundly defeated by Emmanuel Macron for the national presidency in May 2017, Le Pen’s party received 33.9 percent of the ballots in the second stage of the election, the largest number of votes cast for an extremist candidate in France’s postwar history. Equally troubling is the fact that more of France’s young people than its elders presently support the National Front’s ultra-right, nationalist agenda (Mounk, 2018). Hard-line anti-migrant parties have also made momentous headway recently in Austria, where pressure from the ultra-conservative nationalist populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) has pushed the ruling conservative Austrian People’s Party further to the right on immigration issues (BBC, 6 May 2018). And, again, Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS), an adamant critic of the EUs handling of increased migration, began moving forward with a plethora of repressive measures shortly after making a strong win in the 2015 elections (BBC, 16 June 2015). The PiS has attempted to limit

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freedom of movement guaranteed under the EU’s Schengen Area Agreement; they have also launched attacks on pro-immigration activists and other human rights campaigners through media censorship. Recently, the PiS attempted to make it a criminal offense to openly accuse the Polish nation or state of complicity in the Nazi Holocaust (Holleran, 2018). Some view this as an attempt to exonerate and distance certain former key Polish officials and public officials from their complicity in Nazi war crimes (BBC News, 6 May 2018). Possibly the most worrisome crescendo of anti-migrant populism to occur in Europe took place recently in Italy.13 A founding member of the European Union, Italy has seen a rise to power of a coalition government involving the far-right League Party and the “anti-establishment” Five Star Movement (BBC News, 6 May 2018). Both parties play heavily to spreading xenophobia, and a recent poll has ranked Italy as the most anti-immigrant country in Europe (Osborne, 2018). Both ruling parties are Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant, although the Five Star Movement also encapsulates several stock-and-trade Leftist leanings. Nevertheless, both have expressed plans for mass deportations of undocumented migrants (BBC News, 6 May 2018), and the League Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister/Minister of the Interior for the coalition government, Matteo Salvini, recently refused to attend a EU meeting of interior ministers to discuss, among other things, EU migrant policies. Instead, he unilaterally pledged to round-up and deport a half million illegal immigrants presently living in Italy (Financial Times, 2018).

15

Strains in the Alliance and Fortress Europe

One of the most significant impacts of the anti-migrant populism sweeping Europe are the strains it has placed on the EU alliance. These strains exist on several levels. One source of strain, of course, has resulted from the massive migrant influx, especially in 2015, that has proved a moral, political, and economic slippery slope for continental states who once touted open door policies for the persecuted of the world. Indeed, by the end of 2015 the flow of refugees and migrants had “reached an unprecedented scale bringing some member states of the European Union to the brink of their ability to receive more people” (McAllister, 2015). This prompted members to re-examine their obligations to the Union, including agreements for shared refugee management. Relatedly, EU member states have yet to work out the thorny question of how best to distribute appropriate migrant quotas and levels of assistance between nations. Reaching such an agreement is confounded by several factors. As the most common ports of call for new arrivals crossing the Mediterranean; Italy, Spain, and Greece receive the greatest absolute number of migrants and refugees from

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Africa and the Middle East. Yet, because Germany and France are often the first choice of destinations for many migrants, they receive the largest number of migrants and refugees attempting to establish permanent residency. And, then there are the recalcitrant EU members in central and eastern Europe, like Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia, who are only tangentially affected by migrant treks, and therefore strongly resist shouldering any migrant responsibility or costs (Financial Times, 2018). And still another source of tension has to do with the pronounced lack of success European nations have had providing a meaningful place at the table for migrants distinctly different from themselves along lines of culture and race. As Mounk (2018) contends: European nations have mostly failed to assimilate newcomers. Across the continent, immigrants have very high unemployment rates. Many of them speak the local language poorly and refuse to adopt the country’s customs. They are twice as likely as natives to say that they do not feel a sense of connection to their country. There is strong segregation and self-segregation: More than half of Europeans admit that they don’t have a single friend of a different race. And most of these divisions actually seem to deepen from generation to generation.14 Consequently, for all these reasons the overarching trend in present-day Europe is a charting of nation-state courses away from altruistic concerns for migrants and refugees, toward narrow, self-serving nationalistic protections and prohibitions, in some countries involving the open scapegoating and persecution of those who are different, often encouraged and ratcheted up by Right and populist-Right movements. In combination, these developments have led to accusations of the arrival of an undemocratic, inward looking, aggressively nationalistic “Fortress Europe” within sight on the horizon (Financial Times, 2018) And, of course, little of this would make much sense without positioning the rise of European nationalistic populism against the backdrop of the overtly xenophobic, devoutly anti-immigrant, demonstrably Islamophobic, and covertly racist countenance and policies of the US President Donald J. Trump, staunch advocate of a “first line of defense” border wall running the length of the southern United States (Wasington Post, 13/03/18), and responsible for a “zero tolerance” immigration policy that to date has separated more than 2,000 children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border (Kelley, 2018). In our opening consideration of some of the major crises facing our planet at this historical juncture, we have thus far given hopefully ample attention to poverty, inequality and concentrations of wealth, the global gender gap, the persistent AIDS pandemic, the geography of poor health, the loss of children

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and childhoods to war, the costs of the war on terror, and the interrelationship between the refugee crisis and the international rise of the alternative right. We now conclude our summary of urgent problems facing the world by turning our gaze to several critical environmental predicaments, after which we will start a conversation, returned to at length later in the book, regarding the potential corrective capacity of education in our world of trouble.

16

Global Warming, Extreme Weather, and Ravaged Biodiversity

One of the most worrisome indicators of the present state of the world are the threats posed by global warming and the rapid loss of the earth’s biodiversity. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the global average temperature has increased 1.5 degrees F. over the past 130 years, with more than half of that increase occurring over the past 35 years. Moreover, the first decade of this century represents the hottest ten years since reliable records began in the late 1800s.15 Citing a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Tol et al. (2004) contend there is considerable evidence that global greenhouse gas emissions increased by as much as 70 percent between 1970 and 2004, contributing to an overall planetary warming effect of a full 0.7°C during the previous 100 years and a continual rise in sea levels due to the thermal expansion of water and melting glaciers.16 This sea level increase is predicted to be from 20 to as many as 70 centimeters over the next 100 years (Kump et al., 2004). Moreover, every one of the past 40 years has seen global temperatures higher than the 20th century average, and the 12 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.16 According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) (2018), 2016 remains the hottest recorded year on the planet, with 2015 and 2017 tied for a close second. By the first six months, 2018 was on track to be the fourth hottest year on record (Levenson & Miller, 2018). An abundance of evidence suggests that the primary source of the rising temperatures associated with global climate change involves heat-trapping emissions created when coal, oil, and gas are burned to generate electricity, or to fuel cars and industrial production, or a “greenhouse effect”.17 Levenson and Miller (2018) summarize this understanding: The cause of … climate change is the trapping of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. That phenomenon, exacerbated by human industrialization, traps heat in the oceans and on land and raises the temperature of the entire globe.18

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Even seemingly small increases in global surface temperature represent significant additions to accumulated heat levels over the long run, that, in turn, cause unusually high regional and seasonal temperatures. The long-term results include the melting of snow cover and sea ice, and the disruption of established habitats for plants and animals (Sanchez-Lugo et al., 2018). Extreme temperatures in the form of frequent and long-lasting heat waves also create human health risks: cramps, exhaustion, strokes, even death – as well as diminished crop growth and depletion of scarce energy resources caused by increased demands for human cooling systems (United Nations Climate Change, 2018). The World Meteorological Organization (2018) estimates that heat-related illness or death has climbed steadily in the last 40 years, with around 30 percent of the world’s population now living in areas with potentially deadly temperatures at least 20 days a year. The multinational Paris Agreement, created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) and ratified by 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of world’s emissions, seeks to curtail some of these adverse effects by strengthening “the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees” from pre-industrial levels, achieved primarily through the promotion of sustainable low carbon energy alternatives.19 Yet, unless much more aggressive climate action is taken soon, given present trends, many experts predict an overall increase in global warming of about 3 degrees C by 2099 (see Harvey, 2018). One of the ramifications of an increase in global warming of this magnitude is that more than half of North America, Europe, East Asia, as well as parts of southern South America, are likely to experience at least a 300 percent increase in extreme and destructive weather patterns (Ibid.). Indeed, one of the strongest correlations associated with the earth’s warming trend is the increased incidence of extreme or irregular weather conditions. These events often defy “normal expectations” of local seasonal patterns, as they typically involve record-breaking markers in the form of heat waves, droughts, torrential storms, floods, or massive wildfires, to name a few (Huber & Gulledge, 2011). Such weather-related disasters are becoming more frequent, with a yearly average of 306 extreme weather events between 2007 and 2016, a 46 percent increase since 2000 (McCarthy, 2017). Many experts caution that, unless stemmed, weather events of severe magnitude, driven by and combined with global warming, will greatly disrupt global oceanic and atmospheric cycles that circulate energy throughout the planet, causing numerous and widespread adverse consequences which, while for the present cannot be fully calculated, nevertheless foretell potentially catastrophic planetary outcomes (Kump et al., 2004).

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Recent instances of extreme weather include monsoon floods on the Indian subcontinent, severe drought and landslides in Africa, flooding and monsoons in South Asia, and hurricanes and major earth quakes in North America (US News and World Reports, 2017). Extreme weather events deliver burdensome setbacks to economic development, managed migration, food security, and health. In 2016, for example, 797 weather-related disasters caused $129 billion of economic losses around the world, up one-third from 2014’s $97 billion and nearly double the total $69 billion of extreme weather damage in 2007 (McCarthy, 2017). In the same year, 2016, weather-related disasters displaced 23.5 million people worldwide, with especially large numbers affected by floods and storms in the Asia-Pacific region. The following year drought in Somalia reduced the yield of more than half of the country’s cropland and caused the deaths of 40–60 percent of all herd animals in the region (World Meteorological Organization, 2018). Aside from the hundreds of thousands of people who die each year in floods, earthquakes, landslides, and fires caused by extreme weather conditions; increases in world air pollution levels, largely created by CO2 emissions, also constitute an extreme and immense health risk at the global level. Between 1990 and 2014 carbon emissions increased nearly 50 percent (UNDP, 2016). The World Health Organization (2018c) estimates that 91 percent of the world’s population did not breathe clean air by 2016, with more than half of all urban dwellers exposed to outdoor levels of air pollution at least 2.5 times higher than that permitted by international standards. Outdoor air pollution in both cities and rural areas contributed to 4.2 million deaths in 2016. Combined with indoor sources, polluted air in that year was a significant factor in 7 million deaths, or one in every eight deaths globally (p. 10): Potentially, irreparable global environmental damage is also heralded by the rapid loss of the earth’s biodiversity. Biodiversity (or biological diversity) is a collective term meaning the totality and variety of life on Earth. Biodiversity includes genetic diversity within species, the variety among species, and the range of ecosystems within which life exists and interacts. (Hood, 2010) Importantly, the living systems involved in biodiversity “need to retain their complexity … and resilience” in order to “keep the air breathable and water drinkable, and provide nutritious food” (WWF, 2016, p. 12). However, there remains some uncertainty as to whether a reduction in biodiversity and species extinction can reach a “tipping point”, after which large-scale ecosystem collapse takes place. Some argue that species loss and the resulting decline in

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biodiversity in the 20th century represent the same sorts of regular change that occur in all living ecosystems over time, no different than the natural declines and mass extinctions that took place on the Earth’s surface in the remote past (see Hance, 2018). Nevertheless, the current rate of species extinction is many times faster than the long stretches of past geological time which, based on fossil records, may have lost on average one mammal and one bird species every 500 to 1000 years (Hood, 2010). That is, in the last several decades the loss of biodiversity on the planet has been of a tremendously different quality and quantity than previously recorded. In 2007, rates of species extinction, largely created by humans, approached upwards of 100 times this natural rate, and is expected to accelerate by an increase of from 1,000 to 10,000 percent by the middle of this century (UNEP, 2007). The principal assaults on biodiversity involve habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation of natural resources, territorial invasion and transfer of outside species, and climate change and pollution (UNEP, 2012). The severe reduction of specific species and the constriction of natural habitats worldwide are evidenced by numerous longitudinal studies, posing results that are nothing short of alarming. For example, based on data gathered between 2000 and 2005, the UN-sponsored Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) reported that 10–30 percent of all vertebrate species (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians), were threatened with extinction because of human activity.20 Hood (2010) estimated that one in four mammals, one in three amphibians, and one in eight birds are facing extinction. Furthermore, the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Index study, based on research between 1970 and 2012 of 3,706 vertebrate species, concluded that a decline of 58 percent in all monitored groups, or a “persistent downward trend”, had taken place (WWF, 2016, p. 12). And, again, another broad study covering roughly the same time frame found that upwards of two-thirds of monitored species were threatened with extinction (UNEP, 2012). Finally, in more recent research comprising nearly half of all know vertebrate species, Ceballos et al. (2017) established a 32 percent decrease in both population size and in range of habitat; 40 percent of all mammals in the study had experienced “severe population declines”. In 2017, an estimated 25,821 species of animals and organisms across the planet were considered “threatened”, as well as a total of 11,773 flowering plants (Statista, 2017). However, it is important to note that the number of species identified as globally threatened with extinction may be as much as 50 percent too low, because of the huge number of so-called non-threatened species that remain dependent on those threatened for survival (Hood, 2010).

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Evidence of shrinking and damaged habitats for many of the world’s species is also mounting. Since 1970, twenty percent of all seagrass habitats have been lost, with an equal decline of mangrove habitats since 1980. One hundred million hectares of the world’s forest disappeared over a five-year period, 2000 to 2005, and as much as 95 percent of habitats in wetland regions had been destroyed (UNEP, 2012). Between 1990 and 2012, thirteen million hectares of forest were eliminated yearly (UNDP, 2016) And, relatedly, there has been a 38 percent deterioration in the condition of coral reefs globally since 1980, and two-thirds of the world’s largest rivers are classified as “moderately to severely fragmented” by dams and reservoirs (Ibid., p. 134). In Southeast Asia, more than 80 percent of existing reefs may be at risk (Hood, 2010). Because the continued vitality of ecosystems and biodiversity contributes to the provision of “food, medicines, fish and timber products, as well as biomass, energy and water”, their decline and possible eventual demise foreshadows “negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization” (UNEP, 2012, p. 146).

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Section Conclusion: Grim Prospects for World Biodiversity

Given the current rate and magnitude of ecological damage taking place across the planet, some of the basic preconditions that support and sustain human life are being undone. The severity of this destruction is so pervasive, rapid, and possibly irreversible that some researchers have taken to referring to the dire implications as an entirely new era in the Earth’s history (see, for example, WWF, 2016.) Thus, the Anthropocene Era, or “Great Acceleration”, is said to currently be underway, during which humans rather than natural forces are for the first time the primary drivers of planetary change (Ibid., p. 17). This is occurring as increased human pressure threatens the natural resources upon which humanity depends, increases the risk of water and food insecurity, and intensifies competition over natural resources (Ibid., p. 15). Ceballos et al. (2017) refer to this accelerated ecological demise as a planetary “biological annihilation” that underscores a present and ongoing “major extinction event”. Consequently: Such is the magnitude of our impact on the planet that the Anthropocene might be characterized by the world’s sixth mass extinction event. In the past such extinction events took place over hundreds of thousands to millions of years. What makes the Anthropocene so remarkable is that

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these changes are occurring within an extremely condensed period of time. (Ibid., p. 10) Or, as Hood (2010) comments: The permanent loss of large numbers of species over a relatively short period of geological time is known as a mass extinction. According to the fossil record, there have been five historical mass extinctions … The reasons for these are often related to changes in the Earth’s environment and atmosphere. Many scientists now believe that the Earth is facing a sixth mass extinction, in part because of human activities.21 Thus, most present indicators regarding the planet’s future species preservation and biodiversity remain rather grim. According to Elwood (2010), if left unchecked, the decline of the earth’s ecology may result in the disintegration of the very life-support systems upon which life-as-we-know-it depends, including the planetary water cycle, the composition of the atmosphere, the assimilation of waste, the recycling of nutrients, the pollination of crops, and the delicate homeostatic interplay involved in species maintenance (p. 112). During the next century, the planet’s extinction rate may climb as high as 10,000 times the preindustrial level, with the loss of an additional million species in the next 50 years alone (Exploring the Environment, n.d.). There is a self-apparent and well-worn saying in theories about change in human systems that is quite apropos in this, our current, ecological crisis: “Insanity occurs when you do the same things, over-and-over, yet expect things to be different”. Perhaps the real solution to our predicament involves more than laws and regulations that attempt to protect and preserve species and ecosystems under siege. Although such measures are certainly useful, they are unable to impact the “whole problem” so long as entire segments of the world’s population are unable to meet even its most basic human needs under present institutional arrangements. Perhaps, rather, we need to consider some of the deeper structural, systemic factors that sanction the more destructive and injust ways we carry on our relationships together, including our relationships with the natural environment. Many of the darker consequences of the global political economic order, driven by planetary neoliberalism, have been explored in this chapter. We will soon focus on the impact of neoliberalism on systems of local education worldwide. I hope the reader will increasingly “get the picture” that the onslaught on education by neoliberalism involves the same political economic system that fosters such social ills as the global poverty, inequality, and lost childhoods previously discussed. Relevant to a preliminary consideration

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of global neoliberalism, let us conclude our examination of prevalent threats to species survival and biodiversity with a quote by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) (2016): Structural elements of these (ecological destructive) systems such as the use of gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of well-being, the pursuit of infinite economic growth on a finite planet, the prevalence of short-term gain over long-term continuity in many business and political models, and the externalization of ecological and social costs in the current economic system encourage unsustainable choices by individuals, businesses and governments … The behaviours that lead to these patterns are largely determined by the way consumerist societies are organized, and fixed in place through the underlying rules and structures such as values, social norms, laws and policies that govern everyday choices. (p. 13) And, as we shall see, it is the structural elements of global neoliberalism that increasingly govern everyday choices of teaching and learning around the world, and put the social and civic viability of local education everywhere at risk.

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The Ecological Demise of War

Sadly, as is the case with innocent civilians caught in the crosshairs of war, it is often those with no vested interest or involvement in the organized campaigns of violence who suffer many of the immeasurable hardships that result from military conflict. This is equally true of the war-related destruction of the environment: the larger the human and material devastation created by military violence, the larger the scale of ecological demise. Recent examples of this demise abound. During the Rwandan civil war from 1990 to ‘94, for instance, to survive in materially deprived conditions, occupants of displacement camps near a major park removed 1,000 tons of wood for two years, ultimately damaging 105 sq km of the adjacent forest and stripping bare 35 sq km (Mathiesen, 2014). Similarly, during its 2006 war with Lebanon, Israel bombed a Lebanese power station’s oil storage depot. Fifteen thousand tons of heating oil formed a 150-kilometer oil slick along the coast of Lebanon and Syria that took months to remove (Hilleary, 2016). Yet, the environmental costs of war rarely receive large-scale recognition or popular attention. In commemorating the “International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict”, the United Nations (2016) poignantly states:

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Though mankind has always counted its war casualties in terms of dead and wounded soldiers and civilians, destroyed cities and livelihoods, the environment has often remained the unpublicized victim of war. Water wells have been polluted, crops torched, forests cut down, soils poisoned, and animals killed to gain military advantage.22 The “spinning” of public awareness toward the loss of human life and away from the environmental costs was certainly true during the United States’ increasing involvement in the Vietnam War (1955–1975). Although U.S. forces sprayed 79 million liters of herbicides and defoliants over about one-seventh of the land area of the southern half of the country (DeWeerdt, 2008), evening TV news programs focused exclusively on military “body counts” and “territory gains and losses” (Achenbach, 2018). The primary land-based targets of these herbicide campaigns were the hardwood forests and mangroves growing along the Mekong Delta, sprayed in an attempt to expose the ground beneath and deprive communist guerrillas of daytime cover and concealed transport routes. Trees targeted with defoliage lost their leaves for several months, creating disastrous results for the biodiversity of the surrounding tropical forest ecosystems, including thousands species of plants, insects, and birds (DeWeerdt, 2008). As Peter Zahler of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) paradoxically observes: “The same terrain that allows fighters to strike and disappear back into the hills has also, historically, enabled wildlife to survive” (quoted in Frank, 2010). Contemporaneously, by 2014 only 11 countries in the world were not involved in some form of armed conflict (Mathiesen, 2014). With such a large geographical area of the planet affected by war, the immediate and long-term, real and potential, environmental toll is enormous. This grim truth is nowhere better illustrated than with the ecological effects of years of post 9/11 coalition-led military campaigns and civil war. On the one hand, due to the shear enormity of the environmental footprint left by the millions of internally displaced persons and war refugees in areas where camps are set up in Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan; government officials and relief agencies struggle with declining water levels and the overwhelming task of waste management in makeshift transition camps (Zwijnenburg, 2016). On the other, the scale and number of the military vehicles involved in these wars exact a tremendous environmental toll in and around conflict areas. Military vehicles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan consume petroleum-based fuels at an extremely high rate. Consequently they produce many hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and sulfur dioxide, in addition to CO2. Air pollution from military vehicles and weaponry has adversely affected the health of both civilians and combatants in surrounding areas. War-related public health

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concerns are also compounded by the exceptionally high amount of dust created by heavy military vehicles. Furthermore, much of the water supply in these conflict areas has been contaminated by oil from military vehicles and depleted uranium from ammunition (Watson Institute, 2015).

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Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria: The Environmental Costs of War

In order to achieve a clearer point of reference for some of the ways war can disrupt and destroy the environment, it may prove useful to look more closely at several Middle Eastern countries that have not only been ravaged by war in recent years, but for which the environmental costs of military conflict have proved tremendous. These three countries are Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Due to nearly four decades of war, beginning with the Soviet invasion in 1979, large numbers of wildlife and stretches of natural habitat have disappeared in Afghanistan (Mathiesen, 2014). In 2003, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released its evaluation of Afghanistan’s environmental conditions and found, among other things, that decades of conflict and violence: Have had devastating impacts not only on the people of Afghanistan, but also on its natural environment, once pristine and rich in biological diversity, but now suffering from years of overexploitation … and habitat loss. (UNEP, 2003, p. 4) The report concludes that in a country where over 80 percent of the population relies directly on natural resources to meet daily needs, widespread environmental degradation caused by military conflict, internal displacement, overexploitation, and a lack of effective governance “poses an immense threat to future livelihoods” (Ibid., p. 48). In 2005 the country’s Environmental Protection Agency listed a total of 33 endangered species. By the end of 2010, the list had grown to over 80 endangered species of plants and animals. Furthermore, areas in Afghanistan most affected by conflict are home to some of the world’s rarest creatures: gazelles, cheetahs, hyenas, Turanian tigers, and snow leopards among them. The mountain regions where the US recently sought bin Laden were particularly hard hit by intense fighting; perilously, the caves and steep topography of this area are also home to and provide refuge for bears, Marco Polo sheep, gazelles, and mountain leopards. Some of these animals are already on the verge of extinction, and, with only a few more deaths caused by war, could be pushed entirely out of existence (Frank, 2010).

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Along these lines, social upheaval caused by armed conflict in Afghanistan has also buttressed illegal logging as ready sources of funding for local militias, particularly by local warlords, and significant stretches of wildlife habitat have been destroyed in the process (Watson Institute, 2015). The stripping of natural habitats, as commonly occurs with excessive logging operations, combined with the disruptions of military engagements, have either killed or severely altered the migratory patterns of tens of thousands of birds that customarily move through Afghanistan each year, reducing their numbers by as much as 85 percent (Frank, 2010). A cursory examination of the recent spate of wars in Iraq, our second Middle Eastern country useful as contextual illustration of the environmental demise of war, finds matters equally dire. During the Iraq–Iran War (1980–1988), for example, damage to Iraq’s portion of the seminal Mesopotamia wetlands that partly run along the southern border with Iran was a dark precursor to decades of conflict-induced environmental degradation that followed. The largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East before the war, a crucial stopover for millions of migratory birds traveling between Siberia and Africa, and spawning grounds for an abundance of marine life, this area once possessed some of the richest biodiversity in the region. However, the fragile balance of the marshlands’ eco systems was repeatedly disrupted during the war, as both sides built dikes, drained large areas, and used flooding as military strategy. Damage to the marshes was compounded in the 1990s when Sadam Hussein drained most of the wetlands in response to a Shia rebellion in the south of the country. By the year 2000, the once ecologically vital marshes were reduced by 90 percent, “transforming the landscape into a parched desert covered by salt crusts over a meter deep in some areas” (DeWeerdt, 2008). As a result, local temperatures increased by 5°C, coral reefs in the Persian Gulf were damaged, and dust storms in what was once an expansive wetlands area became commonplace. Moreover, several local animal species are believed to have been made extinct, and local bird populations were endangered. Fortunately, due to extensive restoration efforts since 2003, some of the area has been salvaged; yet, perhaps no more than half of the former biodiversity of the Mesopotamia wetlands to date has been restored (DeWeerdt, 2008). Furthermore, in 1991 the world bore witness to the intentional “ecocide” of the first Gulf War, as the retreating Iraqi army set fire to 630 Kuwaiti oil wells (Mathiesen, 2014). Sebastião Salgado (2016) of the New York Times referred to this event as “one of the worst environmental disasters in recent memory”, and Time Magazine identified the “kuwaiti oil fires” as number three of the top 10 man-made environmental disasters ever (Cruz, 2010). Kuwaiti wells burned for seven months, sending off poisonous smoke, toxic soot, blackening ash, and

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causing widespread ecological damage (Hilleary, 2016). Mixing with sand and gravel, the oil and soot from the wells formed a hardened dark surface over 5 percent of Kuwait. Scores of livestock and other animals died from breathing the “oily mist” (Cruz, 2010). During the war, the US fired and dropped an estimated 340 tons of missiles containing depleted uranium (DU) on Iraq, leading many researchers to express concerns that these weapons significantly increased levels of carcinogens in the environment, causing large sections of the country’s soil and water resources to become poisoned (Mathiesen, 2014). DU weapons contain a radioactive and toxic heavy metal. They were again used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and, between the two wars, were fired at more than 1,100 locations, including structures located in densely populated urban areas (Zwijnenburg & Postma, 2017). Advancing coalition forces in the first Gulf War also created an enormous carbon footprint in Iraq, with US tanks and vehicles consuming an estimated 190.8 million litres of oil every month, two thirds of which were used to deliver more fuel to vehicles at the battlefront (Mathiesen, 2014). The combined ecological impact of the two Iraq wars was substantial, leaving the country with mounting environmental pollution. The destruction of industrial and military targets contributed to the spread of hazardous materials, and compounded the government’s already onerous burden of managing the added pollution created by the bombing of infrastructure, an influx of Syrian refugees, an increase of its own internally displaced persons, and the massive attacks by coalition forces on Iraqi towns and cities (Zwijnenburg & Postma, 2017, p. 5). Yet, as the smoke from the 2003 US-led invasion began to clear, until the withdrawal of US troops in 2011, there was relative stability in the country, and some attempts were made to repair environmental damage caused by the two Gulf Wars and Iraq’s conflict with Iran (The Telegraph, 2014). In 2005, for example, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) identified 60 environmentally damaged locations in the country in need of revitalization, five of which needed immediate cleanup. With the help of the UNEP and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Iraqi government worked to create national legislation for hazardous waste management, countering some of the environmental effects of the three wars; they also began to consider ways to respond to some of the adverse effects of climate change on the environment (Zwijnenburg & Postma, 2017). Despite these efforts, many health professionals and researchers in Iraq continue to call for investigations of war-related pollution as a major contributor to poor health rates and high levels of infections and diseases in the country, as well as the specific impact of toxins from war-related environmental damage on increases in cancer and birth defects (Watson Institute, 2015).

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Following the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in December 2011, domestic political and religious sectarian violence erupted almost immediately, and Islamic fundamentalist militancy grew, as the Islamic State (ISIS) attacked and occupied large sections of the country (The Telegraph, 2014). The military threat posed by ISIS was more-or-less defeated by 2017, with jihadists not killed or jailed going into hiding or leaving the country. Yet, in the wake of the ISIS defeat, another, fourth, wave of massive conflict-created environmental damage was left behind (Zwijnenburg & Postma, 2017). This time environmental dangers included the large-scale emission of toxic chemicals and fumes of oil well fires deliberately set alight by ISIS, as well as health hazards created by makeshift oil refining methods employed by ISIS to produce petrol and diesel fuel. The resulting oil spills, fires, and smoke clouds caused considerable environmental damage (Ibid., pp. 7–8). Also, in an attempt to deprive ISIS of oil revenue and fuel for military transport, US-led air strikes targeted sectors of the oil industry controlled by ISIS, worsening the environmental situation significantly (Iraq Oil Report, 2016). Combined US airstrikes and ISIS bombings in Iraqi’s urban areas also created a separate set of high-risk environmental hazards, as these bombings often included the destruction of industrial sites that store and process toxic materials. When damaged, such structures can release large quantities of toxins into the air and water of local populations. Furthermore, at the height of the battles, during the US-led “surge”, for example, entire urban neighborhoods and commercial districts were leveled by artillery, airstrikes, and attacks with Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs), creating millions of tons of debris and rubble that typically contain hazardous elements, such as asbestos mixed with construction materials. The same sorts of dangers were posed by military assaults on certain forms of infrastructure, such as power plants and water networks. Infrastructure sites often contain toxic materials, and, when bombed or damaged, can release hazardous waste (Toxic Remnants of War Project, 2014). Human exposure to toxins is especially high during cleanup operations after military conflicts (UNEP, 2017). Damaged or destroyed military vehicles also present high levels of toxins, such as PCBs and asbestos, that are particularly dangerous to scrap metal workers, or children who might use the vehicles for play (UNEP, 2005). Finally, extensive parts of Iraq’s national water system were intentionally polluted during the ISIS siege of the country. For instance, ISIS fighters used the Tigris River as a mass grave for many of its fallen (Foreign Affairs, 2017), and deliberately dumped oil products and other toxic substances into wells (Peace Insight, 2015), streams, lakes, and rivers as a tactic of war (Foreign Policy, 2016). Syria completes our three-country tale of war-as-environmental demise. As a result of continued internal conflict, the conditions and prospects for species

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maintenance, rich and adequate bio diversity, and robust human existence are no brighter in Syria than in Afghanistan or Iraq, perhaps less so. Since the outbreak of the uprising against President al-Assad in 2011, widespread environmental destruction and public health risks have ravaged the country. Most fundamental, because of the depth, breadth, and intensity of the range of weapons, bombs, munitions and other explosive devices used since the uprising began, there has been a broad dispersal of toxic substances and heavy metals in residential areas around the country (Zwijnenburg, 2016). By 2016 about half of all urban areas were in ruin, largely due to the Assad regime’s counter insurgency campaigns. Prior to the war, Syria had invested billions of dollars in creating industrial zones to attract international investors. These areas contained such structures as cement plants, quarries, power stations, oil refineries, and hospitals. With so many of these structures damaged or destroyed during the civil war, there is widespread concern regarding the massive release of waste products and contaminants into the country’s air, soil, and water supply (Hilleary, 2016). In effect, the damage and destruction of these buildings have left behind millions of tons of “conflict rubble”: A mix of crushed cement, mangled metal, industrial and medical waste, asbestos and explosives residues that have to be removed, transported, and either disposed of or stored.23 The subsequent release of large amounts of hazardous materials and toxic substances has created “contamination hotspots” across the Iraq, with high and growing levels of contamination. Consequently: [T]here are millions of tons of rubble, often mixed with all types of medical, household or industrial waste, asbestos and other hazardous substances; this can pose acute and long-term exposure risk to civilians … who might suffer from toxic dust-induced respiratory problems, skin diseases and, in the long term, cancers and birth defects due to the contamination of air and drinking water with heavy metals. (Zwijnenburg, 2016) Public health hazards created by the long-term contamination of water and soil have also been caused by accidents and uncontrolled explosions in local civilian-constructed munitions factories. Finally, a range of other public health concerns related to the effects of civil war remain paramount in Syria. These include the outbreak of communicable diseases due to waste piling up in the streets, and the pollution and poisoning of soil and drinking water (Zwijnenburg, 2016).

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Ecologically speaking, soil and water contamination, species endangerment, and the protracted onslaught on biodiversity around the globe are some of the more salient ways in which war has proved fatal for the environment. The situations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria simply serve to provide concrete examples of the scope and magnitude of this ecological destruction. The negative impact war has on the environment is simply one more urgent level of world crisis that, like so many others, goes on unabated, unchallenged, and unsolved.

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Summary of Planetary Problems

Such are the broad contours of some of the more salient challenges facing our planet today. Needless to say, any of the preceding massive conditions alone easily warrants urgent and immediate consideration and attempts at rectification on its own terms. Yet, taken together, these challenges represent nothing short of a courting of the catastrophic at the planetary level. Furthermore, add to poverty, inequality, disease, environmental decline, war, and refugees such other contemporary world maladies as modern-day slavery and human trafficking, the persecution of indigenous peoples and religious minorities, entrenched racism and ethnic conflict, and the residual social and cultural distortions of centuries of colonialism and imperialism in the developing world; and what we have is a global system very apparently in crisis and struggling to make (incomprehensible) sense of itself (Baker, 2008, p. 17; Kincheloe, 2007, p. 20). With large stretches of the world continually mired in decline, decay, and devastation, even amidst the “market miracles” of the post-Cold War era, there is a growing sense of urgency at hand to take stock of the demons which beset our planet, a stock-taking informed by “an emergent awareness of the global context as one characterized by a multiplicity of crises” (Baker, 2008, p. 18). Or, as Elwood (2010) states: The global economy teeters on the brink, gaps between rich and poor are widening, decision-making power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, local cultures are homogenized, biological diversity is destroyed, regional tensions are increasing and the environment is nearing the point of collapse. That is the face of globalization today. (p. 13) Indeed, largely due to the more destructive effects of globalization, such tenacious contemporary problems as war and displacement have taken on a depth

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and complexity of Gordian proportion (Held & McGrew, 2003). It is a key intent of this book to examine the origins and nature of globalization, especially those aspects that take place under the totalizing aegis of neoliberalism and, as such, have direct bearing on the vitality and potentials of education today.

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The Corrective Potential of Education in a World of Trouble

Of all institutions best disposed to meet our present and growing world challenges, education in general and an internationally oriented education in particular perhaps reign supreme. In 1994, Jacques Delors, Chair of The International Commission on Education for the 21st Century (ICE21C), a multinational task force studying the capacity of education to achieve positive social change, identified education as “one of the principles means available to foster a deeper and more harmonious form of human development and thereby to reduce poverty, exclusion, ignorance, oppression and war” (cited in Tsolidis, 2002). Others speak with equal conviction of a quality of education needed to meet the “complexities of a modern world”, and the many and urgent trials facing human societies and a common planet (Pillay & Elliot, 2005, p. 94) Democratic values and practices run central to many of these messages, including the recognition that education should foster civic participation, inclusive voting, and political activism, as a means to “increase democratic revolutions against dictatorships” (Davies, 2011, p. 3), along with calls to give schools added social responsibility to “educate critical citizens … in the struggle for democracy” (Giroux, 1992, p. 15). Belief in the socially redemptive potential of education extends far beyond the halls and classrooms of national schools. A number of international educational approaches and philosophies, such as global education, development education, education for international understanding, and world studies, share a “long and distinguished history of education concerned with global issues and concerns” (Roberts, 2013, p. 121). The theories and practices of many internationally oriented educators are critically informed by a recognition of the need for social engagement in teaching and learning (see Burnouf, 2004; Hicks, 2003; Marshall, 2007; Tarc, 2013), and an affirmation of the belief that education can and must “contribute tangibly to broader movements against injustice” (Jackson, 2002, p. 44). Socially progressive movements in education invariably involve creating a “link between power and institutional change that views change in education as a political act” and “attempts to redistribute power and opportunity within the wider culture” (p. 282). In their most vital

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form these efforts comprise what Fägerlind and Saha (1989) mean when they refer to the “liberation role” of learning: the capacity to unpack and change oppressive structures and practices in society and the world through education. Along these lines, Wilkinson (1998) equally contends “international education must be a force for change [and] must address the issues that divide deeply the rich and poor of our world” (p. 232), and Tarc (2009) speaks of international education as a means for “promoting an ethically minded ‘global citizen’” as part of a larger global “social movement … against the lingering imaginary of ethnocentric nationalisms”. Credible, effective social engagement and problem-solving through education necessitates nothing less than: A rethinking of the process and substance of education at all levels, beginning with the admission that much of what has gone wrong with the world is the result of education that alienates us from life in the name of human domination [and] fragments instead of unifies. (Orr, 2004, p. 17) Because of its intimate ties to globalization, “international education must be at the forefront of educational engagement with a global world” (Roberts, 2013, p. 143) This book is written with the goal of contributing, if even in the smallest measure, to a long-term view of the transformative potential of international education that involves unpacking, loosening, troubling, and freeing itself with regard to some of the more degenerative influences of contemporary globalization. It will be shown that this sort of self-emancipation must involve simultaneous challenge and resistance to the “order of things” as they now stand in education in the world at large, through a combination of critical analysis and measured engagement. Yet, the overarching and bulk intent of this work is first to examine the countless ways in which globalization premised upon the values and assumptions of what has come to be termed “neoliberalism” disrupts and corrodes the social and political viability of education, especially public education, across the planet, and precisely at a time when the potency and viability of education is urgently, indeed desperately, needed to help set aright a world beleaguered with crises. Once that objective has been achieved, we will then, in our final chapter, introduce and contemplate in cursory fashion some of the ways in which education as a pedagogy of liberation may provide some of the solutions to the monumental and unprecedented problems caused, in some ways fundamentally, by neoliberal-driven globalization. Without wishing to exhibit pretense, or to haughtily presume he knows the wishes or interests of the reader, the author believes it is fair to propose that the present work regarding

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the corrosive effects of neoliberal- driven globalization on the civic functions of education worldwide represents the first of two or three related installments examining not only the etymology and symptoms of the neoliberal schoolhouse, but also the guidelines and possibilities for corrective liberating strategies in schools and in education. As such, the present work should be viewed as no more than a summary treatment of the origins and causes of global neoliberalism, and as an exploration of some of its more notable influences in contemporary education, both at the global transnational level of organization and regulation, and in the micro day-to-day social and cultural life worlds of schools and the communities to which they are intimately tied. With that rather circumspect and modest, yet large and important, objective in mind, let us begin with an analysis of the some of the causes and consequences of market-based globalization that have swept the planet in the last four decades.

Notes 1 Purchasing power parity or PPP is a method of estimating local values of consumption and income using a foreign currency, usually based on current rates of exchange with the United States Dollar (USD). For example, it is assumed that the daily income of $1.90 USD required by the UN to reflect the “absolute poverty threshold” is chosen based on the average amount of essential foodstuffs $1.90 USD can purchase given prevailing local economic conditions and rates of exchange across the developing world. 2 According to an Oxfam briefing paper in 2018, India has the largest number of people living in extreme poverty, 218 million, followed by Nigeria and the Congo (DRC) with 86 and 55 million extremely poor, respectively. 3 The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals for improving the lives of the world’s poorest people, put into motion by the United Nations in 2000, with a target date for completion of 2015. 4 http://www5.worldbank.org/mdgs/ 5 Gender gaps in income and wealth national comparisons; According to the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) 2016/17 Global Wage Report there are “huge variation across countries” in the hourly gender pay gap, ranging from near t zero to almost 45 per cent (p. 3). 6 Figures involving contemporary global health, poverty, and living conditions, while improving in some regards in recent years (UNDP figures). 7 The four most prevalent non-communicable diseases in 2016 were cardiovascular disease (17.9 million deaths), cancer (9.0 million deaths) chronic respiratory disease (3.8 million deaths), and diabetes (1.6 million deaths).

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8 www.sexualviolencedata.org/ 9 www.icrc.org/en/international-review/article/children-and-war 10 https://www.thenation.com/article/americas-war-on-terror-has-cost-taxpayers-56-trillion/ 11 Nor do these estimates include casualties from the war in Libya in 2011, where NATO intervened in support of insurrectionary forces. Estimates say this war has cost at least 50,000 Libyan lives, although a comprehensive study of the actual number is yet to be conducted (see PSR, 2015, pp. 13–14). 12 http://www.irinnews.org/feature/2018/01/01/ten-humanitarian-crises-lookout-2018; retrieved 2 August 2018 13 It is important to note that there are other anti migrant movements afoot in Europe, although not yet so strong as the right wing nationalist populist movements in Germany, Hungary, Sweden, and Italy. These include the Danish People’s Party, an anti-migrant Prime Minister in the Czech Republic, and the rise of the right-wing Finns Party in Finland the Netherlands’ Freedom Party (BBC 2018 Europe nationalism). 14 https://newrepublic.com/article/143604/european-disunion-rise-populistmovements-means-democracy 15 www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-impacts/globalwarming-science#.W2qYxigzZdg 16 https://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-impacts/ global-warming-science#.W2qYxigzZdg 17 Union of Concerned Scientists, www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_ impacts 18 https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/28/us/2018-global-heat-record-4th-wxc/ index.html 19 https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/what-is-the-parisagreement 20 According to Hood (2010), species is classified as extinct if a single individual member cannot be found despite exhaustive surveys over a long period of time). 21 https://www.scidev.net/global/biodiversity/feature/biodiversity-facts-andfigures-1.html 22 http://www.un.org/en/events/environmentconflictday/ 23 https://www.voanews.com/a/after-the-syrian-war-a-huge-costly-cleanup/ 3286024.html

CHAPTER 2

The Four Defining Elements of Globalization: Integration, Interdependence, State Erosion, Transnational Power Perhaps no one development over the course of the last 40 years has been more decisive for the conditions and directions of education than the widespread and powerful impacts of globalization, especially the keynote principles and assumptions of free market neoliberalism which guide and direct globalizing processes. It is the intent of this chapter to arrive at a broad understanding of what is meant by the very contested term “globalization”, and to consider some of the more obvious effects this phenomenon has had on the world of education, effects referred to by the author as the” birth of the neoliberal schoolhouse”. From this understanding we may then proceed toward an informed and coherent examination of the ways in which the modern nation-state has lost many of its sovereign abilities, including those related to control over local educational policies, as demands are made by external sources of neoliberal power and the vested global market interests it represents. Friedman (2006) proposes that globalization has undergone three distinct historical phases spanning more than a half-millennium and culminating in the present post-2000 era of global collaboration and competition (pp. 9–10). Yet, while its history can be broadly traced, claims regarding contemporary globalization are many, multifarious, even contradictory, so much so that perhaps no clear or consistent definition of the term is possible (see Al-Rodhan & Stoudmann, 2006). Appadurai (1996), for example, notes that globalization is a “world of things” with “different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination, and varied relationships to institutional structures in different regions, nations, or societies” (p. 9). Stromquist and Monkman (2014) also propose a rather mixed view: Although much of the discourse on globalization remains optimistic with increased openness, competition and efficiency, and economic and cultural exchange, in reality different countries are impacted differently with different mixes of positive and negative consequences. (p. 3) Similarly, Giddens (1996/1997) argues that globalization is “a wholly contradictory process”, bereft of a single set of processes or a single direction, producing © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_002

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solidarities in some places and destroying them in others (p. 5). And, Poppi (1997) concludes that although in some ways the meaning of the term is selfevident, in others it is vague and obscure and its reaches are wide and constantly shifting. As such, “perhaps more than any other concept, globalization is the debate about it” (Ibid., p. 11).

1

Overlapping Borders of Agreement

Despite its stubborn inexactness, globalization remains an essential construct for understanding important changes reverberating, in one way or another, across the world today. These changes are especially momentous in the economy, labor force, technologies, communication, cultural patterns, and political alliances bearing down on nation-states (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). Because of its importance, globalization occupies a substantive place in a wide range of discourse, including neoliberal economic perspectives, critical theory, and examinations of postmodernity. For example, critical globalization theory, a view that informs many of the conversations pursued in this book, highlights the ways in which individual and group positions in the international system shape how economic, cultural, and political aspects of globalization are experienced (Kellner, 2002). Unavoidably, one’s political ideology, physical location, social status, cultural background, and ethnic and religious affiliation provide the context that determines how globalization is experienced and interpreted (Al-Rodhan & Stoudmann, 2006). Relations arisng from differential social position and asymmetric power are important lenses for understanding the impact of globalization on diverse peoples, especially those aspects of globalizaiton driven by neoliberalism as the dominant discourse (Mittelman, 2004). As such: Globalization always brings in its wake particular forms of labour and a specific form of social life that for many entail the sacrifice of human capacities for the generation of a set of oppressive and limiting social relations and social forces: capitalist social life – governed by the laws of value and money. (Rikowski, 2002, p. 6) Undeniably, then, as Ritzer (2003) points out, how one feels about globalization depends largely, “among other things, on whether one gains or loses from it” (p. 7). Thus, it is the embedded, human “positionalities” of globalization that prompts some to speak out in defense of those most adversely affected by its effects, those more victimized than valorized, more beguiled than betaken by the “solutions” of globalization. González-Casanova (1996), for instance, sees

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the very term globalization as a rhetorical device used (presumably by global power brokers) to re-establish dependency and to avoid taking responsibility for economic policies that are creating major social problems in many developing countries. In perhaps less equivocal terms, Neeraj (2001) sums up the globalization project as “nothing but ‘recolonisation’ in a new garb” (p. 6), and Walck and Bilimoria (1995) relegate it to forms “of rhetorical and discursive constructs, practices and ideologies which some groups are imposing on others for political and economic gain” (p. 3). It is in this spirit of critical reflection and activism, and the incumbent hope they offer, that propels the present examination of the impact of globalization on schools and education in a time of global crisis. And, despite the divergency of views regarding the nature of the present era of globalization, there appears to be a number of common or overlapping borders of agreement regarding its chief characteristics and effects. These commonalities might be loosely termed: the importance of economics, heightened integration and interdependency, the decline of nation-state sovereignty, and the growing importance of transnational sources of power. Once we have briefly examined these four points of convergent views regarding globalization, we will then be able to more readily discern the ways in which these commonalities, as key components of globalization, have come to exert pressure and shape local systems of education.

2

The Supremacy of Economics and the Neoliberal Motif

As Friedman (1999) points out, globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. First and foremost, this is an “economically-driven” phenomenon (Wallerstein, 1974), one primarily intended to fulfill the neoliberal promise of political and economic market reform across the planet (Pieterse, 2004). Of 114 definitions of globalization provided by Al-Rodhan and Stoudmann (2006), 67 make explicit reference to its economic dimensions, via either market growth or the selling of goods and services. At its most basic, globalization pushes the expansion of private markets while scaling back the size and significance of public sectors. As such, it creates powerful links between large business interests and centers of public policy-making around the world, resulting in what Ball (2012) refers to as “the new architecture of global governance”. Neoliberalism is the economic/hegemonic doctrine that undergirds this entire process by explaining, justifying, and insuring (some might say mystifying) the iron clad necessity of market forces as massive adjudicators of social

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decisions. Under these conditions, economic competitiveness becomes a quintessential unit of value in globalized world markets, and, through open competition by private firms, these forces are expected to bring both output and efficiency to their apex (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). Spiraling increases in the movement of tangible and intangible goods and services, including ownership rights and people, spurred on by the pursuit of profit and the pressures of competition, and facilitated by the dismantling of government impediments, take place through perpetually vitalized global trade and investment (Oman, 1996). Globalization in this way takes shape as “a centrifugal process, a process of economic outreach, and a micro economic phenomenon” (Ibid., p. 5). And, along the way, the acquired fetishes of the market are “enforced” through the “carrot” of consumerism and the “stick” of conscripted competition, underwritten by the uncertainties of material survival, and held together by the “false understanding that the parameters or principal social objectives of all countries are consumption and accumulation” (Odora-Hoppers, 2014, p. 106). Perhaps Cox (1994) best sums up the economic face of globalization as: The internationalizing of production, the new international division of labor, new migratory movements from South to North, (and) the new competitive environment that accelerates these processes, and the internationalizing of the state … making states into agencies of the globalizing world. (p. 15)

3

Economic Integration and Interdependence

Numerous studies attest to the increased integration of resource flows, markets, and people concomitant with globalization (Harris, 1995; Friedman, 1999; Gilpin, 2001; Lindsey, 2002; IMF, 2002; Al-Rodhan & Stoudmann, 2006; Gibson-Graham, 2006). According to Avinash (2000) the integration of national economies contributes: To the notion of a borderless global or planetary economy … an interwoven net of factories, fields and forests, banks, governments, labouring and farming populations, cities and transport spread over the surface of earth. (p. 3) Moreover, hyper-integration of factors and markets invariably leads to some degree of erosion of state sovereignty and an encroaching forfeiture of local political control over economic matters. This occurs as much by impending

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circumstance as by the political decision of governments to reduce barriers to international flows of goods, services, and capital (Linsey, 2002). By the late 1990s, increasing worldwide coordination of markets for goods, services, and capital was gaining attention and resulting in the growing integration of economies and societies everywhere (Deardorff, 2001; The World Bank Group, 2001). According to Aninat (2001) economic integration driven by globalization is first and foremost comprised of the increasing interaction of all important dimensions of activities found in diverse human societies. It invariably involves the intensification of economic, political, social, and cultural relations across borders (Holm & Sorensen, 1995), and the “increasing volume and rapidity of flows of people, ideas, and culture across the traditional territorial boundaries of the nation-state” (Mundy & Manion, 2014, p. 39). This intensification of relations engenders “a world in which societies, cultures, politics and economics have, in some sense, come closer together” (Kiely & Marfleet, 1998, p. 3), or what Harris (1995) calls “the worldwide integration of humanity” (p. 279). And, economic integration fostered by the demands and conditions of globalization spurs ubiquitous interdependencies between nations and societies. As national resources become increasingly internationally mobile, national economies become increasingly interdependent (Van Liemt, 1998). Interdependence takes place in numerous ways and on numerous levels (OECD, 1993; IMF, 1997; Keohane, 2002). Most important it engenders a heightened local vulnerability to economic decisions made by those not physically present in any conventional sense. Krueger (2000), for example, refers to the interdependency of globalization as “a phenomenon by which economic agents in any given part of the world are much more affected by events elsewhere in the world”. Stated another way: Economic inter-dependence creates a process in which the production and financial structures of countries are becoming interlinked by an increasing number of cross-border transactions to create an international division of labour in which national wealth creation comes, increasingly, to depend on economic agents in other countries. (Bairoch & Kozul-Wright, 1996, p. 3) Such vulnerability and reciprocal influence, however, are not confined to the economics of globalization. They also commonly involve “the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual” (Held et al., 1999, p. 2). This involves nothing less than “the process

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of world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer” and “the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact … with somebody on the other side of the world” (Larsson, 2001).

4

The Withering of the Modern Nation-State

Multiple strands of accelerating integration and interdependence between people, regions, and nations as a result of globalization have had monumental effects on the strength and efficacy of the “modern” nation-state as it is conventionally imagined. Not the least of these effects is the weakening of state sovereignty and state structures (Beck, 2000; McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2001; Rikowski, 2002). At its most basic, the massive mobility of goods, services, and people arising from globalization renders territorial and political boundaries between nations so porous in many instances as to make them nearly nonexistent (Oman, 1996; OECD, 2005). This is to say that because globalization causes the economic integration of many formerly national economies into one global economy, it brings about the “effective erasure of national boundaries for economic purposes … What was many becomes one” (Daly, 1999, p. 35). The global integration and interdependence of national economies caused by globalization, although occurring in varying degrees across a range of national landscapes, brings about several common effects. First of all, as previously mentioned, globalization often extends the reach and impact of local decisions far beyond the local context while inextricably linking local matters to developments and decisions in remote places. As Mundy and Murphy (2001) note, globalization has created conditions whereby decisions made by conventional centers of local power have repercussions far beyond the local, and, equally, macro regional and global developments can profoundly impact, contain, and qualify decisions made at the local level. One overriding result is that globalization has delivered a “world order” for which decisions made by centers of power, such as states, multilateral institutions, international corporations, and financial markets, now have repercussions far beyond national boundaries, while local forms of democratic participation and sources of social change remain territorially grounded and confined within bordered nation-states (p. 88). One result is that local strategies intended to promote a “common good” simply do not have the potency and geographical reach needed to effectuate change in an increasingly integrated and interdependent world. As Poppi (1997) points out, globalization has created a dialectical and contradictory process which requires that “localizing strategies become systematically connected to global concerns”, yet the processes needed to realize local concerns also require the “development of worldwide dynamics of

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institutional communication and legitimation”; in effect, what is needed is a socially responsive global civil society attuned to local needs that has yet to take shape (p. 285). Thus, the withering away of the political efficacy of the conventional nationstate, in light of the encroaching demands of globalization, has resulted in “the movement toward markets or policies that transcend national borders” (Washington Council on International Trade, 2006, p. 25) and “the onset of a borderless world” (Ohmae, 1992). This has had several tangible effects. As inferred, perhaps the most ubiquitous effect of integration and interdependency under conditions of globalization has been the disembedding of social process from local contexts and the accelerating importance of asymmetrical local-remote connections (see also Beerkens, 2004). Laïdi (2002) describes this as “a process of intensifying social relations on a worldwide scale that results in an increasing disjunction between space and time” (p. 69). Paradoxically, the “delinking” of social relations from territorial geography under globalization also creates the “world as a single place”, with distanceless and borderless qualities as cardinal factors (Scholte, 1996, 1999, 2001).1

5

Growing Importance of Transnational Sources of Power

As the locus of control of political and economic matters traditionally ascribed to the nation-state has eroded due to the twin globalizing forces of integration and interdependence, new transnational structures and institutions have emerged and some older forms have been reinvigorated to help coordinate and enforce the hegemony of neoliberalism and private markets on a global scale. As such, globalization represents “a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede’ (Waters, 1995, p.3). While a more detailed accounting of the effects on education of these new transnational sources of power will take place at a later point, it is necessary to give at least brief attention to what may be the two most important sources of power in the global economy today: transnational corporations and international finance and trade organizations. For, in order to underwrite the twin processes of economic integration/interdependency and trade liberalization that drive neoliberal globalization, the sovereign capacities of the Keynesian welfare state must be curtailed, and powerful, interventionist forms of transnational private authority, both corporate and non-governmental, must be brought to the fore (Biersteker & Hall, 2002). There is a plethora of evidence corroborating the growing importance and dominance of transnational corporations in national economies (Deardorff, 2001; Soros, 2002), prompting some to assert that globalization, particularly

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as it reaches more deeply into the Global South, is “… nothing but ‘recolonisation’ in a new garb” (Neeraj, 2001, pp. 6–7).2 Across the globe, corporations and transnational business entities have divided localities and regions in ways that allow for manufacturing, commodification, marketing, and sales to take place in a variety of suitable, cost-efficient, and convenient locations (Appadurai, 1990). The ultimate goal of these activities is the “deep structure penetration by transnational corporations seeking to extract the highest returns (in terms of market demand) at the lowest costs (in terms of factors, transport, marketing, etc)” (Ibid., p. 308). The result is to create a world that both unifies, around common consumer and popular culture, while it simultaneously fragments, in terms of heightened competition and a multilayered global division of labor (Ibid.). In broadest terms, globalization vis-à-vis accelerating economic integration and interdependence is intimately intertwined with a wide range of regional and international agencies that prescribe and enforce the new conditions of the global marketplace. The most influential of these transnational organisations are arguably the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, entities that “are increasingly taking on world governmental roles for the interests of capital in general and transnational corporations in particular” (Rikowski, 2002, pp. 3–4). Together, these three transnational organizations perform a variety of monitoring and compliance functions supportive of neoliberal principles in the world economy, including intervening in domestic policies and affairs of countries visà-vis “national austerity policies” (structural adjustment programs, or SAPs) that serve to keep nations in good standing on eligibility rosters for international aid, finance, and credit (Deardorff, 2001). In this view, Stromquist and Monkman (2014) comment: Through structural adjustment programs … coordinated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the process of capital accumulation continues while impacting negatively on the process of distribution and reallocation of the social product and shaping such distributions in ways that maintain existing hierarchies between and within nations. (p. 8) Furthermore, through its Dispute Resolution Panel, the WTO has far-reaching sanctioning powers over member countries, and it uses these to ensure trade commitments remain strictly in line with global free markets (Rikowski, 2002, p. 6). An intricate web of planetary economic and political exchanges and

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agreements are facilitated through these institutions, serving to assuage the global ideological hegemony of neoliberalism and the legitimation of private transnational capital flows as the life blood of the world economy (Mohan, 1994). Resultedly, two critical and interdependent developments take shape for the nation-state. First, decisive sources of power become embedded in global social formations (such as transnational corporations and international financial agencies) and are expressed through global networks rather than territorially based states (Thomas, 1997). Secondly, the structures and functions of remaining geographically bound civic states recede and become increasingly “internationalized”, meaning they are pressured to do the bidding of growing globalized capital flows and the institutional arrangements they involve (Cox, 1994, p. 5). Having given due consideration to the nature and broad implications of the four defining elements of globalization, we may now turn our attention to the ways in which the processes of integration, interdependency, erosion of state sovereignty, and transnational sources of global power have come to impact education at the local level. We will then use this understanding to examine the emergence, growth, and increasing neoliberal role and nature of schools and education against a backdrop of globalization.

Notes 1 Or, as Beerkens (2004) states, “the world-wide interconnectedness between nationstates caused by globalisation is a process in which basic social arrangements (like power, culture, markets, politics, rights, values, norms, ideology, identity, citizenship, solidarity) become disembedded from their spatial context (mainly the nation-state) due to the acceleration, massification, flexibilisation, diffusion and expansion of transnational flows of people, products, finance, images and information”. See http://www.utwente.nl/cheps/documenten/thesisbeerkens.pdf, accessed 8 January 2016. 2 González Casanova (1996), for example, sees the term globalization as a rhetorical device for the reconversion of dependency, as it hides the effects of economic policies that are creating major social problems in many developing countries. Similarly, Walck and Billimoria (1995) highlight the “rhetorical and discursive” nature of globalization, comprised more of the “input” provided by ideological and rhetorical constructs than by the “output” provided by markets and technologies; in effect, tantamount to the “practices and ideologies which some groups are imposing on others for political and economic gain” (p. 3).

CHAPTER 3

Globalization and the Ascendancy of the Neoliberal Schoolhouse It has been argued that the integration and interdependency of societies and people vis-à-vis a massive proliferation of global markets in the last 40 years has produced a corresponding decline in nation-state sovereignty and a growing immanence of transnational sources of power and control. These combined influences, the staples of neoliberal globalization, have exerted tremendous pressure on the viability of public systems of education worldwide, producing fundamental shifts in how teaching and learning take place, narrowing the gate for those who cannot afford a “market-based” education, and creating painfully constricted and critically neutered perceptions of how pedagogy might now be imagined. As Stromquist and Monkman (2014) observe: The current globalization context has made education salient, yet education remains very focused on its contribution to the labor force, less based on democratic decision-making, and, through the ethos of competition, less supportive of reflexivity on the directions of contemporary society. (p. 18) In effect, the transnational mobility of elements that not long ago were decisively local and more-or-less fixed, (people, technology, money, media, ideas), along with the globalization of social, economic, and political processes, have changed the spaces and social functions of education (Ibid.). I refer to the cumulative impact of these mutations and pressures in education as the ascendancy of the neoliberal schoolhouse. I am in strong accord with Carlos Torres (2009) when he states: Throughout the world, a neoliberal agenda promoted by international organizations, professional organizations, and in the case of the United States by the American establishment, includes a drive towards privatization and decentralization of public forms of education, a movement toward educational standards, a strong emphasis on testing, and a focus on accountability. That is to say, educational neoliberal reforms are based on an economic model of educational policy. (p. 43) © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004413603_003

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It is the intent of this chapter to critically examine the ways in which the neoliberal principles endemic to globalization have come, through their interpenetration in public spaces at the local level, to fundamentally alter the manner in which teaching and learning now take place in much of the world. We will do this with a view toward understanding how and why “we are facing the increasing reduction of the historically hard-won social institution of education to a commodity for private purchase and sale” (McMurtry, 1991, p. 43). Such an understanding will require that we look more closely at the planetary rise of neoliberalism; at its political economic goals of downsizing, deregulating, and privatizing public goods; and at some of the ways in which market values have come to be extolled and embodied in public schools and education.

1

The Planetary Rise of Neoliberalism

If globalization is the hard drive of contemporary world capitalism, its historical-material unfolding; then neoliberalism is its central operating software, providing the social and epistemological guideposts for extracting meaning and value, the regulatory basis for imposing order and organization, and the political will for deriving a sense of direction and establishing an endgame criteria for world markets. Demand-side Keynesian macroeconomic fine-tuning, a crisis-management approach to weathering the inherent booms and busts of unregulated capitalism since the Great Depression and World War Two, had by the 1950s emerged as the dominant model in North America and Western Europe. A hallmark of Keynesian economics is the promotion of government deficit spending in the form of public works and social service programs (combined with lower interest rates and “easy money”) during periods of downturn. These policies are viewed as the optimal means to stimulate economic recovery and growth, and to foster spending, consumption, and employment (Mankiw, 2012). According to Hursh and Martina (2003), “post World War II Keynesian economic policies focused on providing a stable and growing economy through government intervention in the economic cycle and the support of social services such as education, health and welfare” (p. 33). Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s worker median incomes, labor rights, and work conditions steadily improved throughout the industrializing capitalist world, largely as a result of Keynesian stimulation packages and national economic “pumppriming” (Ibid.). Parenti (1999), however, argues that between 1965 and 1974 the net rate of profit in core capitalist countries also fell by more than fifty percent (p. 118). One plausible explanation for declining profits combined with worker improvements were pressures exerted on production costs by organized labor,

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such as minimum wage and safety laws, that could not be passed on to consumers because of growing price competition in an increasingly open world economy (Bowles & Gintis, 1986, p. 60). The declining conditions of capital reached an apex with the oil shocks of the 1970s and the resulting increases in production costs, which in turn caused a global constriction of supply. The result was an extended recession in the capitalist world throughout the later 1970s, for the first time in the 20th century characterized by a simultaneous rise in prices (inflation) in tandem with a decrease in production (stagnation), along with steady increases in unemployment. The resulting unprecedented combination of contractions in both aggregate supply and demand became known in popular coinage as “stagflation” (Pearce, 2008). In stark contrast to social contract, welfarist-oriented Keynsian interventionist strategies, a rather exotic form of neoliberal or neoclassicalist “supply-side” economic and social ideology emerged and rapidly gained prevalence (p. 1). Harkening back to the days of early 18th century laissez-faire capitalism, the central postulate of neoliberalism is that “open, competitive, and unregulated markets, liberated from all forms of state interference, represent the optimal mechanism for economic development” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002, p. 351). Arguing that a continuation of conventional Keynesian intervention policies would only worsen the world’s economic woes, powerful and vested right-wing commercial and political interests supported this new or “neo” form of economic liberalism. A prescriptive combination of open markets, deregulation, privatization, fiscal austerity, and tax reductions for the wealthiest was believed to represent the optimal recipe to drive massive recovery at the national level and, in so doing, counter what seemed to be an intransigent global downturn (Sha, 2010). In sum, the backdrop of the shift from Keynesian to neoliberal economic recovery approaches at the national level were “the macroeconomic crisis conditions of the 1970s, the blame for which was unambiguously laid at the door of Keynesian financial regulation, unions, corporatist planning, state ownership, and ‘overregulated’ labor markets” (Tickell & Peck, 2002, p. 388). Early neoliberal policy prescriptions are also intimately related to Milton Friedman’s conservative monetarist principles of macro management (PBS, n.d.). Gill (2003) claims that the primary purpose behind the implementation of monetarist and neoliberal policies in the 1980s in the U.S. and other developed countries was to restore higher rates of profit (p. 7). To pursue this end, monetarist policies became linked with neoliberal principles that emphasized “the deregulation of the economy, trade liberalization, the dismantling of the public sector … and the predominance of the financial sector of the economy over production and commerce” (Vilas, 1996, p. 16).

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Roll-Back Neoliberalism and Public Sector Depletion

By the 1980s neoliberal economic policy had achieved a critical mass of support from the New Right governments of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK (Robertson, 2003): Such governments reacted against what they perceived to be the crisis of the welfare state with its supposed overspending and bloated, unresponsive bureaucracy. The assumption was that the free-market economy was the healthiest – both the most effective and the most democratic – modus operandi, not only in the government’s approach to the economy but also in the way the government formed its social policies. (Ibid., p. 281) As such, “unregulated or free markets, the withering away of the state as government’s role in regulating businesses and funding social services, and encouraging individuals to become self-interested entrepreneurs” (Hursh, 2011, p. 6) became the largely uncontested (and uncontestable) natural order throughout the capitalist world. Causing wave-upon-wave of economic restructuring and social and political readjustment and dismantling throughout the 1980s, neoliberal economic policies came to “dominate state policy-making and the agendas of global institutions” (Robertson, 2006, p. 3). Tickell and Peck (2002) refer to the early years of these changes as “roll-back neoliberalism”, for which “the neoliberal text – freeing up markets, restoring the ‘right to manage,’ asserting individualized ‘opportunity rights’ over social entitlements – allowed politicians the right to be both conservative and radical” (p. 388). Porfilio and Gorlewski (2013) claim these changes also involved no less than “the transnational capitalist class wielding its power and influence to gain control over elements of social life that were once considered vital domains to fostering social welfare”, such as natural resources, health care, prisons, transportation, post-catastrophe restoration, and education (p. 2). One could also add to these new areas of neoliberal influence the historically unprecedented disentanglement of political states from their function as overseers of labor protections and social rights. The quintessential measures of neoliberal roll-back policies since the 1980s have been depleted public coffers, slashed social programs, and shifts toward deregulation and privatization in remaining human services. Integral to the social service sector, of course, are schools and education. Hill (2001), for example, claims the business takeover of schools and their restructuring along neoliberal principles is occurring on a global scale, as each country, in various

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ways, opens education to business interests. What is certain is that a primary result of neoliberal policies in the 1970s has been a massive reduction in the tax base for domestic services, including education (Hursh & Martina, 2003). Repeatedly and consistently, neoliberal-fueled downsizing, deregulation, and privatization have significantly reduced public expenditure throughout capitalist core countries since the 1980, changing the conventional way in which services operate (Leithwood & Jantzi, 1999). Indeed, in most core capitalist countries today the amount of the national services sector “supplied purely by government without any commercial interest or intent is small if not almost non-existent” (Robertson, 2006, p. 9). Or, as Stromquist and Monkman (2014) state: Neoliberal ideologies … have successfully fostered the practice of providing key services such as education and health care through the marketplace, making them available according to one’s ability to pay. (p. 3) As the provision of public goods has moved deeper into the private domain, a resulting tandem of deregulation and privatization has also taken place in the service sector that significantly impacts: How private producers can behave, giving greater scope to the single-minded pursuit of profit and showing significantly less regard for the need to limit social costs or for redistribution based on nonmarket criteria. The aim of neoliberalism is to put into question all collective structures capable of obstructing the logic of the pure market. (Tabb, 2002, p. 7) This combined triadic logic of neoliberal downsizing/deregulation/privatization often causes federal governments to shift social spending to local states and provinces that themselves are then forced to compete with one another in order to create a “favorable business climate, spending the least politically feasible amount on social services” (Ibid., pp. 33–34). Not surprising, such neoliberal constraints at the local level serve to further drain and exacerbate already severely strained public service sectors. Privatization of social services in particular, according to Belfield and Levin (2002), “is fast becoming a widespread trend as it eases the pressure on governments to meet increasing demand and relieves them of excessive costs” (p. 7). The consequences of privatization for education are similar to that for all public goods and services (Tabb, 2002).

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Extolling Market Values in the Neoliberal Schoolhouse

The effects of roll-back neoliberalism on teaching and learning in local schools are pronounced and pervasive. In a rather severe and unapologetic tone, Hill (2003) states: The restructuring of the schooling and education systems across the world is part of the ideological and policy offensive by neoliberal capital. The privatisation of public services, the capitalisation and commodification of humanity, and the global diktats of the agencies of international capital … have resulted in the near-global (if not universal) establishment of competitive markets in public and welfare services such as education. (p. 2, emphasis added) Conservative reforms and restructuring in education involve both the extolling of market-based values in the culture and “business” of schools, as well as imposing clear guideposts and limits regarding what can be imagined in education. A primary indicator of the growing influence of neoliberalism over education policies and school curricula is the the increasing emphasis in education on the private sector competencies needed to function in a global world (Apple et al., 2005; Brown & Tannock, 2009). As we shall see, the ascendency of neoliberal principles and practices in education also has clear social consequences for surrounding communities and larger civil society. Since the 1980s, the commodification of education – reducing the constituents of learning and teaching to set values subject to the rules of buying and selling – has taken place in numerous ways and at multiple levels. Poulsen (1996), for instance, points out how the use of a range of common business terms, such as “clients”, “stakeholders”, “standards”, and “accountability”, work to “commodify education” (p. 582). There is in schools the “use of new language to describe roles and relationships” as: The reformed educational organizations are now ‘peopled’ by human resources which need to be managed; learning is re-rendered as ‘costeffective policy outcomes’; (and) achievement is a set of ‘productivity targets.’ (Ball, 2003, p. 218) And again: The language of educational purpose has undergone a sea-shift of transformation into business terminology and the going discourse of the

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corporate culture: “resource units” for what used to be subject disciplines and their professors; educational “consumers” for what used to be students and learners; “uniform standards” for what used to be the search for quality, depth, originality; “program packages” for what used to be curriculum; “products” for what used to be graduates; “buying” ideas for what used to be understanding truth. (McMurtry, 1991, p. 37) Similarly, Black (2005) reports on the increasing self-perception among students that they are “customers” involved in market transactions, with a corresponding strengthening of the notion of student consumer entitlement, as in “the customer is always right” sensibilities (p. 6): One head teacher recounted a student recently who refused to accept that she had failed a course. She insisted on her rights as a customer and not as a student respecting the professional judgment of her performance. The issue is one of professional standards. ‘Customers’, seeking value for money, are more assertive and believe they have the right to complain if they are unhappy. (Ibid.) Competitive market expressions of commodification can also be seen in school privatization, charter schools, magnet schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits, and the public ranking of schools based on achievement scores (Leithwood & Jantzi, 1999). Intimately caught up with privatization and deregulation, neoliberal influences in education have seen a steady metamorphosis from public good to marketable product (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). Simply put, “the ultimate goal of neoliberalism is to convert educational systems into markets, and as much as possible privatize educational services” (Lakes, 2011, p. 319). In this way, the “success” of a particular school is reduced to individual school merit and schooling becomes one more consumer choice where one benefits by choosing wisely (Hursh & Martina, 2003, p. 34). Similarly, the “tough political reforms” forced on schools by neoliberalism (such as unit cost reductions, downsizing, decentralization, the incorporation of private providers, standardized testing regimes, and performance pay) are part-and-parcel of a concerted opening up of education to the vicissitudes of market forces (Rose, 2003). By definition, then, marketization involves privatization, and there can be no private markets without commodities being bought and sold. Rikowski (2002) refers to this process as “the business takeover of education services” and accurately predicts that, with neoliberalism at the helm, educational

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services are progressively commercialized, privatized, and capitalized over time (p. 2). Neoliberal-inspired “education reform” results in diminishment of the public sector and creates the preconditions for various forms of ‘privatization’ and ‘commodification’ of schools as a core public service (Ball, 2003, p. 216). Strapped for funding, many schools have, for example, resorted to business-school partnerships for which private sector interests provide funding in exchange for publicity and marketing opportunities (Boyles, 2005). The cumulative effect of such processes has been to “position” education’s relationship to the economy and state policy in ways that support: The pervasive rhetoric and values of the market in the representation of educational participants and practices … as an indicator of a general shift towards the commodification of education and the concomitant consumerisation of social actors (Mulderrig, 2003, p. 12). Furthermore, McMurtry (1991) argues that the essential “structure of appropriation” used by the market model, because it is by definition exclusive and preferential, runs antithetical to the central raison d’etre of education to “advance and disseminate shared knowledge” (p. 38). Rather starkly, he concludes: Education is being made to become its opposite by what might be called “the totalitarian moment” of the capitalist marketplace in its period of greatest triumph and global pervasion, a moment that is ironically celebrated as a “victory of freedom” for all. (Ibid., p. 43)

4

Efficiency and Accountability

In broad terms, a second central value of neoliberal influence in education is efficiency. In basic economic parlance, efficiency represents the ability to extract larger degrees of output value from smaller amounts of input expenditure. Thus, efficiency also has a strong affinity with economic productivity, or the general belief in the goodness or usefulness on its own terms of more output per the same or less input. Obviously, efficiency plays a defining role in business investment, where it represents surplus profit over and above the costs of production. Belfield and Levin (2002) claim: In both developed and developing countries, privately managed and regulated schools – whether owned or financed by public authorities – are

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generally supposed to be more effective, more efficient, and produce better results than schools managed by the state. (p. 10) Hursh and Martina (2003) further this argument in their claim that neoliberal governments have attempted to retain legitimacy in the face of resistance to cuts in social services by shifting social responsibility from society to the individual and by using auditing and accounting procedures to improve education efficiency (p. 31). Consequently, caught up in the ascendency of neoliberalism, the criteria of efficiency and productivity typically used to organize and run private firms is now being extended to schools (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). While the principle of business-style productive efficiency has countless implications for how schools can be forced to adjust and operate, factors we will shortly examine more closely, it is of relevance for the moment to briefly consider its general effects. That is, research indicates a focus on commercial-style efficiency in schools often registers a change “from the liberal to the vocational, from education’s intrinsic value to its instrumental value, and from qualitative to quantitative measures of success” (Blackmore, 2000, p. 134). Similarly, Stromquist and Monkman (2014) claim that schools which come to value the market demands of efficiency also typically shift from student-centered curriculum to work-centered skills. The third and perhaps most overarching and persistent value in the neoliberal schoolhouse, and one which gives substantial form and direction to both commodification and efficiency, is accountability. As we shall see, accountability gets played out in privatized, commodified, market-driven education through the cousin values of performativity and standardization, both of which have their day, as it were, in the burgeoning one-size-fits-all policy approach to education provided by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, to be further discussed shortly. The link or “marriage” between accountability in education and private sector culture is clear and salient. According to Robertson (2003), a “consensus for commodifying education” has been manufactured at least partly by converging neoliberal policies with a “free-market, business approach to educational accountability” (p. 281). He observes: The neoliberal economic hegemonic consensus brought about by the predominantly New Right governments in many Anglophone countries in the last 20 years has been the driving force for such a free market, business approach to educational accountability … assumed to be a necessary instrument in education in order to establish high standards of competitiveness, just as it is applied, particularly, in the business world. (Ibid.)

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In business terms, accountability is rather simple and straightforward. It involves the obligation of workers and management to account for and accept responsibility for the quantity and quality of their work, and to be transparent about the results of such work as part of larger quality controls related to productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness.1 Ostensibly similar when grafted onto schools and education, the concept generally means that educators and administrators “should be called to account to clients and contractual conditions” (Robertson, 2003, pp. 280–281). This also “refers to the concept that schools are responsible for ensuring that students meet agreed-upon standards of academic achievement” (Reeves, 2008, p. 9) It is interesting to note how such key terms in educational reform quickly become part of a larger “hegemonic consensus” (in this case a neoliberal hegemony) and readily become integrated into “the cultural and linguistic meanings of a political, economic, and social order representing the interests of a minority … legitimized through being represented as common-sense, universal, and natural” (Poulsen, 1996, p. 582). While the application of a business-related accountability criteria in education may seem sensible and straight forward, there are numerous reasons to question its appropriateness for teaching and learning. In particular, complications in cross-germination between business and education persist because of the fundamental incongruity and lack of comparison between expectations and values in education, as they have historically been understood and sanctioned, and the manner in which the accountability principle persists as a market value in business. Figlio and Rouse (2006), for example, suggest that educational accountability in the United States takes two distinct forms. One of these is the use of test-based performance indicators, such as those inspired by No Child Left Behind (NLRB) policies, inclusive of sanctions for low-performing schools. A variant of accountability uses market forces to encourage parents and students to reward or punish schools through personal resource allocation decisions expressed through the use of vouchers. They argue that the latter type of market-based accountability is particularly prevalent as a guiding principle in charter schools, magnet schools, and openenrollment systems. Echoing this view, Hursh and Martina (2003) claim that accountability is: Transforming education into a market system though charter (publicly funded private governed) schools, vouchers (public funding that students can use for private school tuition) and school choice (permitting students to choose between schools within and across school districts). (p. 34)

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Predictably, a business-style form of accountability in education provokes a gamut of criticisms. Robertson (2003), for example, claims “a business model of accountability which focuses primarily on quantitative measures … has been poorly received by the majority of teachers” (p. 298). As one middle school teacher comments: So much has gone wrong … The over-testing, educators not having any flexibility to do what is needed in the classroom, the terrible business model approach to education. Students don’t enjoy school like they used to, because they’re not treated as individuals. They’re just this group that we’re supposed to whip into shape. This is not what education should be about. (quoted in Walker, 2015) As previously inferred, perhaps foremost among criticisms is the claim that business and education are fundamentally incongruent and involve dissimilarities which render the two “not sufficiently comparable to justify using similar accountability procedures” (Walker, 2015). McMurtry (1991), for example, argues that “fundamental contradictions” exist between the market and education models in terms of their respective goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence (p. i). Unlike well-informed and generally accurate economic and business indicators, such as output, costs, sales, and revenues, many processes and aims in education simply do not readily give themselves to quantification. Simply put, the “assessment of children is more complex than products”, and there are other and quite different criteria in education besides measurable efficiency and productivity, as is the case with special needs students and the social desirability of student access based on criteria other than one’s ability to pay (Walker, 2015, neatoday.org). A UNESCO (2008) Global Monitoring Report on Education for All (EFA) states: In standard economic theory, choice and competition are two of the most powerful drivers of efficiency, with the spur of the market acting to raise productivity and enhance welfare. Few people see education provision as directly comparable with the production of market goods and services. But competition and its corollary, choice, are increasingly viewed as antidotes for the failings of public education systems in relation to learning standards and equity gaps. (p. 159; original emphasis) Reeves (2008) further reinforces this suspected incommensurability with regard to accountability in his observation that despite the capacity,

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applauded by some, of “market-based accountability” to apply rewards and sanctions in education, “the invisible hand of the market does not shed light on how accountability policies can be employed to attain their central aim – the improvement of school performance and student achievement” (p. 11). Indeed, there is considerable reason to believe that market accountability has a number of deleterious effects on schools, teachers, and students. These include “superficial, ineffective results because of the lack of teacher support” (Macbeath, 1999, p. 1), as well as a narrowing of the curriculum, rising drop-out rates, and increasing numbers of educators retreating from the teaching profession altogether (Hursh & Martina, 2003, p. 34). Finally, the preceding discussion of business accountability in education is in no way meant to infer or imply that educators wish to shirk or avoid their responsibility for their students’ learning, intellectual growth, or academic accomplishment. Quite the contrary. I can personally attest as a teacher and department head of many years that the instructor who does not spend long days and nights in arduous self-reflection and professional discussion, deeply concerned over and trying to identify what to do about a certain student or a certain group of students who are “not learning”, is by far the exception, and not the rule. What is at issue here, if I might venture, is not resistance to “being accountable” per se, but rather reluctance to having such accountability reduced to measurable high-stakes outcomes that threaten punishment and are devoid of the richness of teaching and learning as human projects in progress, such as the results-based standardized assessment market approach to teaching and learning would have us otherwise believe. Roberts (2003) found in his study on the perceptions of teachers and administrators regarding market-style accountability in schools that both groups: Largely viewed accountability as being primarily a moral and professional responsibility, with the school functioning as a system in which teachers are to be trusted to give account, rather than having to be called to account. (p. 290) Importantly, an appraisal scheme favored by both teachers and administrators is one motivated by voluntary self-improvement, “rather than for the sake of administrative judgment and without the potential for imposing consequences” (Ibid., p. 281). Regarding student assessment accountability, I do not believe that many educators would seriously propose that testing be eliminated altogether, (although developing the best forms of assessment that do justice to the student, the situation, and the desired competency at

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hand is quite another conversation). I do believe, however, that whatever the quantifiable measures of performance employed, they need to be given their appropriate place within a large and rich constellation of factors that influence and reflect student learning and performance. Intervening learning and performance factors include motivation, personal challenge, family influence, student-teacher and student-student relationships, and, least of all, a student’s sense of cultural and gender inclusion and her unique level of “teachability” at any given point along a continuum of human development and unique possibilities that change over time, to name a few. As Macbeath (1999) points out, the real purpose of accountability in schools should be “to help schools maintain and improve through critical reflection” (p. 1). It should not be, as Agostinone-Wilson (2006) laments regarding performativity regimes in education, “part of a larger corporate effort to impose a ‘speed-up’ on all publicly funded programs to justify their continued existence via demonstrations of performance under lean budgets” (140). Needless to say, the present state of accountability in schools under the aegis of neoliberalism generates little in the way of penetrating and constructive critical selfreflection. If it did, much of the private sector’s incursions into public schools would not have been so readily tolerated. What the neoliberal schoolhouse does generate, though, in its present state of naturalized, unchallenged influence in education, are lots of paralyzing concerns for security and rent-paying in the currency of performativity, productivity, and accountability. All-toooften one unfortunate result of these factors is an “aping” (or, worse, a “fixing”) of performance standards by teachers and administrators in pursuit of what is imagined will lead to acceptable test results, too often at the expense of the innumerable day-to-day human factors that need to be integrated into the rich soup of teaching, learning, and performance. Being reasonably attentive to the preparation and cooking of “good soup” in education may not be profitable for business, but it is certainly good teaching, even better learning. We have broadly sketched the historical development of neoliberalism and have examined several notable ways this political economic philosophy may prove injurious to local systems of education vis-à-vis the influences of commodification, efficiency, and (business-style) accountability. Attention and analysis in the next chapter provides one of the first points of entry into one of the major ways in which neoliberal globalization has become a dominant force in local systems of education through the interpenetration of ideological propagation. In particular, the intent of Chapter 4 is to examine the ways in which the so-called Washington Consensus of 1989 provided a critical global

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policy framework for the promulgation and application of neoliberal principles around the world, developments that would quickly impact local systems education at the ideological level.

Note 1 www.businessdictionary.com

CHAPTER 4

The Washington Consensus as Foundational Policy for the Global Neoliberal Schoolhouse We again turn our attention to a further examination of the global policy and institutional contexts in which local systems of public education are dismantled, reworked, and integrated into flows of world trade and finance. This examination is meant to complement and further enhance our discussion in the last chapter regarding the origins and values of neoliberalism as part of the ascendency of the worldwide neoliberal schoolhouse. Free market principles and claims are pervasive and dominant throughout much of the world and have achieved hegemonic dimensions in what is now imagined as possible for the inhabitants of a planet deeply in crisis. In schools reeling from the restructuring and reform wrought under swells of globalization, these neoliberal principles are legitimized and acted out in countless implicit and apparent ways. Indeed, they have become an ideological and practical substratum of the routine conditions and expectations of teaching and learning today. However, if globalization involves patterns of integration, interdependence, nation-state decline, and new sources of transnational power, as was argued in the previous chapters, then conservative educational reforms and the schools they affect will fall in alignment with this manner of globalization. At various levels and in various ways these schools will come to mirror, embody, and abide by the core characteristics of global markets. Yet, our understanding of this process remains incomplete without a concerted effort to further identify and understand the major historical sources and mechanisms propelling neoliberalism in education. That is, we need a thorough understanding of how neoliberalism bears down on and remakes education. This involves an examination of the ways in which specific historical forces in the global political economy have come to account for the present nature and texture of an increasing number of schools that are more or less “neoliberal” due to their promotion and embodiment of privatization, marketization, and deregulation. The general intent of this and the next several chapters is to deepen our understanding of the ways in which global policies and institutions foster and maintain the links of interdependency between globalization and school reform, including the role played in this linking by the historical eclipse of the role of nationstates as arbiters and mediators of extranational pressures and forces, in more recent times those resulting from globalization. For the present, let us turn © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004413603_004

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our attention to several relevant preconditions of globalization, and the key role played by an essential source of policy formulation in pursuit of global neoliberalism and the neoliberal schoolhouse, in the form of the Washington Consensus of 1989.

1

The Four Precondtions of Market Globalization

For neoliberalism to have reached such a privileged pitch and tone in market globalization, four essential preconditions were needed. First, a ready and coherent ideology had to be on hand to justify the planetary transformations taking place. This ideology, as we have seen, is irrefutably neoliberalism, and requires little more substantiation as a driving force in globalization. Second, ideologies, particularly those based on the universal value of certain “economic” assumptions and assertions, can only gain strength and momentum through the formulation of germane and connected policy proposals for global restructuring. As we will see, the so-called “Washington Consensus”, a conference paper presented in 1989 and containing clear prescriptions for neoliberal restructuring in Latin America, became a global gold standard and established point of reference for national policies linked to neoliberalism worldwide. Third, ideologies, and the policies they engender, can only be fully effectuated at the global level with the help of powerful institutions and mechanisms with extensive, even unlimited reach, able to implement, monitor, and enforce the rules and expectations of an emerging global political economy. With relation to market-based globalization, the role played by three such transnational agents of authority - the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) – is well-substantiated. In subsequent chapters, we will give particular attention to the political economic role each of these transnational institutions of global governance plays in translating neoliberal policies into educational conditions and practices at the local level. Finally, the completion of a proposed ideology-policy-institution loop can only take place on the ground, where reforms and structural adjustments are actually being implemented, with the active collaboration, oversight, and facilitation of local instruments of the state, privy to numerous levels of access and acting in a range of capacities. As has been inferred, a revised brand of market-friendly, neoliberal-compliant nationstate has emerged and congealed in recent years. Characterized by d/evolved authority and a depleted ability to generate public resources, it has for a number of reasons allowed itself to be downsized and reinvented in ways that renders it unabashedly complicit with the creation of the neoliberal schoolhouse.

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We will look closely at the d/evolved neoliberal state, and its role in constructing local versions of the neoliberal schoolhouse in Chapter 10. It is the specific intent of this chapter to look more closely at the policies component of the policies-global institutions-local mechanisms triad which drive neoliberal transformation, both in education and beyond. With that intent in mind, we will look at the ways in which the Washington Consensus has provided a key policy framework for the proliferation of neoliberal-driven globalization over the course of nearly three decades. But, first, let us briefly revisit the constructs of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism, and their relationship to education in a global context.

2

From Roll-Back to Roll-Out

We have to this point discussed several of the defining characteristics of globalization and particular ways in which the pivotal values of neoliberalism have come to inform and flavor teaching and learning. With a particular regard for education, we have termed the broad intent and design of this process as “rollback” neoliberalism, comprised of reforms that take away or dismantle public resources and programs, sometimes; but not always, supplanting and replacing these takeaways with market versions or less. As argued, over the long-term roll-backs involve such consequences as cutbacks, privatization, marketization, and deregulation. For the neoliberal schoolhouse, these consequences are closely meshed and given coherence with value assertions regarding the importance of commodification, efficiency, and accountability. We have also taken a cursory look at the impact of market values on the culture and relational fields of schools. However, we have yet to fully explore the nuanced interrelationships and interdependencies between roll-back neoliberalism at the local level and the broader backdrop of instruments and mechanisms that serve to manage, monitor, and regulate flows and processes at the global level to insure their proper local reproduction and functioning. Whereas roll-back neoliberalism occurs during the relatively early stages of projects toward national integration into global markets, when destabilizing structural adjustments and reforms are at their height and paring or eliminating Keynesian state public sector programs are a central neoliberal objective; there is also, a latter phase referred to as “rollout neoliberalism” (Tickell & Peck, 2002) that emerges along the crest of globalized spaces to further consolidate and cement neoliberal gains in need of deeper alignment and articulation with global markets. According to Tickell and Peck, roll-out neoliberalism refers to:

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The purposeful construction and consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance, and regulatory relations (and) involves the creation of new trade and financial regulations by international governance institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and the IMF. (2002, p. 37) Roll-out processes also involve a wide range of secondary “socially interventionist policies and public-private initiatives that are paternalistic and punitive”, yet instrumental in managing the social and civic order of neoliberalism. These include such things as ordinances banning the homeless from commercial areas, tighter anti-immigration laws, and harsh welfare-to-work requirements. In effect, secondary roll-out policies and programs “seek to discipline, criminalize, and control poor and marginalized social groups” who are most negatively effected by neoliberalism (Ibid.). Pertinent to the center of our discussion, roll-out neoliberalism “represents a very significant transformation in the role and function of education” because it “involves the creation of a set of global rules that both creates and regulates a global education market and industry” (Robertson, 2006, p. 14). Consequently, it is very important to retain an awareness of the roll-out effects of neoliberalism on education as we delve more deeply into the ways in which local systems of education have been steadily integrated as part of global capital over nearly four decades.1 Thus, for present purposes we may consider that the impact of roll-out neoliberalism with a particular view toward education is related to the creation of a set of global institutions, policies, and regulations that anchor and enforce the imperatives of educational reform on the ground, where the flesh-and-blood vistas of teaching and learning take place. Indeed, for our present analysis, rollout neoliberalism can be seen as the critically influential link that establishes and fuels flows of mutual reproduction and support between intricate and innumerable threads in the planetary web of globalization and the routine and mundane (non)functioning of the local neoliberal schoolhouse. It is also important to remember that neoliberalism in education can only be partially understood as a local or national phenomena, although its most noteworthy effects are certainly witnessed and experienced locally. Rather, privatized, commodified, market-driven education emerges and oscillates as part of a much larger interconnected nexus of global economic, political, cultural, and social agreements, rules, and relationships that we have conveniently come to call globalization. Although specific events, developments, and spatial/temporal points of reference, pronounced and resounding, unfold in neoliberal educational reforms at the local level; their meaning and significance cannot be fully fathomed without reference to sweeping international agreements,

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overseen and enforced by powerful international agents. While these developments are sealed, cemented, and given expression as local contingencies, they remain integral to and in alignment with worldwide free market forces, without which they would either exist in a much different manner, or not at all. We now turn our attention to the Washington Consensus, arguably one of the most important expressions of neoliberal global policy formulation of the last four decades.

3

The Washington Consensus: A Policy Framework for Global Neoliberalism

A full accounting of neoliberal education policies under globalization can be found embedded but extractable in the essentials of the Washington Consensus. As indicated in the last chapter, the values and tenets of neoliberalism in the broadest political arena were first packaged and sold to the world by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Consequently, key position papers and policy statements supportive of the ways and means of neoliberalism and emanating from the corridors of power and intelligentsia in the US or Britain during this period were invariably bound to have considerable impact. In 1989, one such keynote piece, written and circulated in the form of a conference background paper by John Williamson, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC (Williamson, 1990), was quick to gather popular currency and morph into a neoliberal catchphrase and point of ready political economic reference for both defenders and detractors of neoliberalism everywhere. This historically irreversible and politically indispensable term, buried deep in the heart of neoliberal policy prescriptions across the planet for the next 30 years, is “the Washington Consensus”. Initially intended as a standard formula for economic development in Latin America, in effect Williamson’s paper became a loose yet clear and coherent policy framework for neoliberal structural adjustment programs and market reforms worldwide. Primarily an academic and researcher/author, Williamson also worked on economic and development projects for the UN and World Bank. His paper, “What Washington Means by Policy Reform”, involves a concise list of the “economic policies that Washington urges on the rest of the world … summarized as prudent macroeconomic policies, outward orientation, and free-market capitalism” (Williamson, 1990, para. 51). Yet, these policies were intimately premised upon a dominant role for markets, both domestically and internationally, and Williamson’s claims of a “consensus”

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rested on his perception that the bulk among Washington’s (then dominant) right-wing politicians and pundits agreed these principles were the best means for achieving stability and growth in the developing world. Furthermore, although general and inclusive of the dominant globalizing neoliberal wisdom of the day, Williamson’s policy prescriptions were especially intended as a means toward market reforms custom-made for Latin America (Ibid., para. 1). In Williamson’s (2008) own words: The term ‘Washington Consensus’ was coined in 1989 … in order to examine the extent to which the old ideas of development economics that had governed Latin American economic policy since the 1950s were being swept aside by the set of ideas that had long been accepted as appropriate within the OECD … I made a list of ten policies that I thought more or less everyone in Washington would agree were needed. (p. 14) This is to say Williamson believed, in light of the staunch prevalence of neoliberalism in the US of 1989, that his ten recommended “policy instruments … would be regarded in Washington as constituting a desirable set of economic policy reforms”, and would represent “a reasonable degree of consensus” among members of Congress, senior members of the administration, Washington-based international financial institutions, the economic agencies of the US government, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Washington-based “think tanks” (Williamson, 1990, paras. 1 & 2). The suggested “instruments” or policy recommendations included fiscal discipline; cutbacks in the public sector, especially the diminishment of subsidies; tax reform; market liberalization of trade and exchange rates; privatization; deregulation; and the increased sanctification of property rights (Symoniak, 2010, p. 2). Williamson’s 1989 paper is germane to our present discussion because it involves economic policies which effectively capture in concise and manageable form the capstone elements of the neoliberal doctrine emanating from Washington in the 1980s. Moreover, it constitutes an important entry point into the same standard-issue cookie-cutter prescriptions for trade and development that would prove so decisive and disruptive to national economies and local governments for decades to come. As Symoniak (2010) points out, Williamson’s paper: Outlined a set of desirable economic reforms targeted at developing countries (and) perceived by those in Washington to be important to both the growth of developing countries and their ability to secure financial support and investment. (p. 2)

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Furthermore, countries receptive to Washington Consensus policies could be “actively encouraged” to open up their markets, restrict their public sectors, and follow neoliberal guidelines in order to receive loan and development assistance from the IMF or the World Bank. Indeed, the ability of states to remain in good standing with global flows of trade and finance has always to some degree been commonly “measured and judged on the basis of their friendliness to … liberal economic policies” (Ward, 2012, pp. 40–41). Along with neoliberal doctrine in general, the Washington Consensus establishes a clear parameter of meaning with which to make sense of a number of pressures exerted on nations worldwide over the course of the last 30 years, including those market reforms imposed on education sectors during the years of the Reagan – Thatcher Revolution and beyond. In this way, the Washington Consensus, as a seminal policy statement for neoliberalism in the late 80s, comprises an exceptionally vital piece of data to help us understand and create a more complete picture of the multiple ways in which education has been impacted by neoliberal globalization. For example, Williamson (1990) clearly states that when addressing fiscal spending, “one of the legacies of the Reagan administration and its ‘supply-side’ allies has been to create a preference in Washington for reducing expenditures rather than increasing tax revenues” (para. 17). In common parlance, this means that rather than raise taxes or engage in deficit spending to salvage social programs, such as education, the standard approach has been and would continue to be under Washington Consensus auspices to cut spending and eliminate programs as deemed needed. Furthermore, while Williamson recognizes that education and healthcare might be “proper objects of government expenditure” (Ibid., para. 20), and suggests that under certain circumstances it is better to allow for financial losses in these two human services while siphoning in financial gains from cuts in subsidies (Ibid., para. 23), the aggregate effect of neoliberal principles on local systems of education around the world has been massive cutbacks, creeping deregulation, and large-scale privatization. It is important to note that the Washington Consensus reads like a veritable “who’s who” of preferred structural adjustment policy prescriptions esteemed by neoconservative economists and global trade and lending institutions. As such, it provides a clear prescriptive formula for the opening up of national economies to global markets and foreign investment, one that has been faithfully reproduced and realized in countless countries under the aegis of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO for the last three decades. Its set of ten neoliberal reform policies are peddled by prominent economists, major branches of the US government, and powerful international governance organizations, and it represents a centerpiece of ideological and policy support and guidance

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for global restructuring at the national level. In light of several major global economic crises and downturns since the 1980s, the principles of the Washington Consensus are not without mainstream critics,2 yet the basic principles continue to crucially inform neoliberal development programs around the world, including those which target market reforms in education.

4

The Washington Consensus and Education: Privatization, Deregulation, and Liberalization

The economic policy prescriptions ordained in the Washington Consensus are so palatable, pervasive, and integral to the planet’s contemporary market political economy as to be nearly indistinguishable from the larger contexts of reform and structural change in which they operate, including those that bear pressure on rebooting education and schooling along neoliberal lines. As such, we can draw a number of logical conclusions regarding the impact of these policies on education as a component of a nation’s larger public sector. While an independent examination of each of the prescriptions contained in the so-called consensus is beyond the scope or usefulness of the present discussion, (in some respects it would also unduly belabor some of what has already been said), three of the document’s policy offerings are particularly relevant for structural reforms in education that have engendered the establishment of neoliberal values and practices in schools around the world. These are the capitalist market staples of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization. Together these three factors also provide a broad patchwork of meaning for understanding how globalization is effectuated through the worldwide reach of trade, aid, and financial institutions, as well as implemented locally through coopted and cued state mechanisms, considered in the latter portions of this chapter. Yet, to assume that these three factors are discreet and separate in their repercussions for education is mistaken, as they are quite interdependent (e.g. in order to privatize a school, some degree of deregulation must take place, and both occur with a view toward liberalizing or opening up educational services to investment and trade). Indeed, privatization, deregulation, and liberalization are mutual parts of larger school reform packages and can only take place fully with cross-reference and interplay with all the policy prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, (e.g. reinvigorated property rights and tax reforms are concomitant with privatization and deregulation; fiscal discipline has a strong association with cutbacks, etc.). Thus, together the ten prescriptions comprise a cohesive, tight, and highly internally fused “package” of market reforms. Furthermore, we focus our attention on the three policy elements at this point

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because to do so provides important support for a central tenet of this book: the effects of globalization on local education are tangibly linked to neoliberal ideology, policy formation, institutional controls, and nation-state submission. So, let us now consider the effects on education of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization as neoliberal policy prescriptions presented in Williamson’s 1989 document.

5

Discussion of Privatization as a Policy

The privatization of education is significant and growing in many countries. Twenty-four percent of all K-12 schools in the US are privately owned, representing more than 10 percent of all student enrollments (Council For American Private Education, n.d.). On average 15 percent of all students in OECD countries attend private schools (OECD, 2011). In the Netherlands, 70 percent of all schools are privately operated, even though many of these receive public funds. Denmark has a system of publicly funded private schools enrolling two-thirds of all students (Belfield & Levin, 2002). The yearly increase in Nigeria’s private sector schools has been nearly exponential since the 1970s (Härmä, 2013, p. 12). The effects of privatization on schools and schooling under the neoliberal aegis were briefly considered in the previous chapter, and the social consequences of commodified private education markets will be examined in Chapter 11. For present purposes, it is useful to further consider the nature of privatization for education and its implications as a policy prescription for schools. Often used as an umbrella term to describe market influences on many different educational programs and policies (Levin, 2001), privatization runs adjacent to many neoliberal streams in education, including the sale of public assets, voucher programs, deregulation, cutbacks in public services, and the contracting out of ed services to for-profit and non-profit agencies (Handler, 1996). For our purposes privatization means, as it was meant by Williamson in 1989, the transfer of activities, assets and responsibilities from government/public institutions and organizations to private individuals and agencies (Levin, 2001). Accordingly, privatization invariably involves the “sharing or delegating of authority to nongovernmental agents” (Handler, 1996, pp. 78–80). The common neoliberal defense for privatizing public services is that private industry is “managed more efficiently” because of profit-and-loss incentive structures facing workers and managers and assumed to be non-operative in the public sector (Williamson, 2002, paras. 34–35). Managerial pressures in particular are thought to contribute to higher performance levels in terms of

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productivity and efficiency for privatized firms because “of the more direct incentives faced by a manager who either has a direct personal stake in the profits of an enterprise or else is accountable to those who do” (Williamson, 1990, para. 39). As Belfield and Levin (2002) point out, the argument for privatization rests mainly on the assumed enhancement of productive efficiency driven by competition, private ownership and management structures, and greater financial systems of accountability and incentives (pp. 41–45). Without steering too far off course, at least a partial response to this claim is in order on several counts. First of all, the privatization of an agency, in any component of public service, is never an ironclad guarantee of improved quality and efficiency. We will see a fitting demonstration of this disclaimer in the educational sector in a subsequent examination of “private schools for the poor”.  With regard to student performance, a sizable amount of evidence indicates that both private schools and public schools benefit student populations from socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds, “but there is no evidence to suggest that private schools help to raise the level of performance of the school system, as a whole” (OECD, 2011, p. 43). Along these lines, at a 2001 symposium of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sponsored by the World Trade Organization (WTO), it was observed that, despite promises to the contrary, private suppliers of health and education services were often unable to guarantee the same levels of quality, universal availability, and employment as public sector providers (WTO, 2001). Furthermore, as was argued in Chapter 3, there is reason to believe that the bottom-line reasoning of financial and performance accountability and an efficiency agenda in education, as in most human services, simply misses the mark in many ways. In education it falls dismally short of considering the complex questions of what constitutes good teaching and learning in schools. In fact, as also pointed out in the last chapter, the basic principles and assumptions of the free-market business model may very well be stubbornly incommensurate and incongruent with the values and orientation of efficient schooling and genuine learning. In so far as the primary function of “management” or “leadership” in schools is to support the conditions whereby good teaching/learning can happen, the business management approach to education implicitly championed by Williamson’s neoliberal policy consensus is rife with inadequacies. Of course schools have budgets, and, even in the best of times, those budgets have limits. I have yet to see, though, a public school which did not have a finance department and at least one certified staff member responsible for public relations of the sort that involves, among other things, some level of commercial marketing. Needless to say, various local, state, and national

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agencies oversee in most countries the distribution and use of public monies in education, and, I might add, usually in accordance with very specific legal criteria. As we shall discuss shortly, perhaps in some of the more challenged social and political situations, such as those that exist in many developing countries, what is needed are attempts to revitalize external (and internal) systems of oversight and management, not to further paralyze and immobilize these systems with austerity measures involving market privatization. Furthermore, as with so many policy aspects of the neoliberal schoolhouse, massive tax cuts and loopholes have been created over the course of the last four decades whereby public institutions, like education, are driven to a stark level of resource underfunding and depletion. Then, when clearly struggling under these (externally imposed and quite ideologically driven) conditions, the same neoliberal policy pundits responsible for fiscal downsizing step up and proclaim public service “incompetency”, “corruption”, and “failure”, arguing the need for “market accountability” and “privatization” as corrective measures. One of the more unfortunate, yet common, results for education of Washington Consensus-type reforms regarding efficiency and accountability is the germination of policy measures that give rise to a pronounced fetish and obsession among “reformers” for the assurances of objective, standards-driven, human capital measures of learning and performance, objectionable from a number of perspectives. One of the most adverse effects of privatization in education sectors, further considered at a later point, is that a culture of self-serving consumption and commodification is set into motion in schools, one that sordidly downgrades the essential relational qualities needed for effective, intrinsically rewarding teaching and learning. Stated another way, “privitization of education puts it in the productive sphere and weakens the acceptance of education as a public good, with a distinct non-market set of measures of effectiveness and value” (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014, p. 6).

6

School Deregulation and the Washington Consensus

According to the Harvard University Center for International Development, the cardinal trait of market-based deregulation proposed in the Washington Consensus is the abolishment of barriers to entry and exit in an economic sector or sectors.3 This invariably involves a process of removing or simplifying the controls and restrictions of various kinds which the government imposes on the economy and businesses, otherwise seen as constraining the proper operation of market forces (Arthur & Sheffrin, 2002; Oluleye, 2005). Neoliberal deregulation promotes competition as it dismantles protective legislation that

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may have been enacted to protect nation-based industries which had yet to achieve adequate returns to scale or are of particular importance to the history, culture, or security of a nation, as is the case with protections and subsidies for rice farmers in Japan or with the direct support of government military establishments around the world. Williamson (1990) comments in this regard: Among the most important economic regulatory mechanisms (in need of deregulation) are controls on the establishment of firms and on new investments, restrictions on inflows of foreign investment and outflows of profit remittance, price controls, import barriers, discriminatory credit allocation, high corporate income tax rates combined with discretionary tax-reduction mechanisms, as well as limits on firing of employees. (para. 44) In the case of schools, deregulation involves “the shift of responsibility from the government to the schools and the shift from public funding to private funding and from public school government to private school government” (Schlicht-Schmälzle et al., 2011, p. 2). Any number of legal dis/enactments can occur for schools, ranging from sheering labor protections and entitlements from educators (union safeguards, tenure protocol, or retirement benefits), to the cancellation of admission quotas, affirmative action guarantees, and financial assistance for historically disadvantaged student groups. Deregulation in education also typically involves some level of privatization and exposure to competitive market forces (Williamson, 1990, para. 42), presumably to increase efficiency and enhance human capital, measured primarily through achievement tests, such as the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Schlicht-Schmälzle et al., 2011, p. 2; OECD, 2011). One example of deregulation in education is the proliferation of charter schools that took place in the US in the 1990s, which, although government-supported, is subject to fewer regulations than regular public schools (Belfield & Levin, 2002, pp. 24–25). As with the gamut of policy prescriptions provided by the Washington Consensus for the fruition of neoliberal policies in education, the productive benefits of deregulation are offset and diminished by the negative social costs. According to Schlicht-Schmälzle et al. (2011), “it is well established that higher social classes benefit disproportionally from privatization and deregulation”, causing increased educational inequality and confirming the “efficiencyversus-equality tradeoff in education” (p. 2). As has been proposed throughout this discussion, whenever education is reduced to an “ordinary commercial service”, basic to the aims and outcomes of neoliberal deregulation, “this affects

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not only the idea of education as a human and social right, but also jeopardizes the identities and sovereignty of participating countries” (DeSiqueira, 2005, p. 35).

7

Trade Liberalization

In an environment of neoliberal reform and restructuring, calls for liberalization can take several forms. As Hill (2003) notes, neoliberalism requires the “removal of barriers to international trade, capitalist enterprise, and the extraction of natural resources”, as well as a system of rules and relations to create a “‘level playing field’ for companies of any nationality within all sectors of national economies”, while insuring a means for penalizing those who engage in “ʻunfairʼ trade policies” (pp. 10–11).4 With regard to the Washington Consensus, one apparent focus is the cultivation among states of a “free trade ideal” (Williamson, 1990, para. 35) involving what is called “an outward-oriented economic policy” of “import liberalization” (para. 33). Williamson explains: Access to imports of intermediate inputs at competitive prices is regarded as important to export promotion, while a policy of protecting domestic industries against foreign competition is viewed as creating costly distortions that end up penalizing exports and impoverishing the domestic economy. (Ibid.) According to Symoniak (2010), the intent of promoting an outward orientation of trade liberalization under Washington Consensus auspices was to encourage developing countries to open their economies to foreign imports, as well as liberalize exchange rates and financial markets, in order to “reap the benefits of economies of scale and the comparative advantage of other producers of goods and services” (p. 10). The assumption here is that trade liberalization in these areas combined with foreign direct investment (FDI) will increase local efficiency and specialization by subjecting domestic markets to competition from abroad (Ibid., p. 2). The manner in which domestic services in education came to be part of Washington Consensus-style trade liberalization under conditions of neoliberal globalization is worthy of some examination. While we will delve more deeply in following chapters into the historic role played by powerful transnational institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, in the effectuation of global neoliberal ideology and policies, it is useful to pause momentarily to consider how education, and indeed literally all domestic services, has been

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increasingly put on the table as part of the worldwide liberalization of trade. It is interesting to note that, in the several decades following WWII a significant increase occurred in international manufacturing and investment, but with only nominal impact on domestic services. As more local manufacturing firms in industrialized countries went abroad in the 1960s and ‘70s, however, (primarily in search of cheaper factor costs, especially labor), there emerged a corresponding increase in the internationalization of commercial services as well (Marchak, 1991). Initially, this increase was most true for financial services, such as banking and insurance, made feasible by the shortening of geographic distances through “telematics”.5 Whatever the case, by the mid 1970s, trade in services had come to represent a sizable segment of all international trade, and accounted for an increasing proportion of international investment (Ibid., p. 84). Indeed, shortly after the beginning of this millennium, trade in services was estimated to be one of the most dynamic growth sectors in the global economy, accounting for one-fifth of all trade and a heaping 60–70 percent of trade in the advanced OECD countries (Hartmann & Scherrer, 2003, p. 5). Yet, despite the spike in the global services sector, for many years the activities of domestic education sectors were thought to be mostly non-tradeable, and they remained largely off the debate agenda regarding the direction of neoliberal globalization (Larsen et al., 2002). However, with the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the Uruguay Round in 1993, a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was formalized, offering “for services trade the same stability that arises from mutually agreed rules and binding market access and nondiscriminatory commitments that had been provided for goods trade for more than five decades” (OECD, 2002a, pp. 2–3). Consequently, under WTO/GATS conditions a Washington Consensus-style trade liberalization of services was ushered in on a global scale, with every participating member’s domestic education sector potentially subject and susceptible to external market forces. As Xu (2009) comments: Under the rules of WTO, foreign suppliers of education services are allowed to enter into every member nation’s education market, and each member nation’s education service institutions can also go out into the international education market to participate in the competition. (p. 39) Arguably, then, the Washington Consensus represented precisely the type of policy prescriptions needed to promote neoliberalism on a global scale. As we have seen, the involved market-based guidelines for privatization and deregulation presented in Williamson’s summary paper both reflected and reinforced contemporary neoliberal canon. More important for present consideration,

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established neoliberal policies had pronounced consequences for local systems of education. That is, as this chapter has demonstrated, in so far as trade liberalization according to neoliberal precepts best takes place within a context of privately owned or privately managed schools with minimal governmental red tape and interference, it is safe to assume that trade liberalization in educational services simply adds to the other components of the neoliberal reform and restructuring agenda an extra and urgent dimension of international capital penetration into local schools and systems of learning. And, consequently, as education becomes more commonly spoken of and handled with such economic measures as efficiency, productivity, accountability, and human capital value, “the issue of international trade in education services will most likely increase in importance”, presenting “a risk of ‘trade creep’ where education policy issues are increasingly framed in terms of trade” (Knight, 2002, p. 20). In this case: The domination of the trade agenda for education is at the expense of other key objectives and rationales for … education, such as education’s role in social, cultural and scientific development and the role of education in promoting democracy and citizenship. (Ibid.) Many concerns about the global liberalization of trade in educational services seem particularly aimed at local and nation-based systems of higher education. Philip G. Altbach, Director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, warns “higher education is increasingly seen as a commercial product to be bought and sold like any other commodity” (2001, p. 2). Indeed, because the global trade in services, as with all trade, is driven primarily by profit motives, “the for-profit private providers of higher education become natural allies of trade in education” (Varghesse, 2007, p. 16).

8

Conclusion

It has been the intent of this chapter to examine the broad prescriptive policy instruments of global neoliberalism presented in Williamson’s 1989 “Washington Consensus” paper, with a particular view toward understanding the impact of the interdependent variables of privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization on education. We may now turn our attention to the manner in which both ideological and policy expressions of global neoliberalism become manifest in the world of education through the political economic

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mechanisms of transnational organizations and the d/evolved nation-state which allows them to influence what transpires domestically.

Notes 1 Of course, constructing a binary-style separation of the roll-back/roll-out phases and characteristics of neoliberal globalization is not only arbitrary, but in fact misleading, for at any particular juncture both are operating and exerting pressure on nation-states. Yet, using this binary as a convenient metaphor and schema for interrogating distinct qualities and challenges associated with the integration of education into global markets will help serve the interests of clarity, coherence, and manageability in our discussion. 2 According to Woo (2010), for example, the unambiguous promise made by the Washington Consensus is that if a developing country were to implement conservative macroeconomic policies and liberal microeconomic policies to expand the role of the private market at the expense of the state in resource allocation, then it would achieve sustained high growth rates on its own (p. 11). He concludes, however, that the Washington Consensus is the farce that the development establishment in Washington foisted upon the developing world as universal science, a status that justifies a one-size-fits-all approach to the problems of the poor, regardless of where they are located (p. 14). 3 www.cid.harvard.edu 4 He also adds “The above three restrictions do not apply in all cases to the USA (or other major centres of capitalist power). These may impose the above by diplomatic, economic or military means” (Hill, 2003, p. 11). 5 Telematics is the branch of information technology which deals with the long distance transmission of computerized information.

Chapter 5

Global Governance and the Neoliberal Schoolhouse A driving dimension of roll-out neoliberalism within the context of market reform globalization has been the role played by transnational entities and the influence they exert on local institutions and mechanisms of control. In effect, local institutions are increasingly expected to do the on the ground bidding for global neoliberalism by embodying both its legitimated ideology and its mechanisms of policy enforcement. With this external stream of influence in view at the local level, it is the first intent of this chapter to further consider the transnational institutional context of neoliberalism, or what many have referred to as a “new global governance”. Consequently, due attention will be given to the ways in which certain intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) work in the new global governance regime, and some of the pressures they exert.1 A second important objective of this chapter is to delineate in general terms the several ways supranational institutions such as IGOs promote neoliberalism in schools. Indeed, it is from this broad point of reference that we will continue our discussion in the following chapters regarding the impact four specific IGOs have had on local systems of education within a context of global neoliberalism. Finally, we will discuss some of the more sorely apparent criticisms and shortcomings of the Washington Consensus as an unquestionable model of development, as well as the origins and nature of the amorphous and largely noneventful post-Washington Consensus that followed.

1

The New Global Governance

Since the 1940s an intricate and growing nexus of global and regional agencies and institutions have emerged to comprise a global governance complex as both the hull and the rudder of globalization, giving rise to “an increasingly dense web of transnational networks, operating at different scales” (Mahon & MacBride, 2009, p. 3). The roots of contemporary global governance can be found in the post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference which opened a world system of trade and fixed exchange rates, while leaving enough economic flexibility at the nation-state level to ensure full-employment policies. The resulting agreement created three international financial institutions (IFIs) of paramount importance today: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004413603_005

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International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (later the World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (later the World Trade Organization or WTO). The IMF was designed to monitor and enforce the international economic order and to prevent balance of payments crises among participating countries. Concurrently, the International Bank for Reconstruction, later the World Bank, would provide post-war financial recovery assistance, primarily targeted at the ravaged economies of Western Europe. And, almost as an afterthought, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, became the international regime governing trade (Drezner, 2008, p. 93). As we shall see, the influence of these three IGOs, along with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have come to buttress and underwrite the institutional roll-out needed for neoliberalism at the global level. As such, they have equally become critical sources of neoliberal reconfiguration of national systems of education. It is important to note at this point that, due to the emergence and growth of IGOs, we can no longer imagine the world in terms of the conventional assumptions of a “state-centric conception of world politics and world order”, as now the principle unit of analysis is the “global, regional or transnational systems of authoritative rule-making and implementation” (McGrew & Held, 2002, p. 9): Globalization has been accompanied, some would say driven, by a thickening web of multilateral agreements, global and regional institutions and regimes, transgovernmental policy networks and summits. The evolving global governance complex regulates and intervenes in virtually all aspects of global affairs. (Ibid., p. xi) By the 1980s, international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank were more or less setting the global tone for pricing policy, ownership of productive and financial enterprises, market structures and regulation, publicsector management, and political and economic governance for many nations around the world (see UNCTAD, 2002, pp. 16–17). Referencing the work of Stephen Ball (2012), Stromquist and Monkman (2014) claim complex strands of worldwide influence, such as those spun by the IMF and World Bank, coalesce to establish “an increasingly tight connection between powerful business, philanthropic, and policy-making networks that today constitute the new architecture of global governance” for which hugely important policy prescriptions are decided by non-elected bodies and channeled through networks that have very little transparency (p. 13). Together, these forces shape in influential ways “economic and social policies (including education) through an array of legal, financial, and regulatory prescriptions affecting both advanced industrialized

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societies and low-income countries” (Ibid.). One of the basic contentions of this book is that a later yet crucial period in global neoliberalism can be bookmarked by the roll-out phase of neoliberal globalization, in which major institutional forms of economic regulation, implementation, and supervision engender a form of global governance that normalizes and naturalizes market reforms and restructuring across the planet. As a result, “an evolving global governance complex” has emerged to “promote, regulate, or intervene in the common affairs of humanity” (James & Soguk, 2014, p. 2). Moreover, because of the global neoliberal hegemony in the economic domain: It has now become taken for granted that a thing called ‘the market’ rules. That is, it has become both subjectively taken for granted and objectively compelling that the global capitalist market provides the central organizing order for all economic activity. This is the case, even for those marginal economies that attempt to remain outside of it. (p. xxvi) It is the author’s opinion that the four IGOs examined , (the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and the OECD), are representative of global neoliberalism at the level of an institutional architecture in the same way that the Washington Consensus is emblematic of the early neoliberal policy mechanisms that rapidly grew and reconfigured the power and privilege of global capital.

2

Three Domains of IGO Impact on Local Education: Legitimation, Operation, and Compliance

A combination of market failures, economic crises, and accelerating technological change in the 1970s paved the way for far-reaching economic reforms in the 1980s. In response to those factors, a number of powerful supranational organizations stepped forward in the 1980s to reinvigorate world capitalism. The effects of these organizations on public education have been substantial (Hirt, 2009). Global market reforms and the policy mechanisms which apply and enforce them impact national systems of education in numerous ways. In lower-income countries, for example, “newborn education systems barely had the time to mature as they were immediately caught up in the quagmire of national debt and the neoliberal offensive” (Ibid., p. 214). Mundy and Murphy (2001) call this impact: The hegemonic influence of formal intergovernmental organizations, both as these directly influence domestic educational policies and as

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they construct a global interpretation of, and set of responses to, worldwide educational “needs”. (p. 85) Perhaps the most important three ways IGOs promote neoliberalism in schools as part of capital-driven global governance are the legitimation of neoliberal views, the running of schools and schooling along neoliberal rails of operation, and the (re)animation of local and national governments as compliant market Mandarins, ready and willing to exact a pound of flesh in exchange for access to global flows of trade, investment, and finance. We will now look more closely at this three-sided coin of IGO excursion into local education, as well as some of the specific ways IGOs promote the marketization of the neoliberal schoolhouse. First of all, a neoliberal episteme, the rock-solid and unquestionable belief in the justifiably true virtue of free markets, promulgated along the multiple strands and networks of global governance, becomes an integral aspect of the very frames within which education is hung, as well as the needed recipe for the construction materials from which neoliberal subjectivities in education are created. It is in this way that neoliberalism is promulgated through mechanisms of global governance and control to become “the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world” (Harvey, 2005, p. 3). In its most sardonic forms, the neoliberal episteme can be said to represent a sort of trickle-down planetary free-market metaphysics. One of my favorite quotes in this regard involves a point made by Martell (2006) regarding what I like to call the “open air prison of market economics”: Capitalism requires increasing numbers of workers, citizens and consumers who willingly do what they are told to do and think what they are told to think. The production of such human capital is the most fundamental role schools play in a capitalist society. But while its strength is obvious and its overall aims are clear, the on the ground nature of this assault is still hard to pin down. (p. 5, emphasis added) Because national culture and a country’s position vis-à-vis the global rank and file invariably serve to mediate and dilute penetration by the neoliberal episteme, there are wide variations regarding the ways in which neoliberalism gets played out locally. Nevertheless, it remains “possible to think about neoliberalism as a hegemonic political-economic project” (Birch & Mykhnenko, 2010, p. 6). Another way to arrange this discussion is to recognize that a gnawing problem with understanding and unpacking “hegemony”, anyone’s hegemony, is that it is “hegemonic”.  This means, short of irreparable collapse, hegemonic

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systems retain their hold through influences that are insidious, pervasive, all-encompassing, and instilled through a conditioned learning about “normal ways” of seeing and acting in the world. Short of the stripping away of illusions that predictably occur during systemic collapse, our routine orientations in the world are largely internalized, unconscious, and felt as reflex. Matters differ little with the broad penetrations of political economic systems, such as neoliberalism. To bring the discussion back to our central thread of the neoliberal episteme as a pillar of support in the global governance edifice, Moutsios (2009) claims there is a “broad consensus” on the part of major transnational institutions regarding the importance of “human capital, social capital and social cohesion” in the acquisition of an “associational life” that helps individuals to access scarce resources (p. 475). Perhaps a more concrete example of the pervasive influence of neoliberalism is what Spring (2014) refers to as the “corporatization of global education”, or the opening of avenues for corporate cultural control over national school policies through: Enlisting economists to judge the work of school systems, teaching cognitive skills and knowledge needed in the workplace, and shaping behavior in schools and by government to meet the needs of corporations and to sustain free market economics. (Ibid., 2014, p. 3) In such instances, a neoliberal episteme is promulgated by IGOs and other global reach institutions that attempts to embed, preserve, and legitimate naturalized and assumed ways of being and doing in education. This represents the “consciousness creating” capacity of neoliberal globalization. Of equal importance, international governmental organizations and the broad field of influence over which they prevail deliver clear and decisive constraints and directives regarding what education should look like at the local level, including the gamut of permissible activities within schools. The globalization of educational institutions and practices has created a broad superstructure of global flows and networks of influence which local educators are called on to interpret, adapt, or reject (Spring, 2014). Dale (2000) asserts that these organizations create a transnational space for education policy associated with economic globalization, or a “Globally Structured Educational Agenda” (GSEA), which reflects the impact of globalised capitalism on local education systems. As Hill and Kumal (2009) note: The restructuring of the schooling and education systems across the world is part of the ideological and policy offensive by neoliberal capital. The privatization of public services, the capitalization and commodifica-

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tion of humanity, and the global diktats of the agencies of international capital … have resulted in the near-global (if not universal) establishment of competitive markets in public services such as education. (p. 1) International governmental organizations, like the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and the OECD, promote global educational agendas that reflect neoliberal praxis (Spring, 2014, p. 4). These organizations mount broad and aggressive public opinion campaigns claiming that the “problems” of education are due to poor management, dilapidation of resources, lack of freedom of choice, outdated curricula, and ill-prepared teachers (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 151), all of which are readily correctable with the right combinations of privatization, marketization, commodification, human capital calculations, and business-style managerialism and accountability. As we shall see, the standard economic development prescriptions of IGOs involve stern market attunements at the local level, with aggressive structural adjustment programs and trade liberalization as sources of crossover unto the beneficial sources of global finance and trade. These attunements ricochet around a nation’s economic house; eventually some of them land in the education sector. In certain lesser income countries, the results can be far-reaching and scandalous, making the education sector: The target of privatization schemes, massive dismissals of teachers, lowering of real incomes, decentralizing of services, changes in the curriculum towards more accountability, and higher standards in the direction of unreachable student achievements, accompanied by the sordid involvement of banks and private enterprises in the public affairs of education, all with the exclusive purpose of optimizing profits. (Ibid.) As we shall see in later chapters, on accounts regarding the spirit and body of the neoliberal schoolhouse, teaching and learning become imbued with highly naturalized and socially decontextualized market designs under the tutelage of world governing IGOs that demand accountability, managerialism, commodification, and human capital sensibilities. In turn, these efforts exact a heavy toll on the human relationships of education and fuel adverse social conditions in adjacent communities.

3

IGOs and the Marketization of Neoliberal Education

The role of major IGOs in the neoliberal commodification and marketization of education worldwide is a broadly established truth. Global networks linking

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such agencies as the World Bank, the OECD, and the United Nations foster a world culture of education even while emphasizing its different aspects (Spring, 2014, p. 88). For example, the World Bank, which indirectly supports the marketization of global education through its International Finance Corporation (IFC) and EdInvest, publicly declared in 2001 that education is a “frontier sector” for future corporate investment worldwide (Klees, 2008, p. 335). According to Stephen Ball (2012), global policy networks govern national systems of education through: An unstable, uneven, but apparently unstoppable flood of closely inter-related reform ideas permeating and reorienting education systems in diverse social and political locations which have very different histories. This epidemic is ‘carried’ by powerful agents, like the World Bank and the OECD; it appeals to politicians of diverse persuasions; and is becoming thoroughly embedded in the ‘assumptive worlds’ of many academic educators. (p. 215) We have referred to this policy nexus and the institutions involved under the aegis of neoliberal globalization as global governance. World system theorists argue that ideas and policies from the global flow are imposed on nations by the economic power of multinational corporations and global institutions (Wallerstein, 1984). With respect to education, the imposition of global governance takes place in an array of complex, intricate, and interdependent ways. According to Robertson and Dale (2007), international agencies like the World Bank and the IMF, along with the OECD, effectively set agendas for key elements of education worldwide (p. 9). One area in which this frequently occurs is through the advancement of “convergence policies” that overlap business principles, such as accountability and managerialism, with educational goals and practices (Jones, 1997). From the mid 1980s debates about education in countries belonging to the OECD were increasingly focused on a range of neoliberal-tinged issues, such as privatization, public choice, decentralization, the use of national testing, and business-based cost recovery and efficiency (Mundy & Murphy, 2001). Similar ideas were also being promoted by major multilateral and bilateral development agencies involved in the field of educational cooperation in poorer countries, especially those agencies dominated by Western governments (Carnoy, 1995, p. 658). Major IGOs, such as those examined in this book: Share a globalized view of education and efficiency, which includes a highly quantitative view of progress. They also share an explicit

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understanding that ‘better’ education can be measured and that better education translates directly into higher economic and social productivity. (Carnoy, 2014, p. 25) Measuring and comparing school assessment outcomes across and within countries, an area of “ed business” that has grown exponentially in recent years, is one example of business-style accountability strenuously promoted by the OECD, the World Bank, and other global financial and development agencies. The information and analysis upon which these policies are based often emerge from “influential think tanks”, such as the Heritage Foundation, as part of the “conservative movement that dominates public policy debate and formation” and is able to promote “conservative education policies like school choice, reductions in education spending, and high-stakes standardized testing” (Haas, 2009, p. 172).

4

The Neoliberal State Imaginary

To complete our discussion of the ways in which IGO-based world governance has come to straddle the neoliberal schoolhouse, a third scenario regarding the ensnarement of public education in the global net of the market imaginary is in order. This scenario involves the creation of an isomorphic means for cross-referencing the local with the global by way of state-supported social institutions, regulatory regimes, and economic policies that ride globalizing winds and incorporate local education into the fold of global markets. According to Robertson et al. (2002): The basis of a national policy for knowledge production, its national appropriation and its distribution, may be eroded in a free-market context of a knowledge-driven economy. Along with the importance of knowledge and information as key inputs for economic productivity and growth, the struggle over its production, appropriation, and dissemination becomes a critical aspect for the structuring of the unequal global social structure. (p. 495) With the institutional framework provided by major IGOs, successive waves of roll-out neoliberalism at the global level are unleashed and transnational mechanisms of world governance are expanded. Yet, without the realization of these policies at the local level all would be naught in the neoliberal imaginary. Consequently, nation-states are stretched and stressed between the

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irreconcilable poles of global capital penetration and privatization in education and the civil imperatives of citizen entitlement. When the Washington Consensus “went global”, schools around the world began a process of neoliberalization and: Governments were advised to restructure their education sectors by lowering subsidies to tertiary-level education and introducing user fees at this level, and encouraging efficiency-driven reforms in kindergarten to grade twelve level schooling through the use of contract teachers, lowering of repetition rates, and parental “participation” in school level costs. (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014, p. 44) These reforms were developed, packaged, and carried out largely under the auspices of international financial institutions and IGOs, (such as our four case studies), and individual nation-states were left paying the bill. As Ward (2012) points out, the specific ways in which major IGOs “conceptualize knowledge, economy and society and their inter relationship” has changed significantly over the course of the last fifty years (Ibid., p. 144), and has recently included “the privatization of a number of epistemic areas involving the production of knowledge and learning that were once seen as simply ‘traditional,’ ‘tacit’ or ‘culture-based’” (Ibid., p. 95). Commencing in the 1960s with a view that knowledge is most importantly a “public good” harnessed in the service of state or national interests and meant to “propel the progress of the nation-state and societies”, by the late 1980s and 1990s IGOs like the OECD and the World Bank had shifted their “rhetoric and public policy” toward “a much more neoliberal vision of the role of knowledge in directly providing innovation for the marketplace and the role of the state in creating conditions for that to happen” (Ibid., p. 144). Only by turning domains of knowledge, (and implicitly education), “into a private commodity through the assistance of governments could national interests be served” (Ibid.). As a result: Education policy-making is no longer an exclusive affair of the nationstate. Transnational institutions, to which most nation-states belong, are now the main contexts which define the major educational aims. (Moutsios, 2009, p. 476) The phenomena of local governmental complicity in the global neoliberal project is explored in more depth in Chapter 10 as we consider the impact on education of the historically d/evolved nation-state. In the next several chapters, we will turn our attention more closely to each of the four IGOs believed

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to be significantly involved in “connecting the dots” between global neoliberalism and education at the local level. But, before we do, it is worth our effort to first re-visit the Washington Consensus.

5

The Washington Consensus Revisited: Criticisms and Failures

In order to understand the tone and texture of the role played by the four identified NGOs engaged in neoliberal world governance, and consequently the effect they have had on education, further consideration to the Washington Consensus is needed. Specifically, no accounting of the contemporary impact major IGOs have had on schools and schooling is complete without first painting a backdrop of the changes and challenges that have occurred with regard to the Washington Consensus as an exportable, cut-and-paste model of global development since the Reagan– Thatcher years of the 1980s. Based in Washington DC and supported by the US Treasury Dept and international financial institutions (Rowden, 2011, p. 5), as we have discussed, early versions of the Washington Consensus promised the extension of growth and prosperity in exchange for market reforms “to the most remote corners of the globe” (World Bank, 1996, p. 7). In this view: Countries are poor because of misconceived state intervention, corruption, inefficiency and misguided economic incentives … development is the inevitable outcome of a set of ‘appropriate’ incentives and neoclassical economic policies, including fiscal restraint, privatization, the abolition of government intervention in prices, labour market ‘flexibility’, and trade, financial, and capital account liberalization. (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 4) According to Stiglitz (2008), vested interests and powers promoting the Washington Consensus are hostile to public services, demand “massive scale backs” in government spending, and refuse to recognize the significance of market failures resulting from unregulated economies and the disruptions of trade liberalization (p. 50): Washington Consensus policies did not allow for the protection of individuals from the vicissitudes of global market forces, especially those created by finance capital markets, nor does it provide for the state interventionist mechanisms needed for rapid and resilient recovery from such crisis. (Ibid., p. 44)

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There was such a bedrock conviction in international aid and trade circles of the irrefutability of a neoliberal model of development that access to aid and consideration for rescheduling or cancelling debt was contingent on satisfactory implementation of consensus-style policy reforms (Rowden, 2011). By the 1990s, neoliberal reforms and restructuring swam freely in development program discourse and were premised on the: Overriding idea that if poor countries simply cut their budget deficits and keep them under control, raised interest rates if necessary to get inflation down and keep it down, privatized, deregulated and opened their trade and financial accounts to the global economy, they would be rewarded with higher economic growth and spontaneous development. (Ibid., p. 6) Rodrik (2008) asserts these traditional, orthodox policy prescriptions are “presumptive”, start with “strong pre-conceptions”, produce a “laundry list” of reform recommendations, and are “biased toward universal recipes” and a one-size-fits-all mindset. The objectives of the Washington Consensus policies were too narrow and fundamental, typically limited to GDP increases, while they “should have included sustainable increases in standards of living, as well as the promotion of democratic and equitable development” (Stiglitz, 2008, p. 47). Consequently, by the end of the 1990s a growing chorus of criticisms from a range of quarters could be heard regarding the pronounced failures of neoliberal development policies, especially in poorer countries. Washington Consensus development discourse was criticized for its theoretical inconsistencies and its close association with weak macroeconomic performance and recurrent crises in poor countries. In some instances WC policies were also said to be responsible for regressive shifts in the distribution of power, income, and wealth (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 16). Many of these failures were attributed to harsh Consensus-inspired structural adjustment programs carried out by the World Bank and the IMF. It was clear, for example, that the economic growth from trade and financial liberalization proved much lower than expected, and often worsened income distribution (McCleery & De Paolis, 2008, p. 439). In sub-Saharan Africa, from the 1970s to the 1990s, GDP rose by less than 1 percent, and investments actually declined. For the same period Africa’s share in world exports fell by more than half. From 1980 to 1990, the continent’s agricultural and food exports dropped from 21 to 8.1 percent of all developing countries’ exports, and the share of exported manufactured goods declined from 7.8 percent to 1.1 percent in 1990 (Lopes, 2012). Indeed, during the first three decades of Washington Consensus hegemony in the international economy, the world witnessed a:

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Confluence of crises including spikes in food and energy prices as well as financial and economic downturn, further aggravated by the impact of global climate change and growing demography. (Ibid.) Criticisms of Washington Consensus neoliberalism throughout the 1980s and ‘90s were also fueled by the mammoth failings of international financial institutions and other IGOs in a series of regional crises that threatened to engulf the world economy, The most dire of these was the Asian financial crisis in 1997 (Shaoul, 2010, p. 247). According to Stiglitz (2004), it was this crisis which marked the genesis of a broad-based reassessment of the Washington Consensus. Thus, within ten years of Williamson’s seminal paper, neoliberalism as a “grand narrative” of global development had failed on many fronts, and the structural adjustment programs promoted by the World Bank and the IMF had fallen short of their promised results. In some countries these policies had even aggravated deeper systemic problems and provoked popular backlash and political instability (Jessop, 2010, p. 174). Lopes (2012), for example, observes that macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment policies of major IGOs prompted waves of popular unrest that contributed to the recrudescence of many civil wars in the 1990s. Sheppard and Leitner (2010) refer to this phenomenon as the” increasingly trenchant contestations of neoliberalism in civil society and states” (p. 188). Ironically, countries in Asia, such as Singapore and Vietnam, that were able to best weather the crises were those which went against the accepted neoliberal grain and imposed financial and currency controls (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010). In fact, throughout the 1980s and ‘90s countries that adhered to Washington Consensus policies generally achieved slower rates of economic growth than those that did not (Stiglitz, 2008, p. 44). Moreover, the global downturn of 2008 increased the widening gap between rich and poor even further and (again) revealed the vulnerability of national economies to the world financial sector. Consequently, in the first years of the new millennium “a broader intellectual shift” was occurring in the development orientation of neoliberalism, one that ostensibly recognized “not just growth strategies but also health, education, and other social policies” (Rodrik, 2008). In broad terms, this shift came to be know as the postWashington Consensus (Stiglitz, 2004).

6

The Post-Washington Consensus and Keynes Lite

The first thing which needs to be understood about the post-Washington Consensus (PWC) is that it has never had many indications of being a “consensus”.

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Unlike its predecessor, the PWC had no definitive list of development prescriptions. Its anticipated form and direction created divisiveness and was hotly contested by major proponents of global neoliberalism, including Washington-based power brokers like the IMF and the World Bank (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 187). According to Stiglitz (2004), the PWC view regarding “what strategies are most likely to promote the development of the poorest countries in the world … is this: there is no consensus except that the Washington consensus did not provide the answer” (p. 2). In fact, post-Washington Consensus policies may represent little more than an imprecise “second Generation … add-on list of reforms” (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 7). Perhaps what has set the post-Washington Consensus apart from its roots is that it marked a period of time during which neoliberal intergovernmental organizations gave some consideration to the need for a “more human face” in development policy discourse. In a series of pronouncements immediately preceding and following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, a number of major IGOs (OECD, World Bank, IMF, United Nations) began softening some of the sharper edges of “neoliberal fundamentalism” (Stiglitz, 2004), with a new emphasis placed on poverty and debt reduction in the developing world (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 187). As implied, this change did not come about spontaneously or as the result of a sudden, unscripted re-evaluation of the core beliefs of global neoliberalism. Rather, it should be interpreted mainly as a tactical response to the mounting evidence and resulting pressures arising from increasing poverty in countries obeying structural adjustment directives, along with indications that the social costs of “adjustments” were being disproportionately shouldered by the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the “recipient” countries. In effect, “the WC stood accused of being … oblivious to the disproportionate burden on the poor arising from the processes of adjustment and stabilization” (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 5). The proposed shift by relevant IGOs also coincided with the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which proposed, among other objectives, to halve world poverty by 2015 (United Nations, 2015). Consequently, in contrast to the article of faith for unfettered free markets championed by the architects and advocates of the old Washington Consensus, “the international economic institutions (carried along by the PWC) were now more interested in poverty, institutions, and the role of the state in emerging economies” (Arrébola Rodríguez, 2011, p. 27). On the latter point, a second “shift” of the post-Washington Consensus was toward a more active, yet diligently pro-market, neoliberal state. According to Stiglitz (2008), the weight of the inadequacies in the Washington Consensus engendered an awareness of the need to arrive at a correct balance between government intervention and markets in neoliberal development. As such,

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“some level of state intervention is necessary to deal with negative externalities and provide public goods which otherwise would not be provided by the market” (Ibid., p. 42). Consequently, renewed attention was given to governance and the development of appropriate state institutions to play a more active and regulatory role in the success of the market model of development. This has involved a shift back toward Keynesian state interventionist policies due to “contestations of neoliberalism as well as its concrete failures to deliver prosperity, and periodic crises” (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 186). Market reforms were also expected to take shape at the level of the state institutions themselves through the deployment incentive structures, accountability, and competition to improve state performance (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 187). In this way a “governance strain” in the PWC, while giving token acknowledgement to the need for social safety nets to catch some of those who fall through the cracks of the severest market failures, remained primarily geared toward bolstering state institutions to help steer market mechanisms away from disequlibriuminduced crises, back toward the stable center of the neoliberal ideal type. Yet, even in matters of the state, the sentiments of PWC proponents were far from uniform. As Rodrik (2006) notes, “the precise enumeration of these requisite institutional reforms depends on who is talking and when, and often the list seems to extend to whatever it is that the reformers may not have had a chance to do” (p. 978). Because of the crucial and many ways IGOs impact education, the shift represented by the so-called post-Washington Consensus is important to our discussion of world governance and neoliberal education as it may reveal some degree of recalibration and softening of neoliberal approaches to education. Although calls to humanize global neoliberalism have met with mixed responses on the part of governing agencies themselves, it is nevertheless relevant to give adequate attention to how the PWC has impacted, if at all, the four IGOs under consideration. With regard to education, we will see the results of the post-Washington Consensus have been mostly limited and superficial, largely confined to a rather shallow consideration of the need for market reforms in education to be more flexible and responsive to local conditions. In brief, the policy impact of the PWC on schools and schooling has so far been a modest increase in toleration on the part of some key members of international governing bodies for limited, piecemeal, Keynesian-like public sector state involvement, while at the same time attempting to increase the state’s institutional capacity to more effectively oversee and drive the “roll-out” dimensions of neoliberalism in education. According to Sheppard and Leitner (2010), the “new development economics” of the post-Washington Consensus were “triggered by concerns about the persistent unpopularity of globalization”,

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with “some proponents … offering Keynesian proposals to redress the failings of neoliberal globalization” (p. 186). Thus: The rise of new institutional economics and growing pressure on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by several country governments, international organizations (including some United Nations agencies), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities, and social movements compelled the mainstream and the international financial institutions (IFI) to address the problems of inequality and poverty reduction. (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 2) The resulting new and improved Washington Consensus, when it has taken place at all, is indicative of a capitulation of global capital to widespread protests and evidence regarding the continued failures of four decades of global neoliberalism. Because of its piecemeal, inconsistent, and market opportunistic qualities, I refer to the new tolerance of the PWC for limited generative state intervention in education, while emphasizing the sharpening of roll-out neoliberal regulatory and market-friendly state institutions, as “Keynes lite”: Policy-wise, the rhetoric of the PWC is comparatively state-friendly but in a limited and piecemeal way, with intervention only justified on a caseby-case basis, should it be demonstrable by mainstream criteria that narrow economic benefits would most likely accrue … the PWC offers a rationale for discretionary intervention across a much wider range of economic and social policy than the WC. (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 6) Despite the strategic realignment of global neoliberalism away from uncompromising market fundamentalism, most observers concede that very little has really changed in the form and content of market globalization. Nothing resembling a “complete break” from the basic principles of the WC has occurred, and “the overall logic of structural adjustment remained largely unchanged”, with the macroeconomic policies of market liberalization, export-oriented free markets, and the removal of trade barriers and tariffs still firmly in place and paramount (Robertson & Dale, 2007, p. 10). Perhaps most kindly regarded as a continuation of the Washington Consensus by “other means”, the PWC remains “fundamentally pro-market, supporting a poorly examined process of globalization … supported by appropriate institutions and the gentle steer of the national state and the IFIs” (Saad-Filho, 2010, pp. 6–7). Indeed, the economist responsible for originally coining the term “Washington

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Consensus”,  John Williamson, sees no underlying difference between the two, except perhaps in some of the language used (Williamson, 2004, p. 476). We have in this chapter pieced together a broad context of meaning for understanding the general role played by neoliberal networks and institutions in global governance, including the impact intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have had on local systems of education. Preliminary consideration, (to be furthered in Chapter 10), was also been given to the role played by the recent emergence of a neoliberal nation-state in coordinating and overseeing market reforms at the local level. Finally, we examined the criticisms and failings of the Washington Consensus that gave rise to the largely cosmetic and unreformed designs of the post-WC. Let us now turn our attention to four specific IGOs that comprise important constituents in global governance, with significant impact for local education. Because of the dire impact they have had on schools and education around the world, we will refer to these IGOs as the “four horsemen of the edpocalypse”.

Note 1 According to Harvard Law School, IGOs are “created by treaty, involving two or more nations, to work in good faith, on issues of common interest”; they have come to “play a very significant role in international political systems and global governance” (Harvard Law School, Intergovernmental Organizations).

CHAPTER 6

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: Twin Horsemen of the Edpocalypse The intergovernmental organizations being interrogated in the next several chapters are the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). By no measure do these four represent the only, or even the largest or most powerful, transnational agencies promoting global neoliberal capitalism today. Certain global corporations indubitably take that honor. In fact, the combined effect of these four IGOs only represents a portion of the global network that consolidates neoliberal hegemony worldwide. Yet, these four are among “the major global institutions affecting worldwide educational policies” (Spring, 2014, p. 1). Together, they comprise central building blocks of a global architecture in trade, finance, and development that involve significant educational reform and restructuring along neoliberal lines. As Moutsios (2009) comments with regard to three of the four: The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO policies are commonly described by what is called the ‘Washington Consensus’, not only because of the hometown of the first two institutions. The expression refers to the promotion by them of the neoliberal economic agenda which includes three basic sets of policies: privatisation of public companies, liberalisation of international trade and investments, and deregulation of domestic economic and financial activity. (p. 472) As such, the intent of this chapter is to explore the key ways two of these IGOs,1 the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have come to influence the workings of the present-day global political economy, and how that influence has “institutionalized” the neoliberal agenda in local systems of teaching and learning. A similar project will be undertaken in subsequent chapters regarding the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization Of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It will be argued over the course of these chapters that, because of the adverse effects these four organizations have had on public education worldwide, they represent a veritable “four horsemen of the edpocalypse” responsible for a tightening global policy

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nexus of macroeconomic rules, demands, and consequences that have torn away at public education and constructed in its wake a universal neoliberal schoolhouse premised on free market principles and social inequality. In our examination of these four IGOs we will also re-visit the impact of the so-called “post-Washington consensus”, especially with regard to the evolving management of global education after the pronounced failures of neoliberalism in the 1990s. Finally, to further anchor our moral center in this conversation, concluding commentary will be directed toward weighing the negative impact each of the “horsemen” have had on access to education as a universal human right, as well as explore some of the ways political resistance might be posed in order to reverse the involved social erosion and to promote the establishment of a just global civil society.

1

Twin Horsemen: The World Bank and the IMF

The concept of global governance presupposes a high level of shared goals, ideology, and coordination among major institutions, such as IGOs. There are perhaps few better instances of this symmetry in global neoliberal governance than that shared between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, including their crossover in promoting market reforms in education. At present, 189 nations have WB/IMF membership, as to become a member of the Bank, a country must first join the International Monetary Fund (World Bank, 2018). According to IMF spokesperson David Driscoll (1996), “the Bank and the IMF are twin intergovernmental pillars supporting the structure of the world’s economic and financial order” (para. 2). Robertson and Dale (2007) consider the shared WB/IMF project so far-reaching and significant as to comprise no less than “the institutionalisation and management of a westerncentred architecture for global capitalism” (p. 11). Both institutions were created at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire, United States with the intention of stabilizing the post-depression/post-war world by rebuilding (primarily European) national economies devastated by conflict and collapse (Action Aid International, 2009, p. 10). The original role of the two IGOs has evolved considerably over the decades and has witnessed increased coordination in implementing the exigencies of neoliberal policies worldwide. The World Bank consists of two constituent organizations: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA). Together they extend development loans to the “governments of middle-income and credit worthy low-income countries”

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including “interest-free loans … and grants to governments of the poorest countries” (The World Bank, n.d.-c). Thus, as Western Europe achieved some level of post-war recovery, the World Bank turned its attention to the world’s poorer nations and, since the 1940s, has loaned more than $330 billion to developing economies (Driscoll, 1996, para. 5). Despite the Bank’s claims that it is “not a bank in the ordinary sense” (The World Bank, n.d.-f), many of its operations correspond to those of commercial banking, including profit-driven borrowing and lending based on interest (Aliquo, 1986, p. 285). Moreover, while making much of its willingness to provide loans on “favorable terms” to “credit-worthy governments of developing nations” (see Driscoll, 1996, para. 7), there is little mention in World Bank literature of the adverse effects the structural adjustment “conditions” attached to these loans often have on poor countries, or that World Bank/IMF conditionalities amount to a form of strong-arming of disaffected countries and teetering governments with few alternative sources of development assistance. By the same token, as a “key actor in determining the architecture and workings of the global political economy”, the Bank’s influence extends far beyond that of a mere financial institution, and its policies are intimately intertwined with “promoting the neoliberal economic agenda” of the United States, which underwrites much of its funding (Klees et al., 2012, p. vii). In a review of World Bank policy documents, Domenech and Mora-Ninci (2009) conclude: One can observe its (the Bank’s) hegemonic vocation and strategic interest in carrying out a political project through the dexterous use of the power it enjoys as provider of credit, through the production and systematization of knowledge and experience on a global scale, as well as its use of an extensive network of academic institutions and research centers, civil society and private sector organizations, and the mass media. (p. 155) As a neoliberal perspective came to dominate international development of the 1980s in tune to the Washington Consensus, the Bank played a crucial role in the promulgation of the new world order in the Global South, primarily through development project loans pegged to expectancy conditions of market performance (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 94). In the process, it “expanded its assistance from an orientation toward projects to the broader aspects of economic reform” (Driscoll, 1996, para. 38). According to the Bank, its focus shifted from a “facilitator of post-war reconstruction and development” to a self-proclaimed and highly contested “present-day mandate of worldwide poverty alleviation”2 albeit devoutedly and persistently along neoliberal pathways.

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Similarly, in response to balance of payments difficulties created by OPEC and the collapse of fixed exchange rates in the 1970s, accelerated by the Latin America/ developing-world debt crisis of 1982, the International Monetary Fund was induced to rethink its policy of confining financial assistance to short-term lending (Driscoll, 1996, para. 34). For its first thirty-four years, IMF powers had mostly involved matters of supervising international exchange rates tied to the gold standard and providing short-term reserve loans to countries needing to shore up balance of payments difficulties (Ibid., para. 22). In the agency’s own words, the breakdown in international monetary cooperation during the crisis-plagued 1920s and 30s had: Led the IMF’s founders to plan an institution charged with overseeing the international monetary system – the system of exchange rates and international payments that enables countries and their citizens to buy goods and services from each other. The new global entity would ensure exchange rate stability and encourage its member countries to eliminate exchange restrictions that hindered trade. (IMF, 2001) In 1978, a fundamental transition was made toward addressing what the Fund saw as “the consequences of the irresponsible lending by banks, and irresponsible borrowing by the developing countries” (Action Aid International, 2009, p. 12). The IMF constitution was amended to broaden its powers to include the surveillance of member countries’ economic performance, technical assistance with market-based development planning, and direct financial assistance to support market reform and restructuring (Ibid., p. 13). It continued to act as a lender of “last resort ” of foreign exchange reserves for members with liquidity problems, although the amount of financial assistance and its length of availability were both increased. More important, these changes telegraphed a historically decisive and deepened involvement by the IMF in addressing “long-standing contradictions in the structure of members’ economies, requiring reforms stretching over a number of years and suggesting closer collaboration with the World Bank” (Driscoll, 1996, para. 34). According to Rowden (2011, p. 12), with the inception of the debt crisis in 1982, the expansion of the IMF’s influence and power was fueled by the Reagan and Thatcher governments’ economic agenda based on the neo-classical assumptions inherent in the Washington Consensus, especially those related to “tight” fiscal and monetary policies. Consequently, the main job of the IMF changed from remediation of balance of payments difficulties to large-scale market liberalization, especially “in the countries of the South, and later in so-called transition economies since these represented the major obstacle

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to an open economy” (Lopes, 2012, para. 22). Thus, by the 1980s the IMF had “gone beyond concern with simple balance of payment adjustment to … the structural reform of its members’ economies” (Driscoll, 1996, para. 38). Critical voices who take exception to what is viewed as an excess of control by the IMF entitlements liken its contemporary status to that of “a global loan shark, exerting enormous leverage over the economies of more than 60 countries” who have little choice but to follow IMF edicts “to get loans, international assistance, and even debt relief” (Global Exchange, n.d.-a).

2

A Functional Symmetry

Close coordination and functional symmetry between the World Bank and the IMF is evidenced on several counts. Since the heyday of the Washington Consensus the two have increasingly “worked close to promote neoliberal development in the global South” (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 156). The World Bank sets much of the reform agenda for the study of development, and passes on data to the IMF regarding policy analysis, reform options, budgetary costs, and important development-related social indicators (IMF, 2001). It then loops back and collaborates with a number of international agencies and national governments to gather information “with the aim of revising its strategies and policies in search of new agreements and political support for its economic and social reforms” as it hashes out actual policy implementation and compliance with the IMF (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 156). In this manner, the Bank provides a constant “data feed” to the IMF and has over time increased its role as global policy advisor for national governments through the “use of baseline analysis, target setting, and benchmarking as policy tools to coerce national governments into adopting a particular reform package, designed and funded by the World Bank” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012, p. 5). Acting as a sort of “super think tank”, the Bank: Functions as a judge on what does not work and consequently does not receive external financial support, even if national governments prove the contrary and request funding for reforms that they deem important for their country. (Ibid.) The World Bank and IMF have in the past worked in near lockstep fashion to impose “the standards of orthodoxy within development economics … enforcing the relevant policies through conditionalities imposed on poor countries facing balance of payments, fiscal or financial crises” (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 4).

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This cooperation is based on an interchange of information backed up by a coordination of financial assistance to members. It involves, among other factors, “regular and frequent interaction of economists and loan officers (from the two IGOs) who work on the same country”, with the Bank staff bringing “a longer-term view of the slow process of development and a profound knowledge of the structural requirements and economic potential of a country” (Driscoll, 1996, para. 36). The IMF in turn: Contributes its own perspective on the day-to-day capability of a country to sustain its flow of payments to creditors and to attract from them investment finance, as well as on how the country is integrated within the world economy. (Ibid.) As such, the World Bank and the IMF work closely to insure that governments comply with market reforms, and, as the European Network on Debt and Development (2006) points out, “if one institution fails to persuade compliance the other steps in to exert additional pressure” (p. 24). Mechanisms of compliance afforded by the World Bank and IMF can have deeply adverse effects for countries viewed as falling short of prescribed neoliberal policy expectations. As we shall see in our subsequent discussion of structural adjustment programs (SAPs), future aid and debt relief for developing countries are commonly predicated on achieving neoliberal development objectives earmarked by the WB and IMF, and “making the grade” plays a decisive role in who gets noticed by rich donor countries in their yearly aid commitments. According to ActionAid International (2009), countries that fail to enact WB/IMF policies can see their access to international capital dry up, and such threats amount to “blackmail” since “poor nations have no choice but to comply” (p. 14). Indeed, international lenders, such as commercial banks, are reluctant to make loan credits available to IMF member nations unless first “seeing satisfactory performance by the borrowing country of its program of structural adjustment” (Driscoll, 1996, para. 36). In other words, the international “signal effect” provided to rich and influential donor nations by WB and IMF ratings gives the two global governance horsemen “tremendous leverage and power over aid‐dependent borrowing countries” (Rowden, 2011, p. 12). Consequently, any country viewed as ”not satisfactorily adhering to the agreed macroeconomic framework” by the two IGOs or “at risk of macroeconomic instability” can find its access to foreign aid flows effectively curtailed or discontinued (ActionAid International, 2006, p. 41). Moreover, together the two agencies can engage in “cross conditionality”, placing massive combined pressure on developing countries to comply with policy reform conditions or

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else run the risks of losing multiple sources of finance (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006, p. 3). The IMF in particular in this regard exerts: .

Extraordinary control … over the economies of Southern countries because of its role as the de facto head of the donor aid cartel, and its ‘signaling effect’ to donors, is particularly disturbing because it threatens national sovereignty and democratic decision-making. (Ibid.) According to one researcher, the power and control the IMF retains over national monetary and fiscal policies is “astonishing”, as “all aid can and has been cut off” from countries that “do not abide by their policies” (Marphatia, 2006, p. 15). Yet, the historic tendency of the IMF and World Bank to ride neoliberal roughshod over the developing world is particularly controversial in light of the fact that the world’s rich countries, while representing only 21 percent of the world’s population and providing little more than 23 percent of the Bank and Fund’s income, hold 62 percent of the votes in the decision-making bodies of the two organizations. In contrast, developing countries comprise 79 percent of the world’s population and provide 77 percent of WB/IMF’s income, yet have just 39 percent of the votes on those same boards (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 8). In the case of the IMF, funding by member nations is based on each country’s wealth, which in turn also determines voting power; in effect, “those making higher contributions have greater voting rights”.3 Moreover, since the U.S. is the largest shareholder with a quota of 18 percent, (38 percent combined with Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain), then arguably the “disproportionate amount of power held by wealthy countries means that the interests of bankers, investors and corporations from industrialized countries are put above the needs of the world’s poor majority” (Global Exchange, n.d.-a).

3

The Magnum Opus of Symetry: Structural (Mal) Adjustment

Perhaps the uncontested magnum opus of functional symmetry and coordinated efforts in neoliberal global economic governance can be found in the World Bank/IMF-sponsored and imposed structural adjustment policies (SAPs). To further underwrite what has already been proposed, the structural reform policies adopted by the two organizations since the 1980s have resulted in “considerable convergence” in their efforts with “greater reliance on each other’s special expertise” (Driscoll, 1996, para. 35). In classic neoliberal form, SAPs are “free market” programs that require governments to loosen internal

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regulations, cut taxes, privatize public goods, and dismantle social safety nets in order to increase productive efficiency and output, and to facilitate foreign investment and trade. They typically involve policies in alignment with trade liberalization, export promotion, elimination of food and agricultural subsidies, local currency devaluation, and reduction of public and social sector spending (ActionAid International, 2009, p. 14). In other words: The IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment policies (SAPs) ensure debt repayment by requiring countries to cut spending … eliminate basic food and transportation subsidies; devalue national currencies to make exports cheaper; privatize national assets; and freeze wages. (Global Exchange, n.d.-b) In one rather biting assessment it is claimed that SAPs require debtor governments to open their economies to penetration by foreign corporations, allowing access to the country’s workers and environment “at bargain basement prices” (Global Exchange, n.d.-b). A parallel and supportive development practice operating alongside SAPs is found in the World Bank’s policy-based lending or structural adjustment loans (SALs). As the world became mired in recession in the 1980s, the Bank expanded its focus on large-scale infrastructure projects to include lending operations targeting structural and sector adjustments. As with SAPs, the primary rationale of structural adjustment lending is to “restructure a developing country’s economy as the best basis for sustained economic growth” and to “adjust economic policies and structures in the face of serious balance of payments problems that threaten continued development” in order to “avert economic crises through economic reforms and changes in investment priorities” (Driscoll, 1996, para. 33). Consequently, in the same way that structural adjustment programs came to embody Washington Consensus principles in the 1980s, SALs “sought to eliminate all obstacles to a ‘perfect market’” as the presumed optimal path to efficiency and growth, and World Bank loans became a key means for realizing the global neoliberal imaginary in the developing world and elsewhere (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 95). The justification for SAPs and SALs is that they improve the domestic climate for business by lowering or eliminating barriers to trade and investment, by gathering foreign exchange through export promotion, and by reducing deficits through cuts in public spending. It is also argued that any short-term negative consequences are more than compensated for later by the increase in new wealth which ultimately trickles down to the previously poor (Castells, 2000; Stiglitz, 2002). At base, structural adjustment programs are fiscal,

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monetary, and structural policy changes especially promoted by the IMF and World Bank in developing countries (Action Aid International, 2009, p. 14). They are de rigueur in global market reforms and free market compliance mechanisms carried out by the bidders of neoliberalism, especially during the market philosophy free rider days of the 1980s and ‘90s. As we will explore in in the next chapter, in their most severe and orthodox versions, SAPs cause extreme national deflationary pressures and result in the wholesale usurping of national economic, often political, autonomy.

4

Conditionality: Neoliberal Linchpin and Debtor Achille’s Tendon

The linchpin of compliance in structural adjustment programs, as well as the achilles tendon for debtor countries, is the binding “conditionality” upon which WB/IMF aid, credit, and loans rest. In layperson terms, such conditionality, a practice that has steadily become a standard feature of WB and IMF lending in the developing world since the 1970s, can be thought of as “what a poor country must do in return for receiving loans, aid, or debt relief” (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 4). Thus, structural adjustment programs are not only based on and derived from neoliberal principles, but a nation’s ability to effectuate and apply these principles at the economic level comprises the very condition on which WB/IMF consortium aid and loans are granted. Moreover, to underscore their linchpin status, the IMF works hard to prevent developing countries from avoiding conditionalities (for example, when a debtor nation might wish to locate less stringent, alternative sources of aid) by pressuring private banks to uphold similar adjustment conditions in their loan programs to low-income countries (Action Aid International, 2009, p. 13). As such, conditions of compliance represent a central organizing principle of SAPs/SALs, and are the lifeblood of neoliberal market reforms in the developing world. It is interesting to note, however, that the process of debtor countries “meeting conditions” in order to be approved for the funds they have already received, and, thus, remain in the good graces of global mechanisms of neoliberal economic governance, comprises a sort of “circular causation”, since the requisite terms for gaining and preserving financial support are no less than the self-same free market reforms à la the Washington Consensus for which that support is intended to produce in the first place. Thus, the overriding condition for receiving development loans and aid is a substantial level of confidence on the part of the WB and IMF that a country is both willing and capable of meeting structural adjustment conditions. To slip below the threshold of this confidence, either prior to loan/aid approval or during an

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in-country assessment after assistance has been granted, can mean falling out of favor with a powerful combination of global capitalist donors, investors, and regulators. With few alternative sources of development support, such a “tumble from grace” can spell deep economic and political trouble and decline for the under-performing country. In this way, the policy prescriptions of the Washington Consensus-style structural adjustment market reforms represent an ever-present potential achilles tendon for developing countries. Once in anyway compromised, with just cause or otherwise, there exists the very real possibility of temporary or long-term incapacity. World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies not only drive the spread of global neoliberalism in the developing world, but serve to separate “worthy” national candidates from those in need of additional, potentially destabilizing, “market discipline” and more stringent methods of inducing acceptable structural reforms. Because of the inherently binding nature of SAP/SAL conditionality, not meeting the prescribed terms is tantamount to losing credit and investment worthiness on the part of global capitalism, a prospect few struggling countries ever hope to confront.

5

SAP Criticisms and Failures: The Party’s over, But There’s Still Plenty to Drink

The nature and content of WB/IMF SAPs have been adequately examined and require little additional comment. In short, the demands imposed on countries complying with structural adjustment conditionality for aid and loans essentially mirror the principles of neoliberalism explored in earlier chapters, specifically the stock demands of the Washington Consensus reforms that prescribe the sweeping liberalization of trade, investment, and the financial sector vis-à-vis deregulation and the marketization of nationalized sectors and public enterprises. In general terms, compliance with SAP conditionality throughout the 1980s and ‘90s invariably involved one broad policy caveat, although applied with some variation reflecting local circumstances. In general terms, then, the order of the day in the developing world for WB/IMF policies was strict fiscal balancing and low budget deficits, with a view toward macro-price stability and low rates of inflation (Rowden, 2011, pp. 11–12). In common parlance this expansive yet conscribed structural adjustment engine is known as “fiscal austerity”, and early critics were quick to point out that reforms were often excessively harsh and unbending, taking place “without due regard for the borrower countries’ individual circumstances” and unable “to resolve the economic problems within the countries” (Bretton Woods Project, 2005). Some

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critics even claimed Washington Consensus structural adjustment conditions undermined national political processes and caused widespread social and economic damage in developing countries (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 3). Also, related to present designs, because loans and aid are made available if countries agree to reduce public spending and shift national resources from government control to the private sector, SAP austerity policies have significant ramifications for the education sector of debtor countries (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). That is, across-the-board reduction of social programs causes a depletion of funds in the public education sector. This, combined with the opening of state enterprises to domestic and foreign investors, accompanies a swell of “privatization-related conditions” that can result in local systems of education literally being turned over to market forces (Global Exchange, n.d.-b). For example, an extensive survey of poor nations undergoing World Bank conditionality in 2005 found that a full 43 percent of all conditions attached to loans were “public sector reform-related” (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006, p. 16). In the case of IMF loans, key decisions are made by Fund technocrats regarding how much debtor countries can spend on public goods like education (Global Exchange, n.d.-b). In fact, austerity conditions tied to development aid often present a paradoxical “double bind” for poor countries. As they are being coerced and cajoled by global IGOs to carry out carte blanche public sector cuts, the governments of developing countries are often also pressured to accomplish and uphold “international standards” of quality in the same public service sectors, including education, targeted for downsizing (Action Aid International, 2006, p. 2). By the end of the 1990s numerous cracks had occurred in the development edifice of global neoliberalism as it came to impact conditions in poor countries through structural adjustment policies and loans sponsored by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Concerns regarding SAPs’ “pernicious economic and social consequences” were expressed by a broad range of actors, including United Nations agencies, civil society groups, academics, and the World Bank’s second largest shareholder, Japan (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 95). The governments of Britain and Norway eventually refused to tie their development aid to SAP conditions of privatization and trade liberalization in poor countries, and G8 leaders indirectly criticized WB/IMF autocracy by highlighting “the importance of national governments’ sovereign right to determine their own national economic policies” and emphasized “the inappropriateness of tying development finance to these (structural adjustment) types of reforms” (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006, p. 16). Aside from straddling the already strained and beleaguered fiscal budgets of

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developing countries with the large administrative costs of structural reform projects: The proliferation of IMF and World Bank conditions often push highly controversial economic policy reforms on poor countries, like trade liberalisation and privatisation of essential services. These reforms frequently contravene developing countries’ wishes, an acknowledged prerequisite for successful development. (Ibid.)

6

Three Criticisms of Early Structural Adjustment Policies

Despite the breadth of criticisms of World Bank and IMF structural market reform policies during the 1980s and ‘90s, they generally belong to one of three views involving worsening social and economic conditions, a dearth of economic growth, and /or increased debt. Foremost are the rather disturbing claims that social and economic conditions in developing countries subscribing to structural adjustment terms during the early years of the Washington Consensus actually worsened rather than improved. According to Castells (2000), instead of development, SAPs caused further economic depression, social impoverishment, poverty, and political instability in the developing world throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. These concerns were underwritten by the 1987 UNICEF publication entitled Adjustment With A Human Face: Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth detailing the negative impact of SAPs on health and education in developing countries, and presenting alternative policy recommendations focused on protecting public expenditure on social sectors, such as education and health (Cornia et al., 1987). Also, according to the European Network on Debt and Development (2006), IMF and World Bank conditionality is “fundamentally flawed”. Not only are these institutions imposing far too many conditions on poor countries, but many of the conditions are at best wholly inappropriate, and at worst, harmful to the poor people and undermine national ownership. Even more worryingly, the picture appears to be getting worse not better with the burden of conditionality rising not falling for poor countries. (p. 25) The adverse social consequences of structural adjustment include an increase in poverty, especially among women and children, due to discontinuation of vital social services (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006), and a massive increase in unemployment, as was the case in Southeast Asia

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following the economic crisis of 1997 (Klein, 2007). A common IMF development policy prescription during this period was the movement of domestic agricultural resources into cash crop export production, away from diversification for internal markets. Resultedly, an estimated “80 percent of all malnourished children in the developing world live in countries where farmers have been forced to shift from food production for local consumption to the production of export crops destined for wealthy countries” (Global Exchange, n.d.-a). The weakening of labor laws and, in some cases, the outright elimination of collective bargaining laws and the suppression of wages, also attest to the socially corrosive effects of structural adjustment for which the World Bank and IMF have been criticized (Global Exchange, n.d.-b), In particular, the IMF’s policy penchant for “flexible labor” permits private investors to summarily adjust their labor needs to rapidly changing market conditions through downsizing and dismissal with little or no due labor process. Flexible labor also allows investors and corporations to rapidly “take flight” with few restrictions, shifting capital on short notice to those areas of the globe where labor costs are lowest and profit margins highest. As Anderson (2001) points out, the ardent support of the World Bank and IMF for “labor market flexibility” makes it “easier to terminate or reduce the ability of unions to represent their members” (para. 6). Anderson cites an instance of IMF influence in a decision by Argentine legislators to pass harsh labor reforms in 2000, whereby IMF involvement in the case “appears to have carried more weight than the tens of thousands of Argentines who carried out general strikes against the reform” (Ibid.). According to Lopes (2012), the “first wave” of structural adjustment reforms undertaken by debt-affected African and Latin American countries in the 1980s involved public expenditure cuts, the introduction of charges for health and education, and reductions in industrial protection that resulted in “high unemployment, poverty rise, and unequal income distribution” (para. 7). Such negative indicators have led some researchers to question “the role of the IMF as the leading authority over macroeconomic discourse … since many of its policies have not led to social or economic development. IMF-led development has in fact failed the poor” (Marphatia, 2006, p. 14). Indeed, the widening of global income disparities between the rich and poor as a result of SAPs has become a commonplace occurrence and a widely recognized phenomenon (Stiglitz, 2002). Easterly (2003), for instance, found that poverty rates do not typically fall in accordance with the economic growth purportedly stimulated by WB/IMF adjustment lending; during related periods of expansion inequality actually Increases (p. 378). Nor does evidence support the premise that trade liberalization necessarily benefits poor people in developing nations by increasing personal consumption through increased income or access to

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cheap imports, an article of faith in neoliberal “comparative advantage” canon. For example, while export volume increased in sub-Saharan Africa by 4.3 percent between 1989 and 1998, per capita consumption actually declined by 0.5 percent (Anderson, 2001). A related criticism of SAPs reflects doubts that WB/IMF lending, and thus the structural reforms tied to loans, invariably produces significant economic growth or debt reduction in recipient countries. As Van Waeyenberge (2010) notes, while structural adjustment policies may be premised on “sound” neoliberal rules of reasoning, they have “not necessarily produced very strong results in terms of growth or poverty reduction” (p. 96). For example, the long-term median growth of per capita income of the thirty-six countries to which the IMF and World Bank gave ten or more loans between 1980 and 1998 was zero, a median for all the nations in the involved study with or without WB/IMF lending (Easterly, 2003, p. 378). Similarly, while the World Bank and IMF promoted unabated SAPs as a veritable development panacea during the early years of the Washington Consensus, debt burden levels continued to grow around the world. Specifically, between 1980 and 1997 the debt of low-income countries worldwide grew by 544 percent, and that of middle-income countries by 481 percent (Anderson, 2001). This mammoth increase in multicountry foreign debt liability occurred against a backdrop of protracted WB/IMF efforts during the same period to eliminate global trade and investment barriers and to promote export-led growth in poor countries according to a pervasive, aggressive development subtext which claimed, among other things, that precisely these types of reforms would substantially increase the foreign currency earnings of poor debtor countries and enable them to repay international creditors and reduce debt liability.

7

The Post-Washington Consensus: Adjustment with a Human Face

By the late 1990s criticisms of WB/IMF structural adjustment policies as conditions for development lending had reached a crescendo (Van Waeyenberge, 2009). Indeed, after more than a decade of protest and criticism, “the term ‘structural adjustment’ became synonymous with failed policies and undermining democracy” (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 5). With increased doubt within and outside of development and economic policy arenas about many aspects of the Washington Consensus as a panacea for eradicating world poverty and debt, including talk, as previously discussed, of a “post-Washington Consensus” in neoliberal development; a reform climate began to surface inside major international financial institutions. Events in the

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WB and the IMF paralleled the criticisms and changed views that took place in global neoliberalism as a result of the post-Washington Consensus of the late 1990s (see previous sections). For the first time since the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the 1980s, credence was given to the possibility that perhaps “the principle of conditionality that underlay the structural adjustment era seemed itself in need of adjustment” (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 94). The World Bank and IMF, along with the World Trade Organization and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, began “procuring a more humane face to the model” while continuing to “accept as inevitable the new neoliberal order without questioning” (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 156). The World Bank, (2001), for instance, sought: A discursive shift away from the Washington Consensus and towards comprehensive development with a more holistic approach … This reflected an attempt to propel the analysis beyond a bias towards stabilization and price incentives, now to include such phenomena as persistent market failures and the importance of non-market institutions. (p. 94) With reference to both the Bank and the IMF, the reform movement took the shape of a post-Washington Consensus revision of SAPs and conditionalities, newly enriched and supplemented with claims of “poverty reduction” and “inclusive growth” (Ibid., p. 3). This shift heralded a departure from the relatively static and austere neoliberal orthodoxy of the 1980s, to a more “mixed” approach to development, one seemingly more attuned to local conditions and wishes, and premised partly on apriori principles of “good governance” by recipient countries. As a result, aid now became conditional on what was achieved beforehand with more focus on reforms in the policy and institutional environment of recipient countries. Consequently, “donors would set conditions that identified environments judged beneficial for growth and development, and aid would be allocated accordingly” (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 96). A central role for the state in development policies was acknowledged and increased stress was given to tailoring programs to local conditions “with the explicit intention to prioritize immediate improvement for the least well off over other development issues” (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 187): Both the IMF and World Bank announced that under their new approach, they would require governments seeking loans and debt relief to consult with civil society to develop strategies for poverty reduction. In addition, the institutions vowed an increased commitment to debt relief for the poorest countries. (Anderson, 2001)

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A stronger emphasis was placed on the advisory role for donors, and loans became conditional on what was already achieved beforehand in terms of policy and institutional reform combined, called Performance-Based Allocations (PBA) of aid. “Donors would set conditions that identified environments judged beneficial for growth and development, and aid would be allocated accordingly” (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 96). Thus: Conditionality was redefined, away from the traditional model based on finance, in return for the promise of policy reform and towards a new approach where the disbursement of funds became conditional on what had already been achieved in terms of policy reform. (Ibid., p. 94) Although restricted primarily to its economic dimensions, governance was added to the World Bank’s agenda in the late 1980s and evolved into a fullfledged agenda item over the next decade (World Bank, 2006). The requisite good governance reforms involved a return to limited public sector intervention and expenditure, albeit to support and facilitate effective market functioning. A governance agenda ostensibly more extensive than that associated with the state animosities of the early Washington Consensus figured large in the 1997 World Development Report (World Bank, 1997). Public-funded projects, run according to market principles and subject to client evaluation, could now be expanded, yet remained limited to “essential services” and confined to “those activities that cannot be effectively performed by the private sector” (World Bank, 1999, p. 18). There was increased emphasis on public sector management, accountability, transparency, control of corruption and military expenditure, and fostering the legal framework needed to sanctify private property rights (World Bank, 2006). In 2005 the Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) began using Country Policy and Institutional Assessments (CPIA), “a diagnostic tool that is intended to capture the quality of a country’s policies and institutional arrangements”, in order to score countries on a number of set criteria assumed to be indicative of a favorable development climate.4 Countries found to foster poverty reduction, sustain growth, and “effectively use development assistance” are said to receive greater volumes of lending (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006, p. 18). Yet, a number of civil society groups: Are highly critical of aspects of the CPIA approach adopted by the Bank, highlighting that the criteria by which the Bank judges a country’s performance gives too much weight to economic liberalisation policies and applying a one size fits all approach to development. (Ibid.)

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According to Van Waeyenberge (2010), CPIAs build “on familiar neoliberal precepts in line with the Washington Consensus’” (p. 100) and embody “a set of predetermined neoliberal norms augmented with apparent social and governance concerns” (p. 102). In this way the CPIA rating process perpetuates a number of “specific biases” associated with earlier SAP criticisms, now implicitly “lodged” in reports that determine a country’s “score”, and thus IFI confidence, regarding its adjustment policies and institutional environments (pp. 102–103). As a result: The original (neoliberal) economic and financial imperatives persist in steering staff assessments of a country’s policy and institutional environment through the CPIA procedure, but now do so in a more surreptitious way. (Ibid.) The IMF, in turn, continued to maintain its insistence that a “good climate for business” is essential for growth and poverty reduction, and again aligned itself with the Bank by demanding reforms in debtor countries to promote good governance and to tackle corruption.5  Good governance principles were expected to take place both at the national and corporate levels (Krueger, 2004), as the state became a necessary element for the adequate functioning of the market economy (Stiglitz, 1989). It was acknowledged that size and quality of social spending, especially that focused on improving the education and health status of the poor, could affect long-run growth and poverty reduction, and that popular support, or “ownership”, for adjustment programs is an essential precondition for their ultimate success (IMF, 2001). Jayasuriya (2006) claims an increased recognition occurred in global governance discourse after 1997 that privileged governments as essential for maintaining market viability through “economic constitutionalism” or “a system of jurisdiction that would facilitate the construction of the market” (p. 21). Both the Bank and the IMF now use international indices of good governance designed to reinforce market efficiency, and to induce countries to improve their rankings in order to gain international recognition and support (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 187).

8

From Structural Adjustment to Poverty Reduction

In 1999, the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, through which it had coordinated SAP loans, became the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (Anderson, 2001), and the flagship structural adjustment policies were morphed into the joint IMF-World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers

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(PRSPs) (Action Aid International, 2009). SAPs were largely replaced by a PRSP process and operational guidelines required analysis of the impact of adjustment programs on the poor. Under a new “country-owned negotiation framework” PRSPs were meant to facilitate coordination between various donors, and to set the preconditions for access to IMF concessionary resources, World Bank aid, and eligibility for debt relief (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 19). Poverty Reduction Study Papers describe the ways in which a country’s macroeconomic, structural, and social policies and programs are intended to meet loan and aid expectations regarding the promotion of broad-based growth and poverty reduction over three or more years (IMF, 2016). The PRSPs process retains a key role for the IMF in structural adjustment, despite the fact that the IMF is not a development agency and was created to lend only for short-term external imbalances (ActionAid International, 2009, p. 15). PRSPs set out a government’s strategy for reducing poverty and are “meant to be developed in consultation with civil society in a country” (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 7). Such consultation consists of: A close collaboration between the debtor economy and the Bank/IMF, wrapped in a compulsory ‘participation’ procedure, with the CPIA results serving as beacons indicating areas on which the PRSP should focus. (Van Waeyenberge, 2006, p. 20) Each strategy paper contains a “Letter of Intent” that specifies the elements of a country’s recovery plan, including when the targets are to be met and when concessional lending and/or debt relief are to be received.6 Because PRSPs are meant to be developed within a country through a participative process, they represent a response to the criticism that WB/IMF policies during the Washington Consensus years lacked transparency (ActionAid International, 2009) and as such were being forced upon countries independently of local wishes (World Development Movement, 2005, pp. 3–7). According to the IMF (2016), poverty reduction papers are prepared by member countries through the involvement of major stakeholders as well as development partners, including the World Bank and the Fund: It is now fully accepted that development must be home grown, with policies fully owned by developing countries in order to work, rather than imposed from the outside … The Bank’s new good practice guidelines for development policy lending, for example, call for conditions that reinforce country ownership by being drawn from country’s expressed policy intentions. (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006, p. 15)

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Along these lines, in some countries compensatory measures were also introduced under poverty reduction policies to address the lack of social safety nets that had characterized earlier SAP austerity measures, although critics point out that such “social services are not regarded as a part of the normal primary functions of the modern state, but rather as institutions that respond to market failure” (World Health Organization, n.d.-b). To add to the acronym barrage of poverty reduction programs, in joint efforts with the IMF in 1996 the World Bank sponsored a Heavily Indebted Poor Country or HIPC start-up initiative to provide a measure of debt relief to the poorest countries adhering to structural adjustment agreements. According to the Fund, this initiative “aims at reducing the debt burdens of all eligible HIPCs to sustainable levels, provided they adopt and pursue strong programs of adjustment and reform” (Boote & Thugge, 1997, p. 9). Thus, combined World Bank-IMF efforts in this area are intended to remove debt obstacles to poverty reduction and to help poor countries adequately service loan repayment (Anderson, 2001). Yet, despite their stated designs to relieve a proportion of the debts of the poorest and most indebted countries, in order to receive HIPC concessional loans: A country has to agree to a program with economic conditions attached. To receive debt relief through the HIPC initiative, countries must have an IMF programme in place, implement further conditions … and create and implement a PRSP. And many donors often require a country to be ‘on-track’ with an IMF programme before they will disburse aid. (World Development Movement, 2005, pp. 4–5)

9

Inclusive Growth and Poverty Reduction

The inclusive growth (IG) constant in the WB/IMF poverty reduction equation stresses the importance of rapid, broad-based, multisectoral economic growth for poverty reduction. Unlike “pro-poor” approaches to development that target welfare gains among the most disadvantaged groups, IG puts emphasis on policies that remove constraints to growth and investment, and increases market opportunities for the majority of the labor force, poor and middle class alike. In this way inclusiveness is measured in terms of “equality of opportunity” comprised “of access to markets, resources, and unbiased regulatory environment for businesses and individuals” with growth being fueled by market-driven sources whilst the government plays a “facilitating role” (World Bank, 2009, pp. 1–4). Thus, inclusive growth policies of equity are not grounded in historic conceptions of universal equality with notions of

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common welfare or a general interest. Rather, equity is reworked by PRSP principles to mean attention to particular, individualistic interests as they relate to markets (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 158). In short, inclusive growth is about raising the pace of growth and enlarging the size of the economy, while levelling the playing field for investment and increasing productive employment opportunities (World Bank, 2009, pp. 3–4). Criticisms of the IG influence in the poverty reduction model are grounded in perceptions that the historical commitment to pro-poor advocacy and redistributive policies in authentic development have both been abandoned by inclusive growth policies, and that conventional notions of equality and inclusiveness have been replaced by compromised and water-downed market approximations. Saad-Filho (2010), for example, contends that the World Bank missed an opportunity in the early 2000s to integrate pro-poor policies that “focused on basic needs of the poor and better distribution of income, wealth and power in poor countries” into its poverty reduction programs (p. 16). IG policies privilege productive employment over income redistribution (World Bank, 2009, pp. 3–4), and whatever social safety nets are involved are primarily instrumental (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 15). In short: They alleviate poverty, provide political legitimacy for the World Bank’s preferred policies, and offer a channel for the poor to gain from growth – but they do not aim at distributive goals. Distribution is purely incidental to IG; the focus of this strategy is entirely on growth and on the potential welfare gains for the poor which might ensue from growth. (Ibid.) Similarly, Domenech and Mora-Ninci (2009) point out that the detection and satisfaction of basic needs, as part of the World Bank’s new and improved development rendition, is not based upon arguments linked to liberal principles, such as human rights, but rather is referenced to neoliberal market criteria of efficiency, efficacy, and profitability. Not only does inclusive growth under the WB/IMF poverty reduction regime belong squarely within the mainstream of the (post-)Washington Consensus tradition, but “the policy prescriptions associated with this tradition have been successful only exceptionally” (Ibid., p. 17).

10

WB/IMF Poverty Reduction: New Wine, Same Grapes

Since their launch in the 1990s, the poverty reduction programs of the World Bank and IMF have received a plethora of other criticisms. Perhaps foremost is the well-evidenced contention that despite claims by both agencies that

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“they have moved away from the ‘structural adjustment programs’ that had characterized the early Washington Consensus policies” (Rowden, 2011, p. 9), supported by a shuffling of names and refocused stated aspirations, both IGOs display a remarkable continuity of development sensibility and policy execution with regard to the basic tenets of the Washington Consensus (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010). The result has been a “continuation of the standard ‘structural adjustment’ policy model that has failed so miserably across many parts of the developing world” (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 17), with policy advice and loan conditions showing a striking resemblance to Washington Consensus standards (Rowden, 2010), comprised of a “striking recurrence of policy imperatives such as trade liberalization, privatization, investment deregulation and fiscal stringency” (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 99). As such, economic policies historically associated with conditionality still constitute a large percentage of both World Bank and IMF lending conditions (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006, p. 25), and debt relief for poor countries remains based on demonstrating “conformance with neoliberal reforms, privatization, tax reform and a balanced budget”, along with participation in World Bank poverty reduction initiatives (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 187). Moreover, this continuity and congruence is persistent: Despite the fact that these reforms are highly controversial; have been rejected by other development donors as suitable conditions for development finance; often undermine country ownership; and can often increase poverty, not reduce it. (European Network on Debt and Development, 2006, p. 25) In the case of trade liberalization and privatization, neoliberal reforms often have a harmful impact on poor people, limiting their access to vital services (Ibid., p. 11). In a study of World Bank and IMF conditions imposed on 20 poor countries between 2002 and 2006, the European Network on Debt and Development (2006) found a rise in both the number of conditions that were “prior actions” and must be completed before a country gets access to development finance, as well as a rise in the number of expected benchmarks, or conditions, which must be completed during the course of a given financing period. Fourteen of the 20 low income countries with WB grants had more than 50 such conditions attached to World Bank grants, and three-out-of-twenty had more than 100 conditions. In Uganda, where 23 percent of all children under-five are malnourished, 197 adjustment conditions were attached to its World Bank development grant in 2005 (Ibid., p. 9).

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The continuation of stringent market policies by the World Bank and IMF in the post-Washington Consensus is further corroborated by an increasing emphasis on lending and aid conditions associated with privatization and trade liberalization. For instance, 18 of the countries in the European Network on Debt and Development (2006) study had numerous privatization-related conditions attached to development finance. Moreover, these conditions make up a substantial part of their overall conditions from the World Bank and IMF that are “rising not falling” in loan and aid programs. In Bangladesh, where 50 percent of the population lived under the poverty line in 2006, almost onethird of the conditions for continued World Bank development credit support were related to “direct conditions calling for privatisation of … banks, electricity and telecommunications sectors and additional reforms to the gas and petrol sector that will facilitate private sector involvement” (Ibid., p. 12). Relatedly, by 2005, less than a decade after their introduction, 72 percent of all WB/IMF PRSPs contained conditions involving trade liberalization, “on top of the significant trade liberalization that has already happened in many of these countries” (Ibid.). Moreover, 96 percent of these PRSPs included Washington Consensus-style fiscal austerity measures, as well (World Development Movement, 2005, pp. 11–12). And, since development assistance is now allocated on the basis of already implemented economic policy reforms; policy scorecards, such as those factored under the guise of Country Policy and Institutional Assessments (CPIA), are, in fact, “a form of conditionality in disguise” (Ibid., p. 5). Or, as Rowden (2010) points out: Despite recent high-profile claims by the World Bank that it has reduced the number of conditions on its loans, a number of studies have shown that the reduction is not as significant as the bank claims, particularly on sensitive issues such as trade liberalisation, and that new, non-transparent forms of conditionality are being applied, contrary to responsible financing principles. (Ibid., para. 7; original emphasis) Similar analysis of 50 PRSPs made public and signed off by the IMF and World Bank by the end of August 2005 found a predominance of “nine fairly standard policy prescriptions” imposed on poor countries by the international financial institutions during the 1980s and 1990s (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 3), These included strict monetary policy, strict fiscal policy, trade liberalization, investment deregulation, capital account/financial sector liberalization, agricultural liberalization, and increased labor market flexibility. The study concludes that “the policies contained within PRSPs bear striking similarity both to each other and to the standard prescriptions of the supposedly defunct

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‘Washington Consensus’” (Ibid., p. 10), including “the policies of previous structural adjustment programmes” (Ibid., p. 3). Underpinning this continuity of SAP-like conditionality on the part of the Bank and IMF is, above all else, an: Unshakeable endorsement of neoliberal principles despite multiple studies that show serious negative consequences attached to this approach. In this way neoliberalism functions as a de facto ideology rather than as a sound economic approach to development. (Klees, 2012, pp. xvii–xviii) Thus, with the World Bank as illustration, outside of a procedural shift from ex ante to ex post conditionality and a more “embedded promotion” of neoliberal assumptions in the Bank’s increased diagnostic capacity, the “imperatives characteristic of the Washington Consensus remain entrenched in World Bank aid practices, even if in a less visible manner” (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 106). Stated another way, regarding both the Bank and the IMF, “despite the name changes, these lending mechanisms have continued to operate in the same way as previous ones; loans are given on the condition that certain policies are implemented by the recipient country (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 4). An important subnote attached to the persistence of Washington Consensus imperatives and policies in multilateral aid and development lending are continuing concerns that World Bank and IMF decisions take place outside of, even in contravention to, input and consent by major sectors in local civil societies. In 2000, for example, IMF/World Bank orthodoxy is said to have wreaked havoc in Ecuador through the reduction of social spending and the cancellation of subsidies on basic goods, with “a total lack of public consultation on the deal … while ignoring the country’s need for debt relief” (Anderson, 2001, para. 13). Skeptics argue that when civil society consultation does take place, it often does not include groups critical of WB/IMF policies. Or discussion is restricted to narrow and unsubstantial questions of “social policy” which often seem orchestrated to avoid considering alternative models of development for impoverished countries that do not involve a world trade system dominated by rich countries and transnational corporations (Ibid., para. 10). A World Bank-sponsored “conditionality survey” in 2004 revealed that 50 percent of recipient countries felt that the “World Bank introduced elements that were not part of the country’s program” into their loan conditions (World Bank, 2005, p. 11), and Rowden (2010) contends the Bank’s CPIAs “continue to be heavily criticised for not effectively reflecting actual country ownership” (para. 7).

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Criticisms targeting the undemocratic nature of the PRSP process include insufficient participation by a broad base of constituents and, as inferred, a lack of diverse policy options in PRSP content (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 99). In fact, the apparent homogeneity of PRSPs across a range of widely differing countries with widely differing histories and conditions, with little or no consideration to alternative policy approaches on key economic issues, “suggests that ownership of the economic policies in such countries is still a pipe dream” (World Development Movement, 2005, p. 12). Although PRSPs officially require that debtor countries consult with civil society in designing economic programs, IFIs have failed to demonstrate much flexibility regarding alternative economic policies. Similarly, World Bank and IMF representatives continue to have disproportionate influence over the content of finalized poverty reduction papers, well after the “human faced” adjustment policy revisions of the post-Washington Consensus era have taken hold (Ibid., p. 8). This latter point is underscored by the fact that: Final PRSPs are signed off by the Boards of both the IMF and World Bank. If country directors on the Board do not like the content of a PRSP, they can just reject it. The PRSP will then need to be redrafted to meet the Board’s expectations, and debt relief, aid and new loans will be withheld until it is. (Ibid.) In short, “because these programs still required WB/IMF approval, the final product changed very little” (Action Aid International, 2009, p. 15). And, rather than representing an authentic means of correcting the autocratic and, some would argue, arrogant lack of inclusive decision-making in the development plans of poor countries during the early years of the Washington Consensus: A tight yet less visible web of control, characterized by a continuing neoliberal bias, has continued to frame policy-making in low-income countries. This is despite the ubiquitous and oft-reiterated commitment to ‘ownership’ and ‘partnership’ principles. (Van Waeyenberge, 2010, p. 95) As such, the entire process of development and debt reduction appears more as a mechanism, or framework, for streamlining WB/IMF poverty reduction efforts in low income countries, rather than “a genuinely country-owned framework of engagement between debtor and creditor countries” (Ibid., p. 99). Indeed, there is good reason to doubt any WB/IMF claims that significant changes have taken place in development lending mechanisms since the outcries for a post-Washington Consensus began to take effect in the late 1990s. As

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Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist for the World Bank, remarked in 2002: “The replacement of SAPs by new programmes in recent years has altered neither the character of the two organisations’ policies nor their consequences” (Stiglitz, 2002, pp. 473–474). In fact, it would appear that shifts and revisions that have been made in the conceptualization and implementation of these new policies regarding structural adjustment and poverty reduction signal little more than limited and partial cosmetic makeovers, more for public relations and moral appeasement than humanitarian revision. As such, they herald, at best, the marketing of new wines made from old grapes. Or, as Rodrik (2006) points out, in the view of the World Bank and IMF, countries seeking development aid or debt relief during the post-Washington Consensus era must simply “do more of the same, and do it well” (p. 977).

11

Chapter Summary

We have in this chapter provided a broad brushstroke summary of the origins and influence of the World Bank and IMF, referred to as the “symmetric twins” of global governance, as key sources of the neoliberal economic and political agenda that has gained global hegemony since the 1980s. This examination has placed special attention on the evolving role played by these two international financial institutions in distributing development aid and loans, especially to the poorer countries of the Global South. As we have seen, with the ascendency of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s, World Bank and IMF collaboration was characterized by an increasing “functional symmetry” regarding the disbursement and enforcement terms of development assistance worldwide. In particular, there has been extensive coordination between the two agencies in the areas of research, loan repayment, and the construction and imposition of structural adjustment conditions on debtor nations, including the eclipse of those policies into so-called poverty reduction and inclusive growth paradigms during the latter post-Washington Consensus era. Although much has been made by these agencies regarding the importance of the creation of aid conditions and policies with a “human face”, evidence indicates that little has really changed regarding the continuation of neoliberal conditions for aid and debt reduction, and that a persistent lack of democratic procedures in WB/ IMF decisions and evaluations continue to plague recipient countries. Thus, having established a clear understanding of the World Bank and IMF as major sources of influence and governance in the contemporary global political economy, we may now turn with some modicum of efficacy to an examination

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in the next chapter of how these two IGOs impact educational possibilities at the local level.

Notes 1 Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are international financial institutions (IFI). However, because they are based on formal agreements between national governments, they will throughout the course of this book, along with the World Trade Organization and the OECD, be referred to as inter governmental organizations or IGOs. 2 www.worldbank.org/en/about/history 3 BBC News. Profile: IMF and World Bank, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/ country_profiles/3670465.stm 4 World Bank International Development Association, http://web.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/IDA/0,,contentMDK:21378540~ menuPK:2626968  ~pagePK:51236175~piPK:437394~theSitePK:73154,00.html 5 BBC, Profile: IMF and World Bank, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_ profiles/3670465.stm 6 BBC News. Profile: IMF and World Bank, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/ country_profiles/3670465.stm; Van Waeyenberge, (2010).

CHAPTER 7

The World Bank’s Impact on Local Education: A Case of the Chickens Coming Home to Roost Once the nature and reach of the World Bank and IMF as purveyors of global neoliberalism under (post-)Washington Consensus rules has been established, further understanding of the impact of WB/IMF policies on local systems of education is a comparatively short stretch. Briefly, all one needs is a grasp of the neoliberal policies inherent in the revised SAP poverty reduction and inclusive growth models that are effectuated through development loans, aid, and debt relief for the repercussions of the two agencies on local public goods, including education, to be readily apprehended. Indeed, these repercussions reflect a near mirror image of the neoliberal values and methods of operation examined in preceding chapters. Metaphorically speaking, the impact of WB/IMF policies on local systems of education are the free market “chickens” of globalization “coming home to roost” in local educational terms. That is, if we take the neoliberal globalization principles of commodification, efficiency, and accountability discussed in Chapter 3, coalesce these with the Washington Consensus-based influences in education of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization examined in Chapter 4, and then position both sets of propositions within the broad institutional framework of neoliberal global governance constituted by the processes of legitimation, operation, and compliance explored in Chapter 5, we are left with a definitive and decisive mix of cognitive structures and defining moments with which to examine, understand, and organize our thinking about the WB/IMF effect on local education. All that remains to give integrative coherence to this constellation of factors is the rather sophomoric expository task of “tightening” and “clarifying” the content of those structures in order to shine light on the multitude of ways in which the World Bank and the IMF corral and refashion local systems of education according to neoliberal imaginaries. For, as we shall see, virtually every aspect of the World Bank and IMF’s projects in education in some way reflects or embodies one or more elements of the global neoliberal hegemony laid out in preceding chapters. And, as we shall also see, the cross application and fine-tuning of neoliberal influences explored earlier continue to provide useful points of reference as we work through subsequent chapters regarding the impact of the other two “Horsemen of the Edpocalypse”, the WTO and the OECD, on local systems of education. It is the primary intent of this chapter to © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004413603_007

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focus foremost on the role played by the World Bank in the neoliberal reconfiguration of local systems of education worldwide. We will then in Chapter 8 do the same for the International Monetary Fund as we also sketch and concretize some of the substantive combined ways in which the Bank and the IMF together work to exert decisive influence in this regard, particularly in relation to schools in the developing world struggling under the torrents of diminished public coffers and neoliberal chastenments.

1

The World Bank as a Global Edvestor

The World Bank has become “a leading global investor in education” (Spring, 2014, p. 32), “able to advance its educational agenda through an extensive global network that includes IGOs and NGOs, national governments, local officials, and multinational corporations” (Ibid., p. 57). According to Bonal (2002), the Bank is “embedded of political and economic capacity to generate global changes in educational discourses and practices” (p. 4). To this end, it uses All kinds of mechanisms to produce discourses and practices subject to a neoliberal rationality. Policy papers, research projects, evaluation methods and other mechanisms have worked under the ideological umbrella of the virtues of the market, and the inefficient and corrupted bureaucratic state. (Ibid., pp. 4–5) Taking on educational issues for the first time in 1962 with the construction of a secondary school in Tunisia, until the early 80s the Bank’s education programs were specific and targeted, involving such projects as building schools and supplying technical equipment. With time, however, the Bank became more directly involved in shaping domestic education policies in areas traditionally reserved for local governments. In other words, the Bank made a “gradual intrusion into the intrastate core which shaped policies and which was also promoted through programs irrelevant to educational issues” (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 87). During the first round of Washington Consensus development policies, roughly through the 1990s, the Bank became a central source of global funding, advice, and research in education, making inroads into international fields of operations that had previously been the exclusive domain of UNESCO (Ibid.). During this period, loans extended for education projects increased from less than 4 percent of the WB annual budget in 1980 to 10 percent in 1996, an augmentation representing nearly two billion dollars (Bennell & Segerstorm, 1998, p. 271). Throughout the 1990s, amounts lent by

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the Bank for education programs represented 27 percent of all global external funding for education and 40 percent of the total aid provided for education by international organizations (Jallade et al., 2001). By 1996 the Bank had doubled the proportion and tripled the total volume of its loans for education compared with 1980 levels; its loan programs represented on average one-fourth of all external funds for education worldwide (World Bank, 1996, p. 162). For example, in the mid 1990s WB funding accounted for 25 percent of all total international development assistance to education (Bennell & Segerstorm, 1998, p. 275). By 2009 the Bank was indisputably the world’s largest external loan provider for education programs with projects in approximately 85 countries (Moutsios, 2009, p. 468). In its own accounting, between 2000 and 2018 the World Bank’s extensive operations and projects in education represented an investment portfolio of $50 billion (World Bank, n.d.-b). In fact, neoliberal reforms spearheaded by the Bank in the education systems of Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia have been so extensive and consequential as to earn it the title of “the world education ministry for peripheral countries” (Leher, 2009, p. 134). Today the World Bank Group represents the largest external financier of education in the world (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 87).

2

The WB as Knowledge Bank

The World Bank’s significance in education at the global level has been significantly augmented in recent years by its self-proclaimed mission to construct “knowledge societies” in debtor nations, able to produce, select, adapt, commercialize, and use knowledge “in member states and debtor nations for sustained economic growth and improved living standards” (World Bank, 2002, p. 7). As Van Waeyenberge (2010) points out, the early post-Washington Consensus shift toward poverty reduction strategies involving “appropriate policy environments” and “good governance” also found the Bank acquiring a newfound “pedagogical’ role” in its development approach (p. 96). This new role partly realigned the WB as a “knowledge bank” empowered through its Knowledge for Development Program (K4D) to measure progress in countries toward constructing “knowledge-based economies” (KBE) for “job growth and competitiveness in the 21st century” (World Bank, 2007). According to Robertson and Dale (2007), the K4D program advances a “particular imaginary” of global development that sees investment in education as the basis for economic growth (p. 11). In 2008 the Bank applied a “knowledge assessment methodology” (KAM) to its 4KD program, ranking 140 countries on the basis of 83 indicators of each country’s performance as a “knowledge-based economy”

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in order to “assess how they compare with others in their ability to compete in the global knowledge economy” (World Bank, 2007, p. 3). The KAM, then: Provides indicators and relational data on countries around the world … and should be viewed as a strategically selective tool that advances the interests of western centered capitalism. It is also a tool for putting into place the ideological and institutional means to enable the developed economies to generate new value from knowledge services globally. (Robertson & Dale, 2007, p. 11) Together, the K4D and KAM involve promotion by the World Bank of global “educational strategies and policies based on (neo)liberal principles which adhere to a pragmatic, technocratic, and conservative vision of society” (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 164). These, in turn, follow suite with the Bank’s efforts to imagine schooling as “a common consumer and marketable product” and the educational system as “a framework within which businesses offering competitive and attractive consumer goods are operating” (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 95). Thus, as “the greatest global financier of education lending to developing countries”, the WB promotes “a banker’s view of the importance and functioning of school systems and contains a clear example of the economization of education” (Spring, 2014, p. 15).

3

Saving Public Education through Privatization

In addition to engendering market-driven private education through an array of SAP conditionalities, global governing institutions such as the World Bank also promote neoliberal schools by offering various forms of practical support to potential investors (Ball & Youdell, 2008, p. 27). In 2013, for example, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) announced a $150 million investment in the for-profit Laureate Education Inc., a private company that owns schools in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. At the time this was the “largest ever” WB investment in private sector education in developing countries (Redden, 2013). As a member of the World Bank Group, a central component of the IFC’s self-proclaimed “mission” is to “promote private sector investment in developing countries” with a more recent post-Washington Consensus orientation leaning toward the aims of global poverty reduction (Ludwina, 1999). As Voutsa et al. (2014) point out, at both the level of ideology and policy application, the World Bank and IMF proceed from the baseline assumption

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that public education is inadequate and inferior, and can only be salvaged through infusions of privatization (p. 95). And, as previously discussed, privatizing schools are also viewed as a means of compensating for the loss of revenues available to public education as a result of austerity measures. Thus, the shift toward markets is deemed both sufficient and necessary for social progress in so far as private schools are, hands down, concluded to be more effective than public, socially inclusion places of learning (Lockheed & Jiménez, 1996) Consequently, the dominant approach promoted worldwide by the WB/ IMF alliance is one which presupposes that public services should be supported and managed by a small, restrained state and predominantly guided by market forces (World Bank, 2011). Again, according to this argument, schools and education are ultimately saved from the clutches of public sector incompetence and mismanagement by working in unison with enterprising investors and entrepreneurs. In other words: Public education provided by state institutions is of poor quality, does not meet the needs of learners, is manipulated by its personnel’s interests and stagnates in bureaucratic procedures. The solution proposed is to open up education within market rules and competition through the admission of service providers operating alongside or within the education system by implementing various forms of privatization. (Ibid., p. 89) While the IMF’s push for privatized education is more or less a corollary of the massive market edicts involved in the structural adjustment model of development, the World Bank utilizes a far more extensive range of project and network-based supports for privatization. The Bank adheres closely to the policy recommendations of neoliberal ideologue Milton Friedman, who championed the elimination of public-funded higher education and the privatization of schools in general (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 153). Throughout the 1990s the Bank was particularly inclined to grant assistance to countries which in one capacity or another were willing to move segments of their education sectors into free market domains. Such client states included El Salvador, in its positioning of private banks as financiers for student scholarships; Indonesia, in opening up private competition to public education; Mali, for initiating private sector participation in school vocational training programs; and, the Dominican Republic, for implementing private sector-oriented teacher training and for incorporating private contractors in public education (Belfield & Levin, 2002, p. 32). Along with other IGOs, the World Bank actively participates in global networks linked to multinational corporations representing “some of the world’s largest manufacturers of computers, software, and information”

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for educational purposes (UNESCO, 2000). For example, the Bank frequently co-sponsors international conferences on investment trends and opportunities in private education. One of the earliest such conferences focused on investment opportunities in private sector education in Africa, and took place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire in 1999. Catering to a range of private sector interest groups, including “private education entrepreneurs”, the Abidjan conference was sponsored conjointly by the WB International Finance Corporation (IFC), the African Development Bank, and an assortment of private companies (Ludwina, 1999). The primary purpose of the conference was “to explore the potentials and practicalities of private investment in education in the developing world”, albeit with a focus in this particular instance on Africa. Agenda items and discussion topics at the Abidjan conference involved: The role of private education in development; criteria for assessing investments in private schools and universities; financial structuring of private school projects; private student financing programs and investments in distance education; … the potential of public-private partnerships in education; and education related investments, such as textbooks. (Ibid.) According to Peter Woicke, Managing Director of the World Bank Group and IFC Executive Vice President at the time of the conference, World Bank support for private education in developing countries is based on the belief that private schools complement state-run schools and help expand educational opportunities overall. Also, the consortium of interests involved in promoting these events believe private schools help take pressure from meager public resources, promote innovation in the classroom, and motivate high teaching standards (Ludwina, 1999).

4

Edinvest and Strategy 2020

The 1999 Abidjan conference was one in a sequence of events directed by the newly formed EdInvest, a favored and well-financed project of the IFC and the education arm of the World Bank’s mission to help promote neoliberal globalization. Indicative of the increasing number of international organizations devoted to privatizing public services, Edinvest provides long-reach market information and a global forum to individuals, companies, and organizations interested in investing in worldwide education with a particular slant toward developing countries (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 94). According to Belfield and Levin (2002):

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EdInvest and the International Finance Corporation provide financing opportunities for public/private partnerships in education. In general, the World Bank (and other supranational agencies) has encouraged reforms which lean towards privatization of the education system; for some countries, this institutional support may be a strong motivation. (p. 32) Finally, in 2011 the Bank launched its ambitious Education Strategy 2020 (ESS2020) under a seemingly progressive banner of “learning for all” and a bottom-line business motto of “invest early, invest smartly, and invest for all”. Yet, despite the liberal-sounding hype, the ESS2020 objectives are riddled with market-driven underpinnings of accountability, benchmarking, performance ranking, reward and punishment incentive structures, results-based financing, and measured-learning outcomes (World Bank, 2011). Adhikary (2014) argues that the aim of ESS 2020 is to establish “a data-driven comparison structure for education systems to ensure neoliberal control and competition at all levels of education” (p. 11). As we shall see in Chapter 9, setting global standards of quality and performance in education is also an important task of the OECD. At any rate, ESS 2020 propositions remain staunchly neoliberal in their emphasis on human capital development, government-facilitated privatization and privatepublic partnerships, and performance comparison and competition at all levels (Ibid., pp. 15–16). At root, then, Education Strategy 2020 represents just one more (globalized) expression of the type of market encroachments that have become standard neoliberal fare in education. As such, complicit IGOs, (e.g. the World Bank), wind up corralling governments into active collusion with firms and corporations to replace public goods with privatized markets driven by expansion and profits.

5

Human Capital Theory and Quality of Education: Learning as Economics

Against the preceding discussions of the post-Washington Consensus backdrop of World Bank austerity, privatization, liberalization/deregulation, and concerns with the social dimensions of development, all roads for education lead inextricably to the continued importance of human capital theory. According to Ilon (2002), the Bank’s World Development Reports during the first decade of the PWC remained fixed upon “human capital development as the spearhead for the discourse on development and education targeting employment, increased income, and economic productivity” (p. 36). The

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Bank acknowledged that there was a shift away from the type of “learning” concerned with mass participation and the “proclamations of enlightenment”, toward “knowledge, abilities, and skills” best suited to employment, trade, and commerce (World Bank, 2011, p. 92). Simply stated, human capital theory proposes that investment in education should be made primarily for the purpose of cultivating better workers in order to foster economic growth and development (Spring, 2014, p. 2). Internationally, education under human capital sway focuses specifically on those subjects and dispositions that increase citizens’ economic productivity and make for effective competition in global markets (Hursh & Martina, 2003). One of the first economists to highlight the economic value of education was Theodore Schultz (1961), who claimed that investing in labor-related human capital was as least as important as the accumulation of physical capital, since both increase productivity and national income in the long run (see Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 85). As Baptista (2001) cogently states: When educational programs justify their goals and activities by appealing to inexorable forces such as economic cycles, demographic changes, global competition, knowledge economy, or skills employers need, and when they treat learners as fated beings whose only options are to consume and adapt, chances are they are wedded to human capital theory. (p. 197) Citing a number of sources, Adhikary (2014) points out that the WB’s focus on human capital development gets worked out through the establishment of globalized markets to create capitalistic wealth and accumulation worldwide. Whatever the claims of human-faced development approaches of the PWC era, the World Bank has remained consistently loyal to neoliberal canon. One of its most revealing loyalties is an unmitigated commitment to human capital theory as a basis for increased involvement and influence in the education sector of client states (Rose, 2003, p. 71). Indeed, the Bank’s penchant for human capital development theory is a linchpin for understanding its approach to education: Education under neoliberal ideology puts all educational activities into the domain of the market and uses education as a supportive process and a product of, for, and by the market. The prime focus on human capital development (production) … forces education to customize human life in terms of market demands, losing sight of some key aspects of human life (welfare, freedom, free will, wellbeing, and the like). (Adhikary, 2014, p. 8)

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The human capital paradigm of education emphasizes two types of skills: a cognitive and knowledge skill set needed to succeed in the technical demands of the workplace, and a package of behavioral and interpersonal “soft skills” attuned to workplace social organization and supporting compliance and deference in top-down work relations (Spring, 2014, p. 2). At the level of macro development strategy, the Bank promotes integration into international markets as a means to stimulate growth and reduce poverty. As a source of increased production and economic growth, human capital education represents a means for national economies to secure competitive advantages in global markets. With labor in abundance in lesser income countries, emphasis is placed on labor force preparation through training and education, mostly by private sources, in response to the previously noted assumption that public-funded education is largely inefficient, costly, and lacking accountability and competitiveness. Thus, one of the results of the influence of human capital development in education is an enlarged market role for private education, with schools that cultivate the skills and sensibilities needed to feed that market “by producing human capital fit to act in it” (Adhikary, 2014, p. 9). As Ward (2012) notes: Market efficiencies and economic fundamentals determine the types of skills and knowledge that are needed while simultaneously creating the competitive pressures necessary to force educational institutions … to produce the best product possible for the lowest possible cost. (p. 21) As we shall see in Chapter 11, human capital theory is an area of global neoliberalism that has also had pronounced impact on culture and social relationships in schools, and on the broader social positioning of education and learning in contemporary societies. Again, with regard to education policies during the post-Washington Consensus, the World Bank (2011) contends: Investments in quality education lead to more rapid and sustainable economic growth and development. Educated individuals are more employable, able to earn higher wages, cope better with economic and other shocks, and raise healthier children. (p. ii)

6

Human Capital as Educational Quality

With the human capital attribution of economic value to education, the logic of business has come to define “quality” in schools, often privileging those aspects

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of teaching and learning that are readily visible, measurable, and can be presented as “objective data”. Common human capital-driven indicators of quality education include “student performance and achievement, employment training, reduction of costs, and increases in enrolment”, as well as calculations of “efficiency, productivity, (and) cost-benefit profitability” (Sobrinho, 2008, p. 87). The pursuit of these factors creates an explicit link between educational quality and labor market suitability. In the ascending neoliberal schoolhouse, students are socialized to act as income-seeking “consumers” attempting to maximize their personal gains in an expanding private education sector open to investment. At the end of the human capital-building process in education, prospective graduates must weigh the degree to which they have successfully attained the work skills and attitudes needed to effectively trade labor for income in the global marketplace (Adhikary, 2014, pp. 13–14). Sobrinho (2008) argues that many of the most influential quality of education indicators during the post-Washington Consensus period (i.e., accountability, efficiency, effectiveness, rate of return, competitiveness) are at heart business concepts borrowed from the private – corporate sector, specifically from the “total quality” industrial management strategies promoted by Toyota in the 1980s and eventually signaling the pivotal rise of Japan as a major player in the global corporate economy (p. 87). With human capital as the measure of quality education, the role of the teacher, student, and school recede in eminence and become “embedded” in the neoliberal process of education, while heightened importance is placed “on the measures and outcomes of learning, with a view to comparing national education systems” (Adhikary, 2014, p. 16). Thus, one increasingly likely approach to solving many problems in education is the creation of a system of global management coordinated by the World Bank and entrusted with the task of making comparisons of educational performance worldwide. The Bank could then use this data to give lending preference to nations that demonstrate high marks on test results and other related performance indicators. An unfortunate corollary, however, of such a WB comparative function in educational performance is that: Education systems would be forced to compete with other systems where the need for, and power of, a data-driven comparison system will be paramount .... Of course, this will generate competitiveness among poor countries over World Bank funding for education, which might lead to test centrism at all levels of national education systems. (Ibid.) Consequently, the WB ‘s program of global education comparison, called System Assessment and Benchmarking for Education Results (SABER), has the

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potential to generate and exercise significant levels of disciplinary and discursive power over national systems of education (Klees, 2012). Such loss of autonomy and sovereignty in education and in other areas on the national level is the direct result of globalization, the consequences of which I repeatedly examine in this writing.

7

The PWC, Learning for All, and the (Anti) Social Dimensions of Education

Having looked at the role of human capital theory and quality of education precepts in the Bank’s general approach to education during the PWC, we now briefly turn our attention to the WB’s claims regarding a shift toward incorporating “social dimensions” in development agendas, and, ipso facto, in education. An important piece in the history of the World Bank’s claims of a policy orientation makeover during the post-Washington Consensus is found in its claim of a new emphasis being placed on broadened and integrated socioeconomic factors in development (World Bank, 1997, p. 206), with a particular concern for “progress in social development” (World Bank, 1999, p. 186). As discussed previously, the Bank began implementing self-proclaimed SAP “good governance” reforms in the late 1990s in an attempt to allay criticisms of the harsh conditions imposed through structural adjustment programs. For example, in response to claims that the Bank’s approach to devising and implementing SAPs in low-income countries was rigidly authoritarian and lacked local participation, the importance of “partnership” in program decisionmaking, implementation, and social capital-based results became key criteria in reshaping WB policy style (Bonal, 2002). That is, these factors were Introduced as symbols of a new policy management that tries to change the authoritarian character that shaped SAPs, and provides an image of dialogue and democratisation in the process of exploring, designing and implementing new policies … The notion of building social capital acquires a crucial meaning for community involvement, partnership and context-based policy strategies. (Ibid., pp. 14–15) Furthermore, the multidimensional social-oriented Human Development Index, with measures for nutrition, education, and health, was incorporated into at least some of the Bank’s poverty reduction programs in the late 1990s, reflecting an ostensible “difference from the conventional understanding of poverty as per capita income” (Pender, 2001, p. 406). Specifically in education,

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the Bank’s World Development Reports (WDRs) during the post-Washington Consensus also claimed alignment with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (Adhikary, 2014, p. 6). Proceeding under a much heralded banner of “Learning For All” as part of the larger ESS 2020 strategy, the Bank openly endorsed universal primary education and gender equity as plausible correctives to “persistently high levels of unemployment, especially among youth”, underscored by “the failure of education systems to prepare young people with the right skills for the job market”, and resulting in the fact “that many children and youth in developing countries leave school without having learned much at all” (World Bank, 2011, p. v). In this regard: Learning for All means ensuring that all children and youth – not just the most privileged or the smartest – can not only go to school, but also acquire the knowledge and skills that they need to lead healthy, productive lives and secure meaningful employment. The three pillars of our strategy are: Invest early. Invest smartly. Invest for all. (Ibid.) One result of the increased emphasis on the Bank’s Learning for All dictum was increased amounts of state expenditures in debtor countries being moved into primary education, combined with “strategic investments in areas deemed to have significant economic payoffs” (Engel, 2010, p. 171). In some countries WB scholarships were given to disadvantaged students and block grants were extended to poor schools in order to pursue the rather paradoxical objective of promoting “human capital development to promote economic and social development” (Ibid., p. 177). Despite clear efforts to integrate relevant social dimensions into development policies and education programs, the World Bank has continued to be overwhelmingly tied and tethered to neoliberal assertions throughout the post-Washington Consensus era. As Bonal (2002) notes, despite all the PWC hype about the importance of social capital in development: Neo-classical economics remains the unaltered paradigm that shapes WB policy-making. Indeed, the colonisation process of other social sciences by economics under the post-Washington Consensus may expand formal economic models as a means of analysing non-economic social relations and, through this, reinforce the existing paradigm of development. (p. 15) Indeed, although the title of the Bank’s 1997 World Development Report, “Socio-Economic Development Indicators”, marked one of the earliest (and much-touted) moves away from strickly economic data as the primary measures

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of value (see World Bank, 1997, p. 206), Adhikary (2014) points out that the many of the involved indicators in the policy shift remained “purely economic, including the newly added Purchasing Power Parity estimate of GNP per capita” (p. 6). Thus, as previously reasoned, evidence continues to confirm that the underpinnings of World Bank policies throughout the PWC have remained staunchly economic in the neoliberal sense and persistently laced with precepts of human capital development theory of the sort previously examined. In fact, the PWC’s proclaimed shift away from a neoliberal adherence in development represented little more than a “rhetorical emphasis”. What remains “critically noteworthy” regarding the World Bank’s performance in this regard “is not the rhetorical mentioning of the social, but its operational absence, along with zero consideration for the political aspect of development” (Ibid.). Carrol (2009) has even gone so far as to claim the post-Washington Consensus era represents a new, more effective stage in neoliberal development governance intended to further remake the sociopolitical terrain of lesser-income countries into market economies, a global phenomenon he terms “socio-institutional neoliberalism (SIN)” (p. 448). Implicit in this critical assessment of the Bank’s development and education designs is that the social dimensions of development upon which the credibility of a “PWC reformation” at least partly depended proved in the light of day to be little more than an extension and refinement of neoliberal canon, if in new guise. Indeed, the semantic assurances of the Learning For All policies during the PWC proved to be infused with numerous tried-and-true neoliberal austerity, privatization, and human capital theory principles and practices that had come to brand the first 20 years of the Bank’s involvement in global marketization. Although, as noted, several policy differentiations have been offered by the Bank since the 1990s, the theory, principles, and expected outcomes of its education policies worldwide have remained essentially unchanged, and clearly allied with neoliberalism (Bonal, 2002). For example, tangible efforts have been made to loosen and even reverse the strict upward caps placed on public school teacher recruitment, especially in primary education, a key ingredient of the broader, sweeping public sector structural adjustment and austerity program recipes that drove the Washington Consensus. And, as a result of the massive downsizing of national public sectors throughout the PWC and beyond, many lower-income countries today remain “unable to hire sufficient numbers of teachers and health workers” (Marphatia, 2010, p. 166). Furthermore, the Bank’s continued penchant for privatizing public services has had equally significant consequences for colleges and universities. Akhikary (2014) points out that the World Bank has increased its promotion of post-compulsory (post-primary) education reforms involving “consumer choice” and increased

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“ownership of the modes of education service … characterized by direct private operation, public-private partnership, or private contracting” (p. 14). In higher education, WB PWC policy “effectively limits government expenditures and facilitates private participation” in ownership and management schemes (Engel, 2010, p. 171). In fact, throughout the post-Washington Consensus the Bank has been a staunch adversary of any moves by local governments to provide free, public-funded tuition for universities, as such policies are believed to be “neither financially sustainable nor directing benefits to the poor, because so few poor students seek entry to tertiary institutions” (World Bank, 2007, p. 13, emphasis added). Using Uruguay as a point of reference, (where 60 percent of the free tuition for tertiary education is enjoyed by the nation’s two richest quintiles), the Bank concludes that public-supported higher education is a service that for the most part doesn’t concern the poor, best financed through free markets and private ownership arrangements that tap the affluent classes willing and able to pay sizable tuition fees (Ibid.). Inherent with education policies that are quintessentially “finance driven and not equity driven”, the World Bank: Takes the lack of attendance of the poor in tertiary education as something natural and hence does not want to improve it. It even instrumentally uses this absence of the poor as grounds for diminishing subsidized tertiary education provision, which is inequitable for the poor. To be more concise, this policy measure rather excludes the poor from higher education. (Adhikary, 2014, p. 15) According to Engel (2010), even when limited measures are employed by the Bank to provide higher education assistance for poorer families, as is sometimes the case with tuition credits, vouchers, and low interest loans (see World Bank, 2007), efforts are often underwritten, as has been the case in Indonesia, with: Policy prescriptions involving decentralization of educational decisionmaking; increased role of market forces in education; and limiting government resources to those areas of educational investment seen as having the greatest economic payoff. (Engel, 2010, p. 171) Consequently, many of the Bank’s PWC efforts to promote social development in education continue to be part and parcel of the larger neoliberal package of structural adjustment policies dating back to the 1980s; they reveal no significant progressive revision or evolution from the earliest Washington

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Consensus days. In fact, while new PWC development indicators acknowledge the “importance of people” in global well-being and the goal of “progress in social development”, their explicit goal continues to be the creation of the requisite conditions for expanding international trade by requiring nation-states to foster a healthy and educated workforce fit to act competently within the emerging global market (World Bank, 1999, p. 186). Needless to state, such factors have little to do with the inherent humanistic and relational dimensions of teaching and learning. Overall, World Bank policies force educators to cultivate skills and sensibilities unabashedly responsive to market demands, often “losing sight of some key aspects of human life (welfare, freedom, free will, wellbeing, etc.)” (Adhikary, 2014, p. 9). Even when the World Bank purposely aligns its education and health indicators with the United Nations’ Millenium Development Goals (MDG), the focus remains primarily on market-based economic processes and outcomes. Consequently, such efforts amount to little more than “a superficially rhetorical concern for the social dimension of development”. In effect, World Bank and IMF intrusions into teaching and learning under PWC auspices fail to acknowledge the potential social, cultural, and political transformative role of education (IIon, 2002). To date, they have accomplished little more than to effectuate policy regimes that acquiesce to the profit-driven needs of global capital and the discipline and training requirements of expanding global labor markets. It has been the intent of this section to examine the growing impact of the World Bank on the internal education policies of debtor countries during the first decades of the Washington Consensus. As we have seen, the Bank has been afforded increased influence in global education through the rapid expansion of loans and project financing, especially in low-income countries. It has also gone to great lengths to remake itself as a “knowledge bank”, whose central role in global education is to persuade debtor countries to construct “knowledge-based economies” by investing in highly commercialized forms of education-as-human-capital with a view toward increasing global competitiveness and market efficiency. We now shift our focus to several of the substantive ways in which the International Monetary Fund helps to coordinate and implement neoliberal principles in education.

8

The IMF and the Globalized Schoolhouse

Although the IMF collaborates extensively with the Bank to develop and enforce SAP conditions, its primary role is to impose “tight” macroeconomic policies that reduce public expenditure, lower inflation, and correct balance

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of payments difficulties. These policies have a more indirect but no less significant impact on education as they drastically reduce the resources available for education and frequently pose obstacles to educational access by disadvantaged groups. Thus, while the Fund’s global influence in educational policy formation was less visibly active and more indirect than the Bank’s during the first Washington Consensus, it was no less consequential. The pronounced impact IMF structural adjustment conditions are capable of delivering to the education sectors of countries receiving financial assistance is well established. In general terms, because of SAPs influence in the economic policy and developmental strategy of borrowing countries, they invariably influence education policy as well (Moutsios, 2009). In other words, IMF SAPs are: By definition related to education, not directly, as it happens with the World Bank’s specialised programmes, but through the demanded measures of financial discipline, which have a strong impact on the borrowing countries’ education systems … When, for example, a set of adjustment programmes request curtailment of expenditure in the public sector, this may be followed by decentralisation of financial responsibilities to educational institutions, by tuition fees, or by promotion of private education. (Ibid., p. 474) Governments are put under great pressure by the IMF to keep public spending low relative to the private sector in order to promote “sound” economic growth by reducing the size of public deficits and shifting national resources from government control to the private sector (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). Even before the global economic crisis of 2008, IMF policies had impacted the quality of education in many developing countries through such austerity measures as national public sector cutbacks, trimming education budgets, and restricting increases to the public sector wage bill, (including teachers’ wages and increased use of short-term contract teachers) (Rowden, 2011, p. 3). Part of the rationale for these policies stems from what has been called “inflation fanaticism” on the part of the IMF, and is premised on the belief that increases in public expenditure and deficits may lead to higher rates of inflation, higher interest rates, and macroeconomic instability (ActionAid International, 2009). Arguing that high prices, especially for basic consumer goods, disproportionately hurt the poor, the IMF consistently pushes countries to bring inflation below 10 percent, preferably less than 5 percent (Global Campaign For Education, 2009, p. 12). The impact is that countries cannot increase spending on education at the rate needed because to do so might run afoul of IMF expectations regarding price levels. Consequently, limits on public spending are also

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meant to offset inflation and, as indicated, typically involve placing caps on public sector wage bills (Marphatia, 2006, p. 15). Yet, low retail prices driven by deflationary policies equally discourage investment, as anticipated rates of return drop for prospective investors. This reduced public spending combined with high interest rates to reign in inflationary demand causes a slowdown in GDP, decreases in employment, and reduced tax revenues. As a result, the government’s ability to effectively target social spending or public investment goals, including education, is dramatically weakened (Global Campaign For Education, 2009, p. 12). Due to all these factors, public education budgets are perpetually at risk of de-capitalization under IMF oversight. Barrett (2012), for example, claims IMF conditionalities targeting balance of payment problems from early on have always been biased against social services, and against education in particular. He states: Those who are old enough can hardly forget the experiences of IMF policies in the 1970s and 1980s, as they related to the education sector … Governments had to sacrifice educational expansion and development in order to secure balance of payment support from the IMF. Moreover, civil society stakeholders are often excluded from IMF discussions surrounding macroeconomic policy, and decisions are “divorced from the reality on the ground, failing to take into account (such things as) the persisting teacher shortage and its devastating impact on the quality of education” (Deghati, 2007). Cutbacks in education sectors often involve reductions in the numbers of teachers employed and/or reduced salaries. In a study of eight countries spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America and undergoing SAP conditions, for example, it was found that IMF policies in all eight both directly and indirectly impacted the number of teachers each country could hire, as well as the terms of labor contracts and salaries (Marphatia, 2006, p. 15). To compensate for teacher shortages, non-professional teachers are often hired at lower pay scales and caps in class sizes are raised (Deghati, 2007). ActionAid International (2006) points out that under austerity conditions important quality of education issues, such as equal access across lines imposed by gender, class, or disability, are neglected. According to Reimers (1997), between 1980 and ’90, a far higher proportion of countries undergoing IMF adjustment policies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa reduced educational expenditures as a share of GNP in comparison with “non-adjusting countries” (p. 9). In African countries with IMF enhanced structural adjustment facility (ESAF) programs, the average amount of per capita government spending on education declined by 0.7 percent a year between 1986 and 1996 (Naiman, 1999). In an attempt to

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curb spending and move toward a balanced budget, IMF policies often require poor countries to freeze teacher recruitment. The Fund asserts that wage bill ceilings are “necessary … when the public sector wage bill has led to macroeconomic imbalances due to unplanned, excess spending and poor expenditure control” (Deghati, 2007). In many cases such requirements may not involve explicit IMF directives, such as openly telling governments to cut salaries or to hire only a certain number of teachers. Rather, the downsizing of teachers, often the largest group of public sector workers in low-income countries, may take place inadvertently, through broad-based cuts in national wage bills (ActionAid International, 2006, p. 20). According to the Global Campaign For Education (2009), until 2007 many IMF loans to developing countries through Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) programs came with the condition that a specific ceiling be placed on the national wage bill, while ignoring national projections for the number of teachers or health workers required to improve education or health care (p. 9). Moreover, any expenditure by a government exceeding current revenues can result in a formal proclamation of “fiscal deficit” by the IMF. With expectations of stringent limits on government deficits and borrowing, painful trade-offs in long-term public sector investment and planning take place (p. 13). Thus, IMF cuts frequently involve a wage bill ceiling that caps the number of public sector workers hired. One common result is significant teacher shortages (Marphatia, 2010, p. 166). During the initial Washington Consensus years: This IMF conditionality (of wage ceilings) pigeonholed governments into making difficult choices on how to distribute and rationalize expenditures. In most cases, this ceiling has meant that governments have been unable to hire enough trained teachers and instead turned to hiring underqualified or untrained teachers … as a way of ensuring expenditures do not exceed ceilings placed on the wage bill by the IMF. (Global Campaign For Education, 2009, p. 9) As such, tight macroeconomic policies imposed by the IMF in return for loans prevent countries from increasing public spending on education. This in turn makes it difficult or impossible to provide education for all citizens and effectively cancels states’ ability to meet their “obligation to fulfil the fundamental right of free, basic education for all children” (ActionAid International, 2006, p. 4). Finally, the impact of IMF structural adjustment constraints on education budgets are an intrinsic aspect of policy directives involving trade

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liberalization. Such liberalization typically undermines core government revenues needed for education by reducing or eliminating sources of public sector funding, such as import tariffs (Marphatia, 2006, p. 15).

9

Chapter Summary

We have spent much of this chapter examining the unfolding impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies on local conditions of education as if formulated separate and discrete, although with both agencies at the end of the day upholding a copious neoliberal global agenda. As with the aligned and integrated nature of WB/IMF global governance discussed in Chapter 6, so too the educational policies of these two governing bodies are dramatically intertwined and collusive. Consequently, we now turn our attention to the symmetrical and interdependent commitment to the global neoliberal schoolhouse embedded in the combined policies and objectives of these two global agencies.

Note 1 http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/The-IMF-and-education_

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The WB/IMF Symmetry of Influence in Global(ized) Education The impact on education of neoliberal institutions with global reach during the Washington Consensus heyday was fierce and unrelenting, combining pressure at the local level in ways tantamount to a formal, yet undeclared and largely unchallenged, system of global governance impinging on local conditions. As Moutsios (2010) points out: The overall framework for this agenda (in education) since the 1980s has been economic neoliberalism, succinctly expressed in the 1990s as the ‘Washington Consensus’ and jointly pursued by the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. (p. 122) Indeed, during the WC years “entire education systems” with deep roots in the history of their societies are regarded and defined first and foremost according to the role they play in the “global production system” (Ibid., p. 129). The increasing power and mutually intertwined and symmetrical influences of the World Bank and IMF in this regard are clear on numerous counts. Most important, as a result of extensive loan conditionalities previously discussed, these two institutions worked in tandem to resculpt global education, making it in most instances the embodiment of neoliberalism in debtor countries via the implementation and enforcement of market-based education policies (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 85). As such, from the 1980s onward the Bank and IMF rapidly came to represent the two most important global “neoliberal institutions with vast powers for influencing public policy and education, powers that were previously reserved to national governments” (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 152). According to Robertson and Dale (2007), these two pillars of world governance not only shaped education agendas in developing and developed economies, but were also able “to reconstitute education as part of the wider services sector within a global knowledge economy framework” (p. 10). Ultimately local systems of education became increasingly harnessed by human capital investments aimed at promoting global market efficiency. The most important area of WB/IMF convergence in influencing local education is cooperation in devising and implementing structural adjustment conditions for loans and credit. It has been shown that these conditions are © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_008

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often quite harsh and have produced an assortment of negative impacts on education, including diminished government expenditure, increased school absenteeism and failures, narrowed access, and increased private costs. Having examined several of the larger expressions of World Bank and IMF influence in global education as separate entities, we now turn our attention to how this influence has become rooted in local education though neoliberal principles of austerity, privatization, and liberalization/deregulation. As pointed out earlier, over time the IMF became increasingly involved in World Bank programs through the shared menu of loan conditionalities and austerity programs imposed on countries receiving Bank financing (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 89). As such, the IMF’s more recent and less direct involvement in local education, in addition to being the result of its own loan programs, also represents “its involvement into the financial procedures of the World Bank” (Ibid., pp. 84–85).

1

Combined Impact on Education During the Washington Consensus

The World Bank and IMF’s shared allegiance to early Washington Consensus principles in education was substantial. With regard to structural adjustment policies, the combined effects of the two agencies’ policies were often quite pronounced, as when prescribed changes in the education sectors of debtor nations were integrated into a larger package of conditions for WB/IMF loans and aid. For example, many of the World Bank’s education policies in lowincome countries characterized by strict loan conditionality were premised on particular and unique understandings of the role of educational aid in development (Bonal, 2002, p. 4) That is: Rather than helping developing countries to achieve context-based educational goals, it (the WB) defines in advance which policy goals are desirable and determines whether a country can receive financial assistance. (Ibid.) The impact of WB/IMF policies on education during the Washington Consensus also occurred on an “indirect” basis, derived from the social, political, and economic consequences of structural adjustment, which in turn produced changes in educational indicators (Bonal, 2002, p. 7). Aside from a decline of educational outlays as a percentage of GNP and per capital national expenditure, SAPs often presage an increase in educational absenteeism and school failures, and a contraction in access to primary and secondary education

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(Ibid.). Similarly, harsh macroeconomic structural adjustment measures throughout the developing world in the 1980s contributed to an immediate increase in local rates of poverty, which then caused a concomitant increase in the opportunity costs of schooling, especially among the rural poor. As market conditions were brought to bear on education sectors, increases in the private costs of many education-related items, (i.e., school fees, textbooks, uniforms, transport) dampened effective levels of access to education among the most disadvantaged populations (Ibid., p. 11). It is interesting to note that during the 1980s countries that abided by WB/IMF structural adjustment program injunctions reduced public expenditure in education more than those that did not (Reimers & Tiburcio, 1993). In fact, out of a total of 50 education policy conditions embedded in various SAPs globally between 1980 and 1993, only six called for an increase of educational expenditure; the remainder involved net reductions (Alexander, 2001). It is not much of a stretch to conclude that where declines in public investment in free or low-cost education take place, so too does a concomitant reduction in access to schooling among the truly needy to which such education is often intended. The economic decline of already disadvantaged communities feeling the sting of Bank and Fund SAPs is often further aggravated by the reduction of subsidies on vital consumer goods (McCleery & De Paolis, 2008, p. 444). Resultedly, not only did adjustment programs tend to increase aggregate poverty levels during the Washington Consensus, but falling per capita expenditure and inadequate allocation of resources within countries’ social sectors caused a further deterioration of access to basic education and health services on behalf of the most vulnerable (Reimer & Tiburcio, 1993, p. 18). In other words, a decline in living conditions stemming from a decline in per capita income (at least partly attributable to the effects of SAPs) in turn further constrains the ability of already impoverished households to pay for education (Ibid., p. 27). World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs, then, impact the provision of education through at least two channels. The first is the reduction of aggregate demand for education caused by increases in unemployment resulting from SAP cutbacks at the macroeconomic level. Reduced income means a reduced ability by poorer families to finance the education of children, augmented by the decreased availability of children to attend school due to new add-on family and work responsibilities. Secondly, overall cuts in public spending incumbent of SAP conditionalities often result in disproportionate cuts in education expenditure, which, although not necessarily involving school closings outright, may certainly involve acute declines in the conditions of teaching and learning,(such as the privatization of utilities), and shortages in key staff and personnel (Reimers & Tiburcio, 1993, pp. 24–25). Evidence also

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points to an implicit bias by the IMF and WB underlying a higher tolerance for deficit spending, including those involving environmental protection programs, by governments in rich countries compared to those in the developing world. For example, after accepting an IMF bailout agreement in 1999, Brazil was pressured to slash funding for environmental enforcement by over 50 percent (Anderson, 2001). Washington Consensus economic adjustment policies in poorer countries not only raised the opportunity costs of education; but education sector liberalization shifted the structure of educational supply and demand away from the poor and toward middle classes and above (Bonal, 2002, p. 11). In Costa Rica during the 1980s and ‘90s, for instance, private expenditure on secondary education as a percent of all direct costs for education doubled, from 30 percent to 60 percent (Carnoy & Torres, 1994, p. 81). The lion’s share of this increase was clearly garnered by the country’s more affluent social classes. Similarly, a joint UNESCO-International Labour Organisation (ILO) task force examining the impact of structural adjustment policies on education in 1991 found that urban elites in Brazil generally protected themselves much better than the poor from the impact of budget cuts in education by transferring their children to private schools in the lower grades, and then by paying more for the higher education tab of offspring (Amadeo et al., 1992). Consequently, there is little evidence that the educational reforms accompanying structural adjustment programs during the early years of the Washington Consensus provided any of the requisite conditions for a broad-based, inclusive, progressive education development strategy. Bonal (2002), for example, notes that the impact of SAPs on education in developing countries produced the “exact contrary” of policy recipes aligned toward innovation and development (p. 7). Indeed, a sizable amount of evidence indicates that access and equality of opportunity in education were often seriously compromised by World Bank and IMF policies, and that throughout the 1980s and ‘90s enrolments in secondary and tertiary education in many SAP-compliant countries actually fell as the rise of private costs aggravated preexisting inequalities in access to post-compulsory levels of education (Ibid., p. 9). The generally adverse effects of World Bank and IMF SAPs on education in the developing world are corroborated by a large-scale study regarding the effects of adjustment policies on various indicators of education in countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In this study, Cornia et al. (1987) found that of seven countries for which data was available between 1979 and 1983, two showed no increase in education enrollment figures and three actually

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showed school enrollment declines. Furthermore, of six countries across the three regions providing data on educational attainment, all showed diminishing levels of school completion (pp. 24–26). Also, according to Reimers and Tiburcio (1993), even at the beginning of the WB/IMF Washington Consensus years numerous problems in the education sectors of many poorer countries “arising in part from ill-conceived structural adjustment and stabilization policies” had reached a critical mass and were compromising national economic recovery, social development, and the future welfare of mass numbers of young people around the world (p. 8). In fact, public expenditures on education as a percentage of GNP in many parts of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa were lower in 1990 than they had been in 1970 (p. 8). The deleterious impact SAPs had on education continued during the final years of the 20th century. Even those countries in the Global South able to hold public education expenditures constant throughout the 1990s often saw per student expenditure worsen due to the recession of 1997 and the net increase in the number of students seeking schooling due to population growth, two problems for which WB and IMF policies had little to offer (Reimers & Tiburcio, 1993). Finally, it is important to note that an axiomatic justification for the restructuring of education in line with IMF and World Bank conditionalities has always been the quid pro quo assertion that education development means human capital development, or the subordination of teaching and learning to the pursuit of skills and sensibilities needed by global markets. We will examine some of the likely effects of human capital theory on the social relations of schools in Chapters 11 and 12. For the moment, though, suffice it to point out that under the aegis of globalized neoliberalism, education has taken a decisively stark historical and political economic turn. This turn involves nothing less than instruction, programs, and individual attainment in education being intimately linked to such capitalist market values as efficiency, productivity, and accountability. Such “economic outcomes” of teaching and learning were first normalized and promoted through Bank-financed programs and IMF/WB SAPs during the Washington Consensus, and have since come to hold court in the education sectors of nation-states worldwide (Moutsios, 2010, p. 122). As such: The model of development discursively defended by the institutions of the Washington Consensus locates education as one of the key mechanisms to train human capital and to insert poor countries into the knowledge-driven global economy. (Bonal, 2002, p. 10)

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Combined Impact in Latin America and Africa

In the 1980s and ‘90s the adverse effects of combined WB/IMF structural adjustment policies were particularly hard felt in Latin America and Africa. As a result of several macroeconomic crises in these two regions, the Fund joined the World Bank in providing sustained conditional lending to lowincome countries in the mid 1980s (Oberdabernig, 2012). The results are well established.  As Central and South America fell in line with privatization and austerity demands, educational expenditures were reduced by 29 percent on average throughout the region (Reimers,1994). Between 1970 and 1985 SAPdirected changes in government financing of public education resulted in disproportionate expenditure cuts in education, both as a percentage of government funding and of GNP (Reimers, 1991). Changes in public-funded education in Latin America wrought by WB/IMF structural adjustment programs in the 1980s include a shrinking percentage of GDP for schools throughout the region, as well as the depreciation of teachers’ salaries in most of Central America (Sanguinetty, 1991). These adjustments included 5 percent yearly declines on educational expenditures for basic education in Costa Rica, and 7 percent declines in real per student expenditure for primary education in Venezuela (Reimers, 1990). Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s African countries signing on for WB/IMF adjustment programs on the whole witnessed a 67 percent decrease in their education sectors (Reimers, 1994). As a result of adjustment demands in subSaharan Africa, for example, government expenditure on education as a percent of GNP steadily declined in the early 1980s. By 1983 the education-to-GNP ratio had contracted to 1970 levels (Tilak, 1990, p. 470). In 1990 more than half of all the World Bank’s structural adjustment loan (SAL) programs in Africa involved the reduction of public funding for both secondary and higher education, the introduction of private tuition fees, and increased privatization of education as lending conditions (Jones, 1997). Reimer and Tiburcio (1993) attribute a drastic decline in primary school enrollment and completion rates and a rise in the absolute number of illiterates in sub-Saharan Africa (from 133.6 to 138.8 million) between 1985 and 1990 as largely the result of severe cuts to the education sector, as well as the adjustment policies of cost recovery and public sector containment pursued by the World Bank and IMF (p. 8). On average, adjusting African countries experienced a 62 percent decline in public expenditures for education between 1980 and 1988, three times more likely than countries not saddled with WB/IMF conditionalities to experience a decline in public expenditure for education relative to GNP (Ibid., p. 33).

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Individual case studies of specific African countries also bear witness to this trend. For example, Keith Hinchliffe’s (1989) study on the impact of structural adjustment on education in Nigeria between 1983 and 1986 found enrollments in primary education declined 15 percent, with massive teacher walkouts, terminations, and severe budget reductions for teaching materials, buildings, and classroom supplies (p. 9). In Malawi by the mid 2000s class sizes in public schools were as large as 72 children per teacher. Estimates in 2007 indicated that government outlays in that country would have to almost double the number of existing teachers in order to reach the “ideal” teacher/student ratio of 40 children per teacher. During the same period, Mozambique, under IMF directives to constrain teacher recruitment, lacked an estimated 100,000 teachers to achieve the average ideal class size (Deghati, 2007). Similarly, a parallel study of the impact of WB/IMF structural adjustment policies on education in Zambia in 1985 found per pupil expenditure in real terms to be roughly half of 1970 levels (Hoppers, 1989).

3

Pioneering Principles in WB/IMF Neoliberal Education: Austerity, Privatization, and Liberalization/Deregulation

Clearly, the capacity of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to hold neoliberal court, so to speak, over national systems of education is pronounced and far-reaching. We have seen how this influence has taken place largely through shared and active complicity in structural adjustment policies at the national level, especially those in the Global South during the uncompromisingly doctrinaire years of the early Washington Consensus. As globalization was establishing a neoliberal ideal type in global education informed by the market principles of commodificatiion, efficiency, and accountability (as discussed in Chapter 3) during the 1980s and ‘90s, so too World Bank and IMF “boots on the ground” were contemporaneously promoting neoliberalism in local systems of education through policies and practices supportive of market reforms. We now turn our attention specifically to the powerful impact the WB/IMF SAP meme has had on local conditions in education through the promulgation of market-based measures involving austerity, privatization, and deregulation/liberalization, (the latter two of which were given brief explanatory consideration in Chapter 4). In the same ways that globalization has come to inform and sustain the neoliberal schoolhouse vis-à-vis the principles and practices associated with commodification, efficiency, and accountability, it can also be shown that the structural adjustment principles of austerity, privatization, and deregulation/

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liberalization move market reforms forward by decapitalizing and derailing civic-oriented public education in debtor countries. That is, from the overarching context of global market forces to the local terrain of structural adjustments, it can be shown that WB/IMF SAPs work to “hook-up” local education to the broad institutional framework of global governance through the required “buy-in” processes of legitimation, operation, and compliance discussed in Chapter 5. Together, these elements combine and coordinate to construct the neoliberal imaginary in local systems of education across the planet. The first factor in the SAP free market equation, fiscal austerity, is tantamount to reducing public spending in order to balance government budgets. For public education, austerity policies typically mean successive rounds of budget cuts that force stakeholders to “do more with less”. As Reimers and Tiburcio (1993) note: Austerity has resulted in reduced government funding for public education programmes, lower personal incomes and family budgets available for education, and an increased focus on encouraging private educational initiatives, which only some can afford. (p. 15) Despite numerous findings that budget cuts do not promote efficiency and equity, austerity-related policies have continued as a mainstay of SAP conditions since the earliest days of the Washington Consensus (De Moura Castro & Alfthan, 1993). Indeed, the fiscal austerity predilections of major international financial institutions represent perhaps the one policy catalyst that most fuels the structural adjustment process in “adjusting” economies. Austerity measures also set the tone and create many of the preconditions at the local level for the realization of increased accountability, marketization, and privatization, the three guideposts of neoliberal globalization. It is the author’s opinion that there can be no structural adjustment without fiscal austerity, as the two nearly always occur together. And, although reform and adjustment provide the broad policy framework for austerity, the terms adjustment and austerity are often used interchangeably in development literature, as though synonyms. Austerity is by far the one Washington Consensus item that figures predominant in World Bank and IMF conditionalities regarding education. While the 1980s were a decade of austerity throughout the world, households in countries undergoing WB/IMF structural adjustment measures suffered the greatest decline in their ability to contribute to the financing of education. During this period adjusting countries’ education expenditures declined in real terms across the board, both as a percentage of government spending and as a percentage of GNP (Reimers & Tiburcio, 1993, p. 50). Also, fiscal austerity aka

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structural adjustment establishes many of the pathways through which education becomes subordinate to the goals and conditions of open markets. It does so by helping to uphold a neoliberal development framework partly premised on the broad teleological assumption that increased “belt tightening” in the public sector invariably paves the way for social, material, and, in fact, historical advancement. As a result of a general dearth of funding for education caused by WB/IMF austerity measures, debtor countries are forced to run a gamut of specific liabilities for public education These include larger class size, teachers with fewer instructional resources and less time to prepare, a decline in the construction of new schools, and a chronic lack of adequate school maintenance (Reimer & Tiburcio, 1993, p. 50). Because of the severe economic pressures exerted by SAPs on already-disadvantaged communities, many teachers also report an increase in hunger and failing health among poorer students, as well as a heightened inability of students to purchase essential school supplies (Ibid.). While we will look more closely in Chapter 11 at some of the social consequences of the global increase in private schools spurred on by neoliberalism, privatization represents our second “market consequence” for education of WB and IMF structural adjustment policies. According to ActionAid International (2006): Private schools are mushrooming around the world. This is partly because of lack of resources for public education. This policy has also been insisted upon by the World Bank in many of its education programmes and has become an explicit criterion in IMF loans. (p. 35) In many ways, private sector involvement in education follows naturally and logically as a consequence of SAP austerity. For, if austerity means fewer resources for schools and schooling, then in situations where educational demand is constant or growing, as is most certainly the case among a country’s middle or upper classes, austerity must also mean supply bottlenecks in education. Under these conditions the “wisdom of unregulated markets” will be expected to respond to the profit-making opportunities of unmet demand by moving private resources into the education sector.

4

SAPs and Trade Liberalization in Education

The third spoke in the WB/IMF deflationary wheel of structural adjustment is the liberalization of trade in education services and related products, which

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invariably also involves some level of decentralization and deregulation of schools and schooling. While we will later consider the large role the World Trade Organization (WTO) plays in promoting the global neoliberal imaginary in education by dismantling safeguards and barriers to global marketization of education, it is important to recognize that World Bank and IMF austerity and privatization policies are largely intended to put into place market-style efficiency and productivity standards in education, so that private and public schools can become more cost competitive within the larger context of regional and global markets. Trade liberalization is a typical conditionality of WB/IMF assistance and development programs (Oberdabernig, 2012, p. 3). Since the 1980s, political states have been expected to provide the infrastructure and regulatory context whereby barriers to trade in goods and services are lowered. This includes supplying the local governance framework needed for international commercialization and trade in education (Robertson & Dale, 2007, p. 9). Since sectoral resource allocation and other key decisions for public goods, including education, at the macro level inherently involve some degree of centralized coordination, and since neoliberal marketization routinely involves the dismantling of public sector bureaucracies, SAP liberalization in education is derived from decentralization and deregulation. As Bonal (2002) notes, World Bank education discourse privileges decentralization and school autonomy as mechanisms for increased effectiveness and competitiveness in market-type education systems (p. 9). Consequently: The private school mode of organisation is taken as the reference model to be followed by public schools. It is assumed that if public schools get the same level of autonomy as private schools and school competitiveness is boosted through quasi-market policies, the quality of education and the school cost-effectiveness will improve substantially. (Ibid., pp. 9–10) Yet, despite claims of market efficiency, some researchers have proposed that WB/IMF decentralization reforms have very little to do with increasing educational quality, and much to do with cancelling the financial and political sovereignty of the state over public goods, including public education (see Carnoy, 1999, p. 54). And, as has been repeatedly pointed out at various junctures in our discussion, when the flood gates of trade liberalization are opened on education, increased inequalities result at numerous levels throughout society. Bonal (2002), for example, found that decentralization and marketization educational reforms in Latin America in the 1980s resulted in significant school and geographic-based social disparities (p. 10).

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Atmospheric and Concrete Effects of Privatization

The consequences of privatized education are both concrete and atmospheric. They involve not only pragmatic and practical repercussions for schools and learning, but also serve to cultivate and reinforce broad intuitive and visceral terrains in schools in ways that are both implicit and tangible. Although we shall look more closely at the impact of neoliberal principles and practices on the culture and interpersonal climate of schools in forthcoming chapters, brief preliminary consideration of some of the more pronounced effects of WB/IMF-style privatized education is in order at this juncture. Ball and Youdell (2008), for example, make a useful distinction along these lines by distinguishing between the “ intrinsic” effects of school privatization, or those carried out inside public education involving the inculcation of corporate-based practices and ideas, and more tangible “extrinsic” shifts that take place in public education services as they become bottom-line, profit seeking enterprises. This latter form of privatization frequently reconfigures the design of education policy through well-trodden private and public sector collaboration, more commonly known as public-private partnerships (PPP) (p. 89). In comparison, the most significant atmospheric or intrinsic effect of privatization is that it changes the nature of education. Under neoliberal designs privatized schools are no longer “public goods” serving the whole society. Rather, they are converted into private goods, bought and sold, serving the exclusive interests of the educated, the employer, and the economy. Students become customers and consumers of educational products and services, and the collective social dimensions of education as a shared public good are ignored (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 92). This is to say: Privatization, combined with commercialization, distorts the social values of education and promotes competitive individualism, modifying the way students, teachers, and families think, act, and decide about education. (Ibid.) The extent of privatization in the education sectors of poor countries is tangible and measurable. According to a report by Oxfam, in 2006 children in 89 out of 103 developing countries had to pay in order to go to school (Emmett et al., 2006, p. 89). If anything, privatization in public education has only increased worldwide in the last decade. When schools are privatized, preexisting social inequalities are worsened and de facto class-based segregation becomes a key organizing principle of society. Global trends toward privatization have fundamentally shifted the public-private sector balance in favor of the latter in many countries, resulting in nearly universal increases in social class-based school

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segregation between private and public sectors. Chile during the height of the early Washington Consensus is a good case in point. After Augosto Pinochet’s government introduced so-called “school choice” and privatization policies, student enrollment in private education increased from 20 percent in 1980 to 43 percent in 1996 (Carnoy & McEwan, 2001, p. 9). In effect, school privatization undermines values of equal access to adequate schooling and effectively cancels out public education as one of the great challengers of intergenerational disadvantage in capitalist society. This is to say, under present trends toward privatization, those able to invest in private secondary education have a better chance of entering prestigious public higher education institutions, (which themselves are undergoing marketization in many countries), while those without the wherewithal to pay for such pre-university advantages, if able to pursue post-secondary studies at all, end up in less-expensive, lowerquality institutions. The increasing preference for prestigious university prep schools also erodes the willingness of middle-class tax payers to pay their share for public education, since whenever possible their aspirational interests for their children lie in private, fee-based, exclusive university track prep schools (Ilon, 1994, p. 102). Relatedly, even where there is an expressed civic preference for quality open-access public education, the austere belt-tightening required by WB/IMF policies ultimately leave little choice for governments but to impose some version of fee schedule in fiscal contexts plagued with shrinking public revenues (ActionAid International, 2006).

6

SAPs, Education, and the Post-Washington Consensus

Before shedding light on the second pair of Epocalypse Horsemen, the World Trade Organization and the OECD, some consideration is due to the impact of the post-Washington Consensus on claimed reformulations in WB/IMF structural adjustment programs. As discussed at length in previous chapters, throughout the 1980s and ’90s mounting evidence clearly indicated WB/IMF structural adjustment conditionalities, especially in the developing world, were not only producing mixed results in terms of human development goals, but in many cases were actually contributing to retrograde, deteriorating social and economic conditions clearly contrary to those goals. However, in light of claims that structural adjustment conditions were revised under later postWashington Consensus auspices, we need to further examine the possible impact WB/IMF “adjustment with a human face” policies had on the education sectors of debtor countries. Furthermore, if we accept that PWC revisions were underway by the late 1990s, then our temporal field of inquiry for those

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changes in the global governance of education involves a period covering approximately the last two decades. World Bank claims regarding the softening of SAPs as they relate to education during the post-Washington Consensus period are numerous and pronounced. With the PWC shift from neoliberal orthodoxy to a more blended form of development (Adhikary, 2014, p. 6), education began receiving “ever-increasing priority … both as a means to and an end of development” (Rose, 2003, p. 67). Subsequently, by the late 1990s Bank policy papers reveal “new objectives and commitments for education”, including increased attention to the “social aspects” of schools and learning (Banal, 2002, p. 17). The sanctification of education as a proposed tool of poverty reduction has been particularly evident in the Bank’s support for primary education, and aligns well with a more general acceptance of the importance of primary education by international agencies and national governments, as articulated at the World Conferences on Education for All in Thailand in 1990, and in Senegal in 2000 (Rose, 2003, p. 7). Since 2004 this alignment has also involved focus on “indicators” of UN Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), including expenditures on education and health, with a view toward “eradicating poverty and improving lives” (World Bank, 2004, p. 254). Specifically, several annual World Bank Development Reports have focused on improving education and health in order to support the realization of MDGs (World Bank, 2011). As Rose (2003) points out, these measures have “allowed an image to be presented of the World Bank being more attuned to welfare, poverty alleviation, gender issues, and community participation” (p. 77). Yet, a flight of swallows does not a summer make. There is an abundance of indication that the exigencies of the post-Washington Consensus brought little more to the World Bank’s burgeoning global influence in education than cosmetic change, with no real impact on the WB’s core neoliberal assumptions regarding the role of education in development. Like all ideologies, neoliberalism exerts influence in domains with which it makes impactful contact. One historical result with regard to the World Bank’s guideposts for development in emerging economies has been: The corporatist focus on quality, putting into effect measures like efficiency, productivity, cost-benefit, profitability, suitability to industry, to the workplace, and its translations into quantitative expressions. (Bonal, 2002, p. 13) Educational institutions are no exception and, predictably, when an overriding capitalist episteme is in place, “the criteria for determining social perceptions

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of educational activities … have to be oriented towards the market domain” (Adhikary, 2014, p. 11). Thus, by ostensibly embracing the moral revisions of the PWC, the World Bank may have done little more than spread vanilla icing on a chocolate cake and then proclaimed to the world that it was in the vanilla cake business. As Bonal (2002) points out: It is questionable the extent to which new objectives and commitments for education challenge the basic principles of economics of education that sustain the rationale of WB education policy. Basic features of WB education policy, like the rates of return rationale for educational investments, the importance of private education, and the marginalisation of vocational education and training remain unaltered. (p. 13) Having concluded our discussion of the WB/IMF symmetry and the shared influence of these two institutions have on global(ized) education, we now turn our sights toward the two other dark horsemen of the worldwide edpocalypse: the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

CHAPTER 9

The WTO and the OECD: The Other Two Horsemen of the Global Edpocalyse We have so far examined the increasing impact on local systems of education effectuated by the World Bank and the IMF as they go about broadening their role as major instruments of global governance, standing shoulder to shoulder under a shared banner of planetary neoliberalism. It has been argued that the central project of these two IGOs in the domain of education has been to promote free market principles of commodificatiion, efficiency, and accountability within the context of directives and policies that put into play local conditions of austerity, privatization, and liberalization/deregulation for schools. We now turn our attention to the other two global Horsemen of the Edpocalypse: the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Although neither of these IGOs exerts the same level of power and influence on local education as does the WB/ IMF nexus of forces, it will nevertheless be shown that both the WTO and the OECD, each in its own fashion, also work decisively to promote the global neoliberal project in education. Specifically, the World Trade Organization does this by promoting the free flow of educational services as part of larger trade agreements in services between member countries. The OECD, on the other hand, plays the more subtle yet equally important function of researching the relationship between education and economic productivity by constructing and disseminating curriculum and assessment tools that are underwritten in neoliberal principles firmly rooted in human capital theory. We will begin this chapter by first considering the origins and history, and prescribed purpose for education of these two IGOs. We will then explore the ways in which each actively helps to engender and preserve the sort of global neoliberal schoolhouse that dovetails with and supports corporate capitalist globalization and the aspirations of the (post-)Washington Consensus. Our objective in this section is to conclude our analysis of how each of the Four Horsemen provide an essential stitch in the global tapestry of neoliberal education. Indeed, together they constitute nothing less than a global vision of what neoliberalism means for local education. For, without the respective contribution of each, the global texture and international configuration of neoliberalism in education today would be far less cohesive and much less well coordinated.

© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_009

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From GATT to WTO: Global Framework for the Neoliberalization of Services

The role of the World Trade Organization in the burgeoning global neoliberalism of the last three decades is on equal footing with that of the World Bank and the IMF, albeit in a more indirectly supportive, contextual manner. Whereas the WB/IMF serves the purpose of providing the structural demands and gyrations needed to realize post-Washington Consensus principles and policies at the local level, the WTO serves to assist in those social and economic transmutations through the provision and enforcement of a complex nexus of regional and global free trade agreements. In this way the WTO’s main function is to insure the necessary articulation of rules and regulations to promote “unfettered” global trade, and to warrant that the exchange of goods and services involved in market liberalization around the world are delivered in a requisite scope, magnitude, and regularity befitting of free market capitalism with planetary designs. Along with the World Bank and the IMF, the historical roots of the World Trade Organization are also found in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, with the creation of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In response to the intensification of protectionist policy in international trade that helped catapult the world toward the catastrophic events of the 1930s and ‘40s, twenty-three countries, led by the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, negotiated the creation of the GATT in 1947 (Bown, 2009). Created as the third institution for post-war international economic stability, after the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, GATT’s general goal was to reduce national tariffs and promote free trade in goods. This was to be done through a “basic template of rules and exceptions to regulate international trade between members” in order to “ensure postwar stability and avoid a repeat of the mistakes … which had been a contributor to the devastating economic climate that culminated in the death and destruction of the Second World War” (Ibid., p. 11). Since GATT’s creation in 1947–48, there have been eight rounds of trade negotiations, with a ninth, the Doha Development Agenda, underway at the time of this writing. Early and ongoing negotiations focus on lowering tariffs on imported goods, and by the mid 1990s capitalist industrial countries’ tariff rates on industrial goods had fallen to less than 4 percent (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 11). In its present incarnation, the WTO “deals with the rules of trade between nations at a global or near-global level” (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 9). These rules represent: WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. These documents provide the legal ground rules for international

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commerce. They are essentially contracts, binding governments to keep their trade policies within agreed limits. (Ibid.) With 164 members in 2016, the primary purpose of the WTO remains the same as its 1948 GATT predecessor: to liberalize international trade by lowering trade barriers between nations and putting in place a system of effective trade rules.1 This is done through a process of bilateral and multilateral negotiations that develop, create, and put forward binding trade agreements and regulations between nations.2 Since its inception in 1995, the WTO has contributed greatly to the global proliferation of neoliberalism. As Tabb (2000) points out, the fundamental postulate underpinning the functioning of the WTO is that “trade and investment liberalization lead to more competition, greater market efficiency and so, necessarily, to a higher standard of living”.  Integral to this is the assumed incremental principle of insuring “freedom for transnational capital to do what it wants, where and when it wants” (p. 5). However, the critical difference between the WTO and the GATT has been the relatively recent introduction of basic services into trade negotiations and agreements. The WTO points out that while tertiary or service sectors account for a full 60 percent of global production and one-third of global employment, they represent approximately only 20 percent of total world trade (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 33). Because of this untapped potential, along with “changing consumer preferences” and “technical and regulatory innovations” that allow for increased international mobility of non-tangible products, the WTO argues that services exhibit an inherent and desirable “tradability”.3 Against a backdrop of the increasing importance and unrealized potential of service sectors in the world economy, member countries of the WTO agreed in 1996 to sign a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), for the first time putting the international trade in services on par with merchandise trade (Sulaiman, 2016, p. 475). Thus, the GATS was “developed in response to the huge growth of the services economy over the previous 30 years and the greater potential for trading services brought about by the communications revolution” (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 33). The outcome involves a set of multilateral rules covering all internationally traded services except those provided in the exercise of government authority and air traffic rights. There is, therefore, an exercise of government authority exception implying that the service is provided on a non-commercial basis by the state and not in competition with other private service providers (Varghese, 2007, p. 14). Up to 1996 GATT trade agreements had focused almost exclusively on the international commerce of tangible goods. With the creation of the GATS under WTO auspices, however, “trade diplomats and corporate lobbyists” were

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given “the opportunity to create an international instrument for the regulation of the liberalization of trade in services” (Devidal, 2009, p. 79). The GATS, then, christened the further (neo) liberalization of world trade by including services in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations, the framework for which was provided in Article 19 of the new General Agreement (Ibid.). According to the World Trade Organization: The GATS was inspired by essentially the same objectives as its counterpart in merchandise trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): creating a credible and reliable system of international trade rules; ensuring fair and equitable treatment of all participants (principle of non-discrimination); stimulating economic activity through guaranteed policy bindings; and promoting trade and development through progressive liberalization.4 The more recent GATS, then, aims at nothing less than to “create a ‘level playing field’ so that there is no discrimination against foreign corporations entering the services market” in domestic economies (World Trade Organization, 1994). As such, the GATS continues to be based on the assertion that market competition is the royal road to development, and that freedom of trade, including trade in services, is the best guarantee for the highest possible quality of output at the lowest possible cost and price (Oosterlinck, 2002, p. 1). Consequently, by the latter-half of the 1990s the international trade in services became governed by the general trade obligations of the WTO, and involved for the first time the production, distribution, marketing, sale, and delivery of services between member countries (Spring, 2014, p. 95).

2

GATS and the Global Neoliberal Schoolhouse

On several counts, there is reason to worry that the inclusion of a services component in WTO negotiations and bylaws represents a tremendous platform for the potential upstaging of local systems of education by global neoliberalism. In so far as education is an integral part of domestic services, the GATS is premised at least partly on the assumption that free trade and market-style competition will improve educational services on a global scale, and, ipso facto, education businesses should be entitled to sell products across national borders and to establish a commercial presence in other countries (Spring, 2014, p. 124). By the new millenum trade in educational services was already a major business in many countries (the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand)

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with the largest contributor being students travelling to study abroad (Larsen et al., 2002) By formally regarding education as a “service”, local schools became subject to market liberalization under GATS conditions (Moutsios, 2010, p. 122), as GATS foreign service providers and suppliers are now afforded conditions and “treatment no less favorable” than that provided by the government to comparable national service providers (DeSiqueira, 2005, p. 43): This means that, in case a government offers a public service, such as transportation, education, or health, and it is understood as entering in competition or being offered in a commercial way, the government can be ordered to discontinue offering such services and/or to be obliged to offer the same entry conditions to foreign suppliers. (Ibid., p. 44) Although services provided in the exercise of governmental authority are potentially exempt from GATS rules, Devidal (2009) notes that “public services provided by governments on a commercial basis, or in competition with private service suppliers, are excluded from the scope of the exception”, thus posing “an exception to the exception that is likely to nullify any practical effects” for meaningful government exclusions in education (p. 83). By 2002 GATS commitments in relation to trade in educational services had been made by 38 countries with sealed agreements to reduce or completely eliminate barriers to the supply of educational services from abroad (Kaplan, 2002). These trade agreements involved basic, secondary, and adult education sectors (World Trade Organization, 1998). The Doha Round, begun in November 2001, is intended to increase international trade in services by insuring that foreign firms are treated equally with local companies, including comparable access to local service markets.5 Under these conditions WTO member governments are mandated to progressively liberalize trade in services through successive rounds of negotiations.6 And, since education is one of the twelve service sectors targeted by GATS for increased trade liberalization (Al-Khalifa, 2016, p. 104), any increase in foreign capital penetration of a country’s service sector under WTO agreements potentially applies with as much force in education (Moutsios, 2009). Along these lines, Desikan (2015) points out the “stunning … lack of dialogue and social concern” over the implications of GATS offering “for global trade, as commodities, services such as higher education; health; life insurance; research and development in the physical sciences, social sciences, humanities; and so on”.7 Beginning in 2000, WTO negotiations involving services included primary, secondary, post-secondary and adult education, as well as specialized training, such as for sports (World Trade Organization, n.d.-a). For each of these

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educational areas, at present GATS regulations place four types or “modes” of education services under WTO jurisdiction for trade negotiations and oversight. These are the cross-border supply of educational services; the student consumption of education services in a foreign nation; the commercial presence of an education provider abroad; and the employment of educators, scholars, or researchers outside of their home country (Sulaiman, 2016; Al-Khalifa, 2016; Spring, 2014). The cross-border supply of educational services takes place whenever teaching and learning transpire internationally, without the educator or the student physically moving outside their home country (for example, in the case of internet-based instruction and virtual schools). Yet, it also relates to private education firms: Selling programs to foreign institutions or franchise institutions to carry out such programs and offering sister courses in which students register with a local education institution and learn some courses in their home country before going abroad for further studies. (Al Khalifa, 2016, p. 103) The other three “modes” of current WTO trade agreements involve teachers, learners, or firms physically traveling to a foreign country to sell, purchase, or produce educational services in the pursuit of private interests. In the case of establishing a commercial presence abroad, profit-seeking education service providers often purchase local schools or open sister, branch, or franchise campuses in second countries that are coordinated from the home office in an attempt to expand overseas revenues and markets (Al-Khalifa, 2016). This invariably involves education service providers establishing commercial facilities in other countries (Sulaiman, 2016, p. 475).

3

GATS Creep and High Pressure Liberalization

With regard to the implementation of trade rules and agreements of the GATS, the World Trade Organization assures member states that they retain the right to regulate “the supply of services in pursuit of national policy objectives”, including voluntarily choosing “which services they wish to open to foreign suppliers and under which conditions” (Devidal, 2009, p. 79). However, in the practical sense, state control over the level of commitment negotiated at trade rounds is far from complete, with pressures being exerted that are often very difficult to resist, especially for countries lacking economic force in the global political economy (Ibid., p. 88). Consequently, several substantive views have emerged regarding the true nature of events, on the ground, as GATS conditions

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are implemented over time. First, there is the matter of the incremental, or “creeping” tendencies, of WTO-driven privatization in education. In the WTO’s own words: The process of trade liberalisation in services (including currently public ones) is progressive; it will be deepened and strengthened over time. (World Trade Organization, 1994) Some two decades after its origins the primary intent of the GATS remains to “progressively liberalize trade in services” (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 81). When the Uruguay Round went into effect in 1995, the stated objective for services was meant to mirror the GATT counterpart in merchandise that began some half-century earlier, promoting trade and development through progressive liberalization (World Trade Organization, n.d.-d). Furthermore, although each member state specifies the extent to which market access and national treatment are granted to specific services, this by rule takes place within the context of a country’s overarching “schedule of commitments” to the WTO. The underlying “gradualist nature” of the GATS’ “built-in system” of continuous negotiations is seen in the fact that when these schedules expire, they become subject to additional trade conditions and expectations of increased market access to services, including education (Devidal, 2009, p. 75). Thus, “what is not covered by the agreement today could be included tomorrow” (Ibid., p. 84). Furthermore, once agreements are made, it is problematic for member states to withdraw, except by “compensating” other member states at later negotiating rounds in the form of comparable access in other sectors of the country’s services industry. Consequently, any areas of education shielded from liberalization in any current “round” of GATS negotiations will be vulnerable to liberalization in future rounds (Potterstraat, 2003). In this way, WTO guidelines ostensibly seem sensitive to public policy concerns, yet nonetheless stress continual trade liberalization and a negotiating process whereby foreign service providers can ultimately have increased access to domestic markets. In this way, the seeming flexibility of the GATS is actually quite “relative” and their incremental nature “implies that every limitation will be renegotiated and progressively restricted” (Ibid.). This makes the potential scope of the GATS “quite vast” and eventually can affect “all kinds of measures taken by every state party at all levels of government, affecting trade in all services” (Devidal, 2009, p. 83). A second area of concern regarding the way the GATS get played out in the educational sectors of WTO member states are the routine pressures and

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coercion for increased marketization. Since the intention of GATS is to facilitate and promote increased opportunities for trade, countries not interested in importing or exporting education services are subject to significant pressure by the wto (Knight, 2002). As Vergi (2009) notes: Since the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was created in 1995, there has been international pressure towards the liberalization of education all over the world, as well as new challenges to the traditional internationalization rationale in the field of higher education. (p. 92)

4

The Tertiary Neoliberal Schoolhouse

In much of the developing world since 1995, many of these changes delivered by the GATS have taken the form of significant increases in the international supply of foreign higher education service providers (Al-Khalifa, 2016; Sulaiman, 2016). In India, for example, the increased presence of foreign universities has contributed to a shift from education as a social good to education as a marketable commodity (Sulaiman, 2016). Predictably, this shift has resulted in comparatively higher operating costs (due to the cost effectiveness of foreign competition), the exclusion of poorer students, forced marketization, challenges to institutional survival, and the undermining of schools created to provide education to disadvantaged populations (Ibid., p. 476). Furthermore, a GATS regime provides no means to ensure only quality universities gain market access or the cost of postsecondary education is modulated once foreign service providers penetrate local markets (Desikan, 2015). According to Siqueira (2005), WTO/GATS market access in education can: Lead to unbridled competition in which several suppliers, looking to reduce their costs, offer lower quality services (shorter programs with less qualified teachers or inadequate distance learning), exploiting workers (unfair payment for tasks or productivity without any vacation or paid rest), and damage to the environment (construction in preservation areas, use of hazardous products and/or equipment that puts the population at risk). (p. 43) Access by foreign suppliers to adult and higher education or education infrastructure also runs the risk of foreign dominance or exploitation of national systems and cultures (Knight, 2002, pp. 12–13). According to GATS Watch, a public advocacy group that conducts research and analysis of the influence of corporate lobbies in the WTO:

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As stakeholders in education, we have reached the conclusion that it is inappropriate for education systems to be regulated within the GATS framework. Education is of such critical importance to the social, cultural, and economic development of society that it should not be subjected to the binding rules of an international treaty that prioritizes trade liberalization over other goals.8 In the process of global trade liberalization, with education as a component of a nation’s GATS-compromised service sector, language and national identity become vulnerable to the gyrations of a world marketplace dominated by multinational educational corporations (Robertson et al., 2002, p. 495).

5

Loss of Local Control and the WTO Hierarchy

We will closely examine the d/evolution of the modern nation-state under global neoliberalism in the following chapter. It is, however, useful at this juncture to briefly consider the rigid top-down decision-making emblematic of GATS processes, as well as the loss of local control and state sovereignty with regard to decisions that guide the direction of public education within a global free market context. Under the highest aspirations of GATS, education becomes a commercial activity, rather than a public service permitting the exercise of governmental authority (Education International/Public Services International, 1999). Once a country has made a WTO-based commitment to provide foreign companies access to its markets, should a GATS signatory allow a foreign competitor into its service sector, it must then provide equal opportunities in that sector to service providers from all other WTO member states (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 34). As Coates (2001) points out: GATS locks countries into a system of rules that means it is effectively impossible for governments to change policy, or for voters to elect a new government that has different policies. (p. 28) Even when adequate momentum can be developed at the national level to demand cancellation or reversal of a GATS commitment, the required process is difficult, time-consuming, and costly. Once a GATS commitment is made to allow for a domestic sector and mode of trade in a WTO services agreement, any change of national policy can only be effectuated after three years, at which point an “exchange” has to be made with the involved trade partners to replace the previous trade pact with a new agreement, and foreign service providers claiming lost revenues can demand compensation (Robertson, 2006, p 10).

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The top-down and hierarchical nature of the trade commitments under the GATS can be seen on several levels. First of all, key decisions regarding the terms and conditions of multilateral trade agreements primarily reflect the vested interests of the world’s main trading nations, while countries with lesser amounts of global capital are left for the most part to follow suit (Mehra, 2001, p. 81). Even though formal, binding decisions in the WTO appear to be openly made by the concerted efforts of national ministers of trade and member state representatives, evidence indicates that the crucial negotiations leading to these “open” decisions are carried out in informal talks and in circles of select representatives to which delegates from many countries, particularly the poorest, have little or no access (Moutsios, 2009, p. 470). Jennar (2000), for example, maintains that although GATS negotiations are led by member states, final decisions and commitments are the result of secret, closed door meetings at the WTO headquarters in Geneva. Similarly, within GATS member nations themselves, the exclusive “inside track” to negotiating domestic service trade policy formation and investment decisions in the WTO context is typically granted to the larger, more conservative, more powerful national sectors, such as commerce and finance; while weaker, yet arguably more progressive, sectors, such as environmental or social policy departments, are seldom included (Mehra, 2001, p. 81). According to Barnhizer (2001), the general WTO system itself is plagued with a lack of transparency, begging the issue of democratic control that is so critical to sovereign oversight over such public goods as education. Because WTO negotiations take place: Outside the ability of any nation’s citizens to control, they make decisions, create policies, and implement actions that have never been agreed to by the citizens of a particular nation … The result is that the mechanisms of citizen participation and political control over decisions that impact their lives in the most fundamental ways are becoming increasingly remote. (Ibid., p. 5)

6

Questions of Sovereignty

The cumulative impact of hierarchical, centralized, and non-transparent trade negotiations leading to GATS policy decisions speaks volumes to the erosion of sovereignty among WTO member states. As early as the 1980s, opening proposals for integrating international rules on services into multilateral trading systems were actively opposed by a number of countries on the grounds that “such an agreement could undermine governments’ ability to pursue national

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policy objectives and constrain their regulatory powers” (World Trade Organization, 2015, p. 33). Because liberalization commitments made under GATS are binding and extremely difficult to reverse, governments need to insist on adequate flexibility in educational policy-making to insure that the educational needs of their citizens are met (Potterstraat, 2003). Yet, achieving such flexibility is potentially undermined by the GATS through the type of aforementioned creeping privatization that implies a progressive withdrawal of nation-state authority and regulation, leaving educational sectors in the hands of private and corporate interests that run the risk of privileging economic over social interests. Ultimately, the ability to insure quality education in accordance with human rights law is compromised as states forfeit their authority to business organizations that have neither the expertise nor the capacity to insure such rights are in conformity with international law (Devidal, 2009, p. 94). Consequently, there still remains “compelling reasons to be concerned that the GATS poses serious threats to vital public interest regulations, including those governing education” (Education International, 1999). In effect, privatized and commercialized education, though nominally still under local state authority, may in effect not be governed or regulated by any discernable government body within a nation-state (Knight, 2002).

7

The OECD: From European Recovery to Global Influence

Of the four international organizations under consideration, our final neoliberal harbinger of the edpocalypse, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), represents a much different and patently more deceptive entry point into the global marketization of public education. In 1947 the foreign ministers of Britain and France invited all European countries to meet in Paris to draw up plans for the implementation of the post-war Marshall Program, intended to aid the economic recovery of battle-ravaged western Europe. As a result, the Committee of European Economic Cooperation (OECC) was created the following year to manage the initial phases of the European Recovery Program and to help achieve the longer-term objectives of Marshall Plan assistance. These efforts subsequently gave rise to the creation of the OECD in 1961 (Mahon & McBride, 2009, p. 8). And, since its inception: The OECD vocation has been to build strong economies in its member countries, improve efficiency, hone market systems, expand free trade and contribute to development in industrialised as well as developing countries.9

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Once European recovery was more or less on solid footing, the newly branded OECD took a decisively wider turn in the course of human events. According to Moutsios (2009), with 30 member states and cooperative agreements from another 70 countries and organizations, the contemporary embodiment of the OECD effectively impacts two-thirds of the world’s production of goods and services, and represents the globe’s veritable “rich club”. Moreover, it exerts this influence largely through wide networks of consultants, researchers, and policy makers involved in “a transnational mechanism of surveillance of economic performance” that comprises “a crucial sphere of influence on the global political scene” (p. 468). This transnational mechanism is: Organised in directorates, departments and centres, committees, working groups and expert groups, and it is comprised of networks of specialists, consultants, researchers and policy analysts, which produce more than 250 publications a year (books, reports, working papers and statistical data), about practically all policy domains. (Ibid., p. 125) The OECD recently described its own activities as: A forum in which governments can work together to share experiences and seek solutions to common problems. We work with governments to understand what drives economic, social, and environmental change. We measure productivity and global flows of trade and investment. We analyze and compare data to predict future trends. We set international standards on a wide range of things, from agriculture and tax to the safety of chemicals.10 Or, as Mahon and McBride (2009) point out, “the OECD is a ‘purveyor of ideas,’ and ideas play an important role in contemporary transnational governance” (p. 3). We now turn our attention to the myriad ways in which the dissemination of OECD ideas have helped to construct the global neoliberal schoolhouse.

8

The OECD and Global Education

Perhaps more than any of the other three intergovernmental organizations reviewed, the OECD most strenuously promotes the cultivation and assessment of the human capital skills needed for countries to effectively participate in the world capitalist economy. As such, an important subtext in the OECD’s

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global agenda is to establish tools, procedures, and methods for measuring the acquisition and mastery of skills and competencies in a global knowledge-based economy. Consequently, the OECD is closely attuned to the World Bank’s drive to persuade debtor countries to establish highly commercialized education sectors that stress human capital development as vehicles for competitiveness and market efficiency in the global political economy. The pursuit of these objectives on the part of the OECD involves the collection of “detailed statistical information on education systems, including measures of the competence levels of individuals”; the development and review of education policies “to enhance the efficiency and the effectiveness of education provisions”; and the review and analysis of “policies related to aid provided by OECD members for expansion of education and training in developing nations”.11 With no official regulatory bite, no independent funding, no loans to offer, and no instruments of enforcement at its disposal, the OECD Convention states its rather innocuous intention to “promote policies” that support “the highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in member countries” (Mahon & McBride, 2009, p. 28). Yet, despite the non-binding nature of its recommendations and proposals, a number of researchers contend the OECD remains quite effective at “nudging member states into compliance” toward its perspective on education (see Morgan, 2009, p. 1). The OECD’s real methods of compliance involve numerous “soft modes of regulation”, such as the “production and dissemination of knowledge” through policy proposals and expert opinion, and tacit “shaming” through the publication of comparative national education and social indicators (Ibid.). Furthermore, the line between OECD research and policy is often blurred as “it is never easy to distinguish between what is policy and what is research; the choice of research that governments support, and often of the people who will carry out the research, is in itself an aspect of policy” (Papadopoulos, 1994, p. 16). Moutsios (2009), for example, contends: The production and comparison of (OECD) performance data have become crucial tools for reform in many education systems; quantitative comparative data provide scientific support to what has been diagnosed as a problem and they legitimise the measures proposed. Thereby, national education policy comes as a result of interstate relations operating in a transnational network of research-based decision-making, in which the more powerful nodes can promote their own aims and make them the aims of the entire network. (p. 471)

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In the 1990s the OECD began issuing annual reports to countries organized around “thematic analysis” and focusing on such topics as educational technology, school management, higher education, adult education, and lifelong learning. In 2001 the organization created a separate Directorate for Education that gives schools and schooling a more visible and expectant place within the OECD’s overall policy agenda (Holtmaat, 2011, p. 10). An example of this is the examination procedure provided by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), created and designed by a network of experts working for the Directorate, and comprised of a battery of student performance measures required by participating countries and used for cross-country comparisons and public policy recommendations (Mahon & McBride, 2009). According to Moutsios (2009), by using extensive research and consultancy networks to compile and release education performance reports and policy recommendations, the OECD has steadily expanded its international role and scope in global education policy, so much so that the organization’s classification of countries on the basis of average PISA scores has in some instances “caused political crises” in affected countries due to the perceived gravity of crossnational rankings (pp. 468–469).

9

Education as Human Capital in Knowledge-Based Economies

The increased use of PISA, along with the OECD’s International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), signals attempts by states to access the tools needed for measuring human capital in order to formulate local and national educational policies that increase performance in highly globalized, competitive international contexts (OECD, 2001, p. 19). Both PISA and IALS are standardized assessment instruments used to audit the performance of national school systems based on the economist view that developing work skills is the primary purpose of schooling (OECD, 2012). Furthermore, by using the production needs of member states as key to the formulation of academic curricula, performance, and assessment, the OECD is also helping to blur the boundaries between conventional education and learning, and workplace-relevant skills and competencies (OECD, 2007). Indeed, the organization itself argues that: Education should serve productivity through organisational, curricular, and pedagogic reforms and through the elimination of boundaries between vocational and general education and between education and work. (Ibid.)

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In other words, when the primary value of education is to contribute to a nation’s productivity, then every type of educational provision (even general education) should be aligned to this purpose (see OECD, 2006). Joel Spring (2014) refers to OECD education policies focusing on productivity and economic performance as part of an ongoing “economization of education” taking place across the planet (p. 2), According to Spring, this process involves: The increasing influence of educational research conducted by economists and judging school outcomes in economic terms. The economization of education shifts concerns from schooling for such things as civic participation, protecting human rights, and environmentalism to economic growth and employment. (Ibid.) In these ways a “new role” for global education is being constructed through the formation of a type of universal “human capital subjectivity” particularly tailored to the tasks of neoliberal globalization, and requiring that states push forward with the sorts of structural reforms and policy framework changes needed to increase labor flexibility, raise employment skills, and support immigration policies “focused on attracting high quality human capital” (Fitzsimons, 2015, p. 2). And, all of this takes place under the auspices of the OECD’s central mission in education to “compare how different countries’ school systems are readying their young people for modern life”.12 By working to shift the emphasis of nation-based systems of education away from civic preparedness and democratic literacy, toward measurable human capital capabilities needed by globalized markets, the OECD effectively subordinates teaching and learning to a global agenda of knowledge-based national economies. Similar to the World Bank, by linking school policies to marketable job skills that “have become the global currency of 21st-century economies”, the OECD promotes an economic model of education based on increased productivity and enhanced work performance (OECD, 2012). The organization’s conception of the role of education in national economies, then, is premised on the assertion that knowledge-intensive and high-technology economic sectors provide the highest output and employ the most highly skilled workers. Consequently, as OECD countries transit from industrial to post-industrial knowledge-based societies, appropriate government education policies related to science, industry, and technology are needed to take advantage of the emergent productive potentials and opportunities for economic growth (OECD, 1996). In other words, if “productivity and growth are largely determined by

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the rate of technical progress and the accumulation of knowledge”, then “networks or systems which can efficiently distribute knowledge and information” are of “key importance” (Ibid., p. 18). Central to the entire OECD project is the need for the “enhancement of human capital through education systems” (OECD, 2001, p. 11).

10

OECD Education and the Neoliberal Schoolhouse

The OECD’s propagation of education as a means to enhance human capital accumulation and spike worker productivity within a context of capitalist knowledge-based economies feeds the prototype of the globalized neoliberal schoolhouse we have been constructing on several counts. As Mahon and McBride (2009) point out, “the OECD message is about adapting to globalization”, and its defense of economic liberalization and integration, as well as its denigration of protectionism and autarchy, extend far beyond the Atlantic and Western Europe (p. 41). The organization’s 1980s policy agenda of vocationally redemptive basic skills education, standards-driven instruction, and cost effectiveness in schools was in close proximity with the economic restructuring that was taking place in the West and being imposed by the IMF and World Bank in poorer countries through SAPs and austerity economics. Since the 1990s, the OECD’s growing emphasis on the importance of human capital has been instrumental in helping to spearhead neoliberal educational reforms around the world, including the avalanche of marketization, privatization, deregulation, and fiscal constriction in public education sectors about which so much has already been said. More recent OECD policy proposals have involved job skills education for new technologies, lifelong learning for worker adaptation to shifts in global market conditions, broadened cross-country performance comparisons, and the production and dissemination of enhanced international assessment instruments (See, for example, Moutsios, 2009, pp. 474–475). Yet, despite its influential activity, the OECD’s main role in transnational governance continues to be more meditative than executive. With a research capability that is arguably global in scope, its Directorate of Education can and does showcase and respond to emergent global political economic trends with research, analysis, prediction, and proposals. In the field of education, this is done first and foremost by publishing research results with intrinsic policy implications regarding the needs, challenges, and possible solutions provided by human capital approaches as harbingers of economic growth and productivity. The OECD’s role as purveyor par excellence of statistical surveillance and performance tracking in global education gives the organization highly

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concentrated control over the sorts of data that member states submit and receive as they move toward restructuring their education sectors in accordance with the demands of global neoliberalism. In Article 3 of the OECD convention, for example, members even agree to furnish the organization with information needed for research and policy formulation, and to consult, cooperate, and, when appropriate, take coordinated action in accordance with OECD principles (cited in Mahon & McBride, 2009, p. 2). Relatedly, Ward (2012) nicely sums up the ways in which the OECD, along with other globalization-minded think tanks, took part in the neoliberal reform of higher education around the world in the early 2000s: These reforms were often circulated through a network of consultants and policy advisors as they moved from place to place and by various professional groups and international foundations through their international conferences and meetings. These networks then fused with the efforts of think tanks and political parties into a global, transnational education policy network that both spread ideas of neoliberal reforms and helped to erode more locally or nationally generated policies. (pp. 145–146)

11

Conclusion: OECD Education and the Loss of Nation-State Sovereignty

It has been the intent of this chapter to complete our exploration of the ways in which four large international governmental organizations, referred to as the Four Horsemen of the Edpocalypse, are instrumental in the global governance of education and in propagating neoliberal principles in local schools and colleges. We have most recently sought to understand how the final two IGOs, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have gone to great lengths to influence and determine schools and schooling under the guise of (post-) Washington Consensus conditions of privatization, deregulation, and marketization. It has been argued that the WTO does this primarily through the confinements and demands of interstate agreements made under the auspices of the General Agreement of Trade In Services (GATS) through which education is given the legal status of an increasingly marketable and tradable commodity in the global economy. In the latter-half of this chapter we also saw that the influential yet somewhat subtle dual function of the OECD vis-à-vis the neoliberal schoolhouse is to research and disseminate data regarding the relationship between national education practices and economic performance, and to

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promote curriculum and assessment instruments needed for the development of human capital in global knowledge-based economies. Furthermore, the non-representative manner in which key decisions are frequently made and implemented by both the WTO and the OECDs raises concerns for the sovereignty of member states. As discussed, in the same way that the sovereignty of WTO member states can be compromised by hierarchical, centralized, and non-tranparent trade negotiations; so too OECD research and policy decisions regarding how best to campaign for the incorporation of human capital education at the national level are routinely made beyond the reach of local stakeholders. For example, the locus of control regarding the selection of education research projects and policy direction is in no way determined by member state representation in the OECD’s Education Council (Moutsios, 2009). Rather, OECD decisions are a function of each states’ financial contribution to the organization, calculated based on the estimated size of the national GDP. In practical terms this means that certain G8 countries, such as the US, (which paid 25 percent of the total OECD budget in 2009), and Japan (23 percent of 2009 total) benefit from an “asymmetry of power relations … associated with the member states’ unequal financial contribution” (Ibid., p. 471). As Ward (2012) points out, in the ongoing policy articulations by the OECD regarding the optimal relationship between knowledge, economy, and the state, local governments are expected, in neoliberal fashion, to either reduce direct support for education and defer to market forces, or to enhance the role of human capital in education so as to help markets function better. In either instance, nation-state “social policies should support first and foremost market interests rather than governmental ones” (Ibid., p. 141). As is the case for all of the IGO Horsemen of the Edpocalypse, the pursuit of market objectives means deregulation, privatization, and fiscal austerity in the education sector, with a view toward a broadening commodity marketization in the context of the neoliberal global political economy. We have spoken at some length of the ways in which the global neoliberal project has increasingly reduced the state’s historic ability to effectively intervene in local education, creating a universal neoliberal schoolhouse in its wake. We now direct our energies toward an examination of the effects this d/ evolved nation-state has had on the provision and quality of local education. Thus, analysis in the next chapter provides valuable points of entry into an unpacking of the ways in which neoliberalism, by becoming hegemonic worldwide, has also weakened and devitalized many of the sovereign powers of the 20th century nation-state. And, in doing so, has challenged essential historic social, democratic, and civic functions of local systems of education.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

www.wto.org/English/thewtoe/whatis_e/who_we_are_e.htm www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tife/org6_e.htm www.wto.org/English/tratop_e/serv www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/gatsqa_e.htm www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/s_negs_e.htm www.wto.org/English/tratop_e/serv_e/s_negs_e.htm thehindu.com/opinion/columns/will-the-gats-close-on-highereducation/ article8042337.ece http://www.gatswatch.org/educationoutofgats/statement.html www.oecd.org/general/historyoftheoecd.htm http://www.oecd.org/about/ http://www.oecd.org/about/ http://www.oecd.org/about/

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The Impact of the D/evolved State on Local Systems of Education The tenuous status and challenges to the efficacy of the modern nation-state as a result of neoliberal globalization have been discussed in cursory fashion in previous chapters. In that regard, it has been argued that the welfare state’s ability to carry through with its post-World War II mission of demand-side full employment, market failure intervention, and public goods provision was severely curtailed by the spiraling conditions of global neoliberal capitalism. In effect, the functions and power of the modern capitalist state have withered and eroded, at both national and international levels, as a result of mandated compliance with neoliberal principles, promulgated and enforced by major institutions of global governance. Before examining the effects of neoliberalism on local (non-international) sources of education, it is of value to further consider the d/evolving nature of the state under the pressures of market forces that have been tantamount for nearly four decades. As has been indicated on numerous occasions, one of the four major effects of globalizing processes is a wearing away at nation-state autonomy and solidarity, especially as countries compete to secure access to limited international financial flows, investment, and aid. One of the growing consequences of global neoliberalism is the plying and molding of nation-state mechanisms to help with the bidding of international capital. As Brenner and Theodore (2002) point out, despite the mainstay principle of neoliberal ideology that eschews state intervention, actual neoliberal policies and practices involve extensive “coercive, disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to impose market rule upon all aspects of social life” (p. 5). As such, by the 1980s neoliberal parties, ideologies, and economic policies came to dominate state policymaking, guided and prodded on by the agendas of the global institutions which increasingly privileged free flow trade unhindered by state interference (Karns & Mingst, 2004, p. 361). Such market-friendly state-based pump priming at the behest of international capital is particularly intense in the developing South where nations “must produce an environment that is conducive to conducting business” through the creation of domestic institutions aligned with the interests and directives of overseas international governmental organizations, such as the IMF and the World Bank, and the provision of favorable and predictable domestic climates for international investment (Symoniak, 2010, p. 12). One © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004413603_010

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important consequence is that numerous state functions, with the possible exceptions of military and national security, are dismantled and downsized by neoliberal policies of privatization and deregulation, and market alternatives are pushed forward to fill the gaps. In education we have repeatedly referred to the cumulative results of this dismantling as the creation of a prototypical global neoliberal schoolhouse. It is the intent of this chapter to explore in a more focused fashion the changing nature of the modern nation-state under conditions of globalization, with a specific regard for local systems of education. The nation-state schema of social, political, and economic organization as a sovereign and largely uncontested source of control and power within clearly defined geographic and civic parameters has been a foundational unit of international political, economic, and military relationships for nearly 200 years (Wimmera & Feinstein, 2010). As the historical product of the ideological and institutional harbingers of global market reform, a qualitative evolution and deflation of the powers and institutions of the classic nation-state have come to pass. Under present conditions in the global political economy, a large margin of shape-shifting has taken place in the modern, powerful nation-state, and a politically disempowered and fiscally withered facilitator and guarantor of neoliberal globalization has emerged in its place. Despite the harsh and devitalizing controls they impose on local polities, deregulated and deconstructed “marketized states” remain conciliatory, even passive, often encouraging and grateful, toward transnational sources of badly needed flows of world capital investment. This has been no less the case regarding the dynamics of the global-local interface that have spawned the creation and proliferation of the neoliberal schoolhouse. We begin this chapter by looking more closely at the erosion, downsizing, and marketization of the state apparatus that has taken place in accordance with global neoliberal imperatives of the last forty years. For our purposes, this phenomenon is named and conceptually anchored as the “d/evolved nationstate”, the retrogressive dismantling and reconstruction of the modern state apparatus in accordance with the dictates of global capital. A truly novel political-economic global development that is largely without precedent in the post WWII era, the d/evolved nation-state could only have taken shape in the context of the globalized neoliberal capitalist landscape. In other words, it could only develop within a context of a strain of neoliberal globalization that involves aggressive public-private sector downsizing, conversion, and deregulation, in effect a veritable mutation of state functions away from the provision of social goods and welfare to the concerted promotion of global private markets. As Macleavy (2010) puts it, the involved social and political rhetoric of this shift “points towards the embedding and extension of neoliberalism

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through the imposition of a new form of governance … signal(ing) the end of the post-war welfare state” (p. 135). It will be shown that the contemporary corollary of neoliberalization of public education is both symptomatic and an embodiment of this new global governance in the guise of the d/evolved state. Once our general discussion of the changing nature of the state is complete, we will then be able to venture a more informed understanding of the ways in which changes in the global political economy under the banner of neoliberalism are located and unfold in local systems of education. Given similar discussions in previous chapters, some of the following content may seem overly obvious, even redundant. Yet, the extra efforts of a set-aside chapter devoted to a fuller treatment of the extraordinary transmutations that have taken place in the nature and function of the “modern nation-state” in recent years will more than compensate by providing important background substance to our understanding of today’s neoliberal schoolhouse. We will conclude this chapter with a critical assessment of the ways in which neoliberalism contributes to de-capitalization, de-criticalization, and de-democratization, the “three Ds” of teaching and learning, in the present neo classicalist era.

1

Globalization and the Erosion of the Modern Nation-State

There are numerous studies regarding the ways in which globalization, especially those processes involving agents of transnational governance, erodes the power and sovereignty of the present-day nation-state (see, for example, Rikowski, 2002; Siqueira, 2005). Both the IMF and the World Bank take strong positions in favor of the contemporaneous reduction of the power of the state alongside the strengthening of private markets (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009, p. 153). Along these lines, Kaplan (2002) claims: Privatization and deregulation are the declared public policy goals now pursued by many governments across the globe, seeking to erode and eliminate government services such as health care, education, and social services, with the goal of giving over as much as possible of these public services to private companies. (p. 1) Grant (2009) describes this process as the “marketization of the state under conditions of neoliberal capitalism” through “increased market penetration into the very texture of what constitutes the post-war welfare state“ (p. xi). Development models derived from Washington Consensus principles greatly reduce the role of the state in promoting structural economic change

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in lower-income countries, limiting state involvement to the bare minimum needed to create market-led conditions for growth through privatization and deregulation (Bonal, 2002, p. 6). During the post-Washington Consensus period, while Latin American, East European, and sub-Saharan countries fastforwarded liberal economic reforms and received international capitalist accolades for being model “emerging” and “transition” economies, they were also being “forced to undergo a radical process of slimming down, shrinking and reinventing the state” (Birch & Mykhnenko, 2010, p. 10). And, since expectations of low taxes are an earmark of structural adjustment programs (SAPs), shrinking state coffers are for the most part unable to reclaim the resulting losses from reduced tax revenue through other sources of public funding. Consequently, because governments are under pressure from international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to keep public spending low as part of the general package of economic reforms needed for growth, national resources are shifted from government control to the private sector and public spending is kept low relative to the size of the private sector (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). Gamble (1988) refers to the outcome of these conditions as “a regime of cuts in the postwar welfare state, the withdrawal of state subsidies and support, and low public expenditure” (p. 4). The quickest point of entry for an examination of this sort involves understanding how the penetration of globalizing forces results in a measurable reduction in the physical size and financial resources afforded the public sector, including the contemporary state. In its first instance, this erosion takes place through the wide berth elimination of government agencies and programs that are deemed “inefficient, superfluous, or contrary to the goals of a well performing national market economy” (Gamble, 1988, p. 4). Furthermore, the cancellation of state provision of many public goods is often expedited by the relentless pressure of trade and investment competition in the global economy. As such, the tune spun by global markets makes it increasingly difficult for national governments to raise tax revenue, particularly from corporate profits and individual incomes, because of fears that doing so will cause domestic capital to go abroad and/ or discourage foreign investment in the domestic economy (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014, p. 16) Under neoliberalism, then, the state aligns itself with the international institutions of finance and capital, and transnational corporations. Rather than cotinuing responsibility for a broad range of social needs, as is the hallmark of the 20th century welfare state across the developed world, government agencies now pursue a standard playbook of “‘deregulations, privatizations, and abdications of responsibility to the market and private philanthropy” (Steinmetz, 2003, p. 337).

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Even when essential state agencies and the public goods they provide survive successive rounds of macro downsizing and elimination, they may still be fundamentally reduced and reconstituted by policies that promote privatization and marketization. The conservative flagship policies of state downsizing and market conversion are readily found in massive privatization policies imposed on nations by global neoliberal agendas. Such policies invariably involve handing over to private markets the production of public goods, services, even entire sectors of the national state economy, once considered the uncontestable domain of the tax-financed public sector. In response to World Bank and International Monetary Fund requirements, then, national governments develop economic policies that emphasize economic growth and property rights over social welfare and human rights, as efforts to privatize national services occur worldwide (Hursh & Martina, 2003, p. 37) As Rikowski (2002) simply states, “nation-states have to deal with and plan for the business takeover of public services” (p. 1). Such takeovers include private sector involvement in welfare, social services, education, and various other state provisions, such as air traffic control, prisons, policing, pensions, public construction, and railways (Ibid.). Indeed, a dearth of public revenues resulting from tax cuts and austerity measures prompt the large-scale transfer and sellout of state enterprises to private bidders. One variant of this process, debt-equity swaps, involves the cancellation of government debt in exchange for future private access to and management of government revenues and production functions, sometimes tied to a nation’s GDP (Grosse, 1992). In the short run, the sale of government enterprises helps to relieve the pressure on shrinking public coffers by generating badly needed revenue; in longer terms it insures that investment in particular critical areas of the economy continues, yet is no longer financed by the government (Williamson, 1990, para. 38). Thus, the: Wholesale break-up of the welfare state and the sale of state-owned enterprises and assets are part of an ongoing process whereby social and public services pass into the private sector through buyouts, subcontracting, concessions, and sale and lease-back operations. Increasingly such goods and services are … integrated into the wider international economy as they are taken over by the transnational corporations (and) the social welfare functions of the nation-state are being integrated into the world economy. (Shaoul, 2010, pp. 239–240) Yet, this is not to say that the modern nation-state under conditions of neoliberal globalization has withered beyond recognition. Rather, it is far more

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accurate to say that it has been drastically reduced, and, in alignment with global governing and regulatory agencies, has taken on new, supportive roles with regard to capital flows and the growth of private markets. As a result, neoliberal globalization has demanded paramount adjustments from nationstates that have meant forfeiting or losing their ability to place reasonable checks or limits on the local impingements of international capital.

2

Public Sector as Private Firm: The Neoliberalism of the Neoliberal State

On the ideological front, neoliberal globalization is first and foremost about irrevocably debunking what is perceived as the “inherent totalitarianism of collectivist and state planning of the economy” (Kean & Mykhnenko, 2010, p. 3). For neoliberal thinkers, such planning is inherently contradictory and unachievable given the naturalistic assumptions and drives of “market freedoms”. As a general rule, then, public sector social services, except in the rarest cases, are dismissed as unneeded and undesirable (Ibid.). The timeless libertarian axiom that the best of governments are those which govern least becomes the rallying cry of government-to-market conversion politics. And, as has been the persistent clamor of this book, the impact neoliberal policies have had on public education is cause for pronounced consternation. Before we return to our examination of the of the ailments of the neoliberal schoolhouse, however, let us briefly consider the related issue of how governments wracked by privatization and downsizing have refashioned the nature of the public sector, including the ways in which governments operate in accordance with market forces. That is, in addition to the physical and financial depletion of many public programs under the aegis of structural adjustments, there are other, more insidious and far-reaching, effects the global advent of neoliberalism has had on the state’s d/evolution as a distinct and enduring entity in the last four decades. While the demand-side macromanaging state interventions of the 20th century were intended to influence national employment, spending, inflation, and income through fiscal and monetary policies; the intervening state apparatus, for all intents and purposes, stood largely outside of capitalist markets and private sectors it sought to augment, vitalize, and grow. That is, twentieth century state institutions were rarely if ever intended to function according to the operating rules of private markets or the logic of the business world. Thus, public-financed programs, from schools and libraries to correctional institutions and highway construction, were not expected to reflect the internal organization of private firms. While government and its

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appendages have always been constrained by public budgets consisting of costs and revenues; generally speaking, an assortment of assumptions and guidelines quite distinct from those found in the private sector determines decisions and weds workers to a culture unique to public sector operations. Influential factors in the public sectors of 20th century nation-states involve bureaucratic legitimacy, the imperatives of civil service, and assurances of political/ideological non-partisanship in performing one’s duties. Yet, the global neoliberal project has also fundamentally changed the nature and texture of governments and government agencies, over and above their size and function with regards to national economies. Perhaps foremost among these changes is the remaking of public sector agencies in the image of market-based enterprises. As noted, global neoliberalism has forced states to contend with extreme fiscal austerity measures related to cutbacks in social services and public goods and the outright elimination of keystone programs, along with a general shift in remaining spending toward supply-side friendly projects (e.g., human capital-based education, commercial infrastructure, and national defense and security as macrogrowth industries) (Birch & Mykhnenko, 2010, p. 7). Additionally, neoliberal policies have forced governments to adopt a prescription of market-based, private sector-oriented, capitalist task-mastering institutional culture that remakes and remolds the state sector in the image of private firms. In the course of this process, the state is essentially preparing for its own market-based demise as it goes about making successive cost-cutting eliminations to its own operational presence, comparable to a prisoner building her own prison cell or a terminally ill patient digging his own grave. In effect, this process involves not only the replacement of public sector roles and functions by private firms, but also the restructuring of the coordination and normal operations of remaining public agencies and projects according to the logic and performance criteria of corporate managerial models imported from the world of business (Gamble, 1988). The early Washington Consensus principles of the 1980s required that governments should, as far as possible, leave the allocation of resources, and the production and distribution of goods and services, to free markets. They also stipulated that governments had a role to play in supporting and protecting market-driven economic investment and growth through the promotion of property rights, infrastructure expenditure, national defense, and human and physical capital development, to name a few (McCleery & De Paolis, 2008, p. 441). However, by the turn of the century the role of the state in the global matrix of neoliberal relations involved not only promoting the alignment of local markets with world trade and business conditions, but also contained a new set of neoliberal imperatives that forced state institutions to both

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practice and embody the basic principles of market economics. In this way, the post-Washington Consensus’ shift of “analytical focus” away from the purely neoclassical emphasis on self-regulating markets towards the “institutional setting of economic activity” brings with it a double entendre (Saad-Filho, 2010, p. 6), and represents the transition from roll-back to roll-out neoliberalism to which previous references were made. Not only is the state now entrusted with deregulating private markets and, as much as possible, commercializing public enterprises; it is also left to “self correct” its own operations according to the precepts of freely functioning markets. In essence, under these new conditions state agencies and projects that have not already been eliminated, privatized, downsized, now themselves must begin operating according to market sensibilities. This expanded set of neoliberal conditions includes controlling internal behavior according to market discipline, performing duties according to market criteria, and creating work identities according to market-based political subjectivities. In sum, the post-Washington Consensus period, dating roughly from the new millennium, saw the advent of a full-fledged “neoliberal state” that came to model its organizational structure, culture, and performance on the basis of the private firm. Consequently, the d/evolved nation-state, suffering from a drastically reduced size and capacity, now becomes the neoliberal nation-state in both its content (what it is) and its form (what it does and how it does it).

3

The D/evolved State and the Three D’s of Neoliberal Education

We have already examined the broad impact of global neoliberalism on education with regard to the reduction of public funding and the shift away from learning as civic preparation, toward an emphasis on human capital development primarily as a means for increasing national competitiveness in the global economy. Since the advent of global neoliberalism in the 1980s, the progressively d/evolved nation-state has laid waste to many of the safeguards and guarantees of public education arising from Keynesian welfare state national revitalization policies of the 1930s and ‘40s. This is to say that the withering away of the Keynesian state under conditions of fiscal austerity and public-to-private sector conversions have produced a corresponding and equivalent decline in local systems of education. From this vantage point, the myriad ways in which the d/evolved neoliberal state has changed many of the virtues, practices, and values of schools and schooling over the course of the last four decades are salient. While the overall social decline of education under neoliberalism and the d/evolved state is the focus of the next chapter,

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the manner in which that state has imagined the neoliberal schoolhouse in accordance with the “three Ds” of de-capitalization, de-criticalization, and de-democratization warrants our present attention. The draining of solvency and tax revenues from the coffers of public education by the d/evolved neoliberal state has been duly noted. Removing taxes from the circulation of private capital flows and liberalizing exchange rates are integral to the economic reforms carried out in accordance with the rules of global institutions that govern international trade and commerce. As discussed, individual states are forced to comply with transnational governing bodies by opening their borders to attract foreign capital and by fostering domestic institutional frameworks and regulatory conditions adequate to keep national sources of investment at home. Reforms include labor market deregulation to facilitate cheap and “flexible” labor pools and the elimination of collective bargaining rights, often resulting in a minimum wage rate regime below subsistence (Bonal, 2002, p. 11). The marketization of education that takes place within the institutional and normative frameworks of these policies, including quasi-privatization voucher schemes that divert scarce resources away from public K-12 schools, in effect “de-capitalize” public education. This occurs at the symbolic level when such principles as equal educational access and (multi) cultural literacy are robbed of their social and political capital, equally at the level of material resources and expenditures when students and teachers in the poorest schools are forced to make do on a shrinking lifeboat. The end result is often an education-based intergenerational cycle of poverty, whereby the decline in real wages for less qualified jobs resulting from neoliberalization means children of the poorest families go to the poorest schools with the highest rates of de-capitalization in disproportionate numbers, receive the poorest education, and, if they do not suffer chronic unemployment as adults, eventually take their parents’ place among the least-qualified and lowest-paid workers in society. Paradoxically, drastic spending cuts in public education as part of the fiscal restraint package pushed by neoconservatives ultimately undermine the ”strategy of investing in human capital to develop the national economy” that is so important to the long-term PWC structural adjustment goal of increasing worker efficiency (Ibid.).

4

The De-Criticalization of Education

The de-criticalization of education in the neoliberal schoolhouse becomes sadly apprehensible once we acknowledge that a central aim of classical as well as contemporary schools of Western education has always been the

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cultivation of civic virtues and community sensibilities necessary for critical reflection and socio political engagement (Bowen, 1981; Connolly, 2010). In fact, the construct of a “liberal arts education”, dating back to antiquity and more recently central to Dewey’s model of democratic citizenship, dominated the pedagogy and curriculum of public education throughout much of the last century (Dewey, 2009; Tachikawa, 2016). As part of the larger market penetration and usurpation of public institutions in advanced capitalist societies in recent years, education and schools have also suffered from the shift toward not only serving private interests, but acting like them as well. As Rikowski (2002) notes, when the economic and private profit needs of a nation become the measure of value in schools, a ubiquitous business model becomes the enforcer of how schools might best serve that value (p. 5). As noted, under such terms national systems of education are relegated primarily to “function as providers of the cognitive and human resources required by global markets” (Moutsios, 2010, p. 137). Equally, this assumed alignment of interests between the nation, schools, and globalization serves to undercut the long-standing “natural model of child development” premised on social interaction and cooperation as essential ingredients in learning, and now “challenged by a highly personalized and competitive model of education derived from modern business methodology” (Grant, 2009, p. xvi). Phrased another way, once future worker productivity, efficiency, and compliance (in the political sense of enduring “flexible” labor markets and the deregulation and dismantling of unions and worker rights) become central to learning goals and outcomes in schools, any variation, especially those which might involve independent social critique or democratic opposition, not only lose favor, they become viewed as threatening. As is the case for many local sectors contending with the forces of globalization, under these conditions power in education can no longer be effectively exercised by national policymaking bodies. Major educational decisions are now the domain of bureaucratic transnational institutions deemed as “legitimate and knowledgeable policy mechanisms” by international agreements and trade regimes (Ibid.). In sum, as the civic and democratic virtues of dialogue, debate, and dissent, mainstays in mainstream Western models of learning, are downplayed or phased out entirely in favor of the human capital skills needed for increased worker performativity in international markets, education becomes largely “de-criticalized” under global neoliberal conditions. Yet, despite the challenges and hardships:, we should: Not …. neglect Dewey’s insight that learning in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom. In a nation that aspires to democracy, that’s

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what education is primarily for: the cultivation of freedom within society. We should not think of schools as garrisons protecting us from enemies, nor as industries generating human capital. Rather, … education’s highest purpose is to give all citizens the opportunity to find “large and human significance” in their lives and work. (Roth, 2012)

5

The De-Democratization of Education

As has been discussed, by removing much of the locus of control and decision making from localities, the interpenetration of neoliberal transnational regulatory forces revokes and cancels many of the rights of democratic process in education sectors at the local level. That is, the local application of the ideology, policies, and institutional directives of capitalist globalization downsizes the sovereign nation-state, sapping it of its ability to generate democratic change and resistance in the midst of neoliberal takeovers. Consequently, as the parameters and policy options of the contemporary nation-state become effectively integrated and fused with the political economic objectives of open markets worldwide, so too local systems of education become directed and regulated by neoliberal-oriented transnational bodies. Hill (2003) captures this phenomenon succinctly in his claim that the “restructuring of schooling and education has taken place internationally under pressure from local and international capitalist organisations and compliant governments” (p. 1). In brief, post-Washington Consensus global governance bodies seek to cultivate societies whose social and political norms, including those embodied by schools, align as seamlessly as possible with parallel values in international capitalist markets (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010, p. 188). Rarely do such markets promote socially engaged citizens or vigorously democratic civil societies. They do, however, foster strict compliance and discipline with regards to the exigencies of material productivity and efficiency, and the subjugation and policing of human bodies and human souls as becomes increasingly necessary in societies wrecked by crises associated with acute social inequities and disintegration. Also, when access to international funds becomes the main objective of recipient countries, priorities and strategies for education re-organize themselves around that objective and limit the number of options available. In this way SAPs, for example, not only reduce national autonomy and the ability to set education strategies; as a “unique source of funding they have the power to restrict the scope of policy choices” (Bonal, 2002, p. 8). The resulting

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de-democratization of education sectors and the larger local and national polity in which they operate become palatable. As Moutsios (2010) observes: Power in contemporary education policy lies in the interaction between global capital, states and transnational institutions and the strategies, arrangements and decisions of their policy-making elites who are able to mobilise economic, institutional and discursive resources to realise their agendas. (p. 129) The World Bank, for example, uses a range of mechanisms at its disposal to “produce discourses and practices subject to a neoliberal rationality”, including the introduction of “new forms of educational governance through a rescaling process of decision-making, from the national to the supranational level” (Bonal, 2002, p. 4). In effect, mechanisms “embedded” in loan conditionalities make “political negotiation residual” and shift “the power of decision-making to the multinational level” (Ibid.). The resulting social, political, and economic context in which schools must now operate re-assigns the task of producing human capital from the workplace to the classroom, while at the same time, perhaps by design, undersupplying opportunities for critical social reflection and civic engagement. As a result, much learning in the neoliberal schoolhouse benignly undermines many of the most vital lessons and sensibilities needed for grassroots democratic competency. These include skills and appreciation with regard to open and inclusive dialogue, political and social critique, active community social and political involvement, tolerance for difference and dissent, and endurance for the disruptions that occur during periods of (peaceful) oppositional change. In effect, in both its institutional and instructional domains, neoliberalism harbors “de-democratization” in education.

6

Loss of Local Control and the Global South

The multiple losses to democratic vitality suffered by local systems of education due to global neoliberal intrusions are particularly salient in developing countries. Yet, as Moutsios (2010) notes, the involved operational space of these changes is no longer international in the traditional sense, insofar as “major policies are no longer made in the context of clearly distinguished relations between nation-states” (p. 122). Rather, the involved dynamics are transnational. In particular, the losses to educational control in poor countries are:

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Sustained by nation-states, international organisations, inter-state entities and global corporations … policies and discourses cross borders and flow in and out of the nation-states’ arenas of power. (Ibid.) Thus, when transnational governing agencies intent upon propagating neoliberal global trade and commerce become the benefactors for economic development in lower income countries, the form and the substance of the resulting educational reforms largely serve those designs. The centrality of human capital principles in the education-related policies of the IMF, the World Bank, GATS, and the OECD, for example, have already been examined and require little revisiting. What is important at this juncture, however, is to be reminded of the magnitude of control and power transnational political economic arrangements and agencies exert in poor countries, primarily due to their role as exclusive and limited sources of international finance and funding for loans and development. Once a general relationship of dependency and control is established and in place at the national level, transnational capitalist inroads into specific state and public sectors, like education, quickly occur. Thus, as “internationalization and globalization constitute the new frame of reference”, transnational institutions “penetrate the national environments previously considered impenetrable and impervious”, carrying out a “process of production and consolidation of education policies” that “determinately affects the perception, interpretation and sense attached to education” (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 94). As previously noted, stringent WB/IMF austerity monetary and fiscal reforms routinely provide the binding preconditions for loan disbursement in recipient countries, the majority of which are in the developing South (see ActionAid International, 2006). With transnational development funding representing as much as one-half of all state revenues in the developing world, most countries are unable to resist the education policy reforms upon which sorely-needed public monies at least partly rest (Voutsa et al., 2014). Under such conditions, the “close and structural dependence of education policy upon the source of loan financing” (in this case global agencies driving neoliberal expansion) “is in essence easily understandable” (Ibid., p. 95). For example, according to Ukah (2014): It could rightly be said that the control of African academic and intellectual life by first world agencies is directly established through the loans the World Bank is giving to African governments for the purposes of education reform. (p. 173)

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In the case of Latin America, international financial agencies, such as the World Bank, often formulate strategic targets for loans at the national level that involve limiting and redefining the Ministries of Education in accordance with open markets (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009). As Dale (2000) points out, although the World Bank may produce somewhat divergent and recontextualized effects in developing countries in accordance with concrete conditions, it nevertheless exerts a paramount capacity for structuring a specific global neoliberal educational agenda that “deeply transforms educational policy-making and policy reception” (p. 5).

7

De-Democratization and Human Rights

The de-democratizationm of education involved in the transfer of authority in education from local to transnational levels is made even more controversial by the fact that it often results in negative consequences for international standards of human rights. In the case of the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), for example, present and impending agreements on trade in education represent a relinquishing of the capacity by states to carry out their entitlements and obligations to regulate education. With respect to the status of education as a human right, nation-states have a duty to improve school quality and increase student access until credible systems of free education are realized. Under international law, states cannot be forced to withdraw their duty to regulate and protect the right to education by transferring those powers to an international organization (Devidal, 2009). Yet, with respect to GATS, the very measures “necessary to ensure availability, adaptability, acceptability, and quality” in local systems of education “are the same measures that constitute barriers to trade” (Ibid., p. 89). This is to say: Fundamentally, the right to education implies a dynamic of increasing intervention by the state until the right to education is fully realized. Under GATS, the dynamic is of a decreasing role of states in the regulation of education. (Ibid.) Moreover, when states attempt to counter external measures that undermine local political and economic autonomy, pressures are brought to bear by transnational regulatory agencies that are in effect punitive and discriminatory, limiting and downgrading the ability of nation-states to participate fully in the global economy and to pursue effective paths of autonomous development.

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Thus, on the one hand, global civil society sanctions principles and practices that honor commitments by national governments to achieve internationally agreed goals in such areas as gender, health, and education. Yet, on the other, transnational regulatory agencies like the IMF set public spending caps below levels needed to achieve those goals in member countries (ActionAid International, 2006). The challenges of being placed in the proverbial wedge “between a rock and a hard place” adds yet another political dimension to the d/evolved and increasingly neoliberal nation-state.

8

Chapter Summary

With a particular view on education, it has been the intent of this chapter to more closely examine the effects of globalization on the “modern” nation-state in the last quarter of the 20th century. It was argued that those effects have included a wearing away of nation-state autonomy and cohesion and a corresponding dismantling and downsizing of public sectors through the neoliberal twins of deregulation and privatization. Similarly, as acute and chronic gaps are created in the provision of essential public and merit goods, private market alternatives are promoted to fill these gaps. Under such conditions, apart from security and policing functions, the d/evolved state becomes little more than a politically disempowered and fiscally withered facilitator and guarantor of neoliberal globalization at local and national levels, even taking on operating principles resembling those historically and exclusively associated with private firms. Consequently, the impact of the d/evolved state on education can perhaps be best summed up in the “3Ds” of de-capitalization, de-criticalization, and de-democratization. Finally, it was expressed that the loss of civic or democratic control over local systems of education has created real concerns for the ability of governments to uphold international human rights standards in the area of education. Having undertaken an examination of the impact of global neoliberalism on the conventional nation-state and its relationship to education, we now turn our attention to the toll those same principles and practices have ultimately taken on the social and cultural conditions of schools and communities in which neoliberal education transpires.

CHAPTER 11

Social Consequences of the Neoliberal Schoolhouse Having earnestly attempted to interrogate some of the more portentous implications of the neoliberal imaginary for the d/evolved state in its relation to education, we now proceed by telescoping our examination to consider several of the more consequential ways in which commodification, marketization, and privatization in education come to impact social conditions in the communities in which the neoliberal schoolhouse operates. It is not by any measure hyperbolic to say that neoliberalism as a political and economic ideology can and often does greatly accentuate preexisting oppressions and injustices arising from social differences based on such demographic markers as class, race, and gender. This stands to reason because: Neoliberalism cannot be abstracted from race and gender relations, or other cultural aspects of the body politic. Its legitimating discourse, social relations, and ideology are saturated with race, with gender, with sex, with religion, with ethnicity, and nationality. (Duggan, 2003, p. 16) In light of its recent flooding the halls of education, the social effects of neoliberal policies in schools “have caused increased inequalities, diminished democratic accountability, and stifled and repressed critical thought” (Hill, 2003, p. 1). Consequently, educational programs that fair best under these conditions are commonly “apolitical, adaptive, and individualistic”, unable to effectively address or even theorize the nature of social injustice (Baptiste, 2001, p. 198). Furthermore, neoliberal market reforms in education of the sort previously discussed play a tangible and active role in contributing to and worsening a number of adverse social conditions. At the community level, these conditions include a narrowing of equal educational opportunity with constricted access for already disadvantaged groups, increased patterns of social inequality, heightened class antagonisms, and deep and divisive ruptures in the social fabric of civil society.

1

The Right of Equal Access to Education

Equal and universal access to education is a central and common principle of most democratic societies. As a civil right and social entitlement, equal © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_011

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educational access was firmly established by international governing bodies in the 20th century. Article 26 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948), for example, states “Everyone has the right to education”, and the founding constitution of the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sanctions “the ideal of equality of educational opportunity without regard to race, sex or any distinctions, economic or social” (UNESCO, 1945). More recently, at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, 164 governments expressed their commitment to universal access to education and an “education for all” principle (UNESCO, 2000). As Belfield and Levin (2002) note: A universally accepted goal of schooling (is) the quest for fairness in access to educational opportunities, resources and outcomes (without discrimination) by gender, social class, race, language origins or geographical location of students. (p. 46) In other words: If a society values fairness and places social and political value on ensuring desired levels of equity, the public aspect of education would include financing it in ways that remove such barriers. This equity argument has been extended to make education as a whole – including higher education – a human right. (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014, p. 3) It is important to note that much of the worldwide student protest which took place during the 1960s and ’70s squarely rested on a subtext of outrage over social inequalities attributable, at least partly, to class/race/gender-based unequal access in education (Klimke, 2010). During that period, long and difficult mass struggles for human and civil rights occurred around the world. With respect to racial restrictions on education, this was especially true for South Africa and the United States, where efforts to de-racialize and desegregate generations of limited educational access and thwarted social opportunity acquired a front-and-center importance; efforts and campaigns for social justice were often met with brutal and systematic state repression. Although the dismantling of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, which involved greater racial integration in schools, took considerably longer and arguably posed more of a comparative challenge than the struggles for justice in the US, the American government also eventually responded to mass movements for social justice, including desegregation, with a series of federal laws recognizing equal access to equal quality education as a civil right for all. Between

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1964 and 1990 national laws were enacted in the US prohibiting discrimination in educational opportunity based on such factors as race, color, sex, national origin, and disability (US Dept of Education, 2011a, p. 2). Many of these laws affirmed the principle that “all students regardless of their race, zip code or family income should have equal access to educational resources” (US Department of Education, 2011b). Yet, in light of the ascendancy of neoliberal hegemony in the global political economy during the last four decades, these ideals and the hard-won progress for educational opportunity and access at the local level they represent have been drastically eroded.

2

The Neoliberal Compromise of Educational Opportunity

Signs and symptoms of this erosion can be found from several vantage points. Possibly the most salient and troubling has been the narrowing of educational opportunity based on social class as a result of the expanding neoliberal privatization of schools. We have already looked at the increasing worldwide treatment of schools and education as “private commodities” under the WTO General Agreement of Trade and Services (GATS). Yet, what warrants re-visiting at this juncture is that the recent increase in private schools around the world has had distinct social consequences for the poor and disadvantaged. This often remains the case despite claims that, without the local and international market takeover of public schools, increased access to education in qualitative and quantitative terms would otherwise not take place (Knight, 2002, p. 20). Chudgar and Creed (2014), for example, found that availability of the growing number of private schools across India’s rural communities is far from equitable, as these schools “are more likely to establish and expand in better off, more connected, more resourced villages” (p. 20). Consequently, the spike in privately owned/private tuition schools in rural India has witnessed a concomitant reduction of educational access by “traditionally disadvantaged” populations, with insufficient growth of public schools to meet the deficit. Significantly, girls, children from certain caste groups, and children from poor and less-educated families experience net reductions in educational access and opportunity, while a greater number of males and children from richer families enroll in private schools. Consequently, the increase in India’s rural private school supply continues to compromise educational opportunity because it “keeps the overall gaps between these various groups intact or even widens these gaps” (Ibid.). Moreover, the cumulative social effects of pay-only education clearly contradicts conservative claims that market-based school reform will somehow “bridge persistent social, cultural, and economic gaps in school

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access in India and across the developing world” (Ibid., p. 21). Rather, the result has been severely compromised educational access and a cancelation of historic commitments to equal educational opportunity for the disadvantaged. In other words in India and elsewhere: The rapid, unregulated growth of private providers of education is already creating – and enabling – violations of the right to education, threatening to erase the last 50 years of progress in access to education. (Education International, 2015) Nor is the case of India’s rural disadvantaged an exceptional or unique violation of the principle of equal access to education. Numerous studies attest to the constriction of access and opportunity among disadvantaged groups as a result of the market-based privatization of schools, prompting UNESCO (2008) to “call into question some of the more optimistic assessments of school governance reform, particularly with regard to the ability to promote free, good-quality, equitable education for all citizens” (p. 167) Proponents of school privatization argue in general terms for the increased power of choice by parents-as-consumers in newly privatized education markets and the broadened capacity of parents to procure higher-quality fee-based educational services for their children (see Right To Education Project, 2014, p. 8). Thus, the belief persists that “parents with higher incomes may often benefit from (education) privatization in several ways” (Belfield & Levin, 2002, p. 46), assumed benefits that include accessing a broader range of educational services through the power of choice, having a more decisive voice in school policies as paying consumers, and spurring schools to improve performance through market competition (UNESCO, 2008). Yet, despite the potential of such factors to play a role in improving “education quality”: There is little evidence of that potential being realized on a significant scale. (Also for) marginalized, vulnerable and impoverished households, choice remains highly constrained – and access to basic education remains contingent on public education provision. (Ibid., p. 167) Thus, pro-privatization claims and arguments do not explain the steep proliferation of educational systems causing unequal access and deep differences in quality driven by an ability to pay. Introducing further educational consumer choice and competition into social contexts already marred with high levels of inequality and lacking firm governance to insure equal opportunity, as has been the case in much of the developing world and increasingly in fiscally depleted

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school districts of the “first world”, can actually increase rather than decrease social disparities (Epple et al., 2004). The World Bank (2004), for example, admits “in many of the poorest countries there are enormous deficits in affordable access” to education (p. 111). In 2006, some 75 million children of primary school age, 12 percent of the developing world’s primary school age population, were not in school, and in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly one-third of that age group was out of school (UNESCO, 2008, p. 9). Responding to the related inequities with additional policies of school privatization runs the risk of further creating “a prescription for widening disparities” as “markets–and quasimarkets – in education are unlikely to prove effective in strengthening equity in the absence of pro-poor regulation” (Ibid., p. 152). Moreover: Such inequalities in the international distribution of opportunity for education have important implications for future patterns of globalization. Today’s inequalities in education are tomorrow’s inequalities in the distribution of wealth and wider opportunities for human development. (Ibid., p. 10) The human rights organization, Action Aid International (2014), reached similar conclusions in its analysis of 18 major social research papers addressing the impact of privatization on education in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Evidence of the negative effects of privatization on schools in these studies included a strong male gender bias in enrollments, a lack of standardization and insufficient or inadequate monitoring and regulatory mechanisms, and substandard instructional quality due to low staff salaries and the hiring of under qualified educators. Of particular note to our present discussion was the agency’s conclusion that “marginalised groups fail to enjoy the bulk of the positive impacts and also bear the disproportionate burden of the negative impacts of privatization” in education (Ibid., p. 9) In effect, reviewed studies indicated that privatization in education contributes to the “exclusion of children living in poverty and the exacerbation of disparities in educational opportunities along socio economic lines” (Ibid., pp. 8–9).

3

Private School Choice: Questions of Differential Access, Motivation, and Sacrifice

More needs to be said about the nature and consequences of “parental choice” in privatized education sectors when squared with the influences of social class. This need is especially tangible in the areas of differential access, motivation,

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and apparent sacrifices and other results for the poor. Predictably, proponents of neoliberal educational reform insist the poor have increased access and better educational quality as a result of the market provision of private schools in low-income neighborhoods and nations. Moreover, it is claimed turning over schools to market forces reempowers parents as consumers, steps up competition, and provides higher-quality options across the ability-to-pay spectrum (World Bank, 1997). As a result, especially in poorer countries, “private schools, including those unrecognized and unregistered, are making a significant contribution to education for all targets”, including the disadvantaged (Dixon, 2012, p. 196). Härmä (2013), however, offers a more mixed conclusion along these lines, one which will direct the focus of our remaining discussion in this section: It is becoming more and more widely recognized that in several global contexts private education is no longer the preserve of the privileged; rather different classes of service have grown up to serve nearly all economic levels, although the attached costs are still proving a barrier to a significant proportion of the poor. (p. 1, emphasis added) Although some evidence indicates that under the right conditions, properly regulated choice and competition can strengthen (academic) standards, market forces in education nevertheless pose “acute dangers for equity” (UNESCO, 2008, p. 16). In fact, many students from low-income households are effectively shut out of the private education sector “due to their inability to pay school fees and associated costs” (Action Aid International, 2014, p. 28). In many instances, prestigious quality schools may attempt to target and appeal to parents and students deemed socially advantageous. Under these circumstances, what is passed off as parental choice in truth involves the school’s choice of “the most desirable parents and children – and rejection of others” (Hoxby, 2000, p. 117). Stated another way: Private schools cherry-pick, or “cream off” the children of wealthier families who are more equipped to succeed at school, leaving the public school system to admit more challenging students with greater needs. (Hill & Kumar, 2009, p. 119) Differential class-based circumstances influencing privatized education are tangible on several other levels. First of all, unlike middle- and upper-class families who increasingly represent market demand for private education, only “a small minority of children of lower economic quintiles access private

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schools” (Ashley et al., 2014, p. 2). Furthermore, the extent of choice for private school providers exercised by poor households rejecting public provision and switching to market options is “often exaggerated”, as many of those households do not have the option of sending their children to government schools in certain economically depressed regions for a very simple reason: there are none (UNESCO, 2008, p. 167). Outside of the developing world, Hill et al. (2009), for instance, point out that “hierarchical differentiation is the consequence of experiments with choice” (p. 118) and the United States and Britain have created a “tripartite system” of education consisting of class-based access and quality (p. 118). This is to say that self-paying private school families remain overwhelmingly from the privileged classes, while financial constraints continue to limit or prevent poorer households from accessing fee-based education, especially those schools with high performance records. Or, as Watkins (2000) notes: The private education sector covers a range of providers of variable quality, including many that are of exceptionally low quality. In many countries, only the wealthy can afford good-quality private schools. Private schools of inferior quality are more affordable to the poor, but they do not offer the advantages often assumed for private education. (p. 230) Thus, while small numbers of poor students, mostly in developing countries, have in recent years been enrolled, apparently without governmental financial assistance or scholarship aid in private schools; there is reason to believe these families do so under a range of circumstances and motivating influences, and at a much lower rate than do their comparatively well-off counterparts. Again, although private schools fill some of the space left behind by collapsed public systems, their potential to effectuate progress towards universal basic education remains thwarted because they fail to address many of the underlying problems facing the disadvantaged, least of which is the inability of the poor to pay private fees (Watkins, 2000, p. 230). As Domenech and MoraNinci (2009) point out, because of the nature of schools as public goods, any increase in educational supply should be equitable, broad, and inclusive of wide and diverse social needs. However, what actually occurs is that diversity in the educational supply-side model ends up reinforcing and legitimizing the unequal distribution of knowledge and produces educational circuits that are differential in terms of the social and cultural backgrounds of the actors. (Ibid., p. 158)

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Differential Motivation and Sacrifice

There also persists distinct social class-based differences in motivation and level of sacrifice for private school “choice” among the poor. A common neoliberal defense for school privatization is that, because of its assumed higher quality relative to public schools, it satisfies broad popular parental demand arising from the fact that “in many countries, education is viewed as an important way to gain social and economic advancement” (Belfield & Levin, 2002, p. 29). And, indeed, in line with human capital assumptions about the essential market role of schooling: Privatization turns education into a marketable, private commodity or ‘positional good’ which exists for the benefit of individuals and assessed solely on the basis of its extrinsic value, i.e. according to the opportunities it provides for access to the labor market, under the conditions of standard qualifications and certificates. (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 92) That being the case, parental choice based on an ability to pay is especially vociferous for those schools with the highest socially perceived quality and status. Yet, despite tenuous links between increased parental choice, academic standards, and learning outcomes, comparatively wealthier parents in poorer countries are the ones who invest heavily in emerging private school markets, mostly, of course, in hopes of garnering a one up for their children’s future life prospects (UNESCO, 2008, p. 160). Such strategies also extend to the beleaguered middle classes of poorer countries, who, despite being repeatedly battered by structural adjustment policies and successive global recessions, attempt to avoid public schools in an effort to circumvent their own potential proletarization brought on by the heightened insecurities of neoliberalism. The resulting pattern of inserted educational demand increases the number of private sector schools, which in turn increases educational inequalities. This downward spiral can especially be the case where secondary private education is used as a means for gaining admission into the best universities (Carnoy, 1999, p. 12). In whichever case, it is typically higher-socioeconomic parents who most actively support “school choice”, and who customarily select schools most attuned to their family’s social standing (Elacqua, 2004). The driving motivation behind private school choice for poor families, on the other hand, is often quite different from those of wealthier parents. Although it is reasonable to believe that both rich and poor are looking for future economic security and social advantage for their young, in the case of poorer families this success motivation is also deeply driven by a dearth of

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acceptable public school alternatives in poor districts due to dwindling public funds or systemic distortions in larger systems of resource allocation. The World Bank (2004) reports: In many countries public sector provision is close to dysfunctional and rife with corruption. The technical quality of instruction and learning outcomes are shockingly low, especially among poor people. (p. 111) Under these conditions, poorer families are forced to make the hard decision of whether to place their children in a “lower-tiered” private school plagued by distortions in local public education caused by cut-backs, closures, fiscal austerity measures, and externally mandated “structural adjustment” policies, and/or an historical absence of preexisting functional public educational institutions. In the slums of Kenya, for example, many poor families resort to the lowest tiers of private education because of inadequate supply in the public sector and an effective “crowding out” by excess demand (Oketch et al., 2008, p. 31). Indeed, Dixon (2012) cites research that suggests that in many low-income areas of the world there are “more unrecognized/unregistered private schools than government schools” (p. 198). For poor people, then, educational “choice” might be considerably more the result of coercive influences than otherwise is often acknowledged. Under such circumstances, already severely strained family finances may be further aggravated (not ameliorated) by private fees associated with the encroachment of business interests in local education, spurred on by moves toward blanket privatization and commercialization at the national level, and, in turn monitored, regulated, and enforced by international agencies in the global political economy of the sort we have previously examined at length. Aggravated class-based differences arising from school privatization and the marketization of education extend proportionately to differences in material sacrifice. Not surprising, poor people, especially those in the developing world, are forced to allocate preciously scarce funds toward a desired quality of education for their children that was once expected, or should have been expected, as part of larger state-citizen social contracts insuring free quality public schooling for all. So, as local public schools are allowed to sink into a quagmire of neglect and decline, unlike those who can more readily afford to turn to private schools provided by private markets as alternatives, the sacrifices made for compensatory private education by poor households: Can be viewed, as … an entry charge to education paid by vulnerable households with two options: paying for education through severe

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sacrifices in other areas, or accepting that their children have no opportunity for an education meeting minimum quality standards. (UNESCO, 2008, p. 166) In fact, chronically poor households may not even be able to generate the relatively low fees needed for the lowest quality schools without suffering adverse consequences (UNESCO, 2008, p. 167). Consequently, “where children of poorer households do attend private schools, research indicates that welfare sacrifices are made and continued attendance is difficult to sustain” (Day-Ashley et al., 2014, p. 2). These sacrifices include “divert(ing) income from other areas, including nutrition, health, shelter and savings for emergencies” (UNESCO, 2008, p. 166). As such, the social consequences of private fee education are quite different for the poor, ranging from shouldering relatively more severe financial burdens to an outright prevention of access. Indeed, “for marginalized, vulnerable and impoverished households, choice remains highly constrained –and access to basic education remains contingent on public education provision” (UNESCO, 2008, p. 167). This is especially true in countries like Nigeria and Kenya, “where income inequality is fierce” (Ibid.), and in impoverished areas like East Jerusalem, “where schools attended by Palestinian refugees are overcrowded and under-resourced, forcing many students into private sector provision” (Ibid., p. 156). Because of the “push” rather than the “pull” factors in these cases influencing school choice, arguments in favor of privatized education based on its assumed universal appeal and broadly dispensed benefits must be thoroughly reconsidered. Indeed, private school choice for the poor seems far less a positive decision actively sought in response to the expected quality and outcome of market options, and much more a difficult compensatory response to public systems in acute disarray and deterioration from neglect. Härmä (2013), for example, found that because of deflated and failed public sectors, residents in Nairobi, Kenya have also had to seek out private solutions in such essential areas as water, power, and basic infrastructure, such as neighborhood roads (p. 26). In fact, the most widely-stated preference among low-income parents in his study regarding their children’s education was for a properly functioning government-financed system of schools. In other words, these parents turned to private schools only when they felt they had no other alternative (Ibid.). Indeed, in the slums of Nairobi, as in many impoverished, overpopulated, and fiscally unsupported areas of the world, there simply are no public schools available for many of the poor (Ibid., p. 16). One either pays for schooling, or children (and in the case of postsecondary education, adults) have no access to

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formal education. And, contrary to what many neoliberal pundits would have us believe, under such circumstances “recourse to private schools on the part of the poor is not an indicator for equitable access” (UNESCO, 2008, p. 167). Rather, when a poor family can afford it, private education is more a pressured choice, made under financial duress, yet in line with a rational appraisal of unacceptable conditions and severe bottlenecks in local public education.

5

Neoliberal Education and the Great Divide

So, some of the more salient and harsher social consequences of neoliberalism for education can now be clearly discerned. Four decades of deregulation, commodification, restructuring, and privatization have fostered extensive systems of pay-as-you-learn private schools, keyed to access by social class and tiered by quality according to what one can afford. The self-congratulating neoconservative claim that an increase of low-cost private schools has taken place in slum areas around the world (see Dixon, 2012) probably has some veracity. Yet, while in goose step alignment with the larger neoliberal social imaginary of a world without taxes or public goods, and providing some respite for impoverished families willing and able to pay dues, lower-end private schools for poor folks fall painfully short of claims that free markets provide equal access to quality education for all. What is taking place, however, is the widening of the social divide that was already substantial between the rich and the poor of the world. For, on the one hand: More expensive school fees are more likely to ensure that students will benefit from smaller student-teacher ratios, qualified teachers, and infrastructure that supports learning outcomes. Families that can afford high-end private schools are also likely to be able to purchase additional private tutoring, especially in the lead-up to exams. (Action Aid, 2014, pp. 27–28) Yet, as we have reasoned, better schools are simply cost-prohibitive for many of the poor, unconditionally so for the extremely poor. And, the quality of learning that takes place at the lower end of the private school fee scale spectrum warrants critical suspicion. Action Aid International (2014), for example, concludes that an increase in the low-ticket private schools market may seem positive in the short-term because of an apparent increased availability of seats, yet “the longer-term impacts require further research, especially on marginalized groups” (p. 9). Gavrielatos (2015) is more decisive on this point: “The evidence

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is quite clear. The growing commercialization and privatization of education is undermining the right to quality education”. Another way of understanding the deepening social divide dug by neoliberal education is to consider the intergenerational relation between social class and educational achievement. Evidence indicates poor parents have less financial, cultural, and social capital with which to support their children, who then, because of this, have less access to preschool, secondary, and tertiary education and who typically attend schools of lower quality, where they are socially segregated from the higher-tiered members of society (Reimers, 2000). The relation between social class and educational opportunity also persists between world regions. Children in Britain or France, for example, are more likely to enter tertiary education than are children in Niger or Senegal to complete primary school (UNESCO, 2008). These systemic distortions have important implications for future patterns of globalization, as “today’s inequalities in education are tomorrow’s inequalities in the distribution of wealth and wider opportunities for human development” (Ibid., p. 10). Research by Epple et al. (2004) regarding the impact of educational opportunity across generations further underscores this point. Because of the reinforcing cycle of class and educational achievement, higher-performing students tend to be from historically advantaged social classes who can better afford a costly private education, while the inverse is generally true of lower-performing learners. Straight forward, students who have been historically disadvantaged by class, a disadvantage that is often intensified by minority, ethnic, language, or cultural status, end up concentrated in the worst schools with the lowest quality; while more expensive, high-performing, higher-quality private schools attract higher-academic performers from socially advantaged, higher-income families. Moreover, even though the broad effects of differences in the quality and conditions of learning between students in low- and high-end private schools may “vary from locality to locality”, these differences nevertheless tend, on the whole, “to increase social stratification between schools” and “reinforce preexisting patterns of social inequality in society” (Connell, 1998, p. 93). In fact, a significant amount of cross-country research shows that countries with the highest levels of school choice tend to be the most socially segmented (OECD, 2007). The related variable of intergenerational social reproduction, more than any other factor, captures what is perhaps the most important “big picture” negative social consequence of encroaching commercialization in education, rendering access to and quality of learning reduced to the ability to pay, the exclusivity of markets, and the vested interests of private ownership.

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Expectedly, then, where neoliberal forces extend the market strategy of product differentiation based on class and ability to pay into national domains of education, the “main beneficiaries” of the resulting stratification “are the already privileged – families with money, know-how, and mobility” (Connell, 1998, p. 93). Likewise, regarding the general claim that private market options, because of their presumed affordability, accessibility, and quality, are more beneficial for the poor than conventional public education, UNESCO (2008) states: The rapid emergence of low-fee private schools may be a response to real demand, but there is little evidence to suggest that low-fee providers offer a genuine choice of affordable, accessible, quality education. (p. 167) In effect, what is undeniable about neoliberal-driven commercialization and privatization in education is the intergenerational reproduction and increase of social stratification, consisting of differential life chances and deeply unequal standards of living between the rich and poor in societies around the globe.

6

The Normalization of Inequality and the Need for Revitalized Public Education

Arguments for market conversion in education based on assumptions of broadened access and increased quality often amount to little more than attempts by the comparatively wealthy and powerful of the world to represent yet another strain of profit-driven social injustice as “legitimate and natural” under the guise of free market assumptions and logic, while delegitimatizing a long and well-established history of struggle and progress toward equal educational access and opportunity for all. As Hill (2003) points out, “education markets are marked by preferential selection and exclusion, and are accompanied by and situated within the rampant – indeed, exponential – growth of national and international inequalities” (p. 2). Such criticisms, most of all, stem from an established belief that: Basic education is a fundamental human right, not a tradable commodity. It follows that provision must be available to all, regardless of ability to pay. Moreover, the public sector must govern provision; underwriting finance, providing management and setting a clear policy framework. (UNESCO, 2008, p. 16)

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Indeed, in accordance with our previous discussion, there is little reason to expect privatized education, even that which allows for marketing strategies designed to target the relatively modest income and purchasing power of the poor, will in any significant way uphold the values and principles associated with universal access to quality education. Positive claims about the relative worth and superiority of fee-based schools within the larger context of public education are far from conclusive, as much depends on the location, history, and present status of the public education system under examination and the particular public schools in question (UNESCO, 2008). However, neoliberal canon and its expounders have been quite astute over the years at creating the economic, political, and social conditions that allow public goods and social welfare programs in general to falter and implode. Then, with equal skill, those same vested interests lavishly point out to the world how “socialism” has once again “failed to deliver the goods”. Conservative hoopla in recent years over the “failures of public education” and the need for “healthy market competition and accountability” in education provide a fitting illustration of this trend. And, while it is quite difficult, even irresponsible, to attempt to generalize about such a mammoth and unmanageable topic as the worldwide state of education today, it is nevertheless quite tenable to argue that many of the abandoned, bereft, and failed public schools and publicly-funded programs of learning at which fiscal conservatives have pointed accusing fingers during decades of (post-)Washington consensus hegemony; were allowed to reach their lamentable state to some very significant degree precisely because of the debilitating and withering effects of neoliberal-inspired cost-cutting, downsizing, resource-draining, austerity-promoting, and business -style managerial “accountability” reforms. When the criteria for viability and success in education is changed in ways that are morally offensive and socially regressive, and blame and censure is handed out to those who attempt to defend and preserve the common-sense (and historically based) moral imperatives and social sensibilities of education; it then becomes a relatively easy task to declare educators as recalcitrant and schools as “incorrigibles”, “incompetents”, or just plain “failures” according to a market-based view of things that sells itself as the only view, unconditionally and indefinitely.

7

Realizing Universal Human Rights in Public Education

Given the mammoth detrimental and onerous social effects of privatization in education today, perhaps what is most needed is a critical and thorough

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appraisal of the ways in which public schools as a pathway to realizing the universal right to quality education can again provide effective alternatives to fee-based market enterprises. It is doubtful that policies of intergovernmental organizations impactful for education, such as the World Trade Organization’s GATS, can provide appropriate instruments for ensuring reconciliation between the development of open markets in services and the protection of the right to education. In fact, the agenda of such IGOs may be “materially and theoretically incompatible with the agenda of the realization of the right to education according to international human rights law” (Devidal, 2009, pp. 82–83). Even the so-called “middle ground” conservative projects of educational reform for the less affluent represented by private-public partnerships, charter schools, and voucher programs are on the whole not producing broad levels of inclusion, equity, or higher academic standards (Leyva, 2009; Trammell, 2005). Public-private partnerships in particular have a mixed and modest record on learning achievements and equity (UNESCO, 2008, p. 131).1 And: Efforts to integrate low-fee private schools into private-public partnerships through voucher-type programmes, as advocated by some, do not appear to offer a short cut to greater equity. (Ibid., p. 16) Rather, what might be most needed, (particularly in developing countries, yet of equal import for the cash-strapped public sectors of the “developed” world), is the fostering of support for effective governance in public education, along with adequate financial assistance and a graduated tax base to help pay for that governance. Hill and Kumar (2008) claim that a broad yet cohesive combination of neoliberal policies, including publicly-supported vouchers for private schools and public/private charters, are duly responsible for a growing underfunding of public education. Of 105 countries surveyed by UNESCO between 1999 and 2006, it was found that the share of national income devoted to education had decreased in more than one-third (UNESCO, 2008, p. 3). Along these lines, a recent UN resolution recommends that states “put in place a regulatory framework” comprised of minimum national norms and standards in education sectors in order, among other things, to, “monitor private education providers” for their larger impact on inclusion and equity.2 The spirit, if not the letter, of international resolutions of this sort represent an increased recognition that “privatisation in education leads to socioeconomic segregation and discrimination against the poorest children in schools, in violation of States’ obligations” (Education International, 2015). It also implies that:

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Low-fee private schools (of the sort touted by neoliberals in their structural reforms) are a symptom of failure in public provision, not a solution to the problem … transferring responsibility to communities, parents and private providers is not a substitute for fixing public sector education systems. (UNESCO, 2008, p. 131) Consequently, given the extent of adverse social consequences caused by school privatization, especially those involving the violation of the right of universal access to quality education, there is a growing awareness that “limits to choice and competition” in education as presently proposed by neoliberal reforms are both warranted and needed (UNESCO, 2008, p. 21). Moreover, without these limits there exists “a real danger” that public education systems will further decline “in a downward spiral of underinvestment, poor quality, and widening inequalities” (Ibid., p. 163). Indeed, public education is already spiraling downward as “there is no substitute for a properly financed and effectively managed state education system”. Furthermore, attempting to counter its shortcomings by allowing markets to provide low-fee schools to the disenfranchised is “not resolving underlying problems in access, equity or quality” (Ibid.). Rather, the real challenge for governments with education systems that are in disrepair is to fix them, not to replace them with privatized facsimiles (Ibid., p. 16).

8

Private Schools and the Broader Socioeconomic and Political Landscapes

Lack of access to quality education probably represents one of the narrowest and most immediate negative consequences of the growing private school sectors around the world. The broader and longer-term effects involve much more, including worsening social inequality, class-based animosity and tensions, and strains and ruptures in the and political and social fabric of civil society. As discussed, market choice and competition in education frequently occur against a backdrop of serial tax cuts and public sector austerity measures. These, in turn, deplete and divert what seems like ever-larger amounts of revenue and resources away from public education. Private education markets, then, are marked by selection and exclusion, accompanied by and situated within the rampant and rapid growth of national and international inequalities of neoliberalism (Hill & Kumar, 2009, p. 1). Hirtt (2009) points out that “four fundamental statements regarding the purpose of Western education” involve the full development of the individual, preparation for democratic society,

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opportunities for success and social advancement, and increased leverage in the world of work. He then reveals how neoliberal education and private schools undermine equal opportunities so that many in society “are locked into a technico-professional education that almost completely deprives them of whole areas of essential general knowledge”, and “indoctrinate(s) them with the dogma that a world dominated by capital and profit is democratic” (p. 209). Giroux (1983) is even more indicting on this count regarding neoliberal policies in postsecondary education: If right-wing reforms in higher education continue unchallenged, the consequences will result in a highly undemocratic, bifurcated civic body. In other words, we will have a society in which a highly trained, largely white elite will be allowed to command the techno-information revolution, while a low-skilled majority of poor and minority workers will be relegated to filling the McJobs proliferating in the service sector. (p. 42) From a broader view, then, the socioeconomic landscape neoliberal education feeds and reproduces at the local and national levels takes on several distinct characteristics as encroaching privatization occurs. First of all, the various disadvantages associated with the inability of the poor to freely choose adequate private education interact over time with other social disparities (UNESCO, 2008, p. 162). Low educational attainment has a strong correlation to illiteracy, unemployment, lack of self-care skills, psychological vulnerability, interpersonal stressors, even physical health and longevity, Because those challenges already exist disproportionately among the chronically disadvantaged, continued or worsened levels of low-educational attainment among this at-risk population contribute to and increase preexisting social and economic hardships across generations. The cumulative effects low or declining levels of education have for the poor over time can become metaphorized as an entrenched, expanding, or consuming “cloud” or “field” of social oppression and hardship that weighs down on and immobilizes already marginalized individuals and groups. Furthermore, the maintenance and intensification of the forms of oppression experienced by the undereducated become institutionalized in the larger organization and structure of society. The heightened class-based social inequalities that are brought into play as a result of marketized systems of education place tremendous strains on the social fabric and cohesion of civil society. Regarding the related polarizing effects of privatization in education, Woodhead et al. (2012) suggest that following repeated rounds of fiscal depletion and middle-class (white) flight from public education, surviving schools

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often become “’ghettoized’ – attended mainly by those from the poorest, most disadvantaged and marginalized groups in society” (p. 26) Not surprising, as the poorest students learn in the poorest schools, wider structural inequalities are reinforced and class hierarchies in society are reproduced, intensified, and cemented. With such rationalizing and naturalizing watchwords for this process of social differentiation in neoliberal education as “accountability”, “efficiency”, and “parental choice”, market reforms run the risk of setting up or exacerbating “racialized school hierarchies” (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 9). And, as Marginson (1997) claims, precisely because market systems reinforce “prior social inequalities” and create “new and worse inequalities”, marketised education “exacerbates class, race and ethnic differences among students, schools, and society generally” (p. 5). Citing the “marketizatized” school systems of Britain, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, Hill (2003) also claims that neoliberal policies exacerbate and increase “racialized social class patterns of inequality” (p. 8). His research gives particular attention to inequities in university admission, where the (racialized) class-based hierarchicalization of universities is “exacerbated by ‘top-up fees’ for entry to elite universities – pricing the poor out of the system – or at least into the lower divisions of higher education” (Ibid.). Schools and universities in many Western countries are already heavily stratified by wealth and area of residence, resulting in what has been referred to as a sort of geographically based education “selection by mortgage” that reinforces social stratification through free market choice (Gorard & Taylor, 2001, p. 18). Similarly, as private education service providers “gain monopoly positions in the most lucrative segments of education”, Fasel (2003) warns of the deepening divisions of an emerging “two-tier society” between the wealthy and the less-privileged social classes (p. 304). Indeed, perhaps “a non-market system” of education, because it “enables prior social inequalities to be modified by the provision of high quality education to all students”, is the only way to counteract the negative social consequences of expanding private sector schools under the aegis of neoliberalism (Marginson, 1997, p. 6).

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Discussion: Blaming the Victim

Yet, the ideologically not so sleight of hand of neoliberalism offers an abundance of rationalizing social narratives to justify pulling the plug on public schools (and public school educators) who fall short of market standards of perfomativity and accountability. These narratives “blame the victim” for systemic distortions, magically transforming the hard realities of social inequality produced by (corporate) free market capitalism’s structural deformities into

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the personal failings of individuals who “just can’t (or won’t) make the grade”. At any given juncture neo conservatives employ some combination of bootstrap social Darwinism and boot-camp market meritocracy to explain away the deep disparities in educational opportunity and access brought on by neoliberal school reform, as “the ideology of neoliberalism in education policy is … touted as the radical solution to historic underachievement of ‘deprived’ communities” (Grant, 2009, p. x). Yet, reform policies such as privatization, accountability, and competition not only heighten social class differences, but “make education an individual rather than a collective right” (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014, p. 12). As Leyva (2009) caustically observes: The free-marketeers somehow seem to miss the obvious fact that we do not all start at a level playing field, and that those of us born with racial, class, and gender privileges have a disproportionate advantage over others, an advantage brought about by imperial savagery not inherent superior genes. To ignore this very basic historical account seems intellectually dishonest, scientifically flawed, and outright inhumane. (p. 376) Yet, some proponents of neoliberalism conclude that demographic cards stacked against the ability of certain groups in society to access quality education should be construed: Not as injustices, the result of exploitation and oppression, but rather as the natural and inevitable outcomes of a competitive, free market. To them, the free market is the most (if not the only) legitimate social institution; that is, it is the only institution that can adequately and justly govern, regulate, and explain (differences in) human behaviour. (Baptiste, 2001, p. 195) In all societies, education plays a pivotal role as an arbiter of life chances and opportunities for social and material progress. Moreover, in functional democracies it has historically served as one of the few pathways available for upward mobility among the disadvantaged. Many arguments against privatization in education: Stress that a market of competitive choices will lead to civic strife rather than to social cohesion. Individual families will choose schooling that generates few social benefits, and that instead produces only private advantages. Schools will compete to offer families private benefits, and not social benefits (such as democratic values and civic responsibility).

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This may result in a deterioration of civic participation, agreed social norms, and the capacity for social action (through conventional means). (Bellfield & Levin, 2002, p. 51) In effect, families endowed with social and economic capital, when encouraged to pursue self-interest through market choice, often make decisions that are socially, culturally, or politically unacceptable to the norms of civil society. That is, under market conditions “a family may choose to educate its children in a manner intolerant to others in society, or it may choose an education that is segregated from other groups (e.g. by race, religion or income)” (Bellfield & Levin, 2002, p. 37). The potential corrosive effects of the neoliberal schoolhouse on civil society thus contravene the historical commitment of education to the “social good” of society. Although the meaning of that good may vary depending on time and place, we may assume with some level of certainty that: In a democracy, this social good is reflected in the provision of a common educational experience that will give students the start that they need to become full participants in the social, political, and economic institutions of … society. (Bellfield & Levin, 2002, pp. 49–50) When education as social progress is blocked from the already disenfranchised, it guarantees the reproduction of oppression, exploitation, and inequality across generations, and can cause further downward mobility for groups whose foothold of advantage in society is already precariously fragile or newly attained. When good-quality private schools become the exclusive domain of the wealthy, without legal safeguards and the adequate provision of public education for the poor, disadvantaged classes receive an inferior education and pathways to social progress are effectively thwarted (Watkins, 2000, p. 230). And, to once again underscore, in this situation the most disadvantaged are chronically “left behind in presumably the poorest learning conditions in government schools’ (Härmä, 2013, p. 28). In effect, school choice paid for in neoliberal currency simply means that: So-called “sink schools” have become more “sink-like”, as more favored schools have picked the children they think are likely to be successful. Where selection exists, the sink schools just sink further and the privileged schools just become more privileged. (Hill & Kumar, 2009, p. 117) Frustration, resentment, potential rage grow when those most in need experience the systematic denial of opportunity along the once well-worn and

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expected routes of universal access to quality education. Moreover, when socially retrogressive education policies are implemented as part of a larger constellation of public sector takebacks and downsizing, the resulting deterioration of social conditions can quite quickly become the “stuff of revolutions”. It is no small coincidence, for instance, that questions of fair access to affordable quality education were among the most important items on the agenda in the recent waves of popular uprising spreading across northern Africa, commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring” (Mohamed et al., 2016). We have in this chapter attempted to examine several of the more salient social effects the neoliberal affront on public education has produced over the course of the last 40 years. As Stromquist and Monkman (2014) point out, for four decades, neoliberal ideologies: Have successfully fostered the practice of providing key services such as education and health care through the marketplace, making them available according to one’s ability to pay. Associated government policies such as privatization heighten social class differences and make education an individual rather than collective right. (p. 15)

10

Concluding Comments

As we have seen, neoliberalism has driven protracted roll-backs and roll-outs of the essential guarantees of universal access to quality public education, mainstays of developed democratic societies since the middle of the last century. The resulting erosion of educational opportunity for disadvantaged groups has created a two-tier, rich-poor, segregated system of educational access and quality learning based on socioeconomic status and other related determiners of social capital. Moreover, this system and the policy assumptions upon which it rests in education continue to operate largely unchallenged, even though there is little evidence to support claims that schools involved in market privatization or increased parental choice boost student learning or performance. In fact, neoliberal justifications for these schools may represent just one more expression of how those with comparatively larger shares of power and privilege in society use arguments consisting of thinly veiled class self-interest to legitimatize the worsening conditions of the world’s poor, albeit in this case arising specifically from differential access to education. Yet, there is a substantial and growing chorus of voices who warn that the ultimate endgame of privatization, commodification, and deregulation in education, combined with other neoliberal policies that marginalize and disempower the poor, may be

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an eventual collapse in the social fabric and institutional cohesion needed for functional civil society. The practical results of such a collapse can be seen in the enduring dislocations of the recent “Arab Spring” uprisings in North Africa. Having considered the nature of some of the more dire social consequences of the neoliberal schoolhouse at the local level, it is highly germane that we now turn our attention to some of the ways in which neoliberal principles and practices in education also come to impact the culture of schools and the adjacent communities in which they exist.

Notes 1 It is important to note that far from being a one-size-fits-all proposition, such conservative projects in education potentially involve a range of formulas and options, including direct funding to private education providers and a number of financing arrangements that provide incentives for parents to pursue “private choice” avenues (see UNESCO, 2008). 2 http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/alldocs.aspx

CHAPTER 12

Culture and Relationship in the Neoliberal Schoolhouse No discussion of the impact of such neoliberal-style principles and practices as commodification, efficiency, and accountability on contemporary education would be complete without due consideration to the effect those factors have on the cultural fiber of schools. This consideration of the cultural ramifications of neoliberalism includes its impact on the quality of human relationships that takes place in sites of learning, as well as the related cultural shifts and changes that transpire in surrounding communities. It is always a tenuous proposition to claim with any level of certainty, (let alone to produce proof-positive evidence), that there exists some sort of a causal link between the policies and practical environments of schools and changes in their internal culture. Yet, I can personally attest as a seasoned educator to the power of political and economic values on beliefs and behavior in schools, and the effect those influences have on school culture as it relates to teaching and learning. As Baptiste (2001) states, “pedagogical practices have deep anthropological and cultural roots and … an understanding of those roots might greatly illumine and aid our educational practices” (p. 198). As such, at least one key source of the regressive cultural sea change we have been witnessing in education, while insidious, is the selfsame influence we have been critically unpacking from the outset of this discussion, found in the fact that education: Has been increasingly transformed to meet the competitive needs of corporations within globalized markets (and) reshaped to support the now dominant neoliberal economic policies promoted by government and corporations. ( Hursh, 2001, para 1) As previously alluded to, an emerging culture, based on commercial competition and consumerism, is taking shape in the neoliberal schoolhouse. This culture is the result of unprecedented changes in the global political economy about which so much has been made in this writing. This culture, however, is noteworthy because it is being forced on schools and is subsuming them in fundamental ways, the least of which is an erosion in the long-established civic functions of education (Reid, 2005). As Ball (2003) relates in regard to this shift: © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_012

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The ethics of competition and performance (in education) are very different from the older ethics of professional judgement and cooperation. A new basis for ethical decision making and moral judgement is erected by the ‘incentives’ of performance. (p. 213) Indeed, imposing a market criteria on schools: Challenges the traditional idea of education as a cultural asset that makes an indispensable contribution to nationhood and whose values and worth transcend economic accountability and instrumentalism. (Symes, 1998, p. 134) No less to the point, Rikowski (2002) observes that market values have come to severely erode many of the historic values embodied in school culture. Translated into the world of education, it is value (not values) that becomes crucial. Old traditional modes of working, professional values, notions of public service and putting community needs before the drive for profit – all become liabilities for capital accumulation as educational institutions shift from becoming public goods to private commodities. Community needs are placed within the context of the market and profit-making potential. They are reconfigured. (p. 6) The seeping of market forces or “marketization” into the fabric of education is never a neutral process. Rather, it involves “a set of practices and relationships that reflect particular ideologies about the purposes of education, curriculum, and social relations” (Whitehead, 2005, p. 4). At local levels there is an increased accommodation and interpenetration of business management elements into the lifeworlds of schools, determining what constitutes quality and what is needed to realize the related performance criteria (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). In his research, Lawrence Angus (2015) illustrates how key elements of the neoliberal worldview are normalized in the day-to-day practices of schools and how certain norms and values that characterize neoliberalism are shaped and reinforced in particular systems of education, (in effect how they become cultural practices), as well as how they exert influence on the personal, family, and social imaginaries of parents, students, and staff. Perhaps more significant is the way austerity measures and social cutbacks in neoliberal restructuring, such as those in education, to some degree promote and valorize the rugged individualist motif of Western capitalism while undermining the social and cultural support for a certain “type of person … a person who sees collective

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measures to protect against economic risk (such as safety net social programs) as necessary, possible, and morally just” (Arthur, 2011, p. 192). It is this sort of “politicized” and “collectivized” person who finds an increasingly meager place at the table of education, either as teacher or taught, real or rhetorical. The demotion of socially concerned and aware communitarianism has to a large extent taken place in education, as the values and assumptions of neoliberalism are skillfully naturalized in mass consciousness and aggressively sold as unquestionable cultural givens, so much so that both students and teachers become inundated in a pervasive web of “market logic” that rapidly becomes “impervious to critique” (Molnar, 1996, p. 25). The effects of neoliberal capitalism are never uniform, as local histories and politics always mediate and temper the ways in which large-scale market forces impact local contexts (Gruenewald, 2003). Yet, neoliberal reforms consistently “play an important part in aligning public sector organizations with the methods, culture, and ethical systems of the private sector” (Ball, 2003, p. 216). In education, these reforms foster a number of on the ground cultural practices in schools. In its widest terms, the entry of market forces into education “has led to a blossoming of an entrepreneurial culture … most marked in school advertising and prospectuses” (Symes, 1998, pp. 133–134), as privatized schools have had to bolster public marketing strategies. Perhaps most elemental in this regard, though, is the socialization of students (and teachers/managers) into a compliant acceptance of private (corporate) sector ethics as the measure of what it means to cultivate an applied competency of “doing things right” in schools and classrooms. AgostinoneWilson (2006), for example, claims that school-based implementation of a neoliberal worldview is promoted through the creation of curriculum and activities that teach “correct” worker attitudes. Leyva (2009) echoes this view in her assertion that much of the new emphasis on teamwork and cooperation in classrooms of the new millennium is meant to cultivate “the correct worker attitude, based on the idea that social skills are necessary for the developing service economy” of OECD countries (p. 374). Thus, political and economic socialization often takes place through classroom management techniques that build particular qualities of “teamwork” (not to be confused with cooperative learning) to steer students toward group “self-regulation” activities which “ultimately shape attitude and dispositions toward a capitalist ethos, embodied in the modern corporation” (Agostinone-Wilson, 2006, p. 129). She adds, in market-compromised education: Task mastery is directly related to self-regulation, because professionallevel employers must be able to trust their employees to endorse a

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particular ideology without being constantly supervised … This ideological pathology extends to middle class workers who do not see themselves as promoting a set of political beliefs, but rather as people who are just following the correct procedures for their own particular jobs. (Ibid., p. 134) One unfortunate result of the growing emphasis on education-as-workerpreparation is a general devaluing of fields and pedagogies less connected to the market, such as the humanities and social sciences, with a simultaneous privileging of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM disciplines). Similarly, classroom discussions based on critical theory and reflection are being replaced by instrumental problem-solving tasks, while consideration of such pressing challenges as social equality and gender equity are taking a distant backseat to the assumed importance of targeted objectives in math and reading tests (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). These trends are further elevated through the fetishization of standardized tests which beg critical inquiry by replacing reflective meaning and understanding with methods specifically tuned to automated and uncritical choices of “the right answer” (Boyles, 2005). Of interest, evidence indicates there is a stronger correlation between standardized test scores and a student’s family income, (with a school’s average test scores reflecting students’ average family income) than between scores and related teaching practices or curriculum (Hursh & Martina, 2003, p. 45).

1

High Stakes and Worker-Ready Testing in the Neoliberal Schoolhouse

The federally mandated and deceptively coined No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in the U.S., with its punish-and-reward high-stakes testing regulations, cogently attests to the deleterious effects of neoliberalism on the culture of schools. Written into law by US President G. W. Bush in 2002, NCLB’s ostensibly commendable intent was to close the “achievement gap” between rich and poor, white and black, and to challenge the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in schools across the nation (Public Broadcasting Service, 2008). As Hursh and Martina (2003) observe, the impact of NCLB on schools was profound and far-reaching: While the federal government provides less than ten percent of public school funding, it has intervened to an unprecedented degree … with NCLB the federal government has determined which subject areas take

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precedence, limits the ways in which they may be taught, and designates what reform options are available to schools and districts that fail to improve sufficiently. (p. 31) The long-term impact of NCLB was harsh and punitive. Over the years a growing number of schools faced sanctions, including closings, “as they failed to meet what turned out to be unworkable expectations and the penalties for struggling schools were overly punitive” (Huettemandec, 2015). What made NCLB policies particularly daunting for schools was the unprecedented emphasis placed on “accountability” vis-à-vis test scores. In effect, it made: The (US) education system more reliant on testing than ever before: mandating that every student from third-to-eight grade (and one high school grade) take a state test every year – a total of approximately 45 million annual tests. (Public Broadcasting Service, 2008) As a result, the NCLB Act “substantially increases the testing requirements for states and sets demanding accountability standards for schools … including the setting of measurable adequate yearly progress objectives for all students” (Linn et al., 2002, p. 3). State governments could choose not to abide by the act, yet risk losing federal funding as a result. Also, students who failed NCLB test performance expectations for two consecutive years were then free to enroll in a more “successful school” (Hursh & Martina, 2003). As previously pointed out, many neoliberal policy reforms have a surface appeal at the mass level due to their seeming sensibility. Touting values of inclusion and opportunity in public education, the NCLB Act was no exception in this regard. Yet detractors were quick to point out the underlying freemarket values and neoliberal agenda embedded in’ the act. Criticisms have been robust, scathing, and uncompromising (see Torres, 2009). Leyva (2009), for example, claims that “essentialist” neoliberalism ideals of meritocracy, selfishness, and competition inform the values of the NCLB Act and undergird standardized testing in education; in effect, he believes they constitute a revised and updated version of Social Darwinism (p. 365). Certainly there is good cause to believe that NCLB policies, at least as they were applied and felt on the ground, represented simply one more foundation stone in the massive efforts toward the creation of neoliberal schoolhouses around the world. Using metaphors and a tone that resounds throughout many critical discussions of the NCLB, Torres (2009) argues that NCLB policies are foremost a “brain child” of neoliberalism, and:

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Part of a larger political and ideological effort to privatize social programs, reduce the public sector, and ultimately replace local control of institutions like schools with marketplace reforms that substitute democratic relations between citizens for commercial relations between customers. (p. 50) While claiming to provide a reform mode that ”raises standards”, the NCLB Act disempowered local decision makers by defining “what quality of education is or ought to be” (Torres, p. 45). Its real aims, though, involved dismantling public education and turning students into uncritical, competitive, consumptive citizens (Leyva, 2008), as well as providing training for generations of entrepreneurial citizens and skilled workers capable of adding economic value in the global marketplace (Robertson, 2000). Indeed, the measure of purpose of the NCLB Act was how well it prepared students for employability in “the post-Fordist neo-managerial economy” (Ibid.). Nor is it a coincidence that US Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential debates referred to the NCLB Act as a “jobs bill” (Commission of Presidential Debates, 13/10/04). Fortunately, following constant and intense criticism, major changes were made regarding the NCLB Act, effectively ending 14 years of conservative federal control in education policy. Although the originating law expired in 2007, no clear replacement has since emerged. In fact, current trends involve an overall general downscaling of high-stakes standardized testing regimes (Huettemandec, 2015). As then US President Barack Obama’s White House website stated in 2016, the “wrong behaviors” and “unintended consequences” of No Child Left Behind Act: Created incentives for states to lower their standards; emphasized punishing failure over rewarding success; focused on absolute scores, rather than recognizing growth and progress; and prescribed a pass-fail, onesize-fits-all series of interventions for schools that miss their goals. Alongside an emerging culture of high-stakes standardized testing in schools, a corresponding strain of “work-ready” testing and credentialing has also been developing, especially in North America. In common terms, the intent of work-ready assessment is to measure “core standards on technical and basic literacy, and show work-ethic skills or pleasing dispositions”, in order to offer “employers a certainty that those hired will be trainable for the new economy” (Lakes, 2011, p. 326). Significantly, neoliberal pressure for employer-friendly teaching and assessment is rendering conventional diplomas redundant, as increasing numbers of companies seek tangible assurance from local systems

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of education of the suitability of graduates for wage labor, while downplaying or ignoring the civic benefits of a broad liberal arts education. Consequently, the keying of educational outcomes to private labor markets has resulted in batteries of: Work-ready tests offered to working-class youth in secondary schools and postsecondary community and technical colleges, and to disadvantaged or unemployed youth or adults in the public sector employment and training system. (Ibid.) Relatedly, Hewitt (2005) argues that the increasing number of educationcorporate partnerships, pursued by cash-strapped schools to help offset the effects of austerity roll-backs, have served to foster an unquestionable faith and belief in the inherent benevolence of corporations among students. One assumes the such agreements also communicate a sort of “anticipatory socialization” to young learners regarding how best to one day succeed in a world dominated by corporations. Normative corporate influences in the culture of education are also evidenced by the development of new “financial literacy” requirements in schools, in some instances beginning as early as the fourth grade (Arthur, 2011). Ostensibly focusing on personal financial management, these courses in effect move toward “empowering the individual to manage and thrive within this new era of austerity” (Ibid., p. 193), while supporting “a neoliberal consumer habitus (subjectivity) at the expense of the critical citizen” (Ibid., p.190). In other words, financial literacy instruction normalizes a world of private markets while teaching young people the survival skills of a new capitalist civic order subject to recurrent downturns and crisis. The cultural lifeworld of the schools in which this sort of pedagogy takes place come to imbue, even extol, the related neoliberal values and behaviors.

2

The (Im)Possibilities of Relationship in the Neoliberal Schoolyard

When market values enter a school’s culture, they deeply condition and confine what can be imagined in the human relationships so important for teaching and learning. The net result is similar to Lyotard’s thesis regarding the post modern “commodification of knowledge” that “involves not simply a different evaluation of knowledge, but fundamental changes in the relationships between the learner, learning and knowledge” (1984, p. 4). As a life-long educator, I am convinced of the importance of sensible, healthy, caring, fair, and responsive relationships in teaching and learning. Solid student-teacher

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relationships are of the sort that nurture meaningful and compassionate connections between people as minds and hearts are grown. The effects of the neoliberal schoolyard on the shared social spaces and interactions between students and teachers are always misleading, often nefarious and antithetical to trust and positive relationship building. One does not have to look far to see that when such market principles as commodification, efficiency, and productivity become tenets of organization for schools and learning, a heavy toll is exacted from the inherently organic, social, and relational processes of learning. Under the interposing influences of neoliberal market hegemony, “education as a social institution has been subordinated to international market goals”, a subordination which includes “the language and self-conceptualisation of educators” (Hill, 2003, p 12). The results are often deeply constraining, thwarting both the art and the politics of human possibilities in schools and classrooms. Ball (2003) identifies some of the more corrosive aspects of market-driven schools, claiming, for instance, that: New roles and subjectivities are produced as teachers are re-worked as producers/providers, educational entrepreneurs and managers and are subject to regular appraisal and review and performance comparisons. (p. 218) As a result, educational reforms based on market sensibilities: Drive performativity into the day-to-day practices of teachers and into the social relations between teachers … Increasingly, we choose and judge our actions and they are judged by others on the basis of their contribution to organizational performance, rendered in terms of measurable outputs. (Ibid., p. 223) On the worst of days, market forces in education hijack the possibilities of interdependent subjectivities that might overlap between students and teachers. These represent learning relationships enriched by visceral attunements and heartfelt connectedness. They are now relegated to a sort of depersonalized twilight of calculation, exile, and abandonment. In the culture of the neoliberal schoolhouse, both the ‘nominally taught” and those “assumed to be teaching” are potentially drawn into and trapped by reified measures of input, output, and performance against a blanketed normative backdrop of instrumental value and commercial exchange, all of which prove profoundly damaging to the human tapestry and texture of human interchange in schools.

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On the best of days, there is perhaps a glimmer of hope, faint yet inspiring, that unforeseen (often unforeseeable) cracks in the edifice of social reproduction in schools might rupture and open up paths of opportunity to trumpet and transfix humanizing engagement and redemptive resistance to the way things have become. Sadly, though, I have also personally seen countless teachers and students around the world repeatedly lose sight, for long stretches, sometimes permanently, of the immediacy, vibrancy, richness, and spectacular promise of critically reflective and naturally unfolding relational tendencies in schools and learning. All too often these potentialities are sacrificed and wasted at the pedestal of market-driven measurement, efficiency, performativity, and evaluation in education. Simultaneously, the “human side” of learning that comprises so much of the grammar of teaching and education becomes disadvantageous, even suspect, under the harsh gaze of market exigencies. The resulting imaginaries, rationales, policies, and practices involved in the intersubjective projects of teaching and learning start to look oddly similar to the production possibility calculations, cost benefit analysis, and resource allocation tabs of private firms. Sensible, rewarding, responsive human relationships in schools suffer accordingly.

3

The Mono Dimensional in Neoliberal School Culture

For students, market demands in school culture very much normalize the sanctity of a “mono dimensional learner” and naturalize the necessity of “mono dimensional learning”. No longer is education seen as that critical period of respite and shielding for the young from life’s more onerous burdens, a safe and supportive public space abundant with the exploration and growth needed to make a natural and effective transition to responsible, civic-minded adulthood. Rather, under the exigencies, indeed urgencies, of “market think”, the measure of educational value and of being a good student/person is some combination of (quantifiable) conformity, performance, production, and achievement. And, from the perspective of market-saavy parents consternated over shortfalls in their children’s future, this process of social objectification takes place with a view toward establishing a step-up on the college admission list or projected post-graduation job application. One of the great misfortunes of the fetish of performativity in education is that teachers teach and students learn to the tempos and rhymes “of the test”, often no matter how far afield of felt and valued local sensibilities and experiences those expectations might land. High-stakes exams and standardized-assessment scores come to represent the proverbial “keys to the kingdom” of present recognition and future

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success. As such, for an increasing number of young people, they also represent a means to secure some modicum of protection against the potentialities of a future bereft of hope and material adequacy.

4

From Mono Dimensional Learning to Mono Dimensional Learner

The principles of assessment-driven teaching and learning also beg the question of individual vs institutional locus of control and the social construction of a mono dimensional learner. For, as is always the case: High-stakes standardized testing and meritocratic idealism promoted by those policies further serve to instill a rigid individualism where failure is blamed on the individual and not on systemic institutional conditions. (Agostinone-Wilson, 2006, p. 131) Decontextualizing and delegitmatiizing the importance of social factors in assessment remains the norm, even though “the idea of equating student learning with test performance is suspect, both in terms of the technical characteristics of tests and the incentive effects of testing on instruction” (Fuhrman & Elmore, 2004, p. 275). The situation is further hardened by the blind belief inherent in the market competition point of reference that technology can be used to dramatically improve learning. Whatever the benefits, the advent of technology-based education (TechEd), including the not-so-distant likelihood of “teacherless classrooms”, furthers the designs of the mono dimensional learner and exacerbates an already pronounced absence of face-to-face, meaning-making contact between young people due to the pervasive influence of social media and solo video gaming. Needless to say, with a mass shift toward shallow, incomplete, unreflective, undigested “bites” of information, and a growing away from richer, more complex, more complete understandings of the world, young people are learning considerably less, both within and outside schools, about the skills and importance of dialogue-driven, criticallyreflective social analysis and engagement. (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). Such deficits both shape and seal the culture of schools, learning, and the institution of education itself, and stand largely unopposed and contrary to the tenets of civic engagement and citizen activism, in closer alignment with the social complacency and self-serving individualism of a world organized around free market values. Under these conditions, it is a relatively small adjustment from the normalization of mono dimensional learning to the naturalization of the mono dimensional learner. Also along these lines, one shirks to consider

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the potentially adverse consequences heaped on students who don’t have a natural liking for any of the subjects related to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) so esteemed by conservative “save our schools” pundits. Indeed, God help the learner in the neoliberal public schoolhouse who might choose, instead, to pursue an “irresponsible passion” in one of the “irreverent” and underfunded disciplines in the humanities, arts, or human sciences.

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Neoliberal Culture and Teacher Subjectivities

The effects of neoliberal values and culture are, perhaps, even more pronounced and consequential for educators than for students. This is the case because teachers must not only abide by neoliberal education codes and sociocultural expectations, they must also implement, monitor, and enforce, even create and personify them in the school and classroom. As such, neoconservative reforms in education “are not simply instruments, but a frame in which questions of who we (as educators) are or what we would like to become emerge” (Dean, 1995, p. 581). As newly-packaged neoliberal professionals, today’s educators are asked to re-frame their sense of self so as to “calculate” about themselves as enterprising subjects in ways that add productive value to their stream of “outputs” (Rose, 1989). In the process, educators are “deprofessionalized” and “reprofessionalized” according to neoliberal assertions about the world (Seddon, 1997). And, in unison, the ethical implications inherent in the market-based regulation of schools require “the ideological co-optation of the moral and ethical consciousness of teachers” (Smyth et al., 2000, p. 86). Stephen Ball (2003), in his work on performativity in education, believes there are clear deleterious consequences for educators as a result of neoliberal-driven reforms in recent decades. These consequences involve the “re-forming of relationships and subjectivities” in education, and the formation of “new identities, new forms of interaction and new values” in schools (pp. 217–218). The results of this cultural shift in education include a devaluing of the imperatives of teachers as public servants, with professional judgment being “subordinated to the requirements of performativity and marketing”. Consequently, an overarching effect of business-style performativity for teachers is a decreased capacity for the committed ethics of human service, as “the space for the operation of autonomous ethical codes based in a shared moral language is colonized or closed down” (Ibid., p. 226). Indeed, teaching today requires an “ethical retooling” by educators in sync with market values that involves, among other things, calculated assessments of client (school, student, parent, owner), needs for “commercial decision-making” (Ibid.).

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Administrators as Neoliberal Prey

Because of a tendency to see teachers as the front line “shock troops” in schools under siege by neoliberal reforms, it is easy to forget the various ways in which the “nominally powerful” in schools – principals, directors, and school heads – are also negatively impacted by market-based globalization. Another reason for this oversight may be that one of the earmarks of market-driven reforms in schools is a shift away from teachers’ autonomy, independence, and control, toward administrators as the new “locus of knowing and control” (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014). And, so, rank-and-file educators may be at a greater loss of power due to marketization than school managers who increasingly are being effectively coopted as enforcers of neoliberal restructuring in schools. Drawing from Basil Bernstein’s (1971) rich work on the role of language in social formation, Ball (2003), for instance, asserts that a “new managerialism” uses appraisals and performance-related pay to extend greater control in the workplace, allowing “a greater range of the workers’ behaviour and emotional life to be made public” (p. 219). It is, of course, school administrators who submit the evaluations and impose the consequences upon which this type of new managerialism depends in education. Yet, we must avoid over-attributing responsibility to school administrators at the visible level of custodial behavior, while neglecting to consider deeper, less-apparent, yet decisive points of sociocultural interpenetration (such as commodification, quantification, accountability, and human capital normalization) at the institutional level that are engineered between administrators, schools, and the broader political and economic domains of neoliberal hegemony in which schools operate. This is to say that school administrators and managers themselves often fall prey to the doctrine of “new management” conservativism in education, professionally shaped and modeled according to a private sector mold and schema over which they have little control. Hill and Kumar (2009) refer to this layout as the “new public managerialism”, and argue that “the language and management style of private capital have replaced the ethic, language, and style of public service and duty” of the “old public services” (p. 20). According to Machin (2014), this private sector style of managerialism has “come to inform, define, and shape school improvement globally … colouring the contemporary discourses of school leadership” (pp. 19–20). The resulting reforms aim at “giving managers and organizations greater freedom in operational decisions and remove unnecessary constraints in financial and human resource management” (OECD, 1995 p. 29) so long as they uphold contemporary neoliberal principles, practices, and sensibilities. What this means in practical terms is greater administrative mobility to deregulate, privatize, and marketize schools at the

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local level without the undue “hold up” or complication of state or national civil law, bureaucracy, or public sector regulation.

7

A Personal Note: Ethical Dilemnas of the New Managers

I speak from personal experience when I say that at least some school administrators, likely quite a few, are more democratically and progressively oriented than the proponents of the neoliberal schoolhouse would otherwise allow or even acknowledge. Moreover, these same administrators, alongside the classroom educators with whom they work, experience their own forms of employment-related objectification and depersonalization in line with market-based efficiency, accountability, and performativity. Many simply do not feel ethically at ease or have any genuine sense of buy in with the changes neoliberalism has placed at the doorstep of schools over the course of the last 40 years. Indeed, managers and administrators in today’s neoliberal schools are up against a double-edged sword. That is, they must somehow attempt to uphold the historical values of Western humanism in education, still very much integral to the professional calling of school management, while at the same time being expected to meet performance criteria derived from market culture, much of which stands in stark contrast to humanist aspirations of teaching and learning. According to Veugelers (2011): Education from a humanist perspective focuses on developing rationality, autonomy, empowerment, creativity, affections, and a concern for humanity. This concern for humanity expresses the relation to other people. This social component can range from empathy to solidarity, and from one’s own community to the global world. Appreciating diversity and democracy are humanist ways of living together as human beings. (p. 1) Furthermore, part of the job of educational managers as (reluctant) participants in the “new managerialism” is to inspire confidence and loyalty in others regarding the effects of snowballing marketization in education. Moreover, they must do so while personifying those selfsame values at the interpersonal level of school relations and at community and professional levels in order to speak to concerns and reservations regarding the school’s market makeover. May (1994) comments: The work of the manager, the new hero of educational reform, involves instilling the attitude and culture within which workers feel themselves

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accountable and at the same time committed or personally invested in the organization. These new managers, in part beneficiaries of reform, are the ‘technicians of transformation.’ (p. 619) Yet, the two potentially progressive values involved in the preceding discussion, humanism and community loyalty, may at times be in tension, perhaps may even be antithetical, with regard to some of the more challenging expectations of neoliberalism in local and national sectors of education (downsizing, privatization, productivity, efficiency, performativity). Indeed, one can even imagine a sort of “cognitive dissonance”, an unsettling inconsistency between what one believes and what one does, taking root at the local level with school managers who are more self-aware and sensitive of the incongruities between professional task and personal truth. Machin (2014) captures the gist of this dilemma beautifully: For schools, and for principals in particular, this ‘for-profit’ paradigm presents a potentially uneasy paradox. Required to balance the aims of educational and commercial effectiveness, required to be both educator and manager, and required to be guardian of educational values and protector of the financial bottom line, school leaders in for-profit contexts must act as brokers between the often competing discourses of the educational chalk face and the commercial boardroom. (p. 27) This is not to say that teachers and administrators experience the same sorts, or even the same level, of discomfort and difficulty in the face of capitalist market incursions into schools and learning. It is to say, however, that as a result of unilateral, top-down, externally mandated infusions of neoliberal commodification, efficiency, and accountability, all educators, both teachers and administrators, run the risk of becoming little more than “bricks in the wall” of the neoliberal schoolhouse; cast equally, more or less, into the ranks of the “barely surviving”, members of a depleted and demoralized public sector, trying desperately to regain a sense of meaning and purpose in what was once a lifelong calling and a valorous moral duty.

8

Human Capital Theory and the OECD Revisited

As previously explored regarding the paramount impact of global IGOs on local systems of education, the market colonization of hearts and minds in the culture of schools, sewn into education at the planetary level by neoliberalism,

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is perhaps best captured and summed up with regard to the highly contentious and rightist-laced assumptions of human capital theory. Originally developed to explain wage differentials under capitalist labor conditions, human capital theory remains a pivotal economic force in education and has contributed significantly to neoliberal economic restructuring of Western liberal democracies since the 1980s (Block, 1990, p. 1). As has been frequently and aptly pointed out, the concept of human capital informs many neoliberal economic development strategies and is a key factor in determining capitalist market performance (see Fitzsimons, 2015). Individuals, constructed and imagined as human capital, are assumed to be affected by conditions involving representation along various economic metaphors, such as “technological change”, “research”, “innovation”, “productivity”, and “competitiveness” (Block, 1990, p. 1). The ability of human capital theory to impact educational sectors and instructional programs worldwide is underscored by the fact that it represents a key rationale for countless position papers, programs, and policies by major international agencies regarding structural change in education. As previously discussed, along with the World Bank, of special note in this regard is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Together, members of these two IGOs account for a significant amount of the world’s economic activity.1 In fact, the 34 member states and five key partner nations of the OECD alone account for 80 percent of all world trade and investment.2 Human capital theory has been a staple orientation of OECD education policy since the 1960s, with a clear shift toward a more neoliberal interpretation in the 1980s (Ward, 2012). The agency’s 1987 policy publication, Universities Under Scrutiny, for example, proposes that post-secondary curriculum be changed to align closely with “long-term economic trends and secular changes in employment patterns” (p. 104), that academic staff be required to have practical vocational experience in their field (p. 102), and that traditional forms of collegial control be replaced by corporate-style management (p. 103). The last two points in particular resonate with the new business managerialism taking place in the public sector and the keying of teaching and education to the principles and performance demands of private sector firms. Largely a result of the increasing transnational character of intellectual activity and property under globalization in 1980s and ‘90s, OECD economic theory and policy recommendations morphed into “new growth” or “endogenous growth” pertaining to the role of human capital theory in education. Essentially a derivative and upgrade of former human capital principles, the “recent reformulation of Human Capital Theory … stressed the significance of education and training as the key to participation in the new global economy” (Fitzsimons, 2015, p. 1). Endogenous growth theory imagines knowledge and

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education as the fourth factor of production, (apart from land, labor, and physical/financial capital), and equates the results of learning with an increase in products and commodities, fully marketable and exchangeable. Accordingly, the commodification of knowledge represented in the production of marketable ideas becomes intimately tied to the economic growth of nations, whereby such growth is no longer a matter of simply increasing the quantities of goods and services; but, more important, is now intimately tied to the ability of ideas to impact economic performance (Ward, 2012, p. 141). Or, as Paul Romer (1990), one of the founding architects of endogenous growth theory, states, “the stock of human knowledge determines the rate of growth” (p. 78). And, of course, the production, refinement, and application of growth-producing ideas best takes place within the confines of “pure market” conditions, primarily because “market incentives … play an essential role in the process whereby new knowledge is translated into goods with practical value” (Ward, 2012, p. 141). By the mid 1990s, then, disembodied, commodified knowledge as the holy grail of economic growth had been propelled by the OECD to the status of a unifying prescription for post-industrial capitalist societies. In its influential 1996 OECD report, The Knowledge Based Economy, human capital-oriented, new growth theory reigns supreme, especially as a basis for understanding “the role of knowledge and technology in driving productivity and economic growth” (p. 7). For the OECD, the term “knowledge-based economy” now reflects a fuller recognition of the role of knowledge and technology in economic growth, “embodied in human beings (as ‘human capital’) and in technology” (p. 9). In particular: Investments in knowledge can increase the productive capacity of the other factors of production, as well as transform them into new products and processes. And, since these knowledge investments are characterised by increasing (rather than decreasing) returns, they are the key to longterm economic growth. (OECD, 1996, p. 11) In addition to education and training, “new managerial work structures” are also “key” for increases in economic productivity and growth (OECD, 1996, p. 7). The central objective of the 1996 report is to encourage recognition of the need to create and quantify economic indicators of the “relation between knowledge creation and economic performance” in order to integrate them into models and measures of productivity and development, an area of investigation “still virtually unmapped”, according to the OECD, at the time of its publication (Ibid., p. 29). Thus, by the end of the 1990s the OECD’s economic development meme of enriched human capital theory was expressed through

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the promotion of a representational “knowledge society” in OECD countries of the sort formerly mentioned. As such, “a bold new frontier, where flexible and well-educated knowledge workers produce smartly and efficiently, while continually creating innovative new products to fuel the marketplace and profit making” became the quid pro quo for quality education (Ward, 2012, p. 130). According to Ward (2012), by the late 1990s “international policy flows” imposing a global regime of “cognitive capitalism” promoting neoliberal ends in OECD and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries were being put in place worldwide by a combination of international agencies, national governments, and non-governmental organizations. Their goal was “to transform knowledge into an engine of economic development and nations and regions into reflexive, knowledge creating, disseminating and utilizing societies” (Ibid., pp. 8–9). By the new millennium, the World Bank, as well as UNESCO and the European Union, received a handoff of the endogenous growth theory baton, joining OECD in its drive to measure, modify, and marketize knowledge; reorganize universities; and place economic-based knowledge and innovation at the heart of development (OECD, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2004). Consequently, neoliberalization in the form of human capital advancement had clearly become a global project for major international development agencies by the turn of the beginning of this century (Fitzsimons, 2015).

9

Constraining the Relational in School Culture

Germane to our present discussion, is also an examination of the ways in which human capital theory has ensconced itself in the vital cultural lifelines of teaching and learning in schools, creating restrictions and expectations so harsh and uncompromising that they alter the rich possibilities of human contact in education. Like so much of neoliberal ideology, human capital theory is deceptively “reasonable” and “self-affirming”. It proceeds from a core proposition that appears simple and straight forward: Human capital theory rests on the assumption that formal education is highly instrumental and even necessary to improve the production capacity of a population. In short, the human capital theorist argues that an educated population is a productive population. (Olaniyan & Okemakinde, 2008, p. 479) In other words, human capital theory exclusively endorses and promotes education and learning that involve first-and-foremost “knowledge, attitudes, and

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skills that are developed and valued primarily for their economically productive potential” (Baptiste, 2001, p. 185). From this point of departure, then, it proceeds unabashedly a priori that the primary goal of teaching and learning is to increase (worker) productivity. Expectantly, education in this light is also viewed as a desirable source of new social skills and knowledge that should enable individuals to better function in modern capitalist society (Fägerlind & Saha, 1989), which in practical terms means to function as eager, cooperative, compliant, and docile, yet technologically savvy, workers and consumers. That is: The economization of education includes giving an economic value to social skills. Cognitive and social skills are valued according to their contribution to economic development. In other words, the goal of the economic education model can be described as producing “homo economicus” or the “economic human” who will fit into the work environment of modern business enterprises or becomes an entrepreneur in the global economy. (Spring, 2014, p. 44) Regarding both the skill base and the social designs of human capital theory, we have already seen substantial evidence and argument in earlier examinations of efficiency and accountability in neoliberal education policies to give accurate associative meaning to the designs and details of the OECD and the World Bank regarding the role schools are expected to play in human capital-based development. That is, as a doctrinal mainstay of neoconservative educational reform, human capital theory imbues the relational dimensions of teaching and learning with painful infusions of objectification, instrumentalism, and estrangement. Or, as Fitzsimons (2015) comments, human capital theory assumes: All human behaviour is based on the economic self-interest of individuals operating within freely competitive markets. Other forms of behaviour are excluded or treated as distortions of the model. (p. 1) Fitzsimons (2015) further concludes human capital theory is “unable to understand human activity other than as the exchange of commodities” and therefore represents “an impoverished notion of capital” (Ibid., p. 3). Additional indication of the relational aridness and paucity of human capital education, devoid of humanizing tendencies, can be sensed in the following statement privileging education as a “productive investment”:

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Human capital theory emphasizes how education increases the productivity and efficiency of workers by increasing the level of cognitive stock of economically productive human capability which is a product of innate abilities and investment in human beings … Formal education is seen as a productive investment in human capital, which the proponents of the theory have considered as equally or even more than equally worthwhile than that of physical capital … The focus on education as a capital good relates to the concept of human capital, which emphasizes that the development of skills is an important factor in production activities. (Olaniyan & Okemakinde, 2008, p. 479) Yet, what seldom if ever seems to get attention by human capital proponents are the many and protracted ways in which expectations regarding such econometric indicators as “productivity” and “efficiency” work to demote, disrupt, dismiss, and demolish the fragile inter subjectivities and relational dimensions upon which learning (and teaching) are anchored and depend. Baptiste (2001), for example, claims that educational programs “wedded to human capital theory … treat learners as rugged individualists indebted to no one and requiring nothing of anyone” (p. 198). In fact: Human capital theorists treat people as homo economica: radically isolated, pleasure-seeking materialists who are born free of social constraints or responsibility, who possess no intrinsic sociability, and who are driven, ultimately, by the desire for material happiness and bodily security. (Ibid., p. 195) Baptiste (2001) also asserts that individuals described in human capital terms bear a striking resemblance to “lone wolves”, whose pleasure-seeking and security-preserving “actions are instinctual and adaptive, not intentional or creative” (Ibid., p. 196). Accordingly, the educational aspirations and desires of such individuals should thus be: Determined by ‘market analysis’ and by technical considerations commonly referred to as ‘needs assessments’, rather than by any ethical or moral philosophy of the educator or program. (Ibid.). The uncertainties, challenges, triumphs, and inner transformations of conscious, willful, vulnerable individuals as they pursue learning, receive little

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attention. In fact, the most that human capital theory has to offer in this regard is perhaps to propose: Capital and natural resources are passive factors of production, human beings are the active agencies who accumulate capital, exploit natural resources, build social, economic and political organization and carry forward national development. (Psacharopoulos & Woodhall, 1997, p. 102) Not the best accounting possible, in the author’s opinion, of the messiness, meandering, magic, and majesty of human interrelatedness that takes place when we try to teach and learn together. Along these lines, Block (1990) insists that precisely because human capital accounting is based on assumptions of neoclassical philosophy, first formulated and caste in the opaque and incomplete human understandings of the nineteenth century, yet attempts to represent itself in contemporaneous terms that are universal and ahistorical, it may be high time to rigorously re-examine the certainty and truth of those earlier presuppositions. I hope we have in some way at least created an entry point into that re-examination in the present chapter. Having completed a consummate query and examination in the first twelve chapters of this book of the key principles and practices, global institutions and local repercussions, (including the social and cultural ramifications), of nearly four decades of neoliberal influence in education, we will now attempt in our final chapter to struggle toward a corrective means for effectively responding to the acute crisis neoliberalism has created in education worldwide today.

Notes 1 http://www.oecd.org/about/; http://www.worldbank.org/en/about/what-we-do 2 http://www.oecd.org/about/history/

CHAPTER 13

Extinguishing the Flames of Our Village Burning: The Spirit and Ground of Education Re-Imagined If schools and education are to help save us from the host of ills bedeviling our planet, a number of which were examined at the outset of this book, they must first figure out how best to save themselves. As has been repeatedly stated and thoroughly demonstrated, any semblance of education, especially public education, ever having existed as a historical locus of social progress has been tragically eroded and undermined by globalized neoliberal creep in our schools and societies. While questions of the accuracy of perceiving education as a champion of social progress in the 20th century remain a conversation well worth having, certainly the tenets of marketization, privatization, and human capital-based pedagogy, working hand-in-glove with the forces of neoliberal globalization, propagated and enforced by the collusion of a select few global governance bodies, have soundly pulled back the veil of any remaining illusions regarding education providing a moral critique or constraining check on the excesses of global capitalism. Quite the contrary. Consequently, what is needed in this epoch of unregulated, unrestrained world markets, with their corrosive social and cultural reverberations, is for schools and educators to gather the means needed to engage in a vigorous de-neoliberalizaiton of education. Schools and those who inhabit them must be re-imagined and reconstructed in ways that allow for re-vitalization and realization of education’s true nature as the massive harbinger of redemptive social change across the planet. Although problems can only be experienced in immediate, intimate, up-close-and-personal local points of contact, if the last four decades of global neoliberalism have taught us anything, it is that, except in the most trivial or rarefied instances, each day, more-and-more, separate, independent, insulated, autonomous “local spaces” exist less and less. What once may have been imagined as personal is now shared, and what was once thought to be local is now greatly deterritorialized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972). Because of the economic, social, and cultural interdependence and integration heralded by capitalist globalization, any efforts to reawaken the socially redemptive prowess of education must grapple with that interdependence, and be heartened by the particular possibilities and systemic contexts of transformative international education. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004413603_013

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Spirits of Hope in International Education

Spirits of hope in international education remind us that meeting the challenges of mounting global crises, perhaps insuring our own survival, intimately depends on deep and far-reaching changes in the way we teach and learn in schools (Orr, 2004; Baker, 2008). We must constantly and earnestly ask ourselves what can be done to change both the spirit and the letter of educational curricula and school culture, so as to ally with larger social and political forces working to break free of the retrogressive spirals of global inequality, injustice, war, and environmental devastation that seem so integral to neoliberal globalization. In their place we must imagine and create a truly redemptive form of international education that realizes human potentials and helps to mold critically reflective and engaged world citizens. One point of entry for this transformation from human-capital objectivation to the realization of socially progressive human potential can be found in fostering a global sense of common purpose in education through the sorts of intercultural collaboration that provide the skills and sensibilities needed to resolve the multidimensional crises threatening the world’s future (Baker, 2008). Such a common purpose will necessitate, among other things, the development of a vision in education that imagines “a world view based on cross-cultural understanding leading towards a holistic view of world affairs and ultimately towards more peaceful collaboration between peoples and nations” (Haywood, 2002, p. 171). Consequently, in light of the social and environmental decline taking place in the world on so many levels, a shining source of hope in education, especially in international education, is cultivating an international or planetary awareness or consciousness among teachers and students sufficient to fundamentally alter the ways in which we experience and act in the world. In its more practical incarnations, such a state of heart and mind in international education is sometimes called “global citizenship” or “international-mindedness”. Cambridge (2010), for example, supports the view that an important “role of education in the reproduction of societal cultures” is one that cultivates a “form of education for cosmopolitan citizenship” (p. 142). Similarly, Lewis (2005) suggests that any student program for global citizenship must provide specific criteria for civic responsibility. Accordingly, Noddings (2005) insists that learning how to be global citizens has never been more urgent, and proposes that education for global citizenship must include such ethical values as community building, mutual respect, social responsibility, appreciation for diversity and social justice, and ways to manage and resolve conflict. Furthermore, while acknowledging that concepts like “international mindedness”

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remain a challenge to define and foster in education, Davies (2011), ventures several plausible qualities that a curriculum effectively embodying such a principle might contain. These include an emphasis on the role of culture in human life, the interdependence of natural and human systems, the importance of peace education and conflict resolution in promoting social harmony, the significance of environmental awareness and sustainability, and the benefits of promoting citizenship and service as requirements of individual responsibility (p. 2). One well-received description of the qualities or skills “global citizens” might possess can be found in Oxfam’s Education for Global Citizenship (2006). Influential in the school systems of numerous of countries, Oxfam defines a global citizen as someone who is: Aware of the wider world and has a sense of their own role as a world citizen, respects and values diversity, has an understanding of how the world works economically, politically, socially, culturally, technologically and environmentally, is outraged by social injustice, is willing to act to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place, participates in and contributes to the community at a range of levels. from the local to the global. (p. 1) In effect, publicly funded schools should promote the social good. While definitions of social good may vary from one society to another: In a democracy, this social good is reflected in the provision of a common educational experience that will give students the start that they need to become full participants in the social, political and economic institutions of their worlds … A democracy requires that its members master the skills and knowledge necessary for civic and economic participation, including one’s rights and responsibilities under the law, the principles of democratic government, and an understanding of the overall economy and preparation to take on productive roles. (Belfield & Levin, 2002, pp. 49–50) Finally, one must hope that at least some of the preceding qualities of global citizenship within a democratic context are inferred in the International Baccalaureate Organization’s (IBO) 2007 brochure entitled “Education for a better world” in which IB students are represented as “internationally aware citizens, with open minds and open hearts” (p. 10).

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International Schools Infused with Critical Thought and Critical Pedagogy

In the author’s view, key among the essential sensibilities needed for planetary citizens in this time of crisis is a pronounced capacity for genuine critical thinking. In our present historical context, such thinking is tantamount to the ability of educators and students to challenge the naturalizing representation of so-called free markets as the apex of human evolution and social organization. To these ends genuine critical thinking involves the cultivation of morally and socially meaningful critical evaluative and analytic skills that do more than merely pass judgement on the validity or invalidity of a particular argument or proposition. While such rhetorical abilities remain important in education, under present world conditions they must be extended to include open dialogue regarding the implicit power relations and types of social privilege advanced or discouraged by particular views, as well as the many ways humans are ultimately harmed or helped by social practices that arise from certain beliefs, convictions, and actions, even though they may appear, on the surface, as perfectly “well-reasoned”, in clear accord with the rules of logic. Following our rather rigorous and extensive shaking down of the adverse effects of neoliberal globalization on contemporary education, a concluding article of faith of this conversation is that education can and should be (re) invigorated to effectively address the most-pressing problems of our time. As has been shown with particular regard for the adverse consequences globalization has had on education, such a project is not only worthy and needed, but urgently so. The emerging field of international education can serve a vital role as arbiter of the progressive change needed to rescue our planet and its inhabitants from an increasingly likely demise. The context for this manner of progressive education is an expanding system of international schools. That is, as unregulated, free market globalization and its incumbent distortions build momentum (Stiglitz, 2002), so too does a parallel, symmetric system of mostly independent, mostly private, largely affluent, yet loosely coordinated K-12 international schools (Pearce, 2013). While a precise definition of what constitutes an “international school” remains somewhat contentious, (see Hayden & Thompson, 2008), the accelerating growth and presence of K-12 schools claiming some form of “international” identity is striking (Brummitt & Keeling, 2013). It has been estimated, for example, that by 2020 there will be 10,000 international schools worldwide with 5.2 million students and nearly a half-million teachers (Keeling, 2010). Located in capital cities and burgeoning hubs of trade and commerce around the globe, these schools cater to the needs of the local elite and the children of

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relatively privileged and geographically mobile expatriate families. Many seek to provide English-medium preparation programs as gateways of admission to reputable universities in the metro poles of Europe, Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States (Matthews, 1989; Hayden & Thompson, 1995; Sutcliffe, 2001; Hurley, 2006; Lauder, 2007; Canterford, 2009). Despite the relatively elite status of the vast majority of international schools, and despite the fact they are products of the precise types of educational privatization and marketization the author has sought to critically weigh from the outset; paradoxically the potential of these schools to play a meaningful role in promoting planetary social progress vis-à-vis some form of critical international education is enormous. That is, although far from constituting an homogenous educational “system”, international schools represent a growing worldwide assortment of parallel sites of learning, often with similar (internationally oriented) curriculum and (multicultural) student and staff demographics. These schools, if given over to progressive, socially engaging principles and practices, could positively transform international education as we know it, and, in the process, impact and change social conditions in local communities, even worldwide. International schools remain at the edge of, yet integral to, global civil society. The creation of a shared process-based, critically reflective social and pedagogic activism within these schools could work to establish “nodes of civic transformation” at key geographic and education intersections around the world. Each of these ongoing local-global nodes of connectivity could eventually be broadened to engage other points of reception and transmission for progressive lines of communication and coordination. What is being pointed out here is that international schools, or schools with strong programs of international education, can potentially work to unleash on the world successive generations of international activists, poised to move forward together with broad, inclusive, democratic campaigns for planetary change and progress. Contemporaneous with the emergence and growth of international schools is the development of a loosely affiliated stream of socially engaged, democratic education philosophies and practices generally termed critical pedagogy (see Apple, 1978, 2004; Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1983, 1988, 2007; Kincheloe, 2007). Key aspects of these approaches pose tremendous transformative potential as viable and direly needed alternative sources of teaching and learning in international schools. Embodying a rich and varied kaleidoscope of socially relevant theories and applications, critical pedagogy works to combine and interject personal narrative, critical self/social reflection and analysis, and political activism into classrooms, schools, and communities. At its most basic it converges with the broad field of cultural studies and provides an alternative

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“way of seeing, analyzing, and intervening into operations of power within various sites of learning, but most specifically schools” (Weiner, 2007, p. 62). In other words, critical pedagogy invokes a theory and praxis of education which “moves us beyond concern for individual student achievement and requires an additional commitment to the transformation of education and society” (Braa & Callero, 2006, p. 357). Within the context of our discussion of the neoliberal schoolhouse, critical pedagogy presents the possibility of using sociallytransformative teaching and learning in schools to resist the adverse effects of neoliberal globalization. Similarly, it poses resistance to neoliberal education through an education of resistance. Examined from a slightly different angle, international education today, informed by critical pedagogic principles, has the potential to offer no less than a “critical ontology”: The process of reconnecting human beings on a variety of levels and in numerous ways to a living social and physical web of reality, to a living cosmos. Critical pedagogues with a critical ontological vision help students connect to the civic web of the political domain, the biotic web of the natural world, the social web of human life, and the epistemological web of knowledge production. (Kincheloe, 2007, p. 34)

3

Globalization as an Opportunity for Awareness and Action in International Education

In the storms of indictments against neoliberal globalization for its erosion of community, security, health, and equality for large swaths of the world’s population, it is easy to overlook the potential usefulness of a planet governed by transnational capital and pole-to-pole markets. Gough (2014) refers to the opportunity to see old matters in fresh ways, to chew on the world with new teeth, as “defamiliarization”, a transformative process through which we are able “to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar” (p. 4). A common feature of artistic creations and creative brainstorming, defamiliarization always invokes a “tactic of surprise”; it sets alight intellectual and emotional breakthroughs capable of diminishing perceptual distortions, and flushing out the limits and window bars of our own preconceptions. The best results and products of conscious defamiliarization are increased clarity, flexibility, and creativity. Perhaps, then, the half-full portion of the globalization glass is our ability to defamiliarize ourselves with the inherent interconnectedness and interdependencies it fosters in ways that enables social progress in the world.

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Roland Robertson (1992), for example, contends that globalization “refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (p. 8). Perhaps, then, it is the increased consciousness and awareness of geographic and social fluidity and interconnection caused by globalization, and a general breakdown of traditions that give rise to multiple options regarding beliefs, values, and lifestyles (Waters, 1995; Berger, 2002; Cuddy-Keane, 2003) which provide the truly positive face of globalization’s possibilities. In support of this point, Hernàndez I Martí (2006) discusses the importance of renewed imagination fostered by what he terms the “deterritorialization of cultural heritage” under conditions of “globalized modernity”: Through the process of a mediatic expansion of imagination, from their own local situation individuals can imagine other lives, become familiar with landscapes and cultural products alien to their locality, create new materials for the re-elaboration of the local experience, develop transnational cultural links, take cultural diversity to the locality, reinterpret standardized cultural products or set the conditions for hybridization to take place. (p. 93) Consequently, an interconnected web of socially redemptive internationally minded schools spanning the planet could do much with the possibilities of defamiliarization and renewed imagination in response to globalization. Reconstituting our understanding of neoliberalism’s adverse impact on the world within a context of vitalized, critical international education is desirable on at least two counts. First of all, fixed and conditioned, if well-meaning, responses to an increasingly menacing world, rarely changes much in a world of dynamic twists and turns. What may be most needed are fundamentally different views and approaches that are inherently adaptive, enabling us to get beyond our habituated views and enter “new zones” of being, perceiving, and acting with deeper levels of flexibility, clarity, and creative responsiveness. In an early work on the need for individuals to comprehend the importance of global interconnectivity, Hanvey (1978) argued for a transition or shift from “pre-global” to “global consciousness”. Central to the changes involved in the formation of global consciousness is a change in perspective consciousness: The awareness on the part of the individual that he or she has a view of the world that is not universally shared, that this view of the world has been and continues to be shaped by influences that often escape conscious detection, and that others have views of the world that are profoundly different from one’s own. (p. 15)

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Indeed, if our knee-jerk responses to globalization on the Left and the Right have anything in common, it is the tremendous toll they have on the virtues of strategic flexibility and provisional clarity as we attempt to act responsively in the ongoing flux of global transmutations, and to arrive at creative responses to the changing needs and circumstances of humans in perpetual disarray. An enhanced planetary awareness in the classroom, seasoned with large amounts of defamiliarization, self awareness, and perspective consciousness, is as much capable of throwing critical light on the dark recesses of globalization as it is of exposing the limitations of our own conditioned perceptions and reactive political reflexes. At its best, such awareness can reanimate the rare attributes of flexibility, provisional clarity, and creativity in teaching and learning, virtues essential if we are to redeem and reinvigorate internatonal schools and international education through a conceptually and strategically fluid critical pedagogy. Equally vital, it is indispensable we remember that globalization is far from the uniform, seamless, encompassing worldwide process both language and political convenience would have us believe. Accordingly, there exist numerous systemic gaps and vulnerable points of entry for a heightened planetary awareness of globalization, one that both increases our ability to think holistically and provides opportunities for leverage against the status quo. Birch and Mykhnenko (2010), for example, claim that the impact of capitalism in different global hemispheres has generated “great divergence in outcomes” between old and newly emergent capitalist states, and even within the geographical boundaries of nations (p. 11). This divergence is in fact so pronounced that global neoliberalism at present is characterized by “variegated, hybrid, and geographically specific political economies in which universal economic tenets and practices” are “married to national and regional concerns” (Ibid.). Indeed, a cursory examination between and within nations of such a touchstone political economic measure as “popular attitudes toward social welfare” underscores the differential impact of globalization, and “suggests unevenness in the neoliberal project which abnegates any suggestion of neoliberalism as a universal, totalizing and inevitable process” (Macleavy, 2010, p. 133). Secondly, globalization presents splendid opportunities for fine-tuning our understanding of the countless ways in which market-tainted educational approaches are not addressing the dire urgencies of a planet mired in crises. Given perchance that some level of hubbub and inspiration driven by socially critical education can be spawned in local sites of learning, even the best of these efforts are destined to be weighed down, made sluggish, rendered opaque, unless some manner of reckoning is brought to bear on knee-jerk status quo pedagogic formulas and regressive institutionalized expectations that have

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flourished exponentially in the human capital/neoliberal schoolhouse era of the last half-century. In some of the vernacular of the global market/privatized education complex, these albatrosses on progressive ed typically involve such relics as “school-to-work performance standards”, “basic skills and vocational curricula”, and “externally assessed qualifying exams”. These market-driven performativity measures of what it “truly means to learn and teach” must be reeled in and unceremoniously placed on a back shelf. This in no way is meant to imply that reasonable norms regarding a school’s functional competency, or well-informed measures of what constitutes student success, be abandoned outright. Literacy, current events, and computational skills will always be valuable, in any society. It is, however, meant to say that when such factors seem increasingly designed to naturalize the social reproduction of market capitalism masked as education across the globe, or to inhibit and prevent alternative narratives regarding the historically mandated role and obligation of schools to take on issues of social in/justice, including equal access to quality learning; then, of course, the “hidden curriculum” embedded in these practices deserves exposure, and those harmed by that curriculum are entitled to the protection of sanctioned, safe avenues for collapsing, correcting, and (re)constiuting the hallowed link between schools and social transformation. As a result, once again, globalization as evolutionary opportunity can be placed front and center and an authentic progressive planetary education can be moved forward. Or, as Fazal Rizvi (2008) points out, when grappling with issues of globalization, educators must highlight: The importance of ‘grassroots’ global networks capable of interrogating dominant social imaginaries that are no longer adequate for negotiating the complex global realities we now confront. In this sense, cosmopolitan learning is not concerned so much with imparting knowledge and developing attitudes and skills for understanding other cultures per se, but with helping students examine the ways in which global processes are creating conditions of economic and cultural exchange that are transforming our identities and communities; and that, unreflexively, we may be contributing to the production and reproduction of those conditions, through our uncritical acceptance of the dominant ways of thinking about global interconnectivity. (p. 31) And, of course, we must never relinquish our willful volition to consent or otherwise in the face of oppression and injustice, as no form of hegemony is ever completely beyond the reach of personal or collective resistance. Even the most aggressive policies of education liberalization under GATS agreements,

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for example, never go completely uncontested. Public universities, teacher unions, development NGOs, and other education stakeholders often oppose and campaign against the GATS in numerous countries and across a broad range of levels, from local to global (Verger, 2009). Similarly, it is incorrect to conceptualize the OECD as holding uncontested or unmediated power over educational policies, as that organization’s recommendations are frequently mediated at the local and national levels by political coalitions that create large significant differences in implementation (Bieber & Martens, 2011). Too often, neoliberalism seems to have a nebulous, atmospheric status somehow floating above the heads of political agents and predetermining the structure and behaviour of their actions, the organizations they work in, and the institutional environment in which they operate. This runs the risk … of naturalizing neoliberalism as ‘out there’ and ready to be implemented, implying not only a universal reach, but also a monolithic notion of ‘natural’ (and somehow moral) order and political inevitability. (Birch & Tickell, 2010, pp. 42–43) The purpose of this section has been to explore some of the spirits of hope lurking in the halls and classrooms of today’s international schools and schools with international orientations. These spirits bode well for our collective ability in education to generate corrective measures before the gathering storm reaches what may eventually be a final and irreversible landfall. Let us now turn our attention once again to the larger contextual ground and systemic circumstances in which schools must operate, while we propose some ways that obstacles to socially progressive education in these circumstances may be overcome. It will be reasoned that any project intended to reclaim the activist functions of education by fostering an interlinking critical pedagogy in international schools worldwide must contend with the larger legal, institutional, and normative contexts, or planetary ground, in which schools exist.

4

The Planetary Ground for Transformative International Education

No institution (or any social formation, for that matter) functions in a vacuum. In the case of schools, choices regarding what, how, and who to teach can only extend as far as surrounding constraints, proscriptions, and guarantees allow. Equally, because the neoliberal schoolhouse is a global phenomenon, even the boldest and most innovative attempts to redeem its socially transformative potential from within, at the local level, will only succeed alongside extensive

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and protracted efforts to change the planetary ground within which contemporary teaching and learning take root. In short, before broad and meaningful progress can be made toward truly liberational methods of international education, schools and schooling must extricate themselves from the culture of the global market, revitalize the controlling powers of nation-states, and reshape the instruments of global governance. The essential factors necessary to cultivate this reconstructed ground involve making private sector education providers morally and legally accountable to principles of equity and inclusion, promoting education as a human right, and (re)fashioning genuinely compassionate global governance informed and driven by an activist planetary civil society.

5

A Revitalized State and Private Education Accountability

Much has already been said regarding the corrosive impact neolliberal globalization has had on the sovereign powers of nation-states. Over the course of the last four decades this erosion has taken the form of downsizing, marketization, and privatization of public goods, combined with the concomitant penetration of neoliberal culture into the very operational texture of the few remaining scarecrow public sector enterprises. Furthermore, it has been argued that the resulting d/evolved state has meant a combination of de-capitalization, de-criticalization, and de-democratization for education sectors everywhere, with massive infusions of human capital objectives to fill the void. Thus, given the devitalization of governments’ ability to command the helm of their own polity in the crossfire of IMF/World Bank conditionalities, the WTO’s “commericialization creep” into public service sectors, and the OECD’s market cult of human capital-led development; it would seem that the first order of importance in the reconstitution of socially transformative systems of public education is the reawakening and revitalization of the state’s sovereign domain, especially its ability to regulate commercialized private education and to generate adequate revenues for the provision of public places of learning. As UNESCO (2008) points out, what is needed is not a reduction in public spending on education, but spending that is decidedly “pro-poor”, and realizes its “potential to redress inequalities … aimed at strengthening equity” (p. 14). Increasing the social-uplifting impact of public education requires more government investment, not less, and, in the case of the developing world, this means targeting expenditures toward such projects as building more teacher training colleges and increasing the education wage bill to attract teachers to poor, rural areas (Deghati, 2007).

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Of course, in most cases, expanded public works in education requires increased government revenue. In the present era of cutbacks, downsizing, and corporate / wealthy elite tax breaks, without a massive popular reconsideration of the civic and societal role and value of public education, attempts to generate the needed political will to increase spending on public education will probably fall futile, preordained to failure, Even under optimal political conditions, the requisite progressive restructuring of tax codes and the approval of public education spending bills can take place only under the guise and guardianship of a nationally elected government ready and prepared to reclaim and exercise its sovereign powers of statehood, both in its commitment to overseeing and checking the adverse social consequences of rampant privatization in education sectors, and in its willingness and ability to extract fair tax compensation from domestic and international capital. Stated in brief, functional systems of public education are not going to happen without increased government spending. And, given the present neutered and hemmed in condition of the d/evolved state, without mass popular support for revitalizing government’s ability to again make social claims on national resources, including a progressive tax base on private wealth, increased expenditures on public education are not going to happen. Yet, as Reimers (2000) contends, “only policies that explicitly address inequality, with a major redistributive purpose … could make education an equalizing force in social opportunity” (p. 55). Increased public expenditures on education, as well as on health, as a means for social leveling are especially needed in developing countries. Not only do they contribute to the wealth of a country, but, when targeted toward the disadvantaged segments of the population, they provide a means to a higher standard of living and increased social equality. Because of the impact increased education and health have on worker literacy and physical vitality, they also dramatically decrease the need for international funding directed at the development of human capital (Symoniak, 2011, pp. 5–6). And, only revitalized states in capitalist countries would be able to regulate and monitor private education providers in order to offset the “wide-ranging impact of the commercialization of education on the enjoyment of the right to education” (Education International, 2015). The resuscitation imperative needed by the state to regulate private capital influence in education is particularly crucial in situations where local schools have been auctioned off to foreign investors through international trade. As Devidal (2009) points out, “the liberalization of trade in educational services can have varied impacts on the development of the right to education, and therefore needs to be controlled” (p. 82). The need for increased local administrative control over WTO penetration into national service sectors in the

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incarnation of GATS, for example, is receiving broad international recognition. A recent UN resolution urges states to “monitor private education providers” and to “put in place a regulatory framework that establishes minimum norms and standards” (Education International, 2015). Such regulatory capability is particularly important in poorer countries, where local public education demands careful, flexible, and responsive government support to achieve the social and development goals of the larger national community. Consequently, because GATS and other neoliberal efforts to bring education services into the fold of international private capital markets involve an “erosion of policy space” and “poses particularly acute risks to education sectors in developing countries … it is vital that governments do not sign-away the right to effective market intervention” (Potterstraat, 2003). Even when private sector education providers are invited and encouraged by the state to help lighten some of the financial pressures resulting from endless rounds of government cutbacks, as will continue to be the case into the foreseeable future, this in no way means governments need abdicate their monitoring and regulatory oversight of private capital.

6

Education as a Human Right

One effective social and political pathway to the revitalization of state mechanisms capable of reconstituting lost and forgotten public schools, this time with enduring commitments to equitable, inclusive access and the promotion of vigorous, even contentious, civic engagement, including the placement of constraints on privatized education markets; may be found in the promotion of education as a human right, established and codified by numerous international declarations, charters, and conventions (Devidal, 2009, p. 78). As Robertson (2006) points out: There is a real tension between education as a human right and education as an area of trade. When member states allow education to be included and traded in global agreements like GATS, member states’ ability to ensure that education is a right for all, rather than a commodity to be purchased by the well-off, is considerably diminished. (p. 14) Thus, sanctifying and promoting education as an international human right means, on the one hand, that equitable education access must be universally granted, in roughly equal proportion, form, and quality to all those wishing to be “educated” without bias or differential treatment. Yet, on the other, the

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inherent contradiction between universal inclusion and private provision brings to the surface countless questions and doubts about the ability of private commercial interests to preserve and deliver education in ways that insure its continued status as a human right. The handover of education as a human right to market forces also poses questions about how well it can or will be protected by business self-interests “beyond the aligned and democratically featured bodies of exercising and controlling power” (Voutsa et al., 2014, p. 96), which is to say beyond the political and legal controls of civil society. Moreover, such a handoff directly contributes to the type of dispersion and outsourcing of effective state sovereignty that has been a constant source of lamentation throughout much of this book. When debtor countries are forced by international aid, trade, and financial bodies to impose tight limits on fiscal deficits and implement monetary policies that push inflation down to extremely low levels, states are often placed in the difficult position of denying children the basic right to education and the long-term prospects for national economic development are compromised (Action Aid International, 2006, p. 2). Thus, by framing the contemporary polemic involving the impact on education of neoliberal-infused globalization within a context of the legitimate pursuit of schooling as a human right, the duly-recognized legitimacy of the state as a guarantor of that right is reconstituted, and the social welfare function of government in the public domain is at least partially recovered. Despite cries of “trade interference” by such entities as the WTO, establishing education as an essential social and human right subject to provision and control by the state potentially waylays commercial education traders with severe limitations (De Siqueira, 2005). Once education is recognized as “a human right and a public good, it is the responsibility of all governments to provide all women and men, boys and girls, free quality public education” (Education International, 2011). There is really little to support the belief that a privatized, forprofit, foreign capital-controlled domestic education sector will ever remotely meet standards of universal access and inclusion; nor from a self-interested private market view of things is there any significant reason to try. Because of the inherently contradictory nature of factors involved in attempting to create a working relationship between human rights compliance and privatized education, proposals have even been made to exclude education services entirely from the GATS (Ibid.). With education as a human right, states not only receive a mandate to provide, oversee, and enforce universal access to quality free public education, they are obligated to do so. The failure of schools and school districts to provide clear and fair equal access guidelines that explicitly prohibit discrimination, including the universal provision of free and compulsory education, requires that effective oversight mechanisms take charge of violations by

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private providers, language-appropriate instruction is guaranteed, and that the insurance of domestically competitive salaries for instructors, among other things, bolsters options for state revitalization once education is sanctified as a legally enforceable human right (ActionAid International, 2014, p. 10). According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (2002), it is the responsibility of states to ensure that the progressive introduction of free education at all levels be made available, accessible, acceptable, and adaptable for all citizens (p. 17). As Hoxby (2003a) points out, free markets are fundamentally incompatible with “the real world of education”. Schools are not allowed to go “bankrupt”, and simply allowing schools to fail in the orthodox business sense creates unacceptable social, economic, and political consequences. Indeed, “no government with a concern to protect basic citizenship rights can allow disadvantaged children to be further marginalized through competitive choice” (Ibid., p. 288). Furthermore, claims that competitive market forces increase educational quality, and thus promote overall social improvement, are not supported by cross-country evidence (Ibid.).

7

Progressive Civil Society as the Planetary Ground for Global Governance

A third dimension of an organized planetary ground offering the potential for a fundamental reworking of education, away from the corrosive effects of neoliberalism, toward an emancipatory and transformative role for schools and schooling, is found in the possibilities of a planetary civil society capable of providing the basis for new and hopeful forms of global governance. That is, in addition to the urgent need for the revitalization of state mechanisms capable, among other things, of holding private education accountable for insuring broad access to quality learning as an inalienable human right; there is as much cause for a participatory, progressive, democratic planetary civil society equally capable of holding the needed space for those states by supplanting and replacing centralized, authoritarian, regressive institutions of neoliberal global governance. Or, as one former World Bank Chief Economist points out, “to make the global economy more stable, to promote equity among countries, and to enhance the ability of developing countries to pursue their objectives”, it is necessary to carry out “reforms in global governance” (Stiglitz, 2008, p. 54). Thus, generative, progressive, meaningful reforms in education can only take place through the construction of a global civil society where norms, rewards, and expectations are less a function of market demand, and much more based on the promotion of a public good premised on equity and participation, pursued through broad-based and inclusive global forums and

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transnational agencies meant to mobilize social progress, not to foster and sanction disparities in wealth and opportunity (Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Boli & Thomas, 1999). Clark (2001), for example, speaks of a form of “ethical globalization” guided by an internationalization of civil society. Within the broader confines of such a civil order, educators would be asked to help students recognize the importance of such global civil values as poverty eradication, political inclusion, human rights compliance, environmental and cultural respect, and transparency and accountability in public office (p. 25). In contrast and opposition, then, to the “expansionary practices of global capitalism, an alternative humanistic possibility is recognized through a new global ideology that proposes global civil values in a global civil society” (Wylie, 2011, p. 21). Such a society must provide a comprehensive and responsive public domain through which self-governing communities are able to express particular interests, values, and norms that can be nudged along and actualized in larger administrative and political bodies and systems (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999; Lavoisier, 2003). A transformative shift in education supported by this broader social and political ground or context of necessity requires a transnational association of avowedly progressive individuals and groups coming together to create a new and just civil framework for global governance. Such a loose and broadly cast net of progressive elements in education spikes in feasibility when one accepts that global governance on any terms is inadvertently characterized by an evolving set of processes and interactions, rather than a fixed and permanent system of rules and exclusively top-down administrative hierarchies. When viewed through an inherently flexible and evolving lens, the ostensibly cohesive and set texture of neoliberal global governance actually reveals numerous levels and scales of heterogeneous private and public actions taking place in domains ranging from the local and national to the international and transnational (Higgot, 2000; Jessop, 2005). This is to say even the most established edifices of global neoliberal governance present countless points of entry, confrontation, destabilization, and germination; as a fact they rest on shifting sands pregnant with subversive possibilities. In the particular case of extricating education from the clutches of IGOs, transformative opportunities present themselves from several vantage points.

8

INGOs and Transnational Advocacy Networks

Of immediate relevance for pushing back against encroaching neoliberalism in education, as well as for providing an emergent schema of a future socially redemptive global civil society, progressive international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and advocacy networks loom large in the growing

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popular resistance to market-driven globalization. As Mundy and Murphy (2001) pointed out nearly two decades ago, “there are clear signs of a new and qualitatively different wave of transnational nongovernmental advocacy initiatives in education, especially around the idea of ‘education for all’” (p. 86). Central to the transnational nature of this advocacy are “new forms of cross-organizational collaboration and of unprecedented levels of interaction between INGOs and intergovernmental bodies around the theme of education” (Ibid., p. 125). Also, development and relief organizations are increasingly recognizing the important interdependency between advocacy and education. Non-governmental coalitions, more recently through social media and cyber networking, are also integrating education into larger agendas for global governance, and are in the process linking education to the mounting urgencies of social justice (Ibid.). Without significant material resources, these collectivities commonly use telecommunications and transportation technologies to build networks and generate international public attention for educatedrelated issues involving international organizations and intergovernmental regimes. Consequently, domestic and international groups are linked in collective protests against both governments and international organizational policies (Ibid., p. 89). Organizations involved in this campaign have moved into the international educational arena, not as service providers but, rather, as advocates mobilized around a well-developed action frame that links the problem of educational access to the wider issues of debt relief, human rights, and global equity, and targets the erosion of national commitments to free, publicly provided educational services. (Ibid., pp. 125–126) It is the author’s belief that such advocacy, with progressive INGOs as the basic model of social organization and operations, can foment many of the essential changes needed in this time of unprecedented world crisis. And, this can be done by constructing a fluid yet functional planetary civil society premised on principles of social equity and justice. Such efforts would consist, foremost, of helping coordinate a growing and evolving worldwide network of interconnected self-governing communities, each linked to the others by shared progressive values and visions, yet attuned to local needs and possibilities. In this way, progressive INGOs may come to represent the embodiment of an alternative form of inclusive and decentralized global governance, providing viable democratic alternatives to the ways in which together we cohabit a planet in present disarray. In the area of education, INGOs can also work together to help propagate alternative pedagogies that contain “countervailing powers to intergovernmental

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organizations (IGOs) like the World Bank and OECD” (Spring, 2014, p. 217), with a capacity to contradict and contain the market-profiteering and human capital instrumentalism that has become synonymous with globalized education. Similarly, transnational advocacy groups capable of imagining and acting beyond the limits of local identity can provide auxiliary support in a worldwide movement toward planetary citizenship. Referred to as transnational social movements (TSMs) or transnational advocacy networks (TANs), these groups are by definition diverse and divergent, committed to the worldwide development of cooperative and democratic institutions capable of influencing and transforming the politics and power structures of global organizations (see Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Boli & Thomas, 1999). In one respect, these transnational bodies represent the increasing power and influence of non-state actors in systems and networks of global governance. Through transnational advocacy, they are able to exert pressure on international agencies regarding such issues as human rights, debt relief, official development assistance reform, anti-globalization, and the universal right to education (Mundy & Manion, 2014). In another respect, they represent: The building blocks of a prototypical “global civil society”, with the power to influence, and perhaps democratize, the structure of world politics, both through their increasing influence within existing international institutions and through their capacity to use this influence to leverage change in individual nation-states. (Mundy & Murphy, 2001, pp. 85–86) Often involving fundamentally “new organizational forms” comprised of NGOs, citizens associations, and trade unions, these transnational bodies coalesce energies around world issues that involve global institutions, yet with a view toward implanting changes at local and national levels (Ibid.). Consequently, the rise of new technologies, the need for non-governmental sources to fill the social sector vacuum left behind by downsized states, and the contemporary broadening of possibilities for collective international political action have together created the conditions for these new forms of “transnational non governmental contestation” (Mundy & Murphy, 2001, p. 88). Indeed, borrowing from INGO models of organization and social change, progressive transnational bodies may eventually come to unseat and replace global organizations of neoliberal governance altogether, both in education and otherwise. The World Social Forum represents one such interdependent counterneoliberal globalization movement (Sheppard & Leitner, 2010). It provides a broad multinational public forum for “alternative thinking of alternatives”, including consideration of “different kinds of knowledge about social

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transformation and emancipation, exceeding the hegemonic epistemologies of the West” (p. 193). An important transnational advocacy network focusing specifically on education is the Global Campaign for Education (campaignforeducationusa.org). Initiated by OXFAM International, ActionAid, and the International Association of Teachers’ Unions, it brings together a large number of the world’s “Education For All” coalition members under one roof, as well as some of the largest international non-governmental organizations involved in education. Similarly, World Education Forum (WEF)1 provides opportunities to fight neoliberal hegemony in education by supporting local and international struggles for free, democratic, and quality public education as a right for all people (Domenech & Mora-Ninci, 2009). The purpose of WEF is to: Create a collective social movement that will mobilize educators, students, unions, social movements, governments, non-governmental organizations, universities, and schools, to advance the debate … on the difficulties and successes in carrying out an education for freedom, all inclusive, capable of inspiring an active citizenry, inter/multicultural, and planetary. (Ibid., p. 164) In light of our discussion of INGOs as possible prototypes for a new planetary civil society, World Education Forum is of particular importance. Its organizational culture and structure are based on decision-making processes derived from collective dialogue and input so as to “avoid the establishment of a centralized power structure away from democratic criteria” (Ibid.). Finally, Education International (EI), an international association of teachers’ unions and a planetary advocate for progressive educational change, has forged close working relations with both Oxfam and the Global Campaign for Education (Mundy & Murphy, 2001). Its advent since the 1990s represents another important strand in the global web of transnational advocacy groups. In particular, it has made significant gains toward achieving international solidarity among historically divided national and region-based labor unions, and has forged bonds of cooperation with a host of non-governmental groups centered on a shared agenda for planetary change. These bonds include formal consultative status with a number of UN organizations. Although EI’s traditional focus has been on the right of teachers to collective bargaining, it remains deeply engaged in a number of broader debates and dialogues involving the ravages of globalization, including research and oppositional lobbying against the WTO (p. 109). As Mundy and Murphy (2001) point out, Education International’s “status as a trade union movement suggests a capacity for disciplined and coherent activism” (p. 110).

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Conclusion: Alternative Imaginaries and the Paradoxes of Transformation in Education

It has been the intent of this final chapter to attempt to bring some amount of closure to the previous discussions regarding the effects of global neoliberalism on education. Central to this closure is the belief that substantive changes need to take place in both the spirit of education, and in the contextual ground within which teaching and learning take place. With regard to the “spirit side” of things, it has been argued that a combination of cross-cultural understanding and the promotion of global or cosmopolitan citizenship, given form through international education, can go stretches toward the type of planetary consciousness needed to pull us out of the present abyss. Along these lines, the development of critically reflective, dialogic, and activist engagement skills – perhaps best initially sewn within a growing system of international schools made receptive to the influences of critical pedagogy – can provide one possible package for “taking back” education from global market usurpation. Somewhat paradoxically, it has also been argued that it is possibly in the very destabilizing and crisis-producing effects for which globalization is often most severely taken to task that one finds the preconditions needed for engendering the sorts of creativity and shifts of awareness necessary to realize the planetary potentials of (international) education. Relatedly, an upswing in the liberational spirit of education is best effectuated within an enabling and supportive institutional and cultural “ground” at both local and global levels. Effectively promoting such a ground requires, first of all, a reinvigoration of the nation-state’s ability to collect revenues, to oversee and limit privatization, and to provide equal access to free quality public education. It has been proposed that perhaps the best way to reset the state’s sovereign powers in education is to pursue public school entitlements as part of a larger legal framework which recognizes equal educational access as an international human right. Finally, it was reasoned that a new and progressive planetary civil society, influenced by the operating principles of forward-leaning INGOs and driven by networks of transnational advocacy, is emerging as the ground for global governance. Such a ground would be immanently more conducive than the present status quo to fostering alternative imaginaries for global citizenship in education, the sort of imaginaries that place social progress over and above personal profit. As Fazal Rizvi (2008) eloquently proposes: It should be in our collective power to develop an alternative imaginary of global interconnectivity, one which is informed not by the universal-

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izing logic of the market … but by our determination to develop a different conception of global relations, which views all of the world’s diverse people and communities as part of the same moral universe. Such an imaginary requires the development of a sense of moral responsibility among students directed not only towards their families and nations, but also towards humanity as a whole. (pp. 31–32) Perhaps central to such imaginaries in education are, first and foremost, “human-centered perspectives”, comprised of “organically based thought … emerging from the exercise of sympathy and empathy” (Henderson, 1996, p. 84). Finally, the author would like to close the final leg of this discussion by proposing that if our planet, teetering on the verge of collapse, is to be salvaged, brought back to a world of redemptive life, then the human co-inhabitants of that planet must grow tolerant, even learn to embrace, the paradoxical, the contradictory, at certain junctures the seemingly non-sensical. Regarding reclaiming education from the jaws of global neoliberalism, at least three such enigmas are involved. The first involves accepting that nation-states must find ways to reanimate their sovereign authority in order, among other things, to take charge and soften the impact of planetary neoliberalism on education (as well as all benign public goods), while at the same time opening up those same sovereign domains to worldwide currents moving toward justice, equality, and inclusive community. This means, first and foremost, fighting tooth-and-nail to turn back the growing fires of xenophobia, racism, and ultra nationalism that have, for some time, been fanned by the local dislocations of a global neoliberalism unhinged. A new type of revitalized nation-state, then, must be reconstituted so as to promote receptivity to progressive social change among its citizens, yet be sufficiently defensive toward and cautionary of the unsettling winds of global markets in order not to undermine the manifestations of that receptivity. Educational systems springing from such arrangements must also, in parallel fashion, simultaneously promote local autonomy and progressive populist democracy, yet participate in and embrace guiding universal principles and values derived from the passions of social betterment and equality. Lastly, educators and students alike will have to learn to re-discover, examine, and understand their own ethnic, gendered, social-positioned, historical stories, even when these narratives forebode less than comfortable conversations around issues of unshared power, exploitation, and oppression. And, again, this is a conversation which will have to take place with the participants, often clinched in fierce disagreement and seeming incommensurability, somehow mustering the generosity of heart and mind to move effectively forward toward

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an authentic, inclusive, and validating understanding of their cultural, gendered, ethnic, historical “others”. As was stated on several occasions during this discussion, despite lofty expectations and the most far-reaching programs of deregulation and privatization in history, the 1990s and 2000s turned out to be lost decades for most developing and transition economies. In the case of Latin America, for example, even the most devout supporters of the Washington Consensus have had to admit that spurts of economic performance were combined with disappointingly slow growth in the long-term and little or no improvement in the region’s highly unequal income distribution (Kuczynski & Williamson, 2003, p. 10). In the final analysis, perhaps the eventual undoing of neoliberalism’s insidious impact on education rests on the hope that under the present form of globalization: If it turns out that people do not live in a perfectly competitive, free market; that unequal power always structures their relations; and that structural inequalities exist that confer unfair advantages on some and undue hardships on others, then it is very unlikely that educational programs that are wedded to human capital theory – those that are apolitical, adaptive, and individualistic – will ever be able to redress social inequalities. (Baptiste, 2001, p. 198) In the wake of a massive realization of this nature, it is our moral calling and historical task to replace programs of exclusion and inequity in education with quality programs of learning offering universal inclusion and pedagogical approaches that extoll the redemptive human virtues and socially (re)constructive projects needed to extinguish the flames of our village burning.

Note 1 See www.worldeducationforum.com

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Index access to education viii, 109, 155, 201–205, 221 AIDS 14–19, 34 alt-right ix–xi, 29–31 austerity 24, 60, 64, 86, 117, 118, 126, 129, 138, 140, 146, 149, 150, 154, 158–161, 184, 190, 192, 193, 198, 209, 214, 216, 224, 229

liberalization 59, 64, 81, 83, 84, 88–90, 97, 100–102, 106, 111, 115, 117, 118, 120, 128, 129, 134, 140, 152, 154, 156, 159, 160, 161, 162, 167–175, 177, 182, 182, 194, 239, 251, 254

critical pedagogy 246–248, 250, 252, 262

nation-state 34, 53–55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 76, 77, 84, 91, 94, 99, 100, 107, 148, 157, 175, 177, 184, 186–188, 190, 192, 193, 196, 198–200, 253, 260, 262, 263 neoliberal culture 233, 253 neoliberal state 78, 99, 104, 191, 193, 194 neoliberalism x–xii, 40, 41, 49–51, 53–54, 59, 61, 63–68, 70, 74, 76–82, 88, 89, 92–96, 99, 101, 103–106, 109, 116–118, 122, 130, 134, 142, 146, 153, 157, 159, 161, 165, 167–170, 175, 183, 184, 186–189, 191, 193, 197, 201, 208, 211, 216, 218, 219, 221, 223–227, 235, 236, 242, 243, 250, 252, 257, 258, 262, 263 new managerialism 234, 235

de-criticalization 188, 194, 200 de-democratization 188, 194, 197, 199, 200 deregulation 64–66, 68, 76, 78, 81–84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 108, 117, 128, 129, 134, 140, 154, 159, 162, 167, 182–184, 187–189, 194, 195, 200, 211, 221, 264 economic integration 57–60 ecological impact of war 45 ecological problems 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 48 education as a human right 199, 253, 255–257 gender gap 10, 11, 34 General Agreement of Tariffs and Services (GATS) 89, 169, 170–177, 198, 199, 203, 215, 251, 252, 255, 256 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 93, 170 global displacement 25 global governance x, 3, 8, 77, 92–96, 98, 107, 109, 113, 124, 132, 134, 152, 153, 160, 165, 167, 183, 186, 188, 196, 243, 253, 257–260, 262 global inequality 8–10, 244 global warming 35, 36 human capital xi, 86, 87, 90, 95–97, 140, 141–146, 148, 153, 157, 167, 178–182, 184, 193–198, 208, 234, 236–244, 251, 253, 254, 260, 264 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) 92, 94, 104, 107, 108, 178, 215 International Monetary Fund 60, 77, 92, 106, 108, 109, 111, 118, 135, 148, 159, 168, 189, 190

mono dimensional learner 231, 232

Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 108 planetary civil society 253, 257, 259, 261, 262 post-Washington Consensus 92, 103–105, 109, 121, 122, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 140, 142–147, 164, 165, 167, 168, 183, 189, 193, 196, 214 poverty reduction 6, 7, 106, 121, 122–128, 131, 132, 135–137, 151, 165 private school choice 205, 210 privatization xi, 62, 64–66, 68, 69, 76, 78, 81–87, 89, 90, 96–98, 100, 101, 118, 128, 129, 134, 137, 138, 140, 146, 154, 155, 158–164, 167, 173, 182–184, 187–191, 194, 200, 201, 203–205, 208–209, 211–214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 236, 243, 247, 253, 254, 262, 264 public sector depletion 65 roll-back neoliberalism 65, 67, 78, roll-out neoliberalism 78, 79, 92, 99, 193

index spirits of hope 244, 252 structural adjustment 60, 77, 78, 80, 82, 97, 102–104, 106, 110, 113–122, 124–126, 128, 130, 132, 138, 144, 146, 147, 149–151, 153–161, 164, 189, 191, 194, 208, 209 conditionality 116–119, 122, 123, 128, 130, 151, 154, 162 criticisms 117, 119, 121, 124, 144 the relational in school culture 239 transformative education 50, 148, 243, 248, 252, 253, 258 transnational advocacy networks 260, 261 testing 18, 62, 68, 72, 73, 98, 99, 226–228, 232

301 war on terror 23, 30, 35 Washington Consensus 74, 76–78, 80–83, 86–90, 94, 100–102, 104, 106–108, 110–112, 115–119, 121–123, 125, 128–132, 134, 135, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153–157, 159, 160, 164, 183, 188, 192, 264 criticisms 101, 103, 107 worker-ready testing 226 World Bank xi, 1–3, 6, 8, 60, 77, 80, 82, 88, 93, 97–100, 102, 103, 106, 108–122, 124–132, 134–143, 145–148, 153–162, 165–168, 181,182, 186, 188–190, 197–199, 205, 209, 237, 239, 240, 253, 257, 260 World Trade Organization (WTO) ix, 77, 89, 108, 162, 166, 167, 183