International Organizations and the Education Privatization Debate: Mapping Knowledge Production Politics Through Bibliographic Coupling

• In Event: 54.019 - Knowledge Mobilization and the Global Politics of Education Reform

Abstract

Education privatization generates one of the most passionate and polarized debates in education policy research internationally. A swath of highly contradictory empirical research surrounds the issue of private involvement in education provision on a variety of related-themes such as the cost and benefits of voucher schemes, charter schools, freedom of school choice or school competition. Yet, the fact that evidence on these themes is far from conclusive is used to legitimate a range of different policy preferences and the political agendas of many educational stakeholders, including think tanks, private foundations and international aid agencies. In the US context, for instance, it has been documented that the publications of think tanks and other education privatization advocates tend to cite repeatedly a limited and usually low-quality (i.e. non peer-reviewed) number of like-minded studies as a way to create an illusion of a general consensus around the advantages of quasi-markets and free-choice policies in education. This is what Lubienski et al. (2009) qualify as an “echo chamber effect” in the use of research.

Based on the application of bibliometric analysis techniques, this paper maps the epistemic configuration of the education privatization debate and explores the role played by international organizations in the politics of knowledge production that surround this debate. The specific objectives of the paper are: (a) to review the state of the art of research on quasi-markets/privatization in education in the last two decades; (b) to analyze to what extent it is possible to identify different epistemic communities on the basis of attributes such as methodology or discipline; and (c) to explore how the knowledge products on education privatization of key international players fit within and engage with the existing epistemic communities. In relation to the latter objective, we focus on some of the most emblematic publications on private education produced by the World Bank and the Council for British Teachers (CfBT). These two international agencies have been selected due to their great capacity of influencing education policy decisions in low- and middle-income countries through lending and/or consultancy operations.

The main findings of our research are that in spite of the variety of approaches, the literature on education privatization is created and disseminated by a moderately well connected epistemic community – where, in spite of the low density, only a limited share of the nodes remain isolated, and where ties are homogeneously distributed beyond discipline or methodological divides. However, a clear difference can be identified between this main corpus of academic literature and the references mobilized by IOs. Frequently, these occupy remote or isolated positions – what suggests that, when engaging in the education privatization debate, these organizations tend to reproduce like-minded policy discourses and hardly incorporate peer-reviewed academic knowledge. Accordingly, these international organizations produce an echo-chamber effect around a small number of studies that is far from being representative of the broad and more complex debate. The article also elaborates on the economic, ideological and institutional reasons that explain how and why such knowledge selectivity within the education privatization debate happens.

Authors

• Clara Fontdevila, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona