Influencers and Protectors: Education Privatization, Consultants, and the Public Good

• In Event: Who Profits From Public Education? The Role of Teachers' Unions in Resisting Privatization

Abstract

Fazal Rizvi (2016) describes the privatization of public education as being “widely embraced by governments around the world,” taking a variety of forms across systems (p. 2). In Canada, while privatization has indeed occurred in a multitude of ways in its provinces and territories, what Verger, Fontdevila, and Zancajo (2017) have called a “polymorphic” path, there are patterns that illustrate the inner workings of privatization in educational governance (p. 758). The polymorphic yet patterned processes in privatization can be theorized and understood through Abrams’ (2016) dimensions of a commercial mindset in education.

In this paper, we use two of the Abrams’ (2018) four dimensions to explore the pattern of education privatization in Canada: how producing a crisis in public education creates the need to “fix” the system, and the use of external experts to provide solutions to manufactured problems allows for further privatization. In this process, the external expert in the form of education consultant produces reports or restructuring plans that are used to justify the need for reform. The consultant and the manufactured documentation become the voice and the reasoning for education privatization. As such, the consultant, and their ensuing report, become “influencers”; the external expert is used by governments to legitimize their plans for education privatization, and the generated report or “evidence” becomes the impetus to quickly push through changes to education governance structures, funding, and in some cases, legislation.

Using two case studies from the provinces of Nova Scotia and Manitoba, we apply critical discourse analysis to official documentation and media responses showing how the pattern of education privatization have been replicated across jurisdictions. There is a pattering of the use of the same external education consultant, or “influencer,” who produced similar reform plans, with similar goals to legally change structures of education, funding, school boards, and union membership.

In this pattern the positioning and employment of an outside private consultant has a dual purpose: to sway public perception into accepting changes set forth by “the influencer” as being best for the public education, while at the same time undermining the democratic foundations of the system. Together, these processes reveal an “organized abandonment” (Wilson-Gilmore, 2008, p. 31) of education as a public good in both cases, where provincial governments intentionally chip away at its foundations to increase private interests over time. The case studies show that one antidote to this abandonment through privatization, is organized resistance from education unions. As such, as an opposition to the external “influencer,” education unions have, and continue to actively protect and uphold education as a public good.

Authors

• Pamela Rogers, Canadian Teachers' Federation

• Nicole Grant, University of Ottawa