Education for all open for business? SDGs and public goods vs. private goods

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Equity, ambition, and omission: can the sustainable development goals be sustained? (parts I and II)

Proposal

This paper looks at three interlocking ways by which SDG goal 4 and targets will be vulnerable, and indeed hampered, because of the implicit assumption of the SDG goals overall that there can be a convergence of motivations and actions between the public and private sectors. It posits that the vulnerabilities will be likely be expressed in unmet financial needs, distortion of spending for programmes and projects that cannot go to scale, and capture of public funds to support privately-conceived innovations that don’t have equity as their core objective. Many private sector entities have been determinedly promoting policies and practice that are primarily aimed at generating new markets and profits and only incidentally if at all contributing to free and equitable education for all (with the emphasis on “all”) while paying lip service to a theoretical win-win relationship between public and private interests. While the SDGs themselves contain many references to the central role of the public sector in education for all, the supporting documents and institutions hedge their bets by referring frequently and insistently to things like the “unprecedented range of public & private parties in policy creation and implementation”. The door is everywhere open for business.

The three interlocking policy trends, promoted heavily by market-oriented interests are:

· promotion of technology as corrective for deficiencies in contemporary teaching and learning;
· internationally-designed, standardized benchmarking and monitoring of learning processes and outcomes;
· tolerance and/or encouragement of for-profit provision of both compulsory and non-compulsory education.

Each of these have their place in well-conceived and regulated education systems that aim for free and equitable education for all. But they also can engender perverse effects that challenge system-wide success of SDG 4. Many of the side effects of market-based reforms of public services, including education, take decades to emerge and then decades to correct.
Capture of public policy and funding (national and international), purportedly in the name of choice, efficiency and measurability, is distorting public spending, increasing inequality and progressively gutting public education as it simultaneously subsidizes corporate profit. The three interlocking trends seem to constitute a perfect storm for both weakening the public sector and reinforcing the hold of private actors on education policies and the public purse.The SDGs can, and probably will, suffer in consequence.

Author

• Alexandra Draxler, NORRAG