Reclaiming public education: The movement to defend a sustainable, just and human future for all

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Description:
A panel on applied research outlining the issue of accelerating privatisation in education and collective interventions by civil society and academics to fight for the preservation and strengthening of public education.

Relevance to the CIES 2024 theme:
This panel reflects on how a broad coalition of education actors are working together to resist trends of privatisation that threaten public education systems operationally and reputationally. It speaks to the importance of building collective power across modalities in education to stand up to powerful narratives that the private sector is the solution to problems in education and to protect the transformative, democratic, just and sustainable capacity of public education.

The problem we aim to address:
Perhaps now more than ever, we need public education to produce a well-informed public. Across the globe we face social and environmental deterioration. Our political systems strain under the contestation between democracy and autocracy. To meet these challenges, we need to develop our collective democratic capacity to engage in civic action, starting with public education.

Public education represents a transformative possibility for both individuals and society at large. The decolonization and participatory democracy offered by and through public education can liberate people from historical disenfranchisement and oppression. Emancipatory public education can prepare people in order to transform society; otherwise, as Freire notes, the oppressed will dream of becoming the oppressors. However, public education faces challenges, and there is a growing, powerfully backed narrative that providing quality education to all is insurmountable without private intervention.

The proliferation of this negative narrative of public limitations and solutions to problems based on neoliberal assumptions, have come at the detriment of public education systems, siphoning funding and attention away from their improvement, increasing school segregation, instilling market-based competition between schools, and demoting public education to a ‘second best’ option or option of last resort. Furthermore, neoliberal ideology and narratives from profiteers and for-profit actors raise grievances and propose markets as panaceas, reducing public education’s ability to deliver for all students.

Using collective resistance and protest to address the issue:
In the past decade, civil society organisations, including those participating in the Privatisation in Education and Human Rights Consortium (PEHRC), have worked to advance the understanding and implementation of the human right to free, inclusive and universal quality public education, holding governments and institutions to account for delivering it. They also have been at the frontlines of defending public education as Ministries, local authorities, donors, and the public increasingly are drawn in by arguments that the private sector is the most sensible and effective answer to addressing problems in education access and delivery. These defenders of public education refute the vision of education as simply an individual good within inequitable systems where learners with resources gain greater benefits and providers can take profit. Instead, they call on states to deliver on the human right to free, inclusive, quality public education for all learners in order to protect its status as a public good that makes society.

This panel reflects on the advocacy efforts of civil society organisations, academics and students working together to protect and defend public education in the variety of spaces in which the sector is seeing the rapid growth of private actors. It will provide analysis on the evidence showing public education working to meet the needs of individuals and society; the challenges public education faces; and the role of states as duty bearers for the human right to education. Appropriate to the CIES 2024 theme “The Power of Protest”, panelists will discuss how to create global resistance against trends of privatisation - how collective action is being used to build power behind the movement for public education, including through an international sign-on statement demonstrating the breadth of support for public education released this year and a manifesto from a broader public services movement developed in 2022.

Advice to offer and reflections on the impact of advocacy:
The panel will feature academics and civil society organisations that are working together across a range of modalities of education advocacy. It includes voices from high, middle and low income contexts, speaking to the importance of tax justice and financing, the growth of profit seekers in education, the human rights implications of the state provision of education, and the promotion of positive cases of public education working well in the face of challenging circumstances. Collectively, they call for changes in narratives around public education, the rejection of profit-making efforts in education, robust funding for public schools, and the support of all education actors in promoting the expansion of broad, publicly funded, democratic, and inclusive education.

The impact of this work:
The work of this coalition is ongoing, and many inroads are yet to be made. However, there have been major successes in dampening the speed of privatisation and building tools to fight back when public education is threatened. The Privatisation in Education and Human Rights Consortium has been successful in facilitating the drafting of the Abidjan Principles, which collates existing human rights laws regarding education, and was instrumental in the International Finance Corporation’s decision to halt funding of for-profit education ventures. It also has shown international support for colleagues at national level who have lobbied resistance to public-private partnerships and for-profit school chains, has created a forum for academics working on the issue to collaborate, and is working to build knowledge around how EdTech and digitalisation affects the right to education.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Organizer

• Aya Douabou, Global Initiative for Economic Social and Cultural Rights

Chair

• Michael Gibbons, American University

Individual Presentations

• Education Financing: Ensuring Full Inclusion and the Human Right to Quality, Universal Education - Jennifer Rigg, Global Campaign for Education-US; Maha Shoaib, International Education Policy Department, University of Maryland, College Park

• Digitalisation of education in Latin America and the Caribbean: ruptures and continuities - Laura Mariana Giannecchini, CLADE

• Enhancing Public Education System; the role of collective action towards IMF and World Bank/IFC education financing policies - Johnstone S. Shisanya, The East African Centre for Human Rights

• Strengthening public education and regulating private actors in education - the human rights perspective - Aya Douabou, Global Initiative for Economic Social and Cultural Rights

• Claiming the right to education through court based intervention - Karuna Parajuli, International Commission of Jurists