Shrinking Publicness in Education: the conflict between reducing state provision and improving the learning outcomes of youth in poor communities

• In Event: Investigating Local and National Learning Outcomes in Contexts of Inequality, Conflict, and Emergency

Proposal

This paper examines the impact of an agenda of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in developing countries on the state’s responsibility to provide public goods that rapidly gained ground and operated through the first two decades of this century. By examining the faulty logic deployed to link the private gains of schooling in the sub-field of economics of education to the logic of state failure in the sub-field of political economy of education, the paper addresses the form of misrepresentation of PPPs provided by international agencies and advanced in developing countries which had not yet achieved complete mass schooling.

This paper argues that this policy prescription permitted a dereliction of duty in the provision of free education, often jointly orchestrated by international development institutions and national governments. The paper will show that the primary rationale is driven by the logic promoted by international agencies that neoliberal policies that promote marketisation of education (Zancajo, et. al. 2022). The negative implication for equitable educational outcomes has been highlighted by recent civil society actions: a recent policy report concluded that national governments, in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, failed to meet the irresponsibility to provide free education and were instead pushed to expand of the private sector by international organisations (Action Aid, 2019). Another indication of the growing evidence of negative impacts of a growing private sector was evident in concerted global civil society action to push the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the for-profit arm of the World Bank that has previously supported low fee schools for poorer sections of society, to sell its stake in Bridge International Academies initiative in early 2022 due to the growing evidence that they do not provide assured quality learning outcomes.

This growing body of evidence points to the educational reforms of PPPs being solely focuses on the individual benefits of accessing and providing education in an educational marketplace, but without any consideration for the growing stratification of learning outcomes along hierarchies of location, gender, and community. The result of this dereliction of duty was a shrinkage in the public provision of education over a period of two decades. It is also becoming clear that the concerns of the community, the parental perceptions about the variety of providers, and youth understanding of learning opportunities did not get included in the early evaluation of PPPs. By reviewing qualitative research conducted in Kenya, Ghana, India and Pakistan, undertaken in the first decade of the twenty first century, this paper will show that bottom-up indicators, evident in parental consultations and youth group activity, should be incorporated into evaluations of educational reform. It will make the case that adopting these changes in the current decade will increase the sustainability of educational programmes. Secondly, it shows that by moving away from marketisation to social contract principles for designing and regulating educational systems there will be greater state accountability.

Author

• Shailaja Fennell, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE