Global politics and education systems: towards education markets?

Abstract

Our paper has as its first aim to highlight the fact that the approach on which studies about educational policies or the politics of education (the second concept being more widely used in social sciences) have been based so far involves returning to the stance posited by J.A. Maravall -a category composed of ideas, foundations, mind-set, ideology, etc.; in other words, politics as an idea. A second analytical category would be expressed by norms, legislation, actions, practices, etc., which represent politics as regulation (Dutercq, 2005). Despite placing our study within the management of both categories from a methodological point of view, our focus is more specifically placed on the second interpretation. Thus, new education policies break the ʻmethodological nationalismʼ with a view to present standardized, mercantile and global discourses and practices as a demand of international education agencies. These global policies end, or begin, by building a social and practical network identified here as ʻschooling marketʼ and expressed through private ownership of schools and governance (the social use of education practices), which operates with different degrees of intensity across international education systems.

Education for Citizenship: The Meanings Chilean Teachers Convey in the Neoliberal Context

“…In Chile, today, education is not a State-guaranteed social right; it rather operates as consumption goods under the wing of a constitutional principle (the subsidiary state) in effect since the ratification of the 1980 Constitution, which has been interpreted as the freedom of those who want to offer educational services so that they can charge for them plus the family's freedom to hire and pay-in conformity with their incomes-for the education they want their children to receive [150]. In other words, education functions as consumer goods [149,[151][152][153][154][155][156]. Among other things, this has caused those who cannot pay for an allegedly quality and private education to attend state or public schools (totally state-subsidized, where mostly the poor attend), and it has caused those that can pay to attempt to send their children to either subsidized schools (those schools that receive funding from the state and the families and that educate middle-class students) or private schools (those that receive no state funds and educate higher income students).…”

Las pruebas de evaluación externa como ejes de la política educativa y su localización en España

“…Así, destaca Puelles Benítez (2012), que entre los grandes movimientos ideológicos actuales nos encontramos por un lado con el liberalismo, el cual concede un reducido protagonismo al Estado como forma de favorecer la libre competencia económica y por otro, el socialismo que apuesta por un mayor protagonismo del Estado. Así, con sus matices y vertientes, desde la perspectiva de los grandes fines y principios educativos, la prevalencia actual de la calidad educativa y el rendimiento académico estandarizado como eje fundamental de las políticas educativas que emanan de los organismos internacionales, se ha consolidado como "un conjunto de prácticas de medición para certificar qué saben los estudiantes, qué enseña el profesorado y qué valor tienen los países en función del lugar que ocupen en una escala comparativa" (Saura y Luengo, 2015, p. 137) y cuyo origen, consideran los propios Saura y Luengo (2015), citando autores como Power (2000) o Martino y Rezai-Rashti (2013), se encuentra en una gestión pública en la que se desarrollan y consolidan nuevas formas de gobernanza neoliberal, orientadas a la descentralización y la rendición de cuentas aplicadas ya en los años ochenta en los dos grandes países anglosajones, Estados Unidos y Reino Unido (Vega, 2013).…”