Cambodia for Sale

Everyday Privatization in Education and Beyond

Will Brehm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000359077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Winner of the Comparative and International Education Society's Globalization and Education SIG Book Award

Cambodia for Sale: Everyday Privatization in Education and Beyond details a post-conflict society that socializes children into a world of private rather than public goods. Despite the government's best efforts since the 1990s to re-constitute a functioning system of public services, life remains organized around buying and selling virtually everything, from humanitarian aid to schooling and from religious good deeds to irrigation.

Through an ethnography of one village, Cambodia for Sale argues that efforts to rebuild Cambodia after decades of conflict have resulted in various forms of everyday privatization. Although this is most notable in the education system, these practices of privatization can be found in multiple institutions that constitute social life, from the Buddhist pagoda to local government. The various efforts of international development are as much at fault for this reality as are the legacies of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. This argument unfolds through the life stories of six residents of the Preah Go village, who collectively depict everyday life through overlapping village institutions, systems, and histories.

This is an insightful and valuable reference for scholars interested in educational development, Southeast Asian studies, and comparative education.

1 Everyday privatization

Educational privatization is far more than the private tutoring I first witnessed in Cambodia. It is a social phenomenon and process that has impacted education systems around the world (Adamson, Astrand & Darling-Hammond, 2016). It is also a subset of a broader phenomenon I call everyday privatization, building off scholars such as Geertz (1973) and Berger and Luckmann (1966). Everyday privatization conceptualizes the phenomenon stretching across all of social life, impacting inter-subjective experiences of individuals and communities inside and outside various institutions. Such a concept relies on a phenomenological sociology where the perspectives of people are used to understand the phenomenon under investigation. In short, everyday privatization is a social construction comprised of behavior, actions, interactions, and affect, and has real impacts on life. It can be influenced by policies of privatization but not necessarily. It can be influenced by pre-existing cultural norms, but it can also change them. In this chapter, I explore the concept of everyday privatization in more detail, first by reviewing educational privatization in general and then by looking at the case of Cambodia specifically. I combine research from the sociology of education, the economics of education, and anthropology to build my conceptual lens. At the end of this introductory chapter, I provide an overview of the remaining chapters of the book.

Educational privatization

In an edited volume on educational privatization and social justice, Ian Macpherson, Susan Robertson, and Geoffrey Walford (2014), brought together a collection of case studies from Asia and Africa that provide empirical evidence of the scale, scope, and diffusion of educational privatization into many aspects of education from policy-making to provision. The cases showed that the education sectors in these locations had opened up to profit-making motives by private actors. Additionally, learners across diverse contexts had been conceptualized to varying degrees as consumers. This is the heart of educational privatization: Schools are potential sites of immense economic profit, which either turns teachers, students, and schools into customers or the products being sold.

The editors pointed out that issues of privatization were not new. Nevertheless, they argued that the intensity of privatization in public education had become more acute since the 1980s and therefore demanded attention. Their point suggests that the process (or processes) of privatization can ebb and flow across time, dependent on national and global political economic formations (see also Sahlberg, 2016). A similar point was made 20 years earlier. Mark Bray (1994), in his reply to William K. Cummings and Abby Riddell's (1994) article on alternative policies for the finance, control, and delivery of basic education, drew attention to the fact that there is a complex range of possibilities – a continuum of sorts – between privatization and publicization:

At one extreme, private schools with no government funding or controls may exist, and at the other extreme, government schools with full government funding and control may exist. However, between these extremes, private institutions may receive varying amounts of public funding and be subject to varying degrees of control; and government institutions may supplement their resources through fees and other means, and may have varying degrees of autonomy. (Bray, 1994, p. 820)

The range of possibilities between privatization and publicization that Bray laid out is a useful aid, helping to situate the various processes of privatization not only in relation to each other but also in comparison to the processes of publicization. In the quarter century since Bray's (1994) reply, a plethora of empirical evidence on educational privatization has been produced (see Verger, Fontdevila & Zancajo, 2016). Examining these findings in more detail reveals a diverse array of privatization processes that would likely have been inconceivable in scope and scale in 1994.

The starting point for the increased privatization of education, to which Macpherson, Robertson, and Walford (2014) allude, is the fact that school is potentially a profitable business. That most children around the world attend some form of schooling means large sums of money circulate through the education sector to provide the necessary goods and services. IBIS Capital (2013) estimated that in 2012 global expenditures on education reached US$4.4 trillion. Moreover, the market for e-learning services (i.e., content creation, management systems, and distribution providers) stood at US$91 billion in 2012 and was projected to have a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent through 2017. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced millions of children around the world to learn from home, has likely increased the profitability of many e-learning companies. By comparison, the S&P 500, which is a collection of 500 large US publicly traded companies, had a compound annual growth rate of 6.6 percent between 1964 and 2013 (Krejca, 2014). Investing in e-learning returns a higher capital gain than investing in the S&P 500. Today, education is big business.

The educational privatization to which IBIS Capital refers in its investment report is a departure from the historic connection between school systems and the State. Since the mid-1800s, education in Western Europe and North America has been organized gradually at the behest of the State in the form of mass schooling and paid for through the collection of taxes (Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985). Similar versions of this type of schooling supported by the State spread to nations worldwide through various international interventions (e.g., colonialism), education development efforts (e.g., through the World Bank), and global multinational frameworks (e.g., the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In Cambodia, mass schooling was imported by the French during the colonial period and had to co-exist and combine with an education system that historically relied on monks who taught religious and moral principles to boys inside pagodas (Clayton, 1995). Today, many State schools in Cambodia are located next to and sometimes inside pagodas (WFDD, 2012).

In recent years, there has been a trend for state governments to adopt various privatization schemes to pay for parts of public education. In some cases, state governments allow private entities to operate public schools. In other cases, privatization has emerged not because of the government's desire to privatize, but rather as a consequence of the state's inability to provide public education. Nevertheless, variations of privatization within public schools exist worldwide. For example, the architects of the charter school movement in America hoped to improve quality through increasing choice and accountability (Dempster, 2013), low-fee private schools in India enrolled students where the government had been unable (Srivastava, 2013; see also, Tooley & Dixon, 2006), the rapid growth of shadow education in East Asia prepared students for high-stake examinations (Bray & Lykins, 2012), and the introduction of school fees for tertiary education in Africa shared education costs with students and their families (Varghese, 2004). Notwithstanding their differences in content or context, these varied schemes and trends may be broadly considered part of the privatization of public education movement. This movement includes a range of private actors from for-profit business to philanthropic organization and has an intellectual history dating to Milton Friedman and James Buchanan in the 1950s (MacLean, 2018, p. xviii).

Ball and Youdell (2007) unpacked some of the ways in which public schools are being privatized by categorizing reforms into endogenous and exogenous privatization:

The first form of privatization [is called endogenous], where the public sector is asked to behave more like the private sector, [and] is widespread and well established. The second form of privatization [is called exogenous], where the private sector moves into public education, [and] is a newer but rapidly growing form of privatization. These forms of privatization are not mutually-exclusive and are often inter-related, indeed, exogenous privatization is often made possible by prior endogenous forms (Ball & Youdell, 2007, p. 13).

In this conceptualization, privatization is both a process to extract profit from the education system and the reconfiguration of the education system to resemble the ways in which private businesses operate. In other words, privatization is simultaneously “the many and complex ways in which the mentality of the business world has been injected into education, such that it operates like a competitive market, with choice, marketing managers, branding, data on student performance as proxies of quality and so on” (Macpherson, Robertson & Walford, 2014, p. 14) while also the “range of ways in which what was once public-sector activity … have now been outsourced to the private sector through tendering, consultancies, joint ventures, or new forms of financing (Macpherson, Robertson & Walford, 2014, p. 15).

But should one be skeptical of educational privatization as the previous authors imply? Advocates of privatization see these changes as an effective and cost- efficient way to administer and deliver education to a nation's youth. Opponents of privatization of education cite a host of inequalities and inefficiencies that result from the reliance on private markets in public education. Despite this on-going debate, a growing number of governments are embracing the logic of privatization to pay for and administer public education. As a policy tool, privatization is commonplace.

The general outcome of educational privatization is the changing role of the nation-state from service provider to service regulator of mass schooling and the increased logic of the market inside the space of schooling. Despite mixed evidence of privatization reforms leading to increased student achievement (Zimmer et al., 2009) or of equity issues between rich and poor students, there has been a rise of charter schools in America, free schools in Britain, low-fee private schools in India, and Pearson Education operating worldwide (to name but a few notable cases). Although the world is not at the extreme of total privatization along Bray's continuum – as is evidenced by the fact that State governments still allocate large sums of money to public education – the array of privatization processes and private actors in education certainly suggests that the contemporary manifestation of privatization has moved towards the privatization end of the spectrum. Pasi Sahlberg (2016) calls these various privatization practices the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM for short), highlighting the “global” nature of the policy regime and the political nature of the international development “movement.” More recently, Diane Ravitch argues that the GERM has been overcome, at least in the USA, because of the effectiveness of teacher union strikes (Ravitch, 2020).

Educational privatization is often examined as part of government policy reforms. This “top-down” approach focuses on particular government policies such as the school-based management approach to decentralization or the growth of private universities. It also focuses on the amount of recurrent expenditures spent on education by national governments and new policy schemes in national development plans, such as outsourcing the publication and printing of textbooks to private companies.

The top-down perspective conceptualizes the structure of educational privatization as deriving from government policies and a network of actors pursuing agendas that foster privatization, sometimes unknowingly (Burch, 2009). The latter includes not only international agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO but also private companies (e.g., Pearson, Inc.) and civil society organizations (Ball, 2012). All of these actors participate and advance different neo-liberal agendas in global educational reforms. The actors advancing this neo-liberal agenda are all-powerful; hence, the metaphor to the Biblical David and Goliath in Ravitch's (2020) title: Slaying Goliath. From this perspective, privatization is part of neo-liberalism, which is best defined as a “political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor” (Harvey, 2016). Over the preceding decades, national and global capitalist classes slowly retooled states and societies as capitalism became dominant. In education, this has resulted in a political economic restructuring that has promoted, to list but a few outcomes, individualism, self-realization, competitiveness, decentralization, managerialism, and student-centered learning (Carney, 2009). Teacher unions were slowly undermined, and new ways of de-skilling teachers were found with every technological innovation (Apple, 1982, 2003). Public education, as a result, was undermined by various privatization practices, including by NGOs, perhaps unknowingly (Silova & Steiner-Khamsi, 2008). Returning to Ravitch: The power of labor in the form of teacher strikes (across the USA starting in 2012) was the proverbial David trying to slay the almighty Goliath of owners of capital exploiting education systems for profit.

In the “top-down” approach to privatization, agency is held by elite actors (or oppressed labor unions). At the school level, actors are mostly affected by privatization policies, through such changes as school management, funding, and operations. The processes of privatization, in other words, are constituted by macro structures conceived and implemented by (inter)national actors, which then affect local actors, such as teachers and students. What happens at the top, impacts what happens at the bottom.

An alternative way to understand the structures of privatization – and the agency of those involved in the process – is through social practices, a “bottom-up” approach. In this perspective, it is the very social practices that constitute the phenomenon of privatization, not simply government policy dictated by the capitalist elite. What happens at the bottom is not simply determined by what happens at the top. Agency at the bottom is not confined to labor movements responding to policy changes at the top. Individuals and communities far removed from the policy process can socially construct forms of educational privatization.

Although this dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up is artificial and simplistic, the separation is helpful in showing different foci and underlying assumptions about the way in which social structures and human agency function. It is most likely the case that both types of privatization exist simultaneously. They are relational.

Theoretically this “bottom-up” perspective highlights how the interactions of people not only construct society but are also simultaneously constructed by it. This is not a new insight in the social sciences (Harvey, 1982, 1985, 2006; Lefebvre, 1974; Massey, 1994, 2005; Soja, 1980, 1996) and can be considered a sociological approach to privatization (Robertson, 2010). For me, the most important part of the bottom-up approach to educational privatization is that it extends the gaze to other institutions in social life. Schools do not operate in a vacuum, apart from religious, family, or government life. These institutions operate simultaneously, at times reinforcing certain social practices while at other times diverging.

The study of educational privatization has seen a nascent use of these types of sociological theories. Steven Ball (2012) used network theory to understand the diverse groupings and interactions of global education businesses participating in policy-making; Susan Robertson (2010) applied a spatial lens to the processes of privatization (namely, decentralization and markets) affecting educational governance; and Prachi Srivastava (2006) developed an idea called “mental models” to highlight how children learned proper practices of schooling through the environment around them. Whereas Ball (2012) and Robertson (2010) were focused on educational privatization at the level of governance and policy- making, my approach begins with the lived experiences of teachers, parents, and students within a situated context, similar to Srivastava (2006). This particular approach requires historical and anthropological analyses to understand the changes to school and society and in-depth engagements with individuals to show “how people make policies and the ways that markets are oh-so human in their construction” (Forsey, 2010, p. 239). It requires an in-depth understanding of the social patterns in a given context. Utilizing insights derived from anthropology allows for such an analysis of privatization from the bottom-up, something that has rarely, if ever (to my knowledge), happened in the academic literature on educational privatization.

Village life in Cambodia

The anthropological literature on village life in Cambodia makes clear that there is a central debate concerning the organization of society. On one side are scholars who view post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia as being “stuck” in a particular way of being. From this perspective, people are unable to build community ties and relations with each other because of past traumatic experiences (e.g., Frings, 1994; Ovesen, Trankell and O¨jendal, 1996). The Khmer Rouge genocide created an abrupt social dislocation that has not yet been overcome, leaving individuals disconnected from one another. On the other side are scholars who view Cambodian villagers as actively involved in the re-configuration of social life after the Khmer Rouge (e.g., Ledgerwood, 1998; Ebihara and Ledgerwood, 2002). These scholars see deep inter-connections between people in society, forming patterns of social life that exhibit both new and old features of traditional formations. In my encounters with myriad villages over the past decade, there appeared deep connections among people in society. Being “stuck” didn’t seem conceptually correct, at least in the 2010s. Nevertheless, some of the social relations in villages I witnessed did seem problematic. Many people I met, for instance, took out debt (often through micro-finance lenders; see Natarajan, Brickell, and Parson, 2020) to pay education-related costs. Some families were even indebted to teachers for providing private tutoring. A debt relation is certainly not a dislocation from social life, although it is premised on a form of inequality (Graeber, 2011). It seemed to me that village life was not stuck at all but was rather actively in the process of becoming.

What then are the traditional features of village life in Cambodia? May Ebihara was the first American anthropologist to do field work in Cambodia starting in 1959 and has had outsized influence on the English-language scholarship ever since (see Marston, 2011). One of the reasons her work is so influential is because she provides a forensic view of village life before the dislocations of the Khmer Rouge. She therefore provides a sort of baseline to think about social life in modern Cambodia. Her insights have been connected in various ways to the longer-term history of the country, which has been perhaps best captured by David Chandler (see Hansen & Ledgerwood, 2008).

The main features of village life can be summed up through three inter- connected concepts: Kinship, clientelism, and hierarchy. Kinship in Cambodia has been found to exist beyond known blood relationships. Kinship is not limited to legal definitions of family or marriage. These bonds among people beyond immediate family members create extensive social systems of moral obligations, including respect among large groups, assistance in times of need, and required participation in ...

Table of contents

• cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Map of Cambodia
• Introduction: Welcome to the Kingdom of Wonder
• 1 Everyday privatization
• 2 Crises in Cambodia
• 3 Mainstream schools
• 4 NGO schools
• 5 Pagodas
• 6 Local government
• 7 Privatization as progress
• 8 Privatization problems
• Conclusion: Privatization, development, and village life
• Notes
• References
• Index