Evaluating European Education Policy-Making

Privatization, Networks and the European Commission

M. Souto-Otero

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137287977
• eBook ISBN: 9781137287984
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungsverwaltung

This collection is an inside look at European Commission policy-making in education and the privatization of policy-making in the European Union. Along with contributions from leading academics in the field of educational policy and policy-sociology, this book also introduces the voices of policy consultants and policy-makers.

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European Policy-Making in Education and Training: Between Institutional Legitimization and Policy Privatization

Manuel Souto-Otero

Governance, consultocracy and independence in the production of statework

Who ‘governances’?

This volume is devoted to the analysis of the insides of European Commission policy-making in education. A central theme of the book is the governmentality of European educational policy-making and, specifically, the role of private organizations within it – that is, the role of private companies in supporting the European Commission in its ‘policy-creation’ processes through the provision of policy advice and evaluation services. Such policy-creation processes have, since 2000, been framed by the use of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), an intergovernmental form of European Union (EU) governance based on the voluntary cooperation of member states and the EU through the use of common indicators and benchmarks, reporting and the sharing of best practice. As a result of this, the OMC as a policy tool to steer national governments (Lange and Alexiadou, 2007; Souto-Otero et al., 2008) and ‘governing by data’ have recently received much attention in the literature (see Grek, 2009; Lawn and Grek, 2012).

However, Keating (2013, p. 481) has noted: ‘it will not just be data that govern, as Lawn and Grek contend, but institutions and organizations … there is thus a need to bring the institutions “back in” to the sociology of European education’. The aim of this book is to complement both the kind of institutional analysis that Keating advocates and the analysis of the governance mechanisms – such as those undertaken by Lawn and Grek – through the study of the actors who operate within institutions, and use specific governance mechanisms and technologies of power. The book thus focuses primarily on the analysis of the complex networks and relationships established by public and private sector organizations in the co-production of the European Commission’s education policy. The question is not who governs (public or private organizations) but who ‘governances’: who is represented in the governance network, how and to what effect. The book addresses these questions in relation to a particular arena (the European Commission) and places a particular emphasis on a specific set of actors: private companies. It analyses what Raudla (2013, p. 606) calls the ‘contractualization of governance and policy-making’ and Freeman and Minow (2009) ‘government by contract’ – that is, the ‘colonisation of the infrastructures of policy’ by consultancy companies that work for and within the state in the production of ‘statework’ by providing policy advice and recommendations (Ball, 2009, p. 89; Olmedo and Ball, Chapter 2).

As such, this volume touches upon a series of related, and pressing, questions, such as: How do public and private stakeholders understand and present the rationale for private intervention in European educational policy-making? What is the role of private actors and their worldviews of education vis-à-vis national and international public agencies in European decision-making? How and to what extent does the European Commission policy-making process incorporate private ‘policy-makers’? In what ways can private intervention legitimize or delegitimize public policy decisions? What are the main consequences of the construction of new public–private partnerships in education policy-making in the EU? What consequences do the identified trends have for the ways in which we conceptualize public action and the public/private divide in education policy production? These are questions in which I have been interested for some time, having been an academic with an interest in EU policy-making in education and a (private company based) consultant for the EU.

The book brings together the views of academics, policy-makers and private sector consultants. The last two types of stakeholder – in particular private sector consultants – are blatantly missing voices in the academic debate about policy privatization. This, arguably, has generated a rather one-sided debate. The volume thus introduces a range of new perspectives into ongoing debates.

While there is an emergent literature describing the increasing involvement of private organizations in educational policy-making, less has been written about what to make of it. Raudla (2013) notes that while there is a growing body of research on the advantages and limitations of contracting out in the public sector, there are very few studies that discuss the advantages and limitations, or the process, of contracting out for policy advice in spite of numerous references to an emerging ‘consultocracy’ (Hood and Jackson, 1991). There are, moreover, divergent views in the literature about such involvement. The chapter proceeds as follows. The contrasting views regarding policy privatization and its consequences of the education and the evaluation literature are presented next. The chapter then examines whether the general arguments outlined in both of these literatures can be expected to apply equally across different policy arenas and geographies, and explicates the relevance of an analysis of EU education policy for the study of ‘varieties of privatization’. It then discusses in more detail the many meanings of privatization in education. This discussion identifies two main proposed differences between the private and the public sector: their ethos and their logics. Claims regarding these differences are examined, before the chapter presents the organization of the remainder of the book.

The education literature: The bureaucracy versus consultocracy debate

The literature on the privatization of education policy tends to look reluctantly at any increase in private involvement in education (see Dencik, Chapter 3), as private actors are seen to blindly follow their own corporate logics in their formulation of policy advice, to the detriment of the common good. Consultancies favour ‘off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all’ solutions that can be produced in cost-effective ways and reduce complexity to ‘winning formulas’ that are easily digestible by policy-makers, who adopt them as articles of faith (Coffield, 2012). This is not only the case in the area of education, of course. Raudla (2013) notes how in countries such as Estonia, external consultants have been involved in the preparation of public sector reforms in extreme ways, including the definition of what the general goals of the state should be.

The quality of the research and advice that consultants produce has been questioned. Coffield (2012) has commented on the influential reports by consultants McKinzey & Company on high-performing education systems to argue that they are methodologically flawed, selective and superficial; provide conclusions that are unsupported by evidence; give an impoverished view of teaching and learning; contain implausible central arguments, and technocratic and authoritarian language; and omit democracy. Why is this the case? To be sure, there are budgetary, time and expertise constraints, but it has also been argued that profit-making organizations’ policy design and advice are not concerned with the ‘general interest’ but with their own interests. Such interests can come in two basic forms: present income generation and the preparation of future income streams. Indeed, one of the main aims of private companies in their public policy advice could be expected to be the creation of new opportunities for influence, profit and exchanges with the public sector (Ball, 2007).

The evaluation literature: From evidence-based policy to policy-based evidence

The literature on evidence-based policy-making presents a very different take on things. One of the central concerns of this literature is the lack of independence of policy advisers and evaluators. Scriven (1993) suggests that evaluators are often too keen to meet the needs of decision-makers and programme managers, at the expense of other stakeholders. Klerman (2010) goes one step further to note that recent discussions in the evaluation literature have questioned whether independent contract evaluation is possible at all. One risk is that evaluators and advisers simply pay lip service to contracting organizations because they need to ensure that they will be contracted again in the future. Those who are not receptive to the ideas that commissioning organizations put forward risk their future financial viability. This leads to a switch from ‘evidence-based policy’ to ‘policy-based evidence’ (Sanderson, 2011; Souto-Otero, 2013) or, as Weiss (1980) put it ‘endarkenment’. At the very least, consultants need to ‘accommodate’ restrictions that commissioning organizations place upon them in terms of budget, timescales or access to sources of evidence (Reineke and Welch, 1986), all of which influence their capacity to deliver critical and solid policy evaluation and advice.

A parallel strand of the evaluation literature stresses that contracting organizations can employ various strategies to make evaluations work in their favour (Metcalf, 2008; Klerman, 2010). There is also a lack of attention by decision-makers to the findings of policy evaluators and advisors (Weiss, 1988), especially in those cases in which the evaluator has not followed adequate strategies of ‘utilization-focused evaluation advice’ (Patton, 1988, p. 11). Non-release of the evaluation report can occur, as the funder normally controls the release of the document. In addition, misutilization (rather than non-utilization) can take an array of forms: from commissioning evaluations for political gain, to forcing the rewriting of conclusions and recommendations or the selective reporting of results (Christie and Alkin, 1999), as evaluations rarely yield a single result.

While misutilization may occur at European level, plain non-utilization is not possible. Its follow-up procedure to evaluations obliges each European Commission unit that has carried out an evaluation to prepare, on the basis of its findings and recommendations, an action plan and timetable for the implementation of corrective measures, and to report on progress regularly (European Commission, 2014; see also Laat and Williams, 2013). Moreover, all evaluations are made publicly available through the European Commission website, where an overall European Commission quality assessment of each evaluation document is also published for public scrutiny. So the European Commission is more transparent in this respect than many other public organizations. Publication, by contrast, is not compulsory for policy advice reports.

The education and the evaluation literature, however, do not tell the full story. A third strand of the literature, that on public sector outsourcing, is concerned not with the dominance of bureaucrats or consultants during the policy-making process but with the collusion of both groups. Policy advice can result in bureaucrats and consultants settling the terms of a policy without choices being drawn to the attention of politicians and the electorate (Saint-Martin, 2000). Two questions that remain unanswered in the outsourcing literature, however, are why – leaving corruption and revolving-door cases aside – bureaucrats would be more responsive to consultants than to politicians or the public, and whether/why the removal of external experts would make bureaucrats automatically more open to dialogue with any of those stakeholders.

Varieties of privatization in Europe

Can the above accounts be expected to apply equally across policy arenas? Much of the education literature argues that while the outcomes of privatization and neoliberalism as a political project differ somewhat from country to country, their broad form and bases for legitimacy do not. The discourse supporting neoliberalism revolves around the notions of national interest and global economic competitiveness as a tool to reduce poverty and stimulate growth (see Coffield, 2012; Robertson and Verger, 2012 for a review). These trends are explicated as the result of ‘policy creation communities’ of advisors and bureaucrats acting across all levels and all forms of policy (Mahony et al., 2004). At a general level this is correct, as neoliberalism continues its tour de force. However, there is a risk that the macrolevel analysis obscures some of the differences that exist at lower, mesolevels (see also Ball, 2009; Olmedo and Ball, Chapter 2). Styles of public management and policy production, as well as the balance of powers among policy actors, vary across countries and policy arenas, and are dynamic within those policy arenas. As Strassheim and Kettunen (2014) note, the way in which evidence-based policy works is to a large extent the result of context-specific arrangements of political and administrative institutions.

So why analyse the European education policy-making arena? This book is based on the premise that the European Commission is an interesting case to analyse policy privatization for three reasons: First, the European Commission derives much of its legitimacy from its self-presentation as an evidence-driven, highly competent technocratic organization (Souto-Otero et al., 2008; Souto-Otero, 2013; Grek, 2013). Second, the European space of education is increasingly important, but this space – and the networks that inhabit it – has scarcely been studied. Indeed, while research on regulation and governance is developing at a fast speed generally, not much attention has been devoted yet to these topics in the area of European educational regulation. As Ozga (2009) explicates, this may be due to the fact that the dominant European studies fields – such as law and politics – have tended to focus their attention on areas where the EU has firm formal powers. In education, by contrast, EU processes and policy-making are not highly visible. Third, in recent years the volume of consultancy work to support the activities of the European Commission in education matters has increased significantly, although arguably starting from a comparatively low base.

The many meanings of privatization in education

Before we proceed further, it is necessary to reflect on the meaning of privatization in education, or: what is privatization? ‘Privatization’ is a ubiquitous term, and a notoriously confusing one (Whitty and Power, 2000; Burch, 2009; Walford, 2013; Robertson and Dale, 2013). Sometimes it relates to who funds a service (Is it the public through general taxation or not?). Other times it is related to who has the competence to decide over an issue (regulation/deregulation), and yet other times it refers to who delivers a service (private/public organization), which may continue to be funded out of general taxation and heavily regulated by government. Whitty’s (2000) notion of ‘ideological privatisation’ goes beyond funding, regulation and delivery. He reports (2000, p. 2):

some aspects of marketisation contribute to privatisation in an ideological if not a strictly economic sense, even where quasi-markets are confined to public sector providers. Aspects of ideological privatisation include: fostering the belief that the private sector approach is superior to that traditionally adopted in the public sector; requiring public sector institutions to operate more like those in the private sector; encouraging private (individual/family) decision-making in place of political and professional judgements.

These processes of privatization do not imply an uncontested victory for the market and a withdrawal of the public, but they redefine the boundaries of the market and the public. In these different processes, the state is seen to remain a central actor, thanks to its regulatory powers and its capacity to strategically shape and use governance networks to secure its objectives (Jessop, 2002). The challenge to the view of a state bureaucracy with state objectives, however, is the complexity added by the extent to which the interests of individuals within the state may compete with (and on occasions prevail over) the interests of the state as an organization or those of the political community where it is based. Those individual interests are associated with personal networks and are clearly visible in the ‘executive revolving doors’ between public and private organizations. These doors, however, are jammed in educational European policy-making at the senior level: there is very little, virtually none, ‘exchange’ between high-ranking education European Commission officials and the consultancies that provide inputs to the Directorate General of Education and Culture (DG EAC) of the European Commission, and there is no ‘revolving door’ whereby public sector workers at lower levels are dismissed only to contract them at higher day rates as consultants at a later point to progress on projects, contrary to the situation in some Member States (The Times, 2013).

In addition to ‘what is privatization?’, a second basic, but often neglected, question complicates matters: What is the public sector? Power and Taylor (2013) show how the language of what counts as public and private in education is historically specific and culturally contingent, as well as ideologically loaded. They argue that ‘public’ and ‘private’ are not clear opposites and that social justice has complex relationships with public and private involvement in education. In the case at hand, conclusions regarding the extent of privatization of the European Commission’s education policy-making depend on decisions such as whether universities or quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations (QUANGOs) are counted as part of the private or the public sector. Most discussions do not include them as part of the private sector, as they tend to lean towards the analysis of the role of large private corporations in policy production (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. European Policy-Making in Education and Training: Between Institutional Legitimization and Policy Privatization
• 2. Competition, Governance and Global Education Policy
• 3. Breaking Down the Learning Silos: What Role for Employers and the Private Sector in Education and Learning?
• 4. The Increasing Need for Private Actors in Policy-Making at the European Commission
• 5. ‘All in’? Patterns of Participation in EU Education Policy
• 6. The Role of Private Companies in Supporting European Policy in the Field of Education and Training
• 7. HE Experts and Commissioned Research: Between Stability, Fragility and Ambiguity?
• 8. Conclusions: Who Benefits from EU Policy-Making in Education? The European Commission and the Privatization of Education Policy
• Index