In September 2017, the third Global Education Industry (GEI) Summit1 took place in Luxembourg to discuss opportunities for better networking between industry and schools. The latter were seen as âlearning ecosystemsâ that are âat the crossroads of innovation,â which although often still seen as âbulwarks of outdated practicesâ may become innovative if well supported. It was organized jointly by the Luxembourg Ministry of Education, Children and Youth, the European Commission (EC), and the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD). Its aim was to give a selected number of ministers, senior policy makers, and industry leaders opportunities to accelerate change, making industry actors consolidated partners in education. In his opening speech, Andreas Schleicher, head of the DG Education at OECD, presented the future aims and tasks as follows:
Schleicherâs introductory speech already depicts a central motif of the GEI Summit: an extensive rhetoric of innovation and modernization that calls for a radical break with the educational system as it has been run so far. The past of education is presented as a divided, isolated, hierarchical practice that has been essentially a technology- and innovation-hostile islandâan island largely severed from the real world and incapable of being innovative. The future of education is painted in bright colors, modeled as an ecosystem of collaborative consumption; creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative, education is portrayed as a future that can only be achieved through transparent collaboration, powered by powerful digital reputational metrics.To turn digital exhaust into digital fuel, to change education practice; that requires us to get out of the âread-onlyâ mode of our education systems, in which information is presented in a way that cannot be altered. [âŠ] What if we could get our teachers working on curated crowdsourcing of educational practice? Wouldnât that be so much more powerful than things like performance-related pay as an approach to professional growth and development? Technology could create a giant open source community of educators and unlock the creative skills and initiative of its teachers. Simply by tapping into the desire of people to contribute, to collaborate and to be recognized for that. (2017, 5:24)
The reader may note how the rhetoric of innovation is embellished as a practice of empowerment and liberation. Schleicher mobilizes the image of a âgiant open source community of educatorsâ that is completely freed from the bureaucratic regulations that have dominated the past of education: in his view, the cartel-like business model of governments, academia, textbook publishers, and software providers have limited and fragmented education into a âread-onlyâ system. The digital technologies are interpreted as the source for a complete reorganization of the education sectorâa âcreative destructionâ to put it in terms of the famous political economist Joseph Schumpeter (1993). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that educational innovation, for Schleicher, is thrust forward by extensive entrepreneurialism.
To be sure, this is one of the central ideas behind the GEI Summit: the gathering of policy actors in education and representatives from the industry: âThe time is ripe to establish a dialogue between ministers of education and the global education industry,â as it was pointed out in the introductory announcement to the first OECD Summit 2015 in Finland.2 The Summitâs aim was and is to establish a platform that allows businesses and generally actors from the economic sector to further their economic interests and penetrate the educational sector accordingly. Thus, the GEI Summits may be taken as a paradigmatic illustration for the current developments of the GEI: the capitalization of the educational sector on a global scale.
This book examines the emergence of new providers and policy actors in education and, more specifically, reflects on how the fast advance of the GEI is likely to transform conceptualizations of (âgoodâ) education. Drawing systematic attention to the rationales, processes, and impacts of current developments of the GEI, the book discerns particular expressions and manifestations of the GEI phenomenon. The contributions to this book investigate not only the influence of private and philanthropic actors on education as well as educational policy-making but also the changing role of the state within the GEI. Further, the book explores the role that digital technology and data infrastructures play in the rise and expansion of the GEI, for example, by aligning the allocation of research funding to economic imperatives. Last but not least, the book examines the rationales as well as the rhetoric of the GEI, that is, how the reorganization of education is strategically legitimized.
Following the threads of the GEI requires educational policy research to transgress the usual country-based design. The chapters of this volume build on a global perspective in order to grasp and theorize these complex developments. The reconstruction and conceptualization of agency in complex networks is of utmost importance to understand the roles of philanthropists, international organizations, and other mediating figures in the GEI. As Stephen Ball explains in his chapter, researching the GEI means to follow and analyze the flow of relations, ideas, and money. It is central to understand how local edu-preneurs draw on global references and are able to use them to their own advantage. Generally, we are faced with complex and heterogeneous relations in the expansion of the GEI. This has immense consequences for disclosing the operation of transnational organizations, philanthropic foundations with a global reach, states, and so on. However, being entrenched with new edu-economic imaginaries, educational policy studies will have to re-evaluate whether its own central concepts still enable it to grasp the current developments in appropriate ways.
In the remainder of this introduction, we address some of the concepts that are used to apprehend phenomena related to the GEI in order to show how they need to be resituated in terms of the GEI. Starting from the state of the art concerning the GEI, we will turn toward central categories such as commodification and financialization, placing them in the ongoing discourse of the GEI. The conceptual framework provided here will also demonstrate how the studies presented in the chapters are of utmost importance for educational researchers, policy makers, and graduate students in a range of academic disciplines who are trying to gain a better understanding of these developments. In the final section of the introduction, we present a short overview over the chapters included in the book.
The Global Education Industry
In the first section, we have already touched upon the central imaginary of the GEI, that is, the establishment of an âecosystemâ or policy infrastructure that is oriented toward business opportunities concerning educational goods and services on a global scale. In fact, the recurring Summits illustrate a number of aspects that are central to our researching the GEI. First, the Summits draw our attention to the size and global influence of the institutions and actors that arrange the Summit and take part in them. Researching the GEI precisely focuses on the increasing impact that comes from these platforms, coalitions, and connections of very different actors toward a global market sphere of education. Second, they also indicate that the emergence of the GEI is strongly related to the delegitimization of how (public) education has been organized so far, which raises key questions as to the social aspects of education as a public good. We mentioned Schleicherâs criticism of the educational system remaining in a âread-onlyâ mode. The GEI is about constructing and fostering educational imaginaries of innovation and modernization that call for the substitution or disruption of education systems as we know them. Third, the Summits allow us to discern how policy-making lies at the heart of establishing the GEI. In other words, they structure, facilitate, and optimize business opportunities, for example, for the IT industry to promote and market information and communications technology (ICT) in schools. As defined by Antoni Verger and colleagues:
Researching the GEI thus entails analyzing these sets of processes, systems of rules, and social forces and structures, as mentioned by Verger et al. However, reconstructing these processes, rules, forces, and structures poses education (policy) research some important analytical challenges. Examining the GEI has to avoid presupposing the global coherence or unity, as we need to discern clearly between the lenses and concepts we use to apprehend these phenomena and the research object. In this context an important issue is the fact that the term âGlobal Education Industryâ has been appropriated by its proponents in order to brand its imaginaries of a worldwide innovation (cf. OECD, 2017; Schleicher, 2017; Tooley, 2001). Related to this, the analytical categories used to grasp the dynamics and impact of the GEI in the education field need to be sharpened, a topic we return to in the next section. In addition, the manifold actors involved in the GEI operate in diverse contexts and networks, and have various relations among themselves and with state agencies. Thus, discerning these differences in type, capacity, and scope as well as in logics of action and practice becomes crucial. Finally, extant research has rightfully stressed the importance of going beyond economic theory that focuses primarily on rationality and interests to include sociological description and analyses of non-economic and non-material factors as well as of the institutional and social contexts that make, maintain, and transform industry sectors. Against this background, researchers in the field turned to Pierre Bourdieuâs concept of field to understand the GEI as a contested and socially structured space (Lingard, Rawolle, & Taylor, 2005; Verger et al., 2016, p. 11).The GEI is an increasingly globalized economic sector in which a broad range of educational services and goods are produced, exchanged and consumed, often on a for-profit basis. The GEI is constituted by its own sets of processes, systems of rules, and social forces, which interact in the production, offer and demand of educational services and goods. (Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016, p. 4)
In summary, in researching the GEI, education policy research has to emphasize its analytic perspective and present studies that can unveil and theorize adequately the complexity, the different manifestations, and the functioning of the GEI. In this sense, research needs to examine the rationales and logics of action of myriad players as well as their modes of operation. Assessing the impact of these developments, as ...