The emerging global education industry: analysing market-making in education through market sociology

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the rise and consequences of an emerging global education industry (GEI), which represents new forms of private, for profit involvement in education across the globe. The paper explores the emergence within the GEI of new and varied, largely transnational, markets in education by focusing on three examples of the GEI at work. The first example addresses the issue of Charter Schools, what they have come to represent, how they have been implemented, and, especially, the impact they have had on public schooling more broadly. While they have taken different forms in different places, they have succeeded in installing the idea of quasi-markets in education, which has been directly instrumental in opening up opportunities for private investment in education. The second example concerns the ways that the increasingly global standardisation of education policies, provision and practices, presents lucrative opportunities for investment and profit. The forms and consequences of such standardisation are described in the contrasting cases of Qatar, Mongolia and Indonesia. The third example concerns low-fee private schools in the Global South. Far from such schools being seen as local initiatives, the paper shows how they have become a major opportunity for profitable investment by international corporations.

KEYWORDS:

• Global education industry
• standardisation
• education privatisation
• market sociology
• low-fee private schools

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/magazine/09roundtable-t.html.

2 http://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hr10_cmo_coalition.pdf.

3 See Global Legal Monitor, January 11, 2013. Downloaded from: http://www.loc.gov/lawweb/servlet/lloc_news?disp3_l205403456_text.

4 See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/08/17/saying-kids-were-endangered-uganda-is-closing-schools-backed-by-u-s-world-bank-bill-gates-and-mark-zuckerberg/.

5 See http://www.right-to-education.org/resource/human-rights-council-resolution-right-education

6 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/opinion/liberia-desperate-to-educate-turns-to-charter-schools.html?_r=0.

7 http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/16/private-education-development-public-research-profit

8 Nonetheless, as the Chilean experience shows (see Bellei 2016), it is also true that when private interests sediment in the governance of educational systems, especially in provision activities, education privatization is a process that, for both political and economical reasons, is very difficult to revert.