Inclusion and social justice in neoliberal India: examining the world’s largest public-funded programme for private education

ABSTRACT

A provision of India’s Right to Education Act requires private schools to enrol 25% of children from ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘economically weaker’ backgrounds. Described as a unique public-private partnership, this policy has been widely debated for its promotion of private actors in ensuring equity and access to education. Within this controversial policy field is the increasing involvement of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that aim to reform the education sector through neoliberal logics and privatisation in India and globally. We analyse documents and reports from two NGOs and pay special attention to the discursive strategies employed. Among them, we find that establishing neutral expertise, legitimising educational privatisation, and promoting assimilationist pedagogy are noteworthy practices. We contribute to the extant literature by illuminating how NGOs implement this controversial provision and negotiate tensions around their position within a neoliberal policy landscape, which embodies privatisation in education yet touts social justice and equality as its objectives.

摘要

印度《受教育权法》的一项规定要求私立学校招收25%来自 “弱势 ”和 “经济薄弱 ”背景的儿童。这项政策被描述为一种独特的公私合作关系，因其促使私立机构确保公平和受教育机会而受到广泛讨论。在这个有争议的政策场域中，非政府组织的参与越来越多，它们试图通过新自由主义逻辑与私有化，改革印度和全球各地的教育部门。我们分析了两个非政府组织的文件和报告，并特别关注其采用的话语策略。其中，我们发现了一些值得注意的做法，包括建立中立的专业知识、使教育私有合法化以及促进同化主义教学法。我们通过以下分析对现有文献有所贡献：非政府组织如何实施这一有争议的政策规定，并且在新自由主义政策环境中，解决围绕自身地位的张力——体现教育私有化，却将社会正义和平等作为其目标。

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• public-private partnerships
• social justice
• inclusive education
• non-governmental organisations

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the team at Indus Action for their generous engagement with the paper. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors declare they have no conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanushree Sarkar

Tanushree Sarkar is a doctoral candidate in the Community Research and Action program at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Her research examines the relationships between education policy and pedagogy for inclusive and social-justice oriented education in India. Her work draws on critical disability studies, decolonial and postcolonial studies, policy sociology, and participatory research methods.

Xiu Cravens

Xiu Cravens is a professor of the practice in education policy and comparative and international education at the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations. Her scholarly work involves qualitative and quantitative analyses of reform policies that are particularly related to the organizational and cultural contexts of schools in the United States and other countries, the role of instructional leaders in a changing policy environment, best practices in professional development, and the conceptual and methodological challenges of cross-cultural transfer and generalization of leadership theories and their applications.