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Abstract
In the education sector, new public management (NPM) has crystallized in policies such as school autonomy, professionalization of school principals, standardized evaluation and teachers’ accountability, and it has been widely disseminated by international organizations, such as the OECD, which enjoy a great prestige when it comes to frame education reforms in European countries.
This article analyses the way NPM has been constructed as a global education policy, and its adoption and re-contextualization into the Spanish education context. This article shows that the reasons for adopting NPM are not so different from those prevailing in other countries where these policies have been implemented before. Counter-intuitively, although NPM is a reform programme traditionally initiated by conservative governments, in the Spanish education field, as also happened in other Central and Northern European countries, it has been adopted and regulated with social democratic governments. In all these countries, social democrats have tended to embrace NPM as an attempt to address the legitimacy crisis of the welfare state and of public services in particular.
Nonetheless, in Spain, the NPM reforms have been re-contextualized and regulated in very uneven and paradoxical ways. For a combination of political, institutional and economic reasons, the final form adopted by the NPM approach is far from the model advocated by the international community and is deeply contradictory.
Our arguments are based on intensive fieldwork that include, on the one hand, interviews with key education policy-makers and stakeholders and, on the other, document analysis of policy briefings, press releases and legal documents.
Notes
1. According to the OECD (2007), non-professional refers to a ‘system of designating school leaders with no prior training or profile’.
2. Although, with the 1995 reform principals had to meet a set of requirements and be accredited.
3. Since the endorsement of the Spanish Constitution (1978), the State gradually transferred functions, services and resources to the regional authorities. Due to historical, political and cultural reasons, Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia achieved the highest level of education competences from the start, although it was the New Catalan Autonomy Act (2006) that gave Catalonia the capacity to pass its own education legislation.
4. In Spain, there is a long tradition of introducing education reforms via the highest legislation possible: organic laws at the Spanish level and ‘autonomic’ laws at the Catalan level.
5. In the programme, there were 20 educational objectives; only in objective 16 do we find references to anything that could be considered close to NPM: ‘Develop autonomous schools and teachers recognized socially and economically in order to improve the administration of education services’ (Catalan Socialist Party, 2006).
6. See for instance http://www.gencat.cat/educacio/congresexit/cat/programa.html
8. See http://www.tv3.cat/3alacarta/#/videos/4539871 and http://www.elperiodico.cat/ca/noticias/opinio/ernest-maragall-mira-dels-centres-ningu-vol-ser-director-240106
11. For instance, the former President of Axia is the director of the division of support to principals in public schools of the Ministry, and another board member plays an important technical role in the Education Evaluation division.
13. Out of the 12 parts of the text, 8 refer to governance issues such as school autonomy, evaluation, direction, management of teaching staff, the role of families and the community in the schools and finance.
15. See Decree 294/2011, 8 March 2011.
16. Interview ExMoE 2 (17 June 2013). See also http://www.elpuntavui.cat//noticia/article/2-societat/5-societat/392377-la-tisorada-frena-lavaluacio-independent-de-leducacio.html
17. There are no new autonomy agreements being signed with schools, and many of the schools that were already part of the SAP are not renewing the agreements due to the fact that the resources they provide are very scarce (MoE 7, 13 July 2013).
19. Published last 10 April 2013, pending to be approved.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Antoni Verger
Antoni Verger is a ‘Ramon y Cajal’ researcher (2011–2016) and Marie Curie Fellow (2012–2016) at the Department of Sociology of the UAB. He was awarded a PhD on Sociology from the same university in December 2007 for his work on the WTO/GATS and the international liberalization of education, which was published by Routledge (New York) in 2010. His main areas of research are, on the one hand, the global governance of education and the role of international organizations, transnational civil society networks and the private sector in global education politics and, on the other, the analysis of education privatization, public–private partnerships and quasi-markets in education and their impact in education inequalities.
Marta Curran
Marta Curran is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. She holds a degree in Sociology from the Barcelona University (2010), and a Masters in Social and Labour Policies from the UAB (2011). Since 2011, she is a member of GEPS (Globalization, Education and Social Policies) and GIPE (Interdisciplinary Group on Educational Policies), where she has participated in several competitive research projects. Her research areas of interest include education inequalities, education and development, education and social policies and gender. She has participated in seminars and scholar visits at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and Harvard University (in collaboration with the Real Complutense of Madrid). She has also contributed in other research projects about youth and school-work transition with the Catalan public administration.