Neoliberals Flashcards
What is neoliberalism? - Harvey
Harvey notes neoliberalism is a “political economic practice” that promotes the total free will of individuals as economic actors.
Neoliberals advocate for “strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” with as little government intervention and regulation as possible. They seek to privatize institutions such as education, health care, and social services, and deregulate industries such as energy, communication, food, drugs, and finance.
Critiques - Monbiot
George Monbiot argues that neoliberalism is the ideology at the root of all of our problems because it reduces human relations to cold competitive battles, it relegates individuals to being mere consumers, and it assumes that democracy is basically an exercise in the buying and selling of goods and services.
The market as independent…
Most ominously, neoliberals suggest that the “market” is a natural and objective force that will solve all our problems if only we leave it up to its own devices. Unfortunately, this assumption fails to acknowledge that the market “is fraught with power relations” and “what ‘the market wants’ tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want.”
Stephen Ball - 4 key ways in which neoliberalism has transformed the education system…
1) Top-down performance management
2) Greater competition and contestability
3) Choice and voice
4) Measures to strengthen the capability of public servants to deliver improved public services
Top-down performance management… (1/4)
Has its origin in the Ruskin Speech – the notion that education was no longer seen as fit for purpose in the paradigm that shows the profession as both resistant to change and too progressive.
The construction of the untrustworthy teacher and the mediatisation of policy, Tyndale School, led to the National Curriculum and the 1988 Education Act.
Top-down performance management… (2/4)
Introduction of league tables in 1992 providing market information to parents and national and local press coverage has now become ritualistic (Warmington and Murphy 2004).
Public discourse now centres around good and bad schools.
New Labour took these ideas much further standards being one of the buzzwords of 1998.
Ministers started to judge themselves by standards, and met national targets.
Top-down performance management… (3/4)
The setting of national targets is indicative of the reconceptualisation of the education system as a single entity and as a fundamental component of national economic competitiveness.
Ozga (2008) describes regimes of audit, inspection, evaluation and testing and the use of measurement and comparison as governing by numbers and as forms of governing knowledge that constitute a ‘resource through which surveillance can be excercised’.
Top-down performance management… (4/4)
We now have a discourse which centres around failing and underperforming schools and Fresh Start Schools governed by Super heads.
The Coalition took up governance-by-numbers (Ozga 2010) and changed key performance indicators; E-bacc, eliminated 2000 courses from GCSE indicators, and raised benchmark targets.
It also made strategic comparisons between unreformed and progressive schools.
MacGuire 2004 says “we now have a cycle of problem, solution, success and new problem”.
Competition and contestability…
Hatcher (2000) refers to endogenous (from within) and exogenous (Externally) privatisation; endogenous privatisation was emphasised by early conservatives it involved making public sector organisations act in a more business like way by creating quasi-market systems mainly through linking funding to recruitment and thus consumer choice and devolving managerial and budgetary responsibility and publishing league tables. Then tweaking to avoid cream skimming/ exclusions.
There are three main aspects to the ‘drivers’ embedded in the theory of quasi market competition –
1) efficiency – more focus on performance, assumes outputs are appropriate
2) market failure – taking over failing schools
3) bringing in choice as a competitive force
Choice and voice…
This involves power being but in the hands of the service users, and the system is open, diverse, flexible (Blair, 2005).
This supposedly provides incentives for driving up standards, promotes equality, and facilitates personalisation – all of which are contestable. Choice and voice are part of the move from a producer to a consumer culture and are about creating citizen-consumers (Clarke et al. 2007).
In saying this, experiments with voucher schemes by the conservatives have not been extended.
Personalisation through participation…
2006 legistation offered parents the possibility of ‘personalisation through participation’ (Parentocracy) – as part of an ‘agenda’ of government to reconfigure the environment for learning with new spaces and time frames both within and outside of the school day and incorporating new technologies. Ball argues that this can be read as a decomposition of a universal system of education – moving towards commodification Student participation was made mandatory in the 2002 Education Act and is now part of OFSTED inspections.
He now notes that choice policies increase inequality along class lines.
Choice Policies were accelerated by new labour in order to appeal to its individualistic, middle class voter base, and taken a stage further by the Coalition with ‘Free Schools’.
Choice policies (free schools) reflect a number of different aspects of Coalition Policy – greater choice, more competition, new ways of tackling deprivation, traditionalism, local community involvement and marginalisation or LEAs, and opening up opps for business.
Capability and capacity…
Contains a dual element of intervention and devolution – a further set of moves through a new discourse of leadership, which enhances the roles of public sector managers, crucial agents of change, and the ‘remodelling’ of the teaching workforce as part of a more general strategy of ‘flexibilisation’ and ‘skill mix’ across the public services.
This also involves reprofessionalisation (training a new cadre of school leaders).
Deprofessionalisation – in that teachers jobs are more closely scrutinised, more and now the abolition of the GTC with the Teaching Agency, tying teacher’s pay more to performance.
Policy moves to bring about improved capability and capacity have three dimensions:
1) Leadership
2) Collaboration / Partnership
3) Remodelling teachers
Leadership…
Heads play a crucial role in re-culturing schools – they should instill responsiveness, efficiency and performance improvement The NCSL – And the Headship Qualification are two relatively new innovations here.
Leaders are managers of performance, not teachers – discourse of school leadership is drawn from Business writing and gurus (see Thomson 2009 and Gunter 2011).
Collaboration…
Collaboration / Partnership – Under the coalition, management became about competition and co-operation.
Michael Gove saw innovative schools as being models for other schools, these and academies and federations are seen as working together to drive up standards.
Partnerships are also part of this but this is a slippery word that dissolves the difference between the private and public sector while obscuring the relationship between financial relations and power.
Remodelling…
Remodelling of teachers – Performance related pay set at an institutional level – teachers are now seen as units of labour to be managed (Mahoney 2004) also academies and free schools allow the appointment of non qualified teachers.
