Response to “Standards are good for business: Standardized comparison and the private sector in education” By Gita Steiner-Khamsi (Teachers College).
Two disclaimers:
1)I am not, by any measure, an expert on many of the issues Gita spoke of today. Rather, my comments come from an educator who, like Gita, explores the phenomena she described through critical—in this case, mostly postcolonial—lenses.
2)This is not really a “response.,in that my comments don’t speak directly to the paper itself but, rather, attempt to use it as a platform to push its ideas in a more radical form, perhaps saying in less polite language what Gita was attempting to say politely—that is, “academically”—in her lovely paper. In that way, I see my comments as a provocative, possibly aggravating, extension to her paper.
I was delighted to read this fresh, provocative, and thoughtful paper that takes to task, in a critical manner, the problematic ways in which educational systems around the world are being subjugated to outside corporate interests, most often to the detriment of their own educational purposes.
The title of the paper asserts: “Standards are good for business.” To that one can add that standards are not only good for business but are good business. But as Gita so well shows, they are not necessarily good for education, at least not if we define education as more than it is regrettably becoming, and becoming so at an alarming rate. The process also, as Gita points out, often serves local political ends. Those, again, however, are not necessarily conducive to education as we would like to see it. Indeed, if education is about fostering mindfulness, agency, and a critical eye in the context of local control, much of the processes described in Gita’s paper are inherently antithetical to such ideas.
Yes, the world is becoming more educationally and globally standardized. But is this good for education?
The use of terms such as “best practices” and “international standards” is proliferating. Yet, as we well know, there are no practices that work best universally (or even locally, but that’s another issue). And terms like “international standards” are inherently suspect for what theyentail, for what theymean, for the baggage they carry, and for what they do (and to whom).
More than a decade ago, John Willinsky wrote an important and lovely book titled, Learning to divide the world: Education at empire’s end.” We might, in light of the issues underlying Gita’s paper, want to amend the book’s title if we were to write it today. We might substitute “learning to divide the world” with “learning to unite it” and Education at empire’s end” with “education in the service of empire.”
My point is that while portending to advance the educational systems of the Other and bring them into the 21st century, the ideas behind that push, the means by which it is obtained, and its consequences are not only similar to ones involved in the process of (and to justify) western colonialism but so are their consequences.
Imposing (or seducing countries to adopt) international standards and curricula constitutes a new form of colonialism. Countries are compared, ranked, and possibly shamed into compliance. This, to the cynics among us, is reminiscent of the construction of the inferior “Other” during colonialism. Also, and much like Western colonialism of yore, it is corporations and organizations, rather than governments, that carry the main effort of infiltrating and subjugating new “markets” to comply with global forces, norms, and priorities.
As Gita so poignantly illustrates, loans and grants from international agencies, such as the OECD and the World Bank, come with strings attached, where funds are provided to implement specific reform programs. This has not worked well for developing countries when they were instructed, through similar grants, as towhat to grow and produce, and it will not have different results in the case of education. After all, and, again, similar to what took place in agriculture and other reform efforts, donor programs are aligned with what the donors want to offer, not with what local education sectors actually need.
Indeed, we speak much about the importance of diversity, both local and global in/for education, yet these processes do all that is possible to homogenize and create the Other in our own image, in ways that reduce rather than enhance difference and diversity.
As we consider how such processes impact the educational systems of developing countries, we ought to ask similar questions about our own context. For like governments in those “Other” countries, we too invoke political expediency and “cheap” and “immediate” fixes to our own education issues. These “fixes” have done little to “fix” anything meaningful in our own education, and yet these are the same fixes we now readily exportelsewhere. It’s a problematic product here and it is equally (if not more) problematic when shipped elsewhere. Why, other than avoidance, to use a psychoanalytic term, would we assume that anything would be different “There” from what it has been able to produce “Here.”
Many take Finland as the panacea, and try to emulate its students’ scores but do little to create the very conditions that have made those scores possible—for example, considering teaching a highly respected profession, supporting teachers, and paying teachers the same salaries as physicians. Simply shipping western standards abroad will not a Finland make.
The notion of “competition” touted through the economic discourse of standardization—as the last downturn in the economy and the increasing disparity in wealth distribution have illustrated—has not worked in the economy and will not work in education. The expected “trickle down” effect that never materialized there will similarly not materialize in this “new” standardized global education. What it does instead is accentuate existing disparities, where those who are supposedly being “saved” are least saved, or saved against their own interests, and those who do the “saving” continue to prosper.