Louisa L.
“The day is coming when we can replace teachers with IPads and computers,” a corporate education spruiker told Angelo Gavrielatos, Project Director with Education International, a while back.
Recounting it to the NSW Teachers' Federation Council in February, Mr Gavrielatos joked that the man had obviously never taught Year 9 boys on a Thursday afternoon.
Giant edu-businesses are no joke. British-based Pearson Education, which began as a textbook publisher, is one of the world's biggest edu-businesses. It already runs NAPLAN, mining Australian kids for data.
“Pearson identifies the problem, and they ride in offering the solution. 'Based on an analysis of all the data sets available, there's a problem in your country.' They've got the people on their payroll to go straight to the heart of the government,” Mr Gavrielatos states.
According to Mr Gavrielatos, companies like Pearson “want to hijack the whole space of assessment and reporting. Once you colonise assessment, then you colonise curriculum, because unfortunately in this new world in which we live, assessment no longer follows curriculum. Curriculum follows assessment.
“From there they take over teacher professional development, and then teacher education".
Mr Gavrielatos said, “When Pyne was trying to deregulate the Higher Education Act, to open it to private providers, a senior official in NSW said to me, unsolicited, 'Angelo, that means Pearson would set up their teacher education institution!'”
“So the point of entry is as it was in the US, where they've lost assessment and curriculum. All curriculum development in the US is outsourced,” he warned.
Companies are sniffing around
Despite weaknesses in Australian education, current legislation doesn't allow for-profit schools to receive any government funding. In NSW, the Act was strengthened in November 2014.
The separation of public and private funding is high on the federal Coatition's bucket list, and would make it easier to legislate federal funding to for-profit private schools, as is the already the case, indirectly through VET Fee Help, with vocational education and training.
So Malcolm Turnbull's failed attempt to foist all funding of public schools onto the states, with the Federal Government funding only private schools, was not merely an excuse for the next announcement that trashed the Gonski funding model.
But in the current legislative context, corporate moves into education will follow the US pattern.
NSW is one of the last places where curriculum and assessment is still overseen by a representative board, but private companies are sniffing around. “The largest provider of for-profit schools in the world, Gems, was here last year holding meetings with stakeholders,” Mr Gavrielatos said.
He cautioned that there were 'big interests' behind an imminent announcement regarding the NSW Board of Studies.
Governing in the national interest?
Mr Gavrielatos painted a dark future if we follow the US path. “In the US the landscape is such that virtually every point of the education continuum has been monetised.”
He described “ a huge monster that's teaming up to reshape education globally... constantly looking for new allies” to help create new markets.
He warned also of a possible 'endgame', from the various 'trade' agreements, like the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement or Trade In Services Agreement.
“Those negotiations are happening in secret. .. Global corporates are in there, shaping that debate in an attempt to achieve their dream, which is the absolute liberalisation of public services,” he said.
“We are still trying to get an exclusion clause for education, but unlike GATTS where you had to actively include something, you have to actually exclude something if it's not going to be incorporated.
“If education is not excluded, that marks the end of governments being able to govern in the national interest, because these agreements have no regard for national sovereignty.
“Higher education will be the first to go...The world as we know it, with government and nation states could evaporate before our very eyes.
“In this new world order, global corporates operate as a para-state, unaccountable, without the capacity of nation states to legislate in their own interest.
“Education is under attack in a way it has never been before. Commercialisation and privatisation is occurring at a pace we've never imagined.
“That's why we are trying desperately to build a global response, where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts, where we link up and build action across the world,” he concluded.
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