Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Professor at the Graduate Institute and Director of the Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training (NORRAG), an associate programme of the Institute, was invited for a Lunch Briefing on “Public-Private Partnerships: Challenges and Consequences for Education”.

An expert on global governance, education and public-private partnerships (PPP) in education, she answers some of our questions.

Is there a new, emerging education model?

The revolutionary shift in education took place more than two decades ago as part of the new public management or quasi-marked reforms. However, it is only today that we experience fully the consequences of the shift towards outcomes, or results-based education. The demand/supply-driven model in education means that everyone, including for-profit businesses, are entitled to run schools as long as they are able to attract students and fulfill certain quality criteria, often measured in terms of the students’ learning outcomes. Within a short period of time, the governments scaled back the role of the state in education from one in which it was at the same time provider and regulator to one in which it could withdraw to being only a standard-setter and regulator. Target-setting and benchmarking became the key governance tools. In education, the outcomes orientation of new public management reform triggered a proliferation of standardised student assessment. The testing industry is thriving both at the national and international level. For example, OECD’s PISA (Programme in International Student Assessment) was only launched in 2000. Today, close to 80 countries or regions participate in the testing of 15-year students. In addition to PISA, we now have PISA-D (PISA for Development), PISA for Schools, and a proposed “Baby PISA” (International Early Learning and Child Well-Being study), that are administered all three years worldwide.

Which new trend of public-private partnership deserves greater attention?

Over the past few years, a new type of public-private partnership in education emerged that is currently underexplored: one in which government funds privately run international schools with the aim to enrich the regular curriculum or to improve the quality of education in public schools. As part of this effort, public schools are internationalised. This type of PPP is expanding like wildfire in upper secondary schools. The Diploma Programme of the International Baccalaureate (DPIB) is a good case in point. In some countries, including in a few public “gymnasiums” in Switzerland, the DPIB is offered as an additional track within the public education system: the language of instruction is English and students receive a transnational (IB) accreditation in addition to the national accreditation. This is a fascinating new development that deserves much greater attention. In other countries (Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Japan, Mongolia, Peru), governments use private international schools as hubs of innovation to serve as models of emulation for surrounding schools and catalysts of change for the entire public school system. If the trend continues, “international” is likely to become increasingly positively associated with cosmopolitanism and “national” with backwardness and parochialism. In an era of globalisation, the national orientation of public education has become in and of itself a burden to governments. Public school systems thus resort to creative solutions, including offering an international (private) track within a national (public) system.

What are the challenges to educational public-private partnerships in education?

Let me confine myself to naming three challenges: (1) the criteria of cost-effectiveness, frequently used as one of the criteria in innovative financing (e.g., social impact bonds or other types of results-based financing modalities) may have an adverse effect on inclusive education. If given the choice, private providers would prefer not to enrol students with special needs or marginalised groups, because their education requires additional support measures that are expensive; (2) there is a need for “slow capital” in education, because the impact of schooling may not easily be assessed over the brief duration of a two- or three-year funding cycle; and (3) outcomes-based reform and results-based financing in education means, in practice, more tests for students and more data collection from schools. We have entered a spiral of collecting more and more data on students; in some countries, there has been a backlash, known as the Opt-Out-Movement, where parents opt to not have their children tested so frequently.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi is also the editor of The State, Business and Education Public-Private Partnerships Revisited. In addition, she holds a faculty position at Columbia University, New York, where she teaches during the fall semesters.