Education policy,globalization,commercialization: An interview with Bob Lingard by David Hursh

Abstract

In this interview with David Hursh, Bob Lingard comments on his current and/or recently completed research projects in respect to new modes of global governance in schooling and the complementarity between international large scale assessments and national testing. He also looks at a project that, in conjunction with school leaders, teachers, students, and community, developed an alternative mode of educational accountability to the currently dominant, simple, top-down, test-based mode. Here schools and their communities would be enabled to give an account of their multiple achievements of various kinds and draw on qualitative, as well as quantitative data. Another project has focused on the ways in which datafication in education opens up spaces for profit-motivated edu-businesses. Here data infrastructures are seen to actually structure schooling systems in particular ways and also work in networked governance across edtech companies and state actors. The final project considered is funded by a teacher union and documents the extent and nature of commercialisation of public schooling in Australia, what enables this, and teachers' and school leaders' attitudes to commercialisation.

Bob Lingard, from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia is one of the most prolific researchers globally, and he and his collaborators have produced a very large number of reports and publications focused on current issues of privatization and globalization in education. In September 2016, I had the opportunity to sit down with him and ask about his current projects. I began with a general question: Given that you’re involved in many complementary projects could you begin by telling us about your current projects? After that initial question, Bob needed little prompting. Therefore, in the interview below, my questions have been edited out and the transcribed text has been edited to improve clarity.

Let me begin with the research funded by the Australian Research Council and entitled Schooling the Nation in an Age of Globalization. ¹ Sam Sellar worked on it with me as a postdoctoral fellow. We broadly looked at globalization and its impacts on education policy and on schooling both globally and nationally. There were two layers to the study. The first layer was the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developments (OECD), changing role in education particularly through its testing Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and related developments, including the expansion of the scope, scale and explanatory power of PISA, its increasing influence in policy making within nations, and its role in the global governance of education. The second layer was focused on ‘national’ policy developments in Australia’s federal polity. There were complementary national policy developments in Australia with regard to the strengthening of the policy significance of PISA, particularly the move to a national curriculum, which is a stronger move, say, than the comparable move in the USA to the Common Core Standards, which really resulted from philanthropic pressure and resulted in a more bottom-up process at the state level. In Australia, the national curriculum and national testing initiatives came from the federal government, the Rudd Labor government (centre-left), elected in 2007; this national agenda in schooling had specific political origins in an election campaign in 2007 and talk of an ‘education revolution’. So, with this research project, there was a focus on international testing and also on national testing and how they came together in new modes of governance in education and also in new modes of accountability functioning through comparison as a mode of governance (Lingard et al., 2016).

The Rudd government introduced, for the first time, national, census style, standardized testing at years three, five, seven, and nine dealing with literacy and numeracy for every school in Australia. Accompanying the testing is a public website called My School, which records the comparative performance of every school in Australia each year on NAPLAN, the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (Lingard et al., 2016). This comparison is made against national averages, benchmarks and the performance of 60 other statistically similar schools, taking account of socio-economic context. So, the study focused not only on the developments and new modes of governance inside Australia, but also on the ways new national testing intersected with and complemented the work of the OECD and PISA in an emergent mode of global governance in schooling.

There was some interest as well in the new PISA for schools (Lewis et al., 2016), which has been big in the United States, particularly in Fairfax County in Virginia, and other subsequent developments like PISA for development, which sees the OECD getting into some of the policy domains with which, to date, UNESCO and the UN have been largely involved. PISA for Schools, with the OECD having policy impact at a sub-national level, is indicative of the new spatialities that have accompanied globalization. Main PISA and its role in educational governance is also an example of the rescaling of the state – another new spatiality.

In this study, then, we sought to understand the changing education work of OECD (Lingard and Sellar, 2016), and in particular, the role of PISA in creating the globe as a commensurate space of measurement. For example and more specifically, we were very interested in the global impact of Shanghai’s outstanding performance in its first participation in PISA in 2009, and the impacts that had in the United States, England and in Australia. This was a case of ‘PISA shock’ (Sellar and Lingard, 2013). What is also important here is that politicians and policy makers in these nations used this PISA shock for externalization purposes; that is, to drive further their educational reform agendas. In Australia the policy and political focus was on comparative performance and decline rather than on growing inequality and strengthening of the socio-economic background and PISA performance correlation (Sellar and Lingard, 2014).

So that was one study on new forms of governance in education working through comparison and performance measures, along with new modes of accountability in schooling functioning through international testing (e.g. PISA) complemented by national testing (e.g. NAPLAN). More broadly, this was a focus on policy as numbers (Lingard, 2011), the new neo-positivism in policy making in education.

A second study, also funded by the Australian Research Council and called Pursuing Equity in High Poverty Rural Schools: Improving Learning Through Rich Accountabilities (Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, LP100200841), looks not at the effects of international tests in Australia, but rather at the effects of Australia’s own NAPLAN on teaching and learning and educational accountability in Australia and, in particular, in Queensland; more specifically in rural Queensland. We refer to the project as PETRA (Pursuing Equity Through Rich Accountabilities). This research was conducted in partnership with the Queensland Department of Education with Dr John Dungan, then Director of Research in the Department, a co-participant in the research. NAPLAN aimed to assess students’ literacy and numeracy at grades three, five, seven, and nine in every school in Australia. It is a census test, not a sample test, so that every student in Australia in all schools (government, Catholic and independent) does the test in the requisite year levels. PETRA was designed to ascertain the effects of NAPLAN in and on schools and principals’ and teachers’ work. It was also designed to see how the test had come to frame educational accountability and to consider alternative, more democratic and educative modes of accountability for schools and school systems.

When the first NAPLAN test was administered, in 2008, Queensland did badly, in particular in comparison with New South Wales and Victoria. The then Premier of the state of Queensland, Anna Bligh, under a lot of pressure from the media, set up an inquiry into why Queensland had done so poorly. Moreover, at the same time, the first NAPLAN results were published on the My School website, with the media also creating and posting school league tables, and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) results for Queensland on TIMSS (Trends in International Maths and Science Study) came out, showing a substantial decline in results for the Queensland sample.

The decline in Queensland’s performance on the IEA’s international tests, combined with the comparatively poor NAPLAN results, led to the Premier setting up an inquiry largely focused on NAPLAN and how to improve performance. Subsequently, following the review, targets were set state-wide for improvement on NAPLAN; in the first instance a ten per cent improvement target for all schools. Here we saw classic goal displacement and subsequently the negative impact of target setting on the practices of schools and teachers’ work and student experiences of schooling. Despite the reality that, in terms of the assessment literature, NAPLAN is not a high stakes test, these improvement pressures on schools (principals and teachers) ensured that NAPLAN became high stakes in Queensland. Accountability pressures on principals to improve NAPLAN results were also put in place. Thus, even though it is argued by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which oversees the national curriculum and NAPLAN, that NAPLAN is not high stakes, the politics, media coverage and improvement pressures ensured it had high stakes effects in Queensland schooling.

As you know from your and other people’s research (Hursh, 2008), as tests become high stakes they then begin to really impact on both curricula and teaching in reductive and counter-productive ways educationally. However, in this second ARC research project, we accepted that schools and teachers needed to be held accountable (the teachers did too), but that a vastly different mode of accountability was required from this NAPLAN-based mode; one in contrast that was democratic in its functioning and one that respected teacher and principal professionalism and one which was educative in its effects. Queensland had a Labor government at the time and I also knew the Director-General of Education in Queensland quite well. I went to her and said that we’re interested in developing an alternative model of educational accountability, but would like it to be empirically-based and derived from collaborative research work with a number of schools and their communities. Here we wanted to work across the meanings of accountability as both ‘giving an account’ and ‘being held to account’. We wanted to see if we could develop a more progressive school and a community-friendly sense of accountability, which didn’t define accountability simply as schools being held to account and being held to account through test scores on NAPLAN but, rather, accountability being defined more broadly as giving an account. We also believed there should be the opportunity for schools to give an account (horizontally) to their communities about what they were achieving, and schools and their communities by opportunity to learn standards asking for or demanding from the department/the system the resources needed to meet the goals the system was setting for them. The Director-General responded by saying, ‘I love the idea and we will partner with you in this research, but I want you to do the research in a socio-economically disadvantaged rural part of Queensland, which is heavily under-researched. The low socio-economic schools in Brisbane in contrast are over-researched.’

So, over a period of four years, at eight schools (five primary, three secondary), we engaged with the schools. There were five phases to this research: case studies of the 8 schools; community-based curriculum projects developed with teachers and students; creation of a Learning Commission in the community; developing a new model of rich accountability; reporting back to schools, community and the system. In phase 2, we paid for teachers to work with us for a couple of days at a time to create curriculum units based in the local community of the school. We took the new Australian national curriculum, focusing largely on history, and worked on projects where the students had to research their local community so that they were strongly located and connected to their communities. In these curriculum projects, the students went into the community and the community was brought into the school. Later, the teachers and students who worked on those projects came and talked to us about what they’d done, what they’d achieved, what was really positive about this. There was much positivity about this approach.

We then moved to our next phase, which was to establish in the local community, a disadvantaged rural area of Queensland, something we called a Learning Commission, which was chaired by a recently retired principal who had been involved in the PETRA project from the outset and was a very strong supporter of it. She was adamant NAPLAN was a poor basis for school accountability. This Learning Commission was based on the work of Professor Sarah Whatmore and her colleagues at Oxford, who created the concept of ‘competency groups’, which brought together experts and community representatives in seeking to solve local problems (e.g. local flooding). In our competency group, the Learning Commission, as noted, was chaired by a retired principal; its membership also included: an Indigenous Community representative, a parent representative, an influential and long term Local Government Councilor, and a community development worker, along with a researcher from the Department of Education. The research team served as the secretariat to this Learning Commission, which took submissions from principals, teachers, students and people in the community (e.g. employers, Indigenous groups, parents). With the Learning Commission, as with the curriculum work in community, we were working with the Louis Moll notion of community ‘funds of knowledge’, accepting that all communities have knowledge bases; we rejected a deficit view of community.

The Learning Commission sought to answer the framing questions: ‘What do we want our schools to achieve? What do we see as their main goals and purposes? How might we ascertain (in multiple ways) if they have successfully achieved these goals in both the short and long term?’ This was an attempt to get to new modes of accountability, including a more horizontal school in community and community in school mode, in addition to the more simple top-down, vertical, bureaucratic, test-driven mode. We had worked with and discussed and debated with the schools, principals, students, community and the Learning Commission with reference to the literature on effective and democratic modes of accountability.

The Learning Commission received submissions from local business people, principals, teachers, students and employers; and a local Women’s Indigenous group came and spoke to the Commission. That group told the Learning Commission that they chose the school their children went to on the basis of whether the school endorsed, supported and reflected upon Indigenous culture within the culture of the school. NAPLAN results were not important to this group in terms of school choice; rather, the extent of school cultural sensitivity was. All groups stressed broader educative and citizenship goals for schooling and all groups thought accountability based solely on NAPLAN was wrong and not reflective of what the community desired from schools, nor did it represent what schools actually achieved. The Learning Commission argued that there were multiple narratives that schools could offer about their achievements of multiple kinds in varying timeframes. Everyone who contributed to the Learning Commission through submissions and discussion stressed the importance of schools producing good all-round people and good and active citizens. The Learning Commission also canvassed ideas about how schools and communities could make upward accountability demands upon the system as well – what have been called ‘opportunity to learn standards’.

The Learning Commission, along with the research team, developed a multilateral and multidirectional model of accountability from all of the data collected across all phases of the project (Lingard et al., 2014). This was presented at an open community meeting held in the regional town with local politicians represented and a senior Department official, along with community representatives, media, teachers, principals and students. The model of educational accountability developed accepted top-down, test-based accountability as just one mode. The Commission also debated the usefulness of narratives and non-quantitative measures and the need for both be held to account and give accounts. The model talked about horizontal accountability, school to community and community to school, and also argued for two-way, top-down and bottom-up accountability, including data beyond simple test scores. The issue was how to frame this mode of accountability without enhancing the amount of work of the schools focused on accountability and thus detracting from the central educative purposes of schooling. A premise of this model was that accountability should be framed by agreements on the broad purposes of schooling and not be reduced to test results: this was a position strongly endorsed by the Learning Commission and principals and teachers involved in the research.

The final report from the research was delivered and presented to the Director-General (DG) of Education (not the one who was involved in supporting the research from the outset), along with his Deputy. It was very well received, but the DG wondered if comparative metrics could be developed for all of these alternative measures and narratives of accountability! The schools wanted to provide accounts of the many wonderful things they achieved each year, but …. Here we got an insight into the significance of numbers in contemporary schooling policy. That was the second study.

A third study is one I’m doing currently. It is another one funded by the Australian Research Council (Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, DP150102098, 2015–2018) – Data Infrastructures, Mobilities and Network Governance in Education – and in a way it grew out of the earlier globalization one, and also tangentially out of the new modes of rich accountability in the schooling study as well. It is looking at the creation of data infrastructures in education, including how these open up schools and school systems to edu-business and commercial interests. I suppose we began with the assumption from Saskia Sassen that globalization is in effect the creation of particular infrastructures which allow, enable and lubricate all those flows, the mobilities/scapes (and fixities), and so on that Arjun Appadurai, Stephen Ball and others have written about – ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideascapes, policyscapes and more.

So, think of PISA and the creation or constitution of the globe as a commensurate space of measurement of school system performance in nations. It’s a sort of infrastructure that allows and facilitates a global mode of educational governance. There is also an epistemological base to it: we see the emergence of a global epistemic community in schooling that has significance for educational policy (Lingard et al., 2015), and for the emergence of global governance in education. We were really interested in data infrastructures because we are experiencing in education a time of policy as numbers, data-driven policy, evidence-informed (not based) policy (Lingard, 2013), and also data driven schools and systems.

In the early days of this research, we became aware of the significance of the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), developed and sponsored by Bill Gates and Microsoft in the late 1990s in the USA as an ed-tech industry standard for soft- and hardware in systems and schools that allows for the smooth flow, interoperability and interweaving of multiple data sets. SIF has now been adopted as the standard in North America, the UK and other nations in the EU, and in Australia. This allows or facilitates a single market for not only the hardware of data infrastructures but also the software, which gives a bigger market to the commercial providers. We’re interested in how that is now almost constituting schooling systems – school systems constructed around flows of data facilitated by underpinning data infrastructures. There’s also huge amounts of research being conducted by educational businesses (e.g. Pearson) in and around all of this, as we also see the move to computer adaptive on-line testing.

To date, then, we’ve done a series of interviews. I conducted some of them at the Federal Department of Education in Washington. I interviewed the person who’s in charge of international data. Importantly the US does not ‘oversample’ on PISA, as do most other federal nations do (e.g. Australia, Canada, Germany), and thus PISA is not particularly useful for policy purposes at state and local levels of policy making and practice (Lingard and Lewis, 2017). This is the context that has seen the rise of usage of PISA for Schools in the USA, sponsored by philanthropic agencies with no public monies involved. We’ve now done interviews in Canada and more widely in the United States. The interviews in Chicago were interesting, because it’s the only place that we can find where all of these contracts for the hardware and the software relating to these data infrastructures have to be made public under legislation; so you can look at who has the contracts, who are the other tenderers, how much the contracts are for; and we’ve been looking through those for Chicago. In most other places, that isn’t the case. This seems to be important legislation in terms of public accountability.

There was an amazing series of interviews in Japan, which I carried out there with my University of New England colleague, Keita Takayama. The Japanese Ministry of Education actually employed/contracted IBM to tell them how they could develop a data infrastructure for an inspection system similar to that in England with Ofsted. We interviewed the person from the ministry and a school principal they sent to England to learn about this and, when they came back, they said we don’t want to do this, and The Ministry actually had to break the contract with IBM. The locals thought schools and systems would be tied up with too much data collection and analysis; and, interestingly, in Japan there’s strong privacy laws in which don’t allow the integration of multiple data sets. Data can only be used for the purposes for which they were collected. (This is a concern also expressed by teachers in our survey of the extent of commercialization of public schooling that I will talk about later. Teachers expressed real privacy concerns about student data being in the hands of private providers of data infrastructures and data services.) There is still a strong focus on teacher pedagogy in the centralised administrations as well in Japan. We were also intrigued about how Japan has incorporated PISA-type application of knowledge questions into their three tiers of standardized testing and how such questions have also been used to reframe the curriculum. This was the result of a PISA shock for Japan following the release of the 2006 PISA results in 2007.

So they have testing by the Ministry of Education in Japan, by the municipal authority and by the prefectures. But they can’t link across the three data sets, because of privacy legislation, which says you can only use the data for the purpose for which it was collected; whereas in Australia the desire is to link every database the government has in order to get algorithms to underpin advice to schools and teachers in the longer run. Kalervo Gulson and Sam Sellar (two co-researchers on the project) have just (August 2016) interviewed people in the New South Wales bureaucracy, and the things they were saying were like the things you told me, David, that you found when you and Martin Thrupp interviewed the people from the research branch of the Ministry of Education in New Zealand. The New South Wales Ministry expected that the data would tell them everything they needed to know about each student to prepare them for their expected future role in society and to provide teaching advice and strategies for teachers. It was almost dystopian in a way.

At the end of 2016 (6 December), the PISA 2015 results will come out for the testing conducted in 2015. ² As part of this research on data infrastructures, we’re going to follow the media responses in England, Japan, Canada, the USA and Australia, and we’re going do that through a whole range of ways and see not only how those comparative data are used in policy terms, but how it also links to data infrastructures. How do PISA data flow through data infrastructures? We have also become interested in how the OECD uses the media to drive home its desired policy message from PISA, and also how the media in participating nations affect policy responses to a nation’s PISA performance (Baroutsis and Lingard, 2017).

And all of this is also linked to educational businesses (Hogan et al., 2016). It’s related to the way the public and private are being blurred in a whole range of ways in the policies and practices in education. This is indicative of networked or heterarchical modes of governance.

The final project to talk about then is the one that I’m here in New York to work on. The project is called Commercialization in Public Schooling (CIPS) and is funded by the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation, the largest teacher union in Australia. It’s a project which links to a bigger project that Education International (EI), the International Federation of Teacher Unions, located in Brussels has, and a project which is headed by Angelo Gavrielatos, who was the federal president of the federated teachers’ unions in Australia for a long period of time, and a very successful one. He now works in Brussels for EI. They have a project that is documenting, researching, and developing a politics regarding commercialization of public schooling across the world, but particularly in the nations of the global South. And to that end they commissioned, some time ago, a research paper by Stephen Ball and Deb Youdell, which you can get on the EI website, that makes a most useful distinction between privatization of schooling and privatization in schooling.

More recently EI commissioned Carolina Junemann and Stephen Ball to do research on Pearson, and they’ve now written a large document for EI, which you can also access on EI’s website. It’s about Pearson’s PALF – PALF is Pearson’s Alternative Learning Fund. The piece they’ve written is called PALF, the Mutating Giant. ³ In this EI report, Junemann and Ball look at how Pearson, through PALF, is investing in or sponsoring low fee for-profit schools in the poor countries of the globe, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, the Philippines, and now in some parts of South America. Interestingly, when we’ve looked at some of these things, Pakistan seems to be the only place that has high fee for-profit schools for elites. Sir Michael Barber, who is the chief education officer at Pearson, is currently overseeing a total reform of schooling in Punjab province in Pakistan. In a YouTube interview he has suggested that such for-profit schools in the rich nations, for-profit schools for the elite, are a likely future policy development in the nations of the Global North. (With a team of Greg Thompson, Kalervo Gulson, Anna Hogan and Nicole Mockler, we have just won another Australian Research Council grant to investigate for-profit schools around the globe and the legislative and policy frameworks which facilitate or inhibit the growth of such schools and their significance for democracy. We want to develop a typology of for-profit schools and of legislative frameworks and structural reforms that enable and inhibit such developments.)

In relation to Australia, if schools, of whatever kind, receive public monies (and all schools do), they cannot operate for profit. However, Victoria is the only state that has legislation that actually prohibits the creation of for-profit schools.

EI is funding research as well in the poor nations of the Global South (see Curtis Riep’s, 2014 work here), but have asked the rich nations to fund their own research projects on commercialization of public schooling, and so our project in Australia is about commercialization and privatization in schooling, and is funded by the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation, and it is a one-year study. This research first involves a survey of teachers and school leaders around Australia facilitated by the teacher unions. My colleague, Greg Thompson, is leading that element of the research. This is an attempt to map the extent of commercialization of Australian public schooling. We are also trying through the survey to ascertain teachers’ attitudes to commercialization and to issues associated with it. In the survey we’ve targeted principals, heads of department, and classroom teachers. Our sense is that teachers don’t know very much about commercialization and they tend to see Pearson, for example, as somebody that simply sells textbooks, not somebody who’s managing the testing, the national NAPLAN tests for a number of states; not somebody who’s moving in a big way in Australian education regarding policy settings, regarding provision of professional development, in relation to computer adaptive testing, and so on. However, if you read the annual reports of Pearson, they say they want to establish a global education policy consensus, and the interesting thing in relation to PISA is that they won the contract with the OECD to do the intellectual framework for the 2018 PISA assessments, thereby determining on what students will be tested.

We are also doing a number of complementary case studies. One is about the politics surrounding commercialization in New York State public schooling that you have written so much about, David (Hursh, 2016). The union is interested in opposition to this commercialization through parent and community groups, the ‘opt-out movement’, particularly on Long Island, and allies for public schooling, and of course teacher union work and that of other activists. The union is interested in effective coalitions and political strategies and the ways in which high stakes testing linked to accountability together have opened up spaces for commercial interests to be involved in public schooling.

So that’s one case study. A second case study focuses on Pearson in Australia, and my colleague Anna Hogan is doing that. There’s a huge amount that Pearson is doing in Australia, at so many levels, and she’s documenting that. Another case study looks at the National Schools Interoperability Program in Australia and is being carried out by my colleague, Sam Sellar, now at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. This case provides a focus on data infrastructures and how we see the significance of SIF mentioned earlier and of a mode of network governance with ed-tech providers and policy makers from all government schooling systems and independent and Catholic schools and systems making policy concerning data infrastructures. So, we’re doing a Pearson case study, but this other case study is about the data infrastructures underpinning schooling. We are also doing case studies on four schools affected by commercialization in various ways, including classification as an Apple School.

So, there are the four research projects, and we have another one which we have just won, also an Australian Research Council funded Discovery project. It will map what’s happening across the globe in both global south nations through some case studies and also rich nations about the creation of for profit schools. And there’s been some evidence recently that some academies in England and Charter Schools in the USA, which are ostensibly not-for-profit, are being used by for-profit companies, mediated by groups that manage the schools. So, the next project will look at the creation of for-profit schools across the globe in poor and rich countries alike. I have to say the Australian federal treasurer last year, when he released a competition report from the Productivity Commission, said at the time that he would not be averse to the trial of for-profit schools in Australia, which really sparked our attention. So, we’re going to try to document what’s happening, where things are up to, why it’s happening here and not there, and so on. We also ask, ‘Are there legislative frameworks which enable or disenable the emergence of for-profit schools?’ One thing we would stress here is that we cannot just focus on edu-businesses, but also must focus on government policy and frames that enable such developments. We must look at the way, I suppose, that the neoliberal, the corporate managerialist, and the network restructuring of the state, in the context of global policy-scapes and fast policy-making (Peck and Theodore, 2015), have opened up and enabled spaces for educational businesses and commercialization. Any research here has to look at the politics surrounding restructured states, policy frameworks and the way educational governance occurs now, as well as looking at the educational businesses and commercialization. In a way, all of these research projects are working with and seeking to understand new practices of statecraft as they play out in education policy in this time of acceleration and globalized educational policy discourses and heavy involvement of commercial interests across all aspect of educational policy and the policy cycle (Lingard and Thompson, 2017).