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Abstract

The spread of neoliberalism in the South African education system provides a template for ways that regimes co-opt the values of excellence and equality while implementing policies that contradict these values. Specifically, South Africa’s education system is “cloaked” in equality, although institutionalized inequality persists long beyond the end of the Apartheid system. Neoliberal education policies legitimize the expectation that “excellence” (i.e., quality) and “equality” are synonymous, which is what leads to the development of a “cloak of equality.” But, in practice, these equivocations become mutually contradictory, as the South African context suggests. This paper examines selected elements of neoliberalism as they are embedded within the South African education system and connects those elements to the development of a symbolic “cloak of equality” that masks institutionalized inequities within the broader system.

Keywords

South Africa educational equity neoliberalism institutionalization scientization

Excellence and equality are dual ideals that both nations and citizens expect from their education systems worldwide (Ramirez et al., 2016). Regardless of the dominant political or economic system, the general public in most contexts strive for these characteristics. Although excellence and equality can be achieved through a variety of means, they can and have been co-opted by regimes that officially value these ideals while simultaneously implementing policies that lead to the opposite results. The spread of neoliberalism in the South African education system provides one such example. Although neoliberalism is critiqued for ignoring the needs of local stakeholders and disregarding contextual variations in South Africa and elsewhere, neoliberal policies have been positioned by both multilateral organizations as well as national governments, as a means to promote higher quality and more equitable education (Enns, 2015).

South Africa’s educational history is unique because of its 1994 transition from an official apartheid system to a democratic one. Throughout and following this transition, South Africa’s educational system has been characterized by a neoliberal approach to educational transformation that is “cloaked in equality” through an emphasis on “quality” (Spaull, 2013; Plagerson et al., 2019). In particular, the shift from a centralized and highly stratified educational system under apartheid to one that is less officially stratified, but still highly centralized under the aegis of quality, has led to the institutionalization of neoliberal policies and structures in a less overt way than in other countries (Postma et al., 2015). This has been made possible by the adoption of a neoliberal agenda in South Africa, which is characterized by capitalist and free-market approaches to education and an increased focus on quantitative data collection for accountability (Spaull, 2015).

Broadly speaking, neoliberalism has become a de facto framework for education in South Africa post-1994 through an emphasis on educational quality, quality control, and efficiency. As a result, the confounding of these elements with equality in education and equal education opportunities in the South African context assumes and legitimizes the expectation that “excellence” (i.e., quality) and “equality” are synonymous, and that in fact quality and efficiency are what allow and encourage equality to exist. In practice, however, these equivocations become mutually contradictory, as the South African context suggests.

Elements of neoliberalism in South African education

The neoliberal agenda took root following World War II with the establishment and rapid expansion of organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (Klees, 2008; McKenzie, 2012). Neoliberalism comprises policy, political discourse, and governmentality, but conceptually, the policy and practice are especially supported by these same multinational organizations, which contribute to international education development (Larner, 2000). Various actors implement the neoliberal agenda, including governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), donors, and other educational stakeholders (Klees, 2017). Neoliberalism also travels well (Lindblad and Popkewitz, 2004) and has been credited with promoting the spread of amenable education policies from international organizations to national ministries of education (Gulson and Fataar, 2011). Although neoliberalism is often characterized by minimal government, it simultaneously focuses on increased assessment and accountability by third-party agencies, whether they are specific national governing bodies, such as South African Qualifications Authority, or international organizations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or World Bank (Ehren et al., 2020; Spaull, 2015). The numerous critiques of neoliberalism in the research literature are either not heard or are ignored by most education policymakers, as movements toward increased accountability and regulation show no sign of slowing (Hoadley and Muller, 2014).

Although many different definitions of neoliberalism are available (Mirowski, 2009), most of them are based on the values of (1) the individual, (2) freedom of choice, (3) market security, (4) laissez-faire, and (5) minimal government (Larner, 2000). In addition, neoliberalism has historically become more seamlessly embedded in countries that have experienced high levels of civil, social, or economic conflict. For example, while the conflict in South Africa was of a decidedly different character than in other sharply divided, and frequently genocidal, nations, the example of education in a society like South Africa that has both reproduced inequality and also reconciled conflicting communities through its education system provides a unique platform for an analysis of neoliberalism and education. These five elements of neoliberalism, therefore, provide the basis for understanding the influence of neoliberalism in South African education and countries that share similar characteristics. Each of these elements of neoliberalism are explained below with reference to the unique situations often present in post-conflict societies like South Africa.

The individual

Neoliberalism in post-conflict societies is often focused on the individual rather than the whole community or society. This is a way to de-escalate the tensions and conflicts that led to society being stratified and somehow violently or traumatically divided by focusing on the rights, responsibilities, and opportunities of the individual (Buckland, 2004). Yet, from a neoliberal perspective individuals are also responsible for making their own opportunities, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals are about creating one’s own “success” rather than relying on the support or skills of others to help individuals rise (Fitzsimons, 2002). For example, from a neoliberal perspective it would be enough to fulfill a social mandate to provide formal education to a community for an individual to have a school available to attend within some proximity to their home. It is not, however, the responsibility of the community or the government to ensure that the school is affordable, convenient, or contextually relevant to an individual’s needs. Instead, it is the individual’s responsibility to make something out of the opportunity to go to school, in spite of what it might cost both directly and indirectly, or whether the education that is offered at a particular school is relevant to the individual’s needs and goals.

Subsequently, this neoliberal focus on the individual provides an escape route for education policymakers. Rather than considering systemic and holistic reasons for an individual or a group’s failure to succeed, an excessive focus on the individual means that it can never be policy or other circumstances beyond a person’s control that limit individual success. Rather, the individual is blamed for his or her failure to take advantage of educational opportunities and achieve success (Francis, 2006). As such, policy makers using a neoliberal approach absolve themselves from any responsibility when individuals from marginalized groups do not meet the measures of success set out before them, as each individual has officially had equal opportunities for educational access. The characteristics of the emphasis on the individual in post-conflict neoliberal societies is that individuals can earn what they deserve (Poppema, 2012). It is a meritocracy, but one that is meritocratic at the most basic level as it is focused on providing the same basic service to every individual rather than what every individual needs based on their unique circumstances or background.

Freedom of choice

For the last three decades, education has been increasingly privatized (Mundy and Verger, 2015). As part of the neoliberalism of education, school choice has become an expectation for systems of education around the world (Gulson and Fataar, 2011), and increasingly so in communities that are post-conflict or burdened by high poverty levels (Mundy and Menashy, 2014). School choice also highlights the value of the individual, where students and their families are viewed as clients or customers, which is another characteristic of neoliberalism (Gulson and Fataar, 2011). So, choice is valued in neoliberal systems and that element of choice is combined with a focus on individuals. This is a way to emphasize the increasing privatization of education in post-conflict communities because it is yet another way that individual needs are valued, especially among those who have the resources to take advantage of private schooling (Languille, 2016). It is also a way for advantaged individuals to get more specifically tailored education based on their unique needs and advantages. And, it is a key argument for those who suggest that education quality is largely associated with the value (e.g., cost) placed on that education (e.g., Hanushek and Woessmann, 2010).

Market security

Economic self-sufficiency is a core component of neoliberalism, and is a key component of educational systems in post-conflict societies like South Africa because these societies are often looking for a source of stability for social institutions like schools (Beall et al., 2005). Market security is, therefore, tied to both the economic opportunities and productivity of individuals and to the opportunities and productivity of schools themselves. Those schools that produce the highest performing students who transition to the highest value jobs or higher education are deemed the most valuable and of the highest quality from a neoliberal perspective. In this way, neoliberalism is closely aligned with human capital theory, meaning that the exchange value of education determines the quality of education (Morely et al., 2014). In other words, as human capital theory relies upon the rate of return on investment in education or other inputs into individuals’ knowledge and skill development, so also neoliberalism suggests that the value of educational systems or processes rely upon the economic value of individuals’ education in the labor market.

Market security is also associated with monopolization of a sector (Ball, 2003). For example, in a community that has had all formal education erased during social and political unrest (e.g., Cambodia), when formal schooling is replaced in that community it may be the only type of education available to school-aged youth. This makes it the only available mechanism for obtaining a formal education complete with legitimized and standardized diplomas or other indicators of training and completion. This provides schools with a high level of market security, even if they are of low quality or inaccessible to a large proportion of the population.

Laissez-faire

A free-market approach presents itself differently in the educational sector than in the general economy. Although education is typically state-run, neoliberal approaches to education have created spaces for external parties to be involved, beyond the typical religious organizations associated with state governance in some societies (Lakes and Carter, 2011). As neoliberalism has expanded, there has been more involvement from corporate organizations or other entities, which exist parallel to but outside of the traditional educational structures (Hursh, 2016). In some cases, schools operated by these organizations are not even accountable to the same standards as schools run by the national government. This non-interference of national educational oversight for these schools which exist outside of the traditional educational structure provides evidence of a laissez-faire approach for particular types of schools.

Minimal government

Finally, neoliberalism as theory, policy, and practice is characterized by minimal government involvement and, in the education sector, this includes a push to limit national involvement in systems of education and increase opportunities for the private sector to become involved. Neoliberal approaches to education include a shrinking of governmental involvement and a subsequent growth of private investors, including through public-private partnerships, as a way to meet the needs which state-run systems of education are accused of failing (Mundy and Menashy, 2014). In fact, in South Africa there has been a “financialization,” which is characterized by a shift in providers of financial services from the government to private and non-governmental institutions (Ashman et al., 2011).

The push for any type of systemic change from the outside after a systemic collapse, such as in post-conflict societies, is a reason for concern, especially when organizations push a particular approach to government and the economy (Davies, 2004). Numerous organizations, including the World Bank and USAID have been identified as perpetuating the neoliberal agenda in post-conflict contexts (Davies, 2004; Moore, 2000), which is especially alarming as they are exploiting already vulnerable contexts to spread their versions of democracy and capitalism. It also appears that some organizations are waiting for nations to be deemed “post-conflict” so that they may enter and spread their particular agenda (Moore, 2000).

The neoliberal rhetoric is alive and well in South Africa, creating a particularly unique setting because of the significant changes in its governmental and industrial structures following the end of apartheid. Neoliberalism may have been present in South Africa prior to the end of apartheid, however the substantial growth in market-driven and performance-based approaches to education in the years since the end of apartheid have created an accelerated environment for education, with many substantial changes occurring in a short amount of time (Maistry, 2014). For instance, with more school-age youth attending school and more from historically disadvantaged groups enrolling, in particular, the expectations for the return on educational investment has spread beyond the middle classes to the working poor (Eckel et al., 2013).

At the same time, expectations for increasing student learning and associated performance measures (like test scores) have steadily grown. South Africa’s fraught participation in large-scale international assessments, like the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), is one example of how expectations for quality education were confounded with expectations about equality among diverse groups in South Africa (Reddy, 2005). However, removing the barrier of apartheid did not remove social stratification in South Africa and students’ performance on TIMSS reflected this gap in both learning and performance, so much so that South Africa officially withdrew from participating in TIMSS for several testing cycles (Reddy et al., 2015).

While much of this may be driven at the international level, South African teachers and administrators have also had agency in perpetuating this script (Hoadley and Muller, 2014). In South Africa, neoliberal education policies, including high stakes testing, school fees, and school choice, are positioned as post-apartheid equalizers (Motala, 2009). However, while the neoliberalization of education in South Africa, including the introduction of school fees and school choice, was positioned as an attempt to equalize opportunity, it has in fact tended to exacerbate inequalities between socioeconomic levels (Motala, 2009).

South Africa presents a unique context to examine changes to the education system as the country underwent an institutional overhaul with the fall of apartheid. Not only did South Africa experience an extreme regime change as it moved from the apartheid system to a democratic one, it did so in a post-conflict system. After decades of violent and nonviolent protests, the apartheid system came to an end in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as president in the country’s first democratic elections. This movement toward political equality was complemented by numerous policies designed to restructure the South African system of education (Naidoo, 2005). These new and ambitious education policies sought to rectify decades of segregated education policies, including the 1953 Bantu Education Act which promoted racial stereotypes and the 1970 Education and Training Act which continued segregation in schools and the unequal distribution of resources (Thulare, 2018).

After the fall of apartheid, numerous policies were adopted which attempted to equalize educational opportunities in South Africa, although many of these policies promoted neoliberal policies under the guise of equity. For example, the 1996 South African Schools Act (SASA) sought to equalize the education system through the promotion of school choice and privatized education (Dzotsenidze, 2018). Under the apartheid system, educational policymaking was described as excessively top-down, with all decisions occurring behind closed doors with input from “experts” rather than stakeholders (Cross et al., 2002). Despite the shift in rhetoric with the adoption of democratic systems, education policy remained predominantly centralized and hierarchical, with one example being the Annual National Assessment for students in grades one through six and nine in math and literacy (Thulare, 2018).

The adoption and explosion of testing programs are additional examples of policies adopted to promote equity in education. As in many other contexts, the implementation of national testing regimes was positioned as a way to share objective information about the quality of education so that appropriate interventions could be taken (Chisholm and Wildeman, 2013). South Africa was one of the first African countries to participate in TIMSS starting in the early 1990s. National evaluations were first introduced in 2001 and further institutionalized through the Annual National Assessments (ANAs), which tested at multiple grade levels in the areas of mathematics and literacy. By 2008, South Africa was one of only three countries participating in international, regional, and its own national assessments. (Kamens and Benavot, 2011).

South Africa is acknowledged for perpetuating the international script around outcomes-based education (OBE), not only in its own education system, but also through promoting national qualifications frameworks to other countries in the region (Chisholm, 2007). The adoption of OBE in South Africa was an attempt to link education and industry, which garnered various reactions from compulsory, technical, and higher education (Chisholm, 2007). As a result of negative backlash, especially at the compulsory and higher education levels, the implementation of OBE has greatly distanced itself from the intent of the original policies (Chisholm, 2007).

As the evidence summarized above suggests, there are numerous internal and external factors that have contributed to the rise of neoliberal education in countries that have experienced conflict, and in South Africa, specifically. These include global trends toward large-scale testing and the subsequent pressure for national averages of student achievement on international assessments to fall significantly above the international mean (Chisholm and Wildeman, 2013). In addition to these changes, the international education realm was also shifting following the 1990 Jomtien conference where the Education for All (EFA) agenda was officially adopted (Chisholm, 2007). Accompanying the EFA agenda, and the subsequent Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (i.e., MDGs and SDGs), has been an increased focus on large-scale assessment and the (false) equivocation of high achievement (i.e., excellence) with equity-based education (Rose, 2015). These trends also indicate that neoliberal agency exists both at the national and international levels. How this dual-level neoliberal agenda manifests itself in South African education follows on the five elements of neoliberalism outlined above.

Evidence of the cloak of equality in South African education

Although counterintuitive, neoliberal policies are often positioned as a means to promote more equitable educational opportunities for marginalized people (Klees, 2017). Examples of such policies include provisions for charter schools and vouchers for private schools, which have expanded under neoliberal policies that position expanded educational opportunities as an equalizer (Klees, 2017). International and national programs that position education as a panacea further contribute to this narrative (Dahlstrom, 2009). While many of these strategies were adopted and implemented to equalize the highly segregated South African education context, they continue to perpetuate educational inequity, as the decades of unequal funding and opportunities are not so easily reversed (Ndimande, 2016). For example, standardized assessments provide evidence of the socioeconomic stratification persisting and reproduced in South African schools almost 20 years after the end of apartheid. Regardless of policy adoption, studies have found that discrepancies between well-resourced and under-resourced schools still exist along the same divisions that were formally authorized under apartheid (Chisholm, 2007).

Three characteristics of South African education reflect the neoliberal “cloak of equality” by providing the illusion of excellence and equity, while serving (purposefully or not) to reproduce the inequalities and segregation that the end of formal apartheid was intended to abolish. These characteristics include high stakes testing, school fees, and school choice. Although there is evidence suggesting that each of these characteristics are presented by international organizations and the South African national and provincial education systems, there is also ample evidence to suggest that each serves as a “cloak of equality”, meaning that each is a simulacrum of equality, but that this is a “cloak” or covering which impedes a clear view of the inequality that each creates. This is especially relevant in a national education system, which follows the global model of instilling egalitarian and individualistic values to the point that education is viewed as a human right (e.g., Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26). Yet, high stakes testing, school fees, and school choice mask institutionalized educational inequalities. This egalitarian mask, or “cloak of equality” (Benschop, 1996), means that although these three characteristics may create some parity in access, achievement, and opportunity in education, historically segregated or unequal populations in South Africa are still not equal in terms of participation in school, higher education, or the labor market. Each of these characteristics of South African education is examined below in light of the characteristics of neoliberalism as well as their potential for contributing to and perpetuating institutionalized inequalities in South African education and society.

School choice

In South Africa, the implementation of school choice policies was linked to desegregation. Under the apartheid system, schools were linked to neighborhoods, which were legally segregated between Whites, Blacks, Indians, and Coloreds under the Group Areas Act of 1952, with schools in the Black, Indian, and Colored communities suffering from severe underfunding (Ndimande, 2016). Post-apartheid, the well-funded white schools were highly sought after, and de facto school segregation is still a reality even though legal segregation is not. Although school choice is portrayed as an equalizer, Black and Colored parents do not often send their children to formerly white-only schools (Gulson and Fataar, 2011; Ndimande, 2016).

School choice policies represent the neoliberal cloak of equality in South Africa. Although they perpetuate marketized and capitalized approaches to education, school choice in South Africa was framed as a means to provide equal opportunities to traditionally marginalized communities (Maile, 2004; Ndimande, 2016). The illusion of school choice perpetuates the neoliberal script regarding “freedom of choice” by cloaking systematic and historically-institutionalized segregation with the apparent opportunity for equality in educational choice without achieving any of the equality school choice is intended to achieve (Hill, 2016; Woolman and Fleisch, 2006). In fact, many South African schools remained de facto segregated in spite of the elimination of the apartheid system more than two decades ago (Ndimande, 2016; Hill, 2016). Ample evidence suggests that the quasi-market in South Africa’s educational system has limited benefits for and perhaps negative consequences for some of those already disadvantaged by the historically racially-segregate society, and the introduction of educational structures like school choice which appear to facilitate freedom of choice regardless of racial identity do not erase the effects of institutionalized racism (Hill, 2016; Ndimande, 2016; Woolman and Fleisch, 2006; Maile, 2004).

School fees

In contrast with international trends, South Africa has encouraged schools to require fees (Motala, 2009; 2013). South African policymakers implemented compulsory school fees as a strategy to support governmental funding to public schools (Motala, 2009). While schools serving more wealthy communities would have higher income from school fees, the idea was that this income would allow the government to redirect some of its financial support into poorer schools (Motala, 2009). The idea is that wealthier schools and communities would not require as many resources from the provincial or national department of education and that funding for schools could be equalized by supplementing resources from local surplus (Mestry, 2016b). However, even the South African Department of Education acknowledges that school fees continue to benefit the most wealthy schools (Motala, 2009). For example, school fees allow for the hiring of additional educators and the hiring of more highly qualified (based on their years of schooling) educators (Motala, 2009).

School fees, from a neoliberal framework, are a way to minimize the government’s role in education because it is a way to shift financial responsibility for education from national and regional governments to local communities and individuals (e.g., Mestry, 2016a). Instead, evidence suggests that neoliberal education policies keep decision-making authority at a centralized level while pushing responsibility to the local level (Astiz et al., 2002). In fact, re-regulation of school fees and other “decentralized centrism” efforts, like school fees in South Africa, have created this situation (du Plessis, 2020). School fees are asserted to be a way of encouraging economic self-sufficiency where individuals and families are provided the opportunity to in some way control the school quality they have access to by providing a way for them to directly contribute to the school’s resources and, by association, quality (Motala and Carel, 2019). This is a form of market security. Neoliberal perspectives suggest that this sort of relationship is empowering and equalizing because individuals and families may––in theory––choose which schools their children attend and therefore which school fees they pay (Buras and Apple, 2005). A more critical assessment of the school fees policy in South Africa, however, suggests that school fees are less about providing opportunity and self-sufficiency as they are about limiting access and making quality dependent on socioeconomic factors outside of individuals’ control (Sayed, 2016). Another way of limiting access and making educational quality dependent on external factors is through high stakes testing.

High stakes testing

Since the turn of the century, South Africa has gone from having a singular high stakes test at the completion of secondary education to multi-level assessments. For example, in the Western Cape, students are assessed by both the Western Cape Systemic Evaluation (WCSE) and the Annual National Assessment (ANAs) (Hoadley and Muller, 2014). High stakes testing was first outsourced by the World Bank and other neoliberal organizations when South Africa originally participated in TIMSS (Howie, 2012). After doing much more poorly than expected, South African education officials decided to cease their participation in TIMSS and focus on regional and national testing schema (Spaull, 2013). Even though participation in international assessment through TIMSS ended for a period of time (2003–2011), the decision was not to eliminate testing, but to push responsibility for testing to the national and subnational levels of the educational system. This is a familiar neoliberal pattern: centralization of decision-making authority and decentralization of responsibility for educational implementation and performance (Astiz et al., 2002).

The distinction between the centralization of authority and decentralization of responsibility is not universally recognized among South African educators and communities as a form of neoliberalism, however, which shifts educational authority to centralized governing agencies, such as the Department for Basic Education, but shifts the consequences of implementation to the regions, districts, and schools (Astiz et al., 2002; Thulare, 2018). For example, South African teachers view testing frameworks as positively contributing to a more equitable distribution of financial and human resources, to the benefit of schools in the lowest quartile (Hoadley and Muller, 2014). Even though the evidence suggests that high stakes testing in South Africa reflects a neoliberal agenda through partnership with and the external influence of hierarchically-empowered international organizations that focus on measuring and sharing student achievement data (Thulare, 2018), the persistent belief among those implementing the assessments and educating students in schools and classrooms that standardized assessments are tools to develop a more equitable education is a striking example of the cloak of equality. Test development and implementation are also indicative of the two-way movement of the neoliberal agenda, as it has been pushed at the international and national level, as well as from local teachers, who consider test regimes as offering opportunities to equalize financial support to schools.

As shown above, neoliberal agendas are embedded in many of the educational policies and structures that are said to create excellence and equality in South African education. The evidence suggests that each of the five elements of neoliberalism outlined above are not only overtly demonstrated in South African education, but that they are embedded in three unique characteristics of the South African educational system: school choice, school fees, and high stakes testing. Of these three characteristics, testing or assessment is the one that is burdened the most with the promise of documenting excellence while providing the foundation for achieving equality. In order for South African education to be deemed excellent overall, average student performance must be at or above high competency levels, but in order to achieve average performance at those levels those students performing at the lowest levels must improve. In order to improve those performing at the lowest levels, South African policies assert that equality of educational opportunity must be the norm (Chisholm and Wildeman, 2013), but schools reflect socioeconomic and racial stratification of resources and opportunities in spite of the structures (school choice and school fees), which are promoted as providing equal opportunities in the decades old wake of apartheid (Taylor, 2009). Consequently, the question remains: how do neoliberal policies and educational practices persist in a nation so focused on achieving equality? One answer is through the scientization of education.

Scientization as a critique of South African education policy and practice

Scientization is a conceptual framework developed from sociological neo-institutional theory to critically examine solutionist approaches to education (Wiseman et al., 2016), such as South Africa’s neoliberal education policies. Scientization is characterized by four primary themes: education as a panacea, the quantification of knowledge, the commodification of education, and the cyborg dialectic. While all of these may be found in the South African education system, the quantification, commodification, and education as a panacea are particularly relevant to the arguments set out here.

Quantification

The expansion of accountability has contributed to an environment where education is heavily quantified, including the measurement, analysis, comparison, and reporting of all aspects of education, with a focus on large-scale academic assessments representing one of the most prevalent phenomena in the area of quantification. While assessments and evaluation are embedded in formal education structures in South Africa and elsewhere, the quantification of knowledge goes beyond this, to include the measurement, analysis, comparison, and reporting of all aspects of formal education so that the general public, including but not limited to parents, can make decisions about which schools to choose for their children. This quantification of knowledge perpetuates the neoliberal agenda by translating public education outcomes into marketable data. Educational policy and practice are informed, negotiated, and in some cases transformed by the results of the quantification of education while simultaneously being encouraged to continue refining this quantification process through processes of standards-setting and accountability systems (Wiseman et al., 2016).

Quantification is the backbone of accountability systems in national education systems worldwide. South Africa’s transition after apartheid is noted for the quantitative documentation and overt accountability systems implemented by international and domestic development organizations contributing to the post-apartheid transition (Nnadozie, 2017). Quantification allows for the standardization of information, which also reduces unique conditions and considerations to normed or averaged experiences. This is a tool that neoliberal policies and agendas take advantage of to remove unique experiences and summarize diverse results as singular numbers (Rutkowski, 2007). Not all quantification is used for or has this purpose, but when the system is as dominated by neoliberalism as South Africa’s education system, and when a system is externally evaluated to the extent that South Africa’s is, then quantification becomes a tool for the promulgation of (1) individualism, (2) freedom of choice, (3) market security, (4) laissez-faire, and (5) minimal government.

Commodification

The quantification of knowledge supports the commodification of education, as data is used to turn education into a service that can be used depending on its quality, as measured by externally created indicators, such as large-scale and high stakes tests. On the other side, linking education’s purpose solely to the economy or employment is another way to commodify the typically national and common endeavor. The commodification of knowledge and education is a phenomenon that has developed in parallel with the neoliberal agenda, as economists have discussed it since the 1970s (Saito and van Capelle, 2010). Commodification is also seen in the numerous funding strategies devised by governments, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), and NGOs. These groups indicate the investment value they place on education in their funding amounts and the value assigned to the amount of time spent debating and measuring the differing levels and types of funding.

South Africa’s commodification of education is apparent through its testing policies and partnerships with international and national funders for schools. This phenomenon can also be seen directly in national policy. For example, the 2012 Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) positions education to manage the transfer of students in schools and other educational institutions to the labor market by providing employers with information about students’ employable skills and competencies. These statements represent the commodification of education, as education is not only cited as a tool for moving individuals to the workforce, it is also meant to provide information about human capital to employers (Maistry, 2014). Another example of commodification, as well as education as a panacea, is evident when education is positioned as the key institution to improve the quality of life through improving the Gross National Product (GNP). However, in South Africa and similar states with highly stratified class structures, higher scores on development indexes can mask inequalities (Maistry, 2014).

Education as a panacea

Underlying both the quantification and the commodification of education is the belief in education as a panacea. The commodification of education assumes that education can solve problems related to the economy and employment. Quantification feeds into the solutionist narrative by positioning the achievement of certain measurable objectives as key to addressing the numerous challenges which education has the power to overcome. These scripts contribute to the perpetuation of education as a panacea, where policymakers and the general public consider education as the cure-all for any and all societal issues, including those related to health, economics, and the environment among others. In addition to being able to solve widespread problems, South African education has been positioned as an equalizer and an opportunity to unite the segments of the country which were oppressed under apartheid. Education as a panacea represents the optimism surrounding education and reflects the persistent perspective, which has evolved since first introduced during the Enlightenment, that humans can rationally and scientifically solve problems at large and in education, specifically.

Conclusion

As the evidence reported above consistently demonstrates, neoliberalism is the de facto framework for education in post-apartheid South Africa. The five elements of neoliberalism and the three characteristics of South African education align with a shared emphasis on quality, control, and efficiency. Or, as a neoliberal perspective would suggest instead, it is an emphasis on excellence and equality through the prioritization of market-driven factors in the education sector. Neoliberalism assumes that excellence and equality are not mutually exclusive, but a critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of scientization also suggests that excellence and equality are not collectively exhaustive either. This critical approach to South African education exposes a more damaging transformation of education and society through (1) the quantification and commodification of education as well as (2) a widespread belief that education is a panacea for the social, political, and economic problems South Africa faces.

The duality between officially advancing the valued ideals of excellence and equality and yet simultaneously using market-driven or market-inspired structures and policies to drive education is an easily identified “cloak of equality.” But, of course, the cloak of equality would not be worth the cost of advancing the official goals of excellence and equality if it did not have some sort of larger significance. As shown earlier, many different actors are involved in and promulgate a neoliberal agenda in South Africa, including policymakers and educators in the education system itself alongside government officials, NGOs and their staff, donors, and development organizations. One of the key ways that power is centralized and responsibility is pushed to local- and implementation-level stakeholders is through the outsourcing of decision-making and authority to international organizations or the centralization of authority at the national department of education.

Through it all, neoliberal educational policies and structures are responsible for developing and maintaining a cloak of equality that the South African educational system wears rather overtly. While there are mechanisms for achieving equality of education, and neoliberal values suggest that individuals are responsible for their own pathways to equality and excellence using what opportunities the state provides, the entrenched and institutionalized stratification of students by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) are responsible for reproducing significant inequalities in the South African educational system and for disguising them as equality. So, while school choice, school fees, and high stakes testing are all readily described by advocates and providing equal opportunities for excellence of educators and students across South Africa, the lived experiences of educators and students and the educational policies that are implemented in South African schools often reproduce neoliberal agendas.

Several approaches to resolving or disrupting the “cloaking” effect of neoliberal policies have been implemented both in South Africa and other nation-states’ educational systems. One solution has been shown to be the acknowledgment or public discovery of inequality by national and intra-national educational agencies. Public expenditure tracking surveys (PETS) are one way to both discover and acknowledge systematic inequality, including corruption, in the education sector (Reinikka and Smith, 2004). PETS track fiscal spending and the movement of funds through administrative layers toward the point of service, which in the case of education is the school, classroom, or individual teachers and students. PETS have been used in South Africa with some success (van der Berg et al., 2011), and they are a public form of identifying and acknowledging systemic inequality in education (Jenkins and Duri, 2020).

Another potential resolution or disruption of the neoliberal “cloak of equality” is the overt identification of unequal educational policies and practices accompanied by the replacement of those policies for the explicit purpose of establishing equitable education. One way this has been done is through the replacement of unequal educational policies and practices based on consensus with stakeholders in communities that have experience systemic discrimination or inequality in the education sector. Although South Africa experienced an aggressive, normative approach to education policy development and education reform in the decades following the shift from apartheid to democracy, evidence confirms that these shifts were more normative than intersectional (Schmidt and Mestry, 2019). In other words, stakeholder involvement in the policymaking process is key to societies governing and regulating themselves (Viennet and Pont, 2017). It is also key to the development and establishment of equitable education in the context of its implementation. Stakeholder involvement with equitable education reform has been implemented in other post-crisis or post-conflict settings such as in Somalia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Uganda (Price, 2019).

Finally, and perhaps counterintuitively and controversially, national and regional education systems can either expose or resolve the cloaking effect of neoliberal polices through the systematic analysis of multiple sources of data and the mechanisms for connecting the equality of individuals with their activities and outcomes. Through the analysis of education data, inequalities in education across communities can be identified and addressed (Reardon et al., 2019). Educational data systems have been misused frequently as part of the neoliberal quantification agenda, but evidence shows that data systems have also been used to provide equitable access to quality teaching, identify and decrease racial and gender biases among students and teachers, and facilitate both mixed ability and multicultural classrooms (Shahar, 2017). Although the collection of educational data is neither adequate nor a guarantee that equitable education policies will follow (Shahjahan, 2011), the paradox is that without systematic educational data collection and, perhaps more importantly, the strategic analysis of that data, the development of equitable education policies is less likely because of a lack of evidence of inequality.

Addressing the cloak of equality in South Africa, therefore, can be accomplished and neoliberal agendas and policies that are embedded in the educational system may be both identified and addressed. But, the responsibilities for publicly acknowledging inequality, involving stakeholders in the development and implementation of education policy, and going beyond the quantification of education to both equitably collect and analyze educational data to identify and address inequalities in education remain a challenge in many educational systems, including in South Africa. Whether or not South Africa is able to move beyond the cloak of equality that neoliberal policies created and maintain depends in large part on the ways that the possible approaches identified above are developed, designed, and implemented in South Africa’s education sector as a whole.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the external reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. All inaccuracies remain the responsibility of the authors alone.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alexander W. Wiseman

Alexander W. Wiseman, PhD, is Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy in the College of Education at Texas Tech University, U.S.A. Dr. Wiseman holds a dual-degree Ph.D. in Comparative & International Education and Educational Theory & Policy from Pennsylvania State University, an M.A. in International Comparative Education from Stanford University, an M.A. in Education from The University of Tulsa, and a B.A. in Letters from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Wiseman conducts comparative educational research on educational policy and practice using large-scale education datasets on math and science education, information and communication technology (ICT), teacher preparation, professional development and curriculum as well as school principal’s instructional leadership activity, and is the author of many research-to-practice articles and books. He serves as senior editor of the online journal, FIRE: Forum for International Research in Education, and as series editor for the International Perspectives on Education and Society volume series (Emerald Publishing).

Petrina M. Davidson, PhD, is an independent researcher and consultant based in Canada. She has worked across education levels, starting as a classroom teacher, moving into curriculum and leadership, and teaching at the university and graduate levels. Her Ph.D. is in Comparative & International Education from Lehigh University and her M.S. is in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership with an emphasis on Curriculum & Instruction from Oklahoma State University. Her research interests include international education policy, especially the scientization of education and the internationalization of curriculum, teacher training and professional development for teachers of immigrants and refugees, peace and nonviolence education, and post-genocide education.

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Institutionalized inequities and the cloak of equality in the South African educational context

Abstract

Keywords

Elements of neoliberalism in South African education

The individual

Freedom of choice

Market security

Laissez-faire

Minimal government

Evidence of the cloak of equality in South African education

School choice

School fees

High stakes testing

Scientization as a critique of South African education policy and practice

Quantification

Commodification

Education as a panacea

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References