Will Brehm:  0:58
Dr. Frank Adamson. Welcome to FreshEd.

Frank Adamson:  1:01
Hi Will. Thanks for having me on the show.

Will Brehm:  1:04
You’ve recently or you will be publishing a co-edited volume called Global Educational Reform: How Privatization and Public Investment Influence Educational or Education Outcomes. How did you get involved in the subject of educational privatization?

Frank Adamson:  1:22
So I initially wrote my dissertation on the relationship between income inequality and a variety of different education measures, student achievement, teacher preparation, opportunities to learn. And so I was already focused on the economic aspects of education. And that continued when I was looking at resource distribution issues for teacher salaries in New York and California in the United States. And so my body of research is always focused on the relationship between education finance and governance. And about 2011, I ran across an initiative in Open Society Foundations that they had just established, the Privatization in Education Research Initiative, which is looking at this newest phenomena of privatization in education, which is a new way to think about economic contributions and the role of economics and funding in the education sector.

Will Brehm:  2:28
Right. So it sounds like you have quite a long history studying economics of education and educational privatization, and specifically the inequalities that may come out. And I know you work at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) at Stanford University, and you co-edit this volume with Bjorn Astrand and Linda Darling-Hammond. How did the three of you come together to work on this project?

Frank Adamson:  3:02
Yeah, well, I was originally working with Linda at SCOPE following my PhD at Stanford. And we were looking at, kind of, how different countries were organizing their accountability systems with respect to testing and with respect to teacher preparation. And I had an idea in mind for an article that sort of evolved into this book. And the title of that article would have been ‘The Future of US Education: Finland or Chile?’ And the idea was that the United States falls kind of at this choice point between a Finnish public investment model and the Chilean privatization model. Well, Bjorn happened to be a fellow at Stanford at this time. And he met with Linda and told Linda about the privatization strategies that were now occurring in Sweden that most of us weren’t actually aware of. So then we had decided to expand the book and use a country dyad model or pairs of countries that are geographically similar, but using different strategies. So we have Sweden and Finland is one country pair, the United States and Canada, and then Cuba and Chile.

Will Brehm:  4:26
Very interesting. That you were kind enough to share with me your introductory chapter for this forthcoming volume. And in it, you begin by speaking of the recent protests in Chile, and you use it as a way to distill the historical trajectory and development of economic thinking and education policy making. And I found it interesting that you distinguish between what you call neoliberalism 1.0 and neoliberalism 2.0. Can you explain what these terms mean to our audience and specifically in relation to Chile, which seemed to be one of the first case studies that you wanted to look at, for this book idea of yours?

Frank Adamson:  5:17
Sure. And I think for me, in writing this introductory chapter, and really looking back at the roots of the economic thought that has developed over the last century, it was very interesting to first look back at, sort of, the root of neoliberalism and break down that word, neo(-)liberalism. And so it was really a turn to liberalism, which was advocated by Friedrich von Hayek as a veteran of World War One. And so, you know, Hayek was, I think, actually in World War One. And he had a lot of suspicion about governments having too much power, politically and militarily. And he was convinced that markets were the way to go. That market liberalism, so freeing up the markets for trade, was going to be the route out of centralized economy, socialism, fascism and the root causes for World War One.  Well, if we fast forward for years, I mean, and actually, we don’t need to fast forward. We can just say that at the same time, in the 30s, there was the Great Depression, and John Maynard Keynes had a new idea, which became known as Keynesian economics, which is really about having the state invest in its population. And the new deal was the iteration of that in the United States and it really was quite successful. Nevertheless, the kind of Neo Liberal ideal went underground for, you know, the following 30, 40 years. And Milton Friedman picked it up at the University of Chicago, and he did what I would call neoliberalism 2.0, which is much more of a focus on privatization. So the first, neoliberalism 1.0 is about liberalisation opening up to the markets. But then Friedman’s idea was that you have private actors, and particularly within education, you have a voucher system where a parent receives money and they can give it to any person public or private that would provide education for their student. And it’s rooted in this idea that the efficiency of the market is what’s going to provide the highest quality of education.

So then, Friedman’s ideas were exported into Chile. And they were imported by Augusto Pinochet, who was the dictator in Chile who overthrew a democratically-elected president. And he instituted this neoliberal ideal sort of the global neoliberal test case. And, in the next 40 years, Chile instituted this voucher scheme across the whole country. So, to return to your question about what happened in Chile, you know, the evolution of the 1.0, the 2.0 of privatization ended up with increased stratification in these countries, I mean in Chile in particular, and the increased stratification of students. And what I mean by that is basically, there are different tiers of students so that each class of parents can provide one or a little bit more money for their students to go to a slightly better school. And what happens is, then a lot of people are left with access to lower quality education. And that got so bad that literally hundreds of thousands of Chileans ended up creating a social movement in the streets in 2006, and most recently in 2011. So that’s where we really tee off, the book is saying in 2011, hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets. Why is this happening?

Will Brehm:  9:31
Right. And you have this incredible image of Milton Friedman and Pinochet meeting in your introductory chapter. And one of the questions that I have, and maybe this is beyond your work, is why did Pinochet want to embrace these neoliberal ideas that Milton Friedman was popularizing, or at least writing about at the University of Chicago?

Frank Adamson:  9:58
Well, I think that’s a great question. I think that’s a geopolitical question, honestly. I think it has to do with US involvement in Chile, both militarily at first, because the CIA was involved in the coup. They basically aided Pinochet in becoming the military leader, the dictator of the country and then there was a kind of a thought exchange, as many Chilean scholars were at the University of Chicago studying under Friedman. And I think it’s also important, though, to note that this wasn’t like a straight import of neoliberalism 2.0. It’s not a download of an update to your iPhone. This was an evolving process over time. And I’m kind of using it, it’s more of an era-description to say that this is how it evolved in terms of the voucher scheme. So Friedman had these ideas, and he thought that, you know, rightly so that, you know, dictatorship you could more easily implement your economic ideas than in democracy. Ironically enough, Friedman thought that this would lead to more democratic decision making, because he thought that the market would, you know, have this catch-all effect on the overall nation. And as we see militarily that didn’t happen.

Will Brehm:  11:23
Right. And to get back to the focus on education, you talk about how this neoliberalism as an era, the 40 years since Friedman, produces something or it creates these economic rationales that are found within education and you call this the Global Education Reform Movement. And it’s made up of certain policy drivers and certain economic rationales and then it ultimately results in particular education mechanisms. Can you describe what you mean by Global Education Reform Movement, or what you term the GERM?

Frank Adamson:  12:06
Sure. So one of the authors in our volume, the author of the Finnish chapter, and I should say briefly, that we’ve had authors from each of the countries that we study, write the country chapters, with the exception of Martin Carnoy ofStanford, wrote the Cuba chapter and he’s done extensive work in Cuba. And so they have a special knowledge about their countries and their contexts that is irreplicable by an outsider. And so when you look at, he’s talked about what he terms the Global Education Reform Movement or the GERM and it’s sort of an evolving set of policies. It’s not really an official stance, it’s more of an unofficial set of approaches to education. And we were sitting down and trying to really think about how it functions at many different levels. And what we came up with was, as you talked about, you know, you have, the GERM is functioning at a policy level. And so those would be policy drivers such as privatization, deregulation, decentralization, liberalisation, that’s what’s kind of driving the direction of national and local policy. And then you have sort of the act, economic rationale that are underpinning those policy drivers. That’s things like efficiency, like I talked about that if the market’s working more efficiently through privatization, then it’s going to more effectively produce education outcomes. You have choice, scarce resources are often used as a rationale for changing it to a more efficient system. And you can see that these rationales are also sort of nested within each other. And then you have the mechanisms, right. So how does this happen in the classroom? The mechanisms from a GERM perspective, or neoliberal perspective would be vouchers. As we saw in Chile, charter schools are a big growing industry or sector of the education sector in the United States, markets are happening in education in Sweden. So these mechanisms are how the rationales of efficiency and choice are enacted in a particular context.

Will Brehm:  14:44
Right. And you kind of provide a counter-example of movements towards the Global Education Reform Movement with something you called the public investment approach in education. What is this approach? And how does it differ with the GERM that you’ve just outlined?

Frank Adamson:  15:04
Sure. So I should, you know, just say that before I mention the dyads of countries. And so, the whole premise of the book is kind of comparing countries that are pursuing different approaches. So Sweden has privatized in the last 20 years, whereas Finland has had a strong public investment model for about the last 40 years. The United States is pursuing in some areas, a path towards privatization. Whereas in Canada, we focus on the case study of Ontario, because it’s a federalist country and it doesn’t actually have a lot of federal oversight over education in the different provinces. So we focus on Ontario, which has pursued a more public investment strategy recently. And then we have Chile, which, as I already described as one of the neoliberal, and Cuba, which has also done a public investment strategy. So within that public investment strategy, we turn to the policy drivers, but we find things like public ownership, public responsibility, democratic decision making, not in Cuba, but in the other countries. And there’s really a focus on if the government is the elective, if the elected officials are the ones responsible for providing and securing high quality education for students, then there’s some sort of accountability mechanism. Upwards accountability mechanism for parents, for educators to know that they need to be supported in their classrooms. Whereas in a lot of the privatization strategies that we see, there’s very little accountability for the organizations or companies that are providing the education because there, they don’t have democratically elected boards, they are usually privately appointed. It functions in a lot of different ways but the main idea is that with deregulation and decentralization comes a decrease in public accountability, public responsibility. So then looking at the economic rationales. So I think, again, we turn, they’re very focused on sort of the public good of education. So universal access, preparing citizens for economy and democracy and of course, equity. And equity, by the way, is a contested term, both privatizers and public investment models claim equity. And I think it’s really important to look at the outcomes to understand whether or not that’s actually occurring. And finally, the mechanisms for public education and public investment models would be well-prepared teachers, equitable funding of schools across the country, or the jurisdiction. Having a high quality infrastructure and having a whole-child pedagogy and curriculum. So there, you’re focusing on all of the elements of preparing a teacher for delivering high quality education, and giving them the right model and context to do that. Whereas if you’re focused more on a profit, or on how markets are working, the primary focus isn’t on the public investment in the GERM model.

Will Brehm:  18:24
And so you say that the term or the idea of equity is contested between both the GERM and the public investment approach, and you say that you need to look at the outcome. So, having edited this volume with these different groupings of countries, what did you learn about the outcomes in terms of equity?

Frank Adamson:  18:47
The outcome story is quite interesting, we talk about in the concluding chapter. And when you look at the, you know, test scores are both helpful, because they’re sort of, single number or a set of numbers that you can look at, to give you a broad picture of what’s going on in countries. And that’s what we’ve done here. So we, when you look at PISA scores, Finland actually scored very high and it’s consistently scored high. Sweden over the time that it has installed the privatization market based model, their scores have actually dropped below the OECD mean. Canada scores have remained high, while the US scores have remained below the OECD mean. And when you look at Latin America, Cuba doesn’t participate in the PISA. But they participate in the SERCE and the TERCE tests with Chile and Cuba is literally off the charts in terms of Latin American education. So there are outcomes that are generally accepted at the global level that show that the public investment models in these countries are preparing their students at generally higher levels. And then when you look at the distribution bands of that performance, you find smaller bands in the countries that are pursuing public investment models. The United States has one of the largest performance bands, so I’m talking about differences between high and low performers of almost a standard deviation in the United States. And it’s a well known term in the United States, the achievement gap.

Will Brehm:  20:31
One of the economic rationales in the public investment approach that you propose is universal access. But there is this rhetoric or argument within some of the literature on low-fee private schools by people like James Tooley, for instance, that actually says, in countries and in places where the government is unable to provide education to its citizens, a low-fee, private school approach actually helps achieve universal access. How does that argument complicate your idea? Or do you agree with it, or you disagree with it?

Frank Adamson:  21:16
So I will answer the question and I want to start with one of the words you use, which was countries are unable to provide it. That I disagree with. I think that many countries around the world make a lot of education and general resource decisions. And quite often, many of the underserved populations are left out of both the decision-making process and receiving the resources on the back end. So I’m going to answer the question and say, yes, given the current situation, low-fee private schools do expand access. But I’m going to come back with a question of access to what? You know, I think there’s a very important question about what the quality of these schools are. And then from a macro picture, it seems like low-fee private schools are, as much as they’re offering in terms of access to some level of education, which I think many studies have shown is not actually that great and not fundamentally different than the public education is offering, actually sort of lets the governments off the hook. And it ends up serving like a band aid over the larger picture of a lack of governments to address the needs of their people. So when you look at, for instance, India, they have a Gini coefficient around 34, which is, that’s the coefficient for income inequality which tells me that they’re not the most unequal country on the planet by far, but they’re also not very equal. Those resources are not distributed very well across the society. And I wouldn’t expect them to be distributed well across the education sector either. So I think I would want to turn the lens back on the government and talk about, you know, what it means to actually achieve education for all in a real way with access to high-quality education. And how pursuing certain models such as low-fee private schools might actually be a way in which education resources get diverted from the places that need the most because low fee private schools target the poor but they don’t target the very poor. So they end up sort of increasing what I’d like to call meso-levels of stratification. It’s not just rich and poor, it’s sort of a very distinct bands of groups of students that have differential access to education, like we saw in Chile and like we also saw in the United States, particularly in New Orleans with a new study that we just published.

Will Brehm:  24:10
This is also the chapter that you write in the book. is about New Orleans and SCOPE just put out a whole report on the New Orleans kind of reforms, educational reforms since Katrina. Focusing on your case study, can you give us a quick snapshot of, what did you learn by doing a case study of New Orleans when it comes to the origins of the GERM model in New Orleans, and what sort of lessons you draw and conclusions you draw after studying it?

Frank Adamson:  24:49
Sure. Well, when you look at what happened in New Orleans, I think you can use Naomi Klein offers a very stark description in the Shock Doctrine about what happened in New Orleans in terms of just a very explicit takeover of their education system. And actually, I did interview a school leader in New Orleans, who admitted as much on tape saying, was the system stolen? Yes, it was. And by stolen, I mean that basically the laws, when you look at the laws that were passed in the United States, and in Louisiana, in particular, following the storm, it was very clear that they targeted the New Orleans schools for takeover and then re-authorizing them as charter schools. And so around over 7,000 teachers were fired without due process after New Orleans had Hurricane Katrina. There are a lot of different reasons for that, in terms of the city was, you know, underwater. It was very difficult for people to come back and return to their homes, schools were not in enough shape to be serving as educational institutions for students there. I don’t want to pile blame too much anywhere. But the fact is that there was a significant shift and the storm was used as the main mechanism for that shift. Now, in our chapter, we don’t focus just on New Orleans, we talk about the US education system as a whole. And there have been a lot of privatization pushes in the United States over the last 30 or 40 years. And one of them came out of the federal law, No Child Left Behind which deems schools as failing, and which provides legislation in which if students and schools are not making adequate yearly progress, they can be deemed as failing. So that gives a mechanism for states which was used by Louisiana to declare a whole subset of schools and they actually changed the bar, the point system to declare a whole subset of schools as failing. So the bottom line is the effect of this, 10 years on, is that you have an increased level of stratification based on this charter system.

You know, there was already a lot of stratification and a lot of segregation in the American South, and in New Orleans in particular, we know this is well documented. And the New Orleans public school system was not doing a great job of serving students before Katrina. However, when we look at it, now, we find around eight or nine different tiers of students based on their access to different schools of different quality. So we’re replicating what happened in Chile in New Orleanswith these sort of meso-level access to different schools with different levels of educational quality. And so you can look at the achievement scores, and it’s literally a downward sloping line from the top tier score schools performing about almost 400 on the state test, to the bottom tier schools performing about 250 on a scale score for math and reading. So the difference is very stark, it’s also racial in nature. So if you’re a white student, you’re much more likely to be going to a school in the top-tier of the New Orleans system, 90% of white students go there. Only 10% are distributed throughout the other tiers in the system. So, you know, the top-tier school is one of the top performers in the State and the bottom-tier schools, one of them is run by an organization, a company that operates a correctional facility in another state in the United States. So you can see a very, very strong difference in who is being served at these institutions, and the level of attention to their education that’s being paid to the different students along the lines of race and class in the United States.

Will Brehm:  29:44
Over this journey of putting this book together and working on these various case studies of this six different countries, were there any surprises that you uncovered?

Frank Adamson:  30:00
Yes. I would say in general, it was quite interesting to work with the authors and I learned that each country has its own story. And that story exists both within a global narrative and also is independent and part of the individual country’s history. And some surprises were that if you take the case of Finland, it turns out that the timing of the PISA scores when they were first released at the turn of the century came out at a time when the business community was really arguing for increasing a privatization model. But Finland’s PISA scores were so high that the business community couldn’t really make the claim that the Finnish education system was not working. So they ended up, you know, saying, well, we know we have to go with what we have, and the rest of the world descended on Finland to find out what was working so well. On the contrary, when you take a case of Sweden, Sweden had an odd event happening in the mid 80s, where one of their ministers Olof Palme was actually assassinated in 1986. And he held a lot of sway in both the national ministries and education and there’s no concrete evidence, but it could be that there was a little bit of a power vacuum in a political power vacuum in the education sector that led to decisions being routed more to the Ministry of Finance. And then finally, I want to highlight one important surprise, which is that Ontario had actually implemented a quasi voucher system in Canada in the late 1990s. And then in the early 2000s, the province reversed course, actually. The conservatives were voted out, the voucher system was rolled back and a whole system reform model was instituted with, the teacher unions are at the table with the policymakers and they’ve seen quite a bit of improvement on their scores and other indicators. And I just like to highlight that because it really is a sign of democracy at work where, you know, the sort of forces of privatization in the markets are not necessarily, over the long term, the ones that serve the public as our book would suggest, and the public actually can and does have a say in their education system.

Will Brehm:  32:58
Thank you so much for joining FreshEd today and for its inaugural show by the way, and we look forward to reading the book when it comes out in March 2016.

Frank Adamson:  33:11
Great, Will. Thank you so much. I’m happy to be the inaugural speaker on FreshEd. And please look for the book when it comes out. Thank you.

Coming soon

Coming soon