The Changing Governance of Education

The Global Political Economy of Educational Governance Changes

Focusing on the political economy of governance implies a move away from the overly technicist approaches to the subject that emerge when the focus is set exclusively on the managerial and organizational aspects of governance. The focus on the management and organization of public services, on the efficiency of governance strategies, tends to leave aside the broader context of the state, the process of globalization, and the operation of ideologies, power, and politics in dominant understandings and practices of governance. The rise of hybrid forms of educational governance—in which education systems, traditionally governed by the state, are increasingly migrating toward a variety of organizational forms that combine the goals and rationales of the public, private, and third sectors in either some or all aspects of educational governance—is often presented and justified in a language of novelty, of efficiency, of diagnoses and solutions that tends to conceal the political and ideological nature of such operations and their consequences.

When it comes to developing explanations for the convergence of governance policies and trends, one finds, on one hand, those developed by institutionalist sociologists (Meyer, 1977, 2000; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997), which suggest that such patterns of similarity are the product of a more or less spontaneous diffusion of ideas, through processes of imitation and borrowing, that are today enhanced by the process of globalization and give rise to a sort of “global culture.” Although this is a clearly simplified summary, such perspectives have been questioned by critics who emphasize the structured and politically mediated nature of such global educational agendas. The difference between the two perspectives lies in that while institutionalists see policy convergence as a process without agents, political economists highlight how such convergence reflects and responds to a particular pattern of economic and political organization and confront emerging common models with normative questions as to the societal impacts that such forms of governance have (i.e., patterns of opportunity and results in terms of equality, equity, fairness, citizenship, social justice, human rights, etc.).

In order to frame the changes in the governance of education that will be described and analyzed below, it is useful to place them within the context of the broader, global regime shift that has taken place over that same period of time. This idea of a global regime shift is taken from Jessop (1999), who argues that after the economic crisis of the 1970s, the postwar consensus with regard to the welfare state—which provided the backdrop for educational policies—has been replaced with a new kind of global consensus that has redefined the role of the state, especially with regard to the provision of social services, like education, and its relation with markets and the private sector. Jessop describes these changes in ideal-type terms, as a shift from a Keynesian national welfare state regime (KNWS) to a Schumpeterian postnational workfare regime (SPWR)—where the term regime highlights the fact that these configurations are the product of political and economic decisions and shifts.

The postwar KNWS was seen as a measure to contain the crisis tendencies of the capitalist production system by containing economies and generating the necessary conditions for the reproduction of labor and society (Polanyi, 1944). Social policies played a central role in this model and were oriented to generate an egalitarian form of citizenship through the provision of comprehensive and universal social services. Such state-provided services as education, health, and public pensions as well as the social security matrix that is associated with the Keynesian welfare-state model sought to decommodify social relations in order to enable a good standard of living for all either independently from the market or at least in times of market failure—these differences are at the basis of differences in welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

Jessop (1999) argues that this global welfare regime:

began to fail as a mode of governance when its coherence as an institutional ensemble became inconsistent with the objects it was governing, the practices being deployed to govern them, and the identities and interests of the active agents and/or “passive” subjects of the KWNS regime. (p. 352)

The Keynesian focus on demand-side management of closed national economies was undermined by processes of economic internationalization, which made labor regulation and policies, such as the national welfare wage, appear as inhibitors of international competitiveness rather than as means to boost internal demand. At the same time, events like the oil crisis of the early 1970s and the ensuing process of stagflation in much of the developed world provided the opportunity and the justification for many of the changes that led to the weakening of the welfare state (Castles, 2004). Likewise, the dominant modes of coordination, which had emerged in the context of the Fordist economies of the postwar era, appeared limited as societies and economies grew more complex, leading to an “increasing reliance on networks and partnerships as modes of coordination” (Jessop, 1999, p. 354). Adding to this, there emerged increasing demands from new social movements for greater democratization and responsiveness at the local level, increased accountability, and space for different identities that challenged more rigid ideas about national citizenship and hierarchical governance.

Such problems were soon the target of more political/ideological discourses that attributed the lack of economic growth to the policies of the Keynesian welfare state. Demand-side policies, social spending, regulation, and the role of the state in general came to be seen as deterrents of national competitiveness in an increasingly global economy (Jessop, 2002). Such ideological readings led to the emergence of a new, neoliberal consensus with regard to the forms and functions of state action, which has led to specific reforms (fiscal discipline and austerity, deregulation, welfare state retrenchment, etc.) and to the state assuming a new role as a “coordinator of coordination” (Dale, 2007; Gill, 2003; Jayasuriya, 2001).

Jessop (1999) characterizes the new regime that has followed from the Keynesian welfare state as Schumpeterian,

in so far as it tries to promote permanent innovation and flexibility in relatively open economies by intervening on the supply-side and to strengthen as far as possible their structural and/or systemic competitiveness. (p. 355)

One of the central features of this regime change has been a shift from a model of “government” to a model of “governance,” that is, from centralized control hierarchies to more heterarchical, horizontal, and networked modes of coordination (Pierre & Peters, 2000). ¹ The rise of new hybrid forms of educational governance has taken place in the context of such changes and needs to be read accordingly.

The Changing Governance of Education

One of the effects of this global regime change has been a “functional and scalar division in the labour of education” (Robertson, 2009, p. 546), which has taken place both vertically and horizontally through processes of globalization, regionalization, decentralization, deregulation, and outsourcing to the private sector of various aspects of educational provision, funding, regulation, and ownership. These are all subfields of education that were traditionally in the hands of the state and that are now open to influence, control, and competition from private actors, supra- and subnational organizations, and so on (Ball, 2007; Ball & Youdell, 2008). In this way, the traditional boundaries between public and private goods and actions have become blurred, and this has had both positive and negative consequences (as assessed against normative ideas but also in terms of efficiencies gained and against their impact on people’s quality of life). Moreover, the way in which new governance discourses have shaped policies in different contexts is subject to important variations that can be read as both path dependent and path setting.

Following Robertson (2002, 2009), the specific changes that this rescaling of educational governance has entailed can be divided into four categories:

There are important variations in the extent of changes in each of these areas, with different elements taking precedence in particular contexts. In England, for instance, devolution and public-private partnerships in the context of increased choice and diversity have taken precedence, while in Peru, as in other developing contexts, the emphasis on “good governance”; the role of international organizations, such as the World Bank; and the rise of for-profit private education have been stronger.

The Governance of Education in England

The main wave of change that led to the current configuration of educational governance in England began during the Thatcher years and is part and parcel of the broader shift from the KWNR to the SWPR. One of the guiding ideas during this era of reform was the alleged need to break with the “provider capture” exerted by local authorities in order to achieve greater efficiency in the delivery of educational services—a reading clearly associated with New Public Management ideas. In line with this, the main target of reforms was the local education authorities (LEAs), which, as the traditional agencies in charge of all aspects of educational provision, were seen to have a monopoly over the service. Policies during this time led to a reduction in LEA authority through the shift to self-managing schools and the introduction of market mechanisms, such as school choice and the participation of nontraditional private, third-sector, and civil society partners in education.

In line with the above, the Thatcher government introduced a policy of grant-maintained schools, which enabled schools to “opt out” of LEA control entirely (through a parental ballot) and to become administered by their own board of governors. Many of the schools that opted for this status had their own, often selective, admissions criteria. By the end of the Thatcher years, this policy was severely criticized on the grounds of research that showed how grant-maintained schools engaged in a process of “skimming” the best students and favored mostly those from middle-class backgrounds, thus creating inequalities in the school system (Balarin & Lauder, 2008).

Together with this fragmentation of educational delivery and administration, the 1980s saw an unprecedented rise in measures of central government control (Dale, 1997). The 1988 Education Reform Act introduced a compulsory national curriculum as well as a system of high-stakes assessments that sought to regulate the educational market, which gave rise to the assessment culture that has dominated the educational landscape ever since.

New Labour assumed power in 1997 with a strong critique of its predecessor’s educational agenda and Blair’s famous motto of “education, education, education” as one of the driving forces of change in the country. While this was so, however, research shows that many of the education policies of New Labour were in continuity with those of the Thatcher years. New Labour criticized its predecessor’s excessive emphasis on changing the structures of educational governance in detriment of achieving desirable standards of learning. This would be the main target of its policies. The rise of the standards and assessment agenda and the emphasis on the evaluation of schools and other educational instances (LEAs, governing bodies) has been described by Lauder, Brown, Dillabough, and Halsey (2006) as a “state theory of learning” enforced by the machinery of surveillance and accountability, which mandates for teachers modes of assessment, the curriculum and elements of pedagogy that, research has shown, leads to performativity, deprofessionalization, and low morale among teachers.

While the Conservatives had introduced markets as the main way to make the governance of education more efficient, New Labour opted for partnerships and performance management as a way of regulating the educational market. This was consistent with New Labour’s Third Way approach to politics and policy making, which sought to bridge traditional divides between left/right, public/private, and state/civil society. Interestingly, while New Labour had been critical of the grant-maintained schools policy and halted it—indeed, few schools had opted out of LEA control and the policy was deemed ineffective—the tendency toward diversity and fragmentation increased with the establishment of new forms of school administration, with more private and third-sector involvement.

At the primary level, New Labour established three categories of schools, those under LEA control (community schools), those administered by voluntary organizations (such as faith-based schools), and foundations schools (which comprise the former grant-maintained schools and which have a governing body with greater decision-making powers).

At the secondary level, policies continued to promote choice, diversity, and competition with the introduction of specialist schools, academies, and trusts. Specialist schools are state maintained and teach the full national curriculum but pay special attention to a selected discipline; they account for 80% of secondary schools in England.

Academies are arguably the best example of organizational hybridity in the English school system. They are all-ability state-funded schools that are established and managed by sponsors from a range of backgrounds—from other high-performing educational institutions, community and voluntary organizations, businesses, and so on—who contribute both funds and knowledge to the school. The first academies opened in 2000. By the end of the Labour government, 203 academies were in operation, and there are now over 1,000 academies all over the country. Academies are required to cover the core curriculum subjects of maths, English, and science, but they are otherwise free to innovate, and they tend to have an area of specialism (arts, science, business, etc.), which often reflects the interests or specialism of their sponsors. The governing of academies is set up as that of limited companies whose functioning is guaranteed by a governing body that acts as a trust. The trust is responsible for appointing the school head and the senior management team.

The results that academies are having in terms of improving standards are somewhat contentious. While government and academies themselves purport to be increasing student achievement, there is some evidence that such improvements have been secured through processes of skimming underachieving students (Gorard, 2009). Critics suggest that academies create a new form of selection, akin to that of the grammar school tradition, that goes against the aims of comprehensive schooling. Likewise, it has been suggested that in their freedom to divert from the national curriculum, academies are sometimes not delivering a well-balanced curriculum—an example of this was seen in the controversy sparked by allegations that academies run by the Evangelical Emmanuel Schools Foundation were teaching creationism.

In recent years, there have been yet further changes in the governance of education as part of the Labour government’s Every Child Matters Agenda and the legislation that followed in the 2004 Children Act. These two have promoted that services in education and social care are delivered together as part of an integrated children’s service. This has taken partnerships to a different level, with an emphasis on schools collaborating with each other and their partners in the delivery of children’s services so as to improve attainment standards.

With the moves towards greater collaboration, there is a shift away from an atomised system of autonomous, self-sufficient, self-managing schools to a much more integrated system where schools, still as individual and self-managing institutions, collaborate and work together for the good of the community. (Balarin, Brammer, James, & Mccormack, 2008, p. 13)

This move seems to suggest a recognition that, having atomized school administration through the creation of self-managing schools, there is a need for some sort of grouping of schools as a means to achieve desired goals, although in this case it is via networks rather than hierarchies (as was the case of LEAs). Ranson (2008) points to the opposite rationales of the move toward more collaborative children’s services and the previous tendencies toward fragmentation and self-management, but the question remains open as to whether this new set of policy initiatives constitutes or not a move away from the overall governance trends seen in previous decades.

The current Coalition government is furthering the diversity agenda with its flagship policy of free schools (modeled on the Swedish free schools and U.S. charter schools), which allow parents, teachers, charities, and businesses to set up and run their own schools. Free schools are meant to cater for all abilities (they are not to be selective) and are state funded but can, and are encouraged to, attract other sources of funding. They are very similar to, and indeed could be considered an extension of, the academies model. While they are free from local authority control, free schools are also subject to inspections by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills and take part in national assessments. The outcomes of the introduction of free schools are yet to be seen, but criticisms have been made in the lines of those made of academies. At this early state of their operation (the first 24 free schools opened in England in 2011), there are indications that the latter have emerged largely in middle-class areas, which is an indication of how this policy could favor middle-class parents in their competition for positional advantage (Miller, 2011).

With the shift toward self-managing schools, one prominent aspect of educational administration has been the rise of school governing bodies. These are modeled on the English board of directors and are one of the main areas in which hybridity can be seen in practice. In the British school governing model, head teachers have the role of senior managers of their schools. Governing bodies, composed of volunteers from the community, parents, school staff, the business sector, and local authorities, are meant to provide a strategic vision for the school as well as to guarantee the school’s accountability to its main stakeholders. Research has shown that in practice, there is not much diversity in school governing bodies and that these respond more to efficiency criteria rather than to the democratization of school decision making (Dean, Dyson, Gallannaugh, Howes, & Raffo, 2007). In recent years, there has been a growing interest from the business sector to promote the participation of governors from the business community to enhance the transference of knowledge and skills from businesses to schools. ²

In summary, the English case is one where hybridization has been on the rise over the past 20 years or so, since the shift to self-managing schools and the introduction of greater diversity in school provision. There are forms of hybridity in all governance activities, including funding, ownership, provision, and regulation, which count with the participation of state, market, community, and households in varied degrees.

Assessing the impact of these processes is not a straightforward matter, and the question needs to include both practical and normative considerations. The first of these sets of considerations involves questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of policies, which can be answered in relation to their contribution to improving management and the use of resources and, ultimately, in relation to their capacity to generate better learning outcomes. But leaving questions at this level would be insufficient: It would correspond to the kind of technicist approach discussed earlier, and broader normative questions need to be posed about the degree of fairness of policy outcomes, the degree of accountability that emerges from the new ways of governing education, and the extent to which they are leading to a shift in education from being a public good to being a private good bought and sold in a market, which, on its turn, leads to questions about the social goals that education is expected to contribute to. Finally, and linked to the latter, there are also important questions about knowledge production, circulation, and use in a context where knowledge is defined at more particular instances than publicly accountable agencies.

In relation to the practical dimension of these questions, the English case, as that of other countries embarking on similar policies, offers no clear-cut answers (Arreman & Holm, 2011; Benveniste, Carnoy, & Rothstein, 2003; Carnoy & McEwan, 2003; Klees, 2010). While proponents and leaders of the new academies suggest that they are producing better results than the publicly run schools, there are questions about the validity of these statements. There is some evidence that results have improved due to changes in the processes of selection, which have been skewed against the poorer students (Gorard, 2009). Similar evidence is available from the Swedish case and from the American charter school experience (Arreman & Holm, 2011). Moreover, impact evaluations based on input-output models of education are extremely limited as they tend to leave out the home variables that have proven to be the best explainers of attainment (Klees, 2010).

This is also raising concerns about the overall fairness of the English education system and the extent to which it is producing and/or strengthening current forms of social segregation in a society that is already highly divided—an issue that became particularly evident in the recent wave of rioting.

The practical changes that are taking place in educational governance need to be considered as part of a broader shift in the discourse on education, where the latter is becoming increasingly disconnected of its traditional public aim of developing citizenship and social cohesion through the extension of a meritocratic model of personal advancement. In this process, education is increasingly portrayed as a private good, privately sought and bought in a market that offers many options and opportunities, but where certain groups are better equipped to secure their positional advantage (Brown, 2000).

The hybridization of educational governance in England appears to be producing a fragmentation and depolitization of education, not only in that a privately run education system is less likely to be the object of political struggles (for access and inclusion) but also in that it is less oriented to advancing social goals, such as citizenship. By fragmenting the spaces in which access to education and knowledge are fought for, the new forms of governance are diminishing the role of education as a contested space where citizenship is built and fought for and turning it into a marketplace where goods are privately bought and sold (Robertson, 2002, 2009).

One final set of reflections, linked to the latter, is the extent to which this kind of privatization is opening the way for private interests to influence the definition of educational knowledge, a move away from accepted standards of knowledge production and diffusion and toward a more fragmented system of knowledge definition. While some would argue that this tendency can be countered through the standards and outputs focus imposed by central governments, there are questions about the extent to which such strategies are adequate (Young, 2006, 2008).

The Governance of Education in Peru

In Peru, although with some important differences and a much more discontinuous trajectory, changes in the governance of education share some important similarities with those of the English case: an increasing presence of the private sector and the market in the provision, funding, and administration of education services; an agenda of standards and evaluation; a transference of capacities to more decentralized forms of decision making, and so on. It is possible to identify two main moments in these reforms. The first was during the 1990s, in which there were attempts to implement reforms similar to those of Thatcher in England, that is, a move toward a more marketized education system with some degree of devolution of decision-making capacities to schools. And a second moment spans the years of the new millennium, during which policies have been led by an agenda of “good governance” that emphasizes democratic decision making and citizenship participation.

During the 1990s, the governance of education was framed by the structural adjustment policies that the country embarked upon after a decade that was characterized by the crisis of the state in a context of increasing internal violence, hyperinflation, and extreme inefficiency on the part of government institutions. In education, proposed changes sought to model school administration more like the private sector, using the competition for financial resources as a lever to improve the quality and coverage of education services (McLauchlan de Arregui, 1994). This led to some initial attempts to create an education market by transferring the administration of schools to private entities (much like chartered schools in the United States or the academy model in England). But the proposed policies faced fierce opposition from important constituencies, such as the National Teachers Union, the Catholic Church, and civil society groups, and were abandoned.

What followed was a process of more indirect but no less pervasive changes that were not organized as a comprehensive reform and were therefore less susceptible of generating organized rejection—even though many of these changes were almost the same as those of previous years. The changes included measures to promote community participation in the management of educational activities, to diversify the sources of funding for education, and so on. Many of these measures were not adequately regulated so as to allow a real transference of capacities to schools, for instance, but they did contribute to alter the landscape of educational governance (Cuglievan & Rojas, 2008).

During the 1990s, the Ministry of Education also started a policy of educational evaluations, although the development of national standards of learning would take another decade to arrive. But maybe one of the policies that has most influenced the landscape of Peruvian education was the Legal Decree 882, which sought to “promote investment in education” by effectively opening the possibility for educational institutions—which up to then could function only as not-for-profit—to engage in profit-making activities. This decree opened the doors for a very deregulated growth in the provision of private education at all levels. In 1994, McLauchlan de Arregui already warned that the decree could be liberating education to the forces of an inexistent market that did not count with the necessary basic conditions to function.

The transition to the new millennium arrived with increasing evidence of corruption in the government of Alberto Fujimori, which had become increasingly authoritarian since it closed and reorganized Congress in 1992, thus breaking the necessary division between the legislative and executive powers. In the year 2000, Fujimori corruptly won an unconstitutional third election but was soon ousted as a series of videos showing Vladimiro Montesinos, his close advisor and chief of the intelligence service, bribing a range of citizens, from congressmen to businessmen and journalists, in order to secure their alignment to the government’s policies. Today both Fujimori and Montesinos are in prison, tried and condemned for corruption and acts against humanity. This is the context that framed the second stage of governance reforms in the country.

The transition to democracy in the year 2001 was marked by a discourse that emphasised the “good governance” agenda that was being promoted by international agencies, such as the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (Grindle 2004, 2007). The transition government was charged with leading an orderly return to democracy and, as part of its activities, organized a series of national consultations on educational and other policy issues. This led to the creation of the National Agreement, a permanent forum for debating state policies. The consultation was also the basis for developing a new General Law of Education—which was passed in 2003—that, in turn, led to the creation of a series of participatory decision-making organizations at the national, regional, and local levels (Aragon & Vegas, 2009). These processes took part amid a process of decentralization that effectively redefined the governance structure of the Peruvian state.

This process was to redress a history of extreme centralization of governmental decision making that is widely accepted to have acted against national development. Between 2001 and 2009, a progressive process of transferring capacities from the central Ministry of Education to the regional level took place. A series of initiatives were put in motion, such as the creation of Participative Regional Councils for Education (COPAREs) charged with the development of Regional Plans for Education (PERs) that would guide education policies in each region. At the formal level, the Law of Education is dominated by the creation of similar participative councils at all levels.

Several problems have emerged in recent years in relation to these processes, the more serious one being the change of direction proposed by the last government when it decreed that the governance of education would be municipalized. This policy change was decided in spite of it being heavily questioned due to its lack of coherence with the decentralization process that was already taking place, which devolved capacities to the regional governments, as well as because of its lack of technical and political considerations and because similar policies in the region have proven to be a failure in terms of improving educational quality and equity. The introduction of a municipalization policy was in clear contradiction with the mandates of the Law of Education, and it generated several contradictions and the duplication of functions in a governance reform context that was already plagued by a number of deficiencies, including the lack of a clear definition of the roles and functions of decentralized governance instances (Consejo Nacional de Educación, 2010). The new government that took office in July 2011 has been quick to announce that the municipalization of education will be halted and that policies will follow the lines established in the General Law of Education and the aims set in the National Plan for Education elaborated by the National Council of Education.

The lack of clear definition and discontinuities at the formal policy level and the deep-seated institutional weaknesses, together with the inadequate training of local officials, make many of these reforms partial. This also opens the way for corrupt and patrimonialist tendencies in the use of public resources—a historical problem in less-developed countries—in what could be described as a path-dependent appropriation of reforms.

Similar problems can be found at other levels, such as parental participation in schools, where formal instances have been created to promote transparency and democracy but where underlying problems place serious obstacles to the development of reforms. These include parents’ poor education, their lack of understanding of how their participation could have a positive influence on their children’s attainment, and the generation of new inequalities that arise from parents’ different capacities to influence their children’s education, with those in more advantaged positions being able to make better use of the newly available opportunities. Besides, there are questions about whether direct participation in school decision making, rather than support at home, is the best way in which parents can contribute to their children’s attainment (Balarin & Cueto, 2007).

In parallel to these developments—and maybe a more worrying consequence of the aforementioned policy changes—the supply of private education has been on the rise. This has taken place in a highly unregulated way that has led to questions about the quality and accountability of private education institutions, particularly, but not only, at the tertiary level, where Peru seems to be following on the lines of other countries in the region where private universities offering, in many cases, a very low quality of education have proliferated (GUNI, 2007). This is due to the lack of proper accreditation and supervision mechanisms to regulate the operation of private education providers as well as to the lack of information and criteria that families count with when making educational decisions. In this respect, Peru is at the opposite end of England, where the standards agenda and a form of “governing by numbers” play a fundamental role in the governance of education (Grek & Ozga, 2008; Ozga, 2009). This can be explained as the differences that emerge between liberating the education market in a highly institutionalized context like England, where the market operates according to clear rules although not always generating desirable consequences, and liberating the educational market in a context like Peru, where institutions in general and the state’s capacity to regulate the market are much more feeble.

Such contradictions are not new in education reform attempts. As mentioned above, the governance of education has been marred by radical policy discontinuities as well as by deep-rooted tendencies toward clientelism, patrimonialism, and corruption that take formal policies in unwanted directions (Balarin, 2006, 2008).

Since 2009, however, some important steps have been taken to reverse some of these problems: These include the creation of the National System for the Evaluation, Accreditation and Certification of Educational Quality (SINEACE) and the creation of the Peruvian Institute of Accreditation and Evaluation (IPEBA), which has started a policy of developing national education standards in some strategic areas, such math and language. There is still, however, much work ahead and many negative processes to undo, but these are important measures toward the development of a more regulated educational market.

Conclusions

The existence of a “globally structured educational agenda,” which international organizations help spread throughout the world, means that at the formal level, governance policies in Peru and England have followed similar trajectories toward the establishment of more hybrid forms of educational governance. However, while in England, policies of devolution, self-management of schools, and public-private partnerships have taken precedence, in Peru, we find an initial period, during the 1990s, that followed in similar lines but then a change toward a greater emphasis on decentralization and the democratization of educational governance through policies that stimulate local participation. While the governance of the public education system has remained largely in the hands of the state—albeit a decentralized state—there has been a parallel development that strongly impacts the quality of public education and the possibilities of improving it: a steady rise in private education provision that now reaches even poor sectors of the population and that was made possible through the liberalization of for-profit private investment in education.

Although governance reforms in Peru have had a much more incomplete and discontinuous development than those observed in England, the steady rise of private education provision has contributed to the deepening of a public/private divide in the education system, which follows in the lines of existing social inequalities. Indeed, this divide has given rise to outcries about the emergence of an educational “apartheid” that points to the increasingly segregated nature of the education system along public/private lines. The rise of private education provision, on the other hand, has taken place in a context that is only weakly regulated and has few mechanisms to ensure adequate levels of accountability from private providers.

A further consequence of the rise of private education provision in Peru has been a fragmentation of education services, which is further enhanced by the process of decentralization and devolution—much needed as it is to ensure that service provision reaches all citizens. This has contributed to depoliticize education, casting it as a private good bought and sold in the market and technically administered, rather than as a public good and a service charged with promoting socially desirable ends, such as social inclusion, cohesion, and citizenship. Many, if not most, citizens now seem to share a certain common sense that private education is better and, consequently, tend to prefer exit to the private sector, rather than articulating demands for better public-sector service delivery (Balarin, 2011).

Fragmentation has also been a consequence of the governance reforms in England, where, again, the strengthening of private-sector participation in a number of educational spheres—from the funding to the administration of schools—has also weakened the general sense that education is a public rather than a private good.

The case of Peru illustrates how such changes have affected a context with a weakly institutionalized state, prone to radical discontinuities, where policies do not have a binding character and which is therefore prone to more informal clientelistic and patrimonialist practices. In contrast, the case of England is one where reforms and their effects have been much more deeply institutionalized through a new set of governance rules and possibilities. The question, in the case of Peru, is not only how to make these reforms more efficient—how to structure them and institutionalize them to make processes more transparent and goal oriented, for instance—but also what general direction should reforms have and what political aims should they attempt to fulfill, and here, the lessons learned from the English experience could provide some guiding insights.

In Peru, like in England, the changing governance of education is producing an increasing commodification of education. This reproduces and deepens existing social inequalities, particularly in the context of the rise of the knowledge economy, in which access to good-quality education and credentials plays a fundamental role in securing well-being. Those in more advantaged positions have more resources—money as well as cultural and social capital—to help them make educational decisions and further their positional advantage, while those in more disadvantaged positions increasingly see their meritocratic dreams turn sour in an environment that rewards material resources rather than personal effort (Brown, 2000). The unequal development of education systems along public/private lines is further called into question by those who argue that inequality in general—and not absolute poverty or absolute attainment—accounts for societies’ lack of well-being (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). It is these kinds of questions, about well-being and the societies that we want to live in, that should guide our inquiries into the modes of governing a public service like education.

The new form that the governance of education has acquired has given rise to what Dale and Robertson (2009) describe as a new social contract, very different to the one that ruled the era of the postwar welfare state, which gave precedence to processes of decommodification through the provision of universal and comprehensive services, such as education. Today, on the contrary, we are witnessing a worldwide trend toward the commodification of educational services, and it is with regard to this that our inquiries into the new modes of governing education systems should lie.