what was the practice of bringing goods to the caribbean

Privatisation Trends in Teaching in the Caribbean

Fighting the commercialisation of pedagogy Students before Profit

published ix February 2022 updated 23 March 2022

Privatisation has been a focus of didactics inquiry for many years, especially in western liberal democracies. Yet, the phenomenon is relatively under-researched within the Caribbean region. This matters.

Increasing privatisation in places like Ghana, Liberia, Morocco, Honduras and Bharat, reveal that this incomplete mapping of the Global South is frequently interplayed with other structural and/or historical features, such every bit colonialism and poverty. This is in addition to more than widely experienced societal harms acquired by privatisation in educational activity as was the case with "leaseback" agreements or public-private partnerships (PPP) in Canada, Kingdom of belgium and with the voucher system in Chile.

Thus, the need to explore privatisation in the Caribbean is pressing.

In our research, nosotros targeted ten Caribbean nations to investigate the extent, intensity and bear on of privatisation practices across the region through mapping trends, key actors and institutional influences. The nations targeted were: Antigua and Barbuda; Barbados; Belize; Grenada; Guyana; Jamaica; St Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; and Trinidad and Tobago. We too sought to understand the part of public policy in relation to privatisation trends and that of supra-national organisations, such as CARICOM and the IMF. We focused on three types of educational activity privatisation: (one) exogenous privatisation, or direct private-sector involvement in the provision of educational products and services; (2) endogenous privatisation, where the methods, goals, language, and dispositions of the private sector become adopted past public-sector actors and (3) the privatisation of the land itself and its policymaking functions and apparatus. Our multiple-methods case study consisted of three strands: documentary analysis, interviews and questionnaires. Participants included teachers, school leaders, parents, teacher union representatives and representatives of supra-national organisations. The results of this research can exist summarised into five central findings:

one) A balance commitment to public didactics

Evidence from many sources positions didactics every bit a public good that the state ought to provide. These sources include national education acts, such as Antigua and Barbuda'south of 2008; interview accounts from instructor union representatives; and, indirectly, from questionnaire data. For case, when parents stated that a lack of teacher qualifications or subject field expertise is affecting their child's educational activity, they are contributing to a instance for public education. When teachers raised the issue of the 'connected stratification of students', they are doing the aforementioned. Notwithstanding, this residual attitude is insufficient to halt the spread or intensification of privatisation trends.

2) Privatisation is the 'default' route to improvement

We found all-encompassing evidence of privatisation in educational activity in our study, demonstrably overcoming whatever legacy delivery to public education. For instance, the inadequate public funding of education and a want for the improvement (framed as 'modernisation') of public instruction encouraged many participants to value privatisation. This belief is reinforced through policies across the region: discursively available options for arrangement-broad improvements in the Caribbean, every bit internationally, draw largely on a privatisation template. This 'default' suite of strategies is often embraced by participants in educational likewise as regional leadership roles. Equally such, modernisation has get collocated through discourse with privatisation. This is not surprising: the same miracle has occurred in other countries. The financial incentives that private-sector entities, especially supra-national organisations, tin can bring to public education is attracting as are the business organisation-like methods of endogenous privatisation, which are promoted as integral and elementary features of a "modernised" educational activity.

Sometimes, the 'problem' with educational activity was fifty-fifty framed every bit privatisation not being 'done properly'. The answer for these respondents, is more, or more effectively realised privatisation. For example, one instructor in Barbados complained in the questionnaire that performance direction is only done every three years and called for a system of bonuses to incentivise performance.

3) Major corporate actors not evident

We asked all our participants to place the fundamental actors in privatisation; no major corporation or international actor was ever mentioned. Therefore, our research did not uncover the wide-spread predatory practices past large, private-sector actors and organisations which take been reported elsewhere in the world. It seems that in the Caribbean area, at least for now, the private-sector provision of funds, goods or services tin can, for the virtually office, exist described as modest-scale, 'goodwill', religiously motivated or community-level. For instance, in their survey, the nigh usually suggested advocates for privatisation were parents with means. It is also possible that any self-serving intentions of private actors, be they international edu-businesses or lesser-known philanthropists, remain under the radar. Nonetheless, concerns over the motives of private-sector actors' interest in public education are beginning to increase in at to the lowest degree one nation, Trinidad and Tobago, where a teachers' union representative reported on their disapproval of, for case, the Ministry of Didactics's increasing employ of a named private edu-business concern for the provision of educational services.

4) Selection drives privatisation

Another fundamental condition and commuter of pedagogy privatisation is the existence of quasi-markets inside education systems, where competition related to the highly common practice of selection to secondary-level schooling results in a favouring of private education over public instruction. League tables and meridian-performers' lists and so serve as market information for parents. These beg the questions: What can such a situation mean for public schools, especially those in rural areas? What can such a situation mean for those families who are unable to afford it? It appears that high-quality education is becoming commodified, thus limiting equal admission and disinterestedness and violating one of the fundamental rights of children. Even so competing tensions inside pedagogy landscapes, such as educators' pay and working conditions, announced to exist the chief focus of attention of teacher merchandise unions, who can be an important bulwark against privatisation.

5) Inconsistent understanding of privatisation

Too hampering unions' efforts to combat privatisation is a widespread confusion well-nigh what privatisation ways, what its features are and what conceptual compages, including language, is often used to build and articulate arguments for information technology. Nosotros plant that participants who might exist expected to push back against privatisation were sometimes accepting a conceptual and linguistic framing of the discussion that is favoured by its protagonists. Words do political and ideological work, and and so unproblematically accepting framings of instruction that foreground 'modernisation', 'agility' or 'flexibility' sacrifice ground before the debate has even begun.

Through policy texts, the Caribbean nation states nosotros investigated appear to be variously committed to privatisation as a fundamental machinery to modernise public instruction provision and improve outcomes. Selection at the finish of master in many Caribbean nations establishes and reinforces the notion of schooling equally fundamentally competitive. These, coupled with inadequate country provision of public teaching, make for ideal weather for the promotion and eventual adoption of education privatisation. While participants sometimes see benefits to such privatisation, many are concerned about its implications for disinterestedness and the notion of pedagogy as a common expert.

Our study provides grounds for our recommendations that policymakers offset fund education to remove boosted, ofttimes prohibitive costs for parents of their child(ren) attending schoolhouse. These include for textbooks and actress-curricular activities. Second, policymakers should tax profits from private-sector interest in educational activity to fund work towards achieving goals in didactics-sector plans and/or UN Sustainable Evolution Goals for education. We recommend that researchers explore more fully who the primal actors are of teaching privatisation in the Caribbean and that teachers' unions increase sensation of all forms of teaching privatisation, including the way the way in which it frames the fence through the widespread and unquestioned adoption of corporatised understandings of fundamental terms—it is hard to argue confronting privatisation whilst accepting the meaning imposed upon key terms by its protagonists.

Read the study and executive summary of the research "Time to plough the tide: Privatisation trends in education in the Caribbean".

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and exercise not necessarily reflect whatsoever official policies or positions of Educational activity International.

Union renewal and development 5 April 2022
Amplifying young voices within trade unions in the COVID-nineteen new normal

Amplifying young voices within trade unions in the COVID-19 new normal
Democracy iv April 2022
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Shows the Importance of Protecting Democratic Values through Instruction

Armand Doucet, Michael Soskil, Noah Zeichner

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Shows the Importance of Protecting Democratic Values through Pedagogy
Fighting the commercialisation of education 16 March 2022
World Bank to exit investment in for-profit school chain Bridge International Academies

World Bank to exit investment in for-profit school chain Bridge International Academies
Equity and inclusion 21 October 2021
Caribbean unions empower women as leaders

Caribbean area unions empower women as leaders
Trade spousal relationship rights are homo rights 25 March 2019
Saint Lucia: teachers urge government to move forward on the collective agreement

Saint Lucia: teachers urge regime to move forward on the collective agreement
Achieving Sustainable Development Goal four 1 May 2017
This May Day, why not effort solidarity?

This May 24-hour interval, why not try solidarity?