216 pages
ISBN-10: 0415399408
ISBN-13: 978-0415399401
List price: $42

Stephen J. Ball has made significant contributions to debates about educational privatization. In the past he has published what amounts to withering attacks on the commodification and privatization of public education and knowledge. He has also published quite a lot of extremely insightful scholarship in the sociology of education—much from a largely Foucauldian perspective.

One cannot forget Ball’s attachment to Foucault reading Education Plc. Ball uses discursive analysis as a central tool and offers valuable insights into the varieties of market discourse as they infuse public sector schooling: the discursive effort of market reformers to portray the public sector as ineffective, the role of the state as a commodifying agent, the misguided idealization of business as a model for public schools. Throughout the book Ball wants to step back and analyze the epistemic shift and its material effects as education is increasingly reinterpreted through business values, assumptions, and perspectives. Yet, as a result of the stepping back, the book is characterized by an odd disjuncture between the descriptive and prescriptive. ( In fact, one of the feminist criticisms leveled against Foucault applies here. Namely, the concealment of the author’s voice and the refusal of overt normative political and ethical referents from which criticism is waged results in delimitation of authorial agency and positivism. See Fraser’s Unruly Practices.)

In Education, Plc the normative political and ethical stances are not missing altogether but are largely absent until the conclusion (which Ball says he was reluctant to include because it is so modernist). More than anything, what fills the pages is description of the prevalent and multi-dimensional business involvement in public education in the UK. Ball includes a lot of interview material with education entrepreneurs. Communities, parents, students, and unions don’t have much of a voice here (raising a methodological concern as to whether the best way to approach a phenomenon is exclusively from the inside.) Ball appears to have grown attached to these education entrepreneur interview subjects and repeatedly takes pains to stress how well meaning they are, how much they care about putting private enterprise to public use, and how we should not caricature them as evil capitalists intent on destroying the public sector. Those of us, he says, who do have this tendency are making a dire mistake of simplifying what is an unimaginably complex phenomenon. Several busy charts and maps illustrate the point. In fact, private sector involvement in public sector education is so complex and “blurry” for Ball that at numerous points in the book he asserts that one can no longer claim that there is any meaningful distinction between public and private education. Rather, one can assay a continuum from state bureaucracy to market.

Reading Education plc calls to mind Pierre Bourdieu’s recounting of the sociological trend evident when Bourdieu began his career in the film biography Sociologie est un sport de combat (Sociology is a Martial Art). Bourdieu explains that nearly everyone was focused on studying change (mutation), which became the end of sociological study. He explains that he wanted to locate the constants, those elements or laws responsible for social inertia, continuity. Ball’s emphasis on complexity has the same problem as that of Bourdieu’s contemporaries. As public education is being whittled away and as public goods and services are being redistributed upward on a global scale as part of a broader upward redistribution of material, symbolic, and political power, the central emphasis on blurriness lacks critical content necessary to analyze adequately and respond to the assault on public values and public power. But part of the problem is that Ball says he does not really know what public values are.

Education Plc is not a complete turnaround on privatization for Ball but it is a troubling and troubled, somewhat ambivalent book in which the author confesses that he does not feel comfortable taking an ethical stance against privatization despite its destructive effects—but then calls for ethical language and moral practice in the conclusion; he maintains that the relationship between public and private is so “blurred” and complex that the distinction can no longer be maintained—but then calls for public examination of the dire effects of privatization. Which Ball to believe? The descriptive one who tends to naturalize public institutions as markets? Or the prescriptive and critical one who laments the commodification of everything and the concomitant alienation and contingent social relations produced by the privatization of public education?

For a U.S. reader, the British context within which Ball situates privatization is both familiar and foreign. Ball emphasizes the shift from a Thatcherite neoliberal privatization to New Labour “third way” privatization. He contends that the market fundamentalism under Thatcher has given way to a pragmatism under Blair. This third way pragmatism aims to use privatization as a tool of the state to further public sector goals. Ball appears throughout much of the book to believe this, but towards the end he criticizes the economism and instrumentalism of third way education reforms that aim to use the private sector to make “delivery” more efficient. Ball relates the privatization of education to the broader shift from welfare state to workfare state and the remaking of the public citizen into the entrepreneurial subject. The parallels to the U.S. are evident.

However, while Ball claims that UK romance with neoliberalism has been replaced by a view of markets as tools (certainly a contentious view for many UK education scholars), in the U.S. neoliberalism (as a faith in markets to magically fix the “failed” state bureaucracy) has only picked up speed in education with the continued expansion of vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling, online for profit education, market oriented standards and standardization, for profit test and textbook industries, and a growing rightist assault on all things public as inherently bureaucratic, inefficient, and in need of privatization or destruction and then privatization. These trends are evident in the U.S. from No Child Left Behind to the post Katrina privatizations in New Orleans at the very least.

In the UK, third way post-politics and its pragmatic approach to education appear to remain centrally a part of the neoliberal program. For example, public private partnerships introduce profit taking to the public sector that redistributes public wealth and governance while establishing particular anti-critical constraints with regard to what can be struggled over and achieved in public schools. Though the emphasis may have shifted to “efficacy,” the basic economic reductionism of the approach remains. Perhaps Ball would benefit by recognizing that what is underway is public “capture” by the private sector. However, such capture is hardly inevitable and what educators and other cultural workers do to counter it can certainly matter.

While the assault on the public sphere through privatization may be more easily discerned in the U.S. context in the UK, I found myself unconvinced by a few central arguments that Ball makes that apply to both contexts:

• The “blurring” of the public and private:
Ball claims that it is unclear what public sector values might mean as distinct from the private. There are at least four aspects of this distinction that need to be considered that his analysis elides. For the sake of simplicity we can take an obvious example like The Edison Schools, which is the largest for profit education company operating in both the US and the UK. All of these four relate to the struggle over public institutions by different publics:
• a) Public versus private ownership and control: Edison is able to skim public tax money that would otherwise be reinvested in educational services and shunt it to investor profits. These profits take concrete form as the limousines, jet airplanes, and mansions that public tax money provides to entrepreneur and majority owner Chris Whittle. These profits also take symbolic form as they are used to hire public relations firms to influence parents, communities, and investors to have faith in the company. This is a parasitical financial relationship that results in the management of the schools in ways that will maximize the potential profit for investors while cutting costs. This has tended to result in anti-unionism, the reduction of education to the most measurable and replicable forms, assaults on teacher autonomy, and so on. There is no evidence that the draining of public wealth and its siphoning to capitalists has improved public education or that it is required for the improvement of public education. If the state is going to use privatization as a tool as the Third Wayers argue, then they could exercise authoritative state action directly in ways that do not upwardly redistribute wealth or funnel such wealth into misrepresenting the public influence and effects of privatization.

• b) Public versus private governance: Ball’s discussion tends to reduce publicness to the personalities of the education entrepreneurs. There are numerous other aspects of the transformation in governance accompanying privatization including the shift away from community governance, union governance, and the shift to business group governance. In Chicago public schools are being closed under “Renaissance 2010” and reopened as for profit and non-profit charter schools. Such schools are robbed of their community school councils and business dominated councils are installed. As with Edison, decisions regarding the use of resources shift from community to a management team with a financial stake in particular outcomes.

• c) Public versus private cultural politics: Ball offers terrific insights into how the modeling of public schooling on business results in a number of transformations to school culture, specifically the production of market based subjectivities. Yet perhaps one of the most troubling absences in Ball’s book is the lack of discussion of how privatization affects the politics of the curriculum. For example, a company like Edison cannot have a critical curriculum that makes central the ways corporatization threatens democratic values and ideals. While most public schools do not have critical curricula, the crucial issue is that some do and most could. This is a matter of public struggle. Privatization forecloses such struggle by shifting control to private hands and framing out possibilities that are contrary to institutional and structural interest. The possibility of developing and expanding critical pedagogical practices are a casualty of privatization.

• d) Public versus private forms of publicity and privacy, including secrecy and transparency. Private companies are able to keep much of what they do secret. Edison could selectively reveal financial data and performance data that would further its capacity to lure investors. Such manipulation is endemic to privatization schemes.
• 2) Perhaps most significantly, in collapsing public and private Ball naturalizes public education as a private business. Although in the conclusion Ball calls for the development of new language that will further public interest, throughout the book he manages to naturalize business language to describe the public sector. For example he refers to the state as a “market maker” and refers to private for profit companies as “public service companies.” In the prescriptive moments, when critical of privatization, the book is suffused with an air of hopelessness and inevitability that alternates when in the descriptive mode with an air of detachment and inevitability. The agency of educators and other cultural producers to engage in the production of public democratic discourse does not enter into the discussion though it would have been a valuable appropriation from Foucault via Stuart Hall.

As a leading figure in the sociology of education in the UK and as someone who has had his prolific oeuvre anthologized by a major press, Ball should use his pedagogical authority to take a stronger stand against privatization and commodification. While the emphasis on complexity and blurriness is valuable for understanding the ways that privatization works, it should not be the basis for an abdication of political and pedagogical authority and moral leadership. He should also, if he is in search of the distinction between public and private, work on developing a clearer sense of public values and projects grounded in the ethical human commitments he clearly holds.

Recommended Further Reading and Viewing

Apple, Michael. (2006) Educating the Right Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality, 2^nd edn, New York: Routledge.

Ball, Stephen J. (2004) Education for Sale: the Commodification of Everything!, Annual Education Lecture, King’s College, London.

Carles, Pierre. (2001) Sociology is a Martial Art (La Sociologie est un sport de combat) Icarus Films.

Fraser, Nancy. (1992) Unruly Practices Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press