1 gen 2014 anni - UNESCO study on edu privatization questions claims of effectiveness

Descrizione:

Most advanced economies accepted the idea that education is a ‘public good’. After the Second World War, in particular, they developed robust systems of public education.

Across the world, there is a growing trend towards allowing private institutions to become active players in the development and delivery of social programmes. This trend is often referred to as privatization: it involves the “transfer of assets, management, functions or responsibilities previously owned or carried out by the State to private actors” (Coomans & Hallo de Wold, 2005). Privatization is often proposed as a way of reducing the reliance on governments in the provision of services either because the governments are no longer able to meet the costs of the services sought by the public, or because they are ideologically committed to minimalist forms of government. Finally, there is a populist argument in favour of privatization, which suggests that people should be empowered to define and address their own needs in order to forge a sense of community and not rely on what are often distant and unresponsive bureaucratic structures.

Many of these claims have been contested (see for example Verger et al., 2016). It has been shown that they are often unsupported or contradicted by empirical evidence. These ideological claims have nevertheless become highly influential around the world. There is remarkable similarity in the ways in which nations that have different social, political, historical, and economic traditions have used these arguments to analyse the problems of governance they face. They have alleged the inefficiency of government services, the lack of public funds to meet the growing demand for these services, the importance of accountability and the need to give consumers a choice. Not surprisingly, the direction of their policy responses has tended to be correspondingly similar, with comparable sets of ideas that demand that public institutions become more responsive to the external market pressures and restructure their priorities in line with requirements of the global economy.

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