Austerity, Standards and ICT as Pushes towards ... - SAGE Journals

European Educational Research Journal Volume 12 Number 4 2013 www.wwwords.eu/EERJ

Old and New Markets in Education: austerity, standards and ICT as pushes towards privatisation(s) in Italy EMILIANO GRIMALDI Department of Social Sciences, University Federico II, Naples, Italy

ABSTRACT This article deals with the issue of privatisation(s) in the field of education. In doing so, it focuses on three distinct, although interrelated, processes currently being experienced in the Italian education system: (a) the widening of the spaces for private schooling; (b) the ongoing privatisation of policy and the related blurring of the boundaries between public policy-making and the private sector; and (c) the dynamics of new/old markets where commercial actors and edu-businesses sell tools, technologies, knowledge and data, policy programs and recipes that inform educational processes. The work tries to highlight some connections between specific developments in these three processes of privatisation(s) and three distinct policy trends that are increasingly shaping the European education space, namely austerity, standardisation, and digitalisation. The conclusion discusses the actual and potential implications of all of this for both the ongoing transformation of the role of the education state in the post-welfarist scenario, and the restructuring of the societal governing of education, reflecting on the relationship between these specific processes of privatisation(s), the related reshaping of the role of the education state, that seems to shift towards a metagovernance function, and the developing of a new market-like governmental environment informed by the neo-liberal imaginary.

Introduction This article deals with the issue of privatisation(s) in the field of education (Ball, 2007, 2012a; Burch, 2009), with a specific reference to the Italian context (Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2013). More specifically, the article focuses on three distinct, although interrelated, processes ongoing in the Italian education system that could be comprised within the wider conceptual category of privatisation(s) (Ball & Youdell, 2008): • the widening of the spaces for private schooling, with its composite nature that varies from religious to for-profit schools (Semeraro, 1996); • the ongoing privatisation of policy (Mahony et al, 2004) and the related increasing blurring of the boundaries between public policy-making and the private sector; • the increasing development of the spaces for commercial actors and edu-businesses (Ball, 2007) in selling tools, technologies, knowledge and data, policy programmes and recipes that inform educational processes. In developing the analysis throughout the article, I try to highlight how these policy developments have been pushed by the overlap between the Italian education space and the European education space (EES) (Dale & Robertson, 2009; Lawn & Grek, 2012), with a scope and agenda which have been set since 2000 and the Lisbon Treaty. As Dale has argued (2009, pp. 126-127), the European agenda is ‘organised around a view that sees Member States’ education systems as deficient in a range of ways related to the achievement of the Lisbon goals’ and establishes the need to organise the capacity of each Member State to pursue an effective change. This has led to a ‘repair project’ (p. 127) and a convergence strategy that was enacted through the Open Method of Coordination 425

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2013.12.4.425

Emiliano Grimaldi (OMC) and developed through the establishment of a tangle of policy imperatives, specific travelling policies, and technologies of accountability. Three policy imperatives have been a relevant part of this ‘convergence strategy’ in the EES and can be associated to a dominant position assumed by the neo-liberal imaginary (Ball, 2012a; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010): (a) austerity, i.e. the policy responses that European Union (EU) institutions have ‘suggested’ to Member States to deal with the global financial crisis (Gamble, 2009; Jones, 2010); (b) standardisation, and in particular the contemporary obsessions for measurability, objectivity and benchmarking as key drivers for improvement; and (c) digitalisation, i.e. the imperative of technological innovation. In this work, I show how these imperatives, and the pressures exerted by EU institutions to adopt them, have widened the spaces for private, commercial and financial actors in the Italian education space. The article is structured as follows. First, I briefly outline some analytical premises of the work, defining the concept of privatisation(s), positioning them as global trends in the field of education, and motivating the strengths and limits of the analytical choice to focus on the Italian context. In the following sections, I then address the analysis of the three strands of privatisation(s) currently being experienced in the Italian education field, i.e. the widening of private schooling, policy privatisation, and the commercialisation of education, addressing the links to the European policy imperatives towards austerity, standardisation and digitalisation. Finally, I discuss the actual and potential implications of all of this for both the ongoing transformation of the role of the education state in the post-welfarist scenario (Jessop, 2008) and the restructuring of the societal governing of education (Simons, 2002; Peters, 2009). Thus, the ultimate concern underpinning the work is about the relationship between these specific processes of privatisation(s), the related reshaping of the role of the education state (Ball, 2012b), that seems to shift towards what Jessop (2002, p. 229) calls ‘metagovernance’, and the developing of a new market-like governmental environment informed by the neo-liberal imaginary (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). In the concluding paragraph I try to point out some key questions that will require public and collective problematisation. The questions raised concern the role of the education state, the threats of commodification in education, the uncomfortable relationship between policy privatisation and democratic accountability, and the potential impact of privatisation(s) on the structuring of the three system-messages of education (Bernstein, 1975), i.e. curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. In doing so, I try to offer a critical contribution to the debate on privatisation(s) in education and on the wider project of the redesign of public education that is ongoing in the European scenario. Privatisation(s) as Widespread Phenomena in the Global Eduscape Overt and hidden privatisation(s) are, nowadays, key governmental strategies in the global restructuring of education. They are part of (and contribute to) the heterarchical reorganising of transnational education governance (Ball, 2012a), the rethinking of education according to the neoliberal imaginaries (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), and the formation of its subjects as competitive, entrepreneurial and self-interested monads (Besley & Peters, 2007). Moreover, privatisation(s) strategies play a crucial role in the reshaping of education as a field of business-making, profitability and commodification (Ball, 2007, 2012a). As Ball (2012a) has shown, privatisation(s) are advocated by and through a maze of interlocking global policy networks, involving global institutions (World Bank [WB], International Monetary Fund [IMF], Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], above all), foundations (e.g. Gates, Clinton, Blair), edu-businesses, consultants and experts, politicians, and think tanks. Ball and Youdell (2008) have offered a clear map of the multiple forms privatisation(s) are taking in the education global space. They distinguish two wider trends, i.e. (a) the making of schools businesslike and like businesses through marketisation, New Public Management (NPM), and performance management (endogenous privatisation), and (b) the entering of the private sector into public schooling and the delivery of educational services (exogenous privatization). Table I presents a summary of the multifaceted forms these two trends are assuming in many countries in the field of education, of course with different degrees of intensity.

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Old and New Markets in Education Processes of privatisation in the field of education Endogenous privatisation – Marketisation and competition as mechanism of regulation making of schools businesslike Reforming public education according to the principles of New Public Management and like businesses Establishing the tyranny of performativity: performance management, performance-related pay and managerialist accountability Favouring entrepreneurialism as new public ethos Exogenous privatisation – the entering of the private sector into public schooling and the delivery of educational services

Increasing and favouring the participation of the private sector in the delivery of public education (elite, religious, and other alternative forms of education) Contracting out services: private-sector supply of education Contracting out schools: handing over of state schools to private companies to run under contract on a ‘for profit’ basis Favouring public–private partnerships Education services as emerging markets and the international capital activity Commercialisation: commercial companies targeting their products/brands at ‘child/youth’ and ‘educational professionals’ as consumers Philanthropy, aid and subsidy to state schools through donations and payments

Table I. An overview of privatisation(s) in the field of education. Sources: Ball, 2007; Ball and Youdell, 2008; Burch, 2010.

Endogenous and exogenous privatisation(s) have been widely analysed in countries like the USA and the United Kingdom (UK), that have historically led the way in the neo-liberal reforming of education (Ball, 2007, 2009; Burch, 2009). They are also receiving increasing attention in some developing and poor countries in Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia (Torres, 2002; Carnoy & McEwan, 2003; Mok, 2005; Nambissan, 2010; Srivastava, 2010), where elite private schools coexist with low-cost private schooling to which the states delegate the education of poor people. Although with different inflections and degrees of intensity, privatisation(s) are actual policy trends also in many European education systems (Ball & Youdell, 2008). Here the neo-liberal imaginary is consolidating its dominant position, thanks to the joint policy influence exerted by European institutions, international agencies, like the OECD, the IMF and the WB, transnational think tanks, and a vast array of travelling policy ideas, recipes, hard and soft technologies. Related to this, the field of private schooling is widening and private and commercial actors are increasingly establishing heterarchical connections with policy-makers, schools, professionals, and academics, through which they influence, in multiple and dispersed forms, governing activities and educational processes. In order to contribute to the critical analysis of these processes, this article explores the intertwining between austerity, standardisation and digitalisation and some forms of exogenous and endogenous privatisation(s), namely the participation of the private sector in the delivery of public education, the privatisation of policy, and the expansion of new/old markets in education services, adopting the Italian education system as a point of observation. The study is based on the collection of a vast array of quantitative and qualitative data from diverse sources. To address the issue of the widening of private schooling, I have used the Italian Ministry of Education and the National Statistical Institute (ISTAT) data set to collect longitudinal financial and structural data. The analysis of the policy privatisation processes and the relationship between digitalisation and the activities of edu-businesses are based on a ‘network ethnography’ (Ball, 2012a; Ball & Junemann, 2012) that unfolded through the Web following the multiple connections between philanthropic actors, businesses, individuals, organisations, public institutions, policy networks, programs, devices, and technologies. The mapping of the connections has been paralleled by the collection of 148 public policy and financial documents (regulation, report, guidelines, publications, newspaper articles, interviews, web videos, public speeches transcriptions, financial annual reports, accounts). The qualitative data have been analysed using coding and subcoding (following the analytic procedure proposed by Strauss and Corbin [1990]) as heuristic strategy to organise materials and identify key themes and problematisations.

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Emiliano Grimaldi The focus on the Italian context is not, of course, a choice of methodological nationalism.[1] On the contrary, some analytical premises inspire my work. I recognise the need to pay attention to the complex interaction and mutual influence between global policy trends and ideas, the peculiarities of the EES, and the policies of recontextualisation, through which policies and their enactments unfold. This is coupled with my effort to abandon what we could call a ‘methodological statism’ [2] and to analyse the governing of education as a dispersed governmental activity involving a plurality of (public and private) actors, different sites, logics and materialities, and multiple connections (Sørensen & Torfing, 2007; Dean, 2010). This is crucial, in my view, if we want to understand the pervasive force of the various forms of privatisation(s) and their implications for the future of education. In a comparative perspective, the combination of these two analytical stances allows recognition of the transnational traits of the processes of privatisation(s), as well as of the different forms and different degrees of intensity they assume across Europe (Ball & Junemann, 2012; Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2013; Olmedo, 2013). Given these underpinnings, Italy could represent an interesting point of observation, given the peculiar traits of its education (and political) system and its path dependencies (Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2012; Landri, 2009). I will justify this statement, giving at least three reasons. First, since the foundation of the national education system in the late nineteenth century, the education debate in Italy has been crossed by harsh struggles around a set of interrelated issues: the public–private education divide, the funding of private schools by the state, the freedom of teaching and educational choices, the laity of the education state, and the influence exerted by the Catholic Church in Italian political life. These are hot and still unsolved issues that recursively reemerge in the educational debate, reinvigorating old and new conflicts and oppositions. As a matter of fact, and as a consequence of the historically stratified compromises reached by the Italian governments since the 1900s, the Italian education system has always been a centralised but dualistic system, where 90% of public schools coexisted with 10% of private (mostly Catholic) schools, directly and indirectly funded by the Ministry of Education. This historical peculiarity has determined, since the early 1980s, a paradoxical convergence between the neo-liberal advocates of marketisation, choice policies, and competition, and the Catholic elites, who were interested in increasing the public funding to private schools and in giving private schools the same status as public ones. This has become a very hot debate in the recent period of austerity, with many politicians and experts advocating the widening of the space for private schooling as a ‘sustainable’ strategy to lower public expenditure in education (see, for example, Unione Cristiani Cattolici Razionali, 2012, an online article on the website of a Catholic association on the funding of private schooling as a ‘saving policy strategy’). Second, Italy has only recently undertaken the contested and troubled way towards the establishment of a national evaluation system based on standards, national tests, improvement plans for failing schools, and all the related machinery of performance management (Serpieri, 2012). This is a clearly European-driven policy process which has its origins in the overlap between the Italian education space and the EES. Interestingly enough, such a process is opening new markets and widening old ones, contributing to a significant restructuring of the education services business (textbooks, online curriculum, testing tools, and so on). Finally, Italy has been severely affected by the global financial crisis, especially since 2008, being also periodically the target of financial speculation due to its political instability and high public debt. In such circumstances, Italy has shown a peculiar political weakness, in that its political and educational agenda has been drawn up by a set of (overt and hidden) imperatives established by a network of international and global institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB), the EU and the OECD. In 2011, the economic policy of the country was substantially ‘put under temporary receivership’ by the EU. The ECB started to establish the recipes to be followed to avoid a default and to exit the economic crisis. The first recommendation was austerity and the reduction of public expenditure. Here follow some quotes from the official letter sent to the Italian government in 2011 by the ECB which set the future policy agenda, and where the links between austerity, public sector reduction, standardisation, and different forms of privatisation are made strikingly clear: At the current juncture, we consider the following measures as essential ... we see a need for significant measures to enhance potential growth ... Key challenges are to increase competition, particularly in services to improve the quality of public services.

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Old and New Markets in Education A comprehensive, far-reaching and credible reform strategy, including the full liberalisation of local public services and of professional services is needed. This should apply particularly to the provision of local services through large scale privatizations. In addition, the government should consider significantly reducing the cost of public employees, by strengthening turnover rules and, if necessary, by reducing wages. In view of the severity of the current financial market situation, we ... also encourage the government to immediately take measures to ensure a major overhaul of the public administration in order to improve administrative efficiency and business friendliness. In public entities the use of performance indicators should be systematic (especially in the health, education and judiciary systems). (ECB letter sent to the Italian government on 5 August 2011).[3]

As a consequence of all of this, what appears (and is often described by its detractors) as an oldfashioned, welfarist and ineffective public education system is undergoing an intense period of change of its deeper texture driven by paradoxical and centrifugal pushes and thrusts towards a somehow post-welfarist settlement. Privatisation(s) seem to have a role in this shift and many hints suggest that, as it is happening in other systems, they will become key drivers of change. Crisis, Austerity and the Actual and Potential Widening of Private Schooling A first strand of privatisation(s) relates to the paradoxical association between an austerity policy towards public education, the widening of the spaces and funding for private (Catholic and forprofit) schooling, and the ‘choice policy rehearsal’ run in the richer and wider Italian region (Lombardy) since 2008 through the launch of a massive ‘school voucher program’. Here I try to give some sketches of these complex and dispersed processes. The 2011 ECB letter reinforced an austerity trend that had been affecting the Italian education system since 2008. Despite the global and European rhetoric about the centrality of education and investment in human capital, the education budget has been a primary target of cuts, as was also the case during the ‘government of the technicians’ led by the economist Mario Monti. As Figure 1 shows, public expenditure on education in 2012 was lower than it was in 2005, with the decrease in education budgets in Italy being around 5% in 2011 compared with 2010, and more than 5% in 2012 compared with 2011 (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2013), and with an impressive cut of more than 10,000 million Euros from 2008 (the first year of the third Berlusconi government) to 2012.

Figure 1. Total public expenditure on education – millions of Euros purchasing power standards (PPS) – Italy 2005-2012.[4] Sources: Eurostat Statistics (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/) and European Commission/ EACEA/Eurydice, 2013.[5]

The picture of a public education system under attack could be enriched by adding some data about the general trends of education. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of teachers in the 429

Emiliano Grimaldi Italian public schools decreased by 81,614, due to cuts and retirements. In the same period of time, the number of public schools has been reduced to about 2000, as a consequence of the new restrictive standards about the minimum number of students allowed. In sharp contrast, the number of students has increased by more than 90,000 (FLC-CGIL, 2013). To summarise, this means less public education services for an increasing number of students. However, these austerity trends have not affected private schooling. In Italy, public and private schools coexist in a sort of dualistic system which was designed in its current form by Law 62/2000, and which provided for the possibility for private schools to be recognised as equivalents to public schools (hereafter Paritarie Schools) if they matched specific standards (enrolling qualified teachers, adopting the national curriculum, having adequate structures, having an educational plan consistent with the Constitutional principles), and the Ministry Moratti Decree 27/2005, which softened some of these standards. The ‘equivalence’ allows the Paritarie Schools, as part of the national education system, to receive public funding and benefit from tax relief, whereas the families of their students can ask for state-funded school vouchers (only in the segments of compulsory education). State funding and school vouchers for private schools can also be cumulated with regional funding, according to the current legislation. Since 2005, the Italian state has constantly raised the funding for private schools, doubling the initial amount of about €250 million established in 2000. Austerity itself has not blocked this process, with funds being increased by a further €200 million in 2012, the year of the harsh spending review carried out by the Monti government. Historically, private schools in Italy have been mostly Catholic schools, although in recent years the number of private for-profit schools (schools run by private entrepreneurs as a business activity) has increased. Table II offers evidence of the relevance of the phenomenon of private schooling in Italy, using the school year 2009/10 as a window of observation. It shows how private schools account for more than 20% of the total number of schools and that 10% of Italian students attend them. Private schools tend to be generally smaller than public ones (e.g. in higher secondary schooling, public schools had an average of 481 students in 2010, whereas private schools had an average of 98 [Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR), 2011, p. 20]).

Schools Students

Total

Public

56,789 8,961,634

42,345 7,852,359

School Year 2009/2010 % Municipal % (Public) 74.6 1904 3.3 87.6 164,004 1.8

Private (Paritarie) 11,766 910,201

%* 20.7 10.2

*There is 1.4% missing in the figures for schools. These are the ‘non paritarie’ private schools. There is also 0.4% missing in the figures for students. These are the students attending the ‘non paritarie’ private schools. Table II. Private schools and their students in 2009/2010 in Italy. Source: MIUR, 2011.

2006/2007 2007/2008 2008/2009 2009/2010 Variance (%)

Number of schools 57,509 57,459 57,230 56,789 - 1.25

Private schools 11,194 11,560 11,647 11,766 + 5.1

Table III. The widening of private schooling in Italy – 2006-10. Source: MIUR, 2011.

A diachronic view of the expansion of private schooling in Italy from 2006 to 2010 (see Table III) makes evident the first steps of what appears to be a new trend: the progressive reduction of public schools, especially since 2008, has coincided with an opposite trend for private schools. Although the complete data are not yet available, this trend is likely to be reinforced by the austerity policy of the Monti and the current Letta governments. The widening of the spaces for private schooling mainly concerned pre-primary and higher secondary education, and was geographically uneven, 430

Old and New Markets in Education confirming the historical trait of the higher concentration of private schooling in the northern and richer areas of the country. It is interesting to disaggregate these data. In fact, it is possible to note how the number of religious schools has decreased (e.g. there were a total of 11,121 Catholic schools in 1991, 8472 in 2004, and 7116 in 2008), whereas the 5.1% increase in the total number of private schools is due to the opening of new private (for-profit) Paritarie Schools. Interestingly enough, private (for-profit) Paritarie Schools, which today host more than 50% of the Italian students attending private schools, have historically been a ‘grey’ area that has been left untouched by the political debate. Ironically, they have recently been put under the screening of the Italian judiciary. Such attention was due to the spreading of the phenomenon of ‘degree factories’, i.e. private schools that were selling their degrees, falsifying official documents, underpaying young teachers, and not respecting the minimum national standards in terms of curriculum, teaching and student attendance. These structural trends have been curiously paralleled by a new impetus of private school champions in the public debate on education. Voices from the Catholic elites have allied with less visible private stakeholders in pointing to private schooling as a potential solution to the crisis of public finance and the transition towards a post-welfarist and market-centred education. ‘Private schooling causes the Italian State to save 6 billion Euros’ and ‘families have the right to choose the education they want for their children’ have been the slogans launched by this alliance through multiple media (websites, newspapers, talk shows, publications and reports, public speeches, and so on).[6] ‘Private schools are more efficient and effective’ echoed experts and analysts, recalling national data on expenditure per student (interestingly enough, data on student achievements offer a different view on the schools’ educational effectiveness, but in the era of performance indicators these data remain invisible). ‘To increase the funding to private schools and favour a transition of a large number of students from public towards private schools would make the State save even more money’ is the simple message implicitly suggested. A national laboratory has been established in this respect since 2000 in Lombardy, the biggest and richest region of the country, where the regional government, led by the Catholic and rightist politician Roberto Formigoni, has launched a ‘School Voucher Program’ (see Regione Lombardia, 2013), providing school vouchers for those students attending private schools. Lombardy has historically a strong tradition of private schooling. Twenty-seven per cent of the schools in the region are private. Most of them are Catholic schools. In 2010 private schools hosted 10% of the region’s students. According to an independent report on the ‘public funding of private schools in Lombardy’, issued every year since 2001 by a minority party of the Lombardy Regional Council and based on official administrative data, in 10 years (2000-9) the ‘School Voucher Program’ has indirectly distributed more than €500 million (80% of the regional budget for schooling) to private schools. Moreover, several short-term schemes for the public funding of the rebuilding of private schools have been issued, distributing more than €200 million. At the same time severe cuts were imposed on the budget for public schools rebuilding. Despite the rhetoric used by the regional government to legitimise the ‘School Voucher Program’ in terms of meritocracy, freedom to choose for public or private education for poorer people, and efficiency (private schools save the state money), official data about the recipients of school vouchers show how the voucher benefits the middle and high-middle classes, with twothirds of the families who have children at private schools, and who are given school vouchers, earning more than €30,000 per annum (8° Rapporto Indipendente sui Voucher Scuola, 2009). Interestingly enough, the School Voucher Program has been regarded in the national debate on education as a case of best practice and advocated by the Catholic elite, private stakeholders and centre-right politicians as a model to be imported at the national level. The structural trends, discursive moves and policy experiments could be interpreted and connected in different ways and with diverse inflections. In my reading, they outline the first moves of a key shift in the Italian education system towards a hybrid dualistic post-welfarist settlement, where the spaces for private schooling will be likely to widen, due to: (a) the decrease of state funding to public schools; (b) the consequent lowering of the quality of public education; (c) the wider possibility for profit (due to the increasing of state funding and market demand); and (d) the cultural and structural incentives to the middle and high-middle classes to enrol their children in private schools (especially in the richer areas of the country). 431

Emiliano Grimaldi Privatising Education Policy-making, Privatising Educational Imaginary A second strand of privatisation(s) in the Italian education system concerns an ongoing redrafting of the mobile boundaries between public and private in education policy-making and, more widely, in the dispersed activity of educational imagination (for a more detailed analysis of this specific process, see Grimaldi & Serpieri [2013]). This process, one which Ball (2007) defines as policy privatisation following Mahony et al (2004), involves the moving of the imagination and design of education policy outside the traditional field of public policy-making, and a parallel formation of new subjectivities within the private field who become entitled to speak, analyse and advise with authority about education. This process accelerated with the rise of the second Berlusconi centre-right government in 2008, which coincided with a fundamental shift in education policy-making. On the long wave of a public campaign against public sector bureaucracies’ ineffectiveness, new non-educational actors and a new analytical machinery started to enter the arenas of education policy, being initially enrolled by the conservative Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini, in the challenge to reform a public education system that was described as recalcitrant to change, improvement and innovation. A paradoxical tangle of powerful watchwords imported by the private/business world (and by the EES education policyspeak), such as merit, improvement, performance, innovation, and evaluation, started to colonise the education debate, acting as organising principles for the ongoing formation of a discourse of education reform whose cornerstone was the blaming and shaming of public education ineffectiveness and resistance to change and innovation, and a radical, but subtle attack on the core tenets of teachers’ professionalism (autonomy, public ethos, self-evaluation and so on), masked under a denouncement of teachers’ laziness and lack of responsibility. Interestingly enough, the ongoing formation of this new discourse of education reform occurred simultaneously with a relevant change in the landscape of education policy. A powerful group of philanthropic actors entered education policy-making, opening the way to a process of ‘policy privatisation’ (Ball, 2007, p. 14). Their stepping into the education arena enacts the ongoing formation of a constellation of heterarchical networks (Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2013) of social relations involving philanthropists, business and charity organisations, banks, politicians, civil servants, national and international institutional agencies, experts and consultants, universities and academics, pioneer schools, head teachers and teachers, and professional unions. The increasing centrality of these new policy entrepreneurs in education policy-making coincided with intense activity in cognition, calculation, experimentation, and evaluation (Rose & Miller, 1992, p. 175), and a flourish of reports, conferences, publications, newspaper articles, press releases, and public debates. A ‘considerable movement of personnel between state and [education] services and the private sector’ (Ball & Youdell, 2008, p. 99) began that heavily influenced policy thinking about education. Philanthropic actors and their experts became the key promoters, relays and legitimisers of the organising watchwords of the new discourse of education reform. Figure 2 is a first attempt to represent graphically the new heterarchical assemblage of institutions, actors, policies, and technologies that emerged as a result of this process of policy privatisation. The assemblage has been mapped matching the findings of web searches, document analysis and interviews with key informants. It is increasingly along and through the maze of these connections (which could be of policy influence, board membership, financial support, lobbying, advising, enroling and co-opting) that policy-making unfolds today in the Italian education field. Within this new education policyscape, I want to briefly focus on three philanthropic actors, namely the Compagnia di San Paolo School Foundation, the Treellle Foundation and the Agnelli Foundation, that have all played and still play a crucial role in the attempt to promote a process of endogenous privatisation of the Italian education system. Quality and the empowerment of school autonomy are the keywords in the definition of the mission of the Compagnia di San Paolo School Foundation: Working with schools and for schools to promote a better quality of education, with a specific focus on the changes originating from the introduction of school autonomy: this is the mission of the School Foundation. (www.fondazionescuola.it/magnoliaPublic/ita/lafondazione/presentazione-e-missione.html)

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Old and New Markets in Education

The ovals marked with red refer to three policies programs launched by the Ministry of Education since 2010 that were ‘designed’ by the private actors.

Abbreviations ANSAS – National Agency for School Autonomy; ANP – Head Teachers National Association; CSP – Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation; INVALSI – National Agency for School Evaluation; PQM – Quality and Merit National Plan; VSQ – School Evaluation and Quality Pilot Policy; Valorizza – Teacher Evaluation Pilot Policy. Figure 2. Mapping education policy privatisation in Italy (2008--11). Source: Grimaldi and Serpieri, 2013.

An ‘ecumenical dialogue’ to promote school modernisation and improvement is the core mission of the Treellle Foundation, that notably declares its ambition to act as a bipartisan actor in education policy-making: TreeLLLe aims to serve as a ‘bridge’ between the ever-widening gap that separates research, public opinion and decision-makers – a gap that hinders progress in modernizing and improving our education system. TreeLLLe is strictly non-political and non-governmental: the uniqueness and ambition of the project lie in harnessing the contribution of well respected personalities and experts who best represent our country’s different traditions and cultural identities. Today these traditions and identities need to be brought face-to-face in dialogue within an environment free from everyday political competition and tensions. (http://www.treellle.org/english-site)

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Emiliano Grimaldi The quality of human capital, the development and competitiveness of the country and the social mobility of talents are, instead, the main concerns of the Agnelli Foundation, whose commitment in the field of education is explained as follows: Since 2008 ... the Agnelli Foundation decided to focus its research activities on education (school, university, lifelong learning). This choice is rooted in the widely shared belief that economic welfare and social cohesion of a country mainly depend on the quality of the competences and skills of its population ... A more educated and skilled population guarantees a higher productivity and, then, a better positioning of the country in the global competition; education is, moreover, one of the most powerful levers for individual empowerment and an important means of social mobility, since it gives the possibilities to talented and motivated young people to reach prominent social positions, independently of their social background. (http://www.fga.it/home/la-fondazione/programma-education.html)

Their managers and experts act in a direct policy-writing activity and are involved in a variety of policy work, such as assessing and reviewing and drafting education legislation, in producing ideas, policy technologies, tools and methods, reports and research to legitimate policies, recipes and technologies. Their overall mission seems to be the selling of new policy recipes to introduce changes in the behaviour of the ‘ineffective’ and ‘past-oriented’ public education organisations. The importing into the daily activity of public schools and education administration of some of the key technologies of the private sector is indicated as the ‘indispensable solution’ to make administration, schools, and professional communities more effective, fair, productive, responsive, and accountable to the country’s interests. These new policy entrepreneurs ‘embody a new kind of self-understanding and a new set of strategic capacities and interests’ and ‘blend private interests and public service’, being ‘constantly engaged in networking and negotiation’ (Ball, 2007, pp. 11-12), acting as subjects, disseminators and relayers of discourses and structures drawn from the private sector imaginary and regime of practice. Interestingly enough, that of mimicking private-sector ethos and practices is not an overt rhetoric. On the contrary, these new philanthropic actors employ apparently neutral, fair and undisputable discursive entry points, such as quality, improvement and effectiveness to legitimise their involvement in education policy and open the discursive possibility to propose their diagnoses of the ‘diseases’ of the Italian public education. Their strategic project seems to be the changing of the regime of practice that regulates the conduct of schools and educational professionals, redrawing it according to a new businesslike ethos and the fairy tale of ‘virtuous competition’ as lever for improvement. This redrawing develops through five discursive moves. First is the use of the ‘indisputable’ value of merit as ‘picklock’ to draw new professional ecologies, where utilitarian actors engage in ‘virtuous’ competition, and competition itself functions as a ‘steering at a distance’ mechanism that assures the pursuit of the common interest (that is school improvement) in a market-like environment. Second is the introduction of the logic of differentiation and abjection. Reproducing the zero-sum games and the winner–loser logic of the market, differentiation and abjection are understood as an incentive for organisational and individual improvement. Third is the dismantling of the professional principle of autonomy and professional self-evaluation, through the importing of some substitutes of the customer-satisfaction technologies (i.e. reputational evaluation). Fourth is the subjectivation of a new educational professional, heroic, committed to change and improvement, competitive, but also keen to abandon the professional qualitative and internal criteria in favour of externally-driven measurable indicators to judge both the effectiveness of her or his individual work and the overall quality of her or his organisation’s work. Fifth is the importing into the field of education of the private-sector rule that what is not measured is not valued, transforming education into a domain of calculability where educational effectiveness is only intended as a production of numerable outcomes. These five discursive moves seem to be part of a ‘profound and pervasive cultural/ethical/ procedural’ attempt to re-engineer public education and its professional ecologies (Cribb & Ball, 2005, p. 118), making them businesslike (see Serpieri [2012] and Grimaldi & Serpieri [2013] for a more detailed discussion of this project of reculturing and restructuring of Italian education). Coopting a vast array of commonly ‘socially positive’ values and offering a legitimising image of a reform to bring merit, fairness and responsibility in a field where they lack, the new policy 434

Old and New Markets in Education designers seem to be engaged in the preparation of the terrain for neo-liberal reforms in a country where the public and the professional communities have been, generally speaking, quite protective of its public services. A crucial part of this attempt is the importing of a new calculative logic into the field of education, where qualitative and professional criteria to judge the adequacy and effectiveness of educational practices are replaced by ‘neutral instruments of scientific measurement’ (Rose, 1999) that are translating education into something numerable, measurable and calculable. Standardisation, Digitalisation and the Widening of Old/New Educational Markets The third strand of privatisation(s) I analyse here is the one more directly related to the widening of edu-business and the increased intensity of the international capital activity in the field of education (Ball, 2012a). It is related to: (a) the global trend towards the establishment of standards in education, the imperatives of benchmarking (see Meyer & Benavot, 2013), and the related development of teaching and learning evaluation machineries; and (b) the increasing investment of the EU and international institutions and national governments in information and communications technology (ICT) as a lever to modernise education and promote improvement. As in the previous two cases, we could see here the enactment of policy recipes and technologies whose authority (and indisputability) is legitimised by the overlap between the EES and the Italian education space. Whereas the evaluation imperative had been reinforced across a decade (and lately recalled in the 2011 ECB letter quoted earlier), the need for technological innovation is clearly stated on the EU Digital Agenda for Europe website (2013): ICT is a key lever to learn better and more efficiently, think creatively, innovate, engage with, and solve complex problems, access wider and up-to-date knowledge – all essential key 21st century competences. It provides school pupils, university students, employees, professionals and life-long learners with flexible and accessible learning opportunities through rich and active experiences. This makes learning exciting, engaging, compelling and it’s empowering learners to manage their own learning in the most appropriate way for each learner. It provides organisations better tools to integrate learning in work processes, and improve time to competency and faster time to market. ICT takes learning beyond the traditional classroom setting to online and mobile environments that are available 24/7. ICT for learning is a cross-cutting theme in various thematic programmes of the European Union, ranging from large scale Structural Funds or Research, Development and Innovation programmes to more targeted sectoral programmes like the Life-Long Learning programme. (http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/education)

These two distinct policy processes have gained in intensity in the last five years in the Italian educational scenario. In 2000, Italy took the ‘long route’ towards the construction of a national evaluation system through the establishment of the INVALSI, the national agency for school evaluation. After 10 years of sharp conflicts due to resistance from professional communities and unions (Barzanò & Grimaldi, 2013), it is only now that a national system based on standards, national tests, improvement plans for failing schools, and all the related machinery of performance management has seen the light (Serpieri, 2012). Digitalisation has a more recent history. In 2008 the Italian government launched the Piano Scuola Digitale (Plan for digital school), which has provided pioneering schools with 69,813 interactive multimedia whiteboards (hereafter IMW) and the technology (computers, tablets, broadband, and so on) to create Web 2.0 Classrooms and Web 2.0 Schools. The Ministry of Education has invested approximately €121 million, a budget that has since been extended and complemented with regional funds (Avvisati et al, 2013, p. 13). I will now try to show how the establishment of this new complex educational and performance management machinery is associated with considerable changes in the governance of the edu-business (i.e. the space of private companies selling products to schools, students and professionals) and the flourishing of new products, tools and programs (new textbooks, online curriculum, testing tools, and so on). New markets are opening and old ones are widening, new/old actors are gaining dominant positions; all of this is resulting in a significant restructuring 435

Emiliano Grimaldi of the education services business. I will focus on a specific old/new market in the Italian eduscape, the market of textbooks, online curriculum, testing tools, soft technology in support of educational hardware technology, and a related set of products targeted to schools, teachers, students and families. In 2012, RCS-Mediagroup, one of the most prominent international private companies selling instructional tools, estimated the overall value of this market to be €570 million (RCS-Mediagroup, 2012). This positive trend and the widening of profit opportunities are well described by Pearson, another giant of this market, which describes as follows the company’s performance in the Italian market: our businesses in emerging markets continued to perform strongly, supported by good enrolment trends and sustained investment.[We had] a strong competitive performance in Italy. (2012, p. 19)

Although most of the companies recognise that the traditional textbooks market is suffering a serious crisis, education is seen (and performs as) a profitable sector, thanks to the new possibilities opened, on the one hand, by the development of the technologies of testing and the improvement policies and, on the other hand, by digitalisation and its tools and spaces. In recent years, the market I am trying to outline here has witnessed a paradoxical process of centralisation, or, from another point of view, it has become more and more transnational. The Italian companies traditionally operating in the field have been acquired by world giants of the edubusiness, such as Pearson (on Pearson Education, the world’s largest education company, see Ball, 2012a, pp. 124-128), or, on the contrary, have varied and widen their spectrum of action, becoming themselves global players in the edu-business (e.g. RCS-Mediagroup). As a result, five companies currently control 70% of the market, after having acquired their smaller competitors: Pearson Education Italy, RCS-Mediagroup, Mondadori Education, Zanichelli and De Agostini Group. Pearson Education is the world’s largest education company, reaching over 30 countries with an extended network of national divisions, and earning almost $7 billion in education revenue in 2011. In the last decade Pearson has pursued three strategic goals in order to adapt to (and shape) the global educational market: (a) to become an integrated education company; (b) to shift from a largely Anglo-American company to a truly global enterprise; and (c) to shift from an analogue print publisher to a digital content and services company (Pearson, 2012, p. 4). This is based on the acknowledgement that ‘education will turn out to be the great growth industry of the 21st Century’ (p. 8). Pearson Italia, whose sales volume exceeded €30 million in 2011, an 11% increase on 2010, describes as follows the commercial strategy of the group: Our publishing initiatives, based on a well-established interaction with Italian teachers and schools, are continuously enriched thanks to the confrontation with multiple experiences of teaching with new technologies carried on worldwide. Pearson, in fact, sustain teaching and learning of more than 100 million people in 70 countries, publishing paper and digital text-books and books, but also through the development of innovative platforms for on-line learning and multimedia teaching and learning tools. (http://www.pearson.it/gruppo-pearson)

A Pearson competitor who also operates on an international scale is RCS-Mediagroup. This international multimedia publishing group, whose honorary president is Cesare Romiti, a former FIAT CEO, operates in multiple sectors (newspaper, periodicals, books, radio and broadcast, new media), and is one of the most prominent European players in advertising and media distribution. Its business ranges from Europe to China, South America and the USA. RCS in 2012 had a pre-tax profit of €1597 million’. A total of €93.9 million came from the Education division. Another powerful actor is Mondadori Education, a division of Mondadori S.p.A, whose CEO and principal shareholder is Marina Berlusconi. Through 13 subsidiary companies, the schooloriented division sells textbooks, courses, teaching supports, multimedia, and online instructional content, in Italian and also in English. Its annual sales in 2012 have generated €76.4 million in pretax profits (12.8% of the total market). Mondadori Education, in their 2012 Annual Report, recognises that education publishers need to deal with the ‘irreversible transformation of textbooks in mixed-products, made of paper and digital contents’ (Mondadori Education, 2012). Zanichelli was founded in 1859 and is one of the historically prominent publishing groups of the country in the field of education. Recently, it has progressively loosened its centrality. In order 436

Old and New Markets in Education to be competitive, it has developed joint ventures and deals with international edu-businesses such as Klett, McGraw-Hill, Bibliograf and Hachette. Zanichelli had a sales revenue of €139 million in 2011. The fifth player in this sort of ‘commercial syndicate’ is the De Agostini Group. Since 1997, this group has diversified its fields of activity through a strategy of internationalisation. Now its businesses range from publishing to broadcasting and content production, betting and lotteries, financial investments and assurance. The publishing division operates in 30 countries and sells products in 13 languages. The De Agostini Group 2011 Education revenue was approximately €69 million (De Agostini, 2012). An overview of the geography of this new/old market in the field of education is presented in the Appendix, which provides a description of the commercial players in the field, their affiliation, and types of products, services and tools they sell. The table presented in the Appendix is the result of extensive searches on the websites of these commercial players and the analysis of the products they sell. Along with the multiplication and the reinventing of their products and offers, these old and new providers of educational services have also reorganised and, somehow, widened their territorial networks, comprised of dealers, sellers, personal and editorial consultants and trainers. Schools are constantly visited by salespersons who propose and recommend an ever-wider set of up-to-date editorial products, instructional tools, training programmes, and other kinds of soft educational technology, always of course in order to improve, match the standard, be successful and creative, and exploit at their height the potentials of ICT and multimedia education. My argument here is that this market has gained a new impetus both from: (a) the introduction of the new machinery of standardisation, and more specifically the INVALSI tests, the more general technologies of testing, and the related terrors of performativity (Ball, 2003); and (b) the somehow forced and unexpected throwing into the mix of a set of new technologies for teaching (i.e. the IMWs and other tools for multimedia education) that stand in front of teachers as ‘black boxes’ and ‘mysterious objects’ that require a new expertise to be explored and unveiled.

Figure 3. New alliances and new opportunities for profit. Source: http://www.auladigitale.rcs.it/servizi/innovazione.shtml

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Emiliano Grimaldi This idea is admirably and fairly summarised on the RCS-Mediagroup website, on the page dedicated to ‘Innovation and Technology’ (see Figure 3), where the logos of multinational companies in the field of technology are highlighted as strategic partners and, at the same time, it is stated that: The use of technologies in the educational practices has determined a radical transformation of the learning environment, the personalization of educational strategies and the improvement of learning and competences. To reach these objectives, it is necessary to support teachers in the very process of technologies integration into their classroom practice and stimulate the sharing of best practices. These are the reasons of the collaborations between RCS, the Fondazione C&I, Certipass and the major producers of technological solutions for schooling. (http://www.auladigitale.rcs.it/servizi/innovazione.shtml)

To a certain extent, the edu-businesses of the old textbooks market have been very ‘forwardlooking’, sensing (and maybe favouring through hidden lobbying) the opening of new spaces for profit and the creation of new demands by schools, teachers, families, and students. Here follow two examples of the new products sold in this ‘in transition’ market and the renewed strategies of the edu-businesses described above. The digital offer is the new frontier, where the edu-businesses play out their battle for competitive advantage. The Pearson website promotes its ‘Digital Offer’, dedicating a specific section to the ‘Pearson Digital System’, an ‘open system for innovative teaching’ which integrates products and services for classroom practice starting from the traditional textbook and enhancing its educational potentials thanks to digital technology. The ratio of this new approach to the old textbook market is well represented in Figure 4, where an integrated matrix of interdependent products is described (and legitimated) as functional to better education.

Figure 4. The Pearson Digital System. Source: http://www.pearson.it/pearson-digital-system

Here the textbook is the starting point of a wider commercial offer made of e-books and digital material for tablets, books for IMW- or computer-assisted teaching, MyLab, the worldwide digital platform developed by Pearson to develop personalised teaching and learning, and training and professional development services dedicated to head teachers and teachers (in collaboration with the University of Genoa and on demand all over the country). Pearson has also developed ‘apps’ for 438

Old and New Markets in Education organisational and instructional functions. Materials about the effectiveness of these new hard and soft technologies are widespread on the Web. For instance, in one example on YouTube, Pearson (2010) presents the functioning of the IMWs they sell, explaining how they can be integrated into classroom practice and represent ‘an effective support to teaching and learning’. The potentials offered by the process of standardisation have not remained unacknowledged as well. Typing the word ‘INVALSI’ into the search engine on the Pearson Italia homepage produces a research report of 81 items, most of which are digital and paper workbooks for national tests, and publications for teachers on the teaching methods to make their students perform well. RCS-Mediagroup seems to be echoing Pearson’s strategic choices. On its website (and those of its subsidiaries), RCS presents an entire section named ‘digital classroom’, with a composite digital offer of the RCS brand to schools, teachers, students, and their families.[7] The publisher presents richer (and periodically renewed!) digital versions of the textbooks (Ebook +), digital platforms for testing and assessment (VOLA) for each subject of the national curriculum, tools for multimedia education, and teaching for competence (auladigitale.it). Digital and paper materials are available for teachers and students to learn how to use the new IMWs. In the ‘Education 2.0. The virtual laboratory to reinvent the school. Together’ section, RCS offers a platform where teachers (buying the publisher card and registering) can engage in ‘an experiment of collaborative construction of knowledge’, uploading and sharing materials, posting links and exchanging ideas. The most prominent section is, however, that titled ‘How to get ready for the INVALSI test’. In this section schools, individual teachers and families can purchase online ‘preparatory exercises, materials, and standard tests inspired by the model of national tests on Italian and Math to educate the students to the INVALSI methodology, confidently deal with the tests and be successful in passing them’. Some titles are particularly attractive: ‘Campioni INVALSI [INVALSI Champions]’ or ‘Bravi in Tutto [How to get Outstanding in all subjects]’.[8] As the table in the Appendix shows, the geography of this new/old market in the Italian context is very complex and the ‘fast and furious’ development of new products, tools and services sold by the edu-businesses to schools, teachers, students and families is very hard to follow. I hope I have shown how there is a strict and mutual link between the unfolding of this new/old market and the global policy trends of standardisation and digitalisation in the field of education. To a certain extent, this creates many similarities between the Italian context and what is happening in many other national education systems all around the world (although of course, some peculiarities remain and processes have different degrees of intensity). In my reading these developments in terms of privatisation(s) and commercialisation are having some intended and unintended consequences that are contributing to a reshaping of the field of education and its basic elements (curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation). Such a reshaping is going on through a sort of multidirectional externalisation of the basic functions of the welfarist education state (a sort of destatisation [Jessop, 2002]). We assist towards a plural, dispersed and opaque definition of these basics, whereas at the same time the state seems to lose control of them. These issues are discussed in more detail in the conclusion. Conclusion In this article I have analysed three interrelated forms of endogenous and exogenous privatisation (Ball & Youdell, 2008) currently being experienced in the Italian education system and have connected them to some of the policy imperatives that are increasingly structuring the EES: austerity, standardisation and digitalisation. The objective was to offer a contribution to a deeper understanding of the roles of private and commercial actors in their varied forms in the governing of the Italian education space, to grasp specific policy patterns and governing strategies that are reinforcing their position, and to problematise the potential implications of all of this in terms of educational governance and education processes. Processes of privatisation(s) are key drivers of change in the resetting of education in the postwelfarist scenario, but also, and maybe mainly, in the restructuring of the state and societal governing of education (Simons, 2002; Peters, 2009; Ball, 2012b). In fact, what we are discussing is a dispersed and polycentric process of restructuring and reculturing that involves not only the state governing of education (in terms of structures, processes, connections, and power relations) and its 439

Emiliano Grimaldi reframing along transnational/national/local and public/private divides, but also the collective thinking and reasoning about it, and the formation of its processes, power relations, technologies and subjectivities. Privatisation(s) multiply the sources for the circulation of data and the construction of knowledge, augment the global selling and importing of ideas and products, and increase the opening of new markets and the legitimation of new expertise and subjectivities. This proliferation contributes to further shift the balance of power from the public to the private sphere in education, or, better, to blur the boundaries between the two, making them more porous and increasingly privatising the public. A preliminary question has to be addressed: what is troubling in all of this? To clarify my positioning with respect to the issue of privatisation(s), I borrow here the words of Burch (2009, p. 764), who comments as follows on a case in the USA: There is nothing inherently wrong with businesses being involved in public education, particularly given that they have been selling some kinds of commodities to ... states for over a century.

In this respect, Ball in his pioneering work Education plc noted how: privatisation in general terms ... has a long history. It has been the normal way of going about things in terms of things like textbook production and sales (Apple, 1996), testing programmes, equipment and buildings for many years.

However, Ball observes at the same time how ‘privatisation is old but also new’ (2007, p. 13) because of the unparalleled scale it has assumed globally, being part of a wider project of redesign of the public sector in many countries. As Burch highlights (2009, p. 764), there are aspects of these policy developments ‘that are extremely troubling, given the democratic purposes of public education, and in a political context where there is much rhetoric about the need for greater transparency and citizen input’. Thus, if we bear in mind the values of democratic education, equality, social cohesion (to quote a mantra of the EU discourse), and public accountability/ transparency, the composite effects of the processes of privatisation(s) pose some actual and potential problems, especially because it seems that the ways we conceive and practiSe education are reframed, educational subjectivities are redrawn, and the school message systems (Bernstein, 1975) reformed through dispersed processes that remain invisible and unaddressed in the public debate. In this respect, I try to point out some key questions that would require public and collective problematisation. These are, I argue, urgent topics, especially if we adopt a European perspective and question the role that European policy networks and the infrastructure of the EES are playing in favouring (directly or indirectly) processes of convergence towards privatisation(s) and the opening of new commercial spaces in education. Private Schooling, the Education State and the Threats of Commodification A first question concerns what is the meaning in terms of social justice of the ongoing dismissing of public education, the lowering of its quality (due to austerity), and the favouring of private schooling through voucher schemes, public funding and contracting out schemes. Somehow these are hints of a project to reframe the welfarist education state as ‘reluctant’ (Ball, 2012b) that is becoming more and more widespread in Europe. Such a project seems to define the state agency in the field of education as metagovernance (Jessop, 2002); that is, the organisation of the conditions for educational governance. These processes have different degrees of intensity, being quite tentative in the Italian context, but very real in many other national education spaces. The troubling issue is that exactly the latter contexts are those globally described as the laboratories of innovation to be mimicked. Those countries that have gone the way towards a mixed public/ private education system experience greater polarisation and growing inequalities, with selected sites of excellence (in terms of resources, quality of the services and social background of their ‘consumer base’) confronting many and dispersed ‘ordinary’ contexts. Of course, the desirability of such an outcome depends on what kind of society we have in mind. If we still think of a democratic society, we should consider as troubling the reframing of education as a private good that can be 440

Old and New Markets in Education purchased and sold on the market, depending on your financial resources and social capital. Despite the fairy tale of the ‘invisible hand’ still operating as a key discursive device, markets are all but democratic. Policy Privatisation and Democratic Accountability: uncomfortable bedfellows? A second question concerns the privatisation of policy, and more generally, the process of delegating education policy-making functions and education imagination to non-state actors, ‘who then act as proxy principals for the state’ (Newman & Clarke, 2009, p. 73). Interestingly enough, the state seems to abdicate its monopolistic function of general principles outliner, devolving some of its public responsibility to the private sector (in our case the design of key aspects of education regulation). The issues involved here are: (a) what education; (b) how to conceive the quality of education; (c) the regulations of educational professions and expertise; and (d) the definition of the equity of the education system. This is a bit of a peculiar process of destatisation, where ‘tasks and services previously undertaken by the state are now being done by various “others” in various kinds of relationships among themselves’ (Ball, 2011, p. 147), the public–private divide in education policy-making is radically redrawn and fundamental policy tasks are reallocated. New public– private partnerships acquire increasing importance in designing education, its goals, structures, processes and subjectivities, where the state is often only first among equals and new private agencies aid government in designing policy. An entrepreneurial policy space unfolds where public and private actors develop a shared commitment in constructing a broad and consensual vision of the future of education, designing at the same time the appropriate structures and mobilising the resources to actualise this future (Grimaldi & Serpieri, 2013). The troubling question here concerns the fact that the unfolding of this entrepreneurial policy space makes education policy-making more opaque. And this is quite paradoxical in the era of the global tyranny of accountability. In this respect, we could ask, which are the new sites of the compromise between the competing interests and how much are they visible and accessible? How can the public, that today is increasingly rethought as a mass of consumers (rather than citizens), judge the political choices? What if this role of the state as fair arbiter and guarantor is dismissed (someone could say is not finally affirmed) and the most powerful gain the control of key and strategic education choices? In the end, what happens if defining the meaning of education and educating is not any more a prerogative of the welfarist state? Who or what is going to take up its role of fair arbiter? Rethinking Education: what, how, who and where A third, related, question concerns the redrafting of the deeper texture of education, once again through dispersed governmental processes, that implies the establishment of new assemblages of discursive frames, new technologies and material artefacts, power relations (a different displacing of authorities), and renewed subjectivities. What is striking (and relatively unproblematised) in the functioning of edu-businesses, as I have tried to describe, is their power of intervention on what Bernstein (1975) called the three system-messages of education: curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. Here emerges the significance of the two global and European policy processes I have discussed. The sketches provided on the great variety of services, tools and products sold by the edu-companies show quite clearly how standardisation and digitalisation (and the ‘soft and hard’ pressures exerted by the European Education Policy [EEP] in order to make them become ‘policy imperatives’) are resulting in the flourishing of new technologies of education, which have the potential to reframe the foundations of the educational practice in the micro-context of the classroom (see Dale, 2009). Strikingly, statements like ‘A new way to teach Math’, ‘Train your students to be outstanding’ or ‘The use of technologies in the educational practices has determined a radical transformation of the learning environment, the personalization of educational strategies and the improvement of learning and competences’ are taken for granted, as if they were simply describing somehow objective processes, natural phenomena, and/or inherently positive and desirable processes. The questions here are multiple and very complex: which are the pedagogies (to recall Bernstein again) embodied in thIS complex machinery? What does it mean to be 441

Emiliano Grimaldi outstanding? What are the learning objectives of education? What impact do specific technologies have on the education practices, the school system messages and the work of school professionals? Can we leave these questions unaddressed and leave the complex global tangle of edu-businesses, technology producers, consultants and trainers to silently decide on all of this? To outline some possible answers to these questions and discuss the desirability of possible developments of post-welfarist education, both in Italy and in the global scenario, would be the ambitious object of another work. It would probably require a sort of multidisciplinary reasoning about the political, educational, technological, economic and communicative assumptions and implications of these developments in post-welfarist educational governmentality. However, I think it would beneficial to put these questions into the public arena now. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on the early drafts of this article. Notes [1] Borrowing Chernilo’s words (2007, p. 1, quoted in Dale, 2009, p. 123), I define ‘methodological nationalism’ as ‘the all-pervasive equation between the idea of society and the formation of the nation state in modernity’. On methodological nationalism and its misleading effects, see also Dale and Robertson (2009). [2] Methodological statism can be regarded as ‘the assumption that the state is the source and means of all governing activity’ (Dale, 2009, p. 124). [3] http://www.corriere.it/economia/11_settembre_29/trichet_draghi_inglese_304a5f1e-ea59-11e0ae06-4da866778017.shtml [4] Eurostat metadata describe as follows the total public expenditure on education: ‘Generally, the public sector funds education either by bearing directly the current and capital expenses of educational institutions (direct expenditure for educational institutions) or by supporting students and their families with scholarships and public loans as well as by transferring public subsidies for educational activities to private firms or non-profit organisations (transfers to private households and firms); both types of transactions together are reported as total public expenditure on education’ (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=en&pcode=tps00158 &plugin=1) [5] The values of total public expenditure on education for 2011 and 2012 are not yet available. The figure presents an estimate based on the European Commission/Eurydice report, Funding of Education in Europe 2000-2012: the impact of the economic crisis, where it is stated that ‘the decrease in education budgets in Italy was between 1 and 5% in 2011 compared with 2010 and more than 5% in 2012 compared with 2011’ (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2013). [6] See for instance the online article ‘Private schools, a good deal for the state’ (Lepore, 2011). [7] Click on the following link to access the RCS-Mediagroup ‘digital classroom’ web section: http://www.auladigitale.rcs.it/#&panel1-3 [8] Please visit http://www.auladigitale.r cs.it/common_boxes/invalsi.shtml to find the materials described in the article.

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APPENDIX Table AI. The geography of a new/old market in Italian education. Products, services and tools sold

Main companies RCSMediagroup

Subsidiaries and actors operating in the market La Nuova Italia Tramontana ETAS Oxford University Press Other eight minor school publishers

Pearson

Pearson Longman Lang Edizioni Elmedi I Pinguini Archimede Edizioni Bruno Mondadori Paravia Linx Paramond Techna

Textbooks Subject-matters online resources E-books and digital contents for tablets and other multimedia devices INVALSI National test workbooks Pearson Digital System MyLab LIM-Books Pearson Apps Training and professional development Academic masters on ICT in education Instructional tools for the ‘Teaching for competence’ The Pearson Laboratory for Learning Tools for online extra training for the students who want to learn more

Zanichelli

Zanichelli Editore Casa Editrice Ambrosiana Loescher editore Il Foro Italiano

Textbooks Subject-matters online resources E-books and digital contents for tablets and other multimedia devices National test workbooks MyZanichelli – a digital key to access online additional resources to textbooks ZTE – Zanichelli Test – online resources for teachers to evaluate, certify competences and train students to the INVALSI tests Training schemes for teachers A student online area with additional materials and national test workbooks A parents online area with a guide to ‘books and resources purchase’ and suggestions to save money

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Textbooks Subject-matters online resources Interactive E-books and digital contents for tablets and other multimedia devices National test workbooks Auladigitale B.I.T. – Bravi in tutto – resources to be outstanding Competenze – online resources for teaching of competence INVALSI national test workbooks iProf for Teachers – an app for teachers to expand and update their RCS Books VOLA – an online platform to create and dispense tests and written examinations Training schemes for teachers Learn Digital and Technology EdApp – 30 virtual environments for cooperative learning Guides and tutorial for teaching methodologies and technologies

Emiliano Grimaldi Mondadori Education

Mondadori Scuola Signorelli Scuola Einaudi Scuola Electa Scuola Le Monnier Scuola Minerva Scuola Mursia Scuola Scuola & Azienda Other four minor publishers

Textbooks Subject-matters online resources and digital additional curriculum contents E-books and digital contents for tablets and other multimedia devices ME-Books – Multidevice Digital Book and the Book+Web package LinkYou – Teachers training on the use of digital materials and devices in classrooms Flashcard National test workbooks Webinar – Web seminar dedicated to teachers and heads Personalised seminars on demand for teachers and heads

Gruppo De Agostini

De Agostini Publishing De Agostini Libri Digital De Agostini

Textbooks Subject-matters on line resources E-books and digital contents for tablets and other multimedia devices National test workbooks InClasse – a digital platform for personalised teaching and learning De Agostini OnLine Teaching Centre – with o line resources dedicated to teaching for competence, INVALSI tests and the use of IMWs and other multimedia devices ZONA Math, Geo and Music – Three online portals dedicated to three subjects with resources, tutorials on how to use IMWs, test editors and instructional videos

RCS-Mediagroup: http://www.rcsmediagroup.it/wps/portal/mg/attivita/libri/divisioneeducation?language=it Pearson: http://www.pearson.it/index.php Zanichelli: http://www.zanichelli.it/home/ Mondadori Education: http://www.mondadorieducation.it Gruppo De Agostini: http://www.gruppodeagostini.it/http://www.deagostiniscuola.it

EMILIANO GRIMALDI is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, University Federico II, Naples, Italy. His works are primarily in the field of education policy analysis. He has published books and journal articles on the issues of governance, accountability, evaluation, privatisation, social justice and racial discrimination in the field of education. Correspondence: [email protected]; [email protected].

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