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A voice missing from the education debate
Public-private partnerships in the education sector bring with it skepticism, suspicion and fear.
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Illustration for a classroom (Shutterstock/File)
F
rom March 21-23, the World Bank held an education conference in Jakarta entitled “Learning for All: Shared principles for equitable and excellent basic education systems.” Supporting this conference was the education ministry and the Australian government.
A line in the invitation said this would be a great opportunity to “facilitate new networks and partnerships”. Indeed it was. I met World Bank officials, think-tank executives, policy makers and government officials (past and present) from all over the world. From Singapore, Mongolia, China, India, Indonesia to Peru and beyond. I saw statistics after statistics being presented: why early childhood initiatives are important, how much Indonesia has increased in their allocation of operational grants to schools, government initiatives, examination of PISA results and much more.
But I recall the invitation also said that this would be an opportunity to “share lessons from best practices and excellent systems.” Sadly to say besides the insight provided by Peru’s former education minister Jaime Saavedra on how Peru improved its systems, there was little “sharing of best practices”.
Saavedra had so much to share and there were so many questions from the floor, that he went well beyond the time set for his session. The fact is, the audience wanted to hear more practical ideas and see less statistics.
Ideas of best practices, as we all know, often exist in the more nimble private sector. Unfortunately, there was no representation from this sector. I may have been the only one there, given the many ideas I shared openly in the interactive sessions. I had several senior government officials from as far away as Brazil and India subsequently exchanging ideas with me. In fact one even replied, “I never thought of that,” when I shared what some private schools do as far as teacher quality is concerned.
Public-private partnerships in the education sector bring with it skepticism, suspicion and fear.
Skepticism largely comes from thoughts that “educating people” is far more complicated in the public sector than in the private. So the ideas from the latter are often inapplicable, so they need to be left out in such meetings. Suspicion because government officials often think that in a public-private partnership the formula is one of “win-winner”. That no private player will want to genuinely partner the public sector unless it can make some money out of it. Fear because someone in the public sector may lose his/her job for trying something new. Or not be recognized for trying to swim against the tide.
