Privatization or public investment in education?

Addressing inequities in education is a global imperative. The 2016 Education Commission Report highlights the inequities of educational access and learning outcomes, while the SDG 4 targets require progress in reducing inequities across geographic units, gender, ability groups, and within crisis-affected settings. Beyond diagnosis and monitoring, what does research tell about effective strategies to enhance equity and equality of opportunity in education?

IIEP's 2017 Strategic Debate series explore this question from several perspectives, pushing us to go beyond understanding the nature of the problem to explore what can be, and is being, done, particularly through education policy and planning.

Policy-makers worldwide are trying to figure how best to organize, govern, and support their education systems. Some countries approach these issues with public investment in teacher professionalization and a focus on equity of student outcomes, while others use a market-based, privatization approach to education. The new book, Global Education Reform, documents the ideologically and educationally distinctive approaches three pairs of countries have taken in structuring their education systems: Chile and Cuba; Sweden and Finland; the United States and Canada.

The analysis concludes that the education sector is better served by a public investment approach that supports each and every child than by a market-based, competition approach that creates winners and losers. This volume explains how and why some children can lose in a privatized system and makes recommendations to ensure that all children receive equitable, high-quality educational opportunities.