CERI Eye: Markets in Education Conference

Henno Theisens reports back from

The Markets in Education Conference held in Geneva on 12-13 March, 2009

Henno Theisens presented the plan for the new CERI project on Markets at this conference.

He provides some observations on the conference:

• While the conference was labelled "markets in education", it dealt in fact primarily with choice in education. An important element, but certainly not the only element of the concept of markets.
• There was an interesting division between people focussing on the negative consequences of choice for equality and the people focussing on the positive effects of choice on educational achievements. The prior were primarily using qualitative studies, the latter primarily quantitative ones, with PISA scores as the main indicator.
• There were some interesting presentations on cases in Brazil, South Africa and China, illustrating that even in the absence of markets, or legal possibilities for choice parents in the position to so will do almost anything to get their children to better schools. Creating hidden “markets” or choice regimes  
• It was clear from these presentations that the will to send children to the best possible school was not just a middle class versus working class issue (never heard that terminology used as often as during this conference) but was operating as well between the richer and poorer working class families. In Brazil for example the researchers looked only at the public system (almost all middle class kids are in the private sector) and found similar results.
• There was a very interesting paper which focused on a small school district in Sweden and on the way in which the existing public schools reacted to the establishment of a competing publicly funded private school.

All papers and the programme of the conference can be found here:
http://www.unige.ch/fapse/ggape/programme.html