Schools under New Labour
von Richard Hatcher

I want to begin by making a distinction between a business agenda for schools and an agenda for business in schools. The first agenda - what business wants schools to do - is a broad transnational consensus about the set of reforms needed for schools to meet employers? needs in terms of the efficiency with which they produce the future workforce. The second agenda ? what business itself wants to do in schools ? represents the interests of a growing sector of private companies whose business is taking over the provision of state education services. The business agenda for schools is increasingly transnational, generated and disseminated through key organisations of the international economic and political elite such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In that global context there is a project for education at the European level which represents the specific agenda of the dominant European economic and political interests. It is expressed in, for example, the various reports of the European Round Table, a pressure group of 45 leaders of major European companies from 16 countries, and it has become the motive force of the education policies of the European Commission and its subsidiary bodies (Hatcher and Hirtt 1999). One of the most recent statements of this business agenda for schools is a report published earlier this year called In search of quality in schools: The employers? perspective (Confederation of British Industries 2000), produced by an international working group of employers? organisations from 7 EU countries (including the CBI in the UK and the BDA in Germany). It begins with this premise: ?The emergence of the knowledge economy means that people have become the key to international competitiveness. This poses new and fundamental challenges for all our education systems.? What are these challenges? ?There is a gap between the skills which employers will increasingly look for in their employees, and the skills schools currently equip their students with. The gap is getting wider.? The report summarises employers? criticisms of their national systems. This is the problem in the UK, according to the CBI report A skills passport (1995): ?Inadequate outcomes from foundation learning are of concern to all employers. The problem lies mainly with low expectations?the vast majority of young people have the potential to achieve far more than is generally expected of them, and must be encouraged to do so.? In Germany, a report published by the German Business Institute in 1999 reaches the same conclusion: ?Schools fail to release the potential of students and even to pass on basic life skills. It costs German employers around DM 70,000 per student to prepare students for work ? the preparation that schools should have completed.?

Kommentar:

Am 01.04.2005 hat für mich, so wie die Regeln des Staates es wollen und wie es aus durchaus guten Gründen sinnvoll erscheint, die "Zeit der Rente" begonnen: over und raus mit 65.

Webressourcen:

Lektüre für die folgende Sitzung:

nurn test

Videoprotokoll:

Termine und Organisation:

PUBLIC SCHOOLS: MAKE THEM PRIVATE
von Milton Friedman

Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.