Educational Privatization: Risks for Equity

Abstract

The past several decades have seen a growing involvement of the private sector in public primary and secondary education in many countries around the world. The increase in educational privatization has emerged as a policy response to neoliberal and managerial imperatives aimed at spending cuts, deregulation, liberalization and commercialization, outsourcing, and the introduction of new providers of school services (Alexiadou, 2013, p. 415). The involvement of private actors in public education is expected to be beneficial per many proponents of educational privatization (e.g., international organizations, policymakers, and scholars) (Robertson et al., 2012). Since educational privatization takes various forms and manifests differently across the globe, we first need to consider what is meant by educational privatization, before discussing its impact on equity in education.