Austerity and inequality; or prosperity for all? Educational policy directions beyond the pandemic
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Austerity and inequality; or prosperity for all? Educational policy directions beyond the pandemic Andy Hargreaves1,2 Received: 17 August 2020 / Accepted: 30 September 2020 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract This paper draws on current international analysis of pandemic issues in education, and on recent arguments by critical economists and political scientists, to examine two scenarios for educational policy beyond the coronavirus pandemic. One looming possibility is an onrush of austerity, deep cuts to public education, financial hardship for the working and middle classes, and a range of private sector, including online answers to public problems in education, leading to more inequity, and an even wider digital divide. The pandemic, it is argued, is already being used as a strategy to bring about educational privatization by stealth by mismanaging return-to-school strategies and by overselling the effectiveness of online and private school alternatives. The alternative is public education investment to pursue prosperity and better quality of life for everyone. This will reduce inequality instead of increasing it, close the digital divide that COVID-19 has exposed, and encourage balanced technology use to enhance good teaching rather than hybrid or blended technology delivery that may increasingly replace such teaching. Keywords Pandemic · Coronavirus · Technology · Education policy · Economics · Privatization · Austerity
1 Introduction We are not yet through the First Wave of COVID-19, but policymakers and school leaders are already starting to look toward the end of the tunnel. They are not just trying to glimpse the light. They are also seeking to grasp exactly what might be beyond the darkness and figure out which way to turn. For many—the elderly in care homes, the essential workers who have been financially forced to continue working in unsafe factories, the migrant farmworkers of the UK and North America housed in overcrowded breeding grounds for infection, and all the parents who have
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Andy Hargreaves [email protected]
1
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, USA
2
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
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A. Hargreaves
had to do their jobs at home while caring for, managing, and trying to supervise the learning of their children, the pandemic has been a once-in-a-century kind of chaos. Once it is all over, what comes next? To turn one way might be to face an onrush of austerity, deep cuts to public services, another round of financial hardship for the working and middle classes, and a range of private sector, including online answers to profoundly public problems in education, more inequity, and an even wider digital divide. There is another path we can take, though. Instead of austerity, we can embrace economic expansion in public education investment to pursue prosperity and better quality of life for everyone. We can reduce inequality instead of increasing it, we can close the digital divide that COVID-19 has exposed, and we can use balanced technology to enhance good teachi
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