Looking to the Dutch for Help in California’s Education System
The advent of the globalisms of education, which is defined as: “… the neoliberal story of increasing world economic integration… and the technological story of openness, interconnectivity and convergence,” (Peters), illustrate the function of the modern education. That is to say, education is tailored to produce citizens prepared to advance the market model under neoliberal politics, which emphasizes deregulation and privatization. This brings us to the questions: To what extent can education systems around the world serve to provide a perspective regarding how inequality in the educational outcome of public education in California can be reduced/eliminated? Does neoliberal politics limit the extent to which educational inequality can be meaningfully reduced?
First and foremost, the track that a student is set on by adults is one main issue that affects the attainment of a quality education. During my elementary school days, I remember being tested for the “Gifted & Talented Education” program that selects and then pairs students who perform above a certain academic threshold, creating a discrimination between students who should be invested more in due to their academic ability and those who should not be due to their lack of. Looking at a study of the Dutch secondary education system by Dockx and De Fraine that observes and analyzes the effect of different education tracks on student outcomes, the report concludes that the track that a student is set on through teacher recommendation and test scores is influential in the outcome of quality education the student will receive, and hence the quality of life that will be attainable as well. More often then not, the separation of students based on performance at a young age is largely influenced by socioeconomic factors, widening the gap between those who have resources and those who don’t, and consequently diminishing “…‘the capacity of human beings’ to ‘participate in shaping their destinies” and to ‘Live in dignity and relative material security.’” The benefits of an educated population are certainly well worth the investment, however, the economic systems that manage the world benefit from the stratification of humans. Even so, throwing more money at education won’t help either as discussed in my WP3, the education system can only be fixed by improving the quality of teachers the students access to them.
Works Cited
Dockx, Jonas, Bieke De Fraine, and Machteld Vandecandelaere. “Does the Track Matter? A Comparison of Students’ Achievement in Different Tracks.” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 111, no. 5, 2019, pp. 827–846. ProQuest, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/scholarly-journals/does-track-matter-comparison-students-achievement/docview/2137575331/se-2?accountid=14749, doi:http://dx.doi.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/10.1037/edu0000305.
Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2016) — “Financing Education”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/financing-education'
Peters, Michael A., and Tina Besley. “GLOBALISM AND THE EXPERIMENT OF OPENNESS.” Knowledge Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, 2017, pp. 50–67. ProQuest, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/scholarly-journals/globalism-experiment-openness/docview/1906045840/se-2?accountid=14749, doi:http://dx.doi.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/10.22381/KC5120175.
Singh, Anviti. “Education Policy: Pedagogical Uncertainty in the Era of Neoliberal Globalism.” Financial Express, Jun 18, 2020. ProQuest, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/newspapers/education-policy-pedagogical-uncertainty-era/docview/2414387233/se-2?accountid=14749.
