Last Updated on October 21, 2026 by Karl Thompson
A summary of one thread within this excellent book… This is background reading on globalisation, neoliberalism and education, useful for evaluating the New Right and neoliberal perspectives. For the core A-level material see the sociology of education page.
The Department for Education (2013) had an overwhelmingly positive view of the future role of ICT in schools and colleges, noting that it has transformed other sectors, that parents and pupils expect it, and that pupils need ICT to equip them with future-work skills. In DfE literature, digital media seems to be presented as a neutral technology through which individual students can be empowered, with emphasis on the benefits such technology can bring to schools, such as more personalised learning, better feedback, a richer resource base and the possibility of extending the learning day. This discourse further constructs not only technologically reticent staff and lack of access to ICT resources as a potential problem, but also centralised government itself, with the forthcoming renewal of the ICT curriculum being endorsed by major technology companies.
There are, however, those who are sceptical about the neutrality of ICT, the claimed inevitability of its expansion and the supposed benefits of the increasing digitisation of education. One such sceptic is sociologist Joel Spring who, in his book Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace and The Digital Mind (2012), draws our attention to the increasing control of education systems around the world by global corporations, a process which he refers to as educational corporatism.
The Nature and Extent of Global Educational Corporatism
According to Spring, a global shadow elite network is responsible for encouraging the growth of information and communications technology in state education programmes in the USA and increasingly in other countries, something which is unsurprising given the size of the global education market.
This network consists of a relatively small number of IT and communications company executives who have close links with senior policy makers in governments, who together have overseen an increase in the use of ICT for the surveillance and education of students. Spring characterises this network as a ‘Flexnet’ because the key actors, or ‘Flexians’, move between government departments and education, media and ICT companies, spending a few years working for one government department before moving to an ICT corporation, and then back to the public sector to spearhead technological initiatives drawing on their corporate contacts to do so, and finally moving back to a more senior corporate role, supposedly to take advantage of the profits generated from said initiatives.
The Corporate Takeover of New York City’s Schools
The means whereby Flexians within the global shadow elite operate is illustrated by the corporate takeover of New York City schools.
In 2001 billionaire and superclass media mogul Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York City. After lobbying for and gaining control of New York schools, Bloomberg appointed as schools chancellor Joel Klein, a lawyer from another media conglomerate, Bertelsmann. Technically Klein lacked the legal requirements to head NYC schools, but this requirement was waived by the state commissioner for education.
Klein initiated changes that centred on student testing and data collection (echoed in education ministries around the world). To aid in this, he contracted with the company Wireless Generation to use their ‘ARIS’ system of data collection and management. Klein then left his position as chancellor to become an executive vice president at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which bought 90% of Wireless Generation for $360 million.
In addition to the above, while Klein was chancellor, Murdoch’s New York Post also supported Klein’s efforts to establish more charter schools and undermine protection for teachers.
The Global Neoliberal Agenda for Education
At a global level, the shadow elite influence governments through the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, which both voice considerable optimism about the future role of ICT in meeting the world’s educational needs. As an example of this optimism, Spring points to the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2010–11, authored by prominent members of the shadow elite.
Where education is concerned, the report anticipates ‘Transformation 2.0′, a process in which educational institutions will make increasing use of analytic software tools which convert data into actionable insights. This not only means the now well-established use of data on students’ past test results to predict the probability of their passing or failing certain subjects and then directing resources more efficiently to those in need, but the report also predicts the increasing use of ‘data exhaust’, or more qualitative information collected on students throughout their school careers, for the same purposes. In the future this might mean increasing surveillance of the number and length of virtual interactions students make each term in order to inform educational interventions.
Individual schools and universities do not possess the resources to develop and maintain the kind of software required to collect and collate such ‘big data’, so ‘Transformation 2.0’ might see educational institutions becoming locked into long-term data-analytics contracts with global ICT companies. The future of education might be one where schools do the teaching at a national level but informed by data analysis carried out by global corporations using global data sets.
The WEF report makes several other recommendations:
- To use ICT to make education more engaging and better suited to the needs of each student through making greater use of data analytics and what Spring calls ‘edutainment’ software, with special emphasis being given to promoting STEM subjects.
- To better link technology to assessment.
- To support access to online instruction in and out of school.
- To increase ‘productivity’ in the education sector: ICT is seen as a relatively cost-efficient means whereby schools can accelerate student progress, rather than employing more teachers.
According to Spring’s analysis this vision is ideological, and it represents a global neoliberal agenda for the progressive privatisation of education through governments spending more public money on data analytics, online instruction and assessment delivered by global ICT corporations. It is already the norm in the US for IT and communications companies to develop educational software which is provided to schools for a profit, a practice which the ICT elite wishes to see replicated in other parts of the world.
The ICT shadow elite’s ambitions are not limited to developed countries; they are also targeting the education sectors of developing countries, and as an example of this Spring cites the Microsoft–UNESCO agreement established in 2009 regarding ICT and higher education. As part of this agreement, Microsoft offered ‘seed money’ to introduce a range of educational technologies to a number of countries – such as DreamSpark, Microsoft Live@edu, Digital Literacy Curriculum and the Microsoft IT Academy Program. Spring’s theory is that such an initial seeding will reap dividends in the future: as public education sectors expand, they will spend increasing sums of money on upgrading software and buying related ICT educational products from Microsoft.
Potential Problems with Increasing Educational Corporatism
Spring points to several possible negative consequences of global companies effectively having more control over national education systems.
Firstly, this is likely to further reduce educational management to the employment of data mining and analysis to predict how student test scores and graduation rates relate to social characteristic information, and to identifying which limited interventions can be made to improve examination results, with the effectiveness of teachers further reduced to how efficiently they can enhance these measurable results.
Secondly, it is likely that there will be an increasing level of control of knowledge by ICT corporations. The concern here is that this will lead to the further standardisation of knowledge into a form which can be easily assessed through technology, which potentially means preferring quantifiable knowledge over more qualitative and critical knowledge, which requires more human intervention to assess. In addition to this, schools are increasingly likely to be seen as institutions whose job it is to provide a 21st-century workforce for ICT firms, meaning the preferencing of STEM, ICT and business-related courses.
Thirdly, the corollary of greater control being handed to global ICT corporations is declining autonomy of individual schools and teachers. This actually seems to be an explicit goal of the global shadow elite: the WEF (2011) states that the main barrier to extending technology in education is ‘human’, with ICT, rather than more teacher time, being (quite literally) sold as the most effective means to personalise learning in order to meet the needs of each learner.
Another idea which potentially undermines teachers, widely publicised by prominent Flexian Bill Gates, is that we should have at least one good course online for all subjects rather than lots of mediocre ones. This idea seems both sensible and inevitable, but its manifestation might come in the form of a core of highly skilled experts constructing corporate-approved online content for a global education market, with for-profit companies responsible for managing testing and tutoring replacing much of the work teachers currently do.
A final possible consequence is an increasing inequality of educational provision. As governments struggle with finances in the age of neoliberal austerity, it might be that cash-strapped schools move towards providing online-only tuition for some courses while students at better managed and funded schools retain more formal ICT-supported lessons. This is precisely what happened in Florida in 2010–11, when thousands of students in Miami-Dade County were placed in virtual classrooms in order to meet the state’s class size mandate, which specified a maximum of 25 students per class but did not apply to virtual classrooms.
Conclusion
While the increasing use of ICT in education appears to offer many benefits, such as enhanced personalisation of learning and increased teacher productivity, the importance of Spring’s analysis lies in reminding us that while technology itself is neutral, the way in which it is deployed is not, given the corporate networks which are currently lobbying for the further digitisation of state education, and the neoliberal agenda of which this is a part.
At present it is difficult to see how anything can halt the spread of educational corporatism: there is a clear demand from today’s students and their parents for digitised education, and global ICT corporations are clearly well positioned to play an increasing role in the delivery and management of virtual learning environments; and with further government cuts likely, the virtualising of learning seems an obvious way to save money in the education sector by reducing the number of teachers.
Whether or not the future of education will be one of reduced teacher autonomy, with for-profit corporations having greater control over national curriculums and thus even more access to students, and what the effects of this will be, remain to be seen.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post links to the New Right and neoliberal perspectives on education and to globalisation and education, part of the education topic in A-level sociology (AQA Paper 1, 7192/1).
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Bibliography
Department for Education (2013) Digital Technology in Schools. Archived at The National Archives.
Paucek, C. et al. (2014) Online Education: From Novelty to Necessity. In World Economic Forum, Education and Skills 2.0: New Targets and Innovative Approaches. Geneva: WEF.
Spring, J. (2012) Education Networks: Power, Wealth, Cyberspace and The Digital Mind. New York: Routledge.
WEF (2011) The Global Information Technology Report 2010–11: Transformations 2.0.