Why Do Governments Adopt Neoliberal Education Policies? Critical Theory on Policy Movement in the Context of Contemporary Reform in Mexico
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both the fields of critical human geography and comparative education have developed substantial thinking on the spread of neoliberal public policy across national and subnational boundaries. Key means for explaining policy transfer include external advocacy from powerful transnational authorities such as the World Bank and the OECD, ideological influence in the form of think tanks, and domestic structuralinstitutional pressures in the form of the interests of national business elites. The relative strength of opposition groups such as teachers’ unions and pro-public education organizations is a significant counterbalancing factor. In this paper I investigate the relative weight of each factor behind education policy development in the context of Mexico’s contemporary adoption of neoliberal ‘education quality’ reform. I focus on the so-called ‘Alliance for Quality Education’ enacted in 2008 under the 2006-2012 Calderon administration, subsequently amended into the constitution under the 20122016 government of Enrique Pena Nieto. These measures include among others, the tying of teacher salary and job security to an expanded regime of student standardized testing, and increased private sector involvement in the public provision and financing of education from kindergarten to secondary level education. The neoliberalization of public education has advanced significantly in Mexico, especially due to the advocacy of Mexican business lobbyists facilitated by ideologically predisposed state officials. However due to a conjuncture of factors, their success is threatened by a consolidating pro-public education teachers’ movement. 1 Paul Bocking (pbocking@yorku.ca) is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography, York University. His research interests centre on labour and political economy in Canada, Mexico and the United States. His projects include union organizing and Canadian mining companies in Mexico, the development and transnational movement of neoliberal education policy, and teachers’ unions in North America. He is also a community activist and high school teacher active in the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation. Why Do Governments Adopt Neoliberal Education Policies? | 75
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".