Barbara Schulte, Sociology, Lund University

2011-2016

The aim was to understand how the privatization of education plays out in an authoritarian-cum-neoliberal context: China. The project investigated how privatization processes are interlinked with (a) processes of commodification ('cash cow'); (b) empowerment and the emergence of alternative, non-state spaces ('civic space') and (c) mutually beneficial alliances between government and middle/upper class families ('cooptation'). The project looked at how private education is regulated both on paper and on the ground, how it is envisioned by policy lobbyists and educational researchers as well as how it is put into practice by school founders, principals and teachers (including issues of control, evaluation, financing, curriculum and pedagogy). Insights from the Chinese case can help us question taken-for-granted assumptions about privatization processes in education.

I undertook 7 research trips (3 of them funded outside RJ), each lasting 2-3 weeks, and visited 17 private schools in Beijing, Kunming and Zhejiang Province. At most schools I was also able to sit in classes and take part in various school activities for several days. I conducted a total of 62 interviews with stakeholders in the private education business, representatives of the Chinese Association for Non-Government Education (a nation-wide research and lobby network for private education with regional offices in each province) as well as with school founders, school principals and teachers at private schools. All interviews were conducted by myself and in Chinese. Beijing represents a highly state-controlled site of educational governance, while Kunming is a good example of a necessity-driven educational market, where the scarcity and poor quality of state-provided education pushes private providers forward. Zhejiang province constitutes the typical example of a consumer-driven educational market, where a combination of affluence, dedication to education and parental ambitions has led to a boom of private education.

THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS
1. Regional, institutional and cross-school diversity:
Private schooling in China can mean anything from an illegal, dilapidated migrant school to an expensive, elitist international boarding school. But even among private schools for the Chinese middle class, schools could be (a) attachments of prestigious public schools (officially forbidden); (b) schools within gated communities (often run by real-estate agencies); (c) schools run by educational corporations; or (d) schools run by individual entrepreneurs. The latter two could be privatized public schools (comparable to US charter schools).

Despite the Chinese state's claim to both formally and informally control school education, most actors viewed official regulations as surprisingly ineffective for accrediting private schools and guaranteeing a minimum of educational quality. Personal connections and negotiation skills were still seen as crucial for successfully opening and running a private school. The regulation of profit that could be legally attained through private schools was felt to be murky. Consequently there were not only stark differences (as expected) between the three selected regions, but even within one and the same municipality, where e.g. a legally guaranteed private school subsidy could be distributed in one district but denied in another.

2. Private education as benefitting partially disadvantaged groups:
Middle class families profiting from these private schools are diverse but share the characteristic that they are partially disadvantaged. They have sufficient economic resources to afford a private school but may (a) have a second child who is barred from attending a public school; (b) have an external household residence permit making public school attendance at least more difficult; (c) want to avoid the least prestigious option, vocational education; (d) not have the time to accompany their child to the notorious tutoring classes (opting for a private one-stop-shop solution; (e) want to spare their child the highly stressful preparations for the Chinese university entrance examination (choosing a private school as preparation for studies abroad); or (f) choose a private school as last resort when their child has collapsed under the pressure of the educational drill.

Despite parents' power (since schools depend on fees) there is little concerted parental action but rather a parental withdrawal: schools are expected to take care of the child, including achieving good grades, providing a healthy environment and acting as substitute parent for boarding children. Many parents have a heavy workload or travel frequently. Private schools are rather spaces for educators to try out new things than a shared communal space for parents, children and teachers.

3. Legitimization in terms of liberalization and justice
Interviewees often framed their support for private education in terms of 'free choice' and 'diversity'. Many saw the market as the most just of all systems since it puts a clear price on the product, rather than allowing for school-choice fees or sponsoring fees, use of personal connections etc. as is common practice with regard to good public schools. The 'free choice' discourse disguises however the many constraints that continue to persist - choosing a private school cannot break up the system of favoritism and inequalities. Another motivation from the side of educational entrepreneurs was to create educational spaces that were different from state-defined spaces, if only in small aspects. All actors however would still view public schools as the best option for the individual child, thus arguing differently from neoliberal thinking in the Europe or the US which considers state interference as essentially flawed.

NEW QUESTIONS GENERATED BY PROJECT
My fieldwork raised new questions regarding the ways of how new technologies, in particular ICT, were integrated into the classroom and utilized by teachers and students. This led to a joint research proposal on Chinese digital society, which received funding from VR in 2013 (for more info see http://www.ace.lu.se/research/research-clusters-and-research-projects/digital-china). A second set of questions concerns the blurriness of the term "migrants", who are overrepresented at Chinese private schools. Project findings (see above) suggest that partially disadvantaged groups such as migrants with economic resources may profit from educational reforms in ways that are different from both majority and severely marginalized groups. These findings call for a more systematic, bottom-up approach towards understanding the relationship between migrant families, the state, educational institutions and the market, not only in the Chinese context. Lastly, there is a dire need of more comparative studies regarding private education - a dimension that I have been addressing through my on-going collaboration in various international networks (see next section).

INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION OF PROJECT
Besides my collaboration with researchers on private education both in China and other countries, contact has been established with 3 research networks: PoPE (Processes of Privatisation in Education), bringing together scholars from Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Sweden and the UK; a research network based at Humboldt University, with contributors from Germany, Ireland, Sweden and the UK; and PERI (Privatisation in Education Research Initiative), a research network based in the UK but spanning the entire globe, with particular focus on low-income countries.

CONTRIBUTIONS OUTSIDE ACADEMIA
A keynote lecture which I was invited to give within the framework of the above-mentioned network PoPE in Helsinki in 2015 also assembled policy makers and more general public interested in educational privatization. My chapter on education in China for the German-language Country Report China (a 1027-pages work on Chinese society) drew much inspiration from this project and is (at a price of only 4.50 EUR) widely distributed in the German-speaking countries. The chapter was also presented to a Chinese-German student network meeting near Osnabrück in 2014 and to China-related human resource management people in Frankfurt in 2015. Due to contacts and expertise in the field, I also advised and accompanied a Swedish school class (Malmö Latinskola) on an exchange visit to Tangshan in 2015.

MOST IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS
My publications are listed separately. The most important project publications (based on previous conference presentations) are in progress and are as follows:
- 'Like a car or a piece of clothes': educational entrepreneurs and consumerism in postsocialist China. To be submitted to: Journal of Consumer Culture; special issue on post-socialist moral economies (publication date: 2017).
- Citizenship through educational consumption: private schools in Chinese gated communities. To be submitted to: Economy & Society (publication date: 2017).
- Navigating between state policies and market dynamics: school choice in urban China. To be submitted to: British Journal of Sociology of Education (publication date: 2017).
Interested readers will find updated information on my webpage (http://www.soc.lu.se/en/barbara-schulte).

PUBLICATION STRATEGY
Project findings were orally presented in the form of one open keynote lecture in the framework of a network meeting on Processes of Privatisation in Education (PoPE) at the University of Helsinki, 2015; an invited talk given at the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies in Buenos Aires, 2013; and 10 papers presented at international conferences. All written published results have been made available open-access by uploading pre-publication full-text versions on 3 different digital platforms (Lund University Publications, Academia.edu and ResearchGate). The download statistics suggest these platforms are reaching a readership.

Publications

The following publications are related to the project, in terms of contents, theory or methodology. Those publications marked with an asterisk are an immediate outcome of the project (including an acknowledgment of the funding received by RJ).

Bu, Wei, Elisa Oreglia, Jack Qiu, Barbara Schulte, Cara Wallis, Jing Wang, and Baohua Zhou. 2015. Studying the Sent-Down Internet: Roundtable on Research Methods. Chinese Journal of Communication 8, no. 1: 7-17.

Schulte, Barbara. 2012a. Joining Forces to Save the Nation: Corporate Educational Governance in Republican China. In The Chinese Corporatist State: Adaption, Survival and Resistance, ed. J. Y. J. Hsu and R. Hasmath, 10-28. London: Routledge.

*Schulte, Barbara. 2012b. The Making of the Educational Consumer: Education as Commercial Entity in Urban China. Paper read at 4th GISFOH (German-Israeli Frontiers of Humanities) Symposium, 'Imagination – Ideas, Aesthetics, and Social Practices', at Potsdam, September 10-12.

*Schulte, Barbara. 2012c. Privatisation à la Chinoise: Social Networks in the Interface of Education, Economy, and Politics in China. Paper read at DGfE (German Educational Society), 'Border Crossings', at Osnabrück, March 12-14.

Schulte, Barbara. 2012d. Webs of Borrowing and Lending: Social Networks in Vocational Education in Republican China. In World Yearbook of Education 2012: Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education, ed. G. Steiner-Khamsi and F. Waldow, 95-117. London: Routledge.

*Schulte, Barbara. 2012e. World Culture with Chinese Characteristics: When Global Models Go Native. Comparative Education 48, no. 4: 473-486. (Spanish translation forthcoming in 2016; re-print published with Routledge in 2015.)

*Schulte, Barbara. 2013. World Culture Recontextualized: Alternative Approaches to the Global/Local Nexus. Paper read at WCCES (World Congress of Comparative Education Societies), 'New Times, New Voices', at Buenos Aires, June 24-28.

Schulte, Barbara. 2014a. China's Education System in Transformation: Elite Education, Inequalities, Reform Experiments [in German]. In Country Report China, ed. D. Fischer and C. Müller-Hofstede, 499-541. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung.

*Schulte, Barbara. 2014b. Spaces of Consumption: Private Schools in Urban China. Paper read at CIES (Comparative & International Education Society), 'Revisioning Education for All', at Toronto, March 10-15.

*Schulte, Barbara. 2015a. Cash Cow, Civic Space or Co-optation: Private Schools in Urban China. Paper read at Chinese Educational Research Association (CERA), ‘Chinese Education Today: Practice and Research’, at London, June 25-26.

*Schulte, Barbara. 2015b. (Dis)Empowering Technologies: ICT for Education (ICT4E) in China, Past and Present. Chinese Journal of Communication 8, no. 1: 59-77.

*Schulte, Barbara. 2015c. School Choice in Urban China: Educational Desires and Life-Packages between the State and the Market. Paper read at 43rd Annual Congress of the Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA), ‘Marketisation and Differentiation in Education’, at Gothenburg, March 4-6.

Schulte, Barbara. 2016. Global Paths, Local Trajectories. China's Education and the Global. In Spotlight on China: Chinese Education in the Globalized World, ed. S. Guo and Y. Guo, forthcoming. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.