Chapter 6: New Public Management, Neoliberal Reforms, and Privatization

In this chapter, we now shift our focus to look at how globally diffusing reforms have affected teachers and their relationship to the state. One of the most pervasive global reforms that has affected teachers is what some have called the New Public Management (NPM) – other terms include “new professionalism” or more broadly, “neoliberal reforms.” In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the idea of NPM with an emphasis on accountability, performance metrics, budget cuts, voucher-systems, local oversight with centralized standards, managerialism, and efficiency emphasis (Gruening, 2001; Knafo, 2019; Schubert, 2009) was promoted in the USA and Britain by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Ball (2009) and others argued that NPM was closely aligned with neoliberal values, promoting privatization that undermined teacher autonomy and collaborative work environments in the name of improving the efficiency of government spending and the provision of public services.