Teacher concerns regarding commercialisation

Public institutions around the world have experienced a series of restructures over recent decades. Since New Public Management emerged in the 1980s, centralised public sector systems were reorganised “to bring their management, reporting, and accounting approaches closer to (a particular perception of) business methods” (Dunleavy & Hood, 1994, p. 9). New structures and forms of governance have emerged that support a view of education, advocating the freedom to choose in an education quasi-market, unencumbered by the bureaucratic edifice of the state (Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002). A particularly striking example of this can be seen in those public education systems that have been restructured and reorganised to promote decentralised approaches to governance, public-private partnerships, the use of data for accountability purposes, within-system competition and a networked approach to education governance. Recently, concern has re-emerged regarding aspects of commodification within public schools as outsourcing has created opportunities for commercial organisations to undertake work typically performed by central bureaucracies (Burch, 2009).