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Teachers vs the Germ
A new book looks at how teachers are responding to the marketisation of schools. Its editor GAWAIN LITTLE talks to Ben Chacko about the Global Education Reform Movement

NEOLIBERALS see everything as business. Health, transport and education are not public services that exist to meet social needs, but opportunities for profit, increasingly on a global scale.

In the field of education, one name stands out above the rest: the Pearson corporation. It is a company “positioning itself to develop a near-monopoly of the digital in education,” in the words of Larry Kuehn, director of research at the British Columbian Teachers Federation.

It has contracts with the OECD to run the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) exams. It creates tests and marks them and uses the results to recommend education reforms to governments.

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