“To ensure supply and variety”: The dominance of neoliberal discourse in policy documents concerning curriculum materials for compulsory education in Iceland

Abstract

In recent decades, the neoliberal agenda has become a dominant force in educational policy throughout the Western world. These effects are transnational and the past two decades in particular have seen many sectors in Iceland undergoing reforms in line with the neoliberal imaginary. Neoliberal reforms of legal provisions in education embrace privatization; with its emphasis on consumerism and commodification followed by deregulation, neo-managerialism, instrumental rationalism and dedemocratization. In this article, changes in the educational materials publishing sector in Iceland are explored by analyzing the neoliberal discourse in legal and policy documents from the years 1990–2011. The analysis comprises a) a historical trajectory of neoliberalization in the government regulation of curriculum material by comparing the relevant Act from 1990 and the updated Act from 2007, and b) a discourse analysis of how the role of the National Centre for Educational Materials (NCEM) changed through the course of this neoliberalization, analysing the discourse in NCEM’s official policy documents produced by the board and the managers of NCEM 2007–2011. Prior to the changes in the regulations in 2007, NCEM, which is a state-run and state-funded publishing house, had the role of producing relevant curriculum materials for the compulsory school sector in Iceland. In 2007 the educational publishing sector was marketized and each school now receives state funds to buy educational materials on the open market, but, as before, materials from the NCEM are offered for free. The 2007 Act included privatization in the form of deregulation for private organizations with respect to many aspects of the sector concerning professionalism, democracy and quality evaluation and contracting some services to for-profit and non-profit agencies. NCEM still had such requirements as they were retained in a special regulation solely for them. The deregulation for private organizations included removing: a) the requirement to provide educational materials for all aspects of the compulsory school curriculum, b) the requirement of professionalism of their managers, c) special requirements of board member candidates which ensured democratic management, and d) requirements concerning research and evaluation of their own material. There was transferral of the professional responsibility of ensuring high quality educational materials to the market without any concomitant quality insurance of the materials produced there, with the exception of NCEM. Additionally, some sort of deregulation was also made to the legal provisions concerning the role and the governing body of NCEM. The board members now number five instead of seven as there is now one candidate from the Icelandic Teachers’ Union instead of three. There is no candidate from academic institutions anymore as this person was replaced by a candidate of consumers, that is, parents. The board now has a weaker position as a governing body than before, as it has no decision power over recruitment and its role in policy making is now less clear than before. The discourse in recent policy documents produced by the board and the managers of NCEM in 2007–2011 encompassed a neoliberal dispersion of relationships, values, operations and concepts. Despite the retained regulations for NCEM, the policy statement of NCEM was dominated by concepts in a marketized and instrumental discourse with a heavy focus on the competitiveness in the publishing market. The discourse in the statement indicates that the main role of the board of NCEM is seen to be protecting the competitiveness of the company, while the political decisions and responsibilities concerning the other, non-competitive, factors were less visible. Overall, the discourse of these policy documents embraced the idea that the invisible hand of the market would produce higher quality and more variety in educational materials. The regime of ‘truth’ within neoliberalism, i.e. the idea that market competition will ‘ensure supply and variety (choices) in educational materials’, was presented in the leading provision of the 2007 Act as the sole role of the publishing agencies. However, NCEM is the only publishing house retaining responsibility for meeting all educational material needs in the official curriculum and for publishing materials for all subjects, while the private publishers may publish solely in competitive subjects as reading and math, i.e. subjects that are mostly like to provide a profit in market terms. It has been established in Icelandic research that, in the majority of Icelandic classrooms, the curriculum is the textbook, so it is vital to take good care of the production of curriculum materials.