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Working Group “Digital Education Governance”
Working Paper
The rising power of business interests through intermediary policy
networking: insights into the ‘digital agenda’ in German schooling
Sigrid Hartong and Annina Förschler
www.hsu-hh.de/sozgov
This contribution examines the growing, yet multi-faceted involvement of business
(particularly EdTech) interests in the digital education agenda, which has been gradually
growing in influence in Germany since 2009, and which experienced a further major boost
during the ongoing corona pandemic. We hereby shed light on intra-national policy flows and
their ambivalent relation to the expansion of a globally operating EdTech industry. As will be
shown, the involvement of businesses manifests as complex, often indirect entanglements
between state and private actors, frequently mediated by different types of intermediary
networks. Two examples of such different network formations are discussed in more detail:
the Alliance for Education (Bündnis für Bildung) and the HABA Education Alliance.
Keywords:
EdTech Industry; German Education Policy; Intermediary Actors; Policy
Network Analysis; Digital Education.
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1. Introduction
The past decade has witnessed a worldwide policy turn towards digital education, which
includes a growing proliferation of ‘personalized’ digital learning technologies, as well
as the expanding role of digital education governance tools, particularly new educational
monitoring technologies (e.g. Selwyn 2015; Sellar 2015; Hartong and Förschler 2019).
As a consequence, digital data generated through the application of ‘personalized’
classroom technologies increasingly feed such monitoring tools, fostering a direct link
between teaching/learning activities and (at best: real-time and adaptive) governmental
action (Hartong 2019b; Williamson 2017). With the corona pandemic and large-scale
school closures, the digitalization of education – during spring and summer 2020 often
promoted as ‘emergency EdTech’ (Williamson 2020) – has reached more attention than
ever before.
With this contribution, we refer to a growing scholarly concern regarding the role
that education technology (EdTech) providers, businesses and private actors have been
playing in the global-local dissemination of educational digitalization and
algorithmization (e.g. Roberts-Mahoney, Means, and Garrison 2016; Williamson 2015,
2016a, 2017; Verger, Lubienski, and Steiner-Khamsi 2016; Parreira do Amaral, Steiner-
Khamsi, and Thompson 2019). While this growing body of research has called strongly
for more critical perspectives on shifting policy networks and problematic pedagogical
implications of ongoing digital policies, it has also discouraged an a priori assumption
that processes of ‘direct’ commodification, or a takeover by (global) businesses are
occurring, instead encouraging close observation of the multidimensional nature of
private involvement (Courtney 2015; Heinrich and Kohlstock 2016). As Ratner,
Andersen, and Madsen (2018, 10) recently expressed, it seems important to ‘[…]
explor[e] […] the public-private schism in [digital] education through the idea of shifting
relations rather than a dichotomy between public good versus […] for profit’. For
example, as Williamson (2016a) has illustrated, there is a growing influence of what he
calls boundary brokers, that is to say actors who ‘[…] seek both to straddle sectoral
boundaries between public, private and civil society sectors, and to bridge borders
between political and the technological systems of thinking’ (Williamson 2016a, 47) by
enforcing intermediary policy networking. A key mechanism of influence hereby lies in
evoking awareness of a ‘lack of knowing’, resulting in a desire for data and speedy ‘in-
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formation’ (Thompson and Sellar 2018, 5; see also Beer 2017). In other words, the power
of such actors, whom Hartong (2016a, 524) has also described as data mediators (for
instance, actors who apply practices of data visualization or data services around the
production and consumption of assessments, software or databases), largely results from
the construction and use of information ontologies to model a world for the operation of
computer code. As an example, in a different contribution Williamson (2015) analyzes
so-called public and social innovation labs (psilabs) that bring ‘[…] particular scientific
forms of methodological and technical expertise into the policy process, while ostensibly
avoiding the politics, values, and ideology of conventional policy-making’ (Kieboom
2014, as quoted in Williamson 2015, 252). Instead, data mediators often frame their
activities within a promise to increase both learning/teaching efficiency and educational
equality (Roberts-Mahoney, Means, and Garrison 2016, 2), thus entangling privatization
with classic conceptions of good education (Macgilchrist 2017), including creativity,
social skills or humanism. A similar frame of legitimation points to the state’s failure to
provide digital education as needed for 21st century societies (or, as in the case of the
pandemic, as needed during periods of global crisis).
Unsurprisingly, such shifting processes of policy framing and influence are far
from easy-to-follow and require us to trace the heterogeneous relations connecting public
(e.g. schools, departments, ministries, national and sub-national governments), and
private actors (e.g. business-es, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups and
philanthropies), that together form new governmental constellations that are increasingly
constituted by (digital) data flows (Hartong 2016a; see also Landri 2018).
This contribution represents an earnest attempt to trace at least some parts of such
complex policy network transformations (interrogating who? and how?) that have
mediated a growing influence of private/business (particularly EdTech) interests within
the digital education agenda in Germany.
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Germany provides an interesting case because
digital education has only recently become a prioritized policy agenda. Simultaneously,
however, within a few years it has turned into the hot topic of reform, including
tremendous discursive transformations and massive investments in infrastructural hard-
and software. As we seek to show, an important reason for this dramatic shift lies in
intranational policy flows, particularly the evolution of new intermediary networks (that
themselves have become key actors within the agenda), and their ambivalent relation to
the gradual expansion of a globally operating EdTech industry. We will provide two
examples of such actors that illustrate the multi-faceted ways in which private interests
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are shaping the digital education agenda: the Alliance for Education (Bündnis für
Bildung, BfB) and the HABA Education Alliance.
Methodologically, the analysis draws on a network ethnography approach as
increasingly discussed and fruitfully applied in critical policy network analysis (Ball
2012, 2016), including research on global education policy flows (e.g. Mundy, Green,
Lingard, and Verger 2016 ) and, more specifically, in Global Education Industry (GEI)
studies (Verger, Lubienski, and Steiner-Khamsi 2016; Parreira do Amaral and Thompson
2019). We join such research in placing emphasis on tracing the relationality and mobility
of policy-making, which, however, ‘[…] makes it necessary to examine both multiple
relationships inherent in such mobilities of policies, people and places, and the various
discursive and material flows these make possible’ (Gulson et al. 2017, 13).
Consequently, the presented findings build from a combination of intensive online
research, document analysis (such as policy and position papers from public, private,
scientific and civil actors), interviews with policy actors as well as observations from
attending key events (for example the Didacta fair).
In the following sections, we illuminate key results from our analysis by first
constructing a brief overview of the emergence and transformation of the digital
education agenda in Germany between 2009 and 2019. We then provide a deeper
examination of two selected networks that have been acting as boundary brokers within
the agenda, ultimately evoking (in very distinct ways) a rising influence of business
interests in public education. The paper closes by summarizing the main findings, while
also discussing some important pedagogical implications as well as some glances at
(potential) consequences of covid-19-related transformations in the German context.
2. The emergence of the digital agenda in German education policy
Generally speaking, and in contrast to many other countries, Germany appears as a
relative latecomer in terms of datafication and digitalization, particularly true in the case
of the education sector. It was not until recently that digital education emerged on the
national agenda in German education policy, yet only shortly before becoming the hot
topic of reform. This does not mean, however, that the digital agenda emerged in a
vacuum. Instead, it can be regarded as a second wave of large-scale reform, driven by a
first ‘turn’ towards datafication between 2000 and 2010. Triggered by the shocking
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results of the initial round of PISA
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in 2001, this first turn included various reforms (led
by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the
Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany, KMK) to expand, standardize and centralize
both administrative and performance data collected by and from the German state
(Länder) education agencies,
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seeking not only to boost student performance, but also to
reduce the heterogeneity of (uncoordinated) data collection (Lange, Grönert, and Breiter
2014).
On the one hand, this significant expansion of data infrastructures came along
with a growing demand for new technologies, software and expertise to collect, manage,
process. analyze, and store that data (see also Williamson 2016b, 49). Consequently, new
relations between educational authorities and IT companies, software developers and
system vendors emerged at that time (Hartong 2019b, 158). On the other hand, however,
even though vendors tried to implement supra-state/national markets for their products,
these attempts commonly failed due to the still significant state-level specifications,
particularly visible in the case of school information systems (see Hartong et al. 2019).
Additionally, and particularly in the field of monitoring infrastructures, it was mainly
research and public institutions that became responsible for (and potentially then
contracted out elements of) the development of testing, reporting and data management
tools, partly because the (global) EdTech industry was viewed with skepticism in many
places. In sum, it was (and still is) significantly harder for the EdTech industry to build
up or (directly) enter the datafication market in Germany than in many other countries
around the world (Interview DF 02/2018).
Finally, while the datafication reforms between 2000 and 2010 did include a
growing role of digital tools and EdTech products, this was mainly directed at the
governance of schools as well as education research. Much less attention was paid at that
time to the EdTech industry’s most important product range; the digitalization of
classrooms, teaching and learning. Although the latter was partly discussed by a few
public authorities in 2010 and 2011,
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it is little surprising that it was the private, and
particularly the for-profit sector, which then actively guided the discourse to increase
political awareness of classroom digitalization. Due to lack of space, we concentrate the
following examination of these activities on key events and actors (for a more detailed
description see Förschler 2018):
In 2009, Bitkom initiated the project Experiencing IT (erlebe IT,
https://www.erlebe-it.de/), which was co-funded by German Telekom, German Post and
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arvato Bertelsmann. Bitkom is an association of “[…] more than 2,700 companies in the
digital economy, among them […] virtually all global players”
(www.bitkom.org/EN/About-us/index-EN.html, n.p.). In the education sector, Bitkom
started to heavily engage not only in agenda setting and policy consulting (e.g. through
conducting and publishing surveys on digital learning), but also in the development of
pedagogical concepts for digital education, IT competitions for schools (seeking to
transform Germany’s schools into ‘smart schools’) and IT training for the teaching body.
Three years later, in 2012, a new policy network emerged: The Alliance for
Education (Bündnis für Bildung, BfB), which brought together civil, public and private
(both non- and for-profit) actors seeking to promote the digitalization of schooling,
including an expansion of public-private partnerships (PPP) (the BfB will be discussed in
more detail in section 3).
From 2013 onwards, the network Initiative D21, which describes itself as
‘Germany’s biggest non-profit digital society network covering economics, politics,
science and civil society’ (https://initiatived21.de/uber-uns/, n.p., own translation),
started to strongly support expanding digitalization (including in the field of education)
by launching a new study, the D21-Digital-Index.
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This annual publication uses sample
surveys to measure the ‘degree of digitalization in German society’
(https://initiatived21.de/publikationen/d21-digital-index-2019-2020/, n.p., own
translation). The surveys are co-funded, inter alia, by the Federal Ministry for Economy
and Energy (BMWi), German Telekom and Fujitsu, Google, Allianz (a global insurance
and stock company), Microsoft, the Federal Ministry for Families, Senior Citizens,
Women and Youths (BMFSFJ) and the Bertelsmann Foundation (check for each volume
at: https://initiatived21.de/studien/).
One year later, in 2014, the International Computer and Information Literacy
Study (ICILS) compared the computer and IT skills of students from around the world,
once more returning disappointing results for Germany (www.iea.nl/icils). As with PISA,
German politicians now greatly feared falling behind their international competitors – an
argument which was willingly embraced by actors such as the BfB and the EdTech
industry. Making constant reference to the embarrassment of ICILS, a tremendous
number of studies, policy papers and guidelines were published over the following
months (e.g. by philanthropies such as the Bertelsmann Foundation, the German Telekom
Foundation and by IT associations such as Bitkom), promoting the implementation of
digital devices in schools as the only means for catching up with global competitors,
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increasing opportunities for teaching and (personalized) learning, and preparing Germany
for the ‘digital knowledge society’.
The global EdTech provider Microsoft joined the chorus, exploiting the
opportunity to gain better access to the German education market. In 2015, it founded the
network Digital Education Pact (Digitaler Bildungspakt), of which the BfB as well as the
Initiative D21 became members (http://digitaler-bildungspakt.de/ueber-uns/). Using the
Digital Education Pact to increase lobbying activities over the following years, Microsoft
at first successfully empowered the reform alliance (Hartong 2019a, 169), using the
leitmotif of a ‘digital economic miracle’ (http://digitaler-bildungspakt.de/positionen-
forderungen/, n.p., own translation). However, confronted with skepticism, the Microsoft
network then in fact backed down after this initial momentum (described by some
interviewees at the Didacta fair 2018 as a ‘nosedive’ or ‘non-starter’). Thus, while the
Digital Education Pact appears to be on hold since 2018, Microsoft has shifted its
attention towards membership activities in other, more successful networks (e.g. through
its membership of the BfB or Bitkom).
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Apart from (global) EdTech players like Microsoft, there were also business-
attached philanthropies (e.g. the German Telekom Foundation, the Bosch, Siemens and
Bertelsmann Foundations) that joined the dynamic discourse, many of them indirectly
representing their financial backers’ corporate interests. While publishing a huge amount
of studies and position papers promoting educational digitization, the most active and
powerful German philanthropies founded the Forum for Education Digitalization (Forum
Bildung Digitalisierung, fbd, https://www.forumbd.de/) in 2016. Like the other networks,
the Forum claims to bring together relevant actors and expertise from ‘education practice,
politics, science and civil society’ (https://www.forumbd.de/, n.p., own translation) in
order to ‘reach a better understanding of the possibilities and appropriate strategies for
contemporary education’ (https://www.forumbd.de/verein/, np., own translation), while
not only hosting conferences (e.g. #KonfBD18), but also advising schools on their digital
transformation (such as the fbd’s school development workshop project).
As these examples demonstrate, there was a remarkable explosion of new
intermediary policy networks between 2012 and 2016 that brought together actors from
various sectors and levels of policy, all of them either directly (e.g. Bitkom, Digital
Education Pact) or more indirectly (e.g. BfB, fbd) interwoven with EdTech interests.
Together, these networks gradually (re-) constructed the discursive framing of public
education – at that time, however, without actually transforming the
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institutional/organizational arrangements. This changed in 2016 when the Federal
Department of Education (BMBF) as well as the KMK responded to rising pressure by
politically cementing a new digital agenda. Both published strategic papers, Education in
the Digital World (KMK 2016) and the Education Offensive for the Digital Knowledge
Society (BMBF 2016), almost simultaneously, which was complemented by a joint
funding initiative to invest in digital school infrastructure, the so-called DigitalPact
(DigitalPakt Schule, see BMBF and KMK 2017). Particularly the BMBF paper not only
promised massive EdTech investments in education, but also explicitly called for
partnerships with business actors to quickly implement reforms (BMBF 2016, 4, 9, 20,
29; yet see also KMK 2016, 42). Strikingly, the BMBF already named one actor assigned
to a key project within the new federal strategy: the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI), a
business-research center founded by SAP-head Hasso Plattner, which was charged with
developing a nation-wide school cloud (https://schul-cloud.org). Furthermore, the BMBF
highlighted its regular dialogue about innovative solutions for digital transformation with
‘central stakeholders’ (BMBF 2016, 29), namely the already mentioned foundation
alliance fbd as well as actors such as the HPI, Bitkom, Microsoft, SAP, German Telekom
(see e.g. BMWi 2016). Pushed by the BMBF and KMK initiatives, 2017 and 2018 marked
years of extensive EdTech expansion (such as the case of HABA, see next section),
including the implementation of numerous digital education platforms that increasingly
use Single-Sign-On ID-management tools (e.g. itslearning or Webweaver). Such products
not only envision the digital classroom, but also facilitate the linking of data generated
via learning tools with other monitoring data such as school information systems, test
data and school statistics (Hartong 2018). During the covid-19 related school closures in
2020, it was especially such vendors of learning management systems (LMS) who
claimed to be ‘saving education’ (bildungsklick 2020) throughout the crisis, this gaining
even further outreach.
In sum, the emergence of the digital turn in German education policy clearly
demonstrates how intermediary policy networks, which in multi-faceted ways reflect
private interests, have strategically placed the digital agenda in the political arena between
2009 and 2016. After the KMK and BMBF resolutions in 2016, it is the same group of
networks that currently exerts significant influence on directing public investments into
new digital technologies.
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3. Examples of intermediary networks channeling EdTech interests
into public education
In this section, we illuminate the complex, often indirect entanglements between state and
private actors within two key networks that either promoted the digital agenda or later
joined the trend: The Alliance for Education (BfB) and the HABA Education Alliance.
3.1. The Alliance for Education (Bündnis für Bildung, BfB)
Founded in 2012, the BfB brings together ‘IT companies, publishers, start-ups,
educational institutions as well as representatives of public authorities’
(https://www.bfb.org/, n.p., own translation), publicly emphasizing a wide heterogeneity
of interests covered by the network. However, while 98 members of diverse kinds were
registered in mid 2020, it is important to mention that private actors, particularly
EdTech/IT companies, represent the largest BfB member group (including Microsoft,
HP, Intel, DellEMC, itslearning, Texas Instruments, Lenovo, Huawai, Fujitsu etc.). This
overbalance is directly reflected in the membership fee structure, which not only relates
to the size and type of member organization (resulting in much higher fees for Microsoft
than for example for a small start-up or a municipal school administration), but also the
level of engagement with the different BfB working groups. Additionally, as noted above,
there is significant overlap between the memberships of different digital agenda networks
(e.g. Microsoft participating in both the BfB and the Initiative D21, while the BfB is also
a member of Microsoft’s Digital Education Pact), resulting in the reciprocal
multiplication of the (discursive) reach and operating scale of each network.
Nonetheless, the BfB’s mission statement explicitly highlights its role as a neutral
mediator between the (global) education industry and public education authorities.
Interestingly, this differs from the BfB’s engagement approach in its initial phase
(between 2012 and 2016), which involved more explicit EdTech lobbying. In addition,
the BfB acted as a consultant during the drafting of BMBF’s and KMK’s digital agenda
documents in 2016, particularly when selected as a participant in the 2016 stakeholder
conference ‘Digital transformation in education: prospects for Germany’, together with
(inter alia) Bitkom, Initiative D21, German Telekom, bettermarks and KLETT GmbH
(BMBF 2016). However, in 2017, the BfB laboriously relaunched its image (including a
new website, a new code of conduct etc.), now presenting itself as a civil, non-profit and
neutral network (Interview DF 02/2018, interview BfB 06/2018). Despite this
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reincarnation, the BfB’s initiatives are still clearly directed at creating better conditions
for EdTech marketization, visible in various initiatives intended to produce what Stephen
Ball (2017, 35) has described as ‘moments of meetingness’ – congresses, (online) talk
series, expert discussions etc. – where ‘[success] […] stories are told, visions are shared,
arguments are reiterated, new relations and commitments are made [and] […]
partnerships are forged’ (ebd.). In addition, BfB heavily engages in the development and
distribution of data standards and interoperability frameworks as well as tools (e.g.
portfolios) for digital media development in schools (which is a requirement for schools
who wish to apply for funding from the BMBF/KMK DigitalPact). Thus, it frequently
criticizes the federal policy architecture, which is regarded as thwarting the digital
agenda, particularly in relation to smaller EdTech start-ups’ (in)ability to sell their
products across state borders (Interview BfB 06/2018). Simultaneously, by directly
supporting schools in their digital media development, the BfB is able to not only bypass
individual states, but also to bring together financially weak schools with prosperous
EdTech network members that are most willing to support these schools in their digital
development. Due to these direct links to schools, as well as to its unique technological
expertise and resources (including having the most innovative EdTech/IT companies
among its members), the BfB has successfully turned itself into a powerful expert: firstly
for EdTech companies that wish to enter the market; secondly for schools that need
support in implementing reform; and thirdly for politicians seeking advice when agenda-
setting.
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3.2. HABA and the HABA Education Alliance
In contrast to the BfB, HABA clearly represents a private, for-profit business agency and
is also a relative latecomer to the digital agenda. Indeed, in contrast to the BfB, which
seeks to improve market conditions for its members, the HABA business group is a global
education market player that aims to keep up with market developments in times of
growing digitalization.
HABA is a family-run business group, founded as early as 1938, which originally
specialized in toy manufacturing, although also covers a wide range of products,
including puzzles, books, fabrics, learning devices and children’s/school furniture (for an
overview see https://www.haba-firmenfamilie.de/de/unsere-marken). As it watched the
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German EdTech market gradually expanding, a few years ago, as we shall portray in the
following, HABA started to strategically invest in products, companies and networks to
gain market access, including strengthening its position as a service provider for
educational institutions and of digital learning products (https://www.haba-
firmenfamilie.de/de/web/guest/historie).
In the beginning of 2015, HABA became a shareholder of the successful
(preschool) children’s app company Fox & Sheep GmbH, founded in 2012
(https://www.foxandsheep.com/; https://www.haba-
firmenfamilie.de/de/web/guest/historie). Fox & Sheep’s CEO Verena Pausder is a well-
known EdTech pioneer, listed in the Top 50 Tech Women in Europe (Forbes 2020) and
thus a frequent guest, expert and keynote speaker at various events. In this capacity she
regularly criticizes public education in Germany for not preparing the next generation
(particularly the very young) for tomorrow’s challenges, while also frequently stressing
the disadvantages of federalism (Magnussen 2017 min. 2:05-2:13, min. 2:35-2:47;
hartaberfair 2020, min. 45:40-46:22, min. 51:50-52:31). In 2016, Pausder launched the
HABA Digital Workshop Ltd. (HABA Digitalwerkstatt, https://www.digitalwerkstatt.de),
which offers coding and IT training for students and teachers in ten German cities,
cooperating either directly with individual schools/classes or with state education
ministries (e.g. North Rhine-Westphalia). HABA took over the successful and rapidly
growing Ltd. completely in 2020 (HABA 2019). Pausder herself again gained further
attention over the last years, e.g. by founding the association Digital Education for All
(Digitale Bildung für alle e.V.), which collaborates with the German Minister for
Digitization and the BMBF, as well as by providing information and support on digital
learning tools during the corona virus related school closures 2020 on her own website
(https://homeschooling-corona.com/). By now she is referred to as ‘the expert for digital
learning in Germany’ (hartaberfair 2020, min. 36:52-58, own translation).
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Besides these valuable collaborations and network ties, in 2016 HABA also
became a shareholder in the rapidly growing business Society for Digital Education
(Gesellschaft für digitale Bildung, GfdB), which offers a full package service including
tablet classes, media development strategies, hardware, IT furniture, and virtual learning
equipment, collaborating with both companies (such as IBM, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple,
Adobe, bettermarks) and public authorities (such as educational departments)
(www.gfdb.de).
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HABA’s new EdTech activities finally culminated in the HABA Education
Alliance (https://www.haba-education-alliance.com/), which unites five different, yet
individually successful HABA brands to tackle even bigger market shares. Seeking to
‘shape learning environments together’ and ‘offer pioneering impulses, inspiring
concepts and well thought-out products for the educational environments of today and
tomorrow’ the alliance uses the collaboration’s synergies to ‘reduce complexity’
(https://hea2020.haba-education-alliance.com/wer/, n.p., own translation).
In sum, due to its corporate network structure, its access to educational institutions
as well as its close ties to key actors, such as Verena Pausder, and their exquisite network,
it is relatively easy for HABA to promote its new products on a large scale, while also
exercising policy influence. Furthermore, HABA can thus build on an established brand,
which is publicly perceived as trustworthy, family-friendly and high quality. This also
means that it can directly reach out to loyal customers, mainly private households, not
only to sell its EdTech products to parents, but to simultaneously encourage them to
engage in the digitalization of their children’s schools (see e.g. product flyer GfdB 2018).
4. Summary and outlook to the (pandemic-related) pedagogical
future
The aim of this contribution was to provide a critical policy network perspective on how
private/business (particularly EdTech) interests have become entangled with the ongoing
digital agenda in German education policy. Our findings have thus illustrated at least
some of the central (intermediary) policy networks that have successfully framed and
influenced the German turn towards digital education over the past decade by
implementing new horizontal and vertical relations, while also, as ‘boundary brokers’
(Williamson 2016a), opening up different gateways and intensities of direct (e.g. digital
literacy training in public schools, offered by businesses) and indirect (e.g. businesses
enforcing the implementation of national EdTech market structures) commodification.
Resulting from thus induced and aforementioned political initiatives in 2016, the so-
called DigitalPact, which came into force in 2019 after two years of political negotiations
(BMBF 2019), further advanced the activities and efforts of the EdTech community due
to its promised 5 billion euro scope. Despite our findings, however, the amount of (direct)
business influence still appears to be significantly lower in Germany than in other,
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particularly Anglophone countries (e.g. Williamson 2017; Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge,
and Jacobsen 2013; Sellar 2017), even so after corona hit the system in spring 2020.
While there is clear evidence of a manifestation of covid-19-related EdTech
empowerment also in Germany, it simultaneously evolved in a specific context, which in
many ways also restricted or buffered the transformations. One important explanation
clearly lies in the relative non-existence of ‘national’ market structures, with Germany
instead characterized by continuing market fragmentation due to federal education policy
structures, including a highly complicated school funding system (e.g. to fund EdTech).
Another reason lies in the comparatively high (yet decreasing) level of public skepticism
towards output-oriented accountability, data interoperability and the contracting out of
education governance. Consequently, as we have shown, global EdTech industries such
as Microsoft have had a significantly harder time entering the German market and
becoming a key provider of digital schooling than in many other countries. This does not
mean, however, that Microsoft has not heavily increased its influence in Germany, but
that this influence appears to be a lot more indirect, frequently mediated through the work
of intermediary policy networks (see section 2).
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In other words, our findings illustrate
how important a closer look at such intermediary policy networks and their
membership/funding structures (in which business interests then become prominent) can
be, even though it may be extremely difficult to draw a clear line between the public and
private sector, or between pedagogic and economic narratives. Indeed, the digital agenda
in German education policy also reveals what Hogan, Sellar, and Lingard (2016, 246)
have described as a ‘[…] context in which education companies feel pressured to present
themselves as “responsible” actors in new governance networks, while continuing to
build the value of their business’ (see also Parreira and Thompson 2019, 277-278). In the
course of the pandemic-related school-closures, such business as well as the formerly
described intermediary actors, embraced this unforeseeable chance to ‘shine’ as the
‘saviors’ of education and expand their market by providing the not yet (fully) established
data infrastructures and expertise for digital teaching and learning.
Simultaneously, the federal ministry (BMBF) also took the chance to strengthen
its position as a promoter of ‘national scale’ reforms and passed a number of large-scale
governmental initiatives and investment programs (partly in collaboration with the KMK,
see i.a. BMBF 2020a; BMBF 2020b; BMBF 2020c). Hereby, highly complex funding
application procedures to implement data infrastructures were enormously simplified
while the BMBF also heavily promoted and extended its open source LMS solution, the
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HPI Schul-Cloud (BMBF 2020b). Put differently, it remains to be seen how strong the
‘disruptive potential’ of ‘the summer of digital education’ (Bär 2020, n.p., own
translation) will ultimately change the German system beyond already visible policy
transformation, particularly regarding if/how strong privatization dynamics might be
counterbalanced by the deliberate implementation of public alternatives.
After all, the ongoing transformations evoked by the digital education agenda in
Germany, and by similar policy agendas around the world (see Williamson et al. 2019),
have far-reaching pedagogical implications. EdTech products produce particular
technologically-mediated inscriptions or articulations of users, students and teachers, as
well as of learning, teaching and pedagogy (Decuypere 2018). For instance, as
Williamson (2015, 266) concluded from his analysis of the learning-to-code agenda, ‘[…]
[a]s a pedagogy, learning to code seeks to produce skilled and literate citizen subjects
with the computational thinking to participate in new strategies of digital governance. As
a governing practice, computational thinking describes an emerging style of political
thought that assumes many public and social problems can be solved through digital
innovation’. Such often technically ‘hidden’ pedagogies appear extremely problematic in
an age when EdTech providers to a growing extent are gaining direct access to students,
teachers and parents (see, for example, itslearning as a global school platform provider
that is also increasingly used in German schools). This also implies bypassing the
gatekeeper role previously occupied by the teaching body (Macgilchrist 2017). In
contrast, the teaching body itself has become affected by technologies that ‘[…] presume
a commitment to calculative data as important for teaching’ (Ratner, Andersen, and
Madsen 2018, 32), thus constantly taking time away from teachers and, consequently,
from non-digital pedagogical activities. Instead, other such activities are increasingly
becoming replaced by the ‘standardized customization’ (Roberts-Mahoney, Means, and
Garrison 2016) of EdTech products, which is mistakenly understood and praised as a
personalization of teaching, learning, and monitoring. Even though the findings presented
in this contribution imply a significant influence of ‘contextuality’, including options for
national/local resistance against EdTech influence, in Germany as elsewhere, the digital
education agenda implies far-reaching consequences for both education policy and
practice that call for further and critical investigation.
15
Notes
1 Programme for International Student Assessment (https:www.oecd.org/pisa/).
2 For a more detailed description of this first wave of datafication see Hartong 2019a,
and Hartong et al. 2019.
3 Examples include the “E-learning in school” commission of the Standing
Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the
Federal Republic of Germany (KMK) as well as the Enquete Commission “The
internet and digital society”.
4 It is important to mention that the origins of the initiative go back as far as 1999. In
2013, however, the initiative turned towards activities in the education sector.
5 It was in the same year that the business HABA started to strategically invest in and
build up an EdTech network.
6 The latter is directly reflected in the new presence of two representatives of the
association in the current national Digital Summit platform 7: “Digital future:
learning. Research. Knowledge.”, in which the aforementioned fbd and Initiative
D21 meanwhile also are represented (see BMWi 2020).
7 Pausder for example is a member of the federal Innovation Council for
digitalization and participates in the national Digital Summit platform 7 (BMWi
2020).
8 In any case, the corona pandemic has further pushed Microsoft’s expansion in
Germany, e.g. with Baden-Württemberg switching from prohibiting Microsoft
products to actively encouraging schools to use Office 365 (Ministerium für Kultus,
Jugend und Sport Baden-Württemberg 2020).
Notes on contributors
Sigrid Hartong is professor in sociology with a focus on the transformation of governance in
education and society at the Helmut Schmidt University (HSU) Hamburg, Germany. Her
research interests include global-local educational reform dynamics, both from single-case and
international comparative perspectives, as well as the growing datafication and digitalization of
education policy and practice, particularly visible in the rise of (big) data infrastructures and
mobilities.
Annina Förschler is a research assistant and PhD student at the department of sociology at the
Helmut Schmidt University (HSU) Hamburg, Germany. Her recent publications and research
focus on educational governance, datafication and digitalization of education as well as
privatization, with a particular focus on the EdTech industry.
16
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