2020 Book HandbookOfEducationPolicyStudi
2020 Book HandbookOfEducationPolicyStudi
2020 Book HandbookOfEducationPolicyStudi
Handbook of
Education Policy
Studies
Values, Governance, Globalization,
and Methodology, Volume 1
Handbook of Education Policy Studies
Guorui Fan • Thomas S. Popkewitz
Editors
Handbook of Education
Policy Studies
Values, Governance, Globalization,
and Methodology, Volume 1
Editors
Guorui Fan Thomas S. Popkewitz
Faculty of Education Department of Curriculum and Instruction
East China Normal University University of Wisconsin-Madison
Shanghai, China Madison, Wisconsin, USA
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in
the Changing World
Since the emergence of the public education system, worldwide education reforms
are still in the ascendant and increasingly in remarkable progress. Reforms with a
spectrum of foci, including “progressive education movement,” “curriculum and
instruction reform,” “educational system reform,” “education choices,” “educa-
tional equity,” “inclusive education,” “lifelong education,” and “smart education,”
have been fostering the advancement of education in countries and regions all over
the world and providing a wide range of opportunities for people from different
countries, regions, and cultures to communicate with each other and learn from each
other, resulting in worldwide reflection and discussion on the common challenges
that education is faced with and the common value that education reforms share.
Modern education entails a continually complex set of relations with society. The
study of the relationship between education and society relies on our knowledge and
understanding of the relationships between the two. Over a century ago, in his
review of Plato (Πλάτeων, 428/427–348/347 BC)’s education philosophy, Dewey
(1916: 97) commented, “The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the
fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a
better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely.”
Similarly, Durkheim ([1977]2006: 166–167) believes “Educational transformation
are always the result and the symptom of the social transformation in terms of which
they are to be explained. In order for a people to feel at any particular moment in
time the need to change its educational system, it is necessary that new ideas and
needs have emerged for which the former system is no longer adequate.” It is in this
stand in view with the relationship between education and society that Dewey
(1900: 20) emphasized “Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new move-
ment in education, it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social view.”
A social system or an education system is a constantly evolving ecosystem,
where its components coexist (Fan 2000, 2011). Hence, when studying the reform
and development concerning education, we cannot conduct the research without
setting it with the broader context of social life, reform, and the problem of change.
These relations take on a distinct quality since the mid-twentieth century with the
post-war efforts of recovery, reconstruction, and the reimagining of societies and
v
vi Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in the Changing World
education. The relationship between education and society has begun to reveal a
quality of mutual interaction and mutual promotion. In addition, increasingly rich
and diversified education policy studies have enhanced the advancement of educa-
tion policies and education reforms in practice.
division, and restructuring in the international community when a new pattern of the
coexistence of “three worlds” began to emerge (Solarz 2012), and consequently
education was granted the mission of the liberation, independence, and develop-
ment of a nation. In the following half century, education reforms have been increas-
ingly reflecting the will of a nation and the power of administration which employ
education as an important mechanism for safeguarding national security and inter-
ests and achieving national development.
After the 1980s, with the revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe and
the disintegration of the Soviet Union (1991), the Cold War between the United
States and the Soviet Union generally ended, while other events including China’s
Reform and Opening up, the European integration, Russia’s economic development
plans, and Japan's rapid economic development have led the world moving towards
multipolarity. In this process, state-to-state competition has shifted from competi-
tion in the military sphere to competition in the economic, technological, and com-
prehensive national strength, and education has been entailed as a crucial component
of each country’s capacity to improve or even maintain its economic welfare
(Benjamin 1998).
Society keeps on developing in constant conflicts. Jacques Delors has described
a range of tension in the society caused by technological, economic, and social
changes, including the tension between the global and the local; the universal and
the particular; tradition and modernity; the spiritual and the material; long-term and
short-term considerations; the need for competition and the ideal of equality of
opportunity; and the expansion of knowledge and our capacity to assimilate it
(Delors 1996). Since the arrival of the twenty-first century, the three major social
development trends of political democratization, globalization, and information
communication technology have profoundly shaped education reforms and devel-
opment in different ways.
The word “democracy” was derived from the Greek word “demos” which means
people. Democracy is based on the principles of the decision-making by the majori-
ties and the respect for the rights of individuals and minorities at the same time,
which is a manifestation of freedom in institutionalization. In a democratic system,
the management of state and public affairs is the exercise of rights and the fulfill-
ment of duties by all the citizens, either directly on their own or by their freely
elected representatives. Therefore, democracy entails the respect for citizenship,
which reflects the shift from centralization to decentralization in government’s man-
agement style. In this process, education has always been taken as an important
vehicle for achieving political democracy. For example, besides its elaboration on
the relationship between education and democratic society, Dewey’s classic book
Democracy and Education also guided us to construct a more democratic society
through educational experiments (Dewey 1916). In the arena of education, the
democratization of education was introduced by the student movement in the late
1950s, which placed the equal access to education as the principal task of democra-
tizing education. Since then, with the efforts of international organizations such as
UNESCO (Faure et al. 1972: 70–80), the connotation of the concept of democratiz-
ing education is under constant renewal and redefinition, from the equality of
viii Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in the Changing World
o pportunities for enrollment to schools to the equality of opportunities for the access
to educational resources and the equality of educational outcomes, and further to the
democratization of the teacher–student relationships, as well as the democratization
and equity of educational activities, educational methods, and educational content,
which all contribute to increasing opportunities for students to have a range of
options to choose freely for their individual needs.
Shaped by the New Public Management and other theoretical trends, there is an
imperative call in the field of education management at national level for the replace-
ment of education management building on government authority and centralized
power with decentralized and multiple participation education governance. In
accordance with his advocacy of free market principles, Milton Friedman’s “free to
choose” theory became a weighty theoretical framework for liberal education
reforms (Friedman et al. 1979). In the attempt to increase education competition,
the implementation of a series of educational policies and reforms including school
vouchers, charter schools, and school-based management has entitled school choice
rights to parents, which simultaneously has broken the monopoly of education by
the government and the education administration to a large extent, restructured the
school system and school organization, and consequently stimulated the vitality of
the school and teachers. Although more studies should be conducted to find the
evidence for their impacts in improving the quality of education, these reforms are
stimulating profound reflection on how the disadvantages of the traditional public
education system can be overcome while still conforming to the trend of social and
cultural autonomy, locality, and pluralism, and how the motivations, initiatives, and
creativity of schools, teachers, parents, community members, local school districts,
and governments at all levels can be stimulated to engage in the course of education
with a shared vision for the construction of better public education.
Although when Theodore Levitt first proposed the concept of “globalization,”
the term was largely limited to the field of markets (Levitt 1983), and people may
have different understandings of its concept, yet it has become a focal concept that
represents the interdependence and the increasing global connections between
countries in the field of politics, economy, and trade and reflects the development of
human life on a global scale and the rise of the global consciousness. Hence, global-
ization has become a social trend of thoughts and social phenomenon that shapes
the global economy, politics, and culture.
There is no doubt that the increase of the interconnectedness between countries
brings economic prosperity and the overall improvement of people’s living stan-
dards and quality of life. However, the flow of capital and commodities generated
by globalization and an integrated global market as its fruit have presented profound
challenge to human’s beliefs and competencies (Brown et al. 1996). At the same
time, the exchanges and collaboration in culture, science, and technology and the
global flow of talents shaped by globalization have enhanced the prosperity of edu-
cation and empowered the corresponding changes in people’s beliefs and competen-
cies. The development of globalization compels countries to strengthen international
education exchanges and collaboration, encourage international exchanges of
teachers and students, expand international trade in education services, scale up the
Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in the Changing World ix
education for international students, and jointly support the children in undeveloped
areas as endeavors for global education governance. The concept of education for
sustainable development and the actions for change should be integrated into the
education strategies and action plans at all levels of a nation. Hence, we should
enhance the education for international understanding and collaboration to cultivate
active and knowledgeable citizens for the establishment of a humane and equal
international society and the deepening of international understanding and the
understanding of the need for dignity as a common need for all humankind as well.
Although globalization is confronted with doubts and criticism rising from the pro-
tection of local industries and the preservation of local culture, and even the chal-
lenges from the trend of “anti-globalization,” from the perspective of global
education reform, a humanist vision of education based on “global common good”
will still profoundly shape the education change and progress in many countries
(UNESCO 2015). Just as Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO, stated,
“The world is changing—education must also change. Societies everywhere are
undergoing deep transformation, and this calls for new forms of education to foster
the competencies that societies and economies need, today and tomorrow. This
means moving beyond literacy and numeracy, to focus on learning environments
and on new approaches to learning for greater justice, social equity and global soli-
darity. Education must be about learning to live on a planet under pressure. It must
be about cultural literacy, on the basis of respect and equal dignity, helping to weave
together the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable devel-
opment” (UNESCO 2015: 3). We believe that the statesmen and education policy
makers in different countries will proceed from their national contexts and set the
education goals of their own country for the balanced development of globalization
and localization, adjust their education policies, and accelerate the advancement of
education (Ayyar 1996; McGinn 1996; Bakhtiari 2011; Fan 2018).
Technology is the driving force for the progress of human society. In the evolv-
ing process of human society, the emerging of a new technology, whether it is a
language, a script, the steam engine, electronic technology, computer technology, or
mobile communication technology, has inexorably forced revolutionary changes in
human life, work, and learning. Undoubtedly, technological innovation and prog-
ress will inevitably bring about changes in the educational process and educational
ecology as well. In the past, the emergence of a language or a type of script, the
invention of the paper, and the development of printing have enabled the instruc-
tional process to be achieved through the media of languages and scripts. What is
more, remarkable changes in educational goals, mechanisms, and forms of opera-
tions were also largely shaped by the invention of the new technologies. At present,
a wide range of information and communication technologies, including the inter-
net, big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and 5G communication, is leading
the human society into a new era. Technological innovation and progress are trans-
forming the working mode largely based on the master of knowledge and the profi-
ciency of skills that came into being in the Industrial Revolution. Consequently,
artificial intelligence has replaced human beings in a range of fields to perform
x Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in the Changing World
numerous procedural and repetitive tasks, and the future work for human beings
will be more complex tasks involving mentoring and managing machines.
The impact of intelligent technology on education is first manifested in the
change of the requirements for human literacies. Mastering “3R” (Reading, Writing,
Arithmetic) has become essential but inadequate literacies (European Commission
2018). Ever since the 1990s, the discussions on what kind of talents should the
twenty-first century education cultivate has been increasing in terms of its size and
scope. The report of Jacques Delors (1996) proposed the four pillars of the twenty-
first century education—learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together,
and learning to be. In the last two decades, countries around the world have invari-
ably taken the initiatives to explore the concepts of the twenty-first century skills or
transversal competencies that can empower their citizens for the future work and
life (Care 2017). With an aim of developing lifelong learners with twenty-first cen-
tury skills, a wide range of countries and international organizations including the
United States, the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, Finland, Singapore, and China have proposed their own frame-
works for the twenty-first century literacies, skills, or competencies, with a common
emphasis on cross-cultural competence, creativity, and critical competence (OECD
2001; NEA 2002; Finnish National Agency for Education 2004; European
Commission 2006; Trilling et al. 2009; Ministry of Education, Singapore 2014;
Lin 2016).
The enormous transformative power and imagination embraced in the emerging
technologies like electronic whiteboards, virtual reality, e-schoolbags, and cloud
technologies further advance education reforms, especially in terms of educational
forms. Extensive Internet reading and Internet education platforms represented by
MOOCs have given birth to new education forms. A variety of online education
forms continues to emerge, and education integrated with information communica-
tion technology and artificial intelligence presents new features entailing deep
learning, interdisciplinary integration, human–machine collaboration, adaptive
learning, intelligent monitoring, and evaluation of teaching and learning process.
Compared with the traditional formal school education, informal learning supported
by technology is considered to have more capacity to empower young people to
learn (not in the way that they have to be in school to learn) (Ito et al. 2009). The
increasing openness of education makes it possible for the shift of education from
the central role of teaching to truly focusing on the learning of the learners in the
future. The future education is extending from the period of children and youth to a
person's whole life, is expanding from institutionalized school education to the
whole society, and from offline school education to more extensive online education
where teachers will become an analyst of learning, a guide for learners’ beliefs and
values, a personal mentor, a companion of social learning, and a caretaker of psy-
chological and emotional development (Fan 2018).
Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in the Changing World xi
Education policy and education reform are not only introduced to resolve the ten-
sions and conflicts within the education system, but also to respond to the social
changes in a particular period and coordinate the relationship between education
and society. “Policy development and enactment should be seen both as an attempt
to solve problems and an attempt to ensure that particular values that delineate
action are accepted by those who enact policies” (Ward et al. 2016). Education pol-
icy studies strive to constantly seek for the harmonious and balanced relationship in
the changing world between the components within the education system and
between education and society through education policies and education reforms. In
this way, education reforms are becoming more frequent while the steering role of
education policy to education reform is becoming increasingly significant.
Education policy is not only a static existence, but also an organized and dynamic
development process that emerges, exists, and adjusts in the course of educational
activities—a static and dynamic unity. Education policy is a code of conduct, a nor-
mative existence, and a tool employed by a policy entity to govern the educational
cause. Educational policy carries the feature of timeliness as it is formulated to meet
the needs of development in a particular period in response to the problems existing
and emerging in the education field in this particular period (Fan 2016). Undoubtedly,
when we consider education reform in a constantly changing and developing social
context, it does not demand sharp perception to notice that the education problems
faced by different countries and regions in different times have something in com-
mon while unique in their own ways, and therefore, education policies in the attempt
to solve these issues naturally vary, which collectively reflects the common
Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in the Changing World xiii
Numbers and statistics perform in policy studies as a way of telling the truth that
seems independent of historical circumstances and social, historical conditions, in
what has been called as a mechanical objectivity. One important element of research,
as mentioned above, is the importance of statistics, and more recently the emphasis
on metrics and algorithms in identifying the rules through which reforms are enacted
and change is facilitated, constrained, or restrained. It is almost impossible to think
about schooling without numbers: children’s ages and school grades, the measuring
of children’s growth and development, achievement testing, league tables of schools,
and identifying equity through statistical procedures about population representa-
tion and success rates.
The increasing use of statistical measure is important for multiple reasons in
terms of the relationship between science and policy. Numbers have become part of
ambitions to increase transparency and accountability of what is, and what is not, of
value and importance. Theodore Porter’s (1995) important book on the history of
statistics in social arenas, for example, explores how numbers are parts of systems
of communication whose technologies appear to summarize complex events and
transactions. The numbers appear to be neutral and precise, providing powerful rep-
resentations in concise and visible forms through tables, diagrams, or percentages.
The mechanical objectivity of numbers appears to follow a priori rules that project
fairness and impartiality in which the numbers are seen as excluding judgment and
mitigating subjectivity.
At the same time, however, educational policy adjustments driven by data, such
as the PISA project, have also induced negative outcomes of digital governance
(Lingard 2011). Some scholars have pointed out that the way of describing the
“truth” of the national school education system and children’s education based on
numbers is employed to distinguish and divide countries globally (Popkewitz 2011:
32–36). This way of constructing and representing the world with digital informa-
tion in a seemingly objective and neutral way actually obscures the PISA’s theoreti-
cal assumptions (Poovey 1998: 237), and as a result, a wide range of countries
reform their education systems in an attempt to improve their rankings in the pursuit
of economic utilitarian values with economic growth as the core goal while neglect-
ing the intrinsic value of education to nurturing the growth of human beings. The
emergence of the above issues calls for attention in the future education policy
research.
what is thoughts, talking about and acted on. But the focus of research on the
knowledge of schooling is not merely about ideas and “discourses” but directs
attention to the historical conditions in which the classifying and ordering of the
“seeing” is entangled with institutions and technologies to give the materiality of
contemporary education. This rethinking of the problematic of research and policy
studies is expressed by Latour (2004) in a different context of social and science
studies. Latour argues that research is to reverse attention from what is assumed as
the matter of concern to research that asks about the concerns of what matters.
Brought into view is a particular notion of science that engages with the tradition of
science that Marx engaged in with his analysis of capitalism, Weber with that of
bureaucracy, and Durkheim’s interest in collective belonging that simultaneously
concerned issues of alienation. Within its contemporary field of the humanities and
social sciences, the research in contemporary policy research draws, in part, on sci-
ence studies and post-foundational and Foucauldian studies.
Entering the twentieth century, the changes in the public education power have
presented huge challenges to education policies. The pursuit of private benefits of
educational activities under the market mechanism may cause damage to the public
welfare of education. Besides, achieving education equity has been compounded by
the intervention from the market and society to education.
Policy statements, research reports, and the classification of tables and graphs, as
a result of the multicultural development under particular historical conditions, are
viewed as documents of a culture. The objects of school learning and children’s
development are given a historical substance; viewed as cultural artifacts to analyze
the state of things in their multiplicities to understand the groups of rules that define
what can be said, preserved, reactivated, and institutionalized (Foucault 1991).
Central in this style of reasoning is the historical and the philosophical that cir-
culates in contemporary research practices. It entails locating the multiplicities of
differentiated spatiotemporal relations that form in school reforms, “seeking to rec-
oncile genesis and structures to a number of issues embodied in the sciences that
pretend to secure the future” (see, Deleuze [1968] 1994: 20). The historicizing in
research is to direct attention to thinking about the grids, or multiple and different
historical lines that come together at a particular time and space to produce the
objects of change. In thinking this way, the problem of research becomes consider-
ing the intersections of various technologies of measurement, theories, and cultural,
institutional, and social practices that travel in uneven historical lines but connect at
a particular time and space (Popkewitz 2020). Therefore, under the educational val-
ues of equity, efficiency, and freedom, educational policies should follow the funda-
mental principles of the new public administration; take particular historical and
cultural backgrounds into account, entail equity as a fundamental policy value goal,
balance efficiency and quality, strengthen the respect for and the recognition of
ethnical culture, and constantly quest for meaningful and valuable educational pol-
icy research.
xvi Introduction: Education Policy and Reform in the Changing World
Based on the analysis of the nature of education policy and education reform,
Values, Governance, Globalization, and Methodology, the first volume reflects on
the values of education reform and the concept of education quality, focusing on the
changes in the macro-education policies at the national level. From the historical
and comparative perspectives, it examines the dialectical relationship between edu-
cation policy and education reform in a variety of countries, analyzes the theoretical
and practical issues in the process of moving from regulation to multiple gover-
nance in contemporary education administration, and explores the impact of global-
ization on national education reform and the interdependence between individual
countries as well. In addition, this volume also collects the studies on the research
methodology of education policy from multiple perspectives. This volume compre-
hensively reveals the complex relationship between contemporary education reform
and social change and explores the new complexity of the relationship between
contemporary social, political, economic systems, and education policy research
and practice, which provides the readers with a holistic picture of the macro trend
of the contemporary education reform.
The second volume, School/University, Curriculum, and Assessment, focuses on
the changes in education policies at the micro level, that is, the policies and changes
in schools and classrooms. The studies on changes in schools present the differences
in the policies and challenges of K-12 schools and universities of different countries
and regions in response to the contradictions and conflicts between tradition and
modernization, as well as the changes of the roles of different stakeholders, espe-
cially those of the teachers. In terms of curriculum and instruction, a great number
of countries have introduced desirable experiments and practices in educational
changes around two themes: “what to teach” and “how to teach.” While enhancing
the extensive application and improvement of educational assessment and testing
technologies, international education assessments represented by PISA also have
exerted far-reaching impacts on education policies and education reforms in differ-
ent countries. This volume comprehensively reveals the complicated interactions
among school organizations, teachers, curriculum, teaching and learning, evalua-
tion, and other elements within the education system, which presents the latest eco-
logical scenario of the reforms in contemporary schools, curriculum, and instruction.
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Acknowledgements
From its design to print over the past 5 years, the two-volume Education Policy
Research Handbook has enormously benefited from the generous contribution of a
wide range of people.
The successful publication of this Handbook would have been impossible with-
out the continuous support from my highly respected predecessor and partner,
Professor Thomas S. Popkewitz, former director of the Department of Curriculum
and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I met Tom 7 years ago. In
the fall of 2012, Dr. Shanyun He from Zhejiang University accompanied Tom to
East China Normal University (ECNU). As the Dean of the School of Education
Science then, I had the great pleasure to meet Tom and presided over his speech. Out
of our shared interest in the history and cultural studies of educational issues, Tom
has become special for me among all the western educational scholars. At that time,
we were planning an open research platform for connecting scholars all over the
world—the Collaborative Innovation Center for Educational Policy Research (later
developed into the National Institute of Educational Policy Research in China), and
Tom was appointed as the first “Distinguished Overseas Professor” of the institu-
tion. Since then, Tom has visited ECNU several times and offered short-term educa-
tional theory research courses for graduate students during his stay. He once
delivered a keynote speech at the “Daxia Forum,” the most influential research
forum of ECNU. Since the spring of 2014, Tom and I came up with the idea of edit-
ing a handbook on international education policy research; Tom has never failed to
give constructive suggestions at key moments of the editing of the Handbook, from
deciding on the themes to inviting papers, and from considerable discussions with
every contributor to revising the papers. Whether it was in Wisconsin in Washington
DC, United States, or in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, and Hangzhou in
China, the numerous exchanges with Tom always resulted in the spark of wisdom,
and thus effectively ensuring the publication and quality of this Handbook. Hence,
I am extremely grateful to Tom for all his support.
The 38 papers in this book were written by 49 contributors from 16 countries and
regions, including Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Hong Kong China,
Israel, Japan, Mexico, Portuguesa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan China, the
xxi
xxii Acknowledgements
United Kingdom, and the United States. They are all prestigious scholars who have
made outstanding and unique contributions in different areas of education policy
research. Their studies on education policy from different perspectives highlight the
diversity of educational policy research and reflect the complexity of educational
reforms. It is this diversified research position and research findings which respect
regional characteristics and present globalization trends that form the unique inter-
national vision of this Handbook. I would like to thank all the contributors for their
unique contributions to this book, especially for their tolerance and understanding
of our constant push in the process and their tireless efforts in the revision of
their papers.
To our deep sorrow and pity, one of our contributors, Professor Geoff Whitty
(1946–2018) of the University of London School of Education, passed away at the
time when we were closing the editing work of the Handbook. Whitty was my old
friend. In 2012, he was invited to make a keynote speech in the “Equity and Quality:
Education Reform under the Perspective of Policy'” international academic confer-
ence hosted by the Institute of Basic Education Reform and Development of
ECNU. His paper1 was translated and included in the Education Policy Observation
(Volume 4), which was edited by me. In July 2018, the University of London School
of Education organized an event for celebrating Professor Whitty’s birthday.
Pitifully, I was unable to be there but could only send a carefully crafted birthday
card to him. I never had thought that he would leave us forever in a few months.
Fortunately, this book includes a paper of him in collaboration with Emma Wisby,
Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the Institute of Education of University College
London. This is the last piece of wisdom that Whitty contributed to the world and
became the best way in memory of him.
A great many departments at ECNU provided extensive help and support for the
editing and publication of this Handbook. My sincere thanks to:
The Academy of Humanities & Social Sciences, the Institute of Schooling
Reform and Development, National Institute of Educational Policy Research, the
Institute of Education Governance (IEG), Department of Education and Faculty of
Education.
I also appreciate many colleagues who devoted enormous efforts for the
Handbook. In the process of editing this book, Ms. Lin Zhang from the School of
Foreign Languages of ECNU and Professor Shuangye Chen from the Institute of
Curriculum and Teaching of ECNU have made painstaking efforts in the revising of
English manuscripts. Xuelian Liu (Amy), a Ph.D. student under Tom’s supervision,
has also contributed in the process of liaison and discussion with Tom, other con-
tributors, and me.
I would also like to thank Ms. Yingying Dong and Ms. Ying Chen from the
Publicity Department of ECNU, and Mr. Xiaolong Wu from the School of
International Chinese Studies of ECNU. They allowed me to use Mr. Wu’s photo of
1
Whitty Geoff, and Jake Anders (2013), Narrowing the Socio-economic Achievement Gap: The
Recent Experience of England. In Guorui Fan (Ed.), Educational Policy Observatory (Vol. 4),
Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, pp. 3–41.
Acknowledgements xxiii
Sages Hall, a classic building at ECNU, as the cover picture of this Handbook. The
Ionic order building was built in 1930, which integrates both Chinese and Western
cultural elements, and thus perfectly illustrates the vision of the Handbook to con-
nect Chinese and Western education.
My gratitude also goes to Ms. Melody Zhang of the Springer Publishing
Company. Her persistence, patience, and tolerance have always instilled confidence
in my heart. I also wish to thank Ms. Sophie Li for her considerable editing work for
the book.
This book is one of the achievements of “Research on Modernization Strategy of
Educational Government System and Governance Capacity in China” (Project
Approval No. VGA160003), the major project (Education) in the 13th Five-Year
plan of the National Social Science Foundation of China in 2016, and it is supported
by the special fund of the Academy of Humanities and Social Science of East China
Normal University.
Guorui Fan
Shanghai, China
June 1, 2019
Contents
xxv
xxvi Contents
Euan Auld The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Leslie A. Bell University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
David C. Berliner Arizona State University-Tempe, Tempe, AZ, USA
Luis Miguel Carvalho Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Yin Cheong Cheng The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Tien-Hui Chiang Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China
Inés Dussel National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City, Mexico
Guorui Fan East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Jieqiong Fan Department of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education,
East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Daniel S. Friedrich Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Sotiria Grek School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, UK
Erica Rosenfeld Halverson University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI,
USA
Richard Halverson University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Magdalena Jiménez-Ramírez University of Granada, Granada, Spain
Kathryn L. Kirchgasler University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
John Benedicto Krejsler Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark
Kaisheng Lao Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
xxvii
xxviii Contributors
1.1 Introduction
Over the past four decades, the dominant understanding of education policy has
shifted dramatically. In the past, education policy was seen as a reflection of particu-
lar historical, political, social, economic, and cultural configurations of a given coun-
try. Today, policy is increasingly understood as heavily influenced by extra-national
forces, so much so that policies “elsewhere” are seen as possible reform options.
This has given rise to many dominant trends in education policy today: the OECD’s
Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA), the discourses of “best
practice,” the dominance of the World Bank in the “developing” world, and now even
attempts to borrow from “high performing” countries to improve education policy
and practice at home. Examples include the United Kingdom’s well-publicized
attempts to borrow Shanghai Math, American ongoing efforts to import Japanese
Lesson Study, and an increasing interest among policymakers globally to transfer an
illusive “Finnish PISA miracle” into different education contexts.
Yet, this perspective is not new. All modern education systems arose relationally,
be it through purposeful learning from systems elsewhere or by forceful implant by
colonizing powers. Notable examples of the former include American interest in the
Prussian system (Horace Mann), Japanese study of the American system (Iwakura
Mission), and China’s import of the Japanese system (Qing Imperial Court Mission
1896). The latter include British education in India (Macaulay) and Hong Kong, the
I. Silova (*)
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
e-mail: Iveta.Silova@asu.edu
J. Rappleye
Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
E. Auld
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
United States in the Philippines and Hawaii, and Japan in Korea and Taiwan. Viewed
against this larger historical span, the recent shift to an extra-national perspective
for policy studies is not a novel development, but a return to the recognition that
modern education and education policy are inevitably entangled with the world
beyond one’s own national borders.
Where difference does arise is in the levels of recognition of global entangle-
ment. Arguably most non-Western countries cannot even imagine education or edu-
cation policy without reference to the Western world: the legacy of Western
colonization remains too powerful, Western-led development ensures constant com-
parison, or the analytical frameworks that are used to understand education remain
imbued with the Western experience. In these contexts—the majority in the world—
education policy inevitably and automatically invokes comparison and contextual-
ization in the wider world. In contrast, most Western countries still lack recognition
of education policy as relational and globally entangled. Having never experienced
colonization (i.e., the receiving end) and viewing their analytical frameworks as
universal rather than particular, these countries—the minority in the world—are
only now coming to recognize the comparative, global dimensions of education.
That is, although Western observers are apt to view global policy trends over the
past several decades as novel, in fact they are only experiencing what non-Western
countries have encountered since the beginning of modern education: the inevitabil-
ity of thinking about education in relation to the wider global context.
One consequence of the fateful combination of Western academic dominance
and Western amnesia regarding relationality is that the analytical frameworks uti-
lized in understanding education policy tend to lack a global dimension. As we
detail below, the one area of research that retained this extra-national dimension was
studies of educational transfer, also called “borrowing” and “lending” (Steiner-
Khamsi and Waldow 2012; Steiner-Khamsi 2004). Yet, even within studies of edu-
cational transfer, the analytical frameworks somehow developed with little serious
discussion of wider global significance, resulting in a set of easy conceptual tropes:
academic/applied, real/imagined, global/local, etc. (for critique, see Silova and
Rappleye 2015). While this work remains important, our aim in this chapter is to go
beyond the usual ways of viewing education policy and, in particular, the theme of
educational transfer within it: we argue that this growing body of work needs to be
(re)contextualized within the larger questions of global significance. Inescapably,
this requires that we as researchers think seriously about the values that underpin
our scholarship and reflect on what sort of global futures our work seeks to con-
tribute to.
America in the 1950s witnessed a coincidence that gave rise to a global contradic-
tion in education policy studies. Parson’s structural functionalism was then domi-
nant in the social sciences. Functionalism held that institutions, including education,
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 5
changed in relation to the particular historical, social, economic, and cultural con-
figurations within a given country. At the same time, America strived for global
expansion of its models and, in the context of the Cold War, began to actively pro-
mote these ideas worldwide in the form of Modernization Theory as an alternative
to Marxism (e.g., Rostow 1971; see also Rappleye 2018). There was a deep confi-
dence that America was leading a universal global trajectory toward a prosperous
and peaceful future. The deep contradiction was that education was understood ana-
lytically in narrow domestic terms, while change was clearly coming from the out-
side in the form of Western-led development agencies such as USAID, UNESCO,
and the World Bank, in addition to the persisting legacies of Western colonialism
(we are apt to forget that dozens of Western colonies existed even as late as the
mid-1950s). Western bureaucrats and colonial administrators, joined by like-minded
academics and local collaborators, set to the task of finding out how to make func-
tionally efficient education policy to “move” countries toward a future imagined in
the image of the West.
This policymaking “logic” only intensified in subsequent decades, particularly
after the collapse of the socialist bloc wherein Western solutions enjoyed virtually
free reign, reaching a point where education policy studies came to be almost
entirely focused on locating narrow “solutions” to predetermined images of “prog-
ress.” The most obvious examples today are found within OECD and World Bank
led projects seeking to gather immense amounts of data and apply the most advanced
statistical techniques in analysis to isolate “what works” in raising students’ achieve-
ment (Auld and Morris 2016). Even initiatives such as Education for All (EFA), the
Millennium Development Goals (MGDs), and more recently the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) reveal a similar focus on minute technical issues with-
out serious discussion of the larger direction and future course (e.g., how to measure
progress toward SDG 4, rather than on clarifying what the key term “sustainability”
might mean). And while it is easy for critical scholars to disparage these attempts as
naïve, in fact the field of education policy studies remains overwhelmingly tied to
the functionalist research agenda: it seeks to “fix” education with norms anchored
in an unexamined faith in the Western future.
Running counter to these trends within the broader field of education policy stud-
ies is research on policy transfer. It has long refused the functionalist fantasy that
education can be understood in domestic terms alone. It remains focused on the
movement of policies across borders and cognizant of global entanglements.
Theoretical frameworks utilized in this area such as World Culture Theory and
World Systems Theory actively champion a move beyond functionalism. In this
sense, the policy transfer research is leading the way, at least in Western contexts,
out of the provincialism bequeathed by functionalism.
Nevertheless, we would argue that educational transfer research still remains too
limited, too unaware of the narrowness of its implicit assumptions to affect deep
change in the way we understand education policy. Concretely, policy transfer
research has too often fallen back on a simple distinction between academic and
applied research, attempting to define itself against functionalism. In contrast to
applied researchers, academic transfer scholars purport to deal “objectively” with
6 I. Silova et al.
how transfer occurs, what stages occur in the process, what actors are involved, and
what larger social forces are in play (Phillips 2006). This purported objectivity is
seen as superior to the normatively laden work of applied researchers, those who
seek to intervene in the “real world.”
Among this group of “academic researchers,” another set of dichotomous dis-
tinctions has subsequently arisen, those focused on “global” developments (e.g.,
work in International Organizations and apex of policymaking) and “local” under-
standings (e.g., how policy is translated into practice, reinterpreted along the way,
or morphs-as-it-moves). This global/local conceptualization has been one of the
most defining categories of analysis over the past two decades, often reinforcing
previous dichotomies such as West/East and North/South (Larsen and Beech 2014;
Takayama 2015; Silova 2012). Some researchers even make a further distinction
between what is “real” and “imagined” in the process, pointing out how adoption of
global discourses alone does not represent authentic borrowing (Steiner-Khamsi
2004). Despite critiques that such dichotomies have become a cul-de-sac for our
research imagination (Silova and Rappleye 2015; Silova et al. 2017), they persist.
As such, these conceptual tools, although once useful in bringing more nuance
and clarity to understanding borrowing and lending processes, have not only become
tropes in their repeated use over the past two decades, but they also continue to
obscure the larger questions of global significance. In the push to become more
“objective” than naïve functionalist accounts, research on policy transfer some-
where along the way lost the larger plot. Why are analyses of policy transfer impor-
tant? What larger project does this body of work contribute to? What sort of future
can we imagine from such studies? Although education transfer research escaped
the narrowness of functionalism, it never attempted to subsequently contemplate the
wider worldview that bestows its work with significance. That is, it has increased in
complexity but has largely failed to address its underlying provincialism.
Can we continue policy transfer research but jettison its underlying Western provin-
cialism, and what would such a project entail? Utilizing the work of Mignolo
(2011), we address these questions by presenting a new framework for understand-
ing the nature of education policy studies, comprising five main research trajecto-
ries that are shaping global futures. Mignolo (2011) describes five co-existing but
competing projects: (1) re-westernization, (2) global reorientation to the left, (3)
de-westernization, (4) decoloniality, and (5) spirituality. Figure 1.1 juxtaposes these
options turned possible global futures.
Here we are in agreement with Mignolo (2011) who argues that “in the forth-
coming decades, the world order will be decided in the struggles, negotiations, com-
petitions, and collaborations between five different and coexisting trajectories—without
a winner” (p. 33). Our primary goal in this chapter is not to advocate for one specific
position or perspective, but instead to call attention to the plurality of projects
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 7
Spiritual/
Spiritu
Reorientation Decolonial
Dewesternization Rewesternization Ontological
Ontolog
of the Left Options
Options
Optio
Fig. 1.1 Schematic visualization of five current trajectories of the world order that are shaping
global futures. (Source: Adapted from Mignolo 2011: 35)
8 I. Silova et al.
working from this perspective face similar challenges as in the West and therefore
“must consider to what extent Western political theories and political economy and
Western universities (as institutions and curricula) shall be the model for socio-
economic organization and education” (p. 44).
Dewesternization initially appears like a clean break from the Western frame-
works of the first two options, but in fact retains and seeks to perfect one half of it:
a universally dominant economic trajectory (capitalism). The proposed break comes
instead with Western epistemology and the means through which it is projected:
“While dewesternization shares with rewesternization the ‘survival of capitalism,’
the confrontation takes place at other levels of the colonial matrix of power: the
sphere of authority, of knowledge, and of subjectivity” (p. 47). Mignolo highlights
China as exemplar of this position: China increasingly rejects Washington’s dictates
as it grows more confident with its global leadership role, yet the politically driven
resuscitation of Confucianism is, Mignolo asserts, largely a means of accelerating
the move toward China taking control of the locus of global authority. That is, China
seeks not to change the structure and hierarchy of a global order created by Western
powers and epistemologies, but simply assert control of it.
The Decolonial Option signifies the attempt to divest from forms of Western
knowledge imposed during the course of colonialism. The key term here is “delink-
ing,” signifying an unhitching from Western economic forms and political authority,
but particularly epistemic and subjective starting points. A crucial feature of deco-
loniality is that “objectivity is in parentheses” which means the end of epistemic
universality; the end of the very idea that there exists an “ultimate blueprint for the
future” (p. 52). Instead, the decolonial trajectory “means both the analytic task of
unveiling the logic of coloniality and the prospective task of contributing to building
a world in which many worlds exist” (p. 54). Central to this project is the presence
of the Other—an entity that does not share the same basic self-understanding, a
challenge that simultaneously defamiliarizes one’s own frameworks and suggests
alternatives.
Last, the Spiritual Option is an attempt to decolonize at an even deeper level,
centered on the triad of knowledge, subjectivity, and religion. Utilizing the word
“spirituality”—a term we ourselves feel hesitant about and feel is better read as the
Ontological Option, as discussed below—Mignolo recognizes that the modernist
assumption of secularism continues to operate within decolonial discussions. As
such, it is necessary to “decolonize religion to liberate spirituality” (p. 62). Lest this
be understood as a mere dropping out from the larger materialism plot and universe
of responsibility, Mignolo recognizes that rethinking the spiritual foundations is
crucial for the general direction of delinking from Western modernity: “the common
ground for all these re-inscriptions of spirituality is the desire to find ways of life
beyond capitalism and its magic of modernity and development that keeps consum-
ers caught in the promises of dreamworlds” (p. 62). More constructively still, what
the spiritual option offers is “the contribution of opening up horizons of life that
have been kept hostage (that is, colonized) by modernity, capitalism, and the belief
in the superiority of Western civilization” (ibid).
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 9
1.3 T
oward Multiple Global Trajectories: Agenda
for Education Policy Research
In what follows we discuss each trajectory toward global futures separately with a
focus on education policy transfer research, while keeping in mind that these trajec-
tories are not fully divergent and may overlap in various ways.
1.3.1 Rewesternization
Stemming from the historical foundations of Western civilization and the accompa-
nying spread of Christianity and colonialism, the project of rewesternization
attempts to maintain the global hegemony of the West by protecting and extending
privileges acquired over the past 500 years (Mignolo 2011). While overt coloniza-
tion is no longer politically viable, the project of rewesternization nevertheless
continues the Western civilizing mission through new political, economic, social,
and racial reconfigurations, ranging from modernization and international develop-
ment efforts to humanitarianism and anti-terrorism campaigns. At its core, rewest-
ernization is about securing the global future for capitalism, market economy, and
democracy, as well as the philosophical tenets of liberalism that underpin it. It
attempts to rebuild, or prop up, a flagging global confidence in the leadership of the
United States and Western Europe.
10 I. Silova et al.
Whereas global economic policy discussions have focused on the goal of “saving
capitalism,” or “reimagining” its future, especially since the global financial crisis of
2008 (Mignolo 2011), rewesternization efforts in education have translated into the
global policies that promote the idea of “knowledge for development,” or, more
specifically, knowledge for economic development and growth. As resources become
increasingly limited, both in physical and political terms, it is clear that “the control
of scientific and technological knowledge is the card the West shall [continue to]
play” in an attempt to maintain its global competitiveness and control (Mignolo
2011: 49). In fact, the World Bank’s World Development Report (1998) spelled this
out in utmost clarity over two decades ago: “knowledge, not capital, is the key to
sustained economic growth and improvements in human well-being.” In another
iteration, the seminal report Constructing Knowledge Societies (World Bank 2002)
maintained that “social and economic progress is achieved primarily through the
advancement and application of knowledge” (p. xix) (see Rappleye and Un 2018).
Underpinning the idea of “knowledge for development” is a set of assumptions
associated with the concept of “neoliberalism,” postulating that markets should play
a fundamental role in determining educational purposes, priorities, and policies.
Rather than viewing education as a public good, the neoliberal education reform
agenda has redefined education to serve private interests, restricting its purposes to
the pursuit of increased individual productivity and economic growth (for critique
see Ball 2007, 2012; Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Morris 2016). The agenda is being
driven by many powerful actors, including corporations (such as Pearson), interna-
tional financial institutions (such as the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund), European Union (EU), the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), as well as a network of private sector coalitions (such as
including Hewlett and Gates Foundations).
The substance to this neoliberal rewesternization agenda is provided by com-
parative policy studies (often commissioned by the World Bank and OECD), which
claim that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA (i.e., an
increase in “knowledge” defined as “twenty-first century skills”) automatically lead
to higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates (see Hanushek and Kimko
2000; Hanushek and Woessmann 2007, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016). The World Bank’s
work is duly based on the premise that “education builds human capital, which
translates into economic growth” (World Bank 2018: 41). Similarly, the OECD has
propelled the neoliberal agenda through its many publications—such as Employment
and Growth in the Knowledge-Based Economy (Foray and Lundvall 1996) or The
Knowledge Economy (1996)—as well as using its Programme for International
Student Assessment (PISA) to promote a link between education and economic
growth. Both the World Bank’s SABER and the OECD’s Education at a Glance
series are subsequently presented as a guide to the “correct” reading of the datasets,
collating information on participating societies to provide a source for identifying
“best practices” and initiating transfer.
Meanwhile, education policy entrepreneurs, experts, and consultants have
stepped up as intermediaries to “translate” PISA data into “best practices,” promot-
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 11
One of the strongest critiques thus far of the rewesternization project has come from
a competing global trajectory—“reorientation of the Left”—which encompasses
different leftist orientations seeking visions of alternative non-capitalist futures.
12 I. Silova et al.
Following Mignolo (2011), these orientations include the secular Marxist Left, the
Global Left that emerged in the World Social Forum (WSF) as a response to the
foundation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as “modern/colonial
Left” that has unfolded in former colonial settings (South America, Caribbean, the
Middle East, etc.). Underpinning the theoretical foundations of these different leftist
orientations are dependency theory and world-system analysis that aim to explain
“the differential power of nation states located hierarchically within the world-
economy” in the face of the unequal distribution of wealth, resources, and well-
being (Griffith and Arnove 2015: 95; see also Clayton 1998 and Wallerstein 1983,
1995). In this context, the “re-orientation of the Left” project seeks to engage in
developing “educational policies and practices that can help to create more peace-
ful, just and democratic futures” (Griffith and Arnove 2015: 90).
In the comparative study of education policy transfer, the “re-orientation of the
Left” is visible in the empirical studies directly critiquing the rewesternization proj-
ect and mapping alternative education trajectories of the Global Left. Such a two-
prong approach enables researchers and policy makers to transform a “language of
critique” into a “language of possibility” (Giroux 1997: 108). In particular, a sus-
tained critique of the unequal power dynamics inherent in the North-South educa-
tion transfer has led many researchers to investigate a South-South cooperation and
grassroots mobilization as possible ways to build more symmetrical relationships
between the lenders and borrowers of education policies and practices (see Chisholm
and Steiner-Khamsi 2008; Jules and Morais de sá e Silva 2008; de sá e Silva 2009).
In the context of international development, South-South transfer has been concep-
tualized as “a way out of the dependency trap in educational development,” offering
new forms of collective mobilization to overcome global inequalities (Steiner-
Khamsi 2009: 242).
Scholars have approached the study of the South-South transfer from multiple
angles, ranging from cooperation initiatives at the nation-state level to transnational
social movements to community-driven forms of political mobilization. For exam-
ple, Hickling-Hudson (2004) calls attention to the governmental efforts to pursue
South-South cooperation in the context of the post-Cold War world. In particular,
she examines Cuba’s international educational assistance to schools in Jamaica and
Namibia as an example of “South–South collaboration which would be independent
of traditional direction and financing with strings from the wealthy countries of the
‘North’” (p. 308). In such relationship, the countries of the “South” attempt to reduce
their dependence on the “North” by assisting each other in the process of building
“radically new relations” necessary to ensure independence from the “North” in
education and other fields. For example, some Caribbean governments have assisted
Cuba with solidarity and trade, while Cuba—with its comparatively large proportion
of scientists and research capacity—has assisted countries of the Latin America
region with several hundred tertiary education scholarships and teacher exchanges
within a cost-sharing framework. While recognizing that Cuba’s education model is
“an imperfect modernist one,” Hickling-Hudson (2004) nevertheless argues that it
has the potential to “energize alternative postcolonial thinking, a necessary step in
facilitating the building of a high quality of ‘education for all’ ” (p. 309).
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 13
1.3.3 Dewesternization
Mignolo (2011) points out that empirical cases of dewesternization can be found
with the greatest intensity in East and Southeast Asia. In many of these countries,
there has been a confrontation with Western epistemology and “the structure of
enunciation,” i.e., the domination of forms of knowledge that remain European and
White. Nonetheless, here the flavor is not completely anti-western, as dewesterniza-
tion shares the same underlying commitment to capitalism and modernity: “it is not
a movement of anti- but self-affirmation” (p. 47).
Empirical examples of education policy transfer from the region support this
vision. Given that the number of empirical cases is far fewer than work in the two
dominant trajectories outlined above, we opt to focus only on the two most salient.
Shibata (2006) illustrates how Malaysian political elites in the 1980s–1990s initi-
ated a “Look East” campaign that took Japan as its exemplar, importing policies,
policy experts, and training schemes. At first glance, this appeared as a break from
the Western world. But, in fact, this referencing functioned more as a political tool
to accelerate political, economic, and social consolidation: “Look East as well as
learning from Japan were political metaphors for Anti-Western and pro-Asian
region based policies. The metaphors were useful in enabling the Malaysian people
to understand the goals they had to pursue and the outcomes they could gain rather
than abstract notions of political ideas or ideology” (p. 655). Herein “Confucianism”
functioned as a discursive technology to accelerate capitalism and political projects
of the ruling elite and a move at “deracialization” of legitimate knowledge, but not
the more challenging move to rethink capitalism or modernity.
Singapore arguably went much further. Avenall (2013) describes how Singapore
launched a “Learn from Japan” campaign, detailing the actual import of institutions
such as the police box system (koban) and quality control circles. Singapore also
attempted to launch worker productivity campaigns and experimented with Japanese
style labor–management relations, both aimed at molding Singaporean workers in
the image of industrious, harmonious Japanese. In education, there were also initia-
tives to bolster moral education. Key to all of this was a discourse of “Asian Values,”
as loudly promoted by Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. It revolved
around the idea that “Asians” preferred social harmony, placed greater emphasis on
the collective, and adhered to loyalty toward authority (see Bangkok Declaration
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 15
1993). Yet Avenall (2013) concludes that rather than a decisive break from capital-
ism and modern statehood, the Learn from Japan campaign and its associated bor-
rowing are better understood in terms of providing “ideological utility in teaching
people about being productive, patriotic, and compliant Singaporeans and in legiti-
mating the persistence of authoritarian governance and neoliberal developmentalist
economics” (p. 45). That is, Singapore’s government-led attempts to transfer poli-
cies from Japan sought to fulfill capitalism and Western modernity, but on its own
terms; to self-affirm its own knowledge in the process of convergent capitalist
expansion and acceleration. China’s contemporary combination of unabated capi-
talist expansion and its recent turn to replace the ideology of state socialism with
“Confucian familism” (Vickers and Zeng 2017: 334) appears to replicate this now
familiar pattern (see also Sahlins 2015).
While research has elucidated how policy transfer, as both substance and dis-
course, is utilized in political processes of dewesternization, it is also possible to
imagine academic research that operates within a dewesternization framework,
regardless of the empirical object. Take for example, an article by leading Chinese
comparative education Gu Mingyuan entitled “Learning from Each Other: a com-
parative study of education in China and Japan” (1995) wherein he argues:
All-around moral intellectual and physical development is a common objective of educa-
tional systems in China and Japan. In particular, the two countries place a lot of stress on
moral development. This is a tradition of Oriental culture, and can trace its origins to
Confucianism. Moral education, or the perfection of personal character, is the core of
Confucian virtue. (Gu 1995 [2001]: 202)
While this initially appears identical with the discussions of Malaysia and Singapore
above, in fact, at this time Confucianism was still not a topic encouraged by the
Chinese government. To this day, there is no explicit Chinese government campaign
to “learn from Japan.” Instead, Gu was pushing for a dewesternization reading of
practices in Japan. The sole focus on “moral development,” however, reveals an
implicit commitment to existing economic goals. The point here is twofold and
nuanced: dewesternization always exists for scholars as one larger frame within
which to situate policy transfer regardless of the larger political discourse, yet what
defines it (particularly in contrast to decoloniality) is its acceptance of the underly-
ing economic and political status quo, as well as its insistence upon self-affirmation
rather than confrontation (anti-) with Western modernity. This in-built ambivalence
is one reason why dewesternization work so often comes under critique: it s ometimes
has difficulty explaining the deeper driver of its self-affirmative move to replace the
outer packaging of existing structures with “vernacular” symbols.
The decolonial option represents a distinct break with modernity associated with
any forms of capitalism, socialism, or other abstract universalisms. It involves a
comprehensive “divesting of colonial power” on which Western empires were
16 I. Silova et al.
founded and expanded globally (Mignolo 2011: 52). Because coloniality is consti-
tutive of modernity, the pursuit of the decolonial option requires changing “the
terms and not just the content of the conversation” (Mignolo 2007: 459). In the his-
tory of the modern/colonial world, the content has in fact been changed many
times—“by Christianity (e.g. theology of liberation); by liberalism (e.g., the US
support of de-colonization in Africa and Asia during the Cold War) and by Marxism
(also supporting de-colonization in Africa and Asia during the Cold War)” (p. 459).
Yet, these changes in content have not challenged the hegemony of Western moder-
nity, leaving its colonial foundations and operational logic intact. Therefore, delink-
ing from modernity/coloniality needs to start with the epistemic and ontological
shift in order to bring to the foreground alternatives, i.e., other principles of knowl-
edge, understanding, and being. According to Mignolo (2007), such a shift will
ultimately lead to pluriversality, opening spaces for multiple ways of understanding
the world, society, education, and being.
One example of an epistemological delinking is Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as
Method (Chen 2010), which offers a decolonial, de-imperial, and de-Cold War ana-
lytical framework that moves research beyond Western-centric interpretations of
history and enables scholars to imagine historical experiences in Asia as “an alterna-
tive horizon, perspective, and method for posing a different set of questions about
world history” (p. xv). Building on Mizoguchi Yūzō’s (1966/1989) “China as
method” and Takuchi Yoshimi’s (1960) “Asia as method,” Chen (2010) has analyti-
cally approached “Asia” as both a geographic region and a constructed cultural-
political space with complex, contested, and intertwined historical relations within
the region and with the “West.” By reorienting the conventional reference points
away from the “West” and instead focusing on knowledge “inter-referencing”
within the Asian region, Chen (2010) re-centers Asia “as the source of a multiplicity
of new [knowledge] flows” (p. 8), thus effectively interrupting the hegemony of
Western knowledge and offering a new view on global history. Furthermore, he
proposes to explore “how local history, in dialectical interaction with the colonial
and other historical forces, transforms its internal formation on the one hand and
articulates the local to world history and the structure of global capital on the other
hand” (p. 66). In other words, “Asia as method” opens ways to bring to the fore-
ground multiple histories, while revealing the relationality and interdependence of
different global spaces.
In the field of education, “Asia as method” has inspired research in the areas of
science and technology (Anderson 2012), teacher preparation (Ma 2014), curricu-
lum inquiry (Lin 2012; Daza 2013), childhood studies (Burman 2018; Millei,
Silova, and Piattoeva 2018; Yelland and Saltmarsh 2013), global citizenship educa-
tion (Abdi et al. 2015), and comparative and international education (Zhang et al.
2015; Takayama 2016; Silova et al. 2018). These different articulations of “Asia as
method” in education reveal that this decolonial project goes beyond a question of
geographic focus but also entails a change of analytical approach in education
research. In childhood studies, for example, Burman (2018) has followed Chen’s
framework to develop the concept of “child as method” as a resource for critically
interrogating Western models of child development and education and exploring
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 17
and being emerge, unsettling the very logic of modernity/coloniality and embracing
a global viewpoint that reflects pluriversality.
The spiritual option is the least elaborated of the five trajectories and for us emerges
as problematic in the way Mignolo (2011) briefly describes it. He argues that “basi-
cally stated, the spiritual option advocates decolonizing religion to liberate spiritu-
ality” (p. 62), aiming at “finding new ways of life beyond capitalism and its magic
of modernity.” Unfortunately, this cursory definition suggests that spirituality—
emphasis on the Spirit—is something “subjective,” something pursued by individu-
als, and that “religion” (never defined) somehow interferes with it. It appears as a
way out of capitalism and retreat from colonialism, but Mignolo’s description
remains disappointingly vague. And yet, he is clearly on to something: by support-
ing secular analytical lenses “progressive intellectuals indirectly support capitalist’s
arguments for modernity and development” (pp. 62–63). To avoid all of this, we
instead choose to read the spiritual option as a move beyond materialism or, more
challengingly, a gesture toward importance of ontological concern. Hence, we
attempt to rename it. It is predicated on the idea that the assumption of a material
world of ontological discrete objects that can be known “objectively” is a bedrock
of Western science and capitalism, but also a derivative of a particular religious
worldview (Christianity). In this reading, the spiritual option moves to open up new
ontological possibilities, or if some prefer, metaphysical universes, ones that refuse
a secular, materialist worldview as a starting and end point of research. It partially
overlaps with recent discussions of the “post-secular turn” (Wu and Wenning 2017;
see also Habermas 2008), the ontological turn (Jensen 2017; Holbraad and Pederson
2017), and bears close affinities to work seeking to center spirituality in the acad-
emy (Shahajan 2005; Shahjahan 2004; Edwards 2016; Edwards 2020).
We offer three preliminary examples from our recent work, demonstrating how
we have tried to operationalize this trajectory in policy transfer related research. The
first study explored the origins and drivers of the “Mindfulness” movement in the
United States (Rappleye forthcoming). It began by exploring the actors and institu-
tions, and agendas that catalyzed the borrowing of Buddhist meditation techniques
into American public schools. It showed how two key actors—US Congressman
Tim Ryan and Professor John Kabat-Zinn—carefully reframed these non-Western
meditation practices into the language of empirically verified science, emphasizing
their practical benefit while downplaying religious dimensions and highlighting
similarities with dominant Christian practices. By “silencing” its non-Western and
“spiritual” origins, these key actors were able to help Mindfulness successfully gain
a foothold and th mainstream. Particularly, John Kabat-Zinn in his book Coming to
Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness (2005) links
this “import” of spiritual practices into secular modern institutions to a future
beyond capitalism and in recognition of climate change. If transfer research turns to
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 19
focus on new initiatives such as Mindfulness and Yoga that have moved from (usu-
ally non-Western) religions into the realm of the “spiritual” and are then inserted
into the secular (e.g., schools), we can begin to imagine research that reveals new
worldviews anchored in non-material concerns.
A second example is our recent work on temporality, self, and nihilism (Rappleye
and Komatsu 2016). At the center of the analysis is the feeling the pervasive sense
that life has no meaning—nihilism—a feeling we source to the diffusion of linear
time over the past 500 years from its origins in Christian theology. The work draws
its legitimacy less from a bevy of statistics and breadth of historical sweep, more
from the potential connection with readers who feel something similar. Focusing on
the case of Japan, we analyze how the concept of Linear Time was “borrowed” to
face the threat of Western colonialism and propagated largely through modern
schooling. To analyze the case, we draw not from Western theorists but Japanese
thinkers, those adept in synthesizing Western thought and East Asian traditions such
as Mahayana Buddhism (e.g., The Kyoto School). This automatically provides a
theoretical lens that is “spiritual,” forcing readers’ attention away from material
structures and onto questions such as selfhood and the search for meaning in one’s
own life. While this initially appears as a flight from the responsibility of scholarly
work, in fact it aims to release the central category that underpins “subjectivity,” the
notion of selfhood itself. In this sense, it is far more radical than even Mignolo
(2011) appears ready to imagine: it asks when and how the fundamental categories
we use for critique (e.g., subjectivity) arose and why we fail to see other historically
specific formations (e.g., clock time) and thus miss its “spiritual” impact upon us.
Our third example brings into focus non-Western worlds and worldviews through
the study of nature-centered spiritualities in Latvian early literacy textbooks and
children’s literature published during the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet peri-
ods (Silova 2019). The study reveals that nature-centered spiritualities have sur-
vived in Latvian culture and everyday life despite the centuries of Christian crusades
and decades of socialist atheism-turned nihilism. However, they have remained
mostly invisible in the light of reason, logic, and rationality associated with the
European (and later socialist) modernity project, especially social science and edu-
cation policy research. Yet, this apparent invisibility does not mean that alternative
worlds and worldviews disappear or lose their importance in people’s lives. Rather,
it means that we (as researchers) need to refocus our gaze in order to become aware
of the previously unknown or invisible dimensions of our existence. Once we dwell
in this space and attune ourselves to it, we can see that Nature’s deities continue to
live in cultural (and educational) practices, mythological consciousness reveals
itself in children’s literature through folk stories and fairytales, and spirituality con-
tinues to unfold in people’s daily lives through ordinary, everyday activities. By
contemplating taken-for-granted notions of time and space, Silova’s study brings
these spiritual domains more clearly into focus, disrupting the established boundar-
ies—between space and time, passion and reason, adult and child, animal and
human, self and other—and thus opening a space for (re)imagining education and
childhood beyond the Western horizon.
20 I. Silova et al.
The spiritual (ontological) option is arguably the least developed of all five tra-
jectories. The reasons for this are several: critical scholars are usually of the modern
Marxist-mold and view religion as a mere “opiate” of political deception; postmod-
ern scholars are willing to question everything except their own unexamined secu-
larism and theoretical preeminence; and scholarship in the Western world still
largely lacks access to ways of thinking that derive from different ontological
worldviews. Moreover, epistemological discussions have dominated ontological
contemplation, prompting Shahjahan et al. (2017) to poetically lament that:
This movement toward a “possible way forward” in terms of the adoption of different epis-
temologies tends to remain within the same ontological parameters that we are trying to
transcend because it relies on the same investment needs, reproducing again the circular
dance of distraction: we try to change knowing without changing our ways of being.
(p. 566)
Future research must develop this trajectory carefully to bring into dialogue differ-
ent onto-epistemic perspectives, without relegating any of them into the realm of
myths or subjective beliefs. Here we have suggested three possibilities that revolve
around a similar approach: focusing on an object that is more “spiritual” in nature
and attempt to utilize theoretical frameworks not originally forged out of the secu-
lar, materialist worldview of the West (hence the natural link to decolonial perspec-
tives that take us beyond the Western horizon). But many more possibilities
surely await.
The multiplication of options, rather than the elimination of them, is…. the road to global
futures. (Mignolo 2011: 39)
valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other” (quoted in
Mignolo 2011: 27). From this perspective, there is no longer the need to search for
and defend the universal truth; the focus is rather on acknowledging multiple, coex-
isting trajectories toward the future.
While different in their goals and orientations, four of the five trajectories out-
lined above—dewesternizaton, the reorientation of the left, decoloniality, and the
spiritual (ontological) options—share the common goal of decentering Western
hegemony in knowledge and subjectivity. They offer different ways toward the
global future that is not exclusively dominated by the rewesternization trajectory but
rather delinks from it and unfolds toward pluriversality. According to Mignolo
(2007), delinking requires an economic, political, philosophical, and ethical refram-
ing of the terms of the conversation that makes “the Bible, Adam Smith and Karl
Marx necessary (because Western categories of thoughts have been globalized
through the logic of coloniality and the rhetoric of modernity) but highly insuffi-
cient” (p. 459, emphasis added). In other words, decentering Western hegemony
does not mean its complete erasure or replacement with other ideologies. Rather
than replacing one “truth” (or one hegemon) with another, the critical task is to cre-
ate “an open horizon of pluriversality” where many different worlds and world-
views can coexist on a non-imperial and non-hierarchical basis (Mignolo 2011:
275). This entails both “unlearning” the terms of modern/colonial knowledge pro-
duction and ways of being and learning to attune to, acknowledge, and engage with
multiple interconnected (and always relational) worlds.
Moving toward pluriversality thus presents several challenges to researchers of
education policy studies. In the introduction, we flagged two dominant characteris-
tics of current work: a continued commitment, albeit not always explicit, to func-
tionalism and a persistent tendency toward dichotomous thinking (e.g., global/local,
real/imagined, objective/subjective). In the deafening silence over values and con-
templations of the future, existing policy research must rethink its approach at a
fundamental level if it is to contribute to pluriversality. Here we flag two moves that
must come to replace our current commitment to functionalism and dichotomy.
The first move requires awareness of both one’s own values and the ways that
one’s research embodies such normative commitments. It demands not “objectiv-
ity” in contradistinction to “applied” researchers, but an awareness of how values
are already inherent in whatever form of research we participate in. As discussed,
choices of research objects are “mediations”: inherently normatively laden deci-
sions in favor of one or another possible future. And contemplating these choices
helps us understand our-selves: “Questioning the material, epistemic and ontologi-
cal fabric that ‘we’ have created—and that in turn has created a part of ‘us’—neces-
sarily means to question ourselves. Who are ‘we’ supposed to be after all, if we
‘transform’?” (Schultz 2017: 137). Through a functionalist lens, an objective world
comes under the refined eye of a skilled policy analyst. Unfortunately, that same
lens not only renders values invisible but also suggests that change need only occur
in the world “out there.”
Second, and closely connected to this, is the move from dichotomy to relational-
ity. Dichotomies signify two options, both equally ambitious in their claims to
22 I. Silova et al.
1.5 Conclusion
1
Restricted by space we cannot extend the discussion fully to its post-anthropocentric implications
and the obvious connections it has to the environment. Yet we agree with recent concerns voiced
by scholars like Haraway among others that the limits of relationality necessarily extend beyond
the intra-human horizon. For some indication of future directions we seek to develop in coming
years vis-à-vis relationality and the environment, see Silova et al. (2020), Komatsu et al. (2019),
and Rappleye and Komatsu (2016).
1 Beyond the Western Horizon: Rethinking Education, Values, and Policy Transfer 23
betray a complex reality below, tempting us to mistake the symbol for the signified.
Yet, the only way to become clear of the differences is to move beyond the horizon
of Western symbols, to refuse the familiarity offered up by the rewesternization nar-
rative. It is inconceivable that a pluriverse could arise from a ground already medi-
ated by rewesternization priorities.
The second meaning entails a realization that the Western horizon is not simply
an on-going political project (i.e., rewesternization) but a set of perspectives embed-
ded in our epistemic and methodological choices. As outlined in the introduction,
the analytical toolkit of most education policy scholars has been forged out of the
hard certainty of Parsonian functionalism and gains legitimacy by comparing itself
favorably against uncritical, “applied” research perspectives. But the toolkit is any-
thing but certain: it was developed inside the Western historical, sociological, and
cultural experience, thus limiting our ability to see and understand multiple worlds
and worldviews outside of it. As but one example, we may return to the issue raised
in introduction: the methodological nationalism of educational policy studies is a
non-relational fabrication generated by the functionalist analytical lens. It is virtu-
ally impossible to understand this until one finds analytical toolkits built in relation
to different non-Western cultural experiences. And this is true even for tools given
by, say, post-modernism (e.g., governmentality, policyscapes). We should not for-
get, as just one poignant example, that Nietzsche’s project, which has generated so
much new thinking when it passed through the hands of social science luminaries
such as Max Weber and Foucault (Owen 1994), drew significant momentum from
non-Western thought (see Figl 1991; Scheiffele 1991; Rappleye 2020).
Finally, the Western horizon constitutes many education policy researchers at an
even more fundamental layer: the notion of self. Prior to even the choice of analyti-
cal tools and research objects stands an implicit set of assumptions about what it
means to be or—in this case, to be a scholar. Most scholars taking advanced studies
in Western institutions come out subscribing to the Western Enlightenment view of
self: Kant’s transzendantales Ich. Deemed necessary to make democracy viable,
“Kant’s answer to the question about what kind of subjectivity needed in a democ-
racy,” writes Biesta (2006), “focused on the ability of individuals to make use of
their own reason without direction from another” (p. 127). The enlightenment self
was to be both rational and autonomous (from the Greek auto, meaning self). These
qualities stand in opposition to the relationality and sympoiesis we have been ges-
turing to throughout this entire piece.
This underscores just how much the Western horizon is both within us and con-
stitutes us: what is presented here as a new idea is really what becomes visible when
the Western horizon of subjectivity is loosened up. Ultimately, the move to a pluri-
verse can be started at the political and analytical layers, but for it to gain momen-
tum, it will need to be anchored in “subjectivity.” Given that intellectuals in the West
are still so thoroughly imbued with Kantian subjectivity, one of the only ways to get
there is to move beyond the Western horizon. Only here, in spaces beyond Western
demarcations, does pluriversality become possible, opening endless opportunities
for conversations and mutual learning across different epistemic and ontologi-
cal realms.
24 I. Silova et al.
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Iveta Silova is Professor and Director of the Center for the Advanced Studies in Global Education
at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at ASU. She holds a PhD in comparative education and
political sociology from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Columbia University, USA. Her
research has focused on the study of globalization, postsocialist transformations, and knowledge
production and transfer in education. More recently, Iveta has been exploring the intersections of
postsocialist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives in comparative education to envision edu-
cation beyond Western modernity.
Euan Auld is Assistant Professor at The Education University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD in
International and Comparative Education from the University College London (UCL) Institute of
Education. His research to date has focused primarily on international large-scale assessments and
their influence on education research and governance, drawing on philosophical perspectives and
narrative theory.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate
credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
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Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not
included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by
statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder.
Chapter 2
Education Policy: Development
and Enactment—The Case of Human
Capital
Leslie A. Bell
However, this view of policy as a product of government action is far too limited.
It tends either to ignore the relationship between policy and action or implementa-
tion or to present policy generation and implementation as a linear and sequential
process in which policies pass smoothly from conception to execution. Working
within this tradition, Kogan (1975) argued that policies are best understood as oper-
L. A. Bell (*)
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
ational statements of values. He identified four key values that informed education
policy—educational, social, economic and institutional. He further argued that it
was possible to distinguish between first- and second-order values. First-order val-
ues included the educational, social and economic. These are values that required no
further defence than it is held to be right by those who believe it, whereas second-
order values were considered to be supporting in nature and therefore focused on
means rather than ends. This was written at a time when there was post-war social
consensus in that there was a broad agreement about key social objectives and the
means of achieving them (Tomlinson 2001). Since that time, any such consensus
has unravelled, and neo-liberalism has emerged as the new orthodoxy on a global
scale. For example, as Suzuki (2000) has argued, the Japanese view of educational
administration has, in recent decades, been closely related to the worldwide view of
neo-liberalism as propounded in the USA and the UK. However, despite the domi-
nance of such ideas, it is difficult to argue that one consensus has replaced another.
Policy is often much more sharply contested, and values that underpin policy can no
longer be described as what Kogan (1975) sees as being self-justified.
Education policy, therefore, needs to be understood in terms that reject the tidy
logic of the political pluralists. Policy is about both intention and outcome. It is
purposive and intended to produce specific ends. As Ward et al. (2016) point out,
policy development and enactment should be seen as an attempt both to solve
problems and to ensure that particular values that delineate action are accepted by
those who enact policies. They also reject what is presented as an artificial, and
unhelpful, separation between policy development and enactment. Policies rarely
emerge fully formed, and so the enactment process involves revising, re-ordering
and re-inventing. The policy process, therefore is not neat and tidy but rather is a
messy process in which, at any point in the policy cycle, participants negotiate over
both implementation and outcomes. Policy is constantly being made and re-made,
formed and re-formed, as those engaged in the policy processes bring their
differential interpretations and influences to bear. Policy therefore can be considered
to be the realization of contested meanings. In some cases, policy may be relatively
inconsequential and uncontentious in nature and largely unproblematic in its
enactment. However in other cases policy may reflect sharp divergences over values,
means and ends. In such cases the contested nature of policy is likely to be more
overt with more visible signs of conflict and struggle based on competing sets of
values that may be identified in the discourses that shape educational policy.
In order to explore the complex relationships between policy and the factors that
shape both policy development and formulation, a more sophisticated form of anal-
ysis than that offered hitherto is required (see Fig. 2.1). The framework presented
here seeks to combine an approach that reflects the importance of central agencies
in driving and determining policy agendas, such as the central governments in
2 Education Policy: Development and Enactment—The Case of Human Capital 33
Organisational Principles
• Targets set and success criteria defined
• Management and leadership developed
Policy • Patterns of control established
enactment
Operational Practices and Procedures
• Organisational procedures determined
• Monitoring mechanisms established
• Second order values mediate policy
nation states, but also to recognize the potential for policy to be contested and medi-
ated at the levels of both development and enactment. In some approaches to policy
analysis, the terms policy formulation and policy implementation are frequently
used (Bell and Stevenson 2006). Here a somewhat different terminology has been
adopted. Instead of formulation and implementation, the terms development and
enactment have been used. This is because the use of the terms formulation and
implementation reinforces the erroneous view that these are discrete elements of a
policy process in which both are connected, but in an overly simplified form (Bowe
et al. 1992). Within the framework presented here the term Policy Development is
used to challenge the notion that policy is made in rational ways. For similar rea-
sons, implementation has been replaced with a term deployed by Ball et al. (2011),
namely enactment because enactment conveys the contested nature of policy imple-
mentation. Ball et al. (2011) refer to the complex process of enactment by which
different types of policy become interpreted, translated, reconstructed and remade
in different but similar settings. Hence, the term captures the sense of a contested
process in which anticipated outcomes and experienced realities are often divergent.
The first element within policy development, the socio-political environment, is
the context in which policies begin to be framed. The wider socio-political environ-
ment provides the forum for ideological and philosophical debates and contested
discourses from which the organization of education is derived. It shapes the con-
text within which policy is framed and enacted and incorporates the emerging dis-
courses of policy development, with a particular focus on the specific way in which
policy problems are presented. It is the dominant discourses of the time, therefore,
which formulate the overarching guiding principles that shape policy and which
provide the languages in which policy is couched and the criteria by which policy is
legitimated and evaluated. Hence these dominant discourses are reflected in the
three subsequent levels of this framework.
34 L. A. Bell
are implicit within this framework are by no means one-directional, but it is impor-
tant to recognize the extent to which power resides centrally within systems.
Moreover, within the framework, there is no intention to convey a tidy correspon-
dence between the levels within the framework and any levels of governance struc-
tures. Rather there is a need to recognize within this framework a tension between
the dominance of global discourses and the resistances of local cultural contexts.
For example the role of the nation state is clearly pivotal, but in what ways do the
apparatuses of individual nation-states relate to the wider questions of global power?
Within nation-states what are the relationships of power between central govern-
ment and governance at the level of regions, localities and individual institutions?
This framework is a testament to the complex nature of education policy. By
applying this framework, it is possible to explore many different issues, some of the
most significant of which are the tensions in the discourses that shape educa-
tion policy:
• Between globalization and the needs of nation states
• Between welfare values and neo-liberalism
• Between the competing demands of centralization and decentralization
These tensions and discourses create contested and challenging environments
within which the policies, governance, leadership and management of public educa-
tion, as well as the work of those in educational institutions, are located. It can be
seen, therefore, that an analysis of the debates within the socio-political environ-
ment that give rise to educational policy can facilitate a detailed understanding of
the policy development and enactment processes. The strategic direction and orga-
nizational principles provide further insight into the text of policy, its aims and
purposes, while an examination of operational practices will focus attention on the
consequences of policy, its interpretation and implementation. Hence the concep-
tion of policy developed here is one that rarely lends itself to neat and simple models.
The discourses that shape educational policy tend to be derived from perceptions
about the overall purposes of the educative process. Spring (2011) addresses the
questions of educational purpose by identifying three different dimensions of pur-
pose—the political, social and economic. He argues that the political purpose of
education is to help young people to become engaged participants within the politi-
cal structures of society and to be able to function as citizens in a liberal democratic
system. The social purposes of education relate to those aspects of education that
shape the social form and structures of society—this may include reducing inequali-
ties for example or promoting social cohesion. The economic purposes of education
in turn focus on developing the labour force at the level of both the individual and
the collective. Capital requires labour in appropriate numbers, and of appropriate
quality, and the education system has a key role to play in meeting these needs.
36 L. A. Bell
These issues have a much wider application across national borders and across edu-
cational phases. Not only are they universal in the sense that they might provide a
focus for educational processes anywhere, but they are also global in the sense that
such issues are increasingly being addressed, at a global level. Understanding this
link between global discourses and the lived experiences of educators and students
in individual schools, colleges and universities is the essence of policy analysis.
It follows that there are a broader set of questions to be asked about education—
what is education for? What are its purposes? And how best might it be organized in
order to most effectively meet these objectives? Such questions are inevitably politi-
cal as they are fundamentally bound up with wider questions about the nature of the
society. It is important therefore to recognize that whatever the detail being consid-
ered, whether it is a government minister determining the content of a statutory cur-
riculum, or classroom teachers exercising some choice over what they teach in their
lesson the next day, the starting point for an analysis of these issues derives from a
much more fundamental set of questions. What is to be taught? What might count as
official knowledge (Apple 2000)? And, critically, who decides? The first two ques-
tions focus on the content of education, but the third question raises a wider set of
questions about processes. What are the mechanisms by which educational decisions
are made? What is the balance of power between the government minister and the
classroom teacher and who else might have a say in that decision—business, the com-
munity, parents or indeed the students? How should such interests be represented?
However, the value differences that underpin these questions are often not recog-
nized, and the current educational provision, whatever it may be, is presented as the
desired norm. Education is too often thought of as simply the delivery of neutral
knowledge to students. In this discourse, the fundamental role of schooling is to fill
students with the knowledge that is necessary to compete in today’s rapidly chang-
ing world as cost-effectively and as efficiently as possible. Hence, there are a num-
ber of significant themes which shape education policy debates within the
socio-political environment and from which values and discourses are derived. The
drive to develop human capital, the promotion of citizenship and pursuit of social
justice and questions of accountability, autonomy and choice, for example, these
must be placed in the context of the wider, international context shaped by one
dominant theme within the social and political environment that of globalization
(Bell and Stevenson 2006).
The drive to find out what works and how best to achieve the maximum return on
investment become critical issues when education is seen as central to surviving and
thriving—whether it be for individuals or whole nations. Education is perceived to
be pivotal to economic success in a global economy in which knowledge is consid-
ered the key to competitive advantage. At the same time education is seen as essen-
tial for preparing young people for the worlds in which they live—worlds that are
characterized by diversity, complexity and rapidity. Not surprisingly, therefore, any
review of the education policy objectives of governments around the world will
often reveal a remarkable commonality of language and aspirations. In Singapore, a
country considered extremely high performing in global terms, the government
argues that the task of schools and tertiary institutions is to give young people the
chance to develop the skills, character and values that will enable them to take
Singapore forward in this future (Singapore Ministry of Education 2012). The
Ministry of Education in Kenya aspires to a quality education that will produce
Kenyans with globally competitive skills, thus providing the requisite manpower
required to drive the country to middle income status by 2030 (Kenya Ministry of
Education 2008). Increasingly, therefore, the purposes of educational policy are
framed in terms of preparation for a globalized world, but education itself is increas-
ingly shaped by globalized considerations. Global imperatives are shaping local
provision (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). Nevertheless, national governments play a key
role in shaping the educational provision in individual national states.
If, as Verger et al. (2012) argue, globalization is based on increasing international
interdependence, then how does globalization begin to frame the issues raised for
those who make and implement educational policy. At its simplest, globalization
might be considered to refer to a ‘shrinking world’ in which lives are increasingly
integrated with those of others who live elsewhere in the world. As a consequence,
through global networks of decision-making, trade and communication, events in
any one location have an impact elsewhere (Giddens 1990). There is nothing new
about the concept of international trade, or the movement of peoples around the
world. However, the sheer reach, pace and scale of these current developments mark
globalization out as something distinctive and new (Held and McGrew 1999). If this
is the case, then a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of globalization
is required. This can be supported by distinguishing between globalization in its
cultural, political and economic forms (Bottery 2000; Olssen et al. 2004)
• Cultural globalization has been described as the expansion of culture to all cor-
ners of the globe, promoting particular values that support consumerism and
capital accumulation (Olssen et al. 2004). The trend to cultural globalization is
often associated with increasing standardization. Perhaps this is most clearly
illustrated by the profile, and market dominance, of global brands that assert a
powerful influence in shaping our identities as consumers.
• A key feature of political globalization is the emergence of supra-national insti-
tutions of governance whose power and influence have been at the expense of
individual nations. Such institutions might include the United Nations, the World
Trade Organization and the European Union. Hence, it is argued, sovereign
38 L. A. Bell
Thus, globalization is not a unified and coherent movement but consists of a number
of loosely interconnected global trends that appear to have a significant influence on
the shaping of educational policy in many countries. The most important of these is
economic globalization which sets the context for other forms of globalization since
its language is increasingly used to describe their activities—it captures their
discourses (Bottery 2004).
Economists have long argued that people are an important part of the wealth of
nations. It is assumed that individuals’ self-interest will be served by personal
investment in the acquisition of qualifications and relevant experience. At the level
of the individual, therefore, an approach to education based on human capital would
indicate that people invest the level of time and effort in education that they believe
they should, based on their view of their future earning potential and of all the con-
ceivable benefits which could possibly be derived from investment in human capi-
tal. The human capital approach to educational policy at the national level works on
the assumption that there is a national economic benefit to be gained from education
and from having an educated and skilled work force. As Leadbetter (1999) argues,
the generation, application and exploitation of knowledge are driving modern eco-
nomic growth so it is necessary to release potential for creativity and to spread
knowledge throughout the population. In many social systems, education is regarded
as the main process by which such transformations might take place, although the
issues surrounding which skills and knowledge are to be acquired, by whom and
who makes those decisions often lack clarification. Education is viewed as an
investment in human capital that has both direct payoffs to the educated individual
and external benefits for society as a whole. How then, does human capital theory
inform educational policy?
The impact of human capital theory on educational policy can best be identified
by examining the socio-political environment which provides the impetus for
policy-making and from which, in most instances, the legitimation for that policy
stems. The languages of legitimation used to present and justify educational policy
(Bell 1989), reflect the dominant discourses within the socio-political environment.
Thus, in the last half century in most pluralistic societies, the discourse within the
socio-political environment has been dominated by the struggle between economic
individualism and social collectivism as determinants of social organization. Hence,
educational policy is shaped by and located within the context of the outcomes of
debates in the wider socio-political environment. The language in which that policy
is expressed is derived directly from its dominant discourse. Within this context, a
range of social and political influences have combined to establish economic func-
tionality as the dominant discourse underpinned by reference to individualistic lan-
guages of legitimation based on a belief in the efficacy of market forces as a
mechanism for social organization and in the capacity of education to supply appro-
priately skilled labour for employment. The outcome of this, as far as education is
concerned, is exemplified by the use of principles derived from economics generally
and from human capital theory in particular, to legitimize educational policy and, in
many countries, to underpin the use of elements of the market place to structure
decision-making and resource allocation.
The nature of such education policy, its overall content and the strategic direction
that defines the shape of policy are also derived from that wider environment. It is
widely recognized, for example, that in most countries where education is subject in
2 Education Policy: Development and Enactment—The Case of Human Capital 41
any way to market forces, then those forces do not constitute a free market in the
sense that total deregulation applies. Rather, the education market is a quasi-market
in which the market functions within an overall system in which the state retains an
important role. Where the operation of the education market is informed by human
capital theory, the role of the state is to determine the nature and mix of skills and
knowledge that the system is required to produce while still retaining elements of
market forces such as a mechanism for resource allocation, competition between
institutions and the ability of parents to exercise choice. Reliance is placed largely
on the language of economics to formulate success criteria. Reference is frequently
made to efficiency, effectiveness, quality, value for money, choice and economic
development. Human capital theory produces, in particular, an emphasis on the
inter-relationship between individual choices, the demands of the labour market for
specific skills and economic growth.
Organizational principles define, for example, the limits of autonomy, the pat-
terns of accountability and the procedures for assessment and quality control.
Educational institutions must respond to the specific demands from the centre to
produce particular forms of outputs in terms of students with predetermined skills
and abilities that will sustain and enhance economic development in their particular
country. In order to achieve this, some form of central control over educational pro-
vision will operate. This might be based on tightly defined and rigidly assessed
curriculum content and pedagogy, an extensive inspection process, detailed report-
ing processes, the assessment of pupil learning outcomes and teacher performance
or a combination of all of these factors. Here the content and the consequences of
the policy overlap because pedagogy, curriculum content and forms of assessment
must be appropriate for the production of these outcomes.
The operational practices are linked to these organizational principles which are
usually centrally determined. These are the activities which contribute to the formu-
lation of internal policies that will enable the institution to deliver an appropriately
skilled and trained set of students, the day-to-day organization of schools, the spe-
cifics of decision-making and the nature and extent of delegation of responsibilities.
Thus, within schools, the key factors in determining the nature of the operational
practices and the structuring of responsibilities are the principal/teacher relation-
ships and the arrangements for decision-making in the school. Once these are estab-
lished, the nature of the curriculum and its content, pedagogy and assessment, the
roles of individual teachers, the mechanisms for reporting to and involving parents,
the internal management of the school, and mechanisms for establishing relation-
ships with the external environment can be established (see Fig. 2.2).
The main institutional consequences of all these are the extent to which the ideo-
logical move to construct education as a market place is successful together with the
necessity for schools to promote a positive image based on performance indicators
such as examination results. The implication of this is that both students and parents
are partners in the educational enterprise. As a result, parents who were once
regarded as passive supporters have changed into active participants as informed
consumers in the educational market place. Education has become a commodity
with both the individual and the state as consumer, the individual seeking to
42 L. A. Bell
Organisational Principles
• Patterns of accountability
• Outputs clearly defined
Policy • Control mechanisms
Enactment Operational Practices and Procedures
• Outcomes drive curriculum and
assessment
• Leadership and management
• Parents as partners
maximize personal benefit and the state seeking to maximize economic growth and
development. This emphasis on human capital on educational policy is based on the
assumption that education is the most effective route to economic well-being for
any society through the development of the skills of its population. Consequently,
education is regarded as a productive investment rather something intrinsically
valuable in its own right.
In practice, however, the relationship between education and national economic
success is anything but straightforward (Miidlewood and Abbott 2017). While the
importance of skills for employment and economic development has featured heav-
ily in much educational policy making, doubtful definitions of appropriate sets of
values and of relevant skills pervade such policies (Bowl 2012). This is partly
because, as Bowles and Gintis (1976) have argued, education policy based on
human capital closely reflects the perceived needs of industrial society for workers
with particular skills and, at the same time, illustrates the role of the state in ensur-
ing that such a work force is available. These perceived needs, however, may not
accurately reflect the actual needs which tend to be too dynamic to predict accu-
rately. Even if such predictions can be made, the educative process may be too
inflexible to deliver a workforce with the precise balance of skills and abilities
required. Hence, the interconnection between human capital and educational policy
has its limitations which can be found at each of the four levels of the analytical
model and are sufficient to cast doubt on the efficacy of the human capital approach
to education as a sufficient legitimization for the structuring of the educative process
in most societies.
At the level of the socio-political environment, the extent to which the funda-
mental tenets of human capital theory pertain to the educative process is open to
question. It is far from certain that there is an economic benefit to be gained from
2 Education Policy: Development and Enactment—The Case of Human Capital 43
there is a major concern in Pacific Rim countries about the lack of critical thinking,
creativity and innovative skills amongst students. The lack of such skills is widely
regarded as one of the contributing factors to the recent decline in the Tiger
Economies (OECD 1996). As Bassey (2001) recognizes, the over-riding emphasis
of human capital theory on the role of education in contributing to economic com-
petitiveness results in a set of pedagogical strategies linked to a narrow conceptual-
ization of school improvement and effectiveness that ultimately are antithetical to
the demands of a high skill economy. In other words, human capital, when applied
to education, contains the seeds of its own failure. Thus, from a human capital per-
spective, the management of learning becomes problematic in itself since it can
produce:
• Reductionism—the curriculum is split into a limited number of key areas.
• Positivism—science and mathematics became pre-eminent in the curriculum at
the expense of the arts and humanities.
• Rationalism—values formation becomes an incidental rather than a central part
of the curriculum.
• Quantifiability—the curriculum and assessment focus on what is measurable. …
The measurable is safer to handle than the intangible … As a result the intuitive,
the expressive, the unmeasurable, the subjective and the intensely personal have
never found a satisfactory place in the curriculum. (after Beare 2001: 39–40)
Thus, the processes of managing teaching and learning created by an emphasis
on the human capital approach to education fail to acknowledge the complexity of
school organization and the development of effective teaching and learning. This
reductionist view of education is rooted in human capital justifications for the entire
educational enterprise.
The links made between educational, human and economic development, there-
fore, produce an excessively utilitarian approach to schooling that can lead to an
inappropriate narrowing of educational objectives and processes because of the
emphasis on national economic competitiveness (Kam and Gopinathan 1999). The
human capital justification for the structuring of educational provision has produced
an excessive instrumentalism in the curriculum:
Instrumentalism has produced the competencies movement; it has affected the curriculum,
producing concepts like ‘key learning areas’, as though learning is not legitimate unless it
is information-driven and packaged into traditional subjects … It has driven the outcomes
approach to schooling, a concentration on tests, the publication of school-by-school results
and ‘league tables’.(Beare 2001: 18)
These operational practices are all control devices to compel schools and colleges to
concentrate on utilitarian outcomes linked to economic productivity and the
demands of the labour market. Consequently younger children must become profi-
cient in the basic skills of literacy and numeracy while their older siblings need to
enhance their skills through an emphasis on information technology, science and
mathematics. In tertiary colleges and universities, the focus shifts to that of the
knowledge-based economy and lifelong learning to respond to the changing
2 Education Policy: Development and Enactment—The Case of Human Capital 47
demands of the work place (Bassey 2001). It is evident that the narrowing of the
focus of education in Singapore, for example, has helped to create an education
system that produces students who are excellent at passing examinations but very
limited when it comes to creative thinking and the development of enterprise (Ng
1999). The STU noted that, in Singaporean education: ‘The emphasis was on results.
We bred a generation of Singaporeans who were examination smart … but we killed
the joy of learning’ (Singapore Teachers’ Union 2000: 1).
The present global emphasis on developing human capital within a market or
economic development paradigm, therefore, is based on a model of education pol-
icy that is deeply flawed in a number of ways. At the socio-political level, the human
capital discourse of legitimation is both confused about the extent to which indi-
viduals can and do make educational choices based on human capital criteria and
unconvincing about the degree to which investment in human capital does contrib-
ute to economic development. At the strategic level, the concentration on economic
utility of education at the expense of its many other contributions may have adverse
consequences for both society and the individuals within it. The organizational prin-
ciples that shape the relationship between human capital and education produce
organizational structures that mitigate against the development of the very skills that
may be required to meet future economic challenges while the related operational
practices lead to inappropriate forms of leadership and a reductionist approach to
teaching and learning to the ethical dimensions of leadership and the wider issues of
morality and social justice at a school level. Thus, human capital as the sole legiti-
mation for the educative process in any society has severe limitations and may be
counter-productive.
2.7 Conclusion
It can be seen therefore that human capital theory when applied to the educative
process leads to education being treated as a private consumable, a commodity or a
positional good in the market place at both individual and state level (Bottery 2004).
The rationale for change and re-structuring in education is largely cast in economic
terms, especially in relation to the preparation of the workforce and repositioning
national economies to face international competition (Levin 2003). The impact has
been significant:
leading to changes in management processes and organization, institutional cultures (at all
levels) and in perspectives on a wide range of dimensions of education from teaching and
learning, to resource management and external relations. (Foskett 2003: 180)
Nevertheless, as has been argued above, human capital theory as the sole legitima-
tion for educational policy has severe limitations such that its outcomes may be
counter-productive. It has produced a situation in which education has become
merely a way of increasing the value of human labour. This fails to recognize that
both education and labour are more than commodities and that they are value-driven
48 L. A. Bell
The deployment of the four-level framework for policy analysis presented in this
chapter can highlight the fundamental contradictions inherent in much educational
policy by exploring the precise nature of the languages of legitimation political
discourses that are evident in the wider socio-political environment. By linking
these discourses to the evolving governance and strategic directions that emerge
from policy development the framework can help to establish both consistencies
and inconsistencies in the policy development process. The framework, by explor-
ing how organizational principles that are derived from the overall strategic direc-
tions within the policy, helps to illuminate where the conflicts in policy enactment
might emerge. It can also go some way towards identifying consistencies and incon-
sistencies between organizational principles and operational practices and, in so
doing, demonstrate the complex, contested nature of educational policy.
References
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Chapter 3
Elites and Expertise: The Changing
Material Production of Knowledge
for Policy
Jennifer T. Ozga
The terms ‘experts’, ‘expertise’ and ‘knowledge’ are used frequently in current dis-
cussion by policymakers and in academic literature on policymaking in education
and other fields, though often in loosely defined or contradictory ways. Experts face
criticism as enemies of the free flow of information, as anti-democratic, serving
vested interests and conspiring against society to protect economic and political
elites against challenges to their power and interests. Experts are, nevertheless,
invoked frequently by policymakers in support of specific policy directions, yet also
castigated by them for their failure to provide coherent, incontrovertible and ‘action-
able’ knowledge (Grundmann and Stehr 2012: 19). At the same time as the public is
confidently told that policy can now be based securely on objective scientific fact,
policymakers state that society ‘has had enough of experts’ (see, e.g., Michael
Gove, then Secretary of State for Education in England, quoted in Clarke and
Newman 2017: 1).
The revolt against ‘expertise’ is illustrated in current popular and media hostility
to ruling elites, to ‘normal’ politics, and is brought into sharp focus in the UK by
Brexit and its aftermath, including political, media and public hostility to EU
bureaucrats and those seeking to maintain Europe’s four freedoms. Bureaucracy or
perhaps, more accurately, technocracy is represented in the media and in populist
discourse as dominated by economic agendas and bureaucratic logic, in a context
where nation states seem less able to act independently of global capital and are
increasingly subject to the authority of supranational institutions (Jessop et al. 2008;
Bevir 2013; Grek 2015; Hartong 2015).
I should note that I am not engaging here with debates about the nature of scien-
tific knowledge nor with competing models of the policy–knowledge relationship.
J. T. Ozga (*)
Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: jennifer.ozga@education.ox.ac.uk
Previous research with colleagues in the project ‘knowandpol’1 suggests that poli-
cymakers and scientists follow opposing logics: as Demsky and Nassehi put it, sci-
ence is based on ‘debating, doubting and rejecting knowledge claims’ (2014: 113),
while policy:
… obeys a diametrically opposed logic. Policy is a practice of making visible and identifi-
able decisions that are supposed to change the social world. In such a context, the admission
of doubt is fatal. (2014: 113)
There are too many people involved in this research to list here, but I owe a particular debt to Luis
2
Miguel Carvahlo, John Clarke, Sotiria Grek, Martin Lawn, Joakim Lindgren, Linda Ronnberg and
Eric Mangez.
3 Elites and Expertise: The Changing Material Production of Knowledge for Policy 55
5. Experts and consultants, as well as key actors in education (e.g. inspectors) are
responsible for translating coded knowledge and are also ‘coded’ by data.
6. Their work is thus increasingly ‘political work’, but its politics is concealed in
the processes of knowledge production and exchange.
To elaborate, nation state-centred governing is in decline, hierarchical organisa-
tion and formal regulation are increasingly displaced by networks and standards,
and formal policy actors are replaced by a diversity of actors, public/private hybrids
and non-formal actors (consumers, third-sector members, media) and guided in
action by data. In the context of increasing involvement of new actors—especially
corporate actors like Pearson and McKinsey—in data production and use, data sys-
tems enable relations to be established between political and other authorities, offer
ways of forming and maintaining these connections and supply devices and tech-
niques that make tactical aims practical (Rose and Miller 1992). Data systems cre-
ate governing assemblages that shape individual conduct while apparently enabling
autonomous, choice-making activity. These data are public—they are described as
‘transparent’; they are no longer produced for and distributed among the bureau-
cratic elite but distributed among and doing political work in the wider population,
not only for politicians and civil servants. Local government and schools that used
to be relatively closed to public and central government scrutiny are now rendered
visible and calculable (Ozga et al. 2011: 92). Data expressed as public rankings,
league tables and PISA results are both ‘official and popular’ knowledge forms, and
so, as Piattoeva (2014) argues, we can see them as doing political work; for example
enabling and consolidating control over a wide network of actors and institutions—
local authorities, schools and teachers included.
The ‘popular’ work they do is make connections to individual citizens/learners/
pupils in such a way as to steer or mediate their decisions and actions in the econ-
omy, family sphere and any other aspect of everyday life (cf. Rose and Miller 1992:
180). Data thus ‘make people up’—make them visible and encourage people to
think of themselves in particular ways—to classify themselves. In schooling, data
act powerfully on individuals and groups through their predictive capacities, and
individuals accept and work with this information, becoming engaged in their own
production. Digital data construct schools as ‘computational’ projects. Here, the
‘modelling’ of education through digital data fosters a sense of algorithmically
driven ‘systems thinking’ through which complex (and unsolvable) social problems
associated with education can be seen as complex (but solvable) statistical problems.
This new governing–knowledge relationship creates a demand for new skills and
new kinds of work from particular groups of actors who are positioned at key points
of intersection of knowledge production and practical problem-solving. Such work
demands skills in translating information into ‘practical knowledge’, mediating
conflict and brokering interests (Clarke et al. 2015). There is a growing literature on
the influence, interconnections and work of networks of experts (Ball and Junemann
2012; Shiroma 2014), who promote cognitive consensus among policymakers based
on the linked processes of simplification of large volumes of information and the
dominance of international comparison as a basis for policy (Ozga 2015). The rapid
56 J. T. Ozga
growth of experts, advisers and consultants in education arises from the rapid expan-
sion of data-based knowledge; simplification strengthens the trend towards com-
parison and the search for ‘actionable knowledge’ derived from patterns in
comparative data, and also increases the influence of analysts and gives consider-
able power to those who can interpret data and identify those ‘levers for action’
(Grundmann and Stehr 2012: 20–21) that make political action easier.
These experts are ‘more than the diffusers of ideas; they develop conceptual
knowledge in order to promote educational reforms, drawing on their substantial
experience as policy advisers to governments and IOs’. Moreover, ‘their attributes
as experts and consultants tend to obscure the ideological and political dimension of
their activities of knowledge production for policy’ (Shiroma 2014: 2).
Despite the claims of big data proponents (see, e.g. Anderson 2008), data do not
speak for themselves but contain coded policy choices and require interpretation.
The political nature of that interpretation is often concealed, as Shiroma points out,
because the label ‘expert’ confers scientific status and authority. Concealment of the
political work that expertise does is also enabled because much of the activity
around data involves the application of rules, standards and processes stored in
algorithms and technical formulae that mobilise the particular preferences of their
creators and are applied without explicit reference to the choices they contain
(Higgins and Larner 2012: 7). As Williamson (2016: 4) puts it: ‘Digital software
technologies, data systems and the code and algorithms that enact them have become
powerful yet largely hidden influences in the governing of education’.
A focus on the political work that data do draws attention to the processes of
brokering and translation that are key in data work for policy and to the kinds of
experts who are doing this work in particular institutions with their own work cul-
tures, technical capacities and interests. The growth of this form of expertise is
recognised as a transnational phenomenon, with experts increasingly working
between national and transnational arenas, and claiming status as a ‘new governing
elite’ (Stone 2013: 41 Lawn and Grek 2012: 75) also described as a ‘magistracy of
influence’ (Lawn and Lingard 2002: 292) and a new ‘European technocracy’
(Normand 2016: 129).
These groups operate globally to promote convergence in education policymak-
ing through the construction of models of education systems that are claimed to be
simultaneously effective, efficient and equitable. A global convergence of educa-
tional and cultural worlds is understood as an inevitable facet of modernity driven
by the logic of technology, science and the idea of progress that is, ultimately,
dependent on scientific advance. The authority of science is invoked to sustain this
approach, but, as Dale points out, the idea of science that is invoked here fails to
acknowledge that ‘scientific authority’ does not in itself ensure acceptance of mod-
els, without reference to ‘the set of political conditions’ under which they are
advanced (Dale 2000: 445). Nor is it attentive to the related recognition that scien-
tific knowledge is produced, accepted and contested in specific contexts (Connell
2007; Demszky and Nassehi 2014).
In the next section, I want to highlight the contrast between the research findings
summarised above, drawn from work on the impact of performance data on the
3 Elites and Expertise: The Changing Material Production of Knowledge for Policy 57
governing of education, and which reveals the speed and power of data to shape
relations and practices, and the almost data-free landscape that characterised the
research environment of policymaking from the 1940s to the 1970s and 1980s. Here
I am drawing on a database of interviews that I have carried out with policymakers
from the 1970s onwards, some of which were retrospective, and some of which
have been the basis of earlier publications (see, e.g. Gewirtz and Ozga 1990, 1994).
Returning to that period demands attention to changes in what Dale identifies as the
‘political conditions’ of knowledge production and also draws attention to change
in the material conditions of knowledge production, highlighting how changes in
knowledge technologies—which may be summarised as a shift from paper-based
knowledge to digital data—impact on the nature and composition of education pol-
icy elites. By material conditions of production is meant attention to (1) the social,
political and economic relations that structure work (including knowledge produc-
tion) and (2) the instruments and material artefacts seen as ‘key bearers’ of knowl-
edge (Freeman and Sturdy 2014).
A return to the policy world of the 1940s–1980s, through exploring and re-analysing
interview and textual data, is also a revisiting of my own past as a researcher and
administrator. I was an administrator in the headquarters of the National Union of
Teachers in the 1970s, and a researcher at the Open University in the 1980s, and in
both of these work contexts, I was able to record interviews with policymakers, in
the case of the OU as part of the study of education policy, and for the NUT as part
of my work in gathering and analysing knowledge to help support Union officers. In
this period work in educational organisations had much in common in respect of
organisational practices and cultures, which were often modelled on civil service
norms and practices. The NUT—a major player in policy in the 70s, but about to
enter a turbulent period and a decline in influence—was deliberately constructed to
parallel the structure of the Ministry (later the Department) of Education in England.
It had the same organisation of responsibilities as the Ministry, and its local organ-
isation reflected the organisation of the Local Education Authorities, then respon-
sible for local provision of schooling and other education services. In their design
and assumptions, the Union’s working practices were also a reflection of the
Ministry’s in that NUT administrators were understood to provide the objective
knowledge resources that informed the practical policymaking activity of the
Union’s elected officers (just as officials in Whitehall were said to act without bias
but draw on experience in informing politicians).
In thinking about knowledge production at that time, it is important to remember
that the 1970s are pre-digital. There is no Internet and no email and communications
work through telephone and post, or person to person. Letters are still often hand-
written or dictated, then typed by clerical staff (who keep and file duplicates).
Copying is messy and tedious, large-scale production of material (policy documents,
58 J. T. Ozga
research reports) has to be printed in systems that do not allow for easy correction
or revision. Photocopying developed in the 1980s and laser printing by the mid to
late 1980s, and word processing then arrived and became widespread in the 1990s.
These changes in information technology bring huge changes in work organisation
(which are discussed, e.g. in Fox and O’Connor 2015, Zammuto et al. 2007). But
the dominant instruments of knowledge accumulation and distribution in the period
up to the late 1980s are paper-based and need people to construct their content. This
paper-based material is heavy, and it is not the weightless, flexible, transportable
material of digital data moving around the Internet—it requires physical manipula-
tion and categorisation in order to do knowledge work. Storing and retrieving paper-
based data is a skill that is both demanding and very time consuming, which requires
attention to and design of hierarchies of importance, that relate to hierarchies of
work organisation. So, for example, the listing of educational ‘plant’ (buildings and
equipment) and salary costs constitutes the basic data for system management: the
recording of examination data is not centralised and does not include the whole
school population. Paper is the medium through which information is gathered: for
example the NUT carried out frequent paper-based surveys as a way of informing
the direction of policy and keeping in touch with its (then) 300,000 strong member-
ship. These surveys had to be constructed, distributed and analysed in paper form.
These processes obviously shaped the kinds of knowledge that was produced, for
example in the Union’s development of responses from members or local officers
about education policy. These queries arrived as letters, which had to be recorded
and classified, so that they could be directed to the appropriate source of informa-
tion, from which a reply could be drafted for official signature. Responses also
needed to be classified and recorded. This activity gradually created a knowledge
base among those engaged in it, who developed knowledge of the policy ‘line’ on
current issues.
Importantly, that knowledge base depended heavily on precedent. Precedent also
guided Committee decisions, and perhaps the power of precedent was most vividly
illustrated at the Union’s Annual Conference. This was, and still is, its main policy-
making forum where membership and officers debate and decide policy directions.
In the 1970s, administrative staff were responsible for transporting to the Conference
site all potentially relevant materials relating to current debates, packed in a large
wicker hamper, so that they could retrieve the correct materials that guided action.
The point here is that this form of knowledge production, which also character-
ised the work of the Department of Education and the Local Education Authorities,
was strongly shaped by past practice. The past was the source of guidance for action
in the present, the future barely featured. The production of knowledge was shaped
by the very concrete knowledge forms (files, memoranda, log books) that guided the
present. These were ‘heavy’ but not inert, as they became actionable through the
interaction of the paper archive (i.e. in Freeman and Sturdy’s terms, the inscribed
knowledge) with the embodied knowledge of experienced administrators and offi-
cers (Freeman and Sturdy 2014).
Examination of the material production of knowledge in the Ministry/Department
of Education in the period up to the 1980s in England reveals that the preferred form
3 Elites and Expertise: The Changing Material Production of Knowledge for Policy 59
From where we are now, these procedures seem painfully slow and startlingly
removed from connection with the public (or with public representatives). Indeed,
even in the 1970s, and especially after the oil crisis of 1979, there was pressure for
change on stately education bureaucracies. These pressures came from the OECD,
which characterised policymaking in education in the 1970s in England as secre-
tive, conservative, committed to maintaining the status quo, and as disconnected
from other policy developments (especially those concerned with employment/
skills/economy). A subsequent Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry, at the
height of the oil crisis, demanded reform of the DES, stressing in particular the need
for connections between education and the economy, and for more consultation and
openness, to which the DPS (Weaver again) responded that the DES did not go in
much for consultation because it ‘did not wish to encourage premature speculation’
(Weaver, in House of Commons 1975–1976).
60 J. T. Ozga
The tone of response to external critique and the assumptions that inform it—of
reliance on what is known and reluctance to imagine the future—was challenged
throughout the 1970s in debates about the structures of schooling and about its
capacity to meet different needs (first in relation to gender, then ethnicity) on an
equal basis. That period of debate and disruption was followed by (and perhaps
produced) Thatcher’s ‘reform’ agendas which of course included significant changes
in the Department and in the local government of education too. The Civil Service
Efficiency Unit was established under ex-businessman Derek Rayner in the mid
‘80s to drive cultural change in Whitehall, prioritising technical expertise and
recruiting ‘action oriented thinkers-people who can get things done’. The Civil
Service College was encouraged to develop contacts with top management in busi-
ness and industry, and a new breed of political advisers begin to make their presence
felt. This is happening as word processing becomes widespread, spreadsheets
become the new currency of knowledge exchange, and new public management
ideas are spread through technologies that disrupt the previously tightly bounded
knowledge regimes of education in the public sector, in the Department, in the
LEAs. Here we see a change in the knowledge and expertise that are valorised in
governance—a shift to generic management (Cutler and Waine 1998), where uni-
versal principles are applied across public sector organisations, and generic knowl-
edge and skills are demanded of public servants. Bureaucracies are demonised as
rule bound, and precedent driven, as vulnerable to producer capture. The growth of
new technologies of knowledge production enabled the transmission and reception
of new management practices and beliefs and disrupted the established patterns of
precedent and hierarchy.
The charge of being rule-bound and hierarchical, shaped by precedent and
shared cultural practices, was levelled at another elite group Her Majesty’s
Inspectorate (HMI). Inspection of schools is a peculiarly interesting knowledge-
based governing practice. In summary, in England, it was and is directly observa-
tional of sites and practices. That is, in the case of schooling, inspectors are
empowered (and required) to enter the world of the school and observe what takes
place within it. It is thus embodied evaluation: the inspector is a distinctive type of
agent whose presence is required at the site of inspection and who embodies inspec-
torial knowledge, judgement and authority. Furthermore, it is a form of qualitative
evaluation, involving the exercise of judgement rather than, for example, only the
calculation of statistical regularity or deviation from a performance norm or target,
though the relationship between performance data and judgement has tightened in
recent years (Ozga 2015).
The transformation from the tradition, independence and elite status of Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) to the government agency of the Office for Standards
in Education (Ofsted) in England offers a good illustration of the alignment of key
3 Elites and Expertise: The Changing Material Production of Knowledge for Policy 61
This approach, which prioritised embodied and experiential knowledge, was set
aside when Ofsted was created in 1992, because HMI, which included distinguished
educationalists, were seen by the ‘reforming’ governments of the late 1980s/1990s
as more focused on influencing government than on schools and vulnerable to pro-
ducer capture. Indeed the organisational culture of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate made
a very strong impression on those who encountered it, including this senior member
of the inspectorate, reflecting on the pre-reform culture of HMI:
….it was a certain kind of style I would characterise as militaristic and hierarchical—It was
driven by the sorts of people who came into the inspectorate, certainly in the post-war
period…..it was very, very powerful. I thought it was both very powerful as a means of
inducting people and giving them a very good professional grounding in the business of
inspection. But I was also slightly concerned that it was about adopting a rather small c
conservative set of attitudes and values. …
And I think there was something about the code which you almost had to just discern-it
wasn’t ever really taught….when you looked at the senior ranks that was actually drawn
from a much narrower educational/social stratum, a predominance of people with indepen-
dent school backgrounds-quite a predominance-way out of proportion to what you’d expect
normally. (former HMI)
from it. Ofsted was also a more dispersed organisation, with a smaller core and a
large amount of outsourced employment. In relation to knowledge production, HMI
had put the emphasis on observation and experience, combined with strong sociali-
sation and a shared culture of work, but Ofsted started the move towards criteria, the
use of templates for observation, and from the late 1990s to the present the increas-
ing use of performance data to set the parameters for inspection. These forms of
knowledge production placed substantial constraints on reference to and mobilisa-
tion of experiential or embodied knowledge, as we found in our recent research:
I think in England we have too much data and a lot of the inspectors don’t really understand
it. (…) I mean data—you can make it say anything you want it to and it’s difficult to refute
in an inspection, or to say something different from what the data appear to be saying. (…)
you are in the bottom left hand quadrant. It’s very difficult to say in a report (…) well yes
you are there but in actual fact the school is much better than that-and there are reasons
why, but Ofsted will say, but the data says this. (Contract inspector14)
I think that the last framework was the least professionally orientated, gave inspectors
the least opportunity to use their professional judgement…. because of the algorithms that
existed within it. Ok so if x was a grade one and y was a grade one then z would have to be
a grade one. (Contract inspector 11)
These interviews, and others, stress paper production as the dominant form
through which ideas were disseminated by political advisers operating in groups
like the IEA and Hillgate, but they also draw attention to the importance of networks
of ‘opinion formers’ and to the new, politicised language through which new poli-
cies could be formulated. These are not the internal, silo-based communications of
bureaucracies, nor do the ‘trenchant’ pamphlets use the style and language of
administrative memoranda. Indeed what characterises that influential writing in
favour of education ‘reform’ in this period is the absence of evidence and the
strength of the opinions expressed, as well as a determination to escape from prec-
edent and history.
As a former Director of Education comments, considering the growth of influ-
ence of political advisers:
Well they are bloody frightening, they are. Because they are usually people with very, very
little experience. Very ambitious, so this is only a step on the route. And, very opinionated.
So they will have views about exactly what needs to be done, that will be influenced by the
press, public opinion, and not history. From ‘74 through to ‘79, it was still…. the people
running it [the Department of Education] were old-style civil servants, and they had excel-
lent folk memories of how things had happened. I mean, any sense of history has gone. It’s
gone from the civil service as well.
(Interview TB 2013)
64 J. T. Ozga
This quotation, like much of the data gathered in research over a period of years
with colleagues on the changing nature of knowledge production (Issakyan et al.
2008; Ozga and Lawn 2014), highlights the changing nature of the expertise
involved, the growing influence of the media, and the emphasis placed on ‘action-
able’ knowledge, involving ‘real’-world translation and brokering. This is a long
way from the closed world of administrative memoranda, as the quotation from a
senior civil servant in the Department illustrates:
I am deeply involved in data-interpretation, management, use of, future of….I have been
involved with targets, national curriculum results, what they mean and assessment ….I am
a full time civil servant but importing some external expertise brings some grounding in
reality to policies.
I’ve got people who are crack teachers, crack advisers and they’re talking to children
first-talking to kids first-hand about what went wrong—I think that’s a professional job, not
a civil servant’s job.
(Interview, DfES 2007)
3.4 Discussion
The documentary analysis and interviews that Sharon Gewirtz and I carried out
in the 1980s with retired officials and officers who had been active in post-war
reconstruction of the system, and which are drawn on here, revealed close social
networks (established at particular public schools) and through intermarriage. These
were long-lasting friendships that built mutual recognition and reciprocity and were
further characterised by collective sponsorship of the next generation. These policy
actors were often sustained in their practical policymaking by a shared belief in the
different abilities that they believed to be present in the school population, as indi-
cated by IQ tests. Policymaking was characterised by reference to precedent, dis-
rupted only by some anxiety about pressure for change from ‘below’, especially in
the immediate post-war years (Lawn 1996).
The workings of post-war education policy could best be understood, on the
basis of that earlier research (Gewirtz and Ozga 1990) as the management of a sys-
tem through a group of highly networked individuals who ensured very consider-
able continuity in policy while maintaining their power and control. In classic
Marxist terms, this was a positional elite, ensuring its continuing dominance through
structural domination and shared—if rather implicit—ideological conviction. This
elite shared a capacity to work within structures of domination (including education
systems) in order to pursue their material and social interests—especially those that
supported them in maintaining their position in the face of challenge ‘from below’.
More recent theorisation of elites has challenged structural analysis (in this and
many areas) and focused on horizontal, culturally based forms of power and control,
and on distributed social relations. Indeed elite theory has become rather preoccu-
pied with cultural elites and their shared educational experiences (see, e.g. van
Zanten et al. 2015). There is considerable potential, however, in extending the range
of engagement with elites, including through the lens of expertise and the produc-
tion of policy knowledge, in order to highlight change in elite strategies of knowl-
edge production and to illustrate how they intersect with governing forms. One
effect of the current controversies and the hostility expressed towards elites in popu-
list discourse has been to revive theoretical and empirical work in this area, as politi-
cal scientists and sociologists of policy seek to understand the intersection between
the possession of economic, cultural and political capital and the growth of consul-
tancy, technology and new governing networks (Ball and Junemann 2012; Normand
2016). In the UK, John Scott’s (2008) work has consistently drawn attention to elite
capacity to exercise both structural power through its capacity to store and hold
66 J. T. Ozga
power, while also observing and recognising the fluidity of structures of domination
and their capacity to function as dynamic institutional formations, subject to change
and development. In Reed’s words, such an approach to elites combines the ‘storage
and holding of power’ with the ‘exercise and mobilization of power’ (Reed 2012:
210) including through the knowledge–policy relationship.
In this chapter, I have attempted to explore the growth of new elites (experts)
in conjunction with the growth of data and its dominance in policymaking.
Research conducted since 2006 traces the rise of data, the increasing dependency
of policymakers on data to provide ‘actionable knowledge’ and the parallel growth
of consultancy. In our research on the rise of data in Europe, we identified the
growth of technical expertise and the increased power of technocrats in framing
policy issues and their solutions (Ozga and Grek 2012). More recent research
identifies a European technocracy that is developing ‘epistemic’ governance,
using its skills and capacities to consolidate and extend its authority and power
(Normand 2016: 129).
The contrast with the ‘data-free’ period of the 1970s is evident if we focus on
what Freeman calls ‘the real things, that is, the objects, tools, instruments and arte-
facts’ with which people engage in the practice of policy. These artefacts, as I have
tried to show, are not inert, but structure practices (Fenwick and Edwards 2014).
The artefact or object—an administrative memorandum, an algorithm—expresses
and shapes knowledge, communicates knowledge and codifies it. It carries implicit
and explicit messages, in the 1970s, about the importance of experience, and prec-
edent, in contemporary contexts, about the need for speed and forward-thinking.
The artefacts discussed here do indeed suggest that the elites have changed and that
expertise is located in a different place and takes a different form from that prevail-
ing in the past in England. But such a large question—on the nature of elites—can-
not be ‘answered’ in a short and selective account of research such as this. What I
do suggest, however, is that widening our approaches to policy as a topic, to include
what Thrift (2005) calls ‘mundane materials’ and their active role in producing and
constituting knowledge for policy, will add a missing dimension to our understand-
ing of the role of experts and elites in policymaking.
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Jennifer T. Ozga is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Education, the University of Oxford,
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Visiting Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Edinburgh. Before
Oxford, she was Director of the Centre for Educational Sociology (CES), University of Edinburgh.
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Chapter 4
The National Concept of Education
Quality
Zhenguo Yuan
Education quality has long been debated by education philosophers as what educa-
tion is good (Burbules 2004). In the global practices, many countries have engaged
in exploring how to make learners acquire good education. In the Education Policy
Outlook 2015 published by OECD (2015), about 16% of education reform mea-
sures by the OECD member countries focused on education quality and equity.
“Improving education quality” has become a strategic education reform theme in
China since 2013. It is also the overarching requirement for education in China’s
13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development.1 The period covered by
the Plan is crucial for improving education quality and allowing China to become a
major country in terms of educational scale and impact. It is also the time2 when
education quality improvement is deemed a key task as China reaches a new stage
of development.3
1
The 13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development refers to China’s plans and
arrangements for the major activities of the national economy, science and technology, education,
and social development between 2016 and 2020. It is a major programmatic document that guides
economic and social development.
2
In the past four decades, China’s development mainly relied on investment and consumption, but
with the development of the economy and the progress of society, especially the upgrading of
industry, China’s future development is increasingly dependent on high-quality workers. Because
high-quality education cultivates higher quality workers, it is very important for China to improve
the quality of its education system at this stage.
3
According to the data released by the Chinese Ministry of Education, the gross enrollment rate for
the first three years of pre-school in 2016 was 77.4%, which represents an increase of 12.9% since
2012, surpassing the average level of middle- and high-income-earning countries. Also during this
period, the primary school net enrollment rate was 99.9%, and the junior high school gross enroll-
ment rate was 104.0%. Additionally, the 9-year compulsory education consolidation rate was
93.4%, which is 1.6 percentage points higher than in 2012 and higher than the average for high-
Z. Yuan (*)
Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
e-mail: zgyuan@admin.ecnu.edu.cn
Since the beginning of China’s Reform and Opening-up in 1978, the Chinese
government has released several historic documents of vital importance on educa-
tion, such as the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
China on the Reform of the Educational System (1985), the Guidelines for the
Development and Reform of Education in China (1993), and the National Medium-
and Long-term Education Reform and Development Plan (2010). In the three docu-
ments mentioned above, the word “quality” appears four times, 20 times, and 51
times, respectively, reflecting that education quality has become a policy focus in
China. At present, China is going through a significant period of accelerating educa-
tion development as it transitions from a “big country of education” to a “strong
country of education.” It is necessary and timely to focus more on quality to achieve
better development of education in this new era, which features a more complex
world, fiercer international competition, and increasingly rapid innovation.
“Education quality” is a rich and contentious term, and how to define and improve
education quality may receive contesting answers among students, teachers, schools,
regions, and countries. Therefore, the ways to improve education quality may vary
accordingly. The quality of education can be viewed either from a national perspec-
tive or a local government or school’s perspective. For example, a school may be
most concerned about quality in terms of the school’s academic achievement,
enrollment, and graduation rates. From a macro perspective, such as the national
perspective, the quality of education is more concerned with quantity, structure,
equity, teachers, and innovation. This chapter focuses on the latter perspective,
which is framed as “national concept” of education quality.
4.1 E
nsuring Appropriate Education Quantity Is
the Foundation of Improving Education Quality
The core of education quality ultimately depends on the cultivation of talent (Hill
et al. 2003). Two criteria for quality talent cultivation from the national perspective
may be particularly useful: (1) whether the education system can adapt to the needs
of economic and social development, which is to say, both meet society’s current
demand for talent in specific areas in specific amounts and also anticipate and pre-
pare adequate talent for future development; and (2) whether the education system
can support individual development, that is, both ensure the fostering of students’
habits of mind and skills and provide space for personalized development. On the
national strategic level, there are five key factors that influence and determine edu-
cation quality. Thus, enhancing education quality entails deepening reform to
achieve continuous improvement of the following five factors.
income countries. The gross enrollment rate in high school was 87.5%, which represents an
increase of 2.5 percentage points from 2012, while gross enrollment in higher education was
42.7%, which represents an increase of 12.7 percentage points from 2012, both of which surpass
the average for middle- to high-income countries.
4 The National Concept of Education Quality 73
4.2 Q
uantity: Appropriate Education Quantity Is
the Foundation of Improving Education Quality
In nearly 40 years since Reform and Opening-up, the rapid increase of educational
capacity is the most striking feature and achievement of educational development in
China. During this period, China has fully realized a system of providing 9 years of
compulsory education, with the high school enrollment rate rising from 20 to 87%;
at the same time, the higher education enrollment rate has risen from 3 to 40%.4 Due
to this rapid development, China has transformed from a country known for having
a large population to one known for having skilled workers in many sectors, with
the largest scale of education and the largest number of college students in the
world. In addition to enrollment rates, there have been increases in graduation rates,
passing rates, and excellence rates at all levels of education5; particularly notewor-
thy is the fact that the duration of compulsory education has been adequately
extended.
However, China has not completed its task of quantity development in education,
which undermines education quality from the perspective of producing future high-
quality national workforce. The number of years included in compulsory education
largely determines the quality of education received by students and the overall skill
level of a nation’s workforce. Internationally, the average number of years of com-
pulsory schooling is 9.24, and in high- and middle-income countries is 9.5, but, as
noted, it is only 9 in China (Yuan 2013). An analysis of countries that have success-
fully escaped the “middle-income trap”6 reveals that lengthier period of compulsory
education is a shared contributing factor to their national success. As China is
undergoing this transition, it will be critical to extend compulsory education lower
to preschool education and higher to senior secondary education. With extended
period of compulsory education, the quality of national manpower will be increased
accordingly. However, implementation can be phased, with careful consideration of
rural and remote areas during the expansion.
4
These statistics are taken from the National Statistical Bulletin on National Education Development
in 2016 and do not include data for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Macao
Special Administrative Region, and Taiwan.
5
The graduation rate is the number of persons who completed school divided by the total number
of children of official graduation age. The passing rate is the number of persons who passed a grade
divided by the total number of students in the grade. The excellence rate is the number of students
attaining “excellent” status divided by the total number of students.
6
The World Bank’s East Asia Economic Development Report (2006) sets out the concept of the
“middle-income Trap.” Its basic premise is that few middle-income economies succeed in becom-
ing high-income countries. Instead, most middle-income economies experience stagnant economic
growth because they cannot compete with low-income countries on wages and cannot compete
with rich countries in terms of cutting-edge technological development.
74 Z. Yuan
4.3 E
ducation Structure: Appropriate Structure Is
the Framework of Education Quality
Education structure refers to the coherent conjuncture of the various parts of educa-
tion, including school types, education levels, layout, disciplines and programs, and
so on.7 Ill-structured education would lead to social waste or even social disaster
(e.g., a massive structural unemployment); well-coupled structure of education–
employment–industry would help accelerate social economic development and
improve national competitiveness (Jia and Chu 2012). Thus, from the perspective of
the appropriate education structure, more high-level education does not necessarily
imply better outcomes. The overall structure conditions education quality. Take
South Korea as an example: its higher education enrollment rate reached 84% in
2012, but the country experienced both (1) a large number of unemployed graduates
and (2) a severe shortage of skilled workers, due primarily to a mismatch in skills.
To defuse this issue, the government of South Korea cut its enrollment rate to 73%.
As the South Korean government recognized, education structure is optimal when it
produces skilled personnel in ratios that best suit socioeconomic development needs
(Yuan 2013).
An appropriate conjuncture of basic education and higher education, general
education and vocational education, and public education and private education is
fundamental to optimizing education structure. As China moved into the 2000s, it
made great efforts to promote the balanced development of compulsory education8
and the diversified development of high schools; in higher education, China has
focused on the development of “Double First-Class” (project of world-class univer-
sities and the first-class disciplines in China)9 to enhance quality. Thus, both ele-
mentary and higher education have made great progress. Governments at all levels
have given additional attention to vocational education and continuing education,
7
School types include public education, private education, public–private education, and so on.
Education levels refer to pre-school education, basic education, secondary education, higher edu-
cation, and so on. Layout refers to the layout of educational development between different
regions, cities, and rural areas. Disciplinary structure mainly refers to the proportion of each disci-
pline necessary for balanced development. Programs refer to the proportion of professional talents
in the population.
8
The balanced development of compulsory education means that in the compulsory education
stage, the government needs to allocate educational resources reasonably, improve the overall
quality of teachers, and narrow the gap between the levels of education in schools, urban and rural
areas, and regions. The basic objectives of the balanced development of compulsory education are
as follows: each school meets the standards for operating a school in the country, and the funds for
operating a school are guaranteed; education resources meet the needs of teaching, and curriculum
are fully developed; and teachers’ allocation is reasonable, and teachers’ overall qualifications are
improved.
9
To propel a group of high-level universities and disciplines into the first-class ranks in the world
and at the same time to improve the level of student training, scientific research, and social service
in higher education, the Chinese government proposed a new policy on higher education reform
called “Double First-Class.” This policy was launched in 2015 and formally implemented in 2017.
4 The National Concept of Education Quality 75
which has narrowed the gap between vocational and general education, and school
education and continuing education. Meanwhile, private education has also been
developing, but—compared with general education, pre-service education, and
public education—vocational education, post-vocational education, and private
education are clearly in a disadvantaged position, leaving room for improvement.
The importance of vocational education has gradually understood by Chinese
government and society. However, while the government demonstrates great enthu-
siasm for vocational education, the private sector often fails because it can be diffi-
cult to obtain benefits. Theoretically, vocational education and general education
are simply two different but equal types of education, but in fact vocational educa-
tion is sometimes still treated inferior schooling. In the last decade, due to the dra-
matic increase in funding for vocational education, the difference in per-student
educational expenditure between vocational education and general education in
high school has become rather small. According to education statistics released by
the Chinese government, the total investment in vocational education from 2006 to
2013 increased from 114.1 billion RMB to 345 billion RMB, with an average annual
increase of 17.1%. However, vocational education still faces certain policy barriers
and is far from being respected by all or from being chosen voluntarily by students.
The difference is much more remarkable when it comes to higher vocational
education,10 and thus, it is important to adjust relevant policies, improve standards
for vocational school operations, increase financial investment, and reduce tuition.
Post-employment education,11 to a great extent, has not yet been incorporated
into the national education system by the Chinese government, and thus when edu-
cation is discussed, people generally refer to pre-service education.12 As a society
moves to one of knowledge and intelligence, the number of people engaged in the
knowledge economy grows and the significance of post-vocational education
becomes more evident. A report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) (2012) shows that during times of economic crisis, the
employment rate of young people generally declines and most employees’ incomes
decrease, while the incomes of high-skilled workers rise and the number of jobs
available for them exceeds worker supply. This research demonstrates that the key
competitiveness of a nation lies not in its economy, technology, or population size,
but rather in the skills of its employees and their training. Despite the great impor-
tance of post-employment education, however, the attention devoted to it is insuffi-
cient in China. There is still a lack of a clear legal framework for post-employment
education, and it has long been marginalized in the Chinese education system.
10
Vocational education is divided into secondary vocational education and higher vocational
education.
11
Post-employment education is mainly designed to help workers gain access to professional
knowledge, skills, and professional ethics necessary for them to achieve greater success and pro-
ductivity at their jobs.
12
Pre-service education is aimed at people who are about to embark on their jobs. The main con-
tents cover three aspects: basic working ability, psychological quality, and social common sense
and basic etiquette.
76 Z. Yuan
Worse still, provisions for the funding, professional personnel, and government
responsibility for post-employment education remain very vague. Post-employment
education is currently not even an explicit item in most financial budgets.
The relationship between private education and public education in China has
been evolving in complicated ways. Now their relationship manifests as the private
sector retreating while the state advancing. Through regulation and management,
the government circumscribes rather than supports the development of private edu-
cation. From 1995 to 2005, educational funding in China rose noticeably, and its
source channels were greatly diversified due to the reform of the school operation
and fund-raising system. The proportion of overall educational investment to GDP
increased from 3.09% to 4.55%, of which fiscal and non-fiscal input13 contributed
0.47%, and 0.99%, respectively. During the following 9 years, from 2005 to 2014,
the government strengthened funding for education at all levels, with fiscal invest-
ment greatly increasing, while non-fiscal investment continuously declined: the
ratio of total educational investment to GDP grew from 4.55% to 5.15%, among
which fiscal input contributed 1.36%, while non-fiscal input fell by 0.76%.
According to the China Statistical Yearbook, the Engel coefficient of Chinese urban
residents in 2013 fell by 4.4% compared with 2000, and in rural areas by nearly
12%. However, the structure of Chinese residents’ consumption over the past
10 years shows the opposite trend: during 2000–2013, Chinese residents’ spending
on health care, transportation, communication, and clothing was on the rise, while
education expenditures trended downward, with urban residents’ expenditures
declining from 7.3% to 4.7% and rural residents’ expenditures reducing in half from
10.5% to around 5% (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2013). At present, the
government expects to place emphasis on encouraging and supporting private edu-
cation in policymaking to fulfill the 13th Five-Year Plan commitments of supporting
and regulating the development of private education and encouraging social forces
and private capital to provide diversified education services.14 But great importance
should be attached to boosting the development of for-profit and non-profit private
education so as to meet the rising demands of Chinese parents.
13
Fiscal input means that the government allocates funds raised from social products or national
income to all sectors of the national economy, which is an important part of its fiscal expenditures.
Non-fiscal input refers to the investment by enterprises and individuals that are qualified as inde-
pendent legal persons.
14
In The 13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of
China (2016–2020), published by Central Compilation and Translation Press.
4 The National Concept of Education Quality 77
4.4 E
ducation Equity: Equity Is Integrated to Education
Quality
Education equity is the social justice in the field of education. It has become a wide
belief that a country’s education system should be accessible not just to elites but to
all citizens. Quality and equity exist in a kind of partially symbiotic, partially antag-
onistic relationship. Without quality, education equity only involves equal access to
a shoddy good, while without equity, high-quality education is only open to a
minority. In fact, equity and quality are two sides of a coin, interdependent and
complementary to each other. Education equity is a goal requiring constant effort,
and its development is recognized as having four stages: opportunity equity, fair
conditions, process equity, and outcome equity (Yuan 2015). Coleman (1968) put
forward that one role played by the modern education was to confer valuable certifi-
cates independent of their social-economic status, i.e., the opportunity of social
mobility. Following this argument, Pfeffer (2015) proposed to evaluate education
quality from the provision of equal opportunity to education.
The essence of opportunity equity is that schools can be accessed by everyone—
education for all, without discrimination (Youjiao Wulei有教无类). The core of fair
conditions is operating every school well—balanced development (Junheng Fazhan
均衡发展); the key to process equity is to treat each student equally—to make no
exceptions (Yishi Tongren一视同仁); and the essence of outcome equity is to pro-
vide suitable education for every student—to teach students in accordance with
their aptitudes (Yincai Shijiao因材施教). These four stages are interrelated, com-
plementary, and mutually reinforcing.
“Education for all without discrimination (Youjiao Wulei有教无类)” is an edu-
cational principle that was proposed by Confucius 2500 years ago. In the Education
Law of the People’s Republic of China,15 it is stipulated that “citizens shall enjoy
equal access to education irrespective of their ethnicity, race, gender, occupation,
property status, religious belief, etc.” Education equity starts with the premise that
each child should enjoy access to school education, because without it, a child’s
ability to acquire equal opportunity and welfare will be severely limited.
However, there is a great difference between merely having access to schools and
obtaining quality education. Although 9 years’ compulsory education is offered in
China, different schools may have completely disparate performance. In the last few
years, China has made great efforts and achieved remarkable progress in promoting
education equity in this regard, but the phenomenon of school choice16 in primary
and secondary schools is still widespread, reflecting the disparity of schools’
15
The Education Law of the People’s Republic of China was promulgated and implemented in
1995.
16
School choice means that if education resources are insufficiently balanced, parents should be
able to choose a good school for their children to enjoy a quality education. This requires parents
to pay extra, and in many cases, only families with good financial situations can afford to go to
school.
78 Z. Yuan
o perating conditions. Different schools teach differently, and even students on the
same campus or sitting in the same classroom do not necessarily receive the same
education. One main government measure to promote education equity is to allocate
public education resources to narrow the educational gaps between urban and rural
areas, as well as between different regions and schools, thereby creating a fair edu-
cational environment.
For students, inequity in the school and classroom has a greater and more direct
negative impact on individual development. In this context, the realization of pro-
cess equity involves at least two important issues: how to realize the basic principle
of modern education that every citizen receives an equal education, and how to
ensure equal treatment of every student to guarantee a fair opportunity for learning
and development. This requires meticulous work and greater progress in updating
educational concepts and teacher quality.
As for result equity, it is unrealistic for all students to obtain the same grades and
reach the same level of achievement. Education equity does not mean dragging
people from a high level to a lower one, for instance; on the contrary, it refers to
providing appropriate, individualized education to enable each student to obtain the
best personal development possible and to offer non-discriminatory education to
students from all family backgrounds to weaken the impact of social disparities and
intervene the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
It is noteworthy that across the four stages mentioned above, the question of fair-
ness and justice prevails: special populations must be treated with special care, and
education resources should be prioritized for the disadvantaged. During the 12th
Five-Year Plan period,17 the Chinese government adopted a package plan with vari-
ous measures and took a significant step forward in education equity. Currently, it is
a major trend in China for rural farmers to move to urban areas and become city
residents. Today’s children of migrant workers are tomorrow’s city residents, and
their education and development will shape the future of Chinese cities.
Comparatively speaking, it is more difficult for migrant workers’ children to receive
equal education. Tackling this issue has been a challenge due to inadequate policies.
The free 9 years of compulsory education for the children of nearly ten million
migrant workers has not yet been guaranteed. In particular, in major cities with a
large number of migrant workers, there is a significant gap between urban and rural
students in education quality, owing to restrictions on teaching assignments,18
school scale, and education budgets. Hence, it is imperative to work with sectors of
the community to resolve these problems to ensure equitable social development.
17
The 12th Five-Year Plan period was 2011–2015.
18
Teacher assignment is part of the teacher management system in China. Teachers who have
teacher preparation are full-time staff of the school, similar to civil servants. Their salary is appro-
priated from the state budget, and their jobs are guaranteed and stable.
4 The National Concept of Education Quality 79
4.5 E
xcellent Teachers: Teachers Are Key to Improving
the Quality of Education
4.6 E
ducational Innovation: Innovation Is at the Core
of Improving Education Quality
In today’s world, the knowledge economy is on the upswing and is beginning to take
a leading role in the global economic landscape, continued advances are being made
in economic globalization, international competition has intensified, and applica-
tion of advances in information technology have become increasingly prevalent. As
China reaches a crucial phase in its industrial transformation and upgrade, innova-
tion becomes the primary source of development. As stated in China’s 13th Five-
Year Plan, innovation is at the heart of China’s development and the cultivation of
creative talent is the key to this innovation. However, insufficient capacity for inno-
vation and poor development of creative talent represents China’s greatest weakness
and may even be regarded as the country’s Achilles’ heel.
In 2009 and 2012, certain students in Shanghai participated in the Program for
International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the OECD and obtained
remarkable scores. Topping the rankings in mathematics, science, and reading,
these Chinese students received great attention from the international community.
However, while Chinese students spent the most hours studying, they scored rela-
tively low in problem-solving and imagination (OECD 2012).
Since the resumption of the National College Entrance Examination in 1977,
China has produced more than 3,600 top scorers for all provinces. These students
represent the best talent by Chinese selection and assessment standards, and it is
reasonable to believe that they should accomplish great things after college and
postgraduate education. However, their performance has not lived up to expecta-
tions. “High marks but weak competence (Gaofen Dineng 高分低能)” has been
frequently used to label Chinese high-score students produced from the examination-
oriented education system.
4 The National Concept of Education Quality 81
Currently, the highly selective examination system has been reformed to encour-
age local governments and schools to explore their own characteristics of operating
a school. Innovation of curricula, teaching methods, assessments, and school admin-
istration are also considered in the recent systemic reforms to nurture students’
innovation, which has been taken as a key indicator of quality in the national educa-
tion system.
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National Education Advisory Committee, Deputy Director of General Office of the National
Education System Reform Leading Group and so on.
82 Z. Yuan
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Part II
Education Policy and Reform
Chapter 5
Education Reform Phenomenon:
A Typology of Multiple Dilemmas
Yin Cheong Cheng
5.1 Introduction
Since the end of 1990s, there had been numerous education reforms initiated by
policy-makers in different parts of the world with aims to meet the challenges from
globalization, international competition, technological innovation, and economic
transformation (Cheng and Townsend 2000). To a great extent, education reform
has become a worldwide phenomenon or movement in the last two decades with
strong policy input and implication (Zajda 2015). To countries with different cul-
tural, social, and economic backgrounds, the formulation and implementation of
education reforms for systemic changes may be different in some ways. But in
general, nine common trends of these reforms at the macro, meso, site, and opera-
tional levels can be observed in many countries or areas particularly in the Asia-
Pacific region, such as Australia, Cambodia, PR. China, Hong Kong, India, Japan,
Korea, New Zealand, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore (see, e.g., Baker
2001; Caldwell 2001; Castillo 2001; Cheng 2001a, b; Rajput 2001; Rung 2001;
Sereyrath 2001; Shan and Chang 2000; Sharpe and Gopinathan 2001; Suzuki 2000;
Tang 2001; Townsend 2000; Yu 2001).
According to previous works of Cheng (2005a, Chap. 7) and Cheng and
Townsend (2000) at the turn of new century, the main trends of systemic reforms at
the macro-level include re-establishing a new national vision and educational aims;
restructuring an education system at different levels; and market-driving, privatiz-
ing, and diversifying education. At the meso-level, increasing parental and commu-
nity involvement in education and management is a salient trend. At the site-level,
Parts of materials in this chapter were adapted from Cheng (2005a, 2015a, b, 2017) and Cheng
et al. (2016a).
Y. C. Cheng (*)
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
e-mail: yccheng@eduhk.hk
the major trends are ensuring education quality, standards, and accountability;
increasing decentralization and school-based management; and enhancing teacher
quality and the continuous lifelong professional development of teachers and prin-
cipals. At the operational level, the main trends include using information technol-
ogy in learning and teaching and applying new technologies in management and
making a paradigm shift in learning, teaching, and assessment.
These trends cover nearly all key aspects of an education system and each trend
itself may involve many initiatives and efforts in policy formulation, implementa-
tion, and evaluation. It means that there may be a wide range of new initiatives and
changes to be implemented in a systemic education reform. As a phenomenon, edu-
cation reforms share some interesting features across countries as illustrated below.
In response to serious international competitions, when one country in a region
is initiating education reforms with aims to further enhance its human capital and
competitive capacity in a context of globalization and knowledge economy
(Beetham and Sharpe 2013; Longworth 2013; Ramirez and Chan-Tiberghein 2003),
its regional competitors also launch their reforms and initiate more changes in their
education systems with a hidden agenda to outperform their counterparts in terms
of growing human resources. The international rankings in performance of school
education (such as PISA-OECD (2006, 2009, 2012), etc.) or higher education (such
as Times Higher Education’s (2014–15) World University Rankings ) in the past
two decades are in fact accelerating this tendency and driving the public concerns
and policy dates about performance and reforms in education locally and
internationally.
Given the above context, it is not a surprise that education reforms mutually
influence and widely spread across countries and areas in the world as a part of
globalization or international movements, sharing some common trends and similar
patterns of reform behaviors. For example, education accountability, quality assur-
ance review, school-based management, and marketization in education are com-
mon worldwide initiatives in education reforms (e.g., Figlio and Loeb 2011; Gawlik
2012; Keddie 2015; PISA 2011).
Assuming all initiatives’ intention is good and achievable without taking the cul-
tural and practical conditions into consideration, the policy-makers often make fun-
damental changes at all levels, implement many initiatives in parallel but plan to
achieve them in a very short time. Probably they worry about losing their country
competitiveness if they do not reform as fast as possible (Amdam 2013; Baumann
and Winzar 2016; Fitzsimons 2015). This may be the reason why many countries
implement so many initiatives, covering most trends of education reforms in the last
two decades.
After nearly two decades, huge national resources had been invested in education
reforms in most countries in the Asia-Pacific region and other in order to bring about
substantial changes in many different aspects of society (Cheng and Townsend
2000; Savage and O’Connor 2015; Lee and Gopinathan 2018). Unfortunately, until
now many countries or areas are disappointed with the outcomes of education
reforms as well as the performance of their education systems in preparing their
new generation for facing the challenges of the new century. For example, Taiwan
5 Education Reform Phenomenon: A Typology of Multiple Dilemmas 87
started its large-scale education reforms in 1995 and Hong Kong launched its blue-
print of education reforms in 2000. But after more than 15–20 years of implementa-
tion, both of them report serious frustration or failure in different key aspects of
their systemic changes (Cheng 2017; Chou 2003).
Neither parents nor members of the community see the education system
reformed satisfactorily as promised. Instead, they are generally confused and disap-
pointed with the new initiatives and are increasingly losing confidence in school
education. To some families, the better-offs are simply sending their children abroad
for education if they can afford. Meanwhile, most school teachers and principals
feel frustrated or even exhausted under great pressure. With Hong Kong as a salient
example, the over competitions from marketization, the close control from account-
ability measures, the increasing workload from numerous parallel initiatives, the
de-professionalization from over-management and monitoring, and the high pres-
sure from uncertainties and ambiguities in education environment become some
typical concerns of education reforms that potentially damage teachers’ well-being
and working conditions (such as being burnt-out and overburdened with unneces-
sary busy works, declining status of the teaching profession, and deteriorating qual-
ity of teaching and learning (Cheng 2009, 2017).
Given the education reforms have been implemented with far reaching impacts
in the past two decades, it would be interesting and significant in policy analysis to
know why the education reforms with so good intention at the beginning may not
bring out the expected outcomes at the end, if not fail. What lessons can be learnt
from the education reform phenomenon in the past decades such that we can avoid
repeating the similar failures in future policy planning and implementation? In par-
ticular, what are the major concerns, tensions, and dilemmas in education reforms
that the policy-makers, teachers, educators, change agents, and other stakeholders
have to struggle with in formulating and implementing the reform policies?
To address these questions, this chapter aims to provide a preliminary analysis to
illustrate the possible key dilemmas or tensions that potentially shape the character-
istics of education reforms and affect their success and failure in implementation. It
is hoped that some implications can be drawn for bridging the theoretical and practi-
cal gaps in research, policy-making, and practice in education reforms locally and
internationally.
Based on the author’s research on the worldwide education reform phenomenon
since the end of 1990s to 2017 (Cheng 1996, 2005a, b, 2007, 2009, 2014, 2015a, b,
2017; Cheng et al. 2016a, b; Cheng and Greany 2016; Cheng and Townsend 2000),
a typology of seven fundamental dilemmas in education reforms will be discussed
and analyzed in this article, including (1) orientation dilemmas between globaliza-
tion and localization, (2) paradigm dilemmas between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd waves,
(3) financial dilemmas between public interest and privatization, (4) resources
dilemmas between parallel initiatives, (5) knowledge dilemmas in planning and
implementation at different levels, (6) political dilemmas between multiple stake-
holders, and (7) functional dilemmas between school-based management and cen-
tral platform in education reforms. Without understanding and managing these
88 Y. C. Cheng
multiple dilemmas and related tensions appropriately, many education reforms with
good intentions may finally fail in implementation.
5.2 O
rientation Dilemmas Between Globalization
and Localization
Rapid globalization is one of the most salient aspects of the new millennium in the
last two decades. How education should respond to the trends and challenges of
globalization has become a major concern in policy-making in these years
(Stromquist and Monkman 2014; Zajda 2015; Verger et al. 2016). In addition, fac-
ing the increasing demands for various developments of individuals and local com-
munities in the new century, not only globalization but also localization and
individualization are necessary in ongoing education reforms. Efforts and initiatives
for a paradigm shift towards globalization, localization, and individualization in
education have been gradually evident in some countries in recent years (Cheng
2005a, Chap. 3).
Globalization creates numerous opportunities for sharing knowledge, technol-
ogy, social values, and behavioral norms and promoting developments at different
levels including individuals, organizations, communities, and societies across dif-
ferent countries and cultures. In particular, the advantages of globalization may
include the following (Brown 1999; Cheng et al. 2016a; Spring 2014; Waters 1995):
1. Global sharing of knowledge, skills, and intellectual assets that are necessary to
multiple developments of individuals, local communities, and international
communities;
2. Increasing opportunities for mutual support in producing synergy for various
developments of countries, communities, and individuals globally;
3. Creating values and enhancing efficiency and productivity through the above
global sharing and mutual support to serving local needs and human
development;
4. Promoting international understanding, collaborations, harmony, and acceptance
to cultural diversity across various countries and regions; and
5. Facilitating multi-way communications and multi-cultural appreciations among
various groups, countries, and regions.
As strong evidence of globalization, internationalization of education, particu-
larly higher education, has received central attention or strategic priority in interna-
tional declarations, national policy statements, university strategic plans, and
academic articles since the turn of new century (Knight 2014a). In general, it was
often believed that the processes and results of internationalization contribute to the
development of student global competences, economic competitiveness, income
generation, national soft power building, modernization of the tertiary education
sector, and transformation towards a knowledge/innovation society (Altbach and
5 Education Reform Phenomenon: A Typology of Multiple Dilemmas 89
Knight 2007; Knight 2014b; Mohsin and Zaman 2014; Yeravdekar and Tiwari
2014). The number of international students studying in overseas universities has
grown by leaps and bounds in different parts of the world, and international educa-
tion has become a booming business in the past two decades (Institute of International
Education 2008a, b, c, 2014). Recently it was projected that the number of interna-
tional students will grow from 4.5 million in 2012 to 8 million in 2025 (OECD 2014).
Globalization or internationalization seems to be unavoidable to many countries,
and numerous related initiatives have been made in education reforms with aims at
taking opportunities to develop their societies and people in the process of global-
ization. However, in recent years, there are also increasing worldwide concerns
about the negative impacts of globalization on indigenous and national develop-
ments (Cheng 2005a, Chap. 3). Various social movements and demonstrations have
been initiated against the threats of globalization particularly on developing coun-
tries (Porta et al. 2015; Fominaya 2014; Martell 2016). It is believed that the danger-
ous consequences of globalization are various types of political, economic, and
cultural colonization and overwhelming influences of advanced countries to devel-
oping countries and the rapidly increasing gaps between rich areas and poor areas
in the world. In particular, the potential negative impacts of globalization include
the following (Brown 1999; Stiglitz 2002; Waters 1995; Martell 2016):
1. Increasing the technological gaps and digital divides between advanced coun-
tries and less developed countries that are hindering equal opportunities for fair
global sharing;
2. Creating more apparently legitimate opportunities for a few advanced countries
to economically and politically colonize other countries globally;
3. Exploiting local resources (including physical resources and human talents) and
destroying indigenous cultures of less advanced countries to benefit a few
advanced countries;
4. Increasing inequalities and conflicts between areas and cultures; and
5. Promoting the dominant cultures and values of some advanced areas and accel-
erating cultural transplantation from advanced areas to less developed areas.
Many people believe that education is one of the key factors that can be used to
moderate some key impacts of globalization from negative to positive and convert
threats into opportunities for the development of individuals and local community
in the inevitable process of globalization (Green 1999; Henry et al. 1999; Jones
1999). Given the above discussion, there may be dilemmas or tensions in policy
orientation between globalization and localization in education particularly for
developing countries. For example, how to maximize positive effects but minimize
negative impacts of globalization is a major dilemma in the current educational
reforms for national and local developments.
Specifically in education, how can we foster local knowledge and human devel-
opment for individual and local developments through globalization but without its
negative impacts? In what way the local education systems and their practices can
localize the global knowledge and world-class skills to develop their students’
twenty-first century competence for the future in a context of overwhelming
90 Y. C. Cheng
g lobalization? Unfortunately, there are not too many studies to explore these impor-
tant dilemmas and issues in policy-making and vision building in the past decades
even though there were numerous education reforms locally and internationally.
Since 1980s worldwide education reforms have undergone three waves of change
including the effective education movement, the quality education movement, and
the world-class education movement. According to Cheng (2005a), each wave of
reform works within its own paradigm in conceptualizing the nature of education
and formulating related initiatives to change educational practices at the opera-
tional, site, and system levels. In the transition from one wave to the next, paradigm
shifts may occur in the conceptualization and practice of learning, teaching, and
leadership (Abbas et al. 2013; Beetham and Sharpe 2013; Cheng 2011, 2014; Cheng
and Mok 2008; Kiprop and Verma 2013).
These three paradigms in education differ from each other in terms of their
assumptions about the environment, reform movements, the conception of effec-
tiveness, the role of educational institutions, and the nature of learning and teaching
(Cheng 2015b) (Table 5.1).
The First Wave. Effective education movements represent the first wave of edu-
cation reforms aiming at improving internal processes in learning, teaching, and
management and enhancing the internal effectiveness of educational institutions in
achieving preplanned education aims and curriculum targets (Cheng 2011).
Numerous initiatives targeted at internal improvements including changes in school
management, teacher quality, curriculum design, teaching methods, approaches to
evaluation, resourcing, and teaching and learning environments (Cheng 2005b;
Ghani 2013; Gopinathan and Ho 2000; Kim 2000; MacBeath 2007).
In the first-wave paradigm, the major role of an educational institution is the
delivery of planned knowledge, skills, and cultural values to students in a stable
industrial society. This paradigm assumes that learning is a process in which stu-
dents are mainly trainees receiving a planned set of knowledge, skills, and cultural
values for their survival in society. The role of the teacher is mainly perceived as that
of knowledge deliverer or instructor (Cheng 2014).
The Second Wave. In response to concerns about the educational accountability
to the public, the education quality that satisfies stakeholders’ expectations, and the
marketization of education provision in the 1990s, a paradigm shift from the first
wave to the second wave of education occurred in different parts of the world.
Various education reforms were initiated to ensure the quality, accountability, and
competitiveness of education provision to meet the needs of internal and external
stakeholders (e.g., Figlio and Loeb 2011; Gawlik 2012; Keddie 2015; PISA 2011).
A growing trend of education reforms towards quality education or competitive
schools emphasized quality assurance, school monitoring and review, parental
choice, student coupons, marketization, parental and community involvement in
Table 5.1 Three paradigms for education reforms
Key features First-wave paradigm Second-wave paradigm Third-wave paradigm
Assumption • An industrial society • A commercial and consumption society • A lifelong learning and multiple-development society
about • Comparatively stable and predictable • Unstable with lots of uncertainties and • Fast-changing society with globalization and technology
Environment • Education provision under centralized competitions advances
manpower planning • Education provision driven by competition • Education provision and content mainly characterized by
and market globalization, localization, and individualization
Reform Effective Education Movements Quality Education Movements World-Class Education Movements
Movements To improve the internal process and To ensure the quality and accountability of To ensure the relevance and world-class standards of
performance of education institutions in educational services provided by institutions education for the multiple and sustainable forms of
order to enhance the achievements of meeting the multiple stakeholders’ development of students and the society for the future in
planned goals of education expectations and needs globalization
Conception of Internal Effectiveness Interface Effectiveness Future Effectiveness
Effectiveness Achievement of planned goals and tasks of Satisfaction of stakeholders with the Relevance to the multiple and sustainable forms of
delivery of knowledge, skills, and values educational services, including education development of individuals and the society for the future
in learning, teaching, and schooling process and outcomes, and as accountability
to the public
Role of Delivery Role Service Role Facilitating Role
Education Delivery of planned knowledge, skills, and Provision of a service to satisfy the needs and Facilitation of multiple and sustainable forms of
Institution cultural values from teachers and expectations of stakeholders in a competitive development of students and the society in a context of
curriculum to students in a comparably market globalization and change
stable society
Nature of Trainee Client/Stakeholder Self-Initiated CMI Learner
Learning A process whereby students receive A process whereby students receive a service A process whereby students develop contextualized
knowledge, skills, and cultural values from provided by the educational institution and multiple intelligences (CMI) and other twenty-first century
5 Education Reform Phenomenon: A Typology of Multiple Dilemmas
teachers and curriculum teachers competences for multiple and sustainable forms of
development
Nature of Knowledge Delivery/Instruction Service Provision Facilitation of Multiple and Sustainable Forms of
Teaching A process of delivering planned A process of providing education services to Development
knowledge, skills, and cultural values to multiple stakeholders and satisfying their A process of facilitating capacity building for multiple and
students expectations sustainable forms of development of students and the
society for the future
Note. Adapted from Cheng (2005a, 2015b)
91
92 Y. C. Cheng
reforms. For example, ignorant of the paradigm gaps between the second wave and
third wave, the policy-makers in Hong Kong have implemented a wide range of the
second-wave initiatives (such as marketization, competition, and accountability
measures) with targets to achieve the aims and goals of the third-wave education.
The education reforms have created a lot of conflicts and frustrations in implemen-
tation in the last 16 years (Cheng 2017, 2018). How to reduce this kind of paradigm
dilemmas or gaps and ensure the alignment between initiatives and aims within the
same paradigm should be an important issue in planning and implementation of
education reforms.
The paradigm shifts from one wave to another involve not only technical or oper-
ational changes but also ideological and cultural changes at the individual, group,
site, and system levels. The transition is quite complicated and dynamic, involving
different types of dilemmas and tensions to be managed and tackled. For example,
how can involved parties change their original patterns of thinking and practice
from the first- or second-wave paradigm to the third-wave paradigm? What are the
major conditions or driving forces to make such a paradigm shift possible and suc-
cessful? What are the major characteristics and best practices of paradigm shifts in
learning, teaching, and leadership, locally and internationally? What are the major
problems in leading paradigm shifts at different levels of education? All these and
similar questions suggest unexplored areas for investigation (Cheng 2015b).
5.4 F
inancial Dilemmas Between Public Interest
and Privatization
In general, policy-makers are often facing tight financial constraints in making poli-
cies to meet the fast-increasing diverse needs of local or national developments in
an era of globalization, international competition, and social transformation. Given
the limitation of scarce public resources, the financing models may be different to
serve different purposes, such as public interest and private benefit (Labaree 1997;
Bloom et al. 2007; Le Grand and Robinson 2018). There are often dilemmas in
education reforms on financing education and also controversies on what education
services belong to public interest but not just private benefit.
In education reforms, it seems quite often that policy-makers try to change the
financial model of education from the exclusive public funding model to privatiza-
tion or marketization as one major approach to expanding the sources of resources
for diversifying and improving education to meet the increasing expectations. For
example, China, being caught in the stream of development with its market econ-
omy playing an increasingly important role, is confronting more complicated and
tighter financial constraints in developing its education system to satisfy the huge
and diverse needs for education (Tang and Wu 2000; Smith and Joshi 2016).
Particularly when more and more people want to pursue higher education in
order to survive in a very competitive job market, the privatization of tertiary educa-
94 Y. C. Cheng
tion will inevitably become more common in, for example, Korea, Taiwan, Japan,
PR China, and the Philippines. It is generally believed that privatization will allow
educational institutions to increase their flexibility of use of physical and human
resources. How to create a market or semi-market environment for promoting com-
petition between educational institutions has become a salient issue in reform. Some
countries (e.g., Australia) experimented with funding methods designed to encour-
age self-improvement as well as competition among schools. Other areas (e.g.,
Hong Kong and Singapore) tried out different types of parental choice schemes
(Taylor 2018; Böhlmark et al. 2016).
Whether the shift in financing model can ensure equity and quality in education
for students in general and those disadvantaged in particular is a crucial concern in
policy-making of education reform. It is often perceived by the public that marketi-
zation or privatization in education may prefer those rich but disadvantage those
poor in getting good education opportunities. Therefore, how to ensure those disad-
vantaged having equal opportunities for quality education in the new funding policy
is a typical issue for debate in many developing countries in the Asia-Pacific Region
(Cheng et al. 2002b).
Public education has multiple roles to serve the national aims and visions in
addition to equipping students for their future (Cheng and Yuen 2017). But the
privatized education may be driven by the market forces instead of the national
aims, and therefore, there may be a dilemma or tension between the market force
and the national agenda. As such, how can policy-makers and educators ensure that
the market forces at the local or community level are in operation in line with
national development? To what extent a policy framework should be set for privati-
zation in line with national development but without hindering the market initiatives
in developing education?
In planning education reforms related to funding model changes, all the above
issues and dilemmas should be studied and addressed with an appropriate balance
between public interest and privatization and between equity and quality in
education.
As mentioned previously, there were nine trends of education reforms at the four
levels, including numerous new initiatives. In the last two decades, many policy-
makers were eager to make systemic changes implementing many initiatives in par-
allel in a very short time.
Any education reform often requires huge resources. The larger it is in scale, the
more resources it needs. However, available resources are often limited, in particu-
lar the valuable manpower, expert experience, and available time. In particular, the
large-scale curriculum and examination reforms require implementation within a
short time and consequently extra and huge costs. But who will pay such costs?
Besides, education reforms are always intended to achieve some noble goals of
5 Education Reform Phenomenon: A Typology of Multiple Dilemmas 95
Parental Mandatory
Increased
Participation Staff
SBM
Extra-
Development
curricula
Duties
Bottle Neck:
high workload,
large class size,
too many lessons
Reform Aims:
High Quality Ed,
Change in T&L
Fig. 5.1 Bottle-neck effect in Hong Kong education reforms. (Adapted from Cheng 2015a)
were finally “jammed” at the bottle-neck. As shown in Fig. 5.1, these initiatives
included school self-evaluation, external school review, parental involvement in
school management, school marketing in the local community, extended profes-
sional services to parents and the community, more responsibilities of co-curricular
activities, various types of quality assurance measures and reporting, and teacher
participation in school-based management and development.
Given multiple and parallel initiatives in education reforms competing for teach-
ers’ time and energy in implementation, how the policy-makers and change agents
address the above resources dilemmas and the related difficulties created by bottle-
neck effects should be a crucial issue related to the success and failure of a systemic
education reform.
5 Education Reform Phenomenon: A Typology of Multiple Dilemmas 97
5.6 K
nowledge Dilemmas in Planning and Implementation
at Different Levels
As mentioned above, the education reforms often change the key aspects of the
whole education systems involving many new initiatives. The scope of reforms is so
huge, and the nature of changes is so fundamental, and therefore, a strong and com-
prehensive knowledge system is really needed to support formulation and imple-
mentation of such large-scale reforms and their numerous related initiatives at
different levels of the education system and at different stages of development and
change. Unfortunately, there is often absence of such a strong knowledge system to
support the related policy planning and implementation. Why?
Let the author use the case of Hong Kong to illustrate the problems in using
knowledge for education reforms. In Hong Kong there was an intended strategy to
use research to inform policy-making before the large-scale education reform,
including that outlined in the Education Commission (1997) Report No. 7: “draw
reference from experiences and research materials in and outside Hong Kong;
research into specific issues related to the review.”
In practice, however, research-based policy development was a rarity and luxury
in Hong Kong (Cheng et al. 2002a). For example, the Education Commission had a
very tight schedule of just 1–2 years but had to review the whole education system
and make numerous recommendations in 1999–2000. It was really a dilemma
between using research and knowledge to inform education reforms, the large scale
of education reforms, and the urgency (tight schedule) of reform implementation.
What kind of research and knowledge could they expect except their own experi-
ences and ideas as well as some overseas experiences without rigorous analysis?
There was lack of a comprehensive and relevant knowledge base to support policy
development and implementation of large-scale and influential reforms in such a
short period (Cheng 2005a, Chap. 8, 2017).
Hong Kong is a small place with population of around seven million. While there
are some tertiary institutions, only four of them have faculties or departments of
education. The numbers of academic staff, experts, or researchers in different areas
of education were in fact too small when compared with the large-scale of education
reforms and the numerous areas of education at different levels to be reformed. In
other words, there might not have the critical mass of education expertise in each
key area to provide the necessary expertise, intelligence, and knowledge base to
support reforms. In particular, there was also absence of any centrally established
research institute to coordinate these separated research and expertise forces to
serve the multiple and parallel initiatives in reforms.
The advisory or steering committees in Hong Kong education have involved ter-
tiary scholars, school practitioners, and community leaders as members to contrib-
ute advices and ideas to policy-making of education reforms. Their chairmen were
often business or non-education leaders appointed by the Government. This arrange-
ment was a tradition to encourage wide participation and input from non-education
sectors to policy-making. However in these years, the scope and nature of education
98 Y. C. Cheng
and related reforms have become so complicated and fast changing. All these com-
mittee works became very challenging and demanding even far more than a full-
time commitment. Many key members who were successful leaders might have
already several, if not many, substantial community commitments on top of their
full-time jobs. From this point, we can see that the policy-making of such a large-
scale reform was in leadership and advice by “part-time or lay intelligence.”
Since the 1990s, the top leadership of the Education Department has changed
frequently from a few months to 2 or 3 years while other senior officials have been
repositioned to different offices often. The bureaucratic/technocratic knowledge
and intelligence that had been accumulated slowly in the past years was disappear-
ing quickly due to the fluid personnel and frequent changes in leadership. Given the
losing bureaucratic knowledge and intelligence, the development and implementa-
tion of new initiatives became more ad hoc, unstable, and unreliable and often
ignored some important ecological relations in the policy environment, that finally
affected the success of education reforms with so many parallel initiatives (Cheng
and Cheung 1995; Cheng et al. 2002a).
From the above discussion, we can see that knowledge dilemmas that influence
education reforms involve not only the availability of relevant research and knowl-
edge, the scale of education reforms and parallel initiatives, and the urgency of
reform implementation but also the critical mass of related expertise in key areas of
education, the leadership by “part-time or lay intelligence,” and the disappearing
bureaucratic knowledge and intelligence.
the workplace. In view of the above, at the system level, how should the expecta-
tions of these key stakeholders be identified and given priority in making the reform
policies? At the site level, how can school practitioners handle the diversities and
conflicting values of multiple stakeholders on the changes in the aims, content, pro-
cesses, and outcomes of education during the education reforms? These are some
examples of political dilemmas emerging at different levels, which have to be tack-
led and managed.
During the past several decades, parents and the community have increased
expectations of education and are becoming more demanding of better school per-
formance for their children. Also, there is an increasing demand for educational
accountability to the public and to demonstrate value for money because education
is mainly financed with public funds (Figlio and Loeb 2011; Gawlik 2012; Keddie
2015). Inevitably, educational leaders at the school, district, and national levels have
to provide more direct avenues for parents and the community to participate in the
management of the schools.
In some developed countries, such as Canada and the United States, there was a
long tradition of parental involvement in their schools. In Asian areas like Hong
Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand, people have become more aware of
the importance of involving parents and local communities in school education
(Wang 2000). Although there is seldom legislation in some areas to guarantee par-
ents’ involvement in school education, sentiment is growing that parents should be
given this right.
In addition to parents, the local community and the business sector are also direct
stakeholders in education. Their experiences, resources, social networks, and
knowledge are often very useful to the development and delivery of education.
From a positive perspective, community involvement in education can benefit the
educational institutions by providing more local resources, support, and intellectual
input, particularly when facing the increasing but diverse demands for quality edu-
cation. Also, parents and community leaders can share the management responsi-
bilities; strengthen communications between families, the community, and the
schools; motivate teachers; monitor school operations; and even assist the school in
combating negative influences inherent in the local community (Goldring and
Sullivan 1996).
Even though parental and community involvement may have advantages, how to
manage the related political dilemmas among multiple stakeholders and implement
it effectively is still a core issue in the current education reforms. The involvement
will inevitably increase the complexity, ambiguities, and uncertainties in the
political domain of schools. How can school leaders be prepared to lead multiple
stakeholders, build up alliances, balance diverse interests between parties and
resolve conflicts of diverse interests? Would the induced political dilemmas and
related difficulties from this kind of involvement in fact waste the scarce time and
energy of teachers and leaders from their central education work with students?
Most Asian countries lack a culture of accepting and supporting the practice of
parental and community involvement. Teachers are traditionally highly respected in
the community. It is often believed that school education should be the sole respon-
100 Y. C. Cheng
sibility of teachers and principals. Parents have tended to view them as the experts
in education. Parental and community involvement is often perceived as the act of
distrust towards teachers and principals; to involve parents can be perceived as a
loss of face among professionals. How the policy-makers and educators can change
this culture and tackle the political dilemmas to encourage more parental and com-
munity involvement is still an important concern in policy making and reform
implementation.
5.8 F
unctional Dilemmas Between School-Based
Management and Central Platform
other people’s effort. It is so ineffective and sad if teachers’ scarce time and effort
are used in such a way instead of directly helping and guiding their students.
If there is a central knowledge platform supported by the state-of-the-art technol-
ogy and software, world-class education resources and packages, frontier expertise
knowledge and experiences, and interactive supporting team to support school-
based initiatives, teachers can build up their initiatives for teaching and learning at
a much higher professional level and at the same time can save a lot of time to
develop their students. To tackle the functional dilemmas between school-based
management and piecemeal knowledge, a high-level central knowledge platform
should be developed to serve the following functions (Cheng 2005a, Chap. 8):
• In practicing school initiatives and education activities, teachers and students can
start from a higher level intelligence platform that can provide the state-of-the-
art knowledge and technology. They can concentrate their energy and time to use
this platform for education practice and school operation, rather than wasting
their time to scratch from beginning at a lower level. Of course, from the spirit of
school-based management, they have their flexibility and autonomy to decide
how to use the platform more effectively to meet the school-based needs.
• Associated with various types of global and local networks, the platform can
provide the critical mass of intelligence and knowledge to generate new ideas,
knowledge, and technology to support education reforms and school education
and ensure the relevance of the policy development and educational practice to
the future.
• The platform itself can be individually, locally, and globally networked to expand
the critical mass of intelligence, maximize the availability of intellectual
resources, and create numerous opportunities for continuous intelligence devel-
opment at different levels of education.
How to develop these central platforms and facilitate schools and teachers to
perform at a high level is really a strategic issue for further exploration in current
education reforms worldwide. The establishment of such a central platform is capi-
tal-intensive, intelligence/knowledge-intensive, and technology-intensive, and
therefore, national, regional, and even international collaborations may be needed.
Both the central platform approach and school-based approach have their own
strengths and limitations. The former can be used to raise the level of intelligence,
knowledge, and technology used by all practitioners in education and to avoid
piecemeal, repeating, and ineffective efforts scratching from beginning. The latter
can be used to promote human initiatives in the process of learning, teaching, and
management and address the diverse developmental needs at the site levels. Both
are necessary and important to education reforms.
102 Y. C. Cheng
From the above discussion, we can see that numerous education reforms worldwide
experienced different types of dilemmas in policy formulation and implementation
and finally resulted in various kinds of frustrations and difficulties in the last two
decades. Without understanding the nature and dynamics of these dilemmas, many
education reforms with good intentions may fail in implementation. To address this
concern, the article discusses the trends of education reform phenomenon and
related dilemmas commonly happening locally and internationally.
To summarize the above analysis of seven dilemmas, a typology of multiple
dilemmas in three clusters can be presented in Table 5.2. The first cluster is entitled
as “Direction Cluster,” including orientation dilemmas between global orientations
and local concerns and paradigm dilemmas between the first, second, and third
waves. The dilemmas in this cluster mainly concern the issues and tensions related
to major directions, orientations, visions, aims, conceptions, and paradigms of edu-
cation reforms. The key implications drawn from the analysis of dilemmas in this
cluster may be summarized as below:
• To foster local knowledge and human development through globalization but
without its negative impacts;
• To localize the global and world-class knowledge to serve the local community;
• To manage gaps between the adopted reforms and the contextual background;
• To reduce paradigm gaps between the implemented initiatives and the planned
aims; and
• To eliminate gaps during paradigm shifts across waves of education reforms in
implementation.
The second cluster is entitled as “Support Cluster” which consists of financial
dilemmas between public interest and privatization, resource dilemmas between
parallel initiatives, and knowledge dilemmas in planning and implementation at dif-
ferent levels. This cluster of dilemmas mainly focus on the issues and tensions in
allocation of resources and funding, competition for scarce resources across multi-
ple and parallel initiatives, and use of knowledge and research in supporting educa-
tion reforms and related initiatives. The common implications drawn from this
support cluster for policy analysis and implementation may include the following:
• To ensure equity and quality in education while changing funding models
towards privatization or marketization;
• To keep a balance between the market force and the national agenda in policy
making;
• To eliminate the negative impacts of bottleneck effects by reducing and prioritiz-
ing the parallel initiatives to be implemented;
• To align and reduce multiple initiatives within the capacity of teachers and stu-
dents to implement them;
• To ensure the availability of relevant knowledge and research to inform educa-
tion reforms particularly those large scale;
5 Education Reform Phenomenon: A Typology of Multiple Dilemmas 103
• To build up the critical mass of related expertise to support reforms in key areas;
and
• To keep strong knowledge/intelligence in leadership and bureaucracy for plan-
ning and implementing education reforms.
The third cluster is “Execution Cluster” including political dilemmas between
multiple stakeholders and functional dilemmas between school-based management
and central platform. The dilemmas of this cluster concern issues and tensions
related to conflicts, difficulties, effectiveness and efficiency in the execution, func-
tioning, and implementation of various education reforms and involved multiple
stakeholders. The key implications from the execution cluster may be summarized
as below:
104 Y. C. Cheng
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Yin Cheong Cheng is Advisor (Academic Development) of The Education University of Hong
Kong (EdUHK). Previously he served as Chair Professor and Vice-President (Research and
Development). He was also the President of World Education Research Association (WERA) and
Asia-Pacific Education Research Association (APERA). He had served as a full member of the
University Grants Committee, a panel member of Research Grants Council, and a member of the
Quality Education Fund Steering Committee of the Hong Kong SAR Government. Currently he is
the chairman of Tin Ka Ping Foundation’s advisory council. His research interest includes para-
digm shift, education reforms, leadership development, school management, teacher education,
and higher education. Some of his publications have been translated into Chinese, Hebrew, Korean,
Spanish, Czech, Thai, and Persian languages.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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Chapter 6
Changes in Educational Institutions
in China: 1978–2020
Analysis of Education Policies and Legal Texts
from a National Perspective
Guorui Fan
This chapter reviews key historical documents and reform events and outlines
China’s educational reform and development in the macro context of 40 years of
social, political, and economic changes. Professor Elizabeth J. Perry (2014) noted
the significance of studying contemporary China from the Reform and Opening-up
in the field comparative politics and public policy, which marked the beginning of
“a new era of developing socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Xi 2017). This
chapter focuses on the process of education institutional changes and innovation
and identifies the educational reform and opening-up as a predominant narrative,
aiming at breaking through the obstacles of existing institutional structures and pro-
moting sustainable development of education. A key challenge to reforming educa-
tion institution lies in how to solve the Chinese governance dilemma of loosening
control in chaos or tightening control in suffocation (“Yifang Jiuluan, Yishou Jiusi”
“一放就乱 一收就死”). Solutions are suggested as exploring appropriate tensions
among education institutional factors and stimulating the vitality of educational ele-
ments and institutions under appropriate tensions.
G. Fan (*)
Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
e-mail: grfan@ecnu.edu.cn
The unification of “top-level design” (Dingceng Sheji 顶层设计) and the practi-
cal processes of educational improvement. Faced with outstanding contradictions
and tasks in education development, central and local governments will seek insti-
tutionalized measures to solve educational problems through a series of decisions
and actions. In practice, due to society and educational development itself, adjust-
ments to institutionalized top-level design are needed based on actual conditions to
innovate and improve institutional design. Therefore, during the research process,
the top-level design of educational institutions, implementation, correction, adjust-
ment, and improvement of educational reforms shall be systematically examined.
Educational reform and changes in educational institutions have gone through dif-
ferent stages of development of the past 40 years, including bringing order out of
chaos, restoring and rebuilding education, comprehensively initiating educational
reforms, exploring institutional changes based on market mechanisms to promote
educational development, adjusting education policies from an efficiency-based
focus to fairness, promoting comprehensive reforms in the field of education, and
accelerating modernization of education governance systems and enhancing gover-
nance capabilities.
Restoration and reconstruction of educational institutions (1978–1984). After
the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC, an urgent
task faced by the education sector in China was to restore and rebuild educational
institutions that were destroyed by the “Cultural Revolution” and improve educa-
tion. By negating the “two Estimates” of the “Minutes of the National Conference
on Education” in 1971, the shackles that plagued teachers and intellectuals were
removed, so did the obstacles that hindered education, science, and technology
development. A policy of “respecting knowledge and talents” advocated by Deng
Xiaoping (1977) led the general public turn to respect and value education. By
drawing lessons from the educational experience of the 1960s, provisional regula-
tions for higher education institutions and primary and secondary schools1 were
revised, and educational order was restored and rebuilt. The educational policy of
1
In 1961, the CCCPC issued the Provisional Regulations for Higher Education Institutions
Directly Affiliated to the Ministry of Education (Draft); in 1963, Provisional Regulations for Full-
time Secondary Schools (Draft) and Provisional Regulations for Full-time Primary Schools (Draft)
were issued. These three regulations have played an important role in standardizing education,
improving educational quality, and promoting educational development. From September to
October 1978, the Ministry of Education revised and issued the Provisional Regulations for Full-
time Secondary Schools (Draft for Trial Implementation), Provisional Regulations for Full-time
Primary Schools (Draft for Trial Implementation), and Provisional Regulations for Higher
Education Institutions (Draft for Trial Implementation), which rectify and restore working systems
in institutions of higher learning and secondary and primary schools.
114 G. Fan
the “Three Orientations”2 and the training objective of the New Generation with
“Four Qualifications”3 were proposed, which have directed the later educational
reform and development. The restoration of the unified college entrance examina-
tion and admission system became a symbolic beginning of the restoration and
reconstruction of the educational system, and for the new order and modernization
of education in China. In the context that the state urgently needs specialized per-
sonnel while education resources are insufficient, Deng Xiaoping proposed “there
are two ways to develop education, on the one hand, we need popularization, on the
other hand, we need improvement. We need to run key primary schools, key middle
schools and key universities” (1977: 40–41). Thus, the establishment of the key
school system has played an important historical role in “raising more talents in a
quicker manner” (Duochu Rencai, Kuaichu Rencai 多出人才 快出人才) and meet-
ing the country’s need for educated and talented personnel.
Development of educational institutional reform: Streamlining administration
and decentralization of institutions (1985–1991). In the early 1980s, the CCCPC
issued a series of decisions concerning economic restructuring, on science and tech-
nology reform, and on educational reform (hereinafter referred to as the “Decisions”
(CCCPC 1985)). Three important documents on these areas constitute the general
framework for social reform and development during this period, thus greatly pro-
moting the modernization process of Chinese society. In the field of education, the
Decisions aims to arouse the enthusiasm of the government at all levels, the general
staff, and the community at large and to promote the development of education. As
for the ethical value of educational reform, the Decisions puts forward the conclu-
sion that education must serve the socialist construction, and the socialist construc-
tion depends on education, which responds to the development strategy of “mak[ing]
economic development our central task” since the Third Plenary Session of the
Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC.
The essence of educational institutional reform is defined as streamlining admin-
istration and decentralizing to expand school autonomy. On various levels and
aspects, such institutional reform manifests. On the central and local relationship,
while strengthening the macro management from the central government, in pri-
mary education, the responsibility of basic education development is decentralized
to local government. To promote the development of compulsory education, the
Decisions first proposed the “two growths” principle of the educational input sys-
tem, namely “the growth of education allocations of central and local governments
should be higher than that of recurrent financial income, and the average education
cost per student should gradually increase.” On the school leadership, the Decisions
stipulated that “school[s] gradually implement [a] principal accountability system
(Xiaozhang Fuzezhi 校长负责制),” thus clarifying the relationship of rights of
2
The “three orientations,” referred to orienting “education towards modernization, globalization,
and future construction” (Deng 1983: 35).
3
The “New Generation” with “Four Qualifications,” referred to a “new generation with lofty ide-
als, moral integrity, good education and a strong sense of discipline who are determined to contrib-
ute to their people, country and mankind” (Deng 1980).
6 Changes in Educational Institutions in China: 1978–2020 115
responsibility among school leaders, party secretaries, university councils, and staff
congress, which established the basic structure of China’s modern school system.
Exploration of educational institution reform: Introduction of the market mecha-
nism (1992–2002). “Establishing a socialist market economy system” for economic
institutional reform was put forward at the 14th CPC National Congress of the
Communist Party of China in 1992 (Jiang 1992). Since then, Chinese society has
embarked on a new development path of establishing a socialist market economy
with Chinese characteristics. The focus of educational institution reforms in this
period lies in the following factors: first, establishing an education management
system compatible with the socialist market economy system. The Outline for
Education Reform and Development in China in 1993 emphasized the need for
“new education institutions compatible with socialist market economy institutions,
political institutions, science and technology institutions reforms” (CCCPC, The
State Council 1993). The management institution of “decentralized operation and
decentralized management (Fenji Banxue Fenji Guanli分级办学 分级管理)” on
the one hand facilitated localized implementation and fed incentives in the lowest
governmental units, but on the other hand caused the dependence of compulsory
education on township-level finance and literally increased the financial burden of
education in the underdeveloped areas, due to the excessive “localization” of the
system (Chen 1996). After the new financial allocation system was implemented in
1994, the township-level financial capacity became increasingly weakened.
Therefore, the regional economic disparity resulted in the regional and urban–rural
gaps in developing compulsory education.
Second, education funds were raised in multiple channels. In 1992, the 14th CPC
National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed that “governments at
all levels shall increase education investment and meanwhile encourage different
walks of life to raise funds for running schools and private schools, and change the
situation where the state has a virtual monopoly on higher education” (Jiang 1992).
The Outline for Education Reform and Development in China stipulated to gradu-
ally establish a multi-channel fund-raising system in which education is mainly
funded by public fiscal allocation, supplemented with tax for education, tuition and
miscellaneous fees from non-compulsory education students, school-affiliated
industrial revenue, social donations, and education funds. This new kind of multiple
funding system is literally created to cover the shortage of governmental funding,
which inevitably produced the later notorious phenomena of “arbitrary school fees
(Luan Shoufei 乱收费)”.
Third, privatization of public schools. The term of public school transformations
was used in Chinese rather than privatization. In 1994, the document Implementation
Opinions on Outline for Education Reform and Development in China by the State
Council encouraged enterprises and public institutions to run schools in accordance
with national laws and policies. Various forms of “minban” schools (literally private
schools) as “civilian run and public subsidized (minban gongzhu 民办公助)” or
“public run and civilian subsidized (Gongban Minzhu 公办民助)” were allowed to
experiment and practice (The State Council 1994). Since 1993, pilots for different
forms of public primary and secondary school transformations were carried out. A
116 G. Fan
group of transformed schools was set up under the market mechanisms, which has
experimented in raising education funds through multiple channels, improving
school conditions, promoting rapid development of basic education, expanding
quality educational resources, and meeting the diverse educational needs.
Apparently, the focus of education in China has shifted from serving the interests of
proletarian politics to serving needs of economic construction, which is influenced
by human capital theory (Schultz 1997). However, compared with the practice of
some developed countries of fostering competitive talents through standardized
education to achieve economic ends in the globalization process (e.g., see Singapore
Ministry of Education 2012), the practice of privatizing education and making it a
commercial industry (CCCPC 1992; Zhang 1993) deprives education of its mean-
ing and value in human development (Bulmahn 2000).
Continuity of educational institutional reform: From efficiency to equity
(2003–2009). China’s rapid economic development has enabled remarkable prog-
ress in economic and social development, but also resulted in inequalities in such
development. Since the proposition of “Scientific Outlook on Development” in
2003, people-oriented, comprehensive, coordinated, and sustainable development
has gradually become China’s new model of economic development (Hu 2004).
Accordingly, the focus of educational reform has changed from the pursuit of edu-
cational quantity, scale, and speed to educational equity.
First, the arbitrary collection of school fees was stopped. Raising education
funds through multiple channels based on the market mechanism leads to the
increasingly serious phenomenon of arbitrary educational charges. Since 1996, the
Ministry of Education has begun to “improve regulations and systems of school fee
management” (National Education Commission 1996). After that, the Education
Fee Publicity System (Jiaoyu Shoufei Gonshi Zhi教育收费公示制)’s (National
Planning Commission 2002) “One Fee System (Yifei Zhi 一费制)” in compulsory
educational institutions (Ministry of Education 2004) and the “Three Limits Policy
(Sanxian Zhengce 三限政策)”4 in senior high school selection fees were approved,
which strengthened the control of arbitrary school fees (State Council 2001).
Second, transformed schools were regulated. In order to solve the problem of
privatizing schools, high school fees, and public education resource losses yet to
regulate by the developing legal system in the 1990s, China began to adjust its
reform policies for running public schools and regulated the school activities in
2005. Approval of newly reformed schools and their fee standards were terminated,
and the “advance and withdrawal” strategy to conduct a comprehensive investigation
4
The so-called Three Limits policy means that public high schools organized by the government
can recruit a certain number of students through the choice of schools under the premise of com-
pleting this year’s enrollment plan, but the scores (no student with a score under admission line can
be admitted), the number of persons (not exceeding the central government-mandated number and
local government prescribed proportion), and the amount of money (tuition standards for students
through the choice of schools issued after the proposition by Education Administrative depart-
ments and approval of provincial government) must be strictly limited (General Office of State
Council 2001).
6 Changes in Educational Institutions in China: 1978–2020 117
5
The “Three Increases” of compulsory education funds refer to the following: “Appropriations for
compulsory education by the State Council and local governments at all levels shall increase at a
faster rate than regular state revenues, and expenditure on education per student, faculty salaries
and funds per student shall also increase steadily” (The State Council 2006; Standing Committee
of the National People’s Congress 2006).
6
“Two exempt and one subsidy” students are exempt from tuition and incidental fees during com-
pulsory education, free text books are provided for students with financial difficulties, and living
expenses are subsidized for boarding students.
118 G. Fan
6.3 C
hanges in Educational Institutions: Seeking
Appropriate Tension and Stimulating Vigor
Reform has altered the relations of production and interest. The first 30 years of
Reform and Opening-up advanced economic growth and accumulated wealth by
following the principle of efficiency. After that, the issue for further reform is the
readjustment of interest relations, redistributing wealth by fairness so as to promote
the harmonious and sustainable development in China. Therefore, the overall deep-
ening of reform involves “resolutely break[ing] away [from] all outdated ideas and
disadvantages of institutional mechanisms and break[ing] out of barriers of interests
consolidation” (Xi 2017). For Chinese society, the 40 years of reform and opening-
up is a process of restoring and reconstructing social order to break through institu-
tional barriers and to stimulate social vitality, from a planned economy to a market
economy, through the unified, centralized management of the government with the
participation of multiple parties. Therefore, the conflicts and compromises between
different parties’ interests will inevitably occur throughout the process.
Following this line of development, in the field of education, changes and inno-
vations of educational institutions inevitably involve a series of complex processes
and ambivalent relationships, including centralization and decentralization, central
planning and the market economy, government and society, government and
schools, and schools and society. The process of educational reform is to seek bal-
ance and harmony among multiple parties to maintain order and stimulate the pas-
sion and vitality of all interested parties.
6.3.1 T
o Adjust the Central–Local Relationship and Promote
Integration of Top-Level Design and the Local
Exploration of Educational Institution Changes
Since the beginning of the Reform and Opening-up, the core of educational institu-
tion reform has lied on the improved mobilization of “all levels of government,
general staff and students, and all members in society,” while “decentraliz[ing] the
6 Changes in Educational Institutions in China: 1978–2020 119
7
Michael W. Apple, professor of the Department of curriculum and teaching and education policy
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in America, tried to reveal the complex relationship
between knowledge and power in education and critically examine “legal knowledge” of particular
social groups or classes during particular historical periods and, in particular, institutional contexts
by using his concept of ideology and hegemony. See Apple (1990).
6 Changes in Educational Institutions in China: 1978–2020 121
the CCCPC, whose major duty is to put forward and organize the implementation of
policies adhering to the Party’s leadership and strengthening the Party’s construc-
tion, to study political and ideological work in the field of education, to deliberate
the national education development strategy, medium- and long-term planning,
major policies for education and institutional reform plans, and to solve current
problems in education. This is of great significance to strengthening the top-level
design of educational reform, in dealing with relationships between central and
local, partial and whole, and improving the system in its entirety, thus forming an
overall effect. On the other hand, with educational reforms entering the “deep end,”
many regions and schools proceed from reality, adhere to problem-oriented princi-
ples, and summarize a lot of experience of reform and exploration. Some of the
experience proved to be effective, which provides important support for macro-
decision-making at the national level. The City of Qingdao, for example, has con-
ducted school administration reform experiments and modern school construction
according to law since 2014. On this basis, in February 2017, the Municipal
Government of Qingdao issued the Regulations for Primary and Secondary Schools
in Qingdao, which specifies that the “principal may nominate [and] appoint [a]
vice-principal,” as well as other school autonomy recruitment of professional and
high-level personnel in shortage,” “independent establishment of internal institu-
tions and [the] appointment of [a person in charge] in accordance with provisions”
(Municipal Government of Qingdao 2017). Those were previously controlled by the
local government. In recent years, Shanghai, as an experimental region responsible
for initiating comprehensive educational reform, has actively explored and pro-
posed many new ideas and reform measures under the guidance of the top-level
design of national macro-educational reform. In December 2017, Shanghai People’s
Congress formulated the Regulations for Higher Educational Promotion in
Shanghai, which is the first local regulation dealing with higher education. It distils
new achievements and experience in the form of laws and provides a strong guaran-
tee for modernizing higher education management system and the sustainable
development of higher education in Shanghai (Fan 2018).
Those educational reforms related to overall reform and innovation in national
education law, educational institutions, educational standards, and educational strat-
egy planning and coordination requires national-level coordination and implemen-
tation. Education reforms of key and difficult issues can be implemented gradually
and adjusted dynamically based on the experiences of local pilot programs. For
education reform at regional and school levels, it is necessary to allow room for
grassroots educational reform initiatives and encourage individuals at the local and
school levels to innovate and explore. Therefore, the process of educational reform
mechanisms could integrate state-level design with grassroots exploration. This will
lead to general advancement based on the key breakthroughs.
122 G. Fan
6.3.2 T
o Rationalize Inter-Government Relationships
and Establish and Perfect the Mechanism
of Governmental Coordination and Inter-Provincial
Consultation
6.3.3 T
o Streamline Administration and Decentralize, Fair
Supervision, Service Optimization, and New-Style
Government–School Relationship Reconstruction
6.3.4 T
o Actively and Steadily Use Social Organization
and Market in Education
In the 1990s, a global trend of education reform using marketization and performa-
tivity emerged to solve the public dissatisfaction with educational quality (Goertz
and Duffy 2001; Headington 2000; Heller 2001; Mahony and Hextall 2000). In this
process, quality education and competitive schools have become salient, emphasiz-
ing education quality management and quality assurance, school monitoring and
evaluation, parental choice, education vouchers, marketization, parental and com-
munity participation in governance, as well as performance-oriented funding mech-
anisms and other reform issues (Cheng 2015: 5–29; Cheng and Townsend 2000:
317–344; Mukhopadhyay 2001; Pang et al. 2003: 1063–1080).
With the development of China’s market economy, in the process of deepening
economic system reform, the role of the market in resource allocation changed from
“basic” to “decisive” (Xi 2017). In the process of promoting government institu-
tional modernization, in addition to participating in school operation, social
organizations are participating in public affairs, including education, by bringing
their professional advantage. The Ministry of Education (2015) suggested to use
contract-out services in legal consultation, faculty training, evaluation services,
sports and arts curriculum, teaching resources, etc.
124 G. Fan
Education reform enacted in China over the past 40 years of Reform and Opening-up
is a process of perfecting educational institution mechanisms and a process of con-
tinuously improving socialist education institutions with Chinese characteristics. It
also entails a process of moving from promoting scattered reform by using educa-
tion policies and regulations to regulating educational organization by using laws
and promoting the construction and perfection of the education institutions. The
process of education reform has explored gaming and appropriate allocation of
power and interests, in which educational order has been rebuilt to break the con-
straints. The course of education reforms features moving from regulation to
empowerment, through empowering by law, promoting consultation and shared
governance, and vitality stimulation.
The main task of education institutional reform in the new era is to construct
and perfect “the pattern of government's macro management according to law,
school operation by law, orderly social participation and concerted efforts of all
parties,” and to make education “dynamic, efficient, more open and conducive to
scientific development.” In the future, the mission of education development is to
126 G. Fan
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder.
Chapter 7
Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth
and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions
of Social Change in Recent Spanish
Education Policy
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Spanish education experienced a full
historical cycle closely related to the profound political changes that the country
underwent during that period. The social and economic structure of the Spanish
society changed considerably during the years of Francoism, and as such the
regime’s social base was gradually narrowing during the 1960s and its last years
(e.g. it was the significant case of the progressive disaffection of the great support
received from the beginning from the Catholic Church). The 1970s witnessed the
decline and definitive disappearance of the dictator in 1975, when a process of polit-
ical transition began that was to a certain extent complete, but peaceful and based on
agreement among the main political parties and social groups. It was generally
regarded as a “success story” as well as a foundation of a country’s re-emergence as
a welcome, more effective player on the international scene. This was a so-called
transition by transaction (reforma pactada) (Gillespie 2017) and was approached by
the political elites, from both inside and outside the regime, with much improviza-
tion and even expeditiously under pressure regarding the new arrangements.
However, this “judicious pragmatism” (Tzortzis 2017) that was praised for so many
years has now come to be perceived by many as one of the most relevant weak-
nesses of the whole process and a means of generating for the near future a sense of
historical amnesia among citizens and in particular for the new generations.
The first fruit of this process was a new Constitution (approved by universal suf-
frage in 1978). This Constitution established a new political regime that is a parlia-
mentary monarchy, similar to those of some other European countries. Accordingly,
in 1986 Spain was admitted as a full member of the European Union. For the first
time in the history of the country, an ambitious decentralization project was under-
taken, resulting in the country’s division into autonomous communities with a sig-
nificant degree of self-governance (Judt 2006).
We must add to these and other political changes a process of rapid and relatively
successful modernization that had just begun in the late 1950s, after the most
authoritarian years of the regime, when Spain began a new era with its “economic
stabilization plan” of 1959 supervised by the World Bank, and during the 1960s
through the so-called Economic and Social Development Plans (created following
the French model of “indicative” economic planning of the post-war era, and tech-
nocratically accomplished by an elite of high-ranking civil servants linked to Opus
Dei) (Balfour 2000). With the advent of democracy after General Franco’s death,
modernization accelerated, after the so-called Social Pact of La Moncloa was signed
by political parties, trade unions, and entrepreneurs, with significant consequences
for all aspects of the social life of the country. During the 1990s, Spain succeeded in
situating itself among the most developed countries of the world, experiencing
excellent economic indicators and a transformation of social structures and life-
styles. In the field of education, a number of major reforms were promoted by a
succession of governments of different ideological orientations, which, obviously,
is similar in many ways to what occurred in other Western countries, with the differ-
ence of the historic acceleration of these processes in the case of Spain (McNair
1984; Boyd-Barrett and O’Malley 1995; Bonal 1998; Escolano 2002; Cuesta 2005;
de Puelles 2016).
Our aim is to analyse the politics of education during this crucial period, but we
will focus attention particularly on the last great reform of the twentieth century,
carried out in 1990 by the Socialist party (PSOE) during its first period in govern-
ment (1982–1996). The effects of this reform persist to this day, as the socialists
were returned to power following the Madrid terrorist bombings in March 2004. In
this sense, our “historical” remarks are really quite contemporary. Our intention is
not so much to describe accomplished deeds, but to analyse the interpretations,
images, and assessments that different social actors have applied to the conse-
quences of this socialist reform.
Principally, we will analyse their discourse regarding the impact these changes in
the governance of education have had on processes of social integration and exclu-
sion, paying particular attention to the role played by young people in secondary
education. It must be remembered that from the start this reform was grounded in a
powerful social rhetoric dominated by such expressions as “equality,” “democracy,”
“participation,” and “innovation.” For accomplishing this kind of analysis, and from
the perspective of language as creator of representations of reality, we conceive “dis-
courses not only represent the world as it is (or rather is seen to be), they are also
projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the
actual world, and tied in to projects to change the world in particular directions”
(Fairclough 2003: 124). Clarifying at this instance, it would be necessary to point out
that in the production of discourses, in front of the logic of the argumentation of them,
another logic can also be produced, the logic of the appearance in which the issues of
conviction and persuasion play a significant role, with their ideological stance.
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 133
7.1 H
istory and Politics in the Construction of Education
Policy in Contemporary Spain
But let us briefly return to the beginning of this historical cycle, to the final phase of
the regime of General Franco. From the 1960s, rejection of the dictatorship gradu-
ally grew as it came to be regarded as illegitimate and anachronic in the contempo-
rary European context. This attitude of rejection extended throughout the university
and the labour communities, both of which were clearly conscious of the fact that
Spaniards did not have access to the most elementary political rights. Spain, whose
political and strategic geographical situation helped it receive foreign investment in
both industry and tourism, enjoyed manifest economic development during those
years; and it leaded to the transformation of a predominantly rural state into a mod-
ern industrialized one, whose standards of living approached those of most advanced
European countries.
During the 1960s the annual economic growth and industrial output of Spain was
one of the highest among all OECD countries being more than doubled since that
time, also thanks to the very important amounts of cash remittances sent by the
emigrants working mainly in European countries (Krasikov 1983: 5–6). On the
other hand, in this final stage of the dictatorship, General Franco’s own government
was aware of the waning relevance of many institutions in the face of the changes
being experienced by Spanish society. Among these were the educational institu-
tions. As a result, the regime promoted a grand education reform in 1970 by means
of a General Law of Education (Ley General de Educación), the greatest transfor-
mation imposed on the Spanish education system since the middle of the nineteenth
century and opportunistically presented as the next step in the implementation of the
above-mentioned Economic and Social Development Plans. Likewise, the new edu-
cational reform led by Opus Dei was actually a kind of promoter of an almost thau-
maturgical modernization of Spain, seeking internally to find a better cover-up
aimed with calculated ambivalence to link modernity with the seamless, reaction-
ary, and Catholic anti-liberalist sources of the regime (we must not forget that it was
part of a fascistized regime, which Francoism was par excellence, at that time des-
perately trying to survive). As such, Spain was presented to the nation’s population
and also internationally as a modern “Europeanized” nation with a certain orienta-
tion to Weberian ethics of success, provided by Opus Dei’s strategic rhetoric and
conscientiously arranged manoeuvres (Saz Campos 2004; for analysis of the role
played by Opus Dei in Franco’s regime, whose influence was felt from the outset,
see Casanova 1982, 1983, Estruch 1995, and Camprubí 2014).
134 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
Through a technocratic reform conceived under the premises of the human capital
theory of the 1960s as promulgated by reports conducted by the UNESCO, OECD,
and the World Bank (according to which education began to be considered in Spain
as investment and consumption), the Franco regime attempted to adopt a progres-
sive rhetoric of social change in order to sustain and extend as much as possible its
increasingly precarious national and international credibility, and its real deficit of
political legitimacy at a time when it was seeking to be admitted to the European
Common Market. In this sense, the reform enacted in the so-called Villar-Palasí
Law, promoted by a pioneering program of mass media publicity, aptly character-
ized as a “political spectacle” (Edelman 1988), sought to promote a new language
of social change by means of a mystified expression of social modernization (Ortega
1994). This process, characterized by the use of the effective authority-based tools
of mutually supporting persuasion, incentives, and controls in the process of con-
structing an effective education policy requiring legitimation, can be understood as
an example of the process that Hans Weiler (1983) called compensatory legitima-
tion in his successful analyses of educational reforms as the Spanish one
(Morgenstern de Finkel 1991, 1993). When this most important reform—actually
not developed during Franco’s time but during the transition period to democracy by
a national agreement among the different political parties—was quickly enacted in
less than 2 years, the dictator was a very decrepit human being.
Ironically, this feature of the political strategy of the 1970 reform has not received
adequate analytical attention in Spain. However, this reform ended up profoundly
altering a traditionally elitist system, institutionalized a distinctive and effective
comprehensive school system inspired by the Scandinavian model through the
emerging processes of educational globalization undertaken by OECD and
UNESCO recommendations, and brought about wide-ranging curricular reform.
After the death of Franco and in the context of the so-called Transition to
Democracy (Transición a la Democracia), numerous educational reforms took
place that exposed the fundamental disagreements underlying the diverse political,
social, and professional constituencies affected. The parliamentary debates con-
cerning the new Constitution were particularly acrimonious when addressing edu-
cational issues. Generally speaking, the political right supported the position of the
Catholic Church, which had traditionally exercised an extraordinary influence on
public instruction in Spain and still controlled a great part of private education.
Leftists sought to increase the control of the state over schools. They also favoured
encouraging the participation of parents in the governance of educational institu-
tions, and they sought to enhance the equality of the system through programmes of
social integration. For the left it was essential that political democracy translates
into educational democracy. As had already occurred in the nineteenth century and
during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936), people began to speak of a
“school war.” This tense educational climate persisted throughout the following
political stage and, in reality, continues to this very day.
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 135
In 1982 the Socialist party overwhelmingly won the general elections. It was a his-
torical milestone given that this party, which had such a decisive role during the
Second Republic in the 1930s, re-emerged in the 1970s after a long period of clan-
destine activity during the Franco regime. A new generation of young socialists,
headed by Felipe González, was to maintain control over the Spanish government
until 1996. Soon after assuming power, they established the Ley Orgánica del
Derecho a la Educación, or the Organic Law of the Right to Education (LODE
1985), that developed some essential points of the Constitution of 1978. This
extraordinarily polemical law explicitly consecrated “the principle of participation
of the members of the educational community” as a key factor of educational policy
and the State established controls to prevent discriminatory practices that even
applied to private schools. As could be expected, the new regulation of educational
institutions was harshly criticized by the proprietors of schools and by some par-
ents’ associations in the private sector. Protests were frequently held in the streets
and in the media, and parliamentary procedures for the approval of the law were
slow and tortuous. The defenders of private education, among them the Catholic
Church, argued that this law represented an unacceptable interference of the State in
the rights of families and the liberty of instruction that were also recognized in the
new Constitution.
In 1990 the Socialist Party (after having produced some critical social move-
ments against the government’s economic policies—e.g. the introduction of new
more flexible contracts for unexperienced youngsters—which ended with a suc-
cessful general strike in the whole country) undertook a new modernization of
the Spanish education system. It was in fact the first since the reform of 1970, and
it would put an even greater emphasis on the comprehensive nature of the school
by avoiding defined tracking policies (Bonal 1998; Fernández-Mellizo, 2003;
Fernández-Mellizo and Martínez-García 2017). This new reform was formalized
as the Law of General Planning of the Education System (LOGSE 1990).
Obligatory schooling was extended to the age of 16 years, and wide-ranging
changes in the curriculum were undertaken. Among the most important of these
changes were the introduction of the so-called cross-curriculum areas of study
and new fields of social learning concerning gender, multiculturalism, and the
environment (Boyd-Barrett and O’Malley 1995).
The curriculum designed by the Socialist reform was theoretically based on cog-
nitive constructivism and defended the creation of a new type of school culture and
a new educational community through the development of appropriate moral values
and attitudes (in fact the reform was designed by leading professors of educational
psychology—and not pedagogy as is frequently thought—at the level of a total
psychologization where language was consciously saturated “with constructivism,
aptitude, psychological diversification… but not social classes, racism, cultural
bias, school failure…”: see Torres 2007: 121; and Varela 1991, for a provocative
understanding of this reform as one designed for the middle classes). With the
136 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
7.2 N
ew Political Changes, New Educational Changes
Ending in a Great Recession
In 1996, after their victory in the general elections, the conservative Popular Party
formed a new government that immediately began to redirect the main aims of the
Socialist education policy (a national evaluation of the education system was con-
ducted for the first time in history; see García Garrido et al. 1998). After obtaining
another majority in the 2000 elections, the Popular Party pushed through Parliament
the Law of Educational Quality (Ley de Calidad de la Educación, LOCE 2002),
which openly questioned the overall foundations of the previous reform, introduc-
ing some substantial changes in the obligatory period of education that have for the
most part not been implemented (Rambla 2006).1 In an atmosphere in which the
predominant impression was one of chaos in the classroom, with insistent calls for
recovery of lost authority and order, some measures began to be taken to improve
the situation.
1
In March 2004, the Socialist Party returned to power. One of the priorities of its program was to
halt the application of the Law of Quality (LOCE) and reform it along the basic premises of the
LOGSE. In April 2006, the Spanish Parliament approved the new Organic Law of Education (Ley
Orgánica de la Educación 2006). The Popular Party voted against the new reform. One of the few
important innovations introduced by the new law referred to the development of free schooling for
children from 3 to 6 years old.
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 137
As noted above, the analysis follows centres exclusively on the application and
development of the socialist reform under the various governments (1982–1996),
although the LOGSE also remained legally in force under the first government of
the conservative Popular Party (1996–2000). During the Felipe González era, the
Socialist Party attempted to build a comprehensive, integrating system to tackle the
social inequalities in Spain at that time. In these circumstances, the development of
a comprehensive school was seriously hampered, as shown by many diverse studies
that focused on the lasting consequences of the rhetorical images, questions, or
slogans such as the issue of “social redemption” that accompanied the Socialist
reform of the 1990s (Peruga and Torres 1997; San Segundo 1998; Carabaña 1999;
Echevarría 1999; Rambla and Bonal 2000; Bolívar and Rodríguez-Diéguez 2002;
Sevilla 2003).
When the Socialists returned to power in 2004, a new cycle of reforms began
(then already including an ideological “hybridation” with the assumption of beliefs
coming from neoliberalism) (García Yanes 2017: 221–222); and again after 2012
when the conservatives returned to government, introducing in 2013 a more contro-
versial and conservative “organic law” of education for the compulsory education
system and post-compulsory secondary education (the so-called LOMCE or
Organic Law for the Improvement of Educational Quality, which replaced the
Socialist LOE or Organic Law of Education of 2006). At present, with a new
Socialist government since May 2018, supported by nationalists and left-wing par-
ties, the LOMCE will probably soon be amended although it does seem that the
new government is just going to derogate some conservative reformist initiatives
and replace for others, as to provide a stronger role to the public schooling and less
to the private-subsidized one.
Some recent general analyses in English of the different main educational
reforms, as elaborated in the four “organic laws” (compulsory in the entire State),
stated since the institutionalization of democracy in Spain, try to introduce some
theoretical understanding although somewhat disappointingly (Jover et al. 2017).
However, an achieved and well-defined ideological analysis of these main laws,
thought from a multidisciplinary approach, has also recently appeared. It is focused
on the relationships of causation and intentionality present in the cognitive linguis-
tic models (necessary for its construction as links between society and discourse
and as they are transmitted by their texts) and also using a critical discourse analysis
(CDA) (García Yanes 2017: 221–222).
Through the reconstruction of the situation models induced by each of the texts
analysed, in the case of the two laws approved by the Popular Party—especially
accentuated in the case of the latter, the LOMCE of 2013—it can be observed that
they appear saturated with conceptualizations of conceiving the individual as a
social actor, but this is defined exclusively by the function that he/she fulfils within
the educational system (63.5% of the references to the individual in the case of
conservative laws versus 32.9% of the socialist laws). The Popular Party, when it
comes to referring to the person who is the subject of the education system’s action,
tends to conceptualize it exclusively based on the role he/she plays towards school
138 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
2
LOMCE exploits, as a reform argument, the social and economic consequences that would have
for the individual (the “social exclusion”) as for the country (“deterioration of the competitive-
ness”) of not carrying it out the educational reform that recommends. But this law (and also the
previous LOCE) excludes from their inventory ideal quality attributes of people such as identity or
personality. Unlike what happens in general to the socialist laws, they mainly attribute to the indi-
vidual a more instrumental character, with the goal of creating individual value and the need for
diversification, individual sophistication and greater “employability” (expecting to achieve the
goal of developing the ability to compete successfully in the field of the international market and
to face the challenges that arise in the future, through the achievement of “new patterns of behavior
that place education in the center of our society and economy”) (García Yanes 2017: 108, 146, and
173). In addition, we observe that in the LOMCE disappears the interest shown by the previous
socialist LOCE for the issue of immigration. With this kind of argument, the LOMCE ends up
promoting the conservative ideology as regards the hierarchical conception of society, which is
characteristic of conservative ideology where inequality and hierarchy of society are accepted as
natural.
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 139
The Education Governance and Social Integration and Exclusion (EGSIE) project
carried out a survey among young students on questions concerning the importance
given to education, valuation of work, choice of post-compulsory studies, and
young people’s own view of their future social integration or exclusion. EGSIE,
over the years, is one of the very first exponents in educational research of the
launching of two contemporary concepts of the greatest significance such as the
relationship of educational governance and social inclusion/exclusion in policy,
from the foundation of which the “policy research becomes bound to the policy
makers definition of research main issues, [avoiding to take] the categories and
problems definitions derived from governmental policies with the problems of
research without any serious intellectual scrutiny”. This pioneering introduction in
the field of educational policy research takes place on the basis of theoretical orien-
tations that initially did not converge with the foundations that will consolidate from
the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was due to the fact that the theoretical
leaders who leaded the EGSIE project derived the conceptualization of the own
concept of governance of contemporary educational systems, and its direct applica-
tion to the case of the mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion of youth, of social theory
then still called postmodern with the Foucauldian new thinking as a distinctive ori-
entation (Popkewtiz and Lindblad 2000: 6).
3
To this end, we used 788 young people’s replies to questionnaires based on the theoretical catego-
ries of the Education Governance and Social Integration and Exclusion in Europe (EGSIE) proj-
ect. EGSIE was an international project of comparative research carried out between 1998 and
2002 as a TSER (Targeted Socio-Economic Research) project of the XII Directorate General
Research of the European Commission within the Fourth Framework Programme of the European
Commission. The surveys were mainly carried out in the regions of Andalusia and the Canary
Islands, which may be characterized by their peripheral geographical location within the European
Union and by their modest economic development by Spanish standards. See: Lindblad and
Popkewitz 1999, 2000, 2001; Lindblad et al. 1999. The Spanish version of the final report of the
Spanish case appears in Luengo (2005, Chap 7).
The official publication European Research on Youth Supporting Young People to Participate
Fully in Society published by the European Commission included several references to the EGSIE
project as well as other youth-related projects funded from the fourth to the seventh research
framework programmes of the European Union from 1996 to 2013 (http://ec.europa.eu/research/
social-sciences/pdf/policy_reviews/policy-review-youth_en.pdf).
140 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
The EGSIE project was one of the three TSER (Targeted Socio-Economic
Research) projects of the 4th Framework Program that investigated the issue
of exclusion and social integration of European youth in the context of the
governance of education systems. The concept of social exclusion, when
approached within the project, had recently been introduced as a concept
within the social sciences as drawn from French Republican thought where
social exclusion refers to rupture of the social bond or solidarity.
The others projects were the important YUSEDER project (Youth
Unemployment and Social Exclusion, ended in 2000), focused on the investi-
gation of the concept of social exclusion in the context of unemployment of
vulnerable groups of young unemployed people in six Northern and Southern
European countries, with diverse historical and social understandings of being
socially excluded or marginalized, and the ENTRANCE project (Enterprise
and its transfer to combat social exclusion, also ended in 2002), in which
university partners of Hungary, Spain, Israel, and England, under the leader-
ship of the Centre for Education and Industry at Warwick University and its
director Prue Huddleston concluded that entrepreneurial education for young
people would help them confront that risk since it has a significant impact on
the affective domain of the youngsters as regards motivation, self-confidence,
and locus of control). The YUSEDER project was headed by Thomas
Kieselbach, director of the Institute for Psychology of Work, Unemployment,
and Health (IPG) at the University of Bremen in Germany, and published an
important book—EGSIE and ENTRANCE did not ultimately produce a book
on their project—containing the findings of the contributors, who were work
psychologists, sociologists, and social workers (Kieselbach 2000).
Although the YUSEDER project made a very elaborate approach to the con-
cept of social exclusion, we think that the EGSIE project was more sophisti-
cated in addressing the conceptualization of this new concept of social
exclusion of young people in school (compared and internally related to
inclusion since this must be conceived as a two-sided process). In addition,
unlike the other two projects, it included a pioneering treatment of governance
in the context of educational institutions, which is not mentioned in the impor-
tant volume cited above. In fact, the governance concept was officially used
with some precision in main European Commission’s reports in 2001; the title
of the important final draft of 2000 of the European Commission on manage-
ment methods (nurtured heavily by the New Public Management, increasingly
integrated into the mainstream of policy-making methodology) was still
called Reforming the Commission, but when released the White Paper in
2001, they decided to change the previous title to Governance in the European
Union (Tarschys 2010: 37).
The 6th Framework Program (2002–2006), which additionally focused on citi-
zens and governance in a knowledge-based society, contained moderate research
on the question of governance in the field of education. The education-related
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 141
projects in the 7th Framework Program did not consider exclusion in school
either, but the focus was on social exclusion in the CSEYHP projects (Combating
Social Exclusion among Young Homeless Populations, 2008–2011) and
YOUNEX (Youth, Unemployment and Exclusion in Europe, 2008–2011).
7.3.1 S
tudy Topics, Young People’s Characteristics, and Family
Backgrounds
The survey, carried out in the year 2000, formed the third phase of the project, with
the participation of four EU countries (Finland, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain) and
one non-EU country (Australia), as part of a comparative study (Youth Survey, coor-
dinated by Risto Rinne from the University of Turku, Finland) (Rinne et al. 2003).4
The Spanish sample consisted of 788 pupils in the third and fourth year of
Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) in the Autonomous Communities of
Andalusia (458 pupils) and the Canary Islands (330 pupils). Some of the partici-
pants were registered in two measures of attention to diversity known as Social
Guarantee Programmes and Curricular Diversification Programmes, as defined by
the 1990 Law of Education (LOGSE). In all the participating countries, the sample
used was of pupils reaching the end of compulsory education, with a total of
3008 cases.
The young people surveyed live in a traditional nuclear family model, where a
majority of parents have only primary education, and a minority have higher educa-
tion or university degrees. In the main, male parents have university degrees, and
there is a correlation in the family structure showing that the higher the educational
level of the father, the higher that of the mother. In this family model, the male par-
ents are in paid employment, whereas 55.3% of the female parents are housewives.
However, there are also working mothers, who are basically those with higher edu-
cational level. The parents are employed in white-collar professions, the services
sector and craftsmanship, and in skilled and unskilled manual labour (blue-collar).
In the comparative study, the traditional family model was found in Portugal and
Sweden, whereas in Finland and Australia, the young people lived under other fam-
ily compositions. Regarding educational level, the data indicate that in Portugal the
parents had only basic primary education, whereas university studies were found in
Finland and, especially, in Sweden. The figure of the housewife was not a visible
4
By age, the Spanish study included young people from 14 to 19 years of age, the majority of
which were in the 14–16 years age range, although 19% of those over 16 were still in the compul-
sory education stage. By sex, 54.3% were girls and 45.7% boys. The survey was carried out at 15
educational centres, 11 public centres (4 in Andalusia and 7 in the Canary Islands), and 4 private
state-subsidised centres (2 in Andalusia and 2 in the Canary Islands), with a sample taken followed
a quota system of pupils from different geographic and educational contexts (the urban or rural
nature and considering also the socio-economic and cultural status of their pupils).
142 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
option, unlike the case of Spain. The percentages of family unemployment were
higher in the countries from southern Europe than in those from the north.
The parents tend to work mainly in white-collar profession in the Nordic coun-
tries, unlike the southern countries. Access to education, the family structure, and
differentiated distribution of roles in the productive and/or reproductive spheres can
be explained by the role played by the State, family, and market in the different
models of welfare states defined by Esping-Andersen (1996, 1999) and, in particular,
by the role played by the Catholic Church in the familialism or the family-centred
welfare states, such as Spain.
The ESO is a crucial stage in school life and the biographical trajectory of young
people. It covers 100% of the population as access has been democratized, but not
without some problems due to the difficulty in compulsorily keeping pupils in the
classroom. ESO is also important inasmuch as the school certificate obtained on
completion is the first certificate awarded by the Spanish education system and is
necessary to continue post-compulsory studies or to join the labour market. Lack of
this certificate places pupils in a situation of academic failure and/or school dropout,
with the accompanying risks of educational and social exclusion (Jiménez 2015).
The aim of the survey was to discover and describe the discourse about the nar-
ratives, sagas, and myths young people have about the relation between forms of
governance in education and how it affects processes of social integration and
exclusion in education and at work. Specifically, we were interested to know young
people’s perception of the changes taking place in the education system, whether
there was a relation between their social, educational, cultural, and economic back-
grounds and their success or failure at school, their future possibilities of integration
or exclusion in the job market, as well as their perception as fully fledged members
of a multinational environment (EU), which could, a priori, offer better training and
work options.
7.3.2 M
eritocracy as Motto: Faith in the School as a Means
to Achieve Equality
The young people, the main actors in the education system, were aware of the
changes taking place in education and society, as well as the not always positive
consequences of education and their access to the job market. However, in their
discourse, they retained some myths about equality in the education system and the
need to cater for a diversity of pupils with different school trajectories, in order to
guarantee them the right to education.
Analysis of the survey found that education is highly valued by the young peo-
ple, as they expressed a strong belief in it as a medium that can bring social equality.
They thought that it was worthwhile to study to be successful in life (90.8%), that
education is a public good (87%), and also, although to a lesser extent, that it is a
solution to the problem of youth unemployment, which agrees with the fact that a
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 143
Spain’s entry into the European Union substantially altered social, economic, politi-
cal, and educational relations between countries and their citizens. Young people
also have their opinions about the expectations and demands associated with joining
the EU, and what opportunities or limitations might affect them regarding their
future as citizens, students, and workers in a common market.
The study on this question carried out by Prats et al. (2001) concluded that “the
majority of young people have a very imprecise and distant view of what the
European Union is; a vision which, moreover, does not concern them despite the
importance that the decisions taken there will have on their lives” (p. 148). The
young people interviewed for the EGSIE replied with scepticism about their attitude
to the EU because, despite the legitimacy of the institution according to young peo-
ple in another study (Elzo et al. 1999), a considerable number choose the “Don’t
know” option. In any case, they think that the EU promotes peace in Europe and
increases equality among citizens because it creates conditions in which the indi-
vidual has more opportunities. However, they do not consider unanimously that
such opportunities are related to the creation of more possibilities for work, and they
are notably reticent about other European citizens coming to Spain to work. This
same opinion was expressed forcefully by all the other young Europeans and
Australians interviewed, who did not accept foreign workers coming to their
countries.
The indecisiveness and lack of awareness of the young Spaniards may be due to
a lack of information on the EU provided by the education system and the interna-
tionalization of Spain, as it can be seen they are unaware of both the advantages and
disadvantages of European integration. Opportunities for student and worker mobil-
ity have different values for these young people. The girls were especially favour-
able (58.7%) to encouragement to study in other countries and were agreeable to the
idea of foreign students coming to study in Spain (58.2%), which is already taking
place under the Erasmus Programme.
However, the results show a different story regarding the question of work. The
idea of working abroad is not well received, with 50.4% not being agreeable to
encouragement to work in another country, as against 30.3% that would be ready to
look for job opportunities in Europe. The older young people did not agree (53.5%)
that EU workers should come to Spain, although there is disparity because almost
25% were not against this and the remainder had no set opinion. The girls were most
in agreement with foreign workers coming to Spain.
In consequence, the young Spaniards interpret the process of European integra-
tion with scepticism, with the “Don’t know” option ranging from 30 to 60% in their
replies. Prats et al. (2001) stated that “teenagers are in favour of the process with the
European Union, but a large percentage of them –around four out of ten– look on it
with indifference and disinterest. They are not opposed to it, but neither do they
express decided support” (p. 157).
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 145
Within this context, the following recent evolution in the case of the European
image and the idea of integration in Europe among Spanish youth has some rele-
vance as confronted with the case of other European nations as shown by the Centre
for Sociological Research (Spanish acronym CIS), which has for many years been
the most important Spanish institution to undertake periodic surveys of the Spanish
population on a wide variety of questions, using privileged samples that are signifi-
cant in the number of participants and the sophistication of research techniques and
whose results enjoy full public access. As such, several years ago, in 2009, the CIS
carried out an initial inquiry into pro-European feelings in Spain. The survey of
3,459 persons found that Spanish citizens give great importance to belonging to the
European Union, with a significant 17.5% of young people from 18 to 34 years who
felt purely European, with less allegiance to their country of origin. However, this
percentage rose to 65.1% when they were asked about feeling European and
Spanish, as against 13.4% of young people, who did not identify particularly with
either Spain or Europe. Following this line of research and shifting the question of
Europe to only the young Spanish population, in 2014 the INJUVE (National
Institute of Spanish Youth) analysed young people’s interest in the European Union.
The results found that Spanish youth was divided between 51.5% who showed
interest in questions relating to the European Union and 48.4% who did not.5
But with the economic crisis that began in 2008, and the introduction of neolib-
eral packages of structural adjustments that became harsher after 2013 with the
return of the Popular Party and its policies of flexibility in the labour market, youth
unemployment has been creating “new views” among Spanish youth about what
had been said before. Unemployment has gradually increased to alarming levels
(with higher unemployment rates and more temporary and part-time employment
than before the recession or the global financial crisis).6 This is why we can state
5
The INJUVE study concluded that young Spaniards with apparently less strong pro-European
feelings have a lower level of education, whereas those with further and university studies tend to
be more concerned and better informed about events in Europe. Similar considerations were found
in young people who classed themselves as “left-wing”, who had stronger pro-European feelings
than young right-wingers, although both also considered themselves Spanish nationals. We can
therefore conclude that young Spaniards, still suffering serious difficulties in the labour market,
view Europe as a way out of these difficulties. The European Union is seen by 34.7% as a means
of collaboration and aid among countries, and 13.9% emphasize the importance of travelling and
studying in a European country. In short, the conception and attitude of young Spaniards towards
the European Union are positive, with as high as 86.6% giving considerable importance to the EU.
6
The last youth unemployment rate reported in Spain is 37% of youth (the second highest in EU-28
after Greece). According to Eurostat data, for the EU as a whole, the percentage of long-term
unemployed young people between 15 and 29 fell from 6% at the beginning of the 2000s to 3% in
2008, and since then has gradually increased until reaching a maximum of 7% in 2013 (Echave and
Echave 2017). In the case of Spain, the percentage of young people affected by long-term unem-
ployment (12 months or more) went from 15% in 2007 to 50% in 2015. There are hardly any
gender differences in the incidence of this social phenomenon among Spanish youth (Montero
González 2017). Unfortunately, this is in fact one of the features of the Southern European model
(understood as historical and comparative political economy) whose socio-demographic model is
characterized by a lengthening of young people’s residential, work, and family dependency, in a
context characterized by weak family policies (Domínguez-Mujica and Pérez García 2017: 18).
146 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
7.3.4 S
elf-Confidence for School Success and Obtaining
Education Credentials
Young Spaniards think of themselves as motivated students, who work hard and
strive to achieve credentials as a means to open up both educational opportunities,
such as post-compulsory studies, and job opportunities, as they state that obtaining
an academic certificate gives them better chances of integration in the job market. In
general, the young people consider that education is the panacea for all social evils
and, of course, for not being unemployed. This discourse found in the social con-
sciousness of youth was common in the 1970s and consistent with the expansion of
compulsory education in the developed countries. Now, towards the end of the sec-
ond decade of the twenty-first century, we might ask if the extension of compulsory
schooling, the massification of access to post-compulsory training, the increased
obsession with accumulating certificates and the excess of university training (and,
by contrast, the lack of numbers choosing VET, although it has become a more
popular option for post-compulsory secondary education and higher education
(Homs 2009) are elements that contribute to improve equality and are an incentive
ensuring the promotion and social rise of young people, or, on the contrary, this situ-
ation causes over-qualification.
7
Spain has been plagued by high youth unemployment for the last several years (in 1999 the rate
reached 25%, falling slowly over the following years until the great recession started in 2008, when
it rose gradually to near 48% in 2015 on average for the whole country) (OECD 2018). This dra-
matic phenomenon of great social concern is also connected to the brain drain, since many Spanish
professionals cannot find employment opportunities at home (Aguilar-Palacio et al. 2015; Nelson
2015). Furthermore, between 2007 and 2013 there was an increase of 18.5% in young people
between 15 and 24 years who neither studied nor worked (NEET: see https://data.oecd.org/
youthinac/youth-not-in-employment-education-or-training-neet.htm), where important increases in
countries such as Greece, Ireland, or Spain (over 50%) contrast with decreasing trends (only occur-
ring in Luxembourg, Malta, and Germany). The most noticeable cases are Italy (22.2%), Bulgaria
(21.6%), Greece (20.4%), Cyprus (18.7%), and Spain (18.6%), as against the lower percentages of
Luxembourg (5%), Holland (5.1%), Denmark (6%), and Germany (6.3%) (Ramos et al. 2015).
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 147
These young people, perceived as meritocratic, think that certain distinctive quali-
ties are needed for academic success. Specifically, and according to this meritocratic
perception, they value highly individual personal qualities to be successful in school,
over and above the positive valuation of other family aspects that could have an effect
on school performance. Being diligent or constant in study (97.6%), a positive atti-
tude at school (94.4%), talent and personal abilities (80.3%), and even a capacity for
rapid adaptation are the most important characteristics for success at school, all more
intensely valued by the girls. Other aspects, such as behaving as the teaching staff
wants, ambition and the will to compete with others, well-educated parents, being
popular among peers or having rich parents (8.6%) are less highly valued, although
the boys believe they are more important. These results coincide with the valuation
of education by young Swedes, Finns, and Portuguese. They too are meritocratic and
value personal qualities and determination in school work over family influence. The
boys have a higher belief in competition and being popular among their peers than
the girls. The young Australians also think it is important to work hard and have
personal skills, although, in comparison with the young Europeans, they give greater
importance to being competitive and ambitious. This question is affected by the edu-
cational level of the parents, i.e., young people whose parents only have elementary
education or VET considered competition and ambition to be much less important.
It is clear that to think one way does not imply behaving that same way, and, as
in other questions, the contradiction between discourse and practice can be seen in
the young Spaniards, but not so much among the Europeans and Australians, where
there is a higher correlation between what they think and what they do. Almost all
the Spaniards state that success at school depends on hard work, but only two thirds
of those claims to put this into practice in their daily school lives. This proportion is
much higher for the girls, who also obtain the best results and have a more positive
attitude to work. Apart from personal merit, the academic results seem to bear some
relation to cultural and educational aspects of the family. Specifically, the educa-
tional levels of the father and mother, as well as their job status, have a positive
influence on school success, although we must not discount the fact that the data
suggest that students whose parents are employed achieve the lowest percentage of
poor or unsatisfactory results. In contrast to what the students suggest (that educa-
tional differences depend on personal merit), these data rather seem to indicate that
social origin affects the level of school success and also the processes of socio-
educational integration and exclusion, which coincides with research by Calero
(2006) and Tarabini and Curran (2015).
7.3.5 M
yths about the Ideal Job in Time of Uncertainty: Job
Stability and Remuneration
Young people in Spain are leaving home at an increasingly late age (Benedicto
2017) because of the difficulty in finding a job, given that youth unemployment is
one of the most flagrant social problems (Moreno Mínguez 2012). The young people
148 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
surveyed also gave very high importance to everyone’s duty to earn their living
through work (93.3%), even though the job might not mean that a person felt ful-
filled by it. However, they prefer a boring, monotonous job to being unemployed.
The girls valued more intensely the ideal of feeling fulfilled by their work, and the
boys gave more value to personal enrichment without much effort. These are basi-
cally the same attitudes for the young European and Australian participants.
In order to gain access to the job market and be successful in it, the young people
considered that certain characteristics were basic, all valued in importance at over
75%: to work a lot, to have a good education, to present suitable habits and attitudes,
communicative capacity, flexibility, abilities, and talent, and, to a lesser extent, to
have vocational training in a specific field, and the ambition and capacity to com-
pete with others. These aspects once again confirm the meritocratic tendency already
evidenced in the educational identity, although the girls valued more intensely effort
and appropriate personal aptitudes, and the boys leaned towards ambition and com-
petition in the workplace, which also correlated with those having the best marks on
their academic record. Perhaps with the idea of entering the job market, VET was
the preference of the older boys still in compulsory education and with lower than
average educational performance, who came from families where the parents had
elementary education and worked in blue-collar jobs. In the comparative analysis,
there were no differences in the perceptions of the young people, except for the
importance of competitiveness for the young Australians (Aro et al. 2010) and the
fact that the young Portuguese showed a preference for VET.
However, the most important characteristics for choosing future employment do
not agree with what the young people would actually wish or choose. Although they
consider personal individual characteristics to be very important, in practice the
highest value awarded to choice of job is related to the extrinsic benefits, i.e., having
a stable job (96.2%) and good remuneration (95.1%), which are conditions found
generally throughout the young Europeans and Australians surveyed. Consequently,
the myth of a stable job for life, which allows you to have a professional career with
good financial rewards, prevails over the possibility of learning and developing, and
interacting with other people. Nonetheless, we must question whether these charac-
teristics of an ideal job continue to be real (particularly if we take into account that
the high rate of youth unemployment, job flexibility, precarious job contracts, and
baseline earnings, among other factors, have reshaped this myth of the steady job
and a good salary). Although many young people mention this myth, much more
importance is given by the boys to having a significant remuneration for their work,
while the girls value being able to develop personally and professionally.
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 149
7.3.6 E
xclusion and Integration: The Result of Personal Acts
by the Individual, Not Family or Social Influence
We were also interested to know the young people’s awareness of the factors that
could lead them to social exclusion or integration in their future lives. They identi-
fied the qualities for success in life as being hard-working or diligent in the work-
place, the capacity to mix with other people, and studying as much as possible, with
a majority of the girls identifying with these qualities. However, with the exception
of the young Australians, little importance was given to being able to compete with
others, having well-educated parents, and, with an even lower valuation, having rich
parents. Once again, we find personal ability considered as a fundamental value,
together with the importance of meritocracy and a low valuation of the cultural,
economic, and educational capital of the family. We also find a certain predisposi-
tion towards language learning and an interest in new technology.
Unlike other political, teaching, and social actors, the young people surveyed
considered the causes of social exclusion to be having poor quality education, not
wanting to take risks in life, a person’s passivity, not having the will to compete with
others, or being unemployed, this last being considered very important by the young
Europeans and Australians. However, they did not think that a family with few
resources could influence them as a determining factor in their situation of social
exclusion or integration, an idea on which they do not differ from other young peo-
ple. This view confirms the young Spaniards’ discourse of strong confidence placed
on education and the little influence of family background to be successful in life
and not be excluded in society. Moreover, this interpretation has little or nothing to
do with the explanation given by other educational actors that family and social
background are mainly responsible for exclusion.
For the young Spaniards, unemployment is not considered decisive for social
exclusion, despite the fact that they considered having a stable job as the most
important thing for their future. As Martín Criado (1998) pointed out, the different
agents and groups involved in the job market give different symbolic views and
strategies when valuating different situations, such as unemployment. According to
the students, coming from a “family with few resources” is an even less decisive
factor for causing exclusion. In their view, school is a valuable means of social
promotion.
With an egalitarian, solidary discourse taken straight from reforming rhetoric,
the Spanish students display, first, a meritocratic and even pragmatic attitude, based
on the most individualistic credentialism. They even go so far as to deconstruct
these beliefs into the immense possibilities of personal effort, giving numerous
examples proving the reproductive capacity of the school system and, therefore, of
the determinations of social origin.
150 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
7.3.7 P
ost-compulsory Studies: Differentiated Educational
Expectations for Access to University or VET
8
However, we did find significant differences between girls and boys, the former being more apt to
consider Bachillerato and university, whereas the latter opted more for VET. The students choos-
ing VET were children of blue-collar working parents with basic education. On the contrary, the
children of secondary or higher education and white-collar workers basically preferred university.
We must also mention that choice of further study according to the employment and education of
mothers shows that a great number of students whose mothers are housewives and/or have only
primary education have serious doubts about the course of study they want to follow, and many of
them choose VET over university courses. Equally, most students whose mothers have secondary
studies generally opt for university study, while less choose VET. It therefore seems that the choice
between one and other types of further education differs according to the occupational category
and education of the fathers and mothers, as has been pointed out in other research on young
Spaniards (Fernández de Castro 1990; Martin Criado 1998; Carabaña 1999; Calero 2006).
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 151
stronger tendency towards the VET option. The branches of knowledge chosen
would lead them in future to hold jobs classified as white-collar.
7.4 D
iscussion: A Story of Light and Shade on Politics,
Policy, and Educational Reforms for Young People
in Spain
Spain is now a country that has arisen from a long period of fascist dictatorship,
which systematically manoeuvred using rhetorical and symbolic illusions of social
change without introducing and implementing deep political and socio-economical
transformations. In this context, analysis of the discourse of the actors in the
Socialist reform of the 1990s shows it to be an indistinct, ambivalent narration aris-
ing out of the gap between a few illuminating intellectual discoveries and darker
practical implications. The optimism they express about the social changes occur-
ring during this decade turns to scepticism regarding the changes experienced by the
school, which they understand to be not exclusively due to the educational reforms.
These contrasts can probably best be seen among the teaching staff. In-service
teacher training, for example, has improved substantially. However, the social pres-
tige of teaching has declined, the practice of the profession has deteriorated (excessive
workloads, hard to accept social expectations, etc.), and relations with the political
administration have become increasingly strained. Democratization, autonomy, and
bureaucratization have become typical factors in the imagery and narratives of school
actors. Despite the fact that the educational reform should have meant greater democ-
ratization and autonomy of management, the teachers continuously complain of
bureaucratization and the deficient administrative organization of education.
On the other hand, the one essential change in the structure of the system brought
about by the LOGSE was the extending of obligatory education to the age of
16 years, with the subsequent creation of a new stage of secondary education, i.e., a
strong drive towards a comprehensive school. However, this decision has led to
numerous problems—shown explicitly during the brief period of economic expan-
sion occurring with the conservative governments after 1995, and even when the
Socialists returned after 2004 and until 2008 when the larger crisis became notori-
ous—related to the desire of some pupils to leave the system before that age. Early
school-leavers or even school objectors wanted to work in the booming real estate
business—a phenomenon also found in the educational discourses of the EU and
there was to the excessive diversification of pupils caused by different programs of
integration or compensation.9 Many school actors believe that this increase in the
9
We need to bear in mind that the Spanish contemporary growth model has been based on sectors
offering little added value (tourism and construction with low technological development). The
real estate business generated a certain economic recovery after 1995 with the conservative Popular
Party in power, although it really masked the continuity of economic crisis when the real estate
bubble burst, when the Socialists were again in power (Buendia and Molero-Simarro 2018).
152 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
comprehensive period of instruction is only of benefit to, and actually was invented
for, the most disadvantaged pupils, with no regard for those who are characterized
as “above average.” These discourses make very clear the tension between compre-
hensiveness—the typical option of education policies in the welfare state—and effi-
ciency, the preferential aim of neoliberal policies that have been very active in recent
years (Simola et al. 2002).
The same constants apply to the relationship between the family and its relation
with the school. The family naturally continues to be considered key as a socializing
agent and, therefore, essential for the development of the new educational system.
Yet its participation in school life—highly valued by the reform—has fallen short of
expectations. If the family does not participate, the system begins to break down—
this is one of the most repeated conclusions in the interviews analysed, especially
when the object of consideration is inclusion and exclusion. For many, the cause of
exclusion resides not in the school but in the family, in society, and in the very indi-
viduals who suffer it. As registered in our “cognitive unconscious” (Lakoff and
Johnson 1999), school, by itself, rarely excludes, although, as a matter of fact, in
Spain the family is a key institution for young people, actually the most highly val-
ued. However, as a counterpart, young people think that the family does not influ-
ence their exclusion/inclusion processes because they are young meritocrats, and
everything depends on their effort and their involvement in school.
This rhetorical exoneration of the school is predictably present in narratives,
thought of as symbolism or social imaginaries (that is to say, the subject and society
are constituted and instituted imaginatively and as such their meanings are per-
ceived and imagined) (Castoriadis 1997). All this gives this institution called school
a sort of “magic aura” inscribed in a “story of salvation” to which all individuals are
summoned regardless of their origin or condition and where they are involved
in local decision-making that brings government policies closer to the individual
(Lindblad and Popkewitz 2004: 84). Although let us first admit that the effect of
including the excluded is not necessarily inclusion. As Goodwin (1996) suggested,
the frontiers or limits of marginalization are mobile and constantly shifting.
What really happens, then, is that what is in fact a socio-political problem is
denaturalized and turned into an individual question of moral or ethical conscience.
The narrative effect of this transformation is a host of weak, diffuse images (a
“humanitarian soup” as the Spanish leading sociologist Manuel Castells would say)
that do not reward reflection or lead to the invention of new creative formulae of
governance that could be useful in overcoming the spaces of classification and nor-
malization so firmly embedded in the school system. In fact, these images work as
part of a normalizing of ideology through precisely “the production of images of
human beings that unjustly serve to keep people in their place” (Beach 2017: 199).
In a more general view, we could say that social inclusion-exclusion in the edu-
cational sphere causes the emergence of different, socially distorted school cultures.
The prevailing models (discourses and imaginary) are those that opt for a school
based on success and results, where there are no insurmountable barriers for indi-
vidual effort and perseverance in study, as against the other models and traditions
that put emphasis on social and economic factors (Silver 1994). The question of
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 153
equity is translated into a system of reason that labels, differentiates, and divides the
subjectivity of educational actors and agents according to certain normalization
procedures.
School educates, i.e., it qualifies and capacitates students, but at the same time it
normalizes them depending on their comprehension of and proximity to this new
and all embracing, but likewise contradictory, legitimacy. This “new legitimacy”
has been queried in various ways by educational actors, whose image of the school
is distinct from that optimistically presented by the Socialist reform of the 1990s.
Many of them felt tired and disappointed upon seeing how, behind all the modern-
izing rhetoric of efficiency and quality, there remains an insufficiently creative
school guided by traditionalist models and values. The future is uncertain. Freedom
and autonomy are a mirage, and the level of student achievement continues to drop
alarmingly (in particular in secondary education). Teachers are trapped by the
demands of the educational authorities, the families, and society, but above all they
feel they are undervalued and alone in the face of a task that is beyond them. The
“ideal” student imagined and desired by the educational reform, society, and teach-
ers bears little resemblance to the “real” unmotivated and even aggressive student
who is actually present in the classroom (González Faraco 2003). School has
changed, but its future is the murkiest image of all.
Such scepticism and uncertainty contrast with the extraordinary confidence
shared by the vast majority of the educational community in the egalitarian condi-
tion of today’s school. The same is not true when deciding on the reasons for failure
and exclusion. For the students, it is a fundamentally personal process, whereas for
the other educational actors, its origin is essentially social. The latter admit self-
exclusion but consider that exclusion is a socially produced artefact (Jamrozik and
Nocella 1998) and that only society is capable of setting it right, so that the initial
confidence in the school’s integrating capacity now becomes doubtful. However, no
one doubts that public and private schools (a decisive duality in the Spanish educa-
tional system) differ in their perception of social inclusion and exclusion and other
closely linked concepts such as “equal opportunity”, “attention to diversity”, and
“school autonomy”.
Taking these differences into account, the most widespread impression is still
that the school cannot solve problems that society has not been able to solve hereto-
fore, that it is not ready to accept all sorts of pupils and that it has little to offer
pupils with difficulties, who end up excluding themselves. Therefore, it merely con-
firms the marginalization of those that society has already marginalized.
Consequently, for many educational actors, progress towards cultural plurality,
which should not be a plurality of cultures but a plurality of culturally defined com-
munities (Bauman 2000: 86), is no more than a beautiful dream.
This confused panorama presents many interrogatives, but there is one above all,
directly related to education and its relations with social inclusion and exclusion,
that we find especially worrying: what is to become of the school system and those
involved in it if it is not openly recognized that its capacity for exclusion, differen-
tiation, and segregation remains intact, even though it is masked and hidden beneath
flowery rhetoric?
154 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
7.5 T
he Relevance of Educational Research in the Forming
of a European Union Policy: By Way of Conclusion
One of the main contributions of the EGSIE project studied in this chapter consisted
of describing the social imaginary of young students on concluding their compul-
sory education from a comparative viewpoint. As actors in the education system, the
students were not examined in depth from the viewpoint of the new practices of
governance, despite their being one of the main actors. The conclusion of compul-
sory education represents a key moment to begin the processes of juvenile transi-
tion, which are determined by the construction of discursive imaginaries on the
importance of education and training, work, and the qualities required to be success-
ful in life. These aspects give meaning to the configuration of de-standardized tran-
sitions that do not follow a classic linear trajectory and cannot be understood unless
they are interpreted in a changing socio-structural context, in which belonging to
the European Union appears as a possible horizon for the development of expecta-
tions of transition for young people. This was found particularly in the case of
Spain, in comparison to the other countries analysed. Even today, one might say that
the social imaginary of Spaniards in general regarding Europe and Europeans con-
tinues to be attractive, more so than for the rest of EU nations together.
The description of the young people’s social imaginary was carried out following
three analytical categories used in the theoretical framework of the research and
which we believe give theoretical consistency to the analysis. Just before the new
century began, the category of “narratives, sagas and myths” described how young
people constructed and idealized the changes they wished to achieve for their proj-
ect of school life, taking into account that those changes were contextualized by
official discourse that visibilized and continues to visibilize the school as a space
offering better social opportunities. This belief that young people have in the educa-
tion system is legitimized by a discourse in which equality and trust in the school
conform a myth of their social imaginary.
The “subject construction” category laid the basis for the identification of the
images, perceptions, and qualities that the young people have or idealize for their
transition processes to imply success at school and in work. In this case, they showed
a meritocratic conception for the achievement of success, both in the school and at
work. After a long crisis from which Spain has not fully emerged, these images have
been considerably eroded and devalued. It is not for nothing that one of the choices
young Spaniards have been taking in recent years has been to leave Spain in search
of work. This general emigration towards Europe is not the same as that undertaken
by their grandparents or parents, many of whom were born abroad, because many
of the young now emigrate after concluding their university studies.
In any case we have to point out that the “governance, social inclusion and exclu-
sion” category of the EGSIE project referred to forms of governance found in the
schooling and education received by these young people, which build and give
identities for action and participation and, naturally, influence the processes of
social inclusion and exclusion of these same young people. Far from having been
sufficiently researched in Spain, it remains of interest to know and understand the
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 155
perceptions of young people today concerning the qualities necessary for success in
juvenile transitions, the influence of individual, family, and social factors, and their
expectations for the future.
As part of an important publication on education policy, this chapter represents a
singular case of scientific literature that is not really well known in the European
context and is intellectually removed in various ways from well-known policy anal-
ysis studies, traditionally in debt to conventional North American approaches in
several aspects. As we have already said, the EGSIE project formed part of the
European Union’s Framework Programmes for Research (FPR) that was set up in
1984. Over the last 30 years, these programmes have led to the development and
identification of specific goals and priorities for a European research policy. At first
heavily influenced by the North American policy of research and innovation (R+I),
these programmes began to encourage the competitiveness of European industry
and technology and have extended their priorities to include questions belonging to
the social sciences that were not considered priority until the approval of FPR4 in
1994 under the denomination Targeted Socio-Economic Research Programme,
including the EGSIE project. This FPR has been considered one of the most far-
reaching (Finnegan 2015), because it introduced the need to analyse the economic
and social effects of the technological changes taking place, including the conse-
quences for the labour market and unemployment.
In the following FPR, the areas of influence continued to consider the need to
support policy-oriented research that affected the achievement of solutions to such
problems, as well as further, emerging ones. By means of these FPR, the European
Commission has acted as a policy entrepreneur (“that is its skills to keep long-term
pan-European goals, at the same time as using the situation as a ‘window of oppor-
tunity’ to expand the scope of its political arena/competences” (Kaiser and Prange-
Gstöhl 2012: 60). Furthermore, with the launching in 2000 of the so-called Lisbon
Strategy Agenda, the EU set the goal of creating a knowledge-based society and
becoming the most competitive and dynamic economy using the three instruments
of knowledge, education, and research and innovation. The creation of the European
Research Area (ERA), the improvement in standards of education and training, with
emphasis on mobility, and the development of programmes promoting Lifelong
Learning, in the context of a cohesion policy focused on reducing economic inequal-
ity by boosting growth, have been encouraging the use of structural funds in the area
of research and innovation (Milio 2012).
The present programme called Horizon 2020 (2014–2020) has involved the
greatest financial contribution of the European Union to research. The final budget
is 80 million euros for R+D over 7 years. On average, about 9% of the EU budget
has gone to research and innovation over the past decade. Recently, the EU has
required most of its member states to invest much more in domestic R+I systems,
even under its budgetary policies of austerity.10
10
Unlike the FPR focused on technological research, in search of an innovative discursive frame-
work, Horizon 2020 shows how the scientific policy of the EU is seeking a new semantics prioritiz-
ing innovation, economic growth, and policy improvement. In fact, this programme has three main
156 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
Last year, 3 years altered the setting up of Horizon 2020, the European Parliament
approved the Resolution of 13 June 2017 on the evaluation of the execution of
Horizon 2020, as well as the recommendations for the upcoming FPR9, Horizon
Europe. Some of the transversal questions pointed out are the need to promote the
importance of collaboration in research in universities, research centres, industries,
and other actors, i.e., the triple helix model and the achievement of “excellence”11
as an essential evaluation criterion for the three pillars of the programme.
In this context, the place of the social sciences, education sciences, and humanities
has been under-represented in the different framework programmes, as recognized
by the EU itself. However, for them to be considered, they must be integrated into the
designs of interdisciplinary research, not just as an afterthought to technological proj-
ects, in a conception of science not merely part of or related to the traditional aca-
demic disciplines, but “explored in the area of interdisciplinary engagement and
[rather with the plea] for a significant broadening of research approaches, albeit one
in which interactional research would feature prominently. This represents an invest-
ment in our future because if we can understand better how interdisciplinary research
gets done, we can find ways of doing it better, and in doing it better we can enhance
its contribution to the world in which we live” (Seongsook and Richards 2017: 267).
Recently, Zapp et al. (2018) analysed European education research and pointed
out that political interests have profoundly transformed the goals and type of
research that should be promoted. On the one hand, government intervention is
legitimized in planning and programming educational research, and, on the other, it
is shown that the EU and international organization are influencing the formulation
of national policies.12 In this way, the FPR represents the most important motor for
areas of research known as “pillars”. The first of these is “Excellent Science”, aimed at encourag-
ing basic research, the second is “Industrial Leadership”, aimed at encouraging strategies of indus-
trial innovation, and the third, “Societal Challenges” with 39% of the budget, aimed to develop
policies to improve social and economic problems. Within this new discursive framework, basic
research has been redefined as “frontier research” and has been institutionalized by the creation of
the European Research Council. On the other hand, applied research is linked to the rhetoric of
“great challenges” (Kaldewey 2013).
Nonetheless, one of the weak points of the whole policy of the FPR is its lack of evaluation as
policy. It is only in the last few years that solid research has begun to be published on it, generally
of an independent nature. Recently, the European Commission has been receiving calls to “to
provide a broader definition of ‘impact’, considering both economic and social effects, by stressing
that the assessment of the impact of fundamental research projects should remain flexible and…
maintain the balance between bottom-up and top-down calls and to analyze which evaluation pro-
cedure… is more useful to avoid oversubscription and to conduct quality research” (see the assess-
ment of Horizon 2020 implementation in view of its interim evaluation and the Framework
Programme 9 proposal, and point 16 on Evaluation states at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/
getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A8-2017-0209+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN).
11
Flink and Peter (2018) have recently analyzed how the concepts of “excellence” and “frontier
research” have structured the political agenda, financing and evaluation of European research.
12
More specifically, Kaldewey (2013) similarly suggested that the list of problems presented by the
German Ministry of Education coincided with that of the European Commission and becoming
central themes for European scientific policy. Symptomatically, themes such as poverty, education
or unemployment figured in second place.
7 Social Inclusion/Exclusion of Youth and Rhetorical and Symbolic Illusions of Social… 157
Acknowledgements We are grateful to Juan García-Fuentes, FPU research fellow of the Spanish
Ministry of Education and advanced PhD candidate at the University of Granada, for his collabora-
tion in providing documentation on recent research into Spanish youth and their image and integra-
tion into Europe.
158 M. Jiménez-Ramírez et al.
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Miguel A. Pereyra is chair of Comparative Education at the University of Granada and former
President of CESE (Comparative Education Society in Europe). Trained as both an educationist
and an historian, his research and publications are focused on comparative and cultural history of
education, and educational reforms and educational policies.
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Part III
Government, and Education Governance
Chapter 8
Retrospect and Prospect: Overview
of 30 Years of Education System Reform
in China
Kaisheng Lao
K. Lao (*)
Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
e-mail: laokaisheng@126.com
The global public educational system has undergone tremendous changes in the last
20 years. The magnitude of such changes has been attributed to general discontent
with the scale, speed, quality, and efficiency of the development of public education.
People are seeking an educational system that pursues higher equality, coverage,
quality, and standards. The educational reform of a number of countries has been
focused on opposing government-led and all-taxpayer-supported colossus educa-
tional machines, thereby placing the pubic educational sphere under increasing social
pressure. Throughout the 1980s, reforms having astonishingly similar forms emerged
in several countries with emphasis on contesting the monopoly of public education.
These countries enacted a series of policies to rehash their public educational institu-
tion through marketization and privatization, attempting to reconstruct the relation-
ship between state and education, government and schools, and schools and students
or their parents. This can be understood as part of a broader process of globalization
in terms of economy, politics, and culture. During this process, the educational
reform of various countries has faced some common issues, and the borders between
countries have never been more ambiguous (Whitty et al. 2003; He 2008).
Since the birth of modern education, the social demand for education has always
been met by two channels, the formal and the informal. In the earlier stages of
human social development, when education was distinct from social production and
social life, people consciously trained their children in rudimentary laboring skills
and living norms; however, this kind of education was only primitively combined
with social life. Hence, education in its primal stages was mostly informal, that is,
passed on from one generation to the next hand-in-hand. When human knowledge
continued to become richer and mature, its impartation became increasingly critical.
In the meantime, education gradually became a part of daily routine, and it is at this
stage that spontaneous educational activities began to form a domain of specialized
human activities alongside social production and social life. To a large extent, edu-
cation shifted from the informal channel to the formal, meaning that it began to be
provided chiefly by specialized institutions and professionalized faculties. With fur-
ther progression of education, its formal provision entailed two forms, the public
channel and the market channel. Public-channel education was offered by the state
and its affiliate municipal administrations or churches, whereas the market channel
consisted of profit-seeking individuals and organizations.
In the history of education, the birth of the public educational institution that had
the function to popularize education was tightly entwined with social modernization.
In the nineteenth century, family-based education faced dire challenges due to the
burgeoning emergence of numerous public schools. The accentuation of schooling
shifted from the general public to formal public institutions, and as such, formed the
8 Retrospect and Prospect: Overview of 30 Years of Education System Reform in China 169
foundation of public education. This was one of the rational choices made within the
process of modernization. In a majority of countries, the finalized systems of public
education after World War II were all funded and spearheaded by the government
and delivered to social participants via a non-market channel. Thus, public education
became deeply rooted in the national political and social life and driven by political
orders under nationalism, which had a profound influence on the educational quality
and efficiency of schools. The effect of nationalism upon education was bi-faceted.
In terms of advantages, the strong interference of the state in education largely accel-
erated the popularization of education guaranteeing equal opportunity. In terms of
disadvantages, nationalism gave rise to state monopoly over education resulting in a
series of abuses to education such as over-staffing and decrease in efficiency among
educational organizations, the suppression of popular voices and the passive recep-
tion of education (the lack of individual free choice) among students. Therefore, the
problems with the public educational institution ought to be attributed to institu-
tional problems themselves. The advocators of public educational reforms held that
traditional public education, although beneficial to the popularization and develop-
ment of education, led to the formation of rigid regulations and strict hierarchy,
which exacerbated over-staffing, led to decrease of efficiency of educational organi-
zations, and derailed schools farther away from their initial goals. They thus failed
to meet the students’ and parents’ demand for diversity and self-choice in education.
In the 1980s and 1990s of the last century, the general public believed that the public
educational institution needs to urgently reconsider traditional way (Lao 2009).
The institutional reforms of worldwide governments in the 1970s and 1980s have
prompted those governments to reflect upon their omnipotent and all-inclusive
grand-government mode and modifying themselves to handle the relationships
between the government and market and those between government and society
more skillfully. From a modern standpoint, governmental functions have two
aspects, to solve market dysfunction and to promote social justice. In terms of the
first aspect, the government proffers public goods, resolves various public prob-
lems, regulates monopolizing corporate behaviors, overcomes the imbalance of
market information, coordinates nongovernmental conducts, secures market devel-
opment, etc. In terms of the second, the government seeks to protect the socially
disadvantageous groups, enforces social-security plans, establishes social welfare,
actively engages in capital re-configuration, etc.
The abovementioned governmental functions can be further dissected into fun-
damental function, intermediary function, and positive function. With regard to fun-
damental function in the context of resolving market dysfunctions, the government
should be providing pure public goods such as national defense, law-making, public
hygiene system, macro-economic management, etc. In the context of enhancing
social justice, the government should emphasize the protection of socially disad-
vantageous groups, enforce anti-poverty drives, eliminate diseases, etc. With regard
170 K. Lao
The state and the public, or the administration and the market constitute the two
poles of the society for public schools. It is, therefore, held by many that the impor-
tation of nongovernmental strength in education and the market-economical mecha-
nism can help change the stagnant educational status quo (Whitty et al. 2003: 3–4).
They hope that marketization and privatization reforms that will introduce market
economic factors to solidify the foundation of market economy will elevate the inde-
pendence of schools to break the confines of administrative institutions (Yan 2011).
In the process of the reconstruction of public educational institutions, different
countries have enacted and implemented a series of relevant educational policies
focusing on introducing cross-the-board participation and free market competition
8 Retrospect and Prospect: Overview of 30 Years of Education System Reform in China 171
School Independence: In order to establish schools that fit the market situation bet-
ter, the reforms in many countries have delegated powers to public schools. Such
power includes financing, personnel redistribution, and policy-making. This move
seeks to transform schools into independently functioning educational entities. The
foremost reason for promoting school independence is that educational service has
certain technological requirements. Education is based upon interpersonal relation-
ship, communication, and the feedback for such communication. It is also based
upon the knowledge, skills, and experiences of the teaching faculty. Hence, the
technological resources that a school needs lie in itself, not in policy-making or at
the higher-up administrative level. The second reason is the huge conflict between
definitive behavioral requirements and strict disciplinary standards under hierarchi-
cal management and high-quality education. The uncertainty of education activities
has given rise to an objective and quantified way to measure concrete activities,
172 K. Lao
namely the process and outcome of schools, which has heavily influenced the con-
trol of educational management over the entire educational working process. The
third reason derives from market requirement. The primary goal of schools is to
satisfy the needs of their potential customers. School staff performs exchanges with
students and parents every day; they know them better than the management and are
more capable to adopt more flexible measures to improve school services and to
enhance educational quality. In terms of the division of power, the most creative
solution is teacher empowerment and school-based management, that is, to provide
a better environment to the schools that are suffering from low efficiency in terms
of empowering their teaching staff. Typical self-managed schools are mainly the
so-called chartered schools, which are the new-type schools legally authorized by
the government. Although chartered schools are fully funded by the government,
they are managed by private individuals. With the exception of complying with
agreed upon educational goals, chartered schools are not bound by common educa-
tional administrative regulations. As such, the reforms of chartered schools are
implemented in an exceptional manner that gradually turns former public schools
into private and self-managed educational institutions, which boosts the quality of
service provided by public schools for educational consumers (Feng 2004: 135).
Choosing Schools: Typical public schools are mostly under the theoretical guid-
ance of governmental management, aiming to increase convenience, rather than
student management, which has proved to be more conducive to the growth of stu-
dents. Therefore, this management system is run under governmental monopoly.
Under governmental management, all school participants have to follow the instruc-
tions provided by the local government, and children are required to enroll in the
nearest institution rather and are deprived of the basic right to choose their own
target schools. A considerable number of parents are forced to choose private
schools for their children on account of their varying situations. However, this type
of choice is largely affected by the occasional rigorous entry standards of private
schools in terms of the intellect, specialties, and familial background of the young
applicants. In addition, choosing private schools also entails significantly higher
tuitions, which feeds the sense of injustice among many because the private-school-
opting families have already paid their children’s public school tuition by paying
taxes, and these families have to make a second payment to private schools. For this
reason, people appeal to include the right to choose schools freely into the scope of
basic educational rights; families need to have the liberty of choice instead of adher-
ing to governmental assignment to designated schools. School-choosing policies
ought to encompass a series of concrete stipulations that aim to enhance pupil and
parental liberty such as open enrolment, chartered schools, indenture projects,
tuition reductions, and educational tax-free financial deposit. These policies high-
light the obligations and responsibilities of the providers and the consumers of edu-
cation, particularly the free choice on the consuming end (students, parents, and
society), and allow free choice to play a role in important life decisions Therefore,
school-choosing policies have brought about a ground-breaking change with a com-
pulsory hue to conventional public educational institution and become the spear-
head of public-school reform (Friedman 1986: 96–111).
8 Retrospect and Prospect: Overview of 30 Years of Education System Reform in China 173
The public educational system in China emerged almost a century later than Western
countries. However, after having undergone a developmental stage of approximately
100 years, the Chinese public educational system bloomed. In terms of positive
aspects, this system fully motivated resources and strengths from every front accel-
erating the popularization of education and radically altered the vicissitudes of
Chinese education. Nevertheless, China’s public education system underwent a
similar trajectory as the West including the problematic phase of governmental
monopolization.
Even though the reforms of the 1980s were primarily targeted at China’s own
problems, and hence had their unique traits in terms of developmental logic, these
reforms exhibited remarkable similarities with a number of other countries, indicat-
ing that a certain type of bad fate had been shared in a manner beyond political and
cultural borders; such degree of universality was not coincidental.
Although it emerged a century later than the West, China’s public educational sys-
tem took on an all-encompassing look after long-time development, and the vicis-
situdes of Chinese education underwent fundamental changes. However, like
Western countries, China’s public educational institution was also led mainly by the
state. Hence, state monopoly of the development of public education had always
been a serious issue. Things worsened since the Chinese Emancipation in 1949.
Planned economy significantly influenced the function of education, and public
educational institution was re-purposed into a government-founded, plan-adjusted,
enclosed, and centralized system. In the 1980s, when China marched toward Reform
and Opening, the most important issue facing education was to revamp the old sys-
tem and build a new one that was convenient both for administrative coordination
and the active elicitation of different social groups to partake in running schools, a
system that granted schools significantly more liberty.
Educational reform began with the release of invigoration. Toward the end of
1979, four university presidents from Shanghai wrote a joint article in the People’s
Daily, calling for reform of advanced education and the liberation of educational
institutions. Their appeal generated strong social reactions (Su et al. 1976). The
broadening of school independence, an encouraging contributions from all social
groups have become the most vocal demands and major break-through points for
every education-themed reform since.
Given the above background, how can we accurately comprehend the release of
vitality in education? It is my contention that two basic pairs of relations ought to be
captured:
8 Retrospect and Prospect: Overview of 30 Years of Education System Reform in China 175
The first is the relationship between the government and schools. Under a chronic
planned economy, the control and adjustment to the Chinese society relied upon an
extra-economical political institution. The chief engine of the institution was rule by
people, which placed every sector of the society under governmental reach. The
excessive strengthening of governmental influence caused the shrinking of socially
independent power, and the situation in the educational sector was no different. In
this case, the basic issue to address for the waves of educational reform in the 1980s
was to change the framework of power allocation between the government and
schools. To achieve this, the functions of the government had to change, which
meant the delegation of power on specific affairs under the overall enforcement of
governmental macro-management, which was bound to alter to no smaller extent
both the comparative power structure and a portion of the legal relationship of some
administrative nature between government and school. This type of institutional
reform led to a complete split between the roles of the government and school; their
relationship became one of host, school-runner, and manager, which patently
effected the traditional allocation of educational power of China and posed an exis-
tential challenge to the new governmental role.
The second relationship was between education and market. An extremely criti-
cal factor that motivated the educational development of China was the social tran-
sition from a planned economy toward market economy. This transition encouraged
the shift of the old integrated Chinese social structure toward one that was more
diffuse, resulting in the birth of a new social sector in this process, the market. The
adjustment to this sector was predicated upon fair exchange and fair competition
under the economic rule of the market rather than the previous extra-economic
political strength. Thus, in educational reform, the public educational institution
was confronting a new social institution that was entirely different from the original
planned economy, namely the market economy. Market interference made the posi-
tions of all social groups undergo evident changes, particularly the varied, re-
adjusted relationship between the government and schools. The government, the
market, and schools had become three inter-connected and inter-cancelling forces,
and their respective rights and obligations needed to be redistributed under new
institutional conditions.
According to the change in dynamics, the 30-year Chinese educational reform can
be divided into the following phases: the first was the decade between 1985 and
1995 or “the First 10 Years”; the second was between 1995 and 2005 or “the Second
10 Years”; and the last was after 2005, when the contradictions from previous
reforms began to erupt and a series of new complexities came to the fore, which
began to be represented as the “Post Reform Era.”
176 K. Lao
d elegation of power had not originated from lower social levels, but from the level
of movers and shakers. Therefore, reform at this stage came from the design, plan-
ning, and promotion of decision-makers and was implemented with the distinctive
characteristic of a top-down, all-compliant governmental mandate.
government during the era of planned economy gradually became the duty of the
socialist market and the object of market-based adjustments. In this stage, the
reform centered around simplified administration, and power delegation was faced
with more issues than center-local and local-school power delegations. With the
growth of the market economy, a new power structure concerning the issues of
power delegations from the state to society began to arise, pertaining to the general
public and to the market.
The 10 years after 2005 was the third 10 years, and the concentration and the paths
of reforms had experienced profound changes. Some complexities had also emerged,
unlike previous reforms. The Post Reform Era did not end the reform; on the con-
trary, some reformative goals continued to be set in motion. Nonetheless, the prob-
lems that the third-phase reform had been facing were mostly triggered during
previous reforms. They have emerged during the process of social evolution, deriv-
ing from the conflicts that appeared between the old social structure and the new. As
far as the nature of these problems is concerned, they were neither historical nor
similar to that of other countries. Hence, to some extent, we can consider the Post
Reform Era as the reform to the reforms.
In the third 10 years of reform, a new social relationship of free trade emerged,
and it had tremendous influence upon public schools. Some public schools effec-
tively utilized their public educational resources; they extended free trade to the
public educational sphere by charging fees, school choosing, changing school insti-
tutions, adopting two institutions in the same school, and establishing private
schools under a public name. Unlike past educational relationships that bore a dis-
tinctive nature of power, the educational free trade relationship better reflected the
spirit of private-law independence; this created a new right and obligation relation-
ship among schools, teachers, and students: As consumers, students have the right
to select schools, contents of education, and even designate teachers based upon
their own demands and degree of satisfaction. Conversely, schools and teachers, as
the providers of services, are obligated to fulfill their commitments made to the
students by the standards of national education. Free trade in education transformed
the relationship between learning and studying as an exchange process, and it
became gradually rooted in a consumer’s culture. Courses and degrees have now
incorporated social demands and are provided to the social members who have rel-
evant demands with a fee. This conduct has shifted the concentration of schools on
such educational products with commercial value and market effect such as course
scores, degree certificates, and popular majors. However, the most instrumental
aspect of education, that is, its basic value for individuals and the society, has been
largely omitted, the result of which has been the complex phenomenon of education
being stripped down to a simple “input-output” or “cost-effect” process.
After the changes made throughout the first two decades, the issue of educational
justice was at the center of the stage in the Post Reform Era. In the public-school
180 K. Lao
In three decades into the Chinese educational reform, how to continue reforms of
public education has become the central issue that has a huge stake in the Chinese
educational future. Chinese public education ought to re-examine its functions and
dynamics, and it ought to promptly respond to the new economic and technological
concepts elicited by social development. Although we lack a certain accurate grasp
on the ever-varying educational situations in contemporary China, judging from the
actual vicissitude of the Chinese society, from the social demand on educational
functions and their possibilities, conventional school borders will be broken into a
new, substitute educational institutions that can be more diversified and flexible,
ones that can provide every student with more developmental opportunities.
8.3.1 H
ow to Handle the Relations Between State
and Government and Between Government and School
Before the birth of public education, education had long served the general public.
The institution of public education had been cultivated by nationalism; hence, two
issues inevitably emerged, namely whether education be hosted by the state or by
society and whether it be hosted by schools by private households. Debates and
discussions on this issue have made frequent appearances throughout the entire
developmental process of education for over two centuries. These questions also
8 Retrospect and Prospect: Overview of 30 Years of Education System Reform in China 181
branched out into a series of more specific issues at different stages, such as the
issues concerning state and the public, and public and private schools, which
patently complicated matters. The reforms after the 1980s could be seen as the logi-
cal extension of aforesaid issues that blighted Chinese education for the last two
centuries. The reforms of a variety of countries commonly adopted the route of
privatization and marketization to reshape public education, which was a critical
direction of educational reform and a phenomenon that had been never witnessed in
educational history. After 30 years of reform, the relationship between state and
education experienced a fundamental change. Schools at all levels were more obvi-
ously characterized by nongovernmental and noncorporate features. Public educa-
tion provided society with a very different type of educational product that, under
particular conditions, was transformed into private or semi-private goods through
the market channel. This change gradually altered the state–education relationship.
How then should this new trend be construed? The answer lies in the observa-
tional perspective of state–school relations. In modern society, the government has
two basic functions. The first is to provide products that cannot be provided by the
market, and the second is to ensure social justice. When we assess modern public
education by these standards, one basic conclusion is that the excessive intervention
of government is a problem that is yet to be resolved. This is no individual but an
official judgement on account of the constant demand for reformative consensus of
“simplified governance and power delegation” for over three decades. One can
understand state–education relations as follows: in modern society, education could
not be fully popularized if not for the power and means of the state; hence, educa-
tion cannot solely be a private enterprise. Nevertheless, education in essence pos-
sesses private features, so private contribution cannot be entirely excluded from
education. Viewed thus, the core issue of education reform is how to encompass
both public and private participation through certain institutional form.
For this reason, future education ought to be diversified with constituting institu-
tions that are both nongovernmental and noncorporate social organizations. Education
ought to be charitable and provide public goods. Due to the non-monopolized nature
of education, its products can be transformed into private and semi-private goods
under certain conditions and offered to the general public via the government and
market channels. The institutions that provide education are those possessing inde-
pendent legal-person qualifications. They can be charitable or profitable depending
upon different owners. Apart from merely ensuring allocation of educational oppor-
tunities, the government’s function lies chiefly in providing the society with products
that cannot be provided by the market such as free obligatory education.
It is fair to say that whether Chinese education can break through its reformative
bottleneck hinges on whether public schools can adhere to their inherent publicity.
Moreover, if public schools are able to maintain their publicity in waves of reform,
said reform shall amount to a measure of triumph, and if not, Chinese educational
reform shall face recession and defeat.
8.3.3 H
ow to Handle the Relationship Between Education
and Market
Owning to the appreciable return that education offers, the original educational sys-
tem wholly under governmental control and strategically progressed by taking
social needs into its consideration is inclining currently toward meeting the demands
of private consumption: the emergence of an educational market is in the offing. The
impact of the market has led to deep changes to China’s educational enterprise,
which has yielded bi-faceted ramifications. On the one hand, the general public is
now entitled to more choices and is enjoying more opportunities to be educated. On
the other hand, as society gradually recognizes the rationality of said consumer’s
culture of education, it has simultaneously become more sensitive to personal loss
and gain. Personal interest has been deemed as a critical gauge of people’s satisfac-
tion of social reality. The formation of the educational market has led to the infiltra-
tion of consumer culture into schools, which has in turn raised a variety of issues
regarding educational ethics. Since the engine of the market is private gain rather
than public benefit, if market restrictions prove to be inadequate, education is prone
to resort to disorder, which could potentially alter the basic public nature of educa-
tion. Hence, education cannot be equated to any commonplace commodity; pure
reliance upon market channel will not balance educational supply with social
demand. To ensure the realization of the publicity of education, appropriate restric-
tive measures should be implemented in the market.
First, appropriate legal supervision ought to be implemented upon schools, a
type of special institution different from any other social organizations, to more
explicitly discipline school behaviors. Specifically, due to the publicity of schools,
their powers and capacities should also be limited. However, such limitations should
adhere to educational regulations and respect their managerial independence. In
terms of institutional arrangement, schools should not be equated to private corpo-
rations. Governmental influence on schools cannot be attenuated even with strength-
ening market interference. On the contrary, administrative supervision should serve
as an instrumental limiting factor.
Second, profit-seeking school management should be precisely defined. The
intervention of profit-seeking institutions should primarily satisfy the diverse edu-
cational demands of social participants and realize the public charitable feature of
education. Clear laws disciplining profit-seeking host of education can guarantee
education’s transfer into the market as a public commodity under strict regulations.
184 K. Lao
As profitable organizations reduce their share of the educational market, their quali-
fications, capacities, and legal rights are entirely different from those in other mar-
kets—in particular, the maintenance of effectual limitations and legal supervision
against capitalist profit-seeking. All these features should be reflected with certainty,
and the optimal means to achieve so is by law.
Third, the mutual relationship between government and state and their respective
functioning territories should also be clearly demarcated. In the educational process
of development, both the administration and state could dysfunction; therefore,
these two forces are not mutually repulsive but are rather supplementary. In the
meantime, in various educational domains, the functions of both the government
and market are even more dissimilar with each other. For instance, mandatory edu-
cation is legally imposed upon every single individual; only after having undergone
such an educational phase can individuals fulfill their services to society and fulfill
self-worth. As mentioned above, the public character of mandatory education far
surpasses other educational domains; it is a main area where the state plays the lead-
ing role and this state responsibility should be reinforced. In the mandatory educa-
tion stage, social justice should be patently reflected, which will make every
individual accept the same conditions of education. Therefore, the provision of edu-
cation can only depend upon the state to an even higher extent. However, extra-
mandatory educational forms such as professional training and advanced education
are not enjoyed evenly by every member of the society. Here, the so-called educa-
tional equality is primarily demonstrable through social equality, that is, the equal-
ity of changes, which guarantees solely the equality in terms of procedure and not
that of outcome.
However, these two routes are all fatally flawed—the public law route might
force Chinese public school reforms to backtrack to the situation under planned
economy. The commercial law route might prompt public schools to be re-spawned
as corporations or profit-seeking social organizations. In terms of the reform and
development of public schools, there are two main goals; on the one hand, they
should maintain the reformative outcome of the past three decades; on the other
hand, they should insist on publicizing public schools. In a sense, this poses a
conundrum on account of these mutually conflicting goals. To fulfill both these
goals, the design of future reforms cannot make public schools retreat to national
monopoly, nor should it push public schools further toward the market. For this,
public schools, due to their activity goals and service subjects, should become a
special type of institution between public and private law, a nongovernmental and
noncorporate social organization. Public schools ought to be entitled their special
legal-person position. Their rights and responsibilities ought to be regulated based
upon such position, which will render public schools as independent entities and
simultaneously reflect the publicity of this type of organization, distinguishing them
from any other organizations.
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Kaisheng Lao is the Distinguished Professor and Chief Expert of Educational Research and the
chairman of the academic committee of Capital Normal University. He is the director of Education
Policy and Law Research Branch of CSE. He is also the educational consultant of Beijing munici-
pal government and a committee member of the National Curriculum and Materials Committee for
Basic Education under the Ministry of Education. He was the director of Department of Education
of Beijing Normal University, the director of Education Policy and Law Research Institute of
Beijing Normal University.
186 K. Lao
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Chapter 9
From Government to Governance:
The Incorporation of Managerial
Regulation at the Ministry of Education
in Israel
Julia Resnik
9.1 Introduction
J. Resnik (*)
School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
e-mail: julia.resnik@mail.huji.ac.il
the efforts to put in place new instruments, mechanisms, rhetoric, and ethic intend-
ing to reshape the functioning of the ministry. The Israeli case is of special interest
because of the strong bureaucratic tradition of the education administration.
9.2.1 F
rom Government to Governance: The Incorporation
of NPM and NPG in Education
Scholars agree that the incorporation of New Public Management (NPM) has trans-
formed the public sector in many countries around the world. The reforms that
started on the mid-1980s were driven by a greater use of markets and market-like
mechanisms, stronger line management (along with weaker trade unions and pro-
fessional groups), and more elaborated performance management and measurement
systems (Ferlie and Andresani 2006). These changes have taken place in the forms
and mechanisms of governance, bringing management concepts from the private
business into the public realm (e.g., performance measurement, customer and
bottom-line orientation, restructuring of incentives) as well as the conditions that
would facilitate this process, such as regulation, outsourcing, tendering out, and
privatization. The central thrust of public management reforms was the replacement
of “rules-based, process-driven” routines by increased emphasis on “result orienta-
tion” (Hood and Peters 2004).
Some scholars see these transformations based on NPM as a shift from a bureau-
cratic professional to a post-bureaucratic regime of regulation (Maroy 2012). This
includes reorganizing units by projects through outsourcing and the development of
contracts, increasing internal and external competition between administrations
through bids, benchmarking, and the development of contracts; improving auton-
omy and accountability, establishing more rigor in public spending through staff
cutting, spending ceilings and definition of goals, favoring successful private man-
agement tools, quantifying performance, increasing accountability and stressing the
evaluation of results (Pons and van Zanten 2007). A post-bureaucratic shift is asso-
ciated with a change in the kind of knowledge brought into the policy process and
more specifically, with the development of knowledge-based regulatory tools.
Knowledge-based regulatory tools are also linked to new forms of knowledge circu-
lation among the different actors involved in the policy process (i.e., researchers,
experts, think tanks, policy bodies, professionals, and clients). This form of knowl-
edge circulation is very different from classic bureaucracies that stress legal and
other forms of “state knowledge” including the “tacit” knowledge that comes from
long experience in the system (Pons and van Zanten 2007).
According to other scholars, the incorporation of NPM in the public administra-
tion represents mainly a shift from government to governance. Governance means
that the state is a partner associated with other actors (business and civil society) in
190 J. Resnik
order to bring about an action, for which they all share responsibility, authority,
risks, and an investment of resources. In other words, governance enlarges the
decision-making circle from the state to other actors, sectors or organizations. The
cooperation between sectors contributes to the impression of legitimacy of the deci-
sions made and an efficacy and efficiency in the application of these decisions
(Lessard and Brassard 2005). Governance involves a shift from the top-down hier-
archical political organization to an emphasis on promoting and/or steering the self-
organization of inter-organizational relations and a greater use of networks. In this
expanding range of networks and partnerships between public, private, and civic
actors, official apparatuses would remain at best primus inter pares. Public money
and law are still important in underpinning their operation, but other resources (such
as private money, knowledge or expertise) would also be critical to their success. In
this sense the state’s involvement would tend to be rather less hierarchical, less cen-
tralized, and less dirigiste in character (Jessop 1995).
Scholars also view governance as a new model of public administration manage-
ment—the New Public Governance (NPG)—resulting from the critiques raised
against the NPM model and the need to move beyond the sterile dichotomy of
“administration” versus “management.” The NPG paradigm combines the strengths
of Public Administration and the NPM, by recognizing the legitimacy and interre-
latedness of both the policy-making and the implementation/service delivery pro-
cesses. NPG posits both a plural state, where multiple interdependent actors
contribute to the delivery of public services and a pluralistic state, where multiple
processes inform the policy making system. As a consequence of these two forms of
plurality, its focus is very much upon inter-organizational relationships and the gov-
ernance of processes, and it stresses service effectiveness and outcomes
(Osborne 2006).
Another important aspect stressed in the governance literature regards citizens’
participation and involvement, both at the organizational/bureaucratic level and at
the communal/political level, which may increase trust in the government and in
administrative agencies. Moreover, direct participation of citizens or through civil
society organizations at the administrative level can improve public sector perfor-
mance and urge policy-makers to advance innovative strategies (Vigoda-Gadot and
Mizrahi 2007). Seen as a means to restore governments’ legitimacy and diminish
the erosion of trust in democracy, citizen participation is strongly encouraged by the
OECD. For this purpose, the organization published the “Citizens as Partners.
OECD Handbook on Information, Consultation and Public Participation in Policy-
Making.” The handbook offers a practical “roadmap” for building robust frame-
works for informing, consulting, and engaging citizens during policy-making
through among others, tripartite commissions and joint working groups that work
out concrete proposals for policy-making (OECD 2001).
The shift from government to governance and the adoption of post-bureaucratic
regulations in ministries of education presuppose a large array of transformations
including new governance structures, new modes of coordination and control, new
knowledge, new skills, and a new ethic.
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 191
support for organizational change among public service employees (Ferlie and
Andresani 2006). However, when new actors with new skills take part in the imple-
mentation of a new regulation tool, functionaries in the ministry can regard this
implementation as a social space for struggle to preserve their own monopoly of
action (Buisson-Fenet 2007).
Governments modernize public services through outsourcing to the private sec-
tor and recruiting actors external to the bureaucracies, mainly consultants. Indeed,
consultancy businesses, mainly big international companies, work on major reforms
(Ball 2012). The role of consultancy is threefold: it takes part in the governance
model representing business or NGO stakeholders, it disseminates the new regula-
tion culture by incorporating new actors with performance-based ethics and culture,
and it bypasses resistance since new actors external to the administrations are
regarded as neutral and not involved in old status struggles in the units. Nevertheless,
the increasing role and contribution of consultants encourage the growth of the con-
sulting industry (Lubienski 2016) and suggest the emergence of a ‘consultocracy’
(Gunter et al. 2015).
Most of the literature on NPM and governance reforms in education explore the
changes conducted in policy processes and the two models of the post-bureaucratic
turns that emerged: the quasi-market model or the evaluative state regulatory model.
Instead, the research this chapter is based upon intends to understand how the
changes are introduced in the ministry and how NPM and NPG are actually incor-
porated into the bureaucratic body responsible for shaping education policy. As we
will see, the study of the transformation of the Ministry of Education in Israel fol-
lowing the formation of the governance network, including the managerial regula-
tion network and tri-sector cooperation network, points to a third regulation
mode—a post-bureaucratic “NGO-ization” model.
9.3 Methodology
9.3.1 A
ctor Network Approach (ANT) and Governance
Network: Managerial Assemblage and Tri-Sector
Assemblage
presupposes, later developments of ANT (or after-ANT) have privileged the term
“assemblage” as a central concept of analysis (Fenwick 2011). In this study, I use
both concepts but differentiate between them. The governance network refers to the
more extensive post-bureaucratic regulations in general, and “assemblages” refer to
the smaller networks—the managerial assemblage and tri-sector cooperation assem-
blage that altogether constitute the large post-bureaucratic governance network part
of a global governance network.
By tracing the formation of the managerial assemblage and the tri-sector coop-
eration assemblage first at the central government and then at the Ministry of
Education, we intend to understand how the governance education network
expanded in Israel and what are its characteristics. We follow the central human and
nonhuman actors and the connections established between them based on inter-
views with senior civil servants at the Prime Minister Office and mainly at the
Ministry of Education, analysis of official documentation, and online sites as well
as observations of roundtable discussions.
9.4 T
he Emergence of the Governance Network in the Israeli
Public Administration: Governmental Governance
Network
The governance network in Israel is constituted by two distinct but partially super-
posed assemblages: the managerial assemblage aiming at instilling a regime of
regulation based on accountability, benchmarking, and quantifying performance
and the tri-sector cooperation assemblage aiming at establishing a partnership
between the state, business, and civil society. As we will see, international organiza-
tions are central actors that encourage both managerial regulation and tri-sector
governance. In Israel, as in many countries, the evolution of institutional regulation
in education has been fostered by major legislation (Maroy 2012). And indeed,
although the changes toward a managerial regulation and tri-sector cooperation had
started several years before spearheaded by various actors, two government resolu-
tions that passed in 2008 were decisive in the deep transformation process of the
Israeli civil service: (1) Government resolution no. 3190 of 24.02.2008 regarding
“The relationships between the government, the civil society, and the business sec-
tor that contribute to attain public objectives” and (2) Government resolution no.
4085 of 14.09.2008 concerning “Aspects regarding planning, measurement and
control and recommendations for discussion in the government.”
Various interviewees pointed to the Second Lebanon War (2006) as the major
turning point of the transformation toward managerial regulation and tri-sector
cooperation because the war puts in evidence the lack of coordination of the third
sector and the absence of governmental planning. Nevertheless, the formation of the
government managerial assemblage and the tri-sector cooperation assemblage
started before 2006, and many actors contributed to their reinforcement and
194 J. Resnik
e xpansion, among them the Aridor Committee (appointed in 2004). As the head of
the Committee, Yoram Aridor specified, the reason for the appointment of the com-
mittee was that in “the absence of reliable data decision makers become accustomed
to operating intuitively and their ability to conform to professional managerial
norms is impaired. While nonprofit organization around the world are aided by reli-
able data in their decision making processes, Israeli organizations fail to meet this
standard” (Limor 2004).
1
http://csc.gov.il/DataBases/Reports/Documents/Helek1.pdf, pages 4–5.
2
OECD, Performance Budgeting in OECD Counties, 2007. Additional information can be found
on OECD GOV Technical Papers: “How and Why Should Government Activity Be Measured,”
“Issues in Output Measurement,” and “Issues in Outcome Measurement,” 2006. http://www.pmo.
gov.il/Secretary/GovDecisions/2008/Pages/des4085.aspx
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 195
http://www.pmo.gov.il/policyplanning/mimshal/Pages/mimshal.aspx
3
196 J. Resnik
When asked whether the use of consulting was a way to diminish expenses, he
clearly stated: “no…it does not reduce expenses ... I don’t think that there was an
economic consideration” (interview with Senior Civil Servant at the Prime Minister’s
Office). He mentioned nine consulting firms selected, five of them were interna-
tional ones—Deloitte, Forrest, Pareto, Martens Matrix, and Hoffman.
Since 2000, governance and the participation of business and civil society organiza-
tions in the provision of social services have been strongly fostered by international
organizations. The Millennium Development Goals (2000) adopted by the United
Nations encouraged the states to cooperate with the civil society and the business
community in order to assure a sustainable, just, and equal society (in Limor 2010).
The OECD also enhances “Citizens as Partners—Information, Consultation and
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 197
4
http://beinmigzari.pmo.gov.il/Documents/Agol.pdf (page 15).
5
https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/aidco/index.php/Structured_dialogue
6
Government resolution no. 3190 approved unanimously on February 24, 2008
7
http://www.pmo.gov.il/Secretary/GovDecisions/2008/Pages/des3190.aspx
198 J. Resnik
p artnership: “As part of its role, the government will continue to carry out its super-
visory and regulatory responsibilities.” 8
Various actors fostered the tri-sector cooperation before the Government resolu-
tion of 2008 passed. The tri-sector resolution was mainly based on the work of three
public committees. First, “The Review Committee of Government Policy towards
the Third Sector in Israel” (Galnoor 2003) headed by Izthak Galnoor, a professor of
Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who served as Head of the
Civil Service Commission (1994–1996).9 The committee was an independent initia-
tive of Prof. Benjamin Gidron, the founder and head of the Center for Research of
the Third Sector at Ben Gurion University.10 The Center was the only institution in
Israel holding a database on third-sector organizations. The objective of the
Committee was “to strengthen these organizations and allow them to operate in a
framework wherein the rules of the game are clear, transparent, and predefined” and
to urge the government to devise a policy toward the third sector. The committee’s
main recommendation was to regulate the relations between the government author-
ities and the third sector on the basis of a clearly outlined, transparent, and consis-
tent policy, a policy that does not infringe in any way on the independence of the
third-sector organizations (Limor 2004). Among the main recommendations, it
included: “Government recognition of the special contribution of third sector orga-
nizations to Israeli society and the Israeli economy” and “Recognition of the impor-
tance of public funding for third sector organizations and the urgent need to regulate
such funding.”11 It is important to note the similarity of the language used in these
recommendations and that of the government cross-sector resolution.
The second committee headed by Yoram Aridor, former Minister of Finance
(1981–1983), aimed at examining State Assistance to Public Institutions”12 [public
institutions = meaning nonprofit organizations, the author clarification] was
appointed in 2004 by the government in the wake of a State Comptroller report
denouncing the lack of professional tools and data for decision-making. “The third
sector in Israel” report (Limor 2004) authored by Nissan Limor served as back-
ground material for the committee’s work. Dr. Limor, from the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, was a member of the first Galnoor Committee and also of the third
8
http://beinmigzari.pmo.gov.il/Documents/Policy_English.pdf
9
It is interesting to note that Galnoor wrote a book on “Public Management in Israel: Development,
Structure, Functions and Reforms” (Routledge, 2011) in which he stated for instance that the col-
lective-oriented mission of government cannot be fulfilled by the private sector or by the nonprofit
organizations of civil society.
10
Committee members: Prof. Yitzhak Galnoor, Chair, Ariella Ophir, Adv., Prof. Arie Arnon, Michal
Bar, Yoram Gabai, Prof. Benjamin Gidron, Dr. Bassel Ghattas, Sara Silberstein-Hipsh, Ophir Katz,
Adv., Rachel Liel, Nissan Limor, Walid Mulla, Amir Machul, Avi Armoni, Prof. Yosef Katan, Dr.
Varda Shiffer, and Dr. Emmanuel Sharon. The Committee published its concluding report in June
2003. http://web.bgu.ac.il/NR/rdonlyres/2DB60683-6DCD-4F0A-ABBD-47529F6B395D/14803/
TheReviewCommittee_Galnoor2003.pdf
11
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/fom/Ictr/Site%20Assets/Review%20Committee.pdf, page 7.
12
Government Decisions 1506 of 12.2.2004 and 1595 of 4.3.2004.
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 199
committee. He also pointed to the need to create the Guidestar site for NGOs in
Israel and submitted recommendations for its establishment.
The third committee for the “Review of third sector functions in Israel and their
functioning during the Second Lebanon War,” whose recommendations were pub-
lished in 2007,13 was headed by Prof. Gidron, who advocated the establishment of a
special committee, which became the Galnoor Committee. This Committee was
appointed at the request of Raanan Dinur, Director General of the Prime Minister’s
Office (2006–2009), and included heads of the third-sector organizations and volun-
teer organizations. The committee submitted a number of recommendations “for the
development of state policy in the volunteer and third-sector spheres.”
As we mentioned above, interviewees pointed to the Second Lebanon War (2006)
that took place during Ehud Olmert’s office as Prime Minister, as the major turning
point of the process that culminated in the Government resolution of 2008 on tri-
sector cooperation. As one of the interviewees told us:
The state did not provide for the needs of the population in the North of the country and
many NGOs assisted them, it was a large voluntary activity. Matan Vilnai (member of the
Committee of Foreign Affairs and Security in the Knesset) arrived to the North and asked:
“who coordinated all the activity?” He was told that there was not such a thing. Vilnai saw
that there was lack of coordination between the organizations and no cooperation existed
between them… people saw the chaos. The situation was chaotic, the state did not function
and the third sector was not organized at all!!! (Interview with a consultant of Sheatufim)
Upon the approval of the governmental resolution, it was decided that the cross-
sector dialogue should be conducted through discussion groups in roundtables. An
academic team that included Prof. Galnoor, Prof. Gidron, and Dr. Limor formulated
the “First framework documents for the constitution of the tri-sector dialogue.”
Based on this document, the first roundtable, which became the Constitutive
Roundtable, started to function in 2008 at the Prime Minister’s Office, and it serves
to this day as the national platform for “constituting and managing the dialogue
between the three sectors.” The tri-sector encounters had to address the govern-
ment’s policy of support for volunteer organizations, the oversight of the third sec-
tor, the transparency of civil society, and the promotion of giving, in Israel (Blum
2009). The First Framework Document specified that an operator in charge of the
technical topics would be assigned to each roundtable. The document also clarified
that the operator should not take a position in the discussion, the function is mainly
technical with the purpose of facilitating the discussion and assisting the group to
enable its success. Other specifications about the roundtable functioning refer to the
recommendations of the OECD which were added as an annex to the framework
document.14
13
The recommendations were published in Katz et al. (2007) Civil Society during the Second
Lebanon War, Beer-Sheva, Israeli Center for Third Sector Research, Ben Gurion University.
14
Source: OECD 2001 Citizens as Partners—Information, Consultation and Public Participation in
Policy-Making, page 15. Cited in http://beinmigzari.pmo.gov.il/Documents/Agol.pdf, Annex 2
page 12–13.
200 J. Resnik
15
http://beinmigzari.pmo.gov.il/Documents/Agol.pdf
16
http://www.pmo.gov.il/policyplanning/shituf/Pages/dafrashishituf.a
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 201
17
National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education has been founded in 2005
based on Dovrat Committee (2004) recommendations.
18
The 2011 Israeli social justice protests were a series of demonstrations in Israel beginning in July
2011 involving hundreds of thousands of protesters from a variety of socio-economic and religious
backgrounds opposing the continuing rise in the cost of living (particularly housing) and the dete-
rioration of public services such as health and education.
19
The committee for Economic and Social Change chaired by Professor Trachtenberg was
appointed as a response to the “tents’ protest” in summer 2011, a large and long-lasting protest
movement against the high cost of living in the country.
202 J. Resnik
Shai Piron (2013–2014). They appointed new heads for several central units, who
shared a managerial culture and would cooperate willingly with the new department
and the transformation of the ministry’s organization culture. They included the
Director of Education Workers Administration, who is simultaneously one of the
two deputy directors general of the ministry, the head of the Pedagogic Office, the
head of the Pedagogic Administration, the head of Society and Youth Administration,
the Acting Chief Scientist and the head of Research and Development.
The approach of Michal Tabibian-Mizrachi, the head of the new department, was
to incorporate managerial regulation progressively and gain the support of the cen-
tral administration’s vice-directors-general in order to avoid resistance. She spent
the first year in her job learning the terrain and approaching the central administra-
tion in order to gain their trust. Their support was essential, since each project
launched by the department needed the cooperation of one or several units.
One of the main goals of the department is to foster data-based processes for
decision-making. A civil servant of the department explains the difficulty of making
decisions without the needed information: “|For instance, in the case of an educa-
tional network with many schools, do you think that I can tell you how efficient is
this specific network compared to a local authority with the same characteristics?
Impossible, because we don’t have data.” The division plans to carry out studies to
evaluate the efficiency of different kind of schools, networks, and local authorities
which will enable, according to the functionary, to make proper decisions in
education.
The Strategy and Policy Division is responsible for systemic changes such as
encouraging inter-organizational relations. Managerial regulation emphasizes inter-
organizational relations, working by projects and horizontal circulation of knowl-
edge between the units of the public service (Jessop 1995). It is through the initiative
called “Involving Relationships” (Yachasim Mearvim) that the Strategy and Policy
Division attempts to encourage inter-organizational relations and the cooperation
between units in projects. By instilling a common managerial language and promot-
ing inter-organizational relations, the Strategy and Policy Division aims at rational-
izing the ministry’s activities. An official of the Planning and Strategy Department
tells us how they intervene in order to rationalize the ministry and eliminate unnec-
essary parallel activities. “Both units, the Pedagogic Administration and the
Pedagogic Office, work on students’ competencies but one speaks about “Skills of
the 21th century” and the other about “Learner abilities”; we are working on the
unification of the language used in both units. The Strategy and Policy Division
leads this activity since as the official explains: “we have the skills for conducting
workshops, leading thinking processes, that’s what we know to do, in this case,
leading to a common approach, a common language on meaningful learning.” He/
she adds:
I think … the units understand our value and our contribution to their decision making and
also the fact that they get information about other units. Through us people get a systemic
picture and it is important since they want to function systemically in order to succeed.
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 203
When asked about the activity of the Planning and Strategy Department, he/she
responds: “I think it's nice to have goals and to plan... but the attempt to quantify
pedagogical issues is terribly difficult. It is not clear that they know how” (former
senior functionary 2, Pedagogic Office, interview 2).
A civil servant of the Planning and Strategy Department discusses the evolution
of the managerial culture in the Ministry of Education and in the public service in
general. He/she used to participate every year in the Public Governance Committee
(PGC) of the OECD “that helps countries strengthen their capacity to govern by
improving policy-making systems and the performance of public institutions.”20
And according to the civil servant, it was “in order to learn from other countries’
experiences, mainly from countries such as Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands
which are similar in size and population to Israel.” In 2010, Michal Tabibian-
Mizrahi, working then at the Prime Minister’s Office, coordinated a committee that
dealt with the acceptance of Israel to the OECD and a sub-committee on the public
service. The civil servant comments: “We felt very bad about the situation in Israel.
But now when I attend the PGC, I feel much better; people learn from us, for
instance, the Government Planning Guide has been translated into Norwegian”
(Official 1, Planning and Strategy Department).
The functionary stresses the significance of the managerial culture in the eyes of
the central government and tells us about the ceremony that takes place every year
at the end of the planning conference organized by the Prime Minister’s Office.
“General Directors of the different ministries are invited to the podium, to speak to
the audience”; she/he specifies, “this act aims at reinforcing planning and perform-
ing as the new skills” (Official 1, Planning and Strategy Department).
9.5.1.2 M
ain Actors: “Education Picture,” “Present,” “Work Plan,”
and “Strategic Plan”
The first projects the new department conducted were the “Education Picture”
(Hatmuna Hachinuchit) and the “Present” (Matana—acronym for compilation,
planning, and management). The Education Picture is an index to measure schools’
quality through indicators such as students’ achievements, volunteering, enlistment
in the army, quality of graduation certificates, integration of special education, and
20
http://www.oecd.org/gov/public-governance-committee.htm
204 J. Resnik
so on. It was developed after a process of online consultation with 3500 different
persons, including focus groups in which education networks and nonprofit organi-
zations participated. The Present is a yearly guide for schools and kindergartens; it
includes the Education Ministry’s planning framework and is handed to schools in
order to plan and attain specific targets and outcomes accordingly.21 The Present
was developed in closed collaboration with the Pedagogic Administration and
involved a complex process based on dialogue with a large number of school prin-
cipals and district directors all over the country (former head of Pedagogic
Administration).
The “Education Picture” and the “Present” became main actors in the managerial
assemblage, but other actors such as “Planning Days” and the “Evaluation of the
Situation” contributed also in instilling regulation by numbers into the ministry.
Every year, the Planning Division organizes common Planning Days for all the
bodies of the education system in which officials of the central administration,
directors of district offices and representatives of principals take part. As the senior
civil servant comments: “these planning days in common represent the highly inte-
grative character of our planning work and the integration we want to attain in the
whole system.” The “Evaluation of the Situation” (Ha’arachat Mazav) of the educa-
tion system, a document that has to be produced every 3 years, is a 2–3 months
process in which the Planning and Strategy Department’s staff learn about the Israeli
education system based on research in Israel and in the world, through parameters
defined by the Section.
The Strategy and Policy Division’s responsibilities include the development of
the Work Plan (Tochnit Avoda) at the ministry. Each unit sends its Work Plan to the
Strategy and Policy Division and receives feedback on the plan. At present, the
Strategy Division works with 19 units including 10 units at the central administra-
tion and 9 districts. The Strategy and Policy Division built a forum of “Planning
appointees” who corresponds in fact to the second person in the hierarchy of all the
units mentioned. As a civil servant from the Planning and Strategy Department
explains: “very soon they understood that those who do not participate in the forum
would not be involved in the ministry’s Work Plan nor in the Strategic Plan of the
Prime Minister’s Office.” Work Plans are a tool for constructing new skills but also
for creating alignment among the different units at the ministry. As the civil servant
comments: “If in the past people used to plan their work according to what they
thought was good, today you have to plan in light of common objectives, targets and
in cooperation with other units.”
Another important actor of the managerial assemblage is represented by the
Strategic Plan (Tochnit estrategit). In order to build the Strategic Plan, the Strategy
21
“It is a tool for effective management of your school, helping you and your team define the goals
you want to reach together and enabling you to see what are the most effective actions to achieve
these goals, from building a curriculum, to managing resources to teaching team development”.
(Source: http://matana.education.gov.il/%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9A_%D7
% 9 C % D 7 % 9 E % D 7 % A A % D 7 % 9 B % D 7 % A 0 % D 7 % 9 F _ -
_%D7%9E%D7%91%D7%95%D7%90)
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 205
and Policy Division gathered all the central administration functionaries along with
a number of teachers and principals. Together, they conceived a strategic plan with
objectives, targets, and tasks, and the following year they also added indicators.
When asked about the past, the functionary responds: “Indeed, there were also tar-
gets in the past, but they were targets formulated in the way education people like to
think about them, in a very holistic manner,” and he/she adds: “Only the last year we
added an indicator to almost each target. We have ten key indicators and several
more that are optional.”
The Planning and Strategy Department is in charge of the “Atudot Program for
the Senior Level in the Education System” an in-service training program for mid-
dle rank officials. It is part of the Atudot Israel, the program conceived at the Prime
Minister’s Office in order to prepare a pool of professional civil servants for the
public administration.22
9.5.1.3 Y
oung Officials with Public Policy Background, Forum
of Planning Appointees, and Consulting Firms
22
http://cms.education.gov.il/EducationCMS/Units/Planning/atudot.htm
206 J. Resnik
tion, the young section heads are aware of the limitations of their training: “we do
not have any pedagogical knowledge, nevertheless, over time we are developing an
education expertise” (Official 1, Planning and Strategy Department).
What is the dynamic employed to advance managerial regulation in the ministry?
First, the officials working in the new department and other close collaborators dis-
cuss projects and exchange ideas. The work team elaborates the main ideas of a
project, and then the Planning Appointees Forum mentioned above disseminates the
project to the units. An official of the section explains that the Planning Appointees
are the vehicle to spread the managerial language.
It began with the fact that they are responsible for planning in their units and we work on
planning the project with them. But the idea is to also leverage them to influence the pro-
cesses of change. So, let's say, now we want to launch a process on school autonomy, so we
will incorporate them into the process and through them, school autonomy or another pro-
cess will reach their units. We hardly stand on the front, that is, we work only through other
central units (Official 2, Planning and Strategy Department, interview 2).
The Planning Appointees Forum comprises 35 members who are deputy direc-
tors of the different units. They meet on average once a month, and the Strategic and
Policy Division organizes a whole learning day for them. “Each year they work on
another issue and they come in order to disseminate the new approaches elaborated
in the forum and incorporate them into their units” (Official 1, Planning and Strategy
Department).
Besides being the vehicle of dissemination of the managerial language, the
Planning Appointees Forum participates in a socialization process aimed at instill-
ing the work team and dialogical spirit among officials of the different units. The
head of the Planning and Strategy Department explains:
The main thing, if you ask me, is that a very strong network of people was established here.
It is the first time that suddenly someone from Informal Education sits with someone who
is responsible for Children and Youth at Risk, and they talk because they never have this
interface point. Someone from the Central District learns something from someone from
the Southern District, because they never had this forum in which people sit and learn
together. This is something that has really strengthened the system.
In spite of the huge task transforming the organizational culture of the ministry
entails, the two divisions of the new Planning and Strategy Department rely only on
less than ten workers, and part of them are temporary workers, student jobs. This
means that the task of instilling a managerial regulation into the ministry is mainly
conducted by consulting firms. A civil servant of the department comments that
“consulting service is less about thinking and more about technology” and specifies
that, for instance, the “Evaluation of the Situation” of the ministry—that, as we have
seen above, is about learning about the Israeli education system compared to those
of other countries—will be managed by an external firm, Tack-Tovanot, an Israeli
firm that won the tender. “Tack-Tovanot, they provide us with a platform that we do
not possess, Tack-Tovanot is one of the five consulting firms that participated in the
tender of the Planning and Strategy Department in the Ministry of Education, five
firms that have been selected from the list provided by the Prime Minister’s Office”
(Official 2, Planning and Strategy Department, interview 2).
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 207
The use of consultants enables the ministry to launch ambitious projects and at
the same time to reduce the number of employees, shrinking the state bureaucracy
as fostered by the new managerial culture. Consulting firms provide a temporary
workforce, but as the head of the department explains, consultants also provide new
ideas and reinforce legitimization of government policy.
When you work with external companies, some of which are non-profit organizations and
some business entities, you get more “soldiers” for the work but also more specific value.
And I think that with external counsel you have an opportunity to get people from the out-
side world who are different from you. Consultants… their value is both in their expertise
and in their being mediators. Since they are not from the government, it allows them to
bridge gaps in trust, thus enabling the implementation of governmental policies.
Part of the work of the Planning and Strategy Department is conducted through
consultation with different stakeholders. Since, as a civil servant of the department
explains: “We understand that in order to influence education we actually have to
involve as many stakeholders as possible, not only principals and parents but also
local authorities and central NGOs.” She/he specifies: “such was the case of the
Education Picture, it was shaped through public consultation and again, Tack-
Tovanot provided the platform,” but as the civil servant clarifies, even with the sup-
port of the consulting firm, the process of public consultation is a hard and complex
task: “a successful consultation requires a thorough preparation that includes well-
prepared background papers and the choice of experts who will be involved in the
process, this is not an easy choice at all” (Official 1, Planning and Strategy
Department).
During the academic year 2016–2017, a large consultation process was con-
ducted around school autonomy. A committee for the examination of school auton-
omy was appointed by the Director General of the ministry in 2012. The committee
headed by Mr. Shimon Harel23 and led by the Planning and Strategy Department
included representatives of the ministry, the third sector, municipalities, and princi-
pals. The committee led a large online consultation in which twenty thousand peo-
ple were invited to participate: all the school principals in Israel, all the inspectors,
and a few thousand teachers. Their input was provided through questions formu-
lated by the committee.
The efforts to involve different education stakeholders in policy-making reflect
the culture of the managerial regulation and tri-sector cooperation that the Planning
and Strategy Department embodies. However, the consultation mode provides addi-
tional benefits: “it is a way of getting legitimacy from the public for our moves and
avoid resistance from the ground, but also to hinder opposition from the central
administration here in the ministry” (Official 1, Planning and Strategy Department).
When asked about the role of the Planning and Strategy Department, the func-
tionary interviewed summarizes: “We are not the brain here but let’s say we are the
neurons of this enormous body called Ministry of Education.”
Head of Human Teaching Resources in the Ministry of Education in 2000 and Head of the
23
9.5.2.1 E
xternal Programs: Unregulated and Uncontrolled Nonprofit
and For-profit Organizations’ Educational Activities
The involvement of the third sector in the education system in Israel has increased
significantly since the 1990s, a trend that continues until the present. The Central
Bureau of Statistics reported that in 2009, the third sector was responsible for fund-
ing educational projects equivalent to 17% of the total of national expenses on pre-
elementary education, 13% of the total expenses in elementary education and 44%
of the total of national expenses on post elementary education. In 2010, nonprofit
and commercial organizations funded 7% of the total national expenses on educa-
tion in Israel, a percentage considerably higher than in other OECD countries
(OECD 2003).24
In 2007, 353,000 workers were employed in nonprofit institutions, about 13% of
all jobs in the Israeli economy. Most of the jobs were concentrated in education and
research (49%) (Asban 2010: 15).
For decades, we have witnessed a growing participation of nonprofit and for-
profit organizations in the provision of education programs, nevertheless national
policies for the regulation of these external programs were not established until
recently. The Attorney General pointed already in 1988 to the lack of control and
regulation of NGOs and disseminated a “Procedure for cooperation between minis-
tries and NGOs.”
Since 2000, the Ministry of Education has made several attempts to map and
regulate external programs. Some attempts had meager success, but others contrib-
uted to the reinforcement of the tri-sector assemblage.
In 2003, the Pedagogic Administration requested from the directors of depart-
ments and units a list of all the programs operated by the Ministry's units or by
external entities. The list obtained was partial due to the difficulties in collecting the
necessary information. In 2004, the Director General demanded the heads of ten
units at the ministry to produce a list of the external programs, but the information
provided was still incomplete. In June 2006, the Director General instructed units’
and districts’ directors to submit a list of external bodies with whom the Ministry
was in contact. Again, the instruction was only partly fulfilled. In 2007, a public
committee, the “Committee for determining criteria for the entry of intervening
bodies, and the activities of the third sector in the education system” (Zailer
Committee) submitted its report. Among the main recommendations: a comprehen-
sive mapping of the existing programs and the establishment of a procedure defin-
ing the criteria according to which those interested in operating in educational
institutions will be authorized.25
24
External education programs in the education system. Research and information center, the
Knesset, July 29, 2014.
25
http://www.mevaker.gov.il/he/Reports/Report_117/ReportFiles/fullreport_2.pdf?AspxAutoDete
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 209
Since the submission of the report, a number of attempts to implement its recom-
mendations have been made. First, two surveys on external programs were carried
out, one published in 2008 and the other in 2009; second, the publication of a circu-
lar by the Director General in 2010 with clear instructions and criteria for the intro-
duction of external programs into schools; third, the establishment of a unit in the
Ministry of Education for the approval of external programs as a result of the
circular.
The first survey mentioned above was a report published by the Chief Scientist
of the Ministry of Education in August 2008. This report summarized a survey con-
ducted on his behalf to examine the activities of external programs in elementary
and junior high schools. The report recommended, inter alia, to proceed with the
monitoring and regulation of the activities of external bodies operating in educa-
tional institutions and to establish a database including the information about exter-
nal programs.26
The second survey was a mapping of external programs which the ministry
assigned to the Institute for Educational Entrepreneurship, headed by Bat-Chen
Weinberg at Beit Berl Academic College. The survey, an important actor of the tri-
sector network, was completed in 2009 and gave an idea of the dimension of the
nonprofit and for-profit organizations’ activities in the education system. The survey
found that associations, foundations, and business organizations operate up to three
educational programs in 68% of schools and at least six programs in 21% of the
schools. They also found that most of the programs were integrated in educational
institutions without any supervision or control by the Ministry (Weinberg and
Shifman 2008). In addition, the survey showed the lack of transparency of the exter-
nal bodies and the pedagogical and budgetary distortions resulting from the inabil-
ity to manage the resources on a systemic basis which should guarantee an
equalitarian social distribution (Dagan-Buzaglo 2010).
The main recommendations of this survey were as follows:
• Formulation of a policy by the Ministry of Education about the partnership with
external bodies operating in educational institutions in conjunction with the dif-
ferent stakeholders.
–– Development of a detailed common database of existing external programs.
–– Definition of responsibility areas for cross-sector cooperation.
–– Systematic and professional evaluation.
–– Encourage and direct cross-sector cooperation (Weinberg and Shifman 2008).
The survey conducted by Weinberg and her associates is a key actor of the tri-
sector assemblage. It is the first official document issued in collaboration with the
Ministry of Education that clearly emphasizes the need for cross-sector cooperation
reflecting the Prime Minister’s Office resolution of 2008.
ctCookieSupport=1
26
External education programs in the education system. Research and information center, the
Knesset, July 29, 2014.
210 J. Resnik
27
Circular of the Director General of the Ministry of Education, 2010/4 (A) 63-1.3, para. 1.1).
28
External education programs in the education system. Research and information center, the
Knesset, July 29, 2014.
29
http://www.mevaker.gov.il/he/Reports/Report_117/ReportFiles/fullreport_2.pdf?AspxAutoDete
ctCookieSupport=1
30
External education programs in the education system. Research and information center, the
Knesset, July 29, 2014.
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 211
9.5.2.2 C
ross-Sector Programs and Cooperation Unit: Consultation,
Roundtable, and Wisdom of the Masses
At the end of 2012, the Cross-sector Programs and Cooperation Unit was founded
at the Pedagogic Administration in the Ministry of Education as the unique body to
deal with the regulation and monitoring of external programs. The founding of the
unit was the initiative of Michal Cohen, who was Deputy Director General at the
time and later became Director General of the ministry. A school principal with no
previous experience at the ministry was appointed head of the new section. From the
outset, the new unit’s mode of operation was different from the traditional minis-
try’s mode; it aimed at formulating a policy on external programs based on a cross-
sector dialogue. The tools chosen were consultations, roundtables, and work teams,
all of them technically supported by consulting companies.
The first step undertaken was a large consultation with different stakeholders,
including the participation of the Deputy Director General. The consultation con-
sisted of four meetings held during 2013, with hundreds of CEOs of nonprofit orga-
nizations, foundations, and the business sector as well as inspectors, principals, and
representatives of the ministry’s administration. The aim was listening to nonprofit’s
and foundations’ CEOs to try to understand what they thought about the functioning
of the ministry on external programs and what were their expectations from the
ministry on the topic. And indeed, the consultation clarified the main problems of
the interaction of the ministry with bodies operating external programs. As the head
of the unit tells us:
They said about us, about the Ministry of Education, you are slow, until you move…we…
the associations… we are already in the field […] every office, every section in the ministry
speaks a different language, tell us what language to use, what you want. You are the
Ministry of Education, we really want you to be a guiding hand, you need to grow up a
spine ... we want you to be strong … be a beacon for us.
When asked about their desired goals, nonprofit CEOs stressed two main issues:
first, “one entrance door to the ministry” meaning that only one unit at the ministry
should be responsible for the external programs and, second, “let the school princi-
pal … be a professional gatekeeper … give him professional tools to choose a pro-
gram by mapping out what already exists” (Head of Unit, interview 1).
The second step was the organization of cross-sector roundtables. Four round-
tables were organized in 2014, chaired by the Director General of the ministry and
with the participation of representatives of the Ministry of Education (from the cen-
tral administration, districts, principals, and teachers), municipalities, third-sector
organizations, and the business community. The main recommendations of the
roundtables were as follows:
A. The external programs’ database—policy recommendations and characteriza-
tion of an Internet database for external programs in the education system, in
cooperation with the ICT Section of the Ministry of Education.
B. An agreed-upon process for building an optimal partnership at the school
level—An agreed-upon work process for integrating external programs in
212 J. Resnik
schools was presented. The process was based on knowledge gathered from all
members of the planning team, including the heads of the education depart-
ments of local authorities, school principals, managers of nonprofit organiza-
tions, and others.
C. Formulation of a tri-sector convention for establishing the rules of the cross-
sector dialogue and cooperation (Director General, Ministry of Education).31
The third step was the organization of work teams comprising different stake-
holders to discuss each one of the tasks decided upon in the roundtable. In mid-2014,
the three tasks were accomplished: database’s principles were defined, the process
for integrating external programs in schools was delineated, and the cross-sector
convention formulated.
The online database was a complex and costly high-tech project. Initially, third-
sector representatives demanded outsourcing of the task because of their lack of
trust in the ability of the ministry units to efficiently and rapidly fulfill a major task.
Nevertheless, the project was completed satisfactorily and in a short period of time
by the computerization unit in the ministry.
It was decided that during the first stage of its functioning, every program operat-
ing in the education system by a profit or nonprofit organization should be regis-
tered in the database. Each program would contain professional feedback, in some
cases feedback from the ministerial staff, but in most cases from school principals.
Principals were supposed to provide feedback on the programs operating in their
schools, assessing the quality of the program. This regulation, based on the wisdom
of the masses (the principals), helps address the lack of the ministry staff needed to
control and assess thousands of programs already circulating in the education sys-
tem. The idea was that for the 2015–2016 school year, principals would be able to
choose only programs that appear in the database and that in the following year
unregistered programs would be forbidden from operating (Head of the Unit,
interview 3).
The online database was an innovative way to regulate the programs and monitor
nonprofit and for-profit organizations. By November 2017, 2365 external programs
had been registered in the database,32 but only 230 had been rated and gotten feed-
back.33 “Principals claimed that they have no time, but in my opinion the problem is
that in Israel we don’t have a culture of posting your opinion, it will take some time”
(Head of the Unit, Interview 3).
Due to the success of the process undertaken by the cross-sector unit, the Director
General of the ministry encouraged the head to extend their activity to other units.
31
https://sheatufim.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/%D7%9E%D7%A1%D7%9E%D7%9A-
%D7%9E%D7%A1%D7%9B%D7%9D-%D7%94%D7%A1%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%AA-
%D7%AA%D7%9B%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7
%A8%D7%9B%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%97%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%9A.pdf
32
About 798 of which are in the green track (accompanied by a representative of the ministry) and
1567 on the blue track (without a representative of the ministry); http://cms.education.gov.il/
EducationCMS/Applications/TYH/hp.htm
33
http://cms.education.gov.il/EducationCMS/Applications/TYH/hp.htm
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 213
f unctions at the district level, and it “enters certain districts directly, they don’t pass
through the ministry” (Former senior functionary 2, Pedagogic Office, interview 2).
Similarly, the Trump Foundation is not subjected to the Pedagogic Office’s control,
a fact that makes the senior functionary wonder about “Who manages whom? We
manage them or them us?” She/he explains:
The Trump Foundation is an extremely strong foundation and his director, Eli Hurvitz34, has
direct contact with the Minister of Education and the Director General here and they can
‘do business’ without consulting us [the Pedagogic Office] at all. On some issues they ask
our opinion, sometimes they only inform us about their activities but in others they decide
directly with the Minister and the Director General. In some cases when the Director
General lacks ten million then she knows that the foundation will provide. And as you
know, whoever pays gets to decide what goes on, and sometimes we have the feeling that
they became the Ministry of Education, in my view they have too much power.
And indeed, the literature points to the evolving role of philanthropists who
decide and control to what and how to donate. This evolution increases their influ-
ence in education policymaking through seeding and shaping the nonhierarchical
structures (Lubienski 2016).
The problem of who controls education policy is even more acute if we realize
that when referring to civil society organizations, it is increasingly difficult to dif-
ferentiate between nonprofit and for-profit organizations. And that is because some
of the largest business entities operate in the public sphere, including in education,
through NGOs; hence, the motivations underlying NGOs’ activities are not always
exclusively philanthropic, but may also be economic (Rose 2009). The increasing
use of tender for service provision in the ministries means that the third-sector orga-
nization has to conduct itself as a business, preparing proposals, arranging guaran-
tors, etc. Thus, as the use of the tender system increases, the line between voluntary
and commercial action becomes blurred (Limor 2004). Moreover, the growing
prominence of social impact investment (SII), a variant of venture philanthropy or
philanthro-capitalism, blurs even more the difference between nonprofit and for-
profit organizations. SII operates with the belief that doing well by doing good or,
more literally, “doing good by doing good business” is the best approach to solving
entrenched social problems (Mitchell 2017).
Setting in motion the tri-sector dialogue demands complex and sophisticated
human and technological platforms. These tools are provided by consulting compa-
nies that are in charge of the functioning of roundtables and consultations in all
stages of the process. Consulting companies were selected by tenders among the
companies selected (also by tender) by the Prime Minister’s Office. It was Sheatufim
(literally = collaborations) that won the tender to put in place the tri-sector dialogue
in the Ministry of Education. It is interesting to note that Sheatufim and its Executive
Director, Shlomo Dushi, led the first constitutive Prime Minister’s Office roundta-
ble35 (interview with a Sheatufim consultant). Moreover, Bat-Chen Weinberg who
34
Between 2000 and 2011, Hurvitz served as the Deputy Director of Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild
Family Foundation, another very big foundation operating in education.
35
The organization site mentions that “Sheatufim has been leading public participation processes
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 215
headed the Institute for Educational Entrepreneurship and prepared the external
programs survey, a key nonhuman actor of the tri-sector cooperation assemblage,
became a senior consultant in Sheatufim and led roundtables at the Ministry of
Education.
Consulting companies are main actors in the tri-sector cooperation assemblage
as we have seen is the case of the managerial assemblage at the ministry. This
reflects the consultization of the Ministry of Education, meaning an increasing
involvement of consulting companies in the different activities carried out by the
ministry. Among the companies that have operated and operate in the ministry, we
find several well-known international consulting firms such as TASK, TACK,
Deloitte, De Levitt, Trigger Forest, and also various Israeli ones such as Lotem,
Tefen, Arbiv Management, Tovanot (literally = insights), Tovanot Bechinuch
(Insights in Education) (Official 1, Prime Minister's Office). The increasing demand
to provide advisory services to ministries contributes to the expansion of consulting
as a distinctive economic sector in Israel. The number of consulting firms—interna-
tional, international firms with a local branch, and Israeli—has been multiplying
in Israel.
One of the consequences of the development of business consultancy is the trans-
fer of educational professionals into private businesses which is also a means to use
the public service experience at the service of the consulting industry (Ball 2008).
Indeed, in Israel, many professionals who left the civil service have been attracted
to the consulting industry. Such was the case of Dr. Gal Alon who used to work in
the Prime Minister’s Office and later founded Tovanot, a very successful consulting
firm.36 When asked about the different consulting firms that submit tenders, an offi-
cial of the Prime Minister’s Office responded: “our country is not that big, I know
all the companies and their head managers, they also used to work in government
offices” (Official 1, Prime Minister’s Office).
Another consequence of outsourcing ministry’s functions concerns long-term
influences of consultancy on policy-making. In the outsourcing process, there is the
understanding that the public body holds the main responsibility and the private
body only implements the policy on the basis of predefined criteria. Supporters of
privatization assume that it is possible to truly separate fields of knowledge in a
hermetic manner, and to deal effectively on a case-by-case basis, detached from the
general, systemic, institutional, or chronological context. However, they ignore the
damage that outsourcing processes cause to the overall knowledge of the system. In
areas where knowledge is important, such as planning, outsourcing leads consulting
firms to accumulate more expertise over the years than the public body that is sup-
posed to guide it has. In such a situation, the administrative unit finds it increasingly
difficult to plan and supervise policy (Paz-Fuchs 2012).
and cross sector roundtables for the government since 2008.” http://sheatufim.org.il/en/subject/
cross-sector-dialog/.
36
https://www.insights.us
216 J. Resnik
It is important to note that the officials at the Planning and Strategy Department
are aware of this problem and try to overcome it:
The subject of knowledge preservation and knowledge development, we are really aware of
it. If you look at the tender we published then you'll see that it's in there, and that we're
really telling the ministries and telling consultants, people who are service operators, that
there's a duty to keep the knowledge in the ministry, because the knowledge is ours. They
have to train people in the units for them to develop that knowledge in the government, and
that they [the units] will not be dependent solely on them [consultant firms]. (Head of the
Planning and Strategy Department)
The former Head of the Pedagogic Administration, the biggest unit in the minis-
try, clarifies that the tendency is to leave “sensitive” matters such as pedagogical
questions or supervision of different types of student populations, in the hands of
the ministry in order to avoid the handling of sensitive data outside of the ministry
(Interview, former Head of Pedagogic Administration). In spite of the efforts to
incorporate the knowledge in the units, experience has shown that Israel does not
excel, to put it mildly, in regulating and supervising privatized bodies. As a result,
increasing outsourcing and policy-making through consulting firms causes the state
to detach itself from its duty to determine policy (Paz-Fuchs 2012).
Officials under NPM (and also NPG) lose their top-down authority over public
bureaucracies and managers because it prioritizes performance over accountability
to citizens and also because it is difficult to maintain and increase the bottom-up
control of all officials, including those employed on contracts (Kersbergen and
Waarden 2004). The failed control of the ministry along with the loss of officials in
favor of the edu-business and the loss of managerial-education expertise—all these
processes weaken the Ministry of Education institutionally. Instead, the new actors,
particularly private business and philanthropists, give rise to the global education
industry that seeks to set policy agendas, frame policy problems, and refashion reg-
ulatory regime to their advantage (Verger et al. 2016).
A rich literature deals with the shift in the mode of regulation of public administra-
tions in the world to a performance-based model inspired by New Public Management
(NPM). However, empirical studies that explore the way new regulations are incor-
porated in the public bureaucracies are scant.
The aim of the study presented here has been to understand the complex process
of transforming a bureaucratic public administration into a post-bureaucratic one
through the incorporation of a mode of regulation anchored in New Public
Management (NPM) and New Public Governance (NPG). Drawing on actors-
network theory (ANT), we followed the formation of the governance network first
at the Central Government and then in the Ministry of Education in Israel by tracing
the different human and nonhuman actors that participated in the formation of the
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 217
through governmental resolutions and under the direct responsibility of the Prime
Minister’ Office around the time of acceptance of Israel as a member of the OECD
in 2010. Although, national states have “control” over their policies, they are inexo-
rably driven to “conform” to global institutional norms in order to meet a particular,
global elite-defined conception of a “well-functioning, modern” state (Carnoy
2016). In fact, Israel was accepted by the organization after an assessment of Israel
concerning OECD instruments, standards, and benchmarks.37
As the literature indicates, the adoption of global education policies is locally
mediated (Carnoy 2016; Mundy et al. 2016). Particularly in Israel, the adoption of
a managerial regulation in the Ministry of Education entails the NGOization and
consultization of the ministry, which both respond to the NPM’s mandate to reduce
the size of public administrations. Consulting firms, as external bodies disconnected
from the bureaucratic culture of the ministry, can “efficiently” work to instill a
performance-based language without the need to recruit new permanent workers.
NGOs have been important actors in education since the inception of the State of
Israel.38 Their growing influence resulting from the governmental encouragement of
third-sector participation linked to the new managerial regulation, engendered an
idiosyncratic Israeli regulation mode—a post-bureaucratic NGOization regulation
model—in which NGOs play an increasingly significant role in education provision
but also in education policy-making.
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Julia Resnik is an associate professor at the School of Education in the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. Her main research areas are globalization of education policies, comparative education,
multiculturalism, migrant children (migrant workers and asylum seekers), international education,
and the involvement of civil society in education systems. She has edited The Power of Numbers
and Networks: Understanding the Mechanisms of Diffusion of Educational Models (Routledge
2018) and various special issues in Anglophone and Francophone journals.
9 From Government to Governance: The Incorporation of Managerial Regulation… 221
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the copyright holder.
Chapter 10
Governmentality: The Notion of Progress
in the Brazilian Political Educational
Discourse
Márcia Aparecida Amador Mascia
10.1 Introduction
Taking into account that the discourse of progress is at the basis of our current edu-
cational policy, this chapter aims at exploring the foundations of this concept in
education using as tools the discursive framework in the convergence with Foucault’s
studies of power and governmentality. For the discussion of progress and curricula,
this study relies on Popkewitz. The questions that mobilize the discussion refers to
the rules upon which the discourse of progress in education is constructed and, also,
how these rules are linguistically materialized in a local example.
The materials that are analyzed are excerpts of documents of Brazilian Curriculum
Discourse, focusing on curricula reforms that took place in the 1980 and 1990. My
great argument here is that this discourse operates under dichotomies of progress/
regression, success/failure, and inclusion/exclusion, naturalizing them. I wish to
demonstrate that these dichotomies should not be accepted as naturalized but should
be considered a social construction and part of the effects of power in the education
system of reasoning.
This chapter is intended to be neither the origin nor the last word about the rela-
tions of progress in education, instead it should be viewed as a continuity and/or
discontinuity in the discourse on education. The intention is to deconstruct some
concepts often related to education: Liberalism, progress, power, and truth. This
investigation does not discuss what includes or excludes, but how the discourses
create a system of reasoning of inclusion and exclusion in education.
A version of this chapter was first published in the volume: Mascia, Márcia A. A. (2009). Inclusion
or Exclusion? An Analysis of the Brazilian Curriculum Discourse of the 1980s and the 1990s.
Culture and Emerging Educational Challenges: A Dialogue with Brazil/Latin America. Michalis
Kontopodis (Ed.). Lehmanns Media.
M. A. A. Mascia (*)
Universidade São Francisco, Itatiba, Sao Paulo, Brazil
The theoretical background lies on post critical thinkers. We are presenting in this
part the notion of progress; object and subject from the discursive point of view;
power and governmentality for Foucault.
One of the greatest challenges of the modern State is to develop strategies for social
inclusion; yet as inclusion strategies are sought, patterns of exclusion remain promi-
nent in social policy and education. These mechanisms of inclusion are embedded
in the Liberal thought which underlies the Enlightenment claim of equality of men.
Enlightenment believed that systematic knowledge was the motor by which “rea-
son” could direct social action and guarantee a good future in society.
According to Mehta (1997), although Liberalism claims, from the theoretical
point of view, a politics of inclusion, in practice, it has actually been exclusionary.
This occurs because:
Liberal theoretical claims typically tend to be transhistorical, transcultural, and most cer-
tainly transracial. (…) What is meant by this is that the universal claims can be made
because they derive from certain characteristics that are common to all human beings. (op.
cit., p. 63)
But the exclusionary bases of liberalism, I believe, derive from its theoretical core. (…)
It is not because the ideals are theoretically disingenuous or concretely impractical, but
10 Governmentality: The Notion of Progress in the Brazilian Political Educational… 225
rather because behind the capacities ascribed to all human beings there exists a thicker set
of social credentials that constitute the real bases of political inclusion. (op. cit., p. 61)
In this sense, what Liberalism forgets is that men are social beings and that they
are embodied in power relations.
Taking into account the notion of progress in Liberalism, it can be said that lib-
eral theory assumes scientific knowledge and, in liberal thought, progress is obtained
through managing social change. Popkewitz reinforces this idea, postulating for the
American educational system that “in contemporary school reforms, these funda-
mental assumptions are deeply embedded as part of the doxa. Dominant and liberal
educational reform discourses have tended to organize change as logical and
sequential” (Popkewitz 1997a: 291).
According to Popkewitz, it is possible to postulate two different ideological
forms in contemporary social and educational theory: the critical and the liberal
traditions, both of which relate to the nineteenth century view of Enlightenment. In
terms of Popkewitz (id., ibid.):
For critical and liberal theorists, change was premised on identifying the subjects who gave
direction to change, either by locating the origins of repressive elements that prevented
progress or the groups that would bring about a redemptive world.
If we think of Brazilian schooling models, we can say that critical and liberal
traditions provide foundational assumptions of progress.
We will now pursue some fundamental concepts that will help understand his-
tory as a theoretical activity. In this work, when we talk about history, we are talking
about discourses, as Foucault defined and was adopted by the French Discourse
Analysis:
(…) a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that
have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, or linguistic area, the condi-
tions of operation of the enunciative function. (Foucault 1972: 117)
between what he calls the historicism or philosophy of consciousness and the “lin-
guistic turn.”1 The former, which has dominated social studies, sees events as “real”
and performed by “actors”; the latter, which was adopted by genealogical studies
and social epistemology, focuses on language as a constitutive element in the con-
struction of social life and “identity.” The difference between them most interesting
here is their concepts of progress. For the historicist view, progress is an a priori
concept and is conceived as a movement from evil to good, applied to the social
conditions of life. The task of social science in this perspective is to detect bad con-
ditions, analyze them, and propose ways of improvement. However, for the “lin-
guistic turn,” which we are adopting in this work, “progress” is seen as change, and
it is constitutive to social practices and does not pursue an ideal world. The “linguis-
tic turn” (Usher and Edwards 1994) focuses on the language, assuming that our
relation with the world is crossed by language, that is, the rules that tell what, when,
and in which way we should say, act, and see the world and ourselves.
The way we see change is as a social constructed image intermediated by lan-
guage. The images of liberalist change in education through the improvement of
curricula involve not only education but also the politics of knowledge of the world,
that is, our relation with language.
In the same line of thinking, Bakhtin (1973) works with the meaning of the sign
crossed by the language:
Meaning is the expression of a semiotic relationship between a particular piece of reality
and another kind of reality that it stands for, represents, or depicts. Meaning is a function of
a sign and therefore inconceivable outside the sign as some particular, independently exist-
ing thing. (op. cit., p. 28)
In short, anything and everything occurring within the organism can become the mate-
rial of experience, since everything can acquire semiotic significance, can become expres-
sive. But all the same, it is the word that constitutes the foundation, the skeleton of the
meaning of every outside sign. (op. cit., p. 29)
1
“Linguistic turn” refers to current methodologies in social studies that take the language as its
center. For Popkewitz, “the linguistic turn centres on the opacity and figurative character of lan-
guage, the manner in which subject positions as well as reality-effects are created within language”
(2001: 50). The term “linguistic turn” was introduced by Rorty in the reader he edited in 1967, The
Linguistic Turn, and this marked an ongoing break within analytic thought, moving from the object
of language to language itself. For further details, see Rorty 1967; Popkewitz 1997a, b, among
others.
10 Governmentality: The Notion of Progress in the Brazilian Political Educational… 227
Each discursive formation has some objects, which vary historically, that we under-
stand as the ordering of the world, that is, the “data.” We define data as a collection
of objects that have their place and their rule of creation inside each discursive for-
mation. For Foucault:
(…) it is not enough for us to open our eyes, for new objects suddenly to light up and
emerge out of the ground. (…) the object does not await in limbo the order that will free it
and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity, it does not pre-exist
itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive
conditions of a complex group of relations. (Foucault 1972: 45)
These relations are not inside the objects, they do not pre-exist; they are, some-
how, within the limits of discourse, which offers the objects that can be talked about.
It is not possible, therefore, to talk about everything in a discursive formation, but
only about those things that are allowed for by the rules of object formation. For
example, the discourse of Liberalism embodied in every social change, as a pursuit
of the objects of truth, talks about the principles of ordering of what is understood
as problem and how we classify the society. When one discursive formation classi-
fies some objects as progressive and denies others, it is managing issues of power in
order to classify the knowledge. Thus, objects related to the concept of progress
should be understood within the rules of a discursive formation. What one discur-
sive formation understands as progress is not the same for another. That is what
Kuhn (1970) calls incommensurability among paradigms. Kuhn (op. cit.) provides
a view of progress that should be understood inside the same paradigm: what is
progress for one paradigm is not for another. He defines progress not cumulatively,
but within rules that are historically and socially delimited. His work raises pro-
found questions about the common image of progress, specially related to science
as a process of cumulative evolution. For him, “we may, to be more precise, have to
relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists
and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth” (op. cit., p. 170).
For Kuhn, we should understand progress in another way, by learning “to substi-
tute evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know
[this way], a number of vexing problems may vanish in the process” (op. cit., p. 171).
However, Kuhn does not go further, his conception of progress is positive and
idealistic, and he does not de-construct the subject and object and still presupposes
an agent.
The notion of agency is relevant to our work. The discourse of progress presup-
poses a subject of consciousness (an agent) who is the owner of his actions, capable
228 M. A. A. Mascia
of deliberately reaching his aims and transforming the world. On the other hand, as
we question his intentionality, relating it to the historical context and, therefore, not
to the origin of his actions, we are questioning and de-constructing this basis.
In brief, this chapter argues that the subject is decentered, a conception that is
stated by Pêcheux and Fuchs (1975) and Pêcheux (1988) when they talk about the
two illusions in which the subject and meaning are inscribed: the first is the illusion
of the origin of discourse and the second is the illusion of only one meaning. We
adopt a notion in which the subject is decentered, historical, and affected by ideol-
ogy; incapable of “consciously” transforming the world, he can provoke changes,
but does not have control over the meanings of these changes.
This decentering of the subject enables us to problematize the reason upon which
the notion of progress is constructed. From a genealogical point of view, we can see
possibilities of change, which could be understood as “breaks, or “movements” in
the discursive field. Differently from the traditional history, which constructs prog-
10 Governmentality: The Notion of Progress in the Brazilian Political Educational… 229
ress as a linear movement toward the truth, we now have genealogy, which con-
ceives changes as breaks within particular discourses and as power/knowledge
struggles. If we transport this idea to schooling, we should study the social and
conceptual conditions through which we have come to reason about schooling prog-
ress the way we do.
Most of the research that focus on the progress in educational curricula assume
that progress is an a priori notion and that students and teachers are stable catego-
ries. Taking into account the picture above, critical studies detect a problem, which
is avoiding to walk in the direction of an ideal school, analyze this problem within
given categories, and finally try to interfere suggesting a possible solution. But, on
the contrary, we argue that the notion of progress and the categories of teacher and
student are social constructs, and they work as discursive practices in constructing
the “self.”
Related to Foucault’s notion of power, we can quote what he calls “governmen-
tality,” which interests us in this study. For the author, it can be understood as:
The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calcula-
tions and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power,
which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and
as its essential technical means apparatuses of security. (Foucault, in: Burchell, Gordon and
Miller (eds), 1991, pp. 102–103)
In Modernity, there was a change in the art of governing, from the sovereignty
that governed a territory to a government model focused on population. We can
consider governmentality as a diversity of government practices that have the popu-
lation as the target and the knowledge of economy as action strategy.
The notion of progress in political education discourse can be inscribed as a form
of governmentality in the way that the target is the population and the curricula are
the apparatuses of security.
After showing the paradigm in which we stand, the following section is dedi-
cated to describe the methodology, that is, the conditions of production of the cor-
pus and take into account the French Discourse Analysis as an analytical tool.
The conditions of production of our corpus, the curricula documents, involve the
social historical moment related to the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, both in the
state of São Paulo and the world.
Globally, we had a process of globalization with a consequent domination by the
industrialized countries, mainly the United States, during the last decades of the
twentieth century. This process resulted in a scientific, technological, cultural, and
linguistic domination by the first world countries in relation to the emergent ones,
like Brazil. This installed a sentiment of excluded country that will be felt in
education.
In Brazil, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, we could see a
process of political opening after the falling of the dictatorship that operated with
the raising of many political parties and a feeling of democratization of Education.
The great problem of this period was that at the same time new schools were being
opened, the quality of education was falling, especially the public ones as the qual-
ity is directed to the elite that attend private schools.
In the political sphere of the state of São Paulo, in 1982 the Governor Franco
Montoro, from the PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, Party of
the Brazilian Democratic Movement), was elected. The workers in education
expected democratic improvements from the new governor, taking into account his
democratic political discourse. His motto was “Caminhando para o fim do quadro-
negro,” that is, “Walking to the end of the blackboard,” or alternatively, “walking to
the end of a bad situation.” It is important to call the reader’s attention to two pos-
sible meanings for “quadro-negro” in Portuguese. It is a compound word, and the
first word “quadro” can also be understood as “picture” or in a metaphorical sense
as “situation” or “context.” This way, “quadro negro” can relate to both the black-
board where teachers usually write during their classes and the terrible situation in
which Montoro found education when elected, which he implies is “negro” (black).
We can say that the interlocutor was using this double sense as a strategy of persua-
sion, in this case, of political change in education. This discursive strategy of using
a word that belonged to both discursive formations, that of the school and that of the
social situations, caught the readers’ attention, in this case the teachers, to point out
the terrible conditions of the schools. Of course he, the governor, would come to
the rescue.
It is within this feeling of change that the curricula documents appeared from
which we chose excerpts to analyze.
10 Governmentality: The Notion of Progress in the Brazilian Political Educational… 231
10.4 Micro-Analysis
For the Discourse Analysis, we analyze excerpts of the discourse, the micro-
analysis, in a way to identify the effects of meanings and point to the linguistic
materiality. These excerpts are considered inside the conditions of production, that
is, the social-historical moment in which they appear. In our case, as specified in
part 2, the moment is of change, in politics and education.
If we take, for example, the discourse of curricula reforms in Brazil, we will see
that it is constructed upon dichotomies: the old and the new. The “old” is seen as the
bad, the evil, the one that failed, and the “new” is associated with the modern, the
complete, in short, “hope.” Reforms are always initiated by the government, they are
top-down reforms and the discourse of reforms is embodied in the Political Discourse.
Political Discourse works in the way of political engagement: the speaker (X)
intends to engage the listener (Y) in a political ideology (Z). For example, curricula
reforms, in Brazil, frequently happen when the government changes, as a way of
establishing a mark, a feature, and a style of governance. Political issues mean
action and action in education means curricula change, among other changes.
One of the characteristics of the Political Discourse of reforms in Brazil is the
use of metaphors. These metaphors are constructed upon dichotomies. Education as
a “process” is one example of metaphor. Below, we present some parts of two intro-
ductory letters that appear in a Curriculum signed by two secretaries of Education
of São Paulo state.
The curricula proposals that are being delivered now to the teams of public schools are the
product of a long process of construction that has been forged into successive versions by
the decisive collaboration of countless educators.
By debating, disagreeing and sending suggestions, specialists from different regions of
São Paulo state, in different moments, provided the technical team of the Coordenadoria de
Estudos e Normas Pedagógicas—CENP—the backgrounds needed for the modification and
improvement of this set of guiding teaching documents.
Therefore, it is a proposal that has been collectively built, but has not been finished.
(Modern Language Curricula Proposal, 1988)2 (…)
The public school should distance itself from the current model (…) It should transform
itself into a living and active organism and part of the life of the society. (Modern Language
Curricula Proposal, 1992)3
2
My translation of part of a letter addressed to the teachers.
As propostas curriculares que estão sendo entregues, neste momento, às equipes da rede estad-
ual de ensino são produto de um longo processo de construção que foi se forjando, em sucessivas
versões, através da colaboração decisiva de inúmeros educadores. Debatendo, discordando e
encaminhando sugestões, professores especialistas, das mais diferentes regiões do Estado de São
Paulo, em diferentes momentos, forneceram às equipes técnicas da Coordenadoria de Estudos e
Normas Pedagógicas—CENP—os subsídios necessários à modificação e aprimoramento deste
conjunto de documentos norteadores do trabalho docente. Trata-se, portanto, de uma proposta
coletivamente construída, mas não acabada. (…) (carta do Secretário da Educação Chopin Tavares
de Lima - P.C. 1° g., 1988)
3
My translation of part of a letter addressed to the teachers.
A escola pública deve se afastar do modelo atual (...). Ela deve se transformar em organismo
232 M. A. A. Mascia
One of the columns of this building is the rescue of quality in public school.
Notable in this excerpt is the desire to “pursue the lost quality,” an argument that
consists of not completely denying a certain quality in the previous education sys-
tem (this is supposed to be politically incorrect), and instead using the prefix “-re”
added to the deverbal noun “qualification” to simultaneously imply two different
meanings: that it is necessary to change—by constructing some columns in this
building—and that, even though in the past the quality was not desirable, it was not
vivo e atuante na vida da sociedade (...) (carta do Secretário da Educação Fernando Moraes - P.C.,
1° g. 1992).
4
“Current” understood as the old one, considered, in opposition to the new one, as “dead” (non-
alive) and “stuck” (non-active).
5
My translation of part of a letter addressed to the teachers.
Agora inicia-se uma nova etapa de trabalho: a da divulgação das Propostas e capacitação dos
educadores, dentro de uma política educacional da S. E., com vistas à requalificação da escola
pública de Primeiro Grau. (carta do Secretário da Educação Chopin Tavares de Lima - P.C. 1° g.,
1988).
10 Governmentality: The Notion of Progress in the Brazilian Political Educational… 233
always bad. It is necessary to reinforce the foundations and give continuity to the
process of construction.
The image of progress, as conceived through the metaphor of construction, is
based on a linear and cumulative action toward an ideal of completeness. This con-
cept of completeness can only be understood in opposition to incompleteness, in our
context applied to the previous curriculum documents. This is what Derrida calls
“the play of differences” (Derrida 1968: 140) in which our western rationality is
inscribed. When exalting the new, this discourse shows traces of inadequacy and
failure in relation to the old. The positive meaning regarding the curricula reforms
is constructed with the voice of negative failure implied by the previous curricula,
and in this discursive game, the two meanings end entwined: the new inscribes in
the sphere of the old and one depends on the other to signify.
In the line stream of thinking, the excerpt below is based upon dichotomies. For
example, in favor of a change in the linguistic approach, the curriculum proposal
quotes the following extract from a book published in English by G. Brown:
Are all classes dead? No, not all. But too damned many are… What's the difference between
a dead and a live classroom? In the dead classroom, learning is mechanistic, routine, over
ritualized, dull and boring. The teacher is robotized and the children are conceived as con-
tainers or receptacles whose primary function is to receive and hold subject matter… The
live classroom… is full of learning activities in which students are enthusiastically and
authentically involved… Each student is genuinely respected and treated as a human being
by his teacher… the learning involves living. (Brown 1975: 1–2, cited in Pedagogical
Practice, 1993: 22)6
The explicit dichotomies upon which the argument is constructed are the images
of death and life. The image of death is related to the previous (or old) approach and
the image of life (alive) is associated with the new one. Reform means the passage
from death to life. In order to create the illusion of death, the author uses the follow-
ing adjectives and nouns: mechanistic, routine, ritualized, dull, boring, robotized,
containers, and receptacles. The image of life is created by the phrases: enthusiasti-
cally and authentically involved, genuinely respected, and treated as human being.
This image of passage from death to life has its origin in the religious discourse,
especially the one related to Catholicism, the most common religion in Brazil.
We could point to other images of incompleteness related to curriculum reforms:
the image of the teacher as a person not prepared to understand the curricula or to
work with the syllabus and to deal with the student. The image of the student as an
empty individual who needs to be constructed, who has no past and no history. The
notion of student is considered in a homogeneous way, because there is no space in
the educational discourse for heterogeneity. The image of teaching is seen as an act of
using strategies and the image of learning is to incorporate behaviors (Pennycook 1994).
6
From: Brown, G. I. The live classroom. New York: The Press Viking, 1975: 1–2. It has been
quoted inside “Pedagogical Practice” according to the original, in English. In: SÂO PAULO
(Estado) Secretaria da Educação. CENP. Língua Estrangeira Moderna—Inglês: 1° grau. São
Paulo: SE/CENP, 1993. v. 1 (Prática Pedagógica). P. 22.
234 M. A. A. Mascia
But what does this discourse of incompleteness imply? It implies that there is a
silent referent of completeness, as it was said by Chakrabarty (1992: 337) when
referring to the first world, upon which the discourse of incompleteness is con-
structed. This desire of completeness generates reforms in education based upon an
a priori concept of progress toward an ideal school. The concept of Liberalism
presupposes a centered subject that is able to transform this world consciously, and
reforms in education are seen as the march of progress.
According to Popkewitz (2013), “modern pedagogy is a major example of pro-
ducing human kinds in the new republics” and progress is inscribed in modern ped-
agogy as fabricating “the kind of person who orders and calculates the paths of the
present to the future in organizing biography will bring individual and social happi-
ness and progress” (Popkewitz 2013: 136).
We started this research with the hypothesis that the curricula reform discourse is
constructed based on the ideal of completeness that characterizes the Liberalist phi-
losophy in the search of progress, freedom, truth, and social wealth, characteristics
inscribed in the notion of Foucault’s governmentality. However, this same discourse
excludes even as it includes the more discourses are created to promote the inclu-
sion in Education, the more it seems to appear the excluded subjects in Education
(Kontopodis 2012).
Our point here was not to argue what does or doesn’t work in curriculum reforms
related to pedagogical practices. By using Foucault’s belief (Foucault 1980) that
knowledge is power, we wanted to show that power is embodied in the discourses
we produce about ourselves, which intervene in social affairs. The curriculum dis-
course, seen as discursive practices of schooling, does not only transmit ideas or
produce instrumental pedagogy, it creates principles of reality by comparing, dif-
ferentiating, hierarchizing, and dividing the subjectivities of the teachers and the
students. Our approach was to examine how the discourse functions, especially the
power–knowledge relations, inscribed in the notion of governmentality, responsible
for the reasoning of Brazilian schooling.
The main effect of meaning in the data analyzed was the conception of this docu-
ment as a construction, that is, with many educational subjects (governors, teachers
and others) democratically involved. This is also the main argument of the curricu-
lum reform discourse, based on the images of the Liberalist philosophy of our cur-
rent time, as we have seen in the conditions of production of the discourse. However,
the analysis examined the discourse in light of the social historical context. Within
this, the analysis tried to deconstruct some naturalized images and see the discourse
as a historical construction, in this case related to education.
In relation to this, we quote Foucault’s ideas about the systems in which we are
prisoners:
10 Governmentality: The Notion of Progress in the Brazilian Political Educational… 235
My problem is essentially the definition of the implicit systems in which we find ourselves
prisoners; what I would like to grasp is the system of limits and exclusion which we practice
without knowing it; I would like to make the cultural unconscious apparent. (Foucault,
Rituals of Exclusion, cited in Butler 1997: 83)
References
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Chapter 11
The Logic and Practices of Governments
Providing Financial Support for
Non-government Education
Hua Wu and Xi Wang
1
Funding for non-government education includes funding for both non-government school stu-
dents and schools. As such, funding for non-government schools is only one of the two ways to
financially support non-government education and includes direct financial allocation, sharing of
school costs, and sharing of teacher resources. While tax breaks, commissioned schools, and gov-
ernment procurement are not typical means of financial support, they may be discussed in the
general sense.
H. Wu (*) · X. Wang
Department of Education, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
understanding of the logic of policy design with regard to the financial support of
non-government education.
11.1 T
he Rationale of Government Financial Support
for Non-government Education
In Mainland China, there remains a widespread dispute regarding whether the gov-
ernment should provide non-government education with financial support and how
to do so. In terms of the law, the legitimacy of and policy framework for providing
such support has been made abundantly clear, and there are various policy practices
across the country. Indeed, local governments’ policy design can differ significantly
in terms of whether they provide such support, as well as the ways and degree to
which they do so. Connected to the local socio-economic development, these differ-
ences suggest that local governments think differently with regard to the necessity
and rationality of financial support for non-government education. It is necessary to
systematically elaborate the rationality for the government to financially support
non-government education, which may also facilitate the formation of policy con-
sensus and improve policy design. This section explores five reasons in greater detail.
The First Reason to Financially Support Non-government Education Concerns
the Equal Rights of All Students in Receiving Compulsory Education According
to the Constitution of People’s Republic of China and Education Law of People’s
Republic of China, all students have the same rights of access to education, regard-
less of whether they attend public or private schools. Therefore, funding non-
government education through the provision of financial support for the students in
non-government schools is legally and constitutionally justified.2
However, the provision of financial aid based on the equal rights of students in
various local practices is minimal. Influenced by the ideology of planned economy
and public ownership, people have long equated public education funding with pub-
lic school funding and considered the public funding of public schools and private
students as dependent upon the relationship of power rather than function. This
misconception of the functional departments in question has resulted in the com-
plete lack of funding for private school students—even compulsory private educa-
tion—for a very long time (Wu 2006, 2007b). Fortunately, there was a shift in policy
in 2015. In the Notice of the State Council on Further Improving the Urban and
Rural Educational Expenditure Assurance Mechanism (State Council issued
[2015]67), the State Council included private schools in compulsory education
under the scope of public funding for the first time. They also differentiated between
2
See Article 33 and Article 46 in Constitution of People’s Republic of China and Article9, Article
37 in Education Law of People’s Republic of China, and Article 5 and Article 27 in Non-government
Education Promotion Law of People’s Republic of China.
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 241
the funding in terms of exempting tuition fees and that of providing public funds for
students in non-government schools on a per capita basis. The publication and
implementation of this notice has transformed educational finance from public
school to public education finance. Moreover, the government since formally placed
the financing of non-government education based on student rights on its agenda.
The Second Reason to Financially Support Non-government Education Is
Based on Its Financial Contribution According to the Communiqué of National
Education Development Statistics 2015, there were approximately 162,700 non-
government schools or institutions, with some 45.7 million enrolled students, in
mainland China in 2015 (Table 11.1). Moreover, according to the Communiqué of
the Ministry of Education, National Bureau of Statistics, and Ministry of Finance on
Execution Statistics of National Education Funds in 2015, the average public edu-
cation finance budget was CNY 8838.44 per primary school student; CNY 12,105.08
per junior school student; CNY 10,820.96 per senior secondary school student;
CNY 10,961.07 per secondary vocational school student; and CNY 18,143.57 per
student in a regular higher education institution. As such, non-government educa-
tion saved the 2015 public education finance budget over CNY 280 billion (exclud-
ing preschool education); if preschool education is added into account, this figure
increases to some CNY 450 billion (see Table 11.1). This accounted for 15% of the
national public education finance budget and matched the ratio of students enrolled
in non-government schools (17%), indicating that if all education services were
provided by public schools, the state may need to increase the public education
finance budget by a further CNY 450 billion.
Thus, from the government’s perspective, the most acceptable reason for the
state to increase its direct financial allocation for private education is based on its
contribution to the public education finance budget. This is also a popular idea
among scholars (Wen 2004; Guan and Xiao 2006; Xie 2009; Lu 2011; Li and Zhang
2012; Wu and Wei 2012; Fang 2017).
The Third Reason to Financially Support Non-government Education
Concerns the Externality of Education The government should provide financial
support for public schools because that education may benefit both the students and
the society, which means that education has a positive externality. Since non-
government schools also provide such educational services and activities and have
the same kind of social function and value, they should receive the same financial
support provided to public schools.
3
In the most optimistic estimated situation, if the Notice of the State Council on Further Improving
the Urban and Rural Educational Expenditure Assurance Mechanism (State Council issued
[2015]67) was fully implemented by all local governments, the financial support for non-govern-
ment education would not exceed that for public school education. As such, the actual situation
would likely be worse.
4
The contribution by non-government education to improving education equity was often over-
looked or misunderstood. As a matter of fact, the development of non-government education made
it possible for the government to increase investment in education in less-developed areas, low-
performing schools, and disadvantaged groups. This means that the development of non-govern-
ment education has helped to form the Pareto Improvement. In the meantime, the parents and
students who willingly chose to attend non-government schools to obtain better education have
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 243
5
Article 7 of the Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on
Amending the Non-government Education Promotion Law states that: “People’s government at or
above the county level could support non-government schools through means of service purchas-
ing, student loans, scholarships and lease or transfer of state-owned assets; for non-profit non-
government schools, the government could also support their development by providing subsidies,
reward funds and donation rewards.” This implicitly reflects the non-profit principle.
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 245
11.2 P
olicy Logic of Public Finance Support
for Non-government Education: Public Interest
6
This does not mean that the government should introduce public policies for all kinds of potential
public interest, which is neither necessary nor possible. Rather, public interest should be the basis
of policymaking for each and every public policy introduced by the government.
246 H. Wu and X. Wang
interest. Moreover, their decision to attend a private school had no impact on those
in public schools, making this process a typical case of Pareto Improvement.
Finally, does providing financial support for non-government education help
generate the third kind of public interest? The answer is also positive. On the sur-
face, if the government provides financial support for non-government education,
the financial resources for public schools would be bound to decrease—making
public school education a victim of this policy. However, a more critical understand-
ing of this situation reveals that most non-government schools struggle to maintain
sustainable development without financial support from the government. Ultimately,
if these non-government schools are closed, the government would have to build
more public schools, and the average financial assistance to all these schools would
be even less as a result. Moreover, if the government provided more financial sup-
port for non-government schools for migrant children from rural to urban areas, the
third kind of public interest generated from this kind of policy would be particularly
self-evident.
The discussion above does not distinguish between the specific sectors of non-
government education, which may raise the concern that it is unnecessary to delin-
eate between formal and informal education, early childhood and higher education,
or non- and for-profit institutions when talking about providing financial support for
non-government education. While such concerns are common, the dispute here is
about whether the government should financially support non-government educa-
tion and the degree to which they should do so, as well as the legitimacy and ratio-
nality of this idea. Whether a certain local government in mainland China should
introduce and implement such supporting policies and how these may be subject to
elements—like the local economy, social development, local politics, and culture—
lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Furthermore, this chapter discusses an issue
that is not influenced by the differences between specific sectors of non-government
education; therefore, the conclusion is not influenced by its failure to distinguish
these aspects.
Thus, in narrowing the scope of our discussion, it is sufficient to assert that all
non-government education sectors corresponding to public education sectors should
be in the place to receive public financial support from the government. After all, the
government supports public schools due to the public interest they produce, and
non-government schools could produce the same—if not more—public interest.
While many people pay much attention to the issue regarding whether for- and non-
profit schools should be treated equally in terms of state financial support, the qual-
ity of educational services is not influenced by whether the school was non-profit.
As such, it should not be reasonable to deprive the rights of students in for-profit
non-government schools.
Moreover, in terms of industrial policy, the government’s financial support of
for-profit educational institutions is merely the concrete application of its strategic
industry supporting policies, like those concerning tax relief. Furthermore, the gov-
ernment does not necessarily choose to provide financial support whenever public
interest exists. As evidenced throughout the reform and opening-up over the last
three decades, public interest is more likely to be obtained through the construction
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 247
of a legal system and the positive effects of the market mechanism, rather than
solely through financial support. In short, discussing financial support for non-
government education from the perspective of public interest may have little to do
with the distinction between different educational sectors.
As discussed above, the answer to whether the government should provide finan-
cial support for non-government education is quite clear: it is not only necessary but
essential for the government to financially support non-government education.
However, there are two more problems to be solved before this idea can be trans-
formed into practical policy.
The first problem concerns the question of how much money the government
should provide. This problem is relatively simple. In theory, the financial support
for non-government education can be considered reasonable as long as it is not
higher than the average public school student’s share of financial resources. In terms
of policy design, the financial contribution of the local non-government schools at
various levels can be seen as the ceiling for state financial support. Considering the
complexity of local interest patterns, game playing of local social forces, and differ-
ences in opinion at the local level, it is reasonable to start with a relatively low level
of financial support in practice—such as 10% of the total financial contribution of
local non-government education, increased on an annual basis.
The second problem is more complex and concerns how financial support should
be provided. This chapter makes some suggestions. As noted, regardless of which
type of financial support we choose, it must benefit the generation and expansion of
public interest. Since real or potential public interest is only possible when non-
government education develops healthily, the answer to this question may be that
the choice of the specific forms of subsidization should be realistic and reasonable
for promoting the development of local non-government education. This means that
the policy feasible in one city or period may not be suitable for another. As such,
two kinds of policy design should be considered when discussing financial support
from the perspective of facilitating the development of local non-government edu-
cation: namely, the guaranteeing of student rights and the sharing of non-government
school costs. We should also place greater attention on financial support policies
that aim to subsidize students in non-government schools.
From the perspective of juridical logic, public education funding should be
shared by all people and should not exclude those who choose to study at non-
government schools. However, this is the current situation faced by students in non-
government schools, who are excluded from public education finance as a result of
their school choice. Therefore, endeavors for the provision of more financial sup-
port for non-government education must be based on students’ rights. Failure to do
so will result in the legitimacy of such proposals being questioned and the construc-
tion of a healthy policy environment for non-government education losing its most
important conceptual ground. Although Section 2, Article 43, of the Outline of
National Medium and Long-Term Education Reform and Development Plan
(2010–2020) (State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2010) reiterated that
non-government schools, students, and teachers should have the same legal status as
those of public schools and ensured the autonomy of non-government schools, the
248 H. Wu and X. Wang
11.3 C
ase Studies on the Public Financial Support
for Non-government Education: Zhejiang Province,
China
7
Strictly speaking, government procurement of school places is a type of transaction rather than
financial assistance. Moreover, the current actual payment of government procurement is usually
below average student costs in non-government schools, and even below those in public schools
(in other kinds of government procurement, the government is usually willing to pay more than the
market price of certain products). Thus, it is clear that the government has received financial sup-
port from non-government schools rather than the other way around. However, the Halo Effect,
which non-government schools received through government procurement, made it tempting
because it showed that the educational products it provided were highly recognized.
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 249
the number of teachers employed, the annual amount of a public school teacher’s
salary multiplied by a third, two thirds, or half the number of the teachers. Moreover,
non-government schools that own their premises and provide formal or preschool
education could receive financial support from the government as a reward rather
than subsidies if they recruit students and run the schools according to the laws and
regulations. Consequently, non-government schools with more than 1000, 1500, or
2000 students could receive an annual reward of CNY 50,000, CNY 100,000, or
CNY 150,000, respectively.
In 2005, the Lishui Municipal People’s Government declared that non-
government schools elected as national quality schools could receive a one-time
reward of CNY 500,000. Meanwhile, those elected as the first, second, and third
rank provincial and municipal quality schools could receive a one-time reward of
CNY 300,000, CNY 200,000, and CNY 100,000, respectively. Additionally, they
would receive an annual reward based on the number of teachers used, with an aver-
age amount of public school teacher’s salary multiplied by one third, two thirds, or
half the total number of teachers employed.
In 2010, Suggestions of the Anji County People’s Government on Promoting the
Development of Non-government Education (Anji County People’s Government
issued [2010]62) stipulated that the government set up a special fund of CNY 1
million to reward well-managed, high-quality, and unique non-government institu-
tions, as well as groups or individuals who contributed significantly to non-
government education courses. Non-government schools elected as outstanding
institutions at the national, provincial, or municipal level would receive a one-time
reward of CNY 500,000, CNY 300,000, and CNY 100,000, respectively. It further
stipulated that the amount of the reward increased annually according to the increase
of municipal fiscal avenue. As such, the financial support policy in Anji County has
replaced subsidies with rewards since 2010.
In 2011, the government of Wenzhou City set up an annual special fund of CNY
30 million yuan for financial subsidies and rewards for non-government schools.
This fund has since been used to reward non-government schools, investors, princi-
pals, and teachers ranked “excellent” in the annual inspection; subsidize teacher
training sessions, teacher recruitment, as well as loans and interests for non-
government schools; and reward the graduates of vocational junior and senior high
schools.
In addition to the aforementioned policy practices of financial support, govern-
ment procurement could constitute another means of subsidizing non-government
schools. Indeed, the practice was observed in Wenzhou, Ningbo, and Taizhou,
among other cities. However, government procurement is only feasible in a handful
of high-quality non-government schools. Moreover, while the general financial sup-
port benefits non-government schools, government procurement is more of a market
transaction between government and non-government schools. Nonetheless, these
two types of financial support could be complementary and guide the healthy and
sustainable development of non-government education.
252 H. Wu and X. Wang
As in the case of mainland China, there are numerous types and names for private
education around the world—including the various independent, non-governmental,
non-state, and private schools in the western countries, which are often related to
religion. Since most western countries have a tradition of freedom of education and
generally recognized the right of parents to choose non-government schools for
their children, financial assistance policies for the government support of non-
government education dates back to the early twentieth century in some countries.
Demands regarding school choice have intensified in many countries over the past
two decades, compelling governments to adjust public finance frameworks and
develop increasing numbers of policy designs and practices to provide financial
support for non-government education.
11.4.1 P
olicy Logic of Public Finance Support
for Non-government Education on a Global Scale
As discussed earlier, the policy logic of public finance support for non-government
education is based on public interest. According to the study of policy practices in
other countries, this policy logic predominantly concerns two aspects: first, the pro-
motion of equal education and reduction of socio-economic stratification; second,
ensuring the freedom of school choice for citizens, especially those from disadvan-
taged groups. There have been several empirical reports and articles on both kinds
of policies.
With regard to the promotion of equal education, the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) examined data from 65 countries and
regions that took part in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA), analyzing the management and funding of schools. This assessment is use-
ful in understanding the policy logic of this practice. The OECD divided schools
into two categories—namely publicly and privately managed schools, which may
correspond to the complex situation of non-government education in mainland
China. This report studied the relationship between public funding and socio-
economic stratification, concluding that the level of public funding for privately
managed schools correlated to socio-economic stratification and that countries and
regions that provided more public funding for privately managed schools tended to
have less socio-economic stratification. The report further advances that it is essen-
tial to choose the most suitable means of providing public funding for privately
managed schools (OECD 2012a, b: 47).
With regard to the second kind of policy practice, the OECD report analyzed the
education voucher program—an important means of providing public support for
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 253
According to the OECD (2012a, b) report, while the level of public funding for non-
government or privately managed schools varies across OECD and partner coun-
tries, the average amount of public funding accounts for approximately 58% of the
school’s total funding. In Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and the partner econ-
omy of Hong Kong-China, some 90% of privately managed school funding comes
from the government. In contrast, 1% or less of the funding for privately managed
schools in the United Kingdom, Greece, the United States, and Mexico comes from
the government; while between just 1% and 10% of funding is provided by the gov-
ernment in New Zealand, Brazil, Chinese Taipei, and Shanghai-China (OECD
2012a, b: 21). These public funding policies do not include flexible supporting poli-
cies like the cost covered by the governments through tuition tax credits; they
merely reflect the general level of a country’s financial commitment to private
schools (OECD 2012a, b: 32).
In summation, there are four main kinds of financial support for non-government
education:
1. The allocation of direct public funding with reference to the form and amount of
public funding for public schools.
2. Sharing of school costs through tax deductions for non-government schools.
3. Performance rewards according to the quality and efficiency of non-government
schools.
4. Alternative funding policies that provide financial support for students and their
parents, such as the education voucher program and tuition tax credits program.
Policy practices around the world tend to be a combination of the aforemen-
tioned policies. Certainly, all the four types of funding policies are observable in the
case of Zhejiang Province, China. In addition, we selected three other countries as
representatives to analyze the policy practices and guidelines for public funding to
support non-government education: the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands.
The ratio of non-government school funding provided by the government in these
countries is almost 0%, 55%, and 97%, respectively (OECD 2012a, b: 21, Fig. 1.3).
254 H. Wu and X. Wang
In the 2013–2014 school year, private schools accounted for 25% of all schools in
the United States, while private school enrollment from pre-kindergarten to twelfth
grade accounted for 10% of all the US students (Council for American Non-
government education 2015). Although the OECD data showed almost no financial
funding for non-government schools, the financial support for non-government edu-
cation in the United States involved the second and fourth means of public funding:
sharing the costs of non-government schools through tax deduction policies and
providing alternative financial support—such as education vouchers for students
and their parents—who chose to attend non-government schools.
For non-profit private schools in the United States, the Internal Revenue Code
(IRC) 501(c) stipulated that charitable educational organizations were eligible to
receive tax-deductible contributions, providing that no part of their net earnings
benefitted any private shareholder or individual (Internal Revenue Service of the
United States 2017). With regard to for-profit private schools, according to the State
Regulation of Private Schools, there are 21 states—including Kansas, Colorado,
and Illinois—that exempt real and personal property used solely for schools from
taxation; some states exempt private schools from taxation in terms of the sale of
food, textbooks, and service of school commuting buses. Funding for public schools
mainly came from local tax revenue until in 1960s, when local tax revenue equaled
state tax in the funding of public schools and property tax was the most important
source of local tax revenue. In the 2013–2014 school year, 45.5% of the funding for
public schools came from local property tax (Snyder et al. 2016). Therefore, as a
main source of funding for the public education system, the exemption of property
tax indicates the financial support of local governments for non-government
schools—especially for for-profit private schools that rarely enjoy tax cutting
policies.
Moreover, although the US Constitution and other laws prohibit the use of public
education funds for religious and other types of private schooling, there were
numerous ways of financially supporting private schools in practice. These include
education voucher, tuition tax credit, and education savings account programs—all
of which aim to protect the freedom of school choice for parents and children.
The education voucher program was the earliest and most influential program for
providing financial support for non-government schools and ensuring the freedom
of school choice. Education-based vouchers were first introduced in the city of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1990, to help children in failing public schools access
better education. Fourteen states, as well as the District of Columbia, currently run
education voucher programs. The main targets of these programs are students from
low-income families, failing public schools, those with disabilities, and students
living in rural areas (National Conference of State Legislatures 2017). Several states
have opened the education voucher programs to middle-income families. For exam-
ple, in Milwaukee, the number of students who have benefitted from the Milwaukee
Parental Choice Program (MPCP) has increased annually since 1990. In the
2015–2016 school year, 117 non-government schools participated in the MPCP,
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 255
while more than 27,000 students from families with an income lower than 300% of
the federal poverty level have benefitted from this program. Indeed, the average
amount of financial aid provided through a voucher is about $7,537 (with a differ-
ence of about $600 between students in grades K4–8 and students in grades 9–12)
(Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction 2016).
The second kind of policy practice is a tuition tax credit program, which appears
to have originated in Arizona in 1998. Since this program can use tax revenue for
school choice before it is turned into public education funds, thereby incurring less
governmental regulation for non-government schools, it has become a particularly
popular policy practice in many states. In Arizona, for example, taxpayers can
donate part of their income tax to School Tuition Organizations (STOs), which turns
the taxes into tuition fees. Indeed, they may even receive a larger amount of money
than they donated and use it as a means of paying the tuition for private schools. In
addition to personal donations to STOs, there are chances for certain social groups—
like families with children who have disabilities—to donate taxes and receive schol-
arships from STOs. In the 2014–2015 fiscal year, the donations to STOs totaled
$140 million, and every couple or joint taxpayers could receive an income tax credit
for a donation of up to $1070. At the same time, the Arizona Department of Revenue
stipulated that 90% of the income of STOs should be used to provide scholarships
for more than one non-government school and that the receivers of those scholar-
ships should come from families with an income lower than 185%, 185%–342.25%,
or above 342.25% of the federal poverty level. The average amount of a scholarship
that year was $1,846, with each of the three income brackets receiving a third of the
available scholarships. By 2015, STOs in Arizona had received donations of about
$950 million, with $780 million used to provide scholarships to support study at
private schools (Arizona Department of Revenue 2016).
Founded in 2001, the Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit
Program (EITC) allows corporations to donate to non-profit Scholarship
Organizations and Educational Improvement Organizations in order to provide
scholarships for students from low-income families, thereby enabling their access to
any public or private schools. With the maximum donation amount of $750,000,
approximately 75–90% of the donation can be used as a tax credit (Pennsylvania
Department of Community and Economic Development 2017a). Pennsylvania
introduced another tuition tax credit program called the Opportunity Scholarship
Tax Credit Program (OSTC) in 2012. The OSTC allows eligible businesses to con-
tribute to a Scholarship Organization in order to provide scholarships to eligible
students residing within the boundaries of a low-achieving school, thereby enabling
them to attend another public school outside of their district or a nonpublic school
(Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development 2017b). As
such, in 2015, 17 states transformed up to $830 million in personal and corporate
income tax into financial support for non-government schools in the form of tuition
fees and scholarships, benefitting more than 234,000 students (The Foundation for
Opportunity in Education 2013).
The education savings account program is the latest financial support program
for non-government education. Started in Arizona in 2011, five states—including
256 H. Wu and X. Wang
Florida and Mississippi—have introduced this program, while North Carolina is set
to introduce the program and begin providing funding to students in the 2018–2019
school year (EdChoice, 2017). This program is typically targeted toward children
with special needs, such as those with disabilities or various kinds of learning dis-
orders, as well as children in failing public schools. Some states, including Nevada,
have expanded the scope of this program to children who have been enrolled in
public schools for more than 100 days, but felt unsatisfied with or could not be
accommodated in the schools in question. With the permission of the government,
this program allows parents to remove their children from their current school and
for the quota of public education funds they have not used to be deposited into a
restricted-use debit card. The family can then use this card for approved educational
expenses, submitting the receipts to the approved administrative agent for quarterly
audits. Approved educational expenses include costs of approved private schools,
accredited and licensed therapists, tutors, online courses, and text books. Although
this kind of program predominantly targets children with special needs, some
states—like Arizona—have expanded the scope of support to all children enrolled
in public schools (EdChoice 2016).
11.4.2.2 Australia
According to the data from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting
Authority (ACARA), in 2016, there were 9414 primary, secondary, and special edu-
cation schools in Australia. Approximately 30% of these were non-government
schools (ACARA 2016a), accounting for 35% of all students (ACARA 2016b). The
Australian government supports a wide range of public and non-government schools
through public funding and favors the direct allocation of funds to the schools. As
stipulated in Australian Education Act 2013, government schools are approved and
managed by the State or Territory authority and receive the majority of their public
funding from their state or territory governments, with the Australian government
providing supplementary funding. In contrast, non-government schools receive the
majority of their public funding from the Australian government, with state and ter-
ritory governments providing supplementary funding. Since 2014, public funding
for non-government schools has been based on the Schooling Resource Standard
(SRS) and the school’s total loading for the year, including the extra costs incurred
by students with disabilities, those with a low socioeconomic status, and those with
poor English proficiency (Australian Government Department of Education and
Training 2017). According to the provisions in Australian Education Act 2013 and
Australian Education Regulation 2013, the Australian government provides public
funding for participating government and non-government schools in accordance
with the same guidelines. The funding formula is as follows (Australian
Government 2013):
{[The number of students at the school for the year ∗ The SRS funding amount
for the year for a student at the school ∗ (1 – The school’s capacity to contribute
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 257
The Netherlands has one of the highest education performances in Europe. Indeed,
PISA 2015 showed that 15-year-old teenagers in the Netherlands ranked 17th in
science, 15th in reading, and 11th in mathematics—indicating that the cognitive
abilities of Dutch students are among the highest in the world (OECD 2016a: 35).
The Dutch education system is also superior in terms of equal educational opportu-
nity and freedom of education. In the Netherlands, anyone is free to set up any type
of school providing that it meets the standards of the Dutch education system. With
due respect to individual right to freedom religion or belief, all non-government
schools—including religious and secular schools—receive the same kind of public
funding from the government. Derived from Article 23 of the Constitution of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands, this policy dates back to 1917, when the Dutch educa-
tion system was no longer monopolized by public schools. A century later, Dutch
private schools outperform public schools with overwhelming advantages (Patrinos
2010). In 2013, about one third of students in primary education attended public
schools, while the remaining two thirds were enrolled in Catholic, Protestant, and
other types of private schools (OECD 2016a: 29–30). In other words, non-
government education has acquired the dominant position in the Netherlands.
While all public and private schools in the Netherlands receive per capita fund-
ing, financial aid is adjusted according to various elements, including rural location,
as well as the number of students with poor socio-economic backgrounds and spe-
cial education needs. Based on the student population, block grants are given to
school boards for staffing and operating costs. Schools can also receive additional
funding for special educational purposes, such as students at risk of dropping out
those in poor socio-economic conditions (OECD 2016a: 34). As such, public fund-
ing for non-government schools in the Netherlands favors the first type: money
258 H. Wu and X. Wang
follows the students and each school receives a sum equivalent to the per capita cost
of public schooling for each student enrolled (Patrinos 2010).
With regard to the decision-making for and management of schools, the Dutch
education system is highly decentralized. While the education systems are decen-
tralized in both the Netherlands and Finland, for example, most of the decision-
making in the Finish system is decentralized to local municipal authorities and the
schools have little autonomy as a result. In contrast, Dutch schools make approxi-
mately 86% of all decisions for themselves, which is the highest degree of indepen-
dence among OECD countries (OECD 2012b: 500). Moreover, there is no national
curriculum in the Netherlands: schools make all of the decisions with regard to
issues concerning the organization of instruction, personnel management, and allo-
cation of resources. This is also grounded in the principle of “freedom of education”
guaranteed by the Dutch Constitution of 1917. In addition, private schools have
even more autonomy than public schools insofar as public schools must admit any
student, unless there is no place left, while private schools are in the position to
refuse students who do not meet their standards or principles (OECD 2016a: 29).
While this policy grants private school significant autonomy, it has also deepened
the gap in student performance between schools to some extent, resulting in prema-
ture divergence among students and schools (OECD 2016b: 226).
Generally speaking, the approaches adopted by governments in the United
States, Australia, and the Netherlands toward the funding of non-government
schools were predominantly one or a combination of the first, third, and fourth type;
it is rare to find policy practices in which the government provides rewards to non-
government schools based on their performance. In the Chinese context, the amount
of rewards based on performance was relatively small and given on an irregular
basis. While most countries seem to disagree over whether the government should
take responsibility for the funding of schools that are not founded or managed by
the government, policy practices and programs concerning financial assistance for
such schools were universal. Examining the freedom of education around the world,
Glenn and Groof (2012) found that, in addition to cases of the Netherlands and
Australia mentioned above, public funding is used to support recognized non-
government schools in Austria, Belgium, Luxemburg, Denmark, Finland, Sweden,
Ireland, Norway, Iceland, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, as well as
most provinces in Canada. Meanwhile, numerous western countries—including the
United States—have programs aimed at promoting education equity, reducing and
eliminating socio-economic stratification, and ensuring the freedom of education.
Moreover, these programs are continuing to expand their influence, as illustrated by
the development and spread of education voucher programs. Although studies on
the development of these programs over the past two decades have shown no signifi-
cant advantage of vouchers for students attending private schools in terms of aca-
demic achievement, there is evidence indicating that students receiving vouchers
graduated from high school at a higher rate than their public school counterparts and
that parents of children who have received vouchers are generally more satisfied
with their child’s school (Center on Education Policy 2011). Studies on tuition tax
credit and education savings account programs have come to similar conclusions,
11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 259
proposing that people are more satisfied with local education through their partici-
pation in these programs. These positive effects advance the promotion of policy
practices and programs of financial support for non-government education around
the world.
11.5 Conclusion
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11 The Logic and Practices of Governments Providing Financial Support… 261
Hua Wu professor of education policy at the Department of Education, Zhejiang University. He
is the president of Institute of China Contemporary Private Education and was the founder and
director of the Non-government Education Research Center of Zhejiang University. His main
research interests include innovation of local education policy system, the policy system design of
balanced development of compulsory education, equity in education, modern school management
262 H. Wu and X. Wang
system, public–private partnership in education, theory and policy design of school cooperation,
educational decision theory, etc.
Xi Wang , PhD candidate at the Department of Education, Zhejiang University. Her research
interests include comparative education policy study, non-government education, equity in educa-
tion, and school choice.
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Chapter 12
The Transformation of Government
Responsibility and the Development
of Educational Policies for Early
Childhood Education Reform in China
Jieqiong Fan and Lin Li
J. Fan (*) · L. Li
Department of Early Childhood Education, Faculty of Education, East China Normal
University, Shanghai, China
e-mail: jqfan@pie.ecnu.edu.cn
12.1 B
ackground and Focus: The Responsibility Shift
of the Government Based on the Status Quo of ECE
Development in China
Given great progress of ECE achieved in China, there are deep-rooted problems and
causes behind. Government responsibility in ECE is one of such salient causes. The
following section outlines the background of ECE development and the key issues
relating to the responsibility shift of the government.
12.1.1 P
ushing Forward Universal-Beneficial Kindergartens
and Improving Quality: The Status Quo of ECE
Development in China
Along with more than 60 years of changes and growth since the establishment of the
PRC, much progress has been made in ECE. According to the latest statistics
released by the Ministry of Education, as of 2016, there were 239,800 kindergartens
across China, with a total enrollment of 44,140,000 children, an increase of 20.6%
and 13.3%, respectively, compared with 2013 (Ministry of Education 2017a, b).
Gross kindergarten enrollment of preschool education1 across China increased at an
annual rate of 4% over a 3-year period, reaching 70.5% in 2014. The Outline of
National Education Reforms and Development Programs (2010–2020) (hereinafter
referred to as the Outline (Ministry of Education 2010)) set a goal, whereby 70% of
pre-school children would be enrolled in kindergartens throughout China before
2020. This goal was realized 6 years earlier than articulated in the Outline. In 2016,
overall kindergarten enrollment totaled 77.4%, 27% higher than that of 2009, when
the Outline had not yet been published (Ministry of Education 2017a, b).
At the same time, along with the launching of the Professional Standards for
Kindergarten Teachers (Ministry of Education 2012a, b), Professional Standards
for Kindergarten Principals (Ministry of Education 2015), and the Guidelines for
Learning and Development of Children Aged 3–6 (Ministry of Education 2012a, b),
the teaching–research guidance has been strengthened, and the quality of childcare
has improved considerably. However, the ingrained problems in institution remain
disparities of ECE between urban and rural areas and in different regions and groups
still prevail. Challenges from new trends of population growth and urbanization
have not been lifted.
The responsibility shift of the government is key to understanding and decipher-
ing ECE development in China. How government defines and enacts its r esponsibility
1
Gross kindergarten enrollment of preschool education is calculated by dividing the total number
of children aged 3–6 years by the number of children who are actually enrolled in kindergartens.
This age group is called “the three years of preschool education.”
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 265
12.1.2 G
overnment Transformation and the Responsibility
Shift: The Origins of the Reform and Development
of ECE in China
2
In 1978, the Chinese government started to reform the country and began to open up to other
nations. This policy included adjusting the relations of production to conform to the level of pro-
ductivity, as well as opening the country to catch up to the world’s developmental trends and to
facilitate modernization.
3
From the initial years of the PRC to the time before reform began, the government was mainly
domination-oriented. Between 1979 and 1994, it was an omnipotent, administrative government
under a planned economy. From 1995 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was a limited
government under the market economy. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has been
in the process of becoming service-oriented. Of these types of government, the omnipotent, admin-
istrative, and limited types differ in terms of scope and mode when it comes to management, but
can collectively be referred to as “administration-oriented.”
266 J. Fan and L. Li
develop education, healthcare, culture, and other enterprises. The overall goal is to
build a public service system that is fair, inclusive, reasonable, and sustainable. The
context of this transformation is crucial to exploring the Chinese government’s
responsibility, as well as the formulation of policies and their impact on the reform
and development of all social undertakings in the country.
The impact of government transformation on ECE development will be elabo-
rated below, mainly from the shift in the government’s values, the identification of
government responsibilities, and the government’s systems and mechanisms with
respect to the expansion of ECE, together with the analysis of ECE policies promul-
gated by the government in different periods. Moreover, based on new problems
faced in the current stage of development, the government’s response and future
trends will also be discussed.
The impact of government transformations since the founding of the PRC on any
social undertaking can be summarized as follows: (1) the shift of the values that the
government uses to guide the expansion of a social undertaking; (2) identifying the
scope of government responsibilities assumed to develop a social undertaking; and
(3) approaches to carrying out the government’s responsibilities (the systems and
mechanisms that the government establishes to further a social undertaking). With
regard to ECE, the discussion will be elaborated based on the three aforementioned
aspects.
12.2.1 F
rom “Efficiency Prioritized” to “Equality Foremost”:
The Shift of Government Values in Developing ECE
Government’s values refer to its political beliefs and pursuits, mainly embodied as
its value goals. The formation of a value goal is shaped by the priorities of political,
economic, cultural, and national construction at the time. Once the ideological basis
is formed, it becomes a restrictive and incentive mechanism of the government’s
activities and directly impacts its functioning. Furthermore, ideological value usu-
ally manifests in specific policies and policy implementation. In a word, policies
can reflect government “values” (Shang 2002).
During the course of China’s governance mode transforming from domination-
oriented to service-oriented, values have played a fundamental role. For example, a
domination-oriented government privileges the interests of the ruling class and may
completely restrict or sacrifice public interests to fulfill them. Meanwhile, an
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 267
4
The most typical policy was as follows: Article 1 of the Opinions on Strengthening Early
Childhood Education Work—jointly promulgated by the Ministry of Education, State Planning
Commission, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Personnel, Ministry of Labor, Ministry of
Construction, Ministry of Health, and State Price Bureau, and forwarded by the State Council on
August 15, 1988—states: “For collectively-owned kindergartens opened in the sub-districts of
urban areas, local governments may appropriately allocate finances regarding their establishment,
the addition of large equipment, and housing repairs. [Such funds are to come] from the local
government’s self-raised endowments. For collectively-owned kindergartens started in townships
and villages, kindergartens shall self-raise the required finances, and the guardians of the enrolled
children could be charged pursuant to relevant regulations.”
5
The Five-Year Plan is an abbreviation of the Outline of the five-year plan for national economy
and social development in the PRC. The government makes this plan every 5 years to prepare for
268 J. Fan and L. Li
k indergarten enrollment during the 3 years of ECE was 55.6% in 2007 in urban
regions, but only 35.6% in rural areas, with a gap of nearly 20%. It seems this dis-
parity has been widening across time (Pang 2009). In 2009, there were only 27,600
universal-beneficial kindergartens in rural areas, a decrease of nearly 3/4, compared
with 106,700 universal-benefit kindergartens in 1995. Around 2/3 of preschool chil-
dren in rural regions had no access to ECE at the time (Zhang 2010). Moreover,
most kindergartens in rural areas were small in size, with limited security and
hygiene conditions. Even worse, the teaching content and methods assembled with
those adopted in primary schools. The quality of ECE in rural areas did not match
its proportion and its status in educating the largest number of children. This severely
hindered the sustainable growth and the quality improvement of ECE.
In recent years, China has seen an “expansion…of public service functions,”
characterized by prioritizing the development of public education services (The
Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Governance 2008).6 During this period,
the transformation of government functions has centered on broadening the scope
of public services, allocating educational resources in a rational manner, and the
delivery of public services to rural and remote regions with ethnic minorities. The
Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government have attached great
importance to ECE in rural areas. The 2010 Outline proposes “prioritizing ECE in
rural areas.” The Opinions of the State Council on the Current Development of Early
Childhood Education (hereinafter referred to as State Council’s Ten Opinions),
issued by the State Council in 2010, provided further regulations on how to organize
ECE in rural education, such as incorporating it into the construction plan of the
new socialist countryside, increasing the government’s financial aid, and promoting
nationwide ECE programs to support the expansion of Midwest China. Since 2011,
to effectively implement regulations from the State Council’s Ten Opinions, three
phases of the Three-Year Action Plan for ECE have been implemented. Along with
efforts made by the central and local governments, it is inspiring to see that ECE in
major construction, the distribution of productivity, and the proportion of national economics.
These plans played an important role in guiding the development of social undertakings. The
Eleventh Five-Year Plan is the blueprint for the period of 2006–2010.
6
While Western capitalist countries built their public service systems, they underwent three peri-
ods: (1) A free competitive market economy (before the first half of the nineteenth century, with per
capita GDP less than USD 1000) when the government interfered to a minimum. The market
economy was underscored as the core tenet, and the government mainly provided sustainable
public services. Thus, the government was called the “night watchman” government. (2) The
mixed economy (1930s–1960s), when per capita GDP was between USD 1000 and USD 8000).
This time is also called the period of public service-oriented government construction, character-
ized by the rapid expansion of public service functions and an increase in the proportion of public
expenses in relation to GDP. The growth of public education services was prioritized. This was the
golden period of the establishment of welfare states and economic growth. (3) Market economy
globalization (since the 1960s, when per capita GDP over USD 8000), when core public services
(such as education and other human resource capital) began to be provided. A “core public service-
oriented” government marks this period. According to the State Statistics Bureau, per capita GDP
in China was CNY 46,629 (equivalent to USD 7092) in 2014, indicating that China was experienc-
ing a mixed economy characterized by public services (especially core ones).
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 269
rural areas has achieved unprecedent growth which is significantly linked to equal-
ity and equilibrium, the foremost goal of China’s service-oriented government.
12.2.1.2 F
rom Model Kindergartens for Elite Groups
to Universal-Beneficial Kindergartens for the General Public
Since the PRC was founded, the establishment of kindergartens has followed the
policy of “walking on both legs,” namely the government joining hands with social
forces (such as enterprises, institutions, social organizations, neighborhood com-
mittees, villagers’ committees, and citizens) to promote ECE. At that time the gov-
ernment’s responsibility was defined as “establishing model kindergartens.” The
1956 Circular of the Ministries of Education, Health, and Civil Affairs on Issues
Regarding Kindergartens pointed out, “The education authorities should establish
some kindergartens in a planned way where possible,” and “The health and educa-
tion authorities should open some high-quality nurseries and kindergartens for pur-
poses of demonstration.” The Opinions on Developing Rural Preschool Education,
promulgated by the State Education Commission in 1983, stated, “Each county-
level government should take measures based on its actual conditions to create one
model kindergarten, and gradually develop town-level (township-level) central
kindergartens.”
Nevertheless, the government still had administrative power over kindergartens
opened by nongovernmental sectors. During the transition from the planned econ-
omy to the market economy, and the period when the market economy system was
established and refined, the administration-oriented government upheld the princi-
ple of “efficiency prioritized and equality considered.” The creation of a small num-
ber of “model kindergartens” to drive the expansion of other ones was a strategy
designed by the government to develop ECE in an efficient way. A typical policy is
the Circular on the Request for Defining the Leadership Management Division in
Early Childhood Education, jointly promulgated by the Ministry of Education (and
other ministries) and forwarded by the State Council in 1987. Another example is
the Opinions on Achieving the Development Goals Specified in the Ninth Five-Year
Plan for Early Childhood Education Nationwide, issued by the Ministry of
Education in 1997. The former document saw the “establishment of model kinder-
gartens” as the responsibility of educational authorities for the first time, while the
latter document further emphasized that the government’s responsibility was to
“create public model kindergartens and make them gradually become local exam-
ples and models.” However, since ECE follows the principle that “whoever opens
kindergartens, takes responsibility for them,” for a rather long time, the government
invested limited public resources in a small number of public model kindergartens,
which only served elite groups. For a certain period, launching model kindergartens
became the only job of local governments when they attempted to develop ECE,
which led to almost no support for a large number of kindergartens of other types.
Unfortunately, the scant number of model kindergartens failed to play an exemplary
role, resulting in great unfairness.
270 J. Fan and L. Li
12.2.2 F
rom Involvement to Withdrawal and Finally
to Leading: A Gradual Clarification
of the Service-Oriented Government’s Responsibility
in Developing ECE
The second aspect of how the government’s transformation influences ECE devel-
opment lies in “the identification of government responsibility.” Regarding the joint
efforts between the government and all possible social forces in expanding ECE, the
government takes responsibility to a certain extent and plays a specific role. Given
the nature of ECE, the changes in the government’s capacities, and social and eco-
nomic growth, the responsibility of the Chinese government in expanding ECE has
shifted from involvement to withdrawal, and finally to leadership.
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 271
12.2.2.1 T
he Government’s Overall Planning and Social Involvement:
Joint Efforts Between the Government and Society
in Developing ECE
Since the PRC was founded, it has experienced various social and political turmoil,
including reform and opening up, and the establishment of the socialist market
economy. China has gone through turbulence and tortuosity in its beginning to the
stable development of all causes during the period of reform and opening up.
Similarly, the relationship between the government and the society in which ECE
has developed has also gone through a series of changes. These shifts can be divided
into two stages.
Stage 1 was designated from the founding of the PRC to the beginning of reform
and opening up. During this time, the core task of ECE was to “guarantee women’s
re-engagement in work to the largest extent possible.” The government realized that
ECE was “local and mass-oriented” and concluded kindergartens should be “run by
the masses under the overall planning of the local government” (Wei 1951). In
1979, this idea was once again reinforced as the policy of “walking on both legs.”
One “leg” refers to “actively recovering and developing kindergartens run by edu-
cational sectors,” while the other “leg” refers to kindergartens run by community
groups, institutions, factories, mines, sub-districts, and individuals. During this
period, although the government emphasized social participation. On the one hand,
the government required administrative departments for education at all levels to
“include a special fund for ECE,” “incorporate ECE projects into educational infra-
structure investment,” and ensure that the sources of educational expenditures were
secured and that the budget was strictly implemented (The State Education
Commission 1983). The government also provided support to social forces—such
as industrial and mining enterprises—to run kindergartens by allocating teachers or
funds (The State Council 1955). On the other hand, social forces participated more
collectively than individually, and most of the collectives (e.g., government-operated
enterprises like factories and mines, and rural community groups) were closely
related to the government’s regulation and control, so they were still publicly owned.
Stage 2 ranged from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. During this period, the
most significant revolution that China went through was establishing the new idea
of the socialist market economy system and the comprehensive promotion of
Reform and Opening up. The government’s main focus shifted from political strug-
gle to economic construction. Social forces at this time were not only publicly
owned “collectives” but also included individuals or private groups that became
wealthy along with economic growth. For example, the Opinions on Reinforcing
Early Childhood Education Work (jointly issued by eight departments including the
Ministry of Education and forwarded by the State Council in 1988) stated that “kin-
dergartens should not only be restricted to national ones. Most kindergartens should
be run by collectives and individuals, in compliance with national law and relevant
regulations.” The government started to rely primarily on social forces to run kin-
dergartens. In terms of policies and systematic management, the government still
played a role as the central coordinator and planner in the development of ECE
272 J. Fan and L. Li
d uring this period, but the trend of the government devolving power to society
became increasingly apparent. Objectively speaking, this period was a golden age
for the fast rise of ECE in terms of enrollment rate and the number of enrolled kin-
dergarten children. Meanwhile, the ECE management system was still in its early
stages, and the system of regulating and managing all kinds of kindergartens run by
social forces (mainly collectives and individuals) had not yet been established.7
These fast-emerging kindergartens faced multiple issues regarding administration
and quality.
12.2.2.2 G
overnment Giving Society a Role: The Government Devolves
Responsibility for ECE Development to Society
This period started from the mid-1990s and lasted until the first few years of the
twenty-first century. China entered its ninth Five-Year Plan, a crucial time when
political structural reform got reinforced and economic structural reform was deep-
ened. Generally speaking, the government’s economic function transformed from
intervening in a microsystem (“direct regulation and control”) to a macro-system
(“indirect regulation and control”). The government followed this reform idea in the
field of social sectors as well. This means that the government backed off from cer-
tain fields in which it deemed did not need a lot of intervention and devolved respon-
sibility to society.
In education, the government was retreating from ECE as it was neither the com-
pulsory education nor the social focused area. Two policies were unveiled at the
same time: Opinions on Enterprises Running Kindergartens, issued by seven min-
isterial departments (including the Ministry of Education) in 1995, and Opinions on
Implementing the Ninth Five-Year Plan Development Goal for Early Childhood
Education Nationwide, issued by the Ministry of Education in 1997.8,9 These two
7
In 1989, the Ministry of Education issued the Administrative Regulations on Kindergartens, stip-
ulating that ECE in China was “under the responsibility of the local government and the system of
hierarchical management. All relevant departments shall cooperate accordingly.” In the same year,
Kindergarten Work Regulations (Draft) was promulgated, which set forth the standards for running
kindergartens but did not establish any administrative system for various types of kindergartens
specifically.
8
One of the most influential points of this policy is to “actively and steadily promote ECE in soci-
ety.” It created provisions for the systematic transformation of public kindergartens “based on the
principle of stable transition…under the overall plan of the government, kindergartens can be
handed to the local administrative education departments, which can continue to run them in mul-
tiple ways, such as handing them over to the care of communities, or qualified organizations or
individuals.” Although this stipulation mentioned that such a transformation should be stably con-
ducted under “the overall plan of the government” and the plans of “educational departments,” it
was common for kindergartens to be regarded as “burdens” or “profitable instruments,” and they
were thrown into the market.
9
One of the most influential points of this policy is to “actively and steadily reform the system for
opening kindergartens, further clarify government responsibility at all levels, explore an establish-
ment mode and an internal management mechanism of kindergartens, and promote ECE in society
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 273
12.2.2.3 L
ed by the Government and Co-governed by Society: Joint
Efforts of the Government and Society to Co-govern ECE
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, along with the reform of China’s
economic and administrative systems, the country’s overall national strength has
rapidly enhanced. The government has been prioritizing public to private and
service-oriented, which means that its functions will become more clearly defined.
The responsibility of such a government is to “steer” more than to “control.”
Since 2010, the trend of the government recovering its leading role has become
increasingly apparent. That year, the National Outline for Medium and Long-Term
Education Reform and Development (2010–2020) summarized the blueprint for
educational development. The government saw this as an opportunity and, that same
year, issued the State Council’s Ten Opinions on ECE, which has supreme legal
authority on educational affairs. In order to realize the recommendations of the State
Council’s Ten Opinions, in 2011, the government formed a task force consisting of
directors of 11 departments/offices, including the Department of Basic Education II
of the Ministry of Education, and led by the vice minister of the Ministry of
Education.10 The main goal was to carry out the Three-Year Action Plan for Early
Childhood Education. Thus far, the first two stages of the plan have been fulfilled,
and the third stage is being promoted. Hence, the government has attached great
importance to ECE and taken back its responsibilities.
First the government recognized that the nature of ECE was a public welfare and
reinforced its leading role. For instance, the State Council’s Ten Opinions states that
“ECE is a significant part of the national education system, and an important under-
taking of social public welfare.” The document also emphasizes that the “govern-
ment’s leading role” must be upheld, and “the responsibility of government at all
levels must be fulfilled.”
Second, in terms of financial investment, the policy declares that “government at
all levels should increase investment in rural ECE” and that “spending on ECE
should be included in the financial budget. Newly increased educational funds
should be allocated toward ECE.” Furthermore, “the central government should set
up special funds to support ECE in central and western rural areas, areas with ethnic
minorities, and border regions.” From 2014 to 2016, the central government invested
CNY 51.8 billion to support the expansion of universal-beneficial education
resources, leveraging local investment of more than CNY 200 billion. In 2016, the
national funds for ECE accounted for about 4% of the total budget, more than twice
that of 2010, which was 1.6% (Ministry of Education 2017a, b).
Third, in terms of establishing the system of kindergartens, the policy stipulates
that “public and universal-beneficial private kindergartens should be the main part
of [this] system” and that “public kindergartens should be promoted, especially in
rural areas.” In addition, the government focused on strengthening the construction
of supervision and evaluation. Local governments as well as kindergartens will be
supervised and evaluated. For instance, the Opinions on the Implementation of the
Second Phase of the Three-year Action Plan for Early Childhood Education—
jointly issued by three departments (including the Ministry of Education) in 2014—
states that, “The Ministry of Education, the National Development and Reform
Commission, and the Ministry of Finance should inspect the implementation of the
action plan across the country. All local authorities should carry out supervisory
inspections, enforce accountability mechanisms, and incorporate the implementa-
tion of the action plan and policy into the evaluation index local governments’ edu-
cational work at all levels.” From policy-making to supervision and assessment, the
government has clearly assumed its responsibility of leading.
To sum up, along with social, political, and economic growth and the govern-
ment’s gradually deepening understanding of ECE, the government experienced
involvement and withdrawal, and eventually took over ECE once again. This change
is in line with the development of ECE in China and efficiently promotes ECE’s
healthy and sustainable development.
Department of Normal School Education (the former of the Department of Teacher Education),
and the vice director of the Department of Physical, Health, and Arts Education.
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 275
12.2.3 O
ngoing Improvements in the Government’s System
and Mechanisms for Developing ECE
12.2.3.1 S
ystem Reform: The Government’s “Steering” Function,
Highlighted by the Systems for Managing and Establishing
Kindergartens
The government’s “steering” function in the spread of public utilities means that
instead of being an omnipotent government, the government plays a guiding, lead-
ing, and decisive role in the core functions of this undertaking. In the field of ECE,
the government’s “steering” function is mainly reflected in the construction and
renovation of the systems for managing and establishing kindergartens.
Currently, the government further clarified its division of power and responsibil-
ity at all levels and gradually built mature administrative system step by step. These
measures founded the basis for the government to lead ECE. For the first time, the
Administrative Regulations on Kindergartens in 1989 declared that China should
implement a management system, characterized by “local accountability, hierarchi-
cal management, and cooperation within relevant departments” in ECE. In the con-
text of decentralization and devolving power to local authorities, this system spurred
local initiative to develop ECE. However, the definition of this management system
was not clear enough in the sense that “local accountability” did not specify which
level of government should assume the main responsibility, and “hierarchical man-
agement” failed to define government responsibility at different levels.
276 J. Fan and L. Li
Moreover, the section on the “cooperation of relevant departments” did not spec-
ify which departments were pertinent or the kind of cooperation mechanisms
needed. As a result, while implementing this management system, the responsibility
for developing ECE was shifted from cities to the districts and sub-districts and
from villages to townships. There were difficulties at the level of districts and town-
ships in terms of coordinating or guaranteeing financial and human resources, which
hindered the growth of ECE. In recent years, the vague definition of the ECE man-
agement system has been amended. For instance, the Opinions on the Implementation
of the Third Stage of Early Childhood Education Action Plan was promulgated in
2017 by four departments, including the Ministry of Education. The document
states that, “An ECE management system, led by the State Council, planned by the
provincial/municipal governments, and oriented by counties, should be established
and improved. The overall planning of provincial and municipal governments
should be strengthened, and support for poor areas should be increased. The respon-
sibility of county governments should be fulfilled, and the functions of village and
town governments should be made full use of.” This document further defined the
rights and responsibilities of government at all levels and greatly strengthened its
“steering” function in terms of administration. This was a milestone for ECE
development.
In terms of the system for establishing kindergartens, the government has speci-
fied a distribution pattern in which public and universal-benefit private kindergar-
tens are the main focus, and all kinds of social forces jointly participate in ECE
governance and development under the government’s leadership. Since the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century, the government has learned from developmental
mistakes caused by having abdicated responsibility for ECE during previous peri-
ods. In regard to the system for establishing kindergartens, the government’s “steer-
ing” function has been especially strengthened. For instance, the State Council’s
Ten Opinions and the Three-Phase Three-Year Action Plan both point out that “pub-
lic kindergartens should be vigorously developed.” In rural areas, an important gov-
ernment task is to set in motion a trend of opening public kindergartens. Meanwhile,
“it is essential to guide and support private kindergartens to provide universal-
benefit services.” This trend moves forward practically in the third phase of the
Three-Year Action Plan. The plan further states that “all provinces/districts/cities
should establish accreditation standards for universal-benefit private kindergartens,
and license a specific number of them each year” and that government should effec-
tively support their development at all levels through a series of strategies called
government purchasing services, such as “reducing rent, giving awards as subsidies,
allocating public teachers, training teachers, providing comprehensive awards and
subsidies, and providing guidance on instruction and research.”
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 277
12.2.3.2 T
he Mechanism Innovation: The Government’s “Service”
Function, Highlighted by the Teacher-Cultivating
and Cost-Sharing Mechanisms
11
The complementary mechanism of “directed enrollment, education, and employment” refers to
targeted cooperation between local kindergartens and normal universities, vocational colleges, and
kindergarten schools based on the quantity, level, and type of teachers in the specific region, which
comprises directional enrollment, development, and position-taking.
278 J. Fan and L. Li
12.3 R
esponding to Challenges: Government Responsibility
and System Construction for Future ECE Development
Since the PRC was founded, especially since the twenty-first century when the
service-oriented government attached great importance to and seriously undertook
its main responsibilities, ECE in China has made enormous, critical breakthroughs.
However, as put forward in The Third Phase of the Three-Year Action Plan for Early
Childhood Education, “ECE remains the weakest part of the whole education sys-
tem.” A lack of educational resources to benefit the general public and the unbal-
anced distribution of public and private kindergartens are persistent common
problems. ECE in rural regions remains underdeveloped, a situation that has not
been comprehensively or fundamentally improved. ECE is “still in a critical period
full of trials, efforts, and lessons.” Due to the aging population, the execution of the
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 279
universal two-child policy, and the migrant population’s growing need for kinder-
garten enrollment, ECE is experiencing unprecedented pressure as well as
opportunities.
12.3.1 N
ew Problems and Challenges That ECE Is Facing
During the Development of Social Undertakings
In recent years, new circumstances have emerged in China’s economic and social
development, bringing new challenges to ECE. Typical problems include the under-
supply of effective labor resulting from the accelerated aging of the population,
which has led to the promulgation of the universal two-child policy. Furthermore,
new educational obstacles for left-behind and migrant children have appeared due
to the ongoing acceleration of urbanization. These two issues are discussed below.
First, China’s fertility rate has greatly declined. Along with this trend, the demo-
graphic dividend is gradually fading, the population is aging, and the imbalance of
the sex ratio at birth is becoming severe. To cope with these difficulties, the govern-
ment decided to adjust the population policy. China began to implement its univer-
sal two-child policy since October 2015, which officially allowed all couples to
have two children. As of 2011, couples, both of whom are the only children in their
families, are allowed to have two children. As of 2013, couples, either of whom is
the only child of his/her family, are allowed to have two children.
The widespread implementation of this policy is expected to have an extensive
influence on all aspects of society. The most affected field of all is undoubtedly
ECE. Many researchers have made forecasts about future population growth. For
example, some believe that the number of kindergarten children will “substantially
rise from 2019 onward, and [that this] increase will last until 2021, when it reaches
its peak (around 57,508,200). After that, the number will start to gradually drop to
about 42,547,800 in 2035” (Yang et al. 2016). Other researchers have estimated that
the population of preschool children will grow in a certain region (Beijing), with
three potential sub-schemes (high, middle, and low) of population prediction. They
also found that “the number of preschool children would reach its peak at around
2023 or 2024, and then gradually drop, forming an inverted U-shape curve” (Hong
2017). Correspondingly, scholars have estimated that in 2021, there will be a short-
fall of 110,000 kindergartens and more than three million kindergarten teachers and
childcare workers. Furthermore, the public financial budget for ECE in 2021 is pre-
dicted to be CNY 303.087 billion more than that of 2013 (Yang et al. 2016). A
growing population will not only enlarge the shortfall in terms of resources but also
be highly likely to amplify the imbalance of resource distribution.
Second, the phenomena of left-behind and migrant children have created new
obstacles for the government. The phenomena of such children are rooted in the
migration of labor from rural to urban areas during urbanization. As of October 1,
2015, the total number of Chinese migrants reached 247 million, which means that
280 J. Fan and L. Li
1 out of 6 people were “migrants.” There were about 100 million migrant and left-
behind children in the migrant population (Yang 2017).
Based on dynamic monitoring of China’s migrant population data and analytical
reports in recent years, the number of migrant children is shifting. First, the propor-
tion of young migrant children is gradually rising. Of all migrant children aged
under 14 years, the average age is 7.02 (±4.525) years. The percentage of children
aged 2 and 3 years is at its highest (Huang 2015). Second, the time that migrant
children spend traveling is increasing, especially children aged 0–4 years. Most of
their life is spent migrating.
Third, in terms of educational opportunities, of all school-age migrant children
who were not attending school during the sixth Demographic Census, preschool
children comprised the highest proportion (40.2%). As they grow older, the risk of
them being deprived of education rises (Huang 2015). Research has found that these
children have developed clear characteristics of the migration destination and have
become estranged from their culture of origin. However, due to various reasons
(such as a lack of social welfare), they cannot genuinely integrate in the migrated
cities. This may lead to multiple social issues.
12.3.2 G
overnment Response and Reflection
on the Construction of the Future ECE System
Confronted with a series of new problems, the government has tried to learn from
the successful experiences of some areas as well as other countries and constantly
makes adjustments and innovates. The government is making all efforts to ensure
that China’s ECE goes through healthy, sustainable development. The following
section will focus on the government’s responses to these new problems and put
forward some suggestions for the construction of the ECE system in the future.
12.3.2.1 G
overnment Leadership and Commitment to Public Service:
The Core Values of a Service-Oriented Government
in Developing ECE
fair, equal, and important opportunities for access to high-quality education” (The
US Congress 2001). India, a developing country, issued the National Policy for
Children in 1974, which stated that the “objectives of national policy shall be to
provide equal opportunities to children at all developmental stages, reduce inequal-
ity, and promote social justice as much as possible” (Indian Social Welfare 1974).
Many countries have not only identified the leading role and relevant responsibility
of governments in ECE through policies and laws (Pang et al. 2014) but have also
established large numbers of public kindergartens, provided free caring and educa-
tion services to children, and executed other political measures to ensure the gov-
ernment’s dominant status in ECE.
Statistics shows that over 80% of the countries in North America, Latin America/
Caribbean, and Europe have more than 50% (or even higher) of children in public
kindergartens. The corresponding proportions in OECD countries such as
Luxembourg, France, and Hungary are even close to 100%. Many countries also
highlighted government responsibility by building a free system of preschool edu-
cation. For example, the more developed countries and regions—such as Sweden,
Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and China’s
Macao special administrative region (SAR), as well as some developing populous
countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba—have included the preschool stage into
the coverage of free education (Pang and Xia 2013). Therefore, the government
assuming leadership and executing relevant policies, regulations, and specific strat-
egies is an international trend of developing ECE.
12.3.2.2 U
niversal-Beneficial Education, Equality, and Equilibrium:
Government and Social Forces Build a New Pattern of Co-supply
for Disadvantaged Sectors
There should be vigorous support for social forces to run universal-benefit pri-
vate kindergartens, forming a new co-supply pattern for both public and private
kindergartens. During the Two Sessions of 2016 on Measures to Expand ECE
Resources, the Minister of Education stated in a press conference that “the govern-
ment should make a robust effort to expand public kindergartens, actively support
enterprises and institutions to establish kindergartens, and give aid to private kinder-
gartens through government purchases. The development of preschool classes
attached to primary schools can also be taken into account if their conditions per-
mit.” This policy signals that, in response to the pressures of increasing demand, it
is a natural trend to build a system for establishing kindergartens, led by the govern-
ment and coordinated by multiple sectors of society. In this context, a large number
of universal-benefit kindergartens based on public–private partnerships, as well as
enterprise-owned kindergartens, are gradually opening up. In the meantime, service
agencies for early education based on the needs of communities and families are
emerging.
The government should play a greater role in “strengthening the weak and help-
ing the disadvantaged” by prioritizing the expansion of preschool education in poor
rural areas and placing more importance on disadvantaged groups’ right to educa-
tion. In recent years, the State has been highly concerned with rural ECE, which has
received strong support from the central government through national projects.
Furthermore, some local governments have promoted grassroots undertakings
through international cooperation. While intensifying its efforts to enhance less
developed rural preschool education, in the future, the government should also pay
attention to the education of disadvantaged groups, such as left-behind and migrant
children. As for left-behind children, the State Council issued the Opinions on
Strengthening the Care for and Protection of Left-Behind Children in Rural Areas
in February 2016, and formed an inter-ministerial joint meeting led by the Ministry
of Civil Affairs, and joined by 27 departments, to carry out a thorough investigation
on left-behind children. This is the first high-level policy on left-behind children and
the broadest government action in China to study and assist left-behind children,
reflecting the country’s progress in safeguarding children’s rights. As for migrant
children, many local governments have taken innovative measures. For example, the
Shanghai municipal government set up and regulated level III private kindergartens
specifically to enroll migrant children, to strengthen the management and develop-
ment of such kindergartens with government purchase services (such as offering a
subsidy to each child, assigning public teachers, arranging teaching supervisors,
and providing curriculum resources). Through all these actions, the Shanghai
municipal government bears the baseline responsibilities of education.
12 The Transformation of Government Responsibility and the Development… 283
12.3.2.3 L
egislation-Based and System First: Constructing an Effective
ECE Mechanism Under Policy and Legal Frameworks
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286 J. Fan and L. Li
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Part IV
Globalisation, Education and Policy
Reforms
Chapter 13
Globalisation, Education and Policy
Reforms
Joseph Zajda
The topic of globalisation and education reform has assumed immense importance
in the discourse and policies of many bodies and agencies across the international
arena. An increasing number of countries and governments have concluded that
globalisation, education and policy research approach to learning and teaching
should be instituted and deployed as one of the main lines of attack on some of the
major problems needing to be addressed in the future. The policy documents and
statements of the UNESCO, OECD, the European Parliament, the Nordic Council
of Ministers and the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Forum (APEC) reveal a
commitment to globalisation and education reforms. There are other regional alli-
ances that are grappling differently with issues of anti-globalisation trends of Brexit,
in the Global South and in developing and underdeveloped nations also.
Globalisation is one of the most complex and contested concepts (Guillén 2000;
Stiglitz 2006; Norris 2015). As a dominant ideology, globalisation was associated
with neoliberalism and technocratic solutions to economic reforms (Saunders 2010;
Zajda 2015). Saval (2017) argues that it is not only the globalisation discourse that
has changed, but ‘globalisation itself has changed, developing into a more chaotic
and unequal system than many economists predicted and that overall benefits of
globalisation have been largely concentrated in a handful of Asian countries’
(Saval 2017).
Carnoy (1999) and Friedman (2018), on the other hand, stress the informational
dimension, as a result of the quantum-like growth in the Information Communication
Technologies (ICT) of the global economy. Globalisation, according to Friedman
(2018), went from ‘connected to hyper-connected and from interconnected to inter-
dependent’ (Friedman 2018). Norris argues the strongest evidence for hyper-
J. Zajda (*)
Faculty of Education and Arts, Australian Catholic University, Melboune, VIC, Australia
e-mail: joseph.zajda@acu.edu.au
Apart from the multifaceted nature of globalisation that invites contesting and
competing ideological interpretations, numerous paradigms and theoretical models
have also been used, ranging from structuralism to post-structuralism, to explain the
phenomenon of globalisation (Held et al. 1999; Hicks and Holden 2007; Steger
2009; Rizvi 2017; Zajda 2018). When, for instance, a writer or a seminar speaker
uses the word ‘globalisation’ in a pedagogical and educational policy context, one
wonders what assumptions, be they economic, political, social and ideological, have
been taken for granted, and at their face value, uncritically, as a given, and in this
case, as a globocratic (like technocratic) phenomenon.
The politics of globalisation, particularly the hydra of ideologies, which are
inscribed in the discourse of globalisation need to be analysed critically, to avoid
superficial and one-dimensional interpretation of the term (see Zajda 2014a, b). We
need to debate new transformative concepts of Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) 2030, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Knowledge Democracy (2017)
that are emerging, and going beyond ‘reforms’ and OECD model, given that the
future globalisation and educational imperatives will be based on the 17 SDGs, as
the key thrust ahead. Furthermore, recent research findings on globalisation, educa-
tion and policy, demonstrate that continued access to quality education and training
for all citizens, both locally and globally, is perceived to be an investment in the
future, a pre-condition for economic advance, democracy, social cohesion, social
justice, equality, personal growth and peace. Yet, the on-going globalisation of
schooling and higher education curricula, together with the accompanying global
standards of excellence, globalisation of academic assessment (OECD 2018; PISA
2018; The World Bank 2018), have resulted in global academic achievement syn-
drome and global academic elitism and league tables. Together, they define and
position distinction, privilege, excellence and exclusivity.
13 Globalisation, Education and Policy Reforms 291
13.2 T
he Impact of Globalisation on Education Policy
and Reforms
There is no doubt that economic, political, cultural and social dimensions of glo-
balisation have a profound effect on education and society, both locally and glob-
ally. The on-going economic restructuring among nation-states and the current
education hegemonies shaping dominant discourses as to how education policy and
curriculum need to be reformed, in response to the ubiquitous global monitoring of
educational quality and standards, are some of the outcomes of the globalisation
process (PISA 2018; OECD 2018; The World Bank 2018). In critiquing globalisa-
tion and its impact on education, we need to know how its ‘ideological packaging’
affects education practices around the world (Carnoy and Rhoten 2002; see also
Zajda 2018). As Carnoy and Rhoten (2002) wrote, there was a need to assess a pos-
sible nexus between globalisation, ideology, education reforms and their impact on
schooling:
In assessing globalization’s true relationship to educational change, we need to know how
globalization and its ideological packaging affect the overall delivery of schooling, from
transnational paradigms, to national policies, to local practices. (Carnoy and Rhoten 2002: 3)
Recent changes in the world economy have resulted in at least four macro-social
policy responses of the higher education sector globally to the market forces and
competitiveness:
• Competitiveness-driven reforms (reforms due to shifting demands for skills,
commodities and markets)
• Finance-driven reforms (reforms in public/private sectors, budgets, company
income, cuts in educational spending)
• Market force–driven reforms for dominance globally
• Equity-driven reforms (reforms to improve the quality of education and its role
as source of upward social mobility) to increase equality of economic
opportunity
The main goal of equity-driven reforms in education and society is to increase eco-
nomic capital and economic opportunity for all. Because educational attainment is
a crucial factor in determining earnings and social positions, equalising access to
high-quality education can play a significant role here. Globalisation-driven higher
education reforms tend to ‘push governments away from equity-driven reforms’
(Carnoy 1999: 46). This is due to two reasons. Firstly, globalisation tends to increase
the pay-off to high-level skills relative to lower-level skills, reducing the nexus
between equity and competitiveness-driven reforms. Secondly, finance-driven
reforms dominate education and policy reforms in the global economy and conse-
quently increase inequity in education.
13.3 T
he Ascent of a Neoliberalism in Education Policy
Reforms
The ascent of a neoliberal and neoconservative higher education policy, which has
redefined education and training as an investment in human capital and human
resource development, has dominated higher education reforms globally since the
1980s. The literature relating to human capital theory demonstrates that education
consistently emerges as the prime human capital investment. Human capital refers
to ‘the productive capacities of human beings as income producing agents in the
economy’. Human capital research has found that education and training raises the
productivity of workers by imparting useful knowledge and skills; improves a
worker’s socio-economic status, career opportunities and income (Carnoy 1999;
13 Globalisation, Education and Policy Reforms 293
Saha 2005; Zajda 2015); and plays a significant role in driving overall economic
performance. Neoliberal dimensions of globalisation and market-driven economic
imperatives have impacted on higher education reforms in four ways: competitive-
ness-driven reforms, finance-driven reforms, equity-driven reforms and quality-
driven reforms. Global competitiveness was and continues to be a significant goal
on higher education policy agenda. Accountability, efficiency, academic capitalism,
the quality of education and market oriented, and ‘entrepreneurial’ university model
represents a neoliberal ideology, which focuses primarily on the market-driven
imperatives of economic globalisation. The latest higher education reforms focus
more on economic competitiveness, academic elitism, quality and standards, rather
than on addressing access and equity, in order to solve serious educational inequali-
ties in the higher education sector.
In general, neoliberalism in higher education policy reforms focuses on ‘meeting
the needs of the market, technical education and job training, and revenue genera-
tion’ (Saunders 2010: 54).
The continual dominance of human capital theory as a social, economic, educa-
tional and vocational paradigm is problematic. On the one hand, with its focus on
human beings as income-producing agents in the economy, it seems to offer promis-
ing economic returns, by raising the productivity of workers and the imparting of
useful knowledge and skills. One could argue that there are both winners and losers
in this approach. The goal of economies is to maximise efficiency, quality and
profit-driven industries. When the production costs increase due to costs associated
with labour, industries, in order to maintain their competitive dominance, shift to
other more favourable markets in other regions, where wages and production costs
are considerably lower. Thus, many skilled workers and highly qualified profession-
als become redundant. Global competitiveness reflects the reality of the mar-
ket forces.
Human capital theory, while focusing on the productive capacities of human
beings as income-producing agents in the economy, does not consider other agents
and forces, namely the capitalist nature of societies, the profit-driven culture, mar-
ket forces and the ubiquitous nature of global competition for economic dominance.
Above all, the human capital discourse ignores ‘the value of education outside of
work’ (Klees 2016: 658).
While human capital theory continues to exercise its dominance and power in
education policy research, it is not infallible. Klees (2016) analyses and critiques the
theoretical weakness and the conceptual failure of human capital theory and the
logic of rates of return (Klees 2016: 645). Research data on the impact of the quan-
tity of education on earnings and on GNP, argues Klees, tend to be ‘completely
arbitrary’:
…different choices in estimating the impact of education on GNP yield different measures
of impact, so their reported results are completely arbitrary and certainly not something
policy makers should take seriously. Like measuring the impact of education on earnings,
measuring the impact of education on GNP has unfortunately commanded the attention of
educators and policy makers for over 50 years, yet, in reality, has been a dead end, providing
294 J. Zajda
Globalisation, policy and the politics of higher education reforms globally sug-
gest ubiquitous economic and political dimensions of neoliberalism and re-invented
cultural imperialism (see Carnoy 1977; McLaren and Farahmandpur 2005; Saunders
2010). As the UNESCO’s humanistic model for education, so influential in the
1960s, was weakening, ‘the economic and techno-determinist paradigm of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was gaining in prominence’
(Zajda 2015).
Such hegemonic shifts in ideology and policy were likely to have significant
economic and cultural implications for higher education reforms and policy imple-
mentations globally. Forces of globalisation, manifesting themselves as a neoliberal
and bourgeois hegemony, tended to legitimate an ‘exploitative system’ (McLaren
and Farahmandpur 2005) and have contributed to the on-going neoliberal globalisa-
tion of the higher education sector (Rizvi 2017). This is characterised by a relentless
drive towards performance, global standards of excellence and quality, globalisation
of academic assessment (OECD 2018; PISA 2018) and ‘global academic achieve-
ment syndrome’ (Zajda 2015). Global academic achievement syndrome signifies
both ascribed and achieved status and the positioning of distinction, privilege,
excellence and exclusivity in education at all levels. In higher education policy doc-
uments in the OECD, the World Bank and elsewhere, policy reforms appear to be
presented as a given and as a necessary response to economic globalisation and
global competitiveness (Rust and Kim 2015).
The impact of globalisation on education policy and reforms around the world
has become a strategically significant issue, for it expresses one of the most ubiqui-
tous, yet poorly understood phenomena of modernity and associated politico-
economic and cultural transformations. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that
forces of globalisation have contributed to a new dimension of socio-economic
13 Globalisation, Education and Policy Reforms 295
stratification, which offers immense gains to the very few of the economic elite in
developed nations and in the emerging economies, especially in Brazil, the Russian
Federation, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). At the same time, it creates a
growing and visible socio-economic divide between the rich and the poor globally,
thus planting seeds of discontent and conflict for the future.
The OECD’s PISA international survey presents an encyclopaedic view of the com-
parative review of education systems in OECD member countries and in other coun-
tries. PISA 2018 was the programme’s recent survey. It assessed the competencies
of 15-year olds in reading, mathematics and science (with a focus on mathematics)
in 65 countries and economies (covering almost two-thirds of the world). At least
half of the indicators relate to the output and outcomes of education, and one-third
focus on equity issues (gender differences, special education needs, inequalities in
literacy skills and income). Only a minority of countries seem to be well on the way
of making literacy for all a reality. For the rest, illiteracy, as confirmed by the OECD
study, was at the time, largely an unfinished agenda (OECD 2016, Education Policy
Analysis: 67; see also OECD 2018).
The major focus of the OECD survey was on quality of learning outcomes and
the policies that shape these outcomes. It also contained the OECD’s Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA), the performance indicators which
examined equity issues and outcomes—with reference to gender, SES and other
variables. The performance indicators were grouped according to educational out-
comes for individual countries. The OECD international survey concludes with a set
of policy questions that are likely to shape the ‘What Future for Our Schools?’
policy debate. These encompass cultural and political dimensions (public attitudes
to education, the degree of consensus or conflict over goals and outcomes), account-
ability, and diversity vs. uniformity, resourcing (to avoid widening inequalities in
resources per student, as demonstrated by current trends in some of the OECD’s
countries), teacher professionalism and schools as centres of lifelong learning.
One could conclude with six scenarios for tomorrow’s schools (Education
Policy Analysis). The first two scenarios are based on current trends, one con-
tinuing the existing institutionalised systems, the other responding to globalisa-
tion and marketisation and facilitating market-oriented schooling. The next two
scenarios address ‘re-schooling’ issues, with schools developing stronger com-
munity links and becoming flexible learning organisations. The last two sce-
narios of ‘de-schooling’ futures suggest a radical transformation of schools—as
non-formal learning networks, supported by both ICTs and a network society,
and a possible withering away, or ‘meltdown’ of school systems (Education
Policy Analysis: 119).
Education policy issues raised earlier by Michael Barber in his keynote address
‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reconceptualising Public Education’ at the
OECD/Netherlands Rotterdam International Conference on Schooling for
13 Globalisation, Education and Policy Reforms 297
Tomorrow (see CERI website at www.oecd.org/cer) include the five strategic chal-
lenges and four deliverable goals for tomorrow’s schools:
Strategic challenges
• Reconceptualising teaching
–– Creating high autonomy/high performance
–– Building capacity and managing knowledge
–– Establishing new partnerships
–– Reinventing the role of government
Deliverable goals
–– Achieving universally high standards
–– Narrowing the achievement gap
–– Unlocking individualisation
–– Promoting education with character
The questions that arise from the strategic challenges and deliverable goals
framework, and which are useful in delineating the policy challenges and the goals
pursued, centre on the issue of equality or egalitarianism (rather than meritocracy)
in education. Specifically, one can refer to the different cultural and political envi-
ronments, which affect the nature of schooling (see Zajda 2010). Diversity and uni-
formity, with reference to equality of opportunity needs to be considered. Important
equity questions are raised by centralisation/decentralisation, diversity/uniformity
and curriculum standardisation issues, the unresolved ideological dilemmas embed-
ded in educational policy content and analysis.
Psacharopoulos, and like more recently Klees (2016), questioned the validity and
reliability of international comparisons of education policies, standards and aca-
demic achievement. In examining the changing nature of comparative education, he
offers a more pragmatic educational evaluation of policy, which is based on decon-
structing international comparisons. He comments on the controversy surrounding
the validity of international achievement comparisons (IEA and IAEP studies on
achievement in different countries), unmasks an erroneous use of the achievement
indicators (including the use of gross enrolment ratios, which neglect the age dimen-
sion of those attending school, rather than net enrolment ratios), and suggests vari-
ous new approaches to comparative data analysis:
Comparative education research has changed a great deal since Sadler’s times. The ques-
tions then might have been at what age should one teach Greek and Latin? Or how English
schools could learn from the teaching nature in Philadelphia schools? Today’s questions
are:
What are the welfare effects of different educational policies? … What are determinants
of educational outputs? ….
The above critique of globalisation, policy and education suggests new economic
and cognitive forms of cultural imperialism. Such hegemonic shifts in ideology and
policy may have significant economic and cultural implications on national educa-
tion systems and policy implementations. For instance, in view of GATS constrains,
and the continuing domination of multinational educational corporations and organ-
isations in a global marketplace, the ‘basis of a national policy for knowledge pro-
duction may be eroded in a free-market context of a knowledge-driven economy’
(Robertson et al. 2002: 494). This erosion signifies the corresponding weakening of
the traditional role of the university, being the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake
(intrinsic):
…the heart of the academic dogma is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge
and the processes of coming to know are good in themselves, and the university, above all
institutions, is – or used to be – devoted to them. To investigate, to find out, to organise and
contemplate knowledge, these are what the university is about….
Globalisation and the competitive market forces have generated a massive growth
in the knowledge industries that are having profound effects on society and educa-
tional institutions. In the global culture, the university, as other educational institu-
tions, is now expected to invest its capital in the knowledge market. It increasingly
acts as an entrepreneurial institution. Such a managerial and entrepreneurial re-
orientation would have been seen in the past as antithetical to the traditional ethos
300 J. Zajda
of the university of providing knowledge for its own sake. Delanty (2001) notes that
‘with business schools and techno science on the rise, entrepreneurial values are
enjoying a new legitimacy …the critical voice of the university is more likely to be
stifled than strengthened as a result of globalisation’ (Delanty 2001: 115). It can be
said that globalisation may have an adverse impact on the higher education sector,
and education in general. One of the effects of globalisation is that the university is
compelled to embrace the corporate ethos of the efficiency and profit-driven mana-
gerialism. As such, the new entrepreneurial university in the global culture suc-
cumbs to the economic gains offered by the neoliberal ideology.
From the macro-social perspective, it can be argued that in the domains of lan-
guage, policy, education and national identity, nation-states are likely to lose their
power and capacity to affect their future directions, as the struggle for knowledge
domination, production and dissemination becomes a new form of cultural domina-
tion and a knowledge-driven social stratification. Furthermore, the evolving and
constantly changing notions of national identity, language, border politics and citi-
zenship, which are relevant to education policy, need to be critiqued within the
local–regional–national arena, which is also contested by globalisation. Current
education policy research reflects a rapidly changing world, where citizens and
consumers are experiencing a growing sense of uncertainty and alienation. Jarvis
(2002) comments on the need to ‘rediscover’ one’s social identity in active
citizenship:
Democratic processes are being overturned and there is an increasing need to rediscover
active citizenship in which men and women can work together for the common good, espe-
cially for those who are excluded as a result of the mechanisms of the global culture.
The above reflects both growing alienation and a Durkheimian sense of anomie
in the world invaded by forces of globalisation, cultural imperialism and global
hegemonies that dictate the new economic, political and social regimes of truth.
These newly constructed imperatives in educational policy could well operate as
global master narratives, playing a hegemonic role within the framework of eco-
nomic, political and cultural hybrids of globalisation (Zajda 2014a).
Whether one focuses on their positive or negative effects, at the bottom line, there was an
agreement that the policies and practices of educational development had converged along
the consensus built at the multilateral forum. (Carnoy 1999)
Globalisation and the competitive market forces have generated a massive growth
in the knowledge industries that are having profound effects on society and educa-
tional institutions. In the global culture, the university, as other educational institu-
tions, is now expected to invest its capital in the knowledge market. It increasingly
acts as an entrepreneurial institution. Such a managerial and entrepreneurial re-
orientation would have been seen in the past as antithetical to the traditional ethos
of the university of providing knowledge for its own sake (see also Zajda 2015). It
can be said that globalisation may have an adverse impact on education. One of the
effects of globalisation on education in all spheres is that it is compelled to embrace
the corporate ethos of the efficiency and profit-driven managerialism. This is par-
ticularly evident in higher education. The new entrepreneurial university in the
global culture succumbs to the economic gains offered by the neoliberal ideology
(Zajda 2014b).
The emerging challenges for education and policy reforms include a drive
towards improving academic achievement in secondary schools. Our key findings
indicate that current trends in most BRICS countries’ treatment of governance in
education rely on the discourses of accountability, performance and output-driven
schooling and that they are characterised by the new high-stakes testing through the
final year tests in secondary schools. The drive for global competitiveness means
that recent education policy reforms in secondary education tend to be standard- and
(global) accountability-driven. BRICS governments’ and MoEs’ push for high aca-
demic achievement in secondary schools has been influenced by the emerging stan-
dardising regimes of global educational governance such as the OECD PISA
assessment.
13.7 G
lobalisation, Marketisation and Quality/
Efficiency-Driven Reforms
The need to address economic and social inequalities was discussed by Dervis
(2007), who argued that globalisation has changed the world economy by creating
‘winners’ and ‘losers’:
Globalization has fundamentally altered the world economy, creating winners and losers.
Reducing inequalities both within and between countries and building a more inclusive
globalization is the most important development challenge of our time … Addressing these
inequalities is our era’s most important development challenge, and underscores why inclu-
sive development is central to the mission of the UN and UNDP. (Dervis 2007)
But the cons are there, too: in absolute terms, the largest gains have gone to what is com-
monly called ‘the 1%’ – half of whom are based in the US. Economist Richard Baldwin has
shown in his recent book, The Great Convergence, that nearly all of the gains from globali-
sation have been concentrated in six countries. (Saval 2017)
Klees (2016), in his informed critique of the human capital discourse, and its use
in the logic of rates of return, or the impact of the quantity of education on earnings,
demonstrates that human capital theory and its connection between education and
productivity is defined and driven by the ideology of meritocratic capitalism, and
neoliberal ideology, where its ‘rewards are more or less deserved’ (Klees 2016:
259). Consequently, it has been fashionable since the 1980s, to use the human capi-
tal and skill discourses to ‘blame individuals’, rather than social structures and
organisation, for lack of education and job opportunities:
…for their lack of ‘investment’ in human capital, for their not attending school, for their
dropping out of school, for their not studying the ‘right’ fields, for their lack of entrepre-
neurship. (Klees 2016: 259)
One of the effects of globalisation is that the higher education sector, having
modelled its goals and strategies on the market-oriented and entrepreneurial busi-
ness model, which reflects neoliberal ideology, is compelled to embrace the ‘corpo-
rate ethos of the efficiency, accountability and profit-driven managerialism’ (Zajda
2014b). This necessarily produces both socially and economically stratified societ-
ies and education systems.
The dimensions of inequality and implications for social justice are due to the
impact of privatisation/marketisation, and the rising inequity in the availability of
funds among local education/regional authorities, because of differentiated eco-
nomic and social differences between rich and poor regions. Regional inequalities
in educational funding have an adverse effect on access to quality education. Some
poorer rural regions are socially, economically and educationally disadvantaged,
with little access to high-quality education. Current government policy of support-
ing best-performing schools, based on National examination results in secondary
schools, will continue to have an ‘adverse effect on access to quality education for
all in those regions’ (Dervin and Zajda 2018: 7).
304 J. Zajda
13.9 Conclusion
Recent policy documents in the education sector, the UNESCO, OECD, and the
World Bank reflect the following themes: The emergence of an awareness of the
importance of the knowledge society and the learning society; an acceptance of the
need for a new philosophy of education and training, the necessity of ensuring that
the foundations for global education are set in place for all citizens during the com-
pulsory and post-compulsory years of schooling; and recognising that emphasis
upon globalisation, education and policy reform may challenge the existing patterns
of social stratification of inequality, power and privilege (Apple 2004; Franzini and
Pianta 2015; Global education monitoring report 2017; OECD 2018; UNESCO
2017a, b, c; World Bank 2017, 2018; Zajda 2018).
The above analysis of education policy reforms, and the resultant social stratifi-
cations in the global culture, demonstrates a complex nexus between globalisation,
ideology and education reforms—where, on the one hand, democratisation and pro-
gressive pedagogy are equated with equality, inclusion, equity, tolerance and human
rights, while on the other hand, globalisation is perceived, by some critics at least,
to be a totalising force that is widening the socio-economic status (SES) gap and
cultural and economic capital between the rich and the poor, and bringing power,
domination and control by corporate bodies and powerful organisations (Milanovic
2016). Hence, we need to continue exploring critically the new challenges confront-
ing the global village, in the provision of authentic democracy, social justice and
cross-cultural values that genuinely promote a transformative pedagogy (Zajda
2015). We need to focus on the crucial issues at the centre of current and on-going
education reforms, namely equity, social justice and human rights, if genuine c ulture
13 Globalisation, Education and Policy Reforms 305
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Joseph Zajda is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Arts at the Australian
Catholic University (Melbourne Campus). He specialises in globalisation and education policy
reforms, social justice, history education and value education. He has written and edited 32 books
and over 100 book chapters and articles in the areas of globalisation and education policy, higher
education and curriculum reforms.
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Chapter 14
Interdependency in Transnational
Education Governance
Sotiria Grek
1
Here we follow Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson’s preference of the term ‘transnational’ versus
‘global’ governance, since ‘the label “transnational” suggests entanglement and blurred boundar-
ies to a degree that the term “global” could not’ (2006: 4—for a more developed argument see also
Hannerz 1996).
S. Grek (*)
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
e-mail: Sotiria.Grek@ed.ac.uk
etrological field. Education is the focal case for this examination since IOs have
m
been central to processes of standardisation, de-contextualisation and performance
management through numbers; as a result, they have been instrumental in commen-
surating, and therefore transforming the policy field. In addition, Education has
been attracting larger policy significance, as it is increasingly considered central to
both economic prosperity and social cohesion. Thus, it is a productive arena to
examine how quantification impacts on the ways IOs reconfigure their govern-
ing work.
Thus, a central focus of this chapter is the—concomitant with the lure of num-
bers, albeit less spectacular—recent moves of large IOs not only to establish col-
laborative partnerships through connections with governments and local agencies,
but crucially with one another. The encoding of data processes and organisational
cultures that these collaborative endeavours require (in order for data to be shared
and co-produced), allows a comprehensive analysis of the workings of quantifica-
tion for transnational governance. In other words, the examination of the interplay
of IOs at their first formative state (rather than later, when they are more estab-
lished), is a unique opportunity to open, rather than stack yet another ‘black box’ in
the field of global monitoring (Bhuta 2012).
This is a novel, problem-driven perspective that goes beyond the role of IOs in
‘governing by numbers’: instead, the chapter brings together diverse bodies of
knowledge in order to cast light on the role metrics play in reshaping the relation-
ships between the data collectors themselves. It focuses on the impact of quantifica-
tion in altering the ways IOs co-exist, compete and survive in an increasingly
quantified yet uncertain world. Although there have been some in-depth studies of
the impact of measurement on reforms in various policy fields, little attention has
been paid at those early, yet crucial, venues, actors and activities that determine
processes of problematisation (the construction of the ‘problem’) and institutionali-
sation (the moment the ‘problem’ enters institutional agendas). Third, and most
important, the chapter’s starting point is that numbers and (international) organisa-
tions have come to be mutually constitutive. Numbers move: this seemingly simple,
yet unique quality has created fluidity between internal organisational arrangements
and external environments, as well as amongst IOs themselves. Hence, going
beyond classic organisational sociology’s distinction between internal structures
and external contingencies and environments, this chapter purports that numbers—
with their qualities to simplify, stabilise and travel—reconfigure relationships,
dependencies and structures of organisations and fields in fresh and politically
salient ways; in other words, they come to govern them.
Despite the renewed prominence given to the need for alliance-building by IOs,
collaboration has always been central to their operation, since they have tradition-
ally needed to work closely with governments, NGOs and the private sector. Yet, the
complexity of ‘wicked’ problems, ‘donor duplication’ (Ringel-Bickelmeier and
Ringel 2010), resource-pooling and data overload have become some of the most
common reasons that IOs are increasingly compelled to work together. Indeed, most
major global strategies, such as the Millenium Development Goals (2000–2015),
the post-2015 Development Agenda or major education testing regimes, such as the
14 Interdependency in Transnational Education Governance 311
Scholarship on the role of numbers in governing societies has been abundant and
has attracted multiple fields of study, including sociology, history, political science,
geography, anthropology, philosophy, STS, and others. Prominent authors have
written lucidly about the role of numbers in the making of modern states and the
governing role of measurement regimes in various areas of public policy and social
life (Alonso and Starr 1987; Hacking 1990, 2007; Porter 1995; Power 1997;
Desrosiéres 1998; Rose 1999; Espeland and Stevens 2008). Similarly, anthropolo-
gies of numbers suggest that ‘our lives are increasingly governed by—and through—
numbers, indicators, algorithms and audits and the ever-present concerns with the
management of risk’ (Shore and Wright 2015: 23; see also influential work by
Merry 2011; Sauder and Espeland 2009; Strathern 2000). Further, important insights
and perspectives on indicators in particular come from STS (Bowker and Star 1999;
Lampland and Starr 2009; Latour 1987; Saetnan et al. 2011), including actor net-
work theory (Latour 2005). Finally, there is a small but growing body of studies
312 S. Grek
data (and the consensual expert practices it involves) decreases rather than increases
the possibility of knowledge disputes and failures. However, it is widely known that
achieving transnational standards is infinitely difficult; and political contestation
often gets submerged and hidden behind the popular imagination’s oddity of the
expert, ‘geek’ professor. Knowledge contestations are then seen as an impediment
to the call for urgent action—and IOs are swiftly required to form another commit-
tee, reach consensus and quickly move on. In fact, it appears that it is precisely in
the knowledge controversies that one has to focus upon, if one aims to understand
the very process of simplification and the exclusion of unwieldy or awkward data
(or awkward experts for that matter). To return to Barry then, ‘what the concept of
political situation captures, is how the significance of a controversy is not so much
determined by its specific focus, but needs to be conceived in terms of its relations
to a moving field of other controversies, conflicts and events, including those that
have occurred in the past and that might occur in the future’ (Barry 2012: 330).
Second, the chapter suggests the need to examine the interplay of IOs as they
construct the ‘global metrological field’. Emanating from physics, the notion of
field has been used in the social sciences in order to broadly refer to actors’ rela-
tional topographies. Nevertheless, it is often reduced to merely looking at specific
geographical and relational spaces. Yet, as Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson also sug-
gest (2006), such a conceptualisation of fields misses a vital ingredient from the
way fields operate; that is an understanding of the field as a field of power. Drawing
on Bourdieu, transnational governance appears as a field of actors who constantly
negotiate and push their own agendas forward; according to Bourdieu (1993), the
logic of positionality is what gives the notion of the field meaning. In other words,
the positions occupied by the different agents in the field, their advances and with-
drawals, relate to their efforts for distinction within this field as an expression of
their professional, educational or other interests. Meanwhile, the structure of the
field is neither static, nor does it change in any systematic way. On the contrary, it is
endlessly reformulated, according to the agents’ struggles for recognition and
improvement of their situation. Agents use the force of their economic, social, cul-
tural, or in the case under examination, knowledge capital, to raise their game and
advance their front. It is the relational nature of these advances that gives the field
its explanatory significance. Thus, following Bourdieu, the chapter uses Djelic and
Sahlin-Andersson’s idea of fields as ‘complex combinations of spatial and relational
topographies with powerful structuring forces in the form of cultural frames or pat-
terns of meaning’ (2006: 27). An examination of the interplay of IOs in the rise of
the global metrological field is therefore necessary, as it is vital to examine transna-
tional governance not only as a field of numbers or as a field of actors, but as both.
Thus and to conclude, the chapter adopts a constructivist standpoint by focusing
on the social and political conditions that influence the production of numbers,
adopting the ontological position that their existence is not organic but rather the
product of the interconnectedness of IOs, as outlined above. It examines those for
whom this transnational game exists and it is their life (‘what keeps them running’
as Bourdieu would put it) and those who just utilise it as an instrument in their local
political battles.
14 Interdependency in Transnational Education Governance 315
The field of Education is a rich arena for the examination of the interplay of IOs.
Education has had a long history of measurement by establishing the first interna-
tional networks for the development of testing back in the 1930s; IOs, like the
OECD, began developing international comparative data on education performance
as early as the 1960s. The recent couple of decades have seen an explosion of indi-
cator development by all major IOs in education, as it is increasingly associated
with the development of human capital and economic prosperity. From global uni-
versity rankings (Kauppi 2013), to the development of global testing of adult com-
petencies (Grek 2014), this is a field which despite the national legal frameworks
that prima facie rule it, is largely dominated by the measurement agendas of IOs.
Similar to their commensuration processes, the ideological swings and alliance-
building strategies of large IOs in the field of education are striking. The OECD
openly uses an economistic education discourse suggesting that comparisons are
essential if education systems are to be competitive in the global economy.
Interestingly, because of PISA’s success, the OECD has begun expanding its work
in the global South, which previously was in the sphere of influence of the World
Bank and UNESCO. All three major IOs have been working together on a series of
large statistical projects, despite competition for scarce resources and their clashing
worldviews. For example, in contrast to the OECD, UNESCO prides itself in its
humanistic approach to education, yet it was the UNESCO Institute of Statistics that
turned to the OECD to ‘learn’ how to do education statistics. In Europe, similar alli-
ances are being built between the European Commission and the OECD. Both
organisations signed a memorandum of cooperation in 2013, suggesting that they
are going to collaborate in adult skills analysis and forecasting, country analyses
and international assessments; indeed, as we will see further, the Directorate General
Education and Culture has been the prime funder of OECD work in Europe for at
least a decade now.
In order to study the IOs’ interdependence in developing quantification projects,
the chapter focuses on the development of two co-constructed data and indicator
projects: this is the emerging collaboration between the European Commission and
the OECD in the field of European education governance; and the construction of
World Education Indicators, co-produced by a range of expert actors as we will
see below.
14.4.1 T
he 2013 Education and Skills Cooperation
Arrangement
In 2013, the European Commission (EC) and the OECD signed the ‘Education and
Skills Cooperation Arrangement’, whereby, according to the EC, ‘the Commission
coordinates political cooperation with and between the Member States... The OECD
316 S. Grek
values the Commission’s expertise and capacity for analysing and assessing educa-
tion systems. The OECD’s work also comprises countries outside Europe which are
of strategic importance for the EU as partners and peers. The aim is to align efforts
in order to help both organisations to provide a better service for member countries,
and enable the avoidance of duplications’ (2013; my emphasis). A result of this
memorandum of cooperation was the development of Education and Skills Online,
a data portal that will allow ‘intensified cooperation in three key areas: skills strate-
gies; country analyses; and assessments and surveys’ (2013).
ESO is the evolution of the Programme for the Assessment of Adult Competencies
(PIAAC), an OECD project funded mainly by the European Commission; as we
will see, the collaboration was fraught with conflict for which organisation’s exper-
tise would ‘count’ more, as well as, ultimately, which actor of the two would have
more policy influence in the member states (Grek 2014). Nonetheless, instead of
folding the cooperation back, the EC is now entering a new phase in European edu-
cation governance by signing a memorandum of cooperation with the OECD and
agreeing to share expertise in most (if not all) key policy areas. But how did we
get there?
The analysis of ESO developed here builds on previous research (Ozga et al.
2011) which suggested that European Commission (EC) and OECD recommenda-
tions are often received at the national level as homogenous (Grek 2009). Thus,
questions about the relationship between the two organisations in terms of policy
direction emerge. More specifically, the case in question points towards moving
beyond top-down accounts of the mere and one-directional transfer of policy from
the international to the national, towards more attention to the interaction and medi-
ation across ‘levels’ and actors. The empirical research focused mainly on the anal-
ysis of discourse through an examination of eight key texts, through a focus on their
‘texturing’ effects and their role in establishing a new ‘order of discourse’, their
chaining, and the extent to which boundary genres were being produced. A firm set
of 15 actors from both the Commission and the OECD, as well as other relevant
research agencies, was identified and interviewed; the interviews focused on the
actors’ role in processes of coordination (conferences, meetings, project work);
their interactions with other actors within and beyond their organisations; and other
relational ties that link them and others through channels of flow of data, ideas and/
or material resources. The analysis here is built using mainly this latter work,
namely the interviews with the key policy actors. The policy actors interviewed and
quoted in this chapter have had positions of power and significant decision-making
leverage, and therefore in all cases first-hand experience and participation in meet-
ings and debate between DG EAC and the OECD in regard to the financing and
conduct of large international assessments.
Hence, although previous work showed how the OECD became a major
Europeanising actor, having not only entered the European education policy arena
but in fact monopolising the attention and policy influence within it (Grek 2009),
this chapter goes one step further; working with the specific case of international
comparative testing, it examines how the OECD became a dominant education pol-
icy actor as a result of its deliberate and systematic mobilisation by the European
14 Interdependency in Transnational Education Governance 317
Commission,2 which found in the OECD not only a great resource of data to govern
(which it did not have before) but also a player who would be pushing the
Commission’s own policy agenda forward, albeit leaving the old subsidiarity rule
intact. As I will show, testing is important because it produces numbers and conse-
quently ratings and rankings; once the OECD has created this unprecedented spec-
tacle of comparison in European education, no system can remain hidden and
separate any longer. The field of measurement becomes instantly the field of
the game.
Although the Programme for the International Student Assessment (PISA) has
become the brand name for the OECD success, historically there has been a range
of such studies that the OECD has been organising since the early 1990s. The major-
ity of these were adult literacy studies initially, followed by PISA, and more recently
PIAAC, the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies
(2011). The first literacy study for example, the International Adult Literacy Survey
(IALS) was the first and largest international comparative testing regime of its kind.
Conducted from the early 1990s, it was an innovative study, as it was the first time
ever that an international comparative dimension was added to the construction of a
literacy survey instrument. As it was an original and new endeavour, slowly at the
start but increasingly later on, IALS boosted confidence in the construction of mea-
surement tools of this kind, increased their persuasive power in regard to their valid-
ity and transparency and created substantial revenues to the research agencies
administering them. Finally, and perhaps above all, it created a circle of like-minded
expert communities, who found in these studies a platform for promoting the prob-
lematisation of specific issues, their institutionalisation through their exchanges and
the setting up of the study, as well as their legitimation, in the form of advice to
failing countries, once the results were published.
Following the successful IALS endeavour, PISA, the Programme for the
International Student Assessment, became more than simply a testing regime—it is
constructed and operates under a clear and specific policy framework, which is to be
adopted by the participant countries if they are to improve their future PISA assess-
ments and thus improve their standing in attracting economic and human capital
investment. In other words, the involvement of the OECD with the steering of edu-
cation policy in participant countries does not stop with the publication of the PISA
results; on the contrary, this is perhaps where it begins. Expert groups write expert
reports, analysed and taken forward by other national and local experts, while the
Commission expert committees are also on board in order to keep the game in sight
and keep it running.
Nonetheless, how has the OECD become such a powerful player in education
governance in Europe? As some of the people who work there might have argued,
the Education Directorate staff who are based in Paris take few decisions, if any; the
OECD, as they argue, is no other than the participant countries and the national
2
By ‘European Commission’, I refer more specifically to the Commission’s Directorate General
Education and Culture (DG EAC).
318 S. Grek
actors and experts sent to the OECD committees and meetings. Thus, how accurate
is to examine the emergence of this new policy arena by simply focussing on a
single international actor? This is where the notion of knowledge controversies is
helpful, as the story of the emergence of the OECD as an influential actor (mostly
on the basis of its large international tests) is yet again a story of tension—a story of
the expert loves and expert wars that have been forming the history of international
comparisons of performance measurement for over a decade.
So around 2003–2004, we [OECD and Commission] started becoming far more involved.
Meetings all over the world, I don’t know how many countries I visited but what is impor-
tant is that the Commission is there…. The European member states should see that the
Commission is there because one of the criticisms of the Commission since all this started
was that we didn’t take into account all the good work of the OECD. Which was wrong but
they said it. The way of showing them was to actually be there—not an empty chair. (EC4)
Indeed, although the Commission and the OECD had been leading quite separate
ideological paths, a new much closer relationship began emerging. This relationship
would gradually strengthen and eventually become the sine qua non for the govern-
ing of European education systems. Another interviewee was even more eloquent in
his discussion of this flourishing relationship:
We used to have great competition between the two institutions [OECD and the EC] which
was that they were research-based, we were policy-based. And we needed that. They needed
the policy aspect to mobilise the European consciousness…it was in their interest working
with us …We had some differences but we are working closer and closer together, we are
very very good friends now, there is no conflict (EU3).
On the other hand, OECD actors appear also as quite open to the Commission,
stressing from their own point of view, the reasons that the DG Education would
work closely with them:
First of all I think we’ve been very lucky that on the Commission side, that they’ve given a
lot of emphasis to skills recently …and so I think we were fortunate that the work that we
decided to do on PIAAC corresponded extremely well with their areas of interest and
research priorities….I think they have been attending these international expert meetings
that have taken place developing the proposal for PIAAC and so they were already onboard
…. So they made a direct contribution, an actual contribution to the international costs and
also eventually agreed to subsidise EU countries, the cost that they had to pay as well to the
OECD. So we got just a block of direct funding and indirect funding to countries that they
then had to pay us for the international costs. That made a big contribution in financial terms
and therefore of course enhanced interest in the project (OECD3).
Another OECD actor also suggested the way that the relationship rather than
hostile, has been much more close recently, in fact ‘hand in hand’:
We have the same perceptions like other international organisations that it is important that
we work together and that we avoid duplication of effort and that we know what the other
organisations are doing and that there are often occasions that jointly we can do more than
what we can do individually. I think we were always aware of that but I think that has
become increasingly important that we work hand in hand and inevitably because we have
some common goals. The OECD has had for some time its own job strategy, the Commission
has its own employment strategy and its Lisbon goals and there is a lot of overlap. So I think
it is quite normal that we can cooperate on a lot of areas (OECD5).
14 Interdependency in Transnational Education Governance 319
Finally, another account which describes the conflict and competition for secur-
ing contracts for education research in Europe, comes from another interviewee, a
key member of staff of one of the Commission’s research agencies:
I think because the OECD is very much looking for member states’ subsidies and grants
and financial support for each separate research activity, they are also keen in showing that
they do something unique and innovative in order to get such funding. And so then in a way
they are in competition with us. An example is they did a recent policy review which is
called ‘Learning for Jobs’ which basically deals with VET. And they didn’t invite us to
some national expert groups and so on that are in development—and they did very little use
of our work because they wanted to do something that was different and specific so that they
could sell it to the member states—this is my interpretation, of course. But I think that there
is this kind of competition, differentiation between European institutions because we are in
competition for funding. (EC3)
The quotations above suggest that descriptions of a field of actors who come
together regularly and on equal terms to achieve consensus for the pushing of might
be certain agendas false. On the contrary, they highlight the need to also focus our
attention and study on those meetings that never happen, as well as those actors who
are consistently not invited to expert meetings. They direct us to an understanding
of a field, which is riddled with internal and external competition for funding, espe-
cially in times of reducing national budgets in an era of austerity.
the transition from school to work; the learning environment and the organisation of
schools; and student achievement and the social and labour-market outcomes of
education.
The OECD argued that this exercise in international comparison was designed in
order to assist in the processes of policy formation in member countries and to con-
tribute to the public accountability of education systems:
At a time when education is receiving increased priority but, like other areas of public
spending, is facing the prospect of limited public funds, understanding better the internal
processes that determine the relationship between educational expenditures and educa-
tional outcomes is particularly important. (OECD CERI 1995: 7)
Thus, we see that even in these early days of comparative analysis of education
systems, the efficiency and effectiveness perspective provided not only relevant
comparative information to member countries, but also aimed at shaping their pol-
icy agendas and priorities. Thus, and as argued by Henry et al. (2001), INES pro-
vides a useful illustration of the shift in the OECD’s role from a technical expert
organisation to a policy instrument and forum—that is, the OECD became an inter-
national knowledge broker and a catalyst facilitating policy development in member
countries and assisting processes of policy dissemination, adaptation and borrowing.
A brief excursion into the history of OECD illustrates the changing attitude to
performance indicators within that organisation. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
amid continuing ideological and philosophical debates about the nature and appli-
cability of performance indicators to education, the OECD, and CERI in particular,
explored issues of educational reform, social equity and innovation in terms that
were more conceptual and philosophical than evaluative and statistical. This was the
time of equity taking priority over efficiency. Within CERI, a culture of distrust
towards performance indicators had developed over the years. By the mid-1980s,
however, even CERI could not easily dismiss the pressures for a new effort to
develop indicators. Henry et al. (2001), drawing on interview data, show how the
US, in particular, repeatedly called for work on outcomes indicators, particularly in
relation to school effectiveness, at one stage threatening to withdraw its support
from CERI if its demands were not met. However, Henry et al. (2001) also demon-
strate that, from a different ideological direction, France—with its bureaucratic
interest in statistical data collection—joined with the US in pushing the OECD
towards the direction of developing educational indicators. With both the US and
France, there was also probably a republican tradition (and possibly a bureaucratic
one in France as well) of numbers used for progressive policy purposes, somewhat
akin to a ‘political arithmetic’ tradition within British sociology and social admin-
istration. Thus, by the early 90s, the doubters had been won over and the Indicators
project had become fully established within the OECD’s educational work.
Interest in education indicators was of course not restricted to the OECD and its
member countries. Other inter-governmental organisations such as UNESCO and
the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) have pursued similar agen-
das—indeed, the OECD and UNESCO’s work on indicators was acknowledged as
a context for APEC’s interest in developing indicators of school effectiveness. In
14 Interdependency in Transnational Education Governance 321
1995 UNESCO, OECD and EUROSTAT (the statistical wing of the EU) joined
forces in collaboratively collecting data on key aspects of education, thus consoli-
dating a liaison formed when the OECD adapted the International Standard
Classification of Education (ISCED) Systems originally developed by UNESCO, in
turn based on the OECD’s earlier developmental work (Papadopoulos 1994: 53–54).
This collaboration, though fraught with difficulties as suggested by Henry et al.
(2001), explored common definitions, use of criteria for quality control and
improved data documentation in order to improve the international comparisons of
education statistics. Reflective of this expanded terrain, the 1998 edition of
Education at a Glance included data from a wide range of non-member countries
through the ‘World Education Indicators Programme’ (WEI) conducted in collabo-
ration with UNESCO and partially funded by the World Bank. World Indicators
identified differing outcomes between OECD and WEI countries around matters
such as student demography, levels of educational attainment, graduation rates and
resourcing per student (OECD CERI 1998: 29–30). By 1998, then, in the OECD’s
own words, indicators were covering, ‘almost two-thirds of the world population’
(CERI 1998: 6). Thus, it is to the World Education Indicators Programme (WEI) we
will now turn.
The program began as a pilot project in 1997 with an original group of 12 coun-
tries which were invited to participate by UNESCO and OECD. Since then, the
group expanded to cover every region of the world, through 19 countries: Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Malaysia, Paraguay,
Peru, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay
and Zimbabwe. Although the programme was developed through the shared techni-
cal expertise between the OECD and UNESCO, since its establishment, the
UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) was supported by the World Bank through its
‘Development Grant Fund’. For the ‘World Education Indicator Program’, the
World Bank provided financial assistance for its organisation and administration,
making WEI a collaborative indicator statistical project involving three major
International Organisations in the field of education. According to UNESCO, ‘from
2001 to 2004 UNESCO received short-term support for project-based work from
the World Bank. In 2005, the mutual trust that had developed between the two
organisations manifested itself through World Bank making longer-term commit-
ments to UNESCO’ (2015, my emphasis).
Therefore, the joint nature of the development of WEI suggests fertile ground
for an exploration of IOs’ interplay in the production of global education indica-
tors. In fact, according to the UIS project homepage, ‘the WEI programme serves
as a laboratory of ideas. Countries do not just collect data—they design and test
innovative surveys and methodologies collectively in this model of South-South
cooperation’.
In many countries, this international perspective has been reflected by efforts to
strengthen the collection and reporting of comparative statistics and indicators on
education. Building on INES, the objectives of the WEI programme were to:
‘explore education indicator methodologies; reach consensus on a set of common
policy concerns amenable to cross-national comparison and agree upon a set of key
322 S. Grek
indicators that reflect these concerns; review methods and data collection instru-
ments needed to develop these measures; and set the direction for further develop-
mental work and analysis beyond this initial set of indicators’ (OECD CERI 2005).
According to WEI reporting, ‘during this time, participating countries have advanced
the conceptual and developmental work in many different ways. They have applied
the WEI data collection instruments and methodology at the national level. In col-
laboration with the OECD and UNESCO, they have co-operated in national,
regional and international meetings of experts, and worked jointly on the develop-
ment of the indicators, in areas such as governance, teachers and financial invest-
ments in education’ (OECD CERI 2005).
Periodic statistical reports from the OECD/UNESCO World Education Indicators
Programme that include data from the 30 OECD countries and about 20 other
UNESCO countries were written. The series focused on trends in education, identi-
fying which countries made progress and the contextual and policy factors that con-
tributed to the different educational outcomes. With the aim to develop a critical
mass of education indicators that measure the current state of education in an inter-
nationally comparable manner, the group took on special projects that aimed to
improve the comparability or broaden the scope of international education indica-
tors. For example, there were special studies on levels of decision-making in educa-
tion, based on surveys of primary schools conducted in participating countries.
Finally, the programme was not only limited to the development of technical com-
petence in comparative measurement; crucially, it also led to high-level ministerial
cooperation and political commitment among the partner countries (UIS/OECD
1995, 2001, 2003, 2005).
insularity and autonomy (Raustiala and Victor 2004). In addition, as we saw above,
IOs are characterised by highly mobile workforces; what does this increased actor
density and fluidity suggest about the coordination of measurement practices?
Indeed, it appears that states ask for the collaboration of IOs as it is seen as a way of
increasing efficiency, resource-pooling and coordination of their agendas—the
example of the ways that European Commission’s DG Education and Culture was
in effect compelled to work with the OECD because of efficiency concerns by the
member states, is a good one here (Grek 2009, 2014).
The concept of organisational interplay is not entirely new to IR: there has been
some stimulating work that has examined the interplay of international regimes and
consequent attempts to produce typologies (Gehring and Oberthür 2006, 2009;
Raustiala and Victor 2004). Nonetheless, regimes lack precisely what Barnett and
Finnemore (1999) suggest above: agency (Rittberger and Zangl 2006). However,
even when IR theory has acknowledged IOs constitutive nature as actors, there are
other problems. By examining treaty regimes, for example, Young suggested two
typologies for organisational interactions: nested and overlapping institutions
(1996). But, as Brosig (2011) suggests, ‘research on regime complexes in which
relations between institutions are of such density has indicated that disentangling
them would compromise the collective character these regimes have acquired’. In
addition, most of IR theory that has examined treaty regimes has done so from a
rational theory perspective, one that would explain the interactions as serving spe-
cific IOs interests and benefit calculations (Galaskiewicz 1985; Oliver 1990; Van de
Ven 1976). Nonetheless, even when IOs are assigned with agency, asymmetries and
power relations are only explained on the basis of rational, interest-based behaviour.
However, as the example of the European Commission’s collaboration with the
OECD has shown (Grek 2009, 2014), material resources do not always explain
organisational interaction; IOs may actually be very well-off but lack the knowledge
and expertise, even legitimacy to promote specific policy agendas. To use the same
example again, the notion of subsidiarity would suggest that for the European
Commission the OECD could act as a mediator of its own policies in the member
states. In other words, DG Education and Culture lacked the legitimacy to enter
national policy spaces; OECD, as an expert institution, did not. On the other hand,
organisations like the OECD, may well have both the resources and the expertise,
but could be lacking in policy direction and influence.
To conclude, it is evident that although important scholarship in the fields of IR,
organisational sociology and the social studies of quantification exists, little has it
enlightened us about the politics, processes and practices of the interdependence
and interplay of IOs in the field of the production of global metrics. On the one
hand, IR theory has given emphasis on the role of IOs in transnational governance;
initially through an examination of treaty regimes, and later with an emphasis on
IOs influence in power play, the field is dominated by rational, interest-based theo-
retical perspectives. Thus, it has failed to examine qualities of IOs that relate to their
constitutive powers as independent, yet interconnected, actors in the shaping of
global policy agendas through their expert knowledge work. On the other hand,
organisational sociology, although rich in its intellectual history of competing views
14 Interdependency in Transnational Education Governance 325
about how organisations work, has not as yet examined closely the role of numbers
in reshaping organisational behaviour. The insistence on separating the internal
from the external organisational lifeworlds, fails to take into account precisely what
numbers are able to do (that may have not been possible before): that is, diffuse
boundaries and set IOs in a more complex and fluid reality. Finally, studies of quan-
tification, although growing in number and coming from a wide variety of disciplin-
ary perspectives, have largely focused on the role of numbers as agents in themselves;
there has been little, if any, attention, to the political work of the actors that organise
these processes, that shape and are shaped by them.
Thus, the rise of a transnational metrological field in education is an excellent
example of the kind of mobility that the policy-making process requires; however,
the in-depth study of the organisation, preparation and delivery of international edu-
cation comparisons makes a case precisely for a close examination not only of the
movement of policy in itself, but crucially of those who move it. The role of experts
is central as their own in-depth and trusted knowledge allows them to be highly
mobile; in the name of their specialised expertise, experts have to be numerous; they
are employed by different policy-making and research organisations and are
accountable to them alone; their expert knowledge suggests the need for them to be
present and offer advice at different stages of the policy-making process, yet it is
precisely this same trusted and objective knowledge that renders them invisible.
They offer evidence for policy, yet their most important role is symbolic; that of the
legitimisation of knowledge.
Acknowledgement This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the
European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and inno-
vation programme under grant agreement No 715125 METRO (ERC-2016-StG) (‘International
Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’, 2017-2022, PI: Sotiria Grek).
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328 S. Grek
Sotiria Grek is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the School of Social and Political Science,
University of Edinburgh. She works on education policy, transnational policy learning, the politics
of quantification, knowledge and governance. She was recently awarded a European Research
Council Starting Grant (ERC-StG-2016) to study ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a
Global Metrological Field’ (2017–2022). She is currently writing a monograph on ‘Educating
Europe: EU Government, Knowledge and Legitimation’ to be published by Routledge in 2018.
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Chapter 15
Is Cultural Localization Education
Necessary in Epoch of Globalization?
An Analysis of the Nature of State Sovereignty
Tien-Hui Chiang
15.1 Introduction
seize state authority. This unbalanced power relation further suggests that sover-
eignty will function as a powerful social discourse to diminish citizens’ critical
thinking. Without an independent soul, they are voluntarily subject to the commands
of the state, which are under the control of the rulers/elites.
15.2 G
lobalization, State Sovereignty and Cultural
Localization Education
Globalization has significantly expanded its influence across countries since the
1980s when R. Reagan and M. Thatcher were in power and committed to exporting
the ideas of neo-liberalism to the international community (Chiang 2011, 2013).
This exportation has significantly contributed to constructing neo-liberalism as a
new world value, and to supporting the expansion of globalization. It is argued that
being a typical capitalist country (Wallerstein 2004), the USA acts as a transnational
corporation in undertaking this construction (Berberoglu 2003; Chiang 2011). This
political/economic intention is espoused by the phenomenon of modeling, referring
to the inclination of developing countries to imitate developed countries (Veblen
1994). Anyway, globalization has benefited America to acquire a hegemonic status
that assists it to export the ideology of neo-liberalism to the international commu-
nity, through such organs as the OECD (Rizvi and Lingard 2006), the WTO
(Robertson et al. 2006), the WB and the IMF (Stiglitz 2002). As globalization has
been constructed as an irreversible world trend, neo-liberalism becomes a powerful
discourse, convincing people to believe that globalization alone will bring a promis-
ing future for its participants (McCarthy and Dimitriadis 2006; Popkewitz 2000;
Säfström 2005).
The link between the state as legitimized administrative apparatuses and the state as one of
the crucial sites of the production of identities in the body politic leads us to the wide-open
spaces of the public sphere, in which civic order is built from discourses that manage the
needs, interests and desires generated by them within the socially combatant populations
that make up society. (McCarthy and Dimitriadis 2006: 201)
Along with this new world value, globalization has significantly expanded its terri-
tory by fusing many countries into a globalized market. It has been argued that this
fusion will erode the state sovereignty. Ohmae (2000), for example, contends that
this integration triggers the development of region states functioning as economic
zones to provide better services and goods. As global economy plays as a primary
force to regulate this development, host nations may decrease their influence on
region states. Robinson (2004) brushed a similar picture in which international
institutions will be established to assist the operation of a global market. Such a
transnational arrangement has gradually taken over the authority from the states and
remold their role shifting from a self-decision agent to an administrative imple-
menter delivering the policies formulated by transnational institutes. These changes
15 Is Cultural Localization Education Necessary in Epoch of Globalization… 331
indicate that the state has significantly lost its authority in the epoch of
globalization.
Furthermore, the development in ICT also re-strengths the force of globalization
and, thus, generates a profound influence on the state sovereignty. As argued by
Thurow (2000), such development allows enterprises to undertake a new way of
operation, which is cost-saving, effective and free from governmental control and
interference. This trend has restrained nations to play like an initiator or commander
in the market so that globalization assists international economy to be an indepen-
dent force and, thus, state authority declines within a globalized market. As the
advanced technology in internet fleshes capitalists up at a globalized market, trans-
national enterprises grow. According to Miyoshi (1996), since this development has
become more evident after 1980s, international arena comes to replace domestic
domain that used to be the central focus for enterprises. Consequently, they need to
be loyal to their international shareholders/clients rather than home countries. This
denationalization, as evident in the movement of capital, personal, technology and
even the whole system of business, disconnects the linkage between capitalism and
its home countries and, in turn, substantially damages governmental authority.
TNCS (transnational corporations) are not beholden to any nation-states but seek their own
interests and profits globally. They represent neither their home countries not their host
nations but simply their own corporate selves… at any rate, manufactured products are
advertised and distributed globally, being identified only with the brand names, not the
countries of origin. In fact, the country of origin is itself becoming more and more meaning-
less. (Miyoshi 1996: 88–89)
This denationalization also makes the transnational corporation require its employ-
ees to be loyalty to the corporate identity rather than to their own national identities.
Consequently, the expansion of the transnational corporation spotlights the predom-
inant influence of imperialism that comes to replace its precedent mode—colonial-
ism and push the nation-state into a hollow entity.
All the above arguments delineate a phenomenon that globalization becomes
more predominant than ever. As the notion of liberty, one of core elements of neo-
liberalism (Friedman 2002; Hayek 2007), subscribes individualism, globalization
helps individuals acquire more power to influence both markets and states. This new
context fleshes up a new form of elites whose power and wealth are obtained at the
international market. Eventually, they internalize free market logic and, thus, firmly
support the issue of a globalized market. Such an inclination will facilitate the
expansion of globalization and decay state sovereignty. This political crisis is even
further intensified by governmental intention to gain the considerable amount of
capitalist profit available in a globalized market (Mittelman 1996). This economic
need has driven many countries to conform to the rules of globalization voluntarily,
as witnessed by the fact that they have reduced their control over tax policy for
imported goods (Dale 2003). This deterioration of sovereignty has been reinforced
by the establishment of international institutions, created to espouse the expansion
of world trade or to deal with transnational problems (Stiglitz 2006).
All these changes indicate that while globalization decreases many states’ sover-
eignty, it actually delivers more power to America. This transmission facilitates the
332 T.-H. Chiang
USA in gaining a hegemonic position that enables it to export its culture as evident
with the phenomenon of McDonaldization (Ritzer 2000). Some researchers argue
that as cultures are the foundation upon which people construct their identities, such
devaluation will jeopardize the cultivation of citizens’ national identity. In order to
solve such political crises, these importing countries will adopt the strategy of local-
ization to protect their local cultures from such cultural invasion (Lingard 2000;
Rizvi 2000). Green (2006) argues that cultural localization will be heavily reliant
upon schooling because schools are the main site for cultural cultivation and trans-
mission. Furthermore, global norms and rules tend to affect school curriculum con-
tents because of the conjugation between schooling and globalization (Baker and
LeTendre 2005; Cha and Ham 2014).
Essentially, the above arguments assume that hegemonic culture is able to replace
the culture of importing countries. This replacement approach may neglect the
interaction between cultures. Chiang (2014) adopts the perspectives of cultural con-
struction to profile cultural localization as a result of interactive development, the
process of which—involves cultural assimilation that is mainly determined by con-
sumers rather than political intentions. Therefore, as proactive endeavor is able to
transform structural constraints into advantageous texts, this two-way exchange sig-
nificantly reduces the boundary between self and others. When consumers become
the master, commanding the interplay between cultures and identity, Americanization
becomes a predetermined ideology. Berghahn (2010) rejects the notion of
Americanization by pointing out that blending or creolizations always occur within
the cultural flows across the Atlantic in both directions. West Europe used to export
high culture to the USA and its influence reached a peak in the 1930s when European
refugees from fascism inhabited in America. This situation was reversed after 1945
because American popular culture gained a hegemonic status in Western Europe. As
a result, the boundary between high and popular cultures was disappearing. This
phenomenon shows that the two-way exchange between cultures assists cultural
innovation so that it is difficult to identify where the originality of certain elements
of modern culture was first born.
As localization is in parallel with globalization, glocalization is invented to nar-
rate the combination between universalism and particularization (Robertson 1992).
Hong and Song (2010) argue that whereas globalization affects the internal struc-
ture of state agents, states are the agents implementing global requirements so that
such interactions consistently move globalization into new forms. Accordingly, we
need to think globally and act locally in order to reconstruct the world into a global
society that can help reduce the gap between globality and locality. Glocalization,
thus, embraces the characters of cultural interaction and indigenization. As argued
by Khondker (2004), Hollywood films and McDonalds are mistaken as the icon of
Americanization. In fact, American culture has been reinterpreted and indigenized
15 Is Cultural Localization Education Necessary in Epoch of Globalization… 333
As its intendants served as a political buffer between the king and royalties, this
administrative mechanism gained power and increased its size. Finally, this admin-
istrative apparatus became a system of civil servants, serving the citizens. Therefore,
governmental authority was gradually transmitted from the king to civil society.
Consequently, this transition changed the presentation of sovereignty, recontextual-
izing its tyrannical form into the idea of civil society, in which governmental author-
ity is created for a common good. Such change also occurred in Britain. State
sovereignty was created to protect the system of monarchy, as witnessed by the case
334 T.-H. Chiang
of William, who was not conqueror of England but was assigned as a legitimate heir
to its throne in the ‘Laws of St Edward,’ or the laws of the Saxon regime. The laws
became an instrument of power serving the interests of the Norman monarchy and
aristocracy. They did not guarantee the reign of justice but depressed people’s voices.
The social body is not made up of a pyramid of orders or of a hierarchy, and it does not
constitute a coherent and unitary organism. It is composed of two groups, and they are not
only quite distinct, but also in conflict. (Foucault 2003: 88)
This governmental injustice triggered rebellions from people. In other words, civil
society waged rebellions against the government in order to fight for their rights,
and install justice into sovereignty. This historical movement documents a fact that
sovereignty is an artificial notion equipped with political intentions, serving the
interests of social elites.
... any law, whatever it may be, every form of sovereignty, what it may be, and any type of
power, whatever it may be, has to be analyzed not in terms of natural right and the establish-
ment of sovereignty, but in terms of the unending movement --- which has no historical end
--- of the shifting relations that make some dominant over others. (Foucault 2003: 109)
This relation indicates that along with different historical contexts, sovereignty has
different meanings. Sovereignty now no longer retains individualism for personal
gain of either the king or royalties, but is shared and commanded by all social mem-
bers in a collective will. In other words, the nature of sovereignty transforms from
an original individualism to a modern collectivism. Similarly, Mosca (1962, 1971)
argues that the concept of sovereignty was originally designed to serve the interests
of the ruling group. Significant contributions, such as protecting their country from
the attacks of enemies, entitled knights to membership of a political class which had
a legitimate authority to rule the state and enjoy privileges. In order to preserve
these privileges for their offspring, they created social norms or values, as manifest
in their invention of the concept of inheritance, which further led to the establish-
ment of the system of feudalism. This institutional setting assisted the ruling group
to maintain their privileged position from generation to generation. Therefore,
although sovereignty was now coated in a collective form for citizens, the process
of historical construction shows that it embodies political intentions serving the
interests of the ruling class. All these relations show that sovereignty changes its
meanings in different historical contexts.
This dynamic development indicates that sovereignty may change its composi-
tion, such as by changing one of its core elements, territory. Traditionally, sover-
eignty is determined by boundaries between states that are officially recognized by
other countries (Giddens 1990). However, according to Angew (2009), this territo-
rial definition set out to serve the interests of monarchy. This socially constructed
fact may change its constitution in the era of globalization again. While the combi-
nation between authority and domestic affairs makes sovereignty a state-based or
territory-based idea, this territorial approach was associated with the realm in which
the king was its head, with supremacy authority to command his people. The opera-
tion of monarchy within a defined territory created a tight linkage between state
sovereignty and territory. Preventing sovereignty from being deterritorialized
15 Is Cultural Localization Education Necessary in Epoch of Globalization… 335
became a crucial way to sustain the authority of the monarchy, so that the states
needed to be treated equally. This equal notion symbolically projected on the juridi-
cal or legal sovereignty that provided the necessary geographical conditions for the
operation of domestic sovereignty. Therefore, state sovereignty is traditionally
understood as the absolute territorial organization of political authority. However,
strong countries may deny this equal recognition, as manifest in the phenomenon of
imperialism or colonialism. Invasions, initiated by western countries, created a non-
territorial fusion among states, so that sovereignty was transferred from the person-
hood of monarchs to discrete national populations. Accordingly, sovereignty can be
shared or pooled in the arena of globalization, in which a new global arrangement,
favoring the networked system of political authority, transfers sovereignty from
domestic to international institutions that are largely influenced by advanced coun-
tries. This relation suggests that political control and authority are no longer
restrained to the regime of territoriality. Sovereignty needs to be viewed as a social
fact produced by the practices of states, and globalization will wipe out the tradi-
tional definition of sovereignty—territoriality.
In fact, immigration also blurs the geographic boundaries between states, and in
turn may degenerate the political definition of territory for sovereignty.
Thus without territorial restrictions on eligibility, cross-border movements of people would
undermine the essentially contractual obligations that underpin both state infrastructural
power and the autonomous role of the state that depends on it… however, the tight correla-
tion between territory and state power (both despotic and infrastructural) need not be so
close. (Angew 2009: 207)
The development of megacities shows that immigration increases its speed and
scale constantly. Globalization further consolidates this phenomenon because it
commands many countries to conduct a policy of deregulation of both politics and
economy (Florida 2008). As people and geographic space are viewed as the core
components in the constitution of a state, massive levels of immigration will decom-
pose the territorial boundaries of a given country. If all or the majority of citizens
moved from a country to another territorial space, the country’s sovereignty would
inevitably shrink, and even be corrupted. The original geographical boundary was
opaque, or even meaningless, for the constitution of the state of sovereignty at the
stage of barbarous society, in which tribes were predominant. Some tribes didn’t
inhabit a certain territory because they constantly moved for food. This movement,
then, disintegrated the linkages among sovereignty, territory and geographic bound-
aries. This phenomenon is still vivid in some geographic spaces in the modern age,
such as in the case of Eskimos. Obviously, no countries would officially recognize
Eskimos’ sovereignty, although their inhabitation of the Arctic for thousands of
years has created some core components of sovereignty, such as people and terri-
tory. This declination implies that sovereignty is an artificial notion equipped with
certain political intentions, as noted previously. Perhaps, some skeptics may claim
that this is because Eskimos haven’t developed their own government. However,
such a predetermined viewpoint lacks adequate justification. Although a savage
society may lack a centralized form of bureaucratic system, this society still c ontains
336 T.-H. Chiang
formation (Stiglitz 2006). However, most political rulers have devoted themselves
to participating in these international institutes. This is because international recog-
nition can promote their political interests, as manifest in increasing the support for
them in the domestic agenda.
Hence, international legal sovereignty can promote the interests of rulers by making it eas-
ier for them to generate domestic political support not just because they are in a better posi-
tion to promote the interests of their constituents but also because recognition is a signal
about the viability of a political regime and its leaders. (Krasner 2006: 84)
15.5 Conclusions
finally constructed a civil society in which the state authority would operate in a
collectivist form for a common good. However, this transformation doesn’t guaran-
tee that the idea of a civil society can be implemented in practice. Its citizens are
incapable of discovering their subjection to the state authority that is under the con-
trol of the rulers/elites. This is because the ruling group has transformed sovereignty
into a civil society notion, educating people to believe that they are the masters of
sovereignty, and that sovereignty operates for a common good. This collectivism
increases the sacredness for state sovereignty and sustains the neutrality of state
authority. This change assists the rulers/elites to engage in the work of schooling to
remold people’s souls. Without critical thought, citizens cannot detect the unbal-
anced power relations in civil society, largely favoring the ruling group, and are
unconsciously subject to the commands of the state. This phenomenon further dem-
onstrates a fact that sovereignty needs to be viewed as an artificial notion, exercising
as a social discourse which functions in the political/economic interests of the rul-
ers/elites. This political intention also highlights schools as a locus in which these
elites intend to secure their personal gain through schooling and this undetected
conspiracy comes to undermine the value of cultural localization education.
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Tien-Hui Chiang Distinguished Professor at Zhengzhou University, the Vice President of RC04
(Sociology of Education) of International Sociological Association, UNESCO and one member of
the Constitutional Standing Committee of the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies,
UNESCO. He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar, visiting at UW-Madison, Wisconsin, the USA, the
visiting Professor of Beijing Normal University, China and the Ex-President of the Taiwan
Association for Sociology of Education. His specialty covers sociology of education, globalization
and education policy, sociology of curriculum, teaching profession and comparative education. He
has produced over 100 essays. He was the co-editor of ‘Cross Education Dialogue’, ‘Crisis in
Education’ and ‘Interculturalism’, and the section editor of the Springer Encyclopedias, including
Educational Philosophy and Theories and Teacher Education. He was also one of the contributors
of ‘Elite, Privileges and Excellence’ edited by Professor S. Ball. The outstanding achievements
have crowned Dr. Chiang many glorious prizes, such as the Distinguished Scholar of Taiwan, ROC
and the International Distinguished Research Fellow, KEPET, University of Crete, Greece. He is
the associate editor of International Journal of Educational Research. Professor Chiang is also the
international advisor of academic organizations, such as IAFOR, ELLTA and SGEM.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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Part V
Methodology of Education Policy Studies
Chapter 16
The Politics of Metrics in Education:
A Contribution to the History
of the Present
Romuald Normand
16.1 Introduction
R. Normand (*)
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
e-mail: rnormand@unistra.fr
tivity, to resume Michel Foucault’s words (2002), is clearly due to the effort of
rationalization achieved through mathesis and taxinomia penetrating the spheres of
the State administration, at least when statistics were used for governing population
in education and health as in other economic and social areas (Porter 1996). Today,
discourses of truth seize numbers, sometimes in caricatural ways subverting them to
ideological and political aims (Berliner and Biddle 1995). Numbers speak by them-
selves, to reveal a truth while they are exhibited and imposed without any contesta-
tion by expertise and centres of calculation (Lawn 2013a, b). As the PISA survey,
this methodological rationale is as a guarantee used by policy-makers to reject any
criticism beyond the small circle of influential experts (Grek 2009, 2013). However,
there is no naturality in the politics of metrics, no discourses and truths that could
be established forever in education. Sociology and anthropology have contested
these postulates and statements for long showing the relativity of data, their contex-
tual embeddedness, and the cultural differences they tend to erase. But government
by numbers appears legitimate for itself and politics of metrics become a new sci-
ence of government at international and European level (Lawn and Normand 2014).
This chapter is resolutely critical but it is not contesting data or participating in
the quarrel of methodologies, nor discussing the rightness of metrological argu-
ments and justifications. It provides a singular argument on the politics of metrics in
education through a social and political epistemology as an archaeology or history
of the present (Foucault 2012; Popkewitz 1997, 2013). Historicizing the politics of
metrics, its ideas and instruments, analytical models and theoretical frameworks,
impacts on human beings, is adopting a critical perspective and considering educa-
tion policies guided by the process of Reason (Popkewitz 2012). The aim is also to
show the force of representations and power relationships leading to the adoption of
such a scientific theory, an instrument, a methodology, a statistical artefact or met-
rological convention for States, local authorities and International Organizations.
We have chosen to structure this history of the present with examples character-
izing the relationships between metrics, knowledge and politics since the beginning
of compulsory schooling. We do not seek to establish continuities but to analyse
some historical moments with their internal coherence, built on epistemological and
discursive configurations underpinned by a certain kind of instrumentation impact-
ing on politics. We highlight some concepts, theories, objects shaping rules of
objectivity and scrutinize discourses of political truth. We look at changes within
the areas of science and expertise and the regimes of normativity they introduce in
the field of education policies.
From Michel Foucault (2002), we know the role played by natural history in the
classification of human beings and things which structure the scientific language
and announce the venue of the comparative chart. Classifications and comparisons
are two elementary acts of any scientific approach and the former is the foundation
16 The Politics of Metrics in Education: A Contribution to the History of the Present 347
of metrics. The continuous, ordered and universal chart, of all the possible differ-
ences, is the ideal of Taxinomia. In addition, Mathesis defines a perspective for
understanding the world from single laws stemming from the mathematical
method. Since, a part of educational sciences has taken natural sciences as a model
in attempting to reach the “perfection” of correspondence between truth and facts
(Popkewitz 2012). Classifications are part of a politics which, by force or negotia-
tion, facilitates the convergence between heterogeneous systems and conceptions.
And even if they raise some ethical concerns, these modes of classification are
finally made invisible and embedded in social and political life routines.
Historically, it was the case of the classification of feeble-minded people as a pol-
icy instrument.
16.2.1 C
lassifications as a Policy Instrument of Inclusion
and Exclusion
At the turn of the last century, classifications of feeble-minded people were assumed
by different social reformers, worried by the rise of poverty, insalubrity and insecu-
rity created by urbanization and massive immigration (Trent 1994). According to
their discourses, feeble-minded people represented an important workload for the
society and their increase required a political solution at a reasonable cost. Many of
them shared the idea of creating colonies to group epileptics, morons, disabled and
undisciplined people. Feeble-minded people had to be more productive. Policy-
makers, concerned about mental deficiency, began to create specialized schools.
With compulsory schooling, a new population was coming in schools and it chal-
lenged teachers who were claiming about indiscipline and delinquency. The man-
agement of deficient students became an increasing political concern whereas most
experienced teachers were not capable of tackling with these “backward children”
categorized as “silly, stupid, idiot, simple-minded, scatter brained, clogged, moron,
duffer, dizzy, dull, peasant, uncultivated, airhead, squash, etc.”
From a sociological perspective, classifications are linked to key cognitive opera-
tions including and excluding human beings (Popkewitz 2013). As it has been
exemplified by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (2009), “primitive” and “scien-
tific” classifications share a common nature: they make relationships between
human beings intelligible. The social function of classifications corresponds to a
cognitive order for accessing to knowledge. Classifications between things shared
among individuals and groups help to understand the logic of most decisive catego-
ries for the human mind: space, time, causality, etc. Following these works, Mary
Douglas (1986) explains that the design of classifications is a specific exercise of
polarization and exclusion: it implies tracing boundaries and creating equivalences
between things which are a priori not comparable. Classifications institutionalize a
hierarchy which is not only cognitive but social with important consequences on
structuring relationships and power within the society. Indeed, education creden-
tials, diplomas, certifications in modern times have been the mean to classify indi-
348 R. Normand
viduals according to their knowledge and skills and to position them in the social
hierarchy serving the political objectives of sorting and selecting people.
In transferring classification into the issue of social classes, Pierre Bourdieu
(1989), by criticizing the realist and Marxist conception of production relationships,
has formulated a theory of social fields in which the fight for classifications, particu-
larly through the school system, functions as a mechanism of social reproduction
legitimizing certain ranks, titles and hierarchies. Some subtle distinctions are estab-
lished according to the ownership of economic, social and cultural capitals which
determine the ranks of individuals and groups within the social space. From them,
incorporated dispositions (tastes, desires, affinities, etc.) are organized which cor-
respond to practices and habitus of a social class with its relational properties. In
conceptualizing a model of differentiation based on power relationships, Bourdieu
demonstrates that systems of classification are the product of permanent struggles
which redefine borders and modes of legitimacy structuring hierarchy and ranks and
serving a politics of inequalities. In education, the metrics of inequalities has been
extended to international surveys based on other modes of classification of equity
and performance disconnected from social class theory.
16.2.2 G
lobal Metrological Policy and Classifications
of Inequalities in Education
Classifications have certain stability in time and space. Beyond the symbolic conse-
cration and legitimation of differences, this representation of social order corre-
sponds to a social and political investment. Statistical classifications play a dominant
role in the legitimation of politics in education (Thévenot 2011). They guarantee
three types of representation: a scientific and technical representation by which sta-
tistical tools allow to build and display a simplified reduction of society through
charts and graphs. And it is also a political representation in the sense that social
actors fight and negotiate for being represented and for representing their interests
within the classification. Geoffrey C. Bowker et Susan L. Star (2000) show, from the
international classification of diseases, that classification is the result of a compro-
mise between several interests related to national and local systems of information
in public health policies. Classification serves also as a cognitive representation and
mental picture of social reality which allows to identify ourselves and those with
whom we developed relationships.
From this perspective, it is easy to understand what is at stake in the definition of
international nomenclatures in education as a global policy. Nomenclatures impose
a universal system of classification even if their apparent homogeneity is question-
able, according to historical, social and cultural differences between countries.
However, The UNESCO’s International Standard Classification of Education
(ISCED) or the regular publication of the OECD’s Education at Glance is rarely
16 The Politics of Metrics in Education: A Contribution to the History of the Present 349
16.3.2 T
he Emergency Policy of “Controlled Experiments”
and Evidence
tory education programmes was criticized and the diminution of federal expendi-
tures forced public authorities to adopt more short term and narrow interventions.
Previous evaluations of these social programmes had been disputed as well as their
methodologies (Cook 2000). It provides windows of opportunity for experts advo-
cating new methodologies in metrics. It was the case of Donald T. Campbell who
had published in 1969, an influent paper, which was a call for the USA and other
nations to adopt “a new experimental approach of social reforms” based on specific
treatments of social problems (Campbell 1969). The “true” experiments implied
groups of individuals subjected to a treatment and compared to a control group. And
if possible, the evaluation of the public policy, to be validated, had to overcome
humanitarian and practical objections to expose randomly individuals to treatments
during the time of the experiment. It was only for opposed moral reasons that other
devices or statistical techniques had to be implemented. “Reforms as experiments”
were not the first publication of Campbell, taking McCall as a reference, and he had
earlier advocated the idea of extending the “logic of laboratory” to the society. With
the statistician Julian C. Stanley, he had published a long chapter titled “experimen-
tal and quasi-experimental devices for research on teaching” (Campbell and Stanley
1963). In 1966, this chapter was republished in another book titled Experimental
and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research (Campbell and Stanley 1963). This
last book was a best-seller promoting a new “standard” for research in social sci-
ences and considering each researcher as the “methodological servant of the experi-
mental society”. In the USA, afterwards, controlled randomized experiments
became the “true experiment” and numerous public policies were implemented in
education, health and social work following these principles and criteria.
Although the Federal State’s action diminished during the 1970–1980s,
Campbell’s ideas were resumed in education by a Right-wing coalition for evidence-
based policy who imposed these technologies in US education through an important
lobbying beside the Congress (Normand 2016). Inspired by methodologies used in
medicine (controlled randomized trials, meta-analyses, systematic reviews of
research literature), experiments became a standard for the No Child Left Behind
policies (2001) while its principles were resumed by International Organizations
and exported in Europe. Evidence-Based Education have been since a reference for
policy-making but also New Public Management (Wells 2007). The postulate of
developing educational research and practices on “what works” entailed the cre-
ation of specialized agencies and international consortiums, such as the Campbell
International Collaboration, to produce an influent expertise for policy-makers and
putting pressure on researchers and practitioners (Lingard 2013; Trimmer 2016).
Controlled randomized trials, largely advocated by economists in education, are
today regarded as the “golden rule” for the evaluation of social policies, including
education, and for the care of people qualified “at risk”. Controlled experiments and
classifications in target-groups became the two pillars of the neo-liberal State’s new
modes of social intervention which renounced progressively to universalistic mech-
anisms of allocation in making individuals accountable for their own behaviours
through New Public Management techniques (Cribb and Gewirtz 2012).
354 R. Normand
16.4.1 L
ocal Policies, Management of Efficiency
and Standardization
Above, we have already shown that in the USA, from 1880s to 1930s, new admin-
istrators and policy-makers shared a common expertise and belief in managerial
effectiveness thinking that science, based on the systematic collection of data,
would be able to create a new educative local and political order (Tyack 1974; Tyack
and Hansot 1982). The time of the 3 R (Writing, Reading, Arithmetic) was achieved.
All students, according to their innate talents, would be able to acquire standardized
knowledge for their success in public education. Administrators wished to promote
a new policy based on transparent standards, stratified and hierarchical school orga-
nizations, objective criteria to value individual skills. The politics of standardization
on behalf of efficiency had to be underpinned by academic research and methods
coming from the industrial world.
At that time, the US education debate was split between the Ancients and the
Moderns (Cremin 1964). On one side, the generation of Horace Mann and the par-
tisans of the Common School wanted education policy to consolidate the school
system on a moral basis in emphasizing civic principles, communitarian consensus
and local democracy. On the other side, professionals of management, qualified
later as “progressive administrators” or “educative trust”, thought that education
policy could be regulated by instruments of scientific progress and expertise guided
by the production of standards. They expected “getting out politics from schools” in
16 The Politics of Metrics in Education: A Contribution to the History of the Present 355
Even if the movement for efficiency disappeared with the Second World War, the
USA sought to maintain their quest for standards. Ralph Tyler, who was one of the
psychologists converting IQ tests in knowledge and skills tests was at the root of an
attempt of standardization and comparison of student knowledge during the 1960s
(Finder 2004). The Kennedy-Johnson administration asked him to develop metrics
on poverty in education. From 1964 to 1968, the ECAPE project (Exploratory
Committee on Assessing the Progress of Education) gathered congress members,
interest groups (notably Carnegie and Ford Foundations), representatives of US
356 R. Normand
States to design and develop the first federal assessment policy based on standards
in school curricula (Lehmann 2004). Tests had to cover reading, English, mathe-
matics and sciences, to diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the US education
system. In fact, policy-makers were worried by the decline of standards in high
schools after the launching of the Soviet Sputnik. It was urgent to train gifted sci-
entists and engineers and to be more rigorous and demanding for curricula in sci-
ences and mathematics. In 1968, the provisory committed became the NAEP
(National Assessment of Educational Progress) and the first assessments of stu-
dents was launched.
But there was pressure from the States to limit the extent of federal policy and
the use of data was restricted as well as the follow-up of student progress. It is only
after the publication of the report A Nation at Risk (1983) that the federal govern-
ment paid attention again to the NAEP which was not producing any comparison
between states. Its political and technical structure was completely revised and the
US congress appointed a committee (the NAGB: National Assessment Governing
Board) to develop standards on school achievement, to design tests, to publish
scores and to ensure their dissemination at federal level. Since, NAEP assessments
has become the benchmarking policy of US students’ achievement particularly after
the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) (Hursh 2007). The NAGB benefited from the
expertise of the Education Testing Service, an agency specialized in the design of
tests, created at its beginning by the US Navy to redefine the SAT (the test of
entrance for prestigious US colleges) (Lehman 2001).
During the 1980s, while US political pressure on OECD was enhanced to
develop and extend international surveys, the NAEP served as a reference for revis-
ing the first IEA surveys on mathematics. The Assessment of Mathematics and
Sciences (IAEP) reused the NAEP items whereas the Education Testing Service
imposed progressively its expertise for designing the PISA project. The survey was
achieved during three cycles in 2000, 2003 and 2006 aiming to measure student
skills at age 15 in reading, mathematics, and sciences. While PISA was resuming
the methodological components of the NAEP, the IEA, and the ETS created a con-
sortium (the IERI or IEA-ETS Research Institute) to develop research and analyses
from international surveys, to train researchers and experts in these issues, and to
disseminate standards worldwide. This policy of standards is today disaggregated at
school level, with the survey PISA for Schools, and data serve to recommend best
practices to potentially failing schools or to those who want to reach a global rank
(Lewis 2017).
16.5 Conclusion
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Chapter 17
An Anthropological Approach
to Education Policy as a Practice of Power:
Concepts and Methods
Since the introduction to our 2001 edited volume, Policy as Practice: Toward a
Comparative Sociocultural Analysis of Education Policy (Sutton and Levinson
2001), we have continued to sketch the foundational postulates of a critical anthro-
pological approach to the study of education policy. In 2009, we expanded and
deepened many of the points from that introduction, more systematically introduc-
ing and defining theoretical terms, and providing a bit of their intellectual genealogy
(Levinson et al. 2009). We also discussed certain methodological considerations
that accompanied the theoretical approach, and we argued for a type of engaged
educational anthropology that goes beyond the mere “study” of education policy to
its democratization and transformation. Here we provide an updated synopsis of our
approach.
Certainly, our approach bears many resemblances to a host of qualitative
approaches to analyzing education policy that have emerged in recent years. Such
approaches are all generally characterized by fine-grained accounts of how educa-
tion policy gets shaped by educational authorities and then interpreted and imple-
mented, often in unintended ways, by a myriad of actors and institutions. We align
ourselves with a specifically critical take on policy as a practice of power and a tool
of governing that entails both domination and resistance (Levinson et al. 2011). Our
approach is arguably distinctive in the emphasis we place on three particular ele-
ments, which we shall describe in turn: (1) the historical, holistic, and cross-cultural
insights that an anthropological lens brings to our understanding of policy as a prac-
tice of power; (2) the centrality of a non-dualistic and agentic conception of appro-
priation in social practice, and (3), an emphasis on social scientific knowledge
produced democratically—as much for various civic publics as for scholarly com-
munities, in addition to those we call “authorized” policymakers.
Arguably more than any other field, anthropology demands that we understand any
contemporary social phenomenon in the context of history and the illuminating
prism of cross-cultural diversity. What this means practically for our case here is
that we must constantly examine and decenter our common assumptions about what
“policy” is or does. Policy has only entered the English vernacular within the last
100 years or so, yet it is now invoked across a wide array of social and political
contexts, and it has developed numerous variants and cognates in other world lan-
guages. So the first step is to realize that policy as both an English word and (post)
modern tool of governance has a particular history and a particular cultural location.
We can trace its origins most broadly to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational
social engineering, and over the course of the twentieth century to an increasingly
technocratic rendering of liberal democratic governance; we can also trace its spread
more recently through other languages and societies, both of the ethno-national and
popular kind, where it often acquires new usages and inflections. Indeed, it was only
when Levinson’s young daughters used the term “policy” to describe the rules they
had created for an invented walking game, “Don’t Step on the Sidewalk Cracks,”
that the full scope of its use became apparent.
So what is this thing we call policy, which gets promulgated and negotiated
amongst supranational organizations, nation-state provinces, grade-school play-
groups, and seemingly everything in between? What are its common traits? We
think it best to define policy as a complex, ongoing social practice of normative
discursive cultural production constituted by diverse actors across diverse contexts.
The resulting normative cultural discourse has positive and negative sanctions, that
is, a set of organizing principles about how things should or must be done, with cor-
responding inducements or punishments. Such a discourse may or may not be for-
malized and codified (it could be stated or unstated, explicit or implicit, de jure or
de facto). In every case, though, it crucially presupposes a view of how things
“are”—a model of the world that is being organized, as it were—and how they
“should be.” In order to solve practical and existential problems, policy thus defines
reality, organizes behavior, and allocates resources accordingly.
The anthropological lens insists on policy being a kind of link between the dis-
cursive practices comprising larger-scale structures of law and governance and the
discursive practices of normative organizing and control in any local-level site or
community. Policy, then, lives in the liminal space between cultural norms and
laws; it is more actively codified perhaps than norms, less binding and coercive than
laws. Importantly, policy organizes social settings whose actors may have quite dif-
ferent levels of awareness or agreement about how they are being organized. The
adult who makes a living teaching second grade and the seven-year-old in her
17 An Anthropological Approach to Education Policy as a Practice of Power… 365
s econd grade class may not understand the world all that similarly, nor agree on
what is supposed to happen in the social environment they share, but they are both
nonetheless organized by policy.
Important work in the fields of political and legal anthropology can clarify our
approach here. Indeed, what we’ve just described as the liminal space where norms
are transformed or codified has been the focus of the field of legal anthropology, and
its evolving concept of legal pluralism. The concept of legal pluralism takes the con-
nections between multiple legal systems seriously by focusing on the dialectical
relationship between state systems of legal order and other normative social orders,
usually at the tribal or community level. Sally Falk Moore (1973) describes how
laws or policies operate in a semi-autonomous social field which
…can generate rules and customs internally, but that…is also vulnerable to rules and deci-
sions and other forces emanating from the larger world by which it is surrounded. The
semi-autonomous social field has rule-making capacities, and the means to induce or coerce
compliance; but it is simultaneously set in a larger social matrix which can, and does, affect
and invade it, sometimes at its own instance. (p. 720)
Moore’s work speaks to the multi-locality of the practice of policy, and echoes
our emphasis on policy as a practice of power as well as a vehicle for potential
resistance. Her work calls our attention to both the larger dynamics, created by
state-enforceable law, that create and organize social life, and the smaller dynam-
ics—the uncodified orders and scripts or the implicit rules for engagement in a
particular social context—operating in between larger social forces. She reminds us
that these ordering principles, large and small, are interconnected and cannot be
separated in our efforts to understand how law and policy organize social life. Even
when policy actors are appropriating policy, acting in informal spaces, and resisting
the coercive power of more official forms of policy, they do so within the larger
social matrix.
of it. Appropriation is a concept that has a complex history. It has been developed
and used in the work of Marxist phenomenologist Agnes Heller, cultural studies of
the media, Bakhtinian discourse analysis, legal scholarship on intellectual property
rights, and so forth. Across these various traditions, appropriation denotes how the
individual or the group reshapes and resignifies in practice some previously existing
cultural artifact. Appropriation thus refers to the way that creative agents interpret
and “take in” elements of policy, thereby incorporating these discursive resources
into their own schemes of interest, motivation, and action, their own “figured
worlds” (Holland et al. 1998).
The study of policy appropriation has tended to highlight later moments of the
policy process, when the authorized text or “policy signal” circulates, by various
means, across the various institutional contexts to which it applies. Admittedly, our
earlier work has been read as suggesting that there is an originating policy forma-
tion process, with appropriation only taking place during later stages of an imple-
mentation cycle (Nielsen 2011). However, we wish to emphasize that appropriation,
like negotiation, takes place during processes of authorized policy formation as
well. We insist that authorized policymakers are appropriating discourses and narra-
tives through their own practice of power. Appropriation thus should not only be
used to characterize the actions of the so-called implementers of a policy that has
been formed officially. Rather, appropriation is always part of the practice of power
in authorized policy formation, too. It may be that authorized policymakers are freer
to selectively adapt, borrow, invent, dissimulate, or otherwise manipulate their pol-
icy ideas, but they are appropriating them from somewhere, not nowhere.1 As we
say, it’s practice all the way down, up, and through the social world. It’s also resig-
nification all the way down, up, and through.
The concept of appropriation is vitally linked with a broader conception of social
and cultural practice that in recent years has come to invigorate the human sciences.
We see two primary streams of work comprising such “practice theory.” On the one
hand, sociological and anthropological theorists such as Giddens (1979, 1984,
1991), Bourdieu (1977, 1990a, b), Connell (1983, 1987), and Ortner (2006) have
developed conceptions of practice to resolve perennial antinomies between struc-
ture and agency, or society and the individual. In their accounts, social practice is
the “site” or “moment” where structure and agency, individual and society, mutually
constitute one another. Meanwhile, out of psychology, work on “situated cognition”
and “activity theory” has tried to resolve similar antinomies between “mind” and
society, or cognition and environment. Influenced by the Russian sociohistorical
tradition, especially represented by Lev Vygotsky, theorists such as James Wertsch
(1991), Michael Cole (1996), and Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) have artic-
ulated powerful new models of human thinking and learning that account fully for
the inherent and emergent social properties of mind. Together these approaches
serve to remind us that education policy is simultaneously “inside and outside” of
1
See, for instance, the burgeoning literature on global policy borrowing and the “global education
industry” (Steiner-Khamsi 2004; Verger et al. 2016).
368 B. A. Levinson et al.
the educators and students who enact it. As participants in an educational system,
we can often more easily identify the external signs of policy than those deeply
internalized, so our work may need to tack back and forth between visible policy
signals and the way such signals get organized as implicit cultural knowledge and
then manifest in behavior. Moreover, structures of power, like policy, are not merely
imposed from without but often subtly instantiated in everyday belief and practice
(Levinson et al. 2011).
By the same token, we cannot say in each instance that policy appropriation by
non-authorized actors recursively links back to, or influences, authorized policy for-
mation. Some critics of our work have said that our emphasis on the recursive nature
of social practice, and how unauthorized actors form their own localized policies in
their own spheres of action, runs the risk of “flattening” our understanding of the
full policy process and overstating the power of unauthorized actors to “make pol-
icy.” To be sure, we need to keep in mind the distinction between official, authorized
policy formation (conducted by elected and appointed officials, bureaucrats, etc.)
and the unofficial practices of unauthorized actors, like teachers. We can’t remain
innocent of the very real power that authorized policymakers have, and we can’t
wax too optimistic about the ability of non-authorized actors to influence conse-
quentially the ongoing formation of official policy. These are empirical questions
and matters, to be investigated through research.
Indeed, recent work in the field shows quite trenchantly how even the notion of
who is authorized, or in what authorization consists, is often deeply contested
(Lashaw 2018; Sandler 2018). The social dynamics of policy authorization cannot
be taken for granted, or simply ascribed to dominant state and corporate actors.
Moreover, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory draws our attention increasingly
to the role of nonhuman and even nonliving “actors” in the “emergence” of policy
(Koyama 2018). Until now, our analytic move has been to theorize the agency of
non-authorized actors, to recognize where such agency has progressive conse-
quences, and to explore the conditions that enable interaction between authorized
and non-authorized policymakers such that authorized policy that has been ill-
conceived or undemocratically imposed can be effectively contested or changed.
Yet this more recent work challenges us to keep expanding our understanding of
agency, and to stay attuned to the complications of power, especially in collabora-
tive, action-oriented policy studies.
2
HB, or “House Bill” 1495 (2005) is commonly referred to in Washington State as “The Tribal
History and Culture Bill” and can be accessed here: http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/bien-
nium/2005-06/Pdf/Bills/House%20Passed%20Legislature/1495-S.PL.pdf5.
370 B. A. Levinson et al.
in the passage and implementation of H.B. 1495 fit within the ideological and hege-
monic structure of the social world, and how that impacts the potential for success
of the policy in terms of its goals to foster student success, educate the public, and
facilitate government to government relations.
Much of the logic from the state policy apparatus focused on the need to main-
tain local control over curriculum at the district and school level, and the risk to the
integrity of the policy lexicon in terms of representation of one minority group in
the state’s required curricular content. The rationale for changing the policy from a
mandate to an “encouragement,” in public testimony and interviews with policy
actors, was that the legislature did not possess the authority to change HS gradua-
tion requirements, because Washington is a local control state. Policy makers at the
State Board of Education were concerned that granting this request would “pave the
way” for additional requests of this kind from every minority group in the state.
That is, they viewed the tribal reform initiative primarily through a liberal multicul-
tural framework, and secondarily through a framework recognizing the political
sovereignty of tribal nations (see Table 17.1). Senator McAuliffe, the chair of the
Senate Education Committee, responded to this testimony by explaining why the
language was changed from mandate to encouragement. This explanation is the
only one that is offered throughout the discussion of the bill:
The reason we changed Section 3 and have the State Board of Education considering tribal
history and culture in the graduation requirements is because the State Board of Education
is responsible for graduation requirements, so rather than have the legislature dictate what
would be required it is the State Board of Education’s responsibility, so we have given it to
them to make due requirements… and that’s their job…So, it really didn’t weaken it, it just
sent it to the right body. [Public Testimony, Senate Education Committee, March 25, 2005]
This moment in the process of the evolution of the legislation is pivotal because
McAuliffe’s perspective points to the official policy reasoning behind the movement
from mandate to encouragement; it also points to the bureaucratic vision that this
legislative body has about how legislative authority should be used in this case.
Senator McAuliffe, here, indicates that this is really the best and only option that
they, the authorized policy makers have, to achieve the intentions of the bill, because
this falls under the authority of the State Board of Education.
The contrasting framework was promoted by advocates for HB 1495, and empha-
sized, among other things, the inherent sovereignty of the tribes, and the need for
relationship building between tribes and state agencies and school districts (see
Table 17.1). This perspective is illustrated in the following quote from Representative
McCoy, the bill’s sponsor, who introduced the policy’s intention to the House
Education Committee during a pre-legislative working group:
There are 29 sovereign Indian nations within the state of Washington; each one has a
unique and powerful history to bring to the state of Washington, and you have heard me say
over and over again if it wasn’t for the Stevens treaties this state would have a different
complexion…
And we have identified a need, the need to have this history and culture taught in the
schools not only to bring forward our history into the school system but also to bring for-
ward the cultural diversity that we have been talking about all day into the school
systems…
Because we realize you are not going anywhere, and we are not going anywhere, and it
is going to take everybody in the whole community to be successful and that’s what we are
here about…The tribal leaders will have some specific ideas about how to improve the
relationship between the legislature and the tribes…Thank you. [House Education
Committee Work session, December 1, 2004]
For more on settler colonial theory, see these recent books: (Veracini 2010; Wolfe 1999).
3
372 B. A. Levinson et al.
17.4 B
eyond Provocation: Some Final Notes on Methodology
and a Democratic Ethics
Until now, much of what we have argued would hold true across many different
types and domains of policy: education, but also health, economic, environmental,
and so forth. But there is something about education that makes it singularly fraught
as a field of human endeavor. Education is universally practiced and deeply inti-
mate. It encompasses the production and transmission of cultural knowledge across
generations, and it serves as the crucible by which human beings learn to make their
way in the world, first and foremost in the company of kin. Everyone educates, but
only some become professional educators, and therein lays the rub. The profession-
alization of education and the historical rise of schooling as a political tool of the
state bring large-scale structural imperatives into the bosom of the family, so to
speak. Official state education policy attempts to reach into and organize the family/
community and its enculturation of the self. It often does so in pursuit of national
“unity” or “security” or “development,” not to mention the specific interests of dom-
inant groups in reproducing the status quo. To speak, then, of democratizing educa-
tion policy is to envision the ways that ordinary people across a society’s structured
inequalities can gain a greater measure of control over their children’s education
and challenge insidious forms of assimilation or social reproduction.
Yet even as we offer such a formulation, we must be wary of our penchant for
romanticized localism. Just as the state does not always reproduce inequality, local
groups do not always liberate themselves or a broader public. Parents and communi-
ties, alas, do not always act in their own children’s best interests (Lashaw 2018). An
obstinate emphasis on local control or the superiority of local cultural knowledge
can lead to the dismissal of valuable, even crucial forms of knowledge offered by
schools. There is, after all, good reason for the professionalization of schoolteach-
ers. Thus, education policy democratization goes both ways. Yes, it stands for the
promise of empowering parents and other local actors—including teachers them-
selves, who are rarely consulted—to have a much greater voice in state-level policy
formation. But it also means that professional educators must be willing to dialogue
with children and parents and community leaders, to temper their assertion of pro-
fessional privilege with a dose of humility. And it also means that students and their
parents must commit to the public good and measure their own particular interests
against that yardstick.
We would like to use the distinguished anthropologist Michael Herzfeld as a bit
of a foil here to argue for an anthropology of education policy that regularly goes
beyond critique and provocation. In the preface to his 2001 book, Anthropology:
Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society, Herzfeld says that he offers a model for
a “critical engagement with the world” (p. x). Such engagement, he says, may take
many forms, from critique of policy or professional practice, to “ethnographically
oriented phenomenology” (p. x). Most tellingly, Herzfeld argues that anthropology
is a “provocation, not a prescription: that is the kind of teaching that anthropology
offers, which is why it is so disapproved by normativists of all stripes—official
17 An Anthropological Approach to Education Policy as a Practice of Power… 373
corporate power (Graeber 2009; Kirsch 2014) and the marketization of public
resources (Brown 2005; Giroux 2015), critical policy appropriation can bolster the
agency of local groups and institutions struggling to restore or expand public power.
In our own field of educational anthropology, there are far too many promising
examples of such work to adequately cite. The pioneering work done by Norma
González and her collaborators on “funds of knowledge” (Gonzalez et al. 2011) has
acted to democratize the prospects for Mexican American student empowerment in
Arizona and elsewhere. The deficit perspective informing most school curriculum
policy is challenged by the demonstration of rich student and familial funds of
knowledge. Angela Valenzuela’s work in the Texas legislature (Lopez et al. 2011)
shows how we can intervene with specific ethnographic knowledge to alter impor-
tant policy debates and reconfigure the calculus of educational resource distribu-
tion; it also shows how we can undertake action-oriented ethnography to better
understand and change the limits of democratic representation in such policymak-
ing bodies. In a different sphere, pioneers in participatory action research with
youth (Ginwright et al. 2006) show how policy can be questioned, destabilized, and
in some cases changed democratically through sustained and passionate inquiry.
Finally, in Levinson’s work on Mexican secondary reform, his talks and writings
across various educational constituencies in that country have attempted to foster
greater input and consideration of teachers’, parents’, and students’ voices in the
policy process (Levinson 2007, 2008; Levinson et al. 2013). Levinson thereby
strives to insert his research findings into the struggle between a neoliberal project
of so-called accountability and standardization and a long-lived popular project for
democratization from below.
We wish to expand the space of the public—and speak to that public, not just to
policy elites. Like some authors (Walters 2000), we believe it is crucial to question
the privileged status of scientific or expert views and to reinvigorate public involve-
ment in the policy process. The work of critical ethnographers (Carspecken 1995;
Madison 2011) is similarly conscious of power and democracy, and in effect, we
also wish to redefine the goals of interpretive research—away from a strictly aca-
demic practice of theory development, or an academic practice of “influencing”
authorized policy, and toward engagement with the aims of democratic social move-
ments (Appadurai 2000). Such scholarship for popular democracy may well have as
one of its goals the development of a cultural critique, theorizing the way that “con-
trolling processes” (Nader 1995) limit and blunt the full possibilities for democratic
participation. Yet an anthropology of education policy may also contribute knowl-
edge to alternative democratic projects, to educational efforts aimed at creating plu-
ral “counterpublics” for a democratic renaissance (Benhabib 1996; Fraser 1989).
We also relate our approach to the earlier discourse, originally introduced by
Laura Nader (1969) about studying “up” the power structure versus studying down.
A policy as practice approach takes seriously the need for critical work that “studies
up” and uncovers the strategies and mechanisms at work in elite, authorized policy
formation processes. Such knowledge can then be circulated to democratic actors
situated in other social domains, and in social movements, to foster greater account-
ability and strategic mobilization. Yet equally important is work that “studies down”
17 An Anthropological Approach to Education Policy as a Practice of Power… 375
4
See for instance the recent study by Remstad Hook on how global human rights discourses for
educational transformation get appropriated and enacted from international organizations all the
way through national, regional, and school-level contexts in Peru (Hook 2018).
5
This can take the form of social network analysis or approaches like Stephen Ball’s to networked
policy (Ball 2012).
376 B. A. Levinson et al.
f ullness of the policy process. When possible, the researcher ought to be present at
the early stages of policy formation to observe the relations and interests that
emerge; if this is not possible, the practice of policy formation can be reconstructed
through qualitative interviewing. Then, depending on the policy in question, the
research design should include at least a 3–4 years investigation of the “life” of the
policy as it gets implemented across various sites. Such a minimal time frame would
enable better understanding of the processual aspects, the unanticipated twists and
turns, of policy appropriation; it would bring into view the possible recursive aspects
of policy appropriation, which may eventuate in modifications to the authorized
policies themselves (i.e., as a form of “policy learning”); and it would foster the
forging of deep relationships between the researcher and the subjects of policy, to
facilitate the researcher’s role as mediator and translator in policy democratization.
Taken as a whole, such a research agenda can move us beyond provocation and
critique. Methodological innovation, long-term commitment, and knowledge for
advocacy and democratic policy (re)formation: these are crucial ingredients in any
recipe for progressive education reform.
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Margaret Sutton is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and an
Adjunct Professor of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. An anthropologist and
comparative educator, Sutton has worked extensively in the field of education and development,
and has written about social scientific knowledge in post-colonial settings, gender and education,
and curricular practices in international and global education. Her current work focuses on teacher
education and higher education development in Indonesia.
17 An Anthropological Approach to Education Policy as a Practice of Power… 379
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Chapter 18
Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting”
in Educational Policy
Thomas S. Popkewitz and Sverker Lindblad
In an important book about numbers and social affairs, Theodore Porter (1995)
begins by asking: “How are we to account for the prestige and power of quantitative
methods in the modern world? How is it that what was used for studying stars, mol-
ecules and cells would have attraction for human societies?” To consider these ques-
tions, Porter continues that only a small proportion of numbers or quantitative
expressions have any pretence of describing laws of nature or “even of providing
complete and accurate descriptions of the eternal world” (Porter 1995: viii–ix).
Numbers, he argues, are parts of systems of communication whose technologies
create distances from phenomena by appearing to summarize complex events and
transactions. The objectivity of numbers appears as mechanical, following a priori
rules that project fairness and impartiality, numbers are seen as excluding judgment
and mitigating subjectivity.
The importance of numbers to contemporary societies is easy to demonstrate,
ironically, by citing numbers. In the post World War Two years, American educa-
tional research iterated the hopes and fears of society through schools through sta-
tistics. The statistical narratives spoke of the breakdown and possibilities of “the
demographic restructuring of the American metropolis, technological and commer-
cial expansions” and the “economic agreements about how segregation wasted the
potential utility of Black children” (Hartman 2008: 158). The nationally funded
Wisconsin Center for Research & Development’s reports at that time, for example,
expressed national commitments to equality through statistics that objectified
T. S. Popkewitz (*)
Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Madison, WI, USA
e-mail: thomas.popkewitz@wisc.edu
S. Lindblad
Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg,
Gothenburg, Sweden
e-mail: sverker.lindblad@ped.gu.se
p articular populations as different. The research was to actualize future hopes, opti-
mistically illustrated in the already increased high school graduates in which 75%
of pupils entering the fifth grade in the fall of 1964 graduated from high school in
1972 and 23% of the high school graduates were expected to complete college
(Klausmeier 1977: 3–4). With the hope was the fear that “one out of four students
has a significant reading deficiency, half of our unemployed youth are functionally
illiterate, and approximately 2.5% of our nation’s youth dropout.”1
Contemporary policy research, as well, deploy statistics as particular rules and
standards for ordering problems, and as criteria for making judgments based on the
numbers in forming the possibilities of educational change. When national and
international statistics are examined, certain indicators of “at-risk” children are used
to recognize those populations to be included. United Kingdom’s statistics, for
example, use the category “at-risk” to differentiate populational groups that are
classified as ethnic minority children, a “high risk” category “since 16% of perma-
nently excluded children belong to it, with nearly half of the high risk category
being African-Caribbean, even though they make up only 1% of the population”
(Alexiadou et al. 2001). Embodied in the statistics of “at-risk” children are different
categories of numbers that overlap educational, cultural, social, economic, and gen-
dered discourses: truancy, school exclusion and crime, and students with special
educational needs defined through a populational discourse of African-Caribbean
children and children in childcare.
The statistics that appear in the interrelation of science and policy are given
plausibility and intelligibility through overlapping and multiple historical practices
that are not merely about the logic of the numbers. In this chapter, we focus on the
system of reason in which statistical grouping of people into populations as a field
of intervention and social planning. Our argument is that the “thought” of popula-
tions in educational policy and change entails double gestures and a paradox: the
practices to include populations and produce equity doubles back on itself as pro-
cesses of abjection that produce exclusion (Popkewitz 2019; also, Lindblad
et al. 2018).
We proceed in the following way. The first section considers modern statistical
reporting as an element of governing modern social life. That governing is through
numbers drawn into social affairs as “actors” for policy and change. The second
section pursues this argument by examining the inscription of social and cultural
principles in numbers that are not merely descriptive but affective in directing atten-
tion to change as a process of actualizing what people and society are to become.
The third section focuses on the work of numbers to order action that entails making
kinds of people.
Our approach is diagnostic and historical: to ask historically how numbers are
given plausibility and considered “reasonable” as a way of thinking about policy
and research, and the limits of such thought in questions about social inclusion and
exclusion. Arguing in such a manner provides a mode of studying educational
questions other than those found in strategies of empiricism (what works!) and the
dialectics of critical theories of education. Our argument about educational statistics
is not about its “goodness/badness,” usefulness, bias; nor it is to censure or condemn
numbers or statistics used in education. It is to place those practices within a broader
cultural and political context of rules and standards inscribed in reforms as the polit-
ical of education; and that political is how the reason of statistics enters into research
and policy as practices of normalizing, dividing, and excluding.
18.1 S
tatistics as Cultural Practices: Political Arithmetic
and the Taming Chance
Statistics joins with the idea of the welfare state in the governing of the modern
nation. Social histories of statistics locate it in the formation of the modern German,
French, and British state. German theorists’ concerns with the science of police in
the eighteenth century were about regulating and keeping order.2 Statistik, the
There are informative histories of the discipline of statistics for the interested reader. See, for
2
384 T. S. Popkewitz and S. Lindblad
German term, was historically a method of policing. It was to calculate the admin-
istration of the population to secure the ends of wealth, public order, virtue, and
happiness. Statistics, for example, ordered populations to control for epidemics and
to regulate tax collections. By the nineteenth century, the French word statistique
and the British statistics, words signifying the arithmetic of the state, were to coor-
dinate the relation of human needs to state interventions. State administrators, for
example, spoke of social welfare in terms of biological issues—such as reproduc-
tion, disease, and education (human “nature,” individual development, growth, and
evolution).
Statistics as a tool of social intervention embodied a particular system of reason
that is not merely that of the numbers themselves. It was linked with science where
truth was tied to modes of conceptualizing and analyzing a rational order to daily
life and the possibilities of human intervention and change (see, e.g., Shapin 1994;
Bledstein 1976). By the nineteenth century, state planning for progress entailed
intervention in social life to enable the action (agency) of the individual to plan
one’s life for future happiness, the latter as a central political theme of the republic
and democracy. Statistical knowledge made it possible to conceive of economy and
society as modes of intervention.
When people spoke about police, Foucault (1979) argues, they spoke about the
specific techniques by which a government in the framework of the state was able
to govern so that individuals would be “productive” citizens. Statistics embodied
probability theories about populations as a technology that composes people. The
creating of populations was a way to think about and plan in order to rectify “harm-
ful” social and economic conditions as well as to enable the individual to become a
self-governing citizen capable of acting with freedom and liberty (Hacking 1990;
Rose 1999).
Populational characteristics function as associations between statistical groups
of people and the attributes of particular children, even though, strictly speaking,
statistical predictions have no bearing (or predictive power) on individuals. The War
on Poverty in post-War Two United States, for example, entailed the invention of the
category of poverty as a schema for social administration and intervention. Poverty
existed prior to that, but it was not classified and tabulated as a device of state policy
and research to plan for intervention with specified populations for moral and eco-
nomic purposes. Poverty was conceptualized in instrumental and empirical terms
related to statistical aggregates from which specific characteristics could be ascribed
to the person and according to which his or her growth and development could be
monitored and supervised.
The construction of populations is a social technology for changing of social
conditions and, while not often considered, changing people (Castel 1991; Hacking
1990, 1991; In education, Popkewitz 1991). Defining how people “fit into” a group
is more than just a way to classify. Populational distinctions in which probability
example, Porter (1995); Desrosières (1998); Hacking (1990); Stigler (1986); and Alonso and Starr
(1987). See also Bowker and Star (1999), Hanson (1993), and Gould (1981).
18 Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting” in Educational Policy 385
theories are assigned to categories about people overlap with the politics and culture
of daily life. From the various characteristics of child development related to age
and school grade to social characteristics of children (urban, at-risk, disadvantaged,
gifted, adolescent, achievement), contemporary schooling is ordered through statis-
tically derived categories of populations and is heightened, for example, through
current American policy discussions of high stakes testing and of international com-
parisons of student academic performance in Swedish policy and research.
Populational reasoning is no longer deployed solely as state or administrative
reasoning, but also as the policy makers “reason” about the quality of the nation,
and teacher’s reason about how to identify instruction for children thought of
through population categories, such as immigrants, ethnic or minority children
(Popkewitz 2017a, b). The statistical categories have a materiality, giving direction
to what constitutes the problem, the causes, and the solutions for rectifying social
issues. The principles order and structure what matters in school planning, and for
individual to think and act about what teachers are to recognize for organizing
instruction and programs for remediation of targeted populations; books are written
about groups classified as ethnic populations; re-search is organized through con-
cepts and theories of cultural and social patterns of family child-rearing practices
among those populations. Categories of school leaver or dropout, minority, or spe-
cial education, important categories deployed to provide for social inclusion, are
administrative categories that presuppose the qualities and characteristics of who
the child is and also the potentialities that educational programs are to actualize.
In our own studies, the inscription of populational reasoning is prominent in
international comparisons by means of large-scale assessments (see, e.g., Lindblad
et al. 2018). During the last decades, this kind of research has expanded radically
and it is often used in policy-making in order to identify and find solutions to edu-
cational crises; for example, the results on PISA studies in Germany and Sweden
have played an important role in policy and research. Similarly, there is an expan-
sion in research publications based on dealing with outcomes of such international
comparisons. Lindblad et al. (2015) identified more than 11,000 publications on this
topic during the period of 2003–2014. Populational reasoning has played a vital role
in determining differences in achievement defined between taxonomic groups that
serve to delineate a nation’s educational system—in terms of gender, social, or geo-
graphic origin. The differences are compared to social, institutional, and manage-
ment qualities of school systems to analyze the reason for such gaps in education,
culture, or society, as well as in relation to individual characteristics and career
directions.
To think through populational reasoning is to engage in a particular conscious-
ness that render domains as representable and applicable for calculation, delibera-
tion, and administration. Statistical knowledge are inscription devices for governing
conduct through processes of distancing and re-attach its knowledge to particular
national spaces and cultural conditions as sets of rules and standards. The classifica-
tions and measurements that accompany the concepts like society and individuals in
the nineteenth century, for example, embodied the logic for interpreting distant
events that works back into everyday life and human experience. Statistics provided
386 T. S. Popkewitz and S. Lindblad
new ways to think about changing conditions through the abstractions of society,
economy, and culture. The new probability theories enabled the codification and
standardization of dispersed phenomena under a singular umbrella of population’s
societal attributes and economics. People were classified within populations to
identify or rectify “harmful” social and economic conditions as well as for policing
and organizing the security of populations.
managed was a strategy to make judgments outside of the subjective. The faith in
numbers in social affairs makes possible such notions as transparency3 through
which the performances and outcomes of schools, businesses, and government
become visible through graphs and flowcharts presented as statistical factors to
measure change.
The invention of modern political polling, for example, was a response to mass
government during the 1930s in the Unites States, where representative government
replaced the town hall meeting and there was a need to symbolically reassert agency
in the new contexts of governing (Merelman 1976; in relation to methods of science
in education, Popkewitz 1981). Varela (2000) argues that the formation of individ-
ual personalities, individual subjects, and the idea of society emerge at the precise
historical moment when the legitimacy of power was being based on the idea of a
general “will.” The individual in the eighteenth-century French philosophé, for
example, was bound to the “discovery of society” in a process of disengagement
from the religious representations. While the word “society” is used prior to the
enlightenment, it emerges to provide a way to think about collective human exis-
tence instituted as the essential domain of human practices. Prior to the eighteenth
century, society was a notion about associations of people, and not about collective
“homes” and belonging. Ideas about progress, civilization, and pluralism are pos-
sible only with ideas of society as their implied reference (Baker 1994).
Three further comments are necessary. First, numbers have historically become
an actor in processes of change. Their mechanical objectivity enters into and
becomes part of the action system of planning, assessing, and making of policy.
Second, the inscription of numbers in the reason governing social life was not the
logical outcome of disciplinary knowledge; nor was it the result of an evolutionary
process from a single origin. Prior to the nineteenth century, as we stated earlier,
statistics were concerned with individual phenomena. It was not until discoveries in
physics and the needs of statecraft to monitor large groups for taxes and disease that
statistical knowledge emerged through probability theories about large groups
(Desrosières 1991).
Third, the inscription of statistics in research embodies utopic dreams. The mod-
els of change in OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA),
for example, hold a utopic promise of bringing into existence prosperity, happiness,
and well-being to societies and people. But these utopian dreams of administration
through numbers are continually fraught with multiple outcomes. For example, the
system of household taxes in France that existed into the twentieth century counted
the doors and windows in a dwelling. To counter this system, peasants redesigned
their dwellings with as few openings as possible, which had a long-term effect on
their health. Mono-cropped scientific forestry developed from about 1765 to 1800
to bring an administrative grid of straight rows of trees for more efficient growth;
such growth was stunted, however, by the second planting because the nutrients
produced with mixed growth were eliminated. And the rational planning of the city
in the nineteenth century into grid-like streets created a particular spatial order that
also produced abstract social relations produced by that order associated with
388 T. S. Popkewitz and S. Lindblad
18.2 N
umbers as Affect: The Agency of Numbers
as Testimonials of the Future
Numbers are affective. Affective is not merely the emotion evoked attachments that
connect us to what is said as “truthful” and reasonable (see, e.g., Ideland 2019;
Ahmed 2004). The numbers expressed in the ranking, charts, and comparisons that
are found in research reports and international assessments embody affective dimen-
sions. The complexities of the differences among nations and cultures disappear and
reappear as standardized and comparable descriptions of numbers that represent
singular, universal population of nations from which differences are calculated. The
numbers and comparative listings of nations function as a GPS system for national
school systems. People and governments can immediately locate themselves and
identify differences that engender feelings about what is but also might be. Mosaics
of numbers are assembled as truth bearing statements about the effective function-
ing of schools that appear as a unified abstraction of “nation” and its potentialities
(see, e.g., Popkewitz 2018).
The affect of numbers entails a double quality. They appear to visualize social
facts that are accessible to all citizens. In ranking of nations that organize the differ-
ences in OECD’s PISA, numbers seemed to make possible that even with differ-
ences, the pathways are possible to close the gaps and give all equal chance and
representation. For a closer look at one of several examples from our research
review on ILSA research (Lindblad et al. 2015), Liou (2014) states that interna-
tional large-scale assessments are used to represent national progress by means of
education formulated in terms of globalization and international competition.
Education not only plays an essential role in reducing people’s social and economic inequal-
ity, but is also the foundation of a country’s economic and social development… This fact
has lead to the globalization of competition in almost every facet of a country’s existence.
Developing highly qualified human power in the fields of science, technology, and mathe-
matics (STEM), is one the requirements to satisfy the rapid development of the global
economy… The results of such ILSA data are one of the most influential determinants in
making educational policies in many countries (Liou 2014: p 2009f)
The affect of numbers as visualized facts brought to change social affairs intro-
duced statistics and populations reasoning as necessary for equality and agency. The
Philosophes prior to the French Revolution in the eighteenth century thought that
unless there is equal system of measures, there could not be an equality in society.
In the nineteenth century, the purpose of objectivizing and standardizing through
numbers was to equalize processes and practices of new republican governments.
Numbers become attached to the very ideas of the enlightenment cosmopolitanism
to embody the hope of human reason and science finding perfectibility to the condi-
tion in which people live.
18 Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting” in Educational Policy 389
they are in danger. One such country is Sweden which is currently one of the best
economies and educated populations in Europe; yet the OECD’s PISA ranking con-
tinually is read by policy makers with fear that if actions are not taken in relation to
PISA results, the nation is in danger.3 For example, based on the OECD identifica-
tion of declining student performances and increasing school segregation in terms
of PISA statistics, the Swedish government asked the OECD for recommendations
on how to deal with these problems. This resulted in a number of measures imple-
mented by the Swedish government.4
The precautionary and pre-emptive programs are engendered, on the one hand,
as fears of the populations and, on the other hand, as to rescue and redeem as the
desires of the potentialities of “humanity” to actualize.
The diagram below is presented by the Swedish Agency for Education. It is
based on OECD PISA data from a sequence of data collections over time. The
Swedish Agency comments it like this:
The figure shows Sweden's relative (standardized) position in relation to the 33 OECD
countries that participated in all four of the PISA surveys since 2006 in reading comprehen-
sion, mathematics and science
The lines are based on Swedish students’ performances ranked in relation the
other OECD countries and are stated by the Agency for Education as well as the
Swedish Government to show a decline of education in Sweden from 2006 followed
by a progress based on the last measurement in 2015.
3
This is not to say that Swedish schools do not face strong challenges in relation to social changes,
such as the large populations brought into the country in the face of wars elsewhere, for example.
But these changes are not addressed through the models of PISA, in fact they are erased.
4
Parliamentary Bill 2017/18:182.
18 Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting” in Educational Policy 391
The “reason” embedded in statistics is the taming of chance and change (see, e.g.,
Hacking 1990). Statistical reasoning can be historically thought about as related to
the erosion of determinism in the nineteenth century. The history of modern statis-
tics is “the measurement of uncertainty” (Stigler 1986). The particular historical
virtue of statistical reporting is that diverse and social phenomena in flux are stabi-
lized to order the phenomena amenable for observation, calculation, and
administration.
The taming of chance is important to modern governing. The emergence of
democracy, the rise of organized capitalism, as well as social and philosophical
5
Staatenkunde, the systematic study of states, an early form of what was called comparative poli-
tics, appeared in municipal censuses in Nuremberg in 1449 (Alonso and Starr 1987, p. 13). The
English tradition of political arithmetic was the application of rational calculation to the under-
standing, exercise, and enhancement of state power. In the eighteenth century, it was to reverse the
growth of the state. Statistical societies in the nineteenth century were to gather objective facts,
mostly numerical, but also data that is today called “qualitative.”
392 T. S. Popkewitz and S. Lindblad
thought made change and uncertainty seems a precondition of life itself. The notion
of incessant change, for example, is built into the very idea of progress and the idea
of the republic. The future is built through the citizen whose participation is neces-
sary for the government. The ideas of liberty, freedom, and the agency of the citizen
are built on notions of the contingency of the present in the development of progress.
The contingency, however, continually embodies certainty that created boundar-
ies about human agency. The child studies of G. Stanley Hall and the connectionist
psychologies of Edward L. Thorndike at the turn of the twentieth century embodied
images and narratives about the child that was a normalized vision about who the
child should be. The universalizing of the child provided comparative principles to
reason about differences in the growth, development, and modes of thinking of
immigrant and racial populations (Popkewitz 2008). The probability theories
allowed the statistical studies in a continuum of difference from what was “natural”
for the child at any point in life.
Contemporary international measurements of student performance maintain the
relation of certainty and uncertainty in projecting agency, but with a different assem-
blage of principles about nature and process than those of the turn of the twentieth
century. We often do not think of the international assessments of student perfor-
mances as carrying particular notions of human agency and the paradoxes imposed
through the relation of certainty/uncertainty, but they do. That promise is related to
the notion of agency students, that is, having the knowledge, skills and “well-being”
for future participation, the competence as a global citizen (see, e.g., Popkewitz 2019).
As the international comparisons of student performance are examined more
closely, the statistical measures of OECD generate principles of a notion of human
agency bound with certainty that what is measured provide students with “knowl-
edge to real-life situations and be equipped for full participation in society” (OECD
2016a; also see OECD 2016b, c). The certainty and uncertainty are embodied in the
assessments ordered through the abstractions of the school as a system whose
desired qualities are called “international benchmarks” that establish the norm of
reference to the theory of effective schools. The benchmarks are what is to be
achieved for the successful future of the student and society.
We began the discussion by arguing that statistics embody cultural and social dis-
tinctions when deployed in policy-making and school research. In this section, we
further pursue how numbers circulate and are connected to give intelligibility to
policy and school reforms.
Statistics was important in turning populational categories embodied into biog-
raphies as kinds of people. Numbers were augmented with qualitative practices as a
script or narrative form of a biography from which to gage the child’s development
and growth. The representations in the US census after World War Two, for exam-
ple, created new biographies of people as populations for policy management that
18 Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting” in Educational Policy 393
did not exist previously. The category of Latino emerged, for example, to classify
people from, for example, Brazil, Haiti, Argentina, and Mexico as a single popula-
tion. Today, this category of statistical reporting works into social movements and
policy in education to define heterogeneous populations as homogeneous through
the system of reason applied.
The profiles and inventories of the kind of children as kinds of people are codi-
fied and standardized in international assessments. The statistical data is organized
to ask if students are ready for the technological-rich world (PISA, 2015) or the
risks and outcomes of social exclusion as insights from longitudinal data (Bynner
2000). The reports identify students who fail; instructional programs were devised
for remedial measures of children who fit these categories of “not passed subject”
and foreign background. Summaries, charts, graphs, and tables identify the charac-
teristics of youth to provide profiles of the child who did not fit the picture of the
successful student.
The kind of child profiled in such reports was then used to invent a plan for inter-
vention through curriculum designs and instructional processes to target groups
excluded categorically while simultaneously normalizing and individualizing the
categories and distinctions on particular children. In a study that we conducted on
educational governance and social exclusion in nine European countries, the dis-
tinctions of national and international statistics overlapped with principles gener-
ated to interpret experience as different layers of education—among governmental
ministry officials, educational system leaders, and teacher interviews. Swedish gov-
ernmental reports describing categories of educational non-performance of students
of “foreign background” or “newly arrived,” for example, circulated with “on-the-
ground” planning of reforms and organizing instructional programs.6
Numbers and categories enter into the cultural and political spaces of policy,
research, and programs to inscribe a comparative style of reasoning. More than
we like to think, the fabricated of human kinds as populations are normalizing
and dividing practices. We say not to suggest intent of policy or research, but to
draw attention to the mode of reasoning whose epistemic rules are comparative.7
The classifications of people are the mapping of cultural spaces about kinds of
people that form through distinctions and c lassification that differentiate individ-
6
Foreign background is an example of the many concepts that form a comparative concept that
establishes “deviancy” even when created as a moral/political obligation of a society to ensure
equity and justice. In one sense, as we will talk about later with the concept of minority, it is only
through certain assumptions about the normal “being” of the citizen/individual that the classifica-
tion of foreign born is applied.
7
This is not only a problem of educational theory. From Latour’s (1999) discussion of science to
Wallerstein (1991) and Wagner’s (2001) discussion of modern social theory, there is a continual
questioning of the ways in which modern social theory has divided phenomena—what Latour calls
the modernist settlement which has sealed off into incommensurable problem questions that can-
not be solved separately. Latour talks about the relation of human and nonhuman in science,
Wagner about the relation of certainty and uncertainty. Also, see Popkewitz (1998) as it relates to
the social epistemology of educational research.
394 T. S. Popkewitz and S. Lindblad
ual qualities and characteristics. The numbers perform in educational spaces to nor-
malize and pathologize differences.
The comparativeness is never merely about the numbers that relate purely to the
statistical magnitudes and equivalences. The work of statistics entails cultural prin-
ciples that are embedded in the categories and relations sought to describe how
school functions and what are thought of as its outcomes and correlations. The style
of reasoning about populations, for example, is not about numbers but formed
through cultural principles that are inscribed in the questions asked and the phenom-
ena of schooling and people made to appear under the gaze of statistical measures.
The categorizations, associations between groups and norms that organize perfor-
mances and differences among social and economic groups are to rectify inequities
and inequalities on behalf of these groups by means of different education mea-
sures. This style of reasoning is translated into educational policy discourses about
what to do in order to improve international ranking, to minimize educational defi-
cits, or to address results to matters of increased global competition.8
The making of kinds of people generated differences that embodied double ges-
tures. The fabrication of the youth as a particular kind of child, for example, con-
nected discourses of medicine, psychology, and pedagogy to calculate what was
normal and pathological for treating the problems that arose from calculable devia-
tions. The discourses embodied the gesture of hope that the transitional stage of
youth to being an adult can be managed to ensure the proper development in becom-
ing an adult. Nevertheless, simultaneously with the gesture of hope there were fears
of youth as a dangerous population that threatened the moral order through sexual-
ity, criminality, among others (Lesko 1995, 2001). Parents, authors of child-rearing
books, or teachers would argue about the need to pay attention to the adolescence of
the child in order to produce a productive and self-responsible adult.
While there is a disciplinary and political reflexivity about the uses and abuses of
statistics, such reflexivity does not examine nor bring into question the rules and
standards that are historically mobilized. Contemporary social and educational
research rarely asks about the cultural principles that order the theories, concepts,
and methods of curriculum research. This is particularly evident where curriculum
research takes official categories and distinctions as its framework of investiga-
tion—such as the way that states categories of poverty, minority, and ethnicity
formed the core conceptual assumptions and the origin of studies to correct inequi-
ties. Statistical reason is a site for the deployment of such categories to embody the
hope of social planning that a better life can be produced for individuals, but this
hope involves tensions and paradoxes. Statistics is never merely its numbers,
For an analysis of ILSA research relevancing, see Lindblad and Pettersson (2019).
8
18 Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting” in Educational Policy 395
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18 Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting” in Educational Policy 397
Thomas S. Popkewitz is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The
University of Wisconsin-Madison. His studies are concerned with the systems of reason that gov-
ern curriculum reforms, the sciences of education, and teacher education. The research works cross
the fields of curriculum studies, the political sociology of education, and cultural history—to con-
sider the politics of educational knowledge and paradox of exclusion and abjection in efforts to
include. His current research focuses on international assessments of education. The research
explores how numbers are cultural practices that express universal principles about the kinds of
people and society that perform to register differences; and a history of present educational
research concerned with practical and useful knowledge, tracing historically the paradoxes of such
research as defining change to stabilize and conserve.
Sverker Lindblad is professor emeritus at the department of Education and Special Education at
the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He was President of the European Educational Research
Association and the Swedish Educational Research Association. The main research interests of
Lindblad are in international and comparative education, and in education policy analysis and poli-
tics of knowledge. He is now researching knowledge politics in the interplay between educational
research and policy-making.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate
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indicate if changes were made.
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Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not
included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by
statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder.
Chapter 19
Evidence-Informed Policy and Practice
in a ‘Post-truth’ Society
Geoff Whitty and Emma Wisby
19.1 Introduction
Particularly since the British vote to leave the European Union (otherwise known as
Brexit) and the election of Donald Trump in the USA, there has been much talk of
our living in a ‘post-truth’ society, where ‘alternative truths’ compete with each
other and where ‘experts’ are often derided and ‘common sense’ celebrated even
where it seems to be contradicted by ‘evidence’ (d’Ancona 2017). Calcutt (2016)
has suggested that the origins of ‘post-truth’ lay with academics espousing ‘post-
modernism’ and other ‘left-leaning, self-confessed liberals’ who sought freedom
from state-sponsored truth and started to discredit ‘truth’ as one of the ‘grand narra-
tives’ that needed to be replaced with ‘truths’—‘always plural, frequently person-
alised, inevitably relativised’. Although both the political and academic versions of
‘post-truth’ may be criticised for undermining any sense of certainty about how we
should proceed in educational policy and practice, we suggest in this article that
exaggerated claims about the possibility of establishing consensual answers on the
basis of research evidence are equally suspect and to be resisted.
The much hyped ‘evidence-informed’ approach to educational research conjures
up a brave new world in which robust research can give us answers to enduring
social and educational problems—in other words, clear guidance on ‘what works’.
It is often implied that this ‘new empiricism’ will take us beyond the ideological use
of research that has hampered collaboration between researchers and policy makers
in the past. Thus, it is argued, we can solve educational problems if only we can get
the evidence right and it is the role of education researchers to come up with that
evidence. This has been reflected in rhetoric about ‘evidence-based’ and ‘evidence-
informed’ policy and practice, and about the importance of research having ‘impact’
or being ‘impactful’.
What counts as evidence and how it is used has always been contested. Indeed,
history suggests agreement between policy makers and researchers (neither of
which category is homogeneous, of course) has rarely been easy to achieve. As
Gene Glass commented at the time, the Reagan administration’s use of evidence in
a review of research entitled What Works (US Department of Education 1986) was
hardly unusual in its attempt to legitimate an ideological position through an appeal
to educational science:
The selection of research to legitimize political views is an activity engaged in by govern-
ments at every point on the political compass…What works does not synthesize research, it
invokes it in a modern ritual seeking legitimation of the Reagan administration’s policies…
and, lest one forget, previous administrations have done the same (Glass 1987: 9).
Other, often more significant, influences include the vagaries of the moment, the
demands of the electoral cycle, and the values and preferences of policy makers and
their advisors and constituents. Equally, we would also highlight that researchers
are by no means of one mind on the nature of evidence and how it should be viewed
and treated. Some want their research to go beyond ‘what works’ and explore why
‘what works’ sometimes does not work, as well as asking ‘what works where with
whom’ and why. Furthermore, research can also have an important role in decon-
structing the assumptions underlying all such questions or in helping people to think
about whether what policy makers are trying to do is worthwhile and what consti-
tutes socially just schooling. The ‘what works’ agenda has tended to filter out these
more structural and critical perspectives on educational policy and practice and
broader understandings of how it develops.
Thus, achieving consensus on what counts as worthwhile educational research
and on the right relationship to policy is unlikely to be an attainable goal even if a
technicist utopia was desirable. This is not to suggest that there is no role for a ‘what
works’ approach to education research, but the notion, implied by some of its advo-
cates, that this is the only type of research that should be encouraged or funded
certainly needs to be resisted. It is not necessary to adopt the sort of relativism that
is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘post-modernism’ to favour a more
pluralistic approach to education research, although we would regard such
approaches as themselves part of the spectrum that should be supported.
To illustrate our concerns, we present a brief account of ‘evidence-based’ policy
in the UK over the past 20 years, where the rhetoric of ‘what works’ was taken up
enthusiastically by the incoming New Labour government of Tony Blair in 1997
and has been adopted in various guises by governments ever since. As well as show-
ing the limitations of such an approach to the relationship between research and
policy, we also explore whether recent enthusiasm for evidence-informed practice
in education is any more viable. Finally, we consider how the ‘new empiricism’ that
informs such work will fare in the so-called ‘post-truth’ society.
19.2 T
he Limitations of ‘Evidence-Informed’ Policy
in English Education
Early in Tony Blair’s government, David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education
and Employment from 1997 to 2001, championed the cause of evidence-based pol-
icy making and looked critically at the research–policy relationship in a lecture
entitled ‘Influence or irrelevance?’ (Blunkett 2000). While he acknowledged that
there were faults on both ‘sides’, he nevertheless threw down the gauntlet to the
social science community as a whole to contribute more directly and ‘productively’
to policy making. Some academics read his lecture as a demand that their research
should support government policy (e.g. Hodgkinson 2000).
402 G. Whitty and E. Wisby
The over-claiming we had identified in terms of the potential for a closer rela-
tionship between policy and evidence—and the push for particular kinds of research
to that end—remained both unrealistic and undesirable in our view. We argued that
many of the impediments to a close and unmediated relationship between education
research evidence and policy debates in education, let alone policy decisions,
remained, and that there was therefore a need to guard against a narrowing of the
scope of educational research in accordance with this model.
This seems to be even more important in the post-Brexit context where Theresa
May, who replaced David Cameron as Prime Minister after the vote to leave the
European Union, announced the creation of some new academically selective gram-
mar schools. In this case, some highly selective if not downright misleading use of
research evidence seemed much less important in policy making than the personal
experiences and preferences of the Prime Minister and the need to satisfy some of
her backbenchers. As the BBC Education Editor put it at the time, ‘the symbolic
status of grammars as a chance to better yourself has trumped the expert consensus’
about the weight of evidence, so that the debate about what (the extensive and
robust) research told us about grammar schools had become ‘almost irrelevant’
(Jeffreys 2016). In the end, the policy itself, whatever the evidence for or against it,
became irrelevant as, after losing her majority at the 2017 general election, Theresa
May concluded she could not get the necessary legislation through parliament.
So, while we are supportive in general terms of the principle that evidence of
various sorts should be a part of policy making, our concern here has been to draw
attention to the risk that unrealistic expectations of what this could or should look
like in practice would skew research funding and commissioning in unhelpful ways.
In particular, we see a risk that the relatively narrow range of methodologies associ-
ated with the ‘evidence-informed’ and ‘what works’ bandwagons—RCTs and sys-
tematic reviews—could come to be favoured disproportionately, and that this would
leave funding for other types of research in education as ‘the remainder of a grow-
ing series of subtractions’, to use Dijkgraaf’s turn of phrase in the 2017 pamphlet
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (Flexner and Dijkgraaf 2017). This, we sug-
gest, would be problematic in and of itself, narrowing the kinds of research being
conducted. It would also, in turn, provide a less rich resource with which the policy
community itself might engage. Taking the example of the sociology of education
(although it might equally apply to the philosophy of education), often now regarded
as irrelevant to the business of policy, as opposed to its critique, we would do well
to remember the warning of Sir Fred Clarke in the 1940s that ‘educational theory
and educational policy that take no account of [sociological insights] will be not
only blind but positively harmful’ (quoted in Whitty 1997: 4).
19 Evidence-Informed Policy and Practice in a ‘Post-truth’ Society 405
Since Research and Policy in Education was published in 2016, there has been a
growing shift away from that emphasis on influencing policy towards influencing
the professions instead and bringing an evidence-informed approach to professional
practice. This was exemplified recently in the UK by the ‘Evidence Declaration for
Professional Bodies’ initiative in November 2017 (AfUE 2017).
Advocates of an evidence-informed approach have themselves conceded that
this shift is being driven at least in part by the difficulties in joining together policy
and research communities. For some, this reflects the difficulty in finding positive
examples of evidence-informed policy and the many examples of poor use of evi-
dence by policy makers (Halpern 2016); others have concluded that the grand claims
of evidence-informed policy need to be replaced by more modest ambitions, at least
for now, partly because researchers are often ‘more interested in indulging their
academic interests than providing useful and practical results’ (Turner 2015). More
significantly, Jonathan Breckon, Head of the Alliance for Useful Evidence, has rec-
ognised that ‘while politicians shouldn’t be ignorant of the evidence, they have the
right to ignore it’, that ‘technocracy should not trump democracy’, that ‘it is right
and proper that politicians “use their gut’” and even that ‘other ways to make deci-
sions are all really valuable’ (Breckon 2016). Some in political circles are being
more vocal about the limits to evidence-informed policy—one noting that being
known as an ‘evidence-based politician’ is regarded as an insult, suggesting as it
does a lack of interest in the politics of governing (HEPI conference, April 2017).
Nevertheless, in part, the shift of focus to evidence-informed practice is a project
to embed a more evidence-informed approach to policy by ‘getting the professions
on board’ and building a wider coalition. In his 2016 lecture at the Institute of
Education in London, David Halpern, chief executive of the Behavioural Insights
Team and What Works National Advisor, stated that his goal was for a ‘golden age
of empiricism’, so that the next generation asks ‘why on earth wouldn’t you test that
out before setting policy?’ (Halpern 2016). Admittedly, Halpern’s focus is often
‘policy with a small p’—the practicalities of implementing a policy programme that
has already been decided, very possibly on largely ideological grounds. The prob-
lem is that the evidence-informed/what works rhetoric rarely distinguishes between
the two.
The emphasis on practice is also about evidence-informed practice per se—side-
stepping the politicians altogether, even if its growth in education has been facili-
tated by an early decision of the 2015 Coalition government to provide seed funding
for an Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a grant-making charity ‘dedicated
to challenging educational disadvantage in English primary and secondary schools’
by sharing evidence on effective practice.1 One of the ways in which the EEF has
1
Founded by the education charity the Sutton Trust, as lead charity in partnership with Impetus
Trust (now Impetus—The Private Equity Foundation), the EEF received a founding grant of
£125m from the Department for Education. With investment and fundraising income, the EEF
intends to award as much as £200m over its 15-year lifespan.
406 G. Whitty and E. Wisby
sought to achieve this is through its Teaching and Learning Toolkit. The toolkit
synthesises the findings from systematic reviews and trials into an online facility
allowing school leaders to compare the estimated impact and cost of different types
of educational intervention. It already encompasses over 10,000 pieces of research,
and remains a ‘live’ resource that is regularly updated (EEF 2012).2 The EEF also
commissions research, where it is largely committed to funding and evaluating
RCT-type studies.
However, any suggestion that the concept of evidence-informed practice has
greater traction than that of evidence-informed policy (as least in the terms envis-
aged by its most enthusiastic advocates) remains to be tested—or evidenced. The
EEF is itself aware of the issues around knowledge mobilisation and evidencing the
impact of evidence-informed practice (Collins 2016). One of its own studies has
highlighted the challenges in demonstrating a causal link between evidence use and
improved pupil outcomes (Speight et al. 2016). Similarly, after reviewing the avail-
able evidence for government, Coldwell et al. (2017) concluded that we still ‘know
relatively little about the effects of evidence-based approaches on schools, teachers
and pupils, and how to increase the likelihood of better outcomes for learners in
particular’ (p. 22).
Kevan Collins, CEO of the EEF from 2011 to 2020, has noted that even when
research evidence is clear it does not necessarily influence decision-making in
schools. He has also noted how school leaders (just like politicians) can often use
research selectively to justify decisions already made (Collins 2016). As with pol-
icy, research evidence is likely to have greater traction where it chimes with assump-
tions and beliefs already held within contexts of practice.
There is a strand in the literature on evidence-informed practice that reflects on
the possible reasons why it is not more firmly and widely embedded within the
schools system. It identifies some now well-rehearsed barriers/enablers to evidence-
informed practice. The main factors seem to be:
• access to the research literature (now arguably much less of a barrier than it has
been in the past),
• relevance, credibility, usability of the research literature,
• willingness of practitioners to engage,
• practitioners having the time, skills and confidence to engage,
• organisational support for practitioners to engage.
To the above list, Brown and Zhang (2016) add the findings from psychological
research about how individuals make decisions—namely, the tendency to make do
with ‘good enough’ solutions and rely on intuition or perceptions rather than anal-
yse the data, as well as the power of emotion, feeling, snap decision-making and
unconscious motivation.
The toolkit itself resonates with the work of John Hattie and, in particular, Hattie (2008).
2
19 Evidence-Informed Policy and Practice in a ‘Post-truth’ Society 407
Yet there remains a view that such issues detract from rather than raise funda-
mental questions about the rational-linear model. Collins (2015) repeated the call
for more evidence of the kind that some would see as aiming to offer a prescription
for teachers: ‘For too long, too many teachers have been as guilty as politicians of
acting on what they believe to work, rather than what has been shown to work’.
There still seems to be, then, an underlying assumption that, given time, evidence-
informed practice on a rational-linear model will ‘come of age’.
While some continue to press for efforts to bring the schools system as close as
possible to a model where practice leads off from trial-based evidence, others are
calling for recognition and acceptance of a broader view—emphasising that the
findings from local, small scale action research are closer to teachers’ experience
and more engaging and useful to them. A BERA-RSA (2014) report, for example,
focuses more on teacher-led inquiry than teachers working with evidence created
elsewhere/by others. Saunders (2017) also regards such ‘inquiry-led teaching’,
based on knowledge created in the teacher’s own context, with the teacher co-
creating new knowledge based on professional experience and expertise, as equally
valid to teachers working with external evidence. She cites the value of teacher
engagement with/in research as making the implicit explicit such that teachers can
articulate the precise reasons—ethical, emotional, intellectual—for the decisions
they have made during any given lesson. Whatever the methodology, this requires
teachers to be part of the research in question, not simply the subject. Nutley et al.
(2008) concur that simply engaging in a research project, not just as a research sub-
ject but as an investigator, can lead to change in ways of thinking and behaving.
Nevertheless, advocacy of and the pursuit of something supposedly more
robust—centred around teacher engagement with and in external trials and the
translation of those findings into practice—continues. The EEF is currently focused
on issues of knowledge mobilisation to this end. Early signs, though, are not espe-
cially encouraging. While the more immediate, practical hurdles to this approach
have been addressed (e.g. access to research summaries), teacher skills and confi-
dence to engage are still not securely embedded (Sharples 2017).
It is not, though, just a matter of overcoming barriers to the implementation of an
impoverished model of evidence-informed practice. As we argued in the 2005
BERA presidential address referred to earlier, the professional literacy of teachers
surely involves more than purely instrumental knowledge. Others have pointed to
the dangers of eschewing the moral purpose of education and overstating the prom-
ise of a particular form of ‘evidence’ in determining the direction of educational
practice (e.g. Biesta 2006; Hammersley 2005). Chiming with this perspective,
Winch et al. (2013) emphasise three interconnected and complementary prongs to a
richer notion of teacher professionalism: practical wisdom, technical knowledge
and critical reflection.
In the face of official support and funding for a narrowly instrumental approach
to the role of research in educational practice, it seems that educational researchers
themselves will need to make the argument for maintaining a broad church of edu-
cation research—and make greater effort to show external audiences, not least edu-
cation practitioners, how their professionalism can grow by engaging with a breadth
408 G. Whitty and E. Wisby
of material. Just as some are keen for teachers to be better able to engage with and
judge the findings of quantitative research, so there remains a place for qualitative
approaches and critical perspectives in their repertoire. This should not necessarily
be seen as a problem, and the constant slippage back to a rational-linear model and
related over-claiming needs to give way to a more inclusive approach to evidence-
informed practice.
political rhetoric, and possibly also in policy too, something that has been particu-
larly pronounced in the USA. Perhaps evidence-informed policy/practice will turn
out, in its current form at least, to be a turn of the century aberration. Another pos-
sibility is that the claims of the evidence-informed movement, as well as the voice
of its critics, fare better amidst a more obviously ideological battle of ideas.
In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols expresses the concern that ‘the average
American’ is not simply ‘uninformed’ but moving towards being ‘aggressively
wrong’. As well as showing ignorance, Nichols asserts, they are actively resisting
new information that might threaten their beliefs. He talks about the conflation of
information, knowledge and experience, and how this has been reinforced by the
ubiquity of Google. He also talks about the triumph of emotion over expertise. He
links in a culture that cannot accept the inequality implicit in someone being more
knowledgeable than someone else (Nichols 2017). This publication is just one of
many to reflect on what has become known as ‘post-truth’, a term that came to the
fore following the vote for Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the
USA (e.g. d’Ancona 2017; Davies 2017).
This literature suggests that post-truth is different to political spin in terms of the
acceptance of untruths, which is termed ‘cognitive resignation’. This results in poli-
ticians and the public paying little regard to whether what they are saying is true or
not, just to whether others are persuaded. It contrasts truth vs impact; facts vs story/
connecting with people emotionally; the honestly complex vs the deceptively sim-
ple; the rational vs the visceral; veracity vs solidarity/identity. Perception is all and
the battle becomes one of defining reality. This is accompanied by the discrediting
of traditional sources of authoritative knowledge. The mainstream media is usually
what is being referred to here, but it might also encompass academia—so called
‘experts’. One could even argue that, in Michael Young’s terms (Young 2013), the
‘powerful knowledge’ generated by communities of scholars is being challenged by
a new ‘knowledge of the powerful’ where the powerful are not the ruling elites of
the past but various ‘populist’ movements (Muller 2017). In this context, the ‘truth
test’ is ultimately popularity rather than the agreed conventions of academic
disciplines.
Once again, the impact of the internet, but particularly social media, is impli-
cated, for exacerbating people’s tendency to retreat to echo chambers and filter
bubbles. Algorithms are now compounding this. Also implicated are Freud and the
paradigm of therapy, behavioural economics and the emphasis on psychological
impulses in decision-making, as well as the emphasis on emotional intelligence and
the role played by emotional competencies in social relations. As intimated earlier,
post-modernism and social constructivism, leading to cynicism, relativism and
hyperreality, are sometimes said to have had their own corrosive effect in terms of
‘putting the ideologically driven layman at the advantage of the scholar’. Calcutt
(2016) argues that ‘those responsible include (postmodernist) academics, journal-
ists, ‘creatives’ and financial traders; even the centre-left politicians who have now
been hit hard by the rise of the anti-factual’. What all this adds up to, d’Ancona
argues, is emotional necessity trumping the need for adherence to the truth.
410 G. Whitty and E. Wisby
However, Nichols, d’Ancona and others arguably put too positive a gloss on sci-
ence and academia, ignoring academia’s own tendency towards echo chambers and
filter bubbles, as well as the limitations of scientific research itself. Thus, although
one response to post-truth might be a retreat to facts and technocracy, seemingly
justifying the ambitions of the evidence-informed movement, this would be to adopt
an unrealistic and unattainable—even undesirable—prospectus. In practice, the
response will need to be much more nuanced. As d’Ancona sets out, the ‘backfire
effect’ (ill-informed opinion becoming more entrenched in the face of evidence to
the contrary) illustrates how post-truth will not crumble under the weight of freshly
verified information repeated relentlessly and ubiquitously. Data should not be con-
fused with truth; it cannot capture the complexity of public policy issues, nor values
or emotion. Purveyors of evidence will need to be emotionally intelligent as much
as rigorously rational—scientifically credible charismatic leaders, able to commu-
nicate around biases and heuristics, to speak to experience, memory and hope.
In Research and Policy in Education we argued for more public intellectuals in
education and social science, given that politics often follows public opinion rather
than expert advice. Academics need, therefore, to be part of the wider dialogue that
goes beyond policy makers and professionals. This recognises that the task of aca-
demics seeking to impact upon policy and practice is much more complex and
uncertain than advocates of evidence-informed policy and practice so often imply.
In its present form, the evidence-informed movement exaggerates the possibility of
‘expert’ answers to enduring educational issues and plays into the hands of those
who are prone to be suspicious of all research. Other traditions of research better
reflect some of the uncertainties that are implied by the post-truth phenomenon.
Recognising this does not mean that ‘anything goes’, but that a range of different
research traditions, with different truth tests and quality criteria, need to be taken
seriously. When conducted to a high standard, various types of research can offer
important insights to policy makers and practitioners as well as the wider polity. But
none of them are ever going to be the only—or even the main—determinant of edu-
cation policy and practice.
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Geoff Whitty (1946–2018) served as Director of the Institute of Education, University of London
(IOE) from 2000 to 2010. Previously, he had taught in primary and secondary schools before pur-
suing a career in higher education at Bath University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, King’s
College London, Bristol Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College. Prior to becoming the IOE’s
Director, Geoff held its Karl Mannheim Chair in the Sociology of Education, as well as serving as
Dean of Research. He subsequently held the title of Director Emeritus of the UCL Institute of
Education, as well as a part-time Research Professorship at Bath Spa University and a Global
Innovation Chair at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he co-directed the Centre of
Excellence for Equity in Higher Education. Much of Geoff’s research was concerned with the
dynamic between middle class advantage and working class disadvantage in education and he led
a number of major research projects within that theme. Geoff was a specialist advisor to successive
UK Parliamentary Select Committees on education between 2005 and 2012 and his extensive
experience of working with the policy community informed his somewhat sceptical stance towards
the current enthusiasm for ‘evidence-informed’ policy. Geoff was Chair of the British Council’s
Education and Training Advisory Committee 2002–2006 and President of the College of
Teachers 2005-2007. He was also President of the British Educational Research Association
(BERA) 2005-2007 and subsequently served on two BERA inquiries into research and teacher
education. He was a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the Society for Educational Studies
and the American Educational Research Association. He served as a Visiting Professor at the
Universities of Bath, Birmingham and Bedfordshire, an Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal
University and an Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University. In 2009, Geoff was awarded
the Lady Plowden Memorial Medal for outstanding services to education and in the Queen’s
Birthday Honours in 2011 he received a CBE for services to teacher education. In 2017, he was
awarded the BERA John Nisbet Fellowship for his outstanding contribution to
educational research.
Emma Wisby is Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the UCL Institute of Education. In this role
she supports the Institute’s strategic planning and institutional and academic engagement with
policy makers and wider stakeholders, as well as publishing on issues surrounding research impact
and education policy, particularly schools policy. Prior to this Emma was a Committee Specialist
to the UK’s House of Commons Select Committee on education, which is responsible for scrutinis-
ing national education policy and funding. Following a PhD on the shift to standards-based quality
assurance in the UK higher education sector, she spent her early career conducting consultancy
research for various government departments and their agencies across schools, further education
and teacher education policy.
414 G. Whitty and E. Wisby
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